The Obama Administration, which has long made it clear high-speed rail should be a national priority, on Thursday released its long-awaited list of high-speed rail project stimulus money.
Read More at Wired.com.
As a huge fan of rail travel, I love seeing this gaining traction.
Over the winter break I moved into a shared house in Mosaic. My new bedroom had to serve a couple purposes - it needed to, obviously, be my bedroom, but it also had to provide sleeping space for when my son visited, as well as be comfortable and easy to relax in. I needed a space for my bookshelves, my desk, my nice comfy Aeron chair, and naturally my clothing and some other bits. Beds take up a ginormous amount of space and I was working with only about 120 square feet total. A queen sized bed takes up 30 square feet, plus 'navigation' around it - I needed to figure out how to use that space the best.
So, a loft.
The design for the two bedroom unit master bedroom includes a sort of 'niche' area - that space is exactly the size of a queen sized bed (okay, not EXACTLY. It's 2" wider and about 15" short), but after staring at the space, it was pretty easy to picture a loft bed build into the space. The ceiling was high enough, there was an awesome highly-placed window, I was ready to go.
I have a fondness for heavy lumber and carriage bolts, so naturally that's what I ended up using. I borrowed the Mosaic pickup truck and headed over to Home Depot. Total materials cost was around $160, which, all things considered, wasn't too bad. I only had to buy one new tool - a 1/4" boring drill so I could make holes through the 4x4 support posts - everything else I could do with my existing tool set (a very nice feeling I must admit). The hardest choice was trying to determine what to use for the decking - initially I had thought to use sanded 3/4" plywood, but holy cats that's expensive ($40+ for a 4x8 sheet, and I'd need two). I ended up using OSB plywood, which was inexpensive and quite strong (but holy cats is it heavy). Not as elegant, but I also determined I'd paint the entire structure (rather than stain or leave as raw wood), so the material for the decking wouldn't really matter - it would be painted and covered with the mattress
Once I had all the lumber back home, I started building the framing. 2x6 wood for the sideboards and the head and footboards - 4x4 post wood for the corners. The back posts were made 'taller' so that I could build what will amount to a headboard against them, with a built in shelf. I set the height so that the decking would be below the window sill but high enough to make 'bunk' space underneath accessible. The other design step was to put the 2x6 lumber 'outboard' from the posts - this would mean the corner posts woul dbe 'away' from the walls and corners, therefore trimwood around the floor would not push the loft away from the wall.
I used 1/4" x 6" carriage bolts to hold all the pieces together, boring pilot holes with my drill. This was quite a challenge in several respects. One was making sure the whole thing aligned properly, another was some of the holes needed to be bored while the structure was standing in the space. Not a lot of room to work with!
The lower supports on three sides are simply standard 2x4 studs, also bolted into place. The decking is held up by 5 2x4 stringers. These stringers are hung from the 2x6 side rails using aluminum joist hangers. I have to say, these hangers are one of the niftiest little accessories I've used. They made installing the stringers a walk in the park (once I had the right length screws. Grr. :)
Once the framing was done, it was time to paint. I decided to paint the entire structure flat black, mixed at the local hardware store. I overbought on the paint, thinking I'd use a half gallon or so on the whole project, but after I had painted all the structural members, I had only used about 1/10th of the gallon. Later, when I started painting the decking, I was using MUCH more paint. More surface area? Didn't seem like it... but I guess it just costs more to paint OSB.
Putting the decking on was a bit of a challenge due to the size and weight of the OSB, and the space I was working in. It's impossible to carry a 4x8 sheet of plywood upstairs in these houses, so I had to cut the sheets down before carrying them up the stairs. The second challenge was the lack of a table saw, so all cuts needed to be done with my skilsaw. Time consuming and inaccurate. I mis-cut one piece (the OSB is tongue-in-groove, and I mismatched the side :-/), but eventually I had the 2 pieces of decking in place and screwed down. Yay!
By this time I was getting pretty tired, and I ended up painting only about 1/3rd of the top of the decking - enough to cover all the edges and a chunk of the surface - everything that would be visible once things were in place.
Another community member offered up a very nice queen sized mattress which we schlepped up and put into place. Perfect fit! The drawback was I had calculated based on what I remember mattresses were like. Unfortunately, I have been sleeping on futons and waterbeds for the last 20 years. Mattresses got thick! Fortunately, not THAT thick - I could still sit up comfortably up in the loft space, but there's slightly less headroom than I had planned. Oh well!
There's some steps left to do - I still need to put the backing board and shelf along the posts for the 'headboard', and I'd like to mount a reading light or two back there as well (with a remote switch I can turn on when I'm climbing into bed). However, I'm ecstatic with the end result as it stands. The loft is secure and doesn't wobble - it's comfortable and very 'cozy'. I adore having the window right next to me when I wake up in the morning, and the mattress is a delight to sleep on.
Total construction time (sawing, hammering, drilling, painting, etc) - about 12 hours. Incidental work (driving and shopping and the like) another 4 hours. Cost: about $180.
I like it.
So, okay, it's true.
I'm playing World of Warcraft.
I've been fighting this ever since the whole platform launched. Hearing stories of folks' lives getting sucked into the game, coupled with tales of hordes of kiddies hacking and slashing their way across the landscape - not exactly ringing endorsements.
But recently Blizzard had an 11 day trial (not sure how recent this is really), and I decided to take the plunge and give it a try.
I... kinda like it.
I can completely see how it would suck people in and replace their lives. The game is immersive, the landscape interesting and beautifully handled, the levelling and character development are interesting enough to keep the game rolling, but not so hard to elicit complete frustration.
My Macbook is handling the game beautifully - frame rates are through the roof, though it does take a mere 5 minutes of playing before I hear the cooling fan kick on. It does take resources.
WoW is as close as you can get to 'real D&D online', particularly if you're in a good guild (which I am) that has good players as well as a fun environment.
Will I stick with it? I'm not sure. The big draw for me right now is not the 3 hour dragon raids (which I haven't participated in yet :), but the "I have an hour - think I'll go run a few quests.) - this is very different (in my opinion) than Eve, where you couldn't 'just play casually for an hour, then go back to work'. In Eve, if you started a mission, you had to complete it within a set time period (days or a week or so), or suffer a major penalty. There's no such issue in WoW. I have a dozen quests going at any given time, so when I log in, I can choose to do deliveries / messaging (mostly involving travelling), or grinds where you have to kill off X critters.
So far, it's been enjoyable, but has not sucked the life out of me. We'll see.
It's no secret I'm not a summer person. I don't like heat and sweatiness and all that goes with it. So as fall rolls around, the weather gets cooler and drier, my satisfaction with being out in the woods goes up accordingly.
Sunday we took a nice 3 mile walk around Gates Pond, a good sized pond (really, IMHO, a lake), about a mile from us.
The weather was glorious. Low sixties, breezy and sunny. Perfect for enjoying the colors and sounds of the woods.
It also gave me an opportunity to haul out my camera, dust it off, and spend some time taking pictures again. I've really neglected my photography. I had to learn how to work with iPhoto and CF card adapters, but all in all, it went pretty smoothly.
Click through to see the gallery!
Ever since my Mom got her new Macbook, she's been a total flash game addict. Word games, match-the-gem games, silly "get the ball in the bucket" games - the whole gamut.
She's a gamer, but a gamer that's never been exposed to games beyond these simple mindless toys. Granted, some of them are sort of interesting and fun, but there's a whole world that she's never seen.
Now me? I'm into Starcraft, and Civilization, and Eve, and all these epic immersive things. But for someone who has never played the basics, these are completely daunting and will more likely scare her off than intrigue her.
So where do you find the middle ground?
I'm looking for basic, introductory games for the Mac that are free (or really close to free), that should have a basic plot line (even if it's trivial), and some way of advancing through the game.
We tried FreeCiv, but that's targeted at people who already grok Civilization, so that's not going to work. Something simpler than that, along the lines of Master of Orion (the original), Spaceward Ho, etc etc. At some point she tried the original SimCity but that almost ate her brain, and she deleted it. However, this same woman is one of the best players I've ever seen at... believe it or not... Crystal Quest. Granted, that's also a mindless "keep shooting" game, but it takes some serious chops for the upper levels.
So, dear readers, what would you suggest? It can be flash based, or downloadable, needs to run on the Mac, and should have a very basic level of introduction, particularly to turn based gameplay where there's regular advancement. The first one I've come across that comes even remotely close is TradeWinds, a trading game set in Arabia. Very simple gameplay, entertaining, and has a plotline of sorts.
Any others?
(Note - I've had reports of people having problems posting comments to the blog. If you have a problem, please send mail to me ( dbs@homeport.org ) and I'll look into it!)
It's time for one of those long chatty posts about goings on at Chez Geek, where obstacles are overcome (and reestablished), perfectly working solutions are broken, and equipment is flung about.
Today's challenges - getting yawl to play with the other machines nicely.
One of the things I love dearly about Radio Paradise is the constant exposure to music I would never have found under other circumstances.
A couple times I've heard tracks from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and sometimes they've hit pretty hard, but the one that got me today is the track "There She Goes My Beautiful World". It came up on rotation on my laptop while coding, and I had to pause to listen... which naturally made me look around for the lyrics (it's a long song and doesn't suffer from the common "there's really only 3 verses in this song, we'll just yammer them over and over again" beat so prevalent in modern music.
I decided to do a little googling, and found the lyrics on songmeanings.net (a little heavy on the ads, but some remarkably good commentary from listeners). The song is about someone longing for their muse - their inspiration and their drive to share, express, and excel, coupled with release and need.
Interested? Video and lyrics after the cut... I recommend headphones. Cave is an expressive and intense presenter, though no one would call his vocals beautifully melodic. The arrangement on this track, with the backing singers, is wonderful...
452 points, so you achieved position 347 of 82048 on the ranking list
You type 562 characters per minute
You have 106 correct words and
you have 0 wrong words
I ran it through twice, improving the second time (from 95 up to 106). It takes a full minute of fast typing to make it work, and I feel silly chalking off my day in one minute increments just to get a higher ranking :)
The silly little "past this code!" thing is:
Aww, what the hey. Here's my icon from MadMenYourself.com. Whadya think, accurate? My mom spent a long time fiddling with it to get it 'just right'.
I've blogged before about being tempted by Macs, and in some ways my iPhone could be considered something of a 'first taste' of Apple products. But until now I've fought hard against really going whole hog into the Mac world.
Until now.
I'm the proud owner of what can arguably be called Apple's top of the line laptop - a Macbook Pro 13.
This is a huge step for me. I am not only investing a significant amount of money into a small device that could easily be considered a 'toy', but I'm changing over to an environment I only have a passing familiarity with - OSX.
I've owned it for about 24 hours, and I will say - I've never worked with a sexier implementation of high end computing in my life. This is by far the fastest computer I've ever owned, let alone as my personal workstation, but with all it's screaming horsepower, it is beautifully designed, with an operating system and environment I find... different, but not irritating. There are things I don't know how to do, but I'm figuring them out. I have not had a single "oh that's just plain idiotic" moment. I'm sure they'll come, but so far it's just been a series of "Hmm, that's interesting... what if I... ah, that did it. Cool." moments.
I'm still installing things, and still setting up my tools. This machine will be my life and blood for the next 3 years, so there's a lot of work to do to bring it into full functionality. So far I have mail and chat and web stuff working fine, next will be my development environment. After that, virtual machines for running some of the business apps I'll be using.
A particular thanks to all the people I talked to while making this decision. There was a lot of fantastic feedback and good commentary. It helped me affirm that I'm making the right decision.
Now, off to download Eclipse and get things set up so I can work on CONGO !
As is common on one of those 'weekends in Cohousing', there's rarely a lot of 'sitting around, relaxing, and being bored.' Yesterday started out fairly domestic, with a Metric Buttload of mowing. The grass and weed around here are growing like... well... like weeds. High humidity, warm temperatures, and a lot of rain will certainly do that. Right now we're at the "need to mow every 2 weeks" stage. Thank goodness for electric pushmowers and simple garden tractors.
Cat and I got about half the property mowed - with me planning on attacking the field today (though the weather looks like it might not cooperate). Right now I'm wishing for a decent battery powered mower. One of my fellow cohousers managed to cut through the power cord already. A simple repair, but managing the cord is certainly tedious.
But we're not through yet! Under the backdrop of Zach being sick (he's been running a low grade fever for 3-4 days - we're taking him to the doctor this morning), Beth and Tim convinced me to go on a bikeride.
Now, I have NOT been keeping up with my riding this summer. Small jaunts on the Giant bike around the site and up the road a bit, but almost no long distance rides on the Haluzak 'bent. My brother in law had done a full tuneup on it recently, so it was ready to go, I just hadn't taken the time to get out there. The other factor was I wanted to test a route to work - with the goal of occasionally bikeriding into work. Google Maps gave a decent route that totalled 14 miles each way. Workable.
So we rode it.
In retrospect, it might have been a bad idea to attempt a 40+ mile ride on the first day out. I ended up NOT making the entire ride - clocking out at 22 miles, and asking for a rescue from Cat. She and Steph and all the kids met the 3 bikers at Kimball Farm for ice cream and dinner, and I opted to ride back home in the car rather than bike it. I was wiped out.
Still, I'm pretty happy with doing 22 miles without completely disintegrating. The route was fantastic, with only 2 Killah hills (one of which I hiked up). The jaunt from my office to Kimball Farm is very simple (about 3 miles), though was probably the ugliest of the ride (riding along Littleton Road is not particularly fun, but it was the shortest of the legs).
Particular thanks to Beth for motivating me to get off my duff and hit the road. Both she and Tim were really supportive when I was flagging. I drank gallons of water, ate some tasty ice cream at Kimballs, and slept like the dead last night.
Oh, the title? Well, Kimballs was PACKED. But they had a lot of activities going on as well. As soon as Zach and I sat down while folks were getting food, I glanced over, and LO, this woman had a ringtailed lemur on her shoulder! She was part of an animal show going on, and was very friendly, but it was certainly not what I expected to see. In addition, there was a balloon set up in the next field over giving rides. Not a hot air type - the gas bag is sealed, and it was well tethered to the ground - it certainly had a steampunk look. It was quite surreal seeing it appearing over the tree line during dinner.
All in all, quite a day. Today we have a doctors appointment, and if the weather holds out, I'll haul the tractor out into the playing field to get that cut.
Generally I don't post "my life" sorts of things on the blog, but it's been quiet lately, so might as well chatter a moment.
Today was supposed to be part of a quiet weekend. Zach and Cat are up in Maine, and I have the house to myself. I figured I'd do a couple small projects, some gaming, some normal Cohousing socializing, and generally take it easy.
Today I:
Yikes. If this is a relaxing day, I'm worried what a busy day will be like.
I have to comment on the above picture. I grew up on a horse farm, and in horse and cow country. Driving, loading, and unloading truckloads of haybales were a fairly regular occurance. I certainly had some flash backs here, particularly since the truck in use there (not Mosaic's truck, a different one), is probably circa 1978. Got to drive it a bit too. Was an automatic, but boy it had all the fixens of the old country, that's for sure.
This morning we moved Homeport's 3 servers, plus the blog host, over to their new home in Mosaic's Common House. This is something of an experiment, as we'll be seeing how well the Charter business cable handles hosted servers. So far so good.
The move went mostly okay, with a time overrun of about an hour and a half due to a mysterious firewall problem that we finally got resolved. All services are up and running now.
It's nice to have immediate physical access to the boxes. I know I can go into the server room and make configuration changes, add new machines, whatever. The only real problem that has cropped up so far is noise. The 5 existing servers + network hardware makes a heck of a racket (though I suspect the Rackable server is making the lions share). We may have to do some sound remediation - I mean more than the blanket I nailed up over the door.
During my brief stint in college, I was required to take a 'phys ed' credit every trimester. Not being a particularly sporty person at the time, I decided to try 'Juggling', and was immediately hooked.
One of the fun things about being settled into the new house is going through all my old movies and watching them again. I'd been putting off watching Heavy Metal for a while - through no other reason than "I want to wait until I'm in the right mood." Last night was that Mood.
While exploring the DVD, I came across a sort of 'making of' documentary that I hadn't seen before. It was Fantastic.
It was an ongoing interview with all the animators, as well as chats with Ivan Reitman and other folks involved in the film.
I found hearing the stories behind each segment, and the unabashed forwardness of everyone associated with the production ("It's all about breasts!") absolutely fascinating. One of the more intriguing bits was seeing the original model for Taarna going through the motions that were film-captured and animated over, including a sort of 'half and half' film clip - with Carol Desbiens acting out Taarna's motions, and half of the animation filled in over her form. Absolutely riveting to watch.
It was intriguing to listen to the folks who worked on the film not making it as a 'stoner' film or anything of that ilk. It was science fiction fantasy material, very male oriented, targeted directly at the audience the Heavy Metal magazine was targeted at - adolescent and post-adolescent boys - particularly us sci fi geeks!
I highly recommend picking up the DVD release and watching the interviews. Really brings another level to the movie.
Ahh, it's wonderful stepping out on my porch in the morning, sitting down with my coffee, and viewing the awesome vista laid out before me... and my laptop.
The nifty thing about this is some of these WAPs are in Camelot, about a hundred yards north.
I find myself doing a heck of a lot of twittering lately. The updated version of Twitterrific has an excellent interface, allowing me to post pictures, follow threads, do things like like "show me tweets that are coming from nearby me physically" (which has led me to make some new friends!).
This unfortunately has meant I don't blog as much. When I see something I want to talk about, I just throw out a twitter post - which may include a picture of something I've just seen.
I understand that many of my readers don't log into Twitter at all, and that's fine. There is, however, a nice RSS feed of my postings available.
To read my tweets via RSS, use my RSS feed link (which is available on my twitter home page). My tweets are also forwarded into my Facebook page.
Last but not least, there's a cute widget on my blog home page that shows the last couple tweets I've posted.
Twitter, for all it's buzzwordism, is an interesting medium. I'll stick with it for a while.
First and foremost, I still love my iphone. It's become my internet-in-your-pocket device. When I'm not carrying it, I feel like something's missing.
But that doesn't mean it doesn't have it's faults - and today's itch is with the Mail app.
I have Mail configured to chat with the Exchange 2007 server at work (which works remarkably well - I get meeting notifications, etc). I also have it configured to talk to my Homeport mailbox over IMAPS. This works... well, but has some quirks.
First, Mail crashes like clockwork on startup. My guess this is due to a large inbox (frequently I'll update and see 50-75 messages waiting to download. It'll get 2/3rds of the way through the download, and BOOM). A restart usually completes the update.
I'll do my mailbox cleaning, removing a bunch of spam, checking notices, etc... and then go on about my daily business.
When I sit down at my desk and run up Thunderbird - which connects to the same IMAP server, I see that all the messages I deleted or marked as read are still in my inbox.
I can't find a way to tell the iPhone to sync it's view of my inbox with the server. It does happen eventually, during some dark and sleepy period when I'm not watching it I'm sure, but I can't figure out how to make it happen on my time - like, say, after I've updated my inbox during a boring meeting, and before I sit back down at my desk.
I know OS 3.0 is right around the corner, and will be a monstrous update. Perhaps there'll be some Mail app tweaks?
Oh, and I also appear to be playing Kingdoms Live on the iPhone. It's a lot of fun, pretty straightforward play, and enjoyable. Limits moves so you don't spend your entire life on it. Not sure how far it'll go, but if you're playing, and you have an invite code, comment here, and expand your army!
My code is VNS22
Today we had 2 more houses move in (well, technically, only one - since the second is still unloading items from the truck as I type, and it's 9:30 at night.) Tomorrow we have another household moving in, bringing our grand total to 7 so far. That's seven families that have pulled up everything, and moved here. And there's more to come.
But that's not what I came here to talk to you about.
When we designed our houses, we put great emphasis on Superinsulation. The idea that a house should be insulated far beyond what 'code' calls for, to the point that it can stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer with a minimal amount of work by heating / cooling systems.
Today we were able to put that to the test. It got incredibly hot today - hot for April in New England, topping out at around 95 degrees according to my indoor/outdoor thermometer (see above). (Note that wunderground history for today says it only got up to 89. But it was still damned hot). According to the thermometer, it got up to 95 outside, but stayed at or below 79 inside the house.
Note that we have no fans running, no AC, in fact all the windows were closed. The house kept in the cool air from the night before - all day long. Even with traffic in and out.
That, my friends, is energy efficiency.
How many other people turned on air conditioners today? We didn't have to.
Tonight we had one of those cohousing moments everyone talks about, but this really was experienced first hand. 
A week and a half now. We've been living at Mosaic for a week and a half. Even though only 3 houses are now occupied, the life that is slowly coming to what was once just another construction site is tangible. I see people I'm close to almost every day - if just in passing, or to sit down for a chat. People are coming by to borrow tools, or to say hi, or for no reason at all.
Inside our house, things are starting to look sane and liveable. The living room is turning into a comfortable space, with the boxes receding like a flood tide, leaving furniture and decorations behind.
The site in general? Wet wet wet. Color it mud. But even with the ongoing work, the dirt and rocks, the double parked construction machinery, and the strangers in your house at 7:30 in the morning working on an electrical problem, there's no other place I'd rather be living.
In the next 2 weeks, I know of 2 definite move-ins, with 1-2 more possible. The neighborhood grows a little more, and a little more dream is realized.
Is is that shimmering utopia we imagined 10 years ago, when we started this project? No. But I'm starting to see glimmers of the thing we've been building. Sure, it's been there, in the community at large, but it hasn't been tangible and here.
Now. Bit by bit. It's turning from a dream we all shared, to a place we can all call home.
You see that switch on the side of the iPhone? That little switch that means "Be quiet, I'm in a place where a vibrate will do?"
Pay attention to it!
There is absolutely no excuse to write a game, app, utility, or tool that starts making sounds or playing music upon startup if that switch is set to 'silent'!
At the moment, I'm talking to you, Ezone, and you're Crazy Snowboard app, that, despite having the phone on "SILENT", you start playing music loud and clear upon startup!
iPhone App Developers. PAY ATTENTION TO THE SWITCH!
Sheesh!
It's always interesting looking into houses that have so much history for you personally - after you've moved out of them.
The house that got to be well known as Homeport, which we sold about three and a half years ago, is back up for sale.
The listing on Realtor.com has a whole series of pictures of what the house looks like now. While I don't agree with many (er, well, most) of their decorating tastes, I do think replacing the countertops in the kitchen with granite was a good idea.
I hope they do well - this is a bad time to be selling a large house, but it looks like they've dressed it up nicely, and have done repairs and improvements that the place needed.
In less than 10 days, Cat and Zach and I will be moving to Mosaic. It's an intense time for all of us, and what with me being down with the crud and life continuing apace, taking no notice of our challenges, things have become a little... chaotic.
Unlike some of my friends, I've moved only twice in the last, gosh, 13 years. Once into Homeport, and then from there to our current abode, called Interlude. Interlude was supposed to be a weigh station between homeport and Mosaic, but it lasted longer than we anticipated (almost 4 years). They were good years though, with our awesome roommate Beth and a cast of thousands (well, okay, 3 cats over that time, plus one dog and one fish). We had some great music nights, great gaming socials, and a few outstanding parties.
Now it's time to pull up stakes and move again. This time to a far greater project than anything else I've ever been involved in. There's a lot of unknowns ahead. I've never lived in cohousing. I know all the families I'll be living near - some families have already had our children growing up together - but what will the community be like when we move from seeing each other on weekends and constantly sending email - to actually living right next door? Will we survive?
Of course we will, but I just don't know what it'll be like.
I'm sick.
I started noticing the telltale throat itchiness Thursday night, and by Friday morning it was in full swing. We're to the point of thinking this is flu now, as I've been down for almost 3 days, and at last sensor check, I'm running a 101 fever.
Sudafed and Nyquil are keeping things under control at night, but I'm really tired of being weak as a kitten.
I have however been enjoying browsing Hulu to watch some shows I never get around to seeing. I really want to watch Heroes and BSG from season 1 on, but Hulu doesn't apparently have them online (Sad!).
What I have been watching is Legend of the Seeker, the TV adaptation of Terry Goodkind's books. All in all, they're not awful - the casting of the main characters is good, though a lot of the incidental roles are terrible. I have read the books, so I didn't have high expectations for the television series, and so far things seem to be meeting that bar :)
What bothers me most is that this show went to 22 episodes,and Firefly, which I still feel is a vastly better series, was cancelled at 12. I just don't understand Hollywood.
Back on the sick front, I may have exacerbated this whole flu thing yesterday, where I spent the whole day helping Mosaic folks move materials out of our basement and into the common house. We needed to get this stuff moved now so that we can clean the basement, and there really wasn't an option to 'sit it out'. The crew was awesome, and I managed to make it through without having to do any heavy lifting (not that I could anyway), and we got everything moved without mishap. Yay community!
Now back to medicine and bedrest.
Found this via UniqueDaily.com
World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.
"A strange man builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves.
This award winning short was created by filmmaker Bruce Branit, widely known as the co-creator of '405'. World Builder was shot in a single day followed by about 2 years of post production. Branit is the owner of Branit VFX based in Kansas City."
We're very impressed you have a nice blackberry, Jawbone bluetooth headset, and brown loafers. The leather case you're carrying is pretty snappy. I think it's particularly fascinating how you've managed to park yourself in a sparsely populated Starbucks, cranked up that wonderful gear of yours, and decided to CALL EVERYONE IN YOUR PHONE BOOK. I suspect there may be a small problem with your headphone, because the tree-leveling volume you're speaking at must be needed for those obviously important customers to hear you.
Oh, and the constant revolving of your head to look at everyone around you, to make sure people notice you're doing real live interesting cool stuff? Wonderful. Makes me want to throw down my obviously worthless career and beg for your guidance to success.
It's particularly riveting that you've decided not to lower yourself to actually patronizing the restaurant you've decided to claim as your own personal conference room. What a star!
While on the topic of webcomics, I'm curious what strips folks read regularly? I have all of mine loaded up in Google Reader (currently one of my favorite toys), and while I'm not necessarily looking for other good strips to add to my lineup, I'm always interested in finding new interesting comics. Some I add to my daily read, some I let slip...
Anyway, here's my current reading list.
So, got any suggestions of strips I absolutely should read, no matter what?
(Who?)
Barry Smith once drew the incredibly awesome Angst Technologies webcomic. He went on hiatus for a while, but has restarted his artwork.
I highly recommend reading through the archives - the current strip is on InkTank.com. He's thoughtfully linked the older strips into archives.
Ya'll can finally see the origin of the IT Ninjas.
Check it out. My nephew's band, "The Malone" has set up their myspace page (Warning for us old farts - it will start playing music as soon as you click on that link.)
Josh is playing bass, and I can well say he sounds a lot better than I do.
Last night I wanted to sit down and listen to some RadioParadise during gaming. Unfortunately, my efforts to get a streaming 'terminal' available in the living room (other than plugging in one of the laptops) hasn't gone particularly well.
I remember listening to RP via my iPhone, and since we had Cat's Bose Sounddock on the shelf, I figured I just had to whip up a connection and dock the phone.
I ran up Safari on the phone, navigated to Radio Paradise, and lo, there was a link to a Radio Paradise iPhone app! For free!
In a blink I had it downloaded and running on my iPhone. The app gives basic functionality, showing the current track and allowing easy music control.
Score another one for the awesome Radio Paradise.
I've been having... unpure thoughts lately.
While I'm fairly happy with clipper running Ubuntu 8.10 as my working desktop machine, I realize that clipper is getting a little long in the tooth (I have not worn the keycaps off, but there's a distinct 'looseness' in the keyboard). It's now 4+ years old, and while it's 'working', it might be time to consider an upgrade.
The macs tempt me. After setting up mom with her macbook, I had a better feel for the mac mobile experience. The latest line of macbooks has enough power in a non-bulky configuration that I can do all my development and serious work on them without making compromises.
I stopped by the Apple store to try out the new macbook touchpad (as I'm not a fan of touchpads in general), and I have to say I was impressed. The 'glass' touchpad implements multitouch in a good way (one finger for 'single click', two fingers for 'right click'). I'd still miss the 'nipple' pointing device in the middle of the keyboard, but I think I'd be okay.
The last thing motivating me is the need to run some business software. I'll be taking over more of Stonekeep's finances, so I need to run Quicken / Quickbooks. While Intuit has done the right thing and put Quicken / Quickbooks online (though with our account with DCU, much of our banking can be done remotely anyway), having native commercial apps available, plus all the wonderful opensource / free apps - is a huge draw.
A properly kitted out laptop from Apple (250gig HD, 4gig RAM, Macbook 2.4Ghz) runs $1800-ish. This would be my machine for another 3-4 years at least - the price is reasonable, though a little daunting.
But then I look at other things that would bring me - like Time Capsule. Brilliant.
It would mean abandoning Linux as a desktop. A moral dilemma to be sure.
Yesterday (Saturday), Zach and I packed up our gear and headed off to Wachusett to ski for as much of the day as we could tolerate. We had some plans for the evening, so the latest we could get home was around 5pm, but as we left the house at 9am, I didn't think that would be a real obstacle.
Zach has been doing a great job skiing. He's now happily keeping pace with me (in fact he's frequently out in front), and I've gotten very comfortable with my Awesome Yellow Six-Ways-From-Sunday Solomon XScream 195cm skis.
This was planned as a escapism day for me. Last week was super-stressful, so I went to the mountain looking for some outdoor, re-centering, thoughtful time with me and the hill. Zach seems to share a lot of my "skiing is a great time for thinking" approach, so though were on the hill together, we didn't talk much. He skied in his space, I skied in mine, we both focused on what we were doing and just relaxed into things. It was nice.
From here on out, we get into serious navel gazing. Fair warning.
So, first of all. I have this... issue. I'm ridiculously critical about myself. I have a hard time considering myself capable or good at 'anything'. If someone calls me a 'musician', I get uncomfortable. I'm not a musician, I can just play some stuff that sounds okay. I'm faking it. "You're a programmer" - well, sort of. I write some stuff, I can code bits, but I'm painfully aware of how much I DON'T know, and just fast talk my way through it. "You juggle really well" - I know some tricks, I know a few things, but I haven't learned anything new in years, blah blah blah. I have a fear of being overconfidence and being arrogant.
While skiing yesterday, I did my usual observation of myself with a critical eye. I watched my skill, timing, form, and control. I watched myself with my 'outer eye' - that self-observation that's always with me, judging. And 2 hours into being on the slopes, somewhere around the time we were considering stopping for lunch and scheduling a lesson for Zach, I came to this conclusion:
I am a skier.
But, more than that...
I am a damned good skier.
This is not a statement I can make and be totally comfortable with for... well, just about anything. In a world of self-aggrandizing pomposity, where people have a tendency to place themselves out as 'experts' and 'highly skilled' and all that jazz, without really being honest with themselves, it's hard for me to state that I am 'good' at anything, and feel comfortable with it.
But I can watch myself ski, and I see a skilled dancer. I see someone in control, competent, not taking things for granted, but working hard on every turn, every motion, every shift of weight - self-chastising when I get it wrong, feeling when it's right, and safely being able to say to myself "Self, you look good. Excellent form."
But that's not what I came here to talk about. It wouldn't be a post to planet-geek without some geekery.
One of the things I've always wanted to do while skiing was listen to music. I remember a very funny story, undoubtedly apocryphal, when I was a kid about some guy who wanted to hear classical music while skiing. He hired an entire orchestra to stand by the side of the slope and play as he skied past, but they couldn't sync up the brass section with the strings...
I grew up skiing on Hunter Mountain in upstate New York. One winter they started offering rentals of portable stereo rigs to skiers. They were essentially full sized automobile cassette decks in a sort of chest pouch with a bunch of batteries and some headphones. I thought this was the coolest thing ever, but a 12 year old isn't going to get a chance to try this thing out, so I never heard what it was like.
I never got around to taking a Walkman with me on the slopes (I do remember some mountains actually banned them, worried they'd hurt the skier if they fell, or presented a safety risk when a skier couldn't hear anything). Nowadays, it's pretty common to see the telltale white cords of ipod headphones on many a snowboarder. It was time for me to try it.
During our lunch break, I went through the music selection on my iPhone and picked out about 30 tracks I'd like to listen to while skiing. They were mostly stuff I knew I liked a lot (Alan Parsons, Blues Brothers, The Cure, Dave Matthews, Dire Straights, etc etc). I queued them up into a playlist, set up my headphones under my shellaclava and hat, and put my iPhone in the inside pocket of my jacket. This turned out to be a fortuitous location for the phone, as it meant I could squeeze the jacket in the right place and adjust the volume up and down, so I could talk to people with a sort of background music going on when necessary. Thus equipped, and with Zach in a ski lesson for an hour and a half, I ventured out.
The result was fairly magical. The weather was perfect, the conditions were excellent, and the music was awesome. The headphones were comfortable and sounded great (I was wondering if the wind / noise would drown out the music, but that didn't happen at all). Listening to "Sweet Home Chicago" while working on short-turn fall line techniques on a bright, clear, sunny day had me grinning from ear to ear and feeling about as good as you can get while flying down a hill at 25mph in 15 degree weather.
If you've never done it before, and you're an active skier, I highly recommend trying this out. There are some drawbacks to be sure. You cannot hear anything else that goes on around you, including someone next to you in line wondering when you're going to move up in the singles line (only happened once, really). Although iPod headphones are 'okay', they can shift around, and adjusting the position of the headphones underneath 2 layers of hat can be tricky. For the most part though, the headphones stayed put, something I was eternally grateful for.
But oh the joy.
Later, Zach and I got back together and did a couple more runs together. I spent a lot of this time watching him. I realize he's on the same track I was when I was 11 or 12 (he's a little ahead of me on the schedule). He's seeking out the little paths on the sides of the trails, looking for the little whoopsie-jumps that are all over the place (skiers know what I mean by these - when i was a kid, I totally did this). What I also realized was... he needs kids to ski with. I'm boring for him - I'm not digging out the little fun bits, and goofing around, I'm just all zen like in my focus, and he's already to the skill level where he's looking for more excitement.
When I was on Hunter, my parents found me a sort of 'kids group' program - it was geared for kids 11-13 or so I guess, and was basically one nutty ski instructor and 4-5 crazy kids, and we just went nuts. We'd do a couple dozen runs a day, going hell bent all over the mountain, and it was a blast. I don't think Wachusett has anything quite as goofy fun, so I'm going to be looking around for other kids groups. Zach has one friend at school who snowboards a lot, I'm going to see if he wants to go skiing with us one day. Zach's already comfortable going off and taking runs and riding the ski lift on his own - having a friend (or friends) he can ski with I think would make the day a lot more enjoyable for him.
Me? I'm enjoying rediscovering my love for something physical, something I'm good at, and the added joy of sharing it with my son. I do have constant memories of doing this with my parents way back when, and every once in a while I get a little teary thinking of my dad... and remembering him doing these things with me 25 years ago.
Someone on a chat channel mentioned this site, and I've been browsing it off and on over the last few days.
The site is TVtropes.org, and is a vast collection of 'tropes' found not just in television, but in comics, manga, and film.
A trope, according to the home page:
Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means "stereotyped and trite". In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.
The site has a horrific amount of information on it, in wiki form, though they are careful to state they are NOT wikipedia ("We're a buttload more informal...").
Some choice bits.
Regarding the 'BerserkButton' trope:
Marty McFly from the Back To The Future films: "Nobody... calls me... chicken!" This is a rare instance in which getting over the Berserk Button is part of the Character Development, or where the Berserk Button is even treated as a bad thing to have.
And, in the 'BarSlide' trope:
In Hudson Hawk, when Eddie orders a cappucino, the bartender slides it down the bar to him.
And it goes on and on and on.
I love the internet.
My Political Views
I am a left social libertarian
Left: 5.16, Libertarian: 3.93
My Foreign Policy Views
Score: -6.68
My Culture War Stance
Score: -6.67
Political Spectrum Quiz
I'm a little surprised at the strong libertarian side of things, as I consider myself a socialist. Some of the questions were... tricky in that I could have answered them in a certain way depending on the next statement. For example, "Do you support the death penalty if the crime is heinous enough" - I have to answer yes, but that is only under the assumption the legal system can be considered infallible. I have to answer the question as it's stated, so had to say "Yes, I agree, strongly."
My current employer is looking for a senior Perl developer. We're located out in Littleton, MA. Full details of the position behind the cut. Feel free to poke me for any details. We use the standard LAMP (where P = Perl here) stack, in CGI / mod_perl configurations.
Hey, this could be fun. I've set up a script that watches twitter for the hashtag '#arisia'. When it finds a tweet with that in the message, the script retweets the message over to @arisia. So, if you're coming to Arisia, and use twitter, add @arisia to your follow list, and join the conversations in realtime with your fellow Arisians!
To have your tweet show up in the @arisia group, just add #arisia to your tweet.
Well, I've gone and done it. Connect away, ya'll!
Still needs a lot of polishing and finessing, but it's a start.
When the workshop is up and functioning at Mosaic this will be one of my first projects. I see it now. I hope I can do half as good a job as this fellow has.
Giant Atari Joystick bedside lamp
Found via UniqueDaily.
When I first starting hearing the audio submissions for NPR's "This I Believe" project, I wondered if I were given the opportunity, what would I say?
In this confusing season, with wildly contradictory messages being pushed in from all quarters, I thought it was time to sit down and say...
This I believe...
As most of my readers know, I have a very nice Aeron chair that I got when I was working at home full time. The decision to invest $600 in a single piece of furniture I was going to use day in and day out wasn't lightly taken, but I needed something comfortable, durable, and designed for my size and weight. An Aeron size C from ebay fit the bill nicely.
I've had my share of problems with it, including a broken 'pan' seat and a damaged lifter. The seat was covered under warranty, and I was able to replace it myself, but the lifter needed a trip to a local repair shop.
The last couple weeks, the chair has refused to recline. The levers on the left side that allow forward and backward motion were 'locked' in position, and I couldn't undo them. It was making me not want to sit at my desk - and even though I'm not working fulltime at home, I know that if there's something that makes an experience less than enjoyable, I'll avoid it. So I was sitting on the couch with my laptop or working downstairs.
Last night, I decided to haul out the toolbox and see what could be done...
About once a year I toss out a reminder that I have a BOINC team actively chewing away on a variety of projects (SETI@Home, Rosetta, Folding, ClimatePrediction, etc).
Out of 78,000 teams worldwide, we are currently at position 1197 - at our best, we were at 662. I'm guessing a lot of this has been attrition. People replace computers, and don't restart the client, or shut it down for various reasons.
I've recently restarted my processes, and also added a couple machines from my work pool. The new machines have definately shown a spike in average credit being reported into BOINC, but I could use a couple more CPU's online!
If you have some spare machines, or desktops with screensavers, please consider joining my BOINC team and putting those machines to good use. The projects that BOINC works with are all for good causes - cancer research, global climate predication, searches for aliens. Cmon!
Misc ramblings, just have to get them out there.
Nuff rambling. Back to the grindstone.
The things you learn while watching Jeopardy. Did you know the original set used for the 1980 movie Popeye is alive and well as Popeye Village (also known as Sweethaven Village), an amusement park on the northwest corner of the island of Malta?
I didn't!
I came across this great article on Gizmodo that goes over the major players in the smartphone market, from a visual standpoint. The article briefly discusses the various platforms out there, and gives a nice summary of the pros and cons of each.
It's a very simplistic overview, but it's nice seeing all the players together.
Read the full article at Gizmodo.
I'm certainly a collector. Scouring eBay looking for another odd component to add to my esoteric toy collection is an age old pasttime.
But Jay Walker, the founder of Priceline.com and entrepreneur extraordinaire, has taken it to the ultimate.
Wired.com has an article and pictorial about his private library, containing centuries old books, originals of the milestones in technical and intellectual history (one of the spare Sputnik satellites, Enigma machines, an Edison kinetiscope, a 1960-era vacuum tube processor from IBM), all housed in a custom built 35,000 sq foot room.
Magnificent.
A couple quick notes from this past weekend.
First, Rock Band 2. ZOMG. I absolutely understand that the PS2 version of Rock Band vastly outsells the Xbox version, but going from our PS2 setup at home (which, admittedly, is pretty good), to a full Rock Band 2 setup on an XBox 360 with about 100 downloaded tracks added to the mix? No comparison, whatsoever. Thanks Doug, I think. :)
This may break my self-imposed ban on buying an Xbox. I understand the money situation, but I still don't like having to buy a Microsoft product just to use one of the best console titles I've ever seen. Grump.
Second, thank you blk for a great weekend of hiking, socializing, and hanging out. And for anyone else who ever has the opportunity to visit Pittsburgh, don't miss the pancakes.
On geeky personal news, I made a bunch of progress on CONGO, as well as thinking about project planning and deliverables. I managed to get Browse working properly while on the plane (why do I do my best coding while jammed into a plane seat? It's weird), just before my battery died :( I'm on track for my self-imposed schedule of having an FC release by December 1st. I just have to give up sleep. *nod*
Continuing the mental rambling, I was disappointed to note that an idea I had while watching the hustle and bustle of a large airport has already been patented. At least it's a fairly recent patent, so it's not like I came up with something and discovered it was considered and discarded a few decades ago.
Last but not least, I continue to love my iPhone. This was my first real trip with it, and having full time access to my email, as well as some intarweb and a few games was awesome. I'm disappointed in the battery life (it requires a complete, full topping up charge -every- night, no cheating), and a couple hours of serious use can deplete it, but it's a solvable problem. I just have to train myself to charge it regularly.
I have, however, managed to lose my headphones. (The iPhone has a modified set if iPod headphones, adding a microphone dongle). Since I haven't been a big fan of the iPod style ear buds, I'll be hunting around for a set of mic-enabled travel headphones now. Any recommendations would be appreciated. They have to fold up nicely. I think I'd like to try a set of on-the-ear headphones again (I've been using a variety of in-ear phones for a while), but I'm not interested in the "hang the headphone on the earlobe" style. I don't mind the bracket-style, as long as it folds up.
Enough rambling for this morning, off to code...
Apparently Zach can walk through walls. Yep, it's easy for him, he even almost got me to do it, he said it was easy. I kept having him do it over and over again, then went over to the common house, and showed Diana, and she didn't believe it either, until I finally convinced him to stick his hand through a door. "See?!?!" I said. She was flabbergasted.
Now all I had to do was figure out how to film it so it didn't look fake, and to convince Zach to keep doing it for people (he was getting bored). Once I had it filmed and the like, that million dollars would be ours, and it would solve a lot of our short term problems.
Then I woke up...
I'm really getting into Pandora lately. One of the channels I've set up is stuff I consider 'Progressive'. I initially seeded it with Spocks Beard and Yes, and Pandora happily ran with it, adding in Alan Parsons, Styx, Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, and Genesis.
It's also added in groups I hadn't ever heard of, such as Dream Theater, Marillion, and Flower Kings. Today I was bopping along listening, and a track came on that I really liked - turns out it was "Suite Charlotte Pike" by the band "Transatlantic".
Huh, sez I. I like these guys. They remind me of Spocks beard and Dream Theater. Off I go to Wikipedia, and, right there at the top of the page about Transatlantic, I see:
Transatlantic was a progressive rock supergroup formed in 1999 by vocalist/keyboardist Neal Morse of Spock's Beard and drummer Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater.
Guess I was on the right track.
I type this sitting in the bay of my local super-quicky-lube place while happy drones in red swaarm around my vehicle. I'm torn between the image of a formula car driver making a pit stop (the minivan sort of clashes here) and some sort of starcraftian crossover - where one of the drones would suddenly stop in their tracks and go 'Work complete!'
Regardless, I'm able to do all this insightful commentary due to the 'internet? We got yer internet right here, buddy' utility of my iPhone.
I love technology.
The time is fast approaching where the dreaded "MOVING" word will begin showing up in my "what are you up to?" column. To prepare for that, I really needed to turn the trailer we got from Harbor Freight a few years ago and turn it into a box trailer. Last weekend I built sides for it, and a folding rear gate, and started loading all the garbage we had lying around into it for a run to the dump.
Now, because we're in the burbs, getting rid of garbage that's not normal kitchen waste and not recycling can be a pain in the butt. Fortunately, my brother in law pointed out a commercial garbage facility in Westborough called EL Harvey (warning, it has music on the home page) that, wonder of wonders, takes garbage. Any garbage.
So with Zach's help I finished loading up the trailer, bungied down the tarp (EL Harvey requires all loads to be tarp covered), and headed over. The trailer held a mix of debris including old boxes that had gotten wet, old yard equipment, broken computers, etcetc. Judging by how the van was behaving, I guessed it was about a ton all told.
Once we got to the station, we lined up with all the big heavy duty trucks, weighed the van and the trailer together, and got directed to one of the buildings. We backed up the trailer, handed over our receipt, and started unloading. It was simply a matter of tossing everything over a low wall into the building, where a pair of big front loaders were shifting the junk around into various piles about 10' below us. Unloading only took 10 minutes, after which we re-weighed the van and trailer, and paid for the dropoff. Because we were below a ton (about 1600lbs total), we still paid the 'minimum' amount ($55 for a ton), and headed off.
Zach and I stopped off on the way up to Burlington to visit Cat's mom, and checked over the trailer to see how it held up to the garbage run. My sides and gate worked as advertised, and the trailer was happily rattling around empty for the drive up.
I still need to have a ratchet strap around the back to keep the sides together, unfortunately. The 1/4" plywood siding isn't rigid enough to keep straight up and still keep the rear gate closed. I may add some bracing on the sides, but really, for the first time out, everything worked just as I wanted.
We'll be doing another garbage haul next weekend, and I'm sure the trailer will get tons of use once we start hauling things over to Mosaic in... amazingly enough... about 7 weeks.
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2008 10:17:50 -0400 (EDT) From: Peter@REDACTED.com Subject: $15.00/hr - 1 Day (Sept 10th Wed) Worcester PC TECH Hi Dave,      My name is Peter REDACTED and I'm a recruiter at REDACTED Computer Corporation. Our records show that you have expertisereflecting work that I have available at my direct client. The details are: WED SEPT 10TH IN WORCESTER PC IMAGE DEPLOYMENT (SYMANTEC GHOST) $15.00/PER HOUR W2 MUST BE ABLE TO PASS A BACKGROUND CHECK. If you are still available, interested, and/or planning to make a change, or know of a friend who might have the required qualifications and interest, please PLEASE EMAIL ME YOUR MS WORD RESUME TO peter@REDACTED.com  even if we have spoken recently about a different position. When you respond, please include a daytime phone number so that I can reach you.  In considering candidates, time is of the essence, so please respond ASAP. Thank you. Sincerely yours, Peter REDACTED REDACTED Computer Corp, Inc. Note: Please allow me to reiterate that I chose to contact you either because your resume had been posted to one of the internet job sites to which we subscribe, or you had previously submitted your resume to RMS. I assumed that you are either looking for a new employment opportunity, or you are interested in investigating the current job market. If you are not currently seeking employment, or if you would prefer I contact you at some later date, please indicate your date of availability so that I may honor your request. In any event, I respectfully recommend you continue to avail yourself to the employment options and job market information we provide with our e-mail notices. Thanks again. Peter REDACTED New York, NY 10036
I think I just made up for my lack of productivity toward the end of last week.
Database Fixes
I had been totally stymied by a problem in the CONGO rewrite - how to handle state of a registrant in a way that didn't involve scanning history logs and essentially replaying an audit each time. The real stumbling block was defining exactly what states a registrant could be in.
Going by a recent event, it appears there really is a situation where someone may have signed up to work up to attending an event, but hadn't actually completed the registration yet. In early version of CONGO, we called this 'subscribed'. It caused all sorts of havoc in the larger events, because there should never have been a situation where someone was subscribed, but not registered.
Cept, it kept happening. The counts of people subscribed compared to the counts of people registered would drift, but in weird ways, and also in ways that were hard to source, due to the funky way CONGO v1 was calculating state of the registrant.
All of this is going away now, with a directly updated and maintained reg_state table that underwent some major surgery tonight. I introduced reg_state to help with this 'what is the current situation of this person' question that arises constantly. Apparently, though, I never quite completed tuning it. To wit:
o The table was a MyISAM table, rather than InnoDB
o It had no foreign key indexes at all
o It was not tracking subscription status at all (the logic was 'if they were in the table, they were subscribed'
Etc etc. That's all fixed now, and logic was introduced to automatically toss the registrant into the reg_state table whenever they were looked up in the current event. So they're added, but NOT subscribed, that can be done later, but their state is no longer non-deterministic.
Layout Schmayout. Just show it
Well, not so much. The ShowRegistrants.jsp file may be my number-one edited file in the whole project. It's the one that determines what the 'registrant zoom' screen looks like - probably the most viewed page in CONGO. And I keep fiddling with it. I'm currently trying to cut down the number of pushbuttons on it, and organize them in a useful way. It's frustrating work, because I'm not really a UI designer. I'm sure I'll good solid feedback from the CONGO power users out there. I hope ya'll like it. *worry*.
The next step is attaching the reworked status display with functions (like 'subscribe' 'register' and 'print badge'). These new hooks really change the workflow of the application, but I think it'll be for the better.
Unfortunately, I've just gotten a poke that the next major event to use CONGO may be going live in about 10 weeks with pre-registration, so I have a hard deadline now for when v2 really needs to at least be in basic useful form. I really don't want to deploy the old version again, so maybe this is a good kick in the pants to work toward a functional version in a reasonable timeframe.
Yeah, but... Vacation?
So, I did mention vacation up there. This weekend I've been up at the house in Maine with the family and the water and the woods. I suppose it helped to get away from the code for a few days, because sitting down tonight definitely got things rolling again. It's the last 'official' day of the summer-vacation-house season, so we did things like pull the sailboat and power boat out of the water, put the docks away for the winter, and cleaned out the freezer. There's always some meloncholy associated with labor day because of this. The weekends spent up here during the summer are great, and we had a wonderful time this summer. On the flipside, we'll start having weekends back at home, which will primarily be taken up with packing for the move to Mosaic in a month or two, but I'll still miss the mornings waking up to loons calling and the calm still lake out our windows.
As the title says, yesterday hardly went as planned, as evidenced by me just getting around to posting at 9:30 this morning.
The Geekery. It is everywhere!
First, the day was full of IT-related geekiness, trying to get SASL authentication working on the the mail gateway for the Greater Homeport Server Cluster. What should have been an hour long setup and fiddling turned into a 6 hour "Learn what SASL is, learn what TLS is, learn how Postfix manages it, learn how Cyrus implements SASL, learn how to set up standard authentication, and learn how to do this all on an extremely busy mail gateway without killing all inbound mail" process.
In the end, we were only partially successful. The main impetus for this setup was making it so Cat and I could send mail from our iPhones without using Googles SMTP gateway (if you have a gmail account, you can use SASL authentication and send mail from anywhere via smtp.google.com. The drawback? Any mail going through that gateway gets it's From: line rewritten to the gmail account ID.)
We got most bits working, except for finding out at the end that v2.0.2 firmware on the iPhone has a problem with self-signed certificates on TLS-enabled mail servers (but this is only for SMTP connections - Safari et al has no problem with self signed certs. Annoying). One assumes Apple will be fixing this soon, but it means we can't have encrypted inbound mail connections from the iPhone. Adam has suggested there is a list of certs that free and Apple certified, I may end up going that route.
Oh yeah, and about the project I'm supposed to be working on...
But that's not what I came here to talk about.
The point of this week's blogging was to get focused on CONGO v2 and make some progress on getting toward an Alpha release. To accomplish this, I need to get 2 hours or so a night of fairly focused work time.
Last night I failed.
The main culprit? Lack of sleep. I went out to dinner with my mom last night (mm, steak!), and ended up getting home around 8:30. Not too bad, thought I, I still have a couple hours before bed. Flopped down on the couch, had the laptop out, tossed a movie in, and started work and... fell asleep right on the couch. An hour and a half later, I woke up (now about 10;30), was immensely groggy, and decided "Right, that's it. Bed." and flopped right into bed, sleeping like the dead til 8am this morning. Total sleep time? About 10.5 hrs. How I feel today? Stiff, but caught up.
Unfortunately, this meant I got only a minimal amount of work done on CONGO last night. I fixed some of the Notes DAO setups, and started work on modifying the ShowRegistrant functions to enable the notes browsing. I'm trying to decide if the Notes listing should be attached directly to an instance of a Registrant, which means it gets populated whenever a Registrant is instantiated. This really only happens on single views (ala, getting a list of Registrants from a search query doesn't load the entire Registrant, just an index), so it shouldn't make things too burdensome. It has the advantage of making everything easily accessible if you have the Registrant at hand. Right now a registrant's attendance history is attached on instantiation (for Arisia, this is perhaps 20 rows, but that's somewhat unusual). If I don't embed the list in the Registrant object, I'll need a second set of lookups and queries when viewing a registrant, which is a little cumbersome.
For now I think I'll embed it, and hook up the DAO's appropriately. It'll make the display logic a lot easier (data is at hand), and if we end up beating the bejeezus out of the database for largish events, I'll look at optimizing it.
Conclusion
Onward and forward. Today I need to focus on the paying job and finish up an annoying script, hoping to get it audited and approved by the other engineer. Have I mentioned that Perl is not my favorite language? Oh there is a rant pending...
I usually give authors some leeway in their personal lives and opinions. I mean, particularly SF authors are an odd lot, and entitled to their quirks.
I had heard that OSC had some pretty off the wall opinions regarding gay marriage and the like, but this latest rant, published in the July 24th, 2008 "Mormon Times" as an op-ed piece, takes the 'batshit crazy' to a new level.
I suggest you sit down and steady yourself with something soothing before reading that piece. There's hardly a paragraph that doesn't elicit a "WHAT?!??!" and "That's a blatant lie" and "You have GOT to be kidding me", but here's a taste if you don't feel like wading through the vitriol. The first paragraph pretty much sets the tone;
The first and greatest threat from court decisions in California and Massachusetts, giving legal recognition to "gay marriage," is that it marks the end of democracy in America.
Got that? Democracy's over, kids! Lets head for the caves!
How bout a few more tidbits:
Remember how rapidly gay marriage has become a requirement. When gay rights were being enforced by the courts back in the '70s and '80s, we were repeatedly told by all the proponents of gay rights that they would never attempt to legalize gay marriage. It took about 15 minutes for that promise to be broken.
Wait, who? what? Who promised what where? And I hardly remember laws being passed where it was stipulated "We shall not pursue gay marriage!"
It just goes on. Enjoy the humor value of his ravings, and know that in fact there are many people in the world who think this way. Mores the pity.
Thanks to laist.com and Digg for the pointers.
Hey kids, it's Sysadmin Appreciation Day! Go out and give your admin a hug, a smooch, and buy 'em lunch!
I have mad appreciation to all my co-administrators working on the Greater Homeport Server Cluster. We have a lot of users, a lot of sites, and do a lot of good stuff. Because of the purely volunteer hard work done by these people, we have happy users, stable hosting, and very very few outages.
Super-duper mad props to...
Dwight Ernest - owner of 'msb' and 'msb2' - he helps keep our network glowing.
Mort - he of the ever-patient Movable Type hackery and general "No problem, I'll take care of that" approach to stuff.
Tim Pierce - a former demigod of Usenet, now good friend and one of the first in the line of fire when Stuff Breaks. I, sir, salute you.
The Greater Homeport Servers can't function without help from all the community members. I want to also send thanks to others who have done a ton of help with technical and content related stuff...
Lisa Holsberg - while not technically a sysadmin, Lisa is our primary Movable Type geek, and we wouldn't be able to run our blogs without her help.
Catya Belfer-Shevett - When I first set up Drupal for Arisia, Cat jumped in and is now a Mad Drupal Goddess.
Luwenth - Luw owns the machine(s) that function as Homeport's secondary DNS servers out in California, and has jumped in and helped several times when we've had Issues. Thank you!
Nathan Mehl - I've known Nathan for many years, and have an enormous amount of respect for him. Right now, Nathan runs a machine that helps keep our IRC network stable. Thank you!
I'm on my way back from camping this weekend. Sitting here in the Pittsburgh airport, it's sort of odd having the trappings of modern society all around me again, having spent the last 4 days and three nights sleeping in a tent (on the ground, no air mattress), and hiking through knee-high grass several times a day to socialize and get food.
There's much to talk about, all sorts of geeky interesting things to go on about camping, food, waste, economy of living, and social interactions, but for now I'm just going to enjoy the air conditioning and modern plumbing.
I'm signal boosting this message a bit. Our cohousing group (collectively Sawyer Hill Ecovillage, consisting of my group, Mosaic Commons and a second community, Camelot Cohousing) have just completed the state-mandated lottery for offering our affordable units to qualified buyers under the 40b Affordable Housing law. Because we did not have a full slate of applicants, the process is now thrown open to anyone who qualifies within the 40b limits.
If you've been interested in our project, and have held off because of the daunting numbers, now may be a perfect time to look into it. These units are being offered on a first come, first served basis.
We have 40b units available priced between $136k and $176k
The 40b limitations are:
Note there are a variety of exceptions for seniors, single parents, etc. See this web page for details.
We also still have a few market rate units for those families who don't meet the limits for the affordable units, so come check us out: http://www.sawyerhill.org.
I'm packing up to head out to a geek camping event going on in upstate New York, but wanted to share this with ya'll. It's no secret I enjoy taking part in the debates on the Convert Me Livejournal community, taking on my Aspect as a rabid evangelical agnostic, and wielding my Attribute of "be a dick". It keeps the heart rate up and gives me a good rant target.
Someone in the group pointed to a fascinating atheist blog / website called Russels Teapot. On the top of the site is the following quote:
"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time." - Bertrand Russell
Pretty good commentary and right in line with my thinking.
While Zach was out to lunch with Rosa, I decided to take the bike in to town with me, and ride around Cambridge. I don't get much opportunity to ride in town, so I thought it would be a good opportunity.
I managed to avoid all the downpours that were skirting through the area, and got in about 10 miles on city streets. I passed all the hot spots of Cambridge... Porter Square, Community Boating, Central Square, Harvard Square, etc etc
Afterwards, Zach and I had an hour or two to kill, so we walked down on the north end and took a good look at the Constitution (I had never actually seen it in person). We didn't have time to go on the tour of it, but Z was suitably impressed ("That's a big boat! All wood? Wow.").
The combination of the long walk and the bike ride, and my lack of anything resembling regular exercise lately (coupled with helping Tim and Ellen move yesterday) has left me pretty wiped out. The hot tub is calling my name.
Today, I'm up in Maine. The house is empty but for Zach and myself. After a morning of swimming, I'm settling down to do some work on the house, Zach is alternately reading and playing around with Scratch.
We had the wonderful Terry and Allen up since yesterday morning, with their awesome two kids, and Cat was here since Friday night. Now it's just down to Zach and I, a sunny day, work to be done, and... music.
I rarely get to indulge in listening to music at a reasonable (cough) volume while I work. It tends to annoy people around me (hard to talk over Peter Gabriel blasting out a live version of In Your Eyes) but Zach doesn't seem to mind, and for me, it just keeps the energy up, and makes the time go smoother.
We had a great weekend, and it's not over yet, but with socializing and spaces, there's always work to be done. Now I'm doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, putting away floaties and boats, and doing some repairs on the house (durned carpenter ants)... but that's okay, because I have Radio Paradise hooked up on the big stereo, and the space to play it in.
Not a bad way to spend a sunny summer Sunday.
ZOMG sore ouchie wow.
Yes dear readers, it must be the beginning of summer. And that means... VOLLEYBALL!
Last night I had my second evening playing (first was last Thursday). All the old muscles are creaking back to life, and ones I had forgotten existed are making themselves known. On the court, I'm playing far better for "first time out" than I was same time last year. Last night's games included some mighty good hits, an acknowledgement from the fellow who runs the games that my hitting and blocking were such that I should be 'switched out' from setting (sad, because I actually like setting, but being 6'6" tall, I really should be in the hitter position).
Probably the highlight of the evening was I was in the right hitter position, ball's on the other side, received and passed, set to the woman just in front of me (who has -outstanding- technical form, she's saddled by being rather short), she goes up for the hit, I time it juuust right, and go up to block. STUFFED! She glares at me, turns to the team, "ALRIGHT, Who put that damned wall there?"
Gonna be a good summer.
I look forward to Friday mornings because I get to read James Randi's SWIFT column. It always has the latest woowoo news and other idiocies being inflicted on the world.
Today's had an interesting tidbit, pointing to an article on Wikipedia about the Flat Earth mythology that debunks the common misperception that until modern times, it was a wide spread assumption that the world was flat.
In fact, there's strong historical evidence that going all the way back to the ancient greeks, there was no such viewpoint (or at least it was very very limited). The misperception arose from the religion vs science debates toward the end of the 19th century, when Darwin's writings were very much in the public eye.
Well that's one personal misconception corrected. Enlightenment continues.
AAAARGGGHHH!
So, I've been having some fun playing Ikariam for the last month or two. It's a low-key, enjoyable game. I'm part of a large alliance, my cities are growing nicely, I'm not involved in any wars. Spiffy.
Lately I've been making a move to expand my settlements from 3 to 4 cities. This requires an ENORMOUS investment in resources and logistics (it's one of the throttles on the game that limits expansionism). Last night I decided to move my resources to the last city that needs to be expanded before I build my new settlement. This involves loading a lot of ships, sending them off, and making sure there's space to receive them.
This morning, I look, and all the resources I set to ship between the cities has vanished.
I've seen this happen once or twice before. It usually means the location I'm heading to isn't large enough to accept the shipment or something. But having the results of weeks of manufacturing just vanish has me totally ticked off.
If this is a bug in Ikariam, they need to fix it. If this is normal gameplay, it would be nice to NOTIFY a player when something they're doing is going to cause a major financial loss.
Right now I'm considering ditching the game and moving on. The tediousness of recreating all that material and re-shipping it is something I'm not too inspired to do, particularly if there's some chance of it all disappearing silently again.
It's frustrating when you chalk out a specific block of time to Get Stuff Done, and then things just keep cropping up to get in the way.
Today I returned from a trip to Pittsburgh, and had 6-7 hours of work time slated to get stuff done. The random factors have aligned to challenge me the whole way:
Good thing this weekend's a vacation.
Now this is more like it. Nothing like seeing an article about Cohousing, and particular referring to us, on the Motley Fool website!
Thank you John!
I find myself with a whole series of little things to yammer about, but any one of them don't really add up to an interesting post of it's own, so rather than let them slip away into the dark musty corners of my head, might as well spew them out upon the ether, so they can clutter up your collective consciousnesses as well.
I'm sure there's lots of other goings on I'm missing, but there's a brief glimpse of Life at Planet Geek! (insert Garrison Keillor witty signoff chatter here)
With all the failures in comics movies, sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they REALLY get it right, and it's all good. Gets you up, gets you hollering, and the "WOOHOO!"s come with ease.
This one does it. Beginning to end.
Robert Downey Jr? Welcome back.
Gwyneth Paltrow? You're still hot, and this time, they let you act.
Jeff Bridges? Long way from Kevin Flynn, you still got it.
And for those who like the mechanics, the CGI, the detail, all the visuals? I once saw a quick review of Transformers that said "Less girl, more robot." - I was fully expecting not to get enough of Tony Stark's creations in Iron Man. In this, I was disappointed. There was plenty, and it was a steady stream of awesome.
I have a post about Ubercon brewing, but until that's ready to come off the burner, lets talk about movies for a few minutes.
I Love 'em.
This will come as a surprise to no one, but still I must go on. While at the MIT Flea market last Sunday, I picked up another bag load of DVD's from Yet Another movie store closing down. At $3 each, it totally falls under my "never pay more than $10 for a movie" rule.
I updated my listing, sorted them onto the shelves, and added in 2 movies given to me as a gift from blk, and totalled things up. I'm over 315 DVD's now, and my appetite is not yet sated! More! More! I'm still not satisfied!
What I hadn't updated in a while was updating my wishlist, so taking some cues from Dumb Distractions (thanks crouchback), I filled out the list of movies I don't have, but feel should be part of the collection.
I'm sure I'm missing some good ones. Whadya think? Any suggestions?
See the collection and wishlist here.
Fine. Ya'll can stop tempting me further.
Rock band is mighty cool.
I've been avoiding it. I totally loved DDR, not only for the plain fun of the game, but it gave me a workout! Double bonus.
In the last 24 hours I've played about 2 hours of Rock Band, and I gotta admit, drumming is a lot of fun. Not as aerobic as DDR, but certainly not couch potato material.
Course, a full setup would cost a couple hundred bucks I don't have, so I don't see picking up in the near future, but, er, if folks are playing, er, lemme know? :)
I'm off to UberCon for the weekend! This'll be a bit different than the last 9 events (8? I've lost count). 
This weekend, Zach is coming with me as a con attendee (and gopher for reg). Barb and her son Justin will be there as well, so Zach will have a friend he knows to hang out with.
I packed up the Mame Cabinet into the van. The new pipe-and-fixture arrangement worked well for quick disassembly, but it's still a large cabinet. This'll be the second 'field test' for the arrangement. I brought it to the last Ubercon, but it was missing much of the upper half. I've also replaced MythTV and MythGame with Kubuntu 8.04 and KXMame, which seem to be working very very well. We'll see how it all goes.
Might be blogging from the event, otherwise, see ya'll Sunday!
Back around, oh, 1996? Something like that, Cat and I took our first trip to the British Virgin Islands to spend a week aboard the Flying Cloud, a 207ft Barque (3 masts, square rigged on the first mast). It was a delightful trip, and our first time in the BVI's. We were hooked.
We'd end up taking 4 more trips down there, once with her company, then 3 doing our own bareboat chartering (the picture above is from one of those trips, where we caught sight of the Flying Cloud while stopping at Normal Island). Our last trip was in 2002, after which most of our time and money was being sunk into Mosaic, so we haven't been back since. I miss it!
I've been off and on keeping an eye on Windjammer Cruises, thinking it might be nice to take a trip again. We thoroughly enjoyed our first time - it was very laid back and comfortable. They don't call it 'Barefoot Cruising' for nuthin.
Alas, the Windjammer company has basically fallen apart. There are many suggestions as to why this has happened, but it appears it's mostly due to infighting among the Burkes, the family that owns the business. The fleet is completely laid up, and even though the website is active, they haven't sailed in over a year. They are essentially closed up permanently.
I hope another comes along to take up the concept. Having a cruise that is part sailing, part exploring, part cruising, without all the stuffiness that tends to come with your standard 'big ship' cruising was very nice, and I'd hate to not have that opportunity in the future.
Edit, 11:40am - There is a fantastic, lengthy article on Cruisemates.com that details the entire history of Windjammer, and how badly they've come apart. Highly recommended.
A couple quick What's Going On updates...
April 20th - MIT Flea Market
As part of the great cleanout, I'll be hauling a vanload of gear to the MIT Fleamarket on Sunday, along with a couple other cohousing friends. This is not a 'for profit' sell-off. I'm getting RID of stuff. A quarter for that 1U dual opteron? Go for it! (okay, not really), but I will have piles of stuff that I just don't need or want anymore, please take it away?
April 25-27 - Ubercon X
Yep, another Ubercon! Yay! I'll be down in NJ again working registration. The change this time? Zach will be coming with me (his first gaming con!). Pretty exciting stuff.
This is a somewhat long post, and has been brewing in my head for a while. Grab a cup of coffee, make yourself comfortable.
I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about commuting, fuel economy, vehicle types, and general transportation habits. There are changes afoot in my life that will change my driving needs, and with the ever rising price of fuel, it makes sense to take a good long look at my driving habits, and possibly make some changes.
Some Background
Between Cat and myself, we own 3 vehicles. Well, two and a half. My 2005 Saturn Relay van, Cat's Toyota Prius, and my 25 year old Suzuki GS850 motorcycle. I can't really consider the bike too much, as I ride it perhaps once a summer, due to it's age and general condition, but I'd be remiss if I didn't include it.
Why do we have a van? Well, there's a couple reasons. When I bought it, I was doing regular conventions, which require hauling a series of crates and hardware to the event. In addition, we own a ski boat, a camping trailer, and a utility trailer, all of which need a tow vehicle. The van does these things just fine, but these are incidental uses. Primarily, I just drive the van around - picking up Zach from school, running errands, etc. That's not to say it isn't useful - having that much cargo space is VERY handy, and is regularly used for hauling furniture, garbage, kids, supplies, and, yes, the occasional convention gear.
The problem is, I'm getting increasingly worried about the cost of running the van as my primary transportation. It's poor efficiency, plus the ever rising price of gas, requires me to take a close look at things.
Usage patterns
When evaluating this sort of thing, it's important to take into account how you use your vehicle(s). Cat drives her Prius to work and to Zach's school every day, around 30 miles a day. That is every day, pretty much without fail. There are additional trips to Burlington, Berlin, and other points, but the daily commute is the one that is important.
On the other hand, I have no daily commute. I work at home. When I go out to lunch, three out of four times I walk or ride my bicycle to wherever I'm going. However, I still do drive to pick up Zach at school each day, around 9 miles each way. This I have to do in the van.
Now, realistically, there's pattern changes in the wind. The school year ends in 8 weeks or so. After that, the driving patterns change, and won't resume, since by the time fall rolls around, our move to Mosaic will be imminent. After we move, we'll be able to carpool with other Sudbury Valley parents in Mosaic, and we haven't worked out what that will look like yet, but there's a reasonable chance I won't need to drive to SudVal every day (Around 15 miles each way).
Also, post-move, there's a reasonable change I'll be moving to an office nearby - within 2-3 miles, easy bikeriding range, but I'll also spend a lot of time at Mosaic, since my job doesn't require me to be in the office constantly.
Costs of usage
Looking at usage is only part of the story. The next step is figuring out cost of operation. I'm going to go with pure fuel costs here, not taking into account cost of vehicle, maintenance, etc. Those are really not in flux right now.
When I filled up the Prius last night, the fuel pump showed $3.20 a gallon. Per-barrel costs of crude topped $110 yesterday as well, and there's no indication this situation will reverse - many analysts are easily calling $4/gallon prices this summer. So for the sake of comparison, lets assume a $3.50 a gallon price point for gas. I know the mileage we're getting out of both vehicles, so here's how it breaks down, as it compares with other vehicles I'm considering:
| Vehicle | Observed MPG | Fuel type | Fuel Price | Cost per mile | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prius | 45 | Gas | $3.50 | 7 cents/mile | |
| Relay | 19 | Gas | $3.50 | 18 cents/mile | |
| Golf | 42 | Diesel | $4.25 | 10 cents/mile | |
| BMW R1200RT | 65 | Gas | $3.50 | 5 cents/mile | |
| VW Jetta Wagon | 30 | Gas | $3.50 | 11cents/mile |
I include the Diesel Golf in there because most folks know I had a Diesel Golf for several years, and really enjoyed it. But at that time, prices for diesel fuel were lower than gasoline. The current ridiculous diesel prices have to be considered when thinking about what vehicle makes sense.
So the question comes to mind. What makes sense for my usage patterns? I'm distinctly uncomfortable toodling around in the van to go to lunch, run to the store for something simple, go to a meeting, not to mention my regular drives down to NJ and back (500 miles total, $90 in gasoline right there).
The Cycle Option...
I included the BMW in there because I do love motorcycles, and have been wondering about having something to have fun with. The old GS850 really isn't going to cut it as a dependable ride - if I need to drive 500 miles to NJ and back, I want something I can really depend on. I'd have to outfit it for road travel as well (waterproof bags, etc), and putting that sort of money into the Beast just doesn't make sense.
If I'm also just commuting to the office nearby, keeping the van for "work" and driving the bike (or riding the bicycle) seems like it makes a lot of sense.
Now, natch, there's drawbacks. I can't take Zach with me on a motorcycle (not for a while at least), and a lot of my shuttling around is driving Z from place to place. The bike can't haul cargo other than a couple small items, and realistically, it's a toy for me that can be used for 'real' transportation, not the other way around.
Possibilities
Having said that, I do feel our lifestyle needs some sort of work vehicle for hauling, towing, and general moving stuff around. We use the van at least twice a month for something 'heavy' - in the summer even more so, whether it's moving trailers, hauling big stuff, whatever. And in the coming 2-3 years, we're going to be doing a LOT of home construction, as our houses at Mosaic are quite skeletal. We'll be installing floors, trim, painting - not to mention all the outside work (such as installing walkways and doing general landscaping). Having a vehicle that can pick up two dozen bags of mulch quickly will be invaluable.
So, I guess this all comes down to what options do I have. The way I see it, here's the possibilities...
Conclusions
I don't have any! I really wanted to get that chart together, to sort of understand what the actual cost of owning and operating a vehicle is like given todays fuel prices. It makes me think pretty hard everytime I drive from place to place "yep, that drive to the store cost me two bucks in gas." And while the cost is foremost on my mind, I have to make sure I remember that I'm also burning fuel with every dollar spent, and there's other reasons to consider fuel economy other than just the cost of fuel.
Since I spent enough time trolling through YouTube videos figuring out guitar licks, poker chip tricks, etc, I figured I'd post one back just for chuckles.
Somewhere along the line, I apparently missed this term. Wikipedia has a great short definition of it:
The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.
The first time I saw this term was in a post on Triggur's livejournal showing some creepy animatronics singing. I looked up the definition, and while discussing it on IRC, Nathan pointed me at a flash page showing a CGI generated woman, who reacts to mouse motions.
As far as I know, that entire image is computer generated, and has some truly scary lifelike elements to it (such as the fact that she's breathing). Interestingly, it does NOT trigger the 'revulsion' response in me nearly as much as some others do, but watching this animation quietly move and look about as I do my work is truly an eerie experience.
Why hasn't anyone told me about McMaster-Carr before?
And, now that I know. Can someone make me forget?
That site is dangerous for anyone with maker tendencies.
The time is fast approaching. In about 6 months, we'll be moving to Mosaic Commons. I'm having a hard time coming to grips with the reality of the situation, after 8 years of working on the project. But the buildings are growing on the site before our eyes, and folks are making plans.
Even though we sold our house 3 years ago, Cat and I have plenty to do before we move. While not nearly as dramatic and inspiring as the work Diana and John have been doing, we have our own challenges, and before any move, there's a period of Cruft-Disposing that has to happen.
I'm starting down that road now.
One of the first projects has been to do something about my CD collection. I picked up these CD cases almost 12 years ago, and filled them pretty much to capacity before I stopped my headlong pursuit of More and More CD's. In recent years, I've ripped the ones I really listen to onto a hard drive, and I rarely pull the cd's off the shelf anymore. I don't want to get rid of them, but they do take up a lot of space.
Enter CD binders! A couple good Googling sessions, and I found a set a 424 CD storage binder. If I use one sleeve for the CD and one for the CD insert, two of these binders would hold my whole collection.
The binders arrived, and Zach and I settled into unshelving the CD's, sorting them alphabetically, then loading them into the binders. It took about 4 nights total, but the end result is reducing the footprint from 3 4.5' tall shelves down to a pair of binders that can be stored easily.
The black cases hold everything easily, and I've left room for all the various spots I have cd's tucked away in the house. I'm sure when we move, I'll find another half dozen CD wallets that will round out all the empty cases I found during the project.
Of course, this now means I have some CD shelving to give away (cat not included). Anyone want them?
Coming out of the winter months, my attention goes to my waistline, which while not exactly exploding, has released some of the territory gained from last summer's busy volleyball, hiking, and biking regime.
So it was with some guilt I glanced at my asiago cheese bagel with (light!) cream cheese this morning, and wondered "Huh. Bagels to me are healthy. Is -this- healthy? I don't know!"
So off to Panera's website, and a look at... bagels!
Plain bagel 290cal, 12g protein Asiago bagel 350cal, 16g protein French Toast bagel 380cal, 11g protein
Now lets add on some cream cheese
Regular cream cheese 200cal, 4g protein Reduced fat plain 140cal, 5g protein
So, I'm not particularly getting hammered by choosing Asiago over Plain, but in general, bagels have a lot of calories in them. What did surprise me was how much protein they have. We're always being careful about how much protein Zach eats, so I was thinking a french toast bagel + cream cheese 'wasn't enough' But consider - a hard boiled egg is 17g of protein - and a tablespoon of peanut butter (the old standby protein-dose), is about 6g of protein. Normally we sort of do a big scoop, so lets call it two tablespoons of PB, so 12g.
So a big scoop of peanut butter has quite a bit less protein than your basic bagel + cream cheese.! Velly intellestink.
This evening saw the third Boston OLPC meetup, this time congregating at Cosi restaurant in Cambridge, right across the street from OLPC Headquarters in Kendall Square.
Okay, that may be a bit more grandiose than is appropriate, but it does put a finger on how I feel about getting a new laptop battery for clipper, my work laptop.
Previously, I had been getting a around an hour of usage on it on the internal battery. When thinking about places to park and work, having a power outlet nearby was an absolute necessity for anything approaching real work. Sure, on the old battery I could fire it up, check email, do some quick surfing, but it put a hard limit in my head on what I could accomplish. I knew that I'd have to stop within a short window and move or shut down or whatever.
Recently I went from the 6 cell Li-Ion battery (56 watt-hour) to the 9 cell battery (85 watt-hour). The first improvement came from just having a new battery (Dell laptop batteries are notorious for losing their 'oomph' after a few years of use), but the other boost was getting a 40% increase in capacity. This drove my work time from a smidge over an hour up to over 3 hours of off-outlet use.
Now, that may not seem like a huge change ("just another 2 hours or so") but in my work-pattern, it's enormous. It means I can spend the 1/2 hour after just sitting down checking mail, getting settled, starting up what I need to do, and organizing my brain a bit, and then get into my work groove... without immediately needing to be interrupted by a power-fiddle.
I'm comfortable parking myself in a random restaurant booth and settling in for a good hack session without thinking about how to manage power outlets and cords, or even firing things up while sitting in my car waiting to pick up my son from school.
Yay technology.
Everyone who has had anything to do with computer gaming has probably heard of Civilization, the genre originated by Sid Meier and so successfully built (some would say exploited by) Microprose. There have been many branches of the Civilization pedigree, and I even reviewed one (FreeCiv) a while back.
Recently I tripped over another incarnation that has taken the Civilization concept into the 'web 2.0' world. Through a combination of Javascript, extremely well done graphics, and some basic gaming smarts, the folks at GameForge have come up with Ikariam, a pretty interesting little game.
This morning I'm on my way back from Pittsburgh, and enjoying the hospitality of Southwest Airlines and their unconventional approach to managing flights (how many times do you have flight attendants singing over the plane PA "We love you, you love us, we're much faster than the bus!"?)
All in all, it's been a pleasant experience, though I have to learn a new set of rules about getting my much-needed bulkhead seat (Check in early. No, really. I'm not kidding, check in THE DAY BEFORE, and print the boarding pass ahead of time. Southwest has no reserved seating, even for 6 and a half foot tall 1/8th ton monstrosities that have little chance of fitting into seat 14B and still retaining the ability walk upright after the flight.)
On the way back, I'm traveling through BWI, hoping to take a few minutes online between flights, and lo I notice these bench-like tables with power outlets AND USB charging hookups. There's dozens of them, they're perfectly set up for a quick park-and-email-check, as well as "I need to charge my cell phone." This may be the most intelligent thing I've seen an airport do to take into account the type of tech-heavy traveler that's so common nowadays.
Naturally, I had to try it out, and here I blog, plugged in and comfy, just outside my gate.
Thank you BWI for getting a clue!
I suppose it's okay to mention every two years or so that I have a BOINC team that is collectively pooling all idle computing power and using those idle cycles for scientific research and analysis. Since 2 years ago, the number of projects that use the BOINC software has increased and diversified widely, though the core projects (SETI@Home, Folding@home, etc) are still extremely active.
If you have a machine that's frequently idle, why not consider installing the BOINC client on it, and signing up to join our team? I've recently re-started many of my idle clients in an effort to shore up some of the sliding numbers (many of our long time computing partners have stopped submitting updates, due to job changes or just disinterest.)
At our best, we were ranked # 662 about a year ago. Currently we ranked #935 in the world (out of 71,588 teams), according to our page on Boincstats.com.
If you'd like to join, our SETI@Home project page has signup information, though we also have teams at Rosetta and Predictor, both great projects.
Someone at General Mills totally got this one right. I found these on the shelf while shopping for Arisia this year. "Protein, salty, AND sweet. And I LOVE peanuts!"
Lemme tell ya, they're awesome. Tasty, not too crunchy, not too squooshy, and salty and sweet. Mmmmmmmm. If they had come to me and said "Design a granola bar. What would you want it to taste like?" - this comes pretty durned close.
And, while we're pushing products, I'd like to just point out the massive LURV I have for my new Bose Companion 3 speakers. Bose has a reputation for doing mighty elegant designs, and under 
normal circumstances I wouldn't be able to afford their gear, but with an in, it becomes more manageable.
I replaced my old set of dying 3-ways with this system, and ZOMG are they schweet. I guess my only real complaint is the speakers are mounted on 5" pedestals, which makes it somewhat difficult to work space around on a crowded desk.
I think I ended up with a reasonable desk compromise though, and I sure can't complain about the sound. Note the above desktop picture is after a massive cleanup and rearranging, my desk is not normally this antiseptic, though I aspire to Star-Trek like geek spartanness some day.
Tasty salty sweet snacks, really good sound, and a clean workspace. Now all I need to do is get some work done, oh look! Day's over! Later all!
I'd like to take a few moments today to talk to those who have recently hopped on the Bluetooth Headphone bandwagon. Apparently its become socially acceptable and, frankly, chic for the general populace to wear a Bluetooth headphone for times other than a casual conversation. I frequently pass people in public who have a chunk of silicon and plastic stuffed in their ear, and invariably, they're not actually using it. It's become a fashion accessory.
Having said that, I'd like to hop up on the soapbox and toss out some basic etiquette suggestions on this topic - not only related to fashion, but also addressing simple social graces...
Please, Mister Businessman who has taken to using Panera as his own personal office. Take into consideration the volume you're speaking when using your headphone. Yes, it may be necessary to speak above normal conversational levels to be heard, but to everyone around you, you're just a loud, annoying person in a restaurant where simply moving out of range is not an immediate, convenient option. Take a moment to think about if you were talking to someone next to you at the table. Would you speak at that volume? Probably not. You'd certainly notice someone next to you doing it, and would likely be uncomfortable, if not actively complaining.
To the hip geek who just got your first headphone. Yes, we all see it, yes it's geeky, and yes you can absolutely take calls anytime just by touching your ear! Congratulations, welcome to 2003. But everyone who would likely call you are all sitting around you right now, including your family, friends, and your manager. We got it, you have a headphone. Yay for you.
In that vein, people who have headphones should think about what they're saying to the people they're with. If I'm in an earnest and direct conversation with someone, I try and remember to take my headphone off and put it away. It seems that leaving the headphone online and stuffed in your ear is a way of saying "I'm listening to you, but I want to LEAP onto any possible interruption that comes along!" I find the headphones enormously convenient when driving in the car, or when walking around in public (I frequently don't hear the phone ring on my belt), but seriously folks, when you're sitting with a friend or a loved one, show some respect. Unplug.
And lets talk for a moment about blinking lights. What is it with blinking LEDs on headphones? Who are they signaling? Some of these suckers outshine traffic lights, and light up the inside of a car. The purpose of an LED on a headset should be so that the owner can look at it, in their hand, and see if it is turned on or not. Pretty simple. A small, muted LED is all that's needed to do this. Not something that looks like it came out of some gamers casemod, and threatens to send random passersby into epileptic fits.
And lastly, to the manufacturers. Is it really necessary to make these things so ridiculously ugly? Of all the headphones I've seen, only the one I'm using now (A Jabra 500) doesn't scream to everyone nearby I HAVE A BLUETOOTH HEADPHONE, SEE!?!? I like the subtle approach, where the headphone is as invisible as possible, but for the most part, it appears Jabra is the only company pursuing that design.
On a meta-level, I see BT headphones as the next step in acceptable 'functional' enhancements for people. Eyeglasses (chunks of metal and glass sitting on your face) are normal, even though they have a direct impact on a persons' presentation. BT headphones are likely just the next step, but not until the bling bling lights are muted, the technical glitches are ironed out, and people get a slightly wider clue on how much their little piece of technology affects those around them.
Personally, I'm ready for direct wireless implants. Mounted right on the mastoid bone. No bit of tech widgetry hanging on the earlobe affecting normal hearing, it should all be inboard.
Ah well.
That's the third time I've had a comment about my laptop this week. I guess it's unusual enough to have a Flying Spaghetti Monster plaque on the machine, but the addition of a large "for SCIENCE!" black bumper sticker just made it that much more comment worthy.
Though, spending a few minutes trying to explain both to an obviously clueless panera-patron really wasn't on the schedule.
Just in case you were curious about the levels of spam I have to deal with daily. I have a filter running on my inbox that tracks how much mail I get each day, how much of that is list traffic, and how much of it is spam. Each night, the program (which is available here) generates a report that lets me see how things have been going.
I have many spam defenses running on boomer, and it does an admirable job of filtering out the spam. This week I've noticed a fair amount of the 3 line plain text spam getting through to me (which Thunderbird does catch). This spam is notoriously hard to filter due to it's simplicity. I was sort of curious how much spam actually -was- getting caught.
Here's my last 7 days of total mail I'm receiving:
Breakdown by day: (17606 posts, average of 2515.1 posts per day.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Feb 10 | Feb 9 | Feb 8 | Feb 7 | Feb 6 | Feb 5 | Feb 4 1983 | 1619 | 2636 | 2878 | 3020 | 2985 | 2485
That is the total mail received addressed to me on perhaps half a dozen domains. They all funnel to the same mailbox. How much of that is spam? Lets look:
Breakdown by day: (12676 posts, average of 1810.9 posts per day.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Feb 10 | Feb 9 | Feb 8 | Feb 7 | Feb 6 | Feb 5 | Feb 4 1656 | 1216 | 1918 | 1990 | 2135 | 2101 | 1660
An average of 1810 spams received each day. By one mailbox.
The spam report is showing 'caught spam'. I get very few false positives (mail caught as spam and misfiled), so I have my filters set fairly liberal. Thunderbird is probably catching another 200 spam messages a day. The rest of my mail is list traffic (I'm on a dozen or so mailing lists). And what's left? Legitimate mail, probably 25 messages a day.
One out of every hundred messages I receive, only one is something I need to pay immediate attention to.
Email is broken. It's time to look at a radical paradigm change. I'll be posting some more about this as I move ahead, but I constantly worry about situations where important mail may be missed, and it's become abundantly clear that the current email situation has to change in order for net communication via electronic mail is to continue being a viable medium.
Tonight, while talking with blk about childhood memories, I started thinking about the summer camp I went to when I was around Zach's age. It was a sleepaway camp, up in the pocono mountains, called Camp Susquehanna. I went for 3 years, and the experiences during those three summers left me with some fantastic memories.
I caught up with one of the sons of the family that owned the camp several years ago, and we exchanged some brief email, but I really hadn't thought of the camp since then.
Tonight, a little googling, and I've found the Camp Susquehanna Alumni website, run by none other than Todd Schroder, the aformentioned son of the owner. Todd's put together a wonderful site, with a lot of fascinating details about the camp and what it was like for us staying there, but there was one bit of magic I thought was lost forever.
The camp was divided into 'units' (remember this was the early seventies. Militaristic models were the norm - we ate in the mess hall, we bought candy and stuff in Canteen, and bugle calls played over the PA system with revelie, taps, and horsemans calls). 
The units were numbered, from 1 through 17, each with 4-6 campers in it. Each unit had it's own counsellor. Once you were in a unit, you were there for the summer, and the camp ran for 8 weeks. That's a long time for a kid 8-10 years old - your unit became your home, your unit-mates were your family.
Every summer, each unit made what was simply called a 'Unit Sign'. It was a wooden board, about 2' square, that could have anything you wanted painted on it, but it had to have the Unit number, all the campers names, the counsellors name, and the year being represented. The signs were mounted on the ceiling of the mess hall. During meals, you could look up, and see all the units that came before you. If you were a returning camper, it was great fun coming back the next year and seeing your name up on the ceiling.
These Unit Signs were an undeniable record of the summers I spent in the Poconos, and I thought they were lost when the property was sold.
They were not.
Todd, being the magnificent person he is, has scanned pictures of all the Unit signs, and therefore, I'm able to present to you my signs, now almost 35 years old:
1972 - Unit 3. My first year at Camp Susquehanna. I was only 8. The Unit was a tent platform, about 14'x20', which had 5 bunks in it. The sides of the tent could be rolled up - it looked a lot like a MASH tent, but smaller, with a peaked roof in the middle. My counsellor was Ron Becker, who did a great job of making us all feel right at home. I remember being very confused at the beginning about what was going on, and what we were supposed to do, but it was only in the first few days, then it became comfortable and routine. Of the other kids, I only remember Eduardo, who became a good friend, and taught me a lot of Spanish.
According to The Lookout, I was involved in the yearly Skink Hunt...
Jim Weeks and Rick Davis told the assembled campers about the skink, an elusive lizard. Then, armed with laundry bags and noise makers, the campers set off to a rock quarry to practice for the big hunt. Robbie Devor, Greg Vogel, Andy Ziegler, and David Shevett eagerly volunteered to be the "catchers", waiting at the end of the field for the skinks, while everyone else made noise and scared the skinks downfield.
1974 - Unit 6 - As the kids got older, folks moved up to higher numbered cabins. Unit 6 was toward the top of the 'lower clearing' (names that'll mean nothing to anyone who wasn' t there - humor me). This was an actual cabin - about 20' on a side, with a roof and rafters and power and everything. The 'windows' could open by hinging up the shutters and latching them open with a hook and eye. These had bunkbeds too, so there was room for 7 kids plus the counsellor, but as I understand it, the camp was beginning to go into decline attendance wise, so the units weren't all full. Eduardo was my bunkmate again, and another boy named David Strohl, whom I remember as being very sweet and a good kid (course, this was 30 some odd years ago. Who knows if I'm even remotely right here.)
1977 - Unit 11 - If I'm remembering this one right, it was another cabin, up toward the top of the upper clearing. By this time I'm 12, and the camp has a different feel. I'm more involved in some of the acting and stage stuff that Jim Weeks was doing, and I remember Andy Bershad (our counsellor) very well. 
He and Jim were icons of the camp. As to what the picture and caption on the sign meant? I haven't the foggiest idea.
And if there were any question about my early love of old movies, according to the Lookout from that year :
"Ah yes!" wailed the familiar voice. And so began an evening of films starring W.C. Fields. The first in our series of films, the Fields evening was moved up to Thursday night due to rainy weather, but no one seemed to mind the quick announcement and showing. In fact, the next day found David Shevett and Todd Schroder giving people "hearty handclasps" in the Fieldsian manner.
I have nothing but positive memories from my time at the camp, ranging from massive games of capture the flag ranging all over the fields and woods, to long horseback rides, to the summer I was given my own horse to take care of (I became a 'horseman' - I was assigned one horse as my responsibility all summer. I fed and groomed her, prepped her for the days classes, and brought her up to and down from the paddock each day). Many of my current fascinations can be traced to this camp - I still love old barns, woods trails and camping, and the sound of rain on the roof of a barn or tent still sends me back to the summer rainstorms spent in our 'homes' with friends.
There are times when I get down, or quiet, or just generally "off". I can almost always turn these moods around with a solid shot of loud intense music. Today it's delivered while sitting at Panera and working on some server changes.
The track I'm listening to? "Spocks Beard", doing "I Am The Doorway". Never heard of 'em? Think a modern day Yes (in fact the bass player sounds almost identical to Chris Squire).
So what's your "Go away world, I want to be in my head for a while" music?
Now, why is this remarkable?
Because I am at Arisia, and for the last 6 years or so, I've been running (or helping to run) registration. This means getting up very early Saturday morning to set up and run CONGO for the days registrations.
This year I'm not running reg. Oh, they're still using CONGO, but a few weeks of tunning, fiddling, and refining, and the system is now startable by mere mortals. I was still 'awake' at 8:45 (registration opened at 9), and I was waiting for the phone to ring with a problem... but it didn't ring. All went well, and I happily slept in until around 9:30.
In some ways, it's awfully nice. In others, I'm sort of mystified. What am I supposed to do with my time now?
I get into these funks in winter, where I just want to curl up somewhere and escape for a few hours. For me this is where my love of movies comes to the fore. I've built enough of a setup that I can watch movies at night without disturbing my family, while enjoying good sound, good video, and a comfortable listening area.
Sure it's escapism. But it's escapism I understand - therefire I can embrace it and revel in it.
It has let me catch up on movies that I've owned for quite a while, but never actually got around to watching. Over the last week, I've gone through a handful of titles...
A Scanner DarklyJust watched this one tonight. I've never read the original story by Philip K. Dick, so I had very little information on what I could expect to see. I knew about it's odd filming style, but nothing else, not even the cast beyond Keanu Reeves.
It was good. It seems this was Robert Downey Jr. at his most neurotic, and because of that, his acting style initially repelled me. But then I realized he and Woody Harrolson were perfectly cast. By the end I was totally involved in the story, and found it engrossing, poignant, and emotional
Spiderman 3Boy I'm sure glad I didn't spend money on this one. What a disappointing end to a trilogy. I've heard folks say "Don't bother, go watch 2 again" and I have to agree with them. What a stinker. Visually has some moments, but there's several scenes toward the middle of the film that had me seriously considering turning off the DVD and giving up, they were so ludicrous.
The Bourne IdentityI've never actually seen Identity all the way through, from beginning to end. I've seen bits and pieces in various cable surfings, plus the non-stop previews. It was very good. Engrossing, mystifying, and all around fun. Many folks have called it What Bond Should Be, and I can see that. Matt Damon gets a lot of flack for his simplistic acting approach, but he was perfect in his role. And, of course, there's the ever wonderful Franka Potente, of Run Lola Run fame.
The Bourne SupremacyIf you're going to take the time to start in a series, why not see as much of it as you can. The sequel to Bourne Identity was certainly as good as the first, with recurring roles and appropriate references to both the first movie and modern day events. One thing I did not expect was the outstanding performance by Brian Cox (he who played William Stryker in the X-Men movies and Nathan Waldman in Long Kiss Goodnight). He had a good strong role in Supremacy, and played it marvelously.
I haven't had a chance to pick up the Bourne Ultimatum yet, but judging by how much I enjoyed the first two, it's now gone onto my wish list.
Last year I tinkered with figuring out how much money was in a coin jar by weight. The numbers I came up with were reasonably close - within 10-15%.
Some folks have come up with an online coin calculator that does something very smart. You weigh the total pile, then pick a handful of coins out of it, randomly. Count the number of coins in your hand. That'll be a statistical sampling of the rest of the coins in the pile, and the page extrapolates based on that sample to the total weight.
Quite accurate, and pretty durned smart.
Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.
This past weekend I decided to take the plunge and replace the bulbs in our recessed lighting in the kitchen with dimmable CF bulbs. We had been using these huge honkin 150watt floodlamps, which were great for getting a tan, but didn't handle the constant vibration of folks walking around upstairs very well, not to mention chewing up gobs of power when running.
I hadn't actually seen dimmable CF bulbs in action, so I was curious how well they'd work. Flourescent lights can't take the same electrical route that dimmable incandescents can (if you lower the voltage in a flourescent light, the ballast that regulates the power into the bulb can't pass enough power to make the bulb actually light up.
I saw the dimmable bulbs in our of our regular visits to Target, and picked up a handful.
Our lightswitch has one of those little sliding tabs next to the switch that lets you adjust the brightness. I installed all the bulbs, flicked the switch on, and lo!
But would it dim?
The answer is... "Sorta". The dimmer switch does in fact lower the light level coming from the bulbs, but not in the range the older bulbs could do. I'd say we can get a 25% reduction in light output from the bulbs before they go out.
All in all, this is just fine. We can't have that sort of glowing nice '1/3rd' light mode that is handy post-dinner (we can sort of do that by turning out most of the ceiling lights and just going with one lamp over the stove), but the dimmer is handy for taking the lights from "bright enough to do real kitchen work" down to "comfortable to live in day to day".
So why is this relevant? Well, aside from the bit that the 5 bulbs now in the ceiling use as much power as only one of the old bulbs did, apparently the new energy bill that just came through congress is mandating that all incandescent bulbs be off the market by 2012. (If that link fails you, see the article on Slashdot and the same on Engadget).
According to the article:
The new energy bill signed this week makes it official. When 2012 hits, stores can no longer sell the cheap but inefficient incandescent light bulbs that are fixtures in most homes.
Personally, I've already switched all our bulbs to CFL's, and we have a lot of them (an off the cuff count puts it at about 30 for our 4br house). We've been here 2.5 years, and I was just trying to think of the last time I had to replace a CFL that had gone out. I think it was once, using a very old bulb we had brought from the old house, but I hadn't until now replaced the ceiling lights in the kitchen yet.
Update 15:23pm.. - THIS BLOG ENTRY IS REFERRING TO A FAKE POST ON THE FAKE STEVE JOBS BLOG. I was duped, hook line and sinker. I'm annoyed at being deliberately mislead, but relieved that my rabid furniture-chewing has no real basis. I'll leave the post here as an example of my own duplicity.
It's been a hard fight for me.
I'm completely taken by Apple's designs, platform, and technology. They're the only company to take Unix seriously enough to put a front end on it that WORKS. Their hardware is sexy as all git out, and for the most part, works very well.
I have considered seriously going the Apple route more than once. Ditching this Linux thing and embracing Cupertino.
There's always been this nagging, though. Apple is very lawyer-heavy. They tolerate no smack-talk from the little guy, and have a tendency to go all Corleone on anyone who even HINTS at revealing their deep dark secrets.
But now I think they've overstepped their bounds.
In the past, when Apple threatens a writer or publisher, the contents of the negotiations are kept secret. A site disappears, the negotiations are private, and we assume they reached some amicable settlement.
One fellow isn't going quietly into the night. Daniel Lyons, the author of the "Fake Steve Jobs" blog, which has been a satirical poke at the head of Apple, is being attacked by a pack of rabid lawyers. While there may be a small bit that they disagree with, Daniel has gone the unusual route of publishing exactly what the lawyers are saying to him. The most recent exchange has said lawyers saying, in essence, "You should play nice with us. Here's a list of your assets you own. Here's where your family and your home are. Would be a shame if something were to, like, you know, happen to any of them....
And then, I swear to friggin God, there's a list of my assets with an estimated value for each and I suppose the implied threat that I stand to lose them. Which kinda scares the living shit out of me, to be honest, since they've got a pretty thorough list, which means they've been doing some research on this and the offer didn't just come out of thin air. Their lists includes my home address, most recent assessed value of my house and all the information about my mortgage; a rental property that we own; my bank accounts and investment accounts, including the college funds for our kids, whose names are used; and our boat and two cars.
This is disgusting. The Fake Steve Jobs site is satire. It's amusing, entertaining, and does nothing to harm Apple. But Apple is coming down on Lyons like a pack of wild dogs, and no ethical, moral, or financial boundary will stop them from destroying Lyons.
This is not a company I can, with any real conscience, support.
We just got mail saying that the XO Laptop for Zach won't arrive until at least January 15th. On the one hand, I'm glad they let us know so I can stop frantically hitting <refresh> on Fedex's website, but I'm sad because he won't have it for his vacation.
I am consolidated knowing that our contribution is still helping the OLPC project, and somewhere in central or southern America, a child -will- get a laptop because of our contribution, but I still wish Zach had his for the winter break.
He's happily spending time working with Scratch on his desktop machine anyway, so at least when the XO does get here, there'll be an environment he's already familiar with on it.
Extrapolating from a conversation on IRC today...
I swear OkCupid is the place budding 'web 2.0' programmers go to see how badly they can screw up a busy site, and still stay in business.
They've gone through a dozen site 'overhauls' in the last few years, rewriting the entire thing into some new funky dynamic design that not only fails to implement features they had working in the old design, but also tends to breaks most browsers. Then they spend the next few months 'fixing' problems with the new site, until most folks have forgotten about the missing features...
AND THEN THEY DO IT AGAIN.
Dear OkCupid. We know you're a site that caters to up and coming jetset socialites and the like, but please... Stabilize your site, lock down a feature set, and stick with it. When you roll a new site? Make sure all the features still work? It's really not that hard.
A few times in the past year I've commented to my lovely wife regarding coffeemakers, and gosh-wouldn't-it-be-nice if we had one that had a timer on it. I generally make a pot of coffee each morning, which involves the standard wash out the pot and gold filter, grind a new set of beans, fill up the tank, and hit start cycle. I've almost got my morning routine timed perfectly - I know how long the pot will take to brew, and I know when I need to be back downstairs.
"Wouldn't it be nice if I could set a timer and have the pot ready the next morning?"
Well, it being Channukah and all, Cat got me a new coffeemaker, but went far beyond the pale and got a SUPER GEEKY coffeemaker.
The machine is a Keurig B-60 'single cup brewer'. Now, don't let the 'single cup' thingy scare you. This isn't some weeny little device that makes weak tan colored coffee and requires a half hour with the kitchen drudges to get clean.
The Keurig uses the little puncture-cups that have pre-measured coffee (apprently known as 'K-Cups'). I've been skeptical of these puppies for a while, but I have to admit the first cup or two has come out just fine. The machine avoids a lot of the pitfalls I've seen in other automated machines. It has a 'time on' and 'time off' setting that changes when the reservoir is kept heated (I set mine to start at 7am, and turn off by 1pm - avoiding the machine keeping the heating element on all day). A full cups' worth of water is kept inside the machine when idle, so you can change out the big tank without affecting the next cup of coffee. If the tank is empty, the machine lets you know on it's little LCD screen.
The K-Cup approach to prepackaged coffee is fascinating, and allows the machine to make dozens of different types of coffee, or tea, or hot chocolate, without requiring a change of hardware between uses. For shared machines (like in our house), this is wonderful.
My only mild complaint about it is the noise. It uses a water pump to cycle water out of the tank into the internal heater, and that can be pretty rattly. I tend to make coffee after everyone has left the house, but my roomies may use it at early hours. I suppose it's really no noisier than a coffee grinder, but it was a little alarming when it first started.
And. It has a cool blue glowing effect on it. I can have my cup of nuclear waste!
All in all, a vast improvement over the old Krups standard filter / pot. It served me well, and will most likely be used for social gatherings still, but my daily 2-3 cups are now coming from this puppy. Thanks Cat!
A blog post about the first OLPC deployment. Uruguay.
About a thousand machines were given out in three days. Another seven thousand will be given out in Uruguay in the next two weeks, and another 90 thousand in the coming months. Peru is next: they signed an order for 260 thousand today.
Awesome.
So I have a profile on Facebook. It's been enjoyable fiddling around with the apps and linking up with other folks, and all that has been peachy keen. In particular, I rather like the Twitter-esque 'Status Updates' that folks can use to say "I'm home, and eating sushi" or whatever else strikes their fancy.
The problem is, I frequently see a Status update where someone says "I'm feeling down" and what I really want to do is go "Oh? What's up?"
But it appears the only way I can do that is to:
This doesn't seem like the interactive social structure I was looking for, where I could simply follow up on something I see with a "hey, what's up?". A message sent as above has no context, is not attached to the status update, etc etc.
In fact, Facebook seems structured in a way to NOT encourage that sort of spontaneous communication. It's more geared to "Lets funnel people toward shared functions or applications" as opposed to "Lets make it easier for people to communicate."
What am I missing? The initial funness of the site is starting to wear off a little bit. There's zillions of people on Facebook. What keeps them there?
I've been having fun playing with Sketchup, Google's 3d modelling system. At first I avoided it because there was no native Linux version, even going as far as to get it to run under Wine (a process that... well, didn't fail completely, but did result in a tool that's unuseable - invisible menus, etc).
After biting the bullet and installing it on clipper, I set about learning what it could do. The project I had in mind was to model Mosaic's building site in Berlin, MA, so folks could have a feeling for what it would be like walking
There was certainly a period of mental adjustment. After all, it's not easy trying to model a 3d object using a 2 dimensional input and display method. But after a while, the keyboard shortcuts began to come naturally, and I found myself enjoying manipulating objects in this non-existent space.
I'm probably halfway through things so far. I'm regularly updating the drawing in 3dWarehouse, Google's sharing service for Sketchup. If you have the tool, feel free to download the drawing so far...
I'll let folks know when I'm done. But Google. Please? Make a Linux native version. You've already got Windows and Mac. This can't be that hard.
As reported on Engadget :
Negroptone's OLPC Buy One, Give One program has been extended to 31 December, 2007 -- well beyond the initial two-weeks originally announced. The deal buys both yourself (or rather, your kid supposedly) and a tot from a developing nation new XOs for just $399. Already, the non-profit claims to be pulling in about $2 Million worth of "donations" each day. They've also opened up bulk buying to schools in quantities of 100-999 ($299 each), 1000-9999 ($249 each), or 10,000 and more ($199). Oh, and the program is now officially renamed "Give One, Get One" (GoGo) -- we presume BoGo'ing the kids just sounded a tad too dirty.
We ordered one for Zach already, and I'd been curious about how the sales were going. Folks on the #olpc Freenode channel were saying that the manufacturer would build based on orders, and if orders were slow, they wouldn't ramp up the daily production. But it looks like things are moving briskly.
Yay!
I know you're the largest online auction house on the planet. I realize that despite the bazillions of dollars you rake in on a yearly basis, you still haven't been able to hire a single competent site designer, and after 10-ish years of operation, your site still looks like it was hacked together by a business major playing around with Microsoft FrontPage.
Requiring ActiveX when selecting images to upload is patently ridiculous, particularly when my browser signature specifically says I'm coming from a Linux box.
c.activeXVersion = '1,0,3,48';
You'll be receiving a bill shortly for the 20 minutes I spent booting my Windows machine, moving images over to it, and recreating my auction from scratch.
Luv, me.
"Dad?"
"Yeah zach, what's up?"
"I'm posting something in a forum, how do you make a link?"
(Dad pauses here, thinking scary thoughts about open forums, but willing to check it out...)
"What forum?"
"OneMoreLevel"
(Another pause to check it out - chats about online games. Okay, this seems innocuous enough...)
(details about how to make a PHPBB link in a forum post)
"Oh, that's easy, thanks!"
"Enjoy!"
sakkura. My son. Am I ready for this? I mean, he's already talking smack to other players :) :) :) . Not sure if this should make me squee with glee or totally give me the heebee jeebees.
... to rain.
This week has me down in New Jersey visiting my client. These visits are invariably very productive, very tiring, and very important in maintaining an even keel and a steady course on the work that's being done. (I blame the rain for all the nautical references. Hopefully it doesn't carry over into my drive to the office). The visit is pretty much a repeat of the other times I've been here. The seasons just keep changing, so sometimes it's hot, sometimes it's snowing, today, it's rain.
One thing that has struck me is that I'm actually commuting to work. Up in the morning, do my morning stuff, pack up, drive to the office, do that stuff, then drive back to the hotel. It's a short commute, only about 9 miles (I keep saying I'll bike to the office some day, but haven't yet), but it's far more of a commute than I have when I'm at home. I'm still not sure about which one is better for me in the long run, but the variation lets me have perspective on it.
In a year, there'll be a whole new living situation, so it's not like we're in a long term situation with the commute. There's change-a-comin.
I have a lot of laserdiscs. Last count had it around 210. Since we moved almost 2 years ago, about half of these were stored in the basement in what I thought was a stable box.
Well, it wasn't.
Apparently the box had shifted and moved around a lot, and ended up with the discs leaning over on one side, where they stayed for a year. The end result is I now have a dozen or so burrito shaped laserdiscs.
I've reconfigured the stack, and owing to the fact that laserdiscs weigh a helluva lot, I've placed the 'bent' discs interleaved at the bottom, and placed the rest on top of them. Hopefully this will restore some sort of flatness.
If I have to write off the bad discs, it won't be the end of the world. Most are available now on DVD (and have the benefits thereof, like better resolution and added features and stuff), but I don't like having to replace movies I already own.
Aaaaand, we're back.
What an insane couple of days. There's a whole series of posts brewing in my head right now, but I'll just touch on probably the one that's most on my mind.
Last week, I was in mid-preparation for Ubercon, an awesome gaming convention I regularly work down in NJ. CONGO has been pretty idle for the last few months as the summer is not a big time for conventions. With a week to go until Ubercon started, it was time to pull out all the hardware and make sure everything was working.
Well, unsurprisingly, it wasn't.
The first major issue was coming to the conclusion that endor, the venerable server of dozens of conventions, really wasn't going to handle Yet Another Apt Upgrade. It was still running on a baseline Debian Sarge install that had been upgraded a dozen times over the years, and finally, after enough apt tweaking had gone on, a dependency just wouldn't resolve, and the machine would not take new upgrades. It was time to nuke from orbit and reinstall the OS from an Ubuntu baseline.
No problem, sez I. I whip out my Gutsy Gibbon Ubuntu CD, do a quick database dump and backup, install Ubuntu, and restore my home directory and databases. Reinstalled CONGO, loaded the working databases and...
stopped.
See, CONGO was my first big Java application. And as such, it has some... intriguing ways of doing database work. And by 'intriguing' I mean butt-ass stupid. In particular, not using PreparedStatements for SQL commands, not checking for failed transactions, etc etc. While this was okay for a fairly static application, once you replace the entire OS underneath it, things start to get a little squirrely. And, well, we had squirrels aplenty.
So over the space of 3 days I basically had to rewrite every SQL interraction in CONGO, resulting in some fairly major code changes, and all of this 3 days before a con.
Add on top of this the fact that I'm also using a brand new printer from Evolis for the first time under Linux. There's a whole nother post about this experience, but it did bring yet another variable into play. Oh, and did I mention that I rewrote the print routine in CONGO to generate PDFs on the fly and use them for badge rendering? Yep, also new.
Needless to say, things were a little panicy leading up to the event. Fortunately, by Wednesday afternoon, I had things fairly well stabilized, the code worked, endor was stable and functioning properly, and I could start packing for the event with a clear conscience.
The end result? It all worked. The convention went fine, the printer behaved wonderfully, running badges twice as fast as my old Fargo printers, and we had only minor glitches through the weekend. There's still some work to do to get endor ready for larger events, but for a week that started out with totally broken software, an unuseable server, and an untested printing system, things went mighty well.
Onwards.
I now have a Facebook profile.
I feel so hip.
Tonights plan had been fairly straightforward. Go out to Pittsburgh via 2 USAir flights. One to Philadelphia, then on to Pittsburgh.
Flight the first, no problem. Checked in, no lines, through security like champ, some idling before getting on the plane, and off we went. I was a little concerned about our delayed departure, because the overlap in Philadelphia wasn't that much, only about 40 minutes. We landed about 20 minutes late, but I knew the departing gate was only about 100 yards from our arrival gate. No problem.
Well, slight problem.
My departing flight has been delayed 3 times now. The airport monitors stubbornly still say "Departure at 10:45 ON TIME", despite the fact that it is now 11:30, and the gate display says "Departing: 2:13am"
It's quite a full flight, and the gate folks are doing their best, but there's just no plane to put us on, and the plane we want is on it's way from Chicago to Pittsburgh, where it will land, refuel, and fly to Philadelphia to get us. At the moment it's flying between Chicago and Pittsburgh.
I'm taking it in stride. Much as I'd like to be in Pittsburgh and enjoying the company that awaits me there, I have my laptop, wireless, reasonable food via the ABP on the concourse, and a convenient power outlet. I'm considering a long bout of Eve.
Perhaps there'll be more updates as this adventure (?) continues. For now, I'd just like send out a huge thank you to the United States aviation infrastructure. You've taken what should be a wonderous and exciting adventure and turned it into a waiting room.
Update, next day - In the end, the plane left Philadelphia at 2:03am, and arrived in Pittsburgh at 2:55. Total time lounging in Philadelphia: 3 hours, 45 minutes.
And now a word from our intrepid explorer...
I've been quiet the last couple of days due to some health issues involving an abcessed tooth, hence the reason there's been a shortage of geeky blatherings of late. Through the magic of Amoxicilin and liberal use of Tylenol, I'm back to almost human again, though there's a long road of further dental work ahead.
I'd like to take a moment to talk about pain though.
I've never had direct experience with chronic pain. The sort of pain that is omnipresent, and can never really be ignored. The last 3 days though have given me a glimpse of what it's like. Even with vast doses of Tylenol, the ache is always there, and I can tell within minutes when it's time to re-dose.
On the one hand, I can generally deal with pain on a point by point basis. "This is going to hurt" "Okay." What I can't deal with is the constant, wavering hurt that never goes away. The worst part of it is it completely destroyed any attempts at concentration. I couldn't latch onto a concept for more than a few minutes before being distracted or whiny. For someone like me who is VERY active mentally, this was horrifying. My pain level was waffling between "Ow" and "I want to curl up in a ball and whimper". I hated every minute of it.
Now I'm back on something approaching functionality, and there is a sigh of relief heard in the land. Not only from me but from other important folks in my life, who have had to deal with me being far wiftier than I am even on my worst days.
Thanks for everyone for their patience. We now return you to your previously scheduled life, already in progress.
The geekitude quotient is low this weekend, at least in the realm of oo-shiny bits that blinken and wiggle. It's fall closeup time for our house in Maine, and my brother in law and I drove the just-over-two hours up to the house yesterday and did all the little things necessary to idle a house for 8 months through a Maine winter. Primarily this had to do with draining and prepping the plumbing so the pipes wouldn't freeze and splode. Fortunately, the weather was magnificent, with the leaves just changing colors and a crisp high-50's temperature and clear blue skies.
"But where's the geekery? There's supposed to be a an earth shattering whee!"
Okay, there's a little bit.
I'm getting myself organized with my tools and workspaces. There's a bunch of Chez Geek projects in the pipeline that really do require a well assembled toolbox, plus enough power tools so that I'm not doing things like trying to bore a 1 7/8" wide hole with a 3/4" masonry bit. This process has been ongoing for some time (I mentioned my Ryobi 18v rechargeable tools when hottubs were flying), and things have steadily been 'filling out' since then.
The problem I was starting to hit is where to put all the stuff. My workbench is wonderful (a tech adjustable height bench with drawers, power outlets, and overhead lighting), but there was really no place for 'tools' other than some shelving and my toolbox.
Solved! On the way back from Maine, my BIL and I stopped by his mothers place, and we removed a 5 drawer rolling Craftsman toolbox that was my FIL's (now unused). It still had a handful of tools in it (some new sockets which I desperately needed, as well as a very good craftsman screwdriver set). That toolbox is now happily ensconced next to my workbench, and I'll be migrating all my smaller tools into it in the next week. Finally, I have a place to store all my drill and power bits!
Tools are fun.
2007.10.12 05:03:11 Combat Your 425mm Railgun I perfectly strikes Roden Shipyard Factory Station, wrecking for 637.6 damage.
OH YEAH!
I rarely get involved in rallying folks to humanitarian causes or try to entice people to donate time any money to charities. When I do, it's generally about something I feel quite strongly about.
About 2 years ago the faculty members at the MIT Media lab launched a project called One Laptop Per Child, the idea being that if a laptop could be built for $100, millions could be produced and distributed all through the developing nations through donations, government support, and other forms of philanthropy. The driving force is to try and make a direct impact on the socio-technological gap that is so apparent across the worlds population.
The result of this project is the XO Laptop, a machine designed by the OLPC team to address the specific challenges that will be encountered by children using the machine where there are no power outlets, or no internet, and where conditions may not be as squeaky clean as they are in your typical home office. The laptop itself, by modern standards, is underpowered, but the design is so open, so green, and so sturdy, you can't help but be impressed.
This is a laptop designed for children to carry around with them, anywhere, anytime. It is waterproof, dirt proof, the battery lasts many many hours, it can network itself to other laptops arond it (a 'mesh'), and it can run off a $10 solar panel (and recharge from it too).
There is an excellent video review of the XO by David Pogue on the NY Times website. Even if you aren't interested in the machine directly, watch the video for an idea of what it's all about.
Now, the XO laptop didn't come in at $100. It actually came in at $183. As things ramp up, they hope to get the price down, but it's still a little more than they anticipated.
So as part of their launch, the OLPC project has a special offer.
On November 12th, you can go to XOgiving.org and enroll in the "Give one, get one" program. You pay $400, and get an XO laptop of your very own. "Wait, $400? That's twice what you said!" - Yes, it is. Because if you purchase an XO laptop for $400, a second laptop will be sent to a child in a developing nation.
My wife and I are seriously considering one of these laptops for our 8 year old son, and the added benefit of benefiting a child elsewhere is just icing on the cake.
If nothing else, watch the David Pogue video for all the details on the machine. It's a remarkably green, well designed, and rugged little machine.
Today I am, alas, home sick. Something horrible has taken up residence in my sinuses and is producing an amazing amount of... well, you get the picture.
Colds like this turn my brain to tapioca. I can't focus, I can't get into the groove I need to get things done. So I'm taking this opportunity to catch up on some movie watching that I've been putting off because of lack of time.
Today's entertainment has been re-watching Lord of the Rings with the directors commentary turned on. I picked up one of the various 'directors cuts' at some point, and unlike many people, I've only watched the entire 3-movie series through once. (Okay, once in the theaters, once at home), so I am a long way from losing my sense of wonder about the whole thing.
I just finished up Fellowship, with the commentary track on, and, as I have every time I've seen this sequence, or read it, or even talked about it, I am completely gobsmacked by the final scene in Moria between Gandalf and the Balrog. It brings tears to my eyes, I start hyperventilating, I am simply floored by the intensity, emotion, and wonder of the story...
You cannot pass!
I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass!
The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass!
And then, the final words...
Fly, you fools!
Sometime soon I'll sit down with Zach and we'll watch the movies together (he hasn't seen them). I've watched out of the corner of my eye when we've shown him other movies, watching to see if he 'gets it' - if he feels the same sense of wonderment I have, and he does. They are magical moments for me (when the Death Star (mark 1) is destroyed... the other one is in Titan AE when the Titan first 'powers up'...)
The directors commentary while watching Fellowship added a lot to it for me, because Peter Jackson et al were so passionate about the story, and the characters, and Tolkien's vision for Middle Earth, it really came through in the decisions they made.
I probably won't make it through the other movies today, but this brief interlude has been.... precious.
Today, I shall not rant about Verizon.
What, I hear you cry? But Dave, you've certainly let your feelings about Verizon be known before, has something changed?
As far as their offerings and their choices for what to do with the subscriber base? No, for the most part, I'm still pretty annoyed at them. But, in the department of "If you do things right, you can avoid a world of hurt for yourself", I'm in pretty good space today.
I feel somewhat foolish.
I've been looking around for local places to go work on my laptop that are outside chez geek. My needs are pretty basic I think... Quiet comfortable space, wireless net access, a power outlet, and coffee.
I've found a space that covers everything but the coffee, and I feel foolish for not having come here before. It's the Moore Institute library, better known as the Natick Public Library. It's a huge space, several floors, well designed and laid out, and... best of all... nice little cubby spaces that are all set up for laptop use (with power outlet, hardwire connection and everything). The wireless is active as well, so you don't need to plug in if you don't want to.
It's within easy bike distance of the house, and lunchstops are all around here. I think I'll try and come down here more often.
This evening saw me visiting the New and Improved [tm] [reg us pat off] Natick Mall here in sunny Natick, MA. There's been a major rebuilding going on over there, and seeing as this thing is only about a mile from me, and the fact that I had an evening free, I felt it was time to go take a look.
First, the original mall was of average size and layout. Natick Mall has always been slightly 'upscale' compared to others, but with the other biggies nearby like the Burlington Mall renovating and upscaling, some developer it was time to upgrade the Natick mall
And boy howdy did they.
I don't want to get into a review of malls, but did you know that there are Wikipedia entries on malls? Weird, eh? But the entry for the Natick Mall does have pictures of the inside of the renovated space. According to the article:
This expansion project includes the renovation of approximately 100 new stores and the addition of two new anchors, (Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus), making Natick Collection the twelfth largest in the country, fourth largest on the East Coast, and the largest in New England.
Now, in this vast space, you'd think I could find something interesting.
Think again.
The newly expanded space has nothing of interest in it. It is huge, to be sure, well decorated, elegant to a fault, and simply drips of sophistication. It is, however, populated with... clothing stores, perfume stores, and luggage and pocketbook offerings. Many were outlet names, but it was simply store upon store upon store of clothing. A vast wasteland of chrome, steel, glass, and fashion manikins.
Until... in the midst of all this rampant hoity toity consumerism, I see one beacon of elegance that does not involve silk, tweed, or leather.
Apple has opened a store within this vast new space. Yes, it is similar to all the other stores, with the genius bar, young hip store attendees, and ranks of elegant hardware, but now they've gone and done it. They've put this store in my back yard.
So, naturally, I went in.
Those who have been in an Apple store need not hear the details of what the store was like. It had by far the most customers I'd seen in that entire bleak landscape for the mall, but wasn't crowded, and it only took me a moment to find a free iPhone and start playing with it.
This was the second time I had touched an iPhone, and while there were no clear revelations from my first exposure, I was again impressed by the design, elegance, clarity of purpose, and all around "rightness" of this device. I left the store after a brief chat with one of the employees, and went in search of food, visions of well designed hardware and software systems dancing in my head.
I chanced by a Verizon store and had a chat with the folks there. My aging Treo 650 is on a Verizon plan, and I had recently heard about a possible offering for 'tethered mode' modem operation for $15/month. That might be handy, thought I, and went to ask them about it.
Oh no, not so fast. Sure it's $15 a month. On top of an 'unlimited' data service plan ($49/mo). Oh, and it won't work with the Treo 650, you'll need to upgrade to a Treo 700p. "Oh, that should be fine. I'm within my upgrade window now, I should get a big discount" *flipflipflip* "Yep, you are, you'll get a $150 discount on a new phone." "So, if I wanted to upgrade from my 650 to a 700p, how much would it be?"
The sales person actually walked around and started referencing various displays, and said "$450, minus the $150 credit you'll get.". I glanced down at the display for the 700p there, and a brand new service, with the 700p, would run me $345. "But that sign says $350 if I buy a Treo 700p now, why don't I just apply the $150 to that?" "Ah, that's just for new subscribers."
I'm really really really done with Verizon.
It looks like AT&T's plans have FAR better data services, as well as a platform I'm interested in supporting. (The Verizon droid basically said I should ditch the Palm platform and use a Windows device. Not in my game plan, thanks)
There are only a few things stopping me from running pell-mell for iPhone land...
So, I haven't bought an iPhone yet. But durn Apple for putting a store right in my back yard. It's a plot I tell ya.
A month or two ago, I posted about calculating value of change by weight. The proof needed to validate this napkin-scratching figuring would be validated by dumping the change jar into a Coinstar machine, and seeing what happened.
Well, today I did just that. I hauled all 58lbs of coins to the local Stop n Shop and spent 20 minutes sending fistfuls of coins rattling into the machine's clinking, calculating innards.
When all was said, done, clattered and kachinged, the display happily reported $673.00.
Originally I figured 52lbs of coins would be $544. I underestimated just a little bit, but it wasn't that far off. One push of the "Pay me please!" button, and the machine happily spat out an Amazon.com gift certificate (and didn't take anything 'off the top' for that, so now I'm off to go camera shopping. Woohoo!)
I'm in a quandry.
Up until recently, I had 3 17" 1280x1024 monitors on my desk. On the right, the monitor for clipper, the laptop. In the center, the nice Dell monitors, used for yawl, my primary looky-atty one. And on the left, the 'spare', which was used for various projects.
Well, the one on the left just went away to be part of Beth's desktop. Which leaves a hole where there used to be a screen.
I've been considering upgrading my main monitor for quite a while, and tonight I sat down at my old T40 Thinkpad and marvelled at it's 1400x1050 resolution. Pixel density was obviously an issue - a 15" screen at that resolution will look finer than a 1280x1024 17" monitor.
The thing that bothers me is that 'high resolution' monitors, (which nowadays are almost exclusively LCD), don't seem to be catering to resolutions over 1280x1024, or more directly, 1400x900 ('HD' format displays). These resolutions are no improvement over what I have, and the monitors I do have are almost 2 years old.
I understand that LCD monitors are driven by the consumer and basic business market. It's much harder to make 1000 high resolution LCD monitors (out of the million 'normal' monitors) than it is to crank out 1000 high resolution CRT displays, but dammit, it's frustrating to see 19" 1280x1024 monitors going for $170, while it's nigh on impossible to find monitors that have a higher pixel density. Sure they have wider resolutions. Common ground is 1400 or 1600 horizontal resolution (Depending on if it's 'widescreen' or not) and 1050 vertical resolution (yay another 26 pixels?), but nothing higher until you start talking $500 for a 24" monitor.
"Nice whining, but what is it you really want?"
I want a dependable, high contrast LCD monitor that has a resolution of 1600x1200, or durned close to it, and I don't want to fork out serious cash for something like the Apple Cinema displays. This was easy to find in the 21" monitor CRT days, though the challenge THEN was finding a video card to drive it, a problem easy to solve with current video boards.
Any suggestions?
Update 9/9/07 Jonah, the dark and sinister influence on my life he is, points out that Dell actually has a decent 20" monitor for $309 that has the specs I want. Hmmm.
It's mighty frustrating when your chief distraction / addiction starts being totally unuseable.
Grrr.
And, in the rant department, I really detest 'debugging' Windows problems, as I've had to do twice today. Windows gives you NO feedback on what's going on. It either works, or it doesn't, and the process for 'fixing' the problem involves playing whack-a-mole with driver versions, tools, and clicky-clicky interfaces. Except the mole is invisible, and the big bell is broken. You may fix the problem, but you won't know it until you try again. And then it might work, it might not, or it might work on the next reboot, or, you may be blessed with your fix working, but may stop next time you reboot, or run an update, or move your mouse, or whatever.
I'm boggled by how people can call this platform 'maintainable', when the chief answer seems to consistently be "Doesn't work? Reboot! If that doesn't work, reinstall from scratch!"
*takes grumpy self off to bed*
I find it terribly amusing, coming from a long history of data communications involvement, that my tactic, when deciding to walk away from my computer, is to turn the volume down so I don't disturb others.
Why is this amusing? Because I don't even bat an eye at the fact that I'm streaming 128kbps worth of music from a server in California through 4 companies' networks and 2 dozen routers, moving something like 20k worth of data a second (that's 10 full pages of text, to give it context) into my machine where... it is not heard, and discarded.
We've become so bandwidth-jaded.
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Back in high school I remember an image of a full size sailing vessel - a galleon or the like (we're talking old school wooden round hull), but it was up on ice runners, and was zipping along on the ice, rather than in water.
It might have been part of the black light poster set, as so well catered to by Spencers or the like, or maybe it was an album cover? Does anyone remember this image, or better yet, have a pointer to it? <a href="http://images.google.com/">images.google.com</a> is not helping me.
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In one of the "making community work" bits of reading I've done, I read about a process for group meetings called 'Pats and Pans'. The idea is when everyone gets together for some form of communal meeting (be it "house meeting" or "gardening club" or whatever), folks go around and say one good thing (a 'pat'), and one thing that irked them (a 'pan'). It would balance out the interaction so there was appreciation and criticism going on in balance.
In that spirit, I give you my pats and pans for the last week or so...
IF you are going stand up and say to the world "I will charge $2.85 for a cup of coffee" (coffee which, realistically, costs you all of about $0.15 to make), you could at least:
No lasting damage to clipper, but the entire experience left me reconsider my continuing support of this these guys.
Every day when I get home I empty out my pockets of loose change and put them into a large glass waterbottle that sits behind my desk. Eventually this bottle becomes too heavy to move and I empty it out to reclaim some cash for toys.
It occurred to me that there might be a way to estimate how much money was in the bottle by averaging out weights a little bit. Since my current 'hottest toy' want is a new Canon digital SLR camera, my 'go for it' point is somewhere around $750. The Coinstar machines now support converting your cash directly into a credit at Amazon without the 9% 'fee' they normally extract. Yay! But do I have enough?
I started by finding out the weight of an empty glass bottle (the web knows all - 15lbs). Then I weighed the bottle with all the coins in it (67lbs), which gives me about 52lbs of coinage to work with.
Because I don't really have a distribution chart showing how many coins of each type I have, I assumed an even distribution. There's probably more pennies than quarters, but I've never sorted things out. When I run the Coinstar dump, it'll tell me how many of each coin I have, and that will make this more accurate the next time I do it.
Given that, some more googling gave me coin weights, so I was able to work it out...
Coin Value Weight(g) Penny 0.01 2.5g Nickel 0.05 5g Dime 0.10 2.68g Quarter 0.25 5.6g Average weight: 3.945g Average value: 0.10 Approximately .10 per 3.945grams or 0.025 cents per gram
Cool. My bottle has 52lbs of coins in it, which is around 23kilograms, which works out to around $544.00 worth of coins
Not quite there yet, but if I wait much longer, I may not be able to move the bottle. Maybe Zach and I will make an excursion to the Coinstar machine and shovel coins into it for a half hour, and see how accurate my numbers are.
There's something deeply satisfying when the number of messages in my inbox drops below one screenful. The disappearing scrollbar on the right side says to me "Congratulations! You've accomplished something!"
True victory happens when I get down to single digits, but that event should be heralded by fanfare and balloons, it happens so rarely.
In case you were curious about how much mail flows through my account daily, here's my catchall report. Of this, probably 80% is mailing list traffic that's foisted into various folders by procmail. The rest is In My Box, baybee.
Breakdown by day: (3459 posts, average of 494.1 posts per day.)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Jul 26 | Jul 25 | Jul 24 | Jul 23 | Jul 22 | Jul 21 | Jul 20
672 | 669 | 649 | 547 | 216 | 207 | 499
(This report is from Mailwatch, a tool I wrote about 12 years ago to monitor mailing list traffic and generate reports.)
I'm back home now after a week-long absence from home and hearth, part for business, part for pleasure. So rather than go on for pages about various things seen, eaten, or visited, here's a Harpers-esque rundown...
GMAPS Miles covered: 1140 by gmaps Odometer miles: 1290 Hours driving: 23 Average fuel mileage: 15.8mpg Estimated gallons of gas used: 81.6 Highest price paid for gas: $3.35 (Connecticut) Lowest price paid for gas: $2.85 (NJ) Estimated money spent on fuel: $252.96 Total nights away from home: 7 Days spent camping: 4 Total time spent sitting in traffic: 200 minutes-ish Volleyball games played: 6 States visited: 5 Miles biked: 10 Weight gained: 3lb :( Number of power windmills seen: 6 ! Problems with the van or trailer: 0
All in all, it was about as good as trip as possible given the huge mileage involved. I think my limit for long distance driving by myself is around 500-600 a day. And even that I don't know if I could keep up for several days in a row without break. The drive out was much easier due to the 3 work days in NJ.
A quick note about NJ. While I was there I googled around and found a pickup volleyball group in Princeton that plays on Tuesday evenings. I got in a good 2+ hour session of indoor playing, which helped offset the slug-like demeanor I was adopting. Indoor volleyball is weird - nothing like a popped-up ball bouncing around in basketball fixtures like a pachinko setup. Sheesh.
As to the camping, southwestern PA is absolutely beautiful - we were almost in West Virginia, and the weather really was perfect for a large (150-people ish) outside event. Temperatures during the day stayed between 70 and 85, and at night it got down to the low sixties. It only rained the first night, and we had the trailer all set up by then.
And before the purists get on my case. Yes I was camping in the sense that I was sleeping in a non-fixed environment without plumbing or heat or electricity, in a place that had only rudimentary facilities. But yes, it was a camper trailer, yes there were hot showers and plenty of water, and yes there was a fixed building nearby. I still say there was a roughing element to it because of no fixed plumbing. Any place that necessitates the use of portapotties is still 'camping', so there.
And now we return you to your regularly scheduled life.
Footnote - no, I was not at BC. This was a different event. :)
So while I'm out on the road, I try to keep myself reasonably in shape. At home, I have volleyball and the like to keep me active, but in a hotel room in Princeton, NJ? Not so good.
Fortunately, I can bring my bicycle with me, and I've worked out a schedule where I can spend 8-9 hours in the office, hop on the bike, ride for an hour or two, and have a nice satisfying wind-down dinner then a shower at night. Works out pretty durned well, but I was curious -how- well it was working.
At yesterday's cohousing meeting, some helpful person had brought some ultra-tasty chocolate cake. I've cut back my sweets intake enormously in the last year, but the cake arrived while I was hungry. I had a slice. That's more than I usually have (I try to have a couple bites - just to get the mmmm yummy taste - this time I downed a whole slice). Felt sort of guilty about it. "Hmm, that was probably about 400-450 calories worth of food there. I wonder if I worked that off riding today?"
The net is FULL of calorie counters. Most of them seem to be pretty much garbage, with a lot of commentary making vague comparisons about which is better for you, how much time you're spending, etc. I finally tracked down a decent calculator that takes into account my own weight, how vigorous I was riding, and how long I was on the road. Tonight I rode about fifteen miles, and according to the calorie calculator on WebMD.com, that means I burned a little over 800 calories in my ride. That feels about right, it was a decent length ride, I could feel my heart rate up, I was sweating, and I feel a little tired, but not wiped out afterwards.
I think I offset the cake, and then some, which is what I wanted to do!
Now I'm back in my room, getting some work done, and soon I'll snuggle into bed. I've found a couple possible pickup volleyball games for tomorrow night nearby, we'll see if anything comes from it.
While out at Canobie Lake Park yesterday with the fam, I chanced to note my Treo had shed another component of itself. I've been missing my stylus for quite a while (I go through about one a month), but I also noted my 2gig Sandisk SD card has ejected itself. This occasionally happens when I drop the Treo pretty hard - but it usually just 'unclicks' the card, and I just shove it back in. This time apparently the card had escaped completely.
There wasn't anything particularly important on it - I usually use it to move pictures from the Treo to yawl, but I have a half dozen apps installs on it also (including GeoNiche, an outstanding bluetooth GPS client specifically designed for Geocaching). The cards cost-wise are down on a par with packing material, so I was at best a little annoyed.
This morning while packing up for a week-long business + vacation trip, I glanced down in the driveway and LO! There was the SD card! Lonely from it's night out in the cold (in July?), but looking none the worse for wear. Clicking it back into the Treo brought up the familiar "Here's what's on this card!"
It's nice when things actually go your way on occasion. Even if it only involves a little $15 memory card.
This week in 1957, What's Opera, Doc was released...
An excellent story on the history of this masterpiece is in The Star.
Yesterday I went out and played volleyball.
Twice.
Once I drove a half hour to play with a lunchtime group out in Westborough. That was good, and got some excellent 3-on-3 on a sand court.
Then, after picking up my son at camp at 6pm, and having dinner with Cat, I wanted to swing by and verify a rumor I had heard about a pickup game that happens Mondays and Wednesdays in Framingham.
Sure enough, I found it, where 13 or so folks were in a casual pickup game. I stopped, Zach hung out in the van while I played a quick game with them, then drove home, arriving a little later than I had wanted to, but feeling nicely worked out.
If I wanted to, I now know of pickup and quasi-league level play 6 days a week, in fact, could even play twice a day, once during lunch and once in the evening.
Maybe I need professional help.
I have a lot of pictures in my photo archive on Flickr. Occasionally some wag comes along and goes "Dude, you should use Picasaweb!, cuz, it's like, Google!"
Ohhkay. Today I got a link to a friends' photo album on Picasa, so went to check it out.
Alas, I see more of what Google is getting very good at doing. And that is breaking inherent functionality in environments in favor of the way 'they' think things should be done. The rapid AJAX-ification of every function on a webpage is making old tried and trued basics stop working. Sure, it might have some gee-whizzo effect, but Google's way of doing some link is not like Bob's way of doing a link and is not like Fred's way of doing a link. Now we have a world wide web that is fragmenting, rather than sticking with at least a basic access methodology. I shudder to think what this does for accessibility issues.
Case in point. Here is what you cannot do with Picasaweb - this discovered in 15 seconds of browsing the site.
* You cannot middle-click on a photo album picture and open the link in a new tab. In fact, you can't middle click on anything. If you do, you either get nothing happening, or it just refreshes the page. How unhelpful.
* You cannot right click on an image and view it. If you do, you get "You have chosen to open PBLAH.JPG, which is a GIMP IMAGE. What should Firefox do with this file?" This is wrong. It should view the image as I told it to. Google has deliberately broken their MIME settings to force that dialog.
* Screen refreshes are unintuitive and slow. If you do a search, and click 'Search Photos', the screen refreshes, but is blank. Oh, but wait! This is AJAX, it's still searching! 5 seconds later I have a screenful of pictures. How did I know it was still searching? Apparently I was supposed to mind-read what was going on. The 'active' spinner in the browser said things were done.
Dear Google. Stop trying to remake the web in your own image. You're hurting everyone in the process.
So I frequently park myself at the local Panera to partake of their free wireless, tasty coffee, and comfy chairs. It's also convenient that it's halfway between home and my son's school.
Yesterday, I stopped by just to get out of the heat. Since I had an hour to kill, I worked up my last blog post, put it together and posted it. So far so good. I traditionally look at the site at it's base URL (http://planet-geek.com/) just to make sure everything is okay. This time, apparently everything was NOT okay.
Apparently access to my blog has been blocked by the infamous Sonicwall 'content protection' system. Nice of them, eh?
Further research into this problem, by following their url, showed that I was not blocked for my abysmal spelling, my poor site layout, or my lack of meaningful content, but that I was simply classified as... pornography.
I had no idea geekitude had slipped so far into the internet's dark underworld.
Naturally, I immediately put in a request to have it reclassified, and demanded an explanation as to WHY my little corner of geekness has been classified as Pornography. Alas, Sonicwall doesn't provide such information, you may simply ask for a reclassification, and they might get around to it. In 8-10 days. What do you bet that I won't hear a thing from them in that timeframe?
If you'd like to grease the wheels against this idiocy, please go to Sonicwalls' ratings page, look up 'planet-geek.com', and request to have it reclassified as an "Information Technology" website.
I still would very much like to hear from Sonicwall, or from anyone else, who has had their site randomly excluded from anyone who uses their product, with no notification and no recourse except for a 'request for reclassification', why this occurs and what can be done about it. I'd also recommend that ANYONE who hosts or runs a website to plug their URL into that page and check to see if they're being blocked.
I have to admit, there are times when having an enabling partner brings unexpected benefits.
In this case, my wife happens to work for Bose as a project manager, and as such as access to their employee discounts and specials. Because of her signing bonus, we have a lovely Bose Lifestyle 48 soundsystem to complement the Big TV. I would never have the money to be able to afford such an extravagant system, but it's hard to argue with the discount.
Tonight I added some more pieces to the mix. We got some new speaker stands for the satellite speakers, and rewired the MythTV box a bit. The new stands look great!
Next step will be to use the new video switcher on the LS48 to route video and audio all via the Bose box. That'll require ducking into the nest O wires behind the display. Something I'm really not looking forward to. :-/
One thing I am toying with though is calling up Comcast and upgrading our cable tuner to HDTV. The whole "we'll stretch 4:3 to fit on an HD form factor" thing is getting wearing. Unfortunately, I'm guessing that Comcast is not providing boxes with enabled Firewire ports, so the usefulness of my MythTV tuner card is dropping daily. Damned corporations.
On the plus side, though, Ben has successfully aquired the HDTV cable for the Gamecube, so we'll be enjoying true 480p signal shortly from that little puppy. Mmm, SSX3 in full glory.
TOTAL geek squee.
Starcraft 2 is official. And it's not a huge variation from the original game - updated after, what, 8 years, naturally, but same 3 races, new vehicles and ships, new engines, all that, but it's the same game, redone.
Starcraft was one of the few games that totally sucked me in, and I still occasionally play it, years and years later.
The Wikipedia article on Starcraft II is under heavy editing right now, but the details are there.
I highly recommend watching the full cinematic trailer. It totally rocks.
The Linux environment is such a love-hate world for me. In general, it's mostly love. All the tools I want, speed, eye candy, toys, productivity, it's all there.
Then there are the cloudy days. When things that should work, don't, and I can't figure out how to make them work.
After a couple sunny weeks, I've hit the equivalent of spring showers, and the clouds have rolled in.
First, I'm having all sorts of performance problems with Thunderbird. I suspect this is down to some twitchy DNS problem, but I've never seen it before, and others have not seen it as well. Right now I'm in 'suck it up and deal' mode, but it's infuriating waiting 5-6 seconds of total GUI lockup whenever I hit Alt-Enter.
Second, I'm still working on setting up the new replacement machine for my roommate. This is a bellwether project for me - can I replace a windows machine completely with Linux. For the most part, we're ready to go, except I cannot get the VPN to their Windows server (a PPTP connection) to work properly. I had great hopes for a new KDE tool called KVPNC, but either due to the programs' newness or traditional complexity of setting up VPNs under Linux, I have had no success. At the moment, this is a showstopper on the project.
And last night, I wanted to edit some recordings I had done with my minidisc recorder at band practice. "No problem!" sez I, "I'll just use Audacity," an excellent free multitrack editor. BZZT! Audacity refuses to talk ALSA properly, and I cannot play the tracks I'm editing. I've used Audacity many times under Windows, and I thought I had also used it under Linux, but now on startup Audacity is yelling about not being able to access the ALSA device. Various forums have said that is because ALSA has sound device locking issues (which I mentally flag as bogus - wasn't ALSA's point to allow multiple applications to access the sound device at the same time? Avoiding the dreaded /dev/dsp lock? Frustrating)
So I have 2 projects held up, and one constant, ongoing annoyance. And, over on the side, my windows machine running quite smoothly, without any of these problems.
I want the sunshine back.
I hate to see a good thing get ruined.
One of my daily joys was waiting until around 1pm when TheDailyWTF would update with a well written story about some workplace / tech related problem that really made the reader go "Wha de FU?" The articles were very well put together, the story behind each posting was interesting and detailed, and it was nice hearing about oddities in the tech sector each day.
Around the middle of last year, the writers added a new feature, the "Code Snippet Of The Day". A sidebar bit of content where code-specific WTF's were posted and readers would comment on where the problems were and how they might be fixed. I found the CodeSOD entries somewhat distracting - the writing style was stilted and boring, and would classh with the normal content.
Then, the site changed it's name.
It was no longer "The Daily WTF" - it was now "Worse Than Failure". The various reasonings behind this move were shallow and rang hollow. It was simply the next step in a blog owner trying to broaden their content base to be able to provide more diverse content. New posters were brought in, and the article quality dropped precipitously. Instead of one high quality article a day, we had a 3-5 poorly written articles, intermixed with CodeSOD's.
Now, the final insult.
This week they are running "Classics Week". Now, I'm all for nostalgia. It's great going back into the archives and pulling out truly outstanding articles from the past and reminiscing. But the authors on TheDailyWTF are doing no such thing. They are posting classic articles from as recent as nine weeks ago.
Ladies and gentlemen, a classic is something I may have missed in the distant past, or something that stood above all the others and should be brought back. When doing 'classics', you don't just repost recent articles.
I'm sorry, but TheDailyWTF has destroyed itself in the process of trying to expand itself, a process all too common in successful blogs. I bear no antipathy toward Alex Papadimoulis, the owner of TheDailyWTF, but if I were to make one suggestion to him, it would be "Alex, stop. Return to what you were doing well. The new content is not working."
One of the things I like best about the Geocache caches is that they're rarely placed in random places without anything interesting around them. Last week I visited a spot in Northboro where a storm in the late 80's flattened 5+ acres of pine trees with a microburst.
Today's hike and find involved going 2+ miles into the woods near Nobscot Mountain (it's not much of a mountain, but it's a great hike), not far from the famous Wayside Inn. There, buried deep in the woods with no markers or anything, I found... Fords Folly.
According to the geocache site, this structure was built in the 20's by Henry Ford:
n 1923, Henry Ford stepped in to protect the Wayside Inn as a "splendid example of colonial America." He purchased nearly 1500 acres surrounding the Inn, built a traditional New England style chapel, a field stone grist mill (rumored to be the "most photographed historic site") and moved The Redstone School or "Little Red Schoolhouse" (of Mary and her little lamb fame) to its current site. In addition, Ford moved the old Parmenter-Garfield general store from Sudbury center to Marlboro and built "Ford's Folly" (the 60 ft. dam up on Nobscott Mountain, so named for its refusal to hold water despite years of labor). Obsessed with historic authenticity, all construction and renovations had to be accomplished in "the traditional manner" using only man and oxen power.
Further information is available at Wikipedia about the Wayside and the abandoned dam.
When I saw the entry on the geocaching site, I was certainly NOT expecting to find a huge 30' dam in the middle of the woods. The entire hike took about 3 hours total, including finding 3 geocaches along the route. gmaps-pedometer has the route, as best as I can map it. It clocked it out at 3.6 miles, but given all the twists and turns of the trail, as well as a couple forays to interesting vistas or other trails, the total hike was probably closer to 5 miles. It certainly ranks up there as one of the more tiring jaunts I've done, but the weather was perfect, the trees were all a-whistle with wind, and the bugs haven't -quite- made it out yet.
It's easy to gripe and moan and stone-kick when doing business travel. While it's become routine for me, it's really easy to fall into the "man this sucks. I miss my family" mindset. But this trip, I tried to schedule it carefully, work out what I was trying to accomplish, and stay focused on what needed to be done.
So here I am, on my way home, and generally, things worked out okay...
All in all, a mighty good week. Now all I have to do is drive home in the rain. Fortunately, that's what XM is for.
I'm beginning to think one of the most brilliant changes to come down the tech pike in the last 10 years is the realization that a USB port provides a nice steady 5 volts at 100ma of power to any device attached to it. The device can even request more current (up to 500ma).
Since just about every computer nowadays includes a USB port, most manufacturers of mobile equipment have made it so their equipment can recharge from an available USB port. For those of us who carry a lot of extraneous gear around, this has eliminated the need to haul a half dozen different power supplies along, and negated the need to invest in bulky and frequently twitchy "universal" power supply solutions.
For my part, here's a list of gear I regularly carry around..
Because of this, the only 'power' supply I need to have with me is the one for my laptop.
All is not peaches and cream, however. My Olympus C-770 camera does not charge off the USB bus, unfortunately, and has resulted in me being stuck with a dead battery on more than one occasion. I chalk this to the relative agedness of the camera, and take heart in knowing that the NEXT camera I get will definitely have USB recharge capability.
As part of my somewhat nomadic working style, I like getting out and about and spending time in local coffeeshops and restaurants. I can do 98% of my business from my laptop, therefore all I need is a comfortable environment, free wireless, and a good supply of coffee.The problem is, trying to actually FIND decent establishments to fill this need can be a real challenge. I'm not talking about Starbucks here - I'd rather support local businesses and encourage free wireless.
So in an effort to help out others with similar pursuits, here's a list of free wireless coffeeshops and / or businesses that I've found comfortable for telecommuting or just 'out of home' work.
If you know of others in the area, leave them in comments, and I'll continue updating the list...
I'm a scrounger.
I can't help it, I love it. The joy and *squee* ness I have for something I acquire is made all the better if I get it at some amazing discount, or find it under a box of 'junk' and get it for a song, or get it via some bizarre wrangling where I end up with the better end of the deal.
Flea markets are the best for this. You can naturally divide flea markets into 'tech' events and 'family' events. The family ones aren't as interesting for the piles of tech gear, but you do have the chance of someone unloading a piece of equipment they know nothing about. "Yeah well, grampa had this in his room, we don't know what it is, it's in German, you want it? $5." - I'm sure someone has acquired an Enigma machine that way (I haven't, but I still hold out hope.)
But the tech flea markets are the best. For me it goes back to my happy days attending the Trenton Computer Festival every spring in New Jersey. This was (and still is) an epic event - we'd plan for it for weeks, load up the trailer / van / car / truck / whatever, and arrive on site at some ungodly hour (usually in the neighborhood of 6:30am). The flea market didn't open until 10, and in many cases, most of the best deals have already happened between the vendors by the time the general public showed up. It was great to see 4 guys go by hauling a big equipment cabinet "Dude! 2 RL02 drives, and controller!" "Hey, good find!" We'd frequently have radios rigged up "Bob, I found a pile of Unibus controllers in a 4 slot backplane. Need it?" "See if they have an RLV11 in there, okay?" "Right..." It was awe inspiring.
This week has brought up another scrounging opportunity though. In the last few days, I've been to 2 fire sales. Computer businesses that are closing out their stores and liquidating their inventory. Sometimes this makes for amazing bargains, but it's totally the luck of the draw, whether you can spot something before someone else does, and how you time it.
The first one was a visit to the sad remains of Comp USA in Framingham. Probably one of the last of the 'computer stores' around (anyone remember places like Computerland?), CompUSA is closing a large number of their stores. This place had that "doom!" feel that many of these stores get as they liquidate. Any pretense of civility by the staff is gone, they just want to be done with it.
Unfortunately, CompUSA's prices started at the astronomical level (which I'm sure contributed to their downfall), so when they advertise "20% off sale! Everything must go!", it's not exactly something you go charging into expecting massive bargains.
Regardless, I did score a few things. Picked up a copy of Black and White 2 and C&C Generals for around $12 each (normally they're around $40), as well as a few other tidbits. Many of the things I might be interested in were either gone already (like a Nokia 770, or still ridiculously overpriced (ATI Radeon high end cards which RETAIL for $250 ish were marked down a whopping 15%. No thanks). I think they're still there, still trying to get rid of stuff, I'll try and stop over there tomorrow and see what's left.
The other opportunity was a very small computer business in Watertown closing down. This was one of those friendly neighborhood computer stores, owned and operated by one person, that's been around for years. The fellow had some problems going on, and decided to sell everything in the store for $1 a pound. Now we're talkin!
Unfortunately, all the mail and notifications I saw said they were going to open at 1pm on Friday. I got there at the crack of 1pm, and probably 80% of the stuff was gone already. I waved hi to a few friends, and picked through what was left. In the end, I found a very nice aluminum hauling cart that was tucked under a table, as well as a box full of power strips, ethernet cables, and other handy tidbits. Total price: $42. Can't really argue with that.
My next opportunity for scrounging will come when the MIT Swap Fest resumes in a few weeks. That's always a load of fun, though it's gotten somewhat uniform (the same vendors with the same things every month). Occasionally there's gems there, and I go, as always, for the thrill of finding something Neat.
In Friday's Swift, James Randi's weekly column, he cited a remarkablebook by Andrew Keen called "The Cult of the Amateur".
I'm reproducing the block that Randi mentioned - I believe his selection is excellent and states much of what I feel is at issue in internet commentary, and indeed, the way people perceive 'truth' today...
Truth… is being "flattened," as we create an on-demand, personalized version of the truth, reflecting our own individual myopia. One person's truth becomes as "true" as anyone else's. Today's media is shattering the world into a billion personalized truths, each seemingly equally valid and worthwhile. To quote Richard Edelman, the founder, president and CEO of Edelman PR, the world's largest privately owned public relations company:In this era of exploding media technologies there is no truth except the truth you create for yourself.
This undermining of truth is threatening the quality of civil public discourse, encouraging plagiarism and intellectual property theft and stifling creativity. When advertising and public relations are disguised as news, the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred. Instead of more community, knowledge, or culture, all that Web 2.0 really delivers is more dubious content, from anonymous sources, hijacking our time and playing to our gullibility.
Need proof? Let's look at that army of perjurious penguins – "Al Gore's Army of Penguins" to be exact. Featured on YouTube, the film, a crude "self-made" satire of Gore's pro-environment movie An Inconvenient Truth, belittles the seriousness of [his] message by featuring a penguin version of Al Gore preaching to other penguins about global warning.
But [this film] is not just another homemade example of YouTube inanity. Though many of the 120,000 people who viewed this video undoubtedly assumed it was the work of some SUV-driving amateur with an aversion to recycling, in reality, the Wall Street Journal traced the real authorship of this neo-con satire to DCI Group, a conservative Washington, D.C. public relationships and lobbying firm whose clients include ExxonMobil. The video is nothing more than political spin, enabled and perpetuated by the anonymity of Web 2.0, masquerading as independent art. In short, it is a big lie.
Trying to navigate the information overload we have today to try and get 'reality' out of the morass is a challenge I personally face every day. Aside from the deep philosophical overtones, I have a firm faith (if that is the proper word) in reality and truth. Superstition and fantasy masquerading as fact has no place in my worldview. To me, spin, misdirection, and deception, like the video mentioned above, are no better.
I ended up with a sort of special bonus afternoon today as Cat is off in town, and Zach is over his friends house. The basic idea was to make up for a very interrupted week of work and try to get some long-neglected work out of the way.
Mostly, it worked quite well. I got caught up on a couple things that had been nagging, and that's good. But what really got me grooving was working on... well, a project that a couple folks know about, but I'm not -quite- ready to release to the public. I've been referring to it simply as the "Secret Squirrel" app, or just 'The Squirrel' for short.
What's been good about this has been the basicness of the design and implementation. I've been spending SO much time delving into the deep complexities of EJB3, JBoss, Hibernate, and more recently Terracotta, I don't get much of a chance to just sit down and whack out simple code.
Today had 2-3 hours of basic grunt 'hamburger' coding, to borrow a phrase from MASH. No fancy libraries, environments, or oddities. Well, okay, one new library that handles OpenGL rendering, but everything else was basic data application coding and design.
It felt good! It sort of underlined where I've gotten with Java programming over the last 2 years or so, and now basic coding is second nature. Eclipse has become my environment of comfort, whether it's running on Windows or Linux (in fact I'm leaning toward moving back to Linux full time soon - with both machines up and running cleanly on my desk, I find myself doing more on the Linux box than on Windows... but I digress...) , and the Java OOP approach to program development Just Plain Makes Sense. It's nice.
Tomorrow it'll be back to EJB3 and Terracotta land, and all the mysteries therein, but for now, I can look at what I did today and do a "That felt good!" happy dance.
And the code even worked.
Today was a great example of the ups and downs of being without an office. I'm sure most folks realize that, being a fulltime consultant has it's positives and negatives.
I've been on the job with this client for over 2 years now, and things don't look like they're going to slow down any time soon. My job description can best be summed up as "Platform Architect" - designing this company's next generation architecture. The work involves a lot of research, tinkering, exploring, and learning - the deliverables are rarely better defined than "Come up with a way we can do X"
On the one hand, I get a very open and free schedule, with no hard deliverable deadlines, no "What? You're leaving at 4:55?", and all the long lunches I could want. On the other hand, I don't get the typical office interactiveness most folks take for granted. My 'office' at home is an L shaped desk with all my computers on it, which is all of 3' from my bed. A 'break' is walking from there to the kitchen to make coffee. It can get a little lonely.
Fortunately I have lots of folks I chat with on IRC and interesting stuff to research, but sometimes I just Gotta Get Out.
My current favorite watering hole is Panera Bread in Framingham, MA. It's all of 3 miles from the house, conveniently on the way to Zach's school, and they provide free wireless. That, combined with a $1.50 cup of coffee that can be infinitely refilled and a set of comfy chairs by a fireplace, makes for my Office Away from Home for the times I just need to get out.
This evening had me settled into said Comfy Chairs[tm] working on long and vexing problem trying to... (if you're averse to long strings of corporate buzzwords, technology references, and other geeky-hoi-palloi, you might want to skip to the next paragraph)... trying to get JBoss AS, running under EasyEclipse to fire up in a standard configuration, allowing for a Terracotta server to act as a DSO cluster server for instrumented classes as distributed in an EJB3 based SOA. The twitch was getting JVM versions to match so the boot-class wrapper for the JVM would allow for the Terracotta cluster to come up, and be accessible remotely from the JBoss hosted app.
Got that? Okay - the nutshell of this was - I got it working. With not a little help from the Terracotta folks on IRC. The baselien concept for this stuff is fascinating, but implementation, when much of this is still in 'beta' form, can be maddeningly difficult to get working. In the end, it's all running, and now I have enough structure in place to actually learn the system.
What made this interesting was about halfway through this intense mishmash of XML configuration files, crashing applications, and "wait, what version of what is where?", I heard a familiar voice in the background... after a few minutes I looked around, and chanced to run into Dwight, who was picking up some edibles for his family. It's unusual for me to see someone I recognize during my 'work day' (even though it was in fact about 6pm), but I found myself sort of pleased at the interaction.
What does this have to do with my future? A lot, since sometime in the next 3 months, Mosaic will be breaking ground. This means that soon my home office will include our common house, where I'll happily be able to sit in front of a fireplace on a comfy couch, and pretty much everyone I see wandering by will be someone I know very well.
How wonderful.
There's been a lot of chatter around the net lately about trying to find programming and introduction to computers-type software for kids to learn on. I mean, we all know where we started, right? TRS-80 and a READY prompt, or the wonderful ] prompt. 5 1/4" floppies, simple programs, and tinkering through the weekends were how we learned.
But how do you get a young one into these environments nowadays?
There's been various attempts at a 'kids' software environment, things like Logo and the like. The problem is nowadays finding implementations that are either free or useful. The only real Logo environment I've been happy with is 
KTurtle, a Logo implemention for the KDE desktop. On the one hand, I'm terribly amused that by far the best Logo setup I've seen REQUIRES Linux to run, and at the moment, Zach doesn't have a Linux desktop to work with. This sorely tempts me to set it up for him, I have to admit.
But Logo has limitations as a fully useful programming environment. In the modern age of "games a click away", kids really want to start writing adventures and excitement right off the bat. We all remember spending weeks debugging "PICK A NUMBER FROM 1 TO 10" programs. How do you code Tetris in a few weeks when you're still learning your multiplication tables?
A long time ago I read an article on SmallTalk in BYTE magazine (yes, a REALLY long time ago, like 1980). It was a discussion about object oriented languages and environments, and described the model of "Everything is an object". At the time, it was somewhat of an intellectual oddity, though many folks really got into it.
Apparently there is an outstanding opensource project to build a comfortable Smalltalk based environment that can be geared toward kids. It's called Squeak, and I first learned about it associated with the One Laptop Per Child project, which incorporates some of the Squeak environment. Once I got past some of the initial environment oddities, I found that Squeak provides a platform independent runtime environment, where object-oriented programs can be run compeltely independent of the OS they're running under. This means apps written on a Mac will work fine on a PC or a Linux box.
Squeak really isn't something ready to take on the Windows desktop or an environment to write accounting packages in. However, in educational circles, distributions in Squeak have really gotten quite a following. The Squeakland site is designed for educators who are looking for Squeak based information.
I'll be writing more about Squeak as I get more and more comfortable with it, but unless someone else tells me about another educational / intro to programming environment that's available for kids, that does NOT require a commercial license, Squeak is where I'm going to put my energy.
During some random chattering online, I pointed a few folks at David Weber's works. I've really enjoyed the Honor Harrington series. Talk about pure unadulterated space opera. Big capital ships, multiple system alliances at war, fleet operations, and military politics all rolled together into a coherent and rich universe. Fantastic.
I have gotten in the habit of picking up each book as I go on my regular road trips. I usually finish one per visit, and there's something like 14 books, so things are moving along nicely. I had also heard that Weber had published all the books onto CD, which sounded like a mighty inexpensive way of getting the material, but I didn't relish having to haul my laptop around to read a story over a slice of pizza.
The other night I came across the Baen Free Library, a series of books that are available, for free, from the publisher. I highly recommend folks take a look at this page, where Eric Flint has an excellent commentary on copyright and why the current "brass knuckles" approach to enforcement is the wrong way to go.
At any rate, navigating around, I happily found the next book in the series I was looking for, and went "Hmm, I guess this should be put onto my Treo. I've been meaning to give this a shot..."
Off to Mobipocket to pick up an e-book reader. A quick sync later, and lo, I have the new book, and a reader, on my Treo.
How well does it work?
Surprisingly well. I admit I was a little leery of trying to read what has always been a paperback-sized book on a screen only 3"x3" in size. Mobipocket does a good job of making it as painless as possible. I found myself settling into a comfortable reading pattern once I had made some small preference settings (go full screen, when scrolling to the next page don't overlap lines - show the entire next page, etc etc). I think my one nudge is that a screen only holds about 1/4 of a page of text, so to read a single page, I have to 'tap' somewhere on the treo to tell it to go to the next page. Fine if I'm holding it in my hand, but when I'm eating lunch, it's tedious to have to reach out and tap the screen or hit a button every 15 seconds or so. If there were a way to make it, oh, I don't know, change pages when I tap my foot or something, that would be something. I guess I'll have to wait on that toe-interface.
Commentaries on E-Books
So, it comes back to E-books. There's been chatter for years about the idea that electronic book readers would replace paper books. Folks could just download the books they want into their reader, and they'd never need a paper version. Why hasn't it really caught on? There is an electronic book market, but it's tiny compared to the volume of paperbacks in the wild.
For me, it's a combination of DRM and pure practicality. If I spend $6 on a paperback, I have it, I own it, it's there. I can read it anytime I want, I can toss it on the shelf, come back to it in 10 years, and read it again. I can loan it to a friend, I can make notes in it, I can let my son read it. If I spill a drink on it, it gets wet. Then I dry it off, and read it again. If I run over it with the car, I can still read it, though it might be a bit mooshed.
If I spend $6 on an e-book, I have... a file. That file is most likely encrypted, and cannot be moved or copied around freely. I have to store it somewhere, perhaps on my Treo. I will not have this Treo in 10 years, so what do I do with the book? Store it on a CD? Okay now I have to make copies of it to a CD, and store that CD on a shelf. In 10 years, will anyone actually own CD readers that can read the filesystem on it? How about in 20 years? 30?
Or, if I download the book, put it on my Treo, and oops! I've mistakenly deleted it. Or the file got corrupted. Poof, it's gone. The publishers will happily say "No problem! Just re-download the file" - assuming you can prove you own it, and the publisher is still in business, and you have the license key. Try that in 5 years. Or 15.
No, I don't see E-books replacing paperbacks. The DRM issue is first and foremost a dead end roadblock, because there's no working around these problems. The physical issues of 'keeping track of media' is something people can work on, and come up with their own solutions, but unless the media is free, there's really no point in investing in a book collection where someone else holds the keys.
A brief life update for ya'll.
First, I've been down sick for the last 2+ days. It started late Friday night after a lovely evening in town at Knitcetera. I was feeling a little sluggish on the way home, and by Saturday morning I knew I had Some Nasty Thing. I've been running a fever, doing the 'really painful sinuses' thing, and coughing off and on all weekend.
Due to the magic of Nyquil, I actually got about 6 hours of sleep last night, so I'm feeling almost human this morning, but that nice sheen of sweat is still with me. Gotta love it.
Further geekiness shall ensue when I can actually focus on something for more than 5 minutes. Lots of nifty projects going on, as well as updates on past ongoing doodles.
Stay tuned, campers!
I normally don't post political activism stuff, but this one is too important to ignore.
The finest internet radio station on the net, Radio Paradise, is under threat of being legislated out of existence, due to the big record companies' influence on the US copyright office.
As stated on RP's home page:
For some time, we've suffered with a system where we pay a large chunk (10%-12%) of our income to the Big 5 record companies - while FM stations and radio conglomerates like Clear Channel pay nothing. Now they want even more. In our case, an amount equal to 125% of our income. Our only hope is to create as much public awareness and outrage about this staggeringly unfair situation as possible. Neither the record industry nor Congress are ready to listen to us at this point. But members of the media may well be, and we need to get their attention.
Please click through to Radio Paradise to see what you can do to prevent fantastic stations like RP from being pushed off the public networks. For a more detailed analysis of the rulings from the copyright office, see Kurt Hanson's analysis.
If you've ever even THOUGHT about living in Cohousing, now's the time to come to our introductory meeting tomorrow (Sunday) at 1pm in Marlborough.
Mosaic Commons has received it's building permit, and will be starting construction this fall. Even if you're not ready to commit to Mosaic or not even sure about cohousing in general, come to our meeting and get the FULL PICTURE of what it's all about.
As the saying goes... "All knowledge is worth having". Learn about cohousing!
I like reading Thomas Dolby's blog. He's a decent writer, and just tells things as they are. It's a great window into the day to day goings on in the music industry.
A recent post however had me all teary reading it. Thomas describes a moment in 1985 working with Stevie Wonder. I heartily recommend anyone who relishes those 'moments' when playing, to give it a read. It certainly made my morning.
As if we needed more evidence of the sleeziness of FoxNews, here's a pretty concrete example.
About a year ago, I posted about foxnews spamming. I've continued to receive these posts fairly regularly, but decided to look a little deeper.
Today I got this posting - this is in the format I receive in email when someone posts to any of my blogs:
IP Address: 206.15.101.44
Name: qwdqws
Email Address: qwsdq@aaa.com
URL:
Comments:dwsqw
<A HREF="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,251660,00.html">Iraq to
Close Borders With Syria, Iran for 72 Hours in Security Crackdown</A>
Looks pretty similar. Hey, that IP address looks similar as well. I wonder....
dbs@yawl:~$ whois 206.15.101.0OrgName: News Corporation
OrgID: NEWSC
Address: 1211 Avenue of the Americas
Address: 7th Floor
City: New York
StateProv: NY
PostalCode: 10036
Country: USNetRange: 206.15.96.0 - 206.15.127.255
CIDR: 206.15.96.0/19
NetName: NAI-NET-BLOCK
NetHandle: NET-206-15-96-0-1
Parent: NET-206-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Assignment
NameServer: NS1-142.AKAM.NET
NameServer: NS1-15.AKAM.NET
NameServer: NS1-163.AKAM.NET
NameServer: NS1-218.AKAM.NET
NameServer: USC2.AKAM.NET
NameServer: USE2.AKAM.NET
NameServer: USW3.AKAM.NET
NameServer: USW5.AKAM.NET
Comment:
RegDate: 1997-01-24
Updated: 2006-01-19OrgTechHandle: JJR10-ARIN
OrgTechName: Ripkey, Jason J
OrgTechPhone: +1-212-852-7000
OrgTechEmail: jripkey@newscorp.com# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-02-12 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.
Yes folks, not only is FoxNews blogspamming the world trying to get their google rankings up, but they're doing it FROM THEIR OWN OFFICES. Remember these are the "Fair and Balanced" folks. Yet more evidence of the hypocrisy of that statement.
Fortunately, their whois record provides a direct phone number and a contact at Fox News.
A brief life post.
This evening we've received confirmation that our cohousing project, Mosaic Commons, has cleared the final regulatory hurdle between us and our building permit. As of 7pm tonight, we officially have a permit to continue with construction and development of our property in Berlin, MA.
This has been a year long complex process, involving the town, lawyers, committees, and constant legal wrangling. There were setbackes, and stresses, not without a few moments of despair. We are incredibly relieved to be done with it, and looking forward to seeing our homes and our vision for our community becoming a reality over the next 18 months.
Curious how we're doing? Keep an eye on our blog for updates and details into what we're doing.
What's a cool thing to do with your son on a nice lazy Saturday morning? Why, it's time to finally sort all the DVDs and bring the inventory listings up to date! Yay!
Doesn't sound like much fun? Actually, it was a blast :) Zach and I went through all the DVDs, sorted them, and got them back up on the shelving in the proper order. Then we went through my incredibly outdated inventory list, and found what discs were missing (about 15), and what ones were not in the inventory (about 80).
I updated my flat HTML file with all my movies on it, noting in italics the ones that are missing (anyone have these?), but also took a look around the net for a possible inventorying tool.
I played around with DVD Aficionado a little, and I sort of like their "bulk import" function. I was able to paste in my listing, and it matched it up with 'best guesses' for what movies I was talking about. It got it right about 80 percent of the time, letting me go back and re-choose ones that didn't match.
Unfortunately, the database is missing a ton of entries. Of my 210 or so movies, 15 weren't in the database -at all- (no entry for 'Animal House'? Cmon!). I know the DB can be updated, but I just wanted to do a quick crack at it.
So here's my listing on dvdaficionado. It breaks down what I entered by category and links to IMDB and all that. I may try and keep it up to date, but really, my videos.html file is the definitive source.
Next project will be inventorying the laserdiscs. Oh my.
A reminder to all my sundry friends - Arisia is this weekend. Due to the hotel change, there is a membership cap in force, and we're getting close to it. If you don't pre-register, there's a very good chance you will not be able to buy a membership on site!
So in the name of all that's good, register!
This has been a public service ranty announcement.
For those who have been asking, yes, I'll be working registration, but this year I'm not actually heading it up. So I will have time away from the reg desk to socialize, play, and generally have a good time. Might be a first for me! Mad props to Jasra and Sarah for all their intense work.
I'll also be helping Blk with her dealer room, where she'll be doing custom hairbraiding, as well as showing off some of my chainmail. Stop by the room on Dealers Row.
Oh fine. I finally broke down and did it. I realized that I had a couple places where I was posting sort of "wishy" lists. Movies I was looking for, other toys. But, ya know, there's a perfectly good site for managing wishlists for DVDs and books.
So, without further delay, I give you... my Amazon.com wishlist. Clicky on the graphic to view in all it's geekiness. Do with it what you will.
When I aquired clipper as my primary work machine, i needed to do something to really make it my own. I'd always wanted to do some sort of 
custom artwork on the cover of my laptops, usually to proclaim I'M NOT RUNNING WINDOWS. Well, that won't work for this particular machine (it is, in fact, running windows), so I needed something else. The answer came to me in while getting a nice evolve plaque for the van. Why not something similar for the laptop?
So on went an FSM plaque, and I went on with my wanderings around coffee shops, customer sites, and the like. The problem? No one got it. I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster sect is just too obscure, too geek-centric for anyone outside the true elite of geekdom to get it.
Well, that is, until today.
Today I walked into Panera Bread and set up in my usual way. The place is pretty busy, it being around lunchtime, and I ended up taking one of the tall round tables. As I hauled out the laptop and parked my backpack in a chair, a passer-by went "Oo, the flying spaghetti monster! Cool!" I turned, expecting to find someone of the geek ilk, but it was in fact the middle aged nondescript woman and her friend who had just gotten up from said table. "Wow!", said I "most people don't recognize it." "Oh sure, one of my kids just did a report on it." "Well great!" and they wandered off.
I somewhat feel vindicated. Maybe the word is getting out.
This weekend I'm down in DC doing registration services for an event - more detail on this later, but I have to gush a moment.
The hotel room here is your fairly standard 'big chain' accomodation, except for one minor touch.
The king-sized bed has a Tempurpedic mattress on it.
I'm so hooked. It's the only mattress I've ever slept on where I could lie on my side comfortably, from head to toe. It gave enough in the hips to let me settle in, but supported everything else nicely. That, coupled with absolutely no motion from other occupants - I'm completely hooked.
If they weren't so fripping expensive, I'd be, er, on top of one in an instant. As it is, I need to get into a place where dropping $800 on a king sized tempur-pedic mattress is a comfortable expenditure. Not to mention we just got up a new futon, so buying another mattress now really doesn't make a ton of sense. Ah well.
In all my driving around I have a lot of time to listen to XM Radio in the techno-van. Much of the time I spend listening to the various comedy channels - sort of non stop standup. It's pretty interesting, but one unexpected delight keeps coming up.
Apparently XM Channel 151 has picked up the entire "Chicken Man" radio series. I used to hear this regularly on WMMR in Philadelphia, but hadn't heard it since. It was a delight to hear that unmistakable introduction...
And now, it's time for another exciting episode in the life of the most fantastic crimefighter the world has ever known... BRA BRAAA BRAH BRAAAAHHHHH CHICKEN... MAAAAAAAAN... (He's everywhere, he's everywhere!)
For those that know this series, you can't help but smile and hear the intro clearly when reading those words. Even after almost 40 years, it's still a hoot to listen to, and I have to thank the anonymous genius at XM Radio who managed to get this show back on the air.
Some further details about the show are here. Thanks XM!
Details about where CCP is going with Eve Online are being announced by the CEO at their 2006 Fanfest.
Some choice tidbits:
Mmmmmmmmmmmm.
I feel like I've taken the bluepill. All I see around me is a sham, the wool that has been pulled over my eyes.
But, ya know? It's going okay.
A grandiose change has happened to my work environment at Chez Geek. Due to the long-running contract with ${customer}, we worked out a deal where due to the instability and possible imminent death of hunter, I was issued a new laptop. The laptop, however, runs Windows, and it was made abundantly clear by said ${customer} that they'd prefer I worked in the same environment as they do, that being, of course, Windows.
So here I am, with a spanking new laptop named 'clipper', and running it as my full time primary machine. After my initial revulsion at the concept, I have to concede - it's going quite well.
I shan't go into the details of what is different between WindowsXP and Linux. That subject has been debated, chewed on, spat up, kicked about, and shot out of a cannon plenty over the last few years. But what I'm using this machine for is exactly what Microsoft has been working on for 15+ years. A stable, high powered desktop environment that can interract with a multitide of peripherals, platforms, and hardware without very little fiddling or complaints.
Over the next few weeks I'll talk more about some of the applications and challenges I've been hitting with this migration, but for now, I seem to have reached a happy detante. My view for the moment is "This is stable, it works, it does things I could not do under Linux, but I still have all the power of my Linux machines handy just a few network segments away. I can deal."
I'm sure this will be the case until I get my first virus or malware installation, but for now, I'm a happy bluepill.
What is it with supposedly 'technical' reporters? They apparently haven't clue ONE about the material they're writing about.
Take for example an article appearing in the Herald Tribune - Europe. The subject is a good one, Tim Berners-Lee discussing research into the future of the 'net. A worthy topic, but the short article contains this little gem:
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist who is credited with creating the Internet, said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. that the way the Web is used should be examined by a broad spectrum of experts.
NO. WRONG. TBL had nothing to do with the 'Invention of the Internet'. TBL is credited with first linking hypertext documents with a mechanism for linking these documents to remote servers. He wrote the first webserver, and the first web browser, and coined the term 'World Wide Web'. This is an application that runs OVER the internet.
What is it about New Jersey? Here I am, back again, this time for more than just visiting a client. It's been almost a week since I've been home, and it begins to wear. But enough of the that, let's see what's been going on.
UberconFirst of all, there was Ubercon. This is the 8th event I've done for them, starting with our snowbound adventures in the beginning of 2003. Many of the original folks who were at that event still come to the con, both as staff and as attendees. It's settled into a close community of gamers, focusing on what they love most - Gaming. Sure there's the smattering of costuming, artists, and movies, but the vast majority of the people there are there to play games. Board games, card games, miniatures, LAN games... 24 hrs a day for 3 days, gaming gaming gaming. Ubercon was the first place I ever played Settlers of Catan and Icehouse, was my first exposure to Unreal Tournament, and was the place I first saw Guitar Hero.
All in all the event went fine. With help from blk, we worked all the hours necessary, got at least one nice dinner out, and generally had an enjoyable time. Once again the Myth box was on prominent display, and many games of DigDug, Contra and SmashTV were played. I think there's a future in making the machine easier to work with - console buttons for coin drops, player starts, and an easier selection mechanism. I would have liked to have left the machine alone and had people come up to play it more often, but alas, it was too prone to twitchy behavior and random joystick resets.
More workOf course, Ubercon came to an end, and I had to go on to the next reason I'm here. My work for this client is coming along fine, with development proceeding apace. Nothing really riveting to tell here, but when away from the convention and spending a lot of time on my own, I get a chance to think about being here, and to write down some of the things I see...
I present to you my NJ ponderings...
PizzaWhat's that you say? Pizza? Boston has plenty of pizza! What's your problem? Hah, I say. Boston has a mere shadow of proper cheesey goodness. NJ is home to the thin-crust style pizza. None of the heavy crust, grease laden horrors that populate the Beantown. Here, any pizzaria has decent thincrust pizza. I frequent my favorite spot every day for lunch, trying to get my fill. In my youth, when I lived in Trenton, a certain pizzaria saw me every day or every other day for dinner. I was quite the regular, and gained a reputation for '4 slices!' - after which I'd happily park myself in a booth and read half a book in the space of 2 hours. Such was my social life.
Oddly, when I brought up my pizza fascination with one of the fellows at my clients' office, he pointed out that Boston does indeed have a source of thincrust pizza. Papa Gino's. In the interest of full disclosure, I do in fact eat there on occasion, but sadly, it can't compete with small-shop pizza in the garden state.
FuddruckersOnly recently did I find out this chain is more widespread than I had realized. Around 1993 I found a Fuddruckers near Edison when I was working for Unipress Software as a sysadmin. We'd make regular forays out for half pound ground beef burgers. Not sure exactly what made them so tasty, but they were sure good eatins. This trip I scheduled my drive from Ubercon down to Princeton to give me time to stop by that particularly restaurant on Route 1, and it was as tasty as I remember it. Delish.
Dunkin Donuts or lack thereofThe great DunkinDonuts epidemic hasn't quite reached New Jersey yet. This has thrown off much of my morning routine, as given any opportunity, I'll happily get a DD coffee and a bagel for breakfast (or lunch, or dinner, or a snack or...). In Boston, DDs are like mileposts. You can actually navigate by them ("Yeah, go down 3 DD's, turn right, up 4 DD's, and we're on the left.") Here? Not so much. I've found only one within a 10 mile radius of my hotel, and alas, it's on the opposite side of the office. Sad.
The dichotomy of the stateNew Jersey is a study in contrasts in many ways. Noting that I did in fact grow up here, my view of the state has always been somewhat bucolic. I grew up on a horse farm in a very rural area. Cows, horses, etc were the normal views, and getting around on trailbikes and snowmobiles was the norm. We could wander for miles in streams and woods exploring in any direction, just avoiding houses every once in a while. The first leg of this trip was spent in Secaucus, near Giants Stadium. There are fewer places displaying a harsher contrast against the locale of my youth than Secaucus. Perhaps Elizabeth (those who are familiar with the area will know Elizabeth by it's high refinery - to - human ratio). After 4 days there, coming down to the Princeton area was a rather dramatic change. Here in Princeton, fall is in full swing. It is cool, breezy, the leaves are bright yellows and oranges, and there's just a hint of winter coming. Such a contrast to the industrial squalor of Secaucus.
ETSMy arrangements in the Princeton area are usually set up for the Chauncey Conference Center, part of the Educational Testing Service, or ETS. I'm sure not a few readers frowned at the mention of ETS, as this company is the originator of the SATs, the bane of many a high school college-student-hopeful. At the moment, I'm sitting in the Chauncey Conference Center lounge, in front of a lovely fire in a natural stone fireplace, in a large comfortable leather chair. Over the fireplace is a portrait of man in his early 60s, holding a pipe, with a loose, comfortable smile. This man is Hen
