Category: Life. Don’t talk to me about life.

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:

• Income limits between $46k/year and $76k/year, depending on number of family members.
• Assets no more than $75k

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:

• Do more with Struts
  I’m still trying to learn Struts. It’s a huge challenge, and takes a lot of brainpower. I’m making slow but steady progress, but halfway through the work, I realized my laptop had gone into ‘slow-mo’ mode (it happens when it overheats). And my nice dual core 2.2gig machine was running at 900mghz. Eclipse and JBoss and Windows don’t like that speed. So only half productivity there.

• Get badges ready for The Cohousing Conference
  I need to get these into the printers to be pre-printed for the event. To do that I need an order form and a proof. The graphics are in, but they won’t generate the proof without my credit card. The one they had on file for me expired. I can’t give it to them over the phone. I can’t email it, I have to FAX it. I don’t OWN a fax machine. I have to print their fugly Word doc (yes, Word, not PDF), write in my information, drive to Mailboxes Etc, and fax it from there. Grr.

• Another Con needs a Contract
  Another convention that’s coming up in August needs a finalized contract before it can move ahead. This one I got done, the contract is out for review. Phew.

• There’s a lot of email.
  Mosaic generates more mail than any other group I’ve ever worked with. I’m not even on the busier lists, and i have a dozen or two messages waiting for me to respond to or act upon.

• Summer Camp for Zach
  The deadline for registration for Zach’s summer camp is this Friday. I have to finish the registration forms (they’re done, they need one 2 week window completed), then drive (yes, drive) them to Worcester and submit them, not to mention PAY for them. Not a check I’m looking forward to writing, but it is what it is.

• Teeth
  Tomorrow I go in for my 1 week followup after oral surgery last Thursday. I had a tooth removed, as well as an abcess cleaned out. If you think that evokes a strong visual, you’re not far off the mark about what it felt like. I shan’t elaborate. But I have a dozen or so stitches in my gumline that need to be dealt with tomorrow, and have I mentioned how much I dislike antibiotics?

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.

• Got my chair back!
  My trusty Aeron chair developed a bit of a problem last week, and after realizing I was out of my service warranty (apparently Herman Miller’s 12 year warranty is only valid when sold a chair directly from a dealer. It is not transferrable), I took it to a local dealership who replaced the broken bits and gave the chair a general tuneup. I felt all yuppie-ish as I hauled my OFFICE CHAIR into the shop for service. “Gotta run, the Miller is ready to be picked up from the shop. Lets do lunch!”

• Cohousing from On High
  Check this action out. We managed to get pictures from a fly-by over the site. That’s how things look in Berlin as of the middle of last week. The 5 ‘missing’ buildings on Mosaic’s side are the ones that were held up, and framing on them should be starting within the next week or two. Wahoo!

• FileUploader sucks
  This is a total random hassle, but I cannot for the life of me get the Apache Commons FileUpload library to work. I’ve written it just as the docs say, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out why it doesn’t work. Know Java? Know how this library works? Check out the code I’m using. Just won’t work, durnit. Grump.

• Cuecat?!?
  This weekend I hauled out a CueCat scanner I picked up AGES ago, and decided to test it out using the ReaderWare application for DVD, CD, and Book cataloguing. The CueCat, for a free barcode reader, worked as advertised. It’s uncomfortable to use, but it does what it’s supposed to do – scans a barcode in as keyboard input, and hits [enter]. So I know it works under Linux just fine. I’m less impressed with ReaderWare. While it seems to do the basic job, it has a very clunky interface, and feels… old. I know it’s an old app, but you’d think they could do something with the 90’s Swing look. I may go ahead and license a copy of it, to get some other functionality, but I’m already considered spinning my own. In my copious spare time, of course.

• Websites moving
  Sometime soon one of the servers we’ve been sharing space on will be shut down. This means a good half dozen very busy websites need to be moved off it to other hosts. I’ve been slowly migrating sites and functionality off the machine, but it’s slow going. Most likely I’ll be moving away from Movable Type (the latest update – 4.1 – is so vastly different than what I’m using now, I might as well just move to Drupal and be happy. I’ll keep folks posted.

• Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron is out!
  I’ve upgraded yawl to the latest version of Ubuntu (in reality, I run Kubuntu, but the differences are only in KDE vs Gnome). So far things are smooth. Nothing has broken, everything is working as expected. New versions of Digikam and GIMP were installed, as well as a beta of Firefox3. FF3 is not blowing me away yet. There’s a lot of niceties in it, but it still can’t come near the speed of Konqueror.

• Bose Lifestyle 48 is back too
  Speaking of things being back from repairs. I sent my Lifestyle 48 off to Bose (in Arizona of all places) for repair. It had been skipping in movies, including total disc lockups 3/4ths of the way through a flick (and some movies not loading at all). Even a firmware update didn’t fix it. I can say happily that it’s back and installed and working perfectly. I’ve only run 3-4 movies through it so far, but there hasn’t been a single blip yet. Yay!

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!