Rhonabwy

Oh shit - i forgot

Oh shit - i forgot to tell you about the blanced almonds. Yeah - take a handful, chop them up, and when the rice is about halfway puffed out (done), pitch them in and stir it up a bit. You probably want to keep an eye on that rice, it'd be terrible if you were fucking around on your computer and let it burn...

Roast Capon Find a large

Roast Capon

Find a large stock pot, and drop in the capon. Fill the stock with water until it's an inch or two above the bird. Remove the bird, note the water level. If you did this process in some sanitary measure, continue. If not, dump the water, clean the pot, and refill to the same level. Now sprinkle in a palm-ful of salt and a shake or two more. Put this on the stove and heat and stir just until the salt dissolves. Now take that handy capon, and dunk it back into the saltwater solution. If you're working with a frozen bird, this is handy way to thaw it prior to cooking. If it's already thawed, make some space in the fridge and let 'er sit. Plan on letting the bird remain in the salt water for at least an hour - up to 6 if you can.

Now head out back to the garden. Grab about three or four handfuls of that damn weed called parsley that's taken over. Add to that the tops of two or three ends of sage, and maybe twelve inches of rosemary (I just picked a twiggy bit sticking way up that looked out of place on the plant - it needed the pruning anyway). Take these all back inside, remove the terribly woody bits from any of it (most likely the rosemary and sage stalks), and dice with a good knife. This should fill a cereal bowl or so. Just set this aside for now - it'll be used in the stuffing.

Grab four apples. Core them, dice them, and stick them on the side too. Yep, more stuffing bits.

Grab a nice large skillet. Put a little oil (I like olive oil) in it, and set it to heating to about medium heat. Now grab a white and red onion. Chop the crap out of them (otherwise known as dicing) and pitch them into the skillet to start sweetening. Maybe take 2 teaspons (or 3) worth of butter and pitch that in there too - the onions should go translucent pretty quickly. Turn down the head to just above low, and add in a half-glass of water. Grab two handfuls of rice, and scatter it around in there too. Let this just simmer and cook for a while in less than medium but above low heat. It'll cook the rice thoroughly, and integrate the flavor of the onions (now lightly sweetened with cooking).

Think about carving that pumpkin you've been meaning to carve. Think really hard. Go write down all the steps you've just taken in your blog. Great, now you're caught up with me.

Ah Christ, do we really

Ah Christ, do we really need another one? We've already got ICQ, AIM, Jabber, and MSN. At least AOL is finally getting AIM and ICQ to work together, about fuckin' time in my opinion - especially since Apple's service is using AIM protocols. I guess Trillian and Fire will be uplisted as the only useful IM tools if this continues.

I remember college pretty well,

I remember college pretty well, even if it was quite some time ago now. There were some classes I really enjoyed, and some I despised. Shit - like any other college student. As a practical generality, I haven't longed for those "days of yore" - yeah, I made it through. I got my two degrees and I learned some things. But now I have a longing to see a class again. A specific one though - at Princeton. The NYT is running an article on Brian Kernighan teaching a course entitled "Computers In Our World". Most of it would be incredibly basic - it a computers 101 for liberal arts students - but the discussions that could occur sound like they'd be tremendous!

Hey Byron, I love the

Hey Byron,

I love the idea of a bandsaw in a datacenter. That's just too cool for words! I need one!

Oh man, I am so

Oh man, I am so bummed! I caught a talking about Warren Zevon (great musician!) and found out he has inoperable lung cancer! Shit!

Yesterday Jen and I had

Yesterday Jen and I had an extended, highly opinionated 'discussion' on the various merits of coffee houses around Seattle. Yeah, it's a sort of Seattle thing to get into a knock-down about, huh?

Anyway, the positive result of the name-calling was that I had some reinforcement to check out Caffe Vita. I'd walked by it a couple bazillion times on the way home, and had resolved at some point to check it out. Well, I normally don't take the same route to work - but I made a little detour to check it out this morning. If you're wandering around, lost in Seattle, I highly recommend stopping in. I had one of the best latte's I've ever had. Of course, I'm not about to admit that to Jen...

Quote from Gus: Gus says

Quote from Gus:

Gus says "private String wrapWithFontTagIfLooksLikeChineseTextButNotTextThatIsNotChineseOkJustTryAndGuessOrSomething(String s, float fontSize)"
Val says "heh"
Gus says "this stuff is killing me."

(and a little later)

Joe says "Gus, please tell me you didn't create that method name ..."
Gus says "did"
Gus says "it got kinda frustraiting"

That was a hell of

That was a hell of a lot easier than I thought. I've got MySQL installed, an updated PHP module for Apache, and phpMyAdmin to deal with the local database. I'm set to wildly develop as I need/like on this iBook for pretty much any web app at this point. Fink took up most of the space of all this - and was the most command line stuff. Apple has a page on PHP for MacOS X that I quickly realized points Marc Liyanage's MacOS X software pages, where he makes available binary installs for the latest PHP and MySQL for Jaguar. If you'd never seen a commandline before, it could be daunting, but his instructions are really well done. Heh, and because of the mDNS setup on Jag, I'm referencing the local box as http://my-ibook.local:80/ (at least it reads easier than http://127.0.0.1:80/

Well, I finally broke down

Well, I finally broke down and am installing Fink of the iBook. There's just too many little pieces that I want to use more recently that I don't have available (easily) without it. There's a nice page about installing it under Jaguar that I'm currently following.

And before you ask, yes I've read the article about Linux vs. MacOS X. A nice bit of research and detail. It'll be neat to see how it matches up in another year or so.

Since I was looking about a bit regarding PHP, i couldn't help but notice the Slashdot article which refers to Yahoo moving to PHP. Michael Radwin has his slides up from PHPCon which actually makes for a pretty interesting read.

To the PHP crew: Know

To the PHP crew:

Know of any baseline PHP that's already been put together to do simple hardware inventory management?

Guess what my next project is...

Wouldn't want to be hangin'

Wouldn't want to be hangin' around there right now, but you have to admit that the Sat photo is really freakin' awesome:

Oh yeah - here's the

Oh yeah - here's the recipe I'm going from. I'll probably swag it as I go, but this is the baseline:

Title: PUMPKIN PIE
Categories: Penndutch, Pies
Yield: 1 servings

2 c Pumpkin, cooked
4 ea Egg
1 c Sugar
1/2 t Cinnamon
1 T Cornstarch
1 c Whiskey
1/4 c Butter
1/3 c Cream
1 x *pastry

Take a large pumpkin, wash, cut in half and place, cut side down, in
pan in warm oven. Roast until soft, but not mushy. Scrape out the
flesh of the pumpkin with a spoon or fork. Place into colander and let
drain over night in a cool place. The next morning, put 2 cups of the
pumpkin in a bowl and whip thoroughly with a fork until all lumps
disappear, but avoid mashing. Drain out as much liquid as possible,
because the pumpkin should be dry. Add the sugar, yolks of eggs,
cinnamon and beat for 5 minutes. Quickly add the cream, the whiskey
and the butter, and mix well. Sprinkle the cornstarch over the stiffly
beaten whites of eggs and add to the first mixture. Pour into a pan
about 2 1/2 inches deep which has been lined with pie pastry, and bake
for one hour at 375-F. Allow pie to become cold before using.
Source: Pennsylvania Dutch Cook Book - Fine Old Recipes, Culinary
Arts Press, 1936.

Pumpkin's cooked, but I think

Pumpkin's cooked, but I think that's all the farther I'm taking it tonight. The mixing and cooking of the pies should go pretty fast, but I'd still be cooking at 9 at this rate, and then I'd want to eat the whole damn thing... Better to wait for more of the evening to attack this (and a full stomach). The baking worked very well - cut in half, open side up in a pyrex square dish. I covered them with tinfoil, and they baked at 350 for 90 minutes. Scooping it out was nice and easy, and the pumpkin doesn't appear to be too stringy. Ought to make a pretty good pie.

BOOZE! I went out and

BOOZE!

I went out and bought some whiskey tonight after I found a particularly cool recipe for pumpkin pie. Yeah .... one that included whiskey. Heh. I tried to call John to see if he had some Jack Daniels or something that I could get just a cup of, but his answering machine pissed me off. He's got this "Hello... uhmmhum... Hey, ya know we're not home right now" that's just timed perfectly with conversation. He's gotten me twice with it now. I'm beginning to remember why I never call him.

So Karen's having some ladies over to review art slides around 6. I think I'll be doing a little pumpkin'n work in the kitchen while they're here, and maybe after it is all said and done we'll grab a bite to eat. That's the plan anyway.

Tabbed views in an HTML

Tabbed views in an HTML browser (such as offered by Mozilla) are fantastic!!!

Here I got all hopeful

Here I got all hopeful I'd be hearing more out of Ryan when he talked about how he doesn't Blog enough. 5 days later... and guess what, he still doesn't blog enough.

Andy Lee made a great

Andy Lee made a great little tool for Mac OS X programming called AppKiDo. I grabbed the current version (0.87) and fired it up on my iBook today. I wish I had more screen real estate (but I always wish that), but the program works really nicely regardless of the smaller screen size. It's basically a object browser that scans the heads and help files that come with MacOS X and makes it a little quicker to find details you might want. It makes it really quick to scan the API for the methods you're wanting. Andy's got a screen shot up if you're interested.

Ah... Today is the first

Ah...

Today is the first monday in quite some time that I intentionally haven't attended the monstrous monday morning meeting. Now that I report lower on the food chain, it appears that I've been able to wriggle out of that delight. My information junkie side is going through a little bit of withdrawl, although all I have to do to get a little reinforcement is look into the room, see who's speaking, and everything's fine again.

I took my time getting

I took my time getting into work today - while I was waiting for the bus up on Queen Anne (yeah, I was lazy and took the bus), I was flipping a quarter over in my hand. It's a nice sized coin. I don't care for dimes asthetically, simply because they're so thin. A coin I really like is the (almost no longer used) 1lb coin over in the UK. That's a hefty coin - you have a pocket of 15 of those, and you know you've got a pocket full of money! The downside is the bit that I like about them: they're heavy and bulky. Quarters really win out for lightness and yet having some reasonable heft. But I still like the pound coins better.

You know, I absolutely love

You know, I absolutely love my little ole' iBook. It's gettin' kinda long in the tooth, but it still serves admirably. It's going on 3 years old now - the battery lives for 2 hours using wireless and MacOS X 10.2. It's only got a single USB port, no firewire, and a relatively small drive (3Gb). It does everything I pretty much need.

But I'm starting to get that familiar geek envy of the Tablet PC. /. has an article on them following a lecture/marketing gig at a U. They link to a research page entitled Inventing the Tablet PC. What's so damn compelling?

That freakin' pen. Being able to scribble on the screen of my laptop instead of having to always type. Typing is great for me in most ways, but there's a couple places where the computer interface with a touchpad/mouse just doesn't do much for me - that's drawing. I scribble a lot - especially when I'm working out designs. I use my own weird UML-ish format identifying classes and objects, and their interactions. It's a mess of scribbles, that usually gets slapped down onto napkins or one of the bazillion notebooks I keep around the house. I've tried to use Omnigraffle (the cool MacOS X sorta thing like Visio). If I know what I already want to draw, then that's fine. But if I'm brainstorming - well - it kinda sucks for me. I get too caught up in keeping all those shapes lined up and arrows doing the "correct" thing, and I loose track of the core info I'm trying to map out. I have a tablet for my Mac, but it's attached to my desktop and frankly I just don't find myself using it very often. Now slap that into a laptop sized screen - that "palm scribble" kind of thing... yeah. That'd rock.

I'm sure it's no surprise. The idea has been around for ages, but the technology hasn't been there. Creating those screens is damned expensive, not to mention the constant wear they'll be getting from folks like me ramming stylus' into them to make a point to a . Yeah, "Uh, Ooops. Just let me pull that stylus back out... I'm sure you won't miss most of those pixels..."

Dinner tonight was at a

Dinner tonight was at a new restaurant up on Capitol Hill: Monsoon. Nice place - maybe $12 to $20 a plate. Really good flavors, and the portions were comfortable, but not outrageous (Karen and I could share a meal, but we'd both be a little hungry afterwards).

I'm sort of recognizing that any restaurant I search for in Seattle appears to be listed in this "citysearch.com" site. From the look of the default "www" site, it seems they've got quite a number of cities covered pretty well. Not a site I really paid much attention to until I started looking for links to the neat places I've gone to eat. Hrm. Guess their marketing needs some work. Or they're making enough cash to survive on and aren't feelin' any pain. Kinda a neat site, so I hope they're surviving. Heh - they even have some of the old places I used to eat in Columbia listed in there. I still recommend Shake's... but that's no surprise to my friends back that way...

Anyway, I was pretty distracted during dinner tonight. Aside from looking at the pale girl with the bright green jade pendant, I kept thinking about payment, security, and trust. The issues get bundled together so very quickly when you're talking about cryptographic protocols for transfering info. Do you even really need a third party to verify you are who you say you are? Who the fuck cares... well, aside from the Gub'ment... and ad agencies... and spammers... and... yeah. Seems to me that one of the issues that's lurking under the streetlights to kick your ass when you walk down that street is the idea of identity. Say you just get some "ID" from someone. It may be honest, it may be completely made up. But you got an id. Then you accept some encoded info from them. How do you know it's the same person? Do you attempt to verify with an out-of-band communications method? Or do you just rely on the security of the system you created? In some ways, I'm suspecting this is exactly what PayPal ran into with the AbiWord theft. Maybe I'm being too generous, but how was PayPal to know that someone had nick'd the password (or whatever mechanism is used there) and wasn't the correct person. Maybe they just don't demand good password security. If there's no out-of-band double-check, then that's all ya got.

So this morning was when

So this morning was when daylight savings kicked in for the year. It was 2am (to me) yesterday night/this morning, and I was online. I noticed that the clock on my mac kicked back to 1am, giving me that free hour. It was nice to see it work so smoothly. So... since I was up... I decided I'd be nice to Karen and change some of the common clocks back an hour too. So I hit all the common ones - the stove, microwave, and the little bell clock that sits in our living room. Didn't change the bedroom clock - didn't want to wake her up.

So this turns out to have been a pretty confusing thing for my poor sweetie. She woke up this morning and assumed that I never remember when daylight savings time hits until after it's hit. Well, she was right - only she didn't far in the idea that I might have been up and noticed the clock switching back. So she got all confused and started changing clocks. Well, that took until about 2pm this afternoon to really fully work out - during which time she was completely stunned that I might have remembered about daylight savings time before the switch occured. Of course, about 8pm tonight, I finally let on that I was awake and actually hadn't remembered. But I had her going for the better part of the day!

I think that now, actually, all our clocks are once again in sync. Well, all but the one in the car, which was never really in sync with anything other than some whimsy when I was screwin' with the little knobby deal which controls it.

Karen and I have been

Karen and I have been working on what we want to do for our 10th anniversary (next September). Well, tonight I think we began the whole thing off - we've started the stuff to set up a 7 day carribean cruise, followed by 4 days at Disney World. Of course it's going to cost us a fair bit of change, but planning this far in advance is getting us some reasonable discounts.

We'd debated the "adventure" vacation vs. the "pamper" vacation. Yeah - guess which won. :) Aside from the fact that it's really unclear if folks with American accents would even be safe wandering around Europe next september. I'd like to think so, but I don't have any faith that George Dubya will restrain himself from knockin' off the guy that his daddy didn't finish.

Tonight: Vietnamese. We're heading over

Tonight: Vietnamese. We're heading over to Capitol Hill in an hour or so to catch up with Nate and Leah over a little noshin'. I'd originally planned to fully create some pumpkin pies, but leaving in the middle of the process isn't very advisable, so I'm only getting the seeds roasted for some yummy munchin. We received a sugar-pumpkin in the market basket this past week, so it's been sliced in half and all the seeds removed and processed with the "secret sauce" for roasted pumpkin seeds. The rest goes back into the fridge for now. Baking, puree'ing, and mixin' with other yummy things will hopefully culminate in a tasty pumpkin pie or two.

Yeah.. back in action. When

Yeah.. back in action.

When I tried to log a little earlier, I got the response:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Could not allocate space for object 'Items' in database 'blogger' because the 'PRIMARY' filegroup is full.

/blog_form-action.pyra, line 54

Yerch. At least we're back...

er, test?

er, test?

Ooh - yeah. I forget

Ooh - yeah. I forget I wanted to mention this. You know how when you wake up the morning after helping someone move, it's always sort of guess where you're going to be sore? You really hope it's not, like, your lower back - reminding you that you overdid things and lifted heavy boxes completely with your back and not your legs? I'm very pleased that my biceps and lats are the only sore muscles today. I did quite a bit of heavy lifting and maneuvering yesterday and tried throughout it all to really watch the lifting and do things with the proper form. Jen and JR have a back stairway on their old house that made that a really damn difficult task too.

Whoa. You can tell it's

Whoa. You can tell it's gettin' a might chilly when the heater is turning on and running at 10am. I just checked the forecast/weather sites, and it's reporting 47 F for the outside temp. Looking outside, it's partly sunny, with lots of sucker holes, and the trees are in their glorious mixture of colors. That's one thing I really didn't expect to get any of - fall color - when I moved up here. Boy, am I glad to have been mistaken on that point! I mean, it's not like the color you see on the Missouri river bluffs this time of year, but it's pretty darn good! Quite the gambit of reds, yellows, and oranges interspaced with flowers (!!) and evergreens of a wide variety. The persistent fog (sometimes light, sometimes heavy) of the past four days appears to have lifted.

Righto then - time for a wander down to one of the coffee shop's for a scone and latte.

Oh yeah, still awake. So

Oh yeah, still awake. So having a mocha at 8pm probably wasn't the wisest thing for a guy that gets insomnia easily, but it sure did taste good. I highly recommend El Diablo for their mexican mocha's. Beaut flavor.

So actually I'm thinking heavily on the topic of transactions and electronic payment tonight. A few things just converged at the right time to get me rolling on the topic, so I have been. The OReilly article on running a shareware business has a section on payment businesses in Part 3. Slashdot is running a "Paypal screwed the little man" story, with links to PayPal Warning and it's alternative's to PayPal page.

I was never a big fan of the service myself, although it's so popular I'll admit to having felt the pull to utilize it. It's easy to pay folks with PayPal - transfer money and stuff. I help support a friend's internet server with periodic cash infusions for upgrades and stuff - last time, the prefered payment method was PayPal, but I sent him a check instead.

The other aspect that's sort of sidelined into this was a background question on how to provide music to people. CD's in music stores seem like such a fuckin' ripoff when I realized how little of it went to the actual artists. I've got a few good friends in the music biz - some really workin' to make their livings through music. So one of the things I keep thinking could be a good way to promote my friends is through the Internet. Yeah, you know - the ole MP3 thing. So you can't hardly buy an artists' album in just MP3 form, although maybe they'd be game if the costs of distributing and selling were really low. This, to me, comes right around to a low transaction cost being key. If some place charges you $10 for any given transaction, then selling a group of MP3's to someone for $9 just doesn't make sense. Larger transfers make sense, but the small stuff is problematic. It seems to me that there's this "impulse threshold" though - for some $x, folks would shell it out to see if the music was stuff they liked - especially if they had some confidence that it was within a genre they already enjoyed. And then there's the whole talk about online music actually boosting music sales.

It just seems like although there's been some successes in this space (I think you can call PayPal a success) and some

Ahhhh. yum. Showered, ate, and

Ahhhh. yum. Showered, ate, and played a little Morrowind (yeah, I was going to play Halo, but Karen wanted to play Morrowind). We just got back from a little walk down to El Diablo. That was nice - hadn't been there in several months, and the nights are getting dark and chilly quickly. It's a perfect evening stop.

So O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center has a really nice set of articles on running a Shareware business. What's really great about them is they pertain perfectly to just about any software business. That it's written for people making Shareware is almost irrelevant. If you've any interest, I recommend a read. There's three parts:

Part 1 (http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/09/30/dev_osx.html_)
Part 2 (http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/10/08/dev_osx.html)
Part 3 (http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/10/25/dev_osx.html)

And a bit that's making the rounds: ComputerWorld is writing that Washing State Ferries will be carrying WiFi access soon

I'm now officially tired. I

I'm now officially tired. I was sleepy this morning, and sort of groggy - but now I'm tired. I helped Jen and JR haul stuff from their old house to their new house. They were significantly more organized this time around (I helped 'em move last time too), but it wasn't any lighter... They own fuckin' 15 (count them all!) air tanks for diving. Those things weigh a ton out of the water! The plastic tub full of chain wasn't much better.

I guess I shouldn't be complaining too much, but that's half the fun of helping someone move. Complaining about how heavy their shit is. A few other folks showed up to help too - Diane and her partner Kevin, Austin stopped by for a couple of hours, and Ken Chin (who races with and against us on sailboats). I got a nice thai lunch out of the deal.

So now I'm home, cooling off and thinking about a shower. Checked the email, checked the workflow - it needed a little handholding this afternoon. Didn't really take long - I'm not polite about my fixes really.

I was going to head home early from work on Friday, but instead I got into a good conversation with Dan at work. I'm going to like reporting to Dan - I think that'll work out pretty OK. We talked about quite the gambit of things, including the "bad attitude" responses I've gotten in the past and what expectations are for my work. The thing I like best is that I can deal straight with Dan, and I believe he'll deal straight with me. It's really surprising to me that you can't always do this with people - in fact, it annoys the fuck outa me when I can't. I understand spin and all that shit when you're dealing with sales, or sensitive negotiations. That's just fine. But you shouldn't need to see that between folks on the same team.

Anyway, it was a good conversation and I finally headed out of work about 6pm. I know Jen's a little "worried" on my behalf - she expressed it quietly to Karen (which is a good way to make sure I hear it) - that since I wasn't at the same level as Dan and Austin that I'd miss out on raises if they ever did come through. That's really sweet of her, actually. I may not get as big of a raise - that's just fine. At this point, to be honest, I don't expect any of us to get raises.

It's striking me, today more

It's striking me, today more than usual, how very small our company is. And it's dwindling. A few folks have moved on, a few were laid off. Bodies haven't really been replaced. Maybe I just perceive us as purely an engineering staff - I could accept that fault. If so, we're dwindling fast indeed. Today's very quiet, and I'm sure that has something to do with it. Vas is the only other person in our little 6-cube "pod" - and he's quietly coding. The next pod over includes Brad and Austin - both aren't there right now. Austin's in a meeting I'm happily no longer involved with and Brad's just gone. Dunno where. There's guys wandering around and punching down cable (repairing the damage done on Wednesday), but they're really the only activity and noise.

It got so quiet today that I plugged my iPod into the computer speakers and fired up Lunasa - all instrumental irish music. I was tempted to just slip out, but something kept me here. Morals? Ethics? I dunno. Something. I'm not doing much today really. The big feature of today was the conference call at O-dark:30 this morning. I'm watching workflow. Fixed a bug with our data feed (input side), read a paper on postmodern programming which is going to be featured in the next OOPSLA conference, did email, checked NetNewsWire for updated RSS feeds, noted the Apple release of Java 1.4.1 developer preview, did more email, noted the average speed of specific partner feed to others for a historical note, created an operation's status report for the week which included me cutting and pasting a webpage into a Microsoft Word document, and checked on Kath and Clif to see how their day was going.

Maybe I did do a lot. I'm feeling tired at the moment, sort of drained again.

Something interesting of note - I received very little praise for quick thinking and getting the networking back active again with Kath after wednesday's cut-fest on the floor below. Austin said "90 minutes is incredible!" and Vas and Paula made a point of thanking me for the effort, but that was really about it. I guess I was expecting some, because now I'm missing it. I'm not really sure why I was expecting it - rationally I know that's a very unreasonable expectation right now. Not unreasonable to want it, but it's clearly not likely to happen. Praise is something that really doesn't exist around here right now. I think that's one of the reasons I try very hard to give some when I can find a good reason.

I played a little Halo last night. I thought I'd be pretty bad as I haven't practiced in quite some time, but I was actually doing pretty good. Of course, I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Halo 2 (see the cool trailer in Quicktime format). Maybe I'll go play it some more tonight...

Yeah! Blogger's back up! -

Yeah! Blogger's back up! - obviously, huh? As I'm typing here.

I meant to write earlier this morning, so it was actually sort of shocking to me that Blogger was down. I saved it though. :-)

I came into work early today for a conference call... with Paris. 8am here is 5pm there, and there was even a guy from Hong Kong on the line. I felt really bad for him, but I'd have rather been up at midnight than up at 8am for this thing, if it was 2 hours long. It was sort of interesting coming into work that early. In the summer, it's light and dawn seems like dawn, even in the city. But the pre-dawn time is sort of unreal to me (maybe because I try and never be awake at that time). Walking around a bit of belltown at 7am this morning was neat. Folks were about and moving, but they had a certain energy that seems atypical of night goers and evenings. I think I rather like the city at pre-dawn.

The conference call itself was sort of mind numbing - I guess that's just what you expect on these things. The worst was trying to understand a guy with a french accent, talking quietly, into a speaker phone on the other end. Neither Austin nor I could make out half of what he said.

A completely different project, but

A completely different project, but very cool - Cynthia Breazeal is the Principal Investigator on a project entitled Anima Machina at MIT.

I try to keep track of what they're up to, as well as the Synthetic Characters group, and other projects generally under the Things That Think umbrella. They're doing some pretty cool research.

Curious Yellow. There's some problems

Curious Yellow.

There's some problems with the arguments about outcomes, but the basic premise is undoubtably clear and available. I just wish the author had been kind enough to include hyperlink references to underlying technologies discussed:

Achord lookup
Chord
DHT with Chord

Er, gus? Did you happen

Er, gus?

Did you happen to notice Huevos? It smells a bit familiar... especially with Brent's latest updates.

How very funny. There's quite

How very funny.

There's quite a flurry of commentary regarding OSAFoundation's announcement of Chandler. Even Lessig piped in there. What I find interesting is that folks are complaining the OSA Foundation's announcement is chilling out small, non-funded developers from trying this with the annoucement that Mitch Kapor is shellin up $5mil.

It's interesting that Microsoft has used exactly this tactic to subdue and destroy potential competition to it's products in the past. A good PR announcement, a little smoke'n'mirrors, and the competition crumbles because it looses support. I think that's the key difference though - public support. If Mitch and his handy team of coder's manages to whip out some cool shit, and it rocks - then fuck ya, we'll use it. If it sucks, we won't. If 15 coders are working in a well-managed and focused effort, then I think there's a reasonable chance they'll create something cool. Destroy the market though? Pluh-ease. If a large company can't coordinate it's resources (which many can't) in an efficient manner, then they deserve to get their asses kicked economically. If this Chandler thing turns out to be a really cool email/calendaring solution that doesn't cost much - awesome, let's go. Will it wipe out Microsoft's monopoly of cross-compatible and very-locked-in software? No way. Don Park had a really excellent comment about what he wished for:

Require all file formats to be documented and made public.

What do you think Open Source enables at it's heart? The rest is just forcing the market to commodity status.

heh. This is cool... Saw

heh. This is cool... Saw it on /. - a remake of the Atari Adventure game.

Okay then. Leah just called.

Okay then.

Leah just called. She's apparently contracted some intestinal unhappiness, and so cancelled out for the evening. That makes it easier. So Karen and I are going to head to Pete's Pizza for a little supper tonight after she takes a shower. Karen's been out while I've been home this afternoon - she didn't get into the house until a little after 5pm, hauling an impressively heavy market basket with her. Lots of good stuff in this one too... including a pie pumpkin.

Fog is rolling in heavily now. It's been so foggy lately you'd think we were in Frisco. When I walked to work today, you could look directly at the sun and see a disc in the sky. With the sun dropping behind the Olympics, the temp is equally dropping, and it's rollin' right back in again.

Cool! I went home to

Cool!

I went home to finish up working, and when I got here I found I'd received my copy of Cocoa Programming. Very cool. I guess I'll spend some of tonight reading it, although the majority of the evening appears to be dedicated to going to the UDistrict to catch a lecture by some big SciFi writers with Leah and Karen. I'm not sure I'm 100% up to going, but that's the plan so far. We'll see how it turns out.

In the meantime, it's back to a little scripting with nobody to pester me and no ceiling tile dust gently wafting down onto me and my keyboard.

So the blogger interface looks

So the blogger interface looks really freakin' weird through Mozilla. Just had to say that. I use the web interface because I can get there from anywhere. It's why I like it. Radio and some of the others are all very machine dependent. I flip through 'em like crazy. I'd probably be happier if I just used one machine, but that isn't likely in the near future. Win2000 at work, Linux at work, WinXP at home, iBook at home, G4 at home. Jeeze...

So we finally had our all company meeting. It went, actually, pretty well. We announced, well - for the most part - a reorganization that I mostly like. I get an advocate to work with instead of (what I feel is) an adversary. With any luck, my life will get simpler now. At the very least, I feel honest communications is appreciated. (I personally find it chilling that honest communications clearly isn't appreciated within the same team). The big nit that appears to be climbing out of this is a title change for some folks. We handed out some titles to people to "reward" them, only it's being perceived as very arbitrary and based on "age" rather than merit. I'm not a big fan of titles myself, having burned out on their value at the U. Show me the cash baby (or - to be honest - other incentives... I'm not just cash driven as most of my friends know). I just don't personally value titles much.

While I don't value them much, I know others take a great deal in store with them. So much, in fact, that I think this "upgrade" for some folks is going to backlash. They were announced today - but without really any background or apparent methodology. I can personally attest to the excruiciating methodology that was applied, but it doesn't matter worth squat if it's not apparent to the majority. Perception is reality in this case.

So the usual words I hear from it are: You named So'n'so a Principal Engineer and me a Senior Engineer. First - that's saying you value them above me. Did you really mean to say that? Do you think they do more or better work than I do? Are you really sure that's what you want to say to me? Dangerous game, that. dangerous game.

Dan looked great being all supportive and stuff during the meeting - exactly what he was supposed to do. Austin looked like he'd been beaten three ways from sunday. He constantly had his head in his hands and looked like he just wanted to run from it all. I suspect that in the end, he's not going to be 100% pleased with the additional responsibilities he's chosen for himself.

Not too much news of

Not too much news of the night really. One article stood out for me - there's now a pure Java SSH2 implementation. It requires Java 1.4 (not exactly a common release yet), but it's there! Kinda cool.

Austin gave me a lift up the hill tonight. Mike was up from Los Angeles visiting the offices today (and for the next couple of days), so Austin was bringing him up to Queen Anne for a bite to eat. I had recommended Pete's Pizza. (side note: there's three of these? I only knew of two - but citysearch is indicating there's one up near northgate mall on 94th and 15th Ave NE) I didn't join them (our Morrowind completed the evening. We didn't play too long though - Karen was sort of tired and grumpy tonight (fitting, given that I was grumpy last night) - so it just wasn't much fun tonight.

I think I'd like to

I think I'd like to visit here:

Ya know, that networking problem

Ya know, that networking problem has a definite benefit. It gave me something to accomplish that I could tackle and deal with. I mean, yeah - it sucked. But it was something that you can actually resolve. Clif, Kath and I just divied up duties and attacked. It worked well - it worked like it should. Clif's got the contrars all on the phone, and here in person providing estimates and work orders. Kath whipped out switches and made some truly heinous cat5 patch cables spanning the length of our floor. I deployed switches, handed out patch cables, and taped down cat5 where it crossed the walkways. It's cool getting a problem and knocking it out.

It'll be days before our phone is back. They apparently cut 120 to 150 single cables down below. All of it was bundled with the previous tenant's wiring, and there was no tagging done. Work's going to need to be done to trace all the cabling, and rewire it - permits, inspections - the whole nine yards. Our landlord (who's employee's did the cuttin') and our wire pullin' contrar will have the split the bills here. We ain't paying squat. In fact, I'm thinking about how to charge one or both of them for the lost productivity.

Shee-it. This wasn't even on my to-do list, and we got it networking back active within 90 minutes. Not too shabby. Ok. Pretty damn good!

The story is the same

The story is the same in a lot of places. Quietly working, doin' your thing. Little do you know, the data and voice infrastructure that you thought was safe is being leered at by slope-headed destruction employees who say "uh, awrite" to just about everything. Being nicely bundled and pinned to the ceiling of the floor beneath you doesn't make it safe. Not from 5 guys in stained coveralls on ladders with big fuckin' pruning shears. Just imagine the scene:

You loose all data and voice. There is construction going on in the floors both above and below you. With a sigh, you know what happened. You know your cabling all goes through core holes in the cement flooring. So you go down to the 3rd floor. When you walk in, having called the building supervisor/security guy Carlos to meet you there, some of the workers turn to see what's happening. After all, it's more interesting...

You point to someone who looks like a construction foreman. She immediately looks back and says "What'd I do?". You point to the guys on ladders with pruning shears, "We've lost networking and voice upstairs."

One of the guys on the ladders says, shears dangling from his hand, "I didn't cut no cables!". The woman looks at him. Above his head you can see a bundle of cat5, still pinned together, but hanging loosely above the level of the ceiling tiles. It ends, like a pipe, pointing at this guy's gead. The woman looks back at you.

"Not my fault - those are your Landlord's employees - and yes, he was just cutting up there."

A bundle of light blue CAT5 cables winks it's bare copper ends from just above the open ceiling tile at you. Another guy pipes up "Hey! None of this stuff is up to code! We've got to tear it all out!".

Your response? Simple: "I don't care, I'm calling the landlord".

Everything goes quiet. A bare bit of cat5 falls and hits the floor, sounding loud in the silence. Snipping is still heard in the ceiling from those farther away and not clueing in. Finally, someone shouts "Stop cutting!!!". The clipping ends. You whip out your cell phone and hit the autodial as your letting the door shut on your way to the elevator...

Yes, a fine scene. Maybe I'll put it in a novel.

In the meantime, Kath and I ran cat5 over the floors and across the cubes. We slapped out some old, nasty (and thankfully spare) switches we had in the closet from our days over on Mercer Street. A couple of hubs, and a box of medium length patch cables later, and we've got data networking restored to all 15 employees who lost it. The phones? Yeah, they're fucked. Prolly be a couple of days until it's restored. If they don't cut more out while we're not looking.

The final joy? At 4pm, the guys on the 5th floor start spray painting. In front of the ventilation intakes. The ventilation intakes that lead to the 4th floor. My floor. They're not supposed to start until 6pm. Maybe they thought they ran us all out when they took out our networking. Dumb muthafucka's. Now we're calling about that too.

Jesus. What a fuckin afternoon.

But hey - we got networking back live in 90 minutes. Pretty damn good. (Course the guys with laptops and wireless never lost it..)

I left my ole' iBook

I left my ole' iBook at home today, and after getting my "todo" list stuff knocked out, I wanted to scan websites. So... I tried the obvious (hopefully) time saving thing: I checked out Feedreader. Well, I can't really recommend it. In fact, it's user interface (to me) pretty much sucks.

NetNewsWire kicks it's ass in so many ways, but the critical one that I'm used to is pointing it at a site and letting it find the XML/RSS feed for me. So I could just point NetNewsWire at Gus' site using http://gusmueller.com/, and it'd find the RSS link of http://gusmueller.com/servlet/ja/rss.xml. So if I want to add feeds, I've got to either use the builtins (sort of limited set comparatively) or I have to put in the links directly to each of the XML feeds. What a pain in the butt. Screw that - I'll use a web browser. Mac Net Journal has a neat lookin' site anyway.

Mitch Kapor's weblog throws a little egg at CNET for their usual over-the-top-and-maybe-not-quite-thought-out-or-true reporting style. So - Ryan, I presume you've checked this (Chandler) out? It's not an exchange replacement (yet...) for large installations, but it could easily be an open-source database backed messaging system... In fact, it sorta sounds like it's that and more. While CNET was derisive of a small team taking on a giant, I'm pretty convinced that a small team and brutally ass-kick a giant in any given focused move. Giant's have weight, momemtum, and bureaucratic utter stupidity to deal with. They can outlast most small groups, and out punch them in a head-on fight... but the small teams are, in my experience, almost always 100 to 1000 times more effective.

Karen and I have decided

Karen and I have decided not to go back to Missouri for Thanksgiving this year. That seems like it should be a relatively easy decision, but it's been really plaguing me lately. In some ways it's sort of admitting that I'm cutting some ties back that direction.

The choice not to go has been mostly driving by financials. I'm trying very hard to maintain a positive cash flow and build up a bigger nest egg to provide more options in the future. But part of me says it's a reflection of growing apart from my friends in Missouri. They've been pretty hard to catch up with on the short visits that I'm back, and I guess I'm partly angry at them and myself for not making the connections better. Visiting with Liz and Trent, as well as getting some pictures via email this past week has sort of put me into a weird funk.

I've been coming home, but just wanting to be alone when I get home. Almost like work is more socialization than I really want right now. Of course Karen is home working (alone) all day and wants to talk, visit, and so forth. Tonight got a little stressful - she really wanted to visit and keep me company, and that's pretty much the last thing I wanted. I made dinner - just a cheapass little thing with potatoes, leeks, onions and garlic. It was tasty, filling (and not enough - I ate yogurt and some bread right after cause I was still hungry). But I'd gone to make dinner to just do something and get away. Karen followed me into the kitchen and read portions of a book to me.

You'd think that'd be really cool. She was trying so very hard to be helpful, social - all that with me. Even now, we're sitting on the couch, quietly engrossed in our own things. I don't really want to be sitting here - walking down to Queen Anne Ave for a coffee sounded pleasant and quiet. But I felt sort of obligated to stay and be social. So I'm staying, even if I'm not being very social.

I guess I'm feeling obligated to go back to Missouri as well. It's a history thing - I've always gone to my Aunt's for Thanksgiving. Always being the past 14 to 17 years anyway. Not going is like - I don't know - breaking a very close tradition. Doing something I know it wrong, and yet doing it anyway. Only rationally I know it's not wrong to stay in Seattle for Thanksgiving.

God, what a fucking mental mess I am right now.

I've been bringing my iBook

I've been bringing my iBook to work each day lately. That's been really nice. I can use the tools I have set up there (like NetNewsWire) to keep abreast of things. If things were in a better position, I'd be tempted to try and get my linux box replaced with a MacOS X box - I've pretty much stopped using the Linux box for anything other than basic server-ness.

I'm using the RSS feed aggregation stuff a huge amount - it makes reading through common sites a breeze. There's apparently a PC version called FeedReader, although I can't immediately vouch for it. I just noted that Joel bitched about the RSS news clients smackin' the bandwidth shit outa his site last night, and he mentioned the two "faves" were NetNewsWire) and FeedReader. Worth noting that Brent updated NetNewsWire today to reduce bandwidth abuse. Heh - and he lives in Ballard (a neighborhood just north of here in Seattle).

I'm getting some good things

I'm getting some good things knocked out today. Got a paper created (which doesn't immediately appear to suck) for a project and justification for that project. Got some code up and happening, and I gave Vas a bunch of shit about If you're going to just give me an interface in Java, don't expect me to enable SQL tracing on what you do underneath the covers. It was a delightful conversation about abstractions and responsibility for those abstractions. Heh. Basically, it's an interface for doing large scale updates to state values for our internal workflow. So I asked the obvious question: How many is too many to update at once? Where should I cap things? The resulting conversation included requests for performance metrics, discussions about how to enable SQL tracing for the DBA's to review, and who was responsible for getting it all done.

Fortunately, I've just picked a reasonable number (50 items at once) and it appears to be working nicely. Can't say if I'm beating the shit out of the databases or not, but there ya' go - no SQL in my code.

Halo Fanatics should be happy

Halo Fanatics should be happy to note these technical details

Spent some time tonight doing

Spent some time tonight doing some coding. It was a pleasant change from my usual evening activities, even if it was for work. It's actually really simple code, but it needed to get done so we could get a specific automatic piece of our internal workflow up and happening again.

After I got the code created to my satisfaction, I had to try it out, and when I was done, I went on to try out Gus' new VoodooNetKey. Tried a few things out, found a few things that didn't work, and made some of those onerous kinds of suggestions (like it should respect and work with Japanese text). Not that I can read Japanese, it's just that I've been beaten with internationalization issues for the past several months, so it only seemed fair to pass it along.

A couple of interesting things

A couple of interesting things on the net tonight. One is an OReillyNet article on building online communities. The other is a nice consolidated list of Cocoa Resources and Articles.

ALL YOUR ENGINES BELONG TO

ALL YOUR ENGINES BELONG TO US

Somewhere in the past week,

Somewhere in the past week, I missed some critical email that explained that this morning's meeting wasn't going to be happening. It went out to everyone, but I must have scanned right across it and missed it completely. Blugh.

So I'm sitting here and reviewing my pretty pictures (all created with RRDtool) showing the flows of our workflow system, and thinking that I'm just missing something. Not with the pictures, but with my job. I look around, and my intuition tells me that there's some personality changes going on - for me, I guess that's significant. Communication isn't particularly terrific at the moment, and the focus on resolution of problems seems to be on policy and details rather than big-picture stuff. Or maybe it is that the questions are just being raised. It's really hard to figure out. I talked with Karen about it a little last night. It's been frustrating for me, because I used to be able to see some of these things coming. I haven't been able to recently.

Karen suggested that perhaps I'm just too close to it now - taking too much of it personally. She said "You know, you work with people long enough, and you learn how to really push their buttons. Maybe folks have just learned how to push your buttons better.". That may be some of it, but I'm not sure that covers it all.

Of course, I'm probably busy analyzing this when it's right in front of my face and I can't see the forest for the trees.

I've always liked the concept

I've always liked the concept of autonomic computing, but IBM appears to be releasing the hype machine just, er, a tad early on this one. I guess that's not surprising, but it is sort of disappointing. Since when is a group forming with a company worth of a news release?

Oh - Dan Gillmore has an interesting sunday column on Mitch Kapor's blog and "his" new game. They've got a wide variety of folks involved - kinda neat to see who.

Internet news: So a couple

Internet news: So a couple of folks have noticed and commented on the fact that Mitch Kapor is publishing his own blog now. It's a sort of interesting place too - the "Open Software Applications Foundation". Some big names on it - it'll be interesting to see what comes of it.

Gus has made some terrific progress on his "VoodooNetKey" (a screenshot) application - although the screen shot doesn't really explain what it does. Gus - you should make a little movie with SnapzPro or something giving an example of how it works...

We helped Jen and JR again today - only a few hours this time (four) instead of a full days work though. Karen went to a Microsoft Playtest this morning, so I helped out while she was playtesting with MS, and then after I picked her up, we both came back and put in more hours effort. We got the entry foyer completely done, and touched up the living room, as well as started taping and prepping the kitchen. Karen even started some of the cutting out work in the kitchen, although we ran out of time....

until we went for another evening with Trent, Liz, Adam, Nate, and Leah. We met up at Nate and Leah's place about 5:15pm (we had a few other little errands to run before hand), and we all proceeded to head down into the International District and had sushi at this placed called "Mizaki's" or something. I don't recall exactly - it was on 6th ave near Jackson. Good sushi, although the service was a bit spotty. Adam, who's 2 years old, did amazingly well in a nice restaurant. Trent and Liz were a bit terrified, but we just kept on through it all and it all worked out very well. After dinner completely overeating for the second night in a row, we all retired back to Nate and Leah's place for a bit of apple crisp, coffee, and conversation. I guess we got home maybe 30 minutes ago.

Fuckin' A, I'm sore tonight.

Fuckin' A, I'm sore tonight.

Today consisted primarily of 5 hours of squats. That would be the primary position that I was in while helping Jen and JR at their new house - squatting, kneeling, and moving around at about that height, spreading nasty toxic paint-stripping chemicals, and then scraping it up with a putty knife and somehow getting it into a 5 gallon plastic bucket. Thank freakin' god for respirators!

The hardest part of the whole game, I think, was the wearing of rubber gloves for those same five hours. I mean yeah, my legs and lower back are really sore, but I was sweating into those gloves, and my hands were basically submerged in sweat for 4 hours. I can tell you, it's really unpleasant.

We blew out of their place at 3pm, headed home to clean up. I took a long shower, then Karen did, and we both felt a lot better. Afterwards, we stopped over to check on some kitties. They were doing fine. This time I picked up the bowls before putting food into them so Max (one of the cats) wouldn't head butt my hand while I was trying to feed them and spray cat food all over the floors.

Afterwards, we headed over to Nathan and Leah's for an amazing dinner. We got back from from that about 10:30pm - so I guess we spent 6 hours (or something like it) over there. Trent and Liz (and their son Adam, whom I'd never met - he's 2 years old) are up visiting from St. Louis. Trent and Liz are also friends going back a long, long way. It's nice seeing them again, and I'm hoping to catch up with them again tomorrow evening. They fly out to St. Louis on Monday morning.

So tomorrow is more paint stripping, and maybe some painting. Somewhere in there, I'm taking Karen over to Redmond for a Microsoft Playtest. Equally in there is checking on and maybe feeding some kitties, and with any luck getting together with Trent, Liz, Adam, Nate and Leah for dinner again tomorrow.

I guess tonights dinner was a "practice run" for Nate and Leah's thanksgiving meal. They're having Leah's family out to their place, and Nate wanted to run through all the recipies and try them out. With a large crew to eat, it seemed like a pretty good plan. It was freakin' fantastic. He "brined" the turkey before roasting it, and man did that come out nice! The skin was crispy and light, and meat was incredibly juicy. Add onto that green beans with roasted almonds, mashed potatoes, handmade rolls with honey butter, squash with roasted shallots and a sweet rice pilaf, a couple bottles of wine... yeah. It was a very, very fine meal. I probably even missed a plate of something in there - there was a boatload of food. Ate, drank, and was merry. I guess that's the way it's supposed to work, huh?

Wrote and got a note back from John Utz, a guy I worked with until recently (he was "laid off" about two weeks back). Turns out he's moving as well, and has some nice prospects at the moment in interviewing. I hope it works out for him. John's an interesting critter - I miss having him around the office to talk with.

Well, not much else to report, and I really need to get some sleep before the work-fest tomorrow.

Gus - let me know who wins your contest, OK? (god knows it ain't gonna be me - wimp with spicy foods, even with excellent Thai around here)

There's an interesting article at

There's an interesting article at Wired on Robert J. Full. He's a researcher really into animal movement - especially legged movement. There's sort of a wild array of publications he's made available in PDF format - if you're interested in legged robotics, it's probably worth a little read.

There's some really great quotes

There's some really great quotes and detail in this article at InfoWorld. Near the end of the this article Phil Shiller is quoted as saying: A second part of this is we fundamentally think that an attempt to create an unbreakable system is foolish. in relation to Apple's stance on DRM, media technologies, and Microsoft. I'm so in agreement there. The article also talks about where Apple is seeing interest from businesses. I'm not very surprised to hear "small business" showing up again. When Karen and I helped with Legacy Art & BookWorks, Apple products were the choice for getting most of the small business stuff done. I'm actually quite glad to hear that QuickBooks is getting more attention again on MacOS X.

For my comrades from back

For my comrades from back at the 'U, check out this article at The Register. Man, it'd be nice to have a pick of the cabling under the flooring there right about now...

I really wished I used

I really wished I used a Mac at work today. The reason? BBEdit. It's a great little editor, and I'm really fast with it. I did a lot of script copying, minor modification, and paste again. Would have been nice to work it out on BBEdit, and then just slap up the finished product with RBrowser or something.

Ah, the joys of creating a couple bazillion graphs from RRD.

rrdtool graph /home/httpd/html/workflow/streamcount.1yr.png \
--start '-29030400' \
--vertical-label '# of streams' \
--width '700' \
--title 'Collected New Streams (1 year)' \
'DEF:B=/home/httpd/html/workflow/spiders.rrd:streamCount:AVERAGE' \
'LINE2:B#8B4513:spiders AVE streamCount' \
'GPRINT:B:MIN:(min=%.0lf' \
'GPRINT:B:AVERAGE:ave=%.0lf' \
'GPRINT:B:MAX:max=%.0lf)' \
'COMMENT:\n'

Funny, ya know. This is

Funny, ya know. This is what Microsoft feared ages ago, when it crushed Netscape out of existance and into a tiny pocket of AOL. I haven't worked with any of the results of this - I sort of imagine it's still pretty raw. Never the less, it's still moving, growing, and getting better.

Crossing the platforms... Java, now Mozilla?

Last of the quiet evenings

Last of the quiet evenings for a while. Tomorrow night, actually, will probably be one as well. Saturday is going to be incredibly busy though - painting at Jen & JR's, followed by dinner at Nathan and Leah's, where Trent and Liz have come up to visit. We'll also be celebrating Nathan's birthday (which is actually tomorrow). Sunday we'll probably be back painting at Jen & JR's new house, and through it all we're to stop by and check on some friend's kitties while they're aware. Phew - I'm sort of worn out just thinking about it.

So Karen and I were reviewing out finances. We've done pretty well this year, although our stocks have all sucked dick (pretty much with everyone else's). Even with doing well, I'm not sure we're going to really be able to easily afford to go to Missouri for Thanksgiving. It'll be the first time in quite a number of years that I haven't gone. Like, uhm, since college? Damn. Yeah.

Looking at all the finances got me thinking about our investments (or failures therein) and I realized that a critical thing has broken. Large companies aren't sancrosanct anymore. I recall reading something about investing that was basically "when you look at a company, try to imagine if it'll be around in 10 years. If you think it will, and that it'll be prosperous, then invest in it."

I would have thought that MCI would still be around, instead of in that smoking hole called WorldCom. I would have thought Authur Anderson would have been around too - except that place got blown up in the shrapnel of Enron. Everyone's known for a long time the common tricks for tweaking the stock markets - shovelling the channels full in the first half of the year, and sucking hind tit in the second half seems to be a common one. The tricks have become nastier - and some have just moved to outright lies. I can't say that I "trust" any corporations. They're mobs of the worst sort - sel and brutal. There's no interest in honesty or truth, and I immediately suspect anyone stating there is of either insanity or malicious intent.

Oh - in case you're curious, The Transparent Society is a decent read. Brings up some good questions.

Today was a very, very

Today was a very, very productive day. I should work from home more often. Aside from getting all the laundry done, I managed to get all the instrumentation and logging stuff for our internal workflow moved to new hardware and operational. In addition, I managed to get some config files, code, and scripts all tweaked to allow (more easily) dynamic generation of the graphs of the data.

If you're doing something like this, and you're not using RRDTool, then you're freakin' missin out. And the mighty Tobi Oetiker has added some really cool new features to it since version 1.0.33 - specifically the rrd tune and xport commands - allowing you to alter the amount of information being maintained (I constantly had to do this while setting up the RRD files, and lost data every damn time I did it before rrd tune).

I didn't, however, get anything done with that justification paper I'm supposed to be working on. Maybe tomorrow - jeez, it's just not workin' well for me. I'm going to be at the office tomorrow though, so... probably won't get shit done.

So speaking of work, I caught this . Okay - so the abuse is obvious. On a page that drives (and gets paid by) clickthroughs, what's to stop some unscrupulous mo-fo from adding in explicit meta keywords to prefetch the clickthrough links and "activate" them... humm.. Wonder when IE is going to include this technology and screw a whole bunch of (slightly twisted and fucked up anyway) business models.

Kind of an interesting article

Kind of an interesting article entitled Making Online Information Usable, which I found at Gordon Meyer's blog. He recently did a bit at the OReilly MacOS X conference. Some neat stuff - hadn't thought about "online help systems" or usability issues for online help in a while.

Dinner was pretty light tonight,

Dinner was pretty light tonight, cheese and crackers. :-) Not really interested in eating a whole lot more, and neither was Karen. Both of us are still fighting this ick, and we just don't have much of an appetite. So we spent the evening arguing over Morrowind (i.e. playing it together) - usually it's not so argumentative, but we spent the whole evening chasing down some evil baddy and puttin' him to the sword, so it was sort of tense - and we're both fairly short tempered to boot right now.

Before all this, however, we stopped by a friends place to get instructions on how to abuse their kitties while they're down in lovely California for a wedding. We have great plans for chasing them around the house, petting them, etc. (Don't worry - they'll be fine!) Speaking of abusive kitties, mine is currently lounging across both arms while I type. And he keeps butting his head into my should trying to get me to scritch the top of his head. I'm not sure how he thinks I can accomplish that with both of my arms pinned, but... there ya go. It's cat logic.

I'm going to hide out and work from home tomorrow. I originally thought we'd be having a company meeting to discuss our revenue goal numbers that we all went over recently, and to announce some internal organization changes. Nope! Apparently higher ranking individuals must be queried, mollified, and otherwise spoken with before any changes can be announced, so it's all on hold. The good news is that gives me the chance to lurk at home, get some laundry done, and get some scripting done that I'm otherwise incapable of completing at work.

I'm also working on this "justification paper" - explaining why someone else under the mother ship's umbrella should use our little company to get some technical work done. I usually don't get more than 5 minutes thinking or writing time on the document before someone comes and needs me to copy something within CVS, deploy a hotpatch into our production environment, tell me about a recent sports score, complain about a lack of security or other relative unintelligence, or perhaps just line up three people on the couch in front of my cube and bounce up and down, wildly shaking the cube (structural?) walls. No shit - they actually did that today. Jen, Vas, and Tony all launched themselves wildly up and down on the couch, acting like kids jumping on a bed. It's really, really fuckin' hard to get anything reasonable done with that occuring in your face.

So Jen and JR took possesion of their new house today. They're apparently coming by tomorrow AM at 8:30 to abscond with Karen to get some paint colors picked out and properly determined. I'll help paint on Saturday, but if I don't get this scripting done tomorrow, I don't think it'll get done for weeks.

Whoa. Gus found a theory

Whoa. Gus found a theory on the web regarding the colors at sunrise and sunset. Not really very different from Byron's crack dream...

Heh. I'll have to run it past Karen now and see what she says. Thanks Gus!

Ok, here's an interesting tidbit.

Ok, here's an interesting tidbit.

I noticed there was a software company of some form up on Queen Anne, near Pat's (one of the seven Coffee places up on the hill). So it turns out it's a place called Flying Lab Software. And most interestingly, they're involved in making a game called Delta Green, based off the Cthulhu-ish pen-and-paper stuff. The game has even been previewed on IGN... Who'd a thought there was a game developer lurking up on Queen Anne...

Oh goodie. The state jobless

Oh goodie. The state jobless rate jumped up today - highest in 2 years - to 7.4%. Just the kind of news I'd like to hear.

I guess there's opportunity in that as well - it means labor is (relatively) inexpensive because businesses can drive down the rates for employees, but the cycle on that sort of thing is kinda long. The newspaper was indicating that we probably wouldn't be seeing a local recovery for another 6 months minimum.

On the colors at sunset and sunrise thing - Karen agrees with Gus, that there isn't a difference and it was just my perception. I watched last night (just to try and defend my wild-assed assertions). So the obvious follow on question is why did I perceive it so differently? I guess I can't ask Byron and Gus for their theories on that one. Or maybe they'll just say I was high or something.

So... last night. I was

So... last night. I was writing that Linux Journal is getting sort of sucky (articles aren't as detailed, getting way the fuck out there in weird-ass topics, huge amount of marketingvomit/realcontent), but I've found Linux Magazine to be a really nice little zine. In depth articles, details, and low amounts advertising embedded. I'm sure this means that Linux Journal is a more successful magazine, but if you're looking for a better read along the same topics, I'd recommend it.

I was pretty depressed last night. Took Karen to a meeting up in Wallingford and spent two hours wandering about, eventually finding a copy of Linux Magazine at the U-Village (a shopping area near the University of Washington). I was wandering around looking for inspiration, but didn't really find anything concrete. I'm trying to come up with new ideas, and I keep finding myself locked in near the same ideas again and again. I need to change my viewpoint somehow - break out of the box I've built around myself. Ya know, that's kinda hard to do...

Damnit. Now I'm pissed off

Damnit. Now I'm pissed off in addition to being depressed. Fucking Internet Exploder locked up tight on my iBook this evening, and I had to fuckin' kill the process to get back to writing in my blog. The bitch is that it locked up with a couple of decent paragraphs of text for my evening Blog entry, and now I've lost them.

Heh. MacNN is reporting that

Heh.

MacNN is reporting that Apple will be producing a new journaled file system code named "Elvis"

Took the cats to the

Took the cats to the vet's this morning. Apparently this was planned, but I wasn't being clear on the planning. So Karen and I walked the two guys down to the vet's in their sherpa bags. They did pretty OK with the morning walk. Wormwood was quiet, and Pooka was squirming around like a little fiend and alternately making chirping sounds and mournful meeps. Once at the vets, all we needed to do was weigh them. We've switched them onto a different diet to try and help a little with their kitty weight problems. The results were - the new diet isn't working worth a shit. They're eating less, and gaining more. I'm waiting for the doc to call and suggest we chase them around the house to give them more excercise.

So after the trials of the vet's office, we walked them back home, where they're happier to be. Pooka spent most of his time in the vet's office slinking beneath chairs and sniffing around all the corners of the office. I had to scruff him to get him to sit still on the scale. Wormwood just wouldn't come out the sherpa bag. The good news being once he was done being weighed, he dashed right back into the bag - making it easy to take him home.

And... I just remembered that I forgot a CD for Jen and Austin. Damnit. They need a special effects sound CD for a project they're working on, and I keep forgetting to bring one in.

Karen's caught some variation of

Karen's caught some variation of the evil flu-bug/head cold that I had this past weekend. I tucked her into bed earlier this evening, and she sounded really rough. I'm hoping sleep will fix her up pretty well. She said she's been taking Vitamin-C and drinking lots of fluids...

I still haven't figured out what the fuck Microsoft was doing making a "switcher" ad with a stock photo from Getty Images and bullshit marketing-drone text. I mean, I can see folks who've switched, and none of the reasons they listed were really valid. Given that they yanked it down, I'd hope they were at least somewhat embarrased but another blatant Apple rip-off thing. You'd have thought they'd have at least listed valid reasons - like software's often made first for Windows, there's more games, it's everyone's default for support. Duh.

I'm still a bit congested myself, but I'm staying up to finish out some laundry that I started earlier this evening. I'm actually really ready to hit the sack myself. Yeesh, and it's only 10:30pm.

It's been all over Macintosh

It's been all over Macintosh news sites, but I'm still rolling on the floor laughing from this one. Talk about a PR marketing fuckup and nightmare!

I'm sure this has been

I'm sure this has been pondered, and even resolved, a gazillion times by now - but does anyone know why the light in the early AM (yes, I actually saw a sunrise) is yellow, while the light in the afternoon/sunset is red/orange?

It's funny. I've read stuff

It's funny. I've read stuff from Studio Log using NetNewsWire - but one thing that never came across was the effort that Studio Log publisher's devoted to making Project Builder tools. Very nice guys.

Looking to waste an amusing

Looking to waste an amusing 30 to 45 minutes in reading a really bizarre web-page? Check this one out: http://www.thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com/.

Well, damnit. mac.com's mail service

Well, damnit.

mac.com's mail service is kaput again this evening. Maybe I should apply for a job down there and get that shit straightened out... Then again, I don't really want to leave Seattle, especially for the south bay area! (I like Frisco & surrounds just fine, just don't want to deal with the housing costs)

Forbes has an article on a new Gseries RISC chip slated to appear on the scene at the end of next year. 64 bit architecture... more power. Let's see if IBM can overcome their production problems that plagued the G4 series of chips at higher speeds.

Larry Lessig has posted his

Eldred vs. Ashcroft over continual (or not) extension of copyright terms. Reading his thoughts was really interesting, and I wish I still had easy access to Randy Wiemer to ask him what he thought about this particular law and case. I probably wouldn't agree with him, but he always brings down the argument to a visceral level, which I really respect.

Reading Lessig's notes brought one thing home that really rang bells with me. He had a hour before the Supreme Court on Wednesday to argue his case. A single hour. Talk about hellish. And he's been waking up at night thinking about how he should have said "X" or "Y" instead of "Z". Man, I'm so with you. So, So with you. I had a meeting last week where I've been doing exactly the same thing. Granted it was several hours longer, but still. I think our "what if" brain muscles are a certain sort of hell sometimes.

Woke up this morning still

Woke up this morning still feeling a bit under the weather. Apparently one of my cats is too - Karen was wandering around cleaning up cat messes' when I stumbled out.

Karen's going to a lecture at 2pm which is the setoff for a collaboration project between quilt artists and other artists. In this case, Karen's going to be collaborating with Leah (a singer/songwriter) and the theme is going to be based on japanese carnations. The talk is apparently at 2pm in Volunteer park. At one point, Karen had asked if I would video tape the lecture and make it available to others, but we never got a go-ahead from the lecturers themselves, and I'm still feeling a bit crappy, so I'm bailing out on this one.

Tony taped some of the Louis Vuitton Cup - sailboat races taking place down in New Zealand as a precursor to the America's Cup. There wasn't anything terribly exciting on this tape (except for OneWorld, an American team, beating the french team of Le Defi) - but Tony said there was a really beautiful tacking war at the end of a previous match between Oracle/BMW and someone one (he told me who, I can't remember).

I received another Join Now marketing thing from a computer society - this time the IEEE Computer Society. I received one from the ACM maybe a month or so ago. The big thing these guys seem to be parleying is "Online Distance Learning Courses" - the usual crap of network certifications, SQL, basic system administration, etc. IEEE Computer appears to offer up the history of their proceedings and journals as a benefit to joining, which seems better than an index to ACM's (there's an extra 'fee' for accessing the ACM library with full text - although it seems to be a more worthwhile library for those interested in the software side fo the game). I can't quite bring myself to join either of these guys right now - seems like the money is better spent on joining the EFF and helping to repeal some of the incredibly stupid shit the legislature is doing these days.

Well, my saturday is about

Well, my saturday is about done. I spent most of the evening playing video games (Morrowind) with Karen, and snacking on whatever was around. She offered to cook dinner, but I just don't have an appetite today. I'd tried playing other games earlier, but I was dying quickly and painfully in RTCW. It was so frustrating, I just quit.

We turned on the heater today. Not just for the heater (59 was a bit chilly when you're fighting a cold), but because we got that really cool air cleaning setup with the new furnace. Seemed like the time to use it.

So now it's time for a hit of cold medicine, and I'm off to lala land.

It's sort of weird to

It's sort of weird to me to have an 80Gb and a 30Gb drive sitting in my desktop for me to store whatever wierd shit I want on it. All of my data, programs, and OS takes up about 28Gb - so I did the paranoid thing any human who'd just lost part of a hard drive would do - I mirrored the data across both drives. Not OS level mirroring, just copied all the bits in a snapshot from about 36 hours ago.

The cool thing about having all those gigabytes is that I can now easily suck in a hell of a lot more DV video for editing at one shot! There's a chance I'll be out capturing video of a lecture on Sunday. If I do, my game plan would be to suck it into iMovie, clip & cut, and produce a quicktime video on CD that you could stream, play directly, of whatever.

I've been reading news sites (what's a newspaper anyway?), watching reports, and I've become pretty convinced that the sole game that large studios have on their front is pre-created distribution channels. People will mostly put up with crappy image quality (look at traditional broadcast quality over the years) compared to top of line - and the technology we've whipped up today isn't that crappy... Even the desktop technologies. Maybe I've just drunk the cool-aid, but I'm pretty convinced that DV cameras and desktop computers are the disruptive technologies for these large studios. It's going to get harder and harder to rationalize $1,000,000 cameras when you can get 1/10th the resolution for 1/1000th the cost. Film is dying - both snapshot and moving picture. Bits, CCD's and CMOS chips are replacing them. I suspect they don't have more than another 10 to 20 years tops.

I'm trying to fight back

I'm trying to fight back the headcold from hell today. Gus is havin' a nice slackin' day, and I guess I am too - although I'm feeling a lot more whiny than he is.

I even snapped at Chris at work yesterday: "If you want to bitch about me, at least have the decency to go somewhere the fuck else!" as he was pushing an agenda of higher security as a specific choice at my office. "I'm just concerned with..." he continued after my short rant, which I followed with "You can be concerned with whatever the fuck you want!" (Austin, who he was talking to, snickered at that one). See what I mean about being whiney? He later came over and I apologized for being excessively bitchy.

Austin, speaking of, had a wierd day yesterday too. His grandfather died (95, and not unexpected) on his son's 2nd birthday. How's that for unfortunate timing. Kind of like having your wedding on September 11th. Throughout the day he was putting out fires - primarily with one of the folks that reports to him. Austin gave me a lift home last night - which was really nice.

I was reading that Rethining the GUI... article, and an obvious bias slapped me to a stall right at the beginning. It read: The upshot: Computer users are still heavily dependent on a 30-year-old technology. Aren't there alternatives?. Uhm - guys. Have you noticed that all of society is critically dependent on 3000 year old technology that we've been doggedly trying to replace with computers: the book. Just because an idea is 30 years old, doesn't immediately mean it's a bad idea. Yet the article puts the age alone forth as the focus for attempting to replace it.

I read the rest of the article, and aside from strange rantings, the only thing I really got from it is that narrative structure is easily interpretted by our brains and that data over time is often more useful than a snapshot. Oh, okay. I hope this guy isn't as freakin' loony as he sounds - the press has a way of making anyone sound like a complete schmuck.

Articles and tidbits for today:

Articles and tidbits for today:

Rethinking the GUI for the Big Picture at CIOInsight (linked from an article at MacCentral)

An artsy bit called the Parable of the Languages, linked from Steve Zellers weblog.

Jim Heivilin is a buddy

Jim Heivilin is a buddy of mine back in Missouri who has recently survived a pretty nasty accident on his motorcycle. Book fracture of the pelvis being the worst part apparently. I called him today, and was glad to hear his normal irrascible self. We talked for maybe an hour, and he seems to be doing pretty good all things considered. I told him I'd call him back in a week to make sure he was now brachiating like a pro.

Managed to crawl out of

Managed to crawl out of bed at 9am or so - didn't manage to catch the right bus, so I didn't get into the office until 10:15am. The day's been sort of a blur. Kleenex. Lots of Kleenex.

I tried calling Karen a couple of times, but never got through to her. I think she's spending the day outside the house, but I don't know what. She was feeling a little under the weather herself last night, so hopefully she's feeling a lot better today.

I keep thinking I should have just stayed home today - worked from home or called in sick. It was Mike Maitlen's last day though, and I wanted to wish him well. Preferably not be getting him sick, but we'll just have to see how that works out.

It's 2am and I'm just

It's 2am and I'm just not getting any sleep. I'm very congested, and unfortunately very awake. I'd hoped that I'd be well asleep by now, but it just ain't happening.

I did get all the data restored to my G4. Erased the original drive, and I'm now replicating the restored drive back over to the original. I even went and updated a few pieces of software - like Escape Velocity Nova. I'm not sure why mind you - I haven't played it in over 6 weeks, but it seemed like the thing to do.

Earlier today I got myself into a funk based on a meeting or three I had earlier in the week. Just convinced myself I'd lost all my technical abilities and that I'd moved into being completely incompetant. I mentioned this to JDR, who promptly bitch-slapped my upside the head via email. It worked - I needed that.

So aside from not sleeping, I'm cruising the web to see what's out there.

Over dinner (where I had way, way too much food to eat) I was chatting with Karen about games. She brought up something interesting about her own interest in computer games: that being the difference between conflict and combat. Conflict was fine and interesting, but the details of combat she didn't want to be involved in. She's not into the twitch-response first person shooters, or even the tactical real-time resource/combat games. But she loves Alpha Centauri, and she loves to explore Morrowind, provided I'm the one running the controls and doing the hacking at beasties.

I guess it's time to try and sleep again...

The hardest part about restoring

The hardest part about restoring from backup was getting my Music back off the iPod. Apple did their thing to make it difficult, and it worked. So I've got my entire library - some 7.69Gb of music - on the iPod, and the partition that had held that on my hard drive failed.

So getting it back has involved trying out a number of shareware programs (none of which were particularly successful or great at this), and finally using the Terminal to copy the iPod_Control/Music folder to my desktop and then re-import all 1723 friggin' songs. Of course, in doing all this I'm loosing the sync to my iPod and all the collected info about which songs I listened to the most. Not exactly a critical failure, but damned annoying having to build back up all those lists and get decent metadata to drive the "smart playlists" again.

What a pain in the ass.

The hard drive is in,

The hard drive is in, formatted, and a clone of the boot partition is being made, courtesy of Bombich Software's Carbon Copy Cloner. Yeah, it's the IBM drive too - I couldn't cancel the order and switch to the bigger one, even if I had the extra cash handy.

We picked up a new printer for Karen today too - a product service contract at Staples paid off, so she now has a brand new Canon i550 color inkjet printer. (and I'm here to tell you - the Canon website is fucked for easily finding product information. If I choose search, you lousy jerks, I expect to be able to search - not get directed into some stupid list that you've predefined! At least let Google roam your site and index it if you're friggin incapable)

We'd really hoped to find a straight-through feed, but none of the inkjets on the market today appear to have that feature. I guess they figure nobody is printing on cardstock...

It'll take a while to fully complete the restore of the G4 - that damn partition failing out was a real pisser. At least I had backups, even if they're scattered and incremental.

Steve Zellers pointed out updated

Steve Zellers pointed out updated documentation regarding Apple's WebServices framework

I saw something kind of

I saw something kind of cool today. As I was walking back from the Colocation facility, the breeze was really picking up and whipping around the corner of our building, where this is a little grass. The neat thing was seeing the grass depress in waves as the wind moved across in a couple bursty breezes, making the dark green highlight briefly and sweep the small verge.

Don't know why that made me smile, but it did.

I think all the tired

I think all the tired and headaches of late are leading up to a cold old fashioned nasty cold. I'm getting more and more congested, and my throat is now starting to get a bit raw... yech.

It's really the end of

It's really the end of the day for me, but I'm waiting for Vas to finish up his code to get it deployed and running. I expect this is about the last of the daily updates for a while, and that we'll be moving back to a weekly rollout cycle. Daily updates are good for fixing things, but sure introduce a lot of overhead and chaos.

I actually got some code nailed down and deployed - first time in months. I'm looking forward to the results - it'll be a nice change.

This morning started off with a bitch of a disappointment. The worst part was I didn't see it coming. I'm disappointed, but not crushed - and it doesn't seem to have put me into a state of being concerned with what I know and how good I am. It's just so terribly embarrasing - like walking excitedly into a tree in the middle of a park while you'd just gotten everyone's attention.

well damn. I blew it

well damn.

I blew it somewhere the other day, and I can't even figure out where. A new opportunity looks like it just slipped away, so it's back to hunting. I'm scrounging for some possible resurrection, but I know that's going to be a darn difficult thing to swing, especially from the outside. In the meantime, I've pinged all the various folks I've been in contact with recently and tried to re-energize some older leads.

Hell of a blow for 8:30am. Yowza.

spent the evening taking karen

spent the evening taking karen to the hardware store to get new floods for her track lighting, and then helping Nathan set up some of his stereo equipment in his cool video/stereo room. We intended to play some Xbox and shot things up, but we never quite got there. Had all the other cables, but the Xbox power cable appears to be missing - as well as his other controllers. Oh well, now it's just a matter of finding out which box they got packed in.

Brand sent me a phone number for a buddy that got creamed by a pickup in Missouri. He's apparently in Rusk Rehab center, and alive - although not very comfortable (they had to pin his pelvis back together). I tried calling, but the number reported it was disconnected - so I'm waiting for another number or for Rusk to fix their telephone system. One or the other...

Ya know - aside from

Ya know - aside from the cash that would be needed, I'd be interested in seeing this macworld expo

I called in sick today

I called in sick today - it appears that I missed a wide variety of things and tidbits. I've been feeling headache-y most of the day, and I've got this sort of recurring headache that seems to be based in really tense muscles near the base of my skull. It's really kinda painful. Naps and my old friend Vitamin I (ibuprofen) have been getting me through the day.

Karen suspects she's coming down with a cold, and I'm wondering if we haven't both caught it. I hope not (doesn't feel like a cold to me - just feeling worn out) but it's hard to say. I don't really have any more days off to take officially though...

There's a story on using

There's a story on using the conductivity of our bodies as a network that I've got to admit is really mind blowing. I mean, I always knew we had conductance and capacitance and stuff, but to use the human body as a bit of CAT5? Whoa. (Courtesy of /.)

Ken Bereskin points out where they've hidden content indexing - in the usual obvious sorta place. I knew it had to be included in there somewhere - Apple was using the content indexing engine for their own help, so I expected it'd be lurking about in the finder somewhere. I admit - I'm really glad they've moved this from it's own application (Sherlock) and built it into the finder again - it just makes so much more sense for me (and easier).

Remlinger Farms was pretty cool.

Remlinger Farms was pretty cool. We picked up John and Sue (and Ursula) at 10am and headed out. We met Cindy, Susan, Klaus, and Marion all out there, but the crowds appeared to be too much for Klaus, so he and Marion split to go do photography or something. Maybe it was John though...

We got some beaut pumpkins, and it all went by really, really quick. The pickin's were great and we didn't have to walk long before we had all found pumpkins we liked. Lunch at the local restaraunt, and then some random shopping, and the afternoon wrapped up. We got back home at 2:30pm or so, and it's been relatively quiet since. Karen's taking a nap, and I'm feeling sort of lazy or just tired - it's hard to say.

Checked email, and Vas had patched the code up at work, so I got it all deployed and set. Sometimes I think I'm being a dork for checking so voraciously. The reward at the office is minimal to negative, depending on the day and situation. I guess it's just cause I'm helping out Vas, Austin, etc - my friends there.

Wow, long day. And it

Wow, long day. And it was a saturday.

Karen woke me up at 10am this morning - Austin had called and there was something wrong with the POS (an unfortunate acronym, huh?) that couldn't be resolved remotely... meaning someone had to go in. When I got to the colo (about 10:45am), something ha