Rhonabwy

Ugh, still on the mend

got up and worked from home for short periods this morning. Spent some time on the phone and like that - it's just rough and wearing.

trailing edge...

I guess I'm on the trailing edge right now. Trailing edge of the flu, trailing edge of february.

My voice is almost completely shot right now, and Karen and I both have to be careful not to laugh or we'll go into coughing jags. There's this horrible wheeze in my chest, but really - it's looking up.

The daffodil's are out and blooming, my energy levels are way up from just a day ago (although I still find myself fatigued exceptionally easily), and I've gone cold turkey from caffeine without even noticing. (And that's saying something for a guy who usually has a double latte every morning and then more caffeine in the afternoon as well).

Sort of debating just staying off the caffeine now that the physical addiction has been broken. The psychological side hasn't been though - I keep thinking how nice it would be to have a latte... Maybe I'll just move to decaf stuff and keep on with the coffee - hard to say.

The full healing is definitely going to be a while longer yet - our plan at the moment is to pretty much sleep right on through the weekend. By Monday I'm hoping that a full day working won't cause me to collapse in exhaustion at the end of it.

Andy?

Gus linked to new blog by one of the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer.

Andrew Hunt's blog is full of interesting tidbits and useful wishwash. (Thanks Gus!) He's got some great commentary - it's definitely one I'll be reading for a while.

I think my favorite quote right now is:

Learning, I've heard, is not a cup to be filled, but a fire to be ignited.

*snap*

Looks like the Kiwi's snapped their mast in Race 4 - another pretty bad setback for them. Karen asks how come these really pricey boats are always breaking and snapping - it's because they're trading everything to the edge for speed on these guys. It's like flying the real high performance kites with carbon-fiber everything and mylar wings - one touch hard on the ground, and *snap* it all goes to pieces - time to rebuild.

Well, these boats aren't quite that bad, but it's pretty clear they just overloaded the main and away it went. I feel bad for them - especially after watching the first terrible accident where they took on water and then had the jib ripped away from them.

I'm glad we race in a studier (and slower) boat. I like the Olsen 911's just fine, thanks.

finally on the upswing

Looks like I'm finally on the upswing. I haven't had a fever for over 24 hours that I can tell, and my energy is definitely returning. Karen's lagging about a day behind me in symptoms, but we're both getting a tad more active, which is a really good sign. Granted active in this case means we're actually cleaning the kitchen now, instead of just piling up dishes - but hey, it's improvement.

The weather looks like it's been absolutely beautiful all week out here - which is, of course, annoying as all get out. The office is conspiring to keep me worried and checking in, although I'm not getting anything real accomplished - just keeping tabs on things way outside of my control.

I sort of suspect I won't be up to full speed for another week even after this one, but at the current rate of progress, I should be good to go on Monday if I take it really easy. The only outstanding thing we have to take up any significant energy is Karen has a class she's going to teach on Saturday. I think that will pretty much use up all of both of our allowance of energy for the day.

books

Mostly up until now we've been either sleeping or watching movies. So - now we're moving into the "book" stage - and I've dug up three good ones that should keep me going a while: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars - a fantastic trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Haven't read them in a while, so now seemed as good a time as any to dig back into them.

watching the world go by

it's weird watching the world go by from this forced respite. It's really putting a different perspective on things for me. A week ago, the day was too short - I couldn't get everything done in it that I wanted to. Now a day is incredibly long - as I wait for sleep to drag me under for a while, or just lie on the couch wondering how long this flu thing will last.

make that two patients in this house

Took Karen to the dor's today, as she had her own spin to the worse. Doc's don't think she has the same thing, but are worried there's something bacterial going on because it's lasted so darn long (10 days now or so). So I'm heading back out in an hour to pick up her prescriptions. What a bundle of joy we are. At least it's lots of together time watching movies...

what a freakish day

The drugs are keeping the symptoms to a dull roar, so I'm mostly feeling human. I checked this morning, and I'm still running a pretty hefty fever, but at least I'm not having to deal with the sweats and chills aspect of it.

Felt good enough there for a while that I checked my email. That was a mistake. Well, not completely - I warned everyone at my office that I'd caught the flu and might have infected a few folks, and asked for movie recommendations. I got a number of good ones, as well as well wishes for getting better. Then I caught up with some more official work "mail" as well - and that was a tragic mistake. I just see this train wreck happening. I've tried for three weeks to keep it all on course, but it seems determined to derail and jump into the chasm.

Now I'm really bummed out

Turns out the big launch for I-831 is this wednesday. I had really hoped to be down there, taking a petition around and getting it all signed up. At this point, though, it looks like I'll just be reading news about it from the couch.

influenza

i caught it. Badly. Apparently I'm going to be contagious for the next 4-5 days, so it's staying home for me. damnit.

fever

Whatever nasty little plague has a hand on me is a good one. I spent from 10pm last night until 12:30pm today in some fever induced fog. I remember "writing in sick" - looking back that was at 5am.

Strange how suddenly this thing caught ahold of me. I was sort of rough yesterday - glad I didn't have to work. Spent most of Sunday sleeping on the couch. But saturday I was more or less fine. A little tickle in my chest.

While this is just some disease that I'll eventually get over, I'm hearing of more and more friends in the reserves being called back to active duty. Young guy who is a friend of Nathan's shipped out this weekend. Byron's soon-to-be-father-in-law too.

Karen said "Joe, I'm glad your not in the reserves". Me too. I've got a lot of respect for those guys, but I can't help but think Bush is just going to be throwing away lives needlessly - ours and Iraqi.

plague

I've fallen victim to some terrible plague. Started coughing lightly last night - has this tickle in my chest. Sneezing some too. Now it's become a hellish ordeal to cough - a burning sensation down in the middle of my chest. Aches and a few chills round out the symptoms. Yuck. What a nasty sunday morning surprise.

adios bios?

Cnet is running a story about the potential replacement technology for BIOS, a rather critical and freakin' arcane bit of computer geekiness that is at the heart of most intel x86 systems. Replacing this up to whatever new system they're devising has the definite possibility of stepping the standard intel class x86 commodity machine into the realm of Sun, IBM, and SGI servers - where when they were "down", they still reacted - and you could tweak drivers, kernels, etc.

I expect this will, in the end, be a good thing - and in the process add a fair boatload of complexity and cost to systems while the transition gets really going. The linux and bsd kids should like it pretty well though - it'll finally get the standard hardware a step further up the server ladder.

python

If you're trying to get an introduction to Python, I have a book to recommend: The Quick Python Book, by Daryl Harms and Kenneth McDonald. I've been fiddling (and meaning to fiddle) with python for a good double handful of ages now, but always hacked out my crappy code and so forth in Perl when I needed a quick script.

Well, I don't know what it does in terms of sql access, but I got an excellent overview of what I needed to know to get started hacking away scripts with this book. I've actually spent a lot of time reading web pages, but I still prefer just gnawing on good ole' paper when it comes to my usual learning process. I just find it a hell of a lot easier.

keeping that QA pencil sharp

Gus released VoodooPad beta 2 this evening. In fashion with keeping my QA pencil sharp, I've snagged it and already complained mercilessly to him about freakish things that nobody will every probably do, but which I did and didn't work as expected. Nothing like tearing up your friend's code with a bunch of bug reports on a saturday evening.

I guess I learned something about QA from my efforts at work.

jeesus, that was fast

I'm reminded of how fast news can travel on the internet. No longer are publishers vying for airtime in a few frequencies or controlled channels.

On a lark, I hit the NY Times site. Saw an article there on Jesica Santillan, the girl who had two back to back heart & lung transplants. She died. I read the story at 3:24 PST. It was posted at 5:58 EST. She died around 5PM.

A single death made it across the continent to reach me in 80 minutes. Today I'm finding that a little frightening. It's probably a "good thing" that news can and does travel this fast, but the news is sad. I'm not enraged at the hospital's mistake, not pissed off at anyone really. The Doc clearly busted his ass with two surgeries back to back like that - everyone was root'n for this girl to make it. But the trauma was too great, and sometime last night it was clear she had irreversible brain damage.

All I feel right now is sad. Sad and somehow shocked that this news - of a 14 year old girl I don't really know anything about - was reported to me so quickly. It's impersonal to me in some ways. I guess I'm sort of shocked because it feels so impersonal. Of all the people around the US, or the world, dying (and yes, I know that statistically there's a hell of a lot of that) - this one made it to me.

Thank god there's not infinite channels for information flow.

Q Cafe

Karen and I kept seeing this new warehouse/cafe thing since about November of last year. It's down on Dravus and 15th W, sort of in the heart of the Interbay area. It had this big sign on it that we'd see when coming back up into Queen Anne over Dravus: 503c non-profit internet cafe.

So today, while wandering back from a critical mission of getting some specific thread for a project Karen's working on, we decided to stop in and see what it was about.

It reminds me a lot of the Chez coffee house in Columbia, except a hell of a lot bigger. It's associated with a church, right next door, and seems to be very focused on trying to be a community center sort of place. I imagine that's a little tricky in the Interbay, which features a double load of railtracks and a landfill-become-golf course. None the less, it's kind of neat. Very open inside, almost spartan with a sort of lack of tables. They had decent coffee, a few little munchy things available - the usual coffee house sort of thing - and a couple of computers in the back of the "hall" (felt like a large hall that you'd rent out for a function or such) that were live and connected. Thought about writing an entry into my blog from there, but decided to wait until we got home.

Anyway, neat place, comfortable, open. I hope it does well.

The world is insane

But that's probably no great surprise to anyone around here, huh?

Sometimes I think it's just me that's flipped. That the world I'm walking through, experiencing, seeing, hearing - that it's just some bizarre and overly complex dream that I'll be waking up from. Waking up, and back in our house in Missouri - maybe in late spring, with the rain coming down and the windows open for a little cool breeze - cooler than Karen likes.

But other times, I think the whole world has flipped on it's head and what the fuck happened anyway? Who let this shrub into the whitehouse, trying to spend away anything resembling a reasonable budget into a terrible deficit my nephew will have to bear? He's pushing for a war in Iraq, we've got a beautiful spanish girl with brain damage on the news - a terrible mistake in blood types screwing up an otherwise hopeful lung and heart transplant. That's right next to continued news on the space shuttle Columbia, which smeared itself into a truly amazing fireball, tumbling and burning out of control in the upper atmosphere at mach something-really-fast. I know it's not related, but in some ways it seems like the media is trying to say it is.

I'm a rare beast in this modern (?) America - I don't watch TV. I surf the net, I watch movies on the silver screen and on DVD, but I don't watch TV. There's even some good stuff on there, but I still avoid it. No tivo for me - just a waste of money. DRM? heh. Now that's a good one. Best silicon snake oil I've seen and heard of in a decade - and still people flow money into that crap. Dude, there is ALWAYS ring-1. And it's clear from what I've seen that quality doesn't make a damn bit of difference to people who want to pirate this stuff.

Karen and I had a wonderful dinner tonight. An almost celebratory dinner. Just the two of us - down at Pasta Bella. Never thought I'd live in a city. Never really thought I'd live in the pacific northwest. Where there's a public initiative to name some pigfucker as a horses ass in law. We have a monorail. We have a freakish building called the Space Needle - that actually looks kind of cool (lousy restaraunt though).

Sometimes I just don't know what to make of this place. Was it a good idea moving out here? Yeah, I think so - but it just sometimes seems so damn weird. ya know?

You just gotta love the Onion

Terrorism not likely cause of fire...

because

because (in general) management is the most risk adverse profession in the world

big order

I always find it somewhat odd, awkward, and strangely invigorating to place a large dollar order. Today is was the order for the hardware to migrate our central databases. Managed to save a fair bit o' cash in monthly lease costs and get an upgrade in the same swag. It's too bad I couldn't have saved us more money...

But you know, I'm just doing the best I can.

Groove-y

Jon Udell has an interesting article up about Groove at Infoworld. He asserts that Groove is really the OS of the future, providing shared spaces, collaboration, security, and ad-hoc groupings on top of all the nifty things that Ray Ozzie originally honed and dropped into Lotus Notes.

The latest version of Groove is 2.5, just released. Interestingly, where Groove started out all Win-centric with COM and a "fuck email" attitude, it's now plugging a lot of stuff back into the core - in this time around, it's SOAP and XML based services. The article also points out it's continuing to invest in the winders OS by integrating more tightly into Sharepoint Team Services, a new fangled piece of Microsoft that hasn't seemed to catch a lot of press, but is definitely on the grow.

I've been sort of tracking these guys on and off (Groove, that is) and pulled down the periodic copy of their app to see what was cookin'. It's neat stuff (I liked Lotus Notes too), and I hope they do well - although I wish they'd open the doors a little more to the Macintosh side of the house. (yeah, purely sel reasons there)

a more typical morning

A more typical seattle winter morning

JavaScript & Python

I was playing a little more with Konfabulator today - and I found that I wished they'd implemented the scripting language of it in Python instead of Javascript. Now I'm not sure exactly why, it was sort of a gut reaction.

I don't really know either language to a significant detail in depth. Both are sort of on my "I can hack it and write a little" list of languages. I've done a little of each - reading it is no problem, writing it usually sends me looking for how to lay out the syntax or such.

The strangest thing is I'm wondering why I wished it was Python instead of Javascript...

Suits

I've always liked suits myself.

Generally ripe for brutal manipulation of their egos. Good thing he's attending those management meetings - he'll undoubtably transform your group into something truly amazing with his careful consideration of the team concept and managing expectations. See! He's started already. :-)

Funny thing is, I have no idea who this Mr. Wonderful really is... I just have a good guess at the "type".

Well, that was painful

Spent part of yesterday attempting to upgrade my Blog software (movable type) to version 2.62. There was a security alert for 2.61 (I'm using 2.51) , so I thought it'd be a good chance and opportunity to make the change.

Whoops - bad idea. The upgrade wasn't seamless, and in the end I just nuked all the tables in MySQL, erased the direry and reinstalled version 2.51 from scratch. I had an export of all my data, but still - that's a pain in the ass.

So... I don't think I'll be moving to 2.62 any time soon. Or if I do, I'll wipe everything and plan on installing from scratch.

pretty much normal

crazy day today, otherwise it's been completely normal. Yeah, I do love the Seattle winters:

buck a gigabyte

Dan Gillmore is commenting in today's column on how disk space has dropped below the buck a gigabyte level. Ever since I saw the presentations on Infrastress (PDF from Usenix) in a 1998 Usenix conference, I've been keeping my eye on this.

Tape was beginning to not be economical anymore, and that barrier had really been crossed now. But there's more data than ever, and bandwidth is the issue. Getting it from here to there. Sneaker-net still has the highest bandwidth available - the old saying was "A stationwagon full of mag tapes", the new one is "A car trunk full of ATA drives". The latency sucks, and the medium may be nearly unusable from that, but the bandwidth... oh yeah.

The interesting thing that hasn't followed up like I sort of expected was the growth of the "small raid" systems. SAN's and NAS have taken over the realm of direct connect storage, so it's actually rather tricky to find disk storage of a terrabyte direct connect. So, yeah, XServe's RAID does a good job in pushing the envelope up to 2.5Terrabytes. But still...

God - to think back from to papertape while looking at my 20Gb iPod.

Named Computer

Steven Frank is asking if you name your computer. I guess, really, most folks I know who work with them name them - if only for a split second. You'd think most programmers have Turret's sydrome or something the way they talk to them...

Heh, but seriously - I've always named my hard drives something interesting, usually a welsh word, and I think Gus still follows in naming his various volumes. But the little iBook has a different name: Henri. Mostly for a pet project that's way, way backgrounded right now.

VoodooCode, part deux

Gus has released a beta of a nifty little thing called "VoodooPad".

If you know what a "Wiki" is, then you'll be very familiar with this bit o' code. It's basically bringing the Wiki concept of autolinked pages to a desktop application. It's in beta, which means there's the occasional quirk, but it's baseline function is ALL there.

It doesn't export of anything as yet, so it's your own personal wiki. If you've ever been involved in helping to maintain a wiki with some little snothead truants that think it's cool to write "0wnzed by xxx" on your Wiki, this may be something of an incredible benefit.

sailing, and more sailing

my hands are toast.

Went back out again today with Jen and JR - this time just the three of us. We were going to go match racing against Rhumb Rhunner (another boat, almost identical) to get practice doing tactical stuff, but that just didn't work out from all sides. Rhumb Rhunner's engine didn't start at all this morning, so it never even left the dock. Before that, however, we had some of the regular crew cancel out - so we would have been seriously shorthanded for match race anyway.

Luther sailed over and docked to come out with us, so there would have been four, but we'd decided to just go out and sail a bit and tune the rigging up, so we didn't really need him. There was some wind blowing up, and he's been wanting to try out his 20' sailboat on wind waves out in the sound proper, so he turned around and headed out to check things out.

We weren't all that far behind him leaving the dock, and made it out there pretty fast. Just did some tacks back and forth and worked on making sure the steel cables that hold the mast straight up and down were evenly tensioned on both sides. We didn't really get much time to do that, however, because a good squall was building up out of the south. We had nice 10 to 15 knot winds for about 45 minutes, and then it started really building. We peaked at 25 knots with the rain really coming down. I was working my butt off to tack and manage the forward sails in this, JR was helping me, and Jen was primarily driving. We started with the #1 jib (largest of the jibs, good up to about 20 knots with a full crew of seven to hold against the weight). We switched two the #2 jib, but even that didn't last long. I think the really heavy rain took it out of them both, and they decided to call it and just head on it. We were all soaked, but I think Jen, being relatively motionless in just steering the boat, was getting really darn cold.

We at least got some tuning in - we'd been about a knot faster on a starboard tack than on a port one because the tension was uneven on the shrouds (so the mast was pulled sideways). We evened it up to the point that we were just 1/2 a knot slower on one side than the other, but after that we just plain ran out of time.

So I got back home about 12:30, soaked but feeling really energized. I think Jen and JR were just exhausted by the experience. I worked out the worst of the lactic acid buildup in my shoulders, so I'm feeling pretty good right now. Oh yeah, some new bruises, but doing OK. (The steps down into the cabin get really damn slick when wet - I went up them fine, but slipped down them three times diving into the cabin for various things). So I thought it was a pretty good day out there.

Pattern Recognition

Yep, reading the new book by William Gibson. It's very strange reading a book set in a world of today. His protagonists are using an iBook - the same thing I'm using to write in my blog. They talk of "Googling" someone. It's a very surreal sort of feeling.

It's an intriguing book, and very definately his style. The writing style is so very, very Gibson. Disjoint, sort of - if you've read his stuff, you'd know. But I'm not sure that I like it. Hard to say, but the emotional content is sort of compelling and fascinated at a disjoint thing happening in front of you. Like watching a train wreck, or a car accident you just see coming. Odd way to describe a book, huh?

racing

Had a race today, went reasonably well.

We did "grand prix" racing - that's short races, typically three of them in a day, around relatively close buoys. Quite a change from the normal long-haul winter races. Means more fast changes from spinnaker to jib and back, and more places to fuck up.

Which we did, but really not all that badly. JR was captain today, and made a few bad calls that cost us time. The rain was persistent, and we had two "overwraps" while tacking, which also cost us time. (normally, the lines feed into the winch and wrap around it two or three times - works just fine. Overwraps happen then you pull fast, and then don't keep up, and the rope loosens enough to slip down and create a bitch of a taught-line hitch when you next pull tight). We also had a new crew member - Ryan - on board. He didn't know everything he needed to about trimming (he'd clearly never done anything with a spinnaker before), but he was fast, strong, and agile. And ground like a son-of-a-bitch. (Grinding is turning the crank on the winches to bring the jib sheet in as far and tight as you can - allows you to point into the wind better and make better speed).

The rain was off and on, as was the wind. Gusty today - up to 20 knots at it's peak, and the low was 3 knots. It's weird seeing the Puget Sound go all glassy - looks vaguely alien to me now. I guess because I got used to 3 to 5 foot waves, whitecaps, and the usual winter weather. The rain and wind made it somewhat chilly today, but the grand-prix style races have a way of warming you up pretty damn fast. By the end, about 3:30pm or so, I was soaked underneath the foul weather gear from my own sweat. Got home, peeled out, and took a quick shower to clear the worst of it.

I did something really odd today - er, odd for me. I told JR to shut up and stop giving orders to Ryan. I think what really freaked me out was that he did. JR's got a really good head on his shoulders, but he second guesses himself like a madman out there, and can get positively freaked. Hard line engineering focus isn't nessecarily a good trait when you're captain of a boat - especially a 7 man sailboat crew that has to work together like clockwork. So he was giving conflicting orders to Ryan and me, and causing the spinacker trim to get really incredibly badly fouled.

Spin's my favorite - I love flying it, and I really love the feeling of lightly hydroplaning the entire 30' sailboat on it's bow with it. (didn't happen today - has in the past). One guy controls the whole kit with a single line - balancing this truly monstrous sail against a shitload of weird aerodynamic forces. The balance is really cool - something I really enjoy. So I finally got pissed off at JR, who didn't realize that Ryan hadn't the foggiest clue, and in an effort to please was doing exactly what JR said. I guess I've learned that you don't follow JR's orders unless he repeats them three times or something. Probably not great for split-second timing, but the crew had mostly worked together enough that it all goes smoothly because we all know what we're probably likely to do. So I told him to shut up, and I'm still pretty freaked out about that. Just feels, like, I dunno - wrong - to tell a captain to shut up on his own boat, ya know? Spinacker trim got a lot smoother after that.

pizza

Pizza? No - I had chili for dinner. A fine valentine's day dinner with my sweetie - chilli from Thriftway.

At least Gus is happy with his girlfriend. So what'd ya get her, huh?

discombobulated

feeling slightly akilter today - nothing's really settling in, and I'm having a really hard time focusing. The day sort of all started off at a strange slant, and it's never really righted itself.

Worked from home today, and took Karen out to lunch for a quiet little Valentine's thing - just a walk and a bite to eat in the neighborhood. No big plans for dinner tonight - everyone, their girlfriends, and their mothers are all out dining tonight. No thank you. I'll save the crowds for something I value more.

I wonder

I wonder, has it started yet?

What? What do you mean? I'm talking about the bombing of Iraq that would be the fore-runner of a ground based invasion.

This has nothing to do with terrorism. It has everything to do with oil.

fuck.

/. effect, wireless

Is currently crushing Locust World, a site devoted to wireless mesh networking and utterly subvertin' the MAN (that would be the neighborhood networking monopoly). Seattle has a pretty cool wireless project that I try and vaguely keep track of, but I haven't been active in it in any significant way. It's a neat idea. but the local group really seems to lack the cash and equipment to make a serious foray into messin' with the local ISP's and wireless network delivery systems.

I once got excited about T Mobile's wireless access service (802.11b) for laptops in Starbucks and stuff. But have you looked at how much that costs? Major disincentive! If I was a road warrior, maybe it'd make sense. But just being an above average Joe, it's so not worth it to me to pay $30/mo for the convenience of the using my iBook in starbucks a couple of times a month. The pay-as-you-play plan would seem to be more reasonable, but I just can't wrap my head around a plan that charges me $0.16 to $0.25 a minute for internet access. My gut says they're markup is way, way too high.

Cray

Looks like it's going public. They've got offices in Seattle, but I'm not sure where.

crisp nights, foggy mornings

Last night was crisp - clear and cold, with a good frost. Got all the way down to 33 degrees last night. This morning was foggy - you can hear the fog horns of the boats down in the harbor from our house without much trouble. It was really socked in.

I finished the root canal process today. That was painful. We had to go a couple of rounds of additional novacaine to get me settled, and after the first couple of screaming leaps through the ceiling i was jumpy and nervous, making Dr. Short's job all that much harder. He was good though, so I was finished up, taken care of, and shipped out by 11:30 this morning (appointment started at 9:30). Not something I care to repeat, but he was good and I'd go back to him if I needed this again. I'm trying to figure out what would be a decent gift - a simple thank you - for him and his staff. He got my money, of course, but he and his staff were really nice, and I think it would be cool to send something more of a thank you. Thinkin' on that one.

Tonight's crisp again, which makes me think tomorrow will be foggy as well. I like walking down to work in the fog - that's pretty cool.

haven't bought one yet

still trying to figure out what I want to get. Danger's sidekick looks the most appealing, but it feels just too early adopter for something I think I'll need to rely on.

Looks like I'm veering towards ATT Wireless, with the simple reason being they're cheaper and still have decent service. Now it's just down to which phone. I'm really leaning towards a clamshell, probably Motorola brand, but I haven't pinned down which one.

Had an incredibly frustrating evening trying to catch up with Nate and Jeff for oysters during happy hour after work. Spent 80 minutes nursing a beer in what I thought was the right place, but clearly wasn't. Damn frustrating. Made up for it by having dinner up at Monsoon. That went nicely, if pricier than I would have chosen for tonight. Very good food there, but you don't get out for under $20 a plate.

Not much else to really report.

Oh - yeah. Gus made this nifty little program with the python objective-C code that had a fortune cookie on it. My cat saw the fortune cookie - a beautiful photo rendering of it - and instantly decided it was a play toy. So he sat on my keyboard and batted at the screen while I moved it around with the mouse. Good fun until I actually realized he was on my keyboard. Gotta get some canned air and blow out all the cat hair - it's way worse than normal now.

cell phone

Ok.

So it seems like it's really time for me to drag my luddite butt out of the stone age and invest in cellular service. Now the question: which one.

I've been all over the consumer reports, and did a little "shopping" today to get a feel for the local continuum.

So - best sales was Verizon Wireless. Damone Gray there gets the "gold star" for being terrifically helpful. They also rate the very top on Consumer Reports (although the city overlay didn't include Seattle - so I picked SF as the closest surrogate). ATT Wireless wins second, with the best plan for straight voice in the Seattle area - plus they're HQ'd here in town, which means new coverage and stuff happens here first for them. The salesman there was decent, but not as good as Damone. Had his bias's (which I enjoyed, although didn't agree with) but in the end didn't leave me feeling like I'd get everything I ever needed from ATT Wireless. They're second the Consumer Reports list.

The last place was TMobile. The only thing I found particularly compelling had nothing to do with them except a comarketing/reselling agreement - the sidekick. Yeah, that's definitely the geeky side of me talking out. I don't really give a shit about SMS, or attempting to get a web browser through a 32x32 LCD screen, or even java games on the current run of cell phones. But the email/IM/always connected thing - that's pretty damn tempting. And it's a phone, which is what I really need. A fellow at work has a RIM Blackberry, and there's a certain amount of geek envy I've always had for that. Even back when I was at MU, and I knew it wouldn't work in Columbia.

So it looks like I could do either Verizon or the TMobile Sidekick plan for about $40 a month. I could cut it down to just $30 a month with ATT Wireless and a plain-jane phone.

Phones - my god! What a plethora! Consensus is bluetooth is bleeding edge, and while cool, not particularly useful unless you freakin' LIVE on your cell phone. Which, at the moment, I don't. The itty bitty guys look like they'd be really comfy in a pocket, only I'd beat the crap out of them. I'm not careful about where I drop in change or keys, and I know from experience that I'll scrap the screen/window up on any cell that doesn't flip closed (and the outside of those that do).

Oh - there's one more possibilty, speaking of damaging phone. Jen has phone service through Sprint (which she doesn't really care for) because she could get the phone itself at Circuit City - which allows for a "any happens" guarantee in case of damage it gets replaced. If you know Jen, you'd know that's a damn good idea - and she's used it more than once. Cell phones don't work worth a damn once they've been dunked a few feet under in the Puget Sound...

I don't think I'm going to be that harsh on my phone, but it's a good thing to remember.

So I don't know from here. Gotta think it all over before I make the inevitable impulsive jump for which Karen will laugh at me.

A Big Thank You!

A big thank you goes to Mary Jorgensen!!!, who as I've recently learned, has a little blog of her own over at Blogspot. Apparently Mary's family used to do a little smelting up in Michigan and Canada... So she suggested the following:

I read your blog today and saw your question about cooking smelt. We used to "" (if you can call it that!) for smelt in Michigan and Canada. To prepare it, you usually just gut it and chop the head off (although, I have been served smelt with the head left on) then dip in an egg/milk mixture and roll in standard breading (you should be able to find a recipe on the net. You just leave the bones in, and the skin on, then deep fry the suckers. I haven't had it prepared any other way.

That's exactly what I did.

I've got to say, eating smelt isn't exactly haute cuisine. In fact, I'm not sure how you'd MAKE it fine dining.

So the next question... what exactly do you do with those spines while eating them? It was sort of akward, but since it was just Karen and I, I didn't worry about being all "proper" or anything about it.

The flavor was really good (Karen thought the flavor surpassed cat, I thought it was good but different), but eating the little buggers was a bit tricky. Oh - and they cook really, really fast. I overestimated the time it would take to cook them on the first set, and left a fair bit of fried in the bottom of the skillet.

The really odd thing was I haven't cleaned in a long, long while. Didn't take long to remember, but the experience with smelt is significantly different from Cat, which you really need to skin and have some barbs that will get you pretty good if you're not careful.

XServe RAID

that Apple's got it's XServe RAID stuff all announced. Really, it's a pretty sweet price. 11k for 2.5 terrabytes. Damn, I mean - it could be a hell of a lot worse and harder. Technical specs show they're ATA drives all hooked up with Fibrechanel. Sounds like the way to build it.

I've actually been looking for a good RAID solution for MacOS X on a G4, and this has about got it all beat. It's really, really hard to find a decent solution in the 2-10 terrabyte range that you're not paying a double amazing shitload for. The only problem I've had so far is getting a concrete answer from Apple if I could use two of these at the same time on a dual-G4 server that's already installed. I need 5 terrabytes total, and I'd like it fast and really compatible. If this works, well - fuckin' A, yeah! When I called their sales line today, however, they didn't know anything more than I did. In fact, the sales guy knew a hell of a lot more than the technical support guys did - who were apparently getting "trained" on it this afternoon.

I actually can't imagine their would be a problem, but I've learned to actually ASK these questions the painful way.

Does GFS actually *run today* on Linux? Heh, yeah. So the example is from two years ago, but still.

Konfabulator has launched

Konfabulator

Been waiting to see what this little thingy was - being made by the same guys that made Kalidescope for MacOS 9. And well... it's pretty darn cool!

It's no skin for the overall OS, but it is another really neat way to make simply graphical widget thingies that do neat stuff for you (very, very skinable). It's based around XML with some embedded javascript to do the actual coding. The language is lightweight, and it really makes sense for it's purpose. Yeah, I mean, you could have built in Perl or Python or some crap like that, but this works really well (at least from a first glance) and doesn't require a massive burden of knowledge to get started making goofball things.

In looking through the documentation (PDF 552k) available on their workshop page, they've got all the nice pieces in there to replicate my Objective-C app "Signal Strength"... so I think I'll check it out as a replacement. Not something I critically need, but nifty none the less.

Actually, my main interest in this is as a widget set to bring status graphs onto my desktop and update them in real time. I currently get notifications from an installation of Nagios and keep a loose eyeball peeled on two internal web pages to check on the status of our little shop of horrors. We've got a massive pile of independent software agents all working to shove data down a pipe as fast as possible. It becomes this big related rates empirical differential equation to keep an eye on - and it's easiest just to glance at # completed vs # in the backlog and throughputs. Lots of pictures, but I've gotten used to diagnosing the majority of problems in a few seconds from those images. So... if I could bring some of the key ones down to the desktop and have them reload on a timer to keep them up to date.... yeah, nice.

One thing I didn't see with this whole setup was a tool to actually build a widget. It's a simple package, but currently it'll involve messing with a copy of an existing widget to create a new one. Opportunity for a widget building tool I suppose. Not very hard or anything - just packaging in the right way and labelling a direry - but it'd be nice. I expect we'll see various personal implementations of just that sort of thing in about 48 to 72 hours.

Oh yeah - their website is absolutely slammed this morning from people checking it out... :-)

smelt

just got back from an evening trip to Redmond. Went over to chat with a friend while he was doing PC maintenance for a small firm after hours.

So it turns out that as I was heading over there, Chuck and Lorrie (next door neighbors) were just arriving home. They'd spent the day ing - well, smelting to be exact. Which I guess is ing with a net when the smelt are running so thick that if you kick hard you'll throw a few up in the air. I did the good neighborly deed (hauled their cooler of smelt into their basement for them), and now I'm the proud recipient of a dozen smelt and a couple bottles of home-made apricot wine!

So...

anyone know how to prepare smelt? Looks like I'll be cookin' it up for dinner tomorrow.

digital cash

Ultimately, I think banks, banking institutions, and banking rules control the idea of smart cards and anonymous cash. The rates cited in the CNN article are just about low enough to finally make sense. Everything else that has been bank related around the US seems to be driven around the minimal transaction cost. Most credit cards are around 3%, but have the bonus of consumer protection laws. Debit cards run nearly the same, but someone can bleed you dry if they just know a 4 digit number... and you've got zero recourse.

bloggers from company Z

Eric writes tonight about a woman keeping a list of all past & present blogger's from Microsoft. God knows what for - seems like a variation of the rumor sites for Apple. (In case you're curious, my favorite is Crazy Apple Rumors).

It's kind of odd, because I keep a list of bloggers that I know are somewhat related to Apple, but mostly watch them because they write about interesting things. I've culled a few from my list that were boring - it's just a neat set of people, and sometimes some really cool info. Like Steve Zeller's Delcom USB drivers (haven't a clue what he does at Apple), or Steven Frank's constantly obsessive detailing on PDA's (he also comes up with some really amazing notes, and he lives relatively close - Portland). Then there's always BBum, who grew up in Columbia and it constantly pushing the limits somewhere, just lately happens to be around Python and Objective-C.

Next milestone - sleeping through the night

Shot another day in the process, had another visit to the dentist, and got refilled on drugs, plus some new one's to boot. But it finally appears to be working. It's been four hours since I took the last set of pain killers and no lancing pains have shot up from my jaw. You can't even imagine how pleasant that is until you've been having to deal with that for the 3 days, 24 hours a day.

So it shot my day at work today - if I'm on the mend now, thank god. My next goal: sleeping through the night. Seems even achievable now.

request logs from Apache

you ever look at them? Interesting things turn up.

For whatever reason, I decided to night to look at all the accesses to my site that had "search" in the referpage URL. It's amazing what searches are pointing towards me. It's amazing what people are looking for.

Oh - and the guy looking for an Escape Velocity Serial Number? GO BUY IT! Ambrosia is an awesome little software company, don't steal from them.

sleep, no sleep

didn't get much of it. This whole root canal/abscess thing is proving to be particularly painful. Didn't sleep more than an hour at a shot last night, which has me terribly dragged out. I'm surprised my stomach hasn't yet rebelled at the amount of ibuprofen going through there.

I've got a followup appointment with the dentist today. He was sure the pain would have slacked off by yesterday afternoon, so he's going to have me in for a quick looksee and we'll see what can be done. On the phone yesterday, he talked about a possible run of antibiotics. I guess most of the pain is actually from an infection in my jaw.

I've got to say, these past couple of days are ranking among the most unpleasant in my life.

Deficit

Heh. Karen and I were talking about this very subject over dinner last night. Karen wanted to know why Democrat's get nailed for "big government" when the Republican presidents spend away our futures.

I've got the fuckin' message

hello body?

all you pain receptors? I've got the message. Pipe the fuck down.

i'm glad Dr. Short warned me it would get worse before it got better, but jeezus, I didn't except this anyway. Worst night yet. took some ibuprofen and tylenol 3 a half hour ago, and it's just now starting to kick in. Woke up karen, woke up the cats. I've got the whole damn house awake with this.

Got Karen back off to bed with assurances that the drugs are kicking in, and Pooka seems content to sleep on me, or at least just claim an arm while I'm typing.

Go! Go! Go!

BusinessWeek is speculating that Pixar may take it's toys and go elsewhere - a move that I think would be terrific!

There's lots of studios who could put up the same effort and technical support to bring Pixar animated flik's to the screen. Disney's been fucking up for almost a decade now, and it's time the piper called. None of their animated works have been worth more than a tinker's damn in the past five years, with the height at Lion King, and then a slow stumbling by-the-numbers plot set into perdition. I hear of the next thing they're working on, and I get scared - "Oh No! They'll just fuck it up!"

I actually do want them to get better - I've got a huge amount of respect for what Walt created, and Michael Eisner has been systematically pillaging and destroying. I just hope they oust the fucker before it's too late.

Wanna know how much trouble you're in?

You know, you can just ask me... I've never been shy about saying what I think. Not that I would ever expect you to actually be decent human being beyond gunpoint.

codeine

Did the root canal thing today. The dentist (Jeffrey Short) was really good, but it's mixed news in the end. The good news is that we're into healing now. The bad news: that another visit will be needed and the pain will continue for another few days until things make the full transition to recovering.

Apparently, the molar had absessed pretty good. He got it mostly cleaned out and medicated, and he gave me some heavy duty pain meds (codeine) to help out with the pain.

I haven't had codeine in quite some time, so it'll be interesting to see what effect it has on me these days. I expect I'll be pretty muzzy headed here in the next few hours.

Best quote from Dr. Short: "Only thing worse than a root canal is a root canal that requires two trips to the dentist". Actually, I have nothing but praise for him. My dentist (Dr. Jensen) recommended him for this specific problem, and he was fantastic. Very straightforward, efficient, explained what was happening, and was very concious of the pain I was in. Couldn't ask for a better dentist than that.

Programmin'

Gus has out a link on a free publication (PDF format) entitled "How to be a programmer". While I haven't read it yet, it just got downloaded for a read while I wait for the pain medication to kick in (I have an infection that has accelerated to critical importance for seeing a dentist to deal with it).

For Gus - you comment about need to be able to "you need to learn to how to realize what you don't know". Well, let me give you an example of someone I believe never was able to make that leap: Ozra. No, she wasn't a programmer (Ryan, Byron, and crew will all be laughing their asses off about now, I'm sure) - but seriously: I think she simply lacked this ability. Well, maybe it wasn't simply, but after a few years to not be just incessantly pissed off at her - I think this may have been the core.

Merc always called coders, sysadmins, etc. "knowledge workers". Very old school world, but I think he got it reasonably right when he saw one who was worth their salt. He always perceived it as being somewhat intangible. Randy just never bothered to attempt to categorize it. But I think what you're pointing out is a far, perhaps a big one.

Long walk home

I took a very long and liesurely walk home today, somewhat needing it after a chaotic day at work. I went in particularly early - 7am - and tried to get out early. I was mildly successful, but probably not enough to completely make up for a few hours over the weekend I spent patching and deploying code to fix a couple of bugs.

Mark Pilgrim has unplugged himself for a few days, which sounds like a good idea. I know exactly what he's talking about, although our builds and such weren't constantly happening at midnight with 2am scrambles to fix things. Steven Frank was commiserating along similiar lines. I wonder if it's just that time of year.

As I stand at the vantage point of the beginning of the month of February, I see a lot of hard work, tight deadlines, and unfortunately the possibility of some long hours ahead. I hope not, but it sort of looks that way. At least I have a good focus on my personal projects at the moment. They're taking, actually, the highest priority with me - so I'm trying to not let work run my life outside of the office. So far, it's been working beautifully.

OSCON, Portland, July 2003

Well, advertising at OReilly works. I just saw the details for OSCON and realized that it was going to be really, really close. Like in Portland this July. Damn, can't really pass that up. God knows how I'm going to swing attending, but I'll figure something out. At least it's not as expensive as WWDC.

PyObjC

BBum has a really compelling article on OReillyNet about PyObjC. He talked about it being published a few days back, but I hadn't gone to check it out until now.

PyObjC is a bridging model between Objective-C and Python. I've had a great deal of fun playing the in the Objective-C toolkit world, but never really quite made the leap into Python. Not sure why - it has a truly incredible library of goodies to keep anyone happy and busy for ages. It comes default on Jaguar, so it's not like I have a good excuse either. I guess it's just because I can still sling nasty perl4 style code out to get those little snippets down that I need doing. Mostly it's stupid crap like parsing log files or iterating over a collection of files and doing massive search and replaces. It's not like you need a powerful set of libraries for that.

Anyways, congrat's to BBum and the crew developer PyObjC at Sourceforge - nice project and well done. Looking forward to watching it and seeing where it goes.

speed of a virus

They're getting better.

CAIDA is hosting a paper analyzing the speed of spread of the Slammer/Saphire worm. Thanks to Wes Felter of Hack the Planet for the link.

Movies it was...

Karen twisted my arm and made me watch Sleepless In Seattle. Let me tell you - they really fuck with Seattle in that flick. First off, those little houses down on the water... they're TINY!!! They made it look like he had 2000 sq ft in that house, and I assure you they don't really breach 1100. With two floors.

And - if you're trying to find your way around Seattle? Don't follow those directions. They showed Shillshole Marina, Lake Union, somewhere I didn't recognize (Alki?), and the waterfront north of downtown as all being somehow colocated together.

Ok. I did it. Now that I'm living in Seattle, I suppose it was due.

We did watch a really compelling flick though: Door to Door. William Macy played Bill Porter, a door to door salesman who (I think) lived in Portland and suffered from Cerebal Palsy. Macy's a good ar, but this was just incredible. It was a relatively new release on DVD at Video Isle, and man am I glad we rented it.

cold gray evening

It's one of those evenings that's just chilly. Karen and I went across the water (a local euphemism meaning to head east over Lake Washington to the cities/neighborhoods over there) for dinner, and all during the drive there and back, the sky was mottled grey with wind and periodic light rain (drizzle to Missourians). Now that we home, dinner didn't sit to well with Karen so she's laying down for a bit. I'm sitting and looking out windows to a slowly darkening sky with colors varying from gunmetal blue to smoke grey, rich textures of clouds filling the sky. They're not low today - I can see the tops of the radio towers without any trouble, but the chill in the air is almost oppressive.

I think the plan for the evening is to watch a movie, but it sort of depends on how Karen's feeling after a little bit. My fall back plan is a little coding - I've got a few nagging project ideas lurking about in my skull.

I haven't yet brought myself up to being willing to retackle the REtry and SignalStrength apps I wrote. I'm kicking myself now for not making them Document based apps in the Cocoa framework. Duh. Live and learn I guess.

Ebay

Getting set to sell my old iBook on Ebay. Looking around, there's several similiar models out there currently, all going for right around $400. Sounds pretty good to me...

I've been procrastinating selling this guy - just because it's hard to let go of equipment I've dragged all over hell and gone with me. Fact is, I haven't really even touched it since I got the newer iBook, so it's really time to move it along. If any of y'all reading this wants to get it direct, without bidding on Ebay, I'll take $400 and ship it to you directly! Otherwise, I expect Karen and I will get it listed up there shortly. Today - it's reinstall with the software restore CD and picture taking.

getting up from a tragic failure

Nobody generally thinks it's all that risky to go into space anymore. Well, mostly. Today reminded them that there's always a cost. And not just in the pocketbook, which Congress and the past several white house administrations have continually squeezed down harder and harder.

I snagged these images from James Duncan Davidson's blog (didn't seem fair to beat up his server with my blog entry). Eric Albert wrote a bit about this today too - Eric, I've got to disagree - there's hundreds of very direct things that space exploration gives us. And billions of indirect things that have changed our lives dozens of times over.

The sky image is shocking, in just knowing that's the Columbia breaking up.

The second image just takes it away, displaying clearly the debris field of vaporized aluminum.

We can't stop now. We've got to get back up from this tragedy and keep going. Karen remember's the Challenger disaster - and it's effect. It made her even more interested in space, space exploration, and space flight. She wanted to be an astronaut for years until it became clear her (then) poor vision would keep her grounded. The first memory I have of television is watching an Apollo moon walk on a black and white TV - had to have been around 1970 or 1971.

Shakespeare's Pizza Tshirt

Karen and I got our final christmas gifts in the mail yesterday - and I got a Shakespeare's Pizza Tshirt! They (my brother in law and his wife) wanted to send me a couple of frozen pizza's, but when they realized how nastily expensive that was going to be, they decided to go with the shirt. Which is OK by me! I'm loving it!

Karen and I headed out this evening (after I'd recovered from the race) down to Pioneer Square. No - not bar hopping. She wanted to go to this antique shop and look at samples of drawn thread work, and convinced me to tag along by holding out the lure of Elliott Bay Book Co.. So that was our eventual distination, where we landed, had some sandwiches, a couple of drinks, and read books for an hour or two. As we were leaving, I got my temptation to head back there soon: William Gibson will be there this tuesday doing a book signing for his new novel: Pattern Recognition.

That alone ought to cause several of my friends in Columbia to go into spasms. (Ryan - make sure and tell John Hay and tell me his reaction).

bruised knees

are a sure sign that we had significant wind out there today - and we did. It stayed up around 13 to 15 knots most of the day (the race was from 10:30am to 2:30pm) and although cloudy and quite chilly, no rain. Actually, I warmed up very quickly, even sitting high on the rail for most of the upwind leg. We left the dock two short of our normal crew size, so not only were we shorthanded, but we didn't really have the weight to offset the winds.

Tony, Jen, JR, Dave and I made up the crew today. In a very different move, Jen was skipper and drove the boat, while JR did main, got exceptionally anxious, Dave and I trimmed and attempted to manhandle the pit between us, and Tony did foredeck. It was the first race I'd crewed on with Jen at the helm, and we didn't do too badly. We weren't first either, and everyone needed more work, but we did OK. Jen did an admirable job on her first day driving the boat under full crew - it's a tricky thing to steer the boat in 3' waves heading downwind. We didn't keeep the course all that well either upwind or down, but Jen was clearly getting better as we kept on. A couple more races, and I think she'll have it without any trouble.

Dave doesn't reel in the jib sheets quite as fast as Luther did, or I tend to. That left a lot more grinding on the winch for me, which quickly showed off my lack of endurance for extended arm motions with a lot of strength. I'm good for quick bursts, but I'm just not getting the final wraps with any speed at all. And my manuevering to get a good grasp on things - well, that's why I have bruised knees now - slammed them into the cockpit quite a number of times to get a grip on the winch that I could power.