Rhonabwy

informational article or advertisment

I saw this article on OReillyNet (my default loading page with Safari on the laptop) - Smart File Sharing Between Macs and PCs by Wei-Meng Lee.

I thought "Oh Cool - he'll have some tips for setting up filesharing using the tools that are already built in! Maybe I can learn a quick & easy something."

Nope.

The article is really a how-to-use-this-program sort of thing - looking specifically at PC-Mac-NET FileShare. A nice article, highlighting a neat bit of indie-developer code, but I guess not what I was looking for. On one hand, I'm gratified to see that indie developers are getting some airtime on a media forum like OReillyNet. On the other, there's a bunch of tools already embedded with the Mac that make for some really great filesharing - and that's what I expected from OReilly. I guess it's not really right or wrong, but I feel somehow betrayed that this article offering me technical advice basically devolved to "get this program - it works really well". I'm sure I'd have a different opinion if it were my code.

I wonder if OReilly shouldn't consider a regular column "indie developer review" where this sort of thing can really get hammered out and showcased, instead of masquerading in the same area with technical tips on programming and "how to use" articles on the OS.

macsb

macsb is the mailing list that Brent created just a few days ago, and the initial flurry is really impressive. So far I've seen and heard from several more mac developers that live in Seattle - very cool.

I even got email from a fellow developer here on Queen Anne, although I think he found me through my blog rather than the macsb.

Oh - so this list - wow! Brent's talked about how many folks have shown up, and from all indiciations it seems to still be growing. 187 members as of this posting. More introductions coming across, and some interesting conversations about pricing quandries, feedback needs, and all sorts of "How on earth do a make a living doing this?" questions are getting asked.

It's not even very Mac specific at this point, although I expect it'll have that flavor before too long. I've got to get caught up with the reading there now - lots of prolific writing...

NASA and the rovers

I wonder if NASA didn't suffer from the same trouble with getting these rovers up and out that so many large corporations suffer - intractable bureaucracy. They didn't run "full shakedown" tests, they had limited budgets, and seemed to be working in tight flexible teams. That sounds like all the hallmarks of a large bureaucratic entity desperately trying to be flexible.

So my real curiousity is - did they have enough time to do it right and just blew it, or did they get crushed into a shorter timeframe than they wanted because of indecisiveness from the organization, and cut testing that could have made things a bit smoother.

Now they've got the landers both on Mars, and they're functional instead of slagged heaps of metal making a few "man made" craters there, so you've got to give them a fair bit of credit there. They also pulled it out when the spirit rover locked itself up into a reboot loop and managed to repair the system from a couple million miles away over a darn slow uplink. These guys definitely get credit for brains. Like everyone else, I guess, I could wish for a flawless mission.

iBook battery

As they say: "it's dead Jim".

This morning the battery wouldn't kick over into charge mode, and it's completely drained. No good recourse from here, so I headed down to the Apple Store to see what they could tell me. We tried out a couple other batteries, fiddled around with the laptop, and it looked like I just had my battery go dead.

So a new one is on order - $129. Not cheap, but a hell of a lot less expensive than a repair on the motherboard. The only major downside is that the battery itself won't be quite the same color as my iBook shell - an opaque white rather than a translucent white. Not that big of a deal - or at least I don't have a real choice in the matter - but it would have been nice to maintain the esthetic of the machine entirely.

moleskine

Karen and I decided to lurk around in the U Village Barnes and Noble this evening, just to get out, view the "library" as it were, and do something different.

While we were there, I spotted a pocket sized moleskine notebook. Well, of course I think it's one of the best notebooks made today, and frankly for quite a number of years, so we picked one up for Karen - since I had one but she didn't.

They're great notebooks - and superior to pretty much everything else I saw - we went through lots of the handmade books there. Many of them didn't even have the paper in the correct way (did you know there was a right way and a wrong way?) A number had really intriging leather covers, but in the end we went for the old classic.

If you're ever looking for a notebook to journal in, sketch in, whatever - I heartily recommend them. Either that or one of my hand-made books, but since I haven't made any books in a couple of years - they're kinda rare.

Update: okay, okay - I added the freakin' e at the end

Spirit is heading back online!

John pointed me to Adot's notblog, which has been a great resource for covering the details of the rovers...

And tonight, he's reporting that the spirit rover will soon be back in action!

*%*#&$ eclipse

for all the nice things I say about eclipse, it's annoying the snot out of me right now. Twice tonight I've had to force-quit (that's kill -9 to you unix folks) the application on my iBook because it got itself rather inexplicably into the spinning wheel of death - also known as "locked up".

I'm not doing any real funky stuff with it either, and it works a hell of a lot smoother on the windows boxes that I've seen, so I don't know what on earth is actually happening to cause the ick.

bah.

smart move for Pixar

Pixar is announcing it's ending it's current deal with Disney - a great move for Pixar in my estimation, as (at least from my point of view) Pixar has been the place generating any real buzz, storyline, or creativity for Disney of late.

How odd...

I wonder if someone made him a deal they couldn't refuse, or if he found that Sun was the place to be to continue his work on tools. Or maybe something else entirely - but apparently Gosling has gone back to Sun.

I've got to admit, I don't have a lot of faith in Sun's ability to execute on the java language or tools. Their built-in software base has, to me, been limited in execution and scope - and I don't see a particularly high value to migrate into that world. Another factor on that "complexity of the API" thing perhaps.

Well, I hope some of Gosling's ideas for his tools set make it to the light of day - I think they've got a lot of promise (at least at the theoretical level that I've read about them). While metrics brings a lot to the table, Eclipse and IDEA have made humongous strides in highly functional IDE's.

here she comes!

It's not often I find something that Sherlock does that Watson doesn't, but tracking airlines is one of them...

chilly and wet but happy

Woke up this morning feeling much, much better. Maybe I just needed a good night's sleep - hard to say. My cat (pooka) decided that I had to be awake this morning, so he danced on my head. It's not my prefered method of waking up, but it worked. Out of spite, I stayed in bed for another half hour before I got up to feed the fellows - can't have them thinking that dancing on my head will immediately get them food, or they'll be doing it ALL the time!

It's dark outside this morning - heavy clouds are shrouding everything, the wind's picked up a bit, but it's reasonably warm (at least compared to the east coast and the midwest - 45F). It looks like it's been raining outside, but there wasn't any appreciable mist or anything in the air when I came into the office - so it must have just been a morning misting or something.

Usually by 10am, the clouds have raised a bit - but not today. They look like they'll open up at any time - dousing us with rain, but they still haven't. I suspect it'll be a chilly, windy, grey day pretty much for the rest of the afternoon. It does make for good walking weather though...

Unison

After seeing the teaser at Steven Frank's blog, I decided to at least stay up long enough to see what they were doing. Well, it's Unison, a usenet news browser that I haven't even touched yet.

What struck me about the product, though, was this page talking about access. It was really well planned out - you can get USENET access through your isp (which they suggest a host for me - and it's even correct!) or you can subscribe to Panic's usenet service. I expect the value of that service alone will be enough to keep Panic going for quite a while with subscription monies. At least I hope so.

not much forward progress

Tonight is one of those nights where I'm just not making any forward progress. Pretty much on anything.

After an initial after-work flurry of "gettin' stuff done", I've devolved into playing scales and silly rythms and melodies on the keyboard with GarageBand, surfing boring sites, and catching up on my backlog of email from the extended weekend.

I'm not really sure why, but I'm sort of down this evening. My personal projects aren't holding any significant alure at the moment, and although there's a billion or so things I could be doing with regards to work, I'm lacking the drive to do anything with it in the evening. Karen's out of town this evening, still in Missouri, teaching classes and (according to reports) having a good time with it all.

She'll be back tomorrow, which will be nice - as the cats are demanding a LOT of attention at the moment, and I'm starting to feel like a pincushion from it all.

Maybe I just need to "fill the well" as it were. Pull in some of that creative recovery time stuff, just fiddling and doing things that are relaxing and enjoyable to me.

mars

What a weekend for Mars, huh? Or at least our rovers.

There's an article at SpaceFlightNow that has some rather "Oh my god, you didn't..." sorts of notes in them. In a quote from the Nasa update on the rover as they've been nursing it back to health:

"She pointed out that the scientists had thoroughly tested the rover's systems on Earth, but that the longest trial for the file system was nine days, half of the 18 days Spirit operated before running into the problem."

Uhm. I would have thought that a full test, including filing up the filesystem, would have been a part of the gig. Guess not...

Still, Opportunity made is down successfully as well, and is sending home some pretty cool stills of it's own now. That's two successful landings on Mars - definitely increasing our rate of sucess as the human race getting probes there.

I hope they figure the patches for Spirit into Opportunity as well - it'd be a shame to see it flog up like the other a few days after landing.

friends

One of the neatest things that happened to me this weekend was a 30 minute interlude from one wedding reception to another. I took off quietly from my sister-in-law's reception to attend (however briefly) a few moments at Jeanette's wedding reception. I think those few minutes will be with me for quite a while to come.

I recall now, very clearly, the excitement and smiles that lit up people's faces as I strode into the main room, seeing me for the first time, in some cases, in years. I can't even begin to describe how good that made me feel to have a bunch of friends from my years in Columbia descend around me, excited to see me. Asking how I was doing, what I was up to. Some of them read this blog, perhaps intermittently. Maybe some read it more often - hard to say. I had at least one comment of "I looked you up on the internet the other day..." It was astonishing, it was soothing. My every-day social group is greatly reduced from what it had been after building it up for 15 years in Columbia. Sometimes it's easy to forget that perhaps they miss me as much as I can miss them.

simplicity

I've been thinking this evening about a dinner conversation with James and Brent from last week (it seems longer ago than last week). I think I'm really falling into agreement with the thesis that Java has reached a point of diminishing returns in that it has become too complex, too detailed. You might even call it a failing of the language, only that I think the language has done anything but fail. And it's not really the language in all aspects - it's things like the servlet specification, the proliferation of complex and general API's that have been carefully (or perhaops not so - but I suspect carefully) crafted to be as flexible as possible - fitting needs from all over for as many people as possible. The solution has been complexity, and for some reason tonight I'm really enthused by the concept of simplicity.

That's in my nature, though - to be fair. I've always had a favor towards simplicity in style, towards artwork that was form derived from function. My interest in the craftsman architecture movement, which I've lived in since I could buy a house. Shaker furniture - which isn't far off that mark either.

Fight the urge to make things complex, to layer on new topics to old, extending frameworks indefinitely! That's what I want to shout sometimes. Maybe I'm just reacting badly to my enforced retreat for a long weekend from computing - and some of my whimsy projects I was working on prior to that retreat. A friend at work strives hard provide layers in his work that reduce "cognitive load" as he calls it. In my mind, you've got to respect that.

ice storm in Missouri

As I write this, I'm traveling back from a (long) weekend in Missouri, having returned ever so briefly for my sister-in-law's wedding. She was radiant, the wedding was lovely, I had a good time, and my nephew is incorrigible. Some may even say "a terror". I think "two and half" is probably the most accurate description.

I meant to be home by now, but a sudden ice storm stalled everything out for me. From Kansas City to St. Louis (and Columbia, where I was staying), pretty much everything was gripped for a day with the ice storm that layered anywhere from 1/4" to 1/2" of ice across cars, driveways, sidewalks, etc. I suppose that the better part of valour was to lurk around in the house, maybe eating some leftovers, and just biding a day by while the streets responded to the combination of traffic, brine solution, and scraping.

I'm not terribly sad to be returning a day later - it was an extra chance to visit with family that I don't get to see all that often anymore, including that incorrigible nephew of mine. Still, it feels weird to me. I'm looking forward to getting home, but at the same time not exactly forward to the plethora of tasks waiting for me to resolve. Paperwork, bills, plans, payments - all the usual crap of a respectable and civilized life in the US today lurks for me at the house. I guess I'm just really focused on that because there's a couple items I feel that I should have had done already - before I left or something. I dunno - you've only got so much time, right? So something's gotta give. I just wonder sometimes if I've made the right choices in what gave.

8 notes & sheet music

Good lord. This GarageBand thing...

It's been a while since I read sheet music, let alone played a piano. But since I got my keyboard - well - it's a new way to really blow some time. Digging around I realized that I wanted to just practice some basics instead of pounding away at the keyboard (ok, so I pounded for while). That pretty quickly led me to getting some music that I could play - which to me meant finding some sheet music.

A little googlin, and I came across 8Notes which, other than some really annoying flickering gif ads, is a pretty nice site. They have some free sheet music for beginners (me) to quite advanced. The include midi files, and lots of other good stuff. To read the online music, you need a plugin.

that pretty quickly led me to realize I didn't remember which of the damn lines was a middle C, so I found a couple of other somewhat useful sites - How to read sheet music, and Introduction to reading music.

So now I can at least destroy greensleeves. Ugh. It's a pretty horrible thing at the moment. I try to assure myself that some practice will make things better, only I have to listen to myself when I practice...

So here's what I'm aiming for: The Jig of Slurs

Errands at mid-day

Well, getting back to work was a definite challenge. Turns out "there was someone shooting" at the intersection where my bus route usually runs. Ok - it's not a shooting, as all the cops were hollering around the area - the Seattle PI has an article on it already.

Regardless of the specifis of this nasty thing, Let me assure you that Seattle has a few choice choke points for traffic, and the intersection of 1st Ave N and Western is one of them. What a pain in the butt.

I'm back at the office now though, safe and sound. No gunshots were heard - just the hovering vultures of the helicopters with their camera crews.

Hey, at least I have my keyboard now...

annoying persistence pays off

Drove to work this morning, half planning on heading over to the Apple Store to see if they had that keyboard in stock. In reality, it was because I woke up really late... But I went to the Apple Store anyway. They had 1 of those babies that had just come in - only one.

Now they have none, and I've got my keyboard!

We'll have to see what noise I can generate tonight and share with the world!

Lots of folks...

Busy evening tonight - good fun though.

Went out to dinner with James Duncan Davidson and Brent Simmons - neat little mexican joint in Ballard I'd never been to before. We had a good time covering a gambit of topics, from Cocoa to current projects to the livability of cities in the pacific northwest.

Afterwards I hunted down the remains of the weblogger meeting. Turns out there was quite the bundle of them this evening, as Robert Scoble's geek dinner coincided with things, and the report is there were 40 folks there at it's peak.

I joined in as they were wrapping up the last and headed over to Dayment's place for cocoa (although I didn't have any cocoa, as it would completely screw up my induction phase with Atkins). I finally wound down about midnight, so here I am babbling about it all before I crash for the night.

MU's newest Tech Writer!

Congrat's to John Hay, who has just accepted a position as MU's newest Tech Writer! Of course, he doens't post worth a damn to his blog... but we can just assume he'll be better about the paid work.

ATT Wireless

It's funny, really.

Last night I was driving down the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and I saw a billboard exclaiming "REACH OUT", "America trusts ATT Wireless". At the time, I thought Hey, I should blog about that - because I don't trust them and I seriously doubt anyone else does either. Ok, so I do trust them to be another large corporate giving me slightly-less-than-McDonald's style service - vaguely crappy but mostly consistent.

Well, today I saw the headline in the PI: AT&T Wireless seeks a buyer

I'd been planning on switching carriers in February (1 year contract is up about then). I'm still thinking about a Sidekick, but mostly it will be focused on an integrated device that does more than just be a phone. So a Treo is in the running too.

I wish they'd market the Sidekick to technical folks as well as teenagers - and maybe focus some product development in that area. There's some, but it's really pretty minimal.

midi keyboard

getting one of those midi keyboards for GarageBand is proving to be a really difficult task! Well, ok - not difficult - just annoyingly long in the wait.

I've got one on order through the Apple Store, but reports from there are indicating that it'll be mid-march by the time I see one. I've been pestering the local Apple Store, but they haven't received any in yet either.

It's frustrating. Oh well. Sooner or later, right?

(but Ma!... All the cool kids got one!)

Disney

Steven is just completely on regarding Disney. Karen's family were all Disney (imagineering) and watched the decline of product and facilities over the past few years. I hope they pick themselves back up, but to be honest I don't have a whole lot of faith in that.

Zing...

It's a letter to the editor at CNet, but interesting none the less.

Firebird

John was telling me tonight that he liked the Mozilla site redesign (it is a good color scheme and layout) and was enjoying using Firebird and Thunderbird independently.

Well, I'm happy with my mail program, but I'm always willing to check out a new browser, so I grabbed Firebird and fired it up. My first thought was "Damn, this default layout is exactly like Safari!" I don't know if it looks like that on Windows or Linux though, so tomorrow I'll download them onto those platforms (at work, duh) and see how they look.

I'm rather compelled to a specific mail platform at work, but the browser can be whatever and anything. I'm currently using Mozilla 1.5 - so it's due for an upgrade no matter what.

monday

what's there to say about a monday?

Okay, so this monday happens to be Martin Luther King Day too. I have spent it mostly sleeping (until noon), and since then just ambling around the house sort of aimlessly. Not having much luck finding inspiration to do anything practical or useful.

I'm kicking back into induction on Atkins... I've been cheating far too much through and since the holidays, so I need to get things back together for me. Been reading the book, reminding myself of the "why" as well as the "how".

Big Fish

Saw Big Fish this evening. If you liked Edward Scissorhands, then go see it. I personally thought that this is a "Tim Burton Classic", and one that I'll buy as soon as it's available on DVD because I know I'm going to want to watch it more than a few times in the future.

A really, really enoyable flick.

low tide

A snap from beaches new Port Townsend last summer. We went during one of the really low tide days - and it happened to be pretty foggy that morning as well. It was the last time Randy Wiemer was up here visiting.

Reminds me I should go out there again.

Running OS X

I picked up a copy of Running Mac OS X by James Duncan Davidson. My name is in lights, ya know (inside the front cover - I did some review and provided some commentary), so I had to get a copy!

Peeking at Amazon, it looks like it has a nice sales rank (368) at the moment too! Congrats! I don't remember the site that graphed the sales rank stuff, but I bet it would be fun to look at right now... That's got to make James feel a little better.

Erp - finally found it after scouring into a reference on a link from the 3rd page of Google results. It's JungleScan that provides graphing of Amazon Sales Rank. Here's the graph for Running OS X. Guess the relevance for that one isn't so hot, eh?

It has some really wonderful tidbits in it. Lots of pieces that I always thought "Hey, I should check into..." are all there in glorious detail.

Note to self...

Note to self:

To run an application (such as Gus' VoodooPad) as though you were localized for a different language, you would issue a command such as:

./VoodooPad.app/Contents/MacOS/VoodooPad -AppleLanguages \
"(German, French, English)"

from the Terminal

iLife '04 annoyances

You what's damned annoying? That the iLife package only included GarageBand on DVD. Now this is annoying for a couple of reasons, but mostly because I feel like a wound has been pricked.

I have a desktop 533Mhz G4 that I got a while back, and I opted at the time to skip getting it with a DVD drive because I thought I could add one later. About a year ago, I went asking around - only to find that Apple doesn't offer that upgrade.

Now I've heard that GarageBand takes some CPU horsepower, so I was going to be putting it on my G4 - except that the damn thing is only provided on DVD - for which I couldn't get a drive on my G4 so that I could even USE it. Grrrr...

So I guess I'll just be trying it out on my iBook, although I'd hoped to really use this on my desktop instead.

If anyone knows of a DVD drive that I can attach to this thing that will WORK with iDVD, I'd love to hear it. I'd heard that perhaps Phillips was offering the drive Apple used as an external firewire add-on, but I couldn't track it down.

Mona Lisa Smile

Went and saw Mona Lisa Smile this evening on a lark. We were in Ballard on a last-minute shopping expedition for Karen, and saw it playing - so we went.

I really liked the movie. I suspect it may be the best job Julia Roberts has done in a film, although to be honest I was much more taken with the acting of Maggie Gyllenhaal, Kirsten Dunst, and Ginnifer Goodwin.

Yeah, it was still definitely a "chick flick", but it was a very well done one. And I think I saw at least one other guy in the theatre.

remote, distributed support network

Thanks.

As I was checking my email briefly this morning (that would be 4am seattle time), I saw the great encouragements and comments that I got on my post about visiting DC today. It was really cool to get that - so thanks.

The meeting, for the curious, was a sucess. I'm afraid I can't share more than that publicly, but it came off well for a from-the-hip sort of start and I think really has the positive seeds that you hope for a meeting like that. I met some really great folks. They piled it on and we all just synced. I've got a couple of follow-up things to take away, but honestly I expected that from the very beginning. From my standpoint, the meeting was an unqualified success.

The funniest thing was as I walked out of the meeting (at Noon), I looked at my cell phone and thought "Damn, it's only 9am at home, and I've already nailed down a 2 hour sucessful meeting!". I don't think I want to make two hour, 7am meetings a regular habit.

I'm now back in Seattle, safe and sound at home. It's a damn long flight from Dulles, VA to Seattle, WA. I've been up since a little before 4am local time, and the food intake has been seriously maligned as well - so I'll wait a few for Karen to get home (she's teaching tonight), and then I'm off for food, a shower, and bed pretty much in that order.

PS: It was freakin' cold in DC today too! I got a headache just walked three blocks downtown! With a wool watchcap on!

Far side

Tonight I'm on the "far side" of the states - staying near Dulles, Virginia. Had a good day here today (arrived here last night), and I'm hoping for a good day tomorrow.

Actually, I'm pretty nervous about tomorrow. I've got a meeting in the core of DC. I talked with my sweetie tonight, and she's sure I'll do well - I just hope so.

amazing panorama's

I continue to be stunned with the amazing panorama pictures we're getting from NASA and the Spirit rover. I particularly like the press release pan from the 12th. I've got the images playing as desktops behind my work on my laptop - sometimes I just have to clear everything away just to look at them...

XML RPC in python

I've been fiddling around the XML RPC in python this evening, and ran across the article XML-RPC: It Works Both Ways from 3 years back. Still works wonderfully well, by the way.

The odd thing was finding that article! I tried searching on Oreilly's website, and didn't come up with squat. Finally had to resort to backtracking how I originally found it, which was a link off the XML-RPC page at Pythonware. Odd. Nobody ever said search was an easy problem to solve though...

martian

Awesome, just awesome.

(Thanks for the link Gus)

eclipse, jakarta, etc...

It's all Gus' fault really.

Some time back, we started talking about a bunch of little and different projects, and that all culminated in me spending this evening getting eclipse installed under panther on the desktop, my java 'library' updated to the latest tidbits, and my trying out this program I've been meaning to work on for ages.

The nice thing about the jakarta projects is that a huge number of them are already set up with .project files, so they import into eclipse incredibly well. A few weren't so nifty. The latest lucene has some pieces which are much better, and some which are really strange. The JavaCC just worked like a charm for me, but the build.xml didn't want to recognize my installation of Xalan-J jars from the shell (I was invoking Ant inside eclipse) - so to get all the nifty JUnit reports, I had to switch to the shell and fire things up.

It's been a while since I've dug myself into deep with some java projects. And that's what is really Gus' fault. I'd been happily pattering away in Objective-C land, and now I'm all confused with moving back to the object.method(argument) notation. It's really damn frustrating when you expect [object method:argument] to work... Hurumph.

modalities of data

CNet has an article about an MIT startup called Ambient Devices, and I think the author really missed the point in his desire to capture readers in his first line: A start-up hatched at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thinks it has the answer to information overload: More information. The answer isn't simply more information, but a different modality of providing that information. In this case, it's the color of a glowing ball. Now, I'm not sure that I'd be so hip to that particular style, but there's other ways of describing the data (link is to a java applet - may take a bit to load) that I really thought were cool. Changing the representation of information is something that I do a lot at work. I use a simpler - even common - tool, but I've thought about more complex ones too. Most of the information I'm dealing with is time-series data, and I'm looking for trends, so graphing works great. If I had a graphing tool where I could flow things into three dimensions easily, I might even use that - but my needs tend to easy to answer with the simpler graphs. Us monkey's are visual creatures - it's a lot easier for us to infer and deal with complex information when it's in a graphical format. Yeah, there's some creatures who can just read spreadsheets and grok the implications immediately, and yeah - I know you can pervert pictures as easily (perhaps even easier) than raw numbers - but I still think the representation of complex information is often best done in a graphical format that makes more use of our native pattern-matching skills than tables of numbers. To Becker's credit, he does explain the detail later in the article - it just served as a handy platform for a mini-rant because I'm having trouble getting some folks to "get" this concept, and I had to let out the frustration somewhere...

Adobe's DRM effort

Wired has an online article about the more-or-less-now-public knowledge that they slipped in some image analysis code. On one hand, this makes perfect sense - you can just guess that the high quality of adobe products made them ideal for assisting in counterfeiting with the complex images that show up on bills today. On the other hand, why keep it secret and let it "blow up" in a PR fashion. Of course, there's always the idea that any publicity is good publicity. I suspect that wasn't their original aim though.

2.65 upgrade, Ecto, etc...

yeah, my whole RSS feed reset itself - sorry. I finally got the MovableType upgrade done to migrate to 2.65 for the bugfixes. While I was at it, I slapped in MT-blacklist. Like everyone else, I've been having some trouble with the spammers in my comments. Jerks. All that said and done, I'm not fiddling with Ecto. I'm moving towards siding with Eric on this app though. The coloration of the panels and windows is overwhelming to me (dear lord - what the hell is that solid black console window?!), and the UI moving between Entries and Drafts and the normal data entry point feel really weird. A little too much custom control work is really what it feels like. It has all the looks of being a really neat bit of code, but rather feels like an ill-fitting glove to me right now. I guess it's just been an updating day for me.

Ecto

Joi reports that Ecto beta is available, so I hopped on over ASAP to see what this thing is all about. There's a blog entry at the creator's blog, so hopefully trackback will catch it up and report. You see, I'm writing this entry in Ecto. It's got it's quirks - some things which I find annoying (like the setup window demanding to be on top when I move to another app while it's working, not being able to tab between the title entry view and the main body of the text) - but initially it seems to be pretty neat. Well, at least if this posts up OK. It'll be interesting to see what all is contained in the depths here. I'm looking forward to playing with, and have been waiting for it's public debut. The biggest win for me is exactly what Dan Gillmor mentioned in his recent post - writing it locally (when unconnected) and then posting later. While I'm traveling, that would be a HUGE win for me (and feed my compulsive writing habit)

Sunday evenin'

Sunday's turning out to be a pretty darn good day. I've got the desktop all upgraded, backed up, and pushed to 10.3.2. Played a little WarCraft III (just to make sure it worked... yeah), and a little Wolfenstein too.

Between all that upgrading and clickity-clickity that it required, I managed to get the house cleaned up, watch my I'd-been-meaning-to-buy-this-forever copy of Akira, and picked up some dinner from Thai Kitchen for Karen and I.

Karen's been holed up on her computer most of the afternoon - she's off playing Alpha Centauri - which is a darned rare event. I'll probably have to remind her to go to bed later this evening too. When she gets into the game, she really gets into the game. Even now, I can hear her blowing something up in the next room...

hard drive upgrade

I picked up a new hard drive today - decided it was time to get a larger one that I could use to mirror out my data and keep a spinning backup.

Got a decent price on it - which sort of made it all worthwhile. $60 for 120Gb, and at that rate it made a fair bit of sense to keep it around for maintaining a backup. So now I have it installed, and I've fired up the lovely Carbon Copy Cloner to replicate all my data.

After that's done - well, it'll be time to finally upgrade the desktop to Panther.

Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

Hadn't heard of this before - but I'm glad I did. It's an online Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures.

Thanks for the link Ryan!

Shareware, Andrew Choi

Andrew Choi (who, until recently, was the emacs maintainer for Mac) has a blog entry with The Set of articles related to writing Shareware.

I'd written some time ago about how lots of folks were talking about business matters in technical article, and he had the link that I remembered (but couldn't find) to OReillyNet's articles on shareware.

It'll be interesting to see what he starts developing... I hadn't read his blog previously, but in perusing back through entries, he's clearly into programming (you'd gotta be to be an emacs maintainer), alternate text input mechanisms, and music.

IT at Apple

MacSlash has an interesting and detailed writeup of the Apple IT presentation that was given at MacWorld Expo. I caught the link from Business 2.0 article where they take some shots at Steve Job's fumbling through some of the details in his presentation. I kind of thought that was interesting, because I bet if you ask most CEO's what those components are - they won't know either, but they wouldn't admit it... Business 2.0 does rather have a point though - in terms of a sales job into IT houses, that commentary was a black eye. Not as bad as having a founder say "Dude, take your meds" to a complaining customer, but still.

I don't know if Jobs has the detail and chops to sell into an IT house, but it's pretty clear to see there's some serious potential there. The biggest fight Apple will have (in my opinion, of course) is in explaining where they're going to be able to "add value" over a free software choice (Linux, FreeBSD, etc) where the hardware costs are lower. If I were setting up a new IT shop, I'd be on the fence. Of course, I'm a fan of Apple, so I'd be willing to hear what they had to say too - so there's probably more work that needs to be done to sell that mode out. The fans (like me) should be convinced of the value and able to articulate it - and I can't do that right now. I can (and do) for Linux/Intel hardware solutions.

I generally base my value propositions on getting (and keeping!) high talent folks. In that mode, any OS will provide value - it's then just an "amplification value" that you get from an OS. I think unix (linux) based OS's give the biggest boost there. A lot of folks, however, base IT predictions on not having the brightest folks in the data center, ya know? That's the realm where "if you follow the rules, everything works. and if you don't...". IBM's realm of years ago, and now Microsoft's.

(I still despise the RS/6000 AIX SP2 administration environment - it could have been SO much better than it was!)

wind and waves

I dropped Karen off to do some teaching at Northgate today and had some time to fiddle with. I thought maybe I should do some programming (some interesting things have been churning around in my mind, wanting to get out onto at least paper - and preferably into code). In the end, I didn't do anything - which I think was a really darn good idea.

Christmas and New Years has been great, but there's been a huge amount of stress on both Karen and I over the past four weeks. Some good stresses, some bad. Some I wrote about, some I didn't. So I took a break.

I've been thinking about sailing, so I headed out to Golden Gardens and Shilshole Marina to watch the boats and clear my head. Walked along the boardwalk there, into the park, and back again. Nabbed some fish and chips, sat and just watched the water against the backdrop of the Olympic Mountains. Last summer, I dropped off the crew of the 30' sailboat because the tensions there were just getting too insane. I really didn't want to get back into that, but I think I should get back into sailing locally. I'm not sure racing is really want I want to do - the competitive aspect of it wasn't all that appealing to me to be completely honest. Interesting, but not compelling.

I think every now and then I need to just sit down and think about what I'm doing, rather than just get blindly caught up in whatever is happening (which I tend to do). I'm trying to get a little more sane about the wild amount of hours I'll burn on something. If it's really something I want to do - then it makes sense. My default has somehow been stuck on "if you're not sure what to do, work!" - so I've been finding myself coming home and immediately firing up the computer and basically going back to work. After a while, I think "Whoa dude - that ain't healthy!".

The programming projects I've been working on have been a great break, not to mention giving me a chance to practice and hone my programming skills (which I'm not doing much of otherwise). But I think something else is yet needed - something a little more physical and grounded. Maybe you don't think of sailing as "grounded", but there's a certain amount of solid reality that you're explicitly dealing with there as opposed to constantly spending your time wandering around in the realm of abstract thought.

Strangely enough, it was Apple's announcement of GarageBand that started off this whole line of thought. I haven't played an instrument (piano was it) since I was something around 14 - but I was really tempted to get this, spend the $49 on that keyboard, and plunk around. Why? I enjoy music, but my interest level was never what my brother's or mother's was. So that got me all started.

I may still do it - just on a whim. In fact, I tried to go get a demo of GarageBand today at the U Village Apple Store, but they didn't have it on the local machines yet. (traffic sucked btw). They said they would have it in next week (it was on the schedule for this saturday at 3pm) though... I'm definately going to purchase the iLife '04 update - $49 upgrade for all that stuff? Shoot, I might have done it just for GarageBand by itself.

Actually, Gus is the music man - it'll be neat to hear what he creates with GarageBand. Pressure's on!!!

DVD's for rent...

Karen and I stopped by the video store on the way home this evening, and I was looking around with sort of a new vantage point. It's really interesting that it's not just movies lining the shelves there - but the stuff that is normally considered top-quality cable programming. Things like Sex in the City, The Soprano's, Taken, 24 - the series and seasons of these are all lined up for rental. Maybe it's been like this for quite a while - I dunno, but I found myself sort of surprised.

In a conversation this evening, we were talking about the high quality programming you can find from amatuer videographers (specifically the MoveOn.org's contest for 30 second anti-bush political commercials. The stuff on HBO - those productions are monstrous and expensive... I wonder if there is a middle ground of content developers like there were in the desktop publishing market - the "indie" film makers that will start getting a little more motion with the technology giving them a huge leg up. Most of Apple's video efforts in marketing have really been towards to the lower-end stuff, but they're clearly moving in higher end markets as well.

(heh - try to get a demo of Shake in an Apple store and watch the local guys start sputtering...)

Docs

If you're into Cocoa development, there are some updates to the Documentation from Apple. Scott sent out "http://cocoa.mamasam.com/COCOADEV/2004/01/1/81032.php">a notification about it to the Cocoa-dev list, which was really cool. (Scott is one of the authors of the Cocoa book that I most frequently use as "The" detailed reference)

Probably the most interesting tidbit is the documentation on Cocoa Bindings, which is part of the new Controller layer that Apple introduced back at WWDC this past year and has made available with the release of MacOS X 10.3.

I'd seen it, and then - just to make sure - Gus also forwarded it to me. heh.

code, games, python

Gus pointed me at a neat little game, all done in python - SolarWolf. The really neat thing is that it's cross platform since it's developed all in python - they went to the trouble of making up native pieces for each of Windows, MacOS X, and BeOS...

From the readme:

SolarWolf is an action/arcade game written entirely in Python.
It is entirely opensource and free.
It is released under the LGPL license.

It features quick and smooth fullscreen 800x600 graphics. There is alpha transparent blitting, colorkeying, animated sprites, scrolling starfield background, antialiased font rendering, and more. The sound system supports multiple sound channel playback, along with streaming music support. It also supports input from keyboard or joystick.

The game and its dependencies are extremely cross platform, allowing gameplay on just about all platforms; Windows, Linux, BeOS, IRIX, Solaris, NT4, OSX, and more.

Social Software

I've been interested in social networks and this vague idea of social software. I'm not really sure how anyone's going to make money off of it, but that's probably just because I'm not inventive enough to really grasp what the potential is there. I suppose in hiring or selling directed advertising there's some potentials. Hard to say.

As it turns out, I was sort of playing around with FOAF files (I even made one for myself) recently, and then I got an invitation from John to join this LinkedIn system.

Now John had already been busy "spreading the love" as it were, so I jumped in and spent some time bothering anyone that I thought wouldn't be pissed off at getting a little spam mail from me to sucked them into the same system. Somewhere in there I figured out that the LinkedIn ID is relatively easily available, and that mine is 111675. Now I'm thinking that maybe I could render this into the FOAF system with rdf, but that doesn't seem completely fair to the guys running LinkedIn - cause you know they got to make some cash somehow, and one of the components they've locked down is searching through this web of contacts.

There's plenty more of you that I correspond with or know that I didn't want to spam (maybe that means I'm more considerate of you, or less considerate - hard to say) - so if you're into this social software thing, request a connect. It's not like it's hard to find my email address...

water, water, everywhere...

Heh, actually - that's not exactly true anymore. It's the way I felt for a while though. The basement has drained out, and because we found the hose with the busted timer mechanism, I think we have the problem reasonably licked.

Ah,

time to go blow up some friends...

Deep, deep, deep under the covers of MacOS X

I heard about this Hackers intro to MacOS X at KernelThread - a site I'd never really purused before. Man, that's a real incredible detail on the underlying OS behind the shiny surface.

Byron, Ryan, and Jeremy - if you haven't taken a gander, I'd bet you'll be interested. He does a good job showing off the details. (And duh, of course I think you should get a Mac...)

Awards

I don't usually pay all that much attention to awards, but when I saw that Sid Meier has been inducted into the Computer Hall of Fame, I thought "Yeah, that makes sense to me". Karen and I have both spent hours fiddling with his games, from various incarnations of Civilization to his more recent Alpha Centari.

He's been fantastic for both the games industry, and for simulation "games". Shoot, I still have a copy of SimAnt and SimEarth in the basement, although I don't even have an OS on which they'll play anymore.

flooding

So imagine what might happen if you have a hose running against the house foundation - not at high, but still running at a steady pace - for two days while you also have 6" of snow and additional rainfall.

Yep, our basement has 2" of standing water again. Thank goodness most things continue to reside on bricks! I found the hose completely on accident - we'd never turned it off all summer because we were using a timer. And with the last heavy frosts - bango - it broke and left it running. Of course the hose was nicely looped up against the house, so all that extra water turned into basement water.

That's not the entire story, but it's a large part of it. We had seeping and weeping from every and any crack in the foundation, but nothing of the flooding that occured from that hose. Karen's been sweeping it to the floor drain, which is frankly pretty loaded already. It's only draining slowly - and I know the majority of that volume is weeping and groundwater pressure into the drain system between our house and the neighbors. But hey - it's draining.

What a morning.

rain

The slush is all getting made slushier - devolving back into it's normal state here in Seattle, which is just plain ole' water everywhere. The storm drains haven't flooded like I expected they might, and a large number of streets are now practically clear. You can still see snow in the corners of Queen Anne, and there's 2 or 3 inches of slush-water against the curbs, but we're about done.

At first I'd been pretty worried about freezing tonight, but the front has moved through. Tonight's low is supposed to be 40, and tomorrow's high is supposed to be 48. Looks like a 10 degree variation is what we expect for the rest of the week - meaning the snow is going to be just a memory within a day or so.

It was cool while it lasted, and I'm bummed that I had to be in the office - it would have been a great snow-day. Karen made the most of it - including sledding down the counterbalance (Queen Anne Ave N) from the top to the very bottom - on a trash can lid. No bruises, none worse the wear. There were some pictures in the Seattle Times from yesterday, but I can't find them now. If you aren't familiar with Queen Anne, it's basically a 425' tall hill with a street going straight up it's side at a pretty hefty grade. I'm not sure it matches some of the Frisco style hills, but it's definately a heavy-duty Seattle hill.

crawlers...

For those of you interested in crawlers, spiders, and bot - take a gander at HERITRIX.

word for the day

wellies...

I finally made it out of the house today, the most dangerous part being getting down my front steps, which were still sheathed in ice where the rest of the world has simply turned to slush.

I walked, half sliding, down to Queen Anne Ave and Boston to catch a bus down the hill (I sure as hell wasn't walking down in slush!). Looking around, we're going to have some serious flooding issues here in not too much time. The slush is melting out now, but enough is still solid enough to clog up drains and generally make drainage out of streets a bit problematic.

So I'm sitting down at work, kicked off my soaked shoes, and wondering what it'll be like to get home tonight. God forbid that it freezes up... The forecast seems to be against that, but my own experience in the midwest would tell me it could get ugly tonight.

busses, snow, ice

Sounds like Tara is getting a bit stressed out about our lovely transit system here. I didn't even try and take the bus down the hill this morning - they closed everything off pretty early on principle - or so I thought.

Turns out they had some pretty good reasons, as the bus that Tony was on coming to work this AM jackknifed and blocked up Greenwood for a good long time. He caught another, but didn't make it into the office until about 10:30 or 11am.

Now this ice thing - that's nasty. I may just bag it and not move from the house tomorrow. Won't be as fun, but once it's melted away some I'll feel better. I've lived through plenty of ice storms, and I've got the idea that I'm not moving an inch from the top of this 400' hill if things are coated in a 1/4" of ice tomorrow morning.

long day

Watching NOVA this evening at home - I think this may be the very first time we've actually watched TV at home since we moved to Seattle three years ago. The show is the same one (so far) as what we saw two nights ago - I'd been hoping for an update, but nothing new so far.

I actually got home a little "early" from work today, but it was a day of meetings, which I find pretty tiring. More to go tomorrow too. After I got home, I had a sink I needed to clear which involved breaking the seal of the pedestal against the wall and dropping the S-trap. Not my favorite type of work, but it went relatively smoothly and an hour later I'd not only dismantled it, but had snaked the drain and reassembled the whole thing.

So it's really been a successful day, but I'm bushed.

Go NASA!!!

Heard that NASA's front page had an update, and boy did they.

This isn't your normal government institution... I'm glad they're marketing the hell out of themselves with this latest landing on Mars!

snowy seattle

Well, I went to work today - but I really didn't want to. It sounds like Karen had a wonderful "snow" day here in Seattle. Queen Anne and downtown looked pretty much the same - about 6" of lovely powder. It's a lot less friendly now though - it's raining ice pellets on top of all that pack.

Walking in to work this morning was really strange. It was 8am, and there was basically nobody out and moving. The powder was lovely to walk in though.

Watched the first half of the MacWorld Keynote, but didn't get to see what happened past the GarageBand app that they've just released. Just now getting settled at home - I'll write more later.

Musicians

It's always neat when you see a not-huge-label musician talked about by folks you know - which happened today! Tyd caught Matt Price at a show the other day and really enjoyed his stuff.

I don't know Matt really well (he's a friend of a friend sort of thing), but I've listened to a lot of his tunes and really enjoyed them myself.

What you can't say

Paul Graham has a new article out: What you can't say.

It's sort of funny, because the first time I read through it, I found myself skimming to find out what he was going to say we couldn't say. It wasn't until the scrollbar touched down at the bottom of the window that I realized he wasn't going to really say anything about what I individually should or shouldn't say in this day and age, but how to recognize a taboo - how to think subversively - or put in a more recent PR phrasing: how to Think Different.

It's a good article, and - like a huge number of his other articles - I heartily recommend it for a good read and a later "hmmm" sort of thinking when you're staring at the ceiling and laying in bed quietly so you don't wake up your wife. Oh wait, that's just me...

He end's his article with a some advice that I like to think I adhere to:

Always be questioning. That's the only defence.

As a side note, I have a number of friends who wil delightfully take up a "rediculous" stance in an argument simply in delight of the debate and conversation of driving a particular idea of theory well past it's lifetime and somewhere beyond the river styx. Although it can be frustrating, I think I value those conversations almost more than any others - simply because they are SO out there, that it really gives you that different prespective on what is "normal" - what Paul is (somewhat) calling a "moral mood".

And now for the strange bug of the evening...

Actually fixed this earlier this afternoon, but I'm still scratching my head on it.

My data model is really simple in this application. It's an array (NSMutableArray to be specific) of hashes (NSDictionary objects). Since I'm using a Cocoa Document based framework, I've overridden -readFromFile:ofType: and -writeToFile:ofType:. In implementing, I take advantage of NSDictionary's -writeToFile:atomically to shove it all out, and then +dictionaryWithContentsOfFile: to bring it back in. The dictionary that I'm writing has one key (for versioning of the filetype - looking ahead) and the object embedded is that array that makes up my lovely data model.

Well, it turns out that I was seeing a bug in my code where if I removed all data from the model (an empty document) and saved it out - when I opened that file again, I couldn't create new entries into the datamodel. Took me a few minutes with the debugger churning away and various po [datamodel items] types of commands to realize that when the array was being read back in, it appeared to be getting created as a non-mutable variety.

Now maybe I'm just smokin' something or just plain missing the obvious (always a possibility), but that one really through me for a loop. I didn't have the problem when at least 1 item existed in that array - but drop it to zero and it just stopped being friendly! The solution I used was the read in the array as normal (all zero or more items in it) and then create a new NSMutableArray with the -initWithArray:copyItems method to force it into an NSMutableArray.

That's solved the problem - everything works as expected now. Weird though.

Mars

Just in case you haven't heard or seen it yet, I highly recommend Susan's weblog for some really incredible coverage of the Mars Rover landing and subsequent news tidbits and details. I'm learning a HUGE amount from this site, and it's a far superior news source for this stuff than CNN, MSNBC, or any of the "regular" channels.

That being said, I'm pretty excited about seeing the PBS Special: MARD DEAD OR ALIVE, based on the animation I saw linked to from Joi Ito's blog. And hey, if I miss the broadcast, I can always see what they had on it at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mars/program.html - where PBS is apparently going to put an archive of the streamed video...

Coding at El Diablo

After a few runs around town for miscellaneous errands, I landed at El Diablo to do a little coding. I made some really great progress, although there's plenty more to do...

The biggest win was realizing that since I'd done some earlier components properly, adding to the application was way easier than I feared. I've added a small pile of preference options that all just slapped right in. One of those options included remembering previously open files when the application was last active. After a little digging, I found the NSDocumentController which took care of helping me pull that off just beautifully. I won't tell you the way I did it on the first round - it was ugly... and it didn't work to boot.

I also became significantly more familiar with the NSFontPanel - which can be a tricky little snot to use when you're trying to set preferences with it. Still not sure if I did that 100% correctly, but it seems to be working - and I figure there's more than one way to skin that cat.

Most of my struggles have been with the mighty NSTextView and dealing with events. I have one open in a window, but I don't try and save the data as folks type - I wait for it's textDidEndEditing delegate call. Unfortunately, it seems that when you select another window and then click into an area elsewhere on the first window, I'm not capturing the data before I update the UI. I know I haven't solved this one 100% properly, but I think I've solved the rather annoying "data loss" bug. That took a while to hunt down, and I'm still not convinced I've got it completely nailed.

Just as I was finishing up this round of feature additions, I ran into a fellow I'd seen here previously with an iBook - Aaron. Only he confused me, because he wasn't using an iBook today - but a Sony Vaio. Nice guy - apparently works for the Visual Studio team at Microsoft. His iBook is one of those that's a victim of the logic board failure - and Apple is in the process of replacing it for him. Last time I saw him in here, he was coding in XCode. He's not a huge fan of the usability of XCode on a laptop (he does all his development on laptops apparently), but he seemed to be making a go of it without too much issue. He had the UI reconfigured so that I first thought it was the old Project Builder development environment.

I was tempted to ask him if he knew Robert Scoble, but decided that was probably a bit OTT. I've only met him once myself - but I expect I'll see him at future Seattle weblogger meetups.

Headin' to Cali-for-ni-ay

Saw my grandmother off on the train this morning, she's headin' down to Cali-for-ni-ay. Fullerton, CA actually. The train was delayed here in Seattle by all of 15 minutes or so because, get this, the pipes froze! Not something you expect here in Seattle, but the outside temperature is an exceptionally chilly 28 degrees right now. Hopefully it'll warm up in the near future.

They expect some delays on the trip south once they hit the mountain ranges in northern and southern Oregon. Apparently those areas have been clogged up with snow and ice and have caused delays for the past three days running there. There's some chance they won't get nailed by the storm heading that way tomorrow - I hope they get through without too much trouble.

Mars Exploration Rover is down!

The Mars Exploration Rover is down! I'm sure more news will be available in the morning, but it's great news and wonderful detail on the landing.

handy-man me?

hrm...

Looks like I'm about to be getting more serious about being "Handyman Me" again. I've got a sink that's being a pain in the butt with clogging, and the trap is exceptionally inconvenient in it's location. Looks like I might have to drop it to get it all fixed - god I hope not. But maybe... teflon tape is your friend - that's what I keep reminding myself of.

I also need to do something with my "office" at home. That little nook of an area that it too cluttered with a round oak table to really be of any considerable use. I measured out the area and draw it up on OmniGraffle to plan for what kind of desk I might be able to put in there. I need something with shelving overhead (something that had shelving climbing the wall) because I just simply have too many books that I like to keep handy. I've got a monstrous library in the basement, but running downstairs to snag a copy of a book for a quick lookup is, well, it isn't a quick lookup.

Turns out that there's just not terribly much space there for a desk. I don't really want to think about making my own, but that may be the only option I really have. I have a table saw and a router downstairs - so it's not impossible. It's just that I don't have a huge amount of experience with finish carpentry, so I'll probably end up spending more on wood as I "learn" the hard way.

home networking

Spent a bit of the afternoon setting up some home networking. Specifically getting a Samba share set up so that either Karen or I can access a central shared place on the desktop G4 I have lurking in the nook.

Made it really easy, actually, since MacOS X 10.2 (yeah, still on Jaguar on that one) had Samba pre-installed - just had to muck a bit with a configuration file and I was good to go. At one time I'd had WebDAV set up there too - but I decided to drop that method of access because I wanted to get in with Samba to make working with printers (looking down the road) from Karen's XP box a little easier.

Maybe one day I'll convert that box to Panther, but not at the moment. It would be nice to develop with XCode on it, but I do almost all my development on my laptop - and the G4 is functioning more and more as a "house server".

Scoble

I'm back to reading Robert Scoble's weblog, even if he is a terribly prolific git with all those tiny posts.

But I'm glad I do, because 1) I caught a nice link about the next Mars lander hopefully landing safely on Mars, and I noticed that I even got referenced in his blog this evening - heh, my "cool kids" entry.

Teatro ZinZanni

We received our christmas gift from Nathan and Leah this evening - we went to Teatro ZinZanni. I'd seen the building there on 5th for more than a year, and had only been mildly curious about it. Nathan and Leah went to a show this summer and loved it - and so they decided that Evan, Megan, Phillip, Cindy, themselves, Karen and I should all attend.

It was a fantastic evening. The show itself was great, dinner was wonderful, and sitting with a bunch of friends was truly amazing. I think it was the first time Evan and Megan had met Phillip and Cindy, but everyone hit it off immediately and we settled in for a few drinks, dinner, and the show.

In some ways you could compare the event to Cirque du Soleil, but it's not 100% accurate. There were acts and performances, including some really amusing music numbers - people doing juggling, balancing, acrobatics, and of course a couple of really amazing clowns. But it was more intimate than a show at Cirque - closer anyway - and the theme of the show didn't seem as abstract and somehow lonely and sad as many Cirque shows do.

It's not an inexpensive affair, but it was a truly wonderful time - and I'd definately spend the money to go see it again. I heard the two shows in Frisco and Seattle were going to switch in April, so after April it is.

bye bye WAMU, it's that errand day

I get today off work as a paid holiday, so it's been spent entirely on errands. We had two accounts to close at WAMU, and two accounts to open at Homestreet Bank. We'd long been planning on switching banks, and just hadn't finished the process - so today was the day. WAMU had really great folks at the local branch, but the "mega-bank" type of policies that they had really just annoyed the shit out of me. We get much better service all around from Homestreet Bank, hence the move.

So two trips to bank to get the accounts set up were followed by two errands to hardware stores. I like to purchase things at the local 5 corner's hardware store (down at McGraw and 1st N) because they're neat folks and I want to support the local hardware store idea. But they didn't have the numbers I was looking for (numbers for identifying your house to the street), so while I got a few things there, I ended up having to make the march up north to Home Depot. Found the last bits there, and turned around and headed south again.

A few other miscellaneous errands in there (attaching said hardware to a house, collecting three tons of quarters - well, it felt like three tons - from a coin-op washer & dryer unit, grocery shopping, etc.) and I think we're finally done with errands for the day. End total was 5 1/2 hours. Got a lot of good stuff done though.

a little worn down today

Feeling a bit at wits end and a little worn down today. The past few days have been a little more tense than is usual around the house, with my being defensive a bit than usual as well. (I'm sure that accerbates the tension)

We've got a lot going on right now, and the holidays seem to be coming to a crashing close all too soon.

I've managed to get a little programming done this week, but really not too darn much. I'm hoping to get some more accomplished tomorrow, but who knows.

Maybe I'll go try and watch a movie or something tonight.