Rhonabwy

I’ve heard you keep track of my crazy hopscotching about through this blog. Since I have your attention, if you’re unhappy where you work – let me know. I’ve had at least three different folks inquire as to your current whereabouts (which I don’t even know) and happiness level – looking or thinking about recruiting you.

Tonight John and I took in V for Vendetta at the Cinerama. Damn, that was a good one. I’d love to go see it with the gang from IATS, it would have been a perfect fit. Hugo Weaving has now more than impressed me with an incredible display of diction and enunciation. It was incredible. He was good in Matrix, better in Lord of the Rings, and this was (to me) his crowning event with voice. Just amazing.

I think Karen would even like the movie – although not the violence. There were some scenes in there that I’m sure would horrify/terrorize her, but I suspect for the core of the movie she would really get into it. Maybe one day, but I’m not going to recommend it to her for a theatre seating (although I do recommend the Cinerama for a good show in Seattle…)

Today I’m doing a fair bit of code archeaology, and at the moment I’m wishing that I had a monitor the size of a drafting table.

Back in Missouri, I had this amazing drafting table. It was freakin’ huge – some relic from a military base that I’d received from a friend’s father. The writing area on this thing was larger than some dining room tables. I still think of that monster fondly – even though there isn’t any possible way that we could even fit it into our house.

But digging through all these files – reading, cross-correlating, driving into the details – man, I need a lot more than a 15″ monitor. Paper is scattered all over my desk with notes as I’m going, and that is about the only way to keep it all straight. But a monitor the size of a drafting table? Yeah, that’d about do it.

It’s been almost a week now that I’ve had the RAZR, and I’ve got to say – that upgrade was really worth it. The new thing is stylin’, a great toy (I just learned that I can send AIM and/or Yahoo IM messages from it), and technologically nifty. I’m looking forward to setting it up with Bluetooth and seeing what interesting trouble I can get into with that.

What I didn’t expect was how much better the reception would be – even in my house – and how cleaner the voice quality was over the TDMA phone that I used to have. Don’t get me wrong – cell phone reception at the house is still terrible. But now there’s a chance of me hearing part of the conversation without having my right arm, ear, and head all glued to the southern facing window in my dining room in a desperate bid to get any reception.

I don’t know how much I’ll use the internet functionality. I purchased a minimal package to check it out – we’ll see where it goes from there. If I use it – great. If not, that’s OK too. Sending SMS messages from the phone – that’s just crappy. Anyone who says that is intuitive is just broken in the head. It’s *doable*, but so was lugging around those “portables” in 1980. Yeah, you can do it. But why on earth would you want to?

The biggest problem I’m having with it is knowing where to keep it. I don’t want to scratch it up against keys, change, or whatever. I dare not stick it in my back pocket, or it’ll die for sure when I sit down without thinking. So far, a breast pocket on a jacket is about my best bet. I’m sure I’ll work something out though.

I saw the notice about the Sun Grid thing being available. So I figured I’d check it out. I’ve an account from way back, but I don’t remember the password. Yet at https://www.sungrid.net/GridPortal/GridPortal/RegisterIdentifyAction.do – there’s NO PLACE TO RECOVER YOUR ACCOUNT.

You dorks, fix your bleedin’ app.

I’ve oversaturated myself. It’s time to step away from the keyboard. Just one of those things, I guess. I’ve been in complete sponge mode at work for the past three – or is it four? – weeks now. I learn pretty damn fast, but even still I’ve reached some sort of threshold.

I’ve been working on a presentation for the XCoders group tomorrow, and I found myself just staring at the screen for 30 minutes tonight. Time to call a break for a while. At least I have the gist of it, even if its not at all what they’re expecting…

Last evening and tonight were an adventure in compiling. I was getting sqlite3 and pysqlite installed on my desktop Mac, and for some reason the pysqlite library was just being a complete pain in the butt. I installed python 2.4 and sqlite3 from DarwinPorts, but pysqlite needed to be version 2.1.3 to match up properly – meaning I had to install it from source. No biggie – only when I installed it on the desktop, I kept getting an error about a missing symbol being referenced.

I still don’t know what I missed, but I ended up copying the egg I created on my laptop (that’s a python binary distribution in a zip-file kinda format) over to the Desktop, and it solved the issue.

Gus suggested that I had my LD_LIBRARY_PATH borked, which may well have been the case. The only other thing I could spot was that DarwinPorts put Sqlite3.3.4 on the desktop, and the laptop has the slightly older 3.3.3. Eh, weird.

I still don’t quite grok the whole python “egg” thing, but I think the binary distributable format concept is really nice. Kind of a java “jar” concept, and obviously the portability made my life a touch easier this evening.

heh – this time I don’t mean the downpour kind. There’s a sushi place in Wallingford called Rain that opened up a little while back that I’d been meaning to try, and finally did. I took Karen to Wallingford this evening, so I stopped in and checked it out. It’s a nice place. A little on the pricey side, the staff was very friendly, and they tended towards spicy offerings.

I finally got the phone working with viewing things on the internet – turns out the recommend procedure to get it online was:

1) turn off the phone
2) take out the battery
3) remove the SIM card
4) let it sit for 5 minutes
5) put the SIM card back in
6) put the battery back in
7) turn on phone

Viola!

I love it when rebooting the system solves the problem. Heh.

Not sure how useful this whole “browsing with phone” thing will be – the RAZR didn’t seem to work looking at my blog, so I guess it has a pretty limited browser mode (WAP or something). I did manage to mail a picture I took with the phone to myself though. Not too bad. Its not nearly as good as the digital camera I keep in my pocket, but it’s reasonably acceptable. And it looks like it’s pretty easy to use. I still remember Jeremy sending my pics from Byron’s wedding since I couldn’t be there. I thought that was pretty cool.

I guess I’ll have to find some a few mp3’s and set up ringtones and such now. All the good fiddling that you can waste hours with – the best kind! I’ve already sync’d the phone to the iBook, and that worked pretty well. I do wish it hadn’t created a separate contact for EVERY phone number – I’ll make a more limited list and sync that in the future I think.

Enough for now – back to my sunday fiddling.

I just ran across Caffeinated and Unstrung, a web site (wiki) dedicated as ‘A Guide to Seattle’s Free Wireless Coffee Shops’. Neat website, and a pretty darn good guide (freely editable) by the locals who use the shops. They also have a neat link to a Google Maps “Seattle Wireless Coffee Shops” link. Neat!