Story Archive - January 2006

OS Ménage-à-trois (01/28/2006)

Why join the navy if you can be a pirate? - Steve Jobs

In college, I ran OS/2, Redhat Linux and WIndows NT on my computer simultaneously. The real joy of it, was that I ran Star Office on all three of these systems using a data file on an HPFS partition. My PalmPilot was even able to sync in all three OS'es against the Star Office PIM. That meant, truly, that I could do all the work I needed regardless of which OS I was actually booted into and it worked seamlessly. It's how things where meant to play together.

I just heard about Redhat's announcement to make their flavor of Linux run on the new Intel Macintosh computers. I know everyone is expecting that the next flavor of Windows, Vista, should be able to run against the new Intel Macintoshes. Obviously OS/2 will run against it. OpenOffice runs in all three, and that means I maybe get to look forward to returning to the glory of the OS Ménage-à-trois.

Labor of Love (01/27/2006)

Even rocket scientists don't do rocket science all day. - Steven Johnson

I think since the dawn of time I have always been working on computer development project. The first labor of love program I ever remember developing was when I was taking a programming class on the Apple IIe way back in grade school (or kindergarten?). During break, and after class until we were picked up, I spent my free time developing a Logo application that drew a spaceship and a starscape and landscape underneath. Then it continually shifted the starscape and landscape to give the illusion of the rocket flying. I can't even recall how young I was when that was written. I remember impressing the instructor.

The next Labor of Love was called, "The Quest" and was written in GWBASIC on the Apple IIe in DOS 3.3. It started as a basic computerized Choose Your Own Adventure book. It's a simple program, even with just the most basic GOTO statements. I remember having the realization that I could use a variable to store if the player had a certain item (armor) and that could affect things (Dragon killing you or not). That invariably led to the Quest II, which was a full text-based RPG with life points and the ability to earn gold and keep getting better equipment and a few other things. In retrospect I'm very proud of myself, since I had yet to actually play an RPG at this point and was basing most of these concepts Atari games like E.T. that had a life meter instead of "you're hit you're dead" experience.

My current labor of love is a time tracking application. It's slick. While a whole new application isn't needed; I didn't feel like spending time building a really simple slick interface into any of the enterprise time tracker applications to support this one killer feature: if you have at least 15 minutes of untracked work time on a given day, a modal pop-up appears forcing you to track it. That's it. That's the only feature that my application brings to the time tracking application space. In fact, this application is only useful to people in a specific role like I am where over the course of day, you may need to track time against ten or more tasks. I have little hope of doing that accurately at the end of the day and no hope of doing that accurately at the end of the week. So I needed something that can annoy the heck out of me and get me to do it on going. Rock on TimeTracker of the Fast Now.

Why haven't I pushed this onto my site yet? Honestly? Because technically If I release it GPL, which is what I use, I need to provide source. Since my coworkers are using it, I don't want to provide anything that points back to this website. I like to keep the bar for finding me online slightly higher than zero. It's not too high, because you can search for my full name (I'm not sure why that works since my last is not mentioned anywhere on here, nor do I find any links with my full name pointing here.) You can also find my entry on Friendster, Orkut and lord knows what other social network I signed up for over my life that I don't really use. Though I did notice the last time I hit Friendster in the "recently viewed your profile section" my coworker Doug showed up. He's probably reading this right now. I hate you Doug.

I Take It Back (01/26/2006)

What's the point of a bunch of books you've already read? - Alan (Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town)

I loved Cory's first book, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." I really liked it. I was in the middle of my make-your-own "audiobook" phase and I recorded the first three or four chapters of it as an audio book and Cory even dropped me a note saying that he thought my recording was the best so far, suggested I upload it all to archive.org and looked forward to having it done. I got pulled away in other projects and never finished. I still strongly recommend "Down and Out." If you haven't read it, go download it or buy it or check it out from the library.

I read his second book, "Eastern Standard Tribe" and liked it less and less with every page I read. I did finish reading it, but I didn't like it. It wasn't worth the investment. When Cory takes our currently world and just turns the computer geek culture into the mainstream, it doesn't appeal to me. Somehow I found this story about people who are in IRC constantly on these little PDAs as they communicate with people in their native time zone less believable than his first book where death is cured and squatters run Disneyland.

I recently started his third book, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town." At the beginning the heard of the story was a weird guy who keeps a complete inventory of everything he has in a big database and is working on a project to provide free WiFi to all of Toronto to support free speech with this completely tangential and unimportant fact that he his father was a mountain and his mother a washing machine. Around thirty to forty percent of the way through, the technobabble became the less important part of the story and the bizarre changeling subculture took over. The story was interesting. It's worth a read, especially if you skip the any chapters that start with talk about linux distribution in a mindless babbling fashion.

Cory's batting average isn't so bad. I'll read the next one.

Keeping Busy (01/24/2006)

Successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at. - Don Marquis

I was reading a Christmas letter recently from a friend. It was sent on time, I was just late in reading it. There was a line in it that said, "I've been keeping busy". Are there really people out there that don't keep busy? Everyone just keeps busy with different things. Some people keep busy playing video games and some keep busy raising a family and some keep busy working. Everyone keeps busy.

For my entire working career a project kick-off discussion starts off with "this is a really important customer" or "this is a really important project." It never begins with "we don't care about this customer. Just let the project bomb, it won't be a big deal." So every customer is important and we all keep busy.

I've been keeping busy myself with the things that are blocking me from keeping busy sitting around at home. I'm flying nine thousand miles in a two-week span. Two weekends ago I flew to Disneyland and I developed the LA soar throat and cough I get every time I go there. What's up with that? I grew up in Sacramento, it seems like I should be pretty immune to horrible smog. Yet, anytime I'm in LA for more than two days I get a cough and soar throat. It has happened consistently so around the fourth time it occurred I stopped thinking, "why do I always get a cold when I go to LA" and started thinking, "I hate you smog city!"

Then during the workweek I flew to Arizona. Arizona was dry. Arizona was really dry. Since I flew into LA with a soar throat, it was horrible to be in such a dry environment. I drank gallons of water a day, which meant that I felt like I went to bathroom thirty times a day.

The weekend after I did a house warming party for one of my friends in Sacramento. Well, it was a joint birthday and house warming party for his first apartment. I think that means that all of my high school friends have officially moved out of their parents homes with a couple in their own houses.

Now I"m in New York on the island. The hotel has had very sketchy internet, but I've been making do. Is it breakfast time?

The Zone (01/23/2006)

I'm too tall to be a girl. I'm between a chick and a broad. - Julia Roberts

A thing about the site is that I tend to get in the zone during quiet moments of reflection when I can crank out a ton of content all at once. If I used one of those cooler publishing programs, I could set things to appear magically and crank out ten entries at once and just let it roll out day after day. Still, I take a bit of pig-headed pride in the fact that I write all the content in bizarre programs. I started as straight HTML in jEdit, then I upgrade to Pages and now I mostly write in the Gmail composer. Gmail gives me spellcheck, but it lets me keep things central so I can compose and easily have access regardless of where I am. Once it's all written, a glorious jEdit macros pulls it into my site, formats the HTML and pushes it out. Glorious.

I'm on a plane to the east coast right now, and that means I have a good six hours of time with not a lot of distractions. I've listened to two episodes of Diggnation, two episodes of the MacCast, and I'm currently listening to an episode of the Web 2.0 Show. My iPod Mini battery has been running for about three hours so far, and I'm thinking I will get another few hours out of it (in fact, it lasted a full six hours and still had some charge left when I made it to the hotel). Alas, I wasn't smart enough to bring my iPod cable to download new casts for my flight home.

There was a time in my life, not too long ago, that I spent time on a plane every week and I would usually take up that time be writing huge numbers of email to all of my friends on my Palm with the keyboard attached. A lot of people who sat next to me go a kick out of that set up. My mail communications has droped over the past few years, and there are a precious few people I still have that kind of regular chat with.

The chick sitting next to me is not big the horizontal way, but she's tall. She's probably six and half feet. So she cleverly raised the middle bar when I stepped to the bathroom and is now crowding hes arm and leg onto my portion of the seat. I am so thankful for being as tiny as I am.

Happiest Place on Earth (01/20/2006)

Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world. - Walt Disney

It was raining when the plane touched down on Saturday the 14th in LA. We went to a Museum of Contemporary Art to less the rainy day pass us by. Sunday morning we awoke to bright blue sky, counted our blessings, and went to Disneyland!

I could have sworn I haven't been to Disneyland since my father's 50th birthday, which was just a tad under a decade ago. The more I think about it, the more I feel like I have been there in between, but I can't remember precisely when, though I know I went to California Adventure last year. I've heard my friends constantly gives details on the new fast pass system and how to maximum your ride enjoyment at Disneyland. Thankfully for us, January is the off season, and all the lines were amazingly short except for one. The newly renovated Space Mountain. When we got our fast pass ticket for Space Mountain at 11am, our time wasn't until 3pm. When the other two people in our group got their fast pass at 1pm, their time wasn't until 8:30pm! Clearly, that is a ride that everyone wants to be on.

We went on the Indiana Jones ride. It had just opened when I went ten years ago and stood in line for over two hours. This time, it took less than ten minutes to zoom through the line and enjoy our jeep ride. The Tea Cups were a blast, but we didn't hit the magic formula that I remember the last time I did it when the cup spun so fast it was ready to take off and people in line had to applaud us at the end of the ride. I'll keep working on the secret of it.

Space Mountain was fantastic. The ride is now what it always should have been, keeping the dark side dark and bright side bright. Plus, all the crazy FedEx sponsorship is gone.

The fireworks were cancelled due to high wind, but we did get to see Fantasmic and had the best "seats" I have ever had for it. We were at the front of the first standing section, and all the sections in front of us were required sitting. So we did have to stand the whole time, but it was gorgeous.

We also made sure to go to Mickey's house and get our picture with him. I gave Mickey a big hug, which is a requirement. I remember when I went senior year in high school, and my group of four studly men saw Mickey and everyone just sort of stood there so I boldly walked forward and gave Mickey a hug promoting the rest of the guys to do the same.

MacWorld 2006 (01/13/2006)

You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new. - Steve Jobs

On Wednesday I had a meeting up in San Francisco, and took the opportunity to go and visit MacWorld. Thanks to O'Reilly for providing the Exhibition Hall Pass to me at the last minute, I love you guys. I hit the floor with the other Mac Geek at work (though perhaps our designer counts, but I think technical people who love Macs are cooler).

The biggest issue I had was the complete overflow of iPod accessories and paraphernalia. I half get it, since the iPod is responsible for give a whole lot of money to Apple and without it a lot of the cool Mac stuff wouldn't happen. Still, this isn't Apple World, it's MacWorld, and on top of that CES was just last week and that is the perfect place for iPods to appear.

I want to upgrade my old PowerBook G4 17" to a MacBook Pro 15" (does anyone else think that MacBook is a horrid name?) as soon as the second revision comes out. That means I actually might be waiting until next summer sometime? I decided after my tme with the current 17" that it's just too big. It's gorgeous when I'm at home and it's sitting on the iCurve while I work, but when I'm lugging it around on airplanes, it is a pain. I'm hoping the second revision will put back in an S-Video out and a FW 800.

I'm interested to play with iWeb, though I suspect it will produce some truly ghastly HTML, as most generators do. At some point I'll get past that, since I gauruntee that MS Word probably produces some pretty ghastly Word Documents, but no one really examines it to that level.

So I'll keep my fingers crossed that the next MacBook is gorgeous!

Battlestar Jeffrey (01/12/2006)

There, there. It's okay. You're not going to have to cry much longer. - Number Six

The new Battlestar Galactica is some of the best SciFi to be produced on television in a long time. I am a huge fan of space SciFi on television. I watched every one of them on broadcast TV over the past few years including Firefly, Andromeda, Starhunter and Enterprise. I watched out of obligation, and talked about them, and wrote letters to the stations. This is the kind of stuff I love.

When Battlestar came out in the UK, we diligently watched it every single week by gathering at my apartment and projecting it onto the wall thanks to Jeff's projector. Now that Battlestar is on SciFi on Fridays, we're not entirely sure how to handle it. But for the premier of the second half of the second season, it seemed right to watch it live.

We had some painful cabling issues trying to figure out how to take the COAX cable that comes out of the wall and get it into an SVIDEO for the projector and a composite audio for the stero. (When we downloaded it, those cables were easy to pull out of the MacBook.) We ended up splitting the COAX out of the wall. One cable ran to the VCR which then sent SVIDEO to the projector. The other COAX when to TV for sound, and we covered the screen with a blanket.

Glorious!

Let's Go SCU (01/11/2006)

You always think so much about making it perfect, but I was thinking, just hit it on goal. - Brandy Chastain

I had it on my plan to put in a twelve-hour day at work on Monday, then the call came in around noon with a free ticket to the biggest basketball game of the year for SCU. Free? Did you say free? SOLD!

I spent five years in the SCU Pep Band, impressive since I was only in school for four years, and I have been to more basketball games than the average alumni. Since the SCU Pep Band dissolved two years ago, I was shocked to see that the band was there that night! Shocked and awed! They were wearing the red and white striped rugby shirts that we called the "Where's Waldo?" shirt and only had for one of my four years because we despised them so much.

The SCU opponent, Gonzaga, has one of, if not the, top scorer in college basketball right now. If the ball touched him, even bounced off his elbow, it went into the hoop. It was insane. He's a good guy though. He is a role model for how diabetics can participate in athletics. He checked his blood sugar throughout the game and would take timeouts to go shoot up insulin.

We sat down the row from Brandy Chastain, which may be more exciting than sitting down the row from Donnie. Who knows? Not I. I haven't talked with her in over four years since the SCU Pep Band played at the soccer games. I didn't talk with her this night either, but the friend I was there with did.

I love screaming my lungs out at a good basketball game from time to time. This was no exception.

Hej Igen (01/09/2006)

Bork Bork Bork - Swedish Chef

We're still working on getting fully moved into the new place. I have down-sized an amazing amount of my stuff and it is continually liberating. I had far too many books I never needed to see again. I didn't need my three books on "Pascal" or my books on GWBASIC or QBASIC. They were a bit of a trophy and I'm sure twenty years from now my kids would have been amazed by the "x86 Assembly Programming" book in the same way I'm in awe of those who programmed on punch cards. Still, just telling the story is nearly as good as having it. Also, if I have one-hundred books, they are all a little special to me, but if I only have ten, each one is ten times as special.

To store the remainder of my things I went to Ikea for the first time of my life on Saturday. The store has a negative pressure system involved, for as I entered, I could feel a powerful force attempting to suck out my soul. It was one, of only two, weekends a year with a sale, and so there were roughly one-billion people in the store making it hard to move, and so stuffy I was sure I was catching all kinds of communicable diseases. I rolled up in a fetal position in the corner while my roommates bought a reading lamp and a small book shelf. We fled home to discover the bookshelf was the wrong size.

On Sunday, in an attempt to reclaim my pride, I braved the store again. Luckily, there were one only around three-hundred million people on Sunday, and I was able to by myself a gigantic bookshelf and shoe rack. I setup the eight-foot tall shelf next to my bed and had visions of it collapsing over and killing me in my sleep. I tried to rationalize it away by remind myself I would earthquake bolt it to the wall. I measured the distance to the bed and even went so far as to calculate and sketch the arch a book would need to take from the top shelf to actually reach me. It wasn't going to happen. Still, I knew I would have a hard time sleeping with the shelf looming not far away. So I moved it to the study and it will kill the computers in the first earthquake.

I Have Fog Lights? (01/05/2006)

The fog of information can drive out knowledge. - Daniel J. Boorstin

Guess what I learned. My car has fog lights! I was driving around in the rain and noticed other Prius with their fog lights on and thought to myself, "I wish my 2004 Prius had fog lights." When I parked at home, I looked at the front of my car only to discover that it does, indeed, have them!

I climbed back inside and looked around all the buttons and doohickeys until I found the one that turns them on. Now I can safely drive through zero visibility fog, right?

Something in my Eye (01/04/2006)

And then he [Samwise] bent his own neck and put the chain upon it, and at once his head was bowed to the ground with the weight of the Ring, as if a great stone had been strung on him. But slowly, as if the weight became less, or new strength grew in him, he raised his head, and then with a great effort got to his feet and found that he could walk and bear his burden. - The Two Towers

Sunday was a much needed day off. My girl and I had hot chocolate and watched the first half of The Return of the King special edition. Over the years Middle Earth has been a good companion for me. I first read The Hobbit in six grade. My first role playing game ever was Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) played on my sixth grade field trip to the Marin Headlands.

Reading through the trilogy, and the atlas, and many other supporting works occurred throughout my high school and college career. To this day I carry the complete Hobbit and Lord of the Rings on my PDA with me.

I was explaining to Gumdrop how I dislike the change in the movies so that Sam never wears the Ring and never assumes the full weight of a Ring-bearer. In the books he takes the ring after Shelob strikes Frodo, and assumes the burder of completing the quest alone. It is a defining moment for Sam where he is no longer just in support of Frodo, but assumes the quest himself and goes on. When he returns the ring, he has no desire to keep It for his own accord, but only a slight pain knowing he must again give the burden to Frodo.

Beyond that moment, though he thinks little of himself being a Ring-bearer, Gandalf tells him near the end that he too is a Ring-bearer and perhaps the strongest willed in the history of all those who bore the ring, for he is without its corruption. In the very end, after Sam's wife passes away, he goes to the Grey Havens and takes the last boat to the West.

At around this point as I was retelling why I find Sam so moving a character, I started to mist up and she had to ask, "are you okay?" "Yeah, sorry, I just get a little too emotionally moved by this particular story." I think only the retelling of certains part the Lord of the Rings and Man in the Iron Mask (the book) can actually evoke so deep a reaction from me.

New Years (01/01/2006)

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible. - Thomas Hardy

I had a party at my new apartment this new years. Both my roommates ended up being out of town, so it was just me and seven other people. There was much karaoke to be had. The ball dropped and I kissed my girl, and then I kissed everyone else in the room (except for one guy who didn't want it).

So I dug through my entries in my public and private journals and didn't find any. Did I really not make any last year? I found a couple random notes in my email history. A note to my now girlfriend sent end of January that said, "We should make a new years resolution to not be strangers" made me smile a lot.

Once again I don't really have much that is on the top of my mind as something for 2006. I'm not looking for a new job. I'm not looking to make a move on a long time friend. I drudged through my friends sites to see their new years resolutions, but didn't get highly inspired. So here are my resolutions so far for next year:

1. Take the GRE: my grandfather gave me a nice chunk of change this Christmas with a subtle hint that I should use it to further my education. It's about time for me to take the GRE. I took a mock GRE back in October of last year and did much worse than I expected. So I'm going to sign up for a prep course by the end of the week and see where that gets me.
2. Workout More: I averaged about once a week at the gym towards the end of 2005. It's not bad, but that's an average. So some months I would go four times in one week, but not at all for the other three weeks. My resolution is to go at least once PER WEEK. Ideally I like to go three times a week, and that might something to work on mid year.
3. Take a non-family vacation trip:technically I do this ever year with AX. There's a luminous trip to Louisiana this year. I want to do a trip that I plan instead of just tagging along. I was considering trying to orchestrate a trip to Australia to visit a friend. I've also considered a trip to Denver to visit an old friend. I'm not sure what I'll do yet, but something.

So just three for now. I'll add more when I think of them. Overall, I think this year is going to go very well.

I have been alpha-testing a new feature of my site I'm hoping to launch sometime in the next three weeks. Some people have said it is "teh cool" and other's have said it is lame. We shall see.