Story Archive - August 2006

Bork Bork Bork (08/30/2006)

Work is a necessary evil to be avoided. - Mark Twain

I keep track of a lot of anniversaries in my life and it gives nearly every day a personal reason to celebrate. August 30th is the anniversary that I joined the world of salaried employment. For seven years now I've slaved away in offices and cubicles and even some times from my couch. My last year in university lots of friends would talk about how excited they were to leave school and join the work force. I never shared the excitement. I knew then, as I continue to know now, that school is easier than working.

Seven years later I've been through three companies. Nothing ever beat the honeymoon effect of my first job at my first company. A month after I started I said very plainly, and very honestly, to one of my best friends "I have finally found a place where everyone else is smart and eager." My enthusiam was slowly away as I worked with more and more people who were neither smart nor eager.

Seven years feels like a long time. It's longer than either highschool or college, but not quite longer than both combine. I have a extensive and winding road of work out in front of me for many years to come. With any job there are good days and there are bad days. I keep trying to have more of the former.

I Love This Place (08/27/2006)

We call them Doobie Snax. - Jay (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back)

Sometimes you see something that makes you do a double-take. Than you take a picture with your camera.

The Mystery Machine

Come Monday [Well, Sunday] (08/25/2006)

I can't help it honey, you're that much a part of me now. - Jimmy Buffett (Come Monday)

The video I was working on last Sunday, that went *poof* on me after the first round was a slideshow of pictures from all the cutey things that Gumdrop and I have done over the last while. She had a birthday on Thursday and had refused to give me the Tokyo mailing address, for fear things would get lost in the mail, so I needed some gift that could make it there in the form of bits and bytes. When the idea sprung to my mind, I knew it was great. I made it on the weekend she was away, and it was theraputic to spent a few hours reminising over all the things we've done together in such a short time.

My new camera arrived this week. The memory card that came with it holds five pictures on the standard size setting. Of course, it doesn't use the same memory card as my previous camera. Why would it' It's not like my previous one is the exact same make from a few model numbers ago. It also doesn't use the same memory card as my PSP. I suppose that makes some sense, since it's not a Sony. It does use the same memory card as my ancient Palm m505. Crazy.

I bought a table for my patio last weekend. I like to spend my evenings sitting outside reading and sipping a little glass of cheap wine. It's much easier to do when I can set it on a nice table rather than balance it precariosly in the cup-holder of my lawn chair.

Just Me Relaxing

As I was reading the paper today one of the cute neighbors walked by. She smiled in passing, then paused for a moment, sighed and said "wow that looks relaxing. I wish I could do that." "It's quite relaxing. I just so happen to have an extra chair and there's plenty more wine." (Hey, my girl has been over five-thousand mlles away for nearly two weeks, I'm allowed to accidentally flirt a little, right') "Sorry, I have to go clubbing tonight." She wandered off down the street. Good for her, I thought. Go find boys her own age.

Don't Be Dumb (08/21/2006)

The length of this document defends it well against the risk of its being read. - Winston Churchill

Always backup your hard drive. I do this. It's not an off site backup so the day my apartment burns down and destroys my laptop, my desktop and thumb drive backups I'm going to be sad.

Always save you work. I used to be excellent at this saving everything I worked on around every five to ten seconds. I think it's all of the Google Web applications that have made me lazy. Every single of them auto-saves my work all the time. Some of the applications don't even present you a way to programmatically save.

So while I was working on my iMovie project on Sunday I was lazy and forgetful and didn't save. I had put the entire thing together over a long two hour session. I was ready to export to a movie file when I saw "The application iMovie HD has unexpectedly quit." I have some expectation of Rosetta apps dying on me, but to actually have a pure Apple-written application go was a shocker. I re-opened the application to learn that iMovie is kind enough to automatically backup each and every clip you have created, but it does not backup the time line. So I had no clue what order my forty clips that I had created went in.

I cried. I went out to get fresh air. I came back and started it all over again. I cranked it out much faster the second time through but it was disheartening. So, stop reading this, and go save that document open in the other window.

I'll Take One Please (08/17/2006)

Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest.

There are food conessuers in the world that love the dining experience. These people will spend hours finding the fanciest restaurant and brave a long wait to get to enjoy select tidbits of delicacy. I am not one of those people. I am even less of one of those people during the work week for lunch.

When I worked in SF, I usually had a friend buy food for me. I'd give him a couple bucks and he would pick something. I gave him no direction on the process and he quickly learned that I just didn't care. If he thought it was edible, I thought it was edible. It was a great deal. I always thought it would be fun to have a place I could just walk in an order "one regular." They would serve you something. It would vary day-to-day, but you could always just order the same thing for the same price and get a decent meal.

My team at work has a great lunch system. We jump into my car and start driving towards our standard eating location. If someone in the car tells us to go somewhere else before we reach the normal place we go there instead. It's easy and predicatable. Today we took two friends from another group who didn't get the system. "Ohh, let's not go to the usual place." I just kept driving. You can't complain without offering an alternative. The vegetarian finally came up with a mediteranean place he wanted to go and we went to a place in downtown San Carlos. Parking was a challenge and restaurant was out of seating. The food was tasty, but I'm not if the effort equalled the reward.

Back in the olden days, I heard my company brought in lunch every day. The problem was too many people were too finicky about the food and ruined it for everyone else. Depress.

Steadily Forward (08/16/2006)

Your future is whatever you make it. So make it a good one. - Doc (Back to the Future)

I had the most incredible sensation at work at about 8pm today. I realized that I had nothing left to do. I mean, there were still plenty of things that could get done and I was chary of going home, but there wasn't a single deliverable I have left do this week. It was weird. Mostly. Granted, by the end of the day Wednesday I had already put in my forty hours, but it just felt odd. I got home at a decent hour and my place is empty of roommates. My girl is gone and I had some moments to just be alone and clean up the clutter in my mind and have myself a good sit.

How many times have you read the articles that people have more "stuff" than ever but aren't statistically any happier' I read it all the time. I always think that the human condition of happiness isn't about the destination so much as the journey. It's cliche, but it feels right to me. They'll be no point in my lifetime I can imagine everything set just how I want when I can say, "yes I'm done. I don't need anything to change." Change is the goal.

There are a lot of those little items in my life that have no firm goal. I can see where they might be a year from now and five years from now and decades from now. They will constantly evolve. I'm not sure if the evolution will always be an improvement, but the difference and the change is a lot of what goes in to making is special.

For a long while I watched my brother live in a perpetual honeymoon always doing amazing things for six to twelve months before moving on to the next thing. Every time it was a new adventure and the adventure never stayed around long enough for it to become mundane. I, on the other hand, take great joy in expected and consistent. It's not stagnation, but just an evolution slow like molasses. I spent five years at my first company out of school and I would have spent many more there if not for unfortunate popping bubbles.

I can't wait to get my new camera. I was one of the first adopters of digital photography back in the day when my K25 could only take 320x240 photographs. I want to have more pictures and more memories stored. It's amazes me what our digital society will produce. One-hundred years from now there will be a ridiculous number of photographs and journals from our time, and a many factors more being produced then.

Else it Gets the Hose Agains (08/15/2006)

I'm still a geek on the inside, that's the important thing. - Al Yankovic

The girl is gone for two weeks. Yes it's lonely and depressing and I've decided there is only one way to cope: Geek Out! The DVD player is all churning out Babylon 5, Forbidden Planet, Farscape, Soyleant Green. Of course, when I mention these things to her on our calls she is disappointed she is missing out on all the SciFi fun.

I took a break from all the annoying technology work I do during the week to do technology fun over the weekend. When I first setup ChaosServer seven years ago he was a little P200 with MMX running over an always-on 33.6 dialup connection. ChaosServer has graduated with upgrades a few times and this weekend he tossed aside his Windows architecture and moved over to OSX Server. Now he is GLORIOUS!

The basic setup of OSX Server was easy. With it I got apache/Tomcat/jBoss/mysql all pre-installed with the operating system. That made it trivial for me to port over my basic web server and the few little WebApps that were running on the old boy. My web apps are just Java EARs, so all it took was a simple copy. It's better than the old server, because I had never figured out how to get the mod_jk working correctly in my Windows environment, but it just required a simplecheck box in the apache gui config this time around. MySql threw me for a loop, because it had internet connections turned off by default so the JDBC driver couldn't connect. I know how to change that configuration, but it was hidden way down inside the LaunchD plist file instead of in the normal my.cnf of mysql startup script.

I set up Open Directory, with full Kerberos support, and added all my users into that. There was another trick here, since Kerberos requires the domain to DNS-resolve to server's IP address, and it resolves to my router. A quick entry in the host file cleared that up. It's shareable over LDAP. I clicked anothercheck box for WedDAV and can restrict access to accounts inside the Open Directory. Isn't that awesome'

There's full ssh/sftp support, as expected, and it's way better than the crummy cygwin openssh that was installed on the old server. Finally I have a proper file system that can support all my kanji file names. No more crappy translation between UTF-8 and windows bizarro format.

I ordered an encloser for the old HD so I can attach it to the new server (I bought my new camera too!). Next I need to get the mail server setup and Squirrel mail! Word.

Green Gossip (08/09/2006)

The day I made that statement, about the inventing the internet, I was tired because I'd been up all night inventing the Camcorder. - Al Gore

My Pi/2 discount was going great on Amazon until the day I went to buy the new digital camera. That's when it said it was gone. So now I have sit back and keep doing A9 searches every day until it re-appears. All that discount has done for Amazon is made me delay a few purchases while trying to earn back the discount. I'm sure that's not the real plan of it.

I am a constant fan of the ValleyWag, the Silicon Valley tabloid. Just a few days ago they discussed that Algore is so exciting, that he makes blockbuster movies of him giving PowerPoint presentations. Any Mac user who has seen the movie would be upset. I know I was gleeful to watch all the scenes of Algore putting together the presentation on the 17" PowerBook G4 in Apple Keynote. I wrote ValleyWag. They made the correction. Life is better for me and the former next president.

Black and White (08/07/2006)

On the one hand, shopping is dependable: You can do it alone, if you lose your heart to something that is wrong for you, you can return it; it's instant gratification and yet something you buy may well last for years. - Judith Krantz

I am not in that percentage of the population that enjoys to shop. I don't like shopping for clothes. I don't like shopping for cars. I don't like shopping for electronics. If I know what I want, I just want it cheap. If I don't know, I don't enjoy figuring it out, I'd rather have another smart person figure it out and tell me.

I'm really bad with clothes shopping. While my friends with older siblings would complain about pass-me-downs, I was always happy to get them. My brother could figure out what grunge, gangsta, craziness was in style, and then I would get to wear it a few years later. I was always just retro. I wore clothes until they fell apart and wore them even longer. My Dockers would get holes in the knees from wear and tear and I'd keep going. I wasn't allowed to wear torn pants in my private high school, so I would duct tape them together on the inside. That's fashion.

I've been realizing all summer that I don't have any good shorts. I have only two pairs, both hand-me-downs from my brother from high school. They are, shall we say, a little out of fashion. So over the weekend, when the girl needed to go shopping, I went along to try and find some shorts. Unfortunately, I live next to the standard shopping small. So my choices for clothes are places like Macy's, A&F and other such posh and frightening places.

There were a few pair at Macy's on sale rack that looked and fit well. The price check put them all at about $45+. The problem with not shopping is that I have no internal gage to know what things should cost. Is $45 a lot' How would I know' I didn't buy anything. The next day I went running over to Target and found some good stuff around the $15 price point. That sounds a lot nicer to me. Still, how would I know'

I also replaced some of my black and white clothing. I tend to own clothing for a very long time and the whites become not so white and blacks become not so black. I forget this fact. My eyes just aren't used to it. So when I opened up my new white shirts and white socks I was blinded. Really' That's what white clothing looks like' Crazy.

Just some Redundancy (08/06/2006)

Nick plays a corrupt politician, which is kind of a redundant statement. - Alan Rudolph

I feel redundant when I talk about working a lot. I work a lot. I think most people who work in the insanity of the internet world in the silicon valley, even in this date and age, work a lot. It's not always necessarily a bad thing. One of the reasons great things are often done by the young is that all their energy and passion goes into work instead of all the little things involved with family.

I recently turned down a job offer. At least I postponed it. I foresee hard work ahead of me for the next three months, but instead of fold, I've chosen to double down. They'll be a point in my life when I'm not willing to sacrifice a little personal time for achievement at work. I guess I'm not quite there yet. The girl is looking at heading to Japan for a bit on her work path. I'm sad to see her go. It's no secret that one of the biggest things I would like to have more of is time with her.

I'm always waiting to see what the future holds. My plans are good. Who knows if they'll happen. I spend every night plotting while I wait to fall asleep.