Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Pseydtonne's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
6:16 pm	"The delicious grace of moving one's hand" -T. Leary I had caffeinated coffee this afternoon -- half a cup at 2:30, the other half at 4:30. It worked its magic and got me going. It was also pure Sumatra beans, so it had a very good smell and made me miss unadulterated coffee. However I must stay sane, so this was a one-off. Now I'm listening to trance or ambient or whatever you call the mix on SomaFM's Space Station. I've been listening to and enjoying this genre of music since college but I still couldn't tell you what defines it other than Strong Bad's rules for techno plus actual tonal qualities and a slightly slower beat. I was banging away at a training lab issue, creating a thing and taking notes about it. Suddenly it felt like my keyboard was a few storeys away from my eyes. My right hand was itching my eyebrow at that moment, so I thought it was on a ledge high above the fray of the keyboard traffic. I've been experienced, so I'm not unfamiliar with these kinds of spatial disconnects. I know how to come back from one instantly or allow it to roll, how to work with someone dealing with one, what is really happening versus what I'm conceiving of the event. One part of me said, "oh cool, free trip!" Another part said, "you gotta be kidding, from caffeine and space music? Couldn't this happen a couple hours from now, when I'm not trying to finish some work. I've been in this office since 8 and now it's 6." The next part of me said, "hey, don't get all judgmental. Let's just write this experience down, savor it a little and then finish up the real work." Then I realized how much more in shape my ego is compared to when I was 17. It's not the master of the house -- it's just mediating desires, keeping the id from setting fires while keeping the superego from starting ice ages of guilt. P.S.: A few minutes after I finished this post, my right hand decided to pretend it was breakdancing on the table. Some part of me liked the feel of the matte finish on the desk and wanted to play with that. It's nice to have a four-year-old moment, so long as no one's watching and you know it's just the harmless side of neurochemical tics. P.P.S.: I'd better go home. My right hand is way too interested in feeling the textures of things for me to absorb the manual I'm reading. Current Mood: I like my hands Current Music: The Jimi Hendrix Lightswitch Rave (Comment on this)
10:48 am	Which expensive battery will die first? My iPod is now three years old and my cell phone is four. Wow, four? Maybe it's only three. I want to say I bought it the same weekend I worked my first weekend shift at IBM Rational, which would've been September 2005. However this phone wasn't introduced until April of 2006 according to one web site I was reading. Hmmm... maybe they're about the same age. Neither has a particularly replaceable battery. I know how to spudge open an iPod and in theory I could replace the battery myself. The cell phone has a battery I can pop right out but the model is so out of date that I bet it'd cost more to replace it than it would to get a new phone on a two-year plan. In both cases I've wanted to upgrade, so I would. The first one to die is of course the first one to be replaced immediately. No, I'm not interested in merging these objects -- I hate the thought of having two of my methods for sanity (calling people to meet up with them and putting on music to tune out the voices in my head) merging into one fragile, taxed object. I beat up my cell phone but I'm a lot more polite with my iPod. Although the best practices for rechargeable batteries vary by chemical composition, I have used a simple approach. The iPod seems to age when you let it discharge completely, so I tend to get it on the charger the moment it shows red. The phone has a less granular metering display (three bars, two, one, flashing and beeping every twenty minutes for a couple hours to drain it even faster) so I get it on the charger as soon as it reaches one bar. Also, it doesn't matter as much if I'm stranded and my iPod is out of juice but it'd really matter if my cell was dead. But hey, now I can afford to be amused by this. I know which iPod I want (Classic, which has 160 GB of space) but not which cell phone. I'm not going to leave TMobile since I like having international coverage (GMS), so I need to wade through the pile of quad-band flip or slide phones. Anyone got advice? Current Music: Smothered in Argyle - "The Still Life of Sara Evans" (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, November 16th, 2009
10:21 pm	Can this decade be over already? I went to the Daily Show web site a few minutes ago. They had a decade-in-review as the startup clip. I watched the 2000 piece -- three minutes of a significantly younger Jon Stewart. As soon as the next clip started and the number 2001 showed up, I clicked away. Is anyone else uninterested in reflecting on the last ten years as a global or national event? Oh sure, I've had lots of great times during them. I got laid plenty, I traveled a lot, I moved out of my home town and I make five times what I did in 1999. However, I have no desire to hear about the 9/11 decade until they invent a new kind of transportation. That's about all I can see in my mind as I think about this decade: Bush got elected, 9/11, and then... we elected Obama but we're in a recession. At least my computer is faster and my car is really good in blizzards. Normally I am a complete fetishizer of year-in-review crap. I'll watch those pointless specials until I forget there is actual news happening. Dang I'd punch a busload of nuns in the tits if it'd prevent any review of the Aughties. Current Music: Great Big Sea - "The Old Black Rum" (2 Comments |Comment on this)
5:55 pm	One politician, two planets I try to read the Montreal Presse every weekday to keep my Quebecois French in shape. Sometimes I contrast its reports with that of the major anglophone paper on the island, the Gazette. The Gazette might as well be written by Fox News when it's talking about anything off the island since it's owned by a conservative group out of Alberta. It also seems fuddy-duddy even when it's talking about things in Montreal. The Presse isn't lefty either -- it's just the main paper. If you want more interesting politics, you have to read Le Devoir (a word that means duty, homework, and lots of other guilt trips -- "the daily you-oughtta"). Today was a wonderful day for wordless contrast. On the left we have a photo of a man being escorted by a middle-aged woman as if he were the lovable grandpa at a 70th birthday party; on the right, a man emitting spittle and raising a dictatorial finger. If I tell you the man was behind the 1995 plebiscite referendum for Quebec to secede from Taiwan the Rest Of Canada, perhaps you can guess which paper presented either photo: I could pretend that when I was younger, media bias had more to do with normal versus chrome cassettes. I guess it's just on the sleeve these days or I'm too old not to see it. If you want extra fun, right-click on each photo to read the properties. (Hey lightfixer, did I get that latter one right?) -geek gadfly, Ps/d Current Mood: amused Current Music: Ok Go - "It's a Disaster" (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 15th, 2009
2:47 am	Yeah, I went anyway I was making some progress with the files. I even found a better file manager for Windows that does a lot of what I want: Free Commander. The crappy Windows file manager, which hasn't changed since Windows 95 and has barely improved since Windows 3.1, is to Windows what the one-button mouse has been to the Mac world: a dirty pustule that should have been lanced a long time ago (oh sure, Macs have multi-button mice and the new touch thing -- but only for the desktop). The point of a file manager is to move files. Why can't I do that in Windows without opening two managers and finding places to put them on the screen? Oh sure, it's only winbutton-e to open one but it'll sit right on top of the one I was just using. You can tell from this talk that I probably needed to get out of the house by this point (3:30 pm). That's when I got a ping from proudlyfallen and I decided to fight the rain and head up to Easthampton anyway. I got there for the last few minutes of the sale, but I found some cool stuff. For example I now own a CD holder that says "pr0n" on the front. Then I had dinner with proudlyfallen and her boy in Amherst. Tuna steak is an easy way to my heart. I had the chance to play with dogs and cats, tell stories... all good. I took route 9 east back to Mass Pike. I didn't check the map and wound up taking the long way around. Instead of taking 202 to 181 I stayed on 9 until route 32. If you look at this on the map you'd see two sides of a squat triangle and a third side that looks a lot more obvious. I didn't realize how close I was to the Quabbin until I checked a map later. What kept me alive on the long drag home (actually, the trip up was a lot more annoying)? Random radio stations fading in and out. One offered a piece of cheese so horrifying... Thus before I sleep, I offer you this insane piece of torture. Oh, it's safe for work... but your reaction may not be. Current Music: Ann Margaret singing about Canada Dry (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
1:57 pm	Maybe it'll clear up My plan for today was to go to Easthampton (Western Mass, southwest of Northampton) and check out the Topatoco Open House. It's raining outside, it takes about two hours to get there and I'm not sure any of my other Noho friends are up for hanging out. Today is feeling more and more like a shop-at-home day. Thursday and Friday at work went a lot better than Wednesday. I was productive, I learned things, I beat up real and virtual computers and explained what I learned. By Friday I could sense the learning curve's angle turning upward. They like me and they aren't being sarcastic. It's been a while since I felt this good. I visited fangirl715 on Thursday evening while she was still in MGH. I lent her my small lappy, since she hadn't had Internet access in days and no one deserves that fate in a loud, sterile hospital. One might actually take the TV seriously after too long... I also got my second paycheck on Friday. Since I've already rid myself of three old computers and a few small boxes of semi-computers, I felt ready to research an upcoming tower purchase. Actually, I'm not planning to buy a tower since I've got a couple emptiess -- just the CPU, matching motherboard, video card and RAM. If I can keep the price of the individual components lower than a full desktop machine, I'll consider it a victory. ( Historical geeking... ) Yeah, the rain just cranked up a notch and Storrow Drive is flooded. I'm going to research motherboards and CPUs instead of heading out. Today will also be good for sorting ancient hard drives for disposal. I'll start with the older, smaller drives since they're usually the heaviest and have the least number of items. Current Mood: It's clearing up already? Current Music: Fuzzmuzz - "A.M." (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
4:34 pm	Bleh for the day I cannot concentrate on anything today. I sit down to read something for work and find my mind wanders instantly. I didn't have this problem yesterday. I must be more tired than I thought. The best I've done so far is to read a few articles in French, get angry enough to write two-thirds of a comment and sign up for a newspaper's blogging features. Since that paper is in Canada and wouldn't accept an American zip code, I gave Santa Claus's postal code (H0H 0H0, in the Montreal central processing office). Forty-five minutes until I leave. I'm bringing my work reading home in case I feel human after a nap. Current Mood: lethargic Current Music: Blake Babies - "I'm Not Your Mother" (Comment on this)
9:03 am	Why am I awake? My official shift is 10 to 6:30. Since I'm in training and we don't directly answer phones, it's variable. This morning I was supposed to have a training teleconference and Webex session at 9. I was going to go to bed early. Then I got a phone call from a friend needing an XP install disk. Next thing I know I'm hanging out with cool people in Somerville, diagnosing hardware problems on a giant old laptop and installing XP while maintaining hipness. My friend had just bought a USB wifi stick. For once the installer disk for it came in handy as we turned on networking and upgraded this beast of a laptop to SP3 without having to run a cat5 line from another room. Note to self: get a USB wifi stick for my traveling tool kit. Even when I have wifi, not every other machine does when it's shot. We all wound up back at my house to grab a MacOS X.4 install disk and a PCI wifi card for another machine. Then I had to drive everyone back to Somerville and drive back home to Brookline again. The point is that I got to bed late -- 1:30. I had to be up at 7:30. Thanks to half the city getting a holiday, I faced no real traffic and got to work at 8:45. Then I found out the developer in Pune (a city in India on their west coast, near Mumbai) got feverish and went home early. Also, half of his office is out because of Cyclone Phyan -- I guess they're called typhoons in the Pacific, hurricanes in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico but cyclones in the Indian Ocean. The upshot is that the meeting has been moved to the same time Friday. I gotta go through this again, when there is guaranteed to be traffic. I must go to bed early on Thursday -- and tonight, for that matter. I may give into the demons of caffeine today. I get so proud about not doing it but... yeah, pride won't turn my keyboard into a pillow. I don't feel tired as much as I feel like I'm gripping onto the edge of my desk. Oh, whine whine whine. I have no real problems if this is my problem -- oh, I can go home early since I clocked in early. Meanwhile, poor fangirl715 is back in the hospital so my thoughts are on her. Also, Prince Charles went to Montreal. Some folks got their heads thrumped by the cops for protesting it. The Prince met Cirque du Soleil. 80% of Quebeckers think the monarchy is outdated, according to the Montreal Presse. Mind you, the same newspaper printed an editorial that institutional bilingualism is hurting the French language in Quebec... and used a stock photo of a road sign in Ontario to make their point. The sign is directing people back to the U.S., which may be the bigger point or a sarcastic counterpoint -- maybe that's the layout department rolling its eyes at the columnist. The more I think about the article, the more I think the photo is an eye-rolling. The author claims it's a waste of government resources to send two pamphlets to homes letting them know about H1N1 vaccinations, one in English and one in French. Oh c'mon! There's an actual health problem out there with a preventative solution readily available and you want to complain that advertising for it is a waste? Sheesh. "This is Quebec and we all speak French." No, it's Quebec and a million citizens out of seven million are still unilingual anglophones -- well, une-et-demie. If you've lived in Quebec long enough to get junk mail, wouldn't you have to be able to read bills and jury duty notices in French? Heck, try reading a Montreal parking ticket without knowing French. For those that want to know how I know that's not exactly a sign in Quebec: the shape of the route number on the sign is the base of a trapezoid. That's the symbol for a secondary or county road in Ontario. Since the digit itself is looking like a 3, this is probably a sign in Windsor where highway 401 ends and brings traffic into Detroit. Okay, enough rambling -- be sure to remember Flanders Field, where Ned Flanders' late wife could be resting. Rod and Tod will be thinking of her too. Current Mood: maybe I'm in gear now... Current Music: Midnight Oil - "Armistice Day" (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
5:02 pm	My default icon is appropriate I had to order a headset for work today. I've never actually had to perform my own office equipment purchasing before, unless you count my thing for slightly nicer pens and fine-tip dry erase markers. I honestly thought they were kidding when they told me this. Since my work life has been a series of headsets, I've often used the quality of the headset as a marker of the employer. For example, it took an entire year of negotiation at The Bank for me to get a headset, even though my job involved a couple hours of phone calls per day. Once I got the headset, my productivity rose as I had expected. When I was in training at what was then AT&T Broadband, they handed each of us our own headsets, still in the box -- it felt like a blessing. I got really good at putting my phone on my chair or on a ledge so I could run around the pit while still taking calls. This helped me fix other people's problems and get them sales while I got mine. When that job moved to outer space and I commuted with it, I got a discount on someone's old wireless headset. This was before Bluetooth, so it had a weird battery pack with a broken clip and a funky charger. Still, it made my crappy end run at Comcast tolerable. When I was at IBM, I found a headset at my desk and scrounged up a binaural later on. These were Plantronics headsets with the extension tubes, on-wire mute buttons and very clear sound. Classy! HPVL didn't have headsets. We just picked up the phone. Since it happened so infrequently (a couple times a week), it didn't matter. Now I am dealing with what feels like... libertarianism. I was only able to scrounge a broken headset, so I had to make a purchase. Oh sure, it's not my money -- but my boss didn't realize how cheap these things aren't. I wouldn't want a cheap thing anyway. I have to absorb the customer, be involved. I can't do that if I can't hear nor can I be heard. I enjoy feeling like a 1920s Ma Bell operator and a corporate raider had a baby. I am The Operator, capable of making things operate for the first time or the last. I talk people down from ledges and get them back to work. Thus I want to feel as comfy as possible while I listen and test. And hey, my company got a discount on a decent wired headset with sound controls. If only my extension were reachable from the outside... -back to learning, Ps/d Current Mood: amused Current Music: Beastie Boys - "She's On It" (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, October 30th, 2009
2:32 pm	6d10 My employer gave me an RSA SecurID fob. It's a stick about the size of my thumb with a small LCD screen. Every thirty seconds or so it generates a new six-digit number. It also shows a set of tick marks to provide a relative time until the next number is generated. I've never had one of these before. I've read about the three guys behind the technology but I've never had the chance to use it. While the technology is fascinating, the actual use of it is kinda dull and it's supposed to be that way. I pull up a tool, type my username, then type my password and the six digits I see on one line and I'm in my corporate network no matter where I go. If that were all I saw, I'd barely notice this stick. Nevertheless, this thing is an OCD victim's dream! Any time I want a new number to attempt to factorize in my head, I can look down and see "330985" or perhaps "063098". This rules! I have a stiiiiiiiick! Oh dude, just think: I don't even need to flip a coin anymore. I can look at the stick and the odd or even state of the next number will be yes or no. Sweet! Stick ruuuuuulez! I wonder whether Harvey Dent would use one of these sticks. He could still flip it in his hand like a coin... I guess this isn't really random number generation. The stick has a serial number, which is tied to my user account. Is it merely playing a sequence of precalculated digits? Not according to Wikipedia. SecurID ties the serial number only to a seed record, so each stick is doing its own math and the RSA authentication server merely runs the same calculation at that same moment. I have a stick! My key chain is getting pendulous. -drinkin' drinks, Ps/d Current Mood: bouncy Current Music: Hedwig & the Angry Inch sndtrk - "Random Number Generation" (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
2:31 pm	Time saver, space saver, compression facilitator Did you know you can read the contents of a zip file inside Firefox without uncompressing? Some of you will shrug and say "that's so 2007", but I'm speaking to the rest of you. Let's say you've just downloaded the entire documentation for a major database application. The zip file turns out to be nearly half a gigabyte. The contents are mostly html, which can be compressed easily. You could unzip the big bundle, but it'll take half an hour and more than a gigabyte of space. Bleh. Firefox lets you run Java Archive (JAR) protocol from the URL line. This protocol can parse a variety of compressed files and treat the contents as normal files. The high-level syntax is: jar:[url to archive]![path to file] That exclamation point is important, by the way. That syntax is still a bit obscure, so let me give you an example with a Zip file on a Windows machine. Remember that Windows uses blackslashes for subdirectories and colons to separate drive mount points, whereas web pages use forward slashes and domain name resolution for the equivalent material. I can tell Firefox that I have a local Windows file by using the prefix "file:///" (note the three slashes) instead of "http://" (just two). Thus a normal local file may be: file:///C:/accumulant/learning/index.htm Since we really want to look inside a Zip file for its compressed contents, we need the JAR protocol to wrap around the Zip file. Thus we would tell Firefox: jar:file:///C:/accumulant/zip/bunchastuff.zip! Now we can search around as if we were in WinZip or the Windows Zip utility. However I want to read an HTML page inside a subfolder of the 'bunchastuff' Zip file. I just add the subdirectories after the exclamation point as if I were requesting a normal local file: jar:file:///C:/accumulant/zip/bunchastuff.zip!/something/index.htm The links within the file will now resolve as expected. Okay, why is this so great? Because you can bookmark a web page inside a Zip file and never have to waste the time and hard drive space. Then you can grab giant bundles of stuff with only the wait time of downloading, then toss them if they're not the stuff you wanted. You can also keep entire knowledge bases worth of material in a third to half of the space. There's your work-friendly tip for the day. Now I have to get back to scrutinizing SQL commands and installing software. Current Mood: jubilant Current Music: Concussion Emsemble - "Smash-Up" (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
12:31 am	Anybody want a dual-CPU 733 MHz server with ECC registered RAM? How about two? If the above sentence makes sense to you, please read on. I'll talk about the work-laptop saga in another post. I am trying to get rid of a bunch of computers -- yet again. Some people got incensed when my roomie and I took hammers to some of our equipment last time, so I thought I'd give people a chance to call dibs before an undisclosed dumpster gets more of my machinery. I have two servers that I am willing to give away. Yes, free. Yes, they work. Yes, they are getting old but are still valid for lots of stuff. Both of the machines I'm talking about today are servers from around 2000. Each has server-grade motherboards with dual socket-370 CPUs. Each has two matched Pentium III Coppermine processors running at 733 MHz on a 133 MHz bus. Each has four slots for ECC registered RAM only. I think each has onboard SCSI and integrated NICs. Would you prefer a 2U rackmount? One of these is an old VA Linux 2200 machine. It's still got the logo! Maybe you'd rather have a beige box with a pedigree more famous for home systems. I've got just the ticket: a Gateway 6400 Server. Neither has POST errors. They boot, they run Linux, and they can run varieties of Windows if you've got the licenses. Here come the caveats: They are kinda loud, although the Gateway is a lot quieter when you aren't running SCSI drives. The VA has a fan more suited to an outboard motor; in turn, the heatsinks are passive! The Gateway's CMOS battery is dead, but two bucks will solve that problem. The VA doesn't have the rack brackets. I think the CPU temperature sensors on the Gateway are shot. Perhaps you're saying, "I'd love both of these servers... or anything that'd keep a white noise in my house but also serves files! But... I don't have any error-correcting RAM for a decade ago." Don't you worry! Lemme know what you need and I'll throw in the RAM! Yes, I'm that eager to part with these machines. Heck, I might bring 'em to ya if you live in New England. So yes, order now by replying to this post. This post is public, so let others know about it! Link away! Have a monolith... it'd make a loud but classy coffee table. -yes I want my back room closet back, Dante Current Mood: chipper Current Music: Big Star - "Life is White" (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 16th, 2009
11:23 pm	More about the wake later... There are zombies doing the macarena in this coffee house. The advent of art school students in my hometown seems to be an improvement, at least for the night life of this moribund place. They had a zombie march this evening and now there is a tiny rave in my favorite coffee house. There are only a few kids dancing, but the DJ totally has fiber in his stool. The Cheat would be pleased. Utica has had an art museum for a long time. Three prominent, wealthy and single men died in the 1920s. They left their money to an endowment for art, which became named for them: the Munson William Proctor Institute. We all call it the Munstitute, since Proctor already has his name on two parks (one designed by Frederick Law Olmsted) and my high school. About a decade ago the Munstitute made a deal to be a campus of the Pratt Instutute in Brooklyn. I don't feel as bad about Utica as I have in the past. Then again, my get-out-of-jail pass is stamped and I got to go to Canada for a few days. The Thousand Islands are two hours from here and Ottawa is only 3.5 hours from here. Today I defrosted the fridge at my childhood home. We had a normal fridge when I was a child, but my parents got this non-defroster used a dozen years ago. It has held up amazingly well, since it's less complex. It also has a huge freezer. Nevertheless, it suffers from neglect since my parents live more at my gramma's old house. It felt good to boil water and get sheets of ice to drop into my hands. It was also a finite task: when the ice was out of the freezer and I had dried out every last drop of water, I could turn the fridge back on, put back what wasn't garbage and relax. Cleaning anything else in the house seems too convoluted. There is no space on the kitchen table, but I don't even know where to put anything. If I put cereal in the shelves where it would have gone when I was a kid, I have no idea what else I may find. I also have no idea where to put the boxes in the way of the shelves unless I just haul everything into the cellar. Suddenly there is a live chiptune band playing. Somehow it's good, but my ear plugs may be helping. In any case, typing at a bar instead of a table is proving to be painful... Current Mood: bouncy (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 18th, 2009
5:11 pm	Students and their pretenders in the 21st Century Today I took Wellington, the little Windows notebook that I got for free, to a lecture at MIT. This is the first time since I depended on lightfixer's old iBook, which I've named iBis, that I used a computer to take notes instead of using pen and paper. It went so well that I may be done with paper notebooks. I don't recall using iBis for taking notes in public, although I had used to take notes during phone calls and had used it to write journal entries. iBis still exists and runs okay, especially since I wiped it this winter. Unfortunately its G3 processor has a real problem with Flash and even with Google Maps. It served me well when I was travelling Australia, but I suspected it wouldn't be reliable enough when I went to France. I schlepped Shanghai across Europe. Shanghai is my giant laptop, which I had bought from quem98 back when I was working at IBM, put in a lot more RAM and a faster hard drive. It definitely helped me plan train routes and days of activities, kept me in touch with you good people and otherwise kept me moving. It also became the majority of the weight on my back. I took Welly with me to Montreal recently, where it gave me maps and directions without a problem. Welly has proven to be the perfect size when I'm not at home. While its screen resolution is only 1024 by 768 pixels, which is minor compared to Shanghai or my desktop environment, its lightweight body and good keyboard give me just what I need to type. I brought Welly and an 8.5" x 5.5" paper notebook to a lecture about the good parts of JavaScript. Since nothing was riding on whether I took good notes, I would try working with Welly as long as possible and fall back if necessary. When I got to the lecture room at MIT, I found the chairs didn't have any table surfaces. This would make it very hard to write on paper. Welly keeps decently cool when unplugged, so I got to typing. Since I type about four times as fast as I write, I had a very easy time keeping up with the speaker and taking breaks to listen more intently. The speaker had made his notes available online, so I didn't even need to retype the screen slides. Since this building has open wifi, I downloaded the slides and saved myself even more grief. When I take written notes, I like to use three pens: black, blue and red. This lets me set examples in blue and important differences in red to contrast with normal notes in black. Typing doesn't immediately give me this, since I 'm typing into a text editor. Realizing I was using a text editor gave me an idea: I could create a new language type and define certain characters to trigger syntax highlighting. This way I could still type only in text and get the effect of different pens by saving the file with a different filename suffix (such as .pen, perhaps). Taking notes in university classes must be a lot easier now that portable computing is practical and cheap. I've only had Welly for a couple months. I still have to clean off residue from the previous owner's sticky tape and stickers. I also ought to remove the fingerprints off the LCD screen, but those are only visible when I haven't powered the machine. Nevertheless I see a bright future for this simple laptop, even though I'll never be able to improve the hard drive. Right now I'm in the student lounge on the fourth floor of 32 Vassar Street, building 32 of MIT. This is the new building designed by Frank Gehry. There is a clot of tourists walking around the rooftop patio, taking pictures and marvelling at the funky shapes. It's hard not to stare at what could be a lustrous submarine with blow hole pipe and periscope, at a giant yellow cone with deck lights. I directed three of the tourists into the room where I'd just heard the lecture (G449), since it's got tapered walls and all sorts of distortion effects. I like being in this building, even though it seems like a behemoth when I'm outisde of it. It looks from the outside like it belongs in a more majestic city. It's very practical inside: lots of light from the outside, lots of sound absorption, lots of lounge space. It was a good investment. -end of exercise, Dante Current Mood: impressed Current Music: Princess Superstar - "Bad Babysitter" (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
4:28 am	Organizing: back to the digital realms... I've mentioned before that organizing digital files can be even more of a time drain than organizing paper files. For example: a stack of papers in a box usually requires an hour of time, contains a fixed thickness of material and items each of a fixed thickness. You can't suddenly find ninety feet of bound volumes in one banker's box. Open the main directory on a partition of six hundred gigabytes and you could find anything. That numerical limit could unveil a few movies, or thousands of music albums, or millions of photographs, or billions of text files in no order, or a fascinating combination of the above. My biggest networked share at home falls under that last category. When I want to sort digital files, I often have to accept much weirder possibilities than I would have with regular papers. Let me describe how I had to sort just one directory yesterday to give you some perspective. This directory had once belonged to a previous Linux machine. I just copied all of the user files to its replacement machine, labelled the new directory "xubily" and stopped there. I can only vaguely recall why the directory has that name (it must've been a computer running Xubuntu Linux and I came up with a mnemonic based on the 1980s kids' show "Zoobily Zoo"). Okay, so what did I find? Some preference files, only two of which did I need. I find entire subdirectories with single items, none of which were worth keeping. Each of these moments of looking in a folder, seeing a piece of garbage and tossing it took time. When more and more directories had picture files, I had to shuffle files from the command line and create new directories -- just to delete the directories moments later. Eventually I found one file of 12 megabyte with a catchy name but only a distantly familiar suffix. It had been encoded in an old Mac format (.hqx), which makes the file even bigger but often uses an unzipping tool to open it. I found that I didn't have such a tool installed, so I had to research the tool's name via the suffix, install the tool on the Linux server, get yelled at a few times for mistyping the name of the command to find its manual page, and then run a simple command. Suddenly I find out I have an MP3 I'd never heard before. I was able to play the song and I liked it but I only had the song title (which was the file name). I looked up the title online to learn the name of the artist. This meant I also needed to edit the ID3 tag on the file to note the artist, album and year. Then I could delete redundant copies of the file and drop it into a folder for future processing. While I was at it, I grabbed all the files from that last folder and started labelling things. This folder has a bunch of MP3s that may be redundant, have filenames that mean nothing but full ID3 details inside or some combination of anarchy. With those objects sorted, I felt like I'd made a lot better use of the last couple hours. Thus my biggest problem with digital sorting is that a single, smallish object may require far more attention than an entire giant directory. My only reward is that I've freed a bunch of space when I'm done, that perhaps I've figured out what to do with future items of the weird one's ilk. Then I'm stuck realizing that I have a pile of files sorted by time and almost nothing else. If I want to make a real organization of these items, I have to decide the order of significance before I can make any progress. All picture files can go into one folder, but how many subdirectories should that have and how significant much the titles be? That's usually when I stop myself from overthinking and just type up what I've done for the day. That's what you're reading. -I feel better now, Ps/d Current Music: Heather Nova - "When Somebody Turns You On" (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 11th, 2009
12:00 am	One-day commemorative deal By the way, I got back from Montreal on Saturday night. I'll have more cool things to say about that in future posts. I want to plug something I consider very special. My friend fuzzplugjones has made one of his amazing albums available for free today in honor of September 11th. The album is called Don't Wait. He wrote it a few years ago to sort out his issues with losing a friend that worked in the North Tower. It's instrumental and very good with headphones. I've been listening to fuzzplugjones's music for over a decade now. I've had the chance to watch songs and styles evolve. This is a great opportunity to find why I am privileged every time he releases something new. So yes, click here and grab a free album. If you want to try one track first, start with "Glory Be". This is actually the last track on the album but it feels like coming out of a tunnel into a pasture. Each passage opens more and more sound layers and a greater feeling of bright movement. Did I mention the headphones? Put 'em on. -he was a less familiar acquaintance but I miss Paul Battaglia as well Current Mood: mellow (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
3:05 pm	That's my Congressman! Yay! Crazy person at town hall meeting last night: "Why do you continue to support this Nazi policy as Obama has?" Re. Barney Frank, D-Newton: "On what planet do you spend most of your time? "...As you stand there with a picture of the President defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis..., it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conservation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table! I have no interest in doing it." This makes my day. I live in the best district ever. Current Mood: satisfied Current Music: Blue Rodeo - "Till I Am Myself Again" (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 15th, 2009
11:34 am	Not a teenager... I took a little too long on my break last night. I wound up passing out on my bed for four hours. Then I could not get back to sleep. I still haven't. I've been awake for ten hours and only now do I feel tired. I laid in bed, tossed, turned, gave up and read. I wound up reading a lot. It's beautiful outside. I'm going to a barbecue in a few hours. Foooooooooooooooooooood. Whoah... sleep is suddenlyyyyyyyy -whacked my head against the head rest of my computer chair Current Mood: listless Current Music: Canned Heat - "Going Up The Country" or whatever it's called (Comment on this)
Friday, August 14th, 2009
9:41 pm	Organizing update: the final shelving I am taking a break from putting together something I purchased months ago: a bookcase designed for storing vinyl albums. It provides eight shelves of about 15 inches each in a four-by-two pattern. I stalled on building this because I knew I'd need to prep the room before I built. This would replace the cinder block bookcase I have assembled six times, once each move since 2000. Putting up the new case would mean having some space to build it but also having the old case out of the way once I was done. There wasn't enough space for both to be in the same room without eliminating all other furniture. Today my plans got shuffled and I was tired of being mad at myself for doing very little the last couple days. So I cleared the dining room table (it only had some magazines on it, so that took ten seconds) and shoved it against the couch. Then I unloaded my vinyl onto it. As I unloaded records, I also took apart the cinder blocks and planks and set them in the sun room. I even swept the dining room floor once I had all of the old parts out of the way. Then the construction began. The hardest part so far has been screwing in the main bolts. I was using the small Allen wrench that came with the kit and nearly breaking my hands with it. The two bolts I had to install first were near the ground, so I kept having to take out the wrench and put it back in, then fight like the exploited workers to get the wrench around another 180 to 210 degrees. "Say," I thought, "this would be so much easier if I had a device with a nicer handle. Something that didn't require me to take out the wrench every half-turn or so -- perhaps something with a ratchet." Then I remembered that I had been playing with that very item last night while watching The Daily Show, meaning it was sitting by my computer and that I might have the correct attachment in the tool closet. Indeed I did. I'm almost finished with the hammering phase. I needed to take a break and revel in being done with my cinder block furniture phase. It only took me 14 years! dobrovolets and I had built a workable cinder block shelf when we lived in Johnson City and both had more books than... okay, most high school libraries. We wound up using old phone books as spacers so that we wouldn't have shelves that were too small to use. Unfortunately the lowest level was almost useless since it was buried in the carpet. I learned from that to build a plinth level for a future shelf. Hmm... does anyone want the parts for a well-designed cinder block bookcase? It holds hundreds of albums and has tiers! I'll even throw in the specially-cut corrugated cardboard floor protectors. If I don't get a taker here, I'll put it on Craig's List on Sunday. -somehow I still woke up my roomie at 8 p.m., Ps/d Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: Zuco 103 - "Otro Lado" (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
1:23 am	The Swine Flu's PR staff are rockin' out One benefit of being unemployed has been a lot of sleep. When I sleep a lot, I don't get sick. Thus the world's low-level panic about the swine flu has been just barely of interest to me. I was researching ferry crossings of the Saint Lawrence River (in English for your convenience) when I found this killer logo: AIDS has a catchy name and breast cancer has a pink ribbon, but H1N1 got a graphic designer. I think more diseases need fashion teams if they want to be conquered. Herpes, Alzheimer's, OCD? I'm talking to you guys. Type 2 Diabetes gets some celebrities, but it's mostly that grumpy guy from The China Syndrome: At least the clap has a filk, thanks to Lenny Bruce. In How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, he suggests "Cure the Clap today, in the U.S.A.!" is if it were a new Chevy. Come to think of it, how many people have caught gonorrhea in the back seats of Chevrolets? Note: The previous paragraph is not meant to suggest any causal relationship between General Motors, its divisions or its products and the acquisition of sexually-transmitted diseases. Everyone knows you can only catch VD from toilet seats (Genesis 27:11). OCD should have a full campaign for its eradication. The process of creating such a campaign would do wonders for its victims because we'd all be so busy working on it. As of now, all we have is my mother's vanity license plate. I wish I had a photograph of it, but it's a Love Your Library plate (sample image here) that reads OCDOCD. Yeah, I'm jealous too -- and it was my idea. Anyone else got a disease that needs better PR? -Quebecois residents have the highest tax rate in the Western Hemisphere and now you know where that money goes... marketing! P.S.: The correct verse should be Romans 3:13. Note to self: I really hope people click on the Biblical links or these jokes won't work. P.P.S.: Yes, I'm the kind of agnostic that thinks it's wicked funny that God tells someone to wear a jock strap when he's gonna talk to Him. "I'm God! G-Oh-muthuhfuggin-D! I can tame the Leviathan! I can unsnarl traffic in New York City! I create diseases! By the way, good job about being faithful to me. Here's your family back and then some. Who's got an infinite number of thumbs and made you in His image?" Current Mood: amused Current Music: Cowboys Fringants - "Pittoresque" (3 Comments |Comment on this)