Thankfully, we aren’t a nation of religious fanatics
this is from some pro-life rally
Archive for September, 2006
For Cory
- Recent accomplishments
- Start going jogging around the park in the morning with my dog.
This is awesome, I only wish I could take him on sidewalks to bump up
the mileage a little. - Saw “Moonlight and Magnolias” at the Intiman last Friday. So-so.
An interesting sort of vaudville interlude between acts sounds like it
should be loads of fun but maybe I was just too tired to appreciate
it. The problem with local theater is how insular the casts seem to
be. John Procaccino has been a major character in every production
this season. Which is OK, because he’s been pretty terrific in all of
his roles, but still, the same actor night after night… - Had an outstanding night of fun Saturday in observation of my
birthday. We had dinner at Mama’s (where, they swear, the ziplock bag
of fluid hanging in the middle of the doorway keeps flies out…) and
then went to Shorty’s where I had plans for a pinball tourney. We got
about ten people to participate towards the goal: highest combined
score on Addams’ Family, Monster Bash, and, just to mix it up a
little, The Simpsons. Yeah, we should have normalied the scores since
a good game on Adamms’ Family can easily compensate for a lousy game
on the other two, but everyone had fun. I handily won but
disqualified myself so that others could get the prizes (which I
bought, so it wasn’t that exciting for me to win anyway).
John-Anthony took first, Tanya had second, and third went to Lisa.Line of the night goes to John-Anthony. Said to me as I’m opening
gifts from some people and he’s explaining that he would have gotten
me something but didn’t have time: “You didn’t get me anything
for my birthday.” Tanya and I gave him
book and I bought a card from some guy who was going door-to-door
during his party trying to raise money for the picture of kids on milk
cartons. - Took Io to Marymoor Park’s 40 acre off-leash dog area on Sunday.
This is a really awesome park - it’s incredible that there is this
much open space for dogs and that there are so many dogs in Seattle
(about 60% of Seattlites own dogs and dogs outnumber children!). - Upgraded my laptop to a Vista RC. Immeasurably better experience
than the shit I was dealing with over the last month. To be fair,
there were a bunch of known issues with the Toshiba tablets with the
old build I had and I didn’t know about them until it was too late to
take the preventative measures that could lead to an experience as
lousy as the one I dealt with. - Checking out Google AdSense. I’m pretty sure it’s a violation of
the terms of use to tell people “go click on my links to make me
money!” but I wouldn’t tell you not to. I’m semi-excited to have
search built in, however my archiving is too difficult to process so
the search only hits the most recent chunks of my blog.
- Upcoming
- The U District food bank auction is a week from this Friday. I
need two more people to fill out my table - any takers? - Later in October I’m hiking to the top of Mt. St. Helens with a
bunch of friends. Really looking forward to this trip! - Nick’s wedding is in November.
- Would like to watch Deadwood and When the Levees Broke.
Kiss me on the bus
Google Transit was rolled
out yesterday for Seattle and so far I’m not impressed. Yesterday
morning I asked it to get me from home to Microsoft, a commute I take
by bus almost every day. There are three basic options for this
commute:
- direct via a 242: this takes about 45 minutes on paper but since
it involves no transfers it is definitely the trip I always prefer - one transfer via a 48 to a 545 (to a shuttle to my building): this
can be faster than the 242 sometimes but it always depends on how long
the transfer takes, which can be seconds or can be a half hour. - two transfers via a [71|72|73] to a [43|48] to a 545 (to a shuttle
to my building): the complexity here and number of transfers makes
this suck - this only ever makes sense if I just missed a 48.
So which route did Google Transit recommend? #3. Maybe on paper it
made sense at the time, I don’t know, but
saying that there were localized problems for people in the
Seattle area with the roll out yesterday. Today it’s recommending #2.
It’s really not quite godawful and I suspect it will mature and be
awesome. The interface is really simple and it’s very easy to use.
And just saying to people “hey, you know you could use the bus and it
might be a pretty easy option” is really, really awesome. But as
ipmlementations go, I’ll continue to use
enough to accomodate two aspects of the commute:
- For public transportation commutes, flexibility is crucial. I
need more than one option because my schedule or, more likely, the bus
schedule, is likely to change. - There are fuzzy aspects to the trip planning process. Given the
choice between route A which takes 25 minutes with one transfer and
route B which takes 30 minutes and is direct, I will almost always
choose route B. If you need to get to your destination as quickly as
possible, driving alone (or more likely bicycling, but that’s a
subject for another conversation) is often the best choice. But
public transportation riders know they can recoup the time spent in
transit doing something and a solid chunk of uninterrupted time is
usually more valuable than three smaller broken up chunks of time.
prioritize routes for the fastest trip, fewest transfers, or least
walking.
With a gazillion PhD’s and dollars behind Google, I’m sure
they can get Transit to match the feature set that my county public
transportation agency has rolling, but it might take a little time.
UPDATE 2006.09.28 It’s getting better all the time…
This morning I needed to go downtown and tried Google Transit again.
This time: 1) it picked a good (direct) route and 2) I found or it
gave me different route options. Also, it will now recommend the
direct route from my house to work - the exact route I complained
about it not finding yesterday. So things are definitely looking up!
Too animalistic
This week in pets - three exciting developments…
Io banned from off-leash After a terrifying incident at the
park late last week when Io decided rather than returning the ball, he
would jettison straight past me toward one of the other dogs in the
park and proceed to flip out and run across the street when that dog
decided to chase him a little, he is now banned from running off leash
in Cowen Park. You aren’t supposed to do this anyway but he’s been
pretty good about it in the past and there are always a bunch of dogs
there off leash so I took some chances.
Jupiter has family! Returning home Friday night we had a common
run-in with our cat, Jupiter: we can’t pull in to the driveway because
he has sung his siren song and coaxed a backrub out of a passerby,
maybe just to remind us “I have plenty of options and don’t really
need to rely on you, you know…” But these people braved the
insane intensity of our Prius headlights to ask “Is that your cat?” It
turns out Jupiter is one of a litter of three kittens born around the
block from us in about 2000 or 2001. He was formerly known as
“George” (which is funny since that’s the name of one of our
neighbors) and he has a sister who lives at the house with this couple
who were out visiting with him Friday night! It’s really interesting
to find this out and I’m looking forward to hearing the story again
since I really didn’t catch the whole deal.
Iocam back in business! What would any post be without some
geekdom? I have a webcam running showing Io in his cage or our
livingroom and after some frustration with my webhost, it’s rolling
again. The problem is that I have it run at some interval, taking
snapshots, looking for motion, and, if motion is detected, uploading
the picture via scp to my webhost. This sounds and should be pretty
simple but the upload would start failing every so often. Should be
pretty simple, the host probably just enforces policy that starts
rejecting clients that keep pinging it within some threshold to stop
DoS or something. But the yahoos running my webhost can’t distinguish
between me asking them for clarification on an acceptable use policy
that they should be able to tell me and “programming help” which they
say they can’t offer. After a couple useless rounds, I just gave up
and lowered the sample rate from every 30 seconds to every 4 minutes
and now it works just fine. If you’re interested in the cam and don’t
know where it is or can’t find it, contact me. I’ll post the script
shortly…
itching and burning
those are two symptoms I happily am free of, but I am still recovering from a new entry in the continuing running for Most Fun Day Evar. This weekend was my good friend Nick’s bachellor party and with the winning combination of Ryan’s planning, 9 or so incredibly fun guys, and Nick we had a super fun outing in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The day started with donuts (two dozen contributed!) at Nick’s pad. From there we rolled to Hudson, Wisconsin for paintball. Ryan advised we should wear long sleeves and I seized the opportunity to bust out my old math team sweatshirt. Nick then told me that a bleached white shirt with red embroidery *might* make me an easy target. Whatever - if they don’t want the handicap, that’s their problem. after getting our ref to cover all the ways our surrender could be offered, I was ready to roll! And proceeded to get knocked out early in almost every round. But that’s ok because the dangling berries escaped unscather and Nick had an awesome time, which is what it should be all about.
later we played two hours of dodgeball. This is what left us all hobbling like old men on Sunday (and Monday and Tuesday). This was incredibly fun and again I showed everyone there’s more than one way to lose. I don’t even know what muscle in my leg is causing me problems today but i’m pretty sure it only gets used in dodgeball. one note about dodgeball with adults: early on I came within inches of sacrificing my first thousand unborn children and immediately learned “avoid the stinger, do not try to catch it.”
dinner at Figlio and cards (i lost - again) rounded out the day and by the next night I was on my way back to seattle and Nick was one step closer to another the altar…everybody had a blast and we were all super glad to hang out with him.
millions of dead cops
nick asked me if i’m happy with my mda (t-mobile branded version of the HTC Wizard, also available on Cingular as the 8215 or something). here’s a summary of some of my likes, disikes, and tweaks towards the ultimate judgment (i really like it a lot):
- in no particular order
- like: platform. windows mobile 5 is great. my old ipaq 6315 was passable as an integrated phone/pda but the new OS is way better. it’s much closer to the smartphone (no stylus) interface of windows ce, meaning one handed operation is a definite possibility. you might say ‘of course that should work’ and you’d be right, but if you want a nice pda, it frequently doesn’t. The new os is still a pda first and a phone second and it shows sometimes (dialing can be awkward with the touchscreen and the predictive behavior feels less smart than other phones I have had in the past, touchscreen is sensitive to my cheek during calls) but it definitely works well enough for me for now.
- dislike: slow processor. the cpu really should be faster, but its not. oh well. Workaround: with smartskey and omapclock you can overclock it to 240 with (for me) no noticeable change in stability or battery life and very noticeable perf improvements.
- like: applications. if you want games on your phone mamece is definitely the way to go (but only overclocked - before overclocking I found it sluggish). tpcmc is an awesome video player and with it I can a 624×352 139kbps xvid encoded video - the same compression files I watch on my tv. I see some artifacts sometimes but at that encoding i’m amazaed I can watch it at all. again, this needs the overclocking or else the quality is unwatchable (but at that bitrate it’s really no surprise)
- dislike: mini rca jack. couldn’t they just put a standard headphone jack in? annoying, but I just keep a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter from radio shack with me all the time.
- like: connectivity. the mda supports edge so I get 2.5G mobile speed, which is generally fast enough for me. it also supports bluetooth and 802.11g. the bluetooth is pretty standard and not all that exciting (however there is a firmware upgrade that has A2DP, meaning stereo audio over bluetooth, which i’m super excited to try out), but the wifi is becoming more rare and makes the wizard stand out. basically the lack of wifi and inclusion of data formats in other phones means if you want to be mobile on the go, you have to pay for your phone carrier’s data plan. often these will be super expensive, which is a huge drag. you just bought a cool new bleeding edge mobile productivity machine but to actually use it to be productive on-the-go, you’re suppose to shell out $40 a month? please. with wifi in the wizard, this isn’t an issue. this was super nice the last time I was in munich where I could find free wifi cafes. note: by default you get 802.11b, it’s a simple reg tweak to enable g. another note: i’m a super happy t-mobile customer of about 5 years and happily pay for what I think is a reasonably priced data package.
- like: more programs. mail (pop or imap) are great. bunnydoku (sudoku), python, perl, gsplayer (music), mapopolis (gps with a bluetooth receiver) - these are all super awesome. mapopolis is priced to move and I definitely notice bugs with it but it meets my needs at a fine price so I haven’t checked out tomtom, which I hear rules (but I hear is very slow which probably means god-awful on the mda).
- dislike: software. for some reason the command shell I have used on a ton of old pocketpcs does not work well on the wizard - this is very very frustrating for me. for some other reason, the WM5 team STILL has not made filesystem performance near where is should be - it take me about 20-30 seconds to read the contents of /windows every time (luckily I don’t need to go in that folder too much…). profile switching (brightness, volume/vibe, sounds, which antennae are on/off) should be better/supported. you get easy access to toggle sounds on/vibe, to the antenna setting program (to toggle phone/wifi/bluetooth), and can map a key to the brightness control but can’t quickly manage all 3 (e.g. “work” “home” “gps”).
that’s about it. this is all based on the original firmware these shipped with, too. as I mentioned above, there is a firmware upgrade which enable A2DP on bluetooth and has AKU2 for corporate email connectivity (if you workplace supports it and you want it) along with a ton of other stuff I hear is cooler that the other side of the pillow but haven’t tried.
the command line is for lovers
everybody loves a keyboard prompt interface, right? of course. so naturally everybody should love command prompt enhancements. this terrific utility I saw on the lifehacker blog called console makes the whole cli experience even better! here’s how…
- tabbed command prompts - I mean, duh. i’m pretty sure my old school fedora core 4 does this but it’s super super nice to be able to collect my prompts together in one host per session.
- saved profiles - this is where it starts getting useful. I have different consoles with different environmental behaviors - vanilla cmd, environment variables for different development projects which use similar namespace tokens, and my personal customized shell with various macros and aliases defined. it’s extra lame to need a different shortcut for each one of these and with console I can keep them all together and choose which one I want in a new tab.
- different processes - this is really nice. want a cygwin bash shell or plink ssh session? those are just another set of console parameters. I haven’t tried powershell yet but the shells I do use work well.
- some key remappings - I haven’t explored how much flexibility there is here yet but what I DO know is that you can map ctrl+v to paste which honestly is enough for me to convert.
all of this is in the 2.0 releases, by the way, which in about a week of use has given me no problems whatsoever. so go check it out today and start riding the wave of a great aggregated shell experience!
Handy non-human phone contacts
- Google SMS (SMS
Google will reply very quickly with the response to whatever you asked
it about.
at MIT (Call 1-888-573-8255
(1-888-573-TALK)) - this is the weather number we grew up with on
crack. It’s an MIT project for doing some speech AI stuff and is
massively awesome.- fboweb (Call
haven’t been able to verify this one since it’s been busy since I
learned about it but fboweb.com, who provide realtime flight
information appear to have a phone number you can call to do flight
time estimates over the phone.
(sms/mail sms@mybus.org) -
this is sufficiently complicated that I think it’s too hard to bother
learning, but it’s included here for completeness or in case you’re
interested in it and smarter than I am. It relies on sending an actual
email message to sms@mybus.org, not just standard SMS (for t-mobile
customers this means composing an SMS to phone number “500″ and the
first string in the body should be the email address), then you need
to know the query syntax and your location ID, both of which no one
knows. If you have a web or WAP enabled phone, those interfaces are
much easier to use.
Note that the “call” links rely on the
probably only work if you’re reading the
version of this entry from your phone.
Io
So after a couple months of combing PetFinder and visiting our local animal shelters, Tanya and I finally got a dog. At the pound he was Lincoln but we’ve renamed him Io (get it?). We think he’s a hound mix and physically resembles the Redbone Coonhound but he doesn’t really exhibit any of that behavior. He’s 6 months old and just about the cutest little fella you could imagine…