aristoi.org

Dr Horrible

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:46:19 -0700

I don't know why I'm so stubborn about Joss Whedon even though I always break down and eventually discover how awesome his work is years afterwards. I jumped on this one before it expired, thanks to Becky for the nudge. Really nice work.

Some days don't fit into 140 characters

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:10:48 -0700

I think Twitter has taken over most of the times when I once would've written a quickie blog post. But now that Twitter has turned unstable and lost its Jabber support, I'm losing interest. (Note to self: if I ever start a futuristic service company that's interesting amongst a core group but not really growing, make sure the service becomes crappy before a while to get people antsy and eager for it to get good again. See: New Coke.

I'm experimenting with a new approach that I'm not sure is working. I know I certainly am enjoying it, but I may be creating rifts with as many people as I'm forging alliances with. Can a person just ignore the hundreds of other people who have had chances to learn and grow but have proven incapable or unwilling to do either? Can you take that list of people who waste your time with inane and clueless behaviors and simply ignore every single thing they say or do?

And can you somehow avoid getting fired in the process?

On an unrelated topic, I finally got a beta invite to Yahoo!'s Fire Eagle. Though I'm hearing a lot of zeitgeist chatter about Y! starting to rot away, they're still a juggernaut and this particular product seems kind of interesting. After trying so many different location-based social and business services, it's nice to find something that can glue them all together. It does not, however, address the fact that pretty much every single one is terrible.

I tried LightPole. I tried Plazes. (Which autolocated me at a random IBM facility in Dusseldorf.) I tried Navizon for the Blackberry. I tried BrightKite. Dopplr. Ping.fm, hellotxt, blah blah yawn yawn. Really, how horrifically difficult could it be for one application to properly and continuously track my location and feed this data back. And then how horrifically difficult could it be for many applications to piggyback on that info and use it to accomplish something meaningful.

Horrible user interfaces. Horrible. Awful, useless out of date data. Huge amounts of "proximity" based clutter that is many weeks out of date, and impossible to remove from my view.

I have half a mind to venture off on my own and try to create something of my own that actually pulls it off. Fire Eagle is fine as the glue, but the tasty nugget at the center is entirely absent- or so rigidly confined to specific devices as to be impossible to appeal broadly. Even if the iPhone pulls it off, I still can't imagine everyone wandering around with iPhones. Meh.

Oh, also, I played around a bit with Adobe AIR. It's the coolest way I've ever seen to make Windows-caliber ugly apps run out of the box on OS X. (Yes, that's sarcasm, asshole. >:O)

On the bright side, some technologies are doing things properly.

Except for when Dropbox causes my desktop mac to crash catastrophically, I love it.

Firefox 3 is nice, but optimized OS X builds are even better. Now that I found Firebug 1.2, I'm actually starting to phase out of Safari as my primary browser. (For reals this time.)

I shall categorize this day under "Meh!"

/swat

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:00:58 -0700

Had a rather bizarre dream last night that I was one of the presenters at a Hollywood awards ceremony. I had to speak in front of everyone and felt entirely out of my element. After delivering my speech and receiving a mixed response (see: Britney's performance at the MTV VMAs) I ended up chatting with the guy who plays Chief Tyrol on BSG. (Argh, yes, I watched it before going to bed.)

My dreams seem to become more transparent the older I get.

I've been rereading a bunch of Kathy Sierra's old posts. It's all great stuff and I've been looking for something to repair my motivation and sense of purpose. This kind of stuff is just what the doctor ordered.

Houston

Tue, 27 May 2008 20:34:33 -0700

Traveling. Haven't done that in a while. Almost haven't even thought of things back home, and thinking less of them all every day I'm here.

Saw Pink Martini perform on Sunday night. It was the most amazing live performance I've ever experienced. I spent half the evening with goosebumps and not only shouted uncharacteristic "woos!" of exuberance between songs, but shouted them right next to old ladies! Fantastic!

I'm trying to think of what else but my brain is drifting out of linear mode and I love it so I shan't try to buck too much. Winery tour today. Bought a few bottles including the tastiest Beaujolais I've ever had and a really nice Gewurztraminer as well. Drove through College Station and near Texas A&M. I'm sure a person or two who reads this ~~studied~~ attended there. Woo and all that y'all.

Hmmm. Karaoke in a gay bar with a racist emcee. (omg I said it! but it's true, I was embarrassed!) Food, food, tasty food. Sleep. It's a good thing.

A few other events to come. Maybe I'll actually karaoke a bit myself. (I plan to stick with Dos Equis to limit my rate of intake, potentially thwarting this plan.) Another concert in a few days which will have a hard time following Pink Martini, but should be an altogether different type of crowd and venue.

And though I'm doing my best not to think about home, hey to everyone holding down the fort. ;)

swing wing

Tue, 13 May 2008 08:22:32 -0700

Blech, Tuesday?

Choo Choo

Fri, 09 May 2008 08:16:29 -0700

I've had a mass transit fetish for so long that I'm not quite sure where it started. At the deepest roots of it are probably Big Bird taking the subway from Sesame Street to the Central Park, really, but somehow it stuck. Even playing the original SimCity, I always tried to force my wee residents to give up their archaic asphalt and use 100% railways. I <3 rail.

Living in Phoenix, it's always been one of my greatest frustrations that our mass transit system is so cruddy. Maybe I idealize the transit in other cities. It's easy as a visitor to say, "Gosh, this [comprehensive public transit system] sure is great!" But the convenience of four separate bus lines going from my house to my office is about where the coverage stops; anything off the beaten path becomes unrealistic.

So today I'm rather excited (for once) to work for a newspaper, since I've managed to get in on a smallish group who are visiting the new light rail operations center today. I'll be meeting the heads of the operations group itself and hopefully figuring out what sort of data they'll have on train locations/activity, and then finding a way to build that data into our site so people can easily check schedules and whatnot.

From what I hear, the schedule is pretty simple. It's a single circuit to start, and any given station is expected to have a train arrive at least once every (x) minutes. We'll see if it actually turns out to be so easy.

In any case, I looked at the meeting itinerary and noticed this: "OMC tour and train ride." Woohoo! Big Bird and I are gonna go to the park!!

blip blip

Mon, 05 May 2008 19:58:08 -0700

I was cruising out of the parking garage at work this afternoon when my car alarm suddenly did a double bleep to let me know that it's reawakened after a long slumber. I think it was the cheapest model I could find, and I mostly bought it so I could get a discount on my auto insurance. It is... temperamental. And asleep for around two years, if I remember correctly.

It'll take me a while to remember to disable it before I open the door. It went off a bit ago when I went to the grocery store. Last time this happened, just as I redeveloped the habit of disarming it prior to entering, it stopped working again. D'oh.

a new day begins!

Mon, 05 May 2008 10:37:30 -0700

Went out with friends on Friday night and remembered that socializing is rather fun. Also remembered that one of my friends has an amazing capacity for alcohol and that I always forget to ignore him as a reference for how much I should drink. (*hic*)

Finally sorted the house out a bit. I decided I don't like the front room to house the tv; one of my favorite parts of having a front room was that I could entertain guests without having to bother cleaning my living space in advance. Dirty clothes strewn about, dishes here and there. With it back as a separate space, at least it stays consistently uncluttered.

I don't know why, but I suddenly had a flash from a work conference I attended shortly after I'd turned 21. I think it was less than two weeks after, and I went with a coworker who enjoyed going out and makes friends anywhere he goes. We ended up at the hotel bar at the end of the night playing pool, drinking and chatting with a few other random guys.

The woman at the bar didn't card me, and I'm sure I looked like I needed to be carded. At the end of the night, it seemed in my drunken state like a good idea to thank her as I left for not carding me. From my perspective it was nice to be treated like I wasn't a child. From her perspective I'm sure she suddenly figured she'd just poured several martinis for a teenager.

In any case, I have a dining room and a separate tv room again. Everything is sorted out, if a bit dirty. Time to bring in the big guns.

2.something

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:49:41 -0700

I think that maybe it would be a good thing for me to give presentations more often. If my brain ran some flavor of unix, giving presentations would be my equivalent of sync;sync;sync. The process of planning forces me into a different mode, and it always seems to be one where all my tangential subconscious wonderings finally reveal themselves to me. Freeform slide topics come together, and over a matter of days I've suddenly synchronized myself again with a pretty broad topic.

I sometimes think that the first half of my career was mostly about observing the behavior of others. I knew I was green and inexperienced, so I usually gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. Nothing about me has changed over the last three years except that I finally decided that the dumb things people do are not, in fact, clever ploys masking their true intentions and intellect. They are, in fact, just actual dumb things.

As soon as I made that shift, I started enjoying giving presentations. It bothered me that management seemed so entirely unconcerned and unaware that their presentations were boring and demoralizing. So I just did it the way I usually learn to do things best: find something awesome and imitate it.

Damian Conway was one of the bigger inspirations there. I had the good fortune of stumbling into just a couple of his presentations at OSCON in 2006, and they were completely awesome. Simple slides, rapid-fire, clever and smart. I'd seen that stuff before, and have seen it since, but the best part was that he was effectively the straight man in an odd sort of comic duet with the projector screen itself.

One thing's for sure... slides are a heck of a lot more fun as visual subtext than as a vehicle for graphs and bullet points.

Almost forgot!

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:50:11 -0700

It's no big secret that I work for a fat public American corporation whose ticker symbol might contain the letters G, C and I. The 401k matching program they use will only apply funds to purchasing additional stock in the company, so it's been a long-running ritual of mine to routinely transfer those funds into investments that actually make money.

I'd joked for a long time about short selling some of the company stock, but in December I finally did it on a whim. I was conservative; I basically looked for something relatively inexpensive, since this was an experiment and the logistics of short selling were a bit hazy to me. The day after Christmas, I spent $113.25 on an option that closed in April. I figured $113.25 would be a tolerable amount to spend on learning how the process worked.

Well, it's been a crappier year for la corporación than even I had expected. The expiration date on the single contract I purchased came up at market close on Friday. Net profits? (I usually don't gloat like this or in detail but seriously, this is sad.) $548.49. On 100 shares. The stock has taken such a precipitous tumble that I'm tempted to spend the proceeds to short several times more again. Or look for a new job. Just in case.

Daily Digest

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:36:21 -0700

Day by day, sanity seems to be returning. I really shouldn't let myself get as stressed out as I have been. I think I've managed to repair all of the leaks in the hot tub finally... I'm not sure why it is that I wasn't the kid who "took stuff apart just to see how it works" because I sure as hell do that a lot nowadays. Maybe the computer just gave me enough to do that I never paid much attention to the mechanical stuff?

In any case, I certainly didn't do any miracles. My experience with said computers has taught me that before you do anything much more serious, try taking it all apart and putting it back together. Apparently this also works in the case of some plumbing... I took the pump component off of its motor and moved it around a bit, reseated it squarely and reassembled it. Voila, no more leaks even on the high speed setting.

I used to worry that if there was ever any serious internal trouble with the hot tub, I'd be stuck with a big heap of junk. After this last round, I'm pretty sure that I could fix any individual fault except maybe a crack in the actual structure.

I've almost run out of my supply of modafinil. I read this article a couple of weeks ago about 20% of surveyed scientists admitted to using cognitive performance-enhancing drugs. I know I'm not the only geek who takes the stuff... hell, I only found out about it at last year's OSCON. A woman giving a talk asked the audience how many were taking it right now and multiple hands shot up.

Its effects seem fairly subtle since it's not really a stimulant. Its impact on sleep is a problem, if anything; it wasn't until modafinil that my occasional absentminded-professor-style antics could very easily result in "oops, it's 7am already?" But it definitely helps me concentrate for longer periods of time without my eyes starting to unfocus from neocortical rebellion.

(Which seems like a good thing at first blush, but it's another variable in a complex scenario which resulted in work completely commandeering the first four months of 2008... so maybe a little inefficiency and soft focus is just I need.)

Either way, I'm down to 9 of them and haven't ordered a refill. I'm a little nervous about it because it takes a few weeks to get more once I order them. Yoinks.

If anybody has emailed me and I've been a black hole, watch for something this week. Even Sandy is in on it and will be sending me daily reminders to get caught up on correspondence.

life

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:49:14 -0700

Took a day off from work today, first one since... February, at least, and the 3rd for the year so far. Not like I haven't worked enough weekends and evenings to accumulate another week or two of vacation, but that's just silly talk. Foolish capitalist. I looked at email this afternoon and almost without thinking went and gorged myself. That's what we call a superhealthy stress relief mechanism, eh?

But since I was home and I'm starting to try to chip away at the things I've neglected. I started on it a bit yesterday, pulled weeds and swept the back patio, got the sprinkler system reconfigured and running on a scheduled timer again. Today I tackled the maggot jar (augh don't ask) and cleaned the koi pond again. I'm finally looking into replumbing the parts of it that are screwed; mainly the waterfall feature. Soon, soon.

And then the giant scary waterworks to end all waterworks, I opened the hot tub again to try to find this new leak. I found one; you know those little dials on the top that let you adjust how much air is in the jet stream? Well, one of them was partly unscrewed (I didn't even know they screwed in!) so I took it apart, figured out how it worked, and put it back on the with the ring resealed. Magically, it stopped leaking.

But water was still dripping a little bit so I dried it off and started it up again. Now, for those who were paying attention, you'll see that part #7 indicated here is rather familiar. (omg, that was 2006?)

Well, I suppose it's not entirely obvious but they are, and the one on the hot tub is leaking. So I reconfigured the DIP switches on the control panel (!! I'm serious !!) to make the controller think that the motor could only handle the low setting, at which speed it only dripped a bit. At least this way I can leave it running the normal nightly ozone cycle until the replacement pump component arrives in the mail.

The koi are happy. They danced around quite a bit and seemed pleased with the slightly-cleaner water. I just ran to the store and bought them some new food and they were all over it. Inexplicably, though, they're even bigger than before. I figured with the cold temperatures they'd at least stop growing, but nope. Enormous jibblies ftw. In fact, I can barely tell Trogdor and his offspring apart anymore. They're both huge.

I don't suppose anybody in the greater Phoenix area would care for some koi? I could really stand to get rid of 4 of them. Or come over, we'll have an Unkempt Movie Lawn and a fish fry. :9

Data

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 04:25:57 -0700

Every now and then I find some awesome new piece of software and I think, "Holy crap, this changes everything!" And then I use it like crazy and eventually figure out the thing it actually does best, and realize it doesn't change everything but rather just one thing and that's OK with me.

So just when I've been obsessing with skitch and taking endless marked up screenshots of things like MindNode

and of course I'm still hooked on Sandy too, and almost never forget even the most ridiculous to-do items that pop into my mind anymore

But then I finally went back and read more about Evernote and immediately lusted for a beta account since I missed the first post on TUAW about it in the middle of my Trying Time of 2008™. (That's its official name now.) I dropped a comment on the blog post begging the masses to take pity on my poor soul, and evernote themselves dropped an invite on me. (Phil maybe? Thanks!)

So I'm tinkering with it and taking pictures of... food labels, and random items around the house, just to test the whole OCR bit. I need a camera in my cell phone now. I did the same thing when I first played with Delicious Library, which fascinated me at the time since it could do barcode scanning via my iSight camera. Then I realized that I am neither 1) in possession of enough media, nor 2) ocd enough, to make it worth scanning the barcodes on all of my books and dvds. But it's nice to know I could if I wanted to.

Despite all my technological exploration, I'm still trapped within the disgusting confines of Lotus Notes at work. It's the pea under my mattress and I hate it. I enjoyed it for a while when I first got my crackberry and was grooving on the integrated mobile calendar, but then I realized that I was responding to work email in the shower on Sunday and I should probably cut that out. Plus I wanted to reformat it so I could use the GPS. And now Lotus Notes is just sad Lotus Notes, unable to offer anything but a clumsy UI and a snappy Mac Classic-inspired color scheme.

I think I might ditch it. I don't really trust our admin to reliably update it anyway and she always asks if I'm free for meetings even though she can see my whole schedule herself, so it might not be any big loss if I abandoned it and entrusted Sandy with my daily comings and goings.

And then Evernote can remember all my goofy thoughts which are currently scattered in notes.txt files on at least 7 different computers and servers. Ooh, I'll bet it'd be good for indexing recipes, too.

Read the rest of "Data"... »

couldn't sleep

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:18:08 -0700

got carried away. behold, new unplanned blog template.

I've been doing a ton of work with jQuery lately. It is, in short, the bees knees- and makes javascript every bit as much fun to work with as any other Real™ language. (Maybe more!) I've dabbled with Prototype and Scriptaculous and Mootools and Rico but jQuery blows them all away... and the code is lovely. And for the most part, works on every browser with no gyrations.

I sent Michael some info the other day and included a link to a corners plugin for jQuery which automatically rounds corners of any element on your page. It will also bezel them, which given BSG's premiere last week unsurprisingly made visions of illogically shaped DRADIS outputs dance through my head.

One thing led to another and this is what I ended up with. If you use Internet Explorer, please for the love of god throw it away already. But if you're on anything else besides Netscape 4.7, you should see the sparse loveliness. And in case you're wondering, that left nav background image does not have the scan lines built into it! That's right, my alpha-transparent PNG is forcing your browser to do all the work every time you load the page. SUCKAH!

Must. Sleep. After saying my prayers. To Baltar-Jesus.

Work r Hard

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:36:27 -0700

I need a vacation. Last week marked the launch of a massive project that's had me brain-dead for at least six weeks, and has been making me a little crazy for most of 2008. There are still followup projects and things to be fixed, but for the most part it's behind me now and as expected, I'm finding it hard to unwind.

My diet has been unfortunate through the process, to say the least. I'm still entirely capable of stress eating and boy have I ever put my back into it. The scale says nothing has changed, and it hasn't been long enough for me to really make a huge difference, but I'd wager that my body fat ratio has tilted a little bit. Overall I just feel gross.

It's funny how quickly the patterns start to shift around once the stimulus changes, though. After a 24 hour work shift wrapping from noon last Tuesday to noon last Wednesday, Thursday night's sleep was long and mostly catch-up. Friday was the first night I slept calmly for quite a while. The weekend was... fitful, for some reason. I did laundry, I cleaned up the kitchen and took out the trash. Mundane things that had been neglected.

So it's starting to feel better. I didn't come home today with the ravenous urge to gorge myself that has been nearly inescapable in the past weeks. I don't think I've had anything to drink since Saturday, which isn't very long but the thought didn't even cross my mind so that's better.

But at the end of it all, I feel like I've been MIA for far too long. My friends and family have (hopefully) been tolerant of my erratic presence and the black hole that has become of my email. I'm primarily looking forward to reassembling my non-work and secondarily looking forward to getting the fuck out of town for a long vacation.

I wish I could remember how to detach from work at the end of the day. It feels like havoc there a lot of the time, and it all influences me too much. It doesn't help that I've been so wrapped up in it in general lately, but it's my aim now to reduce it back to something I can leave at the office when I go home.

Oh, also, hi, blog! How've you been?