Well, I haven’t gotten around to throwing a housewarming party yet. The only other time I threw a party by myself was when I had some folks over for sushi back in Mountain View, 2000. It’s always been roommates or the wife to help me out. Anyway, when a lady on the Yelp talk boards expressed an interest in throwing a Halloween party, but her apartment was too small, I offered to co-host at my place. Well, she got the ball rolling, but had to bail. We had a great time anyway.
My costume was “thrift store drag queen” . . . kinda improvised but I did a pretty good job of putting together my feminine side. I felt a brief “oh my god what if the party is a dud” panic the week before, but as the day approached, well, things started to come together and the party itself was a great success! Probably around 40 people showed up. Nadia came out-of-costume and was coaxed into a “sexy nurse” ensemble that Lorah didn’t wear. Smashing! Ed took the cake, in my opinion, by dressing as boba tea.
Don brought grog, Karen brought pumpkin pie,Jenny brought a crew of Castro revellers from her own party. Everyone brought a bunch of fun, and then everyone cleared out at 1AM, many headed off to the Supper Club, and others carpooling home to get to work on Wednesday.
Cleanup was a breeze. I caught two beer spills, and all vomiting was confined to the toilet. I found a woman passed out on my bed and tucked her in comfortably on the couch.
[Here in San Francisco] they have these GIANT ballots in English, Chinese, and Spanish. Really neat! Its like a giant scantron, and it is somewhat gratifying to hold this huge five-pages of ballot in the blue secrecy folder between your hands and feel like maybe the participatory democracy thing is of some importance.
Proposition J: Shall it be city policy to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney?
They also do ranked-choice voting for some municipal offices, though it was a bit silly because in both cases there was only one candidate running. I suppose a really enterprising citizen could have ranked in three write-in candidates and that crazy person would already be living here anyway.
And, it is not like I’m really impressed with the Democrats, and their fear of articulating some vision of a better America, but it is nice to see the system correcting itself a bit. The best wisdom I have heard is that at least now President Bush will have a check on his power, and he’ll have to behave a bit more like a President. It seems the process has already started, as the GOP has announced that Donald Rumsfeld is going to resign.
The system works.
As far as impeaching Bush goes, I admit that is a silly ballot proposition for a municipal poll, but it is totally San Francisco, and it is a pleasing break from reading up on school bond proposals and sick leave. Unfortunately, they only had “yes” and “no” as options, I would have preferred “oh, hell yes!” (Though, I’m not sure how well that translates into Chinese.)
There’s standing in a subway car at the end, or near a door, with something to lean on.
There’s standing in the middle of a subway car, holding a rail.
There’s standing in a subway car that is so packed you don’t really need to worry about holding on. My ride home on Halloween was like this, until the costumed throngs got off at Castro.
Then there’s standing in a subway car that is so packed that you really don’t need to worry about holding on, and the air conditioning is broken.
I got off at Church Street when the subway car started to pack this way.
. . .
I left reluctantly. I left behind the guitar player who was taking up two seats, one for his case, as he quietly practiced a mellow tune, and the woman, sitting across the aisle from him, studying his fingers on the strings, and the lady with the four kids, who were told to hold on because sometimes the subway jerks, and the story was told of one kid who had been playing around and earned a cracked lip for his trouble. A middle-aged lady invited one of the children to sit on her lap.
I waited a few minutes for the next train: air conditioned, not packed, and lacking in human interest.
Since July, I have been working at Yelp, a hip young Internet startup located just South-of-Market in San Francisco. We provide an Internet-based Yellow Pages service that is really cool because along with basic business information, you can see reviews written by other customers, which gives you a better “feel” for a place when you’re figuring out where to go.
Now, this has been done before, but one of the things we’ve done really well is to help build a community spirit among the folks who write reviews on our web site. These “Yelpers” tend to be young, urban professionals who enjoy going out, and they enjoy writing about their experiences: the good, the bad, the funny, the odd. They socialize on our message boards, meet up for weekly happy hours, and we invite the “Elite” members to spectacular parties every couple of months.
I am a fan. It is more rewarding to work at a company whose service I enjoy!
Anyhow, the reason I am writing just now is to see if anyone who reads my blog is, or knows, a good Unix SysAdmin, or perhaps a great Object-Oriented web developer. The Unix position requires a senior-level, well-rounded generalist who is comfortable with Linux, tiered network infrastructure, and a the variety of challenges offered by a rapidly-growing startup. The web developer should know how to build awesome web sites, while talking to a MySQL database efficiently. There will be further detail posted online, but I would be happy to talk to friends about these positions, especially the SysAdmin, with whom I will be working very closely.
(Anyway, back to the variety of challenges on my plate for the day.)
I love worrying less about STDs and unplanned pregancy.
On the other hand, they require a bit of “planning ahead” so that you will not be caught unprepared with your pants down. When you do have them handy, hopefully they are close enough that you will not have to leave the embrace of your partner, hopefully your slippery fingers will find a corner of the packaging amenable to tearing, hopefully you will feel out the appropriate orientation so you don’t waste your effort trying to unroll the thing backwards, and hopefully you’ll pull it all off–err on–quickly enough to minimize the mood-killing time spent away from your lover fiddling with modern packaging.
Then–and while you’re not supposed to tell the skeptical teenagers this–although one might take pride at having managed the condom maneuver well, the physical sensations that ensue are never of the caliber found without a condom. One swallows these modest tragedies for the sake of engaging in quality lovemaking, but wouldn’t it be nice if condoms were somehow better?
Build a better mousetrap . . . alas, build a better condom, and the Internet will beat a path to your door. Pronto condoms has recorded nearly a million hits on their web counter: they have just launched a condom in South Africa with special packaging designed to make it easier to “get it on.” The demonstration video brought a moment of joy to my heart, because at last, the powers-that-be are thinking of people like me and trying to make my sex life better!
All the same, I will be truly impressed when they get that down to a one-handed maneuver. And even with this bit of innovation, there is still plenty of room for improvement for the world’s most popular prophylactic technology! A brighter future awaits! Let us get it goin’ on!
For production systems, I think it is best to use a single, centralized /etc/crontab, which simplifies the job of tracking batch processes. On a production system, batch scripts should be sufficiently robust such that if they are resource or lock-intensive, they make sure everything is okay before they get to work. Stuff like user crons and fcrontab can live in your development and corporate servers.
Of course, sometimes you inherit production systems with people who don’t think like you do. You’ll need to review what random user crons are running on each system. With any luck you’ll have a sane OS that keeps the user crontabs in a well-documented location. (FreeBSD? /var/cron/tabs . . . SuSE . . . still not sure . . .) Of course, luck is a fickle mistress, and sometimes you have to do it the evil way:
> cat /etc/passwd | awk -F : '{print "echo crontabs for user "$1"\ncrontab -l -u "$1"\n"}' > /tmp/crontabs.sh
> head /tmp/crontabs.sh
echo crontabs for user root
crontab -l -u root
echo crontabs for user bin
crontab -l -u bin
echo crontabs for user daemon
crontab -l -u daemon
echo crontabs for user lp
> sudo sh /tmp/crontabs.sh | mail -s "`hostname` crontabs" $USER
If you are borrowing my “recipe” you will likely want to put your e-mail address where it says $USER . . . and, you may have to do the same for fcron as well. Bah!
cat /etc/passwd | awk -F : '{print "echo fcrontabs for user "$1"\n/usr/local/bin/fcrontab -l -u "$1"\n"}' > /tmp/fcrontabs.sh
sudo sh /tmp/fcrontabs.sh | mail -s "`hostname` fcrontabs" $USER
The problem, in a paragraph-shaped nutshell, as described by George Packer in The New Yorker:
It is true that the presence of American troops is a source of great tension and violence in Iraq, and that overwhelming numbers of Iraqis want them to leave. But it is also true that wherever American troop levels have been reduced–in Falluja and Mosul in 2004, in Tal Afar in 2005, in Baghdad in 2006–security has deteriorated. In the absence of adequate and impartial Iraqi forces, Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias have filled the power vacuum with a reign of terror. An American withdrawal could produce the same result on a vast scale. That is why so many Iraqis, after expressing their ardent desire to see the last foreign troops leave their country, quickly add, “But not until they clean up the mess they made.” And it is why a public-service announcement scrolling across the bottom of the screen during a recent broadcast on an Iraqi network said, “The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians not comply with the orders of the Army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”
I know that I don’t know what the solution is. I think “bring the troops home now” is irresponsible. And nobody likes “stay the course” either, any more, which is a good thing: we need to get our collective brainpower together to find some less-bad solution to the mess. (more…)
I have taken to getting some basic cardiovascular fitness in the morning by taking a brisk walk uphill to Forest Hill station. Today, as I rounded the corner to make my long hilltop descent into the subway, I caught sight of this bus, waiting:
Who needs to leave town to take a globe trot? We forget the breadth of Muni’s service area! When you get to Prague you can take the train to Lyon, where you can catch the 32 Etats-Unis!
The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay
The glory that was Rome is of another day
I’ve been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan
I’m going home . . . to my city by the bay . . . . . .
I left my heart . . .
In San Francisco . . .
High on a hill . . .
It calls to me . . .
To be where little cable cars
Climb half way to the stars!
The morning fog . . .
May chill the air . . .
I don’t care!
My love waits there . . .
In San Francisco . . .
Above the blue . . .
And windy sea!
When I come home to you,
San Francisco
Your Golden Sun will Shine for me!
The song oozes longingly from his lips. And yet, the song itself is easy-going, like the city itself.
A little while back, I had the chance to meet Jenny Yee, a fellow dot-com professional who, like me, has also recently moved to San Francisco. I was impressed by the quality of some of the portrait photography she has taken. She explained that she was working to set up a studio at her new place. I have been thinking that as I become comfortable with single life and begin looking forward to finding that special lady, it will be more and more important to look pretty: to put my best face forward.
I am still getting in to the whole projecting-a-self-image thing, and I’m not ready just yet to pay much to look glamorous, so I approached Jenny to volunteer as a “test model” to help her get up to speed with her new digs. She smiled warmly and agreed, and it is time I returned her favor by sharing the experience online. I will start with a melodramatic before-and-after, of High School Danny versus Jenny’s Web 2.0 Danny:
I smile, because while my shoulders have filled out and I have grown the goatee, in both images I see the same basic, good-natured geek. Fortunately for me: geek is now chic! (Some even feel fondly toward the old Napolean Dynamite look.)
Fun, huh? Well, so was the time spent with Jenny. (more…)
A toe-tappingly titillating trade, which demonstrates that if you’re going to be a player hater, you should do it with a smile, and hopefully a strumming guitar, so we can be reminded of awful things while chuckling despite ourselves:
Do do do do doo dee do / Clinton got a blowjob!
ObWordPress: If you want to enable embedding of YouTube videos, disable the stupid GUI editor.
Thanks, gapingvoid for a Friday Afternoon Diversion. :)
Well, I owe a plug, here . . . and a reminder note for myself if this happens again!
My third Canon camera has suffered a death comparable to my second Canon camera. So, I ordered myself a Christmas present today: a Fujifilm FinePix F30 — should be here Wednesday!
Anyway, one thing my second Canon camera did for a very long time was to EAT pictures I had taken. I tried multiple cards but they would just randomly get corrupted in the camera, and Canon went to great lengths to presume that the problem was with me, and not with their camera. (They got sued for doing that–yay class actions!) I am still bugged that I lost pictures of Clapham Junction and of the Eiffel Tower! Grr! Anyway, when I got to Thailand I slowed down enough to find a work-around to the problem of my second Canon: PhotoRescue! (more…)
Well, I haven’t gotten around to throwing a housewarming party yet. The only other time I threw a party by myself was when I had some folks over for sushi back in Mountain View, 2000. It’s always been roommates or the wife to help me out. Anyway, when a lady on the Yelp talk boards expressed an interest in throwing a Halloween party, but her apartment was too small, I offered to co-host at my place. Well, she got the ball rolling, but had to bail. We had a great time anyway.
