Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/25/week-of-17-january-2010/
Sunday, January 17
2.0h V for Vendetta
Monday, January 18
A quiet day on-call, cooped up. Mei had to pull a long shift at the hospital, but when she got home we enjoyed the from-scratch Apple Pie she made for my birthday.
1.0h China From the Inside
0.5h Twilight Zone
Tuesday, January 19
Last day on-call.
In the evening Mei took me out for dinner at the restaurant where I had taken her for dinner for our anniversary. The anniversary dinner had been a perfect dining experience, and we later learned that the restaurant had a Michelin star. This time around we had a great meal, but the service wasn’t as perfect. I figured that like many restaurants they may not have their best staff working on Tuesdays.
Pushups: 35 + 35
0.25h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Wednesday, January 20
In the morning I biked down to the Tea Lounge. I wrote a follow-up review on Yelp explaining that although I love the Tea Lounge, if you serve diuretics your toilets shouldn’t be traumatizing to sit upon.
Later in the day I called the MTA to get my transit card replaced. They have a new program where you can purchase one transit card and they’ll just charge you more money when your balance runs low. Unfortunately, they send you the same little piece of paper that all the ephemeral transit cards use, so after a few months it was completely shot. They cancelled my defective transit card and said a new one would arrive within 15 days.
Later I dropped by the new orthodontist, who scanned my head in various ways and then got to the business of demanding that my teeth bow to his vision of an ideal alignment.
Pushups: 40
0.5h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Thursday, January 21
I asked Mei if she had any aspirin since my jaw was sore. I never take aspirin, and while I wasn’t quite in pain, my mouth felt sore enough that I’d rather not have it preoccupy my day. The good Doctor hooked me up.
I sent the city another letter explaining how I don’t want to pay them $115 for violating the no stopping zone that wasn’t adequately marked. I also bought some toilet paper which was marketed with the enticing promise “Virtually Lint Free” . . . 1,000 sheets for 59c? I also bought the name brand roll that was 1,000 sheets for 79c, in case Mei found the virtually lint free toilet paper to be exceedingly cheap in quality.
0.5h Community
1.0h Project Runway
Pushups: 35 + 35
Friday, January 22
Work kept me busy, but I can hardly complain given my commute.
Around 11:30 as we were near bed time Mei asked about these popups she was getting to run the virus scanner that we never installed that said her computer was under siege by viruses and she couldn’t run any programs because everything was infected and she was going to have to upgrade to the premium edition. The legitimate virus scanner couldn’t find anything, so I rebooted into Safe Mode and Windows offered to revert itself about two days, and upon the next boot Windows said it had reverted Internet Explorer and a couple shared libraries. Mei was sleeping by now, so I continued to install Google Chrome as an overall nicer alternative to Internet “zero-day exploits” Explorer, and then I went and scraped about two dozen software barnacles off of her hard drive. Her laptop seems happier with the tune-up. If I were more of a man I would disassemble the thing and solder new connections for the fragile speaker wires that have broken in the hinge. Assuming I owned a soldering iron and had balls enough to wave it at the girlfriend’s laptop computer.
1.0h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Saturday, January 23
After sleeping in a bit, I took Mei to Cheryl’s and then we walked over to the ice skating rink in Prospect Park where her coworkers were having a get-together. I skipped the ice skating since on the one hand its not my thing and on the other hand I’m still Secondary On-Call with the work laptop in my bag. Better to hang out in the sun reading my magazine and synthesizing vitamin D.
1.0h Dirty Jobs
0.5h Daily Show
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/20/chicago-versus-new-york/
New York’s public transit system is fantastic. But they’re a bit slow on the whole information technology thing.
In Chicago you can sign up for a Chicago Card Plus, which is a plastic “proximity” card you keep in your wallet. To pass a fare gate or board a bus, you just touch your wallet against the sensor, et voila. When your account runs down it automatically charges another $20 from your credit card. I can log on to their web site and recover the forgotten password for my log-in name, access all of my account information, and a list of trips charged to my card in the last 90 days.
New York has a similar system, that will charge $45 to replenish your balance, but instead of a rugged plastic card they send you the same little piece of reinforced paper with a magnetic strip that is used for the 30 day pass. After a few months of pulling the card out of my wallet and swiping it at various fare gates the strip becomes worn and unreadable. Their web site has no way to recover the “PIN” code for the 13-digit account number they e-mailed to me several months ago, so I call their toll-free number, and after waiting on-hold they cancel the damaged card with a 15-day waiting period to issue a new card.
It somehow seems not worth it.
The part that makes me smile is the back of the card says EXPIRES 06/30/11 — someone at MTA has thought this little paper card would swipe for two years! Hooray for wishful thinking.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/17/week-of-10-january-2010/
Sunday, January 10
2010-01-10 . . . it is too bad they didn’t have binary numbers one thousand years ago.
Last night I began reading Studs Terkel’s “Division Street America” . . . it is starting to remind me of Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” where you drift from person to person, hearing a monologue . . . things shift around as in a dream. Some are more engaging than others.
I like that by page 27, I find a kindred soul in Elizabeth Chapin, who was 75 years old in 1967:
“The automobile, what could you do without it? In another few generations, people will have no legs, we won’t need them. I take the dog for a walk every day. Walk a few blocks to the bakery shop. I have known people who live around the corner from the bakery, who take their car to get there. People are amazed when I tell them I don’t pass a day that I don’t walk three, four miles. It just wouldn’t occur to me. There’s so much to see, to observe, while you’re walking. What happens to us when we don’t see these things? When I take the dog for a walk, I see things. People’s eyes are closed, with a thin film over them, or what is it?”
I should be walking more, myself.
Another theme so far is the people are bothered by the increasing isolation . . . 40 years ago. In the old days it was playing cards and long conversations. I’ve been thinking the world might be a better place if television was a metered service: you pay $1 for each hour you watch, with a fair portion of that going to whomever created the programming. People would watch less TV and the quality would go up if people were more selective about it. Anyway, maybe I’ll actually set up a jar in my own living room. Since I pay the cable/Internet bill I can reimburse myself. Or give it to charity or something.
0.5h Saturday Night Live
1.0h Nova: What Darwin Didn’t Know
Monday, January 11
In the afternoon I snuck off to the Tea Lounge before returning home for the Pager Review Meeting which is at 3pm in California. I go on-call Tuesday morning at 11am . . . well, 2pm local time. Right before the pager review meeting my workstation crashed and required a fsck . . .
1.0h Nova: What Darwin Didn’t Know
Tuesday, January 12
I started feeling seriously blue on Monday, and this morning was no better. The contributing factors are known and temporary, so no reason to freak out, but damn. This morning I treated myself to brunch . . . and spent some time just standing in the frigid sunlight, synthesizing vitamin D and hopefully ameliorating seasonal blues, thinking that office workers should work while the sun is down.
At brunch it was more the people watching than the delicious chorizo frittata that did me good. At first I kinda sympathized with the girl who kept sighing at her computer, which she had to hard-reset . . . Windows Vista or 7 running on a ThinkPad T61 . . . but she kept sighing and I was thinking “attitude problem” . . . the guys next to me sounded like the older guy providing some career mentoring advice for the younger guy. All while I was reading about the Whole Foods CEO in The New Yorker.
“. . . a tendency, common among smart people, to presume that everyone in the world either does or should think as he does–to take for granted that people can (or want to) strike his patented balance of enlightenment and self-interest. It sometimes sounds as if he believed that, if every company had him at the helm, there would be no need for unions or health-care reform, and therefor every company should have someone like him, and that therefor there should be no unions or health-care reform. In other words, because he runs a business a certain way, others will, can, and should, and so safeguards that have evolved over generations to protect against human venality–against, say, greedy, bullying bosses–are no longer necessary. The logic is as sound as the presumption is preposterous.”
On my way out I saw the girl on my left was editing an article in a WordPress blog, and I felt better about her. People who have found the joy of good software have a preposterous notion that software doesn’t have to suck, and so they are logically entitled to sigh when their computer’s operating system starts acting dumb.
Wednesday, January 13
Rough day on-call. I never even left the house.
1.0h Daily Show
Thursday, January 14
Another rough day on-call, but I went out for groceries. I walked to the store farther away, since it was a beautiful day: sunny with a high of 38F. On the shopping list was an onion, which allowed Mei to make beef stew. Yum!
0.5h Community
1.0h Project Runway
Friday, January 15
I was paged throughout the night as a consequence of maintenance activity that ran long. I sent an e-mail to management sharing my reservations about how the project in question was being handled. During the day I took it easy, and we managed to roll out an emergency measure to keep this other thing that had been paging a lot quiet.
Usually, on-call isn’t so bad. My last few times on-call had plenty nights of uninterrupted sleep. Luck of the draw.
1.0h Daily Show
1.0h Dollhouse
Saturday, January 16
The weather was nice so I sat on the park bench in front of the house and read. Of course, the wind kept blowing so I made a few trips inside for more clothing.
I have been bothered by my level of credit card debt and have hatched a scheme whereby I’m thinking to pay it all off out of savings and lay the cards aside. I’ll reduce my monthly “allowance” that I draw from savings for the year in order to re-pay the money borrowed, and basically live within my means on a tighter budget, whipping out the debit card when I need to pay with plastic, and then only if I can afford it. Hooray for austerity! (I haven’t put this idea into motion yet.)
And no, its not that I am anywhere near broke, but I have had my share of hard times, and I am pretty excited that in July I may have a 20% down payment on real estate I can afford, right around the bottom of the real estate market, which has been brought to us by reckless overspending. When I was a kid, my mother yearned for years to own our own home, and it was always just out of reach. As a kid, I seldom had much money I could spend, and had to learn to say “no” to nice things. Well, finally being able to afford a place will feel good. And there is also a value in being able to say “no” to nice things you don’t really need.
0.5h Colbert Report
0.5h King of the Hill
1.0h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/15/google-china-luck-not-bad/
There’s been a lot of buzz in the tech community over Google’s Tuesday announcement that they are just totally fed up with the Chinese government’s utter contempt for human rights and for playing nice on the Internet, and that as a consequence they are going to remove either the censorship filters from Google.cn, or Google.cn from China.
I don’t entirely grasp Google’s strategy here, but if a plucky technology company that I admire wants to goad an autocratic government, I’m naturally inclined to sympathize with them.
So, while it is still around, I figured I’d translate Google.cn‘s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button: 手气ä¸é”™
手 shuo3 is a pictograph for “hand”
æ°” qi4 is a pictograph for curling clouds, meaning “air”
ä¸ bu4 is a pictograph of a bird rising to heaven, which once meant “to soar” but today means “not”
é”™ cuo4 etymologically combines “metal” and “dried meat” for the archaic meaning “gilt” which nowadays means “mistake”
But don’t get hung up on hand-air-not-mistake as the characters combine to form two words:
手气 means luck
ä¸é”™ means “not bad” as in “pretty good”
So, 手气ä¸é”™ translates for me as “luck not bad” and that is what I hope for both Google (è°·æŒ) and the ä¸å›½äºº.
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/10/keeping-up-with-your-web-google-reader-and-google-chrome/
So, you like reading web pages? Do you visit a hand full of blogs and news sites a few times a week to catch up? Is it a lot to remember: which web sites you like to read, and you wish there was an easier way? There is an easier way: use an aggregator!
So, what’s an aggregator? Think of an aggregator as your favorite newspaper. These days most of the content in most newspapers doesn’t come from in-house reporters. Instead the editorial staff select items from syndication feeds like AP and Newswire. That is what an aggregator does: it keeps track of the feeds from the web sites you are interested in, and presents them to you in one convenient package. An aggregator is your personalized electronic newspaper.
Google Reader
Okay, where do I get an aggregator? There are many aggregators, and you may have to try a few before you find one you really like. I like to use Google Reader because I can access it from any web browser. I like the “sort by magic” feature, where it tries to show me the stuff I’m most likely to enjoy first. If I catch up on all my reading it will go and try to find other content I might like.
In order to maximize the Google Reader experience I have moved two buttons to my Bookmark Toolbar: a “subscribe” button and a “note in reader” button. When I stumble on a new web site with interesting content, I hit the “subscribe” button, which tells Google Reader to look for the web site’s syndication information, and add this web site to the list of web sites I like to read. (This doesn’t always work, because not all web sites have a “syndication” feed set up properly . . . in my experience, I’d say 70% of web sites work and 99% of blogs work right, and this is improving over time.)
I hit the “note in reader” button when I am reading something I think is noteworthy. A dialog window pops up inviting me to enter a comment about the piece, and this is then published to a personal scrapbook. The nice thing is you can share these scrapbooks online, and subscribe to these scrapbooks just as you would subscribe to a web site. This means that your friends can help you find interesting things to read. For example, I really enjoy a lot of the articles about urban planning and mass transit that Ed Meng notes in his scrapbook.
When reading in the Google Reader interface, you can hit the “like” icon at the bottom of an article, and Google Reader will use that knowledge to help find interesting articles for you and for other people.
Google Chrome
Lately, my friends and I have started using Google’s new web browser, Google Chrome, more and more. The first reason for this is because it is fast: it launches fast and it performs tricks like DNS pre-resolution in order to load web pages faster. A somewhat faster web browser may not sound like a big deal but those of us in IT spend several hours a day using web browsers, so switching to a snappier web browser feels a bit like switching to a faster car with better handling. In a word, Google Chrome goes “whee!”
Chrome also has a lot of little spit-and-polish features that make a difference. I really enjoy that when I click the “new tab” button, a screen appears showing me thumbnail icons of the web sites I tend to visit. It makes getting where I want to go just that much more pleasant.
Application Shortcuts
The feature I have taken to lately is Google Chrome’s “Application Shortcut” feature. I bought a netbook last year, which is damned handy: like having a little “sketchbook” computer, handy for coffee shops, airplanes, or just catching up on Google Reader from the couch. Unfortunately, netbooks have limited screen resolution, and between the title, menu, URL, bookmark bars, and the Google Reader interface, I was left with less than half the height of the entire screen for skimming articles. Frustrating . . .
Now, I have used the “Create Application Shortcuts…” feature of Google Chrome, which creates a “desktop application” out of Google Reader. When I run the desktop application Google Reader is launched in a special Chrome window that skips all the menu bars in a normal web browser window: all I get is a title-bar and a big old window for reading articles in Google Reader. If I click on article links they launch in the full web browser, where I can bookmark them, note them in reader, or the like.
So, perhaps this explanation is helpful to some. You are welcome to comment with your own tips. Otherwise: happy aggregating!
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/10/rita-buscari-25/
Excerpt from Studs Terkel’s “Division Street America” (1967)
There were about forty of us went down there to protest James Dukes’ execution. We had a very orderly, and I think, dignified picket line. We marched in two’s up and down, very quiet. We rarely spoke to each other. But across the street there were about two hundred people in their cars with the doors open, the radios blarin’ out rock’n’roll music, with beer cans and with sandwiches. They were there all evening, and very often there would be jeers at us from across the street.
I was marching with a Northwestern student, who goes down to protest every time there’s an execution. He said these people are there at every execution. Every single one. He said no matter how cold it is–this was a warm night, this was August–no matter how cold it is, there are approximately the same number of people. He believes they’re there because the lights dim in the building, which isn’t true, because the chair is rigged up to a different electrical system.
They stay there until the body is brought out in an ambulance. You got the feeling, you know, that this was the instinct that sent people to the Colosseum in Rome. And it’s here, right here and now, present in our society. Warden Johnson said people call up and ask for tickets. Well, if tickets were sold, I’m sure it would be a sellout house every single time.
It was so brutish. I was marching with pacifists and ministers, and the quiet of these people compared to the crowd across the street gave it a nightmarish quality. At the time of the execution we all turned toward the jail and ceased conversation. And this was when the rhythm of the noise on the other side gained momentum. They had all the radios on, first of all because they wanted to hear the announcement. The sounds on the other side increased as our silence increased.
When the announcement came through on the radio, there was a big reaction across the street: Oh, that’s over with. Oh, that’s great. Especially toward us. It was a victory for them, you see? A great victory against the crackpots who were demonstrating across the street. You know: This is how much your demonstration has achieved, you’re no place at all.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/10/week-of-3-january-2010/
Sunday, January 3
I would have been content to stay home, but Mei really wanted to go to the gym. I am not a big gym fan myself and I didn’t want to “work” on my vacation so I joined her at the gym and read my magazine.
Monday, January 4
Mei had the day off today. She explained this only after I woke her up in a panic at 7:15. In the afternoon I joined her for a visit to the DMV, where I had this conversation with the DMV lady:
“Good afternoon! I’d like to exchange my California driver’s license for a New York driver’s license.”
“It is very cold out.”
“Yes, it is very cold today.”
“Are you sure?”
. . . “Oh! Yes, I’m sure. Well, I grew up in Chicago.”
“About the same.”
We’ll be representing the Empire State in one to two weeks.
Tuesday, January 5
I watched Google unveil the Nexus One. That is a pretty bad-ass phone. I checked but I’m not eligible to purchase one yet through T-Mobile. Joe said the only service plan they offer with the bundle is $80/mo, which is ridiculous. He ordered the $500 unlocked version, because then he could sign up for a $60/mo plan, and come out ahead after two years without a commitment.
I am paying $55/mo now for data and voice and 500 SMS, and I think that is too much money. I got on a rant about how I really don’t care much for phones, but a magic device is sure nifty. I did a little more research into going full-on data, maybe even just at wifi hot spots, and then using VoIP, or a calling plan with no minutes. It looks like Google’s already thinking that way, and acquired Gizmo5 last November, and in time they will relaunch that as a VoIP portal thingy tied to Google Voice. Which would save a hypothetical me from futzing about with DIDs and a SIP client and other stuff I don’t really understand.
Got some work done. Mei went to bed early due to illness, and I ended up playing Cities XL rather late. Right now the game crashes after 40 minutes or so, so I play for half-hour rounds. They seem to be aware of the issue and will hopefully fix it soon. I started laying out bus routes, which is kind of a neat feature, but that gave me insomnia so I had to get back out of bed at 1AM and re-align my bus routes.
Yes, I am a huge dork.
Wednesday, January 6
“Once I had a woman
With a face so pretty and fine
But she couldn’t make that pudding shake
So I left that girl behind” –Guy Davis
Since the wind chill was up near 20, I rode my bike over to Atlantic for my orthodontist appointment. It was a neat place with National Geographic nature films projected on the wall of the waiting area, with a separate soundtrack of some intense yet relaxing drumming. The work area was this sort of modernist slate and smoked glass nightmare, and the Orthodontist himself seemed disgusted and amused that I brought him the mold from the San Francisco dentist for a plaster cast of my jaw. “I prefer digital.”
He started explaining a bunch of orthodontic jargon that I could parse somewhat, and then he explained a bit more. I figure he’s more of a I-like-animals-let-me-realign-your-teeth person more than a people person, which is fine with me. He is hoping to conclude the treatment before a total of two years.
On the way back I bought a hanging plant, which rode home in the bicycle basket. Now it sits above the monitor.
Cities are like coral reefs: a hard, growing structure that provides habitat for fancifully fragile and unique inhabitants.
Some of those inhabitants protect themselves with poison.
Thursday, January 7
I was up early and rode the bike down to the Tea Lounge, which at 7am was a ghost town.
Friday, January 8
A productive day at work. Afterwards I took Mei up to a restaurant called Bunny Chow. Bunny chow is a South African cuisine of curry served in a bread loaf, which served as a take-out container for laborers during Apartheid. The restaurant was small and seemed to be run by people taking it easy. Many menu items were out of stock, but what we ate was tasty.
It had no Yelp review, so mine was the first. Three stars.
Saturday, January 9
A quiet day, as Mei prepared for an overnight shift.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/08/oh-god-whatever/
Hemant Mehta asks:
Which statement should atheists be using?
1. There is probably no god.
2. There is no god.
In my book, Atheism is reverence toward God.
If God is almighty and all powerful, and leads an existence in the Universe beyond my ability to perceive it, then the most responsible approach I can take towards this thing beyond my perception is to shut the heck up about it, and focus on our collective worldly life.
So, maybe “God does not exist within my perception of reality.”
Or perhaps, “The question of God’s existence is irrelevant, but if for some reason it needs to reveal itself unto me, I bet it could hook that up.”
Or more modesty? “I have been unable to perceive the existence or intentions of God. I do think that Faith is important, and I put my faith in humanity, which tests my faith as surely as God tests the faith of its believers.”
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/03/week-of-27-december-2009/
Sunday, December 27
The Lakeshore Limited stops at 6:54AM in Erie, PA. I heard a voice behind me ask a passenger “are you a US citizen?” And a moment later a warning that they have to carry their I-20 at all times or it is a $100 fine. I had been through a few checkpoints in Europe, and it seemed wrong to me that we were now at a “border crossing” within the US. I figured when they asked for my ID I would first ask for their ID. They asked the guy next to me.
“He’s sleeping,” I offered. He took the coat off his head and rummaged through his papers. He was born in New York, but he is a Mexican citizen, and he immigrated through one point, no, another. The conversation switched to Spanish. They wanted his permicion, and the agent flashed him a sample consular ID that in the dark looked to me like a Hawaii driver’s license.
“You came in as a tourist?”
“Tourist Visa’s only good for a year. Or six months.”
“Vamos con nosotros.”
The man gathered up his belongings. After a rough night sleeping on the train, he was off to a detention center, and then probably to Mexico. I told my neighbor, “I’m sorry.”
“I only asked him for the truth,” the agent replied.
“This is America?” asked the passenger behind me.
Having caught someone, they stopped checking IDs, and didn’t ask anything of me. On my way to the dining car the conductor announced that due to this last stop we were now running ten minutes behind, and would not make it up for some hours, but thanks to good weather and light traffic we would probably be in New York on time.
Monday, December 28
It is our week off together, and we decided to be tourists in New York City. Today we went to the New York Botanic Gardens in the Bronx, which is not all that interesting in the cold of winter, but I was keen on seeing their train show. This was neat: trains running through the conservatory on trestles built from wood and fashioned to resemble New York’s famous bridges, passing houses and architectural landmarks like the old Penn Station, built from plant materials.
Worth seeing once. The gardens are probably a better trip on a Summer day.
Afterwards we caught Avatar, which is definately a mind blowingly wonderful science fiction movie that will be remembered for its innovative effects. I really enjoyed it and if anyone is asking I say go ahead and spend the few bucks extra to see it in 3D and yes get there early because the first theater was sold out and we got a good place in line at the second theater because we showed up 40 minutes early.
On a Monday.
Tuesday, December 29
We got dressed up and went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I enjoyed the European realist paintings, then Mei was agog at the Samurai stuff which seemed to me like an awful lot of impressive blades that didn’t quite captivate me. Mei was enchanted that bunny ears are part of the Samurai style, since rabbits symbolize longevity and cunning.
After that we wandered through the Chinese calligraphy, the writer’s garden which got me thinking that some ferns and hanging plants could really spruce up the home office, then on through the American stuff, which was mostly colonial furniture and some excellent Tiffany mosaics. It seemed interesting to me that the Samurai exhibition had a lot of Japanese tourists, the Chinese calligraphy attracted Chinese people, and there was a group of Indians checking out the Jain temple.
And America is represented by Tiffany mosaics.
Afterwards Mei treated me to a meal at Dean and Delucca, where she grabbed some cupcakes to bring home.
Wednesday, December 30
In the morning we hit up Ikea for a bed frame, and once that was wedged into the car, we took the long way around Brooklyn to the Bed Bath and Beyond so Mei could purchase a food processor. We stopped along the way at a place that Google thought was called VCS Hobbies but turned out to be a storefront for Restaurant Point-of-Sale computer systems. They buzzed me in to their office and I asked if this was supposed to be a hobby shop. Another lady came forward and asked which scale, and then explained that they were pretty much sold out of anything except N, due to the holidays, but they could take my information.
Not much for browsing, I guess. It seemed like a nimble, family run enterprise keen to make money any way they could, and really, there’d probably a lot more money in restaurant POS systems. Still, it is weird for a hobby shop to be on the down-low.
Thursday, December 31
New Years Eve! We watched the ball drop in Times Square from our sofa in Brooklyn. Instead of standing like cattle for hours in the cold without access to restrooms, I made Mei some hot chocolate.
Friday, January 1
We brunched at a French place over on That Street Where I Bought the Bike. Pain Perdu, oh la la!
We bought food, and Mei made a double batch of chicken chili.
Saturday, January 2
Mei baked cookies, and I helped get the place together, trekking out for veggies to go with the cheese plate and alcohol. In the evening, some neighbors and friends who braved the really cold outside came by and there was much noshing on chicken chili, hot apple cider, chocolate chip cookies, ginger snaps, cheese and veggies. It was a smallish gathering but our very first Brooklyn party worked out well.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/12/27/week-of-20-december-2009/
Sunday, December 20
So, it is weird sleeping in when you expected to be on a train. New York City was a winter wonderland, very pleasant to walk around when the cars are driving slow, and the streets are filled with people shoveling snow. A Winter snow storm the weekend before Christmas hits the spot for people to rub shoulders with strangers in a friendly manner.
The snow also means no parking enforcement on Monday. It looks like we will have to move the car before Thursday, as Christmas Eve is not a parking holiday.
We went to brunch, then some light shopping, and back home for a relaxing afternoon. Mei has one last night shift this evening, and since the car is well and buried, I escorted her to the hospital on the train.
I like going out in the snow. Must be that Viking blood. On my way back I noted that in the working class neighborhood surrounding the hospital, there was less commercial activity, because there is less money to spend. Without a critical mass of people with sufficient disposable income, you don’t get the retail services opening up which help employ the working class, and that is why modern small towns tend to be somewhat dead. I started thinking about how in SimCity 4, commercial development always lagged in a new town until a certain point . . .
Later that night I looked up the new MMO city simulator, Cities XL. For $10 / 30 days I thought I would give it a try. I didn’t go to bed until 5am, though to be sure I didn’t get the game running until 3am due to download issues. The game feels pretty “beta” but from what I seen the interface is pretty slick, and the graphics are beautiful. It seems pretty close to the idea of a game I have been wanting to play for years, where you build your city on a planet with other cities, and cities have effects on each other. The first two things I have seen that have been missing from SimCity is that the very first thing you need is a road coming in from outside, and then a consideration for local natural resources, which give your new town a back story and a context, which is a more satisfying start than an abstract sandbox.
Monday, December 21
Brian: Okay, cats riding Roomba pretty much justifies Google’s purchase of YouTube.
Me: Amen! It is all about . . . the long tail!
Tuesday, December 22
Brunch with Mei. We ate at Tom’s which is this famous place that is never open. I ate there once before and enjoyed their French Toast, but this time through we found the food quality somewhat lacking.
After a relaxed day at home, it was up to Penn Station, and on to Chicago. Mei accompanied me to Penn Station to see me off, but as I was concerned with finding the Amtrak check-in kiosks and then a good place to wait for the track announcement I kept speeding off ahead of her. She wasn’t too pleased about that but was gracious enough in saying goodbye. I got a nice seat on the train and a Japanese Literature Post-grad named Steve sat next to me.
The train was running a little late, and they never did go through coach for dinner reservations, so as the train pulled out of Albany at 7:30 I walked back to the dining car, where a long line of confused and uninformed guests had gathered, knowing that they typically stop serving dinner at 8pm. I had a lamb shank, sitting across from a guy who had been in computer sales for the past half century or so. Right now he is retired but helping some guys in nano-fabrication get running in business. Cool stuff.
There was a fair amount of talk of politics. The guy was Republican who had voted for Obama, and the lady sitting next to me said her husband was a Tea Party protester. I started to laugh in sympathy then realized that hey, sometimes you have sat down to eat with Republicans. I listened as these business folks tried to make sense of the role of government in the modern world. They disdained the crazy right-wing types who oppose all government programs.
I slept better than I had the first time I rode the train in November.
Usenet’s big “problem” is that nobody ever wrote a user-friendly web interface for it. Instead, the people who really wanted to chat found it easier to hack up web forums filled with animated emoticons using PHP and MySQL, rather than figure out some bitchin’ gateway into the great gray world, ruled by curmudgeons content to seal themselves off from the hoi polloi.
Wednesday, December 23
We were repeatedly woken in the morning by loud announcements regarding the fact that breakfast could be had in the dining car. I took the L home through a landscape I most remember from high school. In the evening I showed Machinarium to the family, which everyone found to be adorable and engaging. I ended up playing the game until 3:30am.
Thursday, December 24
We headed down to Grandma’s house for Christmas Eve. There was less family around than other years but neighbors dropped by. A lighter year than usual, so we had a lot of leftovers.
Around 10pm we opened presents. I went to set up the webcam I had gotten Grandma, but when I plugged it in to her Mac nothing happened. Further investigation revealed that the UVC feature that enables webcam support was introduced in OS X 10.4 and that if you have 10.3.9 you’re just a sorry twat who can not use webcam software. Okay, so how much to upgrade? Well, the latest and greatest is only $30! That’s not so bad, let us do this! Woah there pardner, you can’t have the new Mac OS unless you have 1GB of RAM and an Intel processor. Your vintage Mac Mini just isn’t going to do! Uhhh, okay. How about 10.4? Well, Apple doesn’t publish that any more, that is a collector’s item, you see. The current market rate for a used copy of the old Mac OS on the resale market is around $150.
I guess if you keep spending money on upgrading your Mac everything will be dandy but if you’re the sort of human trash who only upgrades her computer maybe twice a decade then Fuck You, Grandma! If this were Windows or Linux someone would have figured out how to support a nice webcam. Hell, on Linux I can even use the cheaper “Windows” webcam because, unlike Mac OS, someone figured out how to get the auto-focus working . . . the fact that Microsoft can only manage to squeeze out a potentially mandatory OS upgrade once or twice a decade begins to seem more virtuous. Apple really should let you easily upgrade components of their OS without much hassle, but selling computers is how they make money.
Fuck you, Apple. Well, I’ll find her an upgrade to OS X 10.4 for non-Intel computers on CD-not-DVD and there may even be a store around that will happily get her a memory upgrade, because something tells me that even if the Apple Store has a Genius who could, by appointment only, fill out the form to mail the computer off for a memory upgrade because woah basic maintenance on a Mac Mini is effing rocket science I suspect that when they find out it is an old computer stained by a half decade of tobacco that they will just condescendingly laugh at my horribly backward Grandmother and I’d finally snap and go in there and beat the crap out of some wannabe-hipster douchebags.
Next time Grandma gets a PC.
Friday, December 25
Cleaning up Grandma’s house. Uncle John started to explore the netbook that we got him for Christmas. Janice came by, and we were all glad. John set up an old-fashioned 120mm “dual lens reflex” box camera on a tripod and some lights and took some family Christmas photos. We also looked over some rifles that had been sitting around in Grandma’s house from the previous owner, before heading back home.
Saturday, December 26
Mom treated me to brunch, and Jessica brought the posters she got me for Christmas to her shop to frame them. Then, Mom drove me down to Union Station, for my 9PM train back towards New York.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/12/20/week-of-13-december-2009/
Sunday, December 13
More sleep.
Monday, December 14
Today is the first day for my coworkers to commute to what is by all accounts a soul-crushing new office in San Jose. I get to keep on enjoying my home office here in New York, but this Monday has been harder than most for kickstarting morale. I felt better after a bike ride to shop for groceries, despite the fact that the week’s cash is nearly all spent. Fortunately, I won’t be travelling to San Francisco so much any more, which will reduce my spend rate.
I also helped debug some issues on the shared server which hosts this web site.
Tuesday, December 15
The weather was nice. I rode the bike up to the Post Office to retrieve a delivery. Later, I revised my resume and solicited endorsements on LinkedIn. My manager responded that I nearly gave him a heart attack, and I replied that fixing up my resume has been overdue, and fixing it up makes me feel more empowered.
After gorging myself on some old episodes of “Dirty Jobs” that had been sitting around in the TiVo, “The Hunt For Red October” came on. Damned excellent film, that . . . got to bed towards 2AM.
Wednesday, December 16
Sometimes a vendor is both incompetent, and unconcerned. Makes me angry.
“eNom claims to support IPv6 DNS, but for the past few months our configuration has been non-functional, and eNom customer support has explained that their IPv6 functionality is broken, with no estimate for when it will be repaired, if ever.”
Thursday, December 17
It was very cold today.
Friday, December 18
Still very cold.
Saturday, December 19
As I review the energy used on my Android phone, I find that I am looking forward to the day when phones are more like “instant messenger” clients and it is perfectly reasonable to “log off” from the phone function, saving a lot of energy. Incoming calls can be routed to the local land line, desktop VoIP client, or into Google Voice voicemail, where they are transcribed and delivered via e-mail.
Riding the subway makes my phone die so much faster as it broadcasts harder on the radio to look for a signal. And yet, I take maybe one incoming call a week. The telephone function is basically a giant energy parasite on my PDA. Things will get better when I can turn the cellular network off without disabling the wifi and GPS features. As it is I have to bypass the one-touch power management widget on my Android’s home screen, and hold down the power button until a sub menu comes up, where I can enter “airplane mode” when I ride the subway.
The snow began coming in as I went to the laundromat. In the evening Mei and I trekked out to a local place for sushi. We snuggled in for the evening and I received a robocall from Amtrak: my train to Washington DC Sunday morning was cancelled. I snagged the very last seat on Tuesday’s Lakeshore Limited, the same direct train I rode out on Thanksgiving.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/12/18/banking-history/
The History Channel recently aired a show called “Modern Marvels: Banks” which first caught my ear early in the show when they reported that: “soon it may even be possible to do your banking in the kitchen, using a microwave oven . . . today there are less than 10 million consumers doing online banking, that’ll be over 100 million in the near future.”
WHAT!? I press the Info button on my television and see the show was produced in 2002. Back then my bank’s online service wouldn’t let me log in because I wasn’t running Windows.
Later in the show they cover the Gold Rush, the San Francisco earthquake and firestorm, the rise of Bank of America, the failures of banks during the Great Depression, and then they started talking about Roosevelt’s New Deal, starting with FDIC, and:
Narrator: The Government also took drastic action that split the banking industry into separate parts.
Richard Sylla: It was decided that because of the stock market crash and the Depression that it would be a good idea to break off commercial banking from investment banking. Commercial banking deals with loans and deposits. Investment banking deals with underwriting securities, issuing new securities. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 decided that bankers would have to choose either to be commercial bankers or investment bankers, but they couldn’t be both.
Narrator: It was thought that banks would be less likely to fail if they were not operating as financial “supermarkets.” Economists today believe that bigger financial institutions are much safer, because their risks are diversified. The merger between Citibank and Traveler’s Insurance that created the financial behemoth of Citigroup would have been illegal had the Glass-Steagall Act not been repealed in 1999.
Those economists of 2002 were right in that larger banks were less likely to fail, but this is because of government intervention to bail out financial institutions deemed “too big to fail” rather than diversification of risk. Just as economists were buying into the “bigger is safer” philosophy, my industry embraced a philosophy of small, cheap, redundant parts which could fail individually without bringing down the entire system. They built Citigroup, and we built Google.
Fortunately, these days I can do my banking from Linux, and my microwave never touches my money.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/12/17/use-encryption-damnit/
Thanks, Nathan, for pointing out the Wall Street Journal article:
WASHINGTON — Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.
Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.
Somewhere in Pakistan there’s a kid nick-named “Windows” hanging outside a cave with a laptop computer hooked up to a diesel generator. When the drones get in range, someone runs to Osama and says “Windows has detected a Predator Drone that may be trying to kill you. Take cover now? (Y/n)”
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/12/17/amzn4blgr-lmao/
I received an e-mail with the subject “Amazon Associates and Google Blogger Now Integrated” and I was amused in much the same way that I am amused when I see a dog enjoying someone else’s vomit. The e-mail invited feedback via Twitter, but I went to fill out a form. This is what I wrote:
Hello,
I received an e-mail with the subject “Amazon Associates and Google Blogger Now Integrated” and I was like “oh, trainwreck!” Then I realized Google had added a feature so associates could link more easily. That’s cool.
Except, Blogger is a horrible, horrible, truly awful platform. Hopefully you are working so that bloggers on other platforms, like WordPress, can do stuff effectively. (I know I stopped years ago as it wasn’t worth the effort.)
This was troubling: “The new tool allows Bloggers to add links and images . . .”
Why is it troubling? Because there are bloggers, and then there are users of Blogger. I realize that “Blogger” is short-hand for a “user of Blogger” but it also implies that Amazon is thinking that the only bloggers that count are the ones with a capital B.
But the real punchline was:
“Please tell us what you think of our new Amazon Associates for Blogger feature using hashtag #AMZN4BLGR on Twitter”
This is awesome on two levels:
1) “We should collect feedback from users. I know, we can assign our users a hashtag and they can communicate with us on Twitter! We’ll be trendy cool social media mavens!”
2) “Gotta think of a hashtag! Okay . . . let us take the words Amazon and Blogger, remove the vowels, and smash it together with the number 4. Because, after all, if we’re collecting feedback from users and limiting them to 140 characters on Twitter our hashtag should look like a car’s license plate!”
Maybe instead of having a giant social media marketing boner over integration with the most technically awful leading blogging platform you could focus on delivering core functionality to users that should have been delivered four years ago.
Sincerely,
-daniel
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/12/16/how-i-would-fix-global-warming/
It sounds as if Copenhagen will be yet another disappointment. But a boy could dream, right? If it were up to me, we’d just set a world-wide, per-capita ration on carbon emissions. Use current US emissions as the ration for the first year, and then ratchet it down like 10% each year.
Basically, each year you’d receive your carbon entitlement, and then sell it on the market to the energy companies and other carbon emission points identified by the carbon administration as points of emission requiring use of a ration. That money would offset your increased fuel and electricity prices: if you conserve you come out ahead, and if you’re a heavy user, you pay something closer to the true cost of your energy consumption. Viva Capitalism!
As the entitlement reduces each year, you’d have two things going on. The first would be billions of human beings pouring some of their creative energy and talent into finding ways to reduce their own energy consumption. The other would be that you’d see wealthy first-world folks trading through the carbon markets with less wealthy people in the developing world for a shared, equal human right to emit carbon.
The current approach of each nation saying “well, we’ll spend somewhat less than we did at some year in the past when our economy was less developed” is a shell game. And I hate it when Americans are like “well, China’s the largest emitter now!” China has four times the population we have. That means that if they emit more carbon than we do, that the average Chinese is emitting just over a quarter of what the average American emits. China is operating at an insane scale with an infinite number of challenges that threaten basic stuff like food security and national coherence. We want them to take the lead on climate change? No. Our people got us into this industrialized carbon-economy world, and our people can lead us to the post-carbon world as well.
Feedback Welcome
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