You never forget your first computer.
For Christmas of 1984, Grandpa gave us a
Commodore 64. A couple years later we
got a disk drive, and eventually we even
had a printer. Before the disk drive we
had to buy programs on cartridge, or
type them in to the basic interpreter
line by line. Mostly I just played
cartridge games.
Eventually we got a modem, and I could
talk to BBSes at 300 baud in 40 glorious
columns. (Most BBSes assumed
80-columns.) I was happier when I got a
1200 baud modem for my Amiga, which
could display 80 columns of text.
In my second year of college I
discovered the joy of C programming on
Unix workstations, which led to my
present career as a Unix SysAdmin. I
spend my days juggling multiple windows
of text, generally at least 80x24. /djh
Tea Party? No, these guys make those guys look reasonable . . .
I was on my way home and saw these guys outside the Mountain View Post Office. I looked at the Obama-with-a-Hitler-moustache and figured the Tea Party had set up shop. I snapped a picture, and then this guy asked if I was worried about the solar flares.
Solar flares? Tea Party people don’t worry about solar flares . . . I smiled and approached: these guys were doing performance art! I told them solar flares are good for cooking.
“Obama isn’t doing anything to stop the solar flares,” he began to explain.
I saw the name LaRouche and realized these guys weren’t parodying the Tea Party: they were actually way further down the rabbit hole of crazy. “Well, he likes solar power,” I punted.
As the guy began to explain that we should be performing nuclear fusion ourselves I edged away. I am an impressionable young man with a sufficiently unconventional belief system: I don’t want to catch their crazy!
Fans in Mountain View Celebrate India's World Cup Victory
As I was walking home from the cafe I encountered a growing crowd of shouting, chanting, singing folks waving Indian flags. I googled “Indian Holidays” on my smart phone, then thought to google “India cricket” and it turns out India has just beaten Sri Lanka to win the World Cup.
In my Sophomore year of college I was paired with a roommate from India. Tarun was a very serious EE major who left the room for only three things: 1) classes, 2) meals and 3) the India-Pakistan cricket match. He was a nice guy but since he was always studying in the room he wasn’t an ideal roommate.
Indian ex-pats I meet tend to be really serious, smart, hard-working people, so it is nice to see a crowd of folks reveling in a collective emotional experience. This is a great moment for anyone who has moved so far from home to make their life.
I’m trying to get a better handle on my “spending cash” which is managed through my personal account and credit cards. Most “needs” type expenses are covered through our joint finances, so the personal account is mostly discretionary. The problem is I want to reduce my personal credit card debt, and these days the personal account doesn’t get much money to play with, which means I need to be smart and aware with my discretionary income.
About a decade ago I tried managing my spending by writing the date on a series of $20 bills. If I was breaking a bill with today’s date on it, things were going alright. If I was breaking yesterday’s date, I was doing well, and if I was spending a bill with a future date on it . . . well, time to cut back, eh?
This time around I’m thinking to allow myself $10/day. ATMs don’t give out tens, and these days I make some small purchases with the credit card, so I’ll try a different solution: a Google Spreadsheet!
I thought it might be neat to share the progress here, in case other folks are curious to see how this experiment works. You should be able to see the results tally up over the course of the month on the right.
This is by no means a comprehensive thing: I’m not tracking automatic withdrawals (charity, web hosting) or interest on the cards: I’m merely trying to keep my personal spending (the “burn rate”) in check by maintaining an awareness of what’s up. This is pretty much lunch money, small gifts, and entertaining the sweetheart. My rule is going to be that any personal spending I have to initiate I will track. So, I’ll count the $50 mobile phone bill, for the sake of a healthy challenge.
Technical note: I don’t know for spreadsheets, but the formula for setting up the balance column was to start at cell D3 with this formula:
=IF(A3="",,SUM(D2+C3))
This basically means that if the date (A3) on this row is filled in, add the amount (C3) to the previous total (D2). I was then able to “copy” that cell, multi-select all the cells below, and “paste” and the formula got updated each row, as my Excel Guru colleague expected.
I have been concerned that as Yahoo decays, that Flickr may at some point no longer remain a good place to host my photos. I do wish someone would create a competing service which supported the API. Some kid made Zooomr a few years ago, which was to sport a feature-complete Flickr API, but as best I can tell the kid moved to Japan and lost interest in Zoomr, which remains an abandoned stepchild.
Picasa? The desktop client is kind of neat but I don’t much like the web interface. It feels like another one of those one-offs Google bought but then had no idea what to do with it. Anyway, it’s just not my thing.
So, I took a look at SmugMug, who have been trying to lure Flickr refugees, but the consensus seems to be that if you like Flickr, SmugMug can not approximate Flickr. (The biggest concern for me is the loss of the “title” attribute. I’ve got 7,500 images online acquired over a decade . . .)
This is disappointing, because I like SmugMug’s promise of customization, and I have never been afraid to roll my arms up to hack on templates, HTML, and CSS to achieve my desires. Perhaps in the next few years SmugMug will become a little more flexible such that it can easily achieve what I want:
Individual pages for my photos
Support for a “title” attribute
An ability to browse title/descriptions (Flickr “detail” view)
Every so often I have this idea that the WordPress Gallery feature should take some steroids and create a friendly, Flickr-API-compatible hosting environment, which you could then customize just as much as you can customize a self-hosted WordPress blog . . . but that is very far beyond my code abilities and free time.
Yesterday, at the cash register of my local supermarket, I was asked by the cashier if I would purchase only one of the two packs of noodles I had intended to purchase. The unspoken implication was, in that way, someone else could have noodles too. Now, from the point-of-view of the supermarket’s profit, it makes no difference whether those two packs were sold to me as an individual, or sold separately. Yen is yen. But as an example of a society sharing its burden (even in this small way), it spoke volumes. I had my hand gently slapped, and was humbled.
I recall a story I heard on the radio, from I think it was Denmark, where a lady needed a medical procedure and was informed that there would be a two-month wait for the service. She explained this to her son, a Doctor, who offered to pull some strings to get her in sooner, and she shamed him because the right thing to do is follow the rules like everyone else: fairness before favoritism.
This sort of thinking in anathema in much of the world, but it is a way of thinking that I really like. I guess its because as a child I was indoctrinated with Socialist ideology at the water fountain, where we were taught to queue and each take an equal share.
Taken from the roof of a friend's fancy condo at a party in June, 2010.
At the party we explained that we would soon be moving back to California, but could end up back on the East Coast in a few years. The host said he’d put us down as “Bi-Coastal Curious.”
The southern terminus of the Steven's Creek Trail.
I visited a friend at El Camino Hospital before heading to work. From the hospital, I took Sleeper Ave to the Steven’s Creek Trail, which actually ends at Sleeper. They’ll be extending the trail over the next few years with a bridge over 85.
In the past few weeks I have been pimping out my cubicle.
The newest feature is I moved the bookshelf from shoulder height at the back of the cube to waist height on the outside of the cube, which I can do, since I sit at the end of a row. The new low shelf space is where I share coffee and where snacks can be distributed. This also increases my “visibility” and opens up opportunities to chat with coworkers. Sort of the opposite of when I worked remote last year.
Center, you can see the back of my work laptop, a Lenovo W510 with an SSD drive. (I love SSD drives.) Some low-light flowers, a tall desk chair I nicked from an abandoned cubicle, and to the right, my Lego Cisco logo, which I had disassembled for repairs and which I think I’ll keep in San Jose for now.
Near the end of the bicycle version of my commute I ride along a creek. I could tell from Stephen’s Creek that the water was high, so when I rode the ramp down to this underpass I wasn’t surprised. I took my bicycle around this water, through especially sticky mud that threatened to suck off my shoes, and which globbed on to my bicycle, smeared on my pants.
These potato chips did not succumb to my magic ass.
I was tipped off that a bag of potato chips was hanging loose in the vending machine. I wasn’t desiring potato chips, but I felt obliged anyway to whap my butt against the side of the vending machine to see if I might dislodge them and therefor acquire one of my favorite cuisines: free food! Many a time in college I procured errant candy bars from the vending machines in the Digital Computing Laboratory building by wielding what I refer to as my magic ass.
Alas, my magic ass did not succeed this time. “Dude, just put in 75 cents, you’ll get two,” suggested a coworker.
“But I don’t want BBQ potato chips. I’m only interested in dislodging free food!”
I did buy a Snickers bar, just because, but it is still in my backpack, uneaten. I’ll wash it down with a coffee at some point.
A bloated plate burrito, al pastor on the inside, parmesan cheese atop, at Taqueria San Bruno.
I have fallen off the bandwagon of late, but now that I have freed up some time I’m fixing to retroactively post photos. I make up my own rules.
I visited my team in the San Bruno office on Thursday. We grabbed Taqueria San Bruno, and it was good. The food came out slow so my coworker and I downed two bottles of Mexican Coke each. What is Mexican Coke? Coke from Mexico, made with cane sugar. The other coke we get from Mexico I think mostly originates in Columbia, and that is not my preferred formulation.
A countdown clock at the Bergen St station, Brooklyn.
During my year-in-New-York, one thing the MTA began doing in earnest was to install countdown clocks, which are a really nice feature to let passengers know what trains are on their way and how long before they arrive. But Bergen St also has a little more sentimental value for me because I believe it may be the first New York subway station I ever entered, back in July, 2001 when I visited relatives in Park Slope. My first day in Brooklyn, I got layed off via mobile phone. That same week I trekked up to the World Trade Center towers and figured I’d save my $25 and visit the top next time. New York is always changing, and these countodown clocks help give folks a better glimpse of what may be ahead.
