After making it home and grabbing a shower, I roamed in search of coffee. Alas, the Tea Lounge was pretty packed, so I wandered down to 5th Ave and ordered a hot chocolate from Ozzie’s. After making sure I was “to stay” they served me in a paper cup with a plastic cap, no whipped cream.
Yeah well, I wandered home and around 4:30pm started watching Nova on the TiVo, but fell asleep hard on the couch.
Monday, November 30
Booked my travel to California for next week. Mei is working night shifts this month but I was able to take her out for sushi this evening.
Tuesday, December 1
Last night I dreamed I was driving an old Beetle in California. Mei was with me and we were going to pick Brian up to take him to dinner. Brian still had long hair but the sides of his head had been buzzed clean.
Wednesday, December 2
Notes from Facebook:
I can only respect a Libertarian if they have the faith in their convictions to homestead in Somalia.
The Constitution enshrines the right to bear arms, in the interests of well-regulated militia. Police forces are a fairly recent innovation, often used in the service of tyranny, like standing armies. Somalia’s system of locally supported militias seems awfully close to a “strict interpretation” Libertarian ideal of limited government, with the burden of personal safety being placed upon the individual.
I walked down to the Tea Lounge for lunch: a giant salad and a pain au chocolat. One man beamed at a friend that the Senate was going to vote today, after setting aside 4 hours for debate. I knew what he was talking about. “You heard about DC,” his friend replied. Later I read a cartoon: why didn’t the Army notice Major Alawi’s erratic behavior? Because he wasn’t acting gay! I laughed out loud.
Thursday, December 3
Today I booked my holiday travel, and this time it is Amtrak all the way. Just over $200 round-trip, but this time my ride to Chicago will be via Washington, DC, where I will switch trains.
On Wednesday I had a small cup of coffee at the Tea Lounge. And a giant salad. That’s the only coffee I have had this week. Trying to “detox” a bit. Quite unintentionally, I haven’t eaten any meat either. A lot of oatmeal. I love oatmeal! Mei is working nights so everything just feels weird. It didn’t help that I managed to watch the six-hour “The Prisoner” mini-series this week as well. I thought it was really very good, and goes well with alcohol, but that means I am out of Scotch.
Tonight I ate a half pound of frozen veggies. Delicious enough but I’m a bit gassy, so it is just as well that Mei is at work.
If I were maintaining a Christmas list, I would add “HP 60 color and black-and-white printer cartridges.”
Friday, December 4
I spent the last of my cash on sandwiches, sodas, flowers, and some whiskey on the theory that Mei might like some tasty sammiches before she had to go to work. Alas, she is off Friday and Saturday night. Doh! We figured we could go see the Mr Fox movie, but ended up relaxing indoors instead. Despite the promised weather report, it did not snow in New York City.
I went to bed with a nasty headache. I rarely get headaches.
Saturday, December 5
I woke up with a scummy throat, and Mei was feeling worse all day. I took her out to Cheryl’s where there was a substantial wait, but it was a deliciously good experience nonetheless. She bought a chicken and stock on the way home and as she set to cooking I went and moved her car, dropping the old printer and scanner at the Goodwill, then scoring a Christmas tree off a friendly French screenwriter outside of the Rite Aid on Flatbush. Back home I sorted through digital photographs while playing “Blazing Saddles” and “Ghostbusters” off Netflix Instant on the TiVo, after which we enjoyed a soup dinner together.
I did not make it to the bicycle recycle store up in DUMBO . . . maybe during the week. I did some Christmas shopping online and built a spreadsheet to track my Christmas gift spending, on the theory that I’ll transfer a certain amount from Savings to cover it all.
What I could also use for Christmas: a wireless Ethernet doohickey for the TiVo HD.
I don’t narrate my life any more, whether for good or for ill. Well, maybe . . . I should try a weekly update. This has been working well at work, anyway.
Saturday, 21 November
On Friday I took Mei out to dinner, since we were going to not see each other for most of a week. We went to an Indian place up near the Kips Bay theater, where we then saw “Where the Wild Things Are”. I think the first time I saw that book I was impressed with its style, and so my Mom thought I liked the story and read it to me a bunch, but I always thought Max was kind of a spoiled brat. At the end of the movie I mumbled to Mei, “if my son pulls that crap he is not getting any chocolate cake.” When asked if he’d get any dinner, I responded that I wasn’t so sure. I wonder if the kid might have some blood sugar issues such that missing dinner may be a bad move.
Saturday morning, Mei was up early to go to work. I slept in a bit, and treated myself to brunch at Teddy’s, which served me two eggs, fried potatoes, Canadian bacon, rye toast, fruit salad, orange juice and coffee for $8.25. Now, Cheryl’s has some tastier food, so I’ll take Mei over there, but if it is just me, I stick with the cheaper, hearty meal.
I went home, washed the dishes and relaxed a bit, until around 1400 when I rode up to Penn Station to catch the 3:45 to Chicago. Now, a plane would have been faster and cheaper, but now that I live in New York, I can “afford” the relative luxury of a train ride home. The train was pretty full, and a guy named Don sat next to me. I got the modem working on my laptop and caught up somewhat on Internet reading. At Albany they took our engine off the train and shunted a series of cars from Boston onto the front. This was exciting to me, so I shot some dark, blurry video from the passenger area.
I treated myself to dinner in the dining car. Lamb shank, half a bottle of wine, dessert, coffee, and conversation with a cute college couple who were switching to the California Zephyr in Chicago, arriving in Emeryville on Tuesday to enjoy Thanksgiving in Santa Cruz. Robin the Film major and Miru the Art History major. They’re both minoring in Making a Living.
Despite ample legroom and a glass of Scotch from the Cafe car, I tossed and turned a great deal. (more…)
I remembered a dream this weekend. I was walking in Bangkok and it occurred to me I should turn off the data on my smart phone, lest I get raped by the service provider. Then I was kind of pleased to see that my smart phone was my Sidekick 2, because that thing was just wonderful.
Then I said to myself “I’m in Bangkok with a smart phone and its a Sidekick 2 when I know I own a G1, so like, am I dreaming?!” And so my unconscious was like shitshit, no look, it says Sidekick 4! Whoo! Shiny! Wouldn’t that make an awesome Android phone!? And I was like “damn, that rocks! When did we come up with this?”
I have always been enchanted by maps, especially transit maps. I have used the London Tube, New York Subway and Santa Clara VTA maps as wall decor. Earlier this year I began working on my own version of a transit map, “just for fun” to cover transit options within San Francisco. I figured I would focus on making a map that would be useful for casual exploration of San Francisco, showing the metro lines and those bus lines which reliably connect between them.
I shelved the project for a while when it came time to move to New York, but I have finally picked up again, due in part to inspiration from discovering this site, and hope to release an “open source” transit map soon.
Speaking of San Francisco, if anyone has a free guest room or couch this Tuesday and Wednesday evening, I would be happy to keep it warm for you! (I have been visiting monthly at my own expense.)
Glorious Ranger confronts Ultraviolet Thunder over the danger a fish presents to a squirrel’s nuts.
Some people wonder at the recent Achewood story arc, in which Todd, a substance-abusing squirrel, attempts to “piss up a rope” and thereby triggers his transportation into a text adventure game in which he and Kim Jong-il together flee North Korea to found the “PEOPLE’S KINGDOM OF ECSTASY AND WRATH!”
To quote a friend: “Man, Achewood, WHAT THE FUCK . . . I don’t know if [Chris Onstad] is ignorant or nuts.”
So, leveraging my International Baccalaureate high school education, I explained:
He is riffing on a Latin American literary convention known as “magical realism” popularized in the English canon by translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
An example of magical realism can be found in Marquez’ “One Hundred Years of Solitude” when the town of Macondo comes under an insomnia plague. At first, people don’t have to sleep, but then they realize they are losing their memories. So they start putting labels on things to remind them what what they are. And they put a big sign over the main road that says GOD EXISTS. In case one might forget.
In the context of magical realism, it is entirely reasonable that Todd should type with a stutter.
Many appreciate what he has to say, but then again, he is basically articulating what we all know, and plenty figure that maybe his writing is no longer fresh, and he is just cranking out articles in order to shill his warez:
“This might be a neat opportunity to use Scrum. Once a week, the team gets together, in person or virtually, and reviews the previous week’s work. Then they decide which features and tasks to do over the next week. FogBugz would work great for tracking this . . .”
My position is that most stuff we read is mediocre, and Joel at least writes well, and Joel wears his ulterior motives on his sleeve, so when he starts figuring FogBugz can cure what ails CS curricula, I just figure “and now a word from our sponsors” and my brain hits the fast-forward button.
I think Tom actually has the best reaction to the issue Joel brings up, in that he adds that different people have different learning methods:
We all know there are students that are “visual learners”, “audio learners” and “kinesthetic” learners.
We all know what? Okay, yeah, and “everyone” is talking about this, right? Anyway, Tom, like me, is a learning-by-doing kind of guy who didn’t always “get” the formal CS curriculum:
When I took my undergraduate class on software engineering methodology I felt it was useless because I couldn’t see the point of most of what I was being taught. Most of my programming had been done solo or on a small team. I could not take seriously the problems that were being “fixed” by the software methodologies discussed in our lectures. “Code size estimation? Bah! Impossible, so why even try!”
In my CS days, the bits I enjoyed most were the learning-by-doing: compiling my first C program, bending my mind around recursion and functional programming to complete assignments in MIT Scheme, implementing a virtual spanning tree, and coming up on my own with the idea of a finite-state automaton to parse NWS weather forecasts. (Okay, that wasn’t a CS assignment and I didn’t know how to talk to girls.)
The parts where I fell completely flat were the theoretical classes where we considered bizarre hypothetical problems that didn’t make sense, using Greek letters that didn’t seem to have anything to do with reality. One day my ECE roommate asked how, as a CS major, I would go about sorting one million integers. My response was “why would you want to sort one million integers?” Later I slept through multiple lectures where the best methods of sorting integers were discussed at length. I skimmed the slides so I know that Quicksort performs well and in-place, but that Bubble Sort may work better if your data is mostly sorted, so in my mind that just means that if anybody asks how you would sort one million integers, the correct answer is to ask some questions as to why they need to sort one million integers.
Uh, yeah. Anyway, what was I nattering on about? Joel’s schtick is that CS students aren’t taught to manage large, complex, “real world” projects with lots of moving pieces. CS mostly focuses on the “interesting 10%” like how you would sort a million integers and skips over the boring 90% of hard work like implementing the interface for the customer to provide their million integers and retrieve the results. And Mark Dennehy’s reaction was “of course we focus on the interesting ten percent: the other 90% is constantly changing and best learned on the job!”
But, addressing the “how do you tackle big projects” thing, I think Joel has a point. And his point isn’t new. The point is extra-curricular activity.
Whether you’re a visual learner or whatever, the biggest secret to learning things is to find the thing that you are studying interesting. The very best computer programmers are all fucking fascinated by the challenge of getting the computers to do things within given parameters. Computer programming is fun because when you get down to it, it is a lot like computer games: a person at the interface banging away until they get their dopamine fix by either beating the level boss or getting the damn thing to compile and spit out the correct result.
Well, that is for the learning-by-doing types. Some computer programmers get their jollies by trying to fathom a new and novel method of sorting one million integers. Whatever floats their boat, I guess.
Anyway, long story short, I’m thinking the learning-by-doing types tend to get a little queasy after a few CS theory classes and end up majoring in English in order to score a bachelors degree, but they keep tinkering with the computers along the way, and end up, like Tom and me, as systems administrators, figuring out the best way to keep 1,000 computers running in order to make it possible to sort billions of objects with map-reduce algorithms in constant time.
Oh yeah, and that I agree with Joel that motivated CS students ought to find non-class projects that they are passionate about, and thereby gain chances to collaborate with others on the sort of “real world” challenges that they are likely to face in their professional careers. Back at Illinois the ACM played a big role in this. I myself did some time apprenticing at NCSA and at an ISP, and the big win these days it would seem are the oodles of Open Source projects ready to put interested volunteers to work. And that’s why Google’s “Summer of Code” just sounds like a fantastically great idea.
Barack Obama stumps for his mayoral candidacy near Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn.
Here in New York City, there is a Democrat running a seemingly futile campaign against Mike Bloomberg. As far as I can tell the campaign platform is that Bloomberg is ambitious and power-hungry, with delusions of grandeur. Which, from what I can tell, must surely be a ringing indictment of character for the Mayor of Lake Woebegone, MN.
Anyway, His Holiness recently passed through town, bestowing upon Bloomberg’s Democrat opponent the ringing laurel of endorsement that his colleague was “in the house” . . . somewhere . . . they didn’t have time to meet . . . and then President Obama was off to New Jersey to stump hard for the governor there.
This morning the lamp posts in my black neighborhood are adorned with photographs of Barack Obama, who would surely be an awesome mayor . . . of Chicago.
A comment I made on an e-mail thread that was well-received:
Intelligence is the product of basic brainpower, passion, and education. The brain is like a car engine: whether you have a little two-stroke or a V-12 you still aren’t going to get anywhere without some passion fuel, and the going will be really tough without some nice, smooth educational asphalt to help guide you to where you want to go.
Also, to those endlessly debating nature-versus-nurture, the answer is usually “both” . . . you start with a certain genetic baseline, then a childhood you don’t have much control over, and you make of your life what you will. Some folks receive a terrible start in life and are going to have it hard whatever they do, but most people have something they can work with, and with the right sort of ambition, positive attitude, and tenacity, can achieve some sort of success in life.
It feels like it has been longer, but at just over a month our apartment building has installed the window screens. Boy is it nice to have window screens! Of course, it would have been nicer if we had had the window screens during the really hot days of August, but I try not to gripe too much.
Of course, when the guy came by to install the window screens, he had to explain that management had instructed that screens not be installed on windows opening on to fire escapes. Since this is an idiotic request, and since I had explicitly requested window screens on those very same windows, he installed screens anyway, explaining that if the management company later insisted, he would have to remove them. I was happy to take the chance.
Later I mentioned the issue to our superintendent, who agreed that window screens do not belong next to fire escapes, and that is just one of the tragic outcomes of a city with so many complex rules governing it. I found that a bit unsettling.
Sometimes I find it hard to sleep at night, and my mind will churn with the great questions of our day, like “is there really a restriction against installing window screens on windows that open on to fire escapes in New York City?” Well, the wisdom of the Internet led me to the Rules of the City of New York, which explains in Chapter 15-10(k)(2):
Wire screens and storm windows. Wire screens are permitted on a door or window giving access to a fire-escape. Such screens may be of the rolling type, casement or of a type that slides vertically or horizontally in sections, providing that there shall be a clear unobstructed space two feet (2′) in width and two feet six inches (2′-6″) in height when the screens are opened and further provided that no such screen shall be subdivided with muntins or other dividing or separating bars into spaces less than two feet (2′) in width by two feet six inches (2′-6″) in height.
So yeah, window screens are completely legitimate. I don’t know if this contrary idea is actually with the management or some fanciful notion that has somehow been implanted into our superintendent, but should the issue need revisiting I can leverage my powers as Internet Man to defend the placement of these window screens for which I have long waited.
Download Speed: 12988 kbps (1623.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 2039 kbps (254.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
Twelve megabits?! That is a lot of bandwidth. So much so that my old 802.11b local wireless network will actually have less bandwidth than my uplink. Gadzooks!
And the cable comes with some HD channels to watch on our CRT, and a crude DVR which can record shows on multiple channels simultaneously. Not bad, I suppose, for a tad over $100/mo. Yeah, and free long distance, so I gotta start calling up relatives again.
Week one in New York City has been good. We’re still unpacking . . . or at least, I am still unpacking. M had some coworkers help unload the truck. She stayed in the truck to help shift things around and guard against passing kleptomaniacs. I was good and exhausted as she excitedly tore open boxes and began stuffing things in closets. On Monday I went up to the Manhattan office — it is a half hour by subway. I like the place but as the week flowed along I found it preferable to work from home, emptying a couple boxes most evenings, making frustratingly-slow-to-M but measurable progress.
New Yorkers jaywalk habitually. Eastern Parkway has five lanes of high-speed traffic so they posted a sign advising pedestrians to actually obey the walk signal.
One big challenge is that I’m moving from a beautifully large kitchen chock full of cabinets and counter space into something well under half that size, and M has plenty of kitchen stuff as well. I take it as an interesting challenge to jigsaw everything into place in a logical, useful fashion, with every day items reachable by a woman whose height is emphatically to one side of the bell curve. As with any merger, there are redundancies to be reconciled by downsizing. Fortunately, those items left on the curb will readily find new employment in the brisk sidewalk economy of Brooklyn.
Near the end of the week I could tell I was feeling under-socialized. To be sure, I don’t require much social interaction, but even a computer geek in a new town needs some face time. Fortunately, my cousin the Actor / Tour Guide was by for lunch on Friday, and today I had lunch with a college friend, who although he grew up a nice Midwestern boy, has lived in New York long enough to have fully embraced at least the ambitious gusto of the city. “You can’t go about it by trying to save money here: you just keep striving and make more money,” he explains. Alas, he is a recruiter coming in on Saturdays to fix the office IT, and he has taken two pay cuts. But he’s excited that his novel is nearly ready.
Compared to the San Francisco Bay Area, where even a drywall contractor will show you his iPhone and talk about his cousin who works at eBay, New York City is not so tech savvy. When I went to sign the lease, the stereotypically Very Nice Older Brooklyn Jewish Lady seemed astonished at the idea that one could use the Internet to direct one’s bank to pay bills on their behalf. When she asked “what outfit are you with?” I answered and she was excited that I worked for the butchers! I’m pretty sure she had “the other Cisco” in mind but it was a refreshing surprise.
Another frustration is that our newly-renovated apartment has been renovated on the cheap, so various bits need to be fixed, while the “super” is busy managing the renovation of all the other units. (We are the fourth apartment occupied, out of about sixteen.) I won’t get in to too much griping detail, except to say that at one point the cable installers were here and frustrated at the truly horrible and mysterious site-wiring. (No, really, it is truly horrible. They had some nice wiring running to the units which they had cut off and replaced with cheaper coax that has apparently been terminated using a hammer and a pipe-wrench, and of course none of it is labeled.) The cable installer had his manager come in and I called the management company and at one point I had the grouchy guy at the management company and the field technician shouting at each other over the phone. Anyway, no cable until the site wiring is resolved: I’m going to sweet-talk the management company to get their inept contractor out here to label and signal test their drop-downs.
New York does not, to my knowledge, have a NextBus service, like San Francisco. From what I have seen, there’s not much need for it, since everything here operates reliably at all hours with fairly frequent service. It would be nice, for the power user, to know the status of complementary incoming trains on different platforms, but really I have had no problems getting where I am going. All the same, I’m glad Google Maps got transit directions into the Android application before I moved here. There’s also a little application that just shows you the subway map, and lets you zoom and pan around. Instead of looking like a tourist you’re just another douchebag playing with a trendy, overpriced toy.
This time I am in a moving truck toting possessions of me and my lady to our new place in New York city, where we intend to live for one year for her work. She’s already out there, so it is just me, a 16′ Budget truck rental, and some $3 wifi access at a Motel 6. Hot diggity!
I have made this trek before, with and without my worldly possessions. This time through I own a crazy smart phone which is recording the trip via GPS, and I can upload progress to Google Maps, for all my friends and evil stalkers to see. I can send you a link: just shoot me an e-mail.
I am very happy with the Budget truck. It is a no-frills affair: the radio is just a radio. It has two power ports. I could gripe that it doesn’t have cruise control, but that might actually be a “feature” to keep the fool at the wheel alert. Best of all, it is a Ford, so I already know the dashboard!
This Motel 6 isn’t shabby either. I inquired at a casino just down the road, figuring room rates would be subsidized by gambling, but no. The Motel 6 is less than half the price and has all I need: a decent bed, toilet, shower, air conditioning, a desk and Internet access! (Oh and a TV.) They claim the lowest rates of any national chain, so I’ll have to research what they have down the road.
Ah yes, and as for work: I have received permission to work remote for my San Jose-based employer. As for my old apartment, which I love, a friend fell in love with the place and signed a lease. I left some furniture behind and some e-waste which I have to sweet-talk her into toting downstairs on a weekday, where San Francisco will collect it for free. Another blessing was the help of a trio of college friends who helped load the truck. I treated them to pizza and beers afterwards and we reveled in the pending home ownership of two of our friends. While this recession is hurting many folks, others who have been priced out of the housing market are finding their prudent patience rewarded.
Time to settle in for the evening so I can get on the road good and early tomorrow. The Motel 6 charges $3 for the wifi access, which is just the perfect price for a guy who’d like to kill an hour before bed!
I rode an older Talgo in Spain, which was delayed due to a fire on the tracks ahead of us. They passed out soft drinks as we sat, and the Spaniards began playing music.
Virgin America has wireless access on its flights. For $13 you get enough bandwidth to video conference. It was fun.
I tried not to talk too much or too loudly from my seat. To be sure, everyone on Virgin America is pretty much immersed in their personal entertainment anyway so its not so much of a thing.
I’m flying to New York. Fortunately, I needn’t lose a work day because for $15, Virgin America has got me on the Internet!
It is zippy enough, and the latency is perfectly fine, so I am guessing it is a terrestrial network. VPN works fine, too.
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
Last Result:
Download Speed: 964 kbps (120.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 337 kbps (42.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
It is a bit cramped, for sure. Fortunately, my Dell Mini 10 arrived yesterday, with Ubuntu pre-installed. (Vendor Linux!) I hope to write more about that later, but this is a zippy little thing that is probably about as usable as you’re ever going to get in a coach class airplane seat. Yay!
Virgin claim to have power plugs at each seat. I haven’t seen mine, but given the battery life this thing claims, I shouldn’t need to plug in for the duration of this continental crossing.
That looks like . . . Nevada. No . . . we’re above US Route 6 in Utah. 2112 miles to go. That’s another thing I dig about Virgin America: an interactive map at the seat terminal, and an adjustable headrest, which Southwest lacks . . .
Well, this is a work day, better get back to working.
