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!
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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)”
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.
I bought a bicycle. There’s a place not far away, Brooklyn Bike and Board, that fixes up old steel-framed bikes because they’re darn tough, then sells them for not a whole lot of money. I spent $250 on the bike, and some more on a front basket and a bike lock. I now have a white, steel, 1-speed bicycle made in France.
I had been avoiding the bicycle thing because Mei is not yet a rider, but on the Greyhound ride back, that college student had mentioned that he’d bought a “recycled” bike for fairly cheap, and rarely spent money on the subway. The prospect of riding around for my own pleasure and exercise pleases Mei. Come Spring we can find her some wheels and learn her how to ride.
Monday, December 7
A day that shall live in infamy or simply “Monday?” For “lunch” I rode up to drop off a bag at Goodwill, and I realized I had totally forgotten my helmet. Fortunately, I made it home safe, then stashed the helmet in the bike’s basket.
When I make coffee I dish the grounds into the filter, and then place the filter into the basket. This reduces the chance of accidentally slopping grounds down between the filter and the basket. Instead I have the occasional accident where I spill coffee grounds everywhere.
Every month or so my Grandmother forwards me another e-mail that has been forwarded to her via a chain of dozens of people who haven’t quite figured out how the Internet works, and these photos are from Miniatur Wunderland, in Hamburg, DE. That’s in the North of Germany, and may likely be on the itinerary of my next trip.
From an e-mail shared with my team at work:
While it is true that I wear dark-framed eyeglasses, post to my highly-customized blog, and Twitter, and uhm, have a 100% telecommute, and just yesterday I bought a “recycled” 1-speed bicycle, I don’t like to think of myself as a hipster, no. And the smart phone and the mini computer . . . gah! This is why I can’t own a Mac or an iPhone or grow a goatee . . .
Tuesday, December 8
Come on ride the snake! Ride it!
Come on ride the snake! Ride it!
Come on ride the snake! It’s a Python!
Wednesday, December 9
New York’s MTA is an excellent system for most parts of New York that existed in the 1920s, when the last major expansions were completed. That means airport service is sub-optimal: ride a local train as far as it will go, then catch a local bus that meanders to the airport.
Note that during peak hours they’ll run that bus line in pairs, but only one bus of each pair runs to the airport. The other goes somewhere else and if you’re lucky the driver will speak up and direct you to the correct bus. If you’re less lucky you can wait fifteen minutes for the next pair of buses.
Note also that if you’re running late and try to use the Virgin America self-service checkin kiosk, it will keep inviting you to try again after you swipe multiple credit cards at different kiosks. If you dig out and enter your confirmation code, it will invite you to try yet again. In this way you’ll not hear the lady announcing that if you want to catch your flight you should come over to the human being right now, because this is the last chance to make it on the flight.
Note also that if you wait behind a family with a newborn and plenty of luggage at security then stroll liesurely to the gate you’ll get to watch the plane you missed push back from the gate and taxi away. And yes, while Google is giving us all free in-flight wireless network access for the holidays, JFK expects you to pay several dollars for the privilege during your hopefully brief wait in the airport.
Thursday, December 10
I helped Todd find an appropriate box into which to pack the extra-large can of Sysco beans.
Friday, December 11
I needed change for Muni so I bought a to-go coffee at the cafe on the corner. I joined a little man at the bus stop as I waited for my cup to cool. He noted my coffee and explained that he was banned from that coffee shop. I offered him a sip, and he worked his way through the entire cup I had only bought for bus change anyway as he repeatedly introduced himself to me as a fan of the Kansas City Chiefs.
Various neighbors passed, exchanging pleasantries with the Chiefs Fan, one saw him drinking from the cup, “that had better be Hot Chocolate.”
“Decaf.”
Apparently I delivered a cup of contraband to a guy who isn’t allowed to drink caffeine.
Saturday, December 12
Mei’s sick. Slept too much, and enjoyed riding my bike down to Roots in the 30 degrees.
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’m not 100% happy about it, and it is lacking the SamTrans buses I wanted to add. All the same, I’m rather proud. It is train-centric but features connecting bus routes. I managed to include the three levels of rail transit on Market St by consolidating each service into its trunk lines, which let me gloss over the whole KT thing. My original ambition was to populate it with all the landmarks you wouldn’t find on your regular tourist map, but I sort of moved out of town.
Alas, I like to think that modifying info on the map should be pretty easy for others to do. The SVG file contains multiple layers that can be turned on or off, modified, add a new layer . . . you could totally create your own map based on this, if you like . . .
In selecting the size of this map, I went for a square, because despite its free-wheeling ways, San Francisco is geographically quite square, and figured to make the map 15″ x 15″ . . . if one really wanted to one could slice it in fourths and print 7.5″+ on US Letter-sized paper and voila–your own map!
If anyone finds this map useful or hacks on it, please let me know! Enjoy!
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.
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.
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.
