January 1, 2005
i got me a cool atlas

the first cd i bought in 2005 was raw power by iggy (pop) and the stooges.

i also passed another milestone on the road to car ownership: i bought a boston street atlas. but instead of using it while being lost, i am using it to do a boston region in sim city. a couple weeks ago i found a nice usgs map for sim city for boston on the internet, and today i rescaled it, mapped out city placement, and started interconnecting the cities.

some of sim city 4's weaknesses are painfully evident. the big dig is totally impossible, as is building bridges over waterways that span city boundries. the former is forgivable, as i would not allow that if i were designing a tool to build utopian cities. however, the latter is unexcusable. rivers and harbors make natural city boundaries, and it's tough to build cities if you can't build bridges and tunnels between them.

anyway the point is i don't think i've read another book as enthralling as this atlas. i don't know what it is about boston and maps, but i can't pull myself away.

January 2, 2005
you guys are obsessive compulsive to a point where it scares even me

phil didn't want anything to do with me, so i saw the life aquatic again anyway, bookended by sim city sessions. here are more pictures of sim city, dedicated to my friend joe.

i am afraid to tackle boston, and, to a lesser extent, cambridge.

tonight was the first time i saw the life aquatic when the theater had a lot of people in it. a lot of people laughed a lot, but the only time i really did was when i noticed the "DO NOT LOCK" sign on the reporter's door after steve had broken into it.

January 6, 2005
i just rued again

last week (although it already feels like a lifetime ago) i got my test box booting darwin / x86 (OpenDarwin 7.2.1 specifically). it is not very stable; so i keep a terminal opening which loops running uptime, and then record every time it locks up in a little sticky note:

January 10, 2005
your foodstamps give you a way

everything's coming up roots.

in the past couple of months i've gotten a few pieces of hardware that have been... disappointing. my scanner didn't work with my mac. last week my logitech bluetooth mouse stopped working completely. and that sound card was a total disaster.

well, the other day i went to try the sound card again, and it worked ok. while i had the case open, i noticed that my usb pci card wasn't in the slot all the way. last night, i plugged the scanner into the mac and it worked! just in time, because i had to fax something today. this afternoon i got the replacement mouse in the mail, and i just realized that because it's bluetooth, i don't actually need the receiver (which is what was broken) to be able to use it (the receiver still charges, too!).

unfortunately not everything has gone so well for me today. i went to staples to get more hanging file folders, but i got the wrong size. i did get a pretty nice stapler, though.

January 11, 2005
Still not working in 2005

i don't mind wasting a whole day on bugs that had patches almost 5 years ago.

tonight at dinner i was bragging to phil and joe about how my sleep schedule was magically back on track. well it's now almost 5:30 am and i am 5 minutes away from going to watch a second episode of the news hour (there are no commercials so they really take a long time). if tomorrow's work is anything like today i have no interest in participating. i really need to sleep otherwise this bug is really going to drive me crazy.

i tried really hard to get a mac mini (so cute!) for myself, but without a serial port or pci slot, i can't use it to debug linux on ppc32 and without gige it's borderline useless anyway. and it's silly to use it as a main desktop, because it doesn't match my monitor like a nice powermac g5 would.

January 12, 2005
brought to you by burly brand paper towels

January 13, 2005
nat friedman

i remember well the first day i met nat friedman in person. it was actually . i was in the last row on the flight from pittsburgh to boston, so it took a while for me to get off of the plane. nat was jittery and impatient as ever when i saw him at the gate (you could wait for people at the gate then!). he had written my name on a piece of paper and was kind of tapping or shaking his leg to some internal rhythm while he relaxed and then pulled taught the paper, in time with his leg.

matt loper and chris lahey were also there. as we waited for my luggage, they discussed the pros and cons of gob. this discussion would continue well into breakfast the next morning at the greenhouse cafe.

from there we ran through the airport to the parking lot. he carried one of my suitcases with a little too much zeal and the handle ripped a bit. he explained to me that all of boston was pedestrian bridges and walkways, i think. we got in the car (the tahoe! i should grab a still from the video i have of it) and then were in a tunnel; i forget which one. what i don't forget is nat blasting the spice girls on the stereo as we were stuck in traffic under the boston harbor. he said it was his sister's cd. i didn't believe him then, and believed him even less the more i got to know peach.

after we got out of the tunnel, we were on the pre-big dig turnpike. since nat had never had a car in boston before, and had just moved to brookline, he didn't really know how to get home from the airport yet (these were pre-gps days, you see).

we grabbed some dinner: pizza (of course) at the garage (we had yet to discover noch's), after running through urban outfitters to avoid the rain. then we went to nat's old apartment to get internet (nobody had wireless yet) and so we could get to work. i think i committed a patch that night from john harper (formerly of sawmill fame, more recently of X11.app fame, last i heard).

the next morning (or maybe the morning after that?) nat had to meet the VCs early at the office, so i got to ride the T for the first time. i was confused between kenmore and kendall, so it took me a few trips before i ended up at the office.

then to harvard square to set up bank accounts and breakfast at the greenhouse cafe. the bank has gone through 2 renames; the cafe is largely unchanged (although i have been back there maybe twice since then).

January 14, 2005
two and two always makes five

i went bowling last night for the first time since 1990. my scores reflected that.

next weekend i am going to see JSB in toronto. if you live in toronto and want to see the greatest band since radiohead, i suggest you go as well.

January 19, 2005
in haunted attics

the other day at 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 in the morning when i couldn't sleep i wrote a letter to my neighbor explaining that i had been doing some research, and was quite certain there was a sizable treasure buried in their roof, and would they mind if i had a look.

January 20, 2005
if you will it, it is no dream

i swear people were shoveling show the entire night last night. when i did manage to sleep i had a dream where i forgot to watch bush's inagural address. then i woke up and forgot to watch it.

last night i fixed a bug that had been haunting me for the last three weeks or so. in the end, i learned a couple of things. first, it's more fun to try to find bugs in other people's code. second, phil is always right. finally, don't swab memory you haven't allocated, because it could be someone else's, and then you are in big, big trouble.

the other day at 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 in the morning when i couldn't sleep i put together some "radiohead redux" playlists. the idea was to make playlists that had the same track list as their album, but to try to use other versions of the songs, live or alternate versions from b-sides, etc. i think the best two are pablo honey and HttT. the latter has the gloaming from the boston 2003 show, then there there and i will from the 2+2=5 singles, and a punchup at a wedding from the most gigantic lying mouth which just has thom on vocals and piano, which is such a great version of that song that i might just have to listen to it all weekend.

January 22, 2005
i flew all the way from boston to toronto, especially for tonight

in about an hour i'll be taking off for the great white north.

last night joe and i saw sideways, since i liked paul giamatti in man on the moon and american splendor. what can i say, other than it's about time our generation had a "when harry met sally" to call its own. it was a great coming-of-age story, although i would have been happier if they ended it before the last scene.

i've been forced to explain my positions on napolean dynamite and garden state on an almost daily basis. it turns out my beef with both of them is quite similar; they both feel like they were trying to be something great, but they just weren't. i can't (honestly) say that i didn't laugh at all during napolean dynamite, and it certainly wasn't as bad as the mod squad with claire danes. but it wasn't UHF either. i'd like to think i really gave it a chance, but it wasn't filled with enough genuinely funny (as opposed to just trying to be weird) moments for me.

as for garden state, i'm willing to see it again (although i don't want to buy the dvd in case i still can't stand it). i guess with the rising cost of health care these days, it's cheaper to get a movie made about your mental and emotional problems than to deal with them in a way that doesn't thrust them in front of millions of people encouraging them to make boring movies. i mean, ASWOHG (check out the "customers who viewed this book also viewed" section) is probably more self absorbed, but at least dave eggars is funny and has interesting thoughts. oh, and young toph...

another thing that's been coming up (not initiated by me, i promise) is the need to really figure out what you're going to do with your life. people kind of feeling like britney in "no longer a girl, not yet a woman." but it turns out, those moments are what life is really about.

January 23, 2005
on a personal level i'm a really big fan

plane tickets to toronto: $260
taxi ride to shaver's: $60
cover at jsb show: $12
jsb pin: $1
the look on tyla's face when i told her that all the flights into boston were cancelled and that i wouldn't be leaving until tomorrow afternoon: priceless

January 25, 2005
i'm no bigot, but you know what your problem is?

"Negro students aren't the only kids targeted -- this isn't about special rights for them. But the fact is that 'nigger' is probably the most common insult at schools."

"I hope schools will realize it's less an exercise in tolerance than a platform for liberal groups to promote their equal rights agenda. You can teach civility to kids and tell them every child is valued without conveying the message that failure to accept negroes as normal is a sign of bigotry."

-- CNN or the Onion?

it's good to be back in america!

January 27, 2005
raw chicken is an important link in nature's chain

this morning started with my phone ringing once, and then no voicemail. then, while brushing my teeth and reading the wordly news, i got a call from Unknown (which is often a customer so i have to answer them). the hung up before i could run to the bathroom and answer. no voicemail.

but then i got my dingus card for my sgi monitor, and iLife was finally delivered after a week of failed attempts and idiotry.

TiVo ToGo is terrible. i always knew tivo would follow in kozmo's footsteps, but the inevitable confronts me so drearily every night when i suffer through either non-HD TiVo, or non-TiVo HD. TiVo isn't powerful enough not to sell out to the media companies, but they are too powerful for the media companies to let them sell out.

TiVo ToGo is really slow, and the interface is just not as mature and featureful as, oh, any mac software. maybe the non-wireless adapter will help performance and transfer speeds, but the real annoying bits are that it's windows-only, and that i have to type the password every time i want to watch something.

the even bigger problem with the password is that it doesn't provide any benefit to me. passwords for remote scheduling, my wireless network, or my iTMS account i can understand. they protect something that is valuable to me. but the tivo files aren't valuable to me, they are valuable to someone else, which i understand. if it were like iTunes, where i occasionally have to type my password (which actually protects my credit card information) then it wouldn't be so bad. but having to type a password for something i don't even care about every time i want to watch anything makes me angry. do people not use the products they make and sell?

thinking about this today, in connection with robert's talk on the economics of rent control, made me realize how uncapitalistic DRM is, and how it has simlilarities to the prison system.

one of the functions of prisons in society is to act as a deterrent for people considering breaking the law. but, people who are determined to break the law will, for whatever reasons. DRM puts up a deterrent to casual users, but does nothing for people who are determined to break them, either for really fair-use cases, or for illegal purposes.

it seems to me that the main offenders - people who sign up for the free trial period of netflix-alike services, and just rip and burn everything they get - weren't going to pay for what they are stealing anyway. i don't think these should be counted as "lost" revenue; it wasn't there to begin with.

but since the media companies are using DRM to try to enforce inflated prices rather than combating piracy by letting the market have more of a say in determining price, people are going to continue to "steal" music and dvds. i have a hard time believing that $5 albums would not solve a lot of these problems. but then again, maybe i think too highly of people.

January 28, 2005
i just wish i could fall in

ok, i think i've had enough winter.

January 29, 2005

i fixed the css to work with ie again.

January 30, 2005
more than a feeling

i love it when i wake up but don't get out of bed for a while. and then when i finally do wake up, it's not three in the afternoon like i thought, it's 10:30.