January 7, 2008
what happened, THE FIDELITY RETIREMENT BENEFITS LINE, we used to be so close

what better way, i figured, to ward off this insomnium than by catching up on a little work email from my friends at fidelity?

If you're like most people, you probably have a range of goals - like saving for retirement, paying off college debt, or saving to buy a home.

i leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with a sentence that could be more inaccurate. i certainly have failed at my attempts.

speaking of investments, i must firmly discourage the purchase of google stock. about a month ago, i signed up for an adwords account with the goal of promoting a new website i have started up. in exchange for directing traffic to this site, i had pledged to promptly sign over, on a monthly basis, five of my most american dollars. my ad campaign has been shown hundreds of times, and yet i have received only a single click. i don't know how they plan on colonizing mars when they are only realizing 1% of potential revenue.

January 8, 2008
back in the saddle

today i broke my two month streak, and came in to the office for the first time since The Departure. it was either that, or, well, there was not really any other choice.

it is good to see that some things never change.

someone stole my chair while i was gone.

January 8, 2008
one internet can make a world of a difference

joe will be pleased to learn that, as of 4:23 PM, the beverage refrigerator is unplugged.

the three two-litre bottles of subsidy-driven, corn syrup-laden, tooth-rotting beverages, and the blue box of i-don't-know-what (there is no english on the box i could find, and it "has been there for some time," according to the only other remaining hula developer) have been moved to the other refrigerator in the kitchen. i did not unplug this one.

additionally, the cooler was the source of an obnoxious din; now silenced, a casual conversation can now be held in this room. the benefits of environmental responsibility are often quite serendipitous.

January 10, 2008
the shame of 150 glares

after almost a two year hiatus, i have finally gotten back to reading a jane jacobs book. some of my friends, likely more intelligent than i, seem to not think so highly of some of her conclusions, so i try to take these with a grain of salt, but it is perhaps her writing style that i enjoy most of all. i will not attempt to describe it. in lieu, i will note the following passage, which has caught my eye:

The point is that when new work is added to older work, the addition often cuts ruthlessly across categories of work, no matter how one may analyze the categories. Only in stagnant economies does work stay docilely within given categories. And wherever it is forced to stay within prearranged categories -- whether by zoning, by economic planning, or by guilds, associations or unions -- the process of adding new work to old can occur little if at all.

-- jane jacobs, "the economy of cities", p. 62

this certainly describes the invasion of the music industry by apple's itunes store. i will leave, as another exercise for the reader, the task of drawing parallels with the WGA strike.

i barely made my flight this morning; it was my turn to be that guy that the steward makes fun of. i didn't feel too bad; usually i'm the one waiting for 45 minutes, and anyway, the positive karma from arriving at the airport via public transportation probably makes up for it. and kudos to the mbta for the outstanding (and free) service this morning; i'd estimate a full 25% of my door-to-gate time was spent navigating the 18 feet administered by our friends at TSA.

jeers also to jetblue; they give out water in individual, 8.5-ounce bottles. never again.

one disadvantage of the kindle is that it affords no opportunity for peer verification of my excellent reading material by like-minded travelers; no doubt, this may be interpreted as a feature by my culturally-void neighbor in seat D reading "the secret."

ok, leopard's dictionary app is awesome; every word in a definition is clickable. my mind staggers at what puerile tasks our nation's third graders are forced to do now that definitions are mere seconds away.

January 13, 2007
a time to heal

i was pretty sad when i picked up my number friday, knowing i wasn't going to run the race this morning. but i didn't mind not having to be over at epcot by 5 am, so i guess it all worked out.

i was quite surprised to find a copy of rock band for the ps2 at the best buy here! joe thinks he's playing drums, with me singing and brette on guitar. this explains his affection for arcade fire.

last night i managed to get the new google mobile into an unrecoverable state; if you have something in the local drafts, but you couldn't reconnect and it therefore lost your password, it seems to deadlock when you start it up; removing and reinstalling was the only thing i could find. serendipitously, while trying to find the url to download it again, i ended up installing a slightly different version than the one i had before; this was the correct one for my phone, and was set up to use all of the buttons and the full screen, like the mobile app i had originally. again, it all works out.

January 15, 2008
lost between the notes

my legs were aching yesterday. i thought it was just due to these exercises i did. but now that i have this headache, maybe i really am coming down with something.

January 16, 2008
an important revelation

vacation is not truly over until you've caught up on your dinosaur comics.

January 22, 2008
the daily wtg

as mentioned previously, i have been working from home a lot lately. fortunately, most of the resources i need access to are available over the internet, such as bugzilla. but there are a few resources that are so poorly set up and administered that they are only available from the office network or vpn. this is the story of trying to connect to that vpn.

today's novell product that is "worse than groupwise" is...

first of all, there should be a bright red asterisk on that image, with a footnote: DOES NOT ACTUALLY WORK WITH A MAC. i digress a little; it does seem to work on my nearly six year old powerbook (does anyone still have a thinkpad that old?). but not on leopard.

why? at its core, from what i can deduce, the client for this thing is basically a java applet wrapper for either stunnel or openvpn. this is solid architecture. anyway, on leopard, the ppc stunnel crashes, and it for openvpn it gets an error installing the tun/tap driver saying that it requires tiger. of course it doesn't tell you this in the applet, or even in Console.app. you have to watch /tmp for the .pkg file to be downloaded, copy it somewhere before the install fails, and it removes the files, and then install it manually.

even more offensive, it reinstalls the openvpn/stunnel bits every time you start it up. so i can't even, say, throw in a tun/tap driver that works in leopard. i suppose in a functional company that cared about its employees (or, i suppose, even the external customers of the product!) someone would be responsible for releasing and installing some sort of an update here, but i'm not going to hold my breath. it's been almost 2 and a half years since i started at novell, and last i checked, groupwise still could not forward internet email correctly.

but the worst is this: if this applet uses openvpn, why can't i just use openvpn directly? i can install it from darwin ports! there is even a lame but functional gui for the mac available! this is what open software and open protocols are about: give me the hostnames and settings for the server, and let me choose the software to connect to it. what, do they think people trying to hack in are going to stick to using their software?

this all just reinforces my theory that people who write vpn software never actually need to use vpns. i mean, if they did, they might discover that it's pretty useful to be able to access your local network - printers, your file server, maybe your windows machine - while connected to the vpn.

so, i guess i need to set up another linux vm...

relatedly, i find it somewhat amusing that during the original novell/microsoft partnership announcement, ballmer and hovsepian were arguing that each had the better platform for virtualization. this contrasts greatly with my experiences in practice: almost everyone i know actually runs their vms on a mac.

January 22, 2008
truly a day for the ages

today my postwoman delivered this gem:

January 23, 2008
it's not like it was loaded. wait, what?

i'm pretty sure my friend phil doesn't read cnn.com. it's understandable; i've been trying to cut back myself. anyway, i'm glad, because if he read this article, well, he might, i dunno, post something about it on his web page?

January 23, 2008
amateur hour in idiotville

this... this is just really bad:

%prep PREFIX=/usr rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_DIR/*

January 25, 2008
steve jobs is wrong too. i've read 4 books this week.

If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers, most of whom are women.

i'm glad someone wrote this one down, because it is undoubtedly even more short-sighted than his supposed pontifications on memory availability and practical use in computational systems. it is simply throwing bad money after bad.

more later.

January 30, 2008
a bolder idea

i hope my republican friend takes a look at a plan for free transit in new york. as he and literally one person in western australia knows, i am a fan of removing fares from public transportation. while i don't yet know how to pull this off in boston, the ideas here are probably a good start. i'm not sure how accurate their traffic predictions are -- the fact that they're done in an excel spreadsheet doesn't fill me with confidence -- but i think it's an interesting first step.

on the way home from a film today, someone on the t had an i <3 c.o. button on his bg. it made me smile.

paris trams are beautiful.

January 30, 2008
this just in

i was just browsing cnn before bed -- the assured nightmares eliminate the need for an alarm clock -- and came across this:

my question is, what happened to skipper?

January 31, 2008
what child is this

i've been listening to van morrison all day today. i don't even know who i am anymore.