coffeefog

new dessert house!

Sometime while I was gone this weekend the really horrible noodle house around the corner from my apartment, which has been closed and newspapered up for 3 weeks, turned into the brand new "J J Dessert House."

Basically, I think the sign is really funny, and I'm not entirely sure why. Well, it's the faces - that's what's funny. What the hell makes them think that Peto and Flek from Sifl n' Olly are good mascots?

Peto and Flek sound clip, provided by this guy

Peto and Flek themselves:

software plug

For starters, iTunes 4 for OS X is the shit. Let me count the reasons:

1. Last night I bought a Wilco album for $9.99 and had it on my computer within 5 minutes of downloading. Instant gratification == impulse buying!
   
2. This morning, at work, I can listen to all my co-worker's music libraries via the iTunes 4 streaming music feature. Now I know that Nikolai is way too into Metallica, and nobody else listens to Modest Mouse. I guess not everybody out there works in an all mac environment like I do, so it sucks to be you.
   

Time to plug Nicholas's newest creation - BPM Inspector. A shiny iTunes 4 plugin that lets you click out the beat to a song with your mouse, and will set the BPM ID3 tag accordingly once it has picked up on the beat. It's really fun to do, but I'm not sure why you need to know how many BPM your music is. Nicholas says this is good for making workout playlists. But download it even if you don't know why you want it. It's a little addictive.

splash of color

too many words make weblogs boring!

no rodeo

So the whole rodeo thing was a lie. I make stuff up a lot. I was really in Austin to visit my sister, who is graduating from UT in a few weeks and moving to Princeton, NJ for graduate school. I just thought being in Austin lent itself to a rodeo story. Anyway, I had a great time there, and thanks to everyone who came out to see me!

I had some unforeseen problems prevent me from flying back to San Francisco on Sunday night. Namely, I am a fucking moron. For the second time in a year I booked a flight for the wrong date. After the first time this happened, in November, I swore to consult a calendar on every occasion of booking air travel. And I kept that up. I triple-checked these dates, but still managed to accidentally book my flight home for Monday night instead of Sunday night.

I blame one of two things:

• I booked these tickets over the phone, which means there were 2 humans with 2 human margins of error involved. Maybe it wasn't even me who chose the wrong date, but a miscommunication with the operator?
  
• THE MONEY I USED TO BUY THESE TICKETS IS CURSED. I bought this trip to Austin with a $275 flight credit from the last time I fucked up and bought plane tickets I couldn't use. The money is cursed, but I'm finally done with it. Note that, when cursed, the "airline voucher" is the deadliest of all forms of currency.

Staying in Austin on Sunday night allowed me to drink coffee, watch Cowboy Bebop the movie, and play some board games with Katy. So I had a much better Sunday night in Austin than I would have had during my layover in Denver. Denver is for suckers.

my new life

Well, the rodeo thing was a flop. I'd rather not get into it now, but the term "city slicker" was bandied about like an insult by the "instructors." More like "destructors" of "childhood dreams."

Barring the rodeo travesty, I've been having a good time hanging out around the UT campus. I snuck into a Calculus lecture, then snuck out again because after 15 minutes the novelty of college wore off, and I was like, "why the fuck did I sneak into a calculus lecture?" Good thing lots of coffee took the edge off that, though. If Austin has anything, it's an over-abundance of coffee. So it's going to be a couple of days of spending time with my sister before she moves to New Jersey and catching up with high school friends.

in austin

I arrived in Austin around 7PM tonight, and it's time I actually mention why I'm here. Tomorrow morning I start the Austin Rodeo weekend camp for the "big broncos" age range. I haven't blogged in the past few days because I've been very nervous about actually doing this.

As a child I spent countless evenings at the county fair grounds under the clear night stars, dreaming of being in the rodeo in some capacity. And let's face it - my current work is a far cry from that young Fort Worth boy's dreams. I've decided that it might be time for a change of pace, that maybe computers aren't my calling after all. I'm here this weekend to give the rodeo a shot and find out once and for all - no more "what if"s keeping me up at night.

The camp is an intensive 3 day introduction to the rodeo arts. A lot of the great riders, like Rusty Tercel, got their start here. Will I excel at bareback riding? Maybe steer wrestling or calf roping? Only time will tell. Whatever happens, I get the feeling I'm going to learn a lot about myself this weekend.

austiners

This is your final notice - Ethan will be in Austin from Thursday afternoon to Sunday afternoon of this weekend.

My airplane reading will include Despite Everything: A cometbus omnibus, which I picked up at The Alameda Archives (2251 The Alameda, Santa Clara) - the coolest little alternative bookstore in the south bay. Many thanks to Tad for pointing this place out before he left town for good last Wednesday. You will be missed, Sir Tadley.

dolphin snackers

This image means:
a) Our undersea magic act will delight and amaze! Dolphins are so stupid!
b) Dolphins enjoy our tasty coffee snacks - try it with a biscotti!
c) The planet is your trash can, earth dweller. Enjoy it while it lasts, for soon we shall rise up and you shall know no force as mighty as the space dolphin.

wikis

Wikis are fun, wikis are great. They're quick, easy to edit web pages that can serve as knowledge warehouses, or as a quick-and-dirty discussion board that can quickly be refined into a few nuggets of knowledge once the flamewar dust settles. In short, I'm way too fucking excited about wikis right now. Technically, a wiki is a couple of perl scripts and a few config files that you can upload to your web server. Anybody can create their own wiki in 20 minutes.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read the one minute guide here.

I'm using my saturday morning to learn all about wiki etiquette. Some terms to throw around: WikiButcher, WikiMaster, ThreadMode, PatternMode, DocumentMode, WikiGnome, WikiSquatting

hear THIS

Ethan's week of "things I do that you should also do" continues with indie rock music recommendations. Or, as Emily accurately calls my genre of choice, "mumble rock."

Download 20 or so mp3s from Playing in Fog downloads. My favorites from here:

• Thee More Shallows rock my world. Make sure you get "The Ballad of Douglas Chin" and "The Perfect Map." Now would be a good time for you to put iTunes on "repeat 1"
  
• Summer at Shatter Creek - My Neighbor is Having a Seizure
  
• Ral Partha Vogelbacher
  
• Super XX Man
  
• Ill Lit - Diner Girls
  

nerd to the 5th

I just had my first wardriving experience, and I live in a different world now. It was a short cross town drive from my apartment to Emily's, but in about 3 miles I must have seen 15-20 different WLANs. In the 4 months Emily's lived in her new apartment, this is the first time I've ever come over with a laptop and tried to hijack a signal. And I got two weak signals that are hopping in and out ("WLAN" and "default"). It's just about enough for web surfing and checking email...

This looks like it may bring Emily and I closer together. This might sound like I'm joking, but I'm really being serious:

1. Until last Thursday, I did not have cable. This kept Emily from visiting me more, because she is a shameless TV junkie. Completely shameless, despite my attempts to instill shame.
   
2. Until today, Emily did not have broadband. She had a dialup account connected to a Pentium 120 laptop with 80MB of RAM running Windows 95. Her computer was someone else's trash about 2 years ago. It sits on the living room floor next to the phone - it's relegated to that lowly level of respect. She still isn't about to spend $40 a month on a faster connection, but at least I can bum one off her neighbors.
   
3. There you go. My apartment has cable, her apartment has broadband. Now we can hang out more. Thank you, Comcast Digital Services!
   

So now I'm wondering - has anybody integrated GPS and wardriving software to make a live-updated map of wireless access points? I'd scan the net myself, but it's seriously a pain in the ass to surf over the one "open" access point that keeps disappearing and re-appearing.

over and out from 744 Oak.

success!

As a dedicated mac hacker, I'm subscribed to several Darwin (BSD base of Mac OS X) open source developer lists. They are a hotbed of intellectual debate on modern operating system topics, and today's postings are no exception.

Score another point for Apple and the successes of open source development!

Now I feel bad for making fun of someone's poor English. The more I think about it the less funny and more malicious this seems. Better hit save real quick...

what i'm readin'

I finished 3 really good books this week, and it's time for you, my illiterate and unwashed masses, to buy them and read them yourselves.

• Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street by Lee Stringer
  Homeless crack addict turned writer lays down a bunch of auto-biographical stories from his days living underneath a subway platform, and later writing for a homeless newspaper call Street News. Highly recommended.
  
• Home Town by Tracy Kidder
  A non-fiction look at the town history and current residents of Northampton, Massachusetts. Sounds boring, and it's a little long at 415 pages, but it really gets into people's lives in an interesting way. I recommend.
  
• Burn Collector #12 by Al Burian
  Basically, Burn Collector is the shit. 26 year old slacker/coffee addict writes funny/serious shit about his life. It's a zine that I got into when I bought the collected editions 1-9 in book form, as recommended to me by the internet. It's hard to find in person, but you can order it online. Or you can read the entirety of issue 2 for free on the web.
  

In summary, I'm reading way too much non-fiction right now. At least it's non-ficiton about people - I really can't read computer books or history books. Cook books I CAN read. Oh well. My next fiction conquest is probably gonna be Breece D'J Pancake, mostly because he wrote a collection of short stories, killed himself with a shotgun, and got his book printed and became famous as a "notable contemporary writer in the Appalachian literary community." All in that order. Check out what Vonnegut has to say about him.

"As for Breece D'J Pancake:
I give you my word of honor that he is merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read. What I suspect is that it hurt too much, was no fun at all to be that good. You and I will never know."
--Kurt Vonnegut, in a letter to John Casey

Here's another favorite book I read last year... Greg Bottoms introduced me to Pancake in his book of short stories Sentimental Heartbroken Rednecks. This book is an insanely good collection of mildly depressing redneck stories, and if you know me in person you can borrow it.

uppity white people

I just saw a great commercial for 96.5 KOIT, a lite rock radio station. Note that by "great," I mean funny and ineffective. And it makes me desperately want to avoid their radio station. They've posted a video of the commercial in WMV format (yuck to WMV) on their website.

The commercial starts with this woman sitting at her desk in an office environment (with a CRT monitor in front of her) who's like "When I got to work this morning, the cleaning staff had changed my radio station from 96.5. Well, I'm putting a stop to that!" And she grabs this post-it note she wrote out that's like "DO NOT CHANGE THE RADIO STATION FROM 96.5." Then the commercial goes off on a whole voice over "96.5 - lite rock, less talk" tirade.

My take on it is that the lady needs to chill the fuck out and have some respect for the cleaning staff that's emptying her cubicle garbage at midnight. Let them fucking listen to their own radio stations - there's no need to be a total bitch about having to dial your station back in the morning.

96.5 KOIT - the lite rock radio station for uppity white people.

Note: this posting made possible by ethan's new cable.

carnival ought 3

Hola amigos! It's been way too long since I rapped at ya, but life in the Casa de Ethan has been pretty busy recently. If you who know the real-life brick and mortar Ethan, you may already know that I spent the weekend in Pittsburgh, PA at an annual CMU party and alumni event called Carnival. It's a good yearly chance for alumni to get together, drink, and throw up on each other, just like freshman year. Alumni come to relive their college days, but the college administration looks at this as a great chance to hit the "withdrawl from checking" button on the giant cash machine of nostalgia.

I had my digital camera with me, so click on Mick's bearded visage for all the pictures you can handle. Mick specifically asked that I blog about his zany madcap antics, but unfortunately I forgot my camera on Saturday night. This is Mick on friday night, which is not nearly as interesting as the Mick on Saturday night, who entertained one and all with his goldschlager and OE800 fueled duel-challenges to strangers. So just imagine this guy, very drunk, making friends with everyone he met on the streets of Shadyside... And follow the link for the rest of my pictures.

But I might as well make a couple of points about the photos:

1. If you want a bigger copy of any of these photos, let me know. I've got 'em in 1600x1200 if you want one full-sized. They're scaled to 800x600 for da web.
   
2. I'm apparently a pretty horrible photographer. The phrase "why don't you guys squeeze together for a photo" is evidently absent from my lexicon - I prefer the school of "here are 5 people standing around" photography.
   
3. Despite my photographic failures, it IS possibe to make up for lack of quality with quantity. There are about 100 pics here for ya...
   

code for thought

Since I don't have a lot to say blog-wise, let me just give a message to all the nerds out there who slang code for a living.

Stop using atoi(). I know you love it, but it's deprecated. As Muddy Waters used to say "don't nobody like a deprecated system call that's not even thread-safe." Use strtol() instead.

file under: destructobot

It's a sick day. And as more people from work become aware of this blog, I'm increasingly unable to safely tell the truth about what I did on my sick day. But what the fuck, here it goes.

• emailed in sick
  
• slept
  
• read
  
• ran in golden gate park
  
• went to the museum of modern art
  
• lost a bet about Gary Coleman with a homeless man, had to give him a piggy-back ride
  
• bought a Bottle Rocket yellow jumpsuit, immediately regretted blowing $70 on it
  
• sent Mike a telegram at the Western Union office. OK, I didn't, but apparently it's possible, and it costs $14.99, and you can do it from your computer. That's bullshit.
  

But, most importantly, I completely blocked work from my mind. It's just not allowed in right now...

silly protestors

I'm driving to work this morning, southbound on 280 in San Francisco, when I see 7 people with arms linked inside metal pipes completely blocking traffic going the other direction on the freeway. I mean, traffic was backed up for half a mile beyond that, with cops screaming by on the shoulder to put an end to it. We drove by pretty fast, but at a glance they appeared to be dressed as different members of the village people. Perhaps to no one's surprise, they got arrested.

hello, nerd

let the tivo hacking begin. maybe I'm 2 years late to the party, but soon I'll be running rc5 on my series 1 just like Robert Loggia.

• ethernet upgrade
  
• 80gb hard drive upgrade

sad dog

For Erin. Happy birthday, Erin, whenever your birthday may be. Follow the link, there's more where that came from.

I WATCH YOU WHILE YOU SLEEP

movies

I know the war is bad and all, but my big "the world is going to hell" indication is the fact that I regularly pay $9 to see a movie without flinching. And this isn't even some big ass stadium seating affair, this is at Landmark Theaters, a large chain, but with meager accoutrements by today's standards.

Last night's movie was Divine Intervention, and the preview pretty much sums it up. It was great for a movie with 11 lines of dialog, no obvious plot, and subtle commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that went right over my head. Like, in this one scene, this flying woman who apparently embodies pre-1956 Palestine fights 5 guys in training for the Israeli army in a surreal kung fu scene that steals a lot from the matrix. Then she blows up a helicopter with her boomerang Palestine shield. I mean, what the fuck does that mean?

Next week, Cowboy Bebop!

money

In honor of April, or "tax month" as Americans like to call it, this post is all about money.

About 4 weeks ago, on a Tuesday morning, I groggily stumbled up to the ATM machine at work. It's right off the company cafeteria, and I had my morning cup of coffee in hand, fresh and untouched. I needed money to feed my marshmallow habit, see. But what appeared before me was far more interesting than a stack of crisp and clean smelling twenties without a service fee. It was an abandoned ATM in diagnostic mode. No one was in sight. I approached cautiously. Luckily, I had my Canon S330 in tow, ready to capture the moment in full 1600x1200 beauty. Behold, friends - this is the seamy underside of instant money; I saw up the skirt of giant international bank corporations and now you can too.

A few points to make about this picture:

• This thing has all sorts of funny buttons and menu items. Take a close look at the bigger picture here. I encourage you to print it out and form study groups of people geographically located near you. If you do form a study group, also make me a collage while you've got everybody together.
  
• My first instinct was "Holy shit! This is Windows! You can blue screen an ATM! somehow!" Sadly, closer inspection reveals it is NOT Windows 95 running on my ATM.
  
• WHY DIDN'T I PRESS THE DUMP CASH BUTTON? I know they have a camera and all, but what kind of trouble could I get in?

  Judge Judy: Did you walk up to an ATM in diagnostic mode, tell it to void itself of twenties, and leave? Don't lie - we have you on tape.
  Ethan: Well, yeah.
  Judge Judy: That's about what I'd expect anybody to do. Instead of prison, you get marshmallows!! Hooray!!!

• Hmmm... I just realized that if, in my court fantasy, they have tape of me pressing the dump cash button, don't they, in real life, have footage of me photographing the ATM? hmmm....
  

TAXES

My old position of "taxes are for nerds" has been rebuked by the US government. Also, I have been told that I am a nerd on 3 separate occasions this year, so I will be doing my 2002 taxes this week. Tax season isn't fun at all. You know why? Cause there's no mascot. Christmas has Santa. Easter has a bunny. Tax season could have an accountant who taught you all about IRA's and took away 1/3 of your toys or something. That would get kids, and everybody, in the spirit. Also, there are no tax parties where you get drunk and sing tax songs. That is another thing I would change if you elected me your student body president. Thank you, over and out.