coffeefog

$$$

nik spent $80 on cd's at the show last night...

sorry

and because i feel bad for skimping on the posts this week, two 4am posts tonight.

from alamo square park last sunday:

sidewalk says

Look what fate and gravity collaborated on this time: a magnetic poem. Do you think the patterns of city foot traffic have had any significant impact on the arrangement of words here in this sidewalk crack? Is there any cosmic significance to this? Or is this of little interest at all, just a jumble of words no more meaningful than had you dumped the entire Magnetic Poetry box into a pile on your kitchen table?

This was on Oak street somewhere between Fillmore and Buchanan this afternoon:

Except actually the poem doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you read it left to right. It's all jumbled. So if you can make something sensical out of (most of) these words, you win. Bonus points if you incorporate the word "Parliament" from the cigarette. (link to bigger picture)

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Went to a great show tonight, but for some reason GAMH was full of talkers during all 4 bands. So far the noisepop crowds have turned out to be incredibly un-appreciative as far as "talking over the music" goes. But I had a great time at the show, despite my "blowgun poison darts at the talkers from above" fantasy, pictured to the right, and we saw great performances by the Decemberists and Rum Diary. All-in-all I spent 7 hours with my friend Nik, from the ethiopian dinner before the show to the end of the night where he dropped me off at a random street corner 3 miles from my house. I felt like a hooker, getting out of a car in the middle of a intersection, apparently destinationless. I walked the rest of the way home, over the 17th street hill, but only because I wanted to. Not because he kicked me out of the car or anything.

A high point of the show: The Decemberists dedicated their song The Soldiering Life (mp3) to the city of San Francisco for the 4,000 gay marriages it's performed in the past 3 weeks. The song is an account of WW I soldiers falling in love with one another on a belgian battlefield - great lyrics like " We laid on the mattress and tumbled to sleep, Our eyes align, swaddled in our civies, Cradled in our dungarees". On the first listen you might not even pick up the homosexual message - I only figured it out because I was in the car with Ian for 4 hours and all we had was this promo mix CD that he got out of a men's magazine, and I heard the song 4 times. Give it a listen, and then you'll probably have to buy their album. One thing I should note before you get too far into their music is that approximately half of their songs are about chimney sweeps, and how hard it is to be a chimney sweep. it's inexplicable.

it's 4am. my paper route starts in an hour. fuck...

OMG A CAR

look at me! i'm being eaten by a car!!!

isn't that just WACKY? i'm going to take a nap now.

Haiti

My little sister just had to cancel her spring break trip to Haiti. Serious. Because of the revolution.

movie review

last night's movie screening was Starsky and Hutch

it gets one "meh"

It was funny, but just "meh" funny. Think about it - if this movie was actually good, would they have released it in late February? Hell no. It would have been June, and you would have been able to get a stuffed Starsky at taco bell. But there's no cross-promotional tie-ins to save you now, are there Ben Stiller?

The saddest part of the movie was that the original 1975 Starsky and Hutch had a cameo, and in the entire scene NOBODY HAD A FUNNY LINE. Not Owen, not Ben, not the 2 really old guys. Just some grimaces and lines like "you can't come with us on THIS call, old timer." so weak.

what it's supposed to look like

ok, so apparently this page looks pink and is Times New Roman to more than one person. Thanks to Grodon for originally pointing this out. And to Merritt for seconding it.

bleeech.

let me know if you see it in the ugly pink format, not in the intended grey format. And let me know what type & version of browser you're using:

<

feedback

anyway what's up with your blog? it looks like shit now.

it's the reader feedback that makes blogging so worthwhile.

i do it all for you guys.

UPDATE 2 minutes later
that quote is from a real email. from an old roommate.

immediately after posting it I checked my email to find some blogspam from f4f5gv5re5g@hotmail.com. and i quote:

GOOD website design! Where can we find more information about this ?

see? not everybody thinks it looks like shit. some automated scripts think it looks pretty good.

new blog

lj:meritocracy

Also, I have never wanted a sports car. I drive a 1992 minivan with 165k miles on it and the driver's side window doesn't roll up so when I go to the drive-through bank or take the toll road I have to pull up past the thingy, open the door, and get out. I don't even know how to drive a stick.

movies

I should really blog about all the movies I've been going to see recently. The girlfriend is a professional movie reviewer, and gets us into all sorts of movies 3-10 days before they come out. I'm just along for the ride, but I could at least tell you guys how the movies were, right? Maybe, if I just weren't so lazy.

Did you know that if a movie is bad, they won't screen it to the press until only 2-3 days before the movie is released? This limits the amount of bad press a film can get before it officially opens. All the bad reviews come out a day or two after the release.

In the past month I've seen preview screenings of The Big Bounce (horrible), Welcome To Mooseport (meh, sorta funny), and Touching The Void (OHMYGOD BEST MOVIE I'VE SEEN THIS MONTH)

that's it for now. consider yourselves enlightened.

bad blogger!

it's thursday. i wrote that last blog entry on monday, but it didn't make it up server side until now. the server was fuct as far as running cgi scripts goes. that's what I get for trading beer for web space. in retaliation for the low uptime, I hereby publish this picture of monzy, the giver of the bandwidth, doing the peepee dance.

sell phones

well, the "on" button on my cell phone has been busted for... oh... about a month now. it's the on/off/end call/exit menu button. My solution for ending a call or turning the phone off is to take out the battery. Turning the phone on is considerably harder - I spent over an hour last night trying to turn it on. I was unsuccessful. Another 15 minutes this morning and I still wasn't able to turn it on. But just now, on the first try in the past 2 hours, the phone turned on.

So it's time for a new cell phone. Fucking fuck.

Microsoft links:

• The Ten Rules of Performance as told by a MS developer. Nothing groundbreaking, but a good re-statement of fundamental performance problems when working on a large project.
  
• 4,000 occurences of the word "hack" in last week's leaked Windows source code. As in "THIS IS A HACK." Good stuff. And the article's written with a very reasonable attitude - having klocs full of hacks isn't actually a bad thing, just a fact of life.
  

walking in cupertino

I hate walking in Cupertino. Keep in mind that I'm an avid fan of walking - I spent 4 hours doing it (within San Francisco) on Sunday for no particular reason. But just trying to cross the street in Cupertino I feel like a criminal. Not really a criminal, but some sort of foreign particle that's obstructing the fluid timed traffic of right turns. Cars back up and drivers stare in wonder as I make my way over the crosswalk. I am inexplicable. I am an anomaly in the suburbian sea of asphalt.

Sometimes people honk, but not as often as I'd like. If they'd honk more my rage would be justifiable.

Taking the 12 minute walk from my office to the grocery store includes crossing two freeway on-ramps. People getting onto the freeway don't give a fuck about you - you're making them go zero miles an hour, when they should really be going seventy. I used to live here in Cupertino, approximately 3/8 of a mile from my job, and had to cross the same freeway on-ramps. I only walked to work about 5 times in a year - it's simply an enormous pain in the ass to be a pedestrian here.

So I drove to work instead. The funny thing about that is the time I ran out of gas on the way in to work, but that's another story, and it's not even that funny. So I invite you to fill in the details of that story, of how I could run out of gas on a drive that's less than half a mile. It will be more entertaining for you if you imagine it.

Anyway, I'm kind of flipping out about work right now, so I'm probably going to play hooky tomorrow. And I'll be snowboarding this weekend.

sic transit gloria. glory fades.

First off, a test. Who can tell what this is supposed to say? I don't have a freakin' clue, since like all good Americans I only speak English. And poorly at that.

This is from Prayerbook cross in GGPark. It's my favorite recent discovery. I walked past the hill it sits on a hundred times before I followed the small sign off JFK around 20th. It's a nice place to hang out. If you're lucky, jesus just might come down and say "hi", and you might have a little conversation lke this:

me: hey. whoa. "agnostics" didn't work out so well for me, huh?
jesus: at least you weren't atheist.
me: yeah.
jesus: oh well. catch you later!
me: cool.

sleek != geek

the problem:
content syndication is in a confusing place right now. RSS and Atom are the two big competitors, and a bunch of assholes who can't agree on anything are pushing the different formats independently.

I have effectively stopped surfing the web on a daily basis. My newsreader actively polls all the sites & blogs I read every hour, and tells me which ones have been updated.

My favorite RSS reader for Mac OS X, NetNewsWire only reads RSS. A handful of sites are only syndicating in Atom, not RSS.

the solution:
Antonio Cavedoni's Atom 0.3 to RSS 1.0 converter dynamically generates RSS feeds from Atom feeds, allowing me to read Corey's blogger account from the comfort of NetNewsWire. (corey's atom feed)

What we really need to do is sit tight for 6 months and let this battle flame out, but for now I can read Atom feeds. Thanks, Antonio.

code question

Phili Colavito, Mob Accountant (mcsweeneys.net):

I tell Frankie the Eagle I'm going to Staples to pick up the new version of QuickBooks. He says send one of the boys to get it ....

---

hey nerds - what's your policy on checking memory you've allocated before using it? say you malloc about 4k - do you always check that the malloc worked before referencing it? how about if you're writing kernel code, where you're *really* not supposed to de-reference null pointers?

My reasoning at this point goes that, if your allocations are failing then the system is already in a pretty fragile state. If there's not enough free memory to give you 2k, the whole system will probably become unusable soon anyhow. But are there any more codified ideas on this subject?

Cuban - how does VM work in the xbox? Do you have to be careful about filling up memory, like does anything catastrophic happen to the system? Or does the xbox have a disk-swapfile-backed VM system so performance just drops off after a point?

valentine's day

am i ordering the book Writing Secure Code for valentine's day? No, I'm not, because I'm not a fucking moron. My girlfriend does not want to receive this as a gift of any sort, particularly not for valentine's day.

walking

mapquest says "you walked really fucking far this weekend."

this took 4 hours on sunday:
Market & Castro -> Van Ness & North Point = 3.41 miles
Van Ness & North Point -> Embarcadero & Washington = 2.0 miles
Embarcadero & Washington -> 16th & Valencia = 3.1 miles

all ending just in time to watch two japanese girls blind each other with bleach.

guitars

The guy downstairs is strumming away on his acoustic guitar, perfecting his version of the Smashing Pumpkins classic Disarm. I can hear his every foible from here in my own living room; every time his voice cracks on the "used to be, a little boy, oooooohhhhh" line I thank god that he is an accountant and not the man who put out the records I drooled over when I was 15. Not the man Shelby tattooed herself for. He's no Billy Corgan, is all I'm saying.

I almost want to join in, since it sounds like I know the words better than him, but I know that wouldn't be right. We have to pretend that we have some semblance of privacy.

rainy day

Wow, the rain is heavy today. It was one sheet of rain all the way from San Francisco to Cupertino, but that's cool because Rosie was in charge of driving, and I was in charge of drinking coffee. check and check.

If it's raining where you are, listen to this ancient slowdive song "I believe". It's perfect for heavy rain. The whole "I am the Elephant" album is available as a free download at mojave3online dot com (free reg req'd). It's great slowdivey stuff - iTunes tells me I've listened to this album 12 times since 2004 started...

my hair cut worked

my hair cut worked out great - nothing to worry about. whew. I got outta there with my hair parted along a new meridian, and I bought a couple of CD's, and I ran into Amir, and we got some coffee and played some chess. and somehow that all took 6 hours. huh. that's one great thing about having a job (i.e. not being in school) and lacking any real responsibility - I have so much free time to burn. Sometimes when I show people something I'm working on, like my "book of numbers", they'll say things like "you have way too much free time." And that may be true, but it's still fun to write down every number.

and for the record, there's been a steady gray drizzle all day long.

Daisie told me that I was supposed to take 29 pictures a day for the month of February. Sadly, I blew it off. I consciously decided to leave the camera at home, but now that I was out screwing around for 6 hours, it seems like I could have taken a lot of great random pictures. But really tomorrow is when the plan would have fallen to shit anyway. WTF do you photograph when you're in front of a computer all day? maybe I could take 29 screenshots throughout the day. sigh.

haircuts

sigh. I'm going to get my haircut now. I hate getting my hair cut.

that is all. now back to the superbowl with you.