coffeefog

the joggers!

Last night I ended up on the "Fraternities of Silicon Valley" caltrain car. One of caltrain's greatest blessings, the legality of drinking beer on board, has the nasty side effect of making caltrain popular among rowdy baseball fans on SF Giants game nights.

But I had The Joggers to drown the drunken homophobes out. Many thanks to John for recommending the joggers 6 months ago. I picked up their cd solid guild for $6 and it rocks. In retrospect, it would have been worth a full $13. But you know, so much music, so little time. It takes a while to get around to everything.

On an unrelated note, you know what I got stuck in my head today? "He's Zack! He's Zack! He's a lego maniac!" 10 points if you remember that commercial, 25 points if you get the jingle stuck in your head for over 30 minutes.

Also, now I have DSL.

caltrain + snowcrash

My caltrain 10-ride ticket no longer is accepted by the little machine that validates it when you get on the train. The machine works by chomping off a portion of the edge of your ticket (the black region in the graphic), gradually eating away at the column numbered 1-10. Except now in my case, where the machine just sits there like nothing's happening, even though I'm like "yo dude, let's get to work. let's make this happen." nothing. I think the problem is that my 10-ride hasn't been getting chomped very cleanly, leaving different amounts of black paper on the ticket (I think it's supposed to chomp off the black square entierly). So I just cleaned things up with a pair of scissors and gave it a nice clean vertical line down all of my spent rides. We'll see if that works better... Image wholeheartedly stolen from caltrain.org But this little caltrain ticket snippet got me thinking about the book Snowcrash. In the book, Hiro Protaganist is a stringer, someone who gathers information (text, video, audio, data), enters it into this global database (run by the monolithic government entity/corporation the CIC), and then gets paid a little bit every time that information is accessed. And that's basically where the internet is today. Millions of bloggers post little snippets like this, google indexes it, people who need information find it. The only difference with today's www&blogs&google is that it's all more distributed, lacking the CIC central body. And also there's no payment infrastructure for small-fry info like this. This guy made a similar comment last year. ProfNet is a for-money service journalists can use to get expert answers to their questions.

update:ack! forgot to close my table tag for half an hour...

disaster averted

external firewire drive purchased. peace of mind that I have physically redundant backups of the data on my laptop both at home and at work is well worth the cost. I was getting scared there, walking around with a laptop that used to be a prototype, running an OS that you can't even really call beta, all without any backups of anything. Whew. Now I'm safe.

If you are in Cupertino, tomorrow I begin ferrying books down the peninsula by backpack. You will soon get your deliveries, but it'll take a few days. The rest of you nationwide people who wanted books, email me your mailing addresses and I'll bill you for shipping via paypal once I've shipped them. I'm not entirely sure what the cheapest form of shipping will be, but somebody (tina?) told me there's a discount media rate. So maybe we'll try that.

tad 3.0

Tad would like everyone to know that he is alive and well, and has apparently retired to Ft. Lauderdale. And he recommends that you all read A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander.

giveaway

book giveaway is going well. Roughly 1/3 of the books are allotted now. For some reason people seem to have a very hard time accepting the fact that I want to give these away. I've gotten more than a couple of "uhhh.... if you're really giving these away, I guess I'll... uhhh.... take... these." Plus one offer to BUY the books from me - what the fuck is wrong with you, Brendan?

a gradual lessening

I moved last weekend. And when I moved, I realized that I was hauling too much old crap around with me. I mean, I have a lot of crap. Merritt knows what I'm talking about. But I'm just me, and I can throw away crap I don't need whereas Merritt wouldn't dare thin down her Sponge Bob collection, for the wrath of a 3 year old is not easily suffered. The easiest thing to get rid of is all these books. These represent roughly half of the collection (maybe only a third) that's been snowballing in my bookcases for years, and they're yours if you want them. So this is a public offering - look at these pictures, and if you see anything you want just email me or comment here. If you leave a comment, then you can make your claims publicly. I'm giving away my Twin Peaks tapes, people. Also, I reserve the right to tell everyone else which books you want. For example - let's examine Blake's choices - Blake came by to see our new apartment last weekend and chose from my pile: Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein, Wobegon Boy by Garrison Keillor, and Collected Stories of HP Lovecraft. I find this information highly interesting, but also utterly useless.

coffee mishaps!

fuck! that is a scary scary scary OS X exploit! If you're ever surfing the web and Help Viewer pops up out of nowhere, that would be a good time to panic. Workarounds available.

In other news, the universe is telling me to cut back on the coffee. After coffee lead me to a 1 hour delay in getting to work yesterday, Fate took a drag on her cigarette, glanced in my direction as I drove up Market street, and chose a repeat performance for today. This time it was an entire cup of coffee, unsipped and fresh from the coffee shop, dumped into my lap. Luckily we've come a long way from the scalding McDonald's coffee temperatures of the late nineties, and I am free of major burns. I had to turn around and go home to change pants and sop up the carpeting in my car. It'll have a lovely "ever more stale" coffee smell for the next 4 months. But, you know, no complaints.

nerds: RSS for daily PDF downloads?

Hello, nerds.

Salon lets its premium subscribers download the day's new articles in PDF format. It might be nice to have a stash of current Salon articles on my laptop, but, alas, I am lazy. Too lazy to go to that page every day and download the new PDF.

I do however, have RSS. I'm already running NetNewsWire, which pings each of my favorite 100 websites for updates once an hour. If Salon had an RSS feed of new daily salon PDF's, I could run an RSS reader that would automatically download those PDFs into a "Newsfeeds" folder. Then I'd have a wealth of Salon articles sitting, waiting for me on my laptop every time I rode the train to work.

But I don't think RSS supports this sorta thing. Does it? Does Atom support "bundled downloads"?

caltrain lessons

The new apartment is a tad closer to the train station, so I'm trying a new commute. I've been carpooling with Rosie for a year, but I want to give the train a shot. When I hit all the right connections, the train is 2 hours each way. Carpooling was 1:15 each way, and driving was 0:45 - 1:00 each way. Now that I've ridden it roundtrip once, I have learned a few lessons that I'd like to share with you...

• Riding the train is relaxing, and gives you lots of time to read and listen to music.
  
• My watch is not the official timepiece of the 4th and king caltrain station. Even if it looks like I have 3 minutes left to get on the train, it is NOT ok to stop for coffee.
  
• If you miss the 8:07 train because you stopped to get coffee, the 8:37 train is not so bad, although your one-way trip time balloons to a 3 hour trip. David Sedaris's wacky childhood makes good company for this delay.
  
• The Cupertino 55 bus line, connecting from the Caltrain station, isn't as painful as I feared.
  
• Price-wise, train fare + bus fare from San Francisco to Cupertino is comparable to gasoline costs for one person driving solo getting 28mpg.

Conclusion: I need to commit to 2 or 4 solid weeks of riding the train before I can decide once and for all whether it's a viable means of commute.

moved!

I am moved. Saturday was a long day of 2 hour lines at U-Haul and a truck that stalls out every time you drive up hill. But I'm moved, and Emily's moved, and were 82% settled into our new apartment. Thanks to Nick, Nik, Katy, Matt, and Jen for all their help. My sister Katy is the only person who flew cross country to help me move, so she earns "most favored mover" status with that.

movies

I've just watched this movie trailer 7 times:

• Lost Boys of Sudan - Sunday at the Red Vic
  

doctor trip, free shot

I went to the doctor today, and he said I am a pussy and that I shouldn't complain so much about my foot because there's nothing seriously wrong with it. So we're going to go that route. Also he said I should stretch more when I go running.

But the coolest part about the doctor's appointment was the free tetanus shot. Since I had already paid my insurance co-pay, and my foot was fine, the doctor hereby called "open season" on optional medical care he could give me. He estimated that I needed a tetanus shot, I consented, and there was much rejoicing as we pulled one over on the large medical insurance corporations. And also, since he could charge the insurance companies an extra $30 if he did so, I let him wrap my right wrist with gauze regardless of my wrist's apparent healthy condition. He was a fun doctor, and I would recommend him to anyone else who's tired of the strict "by the books" medical care you frequently get in clinics, hospitals, and doctor's offices these days.

foot hurts!

my foot hurts! walking is possible, so I'm pretty sure it's not broken. But walking does hurt like a bitch. I'm staying home from work today, since when I'm at work my frequent bathroom trips would overwhelm my crippled right foot. At home I'm just curled up in the bath tub for the rest of the day.

Except for now, when the need for coffee arises. Coffee is almost 2 blocks away. Can I hobble that far? We'll see.

All attempts to determine the cause of foot pain have come up fruitless. It started sunday night near the end of a 3 mile walk home...

i am a bastard

tonight I talked to a friend on the phone who I haven't spoken to for 2 weeks.

ethan: oh, hey, and I'm moving next weekend.
tom: yeah? where to?
ethan: ohio
tom: ... (stunned silence)
ethan: uhhh... just kidding. stanyan street.

I think I scared him for a minute. that wasn't a very nice lie to tell.

laundrotrash

I should note that MacStumbler is my warwalking software of choice these days.

Written Sunday
Sitting in Emily's apartment with my laptop right now, stealing WiFi from neighbors. Sometimes (a lot of the time) neighbors are hip enough to know about 802.11 and its myriad uses, but when they leave the network named "default" you know you're free to take all the bandwidth you want.

Check out my craigslist handiwork. Warning: not funny at all. Just... pictures of things for sale. If I had it to do over again, I think I'd right-align the images and align the top of each text block with the start of the images. It's not perfect - it's real. But it's the little flaws, the tiny imperfections, that make this "used furniture for sale" post so beautiful.

Written Saturday night at 10PM
I'm sitting in the laundromat with my laptop right now, but there's no WiFi to bum directly from where I'm sitting. So every 10 minutes, when I'm done reading an article, I stand up and walk outside to this spot around the corner where I can get at somebody's DSL access point. I load the pages, walk back inside and read them. I'm reading:

• this site basically leaves me speechless. have you ever seen an eighteen wheeler decked out in pink neon? Japanese motorcycle hooligans are just crazy. 80 pictures from a Bosozoku meet-up. I don't even know what Bosozoku means, but it must be awesome.
  
• F*cked by the F*CC in the Nation

this is going to go

this is going to go somewhere inside the flap of amir's first major label released album

blogsix

It got really hard to blog all of a sudden. First my comment spamblocker got all crazy because I tried to tell it about EVERY PORNO SITE IN THE WORLD but then that was too many for its wee regular expression parsing abilities, so it just barfed every time you tried to leave a comment. So I fixed that by letting anybody leave a comment, thus opening the floodgates of annoyance. (they *love* to spam this entry)

And then my OS X blog client started crashing because my "operating system" "isn't stable." But that one's kinda my bad...

Daisie's taking orders for more Kaku the Blase Snowman t-shirts. Usual price of $10 applies for "local deliveries." I own 3, and I wear them all at the same time. If you are unfamiliar with Kaku's work, it's important to note that he's a snowman wearing a fez. I mean... whoa.

moving

Looks like I'm moving in a week and a half. This came up rather suddenly - I really wasn't expecting to move for a while :)

The new place is at parnassus and shrader, and it should be a cool setup.

As with all moves, it's now time to recruit people who have much better things to be doing at 9am on a Saturday to come carry the heavy shit out of my apartment and move it a mile and a half. Yes, a mile and a half. So it always comes down to the question of incentive - what can you give people to make 3 hours of their saturday morning hangover worthwhile? I am considering:

• X-Men cake and party favors
  
• a special Pixies reunion performance
  
• pony rides
  
• free couches