coffeefog

to the geeks

Just a quick link for those of you who paying attention to the most recent case of Apple's intellectual imperialism: Dashboard. The Konfabulator folks seem to be taking it pretty well. Their bitterness shows through their playful irony ("Cupertino, start your photocopiers!" plays on Apple's OS X poster at WWDC "Redmond, start your photocopiers!"), but I can understand them being pissed. Apple just took their concept and built it into OS X without so much as a nod in their direction.

But kudos to them for keeping their cool.

And if you're just tuning into the controversy now, you should know that in recent history Apple has shown an incredible unwillingness to play well with others.

guess.

Hey Ethan.

So, I have this (shitty) html survey I wrote for my final project in my business course. I'm trying to get lots of responses, so I was wondering if you would be able to (or allow me to) put a shameless plug for it on your blog as an entry for today. You can even joke about how "cutting-edge" and "top secret" the research is (it's about low carb colas).

Anyway, you don't have to agree to it if you don't want to, it is a lame survey anyway. The URL is www.physics.georgetown.edu/~brendanb/survey.html

I'll catch you later tonight on AIM, I'm between class sessions right now.

-BLB

And if you fill out the survery - ONLY if you fill out the survey - you get a free mp3. -ethan

spca daze

This is Libby! We hung out for a little bit today at the SPCA. She's adorable! And when I left it looked like she might get adopted, so good luck to her. You can't tell from the second photo, but right before I took that she had managed to fit both of those balls into her mouth so I couldn't get them. I put the first picture up on amidogornot.com and she scored a 10. perfect 10. I took the photos with my new camera phone. The 640x480s work out pretty sweet...

the day that lasted forever

Today is looking like it's going to be the longest day ever. Partly because it's summer time and the sun'll be doing its thing until 9PM, but mostly 'cause I woke up at 7:30am to get some car work done, and the day's been laying itself down in brush ever since. I got the girfriend's car all fixed up, drank 3 cups of coffee at 2 coffee shops, commissioned some art from Lydia, proceeded to meet lydia for a late lunch, went to the library, took 2 walks through the park, and drank a beer. And then Ian (file photo) came over out of nowhere, and we had a weird "tag team web surfing" thing going on for 45 minutes.

When you wake up that early, that's it. You've doubled your day time. A lot of people are like "there's no way I can wake up at 7:30 any day of the week, let alone a Saturday." To them I say, "I am cursed." See, I get the morning person genes from my Dad. Which is cool, except that I get the night person genes from my Mom. Which means, taken together, that I am fucked. I'll stay up til 2 or 3am and then be up by 8am at the latest. It takes more than 12 hours (usually 3-6 days) of advanced planning for me to set circumstances up just right so that I'll get 8 or 9 hours of sleep in a night.

But today I got to sit in the sun watching brazilians do backflips in front of a drum circle, so I can't complain... that sounds smug to me. but i guess it is, so... HA.

weekend music

This is going to be the best weekend of music, like, ever. Mike Doughty with Kelly Stoltz, Beulah with Stratford 4, Decemberists with Long Winters. on consecutive nights. My plan at the moment is to be immediately cryogenically frozen after each show and re-animated before the next. It will seem like one awesome day long music festival that way, and I believe modern science has advanced to the point of providing me with this luxury. It's also Beulah's second to last show ever. yeah, ever. I hope you're crying over this schedule, Aron.

the original email

From: adam Subject: please re-create this Date: August 25, 2003 10:06:32 AM PDT To: ethan http://whowouldbuythat.com/images/bikepaint.jpg thank you -a

stizzly

Important new Errand Feasibily Study absolutely must be checked out. Brought to you by the coffee in the park guy I mentioned in January, who I shall heretofore refer to simply as "the genius."

But as long as I'm linking back to posts I wrote almost 6 months ago, I would rather you also look at the Baby Wearing Headphones Drinking No-Foam Latte, for it is that baby who brings light unto the world.

Gretchen, go here. My email bounced from your @alum.collegewewentto.edu address. Nobody else follow that link... Except Adam, because this all harkens back to the guy pretending to ride the bicycle painted on the ground...

hyperlink

Good, quick, only-take-you-4-minutes-to-read interview with a Rhode Island transit planner (via Planetizen). With thanks to amul for the planetizen clue-in. Planetizen is... hard to read sometimes. I started reading it because I thought it was all about anti-car, urban planning, eco-lifestyle stuff. And it is, but it has a heavy emphasis on the laws and city planning and zoning aspects of such things, as opposed to the light and fluffy "sometimes we use napkins twice" type of advice i expected. Planetizen's the kind of thing somebody working at city hall would love to read - "ooooh.... memphis has mixed-use zoning! this will change _everything_!"

And that's... how I know that I'm old and boring now. I want to read, if not a 400 page urban zoning document, at least a 3 page summary. I've skimmed the Fiscal Year 2004 caltrain budget. Also, I bought some $11 earplugs to wear to shows, because I care about my "hearing" and my "ear drums" cause starting in 2 weeks you can round my age up to 30. Yeah, 30.

It's also important to note that the article is tragically titled Rhode Illin'

noam says hi

I spent a couple of hours of soul searching at the Rite-Aid yesterday. In the end I decided that I'm a Mach 3 Turbo kind of guy. Hinged shaving head, medicated aloe strip, no batteries required. It makes me want to crawl under my desk right now and take a nap.

Now let's take a second to ask ourselves "what is noam chomsky doing at the train station?" Now with crazy swirly eyes.

techno2

I think my computer is listening to some awesome mp3s on somebody else's computer on the network, and it's ramping the CPU to the music, much like we humans nod our heads when we hear good music. I bet this music is awesome. It's probably techno, or jungle, or idm. Ishkur would know for sure, just by looking at this.

But really, I've been negligent in the blogging aspect of running a blog. Just last week, instead of writing a new entry I changed the blog configuration to show 15 days of previous entries instead of just 10, so that the page wouldn't go blank with a lack of postings. Yeah - I took the energy to tweak the blog settings rather than actually write anything. it's funny.

But since I didn't write anything last week, I no longer have any idea what happened. Sometime mid-week management at my job said "stop working on whatever you're working on and just test this upcoming software release," so I basically took that as an order to start fucking around at work. I built a giant paperclip monster, and then it battled against Daisie's "couch on its side", and the paperclip monster was obviously destroyed. And that's about all I remember of last week. But Daisie just quit her job, or at least gave 2 months notice, and I didn't just quit my job, so starting today no more goofing off on the job! I've got to retire in 37-ish years, and I can't afford to let my reputation start sliding for another 2 decades...

word of mouth

I saw The Corporation (trailer) during its premiere weekend at the Castro last weekend. Great documentary about the rise and domination of the corporation as a global force over the past century. It's here at the Castro for another two weeks (schedule), and probably coming to your major metropolitan area sometime over the next few months. I don't want to compare it to a Michael Moore flick, because this is much more measured and careful and less "in your face," but it's the same vibe.

And Mike Daisey is doing a run of 21 Dog Years at the Berkeley rep theater in downtown Berkeley. It's a one-man show about his years spent as an Amazon.com call center operator in the late nineties. The book is hilarious, and the show will be worth it. If you're within striking distance of downtown Berkeley, it's totally worth the trip!

baby bullet

(written last night, posted this morning)

Today's the first day of the Caltrain Baby Bullet. Everybody's blogging about it. And you know what? I'm sitting on a local train like a chump. I rode the local to work in the morning, and I'm riding the local home now at night. That's what happens when you're "busy" and "can't leave work just yet", you miss all the fast trains. And since the bullet's covering a lot of the commuter traffic, this agonizingly slow (40 minutes slower for my commute) local train is pretty empty. There are 5 people on my car (capacity 74), and the train has like 8 cars. I bet that, given the fact that we all paid about $4 for our tickets, and given the cost of running the whole train up and down the peninsula just to move like 30 people, it would have been cheaper if Caltrans had just gotten us each a hooker and some blow and told us to chill out at the train station we started at until tomorrow morning.

as much for me as for you

read: librarian blogs

listen to: Aisler's Set:==MP3== of Through the Swells off their album Terrible Things Happen. more mp3s on their website.

Tad got me hooked on Aislers Set with a cryptic remark he made 18 months ago about the propietor of that-one-indie-bookstore-on-the-Alameda in San Jose liking the Aislers Set's latest album. It took me a year and a half to buy the album, but "Terrible Things Happen" is totally worth it.

the day as it stands

I set out today with several goals - those included drinking coffee, buying tickets to a beulah show, getting a haircut, and photographing someone on a miniature motorcycle. The motorcycle plan is a particularly important one, because it's hard to get the point across to people who don't see it every day - miniature motorcycles are incredibly popular in San Francisco. Whether they're street legal or not is unclear to me, but over the past few months people have been riding around on these more and more. It's truly ridiculous.

I managed to whip out my camera just in time to take this photo - all thanks to their incredibly loud and nasal engines announcing their approach a block away.

You might say that my day was a success, what with the picture of this dude on the tiny motorcycle and all. But today I also failed, and learned from that failure. I tried to give away the rest of my books from the giveaway last month. I took them down to the street and sat with them, and shouted at passers-by to come take a look and maybe take a book with them. I, perhaps naively, expected the streets to teem with book-lovers, all eager to take a copy of Linux Device Drivers off my hands. In reality, 15 minutes got me one woman whose loose grasp of the english language made her interested only in "something easy." I convinced her to take a copy of The Beach by Alex Garland (although she seemed offended when I cited Leonard DiCaprio as a reason to read The Beach). So, in summary, after that I got bored and came back upstairs, leaving the pile of books there.

Every now and then I peek out the window and check, but it's all still there. The lesson to be learned from this is: People don't like to pick shit up off of the street. Even if it's free. Also I am lazy.

new park

working from home today; planning a quick little jaunt to the SPCA in an hour to walk some dogs. for now, sitting in a coffee shop - crazy lady keeps asking whether the muffins are fresh.

When we moved last month, I left the immediate vicinity of Grand View Park. I thought that might have been it for the walking distance big ass hills, and I shed a tear, but the new place has a pretty bitchin' hill of its own in corona heights. It's superior to the old hill in the sunset in several ways -

• it has a dog run halfway up
  
• I can get off the bus 1 stop earlier on my way home from work and climb over this hill to get home
  
• it has a very Martian look to it. except for the Bernal Heights skyline in the background, very much the red planet.
  
• much closer to downtown, therefore better views of downtown
  

ticketmaster

I know the "ticketmaster is ridiculous" sentiment is decades old and commonly held, but I must share this latest bit of insanity. It's worth $20 to see lambchop (as a sidenote, some of you may be interested to know that "my people" commonly refer to a twenty dollar bill as a "yuppie food stamp," as it is frequently redeemable for your portion of a split dinner check). It isn't worth $11.15 to suck ticketmaster's cock, though, is the problem. "convenience charge" my ass - you guys are jerks.

i will be buying a ticket in person at the ticket window at the show on friday...

train day

Sun Microsystems "is debuting a new pricing model for developing nations."