wednesday night / a site for sore eyes
choose one:
a few recent posts;
links to embarassing things;
rss was for robots.
the family guy dvds don't play in my playstation. the new zeppelin dvds claim that they are "playstation 2 compatible". what's going on here?
if you are fond of the kid a singles, the there there single should be to your liking.
only 5 more days until summer!
last night i dreamt that i was working in california for sun over the summer, on some gnome stuff. i was staying in the first floor of some building. the bedroom was half outside - there was a roof above the bed, but not above the other side of the room. so it was basically sleeping outside, and was pretty nice.
i broke my friend phil today. i hope he feels fine tomorrow.
the ducks won again. phil acts like he couldn't care less about the finals, but i know that he's just bitter that his beloved leafs couldn't get out of the first round, while my ducks have been sending the league's best to summer vacation for a good two months now.
i'm watching the end of this rockies/giants game, and they're making fun of the old cleveland stadium.
i really wanted to get more work done today, but i think once i take a shower i'll be out like a stearns rd. lightbulb. i should have done more this weekend while it was raining.
surprise! i can't sleep. i listened to dark side of the moon while i was trying to fall asleep. i don't remember the second track sounding so dated, but i guess bt and aphex twin will do that to you. i really need to go see more concerts.
my battery is almost dead.
a few weeks ago there was an article somewhere saying that apple should buy TiVo, if for no other reason than the IP value. i'd heard rumors about a TiVo-like apple device, before, so this made sense. the full scope of this didn't really click until just now, when i was reading a macos rumors update.
i had previously assumed the apple pvr would be like tivo - a set-top box thing. but what if it fit in your pocket? what if the tivo functionality was in your powermac? what if you used iShows to put the last week's seinfelds on your iPod before your flight to beijing? or the family guy dvds? or just your home movies?
i think it would be a tough sell though, because i don't think people would be used to taking their video things with them like they were with music.
but it is an obvious step. i think i have a lot of cds, but i couldn't fill a 30G iPods. are people going to buy 200G iPods for just music?
rcn has decided to filter outgoing smtp, in addition to incoming. it's now been routed around. fascists.
when i said "kid a" earlier i apparently meant "amnesiac."
our router crashed this morning, and the root filesystem was too corrupted to even mount it read only. since that box's floppy drive doesn't seem to work, and it doesn't have a cd drive, i had to take the drive out and fsck it in milano. i noticed the drive was made on april 22, 1996. now, i'm no fan of western digital drives, but this one has somehow lasted a pretty long time. it's only a matter of time, though, because i think i saw some drive_not_ready errors when it booted in milano.
i actually got quite a bit of work done today, and learned some things too. that's always a dynamite combination.
it's way too bright out.
i can't remember how much they were, but the 14' ethernet cables i got at compusa were a lot more expensive than the $2.87 25' cables i got today at microcenter.
here is an excerpt from phik and i looking at hard drives:
phik: I don't want anything with the words "Ultra" or "Super".
me: I don't want anything with the words "Western" or "Digital".
i'm trying to get myself motivated to finish some work things, but i feel kind of tired and can't really concentrate. but i don't think i could fall asleep for another few hours.
i had forgotten how much i enjoy late night skates around the neighborhood.
we figured out a good hockey game to play with 3 people. i won.
i would like to know why ok computer disappeared from the itunes store.
last night i had a dream where the devils won the cup. actually, it was the flyers. they scored with about 1:50 left. i didn't see the rest of the game, but i'm pretty sure they won. i had another dream where i was telling joe that i had a dream where the devils won, but actualy it was the flyers.
i think i also had a dream that osu won the national championship again.
the one camera angle last night that shows kariya popping back to life yesterday was pretty scary. hopefully they'll be able to play their game again tomorrow night, but i wouldn't be surprised to see a 3-0 devils victory.
today has turned out to be one of those computer disaster days.
last night i decided to try to get the sparc running aurora 1.0. the only problems were, i don't have a monitor for it, and didn't have a null-modem cable (to do a serial console install). but, it didn't really matter as the internet blew up and i couldn't download the isos.
i went to get a null-modem cable today. while trying to use it, i rebooted it and corrupted the filesystem, and since i didn't have the serial console working, i had to take the drive out and fsck it from a different box.
i had an adaptec 2920 scsi card from my jaz drive days, and put that in milano. linux didn't detect it, and it didn't show up in lspci. neither did windows, so i guess it's dead. joe had a spare scsi card, and that worked fine. i repaired the partition and put the drive back in the sparc.
around this time, the internet went down. there was the trouble last night, and joe said that this morning the box had crashed so he rebooted it. also, it needed to be rebooted the other day. now, it was panicking on boot every time. i touched the case, and it felt pretty warm, so i opened it.
it turns out the heatsink had fallen off the cpu, since one of the little latches on the cpu socket had broken off. i couldn't get it to stay on securely, so that box now sits sideways. hopefully the heat grease will keep it attached.
i got the null-modem thing working fine from milano, but it still doesn't work from the lustre ost (which lives in the closet. joe barely tolerated the the ost being in the living room, but has a zero tolerance stance on the sparc being anywhere he can hear it.)
the ap reports on the demise of cursive handwriting.
"If you need to relay information immediately and have just a half-second to grab anything, maybe just a napkin, penmanship is so valuable," Sull says. "It doesn't rely on batteries or power. It's like breathing -- it's always with you."
mmmm, not quite. you need something to write with, and something to write on. in my apartment, finding a computer is much easier to do. also, i can read what i type. that's not necessarily the case for written things.
"Cursive was so character-defining when I was in school," says Amy Greene, whose 9-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son prefer keyboards to cursive in their Palo Alto classrooms. "The way you wrote something was considered part of your inner being, your core, your worth. ... Now it's considered an anachronism."
first of all, you're insane. the way i remember it, the 5th grade teachers lied to us when they said that we would have to do everything in cursive in middle school and high school. by 10th grade, i could only remember the simplest of cursive letters.
i wish someone would make these people use roman numerals for everything. they would probably be fine with getting rid of cursive if they missed a precious episode of "according to jim" due to their roman numeral remote.
(i wrote that before it was on /.)
i tried to do a small desk reorganization, and it snowballed into a full-fledged room relayout.
before i could do any rearranging, i decided to keep almost everything as it was. except i threw out some stuff.
yesterday i got new wheels for my rollerblades since one of them is "flat" - it's not round any more but has a flat part. i can't get the bearings out of the old wheels.
serendipity keeps rebooting, and milano locked up on me once today. i *really* hope it's a lustre issue, and not more dying hardware. phik went out to lunch right before i noticed it happening, so i can't get his help. he keeps talking about the great raw fish meals he is getting for $.05 on the streets of beijing, and how if you smile politely they will de-teeth the fish for you.
i woke up this morning thinking i had appendicitis but unless my appendix is on my left side i'm ok.
the apartment does look nicer/bigger now that i cleaned up some things.
my dreams lately have been weird. i don't really remember them though.
is there a way to make static binaries actually work on linux? i always have severe problems when glibc is linked statically.
i also had problems concentrating today. i don't know.
tomorrow i am going to take simon a corned beef treat. i was going to today, but didn't feel up to it.
i finally went out and got hail to the thief. i was going to monday but you know the game was on. it's actually quite different from the leaked version i've been listening to for the past couple of months. at first i thought it might be that i encoded it at a better bitrate than the leak, but that turned out not to be the case. also, they gave me the there there single on vinyl which is pretty cool. it doesn't have where bluebirds fly though.
i don't know why, but rpm 4.1's "it's missing a SIGCHLD" bug started appearing today, and it took a long time for me to accept the fact that i was going to have to install an rpm from rpm.org. but after i did, it seems things are ok.
i also picked up the new zeppelin cds, since they were from different shows than the dvds. i was surprised, but they are really great. everything is really loose, like that's the way (my favorite song) and what is and what should never be is terrific too. i never had the opportunity to go to any zeppelin shows in the 70s, so it's always nice to hear new live zeppelin (even when i think i'm tired of them).
it's a good thing i don't do album reviews for a living, beacause with adjectives like "great" and "terrific" i would be one poor album reviewer.
joe is crazy to fly on friday the 13th.
the last track on machina/the machines of god sounds kind of zwanish to me.
deleting email at 3 something am is not a good idea.
it turns out that when i tell mozilla to save messages in the "Sent" folder on my imap server, that's not equivalent to the Sent subfolder of INBOX (i think that's why they use quotes). it saves it in something strange like Sent/2003/May-20 which other clients don't think to put them in, or check.
oh well.
oh btw - courier's webmail actually works.
i miss hockey.
since i no longer have an office job, and my lease is expiring in 2 months, and i've lived in boston for a whopping 3.5 years, my subconcious has been compiling a list of places i'd like to move to.
they are listed in no particular order.
some places i will never move to, ever. again, in no particular order.
i really do like that there are good thai, vietnamese, and indian restaurants, in addition to a supermarket, ice cream place, t stop, and soon, a subway within like 5 minutes of my apartment.
yesterday the super asked me if my ceiling was still leaking. i said i didn't think so, but i wasn't sure because i had a vague recollection of it leaking, but i wasn't sure if i was dreaming or not. it leaked this morning.
yesterday i went to the store and they had code red for $2 / 12 pack. i slept horribly last night.
while phik and joe recovered from their little trips, i loaded up on code red and played with css again.
i think there was some sort of construction convention going on outside. i don't know how many times i woke up and took my earplugs out, only to wake up again and put them back in. at some point i put them by the foot of the bed, where i could not find them next time i needed them. i think that was when the basketball playing started. there is also some screen door or something that slams, which makes me think someone is being shot. but then i remember i don't live in east cambridge any more.
but 4 hours of sleep is nothing a little hail to the thief + code red can't fix.
also i had a dream where i bought a new pair of headphones. i predict that my current ones will break in the next month.
joe says he doesn't like my new layout. his vote doesn't count though, because he didn't update his page at all during spring. he says he is redoing it or something, but when i went in there it looks like he just stole all my php.
we played some hockey this afternoon. unfortunately, the tennis nets are out. it's really a shame that the parking situation in boston is so bad that we can't even find empty parking lots to play in. there was a church at the end of my street growing up that we always used to play in. anyway, after initially being a bit down because it wasn't as fun as last time, we ended up having a pretty good time. phil kept sending slapshots off my knees.
then we had some food and tried to play mario 3 on phil's nes. it died a couple of times, but it is a great game. the two player stuff is much more fun than in mario 1 or sonic 2. but it kept dying so we didn't win it.
which had me thinking about how much of our culture can vanish so quickly. books last a pretty long time, but it seems netscape archives are broken again. fortunately, i had an old copy of symantec visual cafe lying around which came with netscape 3, so i could see how bad the new page looked.
it would be interesting to see what role drm/copyright will have on umm, what people in the future know about us.
also, i am predicting that stumpel will be back in a bruins uniform by 2006.
it's going to be a long 7 weeks.
i woke myself up early (9:40) to try and grab radiohead tickets:
From: jacob berkman Date: 6/21/03 11:27 AM Subject: Re: Radiohead i am pretty sure i got some tickets. i may have one extra. ticketasster was not giving out v. good seats, and i had a hunch that maybe radiohead's store might have the good seats. i might be wrong. the radiohead store kept timing out when i tried to do things. eventually i got some tickets in my "basket" (that's what they call a "cart" in the uk) and went to pay for them. i clicked submit, and it timed out. the submit button was now greyed out. then the page said that i had it open for 4 minutes, and then sent me back to the store's front page. they had stopped selling tickets. i went back to ticketmaster, and they were down. what time does charlie's open? - j
i swear, it was 1997 again and i was trying to register for classes. boy what a nightmare that was.
fortuantely, it looks like my hunch was right. the guy working the w.a.s.t.e. store said on the radiohead messageboard that they were selling the better seats than ticketmaster. although the hour was frustrating, it was easier than the 6 hours we waited in line at the show 2 years ago (the tickets were all gen admin).
joe and i tried to meet up with nat and veanne to catch finding nemo. they were sitting a little to our left, 3 rows back. we didn't find them until i called them after the movie and could hear the exit music over the phone.
i don't think i liked it as much as monster's inc. also, i don't recommend seeing it on an empty stomach. i have a ostentatious craving for legal's now.
we went to the burrito place, though (which i hadn't been to in a while). we got rained on there, and it was a cold, 50-degree october rain. what's up with that?
i've found the key to going to sleep is sitting on my bed with my laptop on battery. eventually it runs out, and i go to sleep. i have a smart playlist of radiohead+smashing pumpkins+zwan going.
it's 5 am again. where did i put my earplugs?
i can't believe june is winding down already. i think that has a lot to do with the weather.
we went to legal's tonight. i tried to order using character names from finding nemo. that didn't work out so well, as either the waitress hadn't seen the movie or they don't have wood grilled clown fish.
then we tried to get the nintendo to work again, with no success.
click. whiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...........
i was feeling tired last night around 1 or so, so decided to take advantage and try to fall asleep. i actually managed to, but around 3 or 4 i woke up, WIDE AWAKE. i the code red had kicked in. i couldn't fall back asleep until around 8, and then slept until 2:30.
while awake, i was playing around with ichat av. it's only the most recent app out of cuptertino to continue their tradition of not innovating when it comes to the ui. i mean, sure it's pretty, easy to use, and is not in-your-face-annoying like the aol client. but if you look at the following screenshot mosaics, you'll see that they are just copying ui ideas from red carpet, circa the year 2000:
using this many different styles of buttons makes it immediately clear to the user which buttons do something when clicked, and which ones, when clicked, do something.
speaking of apple, reliable sources have it that the rumored new 15" powerbooks were shelved in favor of models which have built-in video cameras (like the vaio picturebooks). these will become available when panther ships, and are in fact the reason no release date was announced for panther.
this afternoon i found out (over email) that we were hosting a party/grilling at our place tonight. i don't think i'll ever understand nat's thought process.
panther looks to be sweet. libiconv, color ls, and -h support in du and ls -l. sadly, ls -sh doesn't do what i want; for that i'll have to wait another year and another $130. i'm going to need to take a week off when it comes out, because all i'll be doing that week is watch expose and user switching go.
kudos to apple, though, for doing cool (and useful) stuff with display postscript/quartz extreme. i have a lingering feeling that most of the cool technologies in gnome never really made an impact to users, but that might be unfounded.
this update is being done on lustre, again. i had grand visions of having the lustre nodes all doing netboot from the gateway, and grabbing the modules and stuff from nfs. unfortunately, if a client ran depmod over nfs, the gateway would oops/panic. and then it turns out that grub doesn't support milano's nic. but, i'm now storing users/groups + lustre config in ldap, which might be a plus.
phik and i tried playing hockey yesterday, but shortly into it i broke my stick. during that time, however, i seem to have brushed my leg against the same plant phik touched a week or so ago, and i now have an itchy/hurty spot on my leg. the new stick was not bad, but it seems like it's breaking a bit too fast. they did have some with no wood on the blade, and that might be the route to go despite the ugliness.
i have something i want to say about itms, but i hven't been able to phrase it well enough. i'll try again tomorrow.
it must be summer. i can tell because i have been listening to a lot of bt the past couple of days. also, the landscapers trimming the hedges in my back yard (read: parking lot) woke me up at 10am. i could still hear it under my blanket with my earplugs in, so i just decided to give up and see what glorious things life had in store for me today.
a minute later the landscapers left.
