Author: shacker

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We’ll Take Both

Back in the house hunt full swing, spending every Sunday traipsing up and down the East Bay, mostly getting dismayed but holding out hope. Today found two places that turned our cranks, though in very different ways.

House A is in Berkeley. We had mostly given up on being able to afford Berkeley, though we put a big premium on living “close in” to shops and good living. Fantastic neighborhood. 10 minutes hanging out with the neighbors and already feel like their friends. House is a little red farmhouse. Inside it’s a blank slate, ready to become whatever we make of it. Strangely configured, but all potential. The downside (there’s always a downside) is that it’s small. Smaller than what we’re renting. That’s a hard pill to swallow. We would have to simplify, get creative.

House B is in El Cerrito. 1950s ranch style. Turnkey, ready to move into. Has a good vibe and is open and spacious. Lots of room to spread out, grow into. Neighborhood feels safe. 5 minutes from Wildcat Canyon for great hiking. Downside: It’s out in June and Ward Cleaver land. The nearest shops are a Jack in the Box, a party supply store, auto row, and a strip mall. Nothing worth walking to. The street it’s on is busier. Biking to work would be harder.

Swallow the red pill, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes…

We love them both, but in very different ways. So we’re going to bid on both — a process that has to be undertaken carefully (there’s always the remote danger one could win both bids). Crossing fingers but not too tightly… but we’re SO ready for this endless process to move on to the next phaser… It’s been 18 months since we started looking, though we skipped the 6 months around Miles’ birth.

Music: Charles Mingus :: A Foggy Day
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Cell Quality

<curmudgeon mode>
If the past century has represented an ongoing exchange of quality for convenience (an admittedly pessimistic, but probably supportable view), I can think of no realm where we have exchanged more quality for more convenience than that of the phone call. It seems half the calls I get these days come from cell phone users, and a frustrating proportion of those calls are static-y, have random drop outs, are too quiet, get weird cross-talk, etc. Sometimes we get cut off in the middle and somebody has to call somebody back.

In almost every area of technology, things are immeasurably better than they were 30 years ago. But the worst phone problems we had in 1970 were the occasional “party line” x-over — hearing a bit of your neighbor’s conversation. Three decades later, with the actual phone hardware evolving at an incredible clip, every other phone call has become an exercise in frustration. Why can’t the carriers evolve their networks as quickly as their phones? Are they cutting corners, or are there unsolvable problems to solve?
</curmudgeon mode>

Music: Loudon Wainwright III :: Red Guitar
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Billing System

Working bit by bit on a PHP/MySQL customer tracking / service management / invoicing system for birdhouse hosting over the past couple of weeks. An hour here and there in the evenings and it’s coming together, slowly but surely. Between this and a professor / bio / course / description / location / scheduling system just completed for the jschool, and I’m learning a lot about many-to-many table design lately (intermediate reference tables).

Music: Will Oldham :: Every Mother’s Son
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Beet

It seems like Amy has photographed mostly Miles for the past eight months, but lately she’s been returning to her art more frequently. Now she’s working digitally rather than analog (we converted her darkroom into Miles’ bedroom a year ago). She was shooting this beet last night.

(When I narrated this to her just now she thought I said “She was shooting speed last night.“)

Music: Jack Johnson :: Rodeo Clowns
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Overheard

Outside my office door, students walk past, sometimes I can hear their cell phone conversations. Today, a beautiful day. Sun shining, air crisp, pine trees swaying. And I hear a student barking, nearly yelling into a phone:

“Sorry, I’m stuck in traffic. Yeah, it’s bumper to bumper. It’s going to be a while.”

Music: Jack Johnson :: By the Way
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Sliding Rocks of the Racetrack Playa

On a dry lakebed in Death Valley, rocks weighing up to 320 kilograms locomote themselves slightly uphill over time, often leaving zig-zag trails in their wakes. Geologist Paula Messina has painstakingly documented boulder movement via GPS. Smells like a hoax? Take a look at this table, linked to hard data on every named rock. A time-lapse map records boulder movement over time — some have chugged as far as 3.2 kilometers.

The mechanisms for these unusual events have been hypothesized and in some cases tested, but never proven.

Music: Yo La Tengo :: You Can Have It All
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Drive Dock

If you nevermind the enclosures, giant IDE drives are cheap enough to use as backup for other giant IDE drives. So just ordered a Wiebetech FireWire Drive Dock (not the bus-powered variant). This will give me easy pop-in access to birdhouse backups, a way to finally back up the audio collection, keep a non-CD software backup all in one place, etc.

Music: Jack Johnson :: Rodeo Clowns
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Word’s Shell Game

When people say MS Word is a standard, I ask them to tell me where the document format is published — standards are published by standards bodies, right? So now MS is moving to something vaguely resembling XML for Office documents, and we’re supposed to celebrate the end of format tyranny. But as Andrew Orlowski puts it, it’s mostly a shell game.

“Well formed” means that the document will parse without errors – it doesn’t mean that the document will make any sense.

That’s exactly what I’ve always loved about Bob Dylan’s lyrics, but that’s a separate topic. Meanwhile (as Sun’s Simon Phipps puts it):

“We continue to live in a world where all our know-how is locked into binary files in an unknown format. If our documents are our corporate memory, Microsoft still has us all condemned to Alzheimer’s.”

In other words, Microsoft’s eternal survival is assured by our need for our data to remain accessible. If in ten thousand years Redmond is destroyed by mutant porpoises, archaeologists may still need to reverse engineer the Word document format before they can begin to read history.

Music: Bob Dylan :: I Shall Be Free No.10
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Jodi

First encountered the ever-surprising accidental art of Jodi.org (don’t click that link) on antiweb almost a decade ago. Wired makes the point that Jodi and other net art sites are a sort of indulgence, or embrace of faulty programming.

…what sets online art apart from other technological endeavors is “not the innovative use of technology, but a creative misuse of it.”

Music: Trifactor :: Without Blame