Category: Misc

Just went to see The Endurance with Amy – pretty amazing, moving. Rare that we go to a documentary in the theater. The range and scope of human experience never ceases to amaze me. All of the times in history a human can be born, all of the cultures, all of the extreme experiences to which we can be subjected. These guys were changed for life by what they went through. What really sent me was the fact that so many of them felt compelled to return to the site years later, like Stockholm Syndrome or something.

Dinner at Jin Ling. Mmmm… curry.

Found a pretty cheap G4 for dad on craigslist. He’s miserable since I switched him to Windows. All he wants is the simplicity of BeOS back, and to play with his digital photos. I think OS X will be just the ticket for him. Going up to Tahoe with this weekend for some snowboarding, will lay it on him then.

Are TiBooks really this bad? Most of what I’ve seen has been positive, but this makes me think twice. If any of you Mac-fiends have TiBook comments for , he’d like to hear them.

Amy and I went after work to Wheeler auditorium to see a lecture by Sebastião Salgado. I had put up a page promoting the event a few days ago, but it turned out that the whole city of Berkeley wanted to be there. We arrived 20 minutes early and were turned away along with thousands (not exaggerating) of other people.

Kissthisguy got mentioned in PC Mag as one of the web’s 100 best “undiscovered sites.” (Thanks for the headsup, dhuff).

Insane day at work. I’m really starting to feel like part of the staff, involved in tons of stuff, not just hunkered down in a lonely dungeon. It’s nice. My to-do list is starting to stretch way beyond what I can do in the next few months.

Amy and I saw “A Beautiful Mind” Sunday afternoon. Really, really loved it. Didn’t expect to be so impressed by R. Crowe. Always love Ed Harris. Have long been fascinated by people who see patterns everywhere they look – faces in clouds, in fences, in bushes, etc. They’re there, but not there. Anyway, heard long ago there’s a correspondence between advanced pattern recognition, intelligence, and schizophrenia. So it was interesting to see this story of that correspondence benefitting someone so acutely, then ruining them so deeply. We talked about it for a long time afterwards.

this page cannot be…

A and I went out for a walk and saw a giant pillar of smoke stretching up above Telegraph Ave. Walked up there and found the local liquor store / laundromat in an inferno. A dozen fire trucks, suds foaming on the street, hundreds of people gawking from behind police tape. We really like the old Chinese man who runs the liquor store, and felt bad for him. Couldn’t find him though. The air stunk. Took them hours to get it under control. Telegraph blocked off, so traffic being re-routed through all the side streets.

Just noticed it’s 5:00 and it’s not dark out yet. That means winter is already half over. But hey, I haven’t gone snowboarding yet this year. Will have to rectify that.

Oh – welcome to . He and I go way back… my birdhouse and his enterzone were some of the earliests arts and literature sites on the web, and we hooked up in a private mailing list called antiweb that i’m still part of. Interesting that LJ kind of manifests some of the web’s collaborative possibilities that we used to get so fired up about on antiweb.

Whoo! Got offered a teaching gig today. I’ll be running a four-week class on database-backed web sites this April. It will be counted as part of my regular job, not as a separate job, but that’s okay – a terrific opportunity.

After two months, I finally got my hands on the jschool web server today and set up Apache, PHP, MySQL. Should go into production with it tomorrow. It’s hard to get used to how slowly things move in the university universe. I really wish we could have done this whole thing on OS X rather than 2K, but hey, at least it won’t be running IIS.

In other news, Amy is still pregnant ;) Hard to believe that in 3/4 of a year, our life will be all about sippy cups.

Number of friends who accompanied Amy and I to breakfast at Mama’s Royal Cafe’ : 2 (Mike and Chris)

Number of delicious cookies left in the container Chris gave for us for Christmas: 3

Number of houses Amy and I looked at today: 4

Number of houses we saw that we would actually want to live in: 0

Number of messages on our answering machine when we got back, offering congratulations on our pregnancy: 8

Number of miles Amy and I ran yesterday morning: 3

Number of days since Amy had her last cigarette: 3

Number of days I have left to quit smoking, per agreement: 24

Number of weeks until our friends Will and Sage birth their own little bubba: 2

Number of PowerMacs our landlord got dirt-cheap at a job site: 2

Number of landlord’s new PowerMacs capable of booting from CD: 0

Number of pounds per square inch of pressure I made sure was in the tires of our boring Toyota this afternoon: 33

Number of days before I pick up the now-fixed motorcycle I pranged up last June: 3

Number of people who have commented recently that my current LJ picture makes me look overly serious, or like an escaped prisoner: 3

Spent the day at MacWorld Expo, just did the exhibit halls. Got a kick out of AppleSkinz — they make plastic G4 case overlays like tribal tatoos, American flags, licking flames, etc. Would be an okay idea, but most of the designs look like they come straight out of the Harley scene. The appearance of the people behind the booth would tend to verify that gross, and very unfair generalization. They’ll do custom ones out of EPS files too.

Saw the new iMacs – in person pretty much what you would expect after seeing the pix and videos. Still feel torn about that design. They’re extremely functional – gotta hand it to Apple on this one – they actually put function over form for once. I’m sure a lot of people love the design, but it reminds me too much of the furniture we all had in the early 70s, all that molded white plastic curved stuff out of Kubrick.

Hunted down and found a good deal on a combo USB/FireWire external drive enclosure. $99. Going to format it FAT32 for PnP compatibility b/w macs and win machines, carting MP3s around, backups, etc.

Went to see David Pogue (“OSX: The Missing Manual”) speak. He was pretty good and I learned a few tricks, but he seemed like an Apple schill, too obviously skirting problems in OS X and talking only about the good stuff. The clincher was during the Q&A. I axed him about his personal OSX wish list for future releases. He claimed he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to see improved. Riiiiiigggghhhhttttt.

Stopped at the Omni Group booth and thanked them for OmniWeb’s great cookie viewer, which was invaluable debugging php cookie problems the other day. Got a demo of Graffle – great app, but can’t think of a personal need for it. Bought a boxed copy of OmniWeb at educational show discount.

Bumped into an old work mate from the Adamation crew. Made me feel kind of nostalgiac, but not really.

Just occurred to me — how long before people start decorating their new iMacs up like Wilson the volleyball from Cast Away?