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November 20th, 2009
09:41 am - Commodore!
I'd mentioned a few weeks ago that I had wanted to get a used C64 as a birthday present to myself. Well, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rebl1969 put me in contact with her brother, who had some Commodore stuff in his garage that he was willing to dump let me have. So Anya and I dropped by last night for a couple hours to check it out and reminisce about the good ol' days of 8-bit superiority.
Anyway I came away with a bit more than I had expected...
(Only one works - the bottom one with extra buttons and Anarchy symbols)
( But wait... there's more! )
I had a lot of fun, they're very nice people (he tried to send me home with a pair of Mac IIci machines, and also offered me rebl1969's Atari 2600 for some reason). I'm sure we will meet up again.
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November 17th, 2009
12:56 pm - Personal Bug Tracker
Problem: I have a TON of ongoing projects, ideas that need to be written down or they get lost, notes, goals, basic to-do items, etc. I've stumbled along using a to-do list for short term goals and my blog for bigger stuff. But things always get lost in the shuffle, or end up in the wrong area. Some things sits for a year while I forget about it, so that when I come back to working on it, I've forgotten what I was doing. Nothing has priority over anything else. Some days I have no idea what to work on given 30 minutes of free time.
This kind of all-encompassing task tracking / management can be a struggle on a personal level. But in the corporate world, it's nearly a solved problem thanks to issue trackers like Bugzilla, Sourceforge, Trac, etc. There's already a whole infrastructure set up to track multiple projects at once, from the small to company-wide, and a lot of it is free open-source software.
So after reading the entry "Enable people to submit bug reports about problems in the real world" on Google's Project 10^100, I was inspired: I set up a bug tracker for myself. I now have my own Mantis project, with big categories (Projects, To Do, Goals, ...), sub-projects within (Atari 2600 Game, Build Shelving Units, Complete ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) 100_snapshots). From there I can open issues for myself to work on, assign priority, and have a consistent web interface to my life.
I suppose the next step would be to add my wife as an account and let her submit bug reports assigned to me : )
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November 5th, 2009
02:10 pm - Sesame Street Fanfic
Anya makes her Elmo and Cookie Monster dolls kiss.
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November 2nd, 2009
10:27 am - It's my Birthday!
I'm 26 today! Kassi and Anya did some extensive shopping and picked out a bunch of new clothes for me, which is good since I always need clothes and yet never buy them. Kassi and Anya have better taste than I do anyway so they always get something that looks nice. I finally have a house robe... very handy for letting the dog outside at 3 AM.
Also, my parents gave me $50. Since there's not really anything I had in mind for it, I need help deciding what to blow it on. I can't post a poll because I'm not a paid LJ member so instead, comment with your favorite suggestion (or make up your own)!
* get to work on the proposed Server Closet (need some Cat6 and faceplates to wire the house for 1gbps ethernet, plus assorted phone and coax cables)
* some electronic gizmos for the house (carbon monoxide detector and electronic thermostat)
* bike gear (fenders?)
* used Commodore 64... why the heck not? Never owned one of those.
* put it in the bank account, yawn
* Something else?
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October 28th, 2009
12:10 pm - In Which I Try to Claim the Bike Commuter Tax Credit
Turns out one of the ridiculous provisions to the $700B bailout package back at the start of the year was a bill that offers up to $20 per month per employee tax break to companies, where the employee is a bike commuter. So, essentially, every month when I bike in for "a significant portion" of the time, my employer has the ability to take a tax break... provided the money they write off in this way is used to reimburse me for expenses of maintaining my ride. So an exchange might work like this:
* I buy a new tube for $5
* I turn in the receipt to the HR department with my monthly "I biked in" report
* They give me $5 extra with my next paycheck
* They write off $5 in taxes at the end of the year
The trouble is that this is all completely non-standardized. Some companies who specialize in this have their own way of going about it, but any company is free to do it in their own way. And it's totally unclear what "significant portion" or "qualified bike expenses" mean. Also it's not defined how the money is to be paid out, if large expenses can be paid over a year, etc.
So! As far as I know our company doesn't offer this. Yet. But I'm going to try to petition the HR department along with a co-worker to try to get it implemented. Up to $240 in free bike repairs a year sounds great, but I'm more interested in the process of trying to stir something up with management and see if they really will listen.
( My initial message to our Admin, who is going to find the appropriate people to contact )
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October 27th, 2009
10:57 am - Geocities
I had a dream about the Geocities shutdown last night. It's in my thoughts not because I had a site there (I was a Freeservers guy), but because it looms large in my memory of the beginning of the Internet. Crack open any HTML book from the 1990s, and Geocities is guaranteed to be listed among the first under the section "how can I put my webpage online?"... along with Angelfire and Tripod. Simply put, the whole event whacks my Web nostalgia buttons with a giant mallet.
Web development wasn't easy back then. The online world dealt with different limitations than it does today, when modem speed and cramped storage space dictated design choices. Tools were inadequate, and editing HTML by hand was the only way to get things up and running when one of the resource-hungry "site builders" did something wrong. People today joke about background MIDIs and animated GIFs, but that WAS the height of web development back then. It was a totally different mindset: those items were Bleeding Edge Technology, and by putting them on a page the author, too, was sharing in it. Self-publishing an audio-visual experience, one which was reachable by anyone in the world, was a completely admirable endeavor in itself.
We take that for granted now. If you want a personal website right now, you spend 5 minutes and start a blog or a Myspace page. It's expected that your choice of service will Just Work, and of COURSE anyone could see your page if they really wanted to: that's just how the Internet works. We didn't know that then, though. It was a new and exciting landscape, and if users wanted it then odds are they built it from scratch. People didn't have digital cameras or MP3s, so we made do with the tools we had. No content-management or blogging software existed. Even search engines were sub-par. Before we all started to favor the magazine-on-the-Web glossiness that drips from css-steeped superpages, multi-colored text was the mark of a capable web developer. How far we've come.
I suppose the world has moved on so fast that we've all become jaded to the history of how things used to work. And in that we've sort of lost the magic - the first time your page came up without errors, and that marquee tag worked just as you'd hoped it would. That spark you got the first time you learned that yes, you could send an email to someone across the globe in seconds. We all grow up, and as we do all things become old hat. I wonder what new territory will catch the interest of my daughter?
The other story is that of the history that's going to be lost. Geocities was probably the biggest of its kind. It housed personal stories. It stored commentary on pop culture. It hosted information for a range of hobbies and activities. Years of art, of work, of problem-solving for the issues of the day, all gladly posted so that others might share. It's a real time capsule which thankfully some dedicated individuals are archiving. The collective information loss is simply astounding to me.
Be glad to live in such interesting times. Communication technology always continues to evolve but the most revolutionary applications happen early on. Nobody thinks about the myriad possibilities that the telegraph will bring us any more. Same with radio and television - their uses are largely played out, save for occasional technological advances that boost the quality without extending the application. We're still in the early days of the Internet, and though we can look back fondly on its history, there's a world of uncharted territory left to explore.
EDIT: For an in-depth look at the recognizable elements that made up the early web (which exemplifies a majority of Geocities pages), I highly recommend checking out The Vernacular Web.
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October 25th, 2009
03:24 pm - Goals Progress - Week
I've been very happy with my progress on stabilizing my sleep schedule. For the past 7 days I've been up by 7:20 AM at the very latest, and though I did take a nap today, I expect I can continue with this throughout the rest of my 30 days. As I expected cutting out caffeine wasn't tough beyond the first day or two, but I'm giving it a while to see if it sticks.
Next big goal: I liked the energy I got from riding my bike a lot last summer, and the muscle I had from lifting weight a bit this summer. But neither of those stuck. So to get in shape I'm:
* Riding my bike to work every day for 30 days - rain, snow, cold, whatever, I'm biking it. (To add to the pressure, a co-worker and I have challenged each other to see who can ride in more during 30 days)
* On days when I don't bike (weekends, tornadoes, etc) - lift weights instead as soon as it becomes clear that I'm not going to bike (generally, in the morning before shower)
Accomplished so far: 38
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October 22nd, 2009
09:52 am - Boom de ya da
I have no idea why the xkcd comic gets so much press. The original commercial is so way very much better.
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October 20th, 2009
06:28 pm - argh
Fun times on the bike today. My chain fell off at lunch, and I had to undo the quick-release to get it unstuck. Anyway I put the rear wheel back on and pedaled away.
I didn't realize it until the ride home was over that I had been biking in what will be courteously referred to as "Extreeeeme Resistance Training Mode", where I put the wheel back on so badly aligned that the tire rubbed against the seat stay the entire ride. I kept telling myself "man, I sure am out of shape! This used to be easy!" At least the tire didn't blow out on the way. D'oh.
On the plus side I'm sure I will feel like Lance Armstrong when I hit the road again on Thursday.
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October 19th, 2009
04:32 pm
argh my head
and I know a nice hot cup of coffee will make everything better
must... resist...
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October 18th, 2009
03:24 pm - Blowing Up the 101 List
From and including: Sunday, October 18, 2009
To and including: Tuesday, November 2, 2010
It is 381 days from the start date to the end date, end date included
Or 1 year, 16 days including the end date
Hoo boy. I have been doing some serious slacking. Part of it is that the house-buying process consumed a good chunk of my time and too much of my attention. But things weren't going well before then.
( First, to get caught up on accomplishments since the last update )
I'm going to take credit for 10 more here (partially completed, yearly or continual goals) and that puts my total at a whole 38 goals in 89 weeks, leaving 63 for the remaining year. Ouch.
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( Revising my methods. ) I'm blowing up the list completely and revising things with this philosophy: I'll reach my goals by setting up habits that lead automatically to goal achievement. For many goals, this is what I should have done initially - putting "read 36 books" is a great way to make reading feel like a chore, but "read 30 minutes a day for 30 days before bed" gets as much done and doesn't feel like work, yet it achieves the same end result.
From here on, weekly update posts will take this form:
* Talk about some overarching goal I'd like to accomplish
* Present 1 or 2 very specific habits or small goals I want to start in on for the week, which are designed to lead me to my ideal goal
* I'll update with the status of my in-flight projects to let people know how things are working out.
* Count of habits and small goals accomplished, after this update
Much more focused, much more realistic, and (hopefully) much more likely to succeed.
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Okay, first new big idea. My sleep schedule is not well fixed, and so my free time is hugely variable - which means I always feel as though I don't have any! Here are two habits to fix this:
* Set my alarm clock for 7 AM. Go to sleep when I am sleepy, get up when the clock goes off. Do this for 30 days and see if it works for me.
* Switch to decaf coffee all the time at work, and drink no coffee beyond a wake-up cup at home. I want caffeine out of my system by bedtime so it doesn't wreck my sleep schedule. Exceptions granted for special occasions (say, getting a mocha at a coffee shop, or the occasional dessert coffee at home). No time limit, this is a reasonably easy and permanent switch.
I've got no other working habits right now. Next week, I'll update so readers can see how things are going.
Accomplished so far: 38
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October 17th, 2009
01:26 pm - Computer Names
One of my favorite parts of doing an OS install on a computer is getting to pick a name for the machine! I typically pick names of famous computers in sci-fi books or other media.
Right now, my work laptop is named "Lappy" after Strong Bad's laptop from Homestar Runner.
My dual-boot desktop is either "Neuromancer" or "Wintermute", from William Gibson's Neuromancer.
The system before this alternated between "Mycroft" and "Adam Selene", who were in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Other favorites include Deep Thought, HAL9000, MCP, etc.
Audience Participation: How do you name your computer(s)?
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October 15th, 2009
12:55 pm - WOO
HOLY BALLSACKS
WE'RE HOMEOWNERS!
ETA: it's an old photo, I know
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October 11th, 2009
09:04 pm - PUPPY
We got a male cocker spaniel puppy last week! He turns 7 weeks today. His name is Google. I finally got pictures.
( Bunches more )
And a video!
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October 6th, 2009
01:44 pm - I ain't afraid of no ghost
You know, I don't care much for Halloween, but between Thriller and Ghostbusters this must be the funkiest time of the year.
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October 4th, 2009
09:35 pm - Help name our puppy!
Our family is getting a female black-and-white cocker spaniel puppy tomorrow. We've narrowed the list of names down to 8 but need help picking further. That's where you come in: take this poll, choose up to 3 names, and we'll name the dog after the winner!
http://www.livejournal.com/poll/?id=1466570
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11:21 am - It's that time of year...
for cliché photos!
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September 15th, 2009
12:48 pm - good way to hear lots of chip
I listen to a lot of chip music, but there are so many half-assed songs out there and tracking down players for all the various formats (especially for Linux) can be troublesome. Plus it's difficult to share the music casually with others since it is not in a widely available format.
Fortunately, chip music gets a lot of distribution through being packed in as background music for keygens! This Youtube playlist has combined 100+ of the songs from various keygens over the years. It's a wide range of styles but is all very good quality since these are assembled for general release. You'll have to check the comments to find the artist, though, as the description only lists the cracking group. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_V8oLONSo0&feature=PlayList&p=FCD4B5868BF26AF5&index=0&playnext=1
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September 14th, 2009
12:06 pm - So it begins
The start of a new video meme.
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September 2nd, 2009
06:16 pm - Machinima?
Not certain how you all feel about machinima - I don't generally care for it - but a couple of these entries to the Bitfilm 2009 festival blew me away and I wanted to share.
This one is Intervention, which is nice and short, made with GTA IV:
Intervention from Phil Rice on Vimeo.
Shelf Life chapter 1, made with Garry's Mod in the Source Engine
And then World of Workcraft, which is funny even if you don't know anything about WoW.
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