By
Mark Boudreau
11 Oct 2002
Last night, armed with Birthday money and a sick penchant for buggary, I went to the Apple store in VA and bought myself an iPod. Now, all I need to do is keep myself from jumping up and down saying, “I have an iPod! I have an iPod! I have an iPod!” which is hard to do, because for some sick and twisted reason, it’s been the one material good that I’ve lusted over for the last year with an unending passion. So now I have it, and it is everything I thought it would be, and a bit more. After I use it for a weekend, I’ll write up a few more thoughts that are maybe a little more objective. So far though, everything is in a happy place.
By
Chris Williams
10 Oct 2002
The die is cast…
<p>In Viagra-land news, their choice to name me as the “document coordinator” has’t bitten them on the heiny as much as even I thought it would. I guess even the likes of yours truly can clean up his organizational act enough to pick up a paycheck at the end of the week.</p>
<p>‘Course it’s still all over but the crying once I’m off the clock. (read: somewhere in this mess that I call a home, maybe I can find some clean clothes…)</p>
By
anders pearson
10 Oct 2002
got a ticket to go see the Legendary Pink Dots tomorrow night. i’m very excited.
<p>i’m disappointed though that there really seems to be no other decent concerts coming to new york anytime soon (aside from avenue d shows, of course). there isn’t even anything good going on on halloween.</p>
By
anders pearson
09 Oct 2002
you’d think i’d have learned by now that staying up till all hours at night watching movies wouldn’t exactly make it easier to wake up in the morning.
<p>alas, i did it again. up till 2 last night watching <a href="http://www.donniedarko.com/">donnie darko</a>, which was excellent.</p>
<p>i only had the TV on because i was testing out a homemade coax to optical <a href="http://www.epanorama.net/documents/audio/spdif.html"><span class="caps">SPDIF</span></a> converter (you can do it with just a red <span class="caps">LED</span> and a 120 Ohm resistor). </p>
<p>on a related note, does anyone have any suggestions for a good linux compatible sound card with <span class="caps">SPDIF</span> (preferably optical) output? my old soundblaster 16 isn’t really cutting it anymore.</p>
By
Chris Williams
07 Oct 2002
So this weekend, while supping upon cheap pizza, I was perusing my “old” copies of Stray Bullets (everyone’s favorite serialized vision of sex, violence, and uh… violence) when I noticed that there was a letter by me in the back… y’know, where all the geeks write in to seem cool.
<p>OK, so first off, I really f-ed up the number of one of the first books. Yup, go Williams. </p>
<p>Second off, it dawned on me that I’d written that letter several months ago in an attempt to seem cordial while trying to russel up a free bumper sticker. Yeah, no bumper sticker came, so I completely forgot about it. Freaked me out when I finally read it yesterday. </p>
<p>Anyhow, now all you comic book nuts can read and say, “I knew that boy when he thought Knox gelatin was a hair product.” Or not. Whatever. Stray Bullets #25… it’s not even that good an issue, but still Stray Bullets, so it kicks butt.</p>
<p>Back to the land of dreams…</p>
By
anders pearson
07 Oct 2002
we’re ordering a new rackmount server at work with failover gigabit ethernet, redundant RAID drives, vast expanses of RAM, etc. to replace the old desktop machine that’s currently doing our web serving.
<p>this means that in a couple weeks when we get the new server, things will get moved around. the rackmount replaces the old server. the old server replaces my desktop machine. my desktop machine turns into an automated network backup machine, etc. IP addresses will change. <span class="caps">DNS</span> entries will be updated. things will move around.</p>
<p>with all the upheaval, i see as good a time as any to upgrade things to <a href="http://perl.apache.org/">mod_perl</a>. i’ve been playing with mod_perl a lot lately and have got a copy of the thraxil engine on my home machine ported to mod_perl with some new features added and ready to go. for you end users, switching to mod_perl will mostly just mean a nice speed improvement. i’ve also vastly improved the caching model, changed things so urls will be more userfriendly (eg, diaries will be accessible through a url like http://thraxil.org/users/anders/diary rather than http://thraxil.org/diary.pl?user=anders), and <span class="caps">RSS</span> feeds are in the works.</p>
<p>i intend to minimize the effects of the server moves on thraxil but my priorities have to be with my employer’s systems. i don’t expect problems, but i just thought i’d warn everyone well in advance that there may be some turbulence in a couple weeks. your reward for putting up with the changes should be a speed improvement and some nifty new features.</p>
By
anders pearson
06 Oct 2002
just noticed that there’s a new sushi restaurant across the street from my apartment. it looks small but classy. i’ll be very psyched if it’s good. i’ve already got my favorite mexican place, a decent ethiopian place and a punk bar all within a one block radius. i love new york. :)
<p>lani was up for the weekend. we had no plans and that was nice. met up with a bunch of people from work for one of gerard’s martini nights down in the west village friday night. saturday we picked up a sixpack and rented ‘Wham, Bam, Thank you Spaceman”, which we found in the ‘cult’ section of the video store. bizarre, low-budget 70’s sexploitation. confusing and amusing.</p>
By
lani
03 Oct 2002
i’ve heard mixed reviews about snuff (the tobacco kind). some people like the different flavors that can be tasted in reassurance that yes those mucous membranes really are connected up the way they say. there’s no real good way to put what the opponents of snuff say. pretty much all i’ve heard is, “it’s gross.” my fascination is with the snuff boxes mostly. those tiny ornate boxes took up an entire shelf in ‘orphan annies’ and rendered the fullness of antiquity…not just an anachronistic objet but the element.
<p>in the world of tobacco, snuff is immediacy without spitting. plus, something historically tells me that anything taken from the nose goes straight to the bloodstream and then to the brain.</p>
<p>this is the summation of my life at this moment. as is.</p>
By
anders pearson
03 Oct 2002
scott
the blogger crowd mostly seems to be concerned with how searches for their names don’t appear as prominently in the listings anymore. well, i personally couldn’t care where any of my stuff shows up in the search engines. but i have noticed and been concerned with a general decline in the quality of google’s results lately.
it’s hard to explain exactly what the changes are, but it seems that they’re not doing as good of a job of identifying the primary authoritative sites on a given subject anymore. random mailing list postings and stuff on big clearinghouse sites like rpmfind.net now seem to dominate the results.
eg, searching for “<a href=”http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=postgresql+python&btnG=Google+Search”>postgresql python</a>” <em>ought</em> to (and i’m pretty sure <em>did</em> about a month ago), point to the <a href=”http://www.druid.net/pygresql/“>pygresql</a> site since that’s pretty much the standard module for using postgres with python. but now, it’s at #6 in the ranking after some worthless mailing list posts and rpmfind.net stuff.
it used to be that if i ever got an error i couldn’t figure out how to fix with some piece of linux software, all i had to do was copy and paste the error message into google and it would immediately bring up either some FAQ or post explaining how to fix it. that hasn’t been working as well lately.
so i hope that whatever problems google seems to be having are just temporary and they’ll get things working better in the near future. i’ve become pretty dependent on google and i’m always impressed with the features they add so i’d be disappointed if they lose sight of what should be their main focus.
By
anders pearson
03 Oct 2002
last night i was bad and stayed up till 3am watching David Cronenberg’s scanners. don’t know how i’ve made it the last 21 years without seeing it. very cool, freaky sci-fi. it’s hard to tell with Cronenberg sometimes whether the acting in a scene is bad, or Cronenberg’s just trying to do something strange.
<p>i also finally watched Se7en a few nights ago. yet another movie that i’d somehow managed to never see. good, although the ending was a little anti-climactic.</p>