By anders pearson 14 Dec 2001
lani and i were supposed to have headed off to the airport to leave for berlin by now. unfortunately, it’s snowing in milan (where we transfer) so the flight’s been delayed about 5 hours. grrr.
<p>so we’re going to hang out and watch anime and a documentary on communist musicals in the meantime (“ooh! singing, dancing soviets!” – lani)…</p> By anders pearson 13 Dec 2001
“CCNMTL 2002 product development team”
<p>these are some of my coworkers. crack is occasionally smoked in our office. (be sure to click the images to move through the slideshow)</p> By anders pearson 12 Dec 2001
here’s an idea for someone with more free time than me who wants something to do: the “death blog”. start a weblog that highlights the deaths of famous people. maybe branch out into bizarre deaths and other death related stuff on “slow news days”. the research part could probably be automated pretty easily with a perl script or two to scour the RSS feeds of various news sites looking for death/obituary related keywords.
<p>i remember kamden once mentioning that a friend of his had started a collage of all the people who died while he was in college and quickly became overwhelmed by how frequently famous and semi-famous people kick it. </p>
<p>i wouldn’t be surprised if someone has already done this although google didn’t turn up anything for me.</p> By anders pearson 09 Dec 2001
made abbot on perlmonks today. only another 2000 XPs till i reach “saint”. perlmonks is definately my favorite computer game.
By anders pearson 09 Dec 2001
went out on friday night with gerard and melissa to some nameless bar on the lower east side. dark with pretty good music (lots of smiths, cure, new order, depeche mode, etc.) spent a few hours talking and people watching. boy with horns. girl with huge tattoo on back.
<p>in the subway station going home we saw a guy playing guitar on the other platform. we’ve seen him before. always on the other side. really good. young japanese guy with crazy hair sitting against the wall playing guitar and doing rythm with his feet (on one shoe he’s got some kind of jingle-tap thing). last time we saw him, he had a friend with him playing one of those cheap little air-powered keyboard things (i have no idea what they’re called). if i ever end up on the same platform as him, i’m going to give him $5. </p>
<p>didn’t have enough motivation to get out of my apartment yesterday. just slept in having weird dreams (sprinting through harlem, Lovecraftesque fish people, scaling the outside of a skyscraper trying to catch aliens, etc) and pondering the best way to implement a robust, multi-layer error-handling scheme for <span class="caps">CGI</span> applications in perl. even wrote most of the code.</p>
<p>funny how motivation works. putting shoes on to go across the street and do my laundry is too much work but spending hours coding tricky stuff isn’t…</p> By anders pearson 07 Dec 2001
followed gordie and dave downtown to 55 bar to see wayne krantz play. his music would probably be best described as ‘21st century jazz’. basically, he’s a phenomenal jazz guitarist who knows how to take full advantage of effects processors. overall, despite having a fill-in drummer for the night, the band was very tight. wayne and his bassist have obviously played together a lot and can improvise together effortlessly. there were a few moments during the improvisational parts of the show where wayne was obviously reaching for it; this was pretty forgivable since his technique seemed to involve a lot of reaching down, randomly turning knobs on his effects pedals then seeing what kind of sound it makes and figuring out how to incorporate it with the rest of the music. when i got home, i immediately bought one of his CDs. he apparently plays in the city more or less every week. i’ll probably have to go back again.
decent beer, good seats, and excellent music.
By anders pearson 01 Dec 2001
had lychee martinis in soho again last night with gerard and other people from work (including jennifer who used to work with us but doesn’t now).
<p>slept late today then, instead of going to the party downtown that i was supposed to go to, i went to go see <b>Amélie</b> again with gordie and ryan. the 5pm show was sold out so we bought tickets to the 7:30 and wandered around midtown to kill time. we stopped in at <span class="caps">FAO</span> Schwartz where ryan’s wife was working as an elf. wow. if my parents had taken me to a toy store like that when i was a kid, it would have destroyed me; i’d probably never have forgiven them for the rest of my life for not buying me everything there. you can buy kid-size <em>working</em>, gas powered harley-davidsons. jesus christ.</p> By anders pearson 30 Nov 2001
as aluded to earlier, here is the result of multo’s project starring tammy faye and the G-Man and featuring a guest appearance by my guitar:
<p><a href="http://www.thecataract.com/vegasforsale.html">VegasUnderGround</a>.</p> By anders pearson 27 Nov 2001
i mentioned in my diary a while back that i’ve started using ion as my window manager on my work machine.
<p>take a minute and go look at the ion site and look at the screenshots.</p>
<p>ion uses an entirely different approach to the <span class="caps">GUI</span> than your standard mac/windows/gnome/kde interface. everything is based on frames and tabs rather than windows. windows don’t really exist. you can’t have apps stacked partially on top of each other in ion. far from being a limitation, i’ve found this to be a serious improvement. it meshes particularly well with the tabbed browsing of mozilla and <a href="http://galeon.sourceforge.net/">galeon</a> (mozilla’s support for tabbed browsing still has a long way to go but galeon is a dream). with ion, i spend no time at all moving windows around and trying to find the right app or browser window. furthermore, the frames + tabs approach lends itself to much more efficient keyboard shortcuts than traditional <span class="caps">GUI</span>s which also tends to make it faster to use. no matter where i am, i know that with my desktop setup i can hit ‘alt-f1’ and see my email, ‘alt-F2’ and have my browser in front of me or ‘alt-f3’ and have emacs up. no alt-tabbing through the 15 browser windows i have open at any given time searching for the icon that corresponds to my ssh session to the email server. it’s just right there; the shortcut is already hard-wired into my brain so i don’t have to think about it anymore.</p>
<p>to get the most from ion, you really have to take the time to learn all the keyboard shortcuts and to experiment and customize your setup to the way you work (you can customize pretty much anything about ion by editting one or two config files (even more if you’re comfortable writing a shell script or two)). expect this process to take a few days.</p>
<p>since ion is still under development, it’s fair to say that it still has room to grow. right now, if you want support for “sticky” apps (ones that stay on screen in the same place no matter what; such as an icq client, clock, or system monitors), you have to apply a <a href="http://rt.fm/ion/archive/2001-11/0051.html">patch</a> to the source yourself and recompile. </p>
<p>you also run into the problem that there are a few apps (such as <a href="http://www.gimp.org/">the gimp</a>) that make assumptions about how the window manager behaves that turn out to be false with ion. eg, the gimp uses a different window for each palette and toolbar which turns into a mess of tabs in ion and some image viewing apps don’t know how to handle it when their “window” is resized to fit a frame in ion, stretching the image incorrectly. the workaround for these kinds of problems is to use <a href="http://www.xfree86.org/4.1.0/Xnest.1.html">Xnest</a> to run a seperate X session inside a frame and then run a lightweight but more traditional style window manager (<a href="http://blackbox.alug.org/">blackbox</a> is my favorite of those</a>) on it to handle these rogue apps.</p>
<p>ion certainly isn’t for everyone (“you mean you actually have to <em>learn</em> something to use it?”) but it’s a good example of how interfaces can sometimes be improved by throwing away old, broken metaphors like “windows” and “desktops” (these are fine if you’re doing office type tasks on the computer but are pretty meaningless for what i do all day).</p> By anders pearson 26 Nov 2001
lani was up for the weekend :)
<p>on friday night we went out for indian food with obert, clayton and clayton’s girlfriend. then obert and lani and i went to see <b>Amélie</b>. beautiful movie. highly recommended. Jeunet really has a way with colour and always seems to present an array of fascinatingly idiosyncratic characters. if you’ve seen <b><a href="http://www.geocities.com/falling_for_faye/chungking/">Chungking Express</a></b> by Wong Kar-Wai, take a moment after you’ve seen <b>Amélie</b> to compare and contrast plots. should be interesting.</p>
<p>after seeing <b>Amélie</b>, i discovered that lani hadn’t seen <b><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0118583">Alien: Resurrection</a></b> (another Jeunet film) so that went on the agenda for saturday night. then i find out that lani hadn’t seen <em>any</em> of the Alien series so some education was in order. it turned into a 6 hour Alien marathon (we skipped the third movie due to time constraints) for which gerard <a href="node.pl?nid=2673">joined us</a> for part of.</p>
<p>today lani and i (well, lani mostly) pulled the trigger on some cheap tickets to berlin. just a quick whirlwind weekend trip the weekend after next (dec. 14th – 17th). we were both feeling a need to get the fuck off the continent for a little while. my plans are to visit <a href="http://www.miromi.org/">mimi</a>, drink some good german beer and otherwise just enjoy my first trip to europe. anyone else going to be in berlin that weekend and want to get together for a drink? any recommendations on places in berlin that should be visited at all costs?</p>