Staticfree Blog

New photos in structure/:

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New photos in silly/:

Some of your friends are already this fucked. An interesting look on the music industry from a financial point of view. How much money does an average band make? I don't quite know the accuracy of the numbers, but looking them over they seem to make sense.

In the shower, I was pondering relationships. As happens too frequently, I started pondering them in terms of other things, and this case - in terms of internet protocols. Yeah, I swear I'm not addicted to computers.

One night stands

This one's simple: UDP. It's an unreliable protocol where no permanent connection is established. You aren't even guaranteed a reply at all.

Relationship (significant other)

TCP/IP. You go through a bit of a dance to establish a connection (lots of hand shaking) and once you do, you've got a reliable connection. Even over long distances and through harsh networks you can have a reliable connection, although they're more apt to disconnect that way. When you're done with the connection, you say a few magic words and it's over; the port you reserved for it is then freed.

Polyamory

Multicasting. It's not widely supported, but some use it on a daily basis. Some think it's the future, while others think it has too much overhead. Some will try it out and realize that it's not for them, while others get very into it and often get swept away by it.

Flirting

nmap ;-)

New photos in Xmas2003/:

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PuTTY for SymbianOS (the operating system of my cellphone). PuTTY is my favorite SSH client when I can't get the real thing. Having it live on my cellphone means that I can have an ssh client...in my pants. (Arguably, I've had such for awhile, but the program is for my Palm and is remarkably slow). I recall drooling about the idea a few years back and hearing various people saying, "bah. what's the point?" The point? Does there need to be a point? It's SSH in my pants! [From MobileWhack]

This was accidentally posted before I finished it. Apologies to those who were horribly confused.

foreach my  ( @lives ){
    live( \@lives,  );
}
live();

I don't really like this very much - it seems so vain - but some people keep asking for gift lists. It's a bit late, I suppose, but here's a list of stuff that I like. Part of it is automagically updated from my Palm's list of media that I need to research, so it's still rather current.

Gifts are so hard, I just don't generally desire many things that aren't very expensive. I spend most my money on computer equipment and eating at fancy restaurants; both things that are hard to give as gifts. I suppose recently, media is the best bet for little things that I like, but that's such an impersonal sort of thing. Everyone should just give me a day of hanging out with them for the holidays - I think I'd like that a lot.

It's about time. I finally made it to one of Dave Weiner's Berkman Thursday weblog meetings. I ended up showing up a bit late, as I couldn't get a fix on exactly how to get to where I wanted to on Mass. ave. (don't pretend to be in a car, walk on the other side of the street).

Before I went, I listened to one of the recordings to get a feel of what was going on. I anticipated a meeting overrun by a large collection of pale, scrawny geek guys, but it turned out to be a refreshingly eclectic group. I arrived, hovered a bit, and eventually landed at the table, fitting in by pulling out my laptop.

I find that an increasingly popular phenomenon: a group of people existing in meatspace proximity, yet simultaneously conversing and residing in a virtual space as well. In this case, everyone was chatting in IRC while Dave talked about how keen public aggregators of common content are (and how easy it is to find this common content if people continuously send you links to it). It allowed silly conversation to go on, while also having a more serious discussion. Both would feed on each other: the IRC channel providing links and flames based on the conversation IRL. All we need to do now is remove the keyboard, screen and shove as much of the tech into an implant. Let this sort of discussion/metadiscussion happen every day.

All in all, I met a bunch of interesting people who don't mind chatting about the social problems of crpytography over a very tasty indian dinner. I'll be going back if I can manage to plan it into my week (things always come up on thursdays) and see if I can drag a friend or two along with me.

I really must stop this habit of posting blog entries before I go off to work: my computer keeps yelling at me to get going. "Yeah yeah, µ, I'm on my way."

New photos in LOTR/:

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In reading the Creative Commons RSS feed, I came across another feed for archive.org, which is very keen. There's a ton of free (free as in beer, free as in legal, free as in speech) music there and some of it's even good.

A particularly nifty compilation there called One Minute Massacre Volume 1 was put together by a bunch of electronic music artists, each contributing a 1-2 minute segment that is supposed to blend with the previous segment. Some of the artists succeed remarkably well. Check it out, the only cost is a 141MB download.

New photos in Boston/:

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In thinking of how news propagates through an information network, Dyfrgi and I came up with the (perhaps not original, but new to us) idea of distributed, pluggable RSS filter modules. Somewhat like what Localfeeds is, except with optional control lines. I like to think of them in the way that Galan thinks of LADSPA plugins: a network of connected modules with separate control lines.

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Hello dear readers. I've recently set up my cellcam such that it'll upload straight to my photo gallery and post an entry to my blog. I've so far heard one negative comment on this and one neutral one. What do you think?

The options I've considered are:

1. Leave it as-is, posting a set of 320x240 occasionally.
2. Smaller thumbnails, leave as-is.
3. Post one image from a set as a "teaser" and put all inline in the comments page.
4. Post a link to the comments page (and/or the images) in the "summary".
5. ...

Please leave me your compliments, suggestions, flames, etc. I want to be able to share these things with people, but I don't want to annoy my audience in such a way that they get up and leave. Tell me, dear readers, what you want to see.

New photos in structure/:

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A flash-based web meme, the snowman creator! I'm mainly noting this here as their gallery seems to have died and I was quite proud of my fractal snowman. I was going to iterate it a bit further, but then I realized that I'm drawing a bloody snowman fractal. And life goes on.

New photos in people/:

New photos in people/:

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(04:42:34) Brigitte: internet needs a peaceful quiet...

The Internet has become a sort of home for me. It's the one place (if you could even call it such) where I find my self returning to each day and falling asleep in. Like a good home, it's comforting to me in many regards - being able to communicate in various ways with my friends and lovers as though they were there. It's missing many things, but one particular one I've been wanting recently - quiet.

The real world is a subtractive environment: you have to actively do less in order to communicate less. You have to make the conscious decision to lay still to not communicate body language. Even then, the pattern and rate of your breathing, the state of your eyes, your facial expression, all say great deals about yourself.

Online, communication is additive. If you want to express yourself, there's a wall up that you squeeze your expression through. You must actively place words, actively create a web page, actively interact with your computer in order to communicate information. The only passive information in the electronic world is your chat status, your avatar. That, though, is ultimately controlled by you, so it is effectively additive.

Why note this distinction between additive and subtractive communication?

Silence.

In an additive world, silence is the norm. If there's nothing happening, then simply nothing is being directly communicated. There's no passive facial expression to show how someone is inside. You can't tell if someone is there and sharing the silence with you, or off playing a video game at top volume. In all the silence, there is no guaranteed lack of activity. You cannot share a silent moment with someone online for there is no silence.

Why is this important? Why does one need to have pure, unadulterated silence? It's a remarkably personal thing. We, as humans, pride ourselves on our accomplishments, on our creations, on our successes. But silence is the opposite of that. There is no activity there. A silence is a moment of reflection: a 4am lay-on-the-couch-and-ponder-the-universe silence. It's a time people can share together, intimate and isolated.

There is no easy way to give the Internet this capability. As noted, it's additive. You would have to literally see all that was happening and hear all that way playing on someone's computer to truly share such an intimate moment like this. Perhaps some things should simply be left to the reality and not recreated in an abstraction.

Grouphug.us came across my radar recently. It's a site where people can post anonymous confessions. As a minister, I feel it my duty to hear some confessions every once in awhile. It's more than that, though: it's intriguing. You get to hear what people feel is bad in their life, what they deem to be wrong. Things vary from having wild, drunken sex with relatives behind their SO's back to confessing that they aren't honest and true to their friends.

I don't know how much is truthful, but it doesn't really matter. Like The Dead Letter Office, it's a small, penetrating look at a portion of a random someone's life that is often hidden. Or what they want people to think about it anyhow.

I have a morbid fascination with these sites which I'm sure many people would deem unhealthy. I think quite the opposite: I can reflect on them and see how I stand against a random set of individuals. I can look at their seemingly unsolvable problems and I can ask myself how I'd handle it. I can look at myself and say, "I'd never do that; I'm better than that" and ask myself if that's really true. It's a strange sort of thing that I like to call "my daily hate", for without the bad, the good loses all its contrast and definition.

MozCC is a nifty plugin for Mozilla-based browsers that lets you view, at a glance, the Creative Commons copyright information embedded in the page. It puts little icons in the lower-right corner of the status bar that show what you're required to do if sharing the work. See this post which has a bunch of other nifty CC toys, including a CC validator.

This robotic vehicle is totally awesome. It has 4 carefully-controlled wheels per side which can rotate more than 90° as well as move forward and backward, raise and lower. It can drive normally, sideways, spin in place, walk(!), and other keen things. If only there was enough monetary interest to build a full-scale model of it. Now that I'd pay to see.

I just received my first Christmas gift in the mail the other day, straight from CD Baby. In the package came a keen sampler of other CD Baby artists (an mp3 CD with a good 90-something songs). One of the songs caught my ear so far, Come to Me by Bethany Yarrow.

Good female vocalists always catch my fancy, especially when accompanied by intriguing backup instruments. There were some particularly amazing samples of a live set where Ari did accompaniment vocals to some ambient electronica by Antarktika; I wish I had been there. On that note, Ari will be performing around Boston. She's having a regular show every Monday of December, so I think I'm going to try and make those. See her site for more details.

I just put together a Nokia image upload server so that I can upload photos straight to my server from my cell. You can see the photos I've uploaded so far in my gallery. I'm pondering a good way to make an RSS feed out of uploads, while consolidating common events into single posts. I'll see what I can find/write tomorrow, when I'm not in dire need of sleep.

Every time I hear someone mentioning "balancing a checkbook" I realize that it's one of the many tedium tasks that I've managed to escape ever having to do. Technology has revolutionized my life in ways I don't even realize at times. Here are a few things which I've never had to do that my parents did, due to technology or modernization.

I have never:

Balanced a checkbook

Online banking and electronic bill payments pretty much got rid of this. I've written perhaps 10-15 checks in my life and they were mostly for rent and payment to friends. I'm still not entirely sure what it means, though I've got some notions and am glad I won't need to do it any time soon.

Gotten cut while shaving

The ads have some merit: never get cut again. Well, I haven't yet. Electric razors don't really cut, nor do the three-bladed ones; that's all I've ever used.

Sent taxes via postal mail

I've filed all my taxes electronically. This is definitely a good thing as it reduces the amount of people in the system considerably.

Used a typewriter for work

They're still used for filling out forms on occasion, which I've only ever done electronically (most of my College applications had magical type-in PDFs).

Sent a fax

OK, this is just a silly thing that I'm glad I never had to do. I've only heard bad things about fax machines, yet somehow a faxed signature is legally-binding. I don't get it.

Used a print encyclopedia

This is a bit of a lie, way back in my childhood, I would occasionally look through the one we had for fun. But I've never used a print encyclopedia for any real work.

What have your parents (or that generation) had to do that technology has saved you from?

I just upgraded this blog's RSS feed from RSS 0.91 to RSS 1.0. I'm hoping this means smoother syndication, as all the entries are now timestamped. I just implemented an RSS story count limiter, so only 5 stories should exist on the RSS feed. Sorry 'bout the aggregator spammage if any occurs; this should be the last time.

Additionally, I updated the code over at my blog such that it avoids a number of bugs in Internet Explorer 6. Of course, it's uglier now if you're using IE6. If you don't like how it looks, note that I'm using standards-compliant code and that you can simply get a better browser. It's also been improved a bit to work better with Lynx, screenreaders, and other non-graphical browsers.

I think I've determined one of the main problems with laws in the United States these days: there're too many superfluous laws. Take for example §61-1-6 of West Virginia Code: "It shall be unlawful for any person to have in his possession or to display any red or black flag, [ctd.]" What is the reason for this? Why is it there? And if it's superfluous, why should it remain? Or how about §61-10-25: "Engaging in work, labor or business, etc., on Sunday - - Prohibited." That's a bit arcane and is highly abused in these modern times. Why should it be permitted to exist still as actual law?

In the same way that both parties in a trial get defendants, in the same way that you free() your malloc()s, in the same way that republicans and democrats constantly battle, you need to balance out the dichotomy. Politicians spend their days creating new jobs and modifying old ones that come up, but what about the cruft? I believe that if you were to have someone who was paid to remove laws like this (mind you, through the same amount of debate that brought it into being in the first place) we'd have the potential for a more successful government.

Not to say that it would happen, but if you could decimate the set of extraneous laws, I've a feeling more people would actually bother to read the laws and realize what they are and aren't entitled to do. As they are, they're dauntingly numerous: a good few hundred laws that could probably be thinned down to effectively 2/3 to 1/2 as many. With fewer laws, the set of laws as a whole would be more manageable.

Paralleling laws to source code (which in a way they are: the code of conduct and organization of a complex system), programmers will often optimize or even rewrite entire sections of code in order to make the system work better holistically. Let's not just remove old, useless laws, let's consolidate! When programming, if you end up copying and pasting the same bit of code more than 2 times, you should probably turn it into a subroutine. The same should apply for laws: let the chapters parallel subroutines and tie them together better. The legal language is certainly robust enough to handle it and I'm sure lawyers would love it too.

I've mentioned this idea to others before and the main cause of concern they brought up was that the laws are there and not harming anyone, why not just leave well-enough alone? Well, the same reason a programmer will remove un-used subroutines from a program: there's no point in leaving it there and it only adds to the bloat. I say, hire someone to act as that programmer and clean up the mess. After all, it's only our laws we're talking here; it's not like they matter in our daily lives at all.

I'm presently sitting in the Trident Cafe with Allyson connected via the free wireless connection here. Allyson didn't bring a computer, so we have to share µ's net connection. I also forgot my cellphone at home, so I can't go online with my Palm. What do I do? I set up a ppp connection over bluetooth from my palm to my laptop and do NAT to get it online. I've a caching DNS server running on µ that serves anything that connects to it via NAT.

Internet gateway → Trident ISP --802.11a→ Airport --802.11b→ µ --PPP over bluetooth→ Palm

And the best part is that it's all wireless and it works. I ♥ wireless.

I moved my blog to a new engine, Blosxom. As much as I loved all the XML of my engine, it got quite out of hand dealing with a single large unicode XML document. Editing it in Emacs would periodically cause Emacs to not want to save it at all. I figured I'd have better success finding someone who has already done most of the dirty work for me, so I don't have to re-invent the blog-shaped wheel.

Blosxom is nice as it's very simple: each .txt file is a blog post; the first line is the title, the rest is the body. Categories are created by making sub directories (the one downside to this is that something can't be in multiple categories easily).

It'll take a bit to make everything work smoothly. I've so far put all the posts into categories (check out /blog/tech/bots/ for example) and set up the comment system. I've yet to move old comments to the new engine, but will as soon as I write a conversion program.

I don't tend to post news here, but this is just awesome. Massachusetts will be providing equal legal protections in civil-unions for gay/lesbian couples as well as straight ones. This is a wonderful, glorious step in the right direction. Congratulations to all who have been fighting for these rights, it's about time the government catches up with the people it represents.

Update: macabre_grrl notes that it's not over yet.

I wonder how much E someone was taking to come up with this twisted combination: digital watch + lighter + LED bling. Impressive. Grab that, show your Jesus-pimpin' pride with your "magnetic flashing rave cross", and make absolutely sure they know you're a candy raver by putting a flashing LED pacifier around your neck. Geeze, and I thought the electroluminescent wire that I wore to a club once was tacky.

A local Rochester church has decided to make their way into the information age by putting up an entirely different type of steeple. I'm sure the Minister appreciates that his audience gets full cell reception during his sermons, ready to interrupt his dramatic pauses with ill-timed electronic hails.

Well, like an RIT construction project gone terribly wrong, Winter hit Rochester like a sack of bricks. Starting with 45mph winds and topping it all off with horizontal, vertical, diagonal and other snow, a near blizzard started and then vanished in a few hours. All that remains are tattered trees and a suspicious cold, white residue on top of most things exposed to the outdoors.

I grabbed some photos here and there, even grabbing a shot of the finals-week coffee shop drum circle.

Java's is a good coffee shop. Not a clean, well-lit place - but a more homey, humanistic type of atmosphere. Where poets, signing and missing words into mics, while flocks of sleep-deprived students poke the plastic keys of their laptops, away in their own worlds. Where an all-nighter is curled up in a dark corner on a couch, stealing a few hours where they can.

FOAF is a keen system for creating distributed social networks. Think of it as a distributed Friendster, where social connections are tied together by URLs and email addresses.

How do you play? It's simple! Go over to the FOAF-o-matic, fill out the form, and put the generated code on your web page. Once it's online, hop by the FOAF Explorer and see who else is available. A more complete getting started guide is also available.

My FOAF file is available if you want to poke it for some reason. I'll be adding more friends as more people start using it. So... use it! There's a bunch of nifty things you can do once you put one together. This is one of those "critical mass" toys that isn't so useful if only small number of people use it. Unlike Friendster, though, it's not nearly as viral as it should be. Tell you friends!

steve@warehaus:~% grep -ce '^feed' ~/.rawdog/config
38

Yes, 38 RSS feeds. I'm starting to feel a slight tingle in a certain corner of my brain, like the buzzing of 1,000 humming birds somewhere very far away. You know they're there, doing their timeless dives into the center of a buttercup; you can see it in your minds eye, buzzing like that little region of my mind. Thirty eight feeds, 21,600 words, news of the world and the metaworld.

So much signal, but with so much more noise.

Now if someone could only invent a way to turn these feeds into food. I'm at Java's still and all the restaurants that Compusfood has have already closed. I guess that leaves vending machines, ordering out for pizza, or taking the 30 minute hike over to Subway.

Awhile ago, I got a Linuxfund MBNA credit card. Ryan had been reminding me that I should start building credit and that his Linuxfund card got the chicks in grocery store checkout lines. Well, got smiles from the chicks anyhow. So I applied for one and some time later, got both a magical sliver of plastic in the mail and a cute little stuffed Tux.

Today in the mail I got another stuffed Tux. You can see him sitting on top of the little penguin bath toys Care got me recently. I'm not sure why they sent it, but I don't mind having another cuddly cute thing in my possession. You can never have too many cuddly cute things.

I also got a new 3800mAh battery for mu, as I've always been paranoid about the main battery giving out after awhile. This also means that I can go on bus rides and not worry about trying to minimize power consumption: 12h of actual battery life isn't too shabby.

I also improved my vocoder network a bit to use my joystick (USB Gravis Gamepad) as a keyboard. The network now uses the buttons on the joystick for notes and the voice will "sing" those notes. Hear µ "sing" my rendition of Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Two black men and a little black book
came knocking on my door.
They wanted to sell me their ways and ideals
and to read me some o' their lore.

I was quite sad that I was running late and couldn't stay to talk to the Jehovah's Witnesses who came by this morning. I've never really had a good opportunity to talk religion with a fanatic besides my mom, and she doesn't really count (Flower child → found Jesus → rediscovered her hippie ways).

Unrelatedly, I think a religion based on the wisdom of fortune cookies would be pretty nifty. When posed with a moral dilemma, one would go to the Holy Chinese Restaurant and take an offering from the fortune cookies. "My teenage son is not talking to me, and calls me a 'controlling bitch'. Oh scrumptious Fortune Cookie, what should I do?" "Love is hard work; and hard work sometimes hurts!" "I see now. Thank you, Fortune Cookie."

Even those without a Holy Chinese Restaurant nearby could participate thanks to the wonders of technology. I think it could work.

Awhile ago, I found this site on some memeblog: The Church of Virus. It's an interesting site that talks about organized religions as memes for spreading ideals. I'm a firm believer in this and this site tries to play upon that, being a meme in itself. I believe the site says it best:

Goal

Virus was originally created to compete with the traditional (irrational) religions in the human ideosphere with the idea that it would introduce and propagate memes which would ensure the survival and evolution of our species. The main advantage conferred upon adherents is Virus provides a conceptual framework for leading a truly meaningful life and attaining immortality without resorting to mystical delusions. (source)

I got myself a vocoder. Well, a vocoder plugin. With it, I can sound like a robot.

You've probably heard a vocoder, but not heard of a vocoder. They're quite popular in electronic music, used heavily by bands like Kraftwerk and Freezepop. It's a audio filter that takes two sources, the carrier and the formant. The formant is the human voice source and the carrier is commonly a simple waveform, say an 80Hz sawtooth wave. Parts of the formant is filtered out and replaced by the carrier, weaving the natural and the generated sound sources into one synthetic-sounding voice that retains most of the voice's pronunciation.

I put together a little network in Galan that had both "analog" and simple wave carriers. I put a cross-fader between the two carriers so they could be changed or combined. I found with an equal balance of an 80Hz sawtooth carrier and a 350Hz "analog" triangle-wave carrier produced a pretty decent robotic voice.

I used the vocoder on my red-robot costume for Halloween. Unfortunately, my laptop speakers weren't loud enough to drown out my voice and so I just sounded incomprehensible with it. I'll have to get some battery-powered speakers and a USB joystick to manually control the carrier frequencies for next time.

I think I'm starting to feel the pulse. The Internet is a vast web of information exchange. It's far too large, even if one could manage to monitor everything, to really get a high-level overview of all the new data that's added to the web. Almost.

On that web there are many nodes that will digest and summarize the information flowing around/through them. There are also nodes that look for patterns, and extract meaning: a news site that is regularly updated, a blogger's site which has interesting links and ideas posted on it. Let's call each of these nodes "neurons". These neurons act as sensors for their environment: a blogger who complains about the weather, a news station that reports on a local crime. If they could be monitored, say via a standard protocol, one get a high-level view of the union of all the neurons monitored.

These neurons are not isolated. In fact, most of them will monitor other neurons, other information feeds, other events and generate output based on their observations. These information feeds, connecting neuron to neuron, could be paralleled with the brain's inter-neuron connective structures: "dendrites". Dendrites function by passing signals from neuron to neuron, creating a network of information flow.

What's the point of this metaphor? Well, it's nowhere near the density of a human brain, but each person on the web functions as a neuron. Information flows through the Internet, regulated and filtered by each of these neurons. I've started adding RSS feeds to a centralized aggregator. I have this insatiable urge to keep adding more feeds, to become more tied in, and monitor more neurons. With what goal? Well, to find the Nodal Points, as another blogger called them. The interesting things being passed around; the things that "matter" to the Internet as a collective.

One type of these nodal points are the ever-popular memes. I often consider memes to be information viruses, but now I'm starting to think of them more as signals that happen to pass particularly well from neuron to neuron.

One such example of this is the site, Friendster. I was very amused to learn of its existence one day, chat about it on IRC that evening, be IM'd by two friends from RIT (within an hour of each other) the next day, and then participating in it, passing it on, the day after that.

The last step is to create a technical system for automatically digesting the feeds and sorting out the most relevant bits of information. Think of it as a Google page-ranking system for "real-time" data feeds. The more automated the system becomes, the larger it can scale and the more dendrites can form between the neurons.

What results from this ever-interlinking collective network of minds? That's a question on par with "What is the meaning of life?". The more I ponder the significance of the Internet the more I hope that the answer to both questions is the same.

"Somebody had to put all this Confusion here!"

I had found it before, but here is a Discordian Coloring book. It's remarkably well-illustrated, for such an eccentric thing. I only wish someone would publish it on cheap paper so I could discretely leave them in Dr.'s offices around the country. The thought of a little kid scribbling over an apple with ΚΑΛΛΙΣΤΙ inscribed in it is just.. awesome. "Mommy, what's she doing to him?"

After poking away at a network client written in pure malloc'd C, I was remound of the most excellent and geeky song, "Write in C". (there seem to be some revised versions of it out there, mentioning Java instead of ).

In remembering that song, I recalled that I hadn't heard anyone sing it besides myself, acapella. I thought it's bound to exist in a recorded fashion somewhere out there in the vast and glorious Interweb. Well, look no further junior rangers! There's a whole flock of geeky songs in an old album by called Spammer's Paradise. You must check it out. MIDI + [bad] singing + awesome lyrics == geeky like nothing you've heard before.

I have a new home. Well, I've had it for awhile, but I'm actually living in it recently. Thanks to the nocturnal habits of my new cuddly friend, Brigitte, I've been spending more nights than I care to admit hanging out on the various couches of Java's.

In fact, with Brigitte comes another group of people to add to my collection: goth/metal John, Shelley, and Leighton. All are permanent residents of Java's and tend to be clad in black and metal pricklies. More often than not, a subset of them will be hanging out in Java's either hiding behind a glowing lap-warmer or curled up in a ball in a corner, rejuvenating.

I've shyly been flirting with MovableType as a possible replacement for my hand-coded blog engine. As much as I like the concepts behind my engine, there are aspects of the implementation that I don't have finished or don't desire to finish. Parsing user comments for HTML, for one, is something I'd rather not have to code. In addition, the constant re-parsing of the XML is slow (yes, I'll change it so it generates static pages soon enough) and prone to corruption with a malicious text editor.

My younger sibling, David, already has his blog up using the MT engine I installed. It's a good piece of software, but unfortunately not open source. I may leave philosophy behind on this one though, as it's still free to use (for non-commercial use) and modify, just not free to distribute modifications. The bling may overcome the licensing.

You know computers are running too much of your life when you accidentally sleep-in and skip class due to a programming error. You also know that you program too much when you can diagnose that error, fix it, check it into CVS, and then can fall back asleep. Finally, you know you're a 'net junkie when you are amused by that chain of events and then blog it, knowing the blog will be syndicated to at least 3 other websites.

Oh, and you can get the updated versions of the code here: classalarm. Other necessities for it can be found here: scripts.

I was just given a link to Tugboat - music done by my friend Jesse from middleschool. He and I would often hang out, making fun of the computer network admin and generally being geeky boys. *reminisce* Check out Tugboat, it's videogameish music done Right™. He even goes as far as to make sure the polyphony was done in the way classic system would do it. Awesome.

"Molten milk chocolate mixed with cream is like a liquid cuddle for your belly." -Steve *drooling at the thought*

Mink and Kris visited me over the weekend. They drove out from Boston sharing the joyous task of conducting Kris's boatSUV on the Route Ninety Sea. We had a most excellent time hanging out while Rob and Ryan worked on and drank their beer, cuddled, toured RIT and other such randomy things. I miss being in Boston and I miss them both; why must I be plagued with the torment of distance? So far I've had one (1) relationship (besides this summer) where distance was not a major impediment. Even then, transportation was a bit of a pain without a car. Some day, some glorious day...

On an unrelated note, I am now Vice President of RIT's SME club. Andrew has also been appointed the President. That means that the top two positions of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers are lead by ones other than Manufacturing Engineers. I'm not even technically an engineer either. I believe there's one ME student in the entire club, but I could be wrong.

Whatever the silly terminology makes itself out to being, I'm now co-leading what's solely become a robotics club (technically, SME does other things. I should probably find out what those are soon, I imagine). Together with MDRC, we will be trying to bring more robotics projects to RIT.

One of the most important aspects of robotics in a school environment is that it requires the help of many types of people to produce a final product. Hardware designers, hardware producers, software designers, software implementers, debuggers, web designers, graphic artists - a vast array of people can work together on one [hopefully] kick-ass tangible goal. This is why I like robotics: bringing together a heterogeneous group of people to make one nifty device. Well, that and the fact that I really enjoy automation in all its various forms. Especially 300lb forms that attempt to drive by themselves.

Now I must return to the homework I've been attempting to do all weekend (how can you sit down in front of a book writing in Japanese, «Mt. Everest is a bit larger than Mt. Fuji.» and other such variations for a few hours when there are two attractive females visiting you for a weekend? It's just unpossible). My partner in AI today greeted at lab me with a yellow Course Withdrawl form. He told me he was going to pull out and will be continuing to help with the project, but that's a good gauge of how frustrating the class is. Hopefully I can find time to sort out all the "fuzzy assignments" he keeps handing out; they're often about as vague as recycled technologies we explore.

My weekend consisted of the following chain of people and events:

Friday: home → RTS Bus → Greyhound → Worcester → Mink.

Saturday: Mink → breakfast with her friends → hang out with her suitemates → Commuter Rail → Lisa → Kris → Eat, Drink, Man, Woman.

Sunday: Kris → Harvard Square → Tashari & Pete → One Arrow St. Crepes → Newbury St. → Allyson & friends → Trident Cafe → Delerium concert at Axis → dad's appt.

Monday: Dad → Greyhound → RTS Bus → home → bike to RIT for classes → Rob → home where Ryan and Rob tried their homebrewed beer for the first time.

And this is why I have trouble getting homework done on the weekends.

Cellphone Update: I got the replacement in the mail friday in a convenient box that had a return postage sticker in it. The only thing they didn't provide was the packing tape to reseal the box (whoever made the origional Palm Pilot did that). The new phone has the latest firmware and everything appears to be happy so far.

I started writing this in a comment on Smileloki's RSI post, but figured it'd be more useful here. Awhile ago, I got a wrist brace to help with my aching wrists and hands. It's been good so far, but isn't a "magic bullet" to cure a RSI.

In CS4 a few years ago, I got a severe RSI from pounding out code and chatting constantly. I looked around for RSI solutions and besides correct posture and a good desk setup, many expensive keyboards were suggested. Considering their $200-400 price range, I looked for a cheaper solution.

I decided take the plunge and switch to Dvorak (and more importantly, learn to type properly - fingers on the home-row, minimal moving of fingers, using pinkies and such.). That helped a great deal as I both slowed down during the re-learning process and ended up with a better typing style overall afterward.

Dvorak alone is not a super improvement over Qwerty - I prefer it, as I overall move my hands substantially less (watch someone typing in the two layouts; it's sorta nifty as typing on Dvorak almost looks like fake typing.), but the process of relearning to type was the most important. You can attempt to relearn to type in Qwerty, but I always find that I fall into old habits too quickly.

Of course, it takes a great deal of patience to relearn to type; ultimately, though, it is worth it. I found the best way to do this was by taking notes in class with a laptop/palmtop which is mapped to Dvorak. I tried to practice typing in Dvorak by chatting in AIM and on IRC, but that proved to be insanely frustrating: I couldn't keep up with the flow of conversation and ended up "reverting" to Qwerty to actually speak. Coding or writing papers in Dvorak is a decent alternative to notes, but deadlines make it look rather unappealing after awhile.

If you do make the switch, don't be discouraged. You will start off slow, but will also regain speed within a month or so. I now type a good 80WPM or so in Dvorak without much issue (I'm not sure if that's better than my Qwerty speed, but it probably is).

One last concern which is always brought up: compatibility. Yes, I can still type in Qwerty. When I was starting off, it took awhile to switch between the two. I had a "shaky finger" as my brain tried to decide which to use, but I've gotten to switching now. I can easily start typing on a Qwerty keyboard, but it'll take me a good 30 minutes to get back into the rhythm of Qwerty (I've heard of people who don't even have this time, and I'm guessing they actually use Qwerty on a semi-regular basis). I tend to find that most people's computers can easily be switched to Dvorak with minimal effort or problems on their part (OS X, GNU/Linux, ). My most recent frustration in that front has been with the modern Sun Blades which have magical new USB keyboards that are entirely unlike all their successors.

Ultimately, if you can spend about 1 month of time typing a bit slower (and 1-2 weeks being frustrated at your typing speed) in order to help prevent any RSI, Dvorak is a great choice.

How do I make my computer Dvorak?

So, how do you do it? It's easy!

Windows

Start → Settings → Control Panel → keyboard → Language → add → "Dvorak"

You should be able to switch it with the little icon in the tray.

Mac OS X

System Preferences → International → Dvorak

GNU/Linux with X 4.* (or anything running X 4.*)

setxkbmap dvorak

I also recommend the -option ctrl:nocaps -option compose:menu options. The former will turn your "caps lock" key into a spare "ctrl" key (no more bumping caps lock aND ACCIDENTALLY SHOUTING) and the latter will map that "menu" button to be a "compose" key.

To switch, I've a two scripts that run the setxkbmap with either the above option or setxkbmap pc104 (which is often the default). The one that switches to Qwerty is called aoeu and the one to Dvorak, asdf (that idea blatantly stolen from Tetron). You switch by rolling your left hand on the home row in a terminal.

2004-04-11 update: setxkbmap -option 'ctrl:nocaps' -option 'compose:menu' -option 'altwin:super_win' -option 'grp_led:caps' -option 'grp:shift_toggle' 'dvorak,us' This is wonderful. I hijacked the capslock LED to indicate Dvorak vs. Qwerty (the LED is on when it's Qwerty) and pressing both shift keys at the same time causes it to toggle layouts. No more hunting for a terminal to type "asdf" anymore :-) This is due to the fact that you can have up to 4 loaded layouts at once in XFree86 >= 4.3.

I stumbled across the info here: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/rules/xfree86.lst and /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/README.config .

Ahoy me mateys! I write this 'ere letter from a ship headin' from the coast o' Rarchestarr to Bawston. She's an old craft, but is quite speedy on the concrete seas. I be in Bawston fur th' weekend, seein' me mateys an' hearin the fine sounds of Delerium. Send me some word if ye be wantin' to meet up Satarday ur Sunday. Me ol' "sell-fone"'ll be right as rain so ye can give me a hollar on that there work o' witchcraft. I can't promise much, though, as me mateys may very well be takin' up all me time.

Aye, me lads and lassies: 'case ye hadn't heard th' word, today be Talk Like a Pirate Day. Save th' day me mateys, this be the best day of the yearrrr.

Yarrr. Mark me words, ye scurvy scallywags. They say lassies arn't ta be on a ship. Aye, it's not th' lassies but their chilluns who're ta be left at port. Thar be one such chillun 'board this 'ere vessel an' 'e be squeelin' like a gull o'er a fresh catch. I'm of mind ta toss th' lily-livered rascal in the brig an' see 'ow 'e likes th' looks of th' bars.

Here be me attempt at a unicode pirate smiley: ṗ-1

Every once in awhile, while in the shower or some other such monotonous task, I get ideas that I think just have to be written down. My first instinct is to draw up a HTML document on the idea, trying to organize and formalize it. One of the reasons for this is - well - I want to pass it on and see what others think.

I wrote up two such ideas recently: a way of transporting an inexpensive object (say, a borrowed book, a burned CD, or such) across a network of people. People are constantly moving; why not try and harness some of that movement for a collective good?

The other (which actually has market potential) is a slight tweak to a used book store. This used book redistribution network favours the movement of the book - the more the book moves on through the network, the more money the people involved in its transport get. If it were implemented well and if it caught on it'd be nifty. Of course, to be effective the users have to grok it (one of the main issues people have mentioned so far; it's very confusing). Maybe someday when I have money to burn and time to waste on projects like this, I'll put it together. Until then, I'll continue posting wacky ideas I have in hopes that anyone cares.

Cellphone update: Well, as I feared, the replacement phone didn't actually come in the mail. I called on Tuesday to confirm that they sent the order out, and I learned that they didn't even have a record of the order in their system. After 45 minutes on the phone with a nice customer service rep., I got a confirmed order and was told that it'd probably arrive by Monday. Most of the conversation was trying to figure out how I could possibly get a phone that I could borrow for the weekend, so I'd be able to twiddle plans while in Boston.

A fun quote from that conversation:

Me: "So, are there any T-Mobile stores that can get me a temporary phone until the new one arrives?"

..pause..

Rep: "Is New York large?"

Me: "Pardon?"

Rep: "Is New York rather large?"

Me: "Uh, Yeah. It's about 6 hours from here to New York City"

It turned out there were no places in the "loaner program" near me and that I'd have to go on an 8 hour bus ride and weekend in Boston with no cell/Internet connection (horror of horrors!). So, I asked him if it'd just be possible to buy a phone (with Bluetooth) and return it within their 14-day "no obligation" trial period and he said that would work.

I stopped by the local T-Mobile shop in the nearby mall and got a Sony Ericsson T68i (it was the cheapest they had with Bluetooth and I figured I'd try a new phone for kicks). So far, it's been working great on both my Palm and my laptop. I still can't get over how light the phone is - it feels like one of those empty "dummy demo models" they have at cheap electronics stores. I'm not so fond of it though - not enough features - and look forward to toting around a Nokia 3650 again.

Combine GeoURL with RSS aggregation and what do you get? Localized RSS feeds. Localfeeds is an aggregate which finds all the feeds in 50 miles of a given city and displays summaries on the site. *Waves to the Rochester blog world!* It'll be interesting watching city-level events be blogged in one spot. I've certainly gotten a kick out of watching the spread of memes through the various sites I read in my aggregated feed.

My next step is to get a better system for posting posts. Right now, as I wrote my blog engine myself, the post system is written in Perl and requires me to ssh into my main computer to write entries. This isn't bad really, as I can use emacs to compose nice HTML, but It'd be rather handy to have some XML RPC methods which I can post with, and the accompanying clients on my various wireless devices. I've pondered looking into switching over to MovableType, but I don't really have the time to write a conversion engine or any such things. Just ponderings for future ways to waste time.

On an unrelated note, some day I - and my army of kitten-seeking red robots - will create a meme that will take over the world. Just thought I'd give fair warning.

This has got to be the cutest ring-tailed lemur I've ever seen. I want one! In addition, people really need to get up and dance more. [from Boing Boing]

Oh, and regarding my cellphone which fatally crashed? The replacement (which, I might add, I said OK to them charging me $15 for next-day air) still has not arrived. Hopefully today will be my lucky day, but we shall see. Even if it does, I'm a bit paranoid that it will have the old firmware. Version 2.54 of the firmware came on the broken one and according to various messages boards, is quite buggy for other people too. Fluffy just got a one from T-Mobile and it came with version 2.54, so I'm a bit skeptical that they even have any with a newer version in stock.

My cellphone crashes while booting and there is no hard reset pin.

I love technology.

Bored in class, I decided to follow Ryan's lead and add a LOC record to staticfree.info's DNS entry. I also added a cute little GeoURL ICBM meta tag to staticfree.info's main page. Ryan likes the DNS entry better, but I think both have their place. The meta tag can be used for someone's about page or their blog, for example, while the DNS one wouldn't suffice. Of course, knowing where a physical server is can be quite handy as well, but for entirely different reasons.

All in all, you can do some pretty nifty lookups with GeoURL and get a map using the LOC data.

I'm back in Rochester, back at school. I've already gone to all my classes and they've been good. I've had two of the professors before (Carithers and Dalal), and I liked their teaching style. This time around I'll put more effort into their classes, so that should be good. The other two seem interesting enough (although my AI prof is both dry and unintelligible) and should provide for good classes.

3 out of my 4 classes are in building 70 - the new CS/IT/SE building - and I take notes on µ in HTML in them. Therefore, I'm generally online in those classes. I love technology.

I've been switching between various wireless devices recently, from my phone to my palm to my laptop. As such, I've been shuffling my online habits to accommodate that: using IMAP more frequently (on µ and my palm), I set up an email address solely for my phone (not entirely sure what I'll do with it), and started using Rawdog to read all my various blogs/sites.

Also on the software front, I added theming capabilities to my schedule system. I put together a nice "white and teal" theme that's actually readable on my palm. (the blacker theme is too black). I'll eventually switch all over to iCalendar. Maybe. I like certain features of the current calendar/schedule system as-is.

Oh, and now that I'm back at RIT I'm rediscovering how much I missed my crazy friends here. Julie, for example, is Very Cool™. Hopefully I'll meet a bunch of other random-crazy-cool people, as there's bound to be at least a few at a school mostly populated by CS/IT and photo majors.

Heading back to Rochester; heading home. Well, one of my homes anyway. I always ponder the concept of home as I have a few (various places in Newton and Rochester), one (the Interweb) or none. I like to think they're all homes of sorts, in their own rights. They all house people I care about, things I care about, and things I've created. Strange how one is but an abstract layer on top of the other two, yet that layer is itself a home. Would it perhaps be a metahome then? All I know is that, provided a cozy spot to sit, a beverage dispenser of some sort, and either WiFi or cellular reception, I can feel quite at home.

The summer's over already and classes are starting in a few days. My dad will be driving my self, my stuff and my new bike out tonight. The trip is a good 6-7 hours so sadly, I'll be missing Rochester.Amber as she leaves Saturday morning.I'll just have to join Kate sometime in the future and visit Amber's new apartment. :-)

It's so mechanical, packing. Consolidating a summer's worth of activities, saying goodbye, moving on again, and leaving behind only memories. I won't miss my dad's apartment (especially not the nasty bugs that occasionally visit it), just the people around it. Oh, how I wish someone'd create a transporter already! Or maybe just a high-speed train straight from BOS to ROC. Even cheap airfare between the two would be plenty! Until then I can only shuttle between cities toting µ, some tech and some clothes. I'll miss Bostony folks so much.

On the note of leaving, I may be coming back. It's still in the air, but I'll probably be back in Newton come winter quarter. FTRD seems to be open to the idea of me working there for another co-op session, I don't mind the extra money, and it'll then fill all my co-op requirements (assuming Pennie ever gets my two bloody credits submitted). All in all, too many people want me around Cambridge/Newton then for me to really be able to stay at RIT then. I just hope classes can coincide appropriately.

Oh, and apparently I can type around 88WPM (77WPM accounting for typos) in Dvorak on µ. I need to find a better tester though. Preferably one that isn't written in java. I'd pro'ly be a bit faster if it was using emacs, as I'm particularly keen on emacs' "undo" and "delete the previous word" bindings.

Sorry to those viewing the RSS feed that I've spammed. I decided it was silly to abbreviate my posts to only the first paragraph, so I got rid of that. I also forcibly escaped the HTML in the posts instead of wrapping it in a CDATA to try and make it more universal across RSS parsers. I'll eventually redo the entire thing as an RSS-encoded RDF, but that'll be when I have free time.

My weekend was joyously spent with Krazy Kris (With a 'k' like "kookie"), Miss Mink and a brief flirtation with a graveyard. After a pleasant evening with Kris, Saturday morning rolled around and so did my dad in our old Volvo. I, having finally re-acquired a learner's permit (this is #3) the day before (taking 2 hours in line. Just my luck as the day before that, the line was 7 minutes long and I was shooed away for not having "proof of residence") joined him on a pleasant Saturday spin around the graveyard.

I can't think of a better place to learn to drive than a large, beautiful graveyard. Except perhaps in the real world, but one tries to avoid that when first starting off. It was full of tricky turns, haunting hills, and ominous obstacles. Of course, it also accurately simulates not-quite-an-hour-rush-hour traffic at a wavering 15 miles per hour or below. I ended up driving for 1.5h which makes the total time I've driven a car in my life around 2 hours. Huzzah! Progress!

After my brief tour of the homes of the deceased, I trundled into Haaavad Square where I met up with Laurie and company. I hung out until I had to run off to a train for Worcester to visit Miss Mink.

Mink and I stayed up late playing on computers and then woke early for King Richard's Faire! The faire was more fun than I thought, but not as amazing as it had worked itself up to being. The various games were too spendy ($3.00 for 10 arrows to shoot into a arrow-pocked bale of hay), the food was of course up there in price (more annoyingly, it had an annoying "ticket" system where all real money transactions were traded for 50¢ tickets), and all merchandice was amazingly spendy. Then again, if you want to go spend a bunch of money on that sort of thing, this place is certainly the right place!

Of course, in light of all the spendyness, I gave in and actually got myself a new carrying case for my Palm. It's not as hardcore as Mink's skull pouch, but it was gotten from the same place; there's bound to be a little hardcore spilled over into it.

We returned to torment her suite-mates with random music which we were remarkably capable of singing along to. *Insert mental video clip of Mink and Xavier singing and bouncing with laptops on laps, joyously to Neutral Milk Hotel - Song Against Sex here*.

I ran off to home, to dinner, to Kris (sadly sans Star Trek), to work and thusly the summer routine will end. It's been an amazing summer and I wish it could last longer.

I opened the summer with a song lyric, and I think I'll close it with one too:

"We're here and now, but will we ever be again
'Cause I have found
All that shimmers in this world is sure to fade
Away again" - Fuel - Shimmer

I've not posted here in a bit, as both I am lazy and µ was in the shop for 1.5 weeks. (I wanted to post a bunch of photos, which were on µ). Some recent events in photos: Adam had a party, b1o spun a session on a hill near a cell tower, my brother came back from Japan, and Tashari re-bleached my hair. All in all, I've been having a great time and enjoying my summer.

My laptop, µ, got lucky. Its warranty ran out the day after I discovered its CD-RW/DVD drive was broken. In addition, its power adapter (like so many other Lifebooks) had also broken. When the CD-RW/DVD drive broke, I was nearly certain that my warranty was already expired, but I figured - hey - they might at least be able to give me a repair estimate. I was very lucky to call tech support and discover that I was still under warranty, as those repairs would have probably cost $400 otherwise. I brought µ down to a local Fujitsu repair shop, Tech Fusion, and they seemed to be pretty good about repairs.

I've recently discovered that one of my favorite bands, Delerium, will be on tour starting 2003-09-03. I'm going to try and convince someone in Rochester that they really need to go to Toronto ("I don't want to go to Toronto!") come the 18^th. There's always room for another road-trip to Canada.

In addition, Guster will be playing at the U of R on the 20^th, and hopefully Amethystmoon will come out for that. Unlikely due to her recent lack of car, but I can still hope.

I also recently set up a variety of calendar-related systems on my computers. I discovered the nifty iCalendar/vCalendar (I'm still not sure of the difference between the two) formats which allow for easy sharing of calendar data. I set up PHP iCalendar over on Warehaus which will eventually house my Palm's datebook and class schedule information. I just need to write a SIS→iCalendar converter and find a Palm Datebook → iCalendar converter, as I'd rather not like to write the latter. Ultimately, it's pretty nifty when coupled with something like Mozilla's calendar plug-in.

Now that I've put about 4 entries-worth in one jumbo-sized entry, I'll be posting more frequently from now on. I hope.

I've been writing a few little poems in my random bouts of inspiration before I go to sleep. Usually I just use them for my away messages, but I figured I'd share them here too. Dreaming of Dreaming and She Dreams. Yes, you are correct: the theme you might be noticing here is purely coincidental.

My party was good. Yada yada yada yada yada. I had an amazing time, saw a few of people I'd thought I lost to time, and - save one important one and a few others - had all my closest friends with me at one time.

On an unrelated note, I've decided that my summer goal to "play with Bluetooth" still had not been fully satiated. Therefore, I decided that I was fed up with Cingular's inability to give me all the cell-phone features (Voicemail has never worked in Boston. Well, it works as people can leave messages, but the system does not notify me in any way) I purchased and have hopped over to T-Mobile. The main inspiration for the jump is because T-Mobile is offering an unlimited Internet plan (via GPRS) for $20 extra/mo. Having portable, always-on wireless Internet access that I can use (via Bluetooth) on my palm and my laptop, as well as a decent cell-phone package is worth the $60/mo. IMO. Which, sadly, is only about $10/mo. more than my Cingular service.

On usability: Bluetooth, with my shiny new camera-phone and Palm, is very nifty. The Palm has a handy little software upgrade that provides a wizard to set up a phone-control and GPRS-connection-sharing link. Palm did an amazing job putting together their phone-palm integration, as I can practically leave my phone in my pocket (with the headset on) and do all that i need to do with it: go online, dial numbers (from my palm's address book). In addition, I can actually send contacts between the two devices over Bluetooth - a feat of standardization that I never thought would be seen in my lifetime. I'll play with getting a link set up to my laptop soon, which should be good: wireless 'net (though a bit slow) anywhere I go that doesn't already have WiFi. I love the information age.

The party starts at 18:00-19:00 and there will be dinnery food served. I've attempted to put together a menu of cheap tasty things that veggies and carnivores can both like, but feel free to post suggestions as a reply to this. So far, the menu is:

• Pizza - pepperoni and plain. Maybe something chickeny or garlicy if I'm feeling daring
• Chips/salsa/etc.
• Spanakopita - one of my favorite snacky foods
• hummus, pita, tabbouleh, etc.
• focaccia - if anyone wants to help make some
• other suggestions?

SmileLoki and I went on an adventure, spur of the moment, because we could, and because it was there. True, in the grand scale of all adventures, this was a walk in the park, but as far as a certain scrawny computer geek was concerned, it was quite a trip.

MacWorld has been in NYC for the past few whiles in the Javitz Convention Center. Many vendors come, as well as the Holy Apple itself, and followers come to pay tribute to the benevolent ruler of their computers. Shown gleaming and proud on whirling pedestals of plastic ice, the latest and greatest are displayed, posing pornographically with their covers off and innards showing. Inside and out, they are seen to be beautiful; thin grates, teasingly glowing icons, and just enough ports to remind you that it's actually a computer.

Why, as two hard-core Linux users, would we go to an Apple festival? One might guess that it's a familial thing: with the recent advent of OS X and its intimate relation with Linux's sister, BSD. In a sense, similar to going to an art show where your friend is presented and seeing what they've done, seeing where they've gone in life, and seeing what their peers have done. There's also the novelty factor: so much new, shiny technology - the pinnacle of modern computer design by many's standards - all concentrated in a hands-on showcase. Finally, the other novelty - I simply hadn't done it before.

Waking early in the morning to catch a ride with Aelsha and Spinfire (friends from the vast network of the Interweb), SmileLoki and I traveled to the closest train stop that the drivers wanted to travel to. There was a train in the station heading to NYC when we got there, so we ran in - not noticing it was making local stops. On the train, we talked and read our respective books.

Arriving at Grand Central Station some 30-40 minutes later, we found the shuttle that took us within a few blocks of the convention center. SmileLoki lead the way through the trip, as she has a compass for a sense of direction, and a spacial memory like a map. We got there much earlier than I anticipated: a good 11:30 or so.

After watching a registration clerk fight with her workstation to spit out a badge (the system had inconveniently forgotten anything I submitted but my name, despite the fact that the web forms didn't allow for such a submission to even occur in the first place. Isn't technology grand?), we wandered towards the showroom. Pausing first to feed my external-brainpack some data from a little winking beacon (cute design. Prior to that, I wondered how long it would take to see such a device in existence.), we entered the showroom and instantly flocked to the pretty new G5 on display.

All I can say about the G5 is: my, what a large heat sink; boy, it sure goes fast.

We wandered the booths, poking at ideas, products, and toys. Bling-blings were presented of all shine and sheen, glossy and glowing, dancing and playing the guitar. From a rather normal (read: it didn't look like a showcase) Apple-schlockmeister, I grabbed a shirt which said, in big, white-on-black letters:

C:/DOS
C:/DOS/RUN
RUN/DOS/RUN

All summers I try to acquire at least a few new t-shirts to add to my collection. One can never have enough shirts with witty sayings or pseudo-religious icons.

After a trip to the food court to feed our bodies and briefly play on the open WiFi, we saw a few more booths and headed out. On the way out, the poor registration clerk said hi and bye, as she and we vanished off into the city.

We made our way to times square and basked in the sky spittle and radiant heat from cars trudging through the flocks of pedestrians. The city is beautiful in its ugliness: a fast-paced writhing network of verbally. tactilely and electronically-linked cells, shuffling through their individualities and lives; hiding from the world in their respective mobile steel exoskeletons.

I grabbed some cheap DVDs from one of the large, blinking stores in the square and we waited for SmileLoki's friend to return her call. He did, but wasn't going to show up. So we left for Chinatown to feed and head home.

There are many buses that go from Boston <-> New York City. The only difference between these buses is sketchiness and price. Normally, I'd take Greyhound or some other commercial entity that advertises on silly things like television and such. In the hopes of leaving as small a financial scar as possible, though, we decided to take the Fung Wah bus. Unfortunately fo