| am I a dorky movie star? |
[11 Jul 2009|10:54am] |
Watching any of the video-blog-posts from the set of the "Scott Pilgrim" movie gives me this eerie feeling that Michael Cera is me circa age 21 or so. He really seems to look and talk uncannily like me. But I spend less time than anyone looking at or hearing myself from the outside, so I'm not sure this is accurate.
I'm not saying that he looks or sounds the way I do from the inside, which is quite different. Rather, watching him gives me the same creepy feeling of oh-god-is-that-dorky-guy-really-me? that I get when I watch myself on video or hear my recorded voice. I guess if he can be a big movie star, then I should feel a little bit better about myself.
Can I also feel envious of him for his/Scott's onscreen girlfriend Ramona Flowers? With her pointy purple bangs as seen in this video. She is a honey.
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| live music, circus, july 15th |
[11 Jul 2009|11:04am] |
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music |
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Pere Ubu - Winter In The Firelands |
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Showtime 9 pm. Rustmoth plays first. Will be loud...
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[11 Jul 2009|03:05am] |
I ate a poppy seed bagel before bed last night
and went to sleep without brushing my teeth
hoping flowers will grow out between them
before dawn comes
and the sun cuts them all down again
When I woke up just now
I had to dig up their roots
clawing the back of my head away from my pillow
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[11 Jul 2009|12:34am] |
So I've spent the better part of every week for the past six weeks in a deposition. I think, in fact, I've spent no more than a single day in the office at a time. This is pretty amazing, given that in prior months I had maybe a week of deposition time away from the office, tops. The down side is that I will be working this Sunday to draft motions and write reports and do other housekeeping type tasks. The up side is I've been all over the place, I've been able to chat with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) jonah777 in between questions, and my hours rock!
Monday I learned I was desperately needed in Milwaukee/Des Plaines, and at 11 pm I was on a plane and off to the Midwestern heat wave. Gah. Fortunately my friend S--also my houseguest this week!--drove me to SFO. I was looking forward to Friday in the office (time to do some work, Friday social hour) until I hit Denver. Denver has figured out that wifi is supposed to be free, but the idiots who designed the "new" airport somehow thought that two outlet plugs PER GATE were sufficient. Were they on drugs? In DIA I learned I would be headed to Pittsburg (CA, thankfully) today. Okay, I'm flexible. The ever wonderful don_negro picked me up at OAK and fed me some hard cider and chili before I crashed.
Fortunately S is the BEST houseguest ever. She ran the dishwasher, folded my laundry, and left me some Charles Chocolates. YUM!
This morning I vaguely overslept, since Potter was in a cuddly kind of mood, and had just enough time to shower, drop documents at the office, and obtain coffee before the deposition started. TGIF people, seriously. We ended after 5, which put me home after 6, though I stopped at BART to drop off a San Francisco-based attorney who was without wheels. I then napped with Potter, which was delicious. Seriously, some hotels have lovely fluffy beds, but there is nothing like being HOME.
The evening was frittered away playing Dark Cloud, drinking Murphy-Goode wine (they didn't even consider me for their PR position, FYI), and petting the cat. Life is good. (Did I mention it is payday?)
Next week was supposed to be three days in the office followed by two in Auburn/Foresthill, until the already swamped trial team lost a motion today and needs all hands on deck. Hence I'm taking another deposition for the first three days of the week (in town, thankfully) before heading out East. Busy, busy, and business is good.
Tomorrow is the firm's annual summer picnic. I'm planning to sleep in, then figure out what foodstuffs I will be taking with me to the noon pig out. I'm not going to stay too late, so I can manage to hit II* at Blazing Star in the evening. I'm sure midnight will find me one tired girl. Sunday I'm sleeping in, and headed to work so I don't miss any of this week's deadlines.
Hope this finds you all well.
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| stallman and free software |
[10 Jul 2009|11:42pm] |
Criticisms or calls for respect of Richard Stallman seem to miss the real importance of the man. People focus on gcc or emacs or the GNU stack, which have certainly been great works; or his more recent GNU/Linux posturing or interviews, which seem to me desperate and nearly pathetic; but these lose the greater context.
I once read the argument that Chomsky -- whether you agree or disagree with his ideas -- serves a useful purpose in delimiting a boundary of the debate. By being "radical", he allows for others to have positions that are more moderate versions of his without themselves getting pegged as radicals. Stallman served the analogous role for free software at a time when it was just not done (the GNU announcement was 1983; Wikipedia says the first nearly free BSD came out in 1991, and the Debian Manifesto was 1993). It'd be excessive to attribute Mozilla or the Free Culture movement just one person but he definitely planted the seed.
In part due to Stallman's influence, today we're not limited to arguing over the relatively minor difference of which megacorp (Microsoft? Apple? mine?) we'd like to license our computers from, but rather whether in a non-zero-sum game like software there are actually moral arguments to be had about sharing beyond simply applying capitalism.
Do I believe in or use the GPL? No, not anymore. But I do believe in free software, and still have a healthy respect for what came before.
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| Biking and such |
[10 Jul 2009|09:40pm] |
I got into a conversation with another cyclist while waiting for the train from Palo Alto. I wanted to know where to get the nifty destination tags that everyone puts on their bikes to make loading them on the train easier. We fell to chatting, and I had what I think will be a typical California conversation about my commuter.
"I like you fenders," he says. I thank him. "Do you mind the weight?" he then asks me.
Translation: It never rains here: what's up with those?
"They're hardly the largest thing on this bike," I say.
"Yeah, I'd noticed that it looks kind of...formidable," he says.
Translation: That's the heaviest bike on the God-damned platform.
"Well, this was my year-round commuter before I moved."
"Oh? Where'd you move from?"
"Boston."
"Boston! Wow! I couldn't imagine biking year-round in Boston," he says.
"Yeah, it isn't for everyone," I say.
Translation: That is because you are weak and have soft skin.
...and so on.
Despite The Girl's and my acumen for picking good places to live, we've arranged yet again to have a commute that's mostly flat but with a brutal hill climb at the end. For reference, my Boston commute from MIT (4.5 miles):
You can see the undulations of Massachusetts Avenue near the start as it goes over the Charles and again over I-90, as well as some mild hills down through Roxbury. What stands out, though, is the ascent right at the end near our house, where you climb sixty vertical feet in very little time. By comparison, my (potential) commute from the 4th & King Caltrain Station, which I rode today (4 miles):
This one climbs 140 vertical feet in the last mile (basically, 26th Street west of Treat) with two nasty humps between Guerrero and Dolores and between Church and Sanchez. Notice that the vertical scale has changed, such that the last hump is nearly twice as tall as the final climb back in Boston. That last one forces me down into my granny gear in front; those two together produce 90 percent of the sweat on the trip.
They're doable, though. I've done them twice, once carrying many, many pounds of groceries and again carrying a laptop and many books. Given the otherwise ridiculously nice character of San Francisco's roads (even Harrison and Bryant by the overpass seem roomy and civilized compared to Boston), this commute should be a breeze.
There is however something wrong with my rear derailer; I'm sure of it now. I think that it was already worn and a little bent, and the bike's being crammed into a moving van may have pushed it over the edge. That's going to need fixing stat.
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| Wherein I tweak the calendar and canvass the voters. |
[11 Jul 2009|01:21am] |
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http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2009/06/15.html It's time for the 2009 SFBG Best of the Bay readers' poll. We made a pretty good showing last year, including winning "Best Dance Club". Let's see if we can do that again, shall we? Categories in this year's poll that are applicable to DNA and our alumni include: "Best Overall Bar", "Best Cocktails", "Best Dance Company", "Best Dance Club", "Best Rock Club", "Best After-Hours Club", "Best DJ", "Best Burlesque Act", "Best Local Blog", and (oddly buried way at the end) "Best Bar". I've changed the calendar pages a bit, and added links that makes it easy for you to add an event into your personal calendar. It handles iCal and Outlook (they're actually the same) and also Google and Yahoo calendars. | It looks like this now: | | It used to look like this: | Most other sites tend to hide this stuff under a +Share box that does a Javascript popup filled with a bunch of "Nascar badges" for the various sites. I'm not sure if that would make this more clear, or less. I'm guessing less. Annoyingly, the API for getting events into the Google calendar won't take URLs that are more than 705 bytes long, so I had to truncate the event description on that kind. You can also subscribe to our full calendar feed in most calendar programs, of course, but this lets you put events in your personal calendar à la carte. Let me know if you find any problems with this stuff, or have suggestions. I keep making the assumption that if we make it easier for people to electronically tell their friends and stalkers about their plans, this will translate into more bodies through the door. It's hard to tell if it's working. Remember yesterday when I asked everyone to "fan" the DNA Lounge Facebook page so that I could set a user name on it? Well, it turns out that they only let you set user names on pages if you already had more than 1,000 fans last month, so the fact that we have more than 1,000 now doesn't matter to them. Oh well... Also, this is old news (in more ways than one) but I just noticed this video on Youtube of Alien Sex Fiend performing at DNA Lounge in 1991. (Actually I'm guessing this was the Nov 1990 show, since as far as I know their next show here was June 1992.) There's also an interview with them from the same show, which is pretty terrible, but I note it only because at around 1:30 and 4:24 in the interview clip you can tell that they're sitting upstairs in the lounge, and that the bricked-over windows on the back wall have glass in them, and are painted black! I had forgotten that they used to look like that. This is from a local public-access music video show called "Post" that I remember watching. They seem to have shot a lot of shows at DNA. Many of the truly ancient clips I've found have come from there. I wonder if it's possible to get DVDs of this show somehow... With a name like "Post", it is, of course, completely ungooglable.
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| why I hate code reviews |
[10 Jul 2009|04:31pm] |
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Comment I just added to the code review thread for a WebKit patch I'm trying to get in:
>Is there a reason that you switched to a boolean argument rather than the enum
>that I suggested?
Yes: because I felt that was a better change. Subtext: I wrote this patch. You are reviewing it to find bugs or confusing code, not to play back-seat driver and make me change everything to the way you would have written it. When you write code, you can use an enum in this situation, and I won't mind.
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| AXIS cameras and IPv6 |
[10 Jul 2009|10:10am] |
So while AXIS has supported IPv6 on their network cameras since, forever ago, I only ever saw it configured via router advertisements. So I emailed them about this, and got the following reply:
"Thank you for contacting Axis Communications. The default setting on the camera for IPv6 is auto; however you can change the IPv6 address inside the Plain Config.
Once you login to the camera, select Setup > System Options > Advanced > Plain Config and select Network."
Lo and behold, it was there on the 210 at work, and this is awesome. No more running a camera behind a linux box with radvd giving it an IP!
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| It's "SCARRED FOR LIFE" FRIDAY |
[10 Jul 2009|10:44am] |
planettom and I started talking (I am annoyed at myself whenever I use the term "talking" for emailing, im-ming, etc. but do it anyways) about what scarred us for life.
I realized that most of the things I remembered scarring me for life were broadcast on TBS!
There was Dirk Benidict transforming into a snake in "Sssssss"
and that scene from "Prophecy" where the guy can't make it under the fence, so you just watch his top half as his legs and pelvis are EATEN BY A RADIOACTIVE BEAR on the other side of the fence! Sorry I can't find that scene. You'll have to imagine it.
But my personal winner was definitely this one:
Enjoy!
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| Herb Simon |
[09 Jul 2009|10:42pm] |
"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.)
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| sold another cartoon, Amanda Palmer |
[09 Jul 2009|08:57pm] |
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music |
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#360: Switched At Birth - Chicago Public Radio |
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The New Yorker just bought another cartoon.
Here is one of the rejects;
New Too Much Coffee Man cartoons up on my website.
Yes. The one woman really was wearing antlers.
Just saw Amanda Palmer at the park. I brought a cd (cds are becoming the new LPs (ie. they're from a bygone era (there's a joke in there somewhere))) for her to sign but she was surrounded by bunches of goth type people. She was reading stories Neil wrote for her. It was sort of cool but it was also a little much for me to deal with.
I just got back from my highschool reunion. About 10 people came up to me with ideas for New Yorker comics. A friend of mine said "there's not enough alcohol here to make these people interesting."
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| SoundExchange |
[09 Jul 2009|07:40pm] |
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music |
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The Cure -- One Hundred Years |
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I can't make any sense of what this new SoundExchange settlement actually means for DNA Lounge. Is someone going to come knocking on my door asking for an additional $25,000 per year because of our webcasts? Given that A) we are already paying ASCAP/SESAC/BMI for them, and B) the webcasts produce zero revenue. If you think you understand this crap, please explain it to me...
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| The Robotic Head of Albert Einstein Teaches Itself to Smile. |
[09 Jul 2009|07:19pm] |
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music |
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Dandi Wind -- Einsteinbrains |
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| And Soon It Will Destroy You. To begin teaching the robot, the researchers stuck Einstein in front of a mirror and instructed the robot to "body babble" by contorting its face into random positions. A video camera connected to facial recognition software gave the robot feedback: When it made a movement that resembled a "real" expression, it received a reward signal.  |
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