Plaidophile

Because we haven't milked it quite enough just yet, we are having a party, with a lot of live music and games and other such entertainment. Be there, or be somewhere else.

So, I'm finally done with all my dental work for this time around. As much as I like Dr. Georges, I'm probably not going to miss the weekly visits (even if they were a nice break from the stress of work). But because of all the work that was done (a crown and a bunch of fillings) and my tendency to clench my teeth while I sleep (see "stress of work," above) my mouth is really sore and probably will be for quite some time.

Of course the real pain was getting the bill today, since my insurance only covers $1500/year, and the total damage was $3158. Hoorayness.

Octothorpe (one of the bands I'm in) will be playing at Jillian's (at 731 Westlake Ave N in Seattle) as part of the Dept. of Records CD release party for "Drink To Bones That Turn To Dust," an Oingo Boingo tribute album.

The concert is at 8 PM on Saturday the 28th. Watch me spaz out on the drums or whatever.

1. I ♥ Malbec
2. A good waiter-style corkscrew is a heck of a lot easier and faster to use than a wing-style opener. Screw rabbit-ears openers. There's a reason waiters use waiter-style openers. (But it has to be a good double-hinged one, not one which is just a corkscrew and a useless lever thing which can't actually reach the lip of the bottle when the corkscrew is inserted. The one I linked to is the specific one I have, which also has a really nice foil cutter. I bought it at Target though Target's website doesn't list it but it cost $6.)

I can't seem to get iTunes-LAME to work on iTunes 7. When I try to run it I get an unhelpful error. Did iTunes 7 break the way it furnishes playlists? And of course the Blacktree forums are down and thanks to the magic of robots.txt, there's no Google cache for the few pages which look like promising leads for information.

Guess I'm encoding in AAC for now. Meh.

After a day of getting my BlackBerry configured at work:

• All messages show up conmingled into a single "messages" view with no way to group them by origin by default (you can have it show a single origin but you can't see at a glance your incoming messages sorted by type, e.g. SMS, corporate email, personal email, etc.)
• External email accounts each get their own "folder" but there's no way to exclude them from the main folder
• You can't make it ring and vibrate at the same time; you can only make it vibrate and then ring
• You can't change the way it vibrates. "Vibrate" means pulse exactly twice.
• In certain circumstances it doesn't seem to notify for calendar events. I can't quite figure out which circumstances those are.
• Due to the funky keyboard, ssh is basically useless (on the plus side, I spend too much time working anyway so this'll help me to stop since I won't be able to do it constantly)
• It has three different web browser apps, and as far as I can tell the only difference between them is the start page (on the other hand it's easy enough to hide the two I don't use)
• Of the themes that are available, most of them suck (including the default one). The only one which doesn't suck is Smoothie, which is only accessible as an OTA download via their walled-garden portal so I can't even link to it.
• Getting it initially configured to sync was a bit wonky
• No task list categories
• Really weird and inconsistent UI (especially with how click vs. alt-click vs. enter works)
• The bundled IM app sucks for a bunch of reasons (it's unreliable, if there's a network interruption it apparently doesn't enqueue a message for retransmission, the buddy list is often incorrect, there's no way to specify or see a buddy icon), but the third-party apps don't work
• Sometimes it doesn't actually provide calendar notifications (which is, of course, the ONLY ACTUAL REASON I GOT A BLACKBERRY)

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So I had more dental work today (only one more appointment left, yay), but the stuff on my right side is still pretty sore because I've been clenching my teeth at night and so it hasn't been able to heal (though the dentist did adjust the bite on the crown a little more which should help a lot). Also the dentist had to use a heck of a lot of novocain because the molar just wouldn't get numb, so my face is still a little numb and moreso it's rather paralyzed. So between the pain, inability to chew, and inability to coordinate my lips I decided to improvise something simple and easy to eat. So I made kicked-up macaroni and cheese, with ham and green chili.

So the blackberry got here today. The UI is very different than anything else I've used, though I think I will be able to get used to it. The realt amazing thing, though, is that T-Mobile provisioned my service immediately, unlike the sidekick which took them a few days.

1. When I get stressed out over something stupid, my manager does whatever he can to make it right. Usually he succeeds.
2. My officemate knows a lot more about C++ than me, having actually worked in it since I was in grade school. He is not afraid to dive into my code and critique it, and he found a lot of stuff which could be improved a lot (and this is seriously the first time that's happened to me, and I was totally hapy to hear it). I'm always happy to learn new things, and glad when someone else wants to work on my stuff rather than just trust/expect me to do it all solo.

Dangit, I'm so sick of the sun setting so early. My circadian rhythms are so jacked up right now.

So, when the Sidekick 3 came out I was lured by its promise of being a better platform which had fixed all of the problems which turned me off on it so many years ago, but I quickly found that to not be the case.

Today I ordered a Blackberry 7105t, since it's actually supported at work, and is an open platform which doesn't, you know, suck. Also work will pay for the data service, so even though the service costs more it'll end up costing me less.

What do you call it when you're running late for work but you're not in any particular hurry? Sashaying, maybe?

I guess I'm sashaying late for work.

Today I noticed that yesterday someone posted a for-sale listing for his old fretless bass guitar, and so I emailed him about it expecting it to be sold already. He replied and said it was still available but there were a number of people interested in it but hadn't bought it yet.

So I went over to his office to check it out.

Actually a bit more than halfway, since all the major invasive stuff is done with.

My mouth actually looks decent again!

Dr. Georges had to use a hell of a lot of anaesthetic this time though, and even then it still wasn't quite enough when he was removing the old crappy fillings I got when I was a grad student. So he had to inject directly into the mandibular nerve. So even my ear is numb, which I didn't even realize until I put in my earbuds afterwards — my hand said "go" but my ear said "no!"

So, I don't actually like using my phone as an mp3 player, since all of the headphones which work with it are expensive and crappy (as I found out by wasting $40 on a Jabra set), the mp3 player itself is pretty horrible (it doesn't support shuffle by album, if the device resets then it loses its track of where it was in the playlist and starts all the way from the beginning and doesn't even reshuffle), and actually getting music on it to begin with is way more hassle than it should be.

So I got an iPod Nano (4GB, pink). They sure are pink. The website doesn't do the pinkness justice. I was hoping it'd be more of a fuchsia/magenta but oh well. As the packaging says, "Like a fine pair of jeans, iPod nano colors may vary and change over time." Maybe I should have gotten a blue one, though. This is the price of buying things online, I guess.

Yesterday I finally got around to buying Darwinia after having enjoyed the demo. Today I finished it. It's been a long time since I've been so compelled by a game to simply devour it as quickly as I could.

I don't like most RTSes, but Darwinia abstracts away the resource management enough that you hardly even notice it. It also has a great visual and audio style (with music by trash80, one of my favorite minimal electronica producers), and a lot of great little homages to the classic demoscene (it's worth starting up repeatedly just to see the various "bootloader" intros for example).

• April 2006: Car gets broken into. Thieves don't steal anything. Costs $250ish to get the window replaced.
• September 29: The window which was replaced suddenly decides it's too indie to roll up and down, and is stuck halfway (and flopped over at an alarming angle) when my friend John decided to roll it down. Clearly some problem due to the installation failing. Fortunately it has a lifetime warranty and so that should be easy to take care of.
• September 30: Technician comes out to my home to see what happened with the window. The previous installer used the wrong epoxy mix, and so the retention tab broke off. Normally this wouldn't be a problem but the window ended up smashing into the regulator (which is what keeps it on track). It'll have to be brought into a shop; his belief is that the regulator can be repaired.
• October 2: I make an appointment to get the regulator fixed and the window reinstalled. The appointment is for Friday. I work it into my schedule.
• October 8: I take the car into the shop and recap what has happened so far with the shop tech (who seems to also be the local manager). "It broke the regulator?!" "Yes, but the on-site technician seemed to think it could be repaired—" "Regulators can't be repaired." "Oh, that's not what the on-site techn—" "I'm not the on-site technician." 15 minutes later: "The regulator is broken. I'll have to order a new one. I'll give you a call when it arrives, which should be in a few days." Argh. At least they have fully admitted fault and it won't cost me anything but time. The shop guy was definitely irritated at both the original OST and the later one for messing up the install and not knowing what is apparently a basic established fact about car windows, respectively, though.
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From an article about Cartoon Network's live-action movie (which is already such a headache-inducing concept):

Dominic Janes (Alex Taggert on ER) stars as 12-year-old Jimmy Roberts, who while visiting the famous Gollyworld Park, has an accident with the park trolley that requires an emergency brain transplant. Gollyworld doctors give him the frozen brain of the famous cartoonist Milt Appleday (comedy veteran Fred Willard), which enables Jimmy to see a whole world of cartoon characters who turn his life upside down wherever he goes.

Er, I suppose that Jimmy's own brain didn't actually contain any of Jimmy's thoughts or memories, then, and that the brain is only useful for coming up with ideas or doing math or something.

Last night I had a dream that someone (my identical twin sister, I think) was lecturing me that dreams were meaningless.

Then I got a haircut at the community college. It was terrible. Then I got to the house that I had just bought and discovered I had an infestation of informational pamphlet droppers.

What's worse than spending an hour trying to figure out what went wrong with the network by changing the configuration and reworking cables everywhere?

Finding out it's because the phone cord somehow got unplugged from my DSL modem.

There hasn't been a "Dear fluffy" in quite some time, but Chris just writes in with this:

Hello

Googling for leads on what's been plaguing me for the past six months brought me to your site, specifically this post:

http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/e/2006/06/16-tendinosis.php

I've been diagnosed with everything from tendinitis to deQuervain's to nerve damage in my neck with no luck so I still hunt for answers. Since your wrist posts seem to end after that one I'm very curious: did anything in that post work for you? Have you had any improvements or progress? Living with this, I sincerely hope you have

Regards
Chris

When I was in grad school, I needed a lot of dental work done. Being a poor grad student I could only afford to get the major parts done, and then stopped seeing the dentist.

When I worked for Longtail, I had full dental coverage, but never had the luxury of using it, so I never saw the dentist.

When I got to Seattle I had full dental coverage and the luxury of actually using it, but I had three years of known problems and I was scared to go to the dentist, although I got a good recommendation from Spud.

Two weeks ago, I finally went to the dentist.

Last night I had a dream which was pretty convoluted and I don't remember much of it, but one salient plot-point was that for whatever reason, the ACM kept on sending me SIGGRAPH proceedings even though I was no longer an ACM member.

The bizarre thing was when I got home today, I had a large padded envelope from the ACM: which had the latest SIGGRAPH proceedings in it! (Specifically the "full conference DVD-ROM" set with all the papers, sketches, art gallery, and who knows what else on it.)

I haven't been an ACM member for two years and when I was a member it was pretty unreliable as to whether I got the proceedings or not (sometimes I wouldn't get them at all, sometimes I'd get two or three sets). Now that I haven't been sending them money for a while, I'm actually getting this stuff that I don't care about anymore. And having a dream about it before it happens. Peculiar.

I was at a party, talking with some girl about music (since Spud had apparently been gushing to her about my drumming), and I mentioned my own music as well and when she asked me where she could hear it, I...

I pointed her at the MySpace page.

What the hell.