Plaidophile

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My first day on the job here was at least as productive as my first two weeks at Amazon. Which isn't to say it was very productive, but still, small victories are great.

I'm also even more excited about this project than when I was getting recruited, so. Very win!

Now I feel really bad that I haven't used Fred (my SIDstation) in a while, because the guy who designed it died in a car accident.

And right now Fred is in storage so it'll be a while before I can even use it en memoriam.

I'm glad I'm finally starting the new job on Monday because god damn am I bored right now. I could use some friends. For all the people I know in the area, nobody seems to actually be around (or if they are, they're not answering their email). Maybe I should call some folks on the phone.

Meanwhile, I heard from a future coworker that things might be a little bit crazy this week at work due to an extremely atypical confluence of high-stress events, so I have a feeling I'm going to just kind of feel like a useless third-party observer for a while. (And in the meantime, said coworker is also going to be on vacation all week. So I'm going to be a total fish out of water! Hooray!)

Oh well. Pretty much every engineering job starts out along these lines. It's where things go from here that makes the difference.

I had these dreams last night:

1. I was at a dinner party somewhere in California with several of my friends from Seattle, including Libbie, Will, and Jenn. For some reason Will was going through my luggage and he found some gray-market estrogen, which he proceeded to do lines of (cocaine-style), and then he licked the mirror when he was done. Then I went back to the hotel (which was based on the one I was staying in), and in my room someone had left a two-piece bikini. It was too small for me, though, and the housekeeping staff (played by my friend Allison back in Las Cruces!) said it wasn't mine anyway. I looked in the bathroom and it was entirely filled with various clothes, mostly in a big pile on the floor, some hung up on hooks, some on partial-body mannequins, and more and more kept on piling in and was about to bury me, so I ran out of the bathroom. The other side of the bathroom wall was a gigantic wall-sized control panel for the air conditioner, which was really loud.
2. I was wandering around downtown San Francisco, and saw some guys fooling around with a payphone, attaching stuff to it. I recognized them and what they were doing from the current (in-dream) cover story of Make Magazine — they were hooking up a pre-paid cellphone to it so that people could make calls to it, as a work of interactive art. They had put one cellphone (some low-end Nokia) into a pedestal in an illuminated cut-out on the top of the phone with an instruction panel, and they had another cellphone (a Samsung) in a Commodore DS-10 VoIP Gateway Box, which looked a lot like a C64GS. Hooked up to it was a slimline version of the Amiga 1200, which the main artist (who was Finnish) was using to reprogram the phone. I chatted with them about the DS-10 VoIP Gateway and asked if it only worked with the Samsung ("no, it's a generic connector that works with all Korean phones, Samsung and LG") and we lamented about how it never actually existed, since Commodore went out of business several years before VoIP was even invented.

Religion: Good or bad?

(I absolutely promise that I won't be posting in this one for a while.)

For those who want a chance to meet up with me before I bugger off from Seattle, here's what's haps:

Since I'm moving and don't know what sort of connectivity options I'll have when I get a place, I just called Speakeasy to cancel my service. The CSR only asked me one question: "Do you want to take Speakeasy with you, or do you need some time to decide?" When I said I needed time to decide, he said, "Okay, let me get the cancellation taken care of for you now." And that was the end of the conversation.

He didn't try to sell me on moving my service or signing up for some transitional dialup service or whatever. Making no attempt at customer retention has actually done more to retain my custom, and so of course Speakeasy will be my first consideration when I'm moved in elsewhere.

So while I was stuck at the airport I needed Internet access. SFO uses T-Mobile HotSpot, which has a number of vastly overpriced options, such as $9.99 for one day of access, $39.99 for a month of access, or $359.88 for a year of access. There is no discount for any of these for existing T-Mobile customers, except on the monthly access, which of course I didn't want.

So I signed up for one day of service (the "day pass" option) and used it to take care of Important Things while I was stranded at SFO.

Bad flash photography adds 15 pounds. Which makes me look 30 pounds overweight. Yes, I could stand to lose 10-15 pounds, but that doesn't make me a morbidly obese fatass on the verge of diabetes or a heart attack. My blood sugar and cholesterol levels are both well within normal parameters. I eat well. I walk a lot. I just have trouble losing weight. Calorie starvation isn't the answer (all that does is make your metabolism slower) and stupid fad diets aren't the answer either. What works well is less stress and more regular meals.

Hopefully I'll be getting a decent daily routine again, and I can actually stick to a decent three-meal-a-day regimen, and I'll definitely be getting 4 miles of biking or walking daily once I move to Oakland. Those are both much more useful than being told "don't eat so much" while simultaneously being offered a larger portion of crap.

"Do you know where our office is?"

"No."

There are two ways to proceed.

The right way: "We're at 10000 Aurora Ave N, do you need directions?"

The wrong way: "Okay, well what part of town are you coming from? Do you know how to get to 85th? Just go there and then if you're coming from Ballard, turn left onto Aurora, which is also Highway 99, and then go up a ways until you see—"

I have had "Don't Look Back In Anger" by Oasis stuck in my head for the last three days.

It is my understanding that the Claremont hotel in Berkeley, CA is not a very good place to stay.

That's the important one.

The recent discovery of AudioCompress being actively used prompted me to finally set set up an SVN repository. (Dreamhost made it mad easy, as always. Though it might take a little while for DNS to propagate, of course.)

What else should I put into SVN? SOLACE maybe? (Cleaning that up for release would take a lot of work though, and it's not really that useful anymore, except as a general reference on how to do things with geometry images...)

Remember AudioCompress, which started life as xmms-compress before I made it generic? Someone's made a "new" XMMS plugin called xmms-normalize using the AudioCompress core.

Meaning they've ported an XMMS plugin to XMMS.

I would have preferred if they'd just submitted a patch to make it compatible with XMMS2 so it could be part of the core AudioCompress distribution, but whatever...

8/11 03:15 This has inspired me to go through the code and basically rewrite it. It's amazing how something I wrote as a quick hack as a grad student is still algorithmically-good but of course several years of professional software engineering have given me a completely different perspective on code quality.

Dear IT guy, techno-retarded guy, and the other IT guy:

1. Shut up
2. Shut up
3. Shut up
4. Shut up
5. Shut up
6. Shut up
7. Shut up
8. Shut up
9. Shut up
10. Please shut up

Why are people emailing me asking me to do things which sound an awful lot like, you know, work?

Just because I'm bored during my downtime doesn't mean I'm so desperate for things to do that I'd do stuff back at Amazon for free...

Things are gelling, schedule-wise. Theoretically I should be getting an offer on my condo very soon, which will close on September 1. I have a party to attend on the 22nd (bowling league wrap-up). So I will probably have the movers come on the 23rd and then I will leave Seattle shortly after, and arriving in San Francisco on (probably) the 24th (unless I get an early enough start on the 23rd, which really depends on how soon the movers can show up).

I guess that means I'll be starting at the new company on the 28th? Cutting it kind of close I guess.

Anyway. Since I won't be in town from the 13th through the 19th, that's limiting the remaining dates on which we can all get together for a final hurrah.

nt