Plaidophile

DO WANT (if that link doesn't work, it's for the N81, as described in this preview article on Switched)

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• Entry aggregation. Lots of feeds I subscribe to happen to carry many of the same item, but there's no one feed of the group that I can have which definitively contains everything else (e.g. MacRumors, MacNN, Ars Technica, and the Register all often carry the same stories, but they also carry a lot of different stuff from each other). Looking at the text of two entries and seeing if they have certain lengths of phrases in common would be exceedingly nice. Then on the aggregation page it could just show the text they share in common (or try to figure out which one is the most definitive, e.g. by looking at which one gets linked to the most or which one came chronologically first or whatever) and then provide an easy way to inspect the others (which could be sorted by, say, Levenshtein distance)
• Automatic subscription to feeds that you come across (e.g. for comment feeds or for webcomics or whatever), paired with intelligently altering the poll rate based on frequency of updates (after a year there's no reason to poll every comment thread on a weblog every hour). Or at least the second one, paired with an easy "subscribe to feeds" button (which many browsers have already). It'd be nice if more things used RSS for comment notification (email notification sucks!) but I'd hate to see the web die because 10 million aggregators each poll 10 million pages hourly.

Ever since I made it to San Francisco, every time I start my car the "maintenance required" light blinks for about 10 seconds, but then goes out. There's no buzzer or anything. I think it may just be because it (finally) passed the 4500-mile mark and so it might just be an oil change reminder. Hopefully it's not something like the engine not appreciating the 1000-mile drive shortly after being mostly garaged for a year and a half.

Usually service reminder lights are solid and stay on until the service has been performed, though, and flashing usually means something more important that wouldn't be disregarded by the computer after the engine revs.

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 was just channel-surfing and came across some kids' show on PBS called Raggs which involves a lot of people in fursuits talking about doing things. The segment I flipped into was a bunch of supporting characters showing Raggs what sporting events he could go through, and one of the supporting characters was sitting in a wheelchair looking despondent while everyone else was running and jumping. When it got to wheelchair-dog's turn, though, he cheerily said "And you can also THROW things!"

Also, the pink girl dog looks like she has cold sores.

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 decided that for now I'd just be happiest renting, so I signed a one-year lease for a very nice access-controlled apartment in SoMa (the "Gillespie" unit). It's in walking distance from work (about 1.5 miles each way) and the management company seems to have it together (they win awards for customer service and have a 24-hour guarantee on all maintenance and so on). It's also right next to a Whole Foods and close to a Safeway and so on.

Having been a homeowner multiple times, I'm not really sure it's right for me. I tend to move pretty quickly and although I've always lucked out and turned a profit, I've never actually come ahead vs. renting. (On the other hand, it's always been very nice being able to have whatever appliances I want.) Aside from the occasional maintenance problems and the feeling of isolation (the latter being more because of my lack of social life at the time), I did like living at Wall Street Tower.

Rule of thumb is that up to 30% of income should go to rent, and I'm looking at nicey-nice places in San Francisco. Given my budget and expenses (no family, an ability to actually save money on my own, already having all the toys I care for, etc.) I think I'd be better off renting and then putting the rest into savings or stocks/CDs/whatever.

I got here about an hour and a half ago, and am finally sitting down to write a post. Unfortunately my Internet connection is rather spotty right now, as for some reason my brother-in-law took the wireless router to Senegal with him, so I'm just mooching off a neighbor for the time being.

Random things about the trip:

• It's amazing how suddenly the scenery changes between Oregon and California. One minute it's dense lush Pacific Northwest stuff, the next minute it's high desert.
• Stop-and-go with a clutch is rather difficult, especially after 10 hours of driving. My left foot and right knee are extremely sore right now.
• It's been a long time since I've had a drive exceeding one hour. I could use a nice hot bath. After a nice hot meal. But I don't want to get up from the nice, soft couch.
• I'm amazed I could find such a good parking spot so close to my sister's place. It's fortunate, too, what with all the schlepping.
• I really should have checked my tire pressure before I left, seeing as how I hadn't checked the pressure for over a year. I kind of assumed that the low-pressure indicator on my car would turn on before the tires reached 20PSI. It didn't. (Amazingly I still got 35MPG before I finally filled them. In Yreka, CA.)
• It also caught me off-guard when I noticed that the outdoor temperature indicator on my car does, in fact, have three digits. Northern California was about 104ºF. Of course that was also the home of possibly the only rest stop in the country which doesn't have vending machines. What the hell.
• Just so that I could do a final MPG calculation I decided to get my last (half-)tank of gas just outside of Oakland (before I hit traffic) insead of at the very end. The pump wouldn't take my credit card for some reason, so I went inside to get a fillup. I gave the clerk my card and said, "Fillup on pump 7, please." In very incomprehensible Chinese-English he said something I didn't understand, and eventually I figured out he was saying I needed to give an actual amount. I said, "Just a fillup." He argued with me. Finally the other clerk said, "just give us your card and ID." And then it proceeded normally. When I got back the first clerk apologized and said that a lot of people there drove off without paying which is why they required prepayment. Of course he could have just taken my fucking card (which I was giving him ANYWAY) and ID (which I would have been happy to provide to begin with if he had just asked) rather than turning it into an instant shouting match. It's not like I was trying to steal anything, I just wanted to fucking get gas. (And I wonder if they disabled pay-at-the-pump for some similarly braindead reason, when like, if you've put your card in at the pump, it's already going to charge you for whatever gas is pumped before you replace the nozzle.)

Made it to Salem, OR before I got so tired I had to quit. Unfortunately all the hotels in Salem are booked because I just happened to decide to move the week of the Oregon State Fair. Oops.

So I ate a handful of Penguin Mints and after they kicked in I continued on to Albany, where I got the last non-smoking room at the La Quinta. Yay for free wifi, boo for paying out the nose.

Fortunately, the actual move came in way below the estimate so I'm sure this is still within my relocation budget.

Religion: Good or bad?

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

The movers should be here in about 40 minutes.

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

So the only major thing I have left to do before The Big Move tomorrow is getting rid of my futon. I already donated the desk to Goodwill. Unfortunately, I'm sore and tired from moving the desk. Nobody in the building wants it though. I guess I could ask for help in moving it down to my car. Whee.

5:37 Maybe I'll just keep the damn futon. It's a pretty okay futon. And really, I'd just be replacing it with another futon anyway.

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.

Although I didn't exactly expect a $240 Ikea couch to last forever, it'd have been nice if it lasted more than 14 months. And if it didn't break during my going-away pseudoparty.

Oh well. One less thing for the movers to move, I guess. (Though I guess I'll keep the cushions. They're at least somewhat useful. Or maybe I could, you know, fix it, but it doesn't seem all that worth it really. Especially since it looks like the shock of the beam splitting also caused some of the hinges on the back to tear off.)

I decided to reject the seller's counteroffer. I guess I'll find an apartment which I can rent on a short-term basis until I find something nicer. Are 3- or 6-month leases common in San Francisco?

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.

My flight back to Seattle was half an hour before I thought it was, and my sister, frequent traveler that she is, didn't think it was necessary to get to the airport until 45 minutes before boarding (which wouldn't have been as much of a problem if I'd actually bothered to double-check my itinerary). So now I'm on standby for a much later flight which is overbooked, and will probably not get back to Seattle until sometime either really late tonight or really early tomorrow. Maybe it'll be just in time for me to get to my 10 AM appointment with the title company. Hooray.

On top of that I got almost no sleep last night because my sister's upstairs neighbors are complete assholes who have late-night parties and dog races and who knows what the fuck else in their apartment.

Also, while most of SFO is very nice, Alaska Air is in a crappy terminal with almost no shops (nothing which sells toothbrushes or replacement phone chargers or whatever) and a few terrible food places. And of course my toothbrush and my phone charger are in my checked baggage. Which goes back to Seattle no matter what. Yayness.

1:35 PM Yay, the friendly gate agent I talked to earlier just came over to me and gave me a real boarding pass! As soon as they released seats for no-shows she immediately got me one. I love Alaska Airlines. They have just won my loyalty. ♥

6:00 PM Home now. Also, worth mentioning that Alaska did everything they could to help some travelers get off the plane faster when they had a quick connection to make. That was cool.

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.

What's wrong with this keyboard? (Besides the "open apple" key no longer being that...)

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

I'm hunting weal estate!

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

Okay, so the new .Mac photo gallery has this feature where people can email their photos to the gallery and it'll get synced into your iPhoto library.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks this is a fantastically BAD idea, especially if it's enabled by default. It certainly brings goatse'ing to a new level, at least.

Also, considering how much spam is sent as an image attachment, having the email address scrapable by a bot means that suddenly a lot of peoples' personal photo galleries will also have hot stock tips and porn...

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.

I'm going crazy for lack of anything to work on. Which of the following should I do?

• Unity
• Pernicious
• The other comic idea that's been pinging around (though it'll require a lot of scripting and planning to do right and that gets kind of discouraging)
• My social network forum platform thingamabobber
• Something else entirely?

nt

I haven't drawn anything in so long. I haven't made any music in so long. I need to actually do something creative, like work on Unity or Pernicious or one of the other dumb comic ideas I have. Meh.

On the plus side, I should be getting an offer on my condo tomorrow. On the minus side it'd be contingent on someone else's home sale and the close date would be on September 1, which makes logistics a bit tricky since I was hoping to be in San Francisco by then. Maybe another quicker offer will come in by then though. Or maybe this buyer could get a bridge loan or something.