A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

So I’m down here in the basement, where a couple of my machines are set
up, and I’m walking on the treadmill. (If you’re just off enough
in the head you can do walking meditation at 2 mph on the treadmill at
3 in the morning.) There, on the screen door outside the
(thankfully closed) glass sliding door is the biggest, ugliest bug I’ve
ever seen. The thing was (is) about 3″ long, with some beetle
like shell and it had revoltingly thick legs for a bug.

I tapped the glass and it stopped it’s ascent up the inside of the
screen. I thought for a moment about what to do, briefly
considering popping it with a 22. But then I figure I don’t
really wanna pop anything with a 22 except some balloons filled with
fun splotchy stuff or some full soda cans, just to see them explode.

But this friggin bug was just stopped, hanging on the screen lookin up
at me with them big round bug-ass eyes. GAH! Made me wanna
call a girlfriend to come kill it.

Ok, no it didn’t. I just thought that’d be funny. Besides
*sigh* ain’t no one to call. (”Pull out the nails & climb down…
we need the wood.” “Yeah, I guess. Nobody else seems to.”
ANYway…)

I looked around the basement for something aerosol and flamable, not to
mention a lighter (’cause let’s face it, unless efficiency or
collateral damage is an issue, there’s only one right way to deal with
bugs.)

I walk towards the water heater and some movement catches my eye.

There, crawling across the floor at a fairly alarming pace (perhaps
skittering might be a better term) is a little salamander/lizard
thingie. S/he was black with little yellow spots and a long tail
that looked like it had been snipped half-off in a scuffle. I’d seen
one of these guys the other night (few days ago) and while surprised, I
didn’t think much of it.

So I got a little paper plate, off of which I had eaten my last
brownie, just before TriGun and I knelt down and coaxed him on.
We then took a little ride up the stairs, through the kitchen and to
the glass sliding door that works, and opens out onto the deck, where I
dumped him from a reasonable height.

I get back down stairs and Skeletor the demon bug is gone.
Great. Probably teleported into some otherwise clean piece of
clothing that I’m going to wear tomorrow.

I’m way too creeped out to sleep. But it’s pushing 4 am. Might be a nytol night.

UPDATE:  I was just about
to shut down the computers and head off to nighty night sleepy–bye
land when I came across another little black lizzard dude with yellow
spots.  I really hope I’m not hallucinating.

Mark Twain. “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. ” [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

Clifton Fadiman. “One’s first book, kiss, home run, is always the best.” [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

In the conversion fury I’d entirely forgotten about the Radio Tool written by Steve Hooker that creates an RSS file of ALL posts.

In retrospect, it’s probably the thing I oughta have used.  Especially since I’d already installed it.

But part of me is kinda glad I didn’t have to deal with more friggin xml than I had to.

Nice tool though.  Check it out over here.

I’m getting there. Slowly but surely.

Andy Fragen developed a tool for radio (on his Public Tools
page) that extracts all posts out into individual files that are a bit
more intuitive than the radio root file export function.

I’ve taken the result of that and ripped it with the perl script I just hacked together (0.1 version retrievable here) to get a decent baseline cut of files as expected by a vanilla (i.e. no plugin) install of Blosxom.

So far so good. There are bundles of features to add to the script, especially as I add plugins to my install.

I invite suggestions & comments.

Baby steps.
Baby steps.

• 500 3×5″ cards?   $3.97
• File box for said cards?  $9.98
• 100 grid design 3×5 cards?  $1.97
• 3 decks of 50 spiral bound index cards each for the road $2.99
• 25 classic manila 3×5 tab cut A-Z cards: $2.97

The 3 minutes of delusional bliss that this crap is going to make me magically organized and productive…

Priceless.

I really thought this would be a cakewalk.  But it’s turning out to be a righteous pain in the ass.

I’ve been working on extracting the entirety of this blog from radio and putting it in “Some Reasonable Format”(tm).

The form of SRF is up for grabs.  I’m simultaneously working on slamming it into Tinderbox and into data files that Blosxom plays nice with.

The extraction of the posts from weblogData.root went “well”.  But
the resulting morass of crap sure seems needlessly complex.

The trick as I see it is to design a nice simple SQL database that can house all this garbage.

I’ll post my findings as I find them.

w00t!

Got to hang out with Pascale yesterday.  It was trippy how trippy
it wasn’t…. or… something like that.  Both of us were fairly
low key due to a synchronistic sleep deprivation problem.

We hit the top of the Empire State Building.  It’s kinda funny, my
father has worked there for something distressingly close to 35
years.  So I haven’t been there in the last ….err… almost 30.
(To the top that is.  Going to work with Dad was always one of the
surrealist high-points of my childhood.  It’s weird watching
people who are terrified of the boss and not knowing quite how to deal
with you as the 8 year old along for the ride.  But I digress, per
usual.)

The tourists were thick for a Friday afternoon.  Alas, they’re returning to my city.  Good and bad.

But it’s big up there!  Manhattan looks strangely misproportioned
from the 86th floor of the ESB.  You can see cars and people just
fine, but things that are quite far away seem strangely close. 
Union Square is just over there.  Central Park is just up that
way.  Not so far really.  And I forgot how wide the Hudson
really is.

We walked downstairs, solved the caffeine emergency, and hoofed it
farther than I’d expected before getting in a strangely enlightened,
overly decorated cab with subtle incense and tasteful middle eastern
(or am I supposed to call that “south asian” now) music.

The cab let us off at the hole.  You know.  The hole.

The fake handbag salesmen were lining the street and as I started to
get out of the cab they scooped up their wares in the giant sheet on
which it was all laid out and started around the corner. 
Apparently they saw a cop.  As one guy bundled up his sheet, one
bag dropped.  In true New York fashion a girl dressed in black
scooped it up as if she’d just dropped it herself and without a word
kept walking.  If the vendor noticed he didn’t say anything.

All this happened between the time I opened the door and when my foot hit the pavement.  It was absolute New York poetry.

We were standing on the street corner waiting to cross and I was
describing what had just happened to Pascale when I said “nope.  I
can’t see her.  I wanted to congratulate her on her ground
score.”  I turned around and there she was.  We exchanged
high-fives.

“And hey, look… It’s a Calvin Klein!”  She said.

“A real fake Calvin Klein!  Nice!  I mean, it’s not a real fake Kate Spade.  But you can’t argue with the price.”

“Hey, it fell off the back of a truck for him. It fell off the back of a truck for me.”

Can I TELL you how much I love my city?  (Why is it that whenever
the phrase “my city” comes up in my head I think of the insane Irishman
in Braveheart “It’s my island.”?)

We continued on and looked at the cross, marveled at the rate of
construction, and walked around the north side of the hole towards the
financial center.

We ate dinner at Southwest New York.  It’s a great place that, for
reasons I don’t quite understand, is never terribly crowded.  It
serves as a wall street after-work spot, overlooks the river and has
really great food.  (Plus it’s got a couple of the cutest
waitresses in New York without that “couldn’t tell you their own name”
pretentious bitch model wanna be crap you get at Union Square Cafe,
where the food sucks anyway.)

I didn’t realize I could get quite so cloudy after one snifter of
Scotch, 25 year old Macallan or not.  Oops.  Perhaps I
could’ve flirted with the waitress a little less.

Afterwards we walked around there for a bit before taking the 4 up to GCT and going our separate ways.

A damn good day.

A couple thoughts:

• I always like people much more in person.  There are a
  couple exceptions, but those are really people I just dislike to begin
  with.
• As a New Yorker I feel strangely guilty that I have remarkably
  little to say about the sites.  As we walked around the top of the
  Empire State Building I was taking it in, amused and excited about
  where I was.  But I couldn’t answer any of the “what’s that
  building?” questions.  Nor did I have any cutesy little insider
  information.  The World Trade Hole is a bit of a different matter
  really.
• It was my first time down since I moved up.  The contrast is
  nothing short of shocking.  While driving down I felt my neck
  tighten up as I got closer to the Willis Ave bridge.  When we sat
  in Starbucks on 5th & 33rd I was very highly energized and peaceful
  as I watched the frenzied comings and goings of New Yorkers.

P.S.  Don’t even guess about the title.  Inside joke.  You’ll be wrong.

When your email address changes, how much overlap time do you
give?  I have FAR too many accounts that point to my earthlink
mpwilson address.  But now I’ve just confirmed the optonline dot
net mpwilson1969 is up and the idea of paying for multiple accounts
while unemployed is…well… “suboptimal”.  I suppose there
really are just too many things involving money that rely on it to
start thinking about deprecating just yet.

But what I’m going to be using as my primary email address has changed to optonline.net, user mpwilson1969.

If you can’t figure that out then you have other problems.

Well, it feels like it anyway.  I popped a nytol to get to sleep
at a reasonable hour so I could wake up at a reasonable hour. (Shifting
your body clock 8 hours by force is pretty much only accomplished by
chemistry.)

Why would I do such a thing?

‘Cause I’m about to get in the car (*yay*) and drive down to the city to meet Dirty Grace Flint.

I was going to drive down to the train station, but that would cost $30
plus parking.  Driving down and parking in a lot will cost me at
most $20.

But now to wake up I’m gonna need to pop a Stacker.  Maybe I’ll just get a couple Red Bull on the road.

Ugh.

Nope. Won’t happen. The comparison while enlightening, is
kinda misleading. (Well… not really. But sorta.) These
two databases serve different purposes and markets. There’s a bit
of apple/orange going on here. If you have the design luxury of
being able to statically embed a database engine in your code, then the
overhead that’s cut out of the IP-based client/server model is a big
win.

But as soon as you move beyond a small-scale website or desktop
application, you have concurrency issues that require logically remote
access to your DB engine. It requires an engine that can resolve
things like deadlock and race conditions. For instance, if you
have a database and A is happily reading data while B is changing it…
what happens? Does A have unacceptably stale data? Does it
crash because more than one client is accessing the same data at the
same time? Is the update lost? How about if both clients
are trying to modify the same piece of data at the same time?
They can’t both work. etc…etc… This is something you
get in a large-scale database server like MySql that you can’t get in
SqlLite. (It’s possible to implement low/moderate level data
locking in static engines, but not without incredible performance
costs, and it really just abstracts the problem 1 level.)

What I’d be interested in seeing, for no reason other than idle
curiosity, is a benchmark comparison of the engines themselves, without
the connectivity overhead. I’ll bet SQLLite is full of
lead. I think a slightly better comparison would be between
SQLLite and Metakit.

There are all kinds of applications for which only simple database
persistence is necessary and for those SQLLite is an absolute dream
come true. I’ve been using it in several of my apps.

But as database engines go, these two are just not playing the same sport.

God DAMN that’s better. I just got my self-install cable modem
kit from Optimum online. Hell, it’s a free rental for the
duration of the account so I figured what the hell, beats spending $100
on the cable-modem I would’ve bought anyway.

It’s good to be a user sometimes. The kit contains a 6′ length of
coax, a 25′ length of coax, the cable modem, a splitter, and a usb
cable.

1. Unplug the cable box
2. screw on the splitter
3. screw on the 6′ & connect it back to the cable box
4. screw on the 25′ & route it back through the hole in the floor
5. thread the cable over to the command center.
6. plug in the cable modem
7. plug the coax into it
8. plug the router into the wall
9. plug 3 cat 5e cables into the computers
10. plug 1 cat 5e into the cable modem
11. point a web browser at the IP address of the router.
12. de-select DSL, select “Cable Modem”
13. Internet Access Achieved

Took about 10 minutes. Most of that was spent untangling cat 5
and routing coax through the beams and pipes in the basement ceiling
here.

Now to go download massive amounts of GARBAGE!

hmm… now where are those overnet and freenet icons…

UPDATE:  There’s a bit of trouble in paradise.  Since
I’m now connected through optimum online, I can’t send email from my
primary earthlink account.  I can still receive it, just can’t
send.  On top of that, there’s a warble in the universe that’s
prevented me from setting up the new email account successfully. 
Just got off the phone with happy tech dude and it’s in the pipe and
will likely take 48-72. :-/  So if people start seeing weird
emails coming from a ’son of crow’ (in russian) at yahoo.com account,
that’s me… or some friggin email forgery.

Kill Bill

The Wachowski brothers can just go back to serving fries now.

Or they could probably get a job as grips for Mr. Tarantino.

Radio barfed on me bigtime for a few days.  Seems back to “normal” now. 

Over the next couple weeks I’m going to be banging into shape my new domain:

www.mpwilson.com

There’s nothing there yet but a boilerplate.  But I’m going to
move UCCU over there as well as add a bunch of content.  Some
vacation pics that people have been clamoring for.  A bunch of
source code, and some stupid CGIs no doubt.

I’ll keep y’all updated with what’s moving when, etc.  But eventually I’m just snipping off this radio blog.

See I thought I’d be clever, so I set Radio to do an ftp based upstream
to the local ftp server. Well… I wish I could say I was
surprised that it didn’t work, but I’m feeling crabby about radio today.

So I disabled the ftp upstreaming and I think I may have hosed the local config.

If you’re reading this, I didn’t.

Yeah, the zonkboard (that little message posting thingie that was on
the right side of the page there for about 30 days) had to go.  It
was all of a sudden replaced with a “Your trial version has expired,
please come give us money so we can effectively prohibit dial-up users
from EVER pulling down the bloated web page that is your blog’s front
door.”  I thought it was a free “diet” version.  Ah
well.  Cya.

Not that it’s not bad enough already.  Dial-up users, I feel your
pain.  I’m now one of you.  This page (unless of course
you’re aggregating me) is prohibitively cluttered with CRAP.

With the move I should get rid of the NYC bloggers badge, and the imood
thingie can certainly go.  I haven’t updated it in months. (Of
course, that’s largely because I’m still feeling pretty damn
freaky.)  That little cute redhead needs to be updated from 11201
to 06883, but I ain’t giving her up… Someone once pointed out the
apparent disparity between my picture (check the Ryze link over on
the  left there) and the weatherpixie.  It hadn’t occurred to
me that people model weather pixies after themselves.

It’s like Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games;  I
almost ALWAYS play a female character.  I figure if I’ve gotta
look at an avatar while I play, there’s no reason it can’t be a cute
one.  Besides, when boys think you’re a girl playing the game they
go easy on you and give you stuff.  And they also feel worse when
a girl beats them like a rented mule. Yes, boys are stupid that
way.  And yes, I think they need to be shamelessly taken advantage
of until they bloody well get over it.  And hey, a free Serrated
Bone Dirk and Dragoon Dirk are welcome any day.

Let’s see, what other garbage can I post…

OOH OOH!!! I’m moving!

No smartass, it’s not a flashback.  I mean The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty is moving!

Fuck Radio.

As a developer, I understand.  I really do.  Radio is
someone’s baby.  There  are people over at Userland who take
pride in their work and do a good job adding features (I’d say ‘and
fixing bugs’ but… well, momma always said something about saying
something nice…)  But facts are facts:  Radio is an
unforgivibly unstable unrepentant bloated resource hog.  It’s big,
it’s buggy, it’s opaque.

It’s Ass.

So I’ve been spending the weekend working on a bitch-slapped amalgam of
Blosxom and my own wiki code, along with dipping my toes in Python a
bit, in order to get:

1. This blog snaked and templated so I can regenerate it and move it to the new site (url to be announced.)
2. A blogging system that I LIKE instead of one that’s “least bad”.

For instance, one of the things I use very frequently is an emacs wiki
mode.  It’s one of the three live-wiki environments I’m aware of
(by “live wiki environment” I mean a system where the editing
environment is actively hotlinked as WikiWords are typed.

The other two (because there’s one or two of you out there who gives a
shit… the rest of you hang on, I’ll go back to the drivel in a sec)
are VoodooPad (which rocketh rightously) and Corvus, a wiki
implementation I wrote a while ago in Perl/Tk.  (It would also
detect at runtime if it was being used as a cgi and would run
appropriately.  It could also cross-link to multiple repositories
with different rules for what created a wiki word and with different
markup, and it could interoperate with them seamlessly after a little
setup.)

Ok.  There was gonna be more.  But I’ve gotta take a bio break here…

…of setting little goals.

By the end of October I’ll have a nice little short story all shined up.  I might even post it. 

I’ll also have an app up here (or someplace) suitable for public
consumption.  There are several candidates in my development
queue, so I’m not sure which one will make the “3 weeks ’til version
0.9″ cut.  But we’ll see.

I’m happy to take suggestions.

I’ve been making a minor rule of not cross-posting (need a better term for that) BUT…

AT LUNCHTIME TODAY, I moderated
a panel discussion on digital downloading and music, featuring a bunch
of musicians, songwriters, and industry people from Nashville. Here’s
the scary bit: one of the industry guys said that their big legislative
priority is to try to create a regime where you have to register with a
unique, verifiable ID to access the Internet.

No doubt the next step would be to take away that ID as punishment for “misconduct” on the Internet. [InstaPundit.Com]

This pretty much makes me retch.

On one hand there’s the battery of people who’ll say “Yeah, but if
you’re not doing anything wrong, what do you have to fear?” To which I
just shake my head in disappointment and pity. (One minor argument to
that is that no, I’m not doing anything wrong by today’s rules… but what about tomorrows?)

On the other hand? I fear this is inevitable.

I’ve pretty much stopped buying music in the last two years.
Recently (a couple days before the move) I went into Virgin in USquare
and was actually shocked at the number of CDs, CDs
mind you, that were $19. Damnit. They really just aren’t
worth that. I never thought pricing would ever actually prevent
me from buying music.

And it takes a great deal for me to boycott something on
principle. Chirac pushed me over the edge this spring (and,
defying all logic, continues to do so.)

Now I’ve got another.

Could someone tell me where Tuesday went?