Author: grid

The holiday is over, at least, technically. (I have yet to exchange gifts with my immediate family because I’m out of town, and because I wasn’t finished shopping before I left town.)

I haven’t seen much of Houston while I’ve been here.

I’m sure there are good aspects to this city, but so far it’s felt like one giant suburb. It doesn’t help that I’m literally in a suburb, and a posh burbclave-type one at that!

I did get to see NASA today. I was thoroughly unimpressed. It was not even as cool as our lovely Science Museum of MN. In fact, I’m sure I’ve learned more about NASA from that science museum than I did from my trip this afternoon.

There were a couple of cool aspects, I guess. One of them was actually seeing some of the big stuff in person. (An Apollo rocket, I think, specifically.) Otherwise, I couldn’t believe how little information they managed to pack into our hour-long tour of the “Historic” Mission Control room. I guess I did learn one or two factoids, (for instance, did you know you dehydrate in zero-g? how about that it’s harder to taste without gravity? weird, huh?) but overall, it was unenlightening. I think they should have had two entrances. The one that I went through, (obviously for tourists and people with mild interest, but no real desire to learn about NASA), and the “other” entrance, the one where you go on cool tours that actually give you dates and figures and stats, and where they show you more than one tiny room, and the pre-recorded tour guide doesn’t sound like it’s talking to a kindergartener.

Anyway, I did enjoy myself just the same.

The trip has been great, overall. Laura’s family is generous and caring. I got a bunch of gifts, which I wasn’t really expecting, and I think Laura and I did a good job of getting everyone stuff that they liked.

Unfortunately, I’ve come down with some kind of nose and throat cold. It seems to be getting better, slowly. I hope I’m feeling better tomorrow, because SCUBA diving will be more enjoyable if I can breathe.

I’m pretty far through Metroid Fusion. It’s only just the last time I played that I got to a part that I couldn’t beat after trying it a couple of times. (I only spent 15 minutes banging my head against this one part… and I’ve already got some new ideas on how to get through it.)

Laura’s dad gave one of her sister’s his old Gameboy color, complete with a couple of puzzle games. Klaxx, which is an old fun one I remember from the arcade (and more recently MAME), and a weird tetris-like variant that I’ve never even seen before, called Ballistic. I’m definitely going to have to try and find Ballistic. It’s different enough that I’m considering it a must-have on my quest to own all types and variety of console puzzle games. (oooh, and a quick search reveals that it was also released for the PSX!)

Well, enough for now. They have DSL, but what with all the hectic lazinessÂ… it hardly matters.

Laura and I are going to visit her parents in Texas. I’m excited about this trip for a couple of reasons… SCUBA and NASA. Two acronyms I’ve always wanted to try. One I can remember what it stands for, one I cannot. One I will get to try this weekend, (and one I will only get to see). I guess it doesn’t make all that much sense to try NASA (although it does sound like some kind of new ad campaign), but it would be fun, wouldn’t it!?

I bought the gameboy Metroid Fusion just for the trip, so I won’t be going entirely cold-metroid-turkey. Just in case I haven’t mentioned this lately, Metroid Prime is one of the greatest games of all time. I have now played it for over twice as long as Nate has (I started first), but I’m only about 5 or 10 percent farther along than he is (I think I’m at about fifty-percent).

So who knows if I’ll update in the next week… I certainly have no idea what to expect. Laura thinks they might have DSL. I’m sure you can expect a full report when I return. I just hope things stay fairly secular. I haven’t really thought about what I’d do if they wanted me to go to church. They’re mormon after all… wish me luck!

Today’s browser discovery is the Avant Browser. It’s a browser that basically puts a shell over IE for windows, giving it many of Mozilla’s most beloved properties. (tabbed browsing, searching from the address bar, and popup blocking, to start with.) I have a few beefs with the thing. To search using google (msnsearch is the default) you have to hit CTR-Q from the address bar. This makes little sense as a shortcut, but since CTR-Q doesn’t quit much of anything anymore, I suppose it had to do something… But unfortunately, one of my favorite mozilla for PC features, hitting CTR-L to get to the address (or Location) bar as you have always been able to do on a mac, doesn’t work. And so you can’t search google from the stupid little location popup window that IE has always had when you hit CTR-L.

I also really like some things about it. Well, two things about it so far. The way that this thing handles your tabs and windows is pretty amazing. (You loose the ability to open a new “window”, and “tabs” for all intents and purposes are referred to as “windows”. Maybe I’ll get over that, even though I can’t–as I expected–open a new process to open a new traditional “window”.)

Basically, you have several window displaying options. The default, and the one familiar to mozilla users, is all windows maximized. (You can also “tab through” windows, by hitting CTR-up and CTR-down, which is one of those hit and miss features in mozilla… it works, but is relatively undocumented, and I always forget the shortcut, even though it seems like one of the most important ones!) But you also have the traditional cascading window option… which basically means you get the grey application background-type-thing, and can move windows around within it. Here’s where it gets cool: There are also window tiling options, vertical and horizontal. This will basically fill your avant window with your open pages, either horizontally or vertically. I don’t know how often I will use this, but it’s really cool, and I’ll definitely be playing with it more soon.

Next feature I like… You can save your state and close all windows. This will basically mean the next time you open Avant it’ll re-open all the windows you had open previously… I’m going to be checking in a few minutes if this will refresh the windows, or just save them in cache. For blog-reading reasons, I’d rather have it refresh them, but it might make more sense to hold the state in cache. Anyway, I’m definitely throwing this thing on my PC at home… especially because the new version of mozilla (1.3a) is crashing like crazy on that machine… it’s so bad I may even downgrade.

(Link via http://www.milbertus.com/.)

UPDATE: It refreshes! It refreshes!

SECOND UPDATE: this tiling thing is less cool than it seems at first. Perhaps I spoke too soon. Basically, if tiles based on how many windows (tabs) you have open. With two or three, you can tile vertically or horizontally, but anything more than that, and it starts doing its own thing. With 4 windows, it splits into equal sized quadrants, whether you chose vertical or horizontal. Also, I can’t CTR-down through the tabs that are displayed and then use the arrow keys to scroll within the tab. I can use CTR-down to focus the window, (er, tab?) but scrolling doesn’t work till I use the mouse to click implicitly in the window itself. Hmmm. I wonder if it’s worth posting this on the message board.

Well, no apologies for lack of updates, but here’s a quick rant on life this past week.

Monday — car failure. Two hours, I waited on the side of the road, talking on the phone, trying to figure out whether I needed a tow truck, and where I should have the eventual tow truck take my car to be repaired.

Tuesday I took the fix-it-place my key, (since they were closed the night before — when my car arrived magically in their lot), and I worked from home. Far from being fun, working from home is actually more frustrating than anything else for me, because we have crappy firewall issues, and shitty exchange webmail. Fortunately, I have been doing some php all week, and ssh-ing into the dev server to work there wasn’t too horrible. Plus, PHP is fun!

Wednesday, worked from home again, which meant that when I finished up my php project sooner than expected I just walked out my front door. I spent the afternoon doing some nearly-overdue Christmas shopping. I am especially proud of what I got Laura. And as she loves to point out, I am constantly on the verge of ruining her surprise — I just want her to share my excitement! (I am not, as coined for me Monday night in the movie Vanilla Sky, a pleasure delayer.)

I also picked up my car on Wed, and am $350 poorer for it. This brings my total car expenditure up to $1100. $1200 if you include the tow. That’s still not bad, really. Unfortunately, when I drove to work this morning, the crack in my windshield was longer than it had been the night before. (And I know it didn’t lengthen while it was at the shop, because I was thinking about its length after I picked it up.) The increase is probably just because it froze last night for the first time in ages. Who knows when that expense will come to visit.

In a few minutes, I’m going to post another rant, about this new version of IE I’ve just discovered.

I haven’t kept up on my blog reading lately. I feel rather bad about it, actually. This morning I went through and read Naked Tiny back to the last time I’d been on his site, and there were a number of political posts that I wholeheartedly agree with, including a letter to our dumbass president.

This got me thinking that maybe we should all write public (open) letters to Bush. I imagined this flood of dissent… A veritable barrage of websites protesting, not loudly, but quietly, questioningly.

Then I remembered that I’d seen one of these before. A while back mopsa posted a link to Sean Penn’s Open Letter to George W. Bush.

I did a few google searches… and realized slowly that this sort of thing is fairly common. There are about 382,000 results for “open letter to president bush”. Someday, maybe I’ll add my voice to the chorus, until then, I’m with Tiny.

This article about p2p file sharing by Tim O’Reilly is awesome. It’s really good to hear that at least someone in the publishing industry has their head screwed on right.

After spending a day digesting the article (most of my readers will have already read the thing, as it was sent to a group of us), I’m left with the thought that this blog is suffering from Lesson #1. “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”

It’s true, I don’t promote this blog (or any of my websites, really,) and therefore, it sits in the vast void that is obscurity on the internet.

Generally speaking, I’m opposed to self-promotion. I want someone else to get excited about stuff without my pushing them to do so. Hell, now that I think about it, I don’t want anyone pushing them to do so. I’m opposed to promotion in general.

An article in the recent adbusters had something in it about a growing dissatisfaction with the concept of advertising. I’ll have to read it again when I get home, but it was basically saying we’re going to begin to see people consciously curbing the influence of advertising on their own behavior. I think that happens already for many of us, but is it really on the rise? And if this does happen, will it be just like the 90s, when “alternative” music becomes popular because it wasn’t popular in the first place? Are we that similarly wired, that if everyone had free reign to choose anything, we would end up with all pretty much the same stuff… whether it’s musical selection, food options, or clothing style?

I think it’s impossible to answer these questions, and I’ve rambled enough about this. This blog is obscure like indie electronica. It’s my garage band. It’s the movie that Nate and I will someday make to show the world our genius. Thanks for reading it, both of you.

Ever have that feeling as you’re walking normally that suddenly you’re in an elevator that’s taken a quick change in velocity? Like you’re reaching the bottom of a tall building, and all your weight shifts to your feet, but you’re actually standing flat on the ground.

I had that just now.

The word of the day is “subloop”, which has interesting vowel sounds. Say it to yourself for the full effect. From subloop, we — the cult of subloop — have created many other words, including but not limited to: subloopinal, subloopinis (perhaps spelled subloopenis), sublooper, and subloopish.

Now I will tell you a quick story to explain what music I’m listening to.

Once, I broke up with a girl. I was in bed sick when I did it, but it was probably for the best anyway (we fought more than I have with any other girlfriend). She then proceeded to date another person, who was a mutual acquaintance, albeit not someone either of us knew well. Because I kept in contact with her at this time (partly because I wanted her back litterally a week after breaking up with her–a pining that continued for at least six months) I managed to hear some of this guy’s music. We shall call him O. O’s music was… how should I put it… crap. It mostly consisted of sounds taken from relatively obscure (but still popular) music, looped and thrown together. Because the loops were very recognizable, it was a bit like a Queen fan listening to Ice Ice Baby for the first time. O’s relationship with my X aside, I was not going to like this music. Even if it was good. (Taking his relationship with my x into consideration, probably especially if it was good.)

O has always seemed very conceited to me. He’s always acted very cold towards me, and the times when I’ve had to be around him (for whatever reason) we have probably never exchanged more than 5 words. In short, I do not like O.

O continued to make music, and through a series of performances he was a part of, I continued to hear it grow and become quite a bit more distinct over the past 3 or 4 years. (While still, inside, trying to convince myself that it was crap.) Now O is dating a very public figure in the local music community, and he put out a limited run of a short (< 30 min) CD. There is no longer any denying it. Damnit, the CD is fucking good. I don’t want to like it, but I’ve been listening to it for a few days straight now. The end.

Daring Fireball has a new rant about the finder which (although it does a little backpedaling) is a far more convincing argument for his original point, which is basically, that the OSX finder sucks ass.

I have been using OSX since the beta. I have intentionally put up with the slowness and inconsistent nature of the finder, assuming that, as with other problems in OSX, they will eventually get fixed. This is still my belief, although it may take a bit more whining from intelligent people like John Gruber and Jeffrey Zeldman before it happens.

In the mean time, I have never done it, but there are supposedly some 3rd party finder replacements out there. (doing a search, I found a few whose pages are down… I wonder why. Only one I could find that is presumably still in development, and its page is in Japanese.) Anyway, an old post on on macosxhints.com is probably the only reason I knew about this, and I had to dig to find it.

The real reason I have beef with the osx finder personally, is that at work I have been using OSX’s built-in samba mount capabilities to mount our dev sites. This means that I’ve been using the finder much more extensively, mostly in a drag and drop fashion. (Although it’s nice to be able to point my terminal at those mounts and vim them locally, for this particular project I’ve mostly been using dreamweaver.) Anyway, for whatever reason, either samba or the finder are creating weird invisible files on the mounted servers. They look like this:._filename.html. Is this normal? WTF? It’s as annoying as hell when I go to commit the stuff to CVS, because these directories contain twice as many files as they should!

In the next post, Gruber rants about Wired’s poor mac coverage. (They have one guy who writes a mac column, and he’s a moron.) I’d agree with him that the coverage is horrible, (and that the guy is a moron), but at the same time — since when have they had serious hardware coverage? I don’t really think that’s their “bag”, so to speak. The only reason they employ this mac guy is to explore the self-titled “cult of mac”, which I have to admit is fairly funny, and interesting. It does leave one with the impression that all mac users are freaks, however. (Then again, I like being called a freak.)

I’d just like to point out that I hate when I wake up at 5 AM and can’t sleep almost as much as I hate those invisible files.

enough geeky blogging. back to bed…

UPDATE: Westwind computing hosts a page on Mac OS X Hidden Files & Directories that solved the ._filename.html question. It’s still stupid now that I know why it happens.

It’s been one of those mornings…

I managed to have my email client crash on me twice this morning, and one of those times I was actually in the middle of composing a blog entry. It’s forever lost, as I was hurriedly doing several things at once, and I can only remember part of what I had said. (I hate loosing things I’ve written. I’m rather obsessive about it.)

The day started out so beautiful. I walked out of my door this morning, saw this weird flatbed truck in the middle of the street carrying strange looking machinery, and walked right back inside looking for my digital camera.

The part of the entry I can remember was my disappointed review of Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars, which I finished this weekend. Basically, it kept up this awesomely poetic tone, (which I would be hard pressed to keep up for more than a few pages, I’m sure), but failed to tell a decent story. I guess Noon is working on reinventing narrative, or some other equally extraordinary description, but in this particular instance, I think it failed to communicate. I would have liked a better picture of the milieu, or more plot, either one would have done me fine, but when there’s essentially no plot to speak of, and the main character’s observations about reality are all pretty much subject to question… we have a broken mirror’s reflection of a novel indeed. (Broken mirrors featured prominently in the story. The main character was searching for what was probably Alice’s.)

I am now reading Michael Marshal Smith’s Only Forward. Every time I go to amazon.co.uk it suggests this guy, and I’d never heard of him, so I finally broke down and bought this one (when I bought Falling out of Cars). So far I’m glad I did. It’s is a fun future detective novel, and so far a bit reminiscent of Stevenson’s Snow Crash, albeit not quite the same level of action-packed intensity.

You can check out my mindblurbs for the brainstormed list of titles for this entry.