reesesWeb

I cannot believe how bloody cold this apartment gets. I double-checked, and the radiators are wide open. When we cleaned up the unpleasantness from last night, Kat took everything up to her mom's to superwash the bedding we didn't throw out, because, well, her mom's washing machine doesn't take quarters. :-) As a result, I just slept on the bed, but in my sleeping bag, which actually kept me warm. Since the weather changed for the colder, it was the first time I was warm earlier than thirty minutes after tucking into bed. How's that for a poorly-constructed sentence?

Do you ever wonder about the rules for hyphenating adjective phrases like that? I like hyphens, so I throw them in all the time. I like commas too, and I tend to use them to break up pauses similar to those I use when I speak. I'm sub-visual, so they're what I'm reading when I'm speaking. It's a result of writing to the SAM on the Apple when I was a kid -- the speech synthesizer was a little weak with timing and pronunciation, so you'd have to creatively misspell and mispunctuate to make it a little more plausible. I lost my fifteen-year-old copy of Strunk and White from fifth grade, so I'll wing it. English is hard, let's go shopping.

Anyway, it was an odd feeling not to wish my feet were warmer, just five minutes after climbing in. We have bedding again, but I'm sleeping in the bag again tonight.

This would, well, it wouldn't, be funny if it weren't gross: one of the cats made a mess (ahem, yes, that kind of mess) on Kat's side of the bed. Kat went in to do some pre-bedtime thing, and started kvetching from the bedroom. "Ewww. Ewww." Since I've learned to ignore the initial subverbal complaining, she escalated to,"This is very bad. Very bad. Honey, come in here."

Now, cats aren't huge animals, unless they're Huge Cats, but somehow, one of our Not Huge Cats made HUGE poopies by Kat's pillow. HUGE. We don't think it's the kitten, and it's probably not Peko. I'm thinking it's Pixel, because she's had the most difficulty adjusting to the new Kitten over the past month. She's never done this before, and frankly, I'm worried about her doing it again.

HUGE poopies. Well, not human huge, or dog huge, but frankly, any poopies on the bed seem huge, like when you're almost hit by a stampeding cow, and that cow seems as large as an elephant, but it's not that big, because it's a cow, and kine don't get that big.

Cows have huge poopies, too. Much bigger than kitty poopies. Much bigger than kitties, sometimes.

My shot to score high on rate my poo, and I blew it. Forgot to take a picture before we cleaned it up.

Nat has climbed to sixth place on google queries for 'Nat'. The hard work has paid off! (*sniff*)

You may see him pop in around 13 if the google node you hit hasn't been updated yet.

On a pleasant note, I have moved up to 2 on the updated database for queries on 'reeses'. Yay me!

(Yes, I'm one of those people who takes pleasure in lame statistics that somehow relate to oneself.)

I thought my computer was crappy.

Good heavens. I hate looking for an apartment. It's even worse when it's in a city where you aren't. If anyone knows a decent rental agent in San Francisco, let me know. I hate the residue from the market of one or two years ago, where the agents seem to act as if they are the customer of the renter, and not the other way around. I just want someone who gives the appearance of wanting to match me up with a good apartment, and take the time to do so. They can see me as a check, as long as I don't get that feeling. :-)

I can't believe Rent Tech, with their 1-month-rent fee, is the best solution. Yowch!

While I find the idea rather unpalatable, I know quite a few people who loathe working. This fits several of them to a T.

It gets a little sarcastic, but P.J. O'Rourke has some good advice to live by.

I gave my notice today. It went exceedingly well, as expected, since the CEO/President was fully aware of my reasons for leaving. He offered coffee tomorrow, and I'll take him up on it. I learned long ago to put all the bridge-burning in the exit interview, and not in the resignation notice. The exit interview will only be summarised at best, and usually forgotten.

Now it's time to find a place and move down to SF!

Talk about an annoying time to forget one's camera. We drove to my parents' for Thanksgiving, and the trip went quite well. On Friday, my father drove us up to the wind farm that crosses the natural gas pipeline that he runs. Because of his pipeline duties, he has clearance to get really close to the windmills, and you can see them really well.

The view from the top of the hill is truly amazing. It looks like a movie set, because you can see fifty miles of farmland over rolling hills, with 21st-century technology churning away in huge numbers in the foreground. At one point, at a casual glance, you can see about fifty of the things, pointing into the wind, whirling with tip speeds around 250 feet per second, using the highly scientific method of "count by thousands, it seems like a little less than two seconds per revolution, at 150 feet in diameter, times three, ok..."

My father seems to know everything that's going on around there, even if it has nothing to do with his regular day-to-day existence. The other really fascinating revelation involved apple trees. Apparently, some of the apple farmers in the area are using genetically-modified apple trees. They mature to a fruitful stage very quickly, and produce huge numbers of apples per tree. They produce so many apples, they can't support the weight of the fruit, and are grown on frameworks like hops or grapevines. There were a lot of conventional apple trees, which live longer, and are probably easier to tend, but acres upon acres were devoted to the vineapples.

I go there countless times, and the time I see lots of cool stuff, where are the cameras???

I'll be sure to pack it from now on.

FOUR! DAY! WEEKEND!

I bought a couple Nexus compilations yesterday at Golden Age. They're the first comic books I've purchased in perhaps ten years. The last ones were also Nexus.

Reading them, two things occur to me. The first is that I'm not a comic fan for a reason. They suck. The reason I think they suck is that I was fortunate enough to be exposed to this comic when I was a kid. I'm sorry, but if your formative comic experiences were Calvin and Hobbes and Nexus, somebody's going to have to pull a flaming pineapple out of his tuckus to impress you.

The other thing is that, as was the case with Calvin and Hobbes, while a particularly exceptional example of a consumable item may lead you to consume other examples by their proxmity, once the exceptional example ceases to become available, the others just aren't worth the effort. When I was a kid, reading Nexus, I bought quite a few comics. I'd go into the store to see if a new Nexus came in, and if it did, great, I'd buy it, and maybe five comics I saw on the way to the cashier. If a new copy weren't in, hey, I'm there already, right?

Once Nexus ceased to be published except as a blue-moon event, I stopped reading comics completely. Of course, this coincided with my turning 19, which may not be a completely unrelated factor.

But the point remains -- this is an exceptional comic. Well-drawn, making great use of a limited medium. The stories are incredibly well paced, and the storyline didn't get too whacky. When it made sense for the main character to be affected by his actions, he was, and the series basically ended.

What is the story? Let me summarise as tersely as possible.

A planetary governor of a post-Soviet socialist empire destroys his planet to stop a revolution, flees with pregnant wife to an abandoned moon, where his wife gives birth to a son. Mother wanders off, gets lost, and dies when her son is five. When the son is nine, a semi-omnipotent alien causes him to get headaches and the ability to cast the fusion energy tapped from the cores of stars, and the son then executes his father for his crime of murder on a massive scale. The rest of the series is more of the same -- headaches, unconsciousness, dreams of mass-murderers, whom he must then kill upon waking.

Yeah, it's wacky. Yes, it works.

On another note, why does this cough start late at night? I'll be ready when it's gone.

Wow. Two huge bugs were revealed today, and after intense investigation, neither turned out to be mine!

It's not that I rock, it's that others often rock less.

Let me say, for the record, that I love codeine. I've had these swollen glands under my tongue (most likely salivary glands) for the past two days, and it finally occurred to me that not only will codeine reduce pain, it will reduce swelling.

And it will mellow me the heck out, even in small OTC quantities.

Yay drugs!

Ahem. These are legal!

But yay anyway.

I apologise to all you wieners who were pulled in by the blogger adlet thing. I warned you. ;>

Apartment searching is so stressful. There's this perception of immutability with the selection, that the apartment you choose has to be the ideal apartment at the right price, in the right location, etc. Since Kat probably won't be working when we first get there, I need to cover the entire rent, so the budget needs to be tightened a little.

We had a funny exchange over this. Previously, when kicking around a ballpark figure, I mentioned a number, $i. That's i dollars not a Perl variable i. I don't do Perl except under extreme duress.

Anyway, this $i was on the high side of what we should spend, roughly one half of my expected monthly salary. So tonight, we were looking through craig's list, side-by-side in the office, and I mentioned that it would be nice if we looked closer to $n = $i - $1000. I thought it would be relatively straightforward. The statement should imply,"Initially, I thought we should spend this much, but now, upon further consideration, we should spend this much."

This statement started a fight. A fight!

"First you said this much, and then you said this much. I don't understand what reasoning was behind that statement."

Imagine this said aloud in a really snippy, b****y voice.

"Umm, I don't want to pay $i. I'd rather pay $n, because $i is one paycheck." Not too tough, right? You think that'd end that there, wouldn't you? (Yeah, this attitude is part of the problem. Bite me, it's my weblog. :P)

That's because you didn't factor pms into the equation, you silly prat. All bets are off when everything you say is objectible. I think she threatened not to move to SFO three times tonight.

Now, next time, when someone tells you not to look, you're going to take them at their word, aren't you? ;>

Stupid People - Funny stories about the stupid things everyday people do.

The funniest thing about this page is when people make fun of other "stupid" people, and, well, pot, kettle, black.

I have a friend we will call him Maki. I told everyone at the lunch table at school that I aced my social studies test. He said "Did you get an A on it?"

Why did you bother calling him "Maki", if you weren't going to refer to him by that name ever again?

Dang, it's too bright to see any but the biggest meteors tonight. And cold! I figure I'll stay in here until 2am or so, when it's supposed to be peaking, and go peeking with a nice hot cup of tea in my hands.

Cold, I say! Clear nights in November make for cold nights!

And I have a sore throat!

But we decided to move to SF! In December! I'll miss Seattle a little, but really, I'll just miss a few people, not the city itself.

We've gotten used to seeing poor acting in Star Wars movies, but I've just seen the latest trailer for Episode II, where Anakin and Queen Natalie Portman smooch and such. Could they not distill a two hour movie into two minutes of good acting? It's like watching soap opera actors reading the TelePrompTer over the other person's shoulder. In addition, Anakin looks to have gone to the Luke Skywalker school of lightsaber baseball-bat fencing.

Will these dreadful trailers make me not see the movie? Hardly. I hope they get better closer to the release date, though.

The company I interviewed with last Monday came back with an offer. It's a little lower than I was expecting, but not by much, only a little over $1k/month. The stock package wasn't huge, either, so I'm pondering countering with roughly the same amount of cash, and a much larger stock component. I need to talk it over with Kat, though. At least I'm not taking a huge salary hit, which is what would happen if I stayed here in Seattle.

It's a lot more responsibility, in a much more visible position, so I'm basically doing more work for the same money. I hope this economy turns around really quickly. :-)

I'm just wibbling. This is the right choice, as anything else is poor career management. This is a brilliant job with brilliant people, and a great place to learn what I need to get where I want to go. How's that for pep talk?

Sometimes I am reminded of how dumb people can be.

Wowies. I flew back from SFO Tuesday morning. Really early Tuesday morning. Really early. I think I got up around 4:15, although my alarm was set for 4. I went out with Ed on my last night in the city, and I got back to the hotel around 1, packed, and got in bed around 2. Not nearly enough sleep. That, and I reeked of scotch and tequila on the flight back, which explains why the guy sitting next to me didn't speak after the first five words.

The interviews went much better than I thought they did. I enjoyed all of the interviews except possibly the last one, with the ceo. He came into the interview room with my resume in hand, and said,"I'll tell you right off, I don't like generalists." Then he commented that my resume was contradictory, and didn't give me an opportunity to address either charge. Fun! I thought I had blown it until yesterday, when I heard that they're formulating an offer package, so I'm in a good mood. I could definitely handle a move right about now. If I'm going to leave Seattle, it'll be easiest in the autumn, when the weather is ecch.

We surplused out some equipment at work this week, and I picked up a Thinkpad 600 for $25 and a Dell pIII/550 for $75 for Kat. I'm in a great mood, despite the fact that I've been nailed by the flu since the interview. It seems to have rounded the bend as of this morning, so it's probably not anthrax. Then again, I could start suppurating any time now, and might just be dead by the time you read this!

Poppy has been stepping up her aggression campaign against the other cats. Peko has had enough of this, and has responded by grabbing her by the throat (not the scruff) and dragging her around the apartment. When I hear this pathetic little mewling whine, I no longer need to look to see what's going on. Go Peko!

Tempest for Eliza is the weirdest thing I've seen in ages. Reminds me of those stories of the old MIT AI Lab, where they did something similar with an AM radio and an old (not then, now) computer.

Wow, there's a huge difference from Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon in a hotel lobby. It's completely dead down there. SFO feels so much like Seattle today. The weather is grey and threatening rain, the people aren't making eye contact, and I'm bored. Hah!

I did buy a get-out-of-deep-doo-doo-free gift for Kat, but I won't tell her what it is. Nyack!

I'm going to get dinner, probably down in the hotel restaurant, and then study a bit for my interview tomorrow. The only thing I'm really going to bone up on is the Design Patterns book, because I can never remember the names of some of the patterns that I never use.

Whee, here at W in San Francisco. I went by an apartment open house this afternoon, but it was packed. It was amazing the number of people showed up. I'm glad I went, though -- the apartment was nowhere near as nice as it looked in the pictures online. The carpeted areas were nasty, the plaster was shoddy, and the kitchen was dreadful. Definitely not worth putting up with an electric stove.

I wandered around for a while, about three hours in all, and now I'm ready for a nap before I go out with Wim later.

You are all doomed.

Ahh, Friday night. Today, all we did at work was diagnose a tiny problem, and pack up our offices for the move. I hate boxing up stuff. Really. I find it completely lacking in any kind of fun.

Then we drank beer, and tried to embarrass one of the guys because he was smitten with our waitress. What are friends for?

I have to get up entirely too early in the morning for my flight to SFO. I think the plane leaves at 7:45, and I figure with all the new crap, I should be there around six. Bleaurgh. I'll get to SF before I can really check into my hotel, too, so I'll have to drop my bags with the concierge and kill some time at the open house I want to see. I'm sure I can grab vittles, too.

OK, my day is suddenly good. Pardon the first picture, the flash didn't go off.

Neil needs to see this. I think he could get some pointers to continue his downward trend.

Wow. I spent about 20 minutes typing another huge entry, and the server puked on me. This is a test to see if it's going to tell me I have permissions to post to this blog or not...

Hilarious meeting at work today. If I work with you, and you read this, I apologise as much as I am capable.

Our founder is definitely of the "ooh, bright and shiny!", easily distracted, type. He also operates under the sometimes-hilarious, often-frustrating delusion that all we need is the right product to make us an attractive acquisition or investment target. He's always coming up with a new product idea, which is fantastic in and of itself, but deeply flawed for a few reasons:

• He never thinks of a 'prototype user'. He always builds a tool based on the argument that "these features would be cool." Never once does he think about the products that should be built to satisfy the needs of any person out in the Real World. Not even when you ask him directly.
  
• Because he's easily distracted, he thinks about the two or three main points. He never thinks about the details. Never.
  
• Because of the last item, he really, really believes that his prototypes are just about ready for production deployment. They don't need to pass through Engineering, they just need someone to put on a finishing touch or two.

Needless to say, this is the cause of 90% of our problems, as management has, in the past, taken his fantasy-spinning at face value. The other 10% is poor motivation, bad timing, etc. Those aren't real numbers, but the proportion is that unbalanced.

Anyway, we had a demo today of a few items that he has brought to a prototype point. The first was pretty cool, but true to form, he had a confusing interface, which we argued about for a half hour. A half hour, and it has three logical steps! Do one thing, then do another, then the machine does something for you and tells you the result. (I can't say what it does, or what it does after that, or what it does to finish.) Anyway, there's a logical extension of our application workflow that dictates that after the first two steps, each consisting of very simple "do this now, I am bob,"-type stuff, the chain of events is very well structured. But somehow, Captain Crackhead has decided that he wants to do it another way, damn anyone else, and he's going to bother the user with a barrage of dialog boxes. It took a bloody half hour to argue him down from doing so!

What I find ludicrous is that our UI people have no concept of simple rules of UI design. Simple terminology such as affordances, etc., have no meaning to them, and they're arguing from positions of expertise. It doesn't seem to matter that everyone does a particular thing in one way, or even that we do it in that one way everywhere else -- if they want to do it this way, they're going to, gosh darn it, and you're an idiot for disagreeing!

It's tough to argue with someone who has pushed millions of dollars into the company, and the realisation of whose initial vision is the purpose of the company. One thing I hate about working in this industry is the notion that most decisions have to be made by consensus. That is, if someone really isn't qualified to partake in a discussion, it is somehow incumbent upon you to educate them up to a reasonable level so that they can even understand your objections. Sometimes, I just want to say,"The decision is mine to make as Chief Architect, and I'm telling you to do it this way. I'm not going to waste fifteen minutes to explain to you why this should be built this way."

Woof! This meeting lasted through about two hours of this kind of crap, and it's not a unique experience. I remember one gig I had while consulting a few years ago, where the management team argued for a half hour over whether labels should have following colons before text entry boxes! Apparently, people like to feel they have input into the creative process, but aren't willing to argue more than thirty minutes.

Kat is on the move with apartments in SF. It's looking as if it's going to be incredibly easy to find a glorious pad in a good neighborhood for minimal cash. Of course, when I say that, I'm talking $2500 for 1200 sq ft, but the past few years have really skewed my perspective when it comes to Bay Area real estate. Still, it's getting close to what I'd be paying in Seattle for the same space. $2k now is worth about $3k-$3.5k two years ago. I love having a job in a recession. :P

It's amusing that the dirtiest toilets in Tokyo are cleaner than most of the public toilets in the US.

And have you ever seen a public toilet (read: a hole in the ground, surrounded by poop) in France? You don't even want to let your tuckus touch the self-cleaning ones!

Have all of the excitement of online dating without having to go through all the work.

I am worth exactly: $3,130,840.00. Who knew?

Anyone with a check?

Be ready!

Oh my. I know what else I want for Christmas.

Yes, I'm snarfing a lot of links tonight. I'm putting them here in the guise of posts so I don't lose them.

This reminds me of a few cousins I had, who lived outside Spokane, WA. While in high school, they had discovered the wonder that is booze, hooch, brewskis, etc. One evening, one of the brothers convinced the others of the incredible brilliance of stealing all of the Big Wheels in the neighborhood, and making a HUGE pile of them -- in their front yard.

The oldest (responsible) brother woke up early on Saturday morning, looked out the front window and probably came close to peeing his pants. I'd like to say the story ended with cops, a woodchipper, or at least a huge bonfire, but he just woke up the brothers and forced them to return the Big Wheels before the neighbors woke up and noticed their relocation.

The funny thing about the link is that I got it from another random log on the net. I imagine a directed graph of these memes on a temporal chart would be mildly interesting, but not enough for me to finish my thought before I finish my soda.

OK, Poppy is almost fully integrated into the family. Peko is chasing her on the noisy circuits around the apartment. At least they're doing it at 9:30pm and not 5am, as he does with Pixel.

Mozilla/Win2k is lovely fast. I had only been using it on a memory-constrained (128M) Linux box, and it's doggish there. Love the tabs, baby.

Sexy window manager browsing time again.

It used to be every few months, but now it's every other year, when I'd start browsing around for window managers, to see what people have done in that space. I don't mean the boring 'retread twm with the current graphics woohoo' efforts that are just obvious, like enlightenment, etc.

The ones that I'm most recently impressed with are the tabbed window managers (no, not twm!), like pwm, ion, and treewm. What's cool about these is that they fix multiple X clients in a single window, with a tab-like panel to switch between them. Treewm is especially cool in that, as its name implies, it permits you to nest virtual desktops within virtual desktops, so you can traverse down the branches of your over-virtual-desktop to node desktops. Yippee. Try finding my illicit webbrowsing in that! :P

I know what I want for Christmas. I can imagine biking to work in one of these, if I didn't die of heatstroke.

It looks as if we're surplusing out the spare kit next Monday, the day I'll be out of town. Darn. No cheap iBooks for me. I suppose that's good, because I wouldn't do anything useful with it anyway. It's probably too weak to run OS/X speedily, although it would probably be faster than OpenStep/Mach 4.0 was on my old IDE 486, but even Windows was faster than that. Some of the 1U SPARC boxes will probably be left, so I might pick up one if the price is right.

This little kid in the middle at the top of this page looks like a junior Moe.

As I was cleaning up my knife after butchering a chicken this afternoon, I sliced hell out of my finger. I'm so glad I was using a great knife, and that it was very sharp. I hardly bled at all, but I scrubbed heck out of the wound to help avoid a nasty salmonella adventure. I don't know how realistic either the concern or the prevention was, but it made me feel better.

To make up for it, I tormented Poppy with the laser pointer.

A coworker and I went out for lunch yesterday, going to the J&M, a local tavern in Pioneer Square. Boring boring, but after lunch, we had a couple drinks. I had a scots, and Peter had a Jameson on the rocks. The first one was fine, but he spilled the second almost immediately after receiving it, onto the old marble table. Still not terribly funny, but we called the waitress over to get another drink and bring a bartowel, all the time, making fun of Peter's clumsiness. However, the tone prompty changed when, while wiping off the (did I mention old marble?) table, the waitress said:

Well, at least you probably disinfected this old crack.

mIRC32 - [#IDM [ nstl 1337]: WHOEVER I LENT MY NORD MODULAR TO /MSG ME ASAP]

This is the funniest thing I've read this morning. You may or may not know why. My favorite part was:

<BT> I've decided to make the 909 "in", you may all use them again.

<BT> The latest beat goes like this.. - BD, BD, BD, OH, SDBD -

<BT> I will most likely notify you all the next time I alter world trends

I'm working at home today, which means lots of little interruptions and distractions. Not all of them are externally induced.

Yes, I'm the person who saw that inane segment on tv and bought that CyberPounce program. I bought it for Pixel, but Poppy seems to like it more.

Kittens in viewfinder may be moving faster than they appear.

Peko had a small emergency this morning. The new kitten has been a pretty disruptive experience, and he started coughing last night. At first, we thought it was just a hairball, because he gets those occasionally, and is able to throw them out pretty quickly. This morning, though, he developed a truly frightening wheeze. I called a nearby vet (Eastlake Animal Hospital), and she was great in squeezing him into the schedule. Apparently, a leaf that he swallowed and spit up a day or two ago scratched his throat, which later became inflamed. Antibiotics and cortisone prescriptions later, he's at home, hiding in the closet to recuperate.

You'd attack something that looked about to eat you, too.

Wow, what do you have to do to get someone to sign a frickin' guestbook?

If you have trouble remembering my birthday, just start looking at the 283619th digit in pi.