I'm back in DC, and it's 30F. +30F, most importantly, and it's still colder than a witch's tit in a cast iron bra after freezing the balls off a brass monkey.

And yet, and yet, it's FIFTY DEGREES FAHRENHEIT WARMER THAN IT WAS WHEN I GOT UP THIS MORNING.

Fifty degrees. Let's think about that for a second.

If it's, say, +50F out, it feels COMPLETELY different than +100F. +50F is pleasant for jogging or being very active, but you might want a light jacket. +100F is hot, and you need to be careful working out, or if you're old, and you're going to think about stripping down to the loose linen, or even tshirt and shorts, if that's your bag. Massive difference, abundantly obvious to the most temperature-insensitive person.

By the same token, the difference between +30F and +80F is also readily apparent. +30F, you have the heavy coat on, you're scraping the windshield some mornings, and you might have snow on the ground. +80F, you're barbecuing in the backyard, and you might even have shorts on. HUGE difference.

Now, +30F is stupid cold. As mentioned, you have the heavy coat on. You have the gloves on. You're wrapped up in a scarf, and you'd like to wear a knit cap if it didn't mess up your hair. There's snow on the ground from Monday, and it hasn't melted in four days. Heck, sitting by the window, inside a heated room, you're chilly from the heat transfer out the double-pane glass.

But -20F, fifty degrees colder (FIFTY!) isn't that readily apparent. It's just faster at making you cold, but it's not going to make you colder. (until well after it kills you) You walk outside, and your hands hurt in fifteen seconds instead of two minutes, and your nostrils freeze on the inside, and the car idles really rough, and the rear defroster never quite clears up the rear window, and the fabric seats are crisp, but cold is cold is cold. It's not as if adding fifty degrees to -20F is going to make it pleasant.

Let's think about this from the other end of the human comfort zone. Let's say 90F is where it starts getting hot. You might say 100F, and that's probably where I'd think about hot in a dry climate, but this is DC, which is like the inside of your sweaty gym shorts, the ones you wash about once a week, but you forgot to take them home last week, so you're already doubling up in moisture and bacteria. DC is like that, but like wearing those shorts that someone else sweated up for you. So, I'll say 90F.

What's 90 + 50? 140.

Can you even imagine 140F? That's like medium rare. Bacteria start dying at that temperature! Has it ever gotten that hot outside that hot box from Cool Hand Luke? That's how hot it has to get before you really can't discern a difference between "too hot" and "way too hot".

Do you see millions upon millions of people living in a place where it gets to be 140F? 150F? 160F?

No, you don't. Yet, you (or at least, I) see people living in a place where it hits -20F, which is just as cold as 160F is hot. People joke about getting frostbite, and even act surprised when they find someone who hasn't had it.

Why do I go there, when God is clearly telling me,"Stay the hell away from here!" I don't think my balls have been outside my body in the past week, and they're definitely not going to brave the cold any time soon, after the scaring I gave them last night.

Fast Food Nation was bad enough, and turned me off of meat for a while, but this was a scoop I either missed in the book (probably when I stopped reading at "Here Be Socialists"), or the author missed.

Chicken feces? In cow food? Wuddufug?

<Duck> im listening to police radio

<Duck> some guy radios in to the seargent, says he has a question, should he ask over the radio or call in

<Duck> seargent says he just "sat down on the zero", which i am guessing means he's taking a shit

<Duck> the guy radioing in asks for the seargents cell #, and he gives it to him

<Duck> and now I have the overwhelming urge to call this man and heckle him for taking a shit

If you read about an angry Irish cop killing a dumbass from West Virginia, now you know why. I changed the name so I won't be the one leading the Boston police to Goose's house.

sexptacular! sbcl next?

Of all the Mac retrospectives that have abounded in the past few weeks, this is the only one that has actually been interesting. And a bit of a vacu-time-suck. Beware.

Shark is the shibnibble. I discovered this last night at Ranchero, and played around with it to optimise some Objective C/Foundation Kit stuff I had written.

Easiest. Profiler. Ever.

Admittedly, it doesn't give you all the information a profiler would. However, if you're concerned primarily with opportunistic optimisation, cpu utilisation, and hot spots in your code, literally five minutes with this baby will melt that stick of butter in your pocket.

How easy is it?

1. Install Shark, which you will probably have to do because, if you're like me, you're afraid of letting anything called CHUD onto your machine. It's on the XCode CD.
2. You'll probably have to run the CHUD updater, in /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/CHUD, to get everything brought up to speed.
3. Close all your other apps, if you want. Or not.
4. Start Shark, in the same directory, and click "Start".
5. Start your app. Play around with it, doing the stuff you're interested in speeding up.
6. Click "Stop" on Shark.
7. Click "Tree" mode and find your hotspots. Double-click to see the code.

No, I didn't leave out the part where you recompile your application with profiling flags. No, I didn't leave out the part where the app was insanely slow while profiling was going on.

I suspect it's a shame, however. While I've been working primarily in Java for five or more years now, I've been doing all of my Mac coding in Objective C. I realised the silliness of it, as all of the AppKit/FoundationKit stuff is exposed to Java. I like my Java IDE* better, I like Java gc better, and, honestly, except for dynamic code, I like Java better than *C.

The reason I suspect it's a shame is that I'm not at all sure how well Shark will work with Java, and Shark is just...so...nice.

*Speaking of which, IDEA 4.0 doesn't look all that impressive from an upgrade perspective. I can't recall if I bought the maintenance when I bought my license, either. If I did, I'll upgrade, but otherwise...probably not.

If you're going to steal the names Kat and I have carefully considered and reserved for our offspring, please give credit!

In the meantime, here are a selection of names you may consider, for a small royalty:

• Death Spike Smith
• Barbara Coast
• Anil Fisher Robert
• Xarkow, God of Flatus
• Rectum Stretcher
• Judas

Find a date to take on this vacation.

If I had known I could buy one, I wouldn't have made mine!

586 on this new version. The old one went away. :(

The best thing about Garage Band is the proliferation of bad electronic music THAT ALL SOUNDS THE SAME.

Please, keep making the same songs with the same four loops, I really like them! It's like 1989 all over again! Did I just hear a 303?

Of course, I'm sitting here trying to decide what the best on-the-road keyboard is now that Edirol has the tiny PCR-1, but that's different. I won't enter my bad music with a mouse. :-)

In other news, I didn't think it was possible, but Showtime killed my interest in seeing Jennifer Beals in hot girl-on-girl action. The show's like lesbian kryptonite.

As a lesbian, I am deeply offended, and think they need to focus more on beautiful naked women and less on personalities and contrived, superficial drama.

Boobies, good, kvetching, bad.

321.1

Oh, and while I participated in the nationstates thing last year or the year before or whatever, I held off on buying the hardcover Jennifer Government because I'm a cheap bastage. I stubmbmbmbmbled on the softcover release among the other ten books in the airport newsstand tonight, and picked it up. It's a wicked fast read, lasting just under the duration of the flight (supposedly one hour forty minutes) and is basically a Carl Hiaasen version of Snow Crash without the tech. Not highly recommended, but if you're caught in the dilemma of Jennifer Government or Dr. Phil, let me nudge you toward this book.

Bleep is eggsackly what an online music store should be, in so many ways. They have music I can't find on iTMS because it's not major label, it's mp3 without DRM (although, that doesn't really bother me at all), and most importantly -- it's cheaper than the CD!

That's right, you get the mp3s of the album you order, and rather than pay $16.99 for this, you pay $11.99. It makes perfect sense. It comes from the label, doesn't go through the cd pressing process, doesn't go through the distributor, all they pay for is production, promotion, and properly sending that bad boy through the ether to me. You don't get the jewel case, the cd, the uncompressed audio, the liner notes, or the liner art, so you don't pay for them. It's cheap enough that, even if you have the cd, it's worth your time just to pay the $12 and not spend the ten minutes to rip it and encode it.

I know "albums" on iTMS are $9.99. But all the big or good ones are more, because Apple calls them "partial albums" so you have to buy the component songs instead, at $.99 per.

The other thing is, while I'm on the road making sekrit movies, I don't want to haul stuff around between trips home. If I don't buy music online, I do without.

Oh, and I finally got fed up with the Sony noise-cancelling NC-11 earphones (and how they've almost completely destroyed my appreciation for portable music) and bought a pair of Shure E2s. I wanted the 3s or the 1s, but the store was out (after arguing even the existence of the E3s) so I had to settle for spending $100 less. :-)

With the foamy tips, they're glorious, and instantly my favorite portable earphones/headphones. They don't need a headphone amp, and the iPod is more than sufficient to drive them. I haven't tried them with MiniDisc yet, because the iPod and its universal library are just too compelling, despite the weight and horrid battery life. They don't have the same problem as the Etymotics, which have been relegated to home earphones worn when someone else wants to watch tv or just make noise. That is, there is no conveyance of sound when the cord is moved. The Ety's have these stupid little cord support things you stick on to keep the scrapy noise down, but I'm awful with accessories.

I'm honestly really, really pleased with how good some cheap audio gear is. My three sets of earphones/headphones that I use most often are much closer to the low-end of the spectrum than the high end. I have the Shure E2s which are now my portable earphones, my Grado SR80s which are my listening-to-music-while-someone-is-asleep headphones, and the Etymotic ER6s, which fill the aforementioned role of stationary-ambient-noise-blockers. Two of them were just under $100, and the other, not much more.

I love progress.

My hair looks like the shaggy. It's actually long and unkempt enough that I'm ashamed to go to my client's office with it. I'll fly in tomorrow morning, and immediately attempt to make an appointment for Monday night to get shorn.

And this, right after they extend the contract. D'oh!

I had tentatively decided, after several abortive attempts at a protracted unemployment, that this project was it. Once I was done, I was going to coast until Kat was out of school. Play bad music, write bad novels, and paint bad pictures while not thinking about writing bad software. Since I didn't know when the Geldbrennschluss would be prior to this week, we had hesitated to move away from our current apartment. I wanted to coast for a year or two, but I didn't want to be broke at the end, after paying for rent, food, law tuition, and h00rs. It would stink if, when we move back to SF, as we intend to do once Kat wraps up her post-JD MA, we had to start all over in saving for a house.

With the recent extension, sentencing me to at least another five months in Siberia, it's apparent that we can handle upgrading our digs, and moving to a new building in Bethesda, without peril. Much as I hate moving, I hate hearing about the lack of closet space in our current place more, and the idea of free rent, due to the disparity in local income tax rates between MD and DC, makes it tolerable, if not almost desirable.

Of course, the fact that I won't actually have to do any of the moving is the sweetest idea. I'll be out of town while Kat calls the movers, and all I have to do is fill the hopper that they'll be draining. Whoohoo!

Late night blog entries are the stupidest.

reeses = dumb4ss.

fux0r.

So, less than one month ago, I bought two iPods, one 40gb, one 20gb, for just under $1k. I had looked at them for a long time, obviously, and held out for two reasons:

1) Battery life = teh sux

2) They're too big

You see where I'm going with this.

So, Tuesday, Mr Jobs announces the new iPod mini. That solves problem #2. I don't care about the 4GB issue or the price, and anyone who is complaining about the price is a complete and unmitigated moron anyway. It's still competitive with the market, and 4GB is enough for most or all of the music I'd listen to on a daily basis. I wanted a tiny capacious player, something to replace my MD with, since NetMD doesn't work with the Mac as of yet. (Hi, Sony! Blow me!)

What's that, did you say MD?

So, I could have bought a new MD player for the same price (probably) as my iPod, continued to use my existing Minidiscs, and still had the glorious 50+ hours of playback on a single AA battery? Sure, so I'd have to use it with a PC, but hell, I have so many of those, I leave Thinkpads in out of the way places so I don't have to carry them from point to point.

1GB!

After you get done blowing me, Sony, you can kiss my squirrel-lovin' ass.

Anyone want a 40GB iPod, cheap?