A Nitrous Crouton

The funny thing is I meant to resume blogging on April 1st.

Obviously, that didn't quite work out. I do intend to shake off the dust, my writing chops have gotten horrifically atrophied. What, exactly to blog about, I haven't the faintest.

I had a lot to get done yesterday. Thankfully, I also had a couple instances of nice, but rare productivity boosters occuring. First: Some pretty snowfall. It's a nice benefit of having moved back to Illinois from California, and apparently I've moved back for some of the heaviest snow cover in years. Very big psychological boost, I dig the view out my office window. Second: Getting to watch/listen to ISS EVA construction spacewalks. Best. Background. Working Material. Ever.

That was yesterday, today I'm still productive, although it appears that my next-project roadmap isn't as definitive as I thought it was, d'oh!

50 degree temperature drop in 5 hours.
50 mph wind gusts sending windchill well below zero and whipping snow into whiteout conditions.

That's the midwest I know and remember!

There’s nothing like wrapping multiple projects simultaneously to turn one into a puddle of goo.

My commute from home to office is pleasantly short. It’s about a five-minute drive or a fifteen-minute walk, passing through the heart of downtown Batavia. One of the more perplexing sights on the way to the office had been a constant puzzlement since I moved here back in May. One of the mini-mall plazas had a decently sized insurance agency in a corner space. This wasn’t ‘Joe’s Insurance’, but an agent for one of the major insurers. Most of the front of their office was covered with plywood. Now, if this were Florida and we had a hurricane bearing down, it would look perfectly normal. In the Chicago suburbs, middle of summer, not so much. The curious thing was that this condition persisted for months. In fact, there was even a little banner made up on the side window saying ‘we’re open, pardon our dust during repairs!’

I’m sure I wasn’t the only person wondering if they couldn’t deal with their front windows promptly (but they could make up a banner about it), how are they going to help deal with my insurance claim? Talk about unintentional negative advertising.

As of yesterday the storefront is finally fixed, three months after I moved here. No idea how long it had been boarded up before that. Yay them.

Also, Baptist church on the corner across from my office building? I’m sure it’s your God-given right to do ice cream socials. But really, calling it an ice cream social and jazz festival event, really? When I walked by it didn’t sound like jazz, it sounded like Jesus had called Lawrence Welk from the grave instead of Lazarus. If you want to be hip, perhaps an ice cream social with special guest appearance by Aphex Twin.

Yes, I'm still alive. Yes, I'm furiously busy.

No, I did not buy an iPhone. Yes, the siren song is loud.

Also, I like pie.

I've hit birthday level 31. Yay me.

Needless to say, I've been a tad busy of late. I'm sure I'll get back to this blog sooner or later, hopefully sooner.

In the past week I have:

Loaded all my worldly possessions into a truck
Driven right around 2,000 miles in said truck
Unloaded all my belongings from truck
Done critical move-in set-up at office and home
Gotten internet/LAN configuration done for both
Returned truck

Now I have to furiously get cracking on task-lists. Making my apartment look more like an apartment and less like an explosion in the center of a Penske truck will probably take a couple months.

Today is the day I try and fit all my worldly possessions into 800 cubic feet of space.

Obviously I've gotten out of the posting groove again. Haven't talked about GDC, my fun travel adventures during last month's winter snap, or, well, anything really. Getting out of the blogging habit plus looming project deadlines and an impending move will do that. On the other hand, I did get my taxes out the door today and signed a new office lease, so yay me. Or something.

While still not a completely successful flight, congrats to SpaceX for getting through first stage burn, stage separation and a good chuck of the second stage burn on their second Falcon 1 launch attempt.

Naturally, footage from the launch is already up on YouTube.

When I saw that elements of the Iranian government had decided to be offended over the portrayal of the Persians in "300", my mind started to wander.

I saw a shirtless Dick Cheney screaming "Halliburtons! Tonight we dine in hell!", Condoleeza dancing with streamers in slow-motion, Ahmadinejad being kicked into a pit while holding a vial of enriched uranium. Then I had to slap myself.

Oh, and 20 minutes of the Security Council voting on a resolution in slow motion? Really boring.

After almost six years, I finally retired my old Qualcomm cell phone. Yes, I had been using it since 2001, and it was a refurb to begin with. The power supply connector was disintegrating and the battery finally reached a point where it couldn't hold a charge on stand-by, much less making a call. It was really time to let go.

As I mentioned a couple months back, even if the iPhone were available now, I couldn't justify being an early adopter, paying the hefty price and switching carriers. But yes, I do wish I could. I also loathe most cell phones. I especially loathe the typical Sprint selection.

Thankfully, they did have a palatable looking phone in their current line-up: I am now sporting a Sanyo SCP-7000. Good sound quality, better reception at my bar-challenged home, doesn't look stupid and rugged enough to knock around in my pocket. The UI sucks, of course, and the built-in ring options are amusingly painful, they sound like rejects from Super Mario World on the old Super Nintendo. That said, so far I'm happy with it, I didn't want a cameraphone, don't care about SMS or IM, web browsing or Bluetooth, I just wanted something to make and receive calls. Because in cell-phone terms I'm the grumpy old man rocking on the porch brandishing a cane.

While America undoubtedly is possessed of some overbearing cultural pride, other societies do need to remember the stones in glass houses adage when making fun of Americal Idol, NASCAR and Anna Nicole Smith. In case any European readers have managed to successfully managed to block it out of their minds again, let me remind you: Eurovision. Example A for 2007: Vampires Are Alive. Thanks a lot Switzerland.

Every once in a while, I run across a contest where I’m not entirely sure who the intended target audience would be for the prize. Today’s example is the Microsoft Office Live “I’m Going Places” Sweepstakes. The grand prize is ten flight hours for you and up to six friends on a private jet. While that’s a cool idea for a prize, the absurdly high value of the prize ($50,000), makes it a bit silly to offer as a prize. Since that value is taxable, you’re looking at anywhere from $10,000-$20,000 in federal and state taxes depending on your existing income bracket. To put it mildly, if you’re well off enough to even be able to consider affording that kind of a tax bill for a prize, you’re probably in the higher tax brackets, so we’ll say $20K. So the prize is basically a 60% discount on private jet fare for one long round trip, or two medium trips at a cost per head that takes you into first-class commercial territory even if you were able to split the cost between all the travelers. Microsoft can’t be targeting rank and file IT workers with this contest, who are they after, cheap-ass CTOs? Do they think a cheap-ass CTO is going to buy Office Live for their company? The mind boggles.

Gmail is pretty effective at filtering spam. This just makes me wonder how someone will eventually circumvent it on a wide scale, however temporarily.

My current thought is to use the YouTube purchase against themselves. I mean, gmail isn't going to filter 'Check out this neat video!' messages sent by itself, or short emails with YouTube links.

I wonder if we've yet seen the first male enhancement spam ad uploaded in the form of a YouTube video. If we haven't, we will.

To me, the real head-slapping part of the latest bomb-squad hilarity in Boston isn't that they blew up a traffic meter, it's that now the most obvious thing for a smart-ass would-be terrorist to do is make a bomb that looks like a traffic meter.

I had an epiphany yesterday about the future culture war battlegrounds of teen sexuality. There has been a fair bit of controversy as of late brought about by issues like the FDA approval of Gardasil and the drive in some states to add it to mandatory vaccination protocols for schoolchildren. I’m pretty ambivalent on the issue, except to note that it looks like Merck has a very nice profit center on their hands. However, if people are getting worked up over this, I can think of a couple things on the horizon that will really make some heads explode, and not just from the usual suspects.

Regardless of various ideological stances on the subjects of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases in young adults, everybody at least wants to avoid them. The means of doing so are the main bones of contention, and lost in the noise, the various camps all have some valid points. Teenagers are going to be, well, teenagers whether you expect them to be abstinent, use a condom, use a condom correctly, or take a pill consistently. However, broad-spectrum dosing of hormonal birth control on girls going through puberty is really not a good idea.

For biological reasons, non-barrier contraception has been predominantly female targeted. There are ongoing trials of hormonal/drug based male contraceptives, but it’s much easier to try and stop one egg. Unless, of course, you could pretty much stop all the sperm, and a ‘mechanical’ method seems to be moving right along towards approval. If this evolves into a reversible, inexpensive, no-monkey-with-hormone-level way of rendering a male infertile, it may soon beg the question: why not make implantation mandatory for boys from puberty through adulthood (18, 21, whatever)? Somebody is going to propose it. Even if it’s too much of a political hot potato for the US, somewhere like the UK which has teenage pregnancy levels half the US, but still high enough to be a concern, who knows? If it were officially mandated somewhere, or merely became hip and trendy, it could quickly snowball into quite the ruckus.

Of course, that does nothing for sexually transmitted diseases. But, at the moment bucketloads of money is being poured into the biosciences. Specifically of interest is money being spent as the result of the War on Terror in the area of detection of viral and bacterial agents. Granted, a lot of that money is going straight down a sewer drain of pork spending with little to show for it, but the field is advancing rapidly. It’s not necessarily absurd to think that by 2015 or 2020 you could end up with something the size of Listerine Pocket-Pack film strips, only they don’t freshen your breath, they let you check your prospective partner for a broad spectrum of contagious STDs. While the combination of those two things would certainly be enough to make James Dobson’s head explode, it’s more than radical enough to cause controversy from a variety of directions and groups, not just the usual suspects.

Going even further down the road, imagine the hip new fad for young lovers in 2040, expressing love by swapping customized sexually transmitted virii, like a variant of a defanged HPV. Sleep tight prospective parents of the future!

The portfolio reel from the firm that did the in-movie advertisements, computer interfaces and propaganda for Children of Men is tasty, tasty stuff.

Found off Daring Fireball, a Mac-centric site worth reading even if you don't actually own a Mac.

Many members of one of my online haunts were watching the Academy Awards the other night, so I jumped off a cliff and turned it on while puttering around. This reminded me I really meant to talk about a couple movies I saw in the theatre recently, which is an increasingly rare occurrence. As it turns out, both movies, Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth, racked up several nominations.

I enjoyed both movies immensely, but I’m not quite sure what I was thinking seeing them both back-to-back on successive days. They are both good, but not exactly light fare or uplifting feel-good movies.

It was a shame that Children of Men didn’t win for cinematography, or pick up a visual effects nomination. The movie itself was solid, a rare sci-fish film with an above least-common denominator script. It is also a prime example of a film wielding exceptional technical artistry to magnify its emotional and visceral impact. There were two extended sequences in particular that left me utterly drained at their conclusion. One sobering side thought was just how effectively you can now create a completely convincing ‘fake’ reality. The opening scene of the movie didn’t really happen, but I’d have to scrutinize HD quality video of the sequence to try and find visual telltales that it didn’t.

I intentionally tried to limit my knowledge regarding Pan’s Labyrinth before going to see it. About all I knew was ‘adult fairy tale’, and ‘civil war era Spain’. Both those things were true. It was well shot, well directed, and very touching, but it was a heavy, sad piece. I found it hauntingly beautiful in spots but hard to watch, even though it was good because happy was not in the cards. Not to say I want saccharine and happy endings, but after Children of Men, I found Pan’s Labyrinth good, enjoyable but as depressing as thought-provoking for its ending of multiple interpretations.

Both are worth watching, both deserved their nominations. Soon I have to get off my rear and rent some titles I’ve been meaning to watch: “The Fountain”, “Stranger Than Fiction”, “The Illusionist” “The Prestige” and “Thank You For Smoking”.

Yesterday was a refreshing cool overcast day in Southern California with periodic rain. It was very enjoyable. Today was bright, sunny, clear and still a bit crisp. That was also nice. What wasn’t nice is I think the sudden weather change was largely to blame for the killer sinus headache that greeted me as I woke this morning. This resulted in a frustrating loss of productivity in a morning that ended up being limited to a couple critical tasks and being fetal. While the pain subsided over the course of the afternoon, the end result is drained lethargy.

Now that I’m back in start-up mode (ironic considering it’s for a company I started back in 2001), I’ve been looking for weapons to combat lethargy, discouragement and drive inspiration. Books are a prime source, and I’ve just finished reading two recent releases that fall into the appropriate category.

The first, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups Early Days has a pretty self-explanatory title. It didn’t turn out to be especially inspirational, or terribly educational, but it was interesting. The stories and anecdotes ranged wildly both in length and quality (measured by ‘interestingness’), but it was well worth the read. As I mentioned, I didn’t really run across anything that was new, although the concept that companies that do well usually achieve it by capitalizing on unexpected opportunities is now further cemented into my mind. Founders at Work is well edited, and recommended if you like reading about the tech industry. I think I was slightly disappointed that the book didn’t spark any epiphanies, but I was probably expecting too much.

The second, Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software is probably an odd choice for inspiration. The book is an exceptional creation, it details the pain, agony, struggle, and sheer difficulty of creating serious computer software, but is written in such a fashion that someone outside the computer industry can read and understand it. It manages this without coming across as pedestrian or condescending, which is quite a feat of masterful writing. The technical, social and political dynamics of large-scale software development are displayed in all their ugly glory. One of the interesting aspects is how the project, Chandler, is largely free of the financial pressures that plague much of commercial software development. With that dimension removed, the others can be seen that much more clearly. The end result is a mesmerizing look at how even if you build a team of really smart, really experienced people, making software is hard. In time I want to be developing software even more complex than Chandler, so it is a case study well taken to heart and oddly inspirational. I suspect I will force some people to read it at some point, because it is a tremendously accessible look at an intimidating and seemingly incomprehensible world from the outside.

More work, more deadlines, more trips, less blogging.

I continue to be exceptionally glad I purchased the MacBook Pro. During my most recent trip, I realized I’d likely be doing a lot of source code reformatting, as well as construction. While the MBP keyboard is quite a good one, the small arrow keys and function keys tend to wear out my fingers during extended editing sessions. Thus, I decided to splurge on an external keyboard.

This led me to my keyboard dilemma, getting my hands on a decent keyboard quickly without paying a fortune. I have always been picky about keyboards and monitors, after all I frequently spent hours upon hours a day typing and staring, using cheap stuff is just plain silly. In this day and age, however, now that computers are a cheap commodity rather than several thousand dollar investments, keyboards have become one of those peripherals that seem to suffer from a race-to-the-bottom syndrome. Even if you go into a computer store, the $80 keyboards are just as crappy to type on as the $12 keyboards, they just have a bunch of extra buttons and useless features.

I wanted a good keyboard, which meant I wanted a mechanical keyboard. At the same time, I was working on-site in an open plan office, which meant I wasn’t going to subject those around me to the sweet sweet clamor of an IBM Model M, or equivalent. Since it was going into a MacBook Pro, I also wanted USB native.

A little searching with Google didn’t turn up anything promising, except for one no-name keyboard from an OEM manufacturer I’d never heard of: the Scorpius-M10 Mechanical USB Keyboard. No word on whether or not the have a Crichton-M9 bluetooth mouse. I decided to take a stab in the dark, roll the dice and give the M10 a shot. Two rolls of the dice actually, since it was so obscure none of the usual suspects (Amazon, Newegg) stocked it.

I was pleased with the results, the online retailer (Cyberguys) promptly shipped it and I had the new keyboard in my hot little hands. And then I realized that I had made a most unfortunate assumption. Years of Mac usage had conditioned me to be used to the convention of ADB, and later USB keyboards having pass-through connectors so you could plug your mouse directly into the keyboard. This never caught on in the windows world (remember that lowest common denominator?), although it isn’t surprising since unlike Apple, it was a long time before PC keyboards and mice ended up using the same physical interface (Bus mice? Serial mice? Ah, the bad old days). I now had one mouse to plug in, one keyboard to plug in, and one devkit to plug in, 3 USB cables, 2 ports on the MBP, and not a single USB hub in the office. It’s only February and I’m already glad I ponied up for Amazon Prime.

The keyboard itself gets a thumbs up. Purely functional visually, with the sole fashion concession being its matte black appearance. No stupid useless keys, I actually wish it didn’t have the Windows key, but I’ve come to learn to live with it in 2007 (control-escape forever). Thankfully, it is quieter than an old-school clicky keyboard, which was one of my major concerns. I’d put the noise level right about midway between a normal keyboard and a Model M. The tactile keypress feel is pleasant. My only quibble is that the keys have a bit more ‘jiggle’ to them then on a Model M or my Matias Tactile Pro. The up and down is fine, but resting my fingers on them, the keys don’t quite have as solid a lateral feeling as I’d like. That said, it still beats the heck out of any non-mechanical keyboard and I’m glad I bought it.