June 2003 Archives

There's a Wiki for OSCON 2003. With attendee list (you can go and add yourself and come back here later, I won't mind).

Robert and I are almost done with our slides, right Robert? :-) Given some some lax definition of "almost" and "done" anyway.

We also have a very secret 5 minute Perl Lightning Talk scheduled about something not entirely unrelated.

I really should get rid of the default MT template and do something spiffier. This is a bit too grey and this (fulifier via yoak) is a bit too colorful. What to do ... what to do ...

The friendly Airborne Express delivery person just dropped off Final Cut Pro 4. 4 DVDs. Must. Do. Work. Focus. On. Coding. And. Stuff.

It doesn't even install on a G3, so now not having a G4+ portable mac is even more painful. (No, the powermac with the old fashioned 21" CRT is not portable). I just can't bring myself to buy a powerbook when new ones are coming out any week now. Or maybe I can ... hmn... Must. Focus. Do. Work.

Why does the conservatives think that not discriminating against gays for what they do behind closed doors "weakens the traditional family? That's just insane. You know, the gays are probably not going to have a "traditional family" no matter what the law says or how much they are being harassed. And no matter what they do for themselves, it doesn't prevents anyone else from having whatever kind of family they please. Why does conservative nuts get to use nice words like "freedom" and "traditional" for their spin?

David Wheeler is in Los Angeles to install Bricolage for an unnamed Hollywood entity. Robert, Jim, Leonard, Josh, myself and Kevin from the unnamed entity went to eat and be geeks at Il Capriccio. Lots of fun. And being outside is healthy, I hear.

In March I got a new 180GB drive that lasted all of six hours as my InnoDB storage device before crashing. Some weeks ago I finally fedex'ed it to Hitachi for replacement. I got the new drive today and just installed it in the powermac. 172GB. Yay. That makes almost 400GB storage in my mac. Room for more than 200 days of mp3s encoded at 192 kbps. It seems like just yesterday that 400MB wasn't all that bad. IBM/Hitachi is coming out with a 4GB Microdrive this fall.

Installing the drive on the 2nd IDE channel was a piece of cake. The inside of the PowerMac is really nicely done. There are three IDE channels in the mac, so the second drive doesn't have to share with either the first drive or the optical drive.

Running Disk Utility is taking forever. Like watching paint try, without the bad smell. Actually, it appears to have stopped progressing the progress bar.

update: Killing Disk Utility and then using "Erase" instead of "Partition" made my new "Goliath" disk ready in less than a second. Duh.

Mayday mayday, running out of burnable plastic.

Where should I buy DVD-R media (for the Apple Superdrive / Pioneer DVR-105)?

My usual pusher of computer parts is spectacularly overpriced for DVD-R's and the prices are not super competitive where I've last bought DV tapes and such (although they seem to be super cool people - and the prices are competitive for DV tapes, just not for DVD-R).

Google leads me to a bunch of places that seems like they easily could turn into infinite hassle, and infinite hassle is a bit too much for saving a few bucks.

So what to do? And what to buy? So far I've just used slow generic media for storing and moving data files. I'd like more of those (although 2x or 4x speed would be much nicer) but also some higher quality media for putting into normal DVD players. They say that the cheap generic media isn't compatible with as many DVD players? Is that true?

Oh, does anyone know where to get clear plastic sleeves? (Like the cheap paper sleeves with a plastic window but in all plastic).

Writing here was amazingly useful when I was choosing IMAP server for my mail spool at home; so maybe it'll be for this as well. :-)

The rumor mill is going so fast the chain is falling off.

Apple accidentially posted specs on some "PowerMac G5" to the Apple Store for a few minutes Thursday. Of course some people think it was on purpose. Why would that ever be? To make fun of the rumor mongers?

Some sites also thinks we'll get new 970 powerbooks. How excellent timing would that be? I can only just barely get my old pismo to turn on now.

I bought Viridiana a 30gb iPod for her birthday. It's very neat. Two words for the supplied windows software: Really Bad. Maybe the 2.0.1 update will make it better. Or maybe xplay sucks less. Or maybe she just needs a mac so she can use iTunes.

I can't wait to download Panther next week. Whee. (Assuming they make it available on the developers connection site or that I ignore everything else and go to San Francisco next week - probably not such a great idea, although I think I might be able to score a free pass).

ps. Oh, and thanks for the happy birthday wishes in the comments and the umpteen emails. I promise I'll reply to the emails before long. It has been some busy weeks lately.

pps. How come I never sleep before 4-7am'ish. Is that healthy? Are you sure?

We had a picnic on the beach on Saturday, it was an amazing amount of fun. We ate, played volleyball, backgammon, chinese checkers and Set. When Viridiana and I got home in the early evening we instantly fell asleep.

It's my birthday today. It doesn't seem to matter all that much to me. Or maybe it does. My mom called right at midnight and Casper Bukh (last updated in 1999, time to update Casper!) and Tim Bunce were the first to write happy birthday emails which was very nice of them. That does matter to me very much. :-)

Oh, and someone wrote on ICQ, but I'm not sure who it was and I managed to close the window. Duh! Please write again!

Google found an article Casper wrote in SALT which you would have never thought would happen five years ago. Amazing. :-) I am very happy for him.

Leela talked about how making choices in life is hard because choosing something always implies not choosing something else. She reminded me that it only gets harder with age.

I am definitely closer to 30 than to 20 now. It is a bit overwhelming. The early twenties are long gone and the mid-twenties are slipping away. In 20 years the distinction will probably not seem all that significant, but in the present it's very easy to doubt your choices. At least for me.

The sound of grasshoppers and this certain scent of the earth, plants and flowers always reminds me of Greece. I haven't been to Greece for almost 15 years. I think the last time was when I was barely a teenager, or maybe it's even longer ago.

A few days ago I listened to the Soma Sonic cd and I was instantly back to the end of '99 when I found them on mp3.com and I was in Japan working too much and playing sad mp3s on my giant Dell laptop.

Dubstar is even more of a time machine. It brings instant memories from traveling Europe the last spring of my time in school. More than memories, I am back in that train with my cd player, headphone implants and backpacks everywhere around us.

U2's Rattle and Hum brings fun memories from that same summer.

Bob Dylan's "Oh Mercy" reminds me of a not quite so happy time. Best Dylan ever. Yes, even better than At Budokan.

For my 15 years birthday some friends bought me Achtung Baby. We were only a bit more than a handful celebrating, but the party lasted all night. It was a blast.

When I was very little I'd cry when my dad played his loud beat music, so he played classical music instead. For years my favorite popular LP to fall asleep was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite. It was a Deutsche Grammophon recording and the cover had this pretty photo of Norwegian mountains. I also had all Bach's symphonies, but I don't remember them as clearly.

Current candidates for what will remind me of the present and the past few years; in no particular order.

• Daft Punk's Discovery album (the Homework album reminds me of that summer in Copenhagen where it was played all too much)
• Alina by Arvo Pärt. Nothing takes tension away faster than this. Three of the five tracks are the same and even then I've played it over and over and over many times.
• Leonard Cohen, Ten New Songs. I barely remember listening to anything else last winter, spring and summer.
• Röyksopp is insanely addicting.
• The last months Beth Orton has been on very frequent rotation.
• I don't think I'll remember it for this particular time, but some of the lyrics on Leonard Cohen's Recent Songs are so wonderful, even if I don't know what it means. Or maybe it's the perfect use of violins through most of the album. "And where, where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight I've heard all the wild reports, they can't be right But whose head is this she's dancing with on the threshing floor whose darkness deepens in her arms a little more"