Life at Fruit Co. is notoriously shrouded in mystery, but after my first day I
can tell you the following about what it's like inside:
- Most of it is underground
- The work is done by unpaid midget slave labor that is never allowed to
leave
- The chocolate is mixed by waterfall, the whipped cream is whipped
with real whips, and the poached eggs are stolen from the king's forest in
the dead of night.
So that's what it's like there. Or maybe that's what it's like at Wonka's
Chocolate Factory—I get mixed up sometimes.
Category: Geek
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This is a quick belated note to say: We made it! We moved in early on the 23rd,
the cable guy was only an hour and a half late getting our cable modem set up
on the 24th, all of our stuff miraculously arrived on the evening of the 24th
(we were sure that it would come much closer to the August 2nd end of the
arrival range), and we've been settling in and wading through boxes ever
since. Everything went more smoothly than could realistically have been
expected.
It's good to be home.
Category: Life
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If all has gone according to plan, we are currently passed out in our new
apartment—Woohoo!
If the cable guy is on time (note the naive optimism), we should
have internet by tomorrow afternoon, and I'll return to fresh, live posts
instead of this canned nonsense.
Category: Travel
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We are on the road again, heading for California. I hear they've got women,
whiskey and gold!
Category: Travel
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We are currently (again, barring disaster) recuperating in the mountains of
Colorado with Laura's aunt, in order to be refreshed and invigorated when we
strike out again. I hope to take some good pictures out here, as it's rumored
to be beautiful.
Category: Travel
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We are striking out once again, with two days of corn to look forward to. I'm
expecting the drive to be about as exciting as this post, if even that.
Category: Travel
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This post is brought to you post-departure, transcending the mists of time,
through the magic of Blosxom. Barring
some sort of hang-up or disaster with the movers, I'm currently on the road,
heading for my first pit-stop: Chicago.
The last night of near-final prep was busy, but not as bad as we expected.
In part, it's because we found that there is a certain amount of fun in
watching the apartment regress to the barren state we remember from moving in.
Plus, of course, the excitement of being ready to go at last!
We'll see everyone in a week and a half! Stop in from time to time, as
there are a few more canned updates biding their time until the moment is ripe.
Category: Travel
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There's little I love more than a speculative
opinion piece pretending to be a statement of
obvious facts. Apparently I'm only heading out west for the lucrative stock
options, and I'll have deflated morale and dissatisfaction in no time.
Of course, during my visits I got the distinct impression that people were
excited about, you know, the software they were writing. But hey, what do I
(and all the current and former Apple employees telling him he's wrong in
his comments) know? He's looked at a stock graph, which has given him insight
that's not available to anyone else. Never mind the fact that he apparently
didn't do enough research to discover even Hyatt's widely famed weblog about
upcoming Safari features—this is clearly a man who knows his
stuff.
Category: Geek
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Perhaps
not. As a ballroom dancer, formerly competitive, I was excited to see a
major article in the NYT about ballroom—but the content of the article,
I'm sad to say, doesn't surprise me in the least. When the dancers said that
the rules of competitive ballroom are “archaic”, they were really
not kidding. In fact, by far the most surprising thing in the entire article
was that the YCN stood
up to the rest of USABDA and got them to allow same-sex
partners at the collegiate level. I've been at college competitions where in
order to be considered an official YCN/USABDA competition, there had to be a
rule that women could not wear pants while dancing—dresses or skirts only.
And this wasn't just a lip-service thing, because the YCN coordinator was on
site making announcements, and preventing at least one couple from competing
again until they changed costumes. Never mind that there are plenty of great
Rhythm and Latin outfits with pants. Progressive they are not.
I had always assumed that USABDA was the biggest group of fuddy-duddies,
but reading what the IDF folks had to say to the media I'm realizing that
the IDF is at least at the same level of fossilization. This was my all-time
favorite section:
“Just as the Hopak dancers do not have to start adding other
ethnic groups' elements to their dances because to do so would fundamentally
contradict what the dance is about, DanceSport does not have to start adding
dances about some other relationship,” Jim Frasier, who heads the legal
commission of the Europe-based federation, wrote in an e-mail message,
referring to the Ukrainian folk dance to explain why his organization has
sought to restrict same-sex couples.
Citing as an example the pasodoble, a dance based on movements performed
during a bullfight with the man in the central matador role, Mr. Frasier
added: “It is performed by a man and woman because it is about the
relationship between a man and a woman, using the metaphor of the matador and
the cape to express one more aspect of the man/woman
relationship.”
What the hell are they thinking over there, letting this guy do their PR?
The pasodoble is they example they choose, of all the dances in their
repertoire, to hold up as an example? Pasodoble, while a very interesting dance,
is pretty much the black sheep in terms of the equality of the roles of leader
and follower. They may as well have issued a press statement saying,
“Well, we don't really see ballroom dance as an art form, or a way of
exploring the dynamics of partnerships in a broader sense—we like to
think of it as a way of preserving the misogynistic elements of our society's
past. If there's no woman in the couple to push around, what's the
point?”
Also not surprising was the mention of the Olympics as a possible factor
in the IDF's stance. Three or four years ago, even at the YCN (collegiate)
level, the powers that be in this area were already obsessed with the Olympics.
That was already becoming a primary motivator. And when I say
“Olympics”, I of course mean “money”
I seriously wonder if any of the leaders of these organizations remember what
it was like to enjoy dancing.
Category: Society
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Laura and I have been trying in vain to find something of interest to stop
and see along I-80 between Chicago and Colorado, and coming up empty. All the
good stuff seems to have been saved for I-90, so that I could be jealous of
my friend who's simultaneously making a cross-country road trip the other way,
but further north. I've taken to joking about stopping and seeing the world's
largest ball of twine, since I figured that's about the most interesting thing
the Iowa-Nebraska region of I-80 would have to offer.
Well, yesterday on a whim I actually Googled for the world's largest ball
of twine and made two discoveries: First, that there are at least three
different "world's largest" twine balls, all using slightly different
definitions, and second, that the nearest one to our route is in Kansas.
That's right, I-80 is so boring that even the world's largest ball of twine
is too exciting for it.
I hope that stretch isn't patrolled too carefully.
Category: Travel
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The top ten signs that you are ready to move across the country:
- You've actually thrown away all that stuff that seemed like such a good idea to keep at the time.
- You have given away several important pieces of furniture.
- You can't see what furniture you have left because of all the boxes.
- Your freezer isn't filled to capacity anymore.
- You get a letter informing you that your rent would be going down next year (thanks to Murphy's second, lesser-known law: "Many things that can go right also will, but also at the worst possible time").
- You have recently had lunch or dinner with just about everyone you know in the area.
- You (or your spouse—thanks hon!) have talked to so many utilities and miscellaneous offices that you could write a detailed treatise on the current themes and trends in muzak.
- Your task-list at work is actually getting shorter.
- You spend hours making a detailed scale drawing of your new apartment, along with scale construction-paper furniture, so you can start arranging things.
And the number one sign you are ready to move:
- You live in Cleveland.
Thank you, I'll be here all week—or at least until Thursday.
Seriously though, as much as I like to rag on Cleveland, there's plenty
here that I'll miss (most of it in Cleveland Heights, but that's quibbling).
But miss it though I will, I am definitely ready to leave. A new life awaits,
so living out the last few days of this one seems empty and futile in many
ways.
Category: Life
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Ok, as the badges on the right suggest, I'm something of a standards nut. I
like web standards, and I generally take pride in coding to them.
However, the standards sometimes frustrate me to no end. You would
think that something as simple as a reverse-order list would be
relatively straightforward. And in older HTML, it more or less is; you simply
use the value attribute to override the numbering. However, that
attribute is deprecated in XHTML, so I went hunting for an alternative using
CSS, and found: nothing. Ok, not nothing, but only a CSS3
method that's widely unsupported. Yippee.
That left me with three options for my last post:
- Give up the reverse-ordered list—not really an option
- Not actually use a list, but instead make the numbers part of the content
and carefully align everything by hand—not only a pain, but also ugly
from a semantic standpoint since being a reverse-order list is structural,
not just presentational (not that value overrides are exactly
structural, but it's a start)
- Use value anyway, and throw validation out the window—not
my first choice from a moral standpoint
- Use value anyway, and convert my whole weblog to Transitional
so that I can technically get away with doing so—this option irks me,
because in every other respect I strive constantly to conform to the Strict
standard, and throwing that all away for one measly post seems overly harsh
I went with option 3. That's right, I've thrown validation to the wind, and
am now living a lie by continuing to display the badge. If the W3C wants better,
they should have given us a new standard that was complete before taking away
functionality we had in the old standard (and this is hardly the first time
they have done so). I blame society for my faults.
Thank you for bearing with this brief interruption. Now back to your
regularly scheduled, valid XHTML 1.1 weblog.
Category: Geek
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I'm firmly resolved to use categories more widely now, but I have an important
issue giving me pause: Should I load my old posts into categories retroactively,
thus breaking links (primarily this would be Google, since I'm not cool enough
yet for actual people to link to me), or should I leave them where they are,
and make a mess of the miscellaneous top-level category? Beloved readers,
I turn to you for advice.
Category: Geek
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Simmoril's prodding, along with my having
reached the point where I'm reading enough stuff that using an RSS aggregator is starting
to look like a pretty good idea, has finally inspired me to mess with my RSS feed. Because
Blosxom rocks, it's incredibly easy to get RSS going.
All I had to do was mirror my strange templating changes into my story.rss file so that
I won't be missing my starting and ending HTML tags, and bam: fully functioning (I hope)
feed. To celebrate, I've added the little orange icon we've all come to know and love to
my badge collection.
Happy feeding!
Category: Geek
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Articles like this
one really frustrate me. Sure, the BSA/RIAA/MPAA/whoever are going to lie
to serve their own interests. But does every journalist have to parrot
their report as if it were gospel? Every story I saw today about the BSA's
report on software piracy contained a paragraph functionally equivalent to
the following:
A BSA study of $80 billion in software installed on computers
last year found only $51 billion was legally purchased, resulting in a $29
billion loss.
Now, I only took a year of economics, and that was in high school, but I'm
pretty sure I have a basic understanding of the laws of supply and demand.
Dumbed down, and ignoring weird fringe effects like prices of luxury status
symbols, it goes like this: more people buy stuff when it's cheaper. And yet,
everyone who reports "losses" from illegal software/movie/music
trading seems to have skipped this basic lesson, and blithely assumes that
every high-school and college student with a pirated copy of Photoshop would
have shelled out $650 dollars for a legal version if they didn't know a guy
who could give them a free copy. Yeah.
I'm not condoning piracy, saying that it doesn't legitmately hurt any industries,
or that no-one with pirated software would buy it if they had to, but please.
If the real number is even a few percent of the $29 billion they quoted, I
would be shocked. Some of the countries where they quote the biggest piracy
numbers are places where Office or Windows would cost months, sometimes years,
of the average salary of their inhabitants.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to set up a paid subscription to my
weblog. I figure I'll charge $100,000 or so per page view—so far, people
have been getting this content for free, resulting in millions, maybe even
billions, in losses for me.
[Edit 7/8: Apparently I can't type. Hopefully it was clear that I was
not condoning piracy. Thanks Laura!]
Category: Society
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As my change over to the new job and new home gets closer, I'm finding myself
in a state of limbo—my standing with the
Camino project more so than anything
else. Although I haven't actually started work yet, I have signed the
requisite IP agreement. In absence of other information, I'm assuming that it
took effect when I signed it, not when I walk in the door for the first
time.
Now, this certainly isn't the end of the story, as I fully intend to begin
the paperwork to see what my future is as soon after getting there as possible
(without being a colossal pain to my superiors, that is). So in a few weeks I'll
start the process of seeing what's what. Until then though, I'm playing it safe.
Unfortunately, I don't actually know how safe to play it, so I'm leaning
toward really safe. That means:
- No code contributions
- No bug
triaging
- No substantive contributions to #camino on IRC
- No forum
posts
The last at least is probably overly careful, but it's easier and safer to
just take a clean step back for a while.
It's hard though, because I like troubleshooting in the forums, and (as sick
as it sounds) I like bug triaging. And it's hard because I feel disloyal to
the Camino team. It's not like we are swimming in developers, and it's looking
like there will be almost no-one for the next month. The Camino team is
awesome, and I hate to abandon them even for a short time—they took me
in, answered my dumb questions, helped me get going doing real work, put trust
in me, and generally made me feel like a real part of the team almost
immediately. They're all very understanding of my hiatus, but in a way, that
almost makes it worse. Since I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I
wouldn't have my new job without my Camino experience (both resumé and
real-world Objective-C), and since it's because of that job that I'm taking a
hiatus (hopefully nothing more), I can't help feeling like I'm giving them the
short end of the stick here.
With luck, I'll be back soon. I'm sure given enough persistence I can find
some way, even if it's curtailed or slightly indirect (e.g., working on some
of the Moz Mac-only bugs, rather than Camino specifically), of helping out.
And if I'm really lucky, the higher-ups will agree with my view: Camino isn't
about competing with Safari, it's just about having more choice, and
filling a slightly different niche. It's about enriching the platform.
Stay tuned.
Category: Camino
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Under the pressure of our impending road-trip (as well as the geek-peer factor
from the fact that our destination is silicon valley) I've finally caved and
bought a cell phone. I'm not wild about the cost, the two-year lock-in, and
my inability to test in the area where I'll be using it for 1.99 of the 2 years.
But I must admit, the neato geek factor is pretty high. And now I'll stop
having those "I really wish I had a cell phone" moments, which is
a plus.
If I were a true geek, I'd probably have a Bluetooth-enabled
combination PDA/phone/camera/slide rule/espresso machine... but I have to start
somewhere.
Category: Life
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