oh my yes

Thank God | TPM:

"Have you gotten one of those phoney-baloney robocalls trying to trick you into believing your car manufacturer is giving you a last chance to extend your warrantee? Apparently they made the mistake of calling Sen. Schumer's cell phone and he sicced the FTC on them...."

kill bank of america

I am a bank of america customer.

I hate bank of america.

I have for a long time, and I don't have an amusing new rant for you. But today, I did my tiny, tiny part to destroy them. I started the process of taking my money out of their system, and putting it in to someone else's system. This process will probably take a long time, but I'm glad I got it started. 

I should have done it a long time ago. The thing that pushed me over the edge, honestly, is the fact that Bank of America is vulnerable right now. If I could I would love to start a movement to kill it before it can get back up.

this is fantastic advice

This is fantastic advice, and I will follow it.  This guy is a huge weirdo.

i love my industry

we are serious business.

an email I got today:

Hi Everyone,

It has been brought to my attention that we are completely out of Rockstar. I placed a drink order today and I was notified that the company is no longer distributing Rockstars. They will eventually be offering Monster, but that wont be until later on.  The only energy drinks that we have available to us are Full Throttle.  

Just wanted to let you all know. 

 response:

social capital tracking

Stack Overflow is doing some cool things with community building within the programming Q/A niche. Specifically, their reputation system works pretty similarly to how I envision XP working for questor: more reputation means more access and privileges at the site. They have some high quality stuff going on, I'm taking notes.

real estate!

Here is a map showing percentage increase and decrease in average real estate value, sorted by city.

The map is color coded by trend, the size of the boxes represent the size of the market. You can see that large swaths of LA have lost a lot of value, but there are enclaves, especially along the coast, or around Pasadena and Arcadia, that have held up pretty well. Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach are actually still going up!

I think it's interesting to see how the crash hits different places in different ways, and it mostly makes intuitive sense to me. But I'm not convinced that the beach cities have completely escaped. In fact I'm betting that over the next year there's a second correction that hits these areas. They may not end up taking the same percentage hit, overall, as the rest of the region--the prices here are high because people actually desire to live here--but there's still a bubble mentality to the real estate near the water, and at some point it's going to have to pop.

hubris again

This community builder software has really got its hooks in me. I feel like it might find a use outside of my own personal scope. I must finish it and find out...

flex builder ftl

So you say you want to change the name of the swf you output?

Oh you have to enter that compiler option by hand.

And the IDE will tell you it's not supported.

But you can ignore the IDE error, it will work anyway.

I wish I were making this up.

That's not even close to the worst problem I ran in to, but it might be the stupidest.

overcoming dataphobia

One of my weaknesses as a client-focussed programmer is that I don't know a lot about how servers work. Specifically, I have a mild phobia related to web technologies and databases. It started out as elitism: as a game programmer I held myself above business application programming, which extended to database management. Elitism turned into passive and then active avoidance: I found that I could avoid by doing anything web or data related through a combination of sloth and social engineering. Somewhere along the line the elitism turned into a phobia.

Eventually it became a problem that had to be faced. All of the cool kids are making web apps these days. Even game programmers have to face the music.

I'm trying to work on the community builder software again. It's been slow going at first, but I think I'm beggining to break through the fog. I'm using C# and ASP.NET, a choice you may disagree with, but I have my reasons*.  I don't have a good reference for ASP though, and like I said, I have mental issues that make this kind of work really hard. But I'm finally getting to the point of creating controls and pages, so that's mildly encouraging.

The worst part, for me, is figuring out what toolset to use, because each toolset makes a different set of assumptions that I am largely unaware of, and I have my own set of assumptions that I'm also unaware of. Sorting it all out took most of my energy on Sunday. Now I feel like I've settled on a data design and a database access plan that I can move forward with. Let's see if it sticks this time.

*I've tried teaching myself ruby on rails a couple times, and it's never really stuck. I can get some things done, but the entire work flow feels foreign to me, and dealing with the constantly changing rails framework is a pain in the neck. ALSO, there's no good IDE support. (see: I hate eclipse.)**. I might try java in NetBeans with the Google Web Toolkit, but I haven't picked up java for years, and I hate it too. Say what you will (and I will!) about Microsoft, but they make solid development tools, and when you commit to an all MS pipeline, the integration is hard to beat.

**The real reason Rails never seemed right to me, I suspect, is that I did not grow up on Perl and PHP. Even the name PHP makes want to throw up a little, if that gives you some idea of how I feel about web programming.

we celebrate the little victories.

Secure Enough to Sin, Baghdad Is Back to Old Ways

can we gtfo now?

ticket to ride

this

clearly the work of Obama's crack transportion system research and simulation team:

cheap futurism

language evolves.

'seriously' will come to be pronounced 'sursly,' (srsly) and so on.

On the other hand, the advent of recorded audio will push back against the usual forces of... vowel changingness?

Who can say.

carpal tunnel stretching

I saw this on BoingBoing and wanted to keep it around to try it out. I don't have bad wrist pain most of the time, but every once in a while it threatens me, so it would be nice if I could develop a routine that would strengthen and protect these vital bits of tissue.

programming font selection

in the form of a dialog

me: I decided I needed a new font.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000157.html

I chose one of these,

if you need a distraction, which one do you think I picked?

 

Anne: haha ok, lemme see....

could i get a hint by asking what it was you didnt like about your previous one? :-)

me: l and 1 were indistinguishable.

 

Anne: ha, that's a pretty good reason

that's always annoying

or when lowercase L and capital i are the same, that's annoying too

but pretty common in sans-serifs =/

 

me: anyway, beyond that, the main criteria is clarity, readability, and being able to see a lot of code at the same time, which means small but still legible.

Anne: if you wanted small, the profont would certainly win, but for some reason "proggy clean" is my personal favorite. I think the roundness of the letters makes it more readable than the more condensed, boxy letters...

but which one would you pick?... hmmm...

and my favorite might be because it looks the closest to a non-programmy font, which I'm used to reading

me: Wow.

so yeah, one of my coworkers suggested proFont,

but it was a bit too small for me

I then looked at pragmata, but it was too expensive.

I am currently using proggy clean

 

Anne: yeah, i had to check a couple times to find the differences between proggy and pragmata

they're very similar

but yeah, booyah. :-)

 

me: :-p

meta fun

N's status message: A* FTW

S: I tried to look up A*, but I couldn't decide what hyperlinks to follow in my web browser to get to the article I was looking for

N: if only there were some sort of algorithm that could explore a graph and find the shortest route to a goal.

S: no kidding

then I might be able to find out what this "A*" thing is

it's gonna be the future soon

Two of my favorite topics, carbon nanotubes and artificial muscles, together at last.

we were into it before the obamas made it cool

Obamas to Plant Vegetable Garden at White House

We don't have tomatillos or Thai basil yet, but I'm going to chalk that up to the white house lawn being a lot more accomodating than our tiny little beds. Not to mention the vast staff of semi-volunteer gardeners they have access to. 

<_<

Not that I have any aspirations to anything like that.

>_>

In unrelated news, land prices in Topanga Canyon are looking interesting.

this is why I don't read books

it just destroys my bio-rhythms.

Had a caffeine headache* by the time I finished Glasshouse, by Charles Stross this morning. True to form, mind-blowing conceptual science fiction, mediocre but acceptable characterization. I'll take it. Memory loss, culture shock, gender shock, and the character's historical immersion shock mirrors the reader's future shock nicely. Some great extrapolation, and the book reads and winds up a lot more human than accelerando, though it's set in a similar universe. Goes to some of the same places as the later Hyperion books, but with less hubris and more hard-nosedness**.

And now I will enjoy the rest of my week off, free from it's grip. Luckily it was short, unlike Anathem.

*from lack, not excess. A cup of joe cleared it up half an hour later.

**Oh man the more I reflect on the Hyperion cycle the more I dislike it, it has some great concepts, but falls into the worst "here are my player characters" trap ever. Which I wouldn't mind as much if the aim were less epic... bah!

deck progress 5

On Saturday I noted a couple of flaws int the deck.  This is the debugging phase.
Flaw the first, the joist that was holding up the roof was cracked and bowing.

Apparently my little pergola excursion on Friday was even more dangerous than I thought. The other problem was that the swaying and flexing was a little more than I was comfortable with. But I didn't really seem to have the will power to do the right thing. Luckily, James arrived

and provided the will power for me. We fully replaced the broken joist, a tricky operation, and added all sorts of triangle bracing*, and joist hangers (!), and hurricane ties and such.

So then on Sunday all that was left was to make the steps, and clean it up.

tada! I like it. It's not perfect, but it was never meant to be. And it all got done in about 5 days. So that's crazy. Next: grape vines, or outdoor lighting, or a stone path? We shall see.

*gussets? Man idunno.

deck progress 4

The deck reaches alpha!

Friday was mostly about the Pergola. Pergola. What a lovely word. I love saying it. It has certainly been the most laborious part so far though.  Getting the box in place

took about 4 hours, which included sawing the notches for the center joist, and more jigs and clamps. Working overhead is always more difficult. Also, I have some sad news to report. During the course of work, my trusty scroll saw, 

which has been with me through many years and many jigsaw puzzles and assorted projects, broke--for good. Now, it's well known* that every major home improvement project requires some form of sacrifice to the home improvement gods. Blood is traditional (and may yet be drawn), but my hope is that the death of my scroll saw will satisfy the requirement instead.

Moving on. After the joists were up it was time for the pergola (pergola pergola) roof, which is made of 2x3s, because they're cheap. I got them all roughly in place, made some cuts to go around the tree trunk, and then I was ready to do the crazy unsafe thing. I climbed the wall, and up on top of the pergola, and crawled along the center beam, nailing the pieces in place as I went. I kinda wished someone had been there so they could grab a picture, and so I could say "I got this" just like old times, but it's probably just as well. Anyway I still have to nail down the outer edges, so maybe we can document that.

Annie came home as I was starting to move on to the next task, which was decking the dock.  We finished that up together under the floodlights, and then spent a while watching a family of mice run back and forth along the fence, behind the brush at the back of the yard.  The floodlight illuminated them pretty well, and Chloe (the cat) was very interested. Final state as of Saturday morning:

Just a few more things to do, nail in the tops of the pergola, put in a few spare nails here and there, build a couple of steps, and maybe do a little triangle bracing. Should definitely be finished, or at least beta, for the party tomorrow.

*Is it?  It is to me.