| Thursday, November 5th, 2009 |
| 10:59 am |
Carmen
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) theloriest took me to the opera yesterday to see the dress rehearsal of Carmen with tickets provided by 42itous. It was much fun. The music was good. The visuals were stunning. For a review worth reading look at theloriest's journal assuming you're her "friend". For my skewed view of things, ( continue on... ) |
| Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 |
| 11:48 pm |
Boston Cycling Trivia
Bicycling on State Route 16 East of I-93 is not for the faint of heart (or really anyone who values their health). But I found out tuesday night that people mostly leave you alone and give you wide berth if you're carrying something as large as a small chest freezer. |
| Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 |
| 11:46 pm |
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| Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 |
| 11:50 pm |
2 ^ 2 ^ 2 * 2 + 2 + 2 + 2
Apparently it's my birthday in a few minutes and I've been told that I have to put at least some form of birthday post up. Who knows, maybe I'll survive another year to be approximately half the age of the current US life expectancy. |
| Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 |
| 7:42 pm |
Automobiles and interacting with the world
It's amazing just how much a car dehumanizes a person and insulates them from the world around them. The media is filled with stories of road rage and similar activities of otherwise reasonable people but I wonder if this is ultimately more sinister. Routinely I end up getting off my bicycle and removing road debris or pushing a car that's blocking traffic and causing problems. Everyone in cars just waits or pulls dangerous maneuvers to get around the obstruction utterly unwilling to stop and help. In some cases people zip past me in their cars dangerously close because they just got enough space that they could squeeze through. Note that I on my bicycle and the jogger who helped me push a car out of a traffic circle today were the least affected by these obstructions. I'd like to think that if some of these people weren't in their cars they'd help too. Maybe I'm wrong on that count. But in all of the cases where I've pushed a stalled car out of the way or helped push a car stuck in the ice or snow, only one person has ever gotten out of their car to help me while many people on foot or bicycle have done so. |
| Saturday, May 30th, 2009 |
| 6:36 pm |
Running Cables
It's days like today that I wish most houses came wired with cat5/6 by default. It's unheard of for a house to not have cable tv. In fact mine has two separate cable installations in every room. Last weekend there was a guy going around door to door offering a free installation for yet another cable provider (and they weren't going to share the internal wiring from either of the other two). And while all of these providers offer network service, they're not interested in running network cables (the new company did at least offer a wireless router though a big part of their sales pitch is boasting that you can have download speeds that are in excess of the speed of the wireless router that they're offering). So today I ran a couple of cat5 cables from the second floor to the basement and another from the printers on the first floor to the basement. I also ran coax to the basement (the one place that my current provider didn't cover though the other provider does). Now I have all of my comms based out of my basement instead of my bedroom. I'm tempted to put a small server in the basement so that I can turn my desktop off at night (though my current desktop is rather quiet when it's not under load). Entertainingly I mostly just used existing holes in the floors and walls to run the cabling. I don't know what the holes in the floor have been used for in the past but I'm not complaining (though from their locations and size, I'm guessing a previous installation of cable tv). The extant holes in the walls that I used were just from oversize holes for pipes. The other tasks I've started working on are setting up the my stereo and piano in the living room. Hopefully I'll have those done tonight. Unpacking and setting up a new house sucks :-) Current Mood: productive |
| Saturday, April 25th, 2009 |
| 10:45 am |
Moving the rest of my stuff sunday April 26
So I'm going to try to move the rest of my stuff on Sunday. It's not all that much relatively speaking but I could use some help with it. I have a truck rented*, I'm going to start around 9:30 or 10:00. Again I could really use some help. I'm moving from 17 Harrison Ave, Cambridge MA to 3A Lakeview St, Arlington MA If I can get a half dozen people it will go really quick and we'll get lunch when we're done. If I can't get that many people it will take a bit longer. Call me at 617-304-3376 if you want to know where we are or if you have any questions * sadly when I tried to make the reservation for the truck I could only get one of the really huge ones so there will be no "packing" of the truck. In fact I think we will have done something wrong if anything is on top of anything else. |
| Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 |
| 6:13 pm |
Moving Help Desired Saturday
Well, as many of you know, I'm being pushed out of my current apartment by my landlord. So I'm moving (with Heather and Brian) this Saturday April 18th. It's really annoying that I'm moving so soon after my last move. For those interested in helping move stuff here are the pertinent details. Things should start around 9:00 AM I'm moving from: 17 Harrison Ave Cambridge MA to: 3A Lakeview St Arlington MA If you're wondering where we might be at any point, you can call my cell phone at 617-304-3376. |
| Friday, November 14th, 2008 |
| 10:40 pm |
Brake Rotor
 After a week of almost daily applications of penetrating oil and beating on the drivers side front rotor, I still couldn't break it free. So last saturday I scored it hoping that it would flex enough that I could get it loose. Still no joy. I've been busy or it's been raining all week (and it's dark out when I get home making any work I want to do more of an ordeal), so finally today I removed a section of it and stuck a cold chisel beneath it and that freed it almost effortlessly. Sigh. Now I know that the angle grinder is a much more effective tool than the "engineers" hammer in a situation like this. |
| Thursday, September 4th, 2008 |
| 1:49 am |
Back from Burning Man
I just got back from Burning Man about an hour ago. I'm exhausted, dusty and my hands are a complete wreck. But I'm pleasantly content. I want to take a bath and go to sleep in my bed. |
| Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 |
| 11:34 am |
Tech Support
[rant on] Yesterday and today I've been playing phone tech support for my mother, who is a reasonably competent user but before yesterday has never opened up a computer, but has had her work computers (in a small church office so no actual tech staff) attempted to be used by someone who doesn't know what she's doing and had upgrades attempted by people who are probably competent users but really don't know networking. Yesterday I spent an hour on the phone helping her open up the case and remove the front panel on one computer so that she could fix the power switch that someone managed to break (a hot glue join had been broken so the momentary switch was floating and couldn't actually be switched). This morning we looked at the other computer. It appeared to power up but wasn't sending a signal to the monitor. The computer was working Saturday and now wasn't. Apparently the less experienced user had tried to turn this computer on by flipping switches in the back and switched the 220/115v selector. How do you mistake that (recessed slider that can barely be reached with a fingernail) for a power switch? It's such an absurd thing that I felt silly asking my mother to check this despite it matching up with the other symptoms. Then on to the networking aspect. The former pastor set up dialup network sharing on one of the computers many years ago (as well as peer based file and printer sharing). The new pastor wanted DSL and since the middle of last month a steady stream of people (who claim to know what they're doing) have tried to set up DSL on the computer and then the network sharing only to create a totally non-working mess. The fact that all of the people attempting the upgrade have thought this configuration to be reasonable in today's world speaks volumes (amplified by the fact that at the time of talking to my mother yesterday, the plan was to pay at&t to come over and fix the dsl and then pay to have geek squad (not even no, but hell no) come over to make the network sharing work). For the uninitiated, dialup network sharing made sense 10 years ago. But when you can get a small, low power $40 box (cable/dsl router) that will handle maintaining and sharing the network and provide a basic firewall it's absurd to have one of the windows computers do the network sharing, especially when that computer is often unused and would spend most of it's time turned off except that it's needed to provide network access for the other computer. [rant off] |
| Friday, April 4th, 2008 |
| 10:18 pm |
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| Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 |
| 11:06 pm |
New Monitor
Since Sony has (just) stopped making Trinitron tubes, and I noticed that I could get a refurb 21" for $179 to my door (that's almost 80 pounds of mostly glass halfway across the country on a truck), I felt that the time was right to get a second one. Now that I've got both displays on my desk, I'm tormented by the fact that eventually one will die and I won't be able to replace it. A six megapixel display is such a wonderful thing. I'm frustrated because you still can't get a large LCD monitor with a high pixel density. I want higher than 100 ppi. LCD displays are made with higher pixel densities than this but so far, only for notebooks. On top of that LCD displays are still metamerismic. Great strides have been made, but the colors are still different at different angles. I could also quibble about the price (though to be fair, a decent 20" display with a native resolution of 1600x1200 can be had for only a few hundred dollars. The price goes nuts for anything much larger than that. |
| Saturday, March 15th, 2008 |
| 4:02 am |
Physics lectures
Wandering about on the intarweb this evening I ran into the videos for Walter Lewin's classical mechanics class at MIT. I've seen short clips of his classes before on TV at various times. He goes to great lengths to illustrate basic physics in a way that few other teachers do. With a $300,000 grant he has set up an impressive set of physics lectures with fun and interesting demos all recorded and available at MIT's open courseware. Here's the article that pointed me at his 8.01 class lectures. And here's the listing of the videos. Many of his other classes are available on the open courseware systems but the set of mechanics lectures that I've linked to are by far the most dramatic. As an aside, they will all fit quite nicely on a single layer dvd. |
| Sunday, March 9th, 2008 |
| 12:14 am |
OkCupid entertainment
I recently discovered OkCupid's flagmod (or moderating images, profiles and messages that people have flagged as inappropriate). It is among the most entertaining things you can do on OkC in my opinion. Not only do you get to see the things that are against OkC's rules, but you also get to see all the things that narrow minded people think shouldn't be seen. You know, the interesting stuff. You do have to wade through a bunch of pictures of peoples pets and windows desktop images to find the interesting stuff but that's not so different from anything else on OkC. The way it works is that anyone moderating can agree or disagree with the flagger (or respond "can't tell") as well as leave a comment that subsequent moderators can read. The comments are often better the content being moderated (though at times that's not saying much). OkC doesn't give lots of details of the process but it looks like once there are sufficient votes as to have a sufficient statistical confidence one way or the other, OkC takes the action determined by the voters. Occasionally there will be something that goes to the point of needing 200+ votes. I would not be surprised if users didn't earn higher weighting based on the results of previous elections compared to their votes but I don't see any evidence of it. |
| Friday, February 8th, 2008 |
| 10:55 am |
xkcd today
In honor of (and from) today's xkcd comic I created the following:  You'll need gif animations turned on to see it properly. It is cleaned up a bit and sized to fit an LJ icon. I'm sure I'm not the first to do it today (it's been posted for over 10 hours now) but here it is anyway. Enjoy. |
| Thursday, January 31st, 2008 |
| 6:33 pm |
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| Friday, December 14th, 2007 |
| 6:20 pm |
Scrabble
At work we have quite a few very good scrabble players who make me look awful. And then we have one person who placed in the top 30 in the world scrabble championship a few years ago. So today at lunch he and another coworker (who has studied computational linguistics and also plays a fairly impressive game of scrabble) were gathering a crowd playing phonetic scrabble (using the arpabet). 'Twas quite entertaining. |
| Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 |
| 4:03 pm |
A new company is opening in Cambridge to offer delivery service by bicycle. They seem to also be selling the "tricycle trucks" that they're using and also "bicycle minivans". They have pictures of the "tricycle trucks" in several configurations (what looks to be a 3x4 foot cargo area with or without containers). But they have no information whatsover about the "minivans" other than "they replace the family minivan". I think it's cool that something like this is coming to cambridge. I'm curious about the "minivan" but I'm pretty sure that my BikesAtWork trailer is more useful to me than the tricycle truck. I might stop by the open house that they're having this friday just to see what they've got. The web page says it's from 4-6 but the email invite says 4-9... I'll have to see what they have to say about it. |
| Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 |
| 10:31 pm |
Moving Help Desired for September 29
For those of you who don't already know, I am in the process of moving to Cambridge (from Medford) if for no other reason than to keep The Boy in Cambridge Schools. Skipping all of the sundries, I would appreciate as much help as I can get for loading and unloading the moving truck. This will start at 9:00 Saturday (Sept 29) morning at 11 Saint Clements Rd #2, Medford MA (not quite a mile from Davis Square). I'll be moving to Cambridge near Alewife at 17 Harrison Ave, Cambridge MA. I can be reached at 617 304 3376 if you need to figure out where I am on the day of the move. Standard bribes of food and drink during and after the move apply. thanks Current Mood:  stressed |
