jiml

Carmen

2009-11-05T16:25:30Z

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,

I know enough french to know that the subtitles were a very poor substitute but not enough french to just watch the opera without them.

It was kind of odd watching people act as spaniards in french with american accents.

It's kinda sad that that Mr. Bizet felt it necessary to steal so much music from Bugs Bunny / Looney Toons cartoons. Would this be why Carmen is considered a opera comique?

Boston Cycling Trivia

2009-11-05T04:56:14Z

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.

Birthday Pie

2009-10-22T03:51:38Z

theloriest made birthday pie for me.

2 ^ 2 ^ 2 * 2 + 2 + 2 + 2

2009-10-21T03:57:34Z

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.

Automobiles and interacting with the world

2009-07-28T20:22:07Z

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.

Running Cables

2009-05-30T23:11:43Z

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 :-)

Moving the rest of my stuff sunday April 26

2009-04-25T14:52:31Z

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.

Moving Help Desired Saturday

2009-04-15T22:28:15Z

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.

Brake Rotor

2008-11-15T03:49:10Z

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.

Back from Burning Man

2008-09-04T05:51:56Z

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.

Tech Support

2008-06-10T16:47:55Z

[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]

Something I found on the intarwebs today

2008-04-05T02:22:35Z

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/why-i-let-my-9-year-old-ride-subway-alone

My own thoughts are quite well summed up in the article linked to above.

New Monitor

2008-03-23T03:35:37Z

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.

Physics lectures

2008-03-15T08:46:50Z

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.

OkCupid entertainment

2008-03-09T05:35:57Z

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.

xkcd today

2008-02-08T15:59:46Z

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.

1/31/2007, Never Forget

2008-01-31T18:40:26Z

http://www.somethingpositive.net/arch/sp01312008.jpg
or the original, http://xuth.net/pics/random/neverforget.jpg

Scrabble

2007-12-14T18:20:54Z

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.

xuth @ 2007-10-31T16:03:00

2007-10-31T16:23:45Z

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.

Moving Help Desired for September 29

2007-09-24T02:48:42Z

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

Juggling

2007-09-11T05:47:26Z

Since it's all the rage these days, here's my favorite picture of me juggling fire at the end of summer party that I've seen so far:

credit to perspicuity. Hopefully he doesn't object to me doing minor editing to the image and then hosting it myself.

Bike Safety (IMnsHO)

2007-08-23T15:27:43Z

I'm writing this because several people I know have commented about recently being hit by cars or almost getting hit. On top of that, 5 cyclists have died in collisions with automobiles in Boston since May. I'm tired of seeing white bikes sprout up around town and don't want to see one memorializing a friend. These are my suggestions based on my experiences bicycling in both the midwest and boston areas and my reading of every report on bicycle accidents that I can find (most of which are linked from massbike.org. Feel free to pass this on or post it whereever you see fit.
In my opinion, the most important thing you can do to be safe is to be visible and where other people expect high speed traffic (faster than someone walking) to be. This means riding with the flow of traffic in the street in the appropriate lane for the direction you're going. By far the majority of the daytime injury accidents reported were cyclists going the wrong way down a one way street, riding on the left side of the street, riding on sidewalks or making left turns from the far right of the road. Most of the accidents occured with automobiles crossing the street or turning onto the street. A car driving behind you can see you. In the dark he has his headlights pointed at you even. If you're in the wrong place a driver crossing the road or turning onto the road won't see you until it's too late if at all.
You should ride to the right of the road but safely to the left of parked cars or other obstacles on the side of the road. I'm of the opinion that being 4 feet from parked cars or the side of the road (measured from the right side of your bike or about 5 feet from your center) is a nice minimum distance. There are many reasons for this:

First off you want to stay well away from parked car doors. If someone opens their door suddenly and you clip it with your handlebars, you will be thrown to the ground to your left into any traffic for you to get run over. The gyroscopic forces of your front wheel will see to that. Beyond the causes listed above, this is probably the most common cause of serious injuries in the Boston area and why most of the bike lanes in Cambridge are completely unsafe (but they tell you where you shouldn't be)

Second, it's not uncommon for large vehicles (buses, trucks etc) to start passing you and then forget that they're passing you pushing you to the right. You want some room to play before getting trapped between the bus on your left and the parked cars on your right.

Third you want to have space to avoid potholes and other obstacles on the ground.

Fourth, drivers turning onto the road can't see you until it's too late if you're riding too close to the obstructions on your right.

In a similar vein you should not pull all the way to the curb when stopped at lights or at breaks in parked cars etc. This just forces you to need to remerge with traffic unnecessarily and minimizes your visibility. In fact at lights, the safest thing you can do is queue up with traffic in the appropriate lane for the direction you're going to be going. You don't want to be going straight from the right side of the road while the driver to the left of you is turning right.
When it starts to get dark, having good lighting is essential. It is most important to have a front light (in fact in most states, it's the only one legally required if you've got the full set of reflectors). Most people are afraid of the people driving behind them. But the cars behind you have headlights pointed and are looking right at you. If anyone can see you it's them. The drivers you need to worry most about are the ones turning onto the the road. Their lights are pointed away from you until it's too late so you need to make yourself visible by providing your own light.
Do not compromise your safety to let other drivers pass you. When it's safe to do so slower moving traffic must let faster moving legal traffic pass but only when it's safe to do so. If the road is narrow, it is much better to force drivers to wait till it's actually safe to pass than to let them try to squeeze by. If the person behind you is honking or yelling at you then you know that they can see you. When it's safe, let them pass. If it's a narrow one way residential road as is common in Boston and Cambridge, take the center of the road and pull off of the road every block or so and make it clear that you're letting cars pass. Most drivers will thank you for your consideration.
Finally make eye contact as much as possible (and avoid wearing dark sunglasses that inhibits this). Humans are wired to find and see eyes in random clutter at a very low and instinctual level. When you make eye contact you change status in someones mind from a random object to a person with all the privileges that that subconsiously entails. And you know for certain that at least this one person can see you.

Yahoo Considered Harmful

2007-08-13T14:23:57Z

(or why I despise large email providers)
In getting ready for burningman I've been sending mail to a bunch of new people and was informed by multiple people that my mails to yahoo addresses were going into spam folders. So I sent a message to yahoo explaining my situation and asking why my mails are systemically being tagged as spam.
The response I got was a form letter asking me to fill out an "application" asking a few dozen questions about where I'm harvesting my email addresses from, who I'm selling them to and what am I using my mailing lists for, to which almost all of my replies are "no lists". They also want a list of any addresses I might be using to send to yahoo mail users, my contact information etc. So I fill out the thing, basically saying that most of the questions asked aren't applicable and that there are no company policies on x, y or z because there's no company (doing much to not be snarky in my responses). To top things off, this had to be sent to mail-abuse-bulk@cc.yahoo.com. This morning I got a response that says: "Based on the information you have provided us, we cannot systematically deliver your email to the Inbox at this time." followed by "While we cannot fully exempt your mail server from our SpamGuard technology, we have made appropriate changes to this IP address of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx in our database."
So the upshot is yahoo may or may not filter messages from me to it's spam filters. After I got this message I created another yahoo account and a message to it and this new message went to the inbox this time rather than the spam box like it did when I tried this a couple days ago.
But the far more insidious thing is that mail providers are filtering messages a) without information on why b) without any clear way of "correcting" the problem. At least yahoo delivered the mail to the spam folder where some people check periodically. Many mail providers silently drop the mail so their user is unaware that they're not getting the mail and doesn't know to complain. If you do notice your mail being filtered and you do complain, the typical response is that you (the user and they're customer) can't do anything about it. You have to have the person who's sending you messages contact their mail provider and have them email your isp who will presumably have them fill out a similar "application" to the one I filled out for yahoo.
In the last couple of years, a new twist has come to this. Last time I checked, there are now seven large email providers (including hotmail, aol and comcast) who will now let you pay to have your mail server whitelisted. So for the right price you can fill people's mailboxes with spam all you like and it will be faithfully delivered.
So the upshot of all of this is that if you care about getting your email you should at the very least know how the messages coming in to you are being filtered. Most small providers will be more than happy to tell you this information. Most large providers call it as a trade secret.

Mr Data Loss

2007-06-05T13:36:55Z

I ran across this image in the latest Rat Shack (tm) ad that was mailed to me. Wow, just wow.

For those not in the know, the above is a hard disk drive. The inside of a hard disk drive. If this gentleman is not in a clean room (or some facimile thereof, but he would never be allowed in one dressed like that), he has likely caused irrepairable harm to this drive by the dust that has settled upon the platters.

New Trailer

2007-05-13T14:28:52Z

I got my new bicycle trailer and put it together on Wednesday:

Click on the image for a large version. It's very nice. It is designed specifically to hold four 18 gallon rubbermaid containers but it's just a truss frame (mostly made of aluminum tubing but with fairly heavy steel tubing at three key load bearing points) so I can throw pretty much anything I want on it up to about 300 pounds. I can carry lots of things on this trailer that just won't fit in my car (not that I've used my car once since February yet) and I think it would be perfect to take to burning man and several other similar events to haul all kinds of crap around.
More details about the trailer can be found at the vendors page (bikesatwork.com).
I've still yet to get the bicycle that I ordered in early March that I had ordered slightly odd because I wanted to get a specific feature set but still be able to accomodate this type of trailer (I knew I wanted one but didn't order the trailer until mid april). I'm rather annoyed at that.
As an aside, I was going to title this post "The Envy of Recycling Pickers Everywhere", but I felt that too many people would take it wrong. I've often seen people collecting cans and bottles for the 5 cent deposits with impressive things they've done to their bicycles (or other container vehicles) and been genuinely amazed. While I'm quite content to get blank stares from people when I make a really dumb joke it's rather frustrating (and sometimes hurtful) that people will assume I'm putting down someone this way. I can remember vividly the time I made a pun based on "black sheep of the family" (click for the first google hit when I looked it up to write this) during a long string of (mostly other people) making silly comments based on anthropomorphizing sheep and the people around me just assumed that I was making a racial comment and the conversation stopped dead.