week 01, 2003 archives
while in vegas for the holidays, i saw shows by penn & teller and blue man group. both excellent, and recommended. p&t was a little less notable, since i've seen them live before and had seen most of the tricks, but the before-show music and new tricks made up for that. blue man group was just incredible.
two quick book reviews
dave barry's tricky business is a fun crime-caper-comedy set mostly on a gambling boat during a tropical storm. the plot is silly, but some of the characters are really fun.
tom perrotta's the wishbones follows a few months from the life of a guitarist from a wedding band after he proposes to his longtime girlfriend. it will no doubt be the basis for a decent movie some day, although i was somewhat left with the feeling that it already had been, and the movie was called high fidelity.
both quick reads (i read the first on the ride from los angeles to vegas, the second in the morning one day in vegas), and both recommended as such.
happy new year!
last year's non-resolution resolution was mostly a dud, so i won't pretend to really try this year. but if i were to make resolutions, here's the top three possibilities (in no particular order):
- get a life.
- move.
- end the campaign of sabotage against myself.
just for fun, linus torvalds' autobiography (written with david diamond) is a fun book. in addition to recounting his own (sketchily remembered) personal history, linus also lays out his basic philosophies in life, which i found remarkably resonant with my own. his golden rules:
- do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.
- be proud of what you do.
- and have fun doing it.
one thing i was disappointed about in the book was the number of copy editing errors, including calling apache the most popular commercial distribution of linux.
jwz pundidates on how rss aggregation sites might get more useless when content providers freak out about their content appearing outside their control. online comic providers are already like this. the otherwise-excellent comictastic had to drop support for various popular comics. of course, it then has a flexible enough system that you can just add support for the comics manually. clue for content producers: once you've hung a piece of content off a http: url, you've lost any control over what client i may choose to view it in.
small project idea #71503: have ezmlm store subscribe and unsubscribe requests
i have roughly a bazillion little ideas and projects floating around. one is to figure out a good way to have ezmlm store (un)subscribe requests (and confirmations) to make it easy to track down what happened when someone got subscribed mysteriously. (actually, a lot of my little ideas involve logging and otherwise storing more information. figuring out ways to mine the collected data can often come later.)
some folks call it a soft launch
if i'm quiet about it, will people notice the new feature on blo.gs? (i mean, besides the fact that pings work after being broken for the better part of the last week.)
the folks behind gawker and gizmodo are looking for a software/hardware engineer. too bad i'm happily employed (and wouldn't really be eager to relocate to nyc), it sounds like they're doing neat stuff.
i saw catch me if you can over the holidays, which was an enjoyable movie that was overshadowed by its brilliant opening credits. tom hanks' role was underdeveloped, jennifer garner's cameo felt tacked on, and the pretending-to-be-a-doctor-using-quotes-from-watching-television was just too clichéd. (but don't get me wrong, i did enjoy the movie—i just wish it were better. i think that's one of the defining qualities of a spielberg film.)
(side note: who the heck are these people? once upon a time, i entered all the info for this game, from the credits, but i had some problem submitting it. i still have the issue of entertainment weekly that called this one of the worst five multimedia products of 1996. i'm so proud. the next company i worked for ended up in some magazine's top-100 worst ideas list.)
meg laments the quality of some of the responses to the job posting that i linked to earlier. i always had fun going through submitted resumés, since it was easy enough to set a low threshold for when to simply toss the bad ones. longer than one page? gone. typos? gone. can't get a good sense of what the person actually did at previous jobs after fifteen seconds? gone. stupid objectives section? gone. (tip: leave out the objectives. everybody knows you're lying.)
while i've been involved with hiring some people that blindly submitted resumés, all of the (post-college) jobs i've had have been the result of various connections. (which is pretty remarkable, given how loosely connected i am.)
charity, january 2003
- international: the jhai foundation: remote it village project (thanks to various bloggers, all traceable back to danny o’brien)
- national: computer professionals for social responsibility (an international organization, strictly speaking, but us-based)
- local: the los angeles free clinic
.net messenger service isn't particularly bot-friendly. for the other major services (icq, aim, yahoo!), you can just fire off a message, but the .net system requires that you “call” the intended recipient before sending the message. nuts to that.
i guess quentin tarantino has come back from the dead to make kill bill. i can't decide if the trailer looks cool, or like a parody of a trailer for a quentin tarantino film.
here's an old story from the the observer about the economics of the illegal drug trade. it's fascinating to see the financials of the industry broken down like this (8% of world trade!). part of the paper's ongoing drugs uncovered series.
i wish dan gillmor's new moveable type-driven weblog pinged blo.gs directly. it's one of those blogs that weblogs.com frequently gets spurious updates for. i suspect dave's weblogsComHelper tool, which appears to be the source of many spurious updates on weblogs.com. i can understand why he made the tool (blo.gs does some polling for the same reason), i just wish it were better.
it does make me think that the ping interface should perhaps have a flag that people could pass in that said “hey, i'm not really the owner of this blog, but i think it was updated” so that the service could take that into account when deciding if the site was really updated. in the case of blo.gs, i'd probably apply the three-day rule in ignoring such unofficial pings for sites that had previously pinged “officially”.
when the recent push for an agreement for the imperial valley to transfer water to san diego crumbled, california was cut back to its supreme-court-mandated allotment of water from the colorado river, and water politics got interesting. i've got the great thirst: californians and water, a history on hold at the library. i need to finish the book i'm currently reading (hot water music, a collection of short stories by charles bukowski) and go pick it up.
i'm a little disappointed about how long it took for the library to make it from the central los angeles library to my local branch. if the next one takes as long, i may plan to just put future ones on hold at the central library and pick it up from there. it's a good excuse to go downtown.
2003 may turn out to be the year of the book for me.
