Taught my first class to adults tonight. It went really well for the most part. We actually covered more ground in the first session than I thought we would. Aside from the fact that several students kept working on other students files accidentally, we got through forms, variables, and control structures. Some of them actually started to get excited, which is all I can hope for. And I enjoyed it. If the rest of the class goes this well, I wouldn’t mind doing this freelance (though I’d probably rather just have normal freelance php gigs).
We can link you under the table. -Mary Hodder
Ask me about hosting with birdhouse.
February 26th, 2002
Danny Pearl
Just attended a memorial service for murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. A panel hosted by two WSJ reporters and Michael Lerner, rabbi and editor of Tikkun. Fascinating perspectives, especially since it was the first time I had gotten to see a rabbi and an atheist sitting side by side at a round table.
Got a lot of behind the scenes information, far outside of what you hear in the press. Stuff about how news organizations deal with overseas reporters, about the preponderance of Jewish editors and reporters, and how they’re received overseas. Heard the Kaddish recited for the first time (not counting Ginsberg’s version ;). It was beautiful.
February 25th, 2002
Multiuser
Figured out today how to make phpmyadmin run multi-user (like it might through an ISP) so I can have students in my webdb class use phpmyadmin for their class projects without being able to see the databases that drive the main site.
February 22nd, 2002
Primal Drum
Amy just called to say she had gotten back from the doctor and heard our baby’s heartbeat for the first time. She described it as the sound of “tiny little horse hoof-beats.” And that she could hear her own deeper, slower heartbeat in the background. So the baby is tuned in to the elemental rhythm, and making one of its own. The primal funk. What a moment, wish I had been there.
February 21st, 2002
Glutton Bowl
We didn’t want to see olympic hockey so switched to Fox, only to find ourselves watching this hugely overproduced food eating contest called “Glutton Bowl.” They bring chronic over-eaters in from all over the country and pit them against each other eating enormous portions of slop. They start by dumping 1,000 lbs of whatever the food for the contest is going to be onto the stage from on high. Then they introduce the “athletes” with “food facts” like “Once banned from an all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet.”
We saw a 23-yr-old Japanese kid eat 31 hot dogs in 5 minutes, winning easily. Then we saw a second group have to slop down mayonnaise in 32-oz. servings. Said one host to the other, “Some of these gustatory athletes have the ability to eat without tasting, which is a huge advantage.” Changed the channel and didn’t see the winner of that one.
It is a strange and beautiful world.
February 14th, 2002
Otto
Amy has been saying for years that she wanted a son to name “Otto.” I’ve always hated the name (can only think of a stoned bus driver or a twirpy little fascist). Most people hate it like I do, but about 10% like it. Amy thinks mostly of Otto Preminger. This valentine should put the final nail in the coffin of the Otto idea. Anyway, it ain’t gonna happen — A has recently backed off. I think she mainly keeps using it just to push my buttons ;)
February 14th, 2002
Endurance
Just went to see The Endurance with Amy – pretty amazing, moving. Rare that we go to a documentary in the theater. The range and scope of human experience never ceases to amaze me. All of the times in history a human can be born, all of the cultures, all of the extreme experiences to which we can be subjected. These guys were changed for life by what they went through. What really sent me was the fact that so many of them felt compelled to return to the site years later, like Stockholm Syndrome or something.
Dinner at Jin Ling. Mmmm… curry.
Found a pretty cheap G4 for dad on craigslist. He’s miserable since I switched him to Windows. All he wants is the simplicity of BeOS back, and to play with his digital photos. I think OS X will be just the ticket for him. Going up to Tahoe with this weekend for some snowboarding, will lay it on him then.
February 11th, 2002
The Fine Print
Are TiBooks really this bad? Most of what I’ve seen has been positive, but this makes me think twice. If any of you Mac-fiends have TiBook comments for , he’d like to hear them.
February 11th, 2002
Salgado
Amy and I went after work to Wheeler auditorium to see a lecture by Sebastião Salgado. I had put up a page promoting the event a few days ago, but it turned out that the whole city of Berkeley wanted to be there. We arrived 20 minutes early and were turned away along with thousands (not exaggerating) of other people.
Kissthisguy got mentioned in PC Mag as one of the web’s 100 best “undiscovered sites.” (Thanks for the headsup, dhuff).
Insane day at work. I’m really starting to feel like part of the staff, involved in tons of stuff, not just hunkered down in a lonely dungeon. It’s nice. My to-do list is starting to stretch way beyond what I can do in the next few months.
Amy and I saw “A Beautiful Mind” Sunday afternoon. Really, really loved it. Didn’t expect to be so impressed by R. Crowe. Always love Ed Harris. Have long been fascinated by people who see patterns everywhere they look – faces in clouds, in fences, in bushes, etc. They’re there, but not there. Anyway, heard long ago there’s a correspondence between advanced pattern recognition, intelligence, and schizophrenia. So it was interesting to see this story of that correspondence benefitting someone so acutely, then ruining them so deeply. We talked about it for a long time afterwards.
February 11th, 2002
netcraft
Interesting that a netcraft lookup on betips shows the whole history of server/platforms I’ve run the site against, from poorman (unknown) through apache/bone, apache/linux, apache advanced extranet, apache/darwin. Sort of like my web server is keeping its own blog ;)
February 9th, 2002
Bye-Bye Linux
As of 20 seconds ago, the linux server that hosted betips and that crunched static HTML files for kissthisguy and that hosted our home samba / ftp server was shut down for good. 94 days uptime. shutdown -h now. It’s all happening on OS X now. Moof!
While I was at it, decided that the annoyance:revenue ratio of the ads on betips was just too high, and removed all the ads. I was only making about $3/month from them. Pathetic. From now on, betips is a free public service again.
Finished moving Amy over to OS X yesterday, and so far she’s clam-happy. This will ensure that our child grows up in a Microsoft-free environment. Of course, Amy is already warning me about getting any bright ideas about pint-sized mice and setting examples that it’s good to sit at the box for hours-on-end fiddling. I think she’s right. But can I stop?
Spent the day creating lesson plans for the web applications / php / mysql class I’m going to be teaching in a few weeks.
February 6th, 2002
Ear Wax Express
When I took that motorcycle trip to Canada last June, I came back with a pretty bad ringing in my ears. My motorcycle is pretty quiet and I wear a good helmet and earplugs. But I was using a Suzuki fairing on the BMW, and it set up this weird relationship where there was tons of turbulence in the face mask. It was really loud.
I came back and had the accident a few days later, which distracted me from the fact that the ringing did not subside. Well, it started to subside after a few weeks, but not entirely. There has been a high-pitched buzz/hum going on ever since. It’s been getting less pronounced, but seemed to stop tapering and plateau’d at a certain point. Most noticeable in quiet moments, like bed time and waking up. Lately it’s been surging on strongly for 30-60 second bursts, much stronger in the left ear. Finally decided to see a doctor about it because it became clear it wasn’t going to go away on its own. It’s really depressing when the body doesn’t heal itself. Makes you feel old and not invincible anymore.
Called up and they had me come in for “urgent care.” Uhh… it’s been eight months. It’s not that urgent. But whatever. Explained the whole thing to the doc. He took a look and said he couldn’t see my left eardrum — it was all waxed up! I had noticed that my motorcycle earplugs always came out dirtier than other people’s.
So an assistant came in for an irrigation (ear-igation?). Big 2″ syringe with a soft tip. Warm water. I held a basin under my ear and she plunged three syringefulls through it. Little pieces came out, but nothing major. Then she grabbed a long tweezer and plucked out something the size of a large pencil eraser — dark brown and hairy / fuzzy. I could not believe that thing came out of me. Unbelievable it could have been there all this time.
She said that some people just generate more wax and there’s nothing to be done about it but to irrigate occassionally. We can do it ourselves at home. Cool! Amy loves this kind of stuff, so we’ll get a kick out of it. She was fascinated by the story when I told her later.
Anyway, this doesn’t guarantee a resolution to the problem. I won’t know till bed time whether it attenuates the problem. And I still have to schedule an audiogram for full testing, to determine whether i have tinnitus or not. But this experience was like getting a hair cut and taking a dump all at once. Ecstasy!
By the time we were done I had seven minutes to get back up to campus for a meeting. Rode like the wind, and had the weirdest sensation of air rushing past my left eardrum. Didn’t even realize it hadn’t been there all this time, but I knew it was different.
Speaking of the motorcycle, I ended up with a big black toenail from the crash in June. I’ve been watching it grow out, and I just trimmed off the last of the black part. Now I know how long it takes my toenails to grow.
So busy listening to my own MP3s that I never get around to checking out all the great radio stations built into iTunes. Found this great Dr. Yo station tonight. Wow – one amazing track after another. I could listen to this for days. In fact, I think I will.
February 5th, 2002
iDVD
Burned my first DVD with iDVD tonight. Paula wanted a hard copy of the Los Platanos footage for posterity, so finally fired it up. Threw Sad Planet on there too. Like iMovie, the software is very primitive and shows its limitations quickly, but it’s also very easy to get good results out of it without having to rtfm. That accursed Apple logo in the corner bugs me, but fortunately it’s only in the main menu, not on the video clips themselves.
February 4th, 2002
Log Cruncher
Spent the last couple of days writing an apache log cruncher in PHP. Scans a dir for the oldest log (so it doesn’t try and work on the one apache is currently writing to), crunches it with analog, which outputs machine-readable report.dat, which is passed to ReportMagic, which makes lots of pretty graphs and charts, zips, archives, and deletes the original log, creates a date-stamped folder in the intranet’s logs dir, moves the latest batch of reports to that dir, and creates a new link on the intranet’s Traffic page connecting to the new report. The whole thing gets run by TaskScheduler weekly.
February 3rd, 2002
Dogcow
February 3rd, 2002
Los Platanos Machos Quattros
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been practicing guitar and playing a couple of times a week with a group of friends, preparing a song for our friend Roger’s surprise 40th birthday party. The party was last night and totally rocked. Amazing food, big circle of good friends, hooch to spare…
We played the song for him around halfway through the evening and he was floored (the intended effect). Amy got the whole thing on tape and I put up a low-fi version on the infernal interweb.
What a great evening. No matter how hard it is to find a place to live in the Bay Area, it would be almost impossible for us to leave our friends here. Just wish Will and Sage lived out here rather than NY.
