Geek Sox Nation

We're not crazy sports fans, and we don't have cable, so we're "watching" the final Sox game online while listening to the play-by-play on the radio.

Nerds.

Ps -- Go SOX!

F***, yeah!

"Swearing at work boosts team spirt, morale: research"

F*** a Duck

So it looks like I have to buy F'ing Visio, again. That's another $500 down the Microsoft toilet for the 2007 version, and that doesn't count the $200 I sank into the bad 2003 version just a few months ago when I had to start spec writing for the contract I'm on. Joy, joy. The original website where I bought it is now an empty GoDaddy-parked husk of an apparently fly-by-night storefront.

Sucks for me.

And I'd just like to mention how annoying the Micro$oft Office info page is -- full of stupid, unnecessary, bandwidth-hungry animations and dynamic pull-downs, and apparently ...films? ...on how awesome Office is? WTF?

Fear

I did a Windows Update and I got the blue screen of death.

That's a confidence builder, I gotta tellya.

This isn't actually the first time it's happened. I'm not sure when it started, but I've noticed it the last several times I've installed the latest set of Windows updates that required a restart. Consistent behavior, actually, for the three most recent installs. It's nothing like my first experience with NT in '99 when my machine would routinely crash 2-3 times a day (usually after a few hours of unrecoverable design code), but it's still annoying.

And maybe I'm just being paranoid, but it seems like the start-up cycle is a lot more sluggish, and I don't remember the icons refreshing halfway through. And can someone tell me why my volume control taskbar icon disappears every time I reboot after a full shutdown? I'm not sure how long that's been happening since I started routinely putting the machine into standby mode. (since it took so long to boot up cold.)

I was pretty happy with XP-Pro. But I guess just about anything would be compared to my experience with XP-home -- random shutdowns, strange screen refresh behaviors, driver incompatibilities and really kludgey file structure. XP Pro seemed to be much more stable, but that seemed to be a only short term condition. I suppose this is really just what you have to expect when you take a piece of software and add layer upon layer of patches month after month. It's inevitable that the software is going to become painfully inefficient.

I really need to start getting familiar with some of the new Linux distributions. My laptop is eventually going to die and I'm going to have to replace it at some point and I'm deathly afraid of having to switch over to Vista, or any other Microsoft operating system for that matter.

In other news, we just tested out our new HD projector, an Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 1080. The initial assessment? It's teh awesome. (not to be confused with "awesome") So far the only downside is that we haven't gotten the real screen yet and we got to bed around 3am last night due to, um, "testing."

except without the part about your mom

*sigh*

I think this is the fourth night in the last six where I haven't been able to fall asleep. Tired. Sleepy even. But I just can't seem to drop off to sleep.

Almost makes me want to try this, although the waking hours certainly aren't particularly useful if you're trying to participate with most of the world around you.

Have I mentioned BAH*?

UPDATE: to answer Leah's question in the comments, and for full disclosure, here's the list of things that I can think of that I've tried over the past few weeks:

• reiki
• meditation (which really is kind of like reiki. Or vice versa.)
• hot shower (I'm a life-long night showerer. I don't sleep well when gritty or sticky.)
• warm milk (with Ovaltine)
• staying up later
• visualizing the comfy feeling I have in bed in the morning when I don't want to get up
• being mindful of the images that play behind my closed eyelids
• visualize constantly dropping into deeper layers of consciousness/reality.
• avoiding computer stuff right before bed

I'd be happy to hear other suggestions.

* not to be confused with "baa." Seriously, does counting sheep actually work for anyone?

An Observation on Language

I'm finding that I have recently developed the habit of using the word awesome to describe a certain flavor of experience that I'm having or have had at a particular time. And generally in these instances, when I say awesome, I mean totally sucked balls or completely useless piece of shit.

So the SOOTTAD and I finally got a chance to play with a particular undisclosed object we've acquired in the past few months, and I think you follow me when I say that the only way that I can adequately describe this object is that it was totally awesome.

What I've been reading

While I did recently finish rereading the first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (which I had first read sometime during high school -- man, I missed a lot of details back then), I really just wanted to mention a few articles that I've stumbled across on the 'net over the past few weeks and wanted to mention, for one reason or another.

• A group is its own worst enemy
  
  It's largely writing in the context of social software development, which I find interesting in and of itself despite the fact that I'm not a social software developer, or even a regular old ordinary software developer, but rather because I find the whole massive online community phenomenon totally fascinating and a bit frightening as someone who only skirts the edge of social network applications and whose spouse harbors a significant distrust of the lack of privacy on the net.
  
  I also find it interesting because one of the things that I really value in life is the connection and community I have with other people, and I've fallen into the trap (if a trap is really what it is) of wanting to be inclusive and wanting things to be fair. And oftentimes, I equate fair with equal, which may not always be the case, but which is probably one of the simpler ways to deal with things because at its core, it at least *seems* fair. Even when it's not. But regardless, I've seen groups get too big for their own britches and implode, I've seen the inclusion/exclusion behavior, I've had the unfortunate experience of trying to "protect the group" when the group had no formal rules or protocols for doing so. It was helpful to read something that gave me some perspective on the social dynamics.

• Childhood TV viewing can cause teenage problems
  
  Not to vilify TV or anything, but I'm kind of glad we don't have cable right now. Still looking into buhgiant front projection systems, FWIW.

• How Callous are Republicans?
  
  National news just depresses me these days. Well actually, in general. And it seems like the politicos are all about Iraq, Iraq, Iraq and troop numbers, and staying the course or bringing them home. It's rhetoric, media posturing, politican partisanship and it's all bullshit. They fucked up. We're there. If we stay, it's going to continue to suck balls. If we pull out, it's also going to suck balls. It will probably suck even more balls, actually. In the meantime, ya think maybe you guys could maybe try fixing health care?
  
  Matt Miller comes up with the HCCAT, the "Health-Care Callousness Assessment Test":
  

  "Question 2: Do you believe individuals' buying their own solo health insurance can be the answer to the problem of the uninsured? The only noncallous answer is no. The problem with the individual market, as anyone with the most innocuous ailments can attest, is that profit-seeking insurers want to cover only younger, healthier people who don't need insurance. The very idea of individual insurance is an oxymoron, since insurance is about spreading risks across a group. Group coverage creates little socialized-health republics in which the young subsidize the old, and the healthy the unwell, with all those in the group paying the same premiums."

• Doctor Warns Consumers of Popcorn Fumes
  
  Yeah, I mostly stopped eating this stuff after I learned that it was full of trans fats.

• The 411 on High-Fructose Corn Syrup
  
  Too bad it's not actually the 411, it's more like a ... ok, I don't have a clever phone-metaphor. Basically, it's just saying: "ooh, HFCS is bad, whoOOOOOoooo!" It'd have been nice if they could have actually linked to the research or something. Not that I don't believe it or anything, just sayin'.

• Vitamins 'could shorten lifespan'
  
  More advocacy for eating a balanced diet rather than trying to make up for your deficiencies through pill-popping. Feeling pretty good about that soup that's cooking on the stove right now, made almost entirely from vegetables from the CSA community farm. (the onion and organic chicken were from the supermarket. And I think the zucchini was from the SOOTTAD's parental homestead.)

• Things that Running Teaches You About Life
  
  The funny thing about this article is that while I don't wholly disagree with the author's conclusions (I see value in what he's said), I feel like I take away a much different set of lessons. Running isn't about weight loss for me, although it is about staying healthy, both physically and mentally. Anyway, here's my take:
  

  1. This is not a race. Sometimes when I go running, I need to remind myself to slow down -- I'm focusing on conditioning, I've trying to avoid injuries. I time my runs, but it's really just feedback to let me know how I'm doing.
  2. Sometimes, even when it is a race, it's still not a race. Again, with the feedback. And the sense of accomplishment. My plan is still to run a marathon next fall -- when I hit, um, a particular age milestone. I wonder if this will still hold true if I'm trying to make a qualifying time.
  3. Enjoy the scenery. Look flowers! Critters! Whoops, car! (Have you smelled the grapes yet this fall?)
  4. Remember to breathe. In. Out. In. Out. Good stuff.
  That's all I got right now off the top of my head. I suspect there a few other things, but there you go.

Ugh.

Stupid not being able to fall asleep until after 3AM. It's probably the third night out of the last four. And now I'm waking up wicked late.

Or maybe it's the other way around.

*sigh*

Modern Consumer

We're looking into getting a HD front projector for our new "playroom" instead of one of those buhgiant flatscreen LCD TVs. I've been cruising some of the online forums and review websites, so I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what's out there and what our options are. The hard part now is figuring out which one to get.

Traditionally, you'd go to the store, compare how things looked on the different models, weigh the costs and then make a decision. The problem being, where do you go to actually SEE what the projected image looks like?

• The high-end audio store we went to for our new speakers didn't have any projector systems on display (although the sales rep had a recommendation for us).
• The SOOTTAD and I rode over to the Best Buy on Sunday to see what they had, and what they had was a shelf with FAKE display models and an apologetic sales guy who thought the only difference between different models was the number and type of input ports. (And a prospective buyer whose totality of experience with projection systems that was driving him to buy one was that he'd seen a projector setup and THE PICTURE WAS HUGE AND IT WAS TOTALLY AWESOME!)
• I went to a Tweeter store today -- they actually have a home theater demo room (Score!), but they only demo one projector, the 1080p Sony VPL-VW100. Which is better than nothing, I suppose -- at least I now understand that a high-end projector with the highest resolution currently available with a given throw distance and display size will give us what we're hoping for. Helpful, without actually being all that helpful. Like learning that it's dark at night, or that rain is wet.
• The local high-end audio store says that they have a demo room, but it appears to be, once again, a single model, and in their case, one of the senselessly expensive models. May go anyway -- it may be a 720p projector (or at least has a native resolution less than the max 1080), so maybe I can see whether the resolution is adequate for the screen size and viewing distance that we're hoping for. Perhaps their webpage is just hopelessly out of date.

Ugh.

So, does anybody know how one can actually see how well these things perform? Do people who buy them just buy them sight unseen and rely on the "expert" discussion in the online forums or online review sites? Are we being just soooo last cenury? Do these things not matter to "normal" consumers? Was the BestBuy guy actually speaking truth when he said the different models were all basically the same and we should just make a decision based on price?

What's the standard operating procedure these days for the modern consumer of the high definition front projection system?

Inquiring minds want to know.

UPDATE 01Sep2007: Did some Googling today, and this looks promising... (too bad their website doesn't actually tell you when they're open)

Eye of the beholder

Towards the end of my run yesterday, I was on a section of the Charles River Walkway that passes through Waltham as it approached dusk. The light was already starting to fade, but I noticed a short woman and her dog walking slowly along one of the larger grassy areas that bordered the path.

I assumed that she had just gotten up or had simply been standing motionless because I hadn't seen her until her movement caught my attention. And in my head, my brain immediately came to the conclusion that she must have been quietly taking in the sunset, admiring the late summer sky as the colors slowly faded beyond the trees. She walked casually, and I imagined that she was lost in thoughts about the transient beauty in the world, the value of each moment in the sea of moments in our lives.

I took a moment for myself to appreciate the failing light. And as I passed her, I noticed...

...that she was talking on her cellphone.

So I guess all that other stuff was just me.

POSTSCRIPT

A few minutes later I saw two girls walking together on the sidewalk who seemed to be engaged in a bubbly conversation with one another. (At least, that's how it sounded to me as I approached.) And as I passed... Nope. Just one girl talking on her cell phone, and her... friend(?) quietly accompanying her, destination unknown.

TECHNOLOGY: bringing people together.

Bah, I tell you.

I just spent over $600* getting the driver side seatbelt fixed in my car.

$600!

Seatbelt!

And apart from the whole money thing, it makes me feel pretty stupid and useless that I couldn't figure out how, if it was possible, for me to fix it myself. It's not like it's the fuel injection system or something; it's a SEATBELT! BAH! I thought about trying and then managed to convince myself that it was probably hooked into a bunch of stupid crash and braking sensors and that was the end of it.

On the plus side, we've been all ecologicalibly-minded and crunchy-granola and rode our bikes for all our errands on Sunday, which carried over to dropping the car off and then biking home yesterday, and biking back to the shop to pick up the car today.

And 2 days of working from home and not driving to the office. Bonus.

* And they also nailed me with a $5.94 hazardous waste disposal charge. FOR A SEATBELT!

picking blueberries

Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

Not the worst way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Updates

Originally uploaded by foodnerd.

I haven't felt like I've had much time to post, or had much to post about, but I finally got around to updating the About page. Quite a bit has changed, and I guess I'm a little sad that I didn't bother to save some of what used to be there. But one of life's lessons is that, oftentimes, once you've done something, it can't really be undone. And at that point, you just have to let go and move on.

Anyway, all the big craziness of the year is finally over. Well, mostly, anyway. The wedding, the travel, the house sale, school, massage certification and licensing. There's still plenty of leftover crazy to go around -- we've got thank you notes to write and we're finally starting to take some baby steps getting the new house in proper order, but otherwise it's just everyday normal crazy.

In the last week, I took my car to the shop, had the SOOTTAD's car insured and registered in Massachusetts, played some ultimate, worked in the garden, ran shopping errands, went to a BBQ, a baby shower, a birthday party and a roofdeck concert eavesdrop (the Police concert at Fenway Park) and finally broke down and installed the window A/C* units in the bedroom and the SOOTTAD's office.

There always seems to be something. We're still busy, although I'm happy to say that it doesn't feel crushingly so. Maybe there's something about our lives that really is unusual or extraordinary, but in this, I think it's just business as usual. There will always be things that we need to take care of, planning, working, fixing, building. We have projects now, and when those are done, there are already plenty of others that are waiting in the wings. It never ends.

But I think I'm ok with that. It seems normal. Life is an everyday kind of a thing, after all. All is well.

...although a bit hot and sticky, at the moment.

* Unfortunately, no A/C in my workspace at the house, but I should be back in the office-office for the rest of the week.

Back, but still busy

...but at least we have a little more control over how we're spending our time these days.

Ingredients...

...for a good time. (for starters)

Text Spam

I got a new cellphone for the massage business. The idea was to provide a separate number that would provide clean boundaries between my personal life, my engineering life and this new massage business, while also providing a separate voicemail where I could provide more business information than I would on my own cellphone.

And so far, I've received 2 voicemails in some slavic language (I think it's Russian, but I'm not entirely too sure), 1 voicemail that was a recording selling loans, 1 voicemail from a live person trying to sell ads for the WeeklyDig. And today, I got a text message for some loan website.

Up until the last one has just been an annoyance. I try to check the voicemail on a regular basis, and actually spending the time to listen to a junk message just wastes my time. The text message however, costs me money, since I don't pay the flat rate to send or receive them. (I find that the flat rate has so far always exceeded the expense of paying on a message by message basis.) Sure, it's only 10 cents a message, but it's 10 cents I never should have had to pay in the first place.

I called Verizon Wireless about it, and basically there's nothing they can do. It's some "Premium Message" that apparently originates off the internet that they have no control over. (I really hope that means that it costs them money.) The customer service rep told me I could reply with a message to unsubscribe, but I'm a bit confused since I never subscribed to any messages in the first place. I don't even really use this phone.

The concern, of course, is that if I don't unsubscribe, I'll get more messages. But if I do unsubscribe, that unsubscribe message is also going to cost me money. And worse, I wonder if, as with Spam, you respond to one of these spam messages, they then know the line is "live" and they'll put me on a list that that will receive more messages from different addresses from the same unscrupulous spamming "marketing" company or sold to other spammers.

Fuck. I swear, the assholes make it really hard to have a kind and compassionate attitude towards the world sometimes.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Wedding Present from the MBTA

We thought it was bad enough when we discovered that the MBTA had closed the Arlington Station Entrance and exits for renovations through 2008. It happens to be the station closest to our wedding venue. Thankfully people can still use the Berkeley entrances, but it's a slightly longer walk, and doesn't open up right at the public garden. But at least people will still be able to use the station.

Today, JBar forwarded this gem published on the Globe's local news site:

Summer repairs on Green Line will halt D branch trains
"The shutdown will commence on June 23, 2007*."

Great, thanks guys.

At least there are supposed to be bus shuttles and extra express buses. And the notice says something about "distributing materials and making other preparations for the major production work activity." Hopefully that means the lines will still actually be running. But who knows?

We'll cross our fingers and hope that peeps will still be able to take public transportation and get to the ceremony on time.

UPDATE: just called the MBTA and it's confirmed -- they're shutting down the D line from Riverside to Reservoir starting on the 23rd. Yeah, thanks Boston, we love you, too.

* For those that didn't pick up on it, that's the day we're getting married.

Holy Maps, Batman!

Looks like GoogleMaps has been updating their databases and rendering engines. You can actually see buildings at the higher zoom levels of Boston, including the parking exit structures on Boston Common. Crazy cool.

Certified

Whew!
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

More later...

For now, I think I'm going to go for a run.

A list, of sorts

This is just a mild rant. Apologies in advance.

So I've mentioned that I'm studying for the National Certification Exam for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork. Anyway, I picked up the review book at the school that was being used for a review class. Didn't go to the class; figured I'd get just as much info reading through the book, and it'd be easier to schedule my own time rather than block out the time to attend the class -- plus I think I saved fifty bucks.

It seemed like a reasonable enough book -- it broke the subject matter into several sections and chapters and had review questions. I was a bit disappointed that it didn't come with a CD or something, since this was going to be my first time taking a computerized standardized exam (yes, I think that dates me a bit), but my concerns were somewhat mitigated because the book indicated that you could access several practice tests online with a handy-dandy passcode that was protected by that crappy silver stuff that you find on lottery tickets and game pieces at McDonald's. (Do they still do that? Is that dating myself again?)

So anyway, the book.

Basically, I'm unimpressed. I'm going to resist calling it a steaming-pile-o-crap simply because I have no other points for comparison, but really, pretty crappy. But I am going to enumerate (ironically, in an unenumerated list) my issues with the book. I'm hoping to find it at least a wee bit therapeutic. Because, you know, it's all about growth and healing.

Anyway, here we go:

• The book includes little notes in the text (which they call "display boxes") which provide "practical applications, additional explanations, and real-life examples for the material covered in the book." Great. Seems helpful. Except for the part where the authors consider the information included within them (and solely within them) important enough to create practice questions on them. Sorry, if it's important enough to be tested on it, it's probably important enough to be part of the main text of definitions.
• Y'know, I'm really glad you provide practice questions -- it's helpful to go through a few questions to see if you've understood a section, or conversely, to determine whether you need to study a certain section of material. Great. It'd probably be more helpful if you'd provide practice questions after every chapter rather than say, after the first 22 chapters, 100 pages into your 300 page review book. Whaddayathink?
• And while I'm at it, it'd be nice if the questions you're asking for a given section could actually be answered by the information in the chapters that make up that section. (ok, maybe part of this problem was that some of the answers might have been found in those stupid "display boxes" mentioned in item one, er, I mean that first dot there.)
• But you know, I'll take the ones that were in different sections, if you'd at least make sure the answers were provided SOMEWHERE in your book.
• Oh, and when you provide practice questions, it'd be really nice if your answer key ACTUALLY HAD THE CORRECT ANSWERS IN THEM. I found 3 errors that I had to confirm by corroborating them with the text and with my old class notes and textbooks. It made me wonder whether some of the other answers were sketchy. Especially when it was unclear what material was being used to derive the answers.
• and when you say "additional practice exams," I generally take that to mean EXAMS, as in, several exams. If you use the same questions and just mix up the order of the questions and the order of the multiple-guess answers for each question, that doesn't count.
• And I'm sorry, even if you're going so far as to call a reordered test a different test, um, you're only providing three tests? Way to underachieve, guys.
• And incidentally, not fond of questions that test for pattern recognition of text rather than understanding concepts. Ever heard of a paraphrase? Especially since I can't be certain that the National Certification Board is going to use the same choice of words as you. An example:
  

  Name the technique that uses the palpation of tender points to guide the positioning of the body to reduce the tenderness.
  (a) Muscle energy
  (b) Myofascial release
  (c) Strain-counterstrain
  (d) Structural integration
  
  From the text: "Strain-counterstrain is a technique that uses the palpation of tender points (or trigger points) to guide the positioning of the body to reduce the tenderness, ..."
  

  Do I really understand that? No. Did I get the question right? Yes. The second time I saw it. Do I feel confident that I'm ready for the real exam? No.
• And, by the way, the "full index" (that they hype in the preface) is not, in fact, particularly full.

And FWIW, I found the book's overall organization to be fairly poor. But that's probably pretty obvious.

I suppose one way of looking at it is that the authors' choice of organization forced me to review more subject matter because I had to spend additional time scanning through whole sections, multiple whole sections, to figure out answers to some of the questions. Not to mention my own class notes and old textbooks. Hey, thanks guys!

Anyway, annoyed, but done now. Hopefully I'll do alright on the test on Saturday.