Mr. E

Celebratory Games!

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:42:43 -0800

Hey! You! Come play some games at our new house! You'll get a sneak peak before the (soon-to-be-announced) housewarming party!

What?: Games. Board games, specifically.
Where?: Our house. Ping me if you need the address.
When?: Sunday, July 18th 1pm-9pm (yes, this Sunday.)
Why?: Because I'm no longer prime (in more ways than just one) and it'll be fun!

My apologies for the short notice, I've been working on a project that uses Facebook Events (*cough*movingtarget/half-assedAPI*cough*) and absent-mindedly created an an event for this party instead of our usual Pingg invite, thus missing a bunch of people.

If you're available, we'd love to have you! If not, it's my fault. Come to the housewarming instead.

Laid Up for a While

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:38:17 -0800

A lot has happened in the last month…

First off, it appears that this information has been unevenly communicated. For that, I apologize. But I hope you agree that I had a good excuse. (At least at first.)

I’m still midway through writing a very long-winded, exhastive account (with its own summary) of what happened that nobody in their right mind would actually want to read. It’s stalled. This is getting ridiculous.

In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: Let me ’splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

I was hit by a car.

The evening of Friday, February 12th as I crossed the street (in the crosswalk, with the light) to catch a bus home, a car turning left onto Market from Montgomery struck me at slow speed.

My knee was broken (x-ray). Everything else was fine. (Specifically, a portion of the tibial plateau was sheared off.) I was, in many respects, very lucky.

It was a long, painful, and story-filled night.

After a long, disagreeable week, the following Thursday I had surgery to fix the (skeletal) damage (another x-ray). My ACL was torn but not repaired (I’m told that many people live full, active lives without one). My MCL was stretched rather badly.

I was (IMNSHO) discharged too early on Friday evening. I spent a harrowing night at home. Too harrowing to be story-filled. The less said about it the better.

The convalescent prescription from here is rather high-powered narcotics (which work most of the time) and no weight bearing on that joint for 10-12 weeks! After that, the real recuperation begins: 6-8 weeks of physical therapy and rebuilding.

The reason 10-12 weeks is two-fold: primarily, it’s to give the cartilage in my knee a break (ha!) to prevent it from deteriorating further. Secondly, it is also hoped that this break will also give the MCL a chance to tighten back up (at least a bit).

This greatly increases the chances of arthritis in my knee (but there is no way to predict if it will be symptomatic or not.)

I am definitely healing. I have good days and bad days with the pain, but it’s reassuring (after the fact) that I’m healing even on the bad days. I’ve regained quite a bit of mobility, but as of right now, I am still confined to the upper floor of our house.

The outpouring of support and well-wishes has been fantastic and overwhelming. Chiara, too, has been a saint to put up with so much. I am humbled by it all.

There is more I want to say, but this is already starting to get long, so I’ll save it for another post.

Authlogic

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 17:36:08 -0800

I have a project I call “Clubcar.” It had its genesis in my frustration at the pathological inability of a group of coworkers to chose a lunch destination, coupled with our general dissatisfaction with the day-to-day functioning of most other automated decision systems.

It was also a complex enough problem that it seemed a good way to learn Rails. Because it was my first Rails project I was as yet unfamiliar with many Rails idioms and practices. I reinvented a few wheels that really should have been patterns.

I am now going back and spending time cleaning up the code base and extending it to allow more than just the original group to use it, since several people have expressed interest in it.

One of the wheels I invented was authentication. Since a wider audience needs a much more robust authentication (and authorization, but that's a separate issue) system, now is a good time to rip out my simple implementation and use one of the off-the-shelf solutions with far more features, and far fewer bugs.

And here's the rub. By far, the most popular solution, acts-as-authenticated (and its REST-ful progeny: restful-authentication) are primarily code generators. The expectation is that you'll use them in a new project to generate the models, views & controllers that make up your authentication system. This has presented two problems, one practical, and one philosophical.

The practical: since my system already has all of these things, I tried to carefully shoehorn the generated code into my existing framework. It was a mess, I felt I'd painted myself into a corner, and the project stagnated.

The philosophical: while I was despairing and frustrated over the shoehorning, I began to wonder: why is the Rails community as a whole, which has “DRY” (“Don’t Repeat Yourself”) as a mantra so enamored with code generation? Even if it's not you writing the code, it is still repetition that makes the project harder to maintain, makes it harder to incorporate fixes and features from later version of the tool, and seems to fly in the face of not only DRY but good object-oriented design as well.

I set the project aside. In returning to it (now that I need to amuse myself on the train again occasionally.) I decided to once again look for alternatives.

I have stumbled upon Authlogic, a plugin that seems to be written by someone who shares my misgivings. It's also extremely well documented, highly configurable, and has a complete API for extension.

Fair warning: I haven't actually started moving my project to Authlogic, and I may yet find some fatal flaw. But I'm very much looking forward to trying it out, and if I do happen to find a flaw, perhaps I can patch it, and everyone using it can benefit immediately, not on their next project!

ETA: I just sent the author some fan mail, because it makes me that happy!

Horus 2002-2009

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 20:28:51 -0800

There are far too many words for me to write here, and I’ll never get it out if I try to capture them all. Keeping it short: The candle that burns at both ends burns twice as bright, but half as long. Horus succumbed to chronic renal failure today. Hoka Hey, little man.

Quality Time with Pepper, originally posted by Erik

Sleeping Horus, originally posted by Chiara

On Some Level, We are Already Legal

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 07:43:35 -0800

Chiara and I are spending this weekend in Monterey / Carmel / Pacific Grove hammering out wedding details. To me this is poetic for on this day our relationship becomes “legal.”

18 years ago today, we had our first date. February 8, 1991 was the Snowball.

I don’t yet know if she realizes this fact, but I do know that she doesn’t expect me to remember.

Today will be fun!

ETA: She didn’t remember. I win! Off to taste some cake.

Not a Time For Gloating

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:25:25 -0800

For the past few months, I’ve hoped that this evening I’d have something about which to gloat. But since about this time last night, I’ve had the immortal words of the inimitable Terry Gilliam, as delivered by an understated Bobby D on a seeming endless loop in my head:

“Listen, kid. We’re all in this together.”

There are likely to be many on the side on which I’ve been standing who are looking to destroy those on the other side, as a manner of repudiating the thinking and damage done in the last eight years. I fully expected to be one.

This morning my realization that I wasn’t in that camp prompted me to remember a well-respected Republican admonishing:

“Why, madam, do I not destroy [my enemies] when I make them my friends?”

It’s going to take every one of us to roll up our sleeves, pull the wheel, and turn the Ship of State off the suicidal course on which it has been directed for the last 8 years.

Let it begin with me. Yes we can.

Grabbing My Destiny (By the Antennae?)

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:33:43 -0800

This afternoon I tendered my resignation. I leave behind a great group of people on the cusp of major to stratospheric success. It was a very hard decision, but my destiny lies elsewhere.

The top half of the page at left isn’t as true as it’s been in the past, making the decision all the more difficult. But the bottom half sings a profound truth.

I was not looking for a new gig. But a few kept landing in my lap that I couldn’t pass up. I’ve accepted the senior developer position at Emmet Labs, an early-stage social platform startup in San Francisco.

There are many reasons this excites me: learning a lot while working on interesting problems in a cool (metaphorical) space surrounded by fascinating (and occasionally famous) people in a dynamic and passion-driven environment. That’s where I thrive!

Obviously there are a lot of other, less exciting emotions tied to the coming and the going, but I feel the need to keep this entry short. Perhaps I’ll catalogue them in a future post.

Golden Gate Social Bike Ride! (Take 3)

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:13:41 -0800

...This time with 4 part harmony and feeling.

I’m putting together another all-abilities, all-ages, slow as molasses, stop & smell the roses bicycle ride over the Golden Gate Bridge on Sunday, June 22.

When:: Sunday, June 22th (next Sunday, not the day after tomorrow). My plan is to start at my house at noon or 1pm. If I’m riding alone, I can probably be at the bridge in 30 minutes, but connecting with people will modify that, and the schedule for this ride is necessarily a bit flexible. I’m also open to other ideas (see below)
Who:: Anyone who has a bike, can manage to stay (mostly) upright on it, and wants to ride across the Golden Gate (C’mon! It’s fun! You should do it at least once!)
What:: Riding a bicycle across the Golden Gate Bridge. Also, you might want to consult your doctor about ADHD, and/or cut down on the fine herb clouding your short-term memory.
Where:: At a minimum, the Bridge, but see below

It’s Dead, Jim

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 08:44:41 -0800

My Treo 650 was acting a little strange during my travails in travel on Tuesday. Wednesday morning it got even weirder, and by noon it stopped working at all.

I’m in Miami for the week, and I feel a bit vulnerable without having the ability to connect with folks, either at home, in the family, or people I want to see/meet here.

But beyond that, I don’t know what to do moving forward. Palm is dead as a platform. The rumored impending release of the 3G network iPhone would be absolutely perfect, except:

The rumor is completely unsubstantiated, it started as an off-hand comment by Walt Mossberg, and is fueled entirely by wanton wishful thinking
I need something now, not in a month or two
It would mean giving a(nother) red cent to AT&T after they:
1. flagrantly and recklessly colluded with the NSA to violate the law and our Constitutional rights.
2. decided all of your personal information? yeah, that’s now “Marketing Information” they're free to use (and sell) as they see fit.
3. etc, etc, etc…

It’s that last one that is so problematic. I feel completely hypocritical even considering an iPhone. Yeah, sure, Android, um, see #2 above.

Further Evidence of Geekdom

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 12:03:19 -0800

In preparation for a demo that could lead to a huge opportunity, I worked two weeks straight, most nights until midnight, sometimes until after 2am. No rest for the ~~wicked~~ weary on the two weekends, I just plowed straight through.

I’m done, back banging on the stuff on which I should be working, and I was very much looking forward to a respite this weekend.

There’s just one minor glitch. The problem I left on Friday evening is sticking in my craw. It’s interesting. I know I should leave it until Monday, but here I am logging into the VPN to grab the file so I can at least map out how I think it should be solved.

Hopefully that will exorcise this demon, and I can go back to enjoying a weekend with my sweetie.

The First Word was Hartford...

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:03:48 -0800

[This has been rolling around my head for a few weeks, and I’ve been chomping at the bit (until my site redesign was finished and MT was working again for me) for the time I could write it.]

I play at being a misanthrope. It’s not all charade, there is certainly a fair bit of my character that is completely anti-social, and while I’ve come out of my shell in shocking and scary ways in recent years, I’m still rather introverted.

But at the deepest level, the essential kernel, I am an optimist. A humanist. A romantic.

There hasn’t been much fuel for that spark in the public space in recent years, in fact in most ways we haven’t been sliding toward oblivion so much a stampeding toward it.

And yet, as I observed the political process recently I’ve found myself experiencing some odd emotions. While reading reading Jon Taplin’s Blog I put my finger on it. The odd sensation I couldn’t quite grasp was hope.

I feel hopeful. Not that we’ve turned around and are headed in the right direction, but that maybe we’ve turned a (slight) corner. That some more people are starting to ask hard, important questions. That people might actually be willing to put aside differences, and dig in for the herculean task of rebuilding everything the last 8-10 years has torn down.

I fully expect these hopes to be dashed. We, as a nation, have been coddled and encouraged to stick our heads in the sand for too long for it change overnight. And the siren song of blissful ignorance is powerful. But, if the cards fall well, that dashing could be delayed until after January. Several months of hope could do me (and many of us) a world of good.

Edit: I finally figured out what was breaking the crossposting of this entry. The original draft of this entry, had I been able to publish it, would have coincided perfectly with the speech about which everyone is talking. It’s gratifying to see so many of us feel the same way.

I know it’s more of that blinding hope, but I can’t help but feel that the choice before us is between the politicians of the past; and a statesman, the likes of which we haven’t seen in a generation, who will lead us into the future.

Redesign

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 12:08:52 -0800

A scientific breakthrough! I compressed another 9 years of slacking and ambivalence into just two.

In reality, my hand was forced. When Six Apart announced plans to release Movable Type 4 under the GPL, I was overjoyed. I’d been itching to upgrade our installation (version 2.65, circa 1999-2000), and it was the perfect opportunity. I’m very glad that WordPress’s design (single blog, single author) made me put off spending any time seriously considering it.

But it left me with dilemmas: First, the ljcrosspost plugin for 2.x was abandon-ware (I submitted a few patches, and the website disappeared shortly thereafter), and even if it wasn’t, it suffered some major flaws. After failing to find a suitable replacement[*], I resigned myself (with some excitement, I’ll admit) to write my own.

And then there was the design for my site. If I was going to have to rework my Movable Type templates for my blog, I might as well revert the templates to the new defaults and update the design as well.

And here we are. It’s not finished, but most of the major pieces are in place. And I don’t hate it. This in itself is a victory. I’m actually more or less pleased with it, for now.

[*] I’ve since found a cross-post plugin that is written by someone who knows what he’s doing, has a nice preference UI, and does more than just LJ. But he doesn’t have all the features mine has (though arguably some of those could/should be a separate plugin), and the license terms are less than ideal. So I’ll keep working on mine. (With the intent of releasing it under the GPL)

The Plea (And Confession) of a Type Torturer

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:33:13 -0800

Please believe me. I’ve tried. I will grant that some of those attempts may have been half-hearted, but I was weary, down-hearted. I didn’t think that I could do it (and I’m still skeptical), but I can’t live this lie, maintain this charade any longer, and so this voice cries in the wilderness, hoping someone out there can help me out of jam of a mental block:

I need a replacement for Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed:

One with an honest italic (not just slanted romans). One that will contrast as beautifully against my body font (currently a simple Bodoni Book, with both lining and old-style numerals as appropriate) without clashing.

You see, I don’t want the world, I just want your half.

My current front-runner is Agenda Semibold Extra (or Ultra, I haven’t decided yet) Condensed (Italic):

[ I've decided to remove the samples for Agenda, you can find it if you care, but as I said in comments in the cross-post I realized I liked it a lot less once this was posted.]

While it is quite nice in its own right, it's too round, lacks the subtle, oblique stress that (was one of the elements that) drew me to Franklin Gothic, and the lack of a branch terminal on the spine & bowl mating of some forms (“b,” in particular) doesn’t sit well with me. It doesn’t feel as . . . classy. You see, I’m still hoping for a long-lost italic cousin to come out of the woodwork.

I can’t seem to shake that sense. A little help?

Synchronicity

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 10:25:26 -0800

[While this may not be the first time I've heard this song since certain facts came to light (to me), it's definitely the first time I've considered the lyrics:]

Really, who but a candidate for a doctorate in astrophysics (now properly defended) could write such a heart-wrenching song about the perils of relativistic space travel?

I know I've had my suspicions over the years, and, sure, it could be argued there are other interpretations (I'd expect nothing less from such a master), but this coincidence is too strong to ignore.

Open Letters

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:56:22 -0800

Dear USPS:

Look, I know things are busy for you right now, so you probably won't even hear my cries over the din of all of the mail you're processing, however I have two comments:

"package tracking" != "delivery confirmation!" Please stop trying to confuse the issue
"Express Mail" my fat, pale, hairy ass!

In short, my package should have been here overnight 1 week ago (even giving you the benefit of the doubt). I have no visibility into your process. I just want my damn package!

no love,
E

Dear Random Cyclist Who Likes to Draft Me on Moffett Park Blvd.:

First off, I am greatly honored by your obvious trust in my abilities, but I have two questions for you as well:

Dude, seriously, what the fuck? That shit is dangerous done with people you know how to anticipate, but a random stranger? Yes, yes, I'm in awe of your mad skillz and your obviously far stronger cojones, but what the hell is wrong with you?
We've done this a few times now, you know I turn left at Borregas, do you not realize that when I look behind me I'm trying to gauge the likelihood of being mauled by a death machine as I enter the lane? Seeing your smiling face blocking my view is not helpful.

In short: thanks, now please back the fuck off!

No Love,
You Don't Even Know My Name

Dear Random Other Cyclist I'd Never Seen Before:

I'm sorry my passing you was such an affront to your machismo that you felt you had to be a complete prick about it. But let's compare:

I passed you, on the left, letting you know I was there, ("On your left")
You passed me, on the right (seriously, are you dense?) with nary a peep, at a stop sign, where you immediately made a left turn across my path!

I nearly ran right into you, asshat! If I'd been aware of what you were about to pull I might have out of spite. I hope your manhood has been vindicated. Now kindly cut that shit out.

Whatever.