Chaz Meyers

Since posting more means memes are OK. ;)

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:23:21 GMT

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, (even if we don't speak often) please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me. It can be anything you want - good or bad - BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your LJ and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you.

(via ceemonster)

Wherein I talk about college paperwork, ideas, writing copy, and library audiobooks

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:17:40 GMT

In the spirit of writing more, I'm writing more. :P

Today I received word that my request to not retake all my classes has been approved by all the people with fancy titles who need to approve that sort of thing. Now I just need to register for my last class, and I will be set!

I tried scheduling an appointment to add the class that today when I first received the news at 4:55PM. After explaining what I wanted and being placed on hold, I was informed at 5:05PM that "The System" gets shut down at 5:00 and I could try again tomorrow. Some might be annoyed by this, but to me it's just home sweet home. ;-)

I often come up with bizarre programming projects and never follow up on them once the idea loses it's novelty in my mind. Not this time! I was struck with the best worst useless idea ever, and by golly I will not let that go to waste! I'm not going to write about it quite yet, though. Whenever I write about an amazing idea, I abandon it shortly afterwards. (Perhaps I need to become quicker as a programmer. Or, I need a longer attention span.)

Much of today I've been writing copy. It's important and needs to be done, but I can't decide if I'm bad at it or if I just dislike the task. Maybe it's a little of both. I'm eager for the month to be over so I can stop pretending to be a web designer and get back to writing software.

Earlier today I got very excited because I thought I could download DRM'd audiobooks from my local library. Upon closer inspection, I think you can only be put onto a waitlist to download an audiobook someday? Disappointing.

My Pandora station for this week is seeded by "Party in the USA" and "Single Ladies". I enjoy it, but you should pity my coworkers.

Wherein I talk about Seussical wrapup, Godspell, brain rot, cars, and school. Also: I plead.

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:01:07 GMT

I've been busy, but not in a way that lends to great stories to share with the internet. Le sigh.

Seussical turned out to be an absolutely fantastic experience. Great performances with a wonderful tiny cast. It was a very consuming show in terms of energy and time, but in a really good way, so immediately afterwards it felt like a weird combination of loss and relief.

Last week I auditioned for a production of Godspell and was cast as the soloist for "All Good Gifts". That would make me Lamar, I suppose? It should be fun. I know next to nothing about the show, but the music I've heard so far sounds good. That starts early January and ends in March, I think? So it's a pretty short run. And after that I think I'm going to sleep for a while.

I've always explained to people that the artistic and scientific sides of my brain both get very hungry and so I feed the former with theatre and the later with coding. I'm afraid the coding half hasn't been as satisfied lately. It's gotten worse over the past few months, but the problem goes back a few years.

A big part of it, I think, is I don't talk to many other programmers in my day-to-day life. In fact, I have no close friends who are software developers. For me, there's an important social component to writing software which I have been neglecting since leaving college. Collaborating with others and bouncing ideas off of one another is a great way to grow new ideas and weed out the bad. Also, I enjoy being competitive and showing off. It helps to keep me sharp. Otherwise, I'm a single voice bouncing around in an echo chamber. That echo chamber is starting to take a toll on me.

Philadelphia has developed a thriving technological community, particularly over the past two years, and I need to get more involved with it. It would be very healthy for me.

That, and I think I need to either start or hook onto some open source project. I've given that idea a lot of lip service, but have done very little towards those ends. I'm good at what I do, but, again, I'm in an echo chamber. No one around me is qualified to tell me my work sucks outside of a black box testing sort of way, and I think that sort of environment makes it very easy to stagnate.

In more annoying news, in mid-October I was in an accident that totaled my mother's car. It doesn't really affect her that much. Due to a weird set of circumstances she has been driving her sister's car for years now. However, it did mean that I had to buy my first car. That was kind of annoying with a dash of excitement. I am now the proud owner of a silver 2010 Honda Fit.

In mixed news, I'm in a paperwork-based cage match with my alma mater, trying to get back in so I can finish my last few classes and get my BS. If all goes to plan, I'll be done either by the end of spring or the summer. Otherwise, I'm probably going to drop the whole matter forever because they'll want me to re-take a few dozen classes. My paperwork has been approved so far, but it's still being pushed further up the ladder. My major is no longer offered (wtf?) so a lot of fancy people with many letters before and after their names need to decide whether I can give them money in exchange for a piece of paper. Exciting, right?

LJ seems to have turned into a ghost town. I know that part of it is the company itself has turned to shit from the sounds of things, and another part is everyone (with a few noted and appreciated exceptions!) has moved to posting trite status updates in Facebook's closed garden (oh hi!) or Twitter's noise factory (hay!). It doesn't need to be that way! Come back, everyone! :P

There's still value in writing in essay form about how ridiculous your day was or giving bi-weekly updates on your life! There's so much noise in those other mediums and such little room for context and content that a few years from now when you want to be nostalgic, you'll still find great gems on LJ from 2001-2008, but very little from this period of time. FB's and Twitter's archives will be difficult to navigate if they'll exist at all and the content will be of such little value it won't even be worth the effort to go through them.

I know I'm a complete hypocrite because lately if I write bi-monthly, that's a good run for me. However! If you guys come back I promise I'll write more frequently. I'll even comment. Pinky swear. It's sad that my 20 most recent friends entries spans 5 days! I miss y'all.

Remember in elementary school when the first assignment would always be to write about summer vaca?

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:34:58 GMT

There hasn't been much to write about. The summer went by in a blur.

Back in June I was trying to get more in touch with my non-work geek. Went to some local User Group meetings. Want to do more of that soon.

I started some work on a web-based frontend for computer-based music notation and MIDI generation because everything that exists sucks in one way or another. Music can be incredibly complex and tricky to map. The only reasonable text-based route is Lilypond, which is an entire scheme dialect and there aren't any great GUI options. Most commercial options are incredibly tedious and error prone drag-and-drop based like Finale. And, don't even get me started on writing software that speaks MIDI. That's just a clusterfuck in and of itself.

As the summer picked up, all that went to the wayside. This was my last year at UD Summer Stage, which was significant to me since I have participated in that program for every year save one since 1996. I landed an ensemble role in Thoroughly Modern Millie, participated in a lovely Caberancetroupe, and directed a scene from Barefoot in the Park, all of which were rewarding experiences. I haven't often won things at the end-of-the-summer award ceremony, so it was an unexpected but very much appreciated pleasure to be awarded "Mainstager of the Year" and one of the two "OneActs: Best Director" awards. It was a nice way to end that chapter of my life.

Life has since slowed down a bit since then.

At the end of August I started rehearsals for Seussical at Narberth, a venue I never even stepped into before auditions back in June. It's less time intensive than what I was doing over the summer, but it is interesting since it's the smallest cast for a musical I've ever been in. Everyone is very talented so I need to keep my A-game on if I don't want to look like a dunce.

I've also taken up voice lessons again for the first time since high school. I didn't realize how much I've missed them until I started them up again.

As you can see, the theatrical geek side of my brain has been saturated over the past four months. I really need to engage in more computer geek recreational work to balance things out. That equilibrium is important to me. I need a new hobby project. Maybe something in Perl or C. Ruby is very pretty but I feel like I've spent too much time in that code culture over the past few years and I really miss in particular Perl code culture.

I need to take advantage of the time I have right now. If all goes as planned, I'll be finishing up the last two classes for my undergraduate degree in the Spring, so once that starts up time will not be in ample supply.

New job. Life updates.

Sat, 09 May 2009 04:39:53 GMT

I keep on starting epic posts, running out of time, and marking them as private. At the time I intend to go back and flesh them out later, but when later comes either they no longer feel relevant or just don't seem interesting anymore. Clearly I am not a very good blogger.

In avoiding that trap, I'm going to try to keep this short and on point. Except for that meta-paragraph above. And this one too.

I've been working as a contractor for a university since January 2007. As a student, I had worked for them since 2002, but this was the first time I worked for them in a professional software developer capacity. It was exciting!

About two months ago, I found out that my contract for this year would only be funded until July. After some drama, soul searching, and job hunting, I ended up securing a position with my friend's company.

Then I found out last week, oops! The funding ran out three weeks ago. They extended my funding to cover the time I already worked plus this week to tie up loose ends, and fortunately my friend was in a position to bring me on a few months earlier than already planned.

Today was my last day working there. It's both sad and exciting to leave something that was familiar and constant for seven years. My old job was nice and convenient for a number of reasons, but I am afraid I was starting to get into a bit of a rut. It's nice to shake things up a bit.

I'll be doing work that's entirely different from everything else going on in the company which is weird but cool. I think it might give me the chance to have a large, perhaps unilateral, influence on the shape and direction of the work I do. I'm hoping that will translate into building awesome interesting things.

This shift in my career path combined with living by myself for the first time ever come the end of this month means my life might have a significantly different intonation this time two or three months from now. I hope it is for the better.

Taking some time after lunch for OMG OLD MEMES

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:20:41 GMT

Big Five Test Results (take me)

The Big Five is currently the most accepted personality model in the scientific community. The Big Five emerged from the work of multiple independent scientists/researchers starting in the 1950s who using different techniques obtained similar results. Those results were that there are five distinct personality traits/dimensions. Here are your results on each dimension:

Extroversion	27%
Orderliness	15%
Emotional Stability	35%
Accommodation	50%
Inquisitiveness	58%

Extroversion results were low which suggests you are very reclusive, quiet, unassertive, and secretive.

Orderliness results were very low which suggests you are overly flexible, random, improvised, and fun seeking at the expense too often of structure, reliability, work ethic, and long term accomplishment.

Emotional Stability results were moderately low which suggests you are worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious.

Accommodation results were medium which suggests you are moderately kind natured, trusting, and helpful while still maintaining your own interests.

Inquisitiveness results were moderately high which suggests you are intellectual, curious, imaginative but possibly not very practical.

Global 5: sloan RLUAI; sloan+ rxUA|I|; primary Inquisitive; R(73%)X(50%)U(85%)A(50%)I(58%)

Jung Test (take me)

Introverted (I)	79.17%	Extroverted (E)	20.83%
Sensing (S)	54.17%	Intuitive (N)	45.83%
Feeling (F)	62.5%	Thinking (T)	37.5%
Perceiving (P)	70.83%	Judging (J)	29.17%

ISFP - "Artist". Interested in the fine arts. Expression primarily through action or art form. The senses are keener than in other types. 8.8% of total population.

Why `rake db:migrate` is slow against large databases.

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:38:43 GMT

I just realized why `rake db:migrate` takes so damn long at work.

Rails is generally designed assuming that the application will get its own database. This is normal in environments where "database" is a lightweight concept, as in MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite. After updating the database, it dumps the database schema to a file so when you install a new copy of the application you don't need to run dozens of migrations.

This works fine when there aren't many tables unrelated to your application, but in Oracle-land it's not unusual to put tons of applications all in the same massive database. Consider the following:

SQL> SELECT count(*) FROM all_tables; COUNT(*) ---------- 1747

Every time I add a single column to the database via migrations, all those tables get introspected and transformed into 13.5K lines of ruby. A three minute tax is added to an operation which usually takes less than a second.

I wonder if there's some way to turn off this behavior without hacking up their Rake file.

Update: Turns out this only happens if ActiveRecord.schema_format = :ruby. Change it to :sql and it won't try to dump the database.

Desktops

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:46:36 GMT

No one wanted me to make them anything? Oh well. Your loss. :)

We haven't done the meme where everyone posts their desktop in a while. Here's mine:

You should post yours too!

Gift meme, via revjim

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:53:00 GMT

The first 10 people to respond to this post will get something made by me.

This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:

I make no guarantees that you will like what I make. But I'll certainly try.
What I create will be just for you.
It'll be done some time this year (2009).
You get no say in what it's going to be. It may be a mix CD. It may be a poem. I may draw or paint something. Perhaps a photograph. I might bake you something. Maybe I'll clip a lock of my favorite section of hair, douse it with my cologne, and throw in a few fingernail clippings. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure!
I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.

There is also a catch.

You have to put this in your LiveJournal, blog, website, Facebook, MySpace, whatever as well.

(Comments are screened.)

Ghost Town

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:36:55 GMT

It's 6:30PM the day before an American presidential election and so far there are three new posts on my Friends Page.

LiveJournal is officially dead.

Wherein I become a stereotypical blogger. Look! Cat pictures!

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:01:43 GMT

When I left for work this morning, I couldn't help but notice the stray cat who took up residence in the flower pot by our front door.

LiveJournal is powered by the tears of furries and memes.

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:34:28 GMT

Comment and I will...

a) Tell you why I friended you.
b) Associate you with something -- a fandom, song, color, photo, etc.
c) Tell you something I like about you.
d) Tell you a memory I have of you.
e) Ask you something I've wanted to know about you.
f) Tell you my favorite userpic from your list.
g) In return, you need to post this on your own livejournal.

Wherein I tell lies.

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:22:43 GMT

I normally don't look at browser statistics. However, since I'm about to start a new design of something, I was curious where we stand right now with respect to IE.

Before we start, let me confess that my data gathering methodology is completely flawed for a number of reasons and quite possibly misleading. Still, if we can compare flawed apples to flawed apples, we might get some ideas about the tree. I found these results a little surprising:

# Unique IPs identifying as IE6 - September 2008 [ ~/www_logs]$ zgrep "MSIE 6" . www.200809* | cut -b 17-31 | uniq | wc -l 474 # Unique IPs identifying as IE7 - September 2008 [ ~/www_logs]$ zgrep "MSIE 7" . www.200809* | cut -b 17-31 | uniq | wc -l 5520

I thought that IE6/IE7 in the wild was close to 50/50 or slightly leaning toward IE6 still, but I guess within our demographic that's no longer the case. IE6 numbers are actually slightly inflated because I noticed quite a few webserver cracking scripts running against us were identifying as IE6.

In contrast, here is where we were a year ago:

# Unique IPs identifying as IE6 - September 2008 [ ~/www_logs]$ zgrep "MSIE 6" . www.200709* | cut -b 17-31 | uniq | wc -l 848 # Unique IPs identifying as IE7 - September 2008 [ ~/www_logs]$ zgrep "MSIE 7" . www.200709* | cut -b 17-31 | uniq | wc -l 1044

IE6 IPs have been dropped by a little less than 50%, but more impressive, IE7 IPs have nearly quintupled! Of course, it's not all roses:

# Unique IPs identified as Firefox - September 2008 [ ~/www_logs]$ zgrep "Firefox" . www.200809* | cut -b 17-31 | uniq | wc -l 320 # Unique IPs identified as Safari - September 2008 [ ~/www_logs]$ zgrep "Safari" . www.200809* | cut -b 17-31 | uniq | wc -l 12 # Unique IPs identified as Google Chrome - September 2008 [ ~/www_logs]$ zgrep "Chrome" . www.200809* | cut -b 17-31 | uniq | wc -l 7 # Unique IPs identified as Opera - September 2008 [ ~/www_logs]$ zgrep "Opera" . www.200809* | cut -b 17-31 | uniq | wc -l 2

We sill have a long way to go!

(On a slightly different note - we have two Opera users? Are they using our app on their Wii or something??)

LJ getting trashy...

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:27:23 GMT

I just reinstalled Ubuntu at work, so I didn't have my Permanent Account cookie set when I first hit the f-page. People not logged in see ads on Early Adopter accounts? When did that happen? I thought it was only the "Plz Put Ads On My Page for Picture Storage" accounts that did that. Really gross.

Edit Snapshots is pretty gross too. But I did notice that change before...

A more different meme.

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:27:42 GMT

Listed below are 30 answers. The questions are secret. If you want to know them, you have to agree to do this meme in your journal/blawg/whatever. If you're down for that, leave a comment with your email and I'll send you the questions.

1. Mike F.
2. Brian W.
3. Depends on duration. For just a day or two, anyone would be interesting.
4. A1, A2
5. Sam, Michelle. I guess. But really it depends.
6. Michelle.
7. Michelle.
8. Chris P, Mike P, Mike F, Liz.
9. That's actually a pretty long list.
10. A1, Mike P.
11. Me?
12. Spoilers.
13. Michelle.
14. Sam, A2 / Dan, Steve S.
15. Chris R. Hilarity ensues.
16. Becca.
17. Almost everyone I know?
18. Most animals I know. Tucker. Emma. Apollo.
19. A1, A2.
20. Yana.
21. Chris R.
22. Chris P.
23. Uh, Chris R.
24. No one comes to mind, so clearly they would have the advantage.
25. Liz, Steph, and A1 all seem to have decent track records, ;) although I'm not sure if that's the vocabulary I would use.
26. None.
27. Sadly, no one in particular comes to mind. Hm.
28. No one. :) Close proximity with someone for long periods of time like that is grating.
29. More spoilers.
30. Tempt not the fates.

Can you paint with all the colors.. of Web 2.0?

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:29:36 GMT

Someone on StackOverflow asked about Web 2.0 color combinations. Some people have collected the various colors and put them into spread sheets and JPGs.

It's well established that I have an odd obsession with taking pretty looking rectangles and making big grids out of them, so one thing lead to another and now I have a grid of colors and the companies who brought them to us.

So, now when someone asks you what Web 2.0 is, instead of saying, "I don't know. It's a stupid marketing term" you can say "I don't know. It's a stupid marketing term, but it looks sort of like this."

fictional request.

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:37:10 GMT

Now that rehearsals are over for this summer, I'm going back to commuting via mass transit next week. This means I have time each day to read and avoid urine puddles instead of listening to trashy Jersey radio and cursing at idiot suburban drivers commuting into the city.

My brain feel simultaneously shriveled from lack of good literature and somewhat burned out on the few nonfiction technology and philosophy books I've feed it this past year or so.

Please recommend fiction. :) I'm looking for stuff that's character driven, not fantasy/science fiction, and will make my brain feel good for the top of my list, but any suggestions are welcome.

Time Change.

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:32:09 GMT

Previously I said that the Caberance Troupe will be Weds @ 7PM.

FALSE.

It was moved at some point to Weds @ 7:30PM.

You should still come. It's fantastic. :D

Overthinking the problem, or another post where I forget the demographics of my readership.

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:00:03 GMT

I was writing some trivial yet repetitive error-handling code when it occurred to me it would be cool if ruby had a feature to define a method that didn't increase the call-stack, such that you could have a new scope but could also return or terminate directly from the calling function. Sort of like the following pseudo-code...

class A
  attr_accessor :check_errors

  def initialize
    @check_errors = Proc.new do |something|
      return something if something.kind_of? Exception
      if something.respond_to? :each
        bad = something.detect { |thing| thing.kind_of? Exception }
        return bad if bad
      end
    end
  end
end

class B < A
  def maybe_erronous
    # do stuff...

    self.check_errors(questionable)

    # do more stuff...
  end
end

Except the code would actually work. If you define a Proc like that it raises a LocalJumpError exception.

Then I remembered I could just re-raise the exception and catch it in the calling code. Duh.

Sleep Schedules.

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:55:17 GMT

Anyone who has known me for a significant amount of time knows I spend a lot of time and energy worrying about my sleep schedules. It seems my most comfortable routine is waking up at 9:30AM, lounging and getting ready until 10:30AM or so, and getting in to work around 11:30AM, and then going to bed sometime between 12:00AM and 2:00AM.

Now, while my current work and lifestyle allows for this, I would rather shift myself such that I'm in work sometime between 7:00AM and 9:00AM. That way my workday ends around sometime between 1:00PM and 3:00PM. I have always loved sleeping late, but at the same time I have also always romanticize the idea of waking up at the crack of dawn. Plus, with that extra daylight time I could experience the day in new and exciting ways. Maybe I could take up kite flying.

Of course, I also have a particular affinity for the hours between 11:00PM and 1:00AM. I don't want to be an old fogy, after all. Maybe there is room for compromise.

To wean myself into waking up earlier, I started an experiment this week. My alarm is set for both 6:00AM and 7:30AM. That way I can initially wake up at 6:00AM and be half-asleep until 7:30AM. I tend to naturally wake up in two phrases like that anyway, so I thought I might be able to recreate my normal refreshed state of being if I tricked my body into thinking that it was still in charge.

The results have been less than awesome. I've found on some days, I would in a half-awake stupor just turn off the alarm at 6:00AM and not wake up until my normal start time. Curses! Regardless of whether I turn the alarm off or not, I find myself much more sleepy and cranky throughout the day. This is probably because my room has 5 windows with inadequate shades, so my room is flooded with light by 6:00AM, so any subsequent sleep is not sufficiently restful.

Maybe I need to give the experiment a bit more time to allow my body to shift a bit. Or maybe I need to change the parameters a bit. Hm.

Come see my stuff. (If you're local.)

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:17:52 GMT

I'm going to be in a lot of stuff in August, so I'd appreciate it if people showed up to some of these things. :)

My Favorite Year:
My Favorite Year is a musical with a book by Joseph Dougherty, music by Stephen Flaherty, and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens.

Based on the film of the same name, it is set in the 1950s and centers on Benjy Stone, a sketch writer for a television variety show starring Sid Caesar-like King Kaiser. Signed for a guest appearance is Errol Flynn-like Alan Swann, a one-time movie idol whose career was disrupted by his addiction to alcohol and loose women. The task of keeping him sober and celibate until airtime falls to Benjy, who soon finds himself involved in a sequence of shenanigans unlike any he ever experienced before.

The show has sufficient lolz. I promise.

Performances are:

Friday, August 1st @ 7:30
Saturday, August 2nd @ 7:30
Friday, August 8th @ 7:30
Saturday, August 9th @ 7:30

You can find out more information about pricing and ticket availability at the UDPAC's box office website.

Director's Workshop/OneActs:
This is a night of short scenes, all cast, directed, and performed by non-paid program participants. This year I am in a scene from the musical Shenandoah, wherein I try to explain to a young man trying to court my daughter that bitches be crazy.

Performances are:

Tuesday, August 5th @ 7:30
Wednesday, August 6th @ 7:30

There are no tickets for this event. Admission is $5 at the door, and seating is on a first-come first-serve basis. (The venue is small and intimate, so if you might want to come earlier than later.)

Cabaret/Dance Troupe:
This is a night of singing and dancing. In the past, these have been two separate events which happened after one another on the same night. Awkward! Now they're bringing the two together into one giant melee of entertainment. I will be singing (dueting? Is that a verb?) "The Hardest Part of Love" (Children of Eden) mixed in with Brian Walsh singing "Tell My Father" (The Civil War). You should come. It will be faboo.

The only performance is on August 13th @ 7:30PM. Again, there are no tickets for this event. Admission is $5 at the door. It's in the ginormous theater, so I wouldn't be too concerned with finding a seat.

All of these are occurring at the Upper Darby Performing Arts Center.

For my car-less city-dwelling friends, it is ridiculously easy to get there via SEPTA. Take a westbound El (Market Frankford Line or Blue Line) to the end of the route, 69th Street Terminal. From there, you can take any trolley (101 and 102 lines) to Lansdowne Avenue. Walk uphill up Lansdowne Avenue about two blocks. You can't miss it. It's right past the hospital.

If you would be driving, just punch this address into your favorite GPS/mapping website/whatever:
601 N Lansdowne Ave
Drexel Hill, PA 19026

OK! That's all for now.

30 Songs: The Meme.

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:21:10 GMT

I think it's been long enough since I've done this meme. This time it's stolen from runnernda. The funny thing about this meme is I would know a handful of these at most. I generally just listen to albums on Rhapsody so my playlist over there is really short and boring, but my iTunes library has stuff I haven't listened to in over 2 years or so. Oh well!

1. Open your iTunes and put it on shuffle
2. Write the first line of the first 30 songs that come up, no matter how embarrassing.
3. Cross it out when someone gets it right and give them credit.

~~"Well I don't mean to piss you off with things I might say"~~
[Politically Correct - SR71 duckssaymip and qsical]
~~"Seagulls sing your hearts away, 'cause while the sinners sin, the children play"~~
[Tea for the Tillerman - Cat Stevens gwennluin]
~~"You know if you break my heart I'll go, but I'll be back again"~~
[I'll Be Back - The Beatles qsical
~~"I've got sunshine on a cloudy day"~~
[My Girl - Rockapella (cover) duckssaymip]
~~"Load up on guns, bring your friends"~~
[Smells like Teen Spirit - Nirvana gwennluin]
~~"Bottle of white, bottle of red"~~
[Scenes from an Italian Resturaunt - Billy Joel. finnell1912]
"I'm watching sis go pitter pat"
~~"On the edge, windowsill; Ponders his maker, ponders his will"~~
[Deep - Pearl Jam duckssaymip]
"Oh, I'm choking, I'm choking on the smoke from this burning house"
~~"In my eyes, Indisposed, In disguise as no one knows"~~
[Black Hole Sun - Sound Garden duckssaymip]
"I am a vision, I am justice"
~~"Oh, life is bigger. It's bigger than you"~~
[Losing My Religion - REM gwennluin]
~~"All my life I've been searching for something"~~
[All My Life - Foo Fighters instantdharma]
~~"No one ever loved me like she does"~~
[Don't Let Me Down - The Beatles duckssaymip]
~~"I'm me. Me be. Goddamn, I am."~~
[Undone - Weezer instantdharma]
~~"If I fell in love with you would you promise to be true and help me understand?"~~
[If I Fell - Beatles duckssaymip]
"Since you've been gone, since you've been unglued"
~~"You say we've got nothing in common"~~
[Breakfast at Tiffany's - Deep Blue Something duckssaymip]
~~"There's only two songs in me and I just wrote the third"~~
[Number Three - They Might Be Giants bearsintheair
"Tried to write a letter to tell you how I feel"
~~"Coming out of my cage and I was doing just fine"~~
[Mr. Brightside - The Killers finnell1912]
~~"It's raining outside; You've nowhere to hide; She's asking why you think it's funny"~~
[It's Coming Down - Cake bearsintheair
"Welcome to her busy dizzy life of going out and getting high"
~~"Summertime and the living's easy, Bradley's on the microphone with Ras-MG"~~
[Summer Time - Sublime slinx]
"You told me you would be here by my side, warming my heart on this cold winter's night"
"The sky was dark this morning, Not a bird in the trees"
"I'm hanging out with me and you're a vacant chair"
~~"She don't wander in... don't wander in here"~~ [Garden - Pearl Jam bearsintheair]
"Let's get drunk and go out driving"
~~"Someone told me long ago there's a calm before the storm. I know and it's been comin' for sometime."~~
[Have You Ever Seen the Rain - Spin Doctors duckssaymip]

Sometimes XKCD relates too much to my life.

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:27:02 GMT

Let's not be silly. Firefox is fantastic. :)

However, I cannot say these feelings are foreign to me, and sadly they do not subside. For the past few years, I've been disillusioned by everything that is "Web 2.0". We have seen an endless stream of companies who all have a business plan approximated by, "Let's organize and present some bit of user-generated content in a slightly different way, get a ton of page views, and then get money from ads."

Boring. In 2001, I loved the concept. LiveJournal seemed to be the model to follow. MySpace was a disaster but was replaced by the then-application-free Facebook a few years later. CraigsList and Wikipedia had been around for years and to this day neither has not been displaced in brilliance.

Lately I feel as niches with wider potential audiences are being filled, new products are becoming less creative and more mundane echos of the truly unique and ground breaking ideas of yesteryear. Twitter? Virb? Brightkite? Sandy? Those aren't the "worst cases", just some sites that come to mind. Don't get me wrong, these products serve their niches, but I'm finding it difficult to get excited about subtle modifications of ideas I saw 5 years ago.

Have we moved into a phase of new technology for the sake of new technology, banking on bored office workers providing enough click-throughs without providing something that's actually useful and interesting? Simply producing fodder for LifeHacker and ValleyWag?

Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places or maybe I've grown in such a way that things that used to interest me do not anymore, but I miss ideas and products that appear unique, interesting, and useful to me.

While I'm on speakerphone on a work call...

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:51:34 GMT

I believe I've found duckssaymip's evil twin doppleganger, if he had chosen to continue his music major and got an awful haircut on YouTube.

Consider, Real Mike:

VS Fake Mike:

You need to watch the full video for the complete effect. He does the same weird eyebrow things Mike does too!

Two months in twenty minutes worth of bullets.

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:28:45 GMT

Work lately has been annoying. I like the beginnings and scheming of projects, and right now I'm on the never-ending last mile of two big projects. There's a light at the end of the tunnel, but it's faint and flickering. I'm hoping that once they're done, I'll be able to clear a chunk of my brain/time to turn my cognitive surplus towards something interesting and mostly useless to me (for now). progreddit has tempted me Erlang for a few months now. Seaside could be a good excuse to learn Smalltalk. Alternatively, the masochist in me craves an excuse to write something in C. I fear working almost exclusively in PHP and Ruby for a while is making my brain soft! I also have some half-completed lightweight web frameworks I've been writing in PHP and Ruby which with some love and care can fill some niches that I think need attention.
Netflix is amazing and has turned me into a TV junkie. When I need to veg out, my hobby over the past few months has been watching entire TV series online via Netflix. I never remember to mail in my DVDs, but the online viewer make the subscription worthwhile.
The future is uncertain. A year from now, I will most likely living by myself for the first time ever. A terrifying prospect for someone who loathes change as much as I do. Yet, if change must happen, perhaps it would be best to stick a bunch of changes together and rip them off like a band-aid. For the past few years, I have toyed with the idea of one day leaving the Greater Philadelphia region. Next June, I see myself having very few things binding me here. At the same time, I do not crave another particular venue. How peculiar it is to have little reason to leave yet little reason to stay.
If I had to summarize my last two years with a single word, the word would be "adrift". I can feel that a huge shift is coming and a chapter of my life is coming to a close. It is horrific, unavoidable, and completely welcomed.