June 24: Movie season

It's movie season! 2008 has been really kick ass for movies so far: Indiana Jones (which sucked, but was nonetheless heavily anticipated), Iron Man, Get Smart — it's great! It's been years since I've wanted to see just about every movie coming out. Wall-E comes out on Friday, and I'm crazy excited. Lynn hung a picture of him up on the wall of my cube in celebration of the midnight showing a bunch of us are going to go to on Thursday. We're going to go to it in Emeryville, which is where Pixar is, in the off-chance that we might see someone relevant to the movie. I'm excited! Wall-E is the cutest thing ever — a cross between Johnny 5 from Short circuit and a Tonka dump truck.

Anyway, I am finally getting to resolve my geek drama with respect to my archive of old files — the RAID controller in bitbox, the computer I built just for this, flaked out. I was worried that I had lost everything, but thanks to the diligent efforts of my cousin Darren, I have access to them again. I don't trust the computer anymore, though, so s3sync is chunking along, syncing everything to Amazon S3. If you have any files whatsoever, you should look into S3. It's ridiculously easy to use and makes your data pretty much invincible. It's only ten cents per gig a month — my whole archive is only going to cost me about $12 a month to store, and I'll never have to worry about it again.

Apparently, Wells Fargo is planning a more user-friendly system that they'll try to market as the modern equivalent of safety deposit boxes. I think it's a great idea. Long-term storage is not something that computers are generally any good at. Hard drives can get stuffed full of data and seem totally reliable until you actually go to read the data again, at which point you realize that it's all gone bad and the drive just hadn't noticed. I'm not really sure what the answer to this problem is, though. Hard drives worked well when they were so small that you used everything on them constantly, but now that they've ballooned to hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes, the usage pattern is totally different. I'm curious to see whether solid state drives have better long-term storage characteristics. If only I could afford one!

June 15: Case spreader

I think i need a hobby. I'm vaguely enamored by the idea of meditation right now, inspired by Ian and his weekend morning shenanigans. I find the idea of taking time out of my day to just reflect on life in general to be quite interesting, but I hate the mystic crap associated with the concept. Maybe I just need something to fill quiet moments at home.

Usually, my idle time is spent surfing the Internet, which generally doesn't lead to a feeling of productive relaxation. Just a few days ago I spent several hours Wikipedia surfing, which is always an interesting game, since you never know where you'll end up. I found myself reading about old IBM mainframes and data processing and the sort of monolithic computer culture of the sixties and seventies.

I like to visual Wikipedia browsing sessions as being comprised of planet-like bodies 0 general concepts — that my attention orbits. I'd really like to see something that tracked my Wikipedia browsing in general. It'd be intriguing to see how I shift from different concepts, and how long each broad category tends to hold my interest. Right now, I'm definitely fascinated by old computer stuff.

Speaking of which, I made an unusual purchase yesterday: a Macintosh SE, which is a tiny, compact Mac from 1988. It looks like the very first Macintosh and has a magnificent 20 MiB hard drive. It's running System 6.0.7, has a bitchin' 3D air hockey game built in, and that's about it. My long-term goals for the little system include replacing the hard drive with a Compact Flash card (a SCSI-to-IDE adapter should do it) and finding a way to get it online as an SSH terminal (possibly involving some sort of tiny Linux device as an intermediary).

It's also leading me to lust for a more functional classic Mac: I think it would be a fun project to put a Mac mini inside of a classic Mac case, replacing the 9“ CRT with an LCD, of course. I think it'd be a fun project, but it would certainly be nerve-wracking to start disassembling a cute lil Mac mini for such an endeavor. Plus, both of those computer types are notorious for needing stupid, proprietary tools to disassemble. (The phrase ”case spreader" seems vaguely intimidating to me.)

June 13: Thirteeeeeeeen

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone. Try not to walk under any ladders, piss off any black cats, walk under any pianos being hoisted, ride a motorcycle through a crowed European city where there are people moving panes of glass, take any wooden nickles, be the first person to leave a table with thirteen guests, spill any salt without chucking some over your shoulder to counteract it, knock over any brooms, or break any mirrors. (In particular, that means you REALLY shouldn't ride a motorcycle through a crowded European city where there are people moving large mirrors.)

According to Wikipedia's article on Friday the 13th, there are 4,800 unique arrangements of the twelve months, and Friday is the most likely to happen on a 13th (Thursday & Saturday are the least likely). I love that someone sat down and calculated that. Also really neat is the fact that on the next Friday the 13th, February 13th, 2009, the UNIX timestamp will be 1,234,567,890 at 11:31:30 PM GMT. That's fantastic.

Also, the Zune comes out in Canada today. How's that for bad luck?

June 06: Another retro tune kick

For some reason, “Never Get Over You” by Prozzak got stuck in my head yesterday and firmly lodged itself in my brain. I think it made a dent, because before I knew it, all kinds of Prozzak era songs were playing in my head while I worked, even total surprises that I haven't thought of in years. Remember “Weightless” by See Spot Run? That's in there! It's crazy. I wonder what my brain is doing half the time, and how I have room for so much useless data. Weird.

Anyway, things are excellent on this side of the world. Work is going well, and I'm finally checking some items off of my daily todo list that have been there for weeks and weeks. It's very satisfying. This weekend, I'm off to investigate the prospect of buying a car. I want something newish but not super expensive. I hate the idea of getting something that is likely break down at any point in the near future, because I hate dealing with car crap.

Also, Mom bought a set of plane tickets to bring her and Grammy down here for a few weeks in August. Between that and me coming home in September, I should be set for familial/Canadian contact for a little while. I'm looking forward to it — I have to figure out some interesting things for them to do. Hopefully, I will have the aforementioned car by this point in time. Since it'll be the height of summer, I'm sure there will be lots of potential activities. The Renaissance Faire is on August 16th, for example. (Nerdtacular fun!)

Wish list: I wish YouTube would gracefully scale to let me resize the window to be just big enough for the video to float on my screen, without gunking things up with scrollbars.