This is something I saw a decade or so ago, mentioned in conversation with someone vaguely recently, and couldn't find when I went looking for it.
Fortunately, someone else linked to it when they linked to this.
Remember, only you can prevent traffic jams.
My stubborn insistence on writing my own software for things like maintaining this blog causes me to spend more time thinking about the problem and less time writing about other stuff.
There are large projects that occupy a lot of my spare time that I never mention here because linking to them isn't particularly useful yet.
I need to sit down and do something about a lot of my infrastructure; my mail reading pattern isn't standing up to the current demands of work, my personal mail infrastructure could use some work, I'm still depending on Debian Sarge in places where I really shouldn't be; I'm running three or four different pieces of IM software for three different systems and as such missing critical information, and of course, I don't write here as often as I'd like. (see above)
Remember the cuecat? It's not a great barcode scanner, but it does work. Most of the time.
Deep-Fried Coca-Cola. . . .
Home built USB logic analyzer. Like I'd have time to use one, much less build one.
Read your Own DHS Travel Dossier. For various reasons, I would be disappointed if they weren't keeping at least something of an eye on me. I wouldn't expect that to be true of everyone, though.
Make a Jacob's Ladder. I've always wanted to do this. Where do you get neon sign transformers, anyway?
Super Probe. This just looks handy.
I'm beginning to think that I need to switch to Windows on my laptop for a while, if only to try and understand how the other half (which is to say, nearly everyone else) thinks. I say this, because whiz-bang "new" applications (about which, more later) are seeming to have increasingly incomprehensible (to me, anyway) UI methodologies.
I suspect at least part of it is that one of the applications I was trying (jarnal) is either flaky or just doesn't do what I think it does, and possibly doesn't work very well with my window manager.
I could get much of the effect from switching to Gnome (it has enough Windows/Motif-think in its UI to have the right consequences in my head) but it would be too easy to cheat. I'm also not sure how much good it would do me unless I gave up emacs for mail, zephyr, and coding, but there isn't a windows alternative for zephyr (I guess I could switch to owl to maintain the the complete alienity of it all), and the temptation to beat all of those into working on windows in emacs would be high.
I could also probably get much of the effect from switching to a MacOS machine, but it many of the same problems switching to gnome does, only those problems would be more annoying because I've gotten really used to Debian and switching Unix platforms is no longer something I'm used to doing. (Also, I may want to play more with OneNote.)
It's been several years (I think the last time was early 2003) since I both gave much thought to my computation environment and actually did something about it. (This involved switching to ion as a window manager and emacs term-mode as a terminal emulator in order to make some pointing-device related RSI go away; ion stuck, and seems particularly addictive from a UI perspective (I haven't seen my desktop background in years), term-mode had problems and seemed like overkill once my hands stopped hurting.
I wonder how happy MacOS X is on a T42, or if I could convince work that it needs a loaner MacBook Pro.
I deleted ~5000 spam comments earlier this evening. Then in a fit of activity, I wrote code to let me disable comments on specific entries. Then I disabled them on everything. I'm going to leave them off entirely until the spammers appear to have lost interest; then I'm going to have them automatically turn off after two weeks for new entries.
Sometime in there I might write a real entry.
I wish to announce that the rumors of my death have been only slightly exaggerated, and that this is the coolest thing ever.
That is all.
The problem with a broken heart is not that it aches, but that it won't bear any weight.
So, once again I find myself in the Logan Terminal B Satellite (low earth orbit, more like) on my way to visit my parents. This time I found some outlets useful for charging things (which is good because my new old phone (see below) seems to have crashed in the night and not bothered to charge itself), and they want to sell me network access for the low price of $8/day, which seems like it's not quite worth it given that my flight should be boarding shortly.
I notice that they're allowing udp dns through, which If I'd been prepared, I know there are tools available to tunnel through. However, prepared is not an adjective I'm really ready to apply to this trip so far.
So anyway, new years resolutions, fortunately or unfortunately made in front of witnesses this past Monday:
I will not fret about women who aren't interested in me.
(Some of you are feeling knowing at this, some of you are feeling confused and left out of the loop. Please feel free to continue feeling however you're feeling.) But anyway, this is fairly self-explanatory.
I will not pick up any more time-consuming hobbies this year.
Jiujutsu, my extra-curricular coding, photography, and the occasional running around and shooting people with dartguns really should be enough. I think I've already reached the point where I'm getting less out of things than I could because I'm trading stuff off, and I really should finish the delivery mechanism for the photos, which ties into:
I will get stuff done.
I will procrastinate on the distracting short stuff rather than the major stuff than I need undistracted blocks of time to accomplish. (Paul Graham has an article on this concept of good procrastination vs. bad procrastination, which rings true as long as you don't procrastinate too long on paying the rent).
(We interrupt this message to mention that I am now typing this on the plane, and would gladly play much more than $8 for Internet service on a two-hour plane flight.)
I will make lists so I don't forget things or waste energy or time trying to remember them.
I will be more awesome.
This is also fairly self-explanatory, although it does seem like it might just be a consequence of the previous resolution.
Hah! There! I just made good on the technical laziness alluded to in the last posting, as demonstrated by the bullet list above.
Anyway, I mentioned a new (old) phone. My T39 was being increasingly recalcitrant (difficulty getting outgoing channels, people being completely unable to understand me) so I picked up a Nokia 3650 that was lying around at work (yay for GSM that lets you switch phones without the cooperation of your carrier).
The 3650 is an interesting historical artifact in that it was one of the first generation of Nokia Series 60 smartphones (I can't just say Nokia smartphone because of the Nokia Communicator, which has been around forever in various forms. Now, it's quite a brick (the follow-ons are much smaller), but it is interesting because you can get a python interpreter for the Series 60 phones, and run arbitrary code on it. I find this a little less exiting that other people I know, because you still don't have quite enough rope to fix the things that annoy me about the UI (to be sure, much less than annoyed me about the T39) since you can't get T9 input yet, and thus can't replace the SMS-sending application. However, I suspect that I will be able to use it to fix the muddle that it made out of the contact list from my SIM, with out hours of drudgery fiddling with a stupid contact manager UI...
In retrospect, I should have picked up a 6600 from T-mobile while they were still selling them, but I always thought they were too big.
Ah, well, the E60 or the E70 should come out soon enough, and they will rock.
Well, that's about enough for now, other than the links that I will be filling in later. I expect we'll be on approach soon, anyway.
(After I got home, it occurred to me to mention that in order to get on the bus that takes you to the satellite terminal, you still have to go through a door marked "Emergency Exit Alarm Will Sound" and another marked something like "Security Badges Only Past This Point". This is slightly amusing and commendably pragmatic, although you'd think they'd've done something about it in the past two years.)
