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.)
