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Three people who don't get credit for a blog entry tonight


Originally uploaded by ryancnelson

Maggie and Charlie and the TSA


Originally uploaded by ryancnelson

We flew from SFO to EWR today with Charlie, the half-pomeranian-half-wonder-dingo that @waferbaby graciously let Maggie's mom adopt.

She's adjusting to being spoiled rotten quite well. Her Polish language skills are still a bit rough, like mine.

We just got back from a yummy meal with J & D, who're visiting SF from NYC.

Now, we're packing in a frenzy for our own visit to NYC. With Charlie, the dog.

Friends and frequent viewers might know that we don't own a dog. The dog we're traveling with belongs to our new SF friends, who have too many pups as it is. Charlie is a super-sweet dog who'll be perfect for Maggie's mom, and who's kinda too mellow for her more ornery pack-mates here in California. So, tomorrow at around 5:00am, we're loading up Charlie and heading for the airport to take her to her new home in New Jersey.

Charlie has been a vegetarian dog for quite awhile, so she doesn't know that New Jersey brings the promise of a keeper who's got a lot more extra chicken and sausage than her previous house.

I'm sure the next few blog entries will feature dog-travel-adventure-photos, and tales of a visit back to NYC. If you're reading this from NYC, and wanna be a part of that, let me know!

Another quick entry tonight; had a big day today driving around down in Silicon Valley today, had a free burger in the Facebook cafeteria, saw some friends, and met up with some node.js enthusiasts. Tomorrow, dinner with more friends, and packing for a short vacation back East!

The other day I wrote about some of the stuff in my sidebar, that's served, in the past, as "widgets" that report on some metric or other about my life. I'm a big fan of these, but the ones here (perhaps they'll be gone by the time you finally read this) are woefully out of date. The front page of ryan.net has more current stuff, like metrics on my recent jogging trails, etc.

Tonight's sidebar re-cap subject is this thing:

It once used to let people know where they could find me, as sort of a "presence indicator", prior to me being on instant messenger whenever I wanted to participate in the goings-on online. These days, I'm not always on-call, which is strange, since I really am available to pitch in for an issue at work whenever I'm not busy with my personal life. It's just that my jobs for the previous fourteen years weren't even that reasonable, regarding on-call. I got called by work, about doing a production code push, on a Saturday, on my wedding day.

In that environment, the idea was, that someone could see if I was already sitting in front of a computer, either in the office, or at home, that they could call me at that phone (presuming they had the number), and not bother someone else who'd left the office already, or was out enjoying their life and family. Conversely, I thought, if people got used to this system, they might check it, and postpone casual requests until my status suggested I was around and available.

The whole thing hinged on the fact that my workstations are pretty much always on, and that, even at home, I set them to auto-lock after a few minutes of idle time, for security reasons. Cached keys expire, screens lock, clipboards encrypt, etc. so that a cat walking on a keyboard doesn't reboot a server someplace, and a burglar might get the laptop, but that loss doesn't threaten my business.

In that environment, sensing presence is as easy and running a periodic process that checks to see if the screen-saver is currently running, and a http call that generates an image and moves it into the right place. It only ever said "screen is active!", but technically I could've called it to say arbitrary strings.

Since I've changed jobs, that old office workstation is long gone, and my current office computer is a laptop that travels with me, and docks into multiple-monitor-land when I'm there. But it's not online when I'm away. My new computers at the new home aren't set up for this either, so my sidebar's been inaccurate for quite awhile.

I'll probably put something like a presence indicator on "the new thing", but I'm not sure what form it'll take. I track and log my location hourly, so technically, it should be pretty easy to "check in" at home, work, or wherever. One small benefit of living in an apartment, and not a house, is that it's far less a risk to report things like "I'm out of town for the week" on twitter, facebook, etc.

I'm back on the blogging horse, after taking the weekend off. Here's a recap of the pleasing, but pretty tame events:

On Friday night, we went out to dinner with my coworker Linda, the keeper-together-of-all-things for the Joyent Public Cloud. She was in town from Baltimore for a few days. We hit up Barbacco on California street for dinner. It was kind of an easy pick, since it's right across from our office, but Maggie hadn't been there before. Good eats, and a lot easier to get a table than their fancier sister restaurant, Perbacco, two doors down. Afterwards, we gave Linda a hug and came home to a little downloaded TV and about 10 hours of sleep.

Saturday, I woke up around 11am, and loaded up on coffee at Starbucks. I typically go there and get a comfy chair if I can, and read the NY Times on the iPad. This time, the chairs full of hippies, so I brought Maggie's coffee back and consumed the news from our couch. Reading the paper and tech books got my head wound up... not an uncommon occurrence recently, as I've been reading up on a lot of new technical topics, partly out of just curiosity, and partly to solve problems at work. These include ipv6 networking, server-side javascript, my to-do system, and a bunch of other stuff.

To get offline, I decided to go "meditate on the street", and go run until I was exhausted. I did that a lot back in NY, and I think it's really good for my mental health. Also my regular health.

For Saturday's run I took my usual route down to the water, then over to the foot of the Golden Gate. Then, since I still had some energy, I ran the bridge for the first time. I usually run to interesting places, then bus back home (I use MUNI like a chairlift.) Note to bridge-runners -- busses don't go from Sausalito back into the city on weekends. So, I ran back over the bridge, for a total of almost exactly 8 miles:

My knees were pretty sore, but otherwise, I kinda can't believe how un-wrecked was afterwards.

Sunday, we tried another new restaurant for brunch, this one just a block from home. Then, we prepped for guests, as Maggie had invited some friends over to make "paczki" (POHN-schkee, Polish donuts), a pre-Fat-Tuesday Polish tradition, I'm told. (Not the gluten-free batch we did, though. That's a concession to California.)

Still to come this week, visitors from New York on Wednesday, and a visit TO New York on Thursday. With other people's pets!

Quick daily entry for 3/3/2011:

Warrick is a super-handy tool for recovering a website (or fragments thereof) if you've had failure of a disk, server, or credit card. It attempts to do this by pulling recoverable bits from the Wayback Machine at web-archive.org, as well as from Google, Bing, and Yahoo's caches, then assembling them into a flattened copy of the original website.

Depending on compute-cycles being available, the inventor of Warrick sometimes runs it as a service (currently not accepting new requests), but I've downloaded and installed the software on my own computers. It's written in Perl, and requires a few non-exotic modules, but is otherwise pretty simple to install.

I wish I'd had this a years ago. I've basically performed it's tricks, by hand, several times for friends, customers, co-workers and family who've deleted something on a website they wish they hadn't, or wanted to recover something from a domain name that they suddenly didn't own.

Speaking of things that've been wiped out, my cat Brutus and I are exhausted, so we'll leave tonight's Forced March blog entry here, post a quick cat-photo, and head to bed.

I'm gonna pad out the "forced march" posts with a running commentary of stuff I should've done a long time ago, with regards to not letting this ol' blog get so stale.

These posts, daily throughout March, should do their part to freshen the content, but the foundation is pretty rough. For example, here, let's look at the sidebar, upper right:

(screenshot included here, since, soon after we've discussed it, I hope to fix it, so this post in archive form will hopefully be surrounded by widgets and blurbs of the freshest quality)

First, the "about me" link. As it exists now, (and here linked to it's web-archive version), it includes topical info about my choice of home, computer workstations, job, pets, and life-partner.

Choice computer bits: "Apple Powerbook G4 667 Mhz", "200mhz pentium freebsd machine", "Dell Dimension running windows XP", and "Sun Ultra1 workstation." Ahh, youth. My iPhone's more horsepower than any of those today.

My career info isn't that stale, it just doesn't include my current job at Joyent, or my last 4 years at MLB for that matter. The bits about where I live are also woefully out of date, although technically they reflect what's on my driver's license... which itself is woefully out of date, and doesn't match the state on the VW's plates.

I do still love my wife Maggie, and the Yankees. That's not changed.

Moving further down that chunk of stale sidebar, we get to the links for "my current fotolog" which itself is kinda funny, since it's the old "fotolog.net" URL, when the site, and company, switched to fotolog.com before they got sold years ago. Fotolog was one of the creations of serial-entrepeneur and Nelson-wedding-groomsman Scott Heiferman along with Adam Seifer. I was a very early user of fotolog, but I kind of outgrew it's purpose, and was only updating it out of loyalty to friends. When they sold the company and moved on, I let that project rest.

Beneath that, there's a link to my Flickr page which I had before Maggie joined their staff. Flickr's a great site, and I've got a Pro membership there for years to come, so I'll be keeping that on the new sidebar.

Finally (for today), there's a counter I whipped up that used to update a counter of the messages that'd passed through and gotten caught by my SpamAssassin filters. I shut down a workstation years ago that was a cog in that process, and the counter's been frozen at 412587 ever since. It might have rolled over by now if I'd kept that running. Any more, I just forward a copy of most of my ryan.net mail to gmail for spamfiltering it there. I do still receive my mail through my mailserver, though. I can't let go of knowing what's arriving when, by watching the logs.

That's all for tonight. Now, I'm off to back this server up, before I start knocking out load-bearing GIFs.

So, I'm participating, with Beth, Don, Heather and Kathleen in The Forced March, a month-long blog throughout March, conceived by people (undoubtedly in a bar in NYC, but I wasn't there) to get these formerly-blogging members of a certain circle of friends off their stagnant butts. We'll try to blog something interesting daily. Yell at me if I don't. Pardon me if it's not riveting every day, though.

Since today kicks off March, and I've got 71 minutes to go today (one benefit of living out west -- three extra blogging hours), here goes:

Maggie and I got an invite to a party at one of her co-workers' houses this past Saturday, for the occasion of the birthday of the fairer half of that couple. The theme of the party was "potluck dinner", and everyone brought a dish. The dish, however, was supposed to have some sort of movie-theme to go along with it, so no bringing Grandma's apple-brown-betty recipe, unless Grandma was Hedy Lamarr or something. (and if so, wow.)

We discussed a lot of things, including "50 Eggs", a plate of "Royales with cheese" (or perhaps Big Kahuna-burgers), or lime jello shots, labeled "Soylent Green". Jello molds bring all kinds of movie-scenes into the possible food spectrum.

We settled on "Dry White Toast, Four Fried Chickens, and a Coke." We punked out on actually making the fried chicken in volume, and just picked up Popeye's in the Mission, so it was warm. I did make the toast myself, though, in advance, since I figured it was just garnish, and nobody was gonna eat it. Some did, though, with the chicken curry that someone brought (yeah, I dunno either... maybe "Slumdog?" BollyWood, definitely.) The Coke was Mexican Coke, in glass bottles, and it went fast. Hipsters like Mexican Coke. A lot.

The party was AWESOME, by the way. Other dishes included "The Sliders of the Lambs" (lamb mini-burgers, and a ketchup dispenser labeled "it puts the lotion on it's bun"), a cake that looked like the Monolith from 2001, The spaghetti recipe from The Godfather, The Lord of the Onion Rings, "Like Water for Chocolate" (pellegrino and a cake), some "Troop Beverly Hills" bake-sale goods (it's girlscout cookie time), and a guy making wicked-good "French 75's" (a cocktail that I'd forgotten was in Casablanca, but I'll remember now. Made with champagne, gin, lemon juice, and sugar, it would be right at home at a Zuckerland summer party. Yum.)

Oh, also, Eric brought an "American Pie." I'm not sure whether Eric's a method actor, but the desert looked the part.

But the best part of the evening was when the host had us step outside and a Dixieland band came strolling up the street to serenade the birthday girl. Afterward, they came inside (it was chilly), and entertained us for awhile. They even did a Weezer cover!

I encourage people to comment here with what movie-food we should take next time. I like the idea of anthropomorphizing the "Let's All Go to the Lobby" foodstuffs somehow:

SF is growing on us. We still miss NYC, but stuff (and friends) like this are making us like here a lot, too.

I spent a couple of hours this evening down at TechShop practicing cutting things up with the laser cutter.

Here's Brutus examining my work:

(I got the gears artwork from http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:53 )

I've become a bit of a GPS nerd in the last few years, or, more accurately, a data-tracking nerd. I've been a data-hoarder for a long time. Several years ago, I bought a batch of 8 refurbished digital cameras on eBay and gave them out to friends who didn't yet have digital cameras, because it drove me nuts that all the events that I'd missed lacked archival footage, and for all the events I attended, none of the pictures included me, because I'd been behind the camera. That investment paid off handsomely, in karma and cool pictures.

More recently, I've started to try and lose weight and get healthier, and as part of that plan, I've been putting sensors in my shoes and accelerometers on my belt-loop, and a GPS on my wrist so I can log and track where I've been, how fast I was going, and roughly how many calories I burned while doing it.

I've got other GPS gadgets, like my old pre-iphone PDA, the Nokia N810, which I used to map our 2009 RoadTrip to Mount Rushmore in 2009. Our cars both have Garmins in them, or I'd have been eaten by wolves by now. I have no natural sense of direction, and am helpless without a navigator. The advent of affordable GPS devices (plus things like Yelp and mobile-searchable google maps) has revolutionized urban exploring for me, much like cellphones and SMS revolutionized just-in-time social gathering last decade. The airport-pickup was a radically different thing in 1996. Did you ever take a trip with friends to Vegas *before* cellphones and pagers? Organizing was brutal, I tell ya.

Jason Kottke does (or at least used to do) a yearly roundup of cities he'd been to that year. I did one awhile back, but this year I realized I could get a lot more fine-grained.

I use an iPhone program called Device Locator, running in the background all the time, to track my location, just for myself and logging purposes, wherever I go. Currently, it logs my location, to the phone, and to a webservice I've written, every time I change cell-towers, or every couple hours if I'm stationary. I've been running it since August. I Twitter-posted about it last week. Since then, it's bugged me that I only had half the year's trails logged, since that's about when iPhones started letting you run sanctioned apps in the background.

It occurred to me on the flight home from the holidays that I still had a big pile of photos taken with my iPhone and other gps-capable cameras, and those together tell the tale of where I've been this year pretty well. I take a lot of cameraphone pictures, not just for scenic vistas and pics of the bros I'm partying with, but of things like "where's my parking spot", and "receipt for lunch at the airport to expense". All those things have GPS data associated with them.

So, I've revised my 2010 Trails Map to include that data, scraped from my iPhoto Library folder with some Perl scripting and various photo EXIF-data scraping Unix tools, and the iPhone Device Locator data, all poured into Splunk, and mapped using the Google Maps for Splunk app from SplunkBase.

Here's the result:

Upshot is I get credit for short trips to Houston, Phoenix, and Poughkeepsie, on top of all the other cities from last week's map. I'm gonna make 2011 even cooler.