The question is

Should I switch to Tumblr? All the cool kids are doing it.

Things I don't really get

• Golf
• IPA
• Fugazi
  
• The second amendment
• Aquatic pets (i.e. fish)
  

shiny and new

Just got a new macbook pro. I am loving the speed - 8GB RAM, quadcore, Solid State Disk. And silent. As in - "Real G's move in silence; Just like lasagna".

Anyway here is what I'm putting on there over the base install (It already comes with MS Office, Firefox, Thunderbird and Parallels).

GUI Applications
* Chrome
* TextMate
* Cocoa Emacs
* ITerm
* Dropbox
* Seashore

CLI Stuff
* Homebrew
* RVM + ruby 1.9.2
* git
* node.js

Python Stuff
* pip
* Django
* virtualenv
* yolk

javascript for all

dusting off the cobwebs

Hello there! Yes - serious cobwebage around here. (There is a 'web' pun in there somewhere, but we don't want to force it now, do we?)

In my quest for self-improvement I've started thinking about what I want to start doing better. I'm asking myself - what do I want to learn, as I head into the middle ages?

I've always been really bad at tinkering with mechanical things. I'm just not a very good fix-it-up kinda chappie. Some of this is not having the right baseline knowledge. But much of this comes from good old fashioned mental blocks. A kind of learned helplessness.

So I'm taking the horns by the bull. Or is it catching the tail by the tiger?



Pardon the digression, but really - who doesn't love a little Fraggle Rock in the middle of their epiphanies? As I was saying, I'm trying to fix my mechanical inadequacies. I've also become increasingly interested in bicycles lately (bicycles might just be replacing motorcycles as the symbol of the new urban midlife crisis, but that is a whole post in itself). Ah - bicycles! The simplest of machines - pure Newtonian physics at work. And sexy to boot.

So my new project is to get better at fixing bikes, working my way towards putting together my very own road bicycle. And hopefully, I'll learn a little about tools and grease and how mechanical things go together. Not shooting for genius level wizardry here - I'd be happy if I can simply achieve basic competence. And maybe I can start to have half a clue when my dearest beloved starts to throw down her handygrrrl skills.

the scenic route

This was a bag I had shipped from SF to Oakland. Fedex decided to ship it through San Leandro by way of Sacramento. The sad thing is that the company that makes the bag is all about zero-waste and even mails it to you in a reusable canvas mailer that you return to them upon delivery. Sigh!

rubbish

every time someone has a conversation about astrology, my instinct is to interject with a: this is a nonsensical conversation. this is inane and reductionist and insulting to generations of scientific progress.

but i don't. i smile and nod, and stop myself from being an ass. ah - the tragedy of enlightenment. but really - 2010 and we still believe in this bullshit?

1.0

Feeling re-inspired by v1.0. A lot of it is sophomoric and cringeworthy. But there are also several moments of total fucking genius. And there is some funny shit in there.

I think it was good for me to be prolific. The more I wrote, the better my stuff got. Or at least I managed to hit paydirt more often. Ya know, more darts = more chances to hit bullseye. Umm - WTF - a darts analogy? I think that might be a first.

analog

mark me down, mark me up

I've been recently introduced to Markdown. Markdown provides you with a simple syntax for creating text documentation that can be easily converted to HTML.

If you've ever used a wiki, it is pretty much the same principle. For example, headers are just underlined words. And bulleted lists can be created by simply using a bunch of asterisks. Like zis:


Title
=====
* item 1
* item 2
* item 3


What makes Markdown powerful is that the syntax is decoupled from a specific web service (such as a wiki). This means that you can write your docs in your favorite text editor (insert obligatory emacs vs. vi showdown reference), and convert it to HTML with a single command. The standardized format means you have very elegant looking README text files, that easily turn into first class html pages once passed through the Markdown converter.

There seems to be a whole eco-system that has evolved around Markdown, and it appears to be the format of choice for a number of git based code repositories. Now if only Blogger supported the Markdown syntax.

And once again, I've jumped on the bandwagon much later than I should have.

when in doubt, drop core

Now reading

Bicycle Diaries - David Byrne, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler - Italo Calvino, Pragmatic Thinking - Andy Hunt

Listening to

Brazilian Girls, The XX, Ke$ha (you heard that right - Tik Tok is Da Bomb)

On (internet) TV

Old Lost episodes, Parks and Rec, NBA playoffs

Drinking ...

Ritual Coffee, Beckman Vineyards 2008 Cuvee Le Bec (I bought a case - seriously!)

Current internet hangouts

The Changelog, Mashable, Signal Versus Noise

games

Lately, I've been on a mini-quest to find interesting, well-crafted games that are playable in your browser. I am less concerned with the challenge or level of difficulty associated with a game. Rather, I focus on aesthetics, innovation and ideas. Games that are works of art. Stuff that makes me go Wow! within the first 5 minutes of play. You get the idea.

So if you have any suggestions send them my way. I tend to like logic and puzzle based games, but I'm open to anything that pushes the boundaries of design and concept.

I'll offer up an exhaustive list of my findings down the road. You can get started with these two fantastic gems that I've run into:

• Continuity
  
• Auditorium
  

happy 3

although it sometimes feels like the personal blog has gone the way of Diaryland (remember Diaryland?!!) and that this seems a bit like making sound in a vacuum, it is nice to pop in here now and then. must make sure those database tables are getting exercised every once in a while.

very nice little birthday party in the park for the (not so) tiny (anymore) one. managed to find a balance between grown-up conversation and enjoying the kids playing in the park, which is something that i've been striving towards for the better part of three years now. when you can seamlessly work your way through Raaaaaaaandy, nap schedules, Ruby-On-Rails, indie rock coloring bocks, bike geekery, preschool politics and 90s hiphop, I think you can safely declare WIN.

yes - have to drop a link to Aziz Ansari's genius Raaaaaaaandy videos.

ended the evening with a rare night out - De La Soul show at Yoshi's SF. they've totally still got it going on. thanks for a great birthday weekend tinu.

top 10 tings o' 2009

Dominant memes in my personal zeitgeist for the year:

• Ruby-on-Rails


• Bicycle fever


• Twitter


• School days for the family D.


• Aunt Mary's Cafe


• Travel travel travel


• Sesame Street


• weddings


• Infinite Jest


• The farmer's market

Stuff that hasn't been getting as much play:

• DJing at KALX


• Trivia night at the Nomad Cafe


• Java


• The New Yorker


• International business trips


• Yoga


• Blogging


• 43 folders


• The afternoon nap


• Live shows

naughtie naughtie

there seems to be a backlash against the "lifehack" type productivity blogs. apparently the productivity gurus realized that people seemed to be spending more time diddling with productivity pr0n than actually getting things done. merlin mann of 43 folders has had some particularly lucid rants that are worth reading, in and of themselves.

it looks like we are starting to see casualties from the naughts. 5 years from now we'll all be like - "lifehacks - those were so naughties". That said, I'm not sure that the term naughtie or aughtie or whatever the hell we are calling this decade will make it that far either.

remember, remember, the 4th of november!

Last year, at this time, I cried-

Tears of joy because a certain Barack Hussein Obama II gave me hope that the dream was alive. It made me proud to be the father of a mixed-race kid with a funny name.

Tears of sadness at the travesty that is proposition 8.

Things don't seem any easier now, but we must keep on keepin' on.

Damn - this Dogfishhead Palo Santo is some strong beer. It is making me totally emo.

i can care, but not too much.

as i write this, hideki matsui has just powered the yankees to their 27th title. as much as the yankees are annoying, i feel like america needed this win. it will go a long way towards re-establishing the nation's confidence in "the system". the yankees win the world series and the natural order of things will prevail. the economy will fix itself. the greater good of the nation will trump narrow political maneuvering. or so i keep telling myself. of course, this makes some assumptions about the true "natural order of things", but i'll let my optimism carry me forth for now.

and then there is the whole university of florida coach suspending his player for a whole HALF because he tried to gouge this other player's eyes out. WTF??!!! a. why bother? b. how can you possibly expect not to be called out for this weak-assed half assery? doing nothing would have been less controversial than pretending to "punish" your players. ugh.

not sure why, but i've been more into sports this year, than in a while. i'm probably just using it to avoid thinking about the bigger problems facing the world right now. i guess sport provides you with a microcosm of human interaction and emotion. but at it's very core - it doesn't actually matter. our lives go on. people don't die. you can get really passionate and argumentative, without having to hate your fellow human being. i can care, but not too much.

now we can swim any day in november

we went as rakshasas and butterflies (heliconius erato). as david foster wallaces, complete with footnotes. seriously - that was a killer idea. little notecards on one's feet. anyway - it was nice to get dressed up and get out. and it was unseasonably warm too.

need to start documenting ideas for next year though, so that we can put in more advance prep work.

idea sketches:

• Sexy Abe Lincoln


• Bert and Ernie


• Bake Sale Betty


• Very Hungry Caterpillar (green sleeping bag anyone?)


• Hipster Elves

and it is still unseasonably warm - november and 70 degrees outside. and with that nablopomo has been kicked off.

A SUPPOSEDLY FUN BOOK

I am about a third of the way through the late David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest", as part of the Infinite Summer online book club. My feelings so far: brilliant, self-indulgent, tedious, funny-in-that-darkly-comic-way, clever, inconsistent. I both love and hate the fact that DFW pretty much makes up words when the occasion calls for it (1). Which gets rather confusing when he also happens to summon his rather prodigious vocabulary of not-made-up words in the same context.

I love his vision of a dystopic near future. Years named after sponsors (2009 would be the "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment"). Quebecois Separatists fighting U.S. experialism. Apres-Garde cinema. Very funny, very sardonic, very cyberpunk (in the way that modern fiction writers overtly eschew SF, while ingratiating themselves to it at the same time).

At the same time, he could have really used an editor. I mean, all the ultra-detailed chemical and physiological descriptions of real and/or fictional drugs that you will pretty much forget right away? The pages upon pages of tennis scores interspersed with the occasionally interesting bit of information? And those sentences that last forever (some brilliant, some just plain long). I read somewhere that part of the motivation for the digressions and the footnotes was to control the pacing and flow. But seriously - you could have easily had a 700 page masterpiece instead of a 1000 page flawed work of genius.

What else - There is a strong element of the meta throughout the book, where many of the themes and elements play out in other unrelated parts of the book. His use of language mixes formalisms with, like, the causal patois of the 1990s twenty-something. I like this a lot.

Overall, my enjoyment of this book is similar to how I feel about a lot of experimental art/music. The process is just as important as the work. An indulgence that seems hit-or-miss, but is perhaps necessary to this process. Parts of it are very frustrating, parts of it are confusing, parts of it tickle the cerebrum and parts of it just flat-out blow your mind away.

I am very glad I am reading it as part of a book club, since it provides context and discussion for the overall process. It lets me get through the harder parts knowing that there will be some kind of payoff on the discussion boards - some little connection contained therein that makes you go a-ha. Keepin' on keepin' on for now.



1. "Experialism" isn't a word? Well - it should be. I mean how else would you describe the forced expulsion of territory into foreign hands.(a)

a. Sorry - I promised myself that I wouldn't use footnotes, but it is simply too tempting this far into the book.

not a bad day

started waaay too early. someone decided that 6am was a fine time to be up and about.

brewed up some ikea instant cappuccino which turned out to be surprisingly good.

lego time!

family outing at the farmer's market on our bicycles, with the sea-of-clouds clan.

a very thrilling confederations cup final.

hatching a dinner plan - some masala corn, some cliantro tofu ...