da | Entries tagged with justify my bourgeois lifestyle

( Dear Builders )

Sincerely,
Someone who feels whiny this morning.

Icky story: Near the beginning of February, some automated system broke into my gmail account and sent spam to a small set of people in my address-book. Which it could do, because my stoopid password was only seven characters and contained a dictionary word. Not good! Fortunately, one of the recipients was my other email account, so I saw it almost immediately, and I was able to log in and immediately change my password. Unfortunately, two recipients were mailing-lists, which was fairly embarrassing. The email was your standard spam, links to some russian pill site.

Story over? I had a new password (MUCH stronger- a full sentence, with punctuation...) and more info about how gmail protects account-owners. NOT QUITE STORY OVER. This Saturday, I got more spam "From" my gmail account. As did some select members of my address book, including the same two mailing lists. A quick check of gmail proved to me that it wasn't actually coming from me; they were merely spoofing it, using an open relay (via a German ISP, sending to hotmail, which accepted the sender).

So, by this point, I set my own email to "moderated" on one mailing list, as did the manager of the other list, and I sent around apologies, and damned if the jokers didn't try to resend more spam to the mailing lists.

And (after submitting the spammer info to spamcop.net), now I wait; either they will keep trying, or try with different parts of my mailing list, or I'll decide to bite the bullet and tell everyone to block mail from 'dada.da at gmail', or I'll just sit here and be embarrassed about getting my account cracked because I wanted a convenient password instead of a nice long password. (Yes, sometimes my purpose in life is to be an object-lesson for others. That's mostly OK, even though I was pretty grumpy about this on the weekend.)

---

Tasty story: My Saturday breakfast was leftover pancakes that

melted_snowball made a friend for lunch the day before. Lunch was amazing brioche french-toast made by

thefateyouare. Dinner was chili with ground turkey, made by my sweetie. Sunday breakfast was a bagel made by d. the day before (he's getting quite good at bagels! I will pay close attention with the next batch, because I want to learn these! (Requires being comfortable with using lye! DANGER! But MMMM that crust.)) Sunday afternoon snack was a cannoli from a batch made by

melted_snowball and

the_infamous_j. Aaaand dinner was pad thai, also made by d., with a leftover cannoli for desert. All of this made me less grumpy! (thanks guys!)

---

Good things come by courier: My macbook pro has gotten progressively creakier over the last few years. There is a problem with its graphics; this particular graphics card is apparently prone to a data-corruption that somehow corrupts the graphics memory, so I get weird visual artifacts on the screen: horizontal bands of background showing through windows; occasional triangles of warped screen... Weird stuff. I've gotten accustomed to it, though lately it's been getting worse- I can barely open iPhoto without it crashing. At one point I tried resetting everything and reloading my configs, but that didn't help; apparently a complete reinitialization may fix it, but I decided last summer when Apple redid their Macbook Pro that I'd wait until this year to replace it, since the hardware is now 5 years old. And lo, they released their update last week, instead of the anticipated April or May. So, for the first time, I ordered a computer on its first day of sale, and I have a fancy new machine winging its way to me. 5 , no 10 models newer than my early-2006 laptop, according to wikipedia. Same weight, slightly wider screen, 130% pixel-density, a gazillion times faster, and hopefully equipped to last another five years.

---

And some things go by Air Canada: Last weekend (Family Day weekend, here in Canada) was amazing. I was in North Carolina, for the mid-winter Gathering of Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Concerns. I don't feel equipped to describe it, other than being happy that I got to hang out with so many awesome people. It was one intensely packed four-day weekend.

I'm a lucky guy, ya know?

Yesterday, I woke up a bit early, determined that Snowpocalypse had not closed our university, got ready for work and spent some time with d., who was leaving for a conference [1], hiked through the snow to the nearest express bus, with a quick detour to pick up a chunk of smoked salmon for my breakfast bagels, just caught the bus, and made it to work in excellent time.

At which point I discovered that the salmon, which I had already noticed smelling awesome, also transferred some of that awesome smell to my gloves and the coat-pocket I had briefly put the salmon bag into.

Which happened to also contain my gym shorts, because on Wednesday I had a physio appointment and she wanted me to wear shorts.

And after work, I bussed downtown to the Art Gallery, which was hosting a Groundhog Day party [2], and in answering email from someone suggesting I pack earplugs for Thursday night's concert, I was pleased to reply that I did have earplugs on me; in fact they were in the pocket containing the smoked salmon, not the pocket with my gym shorts (as I had put the salmon in the other pocket, while I was putting on my gloves).

[1] in Florida, and I'm happy he made it, because it would be awful and ironic to miss a February trip to Florida because of a snowstorm. [3]

[2] Have you ever gone to a Groundhog Day party? Me neither, figured I would check it out. Plus, catered reception, and free visit to the art gallery, which I hadn't visited in a few years.

[3] even a work trip.

( Caution: contains Super Lambananas )
You know, I'm looking forward to home.

[ETA: Comments disabled due to spam]

Current Location: United States, New York, Smithtown

Dan, rover and I are at an inn a town over from home; we're spending the night, and tomorrow I'm going home, repacking, and heading off to a week with 1,000 or so Quakers.

The experience here has been delightful. They fed us well. We shared a table with three other couples, each with good stories. There were fireworks. Our room smells of wood fires. Tomorrow breakfast will be tasty.

The irony of going off to a Quaker gathering afterward is not lost on me.'that will also be good, but differently so. There probably won't be buttery croissants at Bowling Green State University.

Over the last three days I've been going through my boxes of dust-covered tapes. Alannah Miles through When in Rome.

One box of legal resellable tapes: off to the MCC thrift store!

1.45GB of music: purchased from itunes or in a few cases skimmed from youtube or elsewhere. (In passing I will say: that video is a LOT of fun. It took me about an hour to find the right version of the song. And there it is, complete with video. Vicky, where ever you are, thanks for introducing me to it, half our lifetimes ago.)

15 or so mix tapes, prodded, googled, sorted, and reconstituted as playlists or summarily dragged behind the barn and shot. (Warrant! Winger! Aerosmith! Paging 1990, paging 1990; your hair metal must be removed now from the waiting area.)

Two boxes of digested mix tapes, recordings from the radio, and illegal copies: set to go out with the trash.

And 14 irreplaceable tapes: a few bootlegs, a few recordings of the folk music coffee-house I was involved with in Ithaca, and suchlike, are set to be digitized by

fuzzpsych who's got the right equipment for that job.

I'm excited to be rid of the clutter [1] and some of the rediscoveries did make me smile (I'm sure I hadn't given a thought to The Hooters or Black 47 in most of a decade.)

I'm amused there were as many rediscoveries; the "good stuff" I hadn't realized I was sitting on, and hadn't previously run across elsewhere.

I'm very pleased to be in a position where I can do a bit of googling and listening on iTunes and youtube and successfully end up with the proper versions of all these songs.

And hey, you can play along with my last.fm page. Or give a shout if you want to come on over for a listen. (We can trade mixes and do homework and read out our angst-ridden poetry... Bring your beanbag chair.)

[1] Next up: my 20-year old stereo and 30-year-old speakers, still functional but utterly useless to me. And the furniture it sits in, which has felt like clutter for the last few years. But that's a post for another day.

Current Music: Black 47 - Funky Ceili (Bridie's Song) | Powered by Last.fm

After my first 24 hours in Chicago...

Friday night, we were off to Steppenwolf Theatre to see American Buffalo, by David Mamet. I hadn't known anything about it, other than it being a classic, and it turned out to be a real treat. The seats were excellent (even though they were in the back row; it was a small theatre), and the play itself was disturbing and well done. "Disturbing" because it said much about friendship and "business" (read, shady dealings). The set made me smile- the stage was made to be a junk shop in a basement, with much of a real junk shop's worth of stuff cluttering the stage, with amazing lighting coming from "upstairs" or from florescent bulbs. Very intricate, as also were the story and the dialogue.

Saturday, we went for deep dish pizza at a nearby bar and didn't pay much attention to the (American) football on the tube, except when the guy next to us at the bar made a comment in our direction about a play. I burned my tongue on some marinara sauce.

We walked around Old Town, and we saw A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant. It was very merry, indeed. Fairly self-referentially funny (it started with a disclaimer about Scientology and Dianetics being copyright, etc etc.) The players were all kids, the set was very simple, and it was a 60-minute show. We agreed 60 minutes was a good length.

Then, to a Mexican restaurant, where our dinner was overshadowed by the blind-date a table over, where the guy really needed a hearing-aid, because we didn't need to hear him strike out.

Sunday: more touring around, including The Art Institute of Chicago, which has added a large wing since I was last there in 2006. High points for me: a temporary exhibit called "Light Me Black" - the floor was drywall punched with a lot of craters, and some hundred florescent tube lights were suspended in the middle of the room. Entering, we were told, "please watch your step and don't make more holes." It was remarkably stark, and I liked that. There was also a wonderful exhibit on Arts and Crafts in Britain and Chicago; not only Frank Lloyd Wright, but Stickley furniture, Tiffany glass, and photos by Alfred Stieglitz and others. I was amazed by two finds: a self-portrait by Edward Steichen, a bichromate gum photograph which appears as a painting- Steichen manipulated the print with brush-strokes to add both white and black shades. I stood there studying it for quite a while. ...And there was a neat piece by Marion Mahony Griffin, a line drawing of a Frank Lloyd Wright house which used space and light/dark in a stylistically Japanese way. I appreciated how the exhibit called out a number of associations between Arts and Crafts and design elements taken from Japanese forms in the mid-1800s- lots of connections I hadn't known of.

In the evening, we popped off to Alinea for the most decadent dinner I've ever had. ( Twelve courses )

So that's how I ended my Chicago trip; with a hangover, pulling my bags through a new layer of snow, back through the Red Line, Orange Line L, to Midway (a bit concerned about time; the train was slow; but then my plane was late arriving), back to Toronto Island, back to Royal York Hotel, where I sat and read for an hour because my late plane meant I missed the earlier bus back, then dragged myself up to the Greyhound station to catch the 3pm bus home, which got me in the door at 5:30.

Which, I'll note, was just exactly 24 hours after the caviar, champagne, and quail eggs.

This life, it is a good one.

Oh, finally: I think Porter was a good choice, but not a great choice. I didn't pay more for the plane ticket, the departures lounge in Toronto was wonderful; but on the way back, missing that bus meant I got home two hours after I'd hoped I would, turning a 7-hour travel day into 9-hour travel. *shrug* It was a good experiment, at least.

The last week has seen me:

* startle Neil Stephenson [1]
* have an annoying contact lens incident [2]
* apply the necessary teachable-moment to a kid outside my workplace who was messing around with my bike when I left the office
* meet Stewart Brand
* watch a superconducting toy train, a sort-of real quantum computer and a really pretty 3-d movie which was narrated by Stephen Hawking [3]
* document the activities of the zombies at City Hall. Well, the zombies attracted to City Hall by a certain video. This was surprisingly fun.
* play with a working reprap, a supposedly self-replicating machine. [4]
* be part of creating and solving various problems; technical, social; problems of planning and problems of execution. Be pleased with some outcomes. Be exhausted at work, but not too exhausted.
* see

melted_snowball off on his trip to Japan. Missing him a lot.
* not get enough sleep. Not get the rounds of bugs that are sweeping my workplace. Now if I can just get my flu shots before I have any flu symptoms, I'll be even happier.
* feel simultaneously lonely and not like talking to people. Sometimes I wish I were wired to be more social.
* spending quality time with Rover.

[1] I saw Neil Stephenson speak twice last week; afterwards, I thanked him for providing fun role-models for geeky people everywhere. I offered that I was occasionally inspired by Sangemon, the "hero" of Zodiac, whose style of bicycling in Boston traffic was over-the-top assertive. Neil looked a bit nervous at this- "I hope you do that safely." I laughed. Anyway, he was very polite.

[2] on second thought, I won't describe it. Not fun. [5]

[3] The toy train zoomed around a magnetic track. The "train" contained a super-chilled magnet and it was propelled by a shove from the demo-guy. The "quantum computer" was very poorly explained by a volunteer docent but it had an oscilloscope readout with a squiggle. And a plexiglass and metal assembly. Sorry, but that's all I got. I found my favourite part of the video, animated by NCSA - flying from the western spiral arm to the center of our galaxy. This was the most effective use of 3D I've yet seen.

[4] This evening I went off to the local nascent "hack lab" (clubhouse for tinkerers, more or less). I brought my arduino and stepper-motor. But I spent a lot of the time there socializing, playing with other peoples' toys [6], and such. It's a cool space, and my life isn't compatible with spending much time there, but I'm glad to see it exists.

[5] but my optometrist's office is 5 minutes walk from my office; and they gave me a new lens to replace the one that was stuck in my eye. Oops, I wasn't going to describe it. Well there you go.

[6] the reprap was a surprise to see in person- by the end of the evening, it was working, and it did "print" a plastic part used to make itself. Re-reading reprap.org, I had forgotten they only produce 60% of their own parts- yes it's a toy, but it's a fairly cool toy.

I'm missing some stuff in this update, but that's what I get for not posting frequently enough.

Back from being tag-along partner in San Diego. I'm trying to convince my body it's actually midnight, not early evening, because 7am is just around the corner.

San Diego was OK. Didn't see anything that made me particularly charmed with the city. Nice climate? Yup. Excellent public transit? Yup. Much to hold our attention for fun? Not really.

We skipped d's conference's Evening Activities: Zoo, and Seaworld. Both were pricey and at least with the Zoo trip, we had a better offer- our friend Joe and his new spouse David came down from the LA area to visit with us.

And Sunday evening, we had dinner with our friend Rob, who was at the conference along with dan.

Food in San Diego? We had a tasty lunch, in an Old City fairly-fake taquria, and we had sushi with very fresh fish last night, but for the most part, meals were only ok.

Last week when we were at our neighbourhood Crêpe place with dan's mom, and our waitress asked what we would do in San Diego, I said we might possibly go to Tijuana, but didn't really have a good reason to. She said, "But what better reason to go, then?" and I couldn't think of a good rebuttal.

So, yesterday I failed to find the birthplace of the Caesar Salad but I did a substantial amount of walking in the process of not doing so. Lunch, which consisted of two chicken tacos, chips and salsa, and a Dos Equis, ran me a whopping $3.25.
My most scary moment in Tijuana was when I started crossing a street and discovered the lights were green in both directions; and the most threatening people I saw were riding police motorcycles (followed up by the guys in military fatigues with submachine guns). The border crossing was extremely streamlined, and smoother in both directions than I expected (I didn't speak to any agent going into Mexico, and the agent going into the US asked exactly one question). Overall, my experience was that of fish-out-of-water, and I wish I had more than a handful of words in Spanish, because I felt terribly rude the entire time I was there.

Efficient public transit in San Diego, as I said. $5 got me a day pass (or $12 for three days) and the light-rail went from Tijuana to Old City (in the north, which was a fun afternoon with

melted_snowball). The bus schedules were frequent enough that it offered me three different routes to get to Quaker Meeting on Sunday morning, which seems pretty great.

I have more I'd say, but bed is calling.

Glad to be home! What'd I miss? :)

Oh, to post or to go to sleep. I will take the wiser choice, since I should be rested before getting on the road tomorrow. My plans: leaving around 9:30, stopping for lunch in Kingston, and getting to my parents' place before 3.

But on the other hand: I seem to have a backlog of 9 things I've meant to review from the last few weeks.

Guess you'll have to wait!

Thanks for all the well-wishes for smooth driving. It will go fine, I'm sure; just a bit long.

On that note, G'night. :)

[ps- bike odometer rolled over this evening, 200km.]

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Usual mornings go better than this, and we haven't even left for work yet.
Four things make a post
And that's why my gym shorts smell like smoked salmon
UK trip notes
(no subject)
trading bits
Chicago: days 2-5
updatey thing
Home again
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Mambo Taxi

Daniel Allen's Journal

Entries tagged with justify my bourgeois lifestyle

Usual mornings go better than this, and we haven't even left for work yet.

Four things make a post

And that's why my gym shorts smell like smoked salmon

UK trip notes

(no subject)

trading bits

Chicago: days 2-5

updatey thing

Home again

Choices