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December 31, 2004

"Annis Horribilis"

In 1997 Queen Elizabeth lamented her annis horribilis after Princess Diana's death. This year has been, in a way, my own annis horribilis.

It started off bad with a relationship gone sour in the ugliest of ways, followed quickly by my dad's bypass surgery. The year progressed at its glacial pace, adding heartbreak to sadness as a lovely neighbor, a former boss and my uncle passed away. Of course, the year ended with two resounding crashes as my job changed dramatically (never for the better) and a tsunami showed us that you really should live for the moment. I've not even made my annual pilgrimage to London and Iceland.

It wasn't all bad: that sour relationship is now a solid friendship; I got to go see the west coast by train; I got to know that in my heart I'm not just a drone.

And so I look towards 2005 with some hope and not a little trepidation. As bad as 2004 was, 2005 is going to be better. I think there are going to be good things on the relationship front, on the job front and on the location front. There's a lot brewing, maybe it winds up being nothing, but the journey is going to be worth taking this year.

Cheers to all of you, and may you all have a great new year.

Posted by Samer at 05:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Tsunami Relief

I'm sure you've all seen the destruction and loss of life that a 9.0 earthquake unleashed when it started a tsunami. That killer wave has claimed over 100,000 lives and destroyed cities, islands and communities.

If you've got a spare few dollars, I'd suggest helping out. Amazon is taking payments for the Red Cross, and Google and Apple have links on their home pages to disaster relief organizations.

A small donation might make someone's life a little better and end this awful year on a positive note.

Posted by Samer at 02:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A book and a Phone Call

bOINGbOING publish the harrowing story of Pearl, a guy who is living in Thailand:

Our house was 150 feet from the beach, that is THE hardest hit beach in Thailand. As water rushed into our house and then ripped open the second story wall, I leapt off our second story roof and swam and swam and swam, riding the wave deep into the jungle, as it destroyed building after building, ripping up trees and spinning diesel trucks into the air.

It is a very moving tale of survival and quick thinking. A very personal look at the death and destruction wrought by this tsunami.

Pearl, an American citizen, tried to get the help of his government, our government, in an effort to get out of there:

The U.S. goverment offered me a phone call, a toothbrush, a paperback book and a temporary passport. No hotel, no food, no flight home. I was told that I could take out a loan if I could list three people who would vouch for me at home. The process would only take a few days. I was alone, injured (superficially - but I sure did look bad), no possesions, no money and my government offered my a book.

"A phone call, a toothbrush, a paperback book and a temporary passport." Seriously, is that the best we can do for our people? Ostensibly, even when you live overseas, you pay taxes with the idea that your government will come and help you when the shit hits the fan. A paperback novel is not help.

Maybe (hopefully) there's another reason for this than plain idiocy, but you never know.

Posted by Samer at 02:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 24, 2004

Comments

Well, I've just about had it. Comment spam is insidious and annoying. I've banned over a hundred IP addresses from posting to my blog, and this morning I've deleted over 200 spam comments from this blog and another 50 from pictures.

I've seen one after the other of my friends blogs lose comments, and it disappoints and saddens me. There are technical solutions out there, including some good ones built into MovableType 3, but my hosting provider seems to not support them.

For now, I'm killing comments. Once I move to a different, more technically savvy host I'll re-enable the comments.

Posted by Samer at 11:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 20, 2004

A little chill

Wow, this really is an Arctic cold front! Currently it is 11°F (-12°C) with a wind chill of -8°F (-22°C). Even I think that's cold. And we did get a dusting of snow, but I am sure it blew away.

Posted by Samer at 08:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 18, 2004

Winter is Here

"ARCTIC COLD FRONT SWEEPS EAST OF THE CWA SUNDAY EVENING..." reads the long term forecast discussion, today. You know what that means? Cold. And lots of it. Teens for Monday morning.

Finally, winter is here.

Posted by Samer at 05:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 12, 2004

Have you ever seen a llama...

... kiss a llama on the llama?

No? Well, then you need to see the llama song. No, really, you have to.

Llama, llama, cheesecake.

Thanks, Law-rah!

Posted by Samer at 11:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

WarDriving

I was headed to meet up with a friend of mine and I wanted to show him something on my laptop, so I took it along for the ride. I decided that since the laptop was driving with me, I'd do a little wardriving, using the MacStumbler program. Some interesting results...

I hacked up a program to take the output and crunch some numbers. Here's what I found:

The difference is pretty striking.

Posted by Samer at 12:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 11, 2004

ZipDecode

I just love this Java application. It is called ZipDecode and it lets you fly over the US and zoom in on zip codes. Click on the map, hit "z" and then start typing your zip code. Very cool.

Posted by Samer at 12:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 09, 2004

Law School

I have two good friends who are in law school. One, AB, recently started blogging on her PIEL blog, which I talked about a few days ago. The other, law-rah as she calls herself, also writes a blog called WonL. They've both been prepping for finals, and they are both a little stressed by the immersive experience of studying.

On WonL, law-rah's been keeping a list of things that she's learnt while studying (for the record: I love that word). An example or two:

4) my roommate really doesn't care about UCC 2-207..but found Williams v. Walker Thomas extremely interesting (could've been due to my theatrical performance of replevin...perhaps as an encore, I will throw large pieces of lumber off of the 2nd floor at my other roommate below)

11) I think I have an unhealthy obsession with collecting markers and highlighters

I've found the series amusing, myself. Check them all out. Of course, I think number 15's pretty good.

Good luck to both of them, and hope they kick some law school ass.

Posted by Samer at 12:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 05, 2004

The Reality Distortion Field

From the Jargon File:

reality-distortion field: n.

An expression used to describe the persuasive ability of managers like Steve Jobs (the term originated at Apple in the 1980s to describe his peculiar charisma). Those close to these managers become passionately committed to possibly insane projects, without regard to the practicality of their implementation or competitive forces in the marketplace.

The feeling you get when you are around Jobs is really a strange one. He's mesmerizing and dominant and, well, makes you seem like a bumbling idiot all the time. Bill Clinton had that effect on people.

These little tidbits from the Audion Story, reminded me of my own encounter with the man. The first comes after Panic's Cable Sasser gets an e-mail from Jobs:

Whoah.

That's Steve.. as in.. Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steven. P. Jobs. The guy.. who did the thing.. with the Apples and... in my INBOX.. Wozniak.. whoah. And he wants to know if WE are interested in throwing in with THEM? The guy who we basically owe our entire professional existence to, who basically created the very platform we want to hug, the computers we want to crush into little pure plump pieces of joy?

As the kids say, upon seeing some awesome frags and/or gibs: OMFG

And later, when they met with him at 1 Infinite Loop:

Anyway, a few moments later, Steve Jobs himself entered the giant Apple boardroom, threw his feet up on the table, and got to the meat of the matter.

To be honest, my memory is a bit compressed here, as the whole experience was nothing less than surreal and difficult to process. To find ourselves — just two nerdy guys who make Mac shareware — sitting on Apple Campus, in a meeting with all of these brilliant bigwigs, pretty much caused our heads to continually and rapidly explode, humbled to say the least.

This is very much in keeping with the one time I got close to him. It was at MacWorld Boston, when it was rumored that Jobs was going to go from iCEO to just plain CEO. I was sent up there to cover the event as a producer, not really having ever produced professionally before. My camera man, a local hire, turned out to be great. He figured that Jobs had not made it to the hall yet, and asked around. The doorman told him to go around back. While the rest of the media was buzzing out front, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, we took a risk and went to the back door.

A few minutes later Jobs came out of a limo that had pulled up to just where we were. I had not really been prepared to meet him, and was still in shock. I blurted out: "Are you going to say anything interesting, today?"

There was a long sickening silence as he walked away and climbed the stairs to the entrance. He then stopped, smiled and said, "I hope so!"

And, much to my shame, he vanished into the hall. Next time, Steve. Next time.

Posted by Samer at 07:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Audion Story

About a week or so ago, Panic put up the story of Audion, their ground breaking MP3 player. They had retired it, and it was time to tell its story. And what a great product story it is. It is a riveting read and, for anyone involved with the Macintosh, a wonderful trip down memory lane.

So, go read the true story of Audion and enjoy a story with as many twists and turns as a thriller.

Posted by Samer at 06:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 04, 2004

Google Tech

Everyone uses Google. It is ubiquitous, just like the dial tone. You always expect that it will be there, and always expect that it will return some results of interest. Urs Hölzle, Google's VP for Engineering, was in London and ZDNet UK's Matt Loney wrote a really interesting article (even for you non-techies) about "The Magic That Makes Google Tick".

When Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, he was alluding to the trick of hiding the complexity of the job from the audience, or the user. Nobody hides the complexity of the job better than Google does; so long as we have a connection to the Internet, the Google search page is there day and night, every day of the year, and it is not just there, but it returns results.

I really like that Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's information", and not just as a search engine. The distinction may be lost on some, but that's clearly part of the magic. The interesting bits, for those propeller heads out there, is how they do what they do. And the answer, more common every day, is in the software.

Google's hardware is standard, no-name, failure-prone computers that any other IT department would refuse to even consider. But the thing the folks at Google realized is that there were going to be failures and that the only way to deal with them is to write software that will work around it. So, in a cluster of 2000 computers, a couple of hardware failures in a day mean nothing. They just route around it.

Their need to create software that manages the mess of computers led them to develop their own file system as well as systems management software that makes rolling out a new data center painless:

A new data centre can be up and running in under three days. "Our data centre now is like an iMac," said Schulz. "You have two cables, power and data. All you need is a truck to bring the servers in and the whole burning in, operating system install and configuration is automated."

Go read the article, it is quite fascinating.

Posted by Samer at 01:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"We're Moving"

I thought it slightly amusing and not a little bit ironic to get one of those "We're Moving" postcards. What's so amusing or ironic about it, you ask? It was from my post office. They are moving across the street. And while they are happy to tell you to give them a month's notice for moving, this arrived in my mailbox yesterday, and the move is today.

Posted by Samer at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 03, 2004

What the ... ?

I bring you The Gobbler.

It was a concept motel in Wisconsin. I promise you that if you go look and read the captions to the pictures (click on the "Let's go Gobblin'" link) you will laugh out loud.

Posted by Samer at 09:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 02, 2004

The ABlog

One of the coolest and funnest people I know, my friend AB, has gone out and got herself a blog: "PielBlog...My Life In Interesting Tidbits". Piel, she explains in her first entry, is public interest environmental law, in case you were wondering.

I like the way she writes, and I like that I can keep up with her more often. If you like following someone through the trials of law school, reading about some law stuff and seeing how passionate she is about the things that matter to her, then take a look.

Posted by Samer at 09:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 01, 2004

Guinness

Guinness.

Two Ns, two Ses. Really isn't that difficult.

Thank you for your understanding.

Posted by Samer at 11:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack