wiredfool

The occupation has begun anew. 4 news helicopters are hovering above Pike/Pine downtown. A police wagon flew downtown with lights and sirens blaring. 100 people (reportedly office workers) in westlake were gathered at noon yelling “We Want Jelly Donuts!”

Fun Fun Fun.

And my camera is at home.

Long time, long weekend. 4 days is almost too much of a weekend. I’d almost rather have 3 day weekends, or more 3 day weeks. But that is probably whining.

For those of you paying attention, thanksgiving grub was vegetarian lasagne, with mushrooms, artichoke hearts, spinach and a tofu filling. With a 1997 Adelsheim Vineyards (Oregon) Pinot Noir. And truly excellent cookies. The lasagne was nearly perfect, the wine was good, but not really “wow”. It’s not a traditional thanksgiving feast, but my family is split between the coasts, and the two of us here didn’t really want much more.

I had the second Beaujolais Nouveau of the season, from Joseph Drouhin. The verdict? Not as yummy as the Georges Duboeuf. It’s a little more acidic and winey, and less fresh grape flavor.

Friday was spent realizing that I’m not as young as I used to be, and driving to work then sitting in front of a computer all day isn’t really helping the situation. So my response after the bike ride of pain was to curl up on the sofa and read. Gibson’s Idoru, Stephenson’s Diamond Age, and half of a Tom Robbins book. All stuff that I had on hand, most of it pretty good and comforting. Then again, saturday’s weather got into typical Seattle November: cold and wet.

And now the three month old linux box seems to have thrown a hard drive. It sounds like hardware. (loud thudding sounds, coupled with errors about not being able to find a sector) So I’m off of the mp3 collection for a while, until the 60 gigger arrives tomorrow and I can put the data onto a reliable drive. I’ve had this computer for 120 days, and until I shut it off today, it had a 115 day uptime. This is a machine that was running 2 webservers (apache and tomcat), postgres, php, perl cgis, and my music stuff, as well as being a semi general desktop machine for some of my daily use.

And when I called about getting the drive replaced under warranty, they asked me if I could boot to windows. Yeah. X comes up just fine, using the helix-gnome environment. Somehow I don’t think that’s what they were looking for…

Actually saw the sun rise this morning. That’s one of the nice things about this time of year; I can wake up at a decent hour and still see the sun come up.
This is the view from the front of my house, over the houses on the other side of the street, towards the southwest. Ranier is in the lower corner of the image, between the two trees.

The sunset was beautiful too. All that color, all that pollution. And tonight? The Squirrel Nut Zippers (warning link rot), @ the Crocodile. So they’re not really swing, and they’re not really in style any more. Their live shows are great in a large arena (Memorial Stadium, Bumbershoot, a year and a half ago). I can’t wait to see them in a club.

Ah the first Beaujolais of the season, from Georges Duboeuf. Availiable anywhere.
The verdict? In a word, Yummy.

It’s not wine for savoring or finding layers. It’s just a happy celebration of the new harvest. The wine equivalent of a black lab puppy. Everything changes in a few months, All energy, and hard to dislike unless you really dislike wine.

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I’m playing with the aggregator, not messing with the kid. Started with the idea of “wouldn’t it be interesting…” and “I wonder how hard that would be…” and a night and a half later, I have some database datamodels, some php xml-rpc, and some RU/Frontier static website generated php interface code.

And it worked!

Well, there was a little hacking of RU reqired, the 4 rpc wrappers don’t have the path preference wired through, and the song script appears to be hard wired to ourFavoriteSongs.com. But that’s a minor price to pay, since I already change code that can be clobbered by updates for other reasons. Coming soon, linux side source and RU patches.

So the next move is to replicate Jessamyn’s “Jessamyn is in…” box, updating automatically with what I’m listening to and if I’m at home, work, or not paying attention to the net. With automatic hiding of what I’m listening to if it’s a guilty pleasure.

I’m in a politics free zone today. All I can say is that the truth is stranger than fiction.
Which brings me to this little plant. That photo is really how it looks. This thing has been on the rail of my balcony since last spring. It nearly died this summer, turning greyish brown and generally looking unhappy. Now the cold rains have come, and it thinks it’s time to turn yellow.

With the maple in the background bright red and dramatic lighting in the morning and evenings, this is a beautiful time in Seattle. Friday morning as I woke up, the front of my house was filled with golden light shining through the red leaves filling my house with an unearthly glow. I tried to get a picture of the glow on the wall, but it just didn’t come out right.

This morning, I woke up briefly to see the shadow of Mt Ranier against a clear sky of orange and pink. Of course, seeing as it’s Saturday, I promptly went back to sleep. At least the sunrise is at a reasonable hour.

In progress…
Expectations color your view of reality
Expectations help us decide to spend the time/money/effort to experience something
These expectations get in the way of experiencing the reality in front of you.

Taking stock of going to concerts:
You want to hear stuff that you’re familiar with, so that you don’t feel lost
The artist has probably heard the same thing a million times,
Oftentimes, the artists don’t want to do the greatest hits anymore.

Sometimes the albums are a let down, sometimes the live shows.

There are a few bands that I’ve seen a lot in a short period of time, enough to see the differences between shows, know what they always play, and sort of know what to expect.
Of course, these bands tend to be good enough that I consider their live shows worth goign to because they are significantly different than their recorded music.

In a stunning defeat for instant gratification, the presidential race is still up in the air, 12 hours after the last polls closed.
What a spectacle.

Got some photos from the Jason Webley concert last weekend. A lot of these pics were shot at night with no flash, so they had to be pushed pretty hard in photoshop to make anything come out.
I’m still trying to figure out how to take good low light pics with a canon digital elph camera. If you’ve got suggestions, I’d like to hear them.