danielbeck.net

Photo: Where did this come from?

Forty-five days left, if we stay on schedule.

And counting.

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Photo: Full of movies

Oh, what the heck, here’s one more picture of the cabinet.

How much of our movie collection can you identify?

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Photo: Another angle!

So you can see it in all its permutations. Because this is important.

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Photo: Woodburning!

I finished the cabinet weeks ago, but dithered endlessly about how to decorate it. The black is done by sticking a hot piece of metal into the wood, over and over. I tried to take a closeup but it’s too dark to see any details so I didn’t bother posting it.

Originally I’d just done the squares in the corners and left it at that, but it looked oddly coffin-like. Emily talked me into giving it another go, and this is the result.

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Photo: Carpentry!

As part of the ongoing baby-related Rearrangement Of Our Entire House, I built this shelving unit for our movies. (There wasn’t enough wall space for the shelves we had been using before, so I drew up plans, bought some planks at home depot, redrew the plans to accommodate the sizes I bought instead of what I should’ve bought, cut the pieces down to size, redrew the plans a third time to make up for the one board I cut three-quarters of an inch too short by mistake, and finally hammered it all together. Ta-dah.)

I’m pretty pleased with it — the angles are all more or less square, and the doors open and close just like they’re supposed to. And when we finally filled it with all our movies it didn’t collapse into a pile of ragged sticks and cartoon noises. So I’m declaring it a win.

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Photo: I think that I shall never see…

…the Joyce Kilmer Memorial NJ Turnpike Service Area of East Brunswick Township.

Oh, wait, yes I will.

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Photo: Philadelphia Magic Garden

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Photo: Philadelphia Magic Garden

Philadelphia has a lot of buildings coated in complex mosaics. This is perhaps an extreme example.

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Photo: Peas!

Hooray for the CSA!

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In which I learn new things

Unlike all other developers who have ever touched a mac, I’ve been trying to learn how to write software for the iPhone.

Because right now would be a very, very good time to be in that business. What would’ve been a better time would be back when the App store launched — that boat’s well and truly sailed, of course, but the quality of the apps in there right now still leaves me confident that I could carve out a reasonably profitable niche for myself if I don’t put it off too long.

What I’ve learned so far is, A) I’ve successfully taught myself a lot of new languages over the years, because that’s part of what being a software developer is, but B) they’ve nearly all been conceptually similar languages to something I already knew pretty well, and they all fit into a framework that I was intimately familar with, i.e. The IntarWeb, so the parts that are new to me are self-contained, and C) transitioning from mostly web-based scripting languages for which I have easy access to zillions of open examples to learn from, to a compiled C-based language with a complicated set of APIs that I have to learn from scratch and which everyone’s still prevented from discussing due to the developer NDA is… hard.

I mean, I’m mostly getting it. I already had a reasonably good handle on object-oriented code, I know the difference between a variable and a pointer and why it matters, and I can usually sort out what the API docs are trying to tell me if I squint at them long enough… I’m not totally at sea, is what I’m saying.

But I’m constantly getting hung up for hours on what I know are trivial syntax issues which I just don’t have a quick way to resolve. That’s normal, if irritating.

Worse, I’m often second-guessing myself and backtracking, wondering if I’m doing things the Wrong Way, or if there’s some underlying concept that I’m just completely failing to grasp. Back when I was learning my first real coding language, I got past this stage mostly by being young and stupid enough to not care if I was doing it Wrong, as long as it worked (and by doing it in perl, which makes something of a fetish out of there being no wrong way to do anything anyway.) This time around, either because I’m older and wiser, or older and more timid, I’m having a harder time getting past that.

The biggest hurdle for me, honestly, is all the timesaving shortcuts the language offers. Instead of having to write a lot of repetitive getter and setter functions, you can just drag a few connections around in the Interface Builder, or use stuff like Core Data which magically deals with all the gruntwork of manipulating and structuring data in standard ways — so the only code you actually have to write is the bits and pieces that don’t work in standard ways. This is awesome, if you already know what you’re doing. But it’s an incredible pain in the ass if you’re trying to learn, because even if you have a functional example to look at, you can’t necessarily figure out how it works by looking at the code, because a lot of what makes it work isn’t code, it’s invisible magic.

So it’s slow going, you could say.

I’m sure I’ll get there eventually, but it’s been a long time since the distance between where I am and where I want to be has seemed so far.

Compare and Contrast

Webcomics are so popular, even heartland politicians are starting to make them!

Brent Rinehart for Oklahoma County Commissioner

Sean Tevis for Kansas State Representative

Guess which one I donated money to? (Hint: he’s also a metafilter user.)

Tomorrow will be better

Today I:

Spent four hours on hold, waiting for technical support.
Absorbed every nuance of a Bollywood cover of Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita”, complete with sitar solo. But only one verse and chorus, because that’s all that was on the loop for those four hours.
Learned that telling a voice-recognition system “Oh, for fuck’s sake” at an appropriate volume and level of vocal stress will elicit the response “I think you said, ‘Please let me speak to a customer service representative.’ If that is correct, say ‘yes’ or press 1. If not…” etc.
Discovered that the support email contact form was coded to use a GET instead of a POST, so if describing the issue you’re experiencing requires more characters than will fit in a URL, you’re out of luck.
Found that the Live Web Chat support connects you with a customer service representative who is clearly forced to have at least five simultaneous chat sessions active at any one time, and who is allowed to communicate with you only using macros which alternately apologize for the issues you are experiencing, and repeat the phone number of the customer service line you spent four hours waiting for earlier in the day.
Ascertained that calling the sales line to bitch about a support issue will get you absolutely nowhere, even if it’s the only other contact information available.
Went outside, took a very deep breath, spent half an hour watching a songbird watch me watch the distant contrail of a 747 slowly dissipate into the sky, and took another very deep breath.
Dropped a butcher’s knife on my foot while cooking dinner, by chance blunt end first.
Will maintain a constant input of ambient and experimental music to prevent any recurrence of Madonna, and of chianti to prevent recurrence of anything else at all.

The fireflies are out in force

The forest outside looks like dizziness just before a faint, all flecks of light, insect signals wheeling around the yard.

Have you gotten up really close to a firefly yet? They don’t have just one light; they’re this cluster of seperate little bubbles which don’t all light up in synch, more sort of ripple in and out gradually. (Some don’t follow the main pattern at all, just blink randomly like a stuck pixel showing static.)

I’d never seen that before.

[Later:] I tried to show this to Emily the next night, and it turns out I must’ve been looking at a very fancy or very mutated firefly, because the one we looked at together was just a single undifferentiated light.

Lessons

1: Never cook bacon while wearing a new shirt.

2: If you happen to notice that you are wearing a new shirt while cooking bacon, the correct solution is not “take off your shirt.”

Photo: In lieu of the giant screaming head…

…we decided to paint the kid’s room thusly.

Psychology experiment No. 1: Will this give the child A) an unreasonable love of circles, or B) an unreasonable fear of circles?

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Conversations my wife and I have had

Me: [unwraps new 4/e Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, points to cover of Player’s Handbook] Look, there’s breasts.

Emily: I think they’re kind of compensatory breasts.

Me: [turns around in chair, blogs]

Department of mixed feelings

Warning: politics ahead, and a touchy subject.

So, this news story. Major ISPs agree to block access to USENET groups and websites that carry child porn.

On the one hand, yay for protecting the children. Child porn boo.

On the other hand, is it really a good idea to give ISPs (or, more accurately, the NCMEC) carte blanche to censor the internet?

On the other other hand, the censorship won’t work anyway, since most of the stuff is on newsgroups, which can be accessed through third-party providers who won’t be following this blacklist. And even if you eliminated newsgroups altogether, there are a zillion other ways to pass around data in ways that can’t easily be tracked from outside. Yay for the internet, routing around censorship like always.

On the other other other hand, this agreement reinforces the idea that ISPs aren’t common carriers, so are allowed to control what you do on their wires. And therefore things like tiered access are acceptable; goodbye net neutrality. Which strikes me as a very good reason why the ISPs would have agreed to this deal (and even to pay for it), because they’d like that sort of control very much, and that battle is going to be played out, one way or the other, within the next couple of years at most: everyone’s just waiting to see who jumps first.

And on the other other other other hand, this time around they censor child porn. Who gets to control what sites go on that blacklist next year? Where’s the oversight? Will it be like those antiterrorism laws which oh of course will never be applied to anyone who isn’t a terrorist, except a couple years later when it turns out well, actually, they have been and still are?

So. That.

I hope nobody reads this as me approving of child pornography. I don’t, of course. It just seems like an awfully convenient bogeyman, is all.

Update

Apparently Verizon’s first step as part of this agreement was to stop hosting the entire alt.* section of USENET, and Time Warner is dropping their news server altogether.

USENET is different from the web. A website sits on one machine, anybody who wants to look at it is reading the file from that machine. USENET newsgroups are copied to every news provider, so everyone who carries a particular newsgroup is hosting a copy of all the files from that newsgroup on their server. Because of this, there’s a long tradition of providers selectively hosting some parts of USENET and not others, so the news that Verizon and TW are doing so is far less a big deal than the website blocking. But the fact that it’s tied to this agreement, and that Verizon is dumping 100,000 newsgroups because of the 88 of them that contained child porn gives a taste of how subtle that website blocking might turn out to be as well.

Update 2

Turns out this was a big bowl of nothing. Dropping the newsgroup feeds is real: that must be disappointing for any Verizon or TW customers who were using those feeds, but it’s not the End Of The Internet. But the “blocking of websites” is not real: Time Warner Cable’s director of digital communications just posted on Metafilter to clarify that it’s not the scary IP blacklist the Times makes it sound like; it’s just the individual companies removing child porn websites which are hosted on their own servers (which they have every right to do, as those sites are presumably in violation of the ISPs’ terms of service). So, again, not the End Of the Internet, just business as usual.

Oh well. At least I learned that TWC’s director of communications wastes time on MetaFilter, just like me.

Photo: Look at his ickle feetses

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Photo: Salamander and lilacs

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Photo: Enh enh enh enh

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Photo: Look what we got in the mail today!

He was curled up between a Victoria’s Secret catalog and a letter from Al Gore.

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Photo: Emily would like him to go outside now, please

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Photo: Emily greets a bear

“Teddy bear” doesn’t quite do it for a bear this size. “Tedzilla,” maybe, or “Tedstron, Plushmaster of Snuggle”.

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Photo: Erin reacts to my sister’s detailed explanation of the proper application of Desitin

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BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

I just spent a couple hours wrestling with a piece of electronics, trying to get it to stop beeping.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

Pulled the whole thing out of its case and checked all the circuit boards for one of those piezo speakers, which

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

should have a contact switch wired in somewhere there that I should be

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

able to slip a bit of cardboard into or something, to break the connection

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

and stop the beeping, except that I’ve been over the whole thing and

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

can’t find a switch anywhere, or a speaker either; I can’t even figure out

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

where it might be drawing power — and then I notice that the

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

beeping is actually coming from my testmeter, which has a little warning

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

light flashing to tell me that the toolbox temperature doesn’t match its

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

reference temperature, it’s off by about half a degree. So I adjust the reference temperature until

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

it matches but it still keeps beeping at me anyway.

Then I wake up.

Except I can still hear the beeping noise. That really wakes me up; I sit bolt upright in bed trying to hear what in my house has been beeping all this time, loudly enough to infiltrate my dreams. Did an alarm go off in some other room? Is it the smoke detectors?

It’s a bird, outside. Emily left the window open a crack last night, and it’s dawn, and I’m hearing a birdcall. Tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet. It’s just like the first morning of our honeymoon, when jetlagged me tried to answer the phone which turned out to be a gecko. It sounded very digital.

So does this stupid bird.

I’m going to try to go back to sleep, now.