Older blog entries for mrorganic (starting at number 143)

Absolutely nothing interesting has happened today. I do not expect interesting things to happen tomorrow, either. The peril of a middle-class life, I suppose.

I checked out SomethingAwful, which is always good for a laugh. I hope that site stays up forever. I've grossed-out my wife more than once by having her follow a SomethingAwful link! WARNING: this site contains profanity and some ruthless humor at the expense of idiots.

Presidential inauguration. Feh. Who cares? Why should we celebrate the fact that a man who lost both the popular vote and (probably) the electoral vote still gets to be President?

Afternoon update:

I just heard about the good Reverend Jesse Jackson's little indiscretion (he fathered a child with a Rainbow Coalition employee almost two years ago). The National Enquirer was apparently ready to break the story, so Rev. Jackson stole their thunder and apologized publicly in a press conference.

There's a good southern word for this situation: *sorry*. This is just *sorry*. I never had strong feelings for Rev. Jackson, pro or con, but this kind of thing makes me want to puke. It's absolutely infuriating to have someone lecture people about being moral and upright, and then find out that the smug bastard was doing everything he was counseling everyone else *not* to do. It reminds me not only of the Hon. William Clinton, but also of the Jim Bakker scandal so many years ago.

I feel badly for the many African-Americans who placed such trust in Rev. Jackson, because it is clear that his credibility is completely in the dumper. For a long time he has acted as the unofficial "voice" of the African- American community, but I don't see how he can continue in that role given this situation.

----------------- Work Stuff:

Full up build done, but I noticed some UI weirdness I'll need to work out.

Personal:

I've been thinking lately about why the OSS community tends to simply re-create applications rather than inventing new ones. I think it boils down to R&D, or the lack thereof. OSS programmers simply do not do R&D well -- all the really interesting new stuff to come down in the last few years has either been done under government or corporate aegis.

Maybe that's the ultimate role of OSS -- to popularize and unencumber new technologies, rather than invent them. It makes sense to me.

Work Stuff:

Same old stuff. Took yesterday off, so I have some stuff to get caught up on.

Personal:

Got most of my CD catalogue encoded into MP3 format. Don't know why I didn't do it before -- laziness, I suppose. iTunes made the whole process pretty painless, although my old Mac can only encode at about 2x (and this with a G3 upgrade; I would never have attempted it with the 603e CPU the machine came standard with). I really like iTunes, although it's nothing too earth-shaking. It's got a nice interface which allows *much* eaiser navigation than Real's JukeBox (my Windows player of choice).

So I expect my Mac will live out the rest of its life as an MP3/DVD player. There are worse ways to go out.

I need to buy a new laptop one of these days -- my old Toshiba 610CT is maxed at 24MB of RAM, and the 640x480 screen is completely inadequate these days. Any purchase is still several months away, and I'm leaning heavily towards the new Titanium PowerBook. $2500 is a hell of a lot to spend on a notebook, though; I'll need to compare with other x86 laptops and see how they stack up, given equal (or at least similar) feature-sets. I'm willing to pay a premium for Apple hardware, but not a *huge* premium.

I feel a bit guilty about neglecting my personal programming projects, but the simple fact is that I need a mental rest. And it's not like the world is waiting with bated breath to see my software. It'll get done when it gets done. (Hopefully sometime before the heat-death of the Universe....)

Work Stuff:

Delving back into the mysteries of COM. COM is actually a pretty elegant concept, once you get used to the interface- driven paradigm of programming. I haven't done much with it for the last six months or so, though, so I'm having to dredge up a bunch of stuff the recesses of my brain.

Personal:

Importing all my CDs into my Mac so I can use it as a jukebox. I never did it before now because (a) I'm lazy, and (b) I never found software that was good enough. iTunes is good enough, so I'm making the leap. It'll take awhile: my poor tired Mac (a 6500 updated with a G3 CPU) can only encode at 2x, and with 250+ CDs to encode, I'll be at this for several days.

Work stuff:

Still haven't gotten a full-up build done yet. Dammit.

Personal:

Just saw "Antitrust". It wasn't a good movie, but it sucked somewhat less than I expected. Should have waited for the rental, though.

Work Stuff:

Same old.

Personal:

Probably won't be doing much hacking tonight. I'll probably kick back and take it a little easy; I've been fighting a nasty cold for several days, and I just don't feel up to pounding a keyboard tonight. Maybe I can talk the wife into making me some lemon tea....

Work Stuff:

Still trying to get a build done.

Personal:

Caught Steve Jobs' MacWorld SF keynote this morning (archived and rebroadcast from yesterday -- I wasn't crazy enought to try and tune in live). Lots of interesting stuff, especially the iDVD software. Video copying and creation is getting cheaper at a geometric rate, which scares the shit right out of Hollywood. I can forsee a time (maybe only a few years from now) when average joes and janes can create their own professional-looking movies and distribute the movies themselves, bypassing Hollywood entirely. And more power to them.

I'm looking forward to this time because I think it will allow artists more full expression than ever before. We may not see many 100-million epics, but we *will* see lots more avant garde stuff, more experimental stuff, and we will all get more exposure to foreign films. All of which is a Good Thing.

You can say what you want about Apple, but they're always out there a couple of steps ahead of the rest of the pack. I don't use my Mac as much as I used to (although I expect that to change when Mac OS X comes out), but I've always thought that it was the most trouble-free computer I've ever owned. It just works. (Although it also crashes a lot....)

Another thing is that iTunes (dumb name for such a cool product) is *free*. I plan to install it sometime over the weekend and see if it works as well as the demo made it sound. If so, I can turn my old Mac into one hell of a jukebox!

And man, I'm lusting after that new Titanium powerbook in a major way....

Work Stuff:

I want to get a test build done before Friday and do some unit testing of some of the modules. I might be able to deploy week after next if all goes well.

Personal:

I finished watching "Cosmos" on Sunday afternoon. I really enjoy that series -- perhaps more so now than when I watched it the first time because now I understand more of it.

Not much hacking over the past couple of days; my wife and I are both fighting colds, so I tend to spend most of my time sitting on the couch huddled under a blanket, coughing and sneezing and wishing I felt better.

Still watching "Cosmos" and hacking away on BeOS. My wife is out with a friend, hitting all the junk shops and thrift stores in town.

My "Cosmos" DVD set came in last night! Woohoo! I immediately opened it and watched episodes I,II, and III. I remembered why I loved this series so much: Carl Sagan's obvious love and excitement for science comes through in every frame. The sonorous cadences of his voice brings it all back. I'm probably going to wear out these DVD's by watching them too much.

Carl Sagan has always been one of my personal heroes. When he died in 1996, I felt as though I had lost a personal friend. He certainly wasn't a perfect person (who among us is?), but he has a true Renaissance Man in an age sadly lacking in them. He was one of the few scientists who could make science understandable to the rest of us. He was both a gifted writer and a raconteur of rare ability. The world is much poorer without him. We will not soon see his like again.

Work Stuff:

Still trying to catch up on the backlog left from the downtime we had over the New Year's break.

Personal:

Rather than hack on my newsreader, I experimented with screen layouts in BeOS using BViews, BOutlineListViews, BScrollViews, and BStringViews. I needed to understand better how the sizing and drawing features of these classes work, and I think I've got a good grip on it now.