Pretty Pictures

apparently the bruce museum in greenwich is having an m. c. escher exhibit, running until february second. i'm a huge escher fan, so i'll definately have to check that out, maybe this coming weekend if i've got time...

Ouch

it would be nice if this headache would go away...

Xmas Power Outage Sing Along

so on christmas night we were hanging around my parent's house in the dark (since the power had gone out), and my father and cousin and one of my cousin's friend's father's (yeah, we get a strange crowd at my house around the holiday's) were playing old songs on their guitars and everyone was singing along...

i was particularly amused when we got to a traditional irish song called "A Man You Don't Meet Every Day" (probably best known these days because The Pogues sing a version of it), which has a line in it that always seemed kind of off to me...

"I took out my dog, and him I did shoot, All down in the County Kildare."

my cousin mentioned that he had heard it sung differently, as:

"I took out my dog and my gun for to shoot, All down in the County Kildare."

so i looked around on the web, and all the web sites i found with lyrics seemed split 50/50. half of them have the guy taking his dog out and shooting him, and half of them have him taking his dog out and going hunting.

i just found it amusing how the wording of a traditional song can be altered over time. which way was the original? who decided to sing it slightly differently?

in any case, it was a fun night. we went through all the old songs we sing at family gatherings, and amber's father introduced us to a bunch of songs i hadn't heard before. apparently he worked his way through college playing the guitar in bars.

Back From The Dead!

it's been like 3 or 4 years since i last saw toad the wet sprocket in concert. i only saw them once, because a little while after that concert they broke up, which really sucked because they absolutely rocked live.

anyway, if you follow that link to their web site, you'll see that they're touring again, and i recommend going and seeing every show you can possibly get to, it's well worth it.

(i'm hoping to hit the Boston, NYC, and New Jersey shows, assuming we can get tickets)

Fun With Java

or... "hey, in the past few years they actually made some of this stuff not suck!"

so i've been playing around with server side java web application stuff lately, servlets and jsp's and all that jaz. it's pretty neat. so far i've run across the following cool things that i would have loved to have had when i was actually doing this stuff for real:

• ant. ok, technically they did have this when i was doing java, but i never really used it, and i really should have cause it rocks.
• junit. we all know how much i love unit testing with cppunit, and junit is even cooler than cppunit since they've got a lot of custom extensions to it to simplify testing specific kinds of applications (like server side code that's notoriously hard to test).
• struts. james farley mentioned this stuff to me a while back, and i finally got around to taking a look over the weekend. great stuff.

so now i'm toying with a little java webapp that's backed by a postgres database (oh, another cool thing: the postgres JDBC connector, a full reimplementation of the postgres network protocol in java, so you get all the stuff you need to connect to the database just by dropping in a jar file).

maybe it'll get far enough along that i'll throw the svn repos up where people can get at it, who knows...

at the very least it'll let me polish up my java skills, which are very rusty at this point.

oh, and i almost forgot! the absolute coolest thing about all this java stuff is that it all just worked on the first try on my powerbook! maybe there is something to this 'cross platform' stuff after all...

Bad News On The Eldred Front

it's good to see that Lawrence Lessig has a sense of humor about this sort of thing...

[Lessig Blog]

Game Prices

i love the way video game prices drop through the floor after the game's been out.

i just picked up a copy of 'Alice' for 15 bucks! it's such a cool game, and since it's a little old, it runs fantastically on my new powerbook.

ok, back to wonderland i go...

Testing, One, Two, Three...

here's a test post from NetNewsWire Pro's weblog editor...

let's see if this shows up...

[ later... ]

ok, it works. i like it ;-)

i am so buying this when it hits 1.0.

Bad Day

today was a bad day at work.

i had a long discourse mostly written about exactly why it was a bad day, but i think i'm just going to leave it at "today was a bad day at work" and move on with life.

OMG This Rules

i am so amused.

oh, and completely unrelated, but the two towers rocked.

From The Mouth Of Ben Stein

read it

courtesy of rob

Math Is Power

i just saw the most amusing 'math is power' commercial...

that entire advertising campaign cracks me up. every time i see it i can't help but think of my friend adam, who has to be the best math teacher i've ever met. of course, he'll likely end up flipping burgers or something after college, but that just underlies the irony inherant in the commercial ;-)

i don't really have anything more useful to say, but it cracked me up and i felt the need to post an entry about it.

Weird Movie Interactions

so i'm watching a movie that my replay happened to start recording (two ninas if you must know, and yes, it's a sappy romantic comedy, what of it?), and one of the main characters just quoted from one of my favorite movies of all time (kicking and screaming, which is STILL not available on DVD!).

it's not like he just said a line that happened to be in the other movie, he literally refered to seeing a movie sometime where someone said "if you want to make god laugh, make a plan".

that's so random.

What? You Were Expecting More From A Star Trek Movie?

went to see star trek: nemesis this morning.

it was as expected. not great, but not horrific. i never go into star trek movies expecting much, so i'm never all that dissapointed.

oh well, back to doxygenating subversion's header files.

My New Favorite Application

LaunchBar has the be the most brilliant application i've ever seen.

i now have keyboard shortcuts for like everything i ever use! i'm on the verge of registering for the full version, and i haven't even been playing with it for 10 minutes yet! this is so cool!

This Is So Not My Week

lets just say that i hate being on call at work.

so far this week i've dealt with hardware problems, software problems, magic "we didn't change anything but it seems to have fixed itself" problems, and most likely a dozen or so other problems i can't recall at the moment, and it's only wednesday.

the really annoying part is that i've actually got some cool stuff i'm trying to work on, but i'm not getting any time to work on it because i'm dealing with stupid shit all the time!

Apple Switch Parody Number 4753

watch it.

then go see this movie.

(hey, they're vaguely related... ok, i was just too lazy to post two entries.)

Adventures in Retro-Computing

jwz seems to be having an interesting time with some old macs.

the whole concept of retro-computing is interesting.

i mean we've already got companies who specialize in recovering old data from older machines, since really, do you have the hardware and the software to read that obscure archive format you used to back stuff up on to now-ancient floppies back in the 80's? what if you need something on those disks?

this kind of thing can only become more important as time goes on, with people storing so much of their data in the random proprietary format their favorite app happens to use.

in any case, yes, i'm jealous, i wish i had a dedicated daliclock machine.

I Am So Weak...

i was wandering around the palisades mall today, and i had a moment of weakness...

so now i'm typing this on a brand new 1 GHz Titanium PowerBook.

it is so nice.

i got the 'double your RAM for 40 bucks' option, but they were out of 512 Meg chips, so i'll have to go back next week to get that put in. even without the RAM maxed out, it's screamingly fast. i love it.

now i'm going to get back to not thinking about my credit card bill...

Who Knew Math Could Be This Fun?

i've got this feeling that someone has pointed this out to me before, but i can't recall when or who.

it's still damn funny though, either way.

Tetris!

brent simmons (of NetNewsWire fame) had a link to this tetris clone on his blog today.

so of course now i've become addicted...

it's really amazing how such a simple little game can be so much fun...

Unit Tests == Goodness

so i imported cppunit into our source tree at work and started writing unit tests for some of our code. it's something i've been thinking about for a while, and i finally broke down and just did it (like my recent reworking of our build system to support partial tree builds).

it's taken me a few days to get this stuff working well, but overall i think it'll be worth it in the long run, since checking out the entire tree to build was getting cumbersome, converting all our old crufty makefiles to use my newer system will only help us maintain them, and unit testing just makes everything easier in the long run.

of course i'll really have to start making progress on my other projects soon, but i think i've figured out one of our major problems, and once that's out of the way the rest will begin to fall in to place...

I *HEART* Newbury Comics

so i was in the belingham newbury comics this week, and i was looking for the second season of the simpson's on DVD, but i couldn't find it, which was annoying, since they're always cheaper than anyplace i can find around stamford, and i don't get too many chances to shop there anymore, since they don't seem to have them in CT.

anyway, i gave up and bought something else.

then, today i was heading back to CT and i decided to stop again just for the hell of it, and i found a copy of it in their used section!

bonus!