Old Habits

So back when we were on co-op, Rob and I went to see a lot of movies.

You see, we didn't have air conditioning that summer, and it was really hot out, so we took any available excuse to go someplace that did have air conditioning, and the standard place was a movie theater.

So we saw lots of movies. Pretty much everything that came out that summer, which is impressive when you consider that it included such gems as Lake Placid (best giant gator movie ever!) and Deep Blue Sea (watch Samuel L. Jackson get bit in half by a giant superintelligent shark!). I had already been in the habit of seeing a lot of movies, but that summer really pushed me over the edge, into the "see anything and everything" neighborhood.

These days, I've got air conditioning, so I don't have the excuse anymore, but I still seem to see an awful lot of movies. Not quite up to my old level, but close. I still have staggeringly low standards.

This week's contribution, Lords of Dogtown turned out to be quite good, although now I'll have to go back and watch the original documentary, just out of curiosity.

I was particularly amused by the fact that I didn't put the name of one of the main characters together with the name of the skateboard company he founded until they mentioned it at the end, even though I actually remember my next door neighbor drooling over stuff that company made back when we were kids.

In any case, it's worth seeing.

BBQ

So among the things I left behind in CT was the grill.

Well, it wasn't really my grill, it was Jason's, but it lived at our apartment since he didn't have any place to put it at his place.

In any event, it was awfully nice having it around during the summer months, and since every month feels like a summer month out here acquiring access to a grill seemed like a good thing to put near the top of the todo list.

A while back, I read about the Weber Baby-Q Grill on Jeremy Zawodny's blog. I rarely cook for more than two or three people at most, and thus it's pretty much the perfect size for me. I ordered one a few weeks ago, and since then I've been enjoying it immensely. If you're in the market for a nice grill that isn't too large or expensive you really can't go wrong with this one. It lights instantly, grills everything I've tried beautifully, and if you don't like the idea of small propane tanks it uses you can get an adapter that lets you hook it up to a standard 20 pound tank. Highly recommended.

Anyway, it's just about time to throw that steak on the grill...

What's Garrett Up To?

So most of my recent posts have been about the whole "moving across the country and starting a new job" thing... But that's obviously not all I've been doing, I've got the standard collection of geeky shit jumping around in my head.

In summary:

• I'm playing with bridging the gap between C++ and Java via GCJ, for use in Lucene4c. I've recently come to the conclusion that actually reimplementing the Lucene libraries in C, while fun, is not the best way to go about making Lucene's functionality available to C programmers. My new GCJ based version is available in the ASF Subversion repository, specifically in Lucene4c's gcj-backend branch.
• In an effort to bring my HTML/CSS/JavaScript skills kicking and screaming into the 21st century I've been reading up on Web Standards Solutions (great book by the way) and trying to wrap my brain around all the recent AJAX stuff that's been going around. So far, I think it's all very neat. The HTML/CSS stuff is a clear win, and I'm looking forward
  to applying it going forward. The JavaScript magic is also cool, but I think we need to be careful to apply it where it's needed, not just where it's fun.
  

Anyway, those are the main "Geek" topics that have been rolling around inside my head lately, at least the outside of work topics anyway ;-)

Eye Opening

I'm really not sure what to say about Bill Moyers' speech about the state of journalism in America, other than that you should go read it. Now.

Moved In

Well, after far too much unpacking, I'm mostly settled in my new apartment.

The moving guys showed up right on time yesterday morning, and with only a little trouble getting the box spring for my bed into the bedroom (it turns out there was one way to make it fit, but it took us about 5 tries to find it) the move went well. The appartment looks quite a bit better with stuff in it, and actually seems a bit larger than I'd expected, which is always a nice surprise.

I spent most of the rest of the day unpacking (18 bags of packing paper and about a 3 foot tall pile of flatened cardboard boxes at last count), with a brief pause in the afternoon to allow the cable guy to hook up my cable and network connection.

Anyway, so far the apartment is great, and it's nice to actually be moved in. There wasn't anything wrong with the temp apartment mind you, it's just that the whole "temporary" feeling gets kind of old after a while.

I've still got about a million and one things to do to get settled here, but at least the process has started, and that's the important thing.

A Productive Weekend

I appear to have fallen out of the habit of updating my blog regularly. Lets try to summarize recent events...

• O'Reilly put up the website for OSCON 2005, including the description of my talk about Backwards Compatibility in Open Source Projects. There are a ton of other cool talks scheduled as well, so if you can make it out to Portland for the conference you absolutely
  should.
• I signed the lease on my new apartment. It's a 1 Bedroom on the second floor of a building at the Mansion Court complex in Santa Clara, just a few blocks from my temporary corporate housing. Tomorrow morning I'll call to schedule a time for the movers to show up with all my stuff, since right now the place is looking pretty empty.
• In an effort to do something about the "this place looks pretty empty" problem I made a trip to IKEA today. I'd never actually been before, but it certainly lived up to expectations. I ended up picking up a bookcase, and I'll probably order another one via their website
  soon, since I'll need more space for books, and the size I really need won't fit in my car.
• Since Chris recommended it, I picked up a copy of Mercury for the PSP, and it's been sucking down all my free time. Cool game though, if you've got a PSP you should absolutely pick it up.

Anyway, back to Mercury...

Another Milestone

As of this afternoon I am now licensed to drive in the state of California.

Apparently my "getting things right on multiple choice tests even if you aren't sure of the right answer" skills have held up rather well since high school, because I only got one question out of thirty six wrong.

Of course, next week I have to go back again and register my car. You need to get a CA license within 10 days of starting a job here, but you're given 20 days to register your car. I still can't figure out why there are two different deadlines for that sort of thing, but whatever...

Now all I have to do is finish this whole "Getting an Apartment" thing and this week will be a total success...

Yay!

I just fixed my first bug in bloglines!

It was just in the unreleased development version, so nobody outside the people here in the office will notice the difference, but I'll know, and that's what matters ;-)

I'm Such An Idiot

So apparently I'm totally incompetent, and managed to delete virtually all of my AIM buddy list today. So if you think I should have you on that list, you might want to IM me so that I can add you again. So far I've only been able to recreate the names of the people I've actually talked to on this particular computer rather recently, since all I had to work from was the logs I still had lying around...

Irony

I'd like to point out the irony in the fact that "Microsoft Outlook Web Access" (i.e. the webmail thingy for MS Exchange) works a hell of a lot better with a Mozilla based browser than the lotus notes webmail thingy we had at my previous job.