Just Another Altered Ego

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

I just requested a CPAN account last night.  Hopefully I’ll have the gumption to throw up all those that I feel are missing that I’ve been missing that I would be very happy to add.  one of them is glob-match support in perl that’s file-system agnostic.

Of course, My first module’s going to be a result of some Scav Hunt tomfoolery, which I’ll be sure to post about later, once it’s up.  Let’s just say that Jewish numerology will get a lot easier now.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

What did i do this weekend?  I helped build a loft, that’s what.  And it was awesome.

Next up on the agenda: I feel sometimes that I’m the leader of the software interests at PS:1 somewhat, so I’m going to make an executive decision on this.  I have many, many different projects going on aside from hacking, so I can’t show up at the space every day like some of the more dedicated members have been doing.  Instead, I’m just going to be regular about this.

I’m going to try and make it to the space Wednesday night and Sunday afternoon.  Anyone interested in programming languages, esoteric languages, functional programming, and software engineering should show up and talk/yell at me.  If enough people show up, we’ll call it a meetup group.  If they don’t, I’ll read & study by myself, and get anti-social and even more stabbity.  Your call.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

After a bit of database corruption sweeped under the rug, I’m back and as ornery as ever.  However, this has brought me to an empasse, as I didn’t know what to do with Wordpress in the event of a disaster.  However, I could manage to hack Movable Type pretty well, as it’s written in a language that doesn’t make me want to choke up bile, and I’d feel more like contributing to that project than anything.

So there’s a minute possiblity that this blog might make some changes in the future–stay tuned.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’d know I hate mornings.  We’re not talking cutesy Garfield grumpiness, we’re talking it’s-sharp-objects-time distaste for life.  College let me cement a lax schedule in my life, and working from home lets it continue.

Over Christmas break, my sleeping schedule got completely discombobulated, since I had about eleven consecutive days.  For the next week, it was difficult for me to get up before noon, and was getting worse.  Finally a couple weeks ago, a couple naps aligned my sleep schedule in such a way that I was getting up between 5 and 7 am; something I haven’t done since my high school days.

So far, the major difference is how I use my time.  I usually spend the hours between midnight and 4am doing a lot of nothing.  It’s me time, but I’m usually surfing the internet or watching TV.  When I get up early, I eat (something I used to not do as well), relax online for a while, then get to work.  The relaxed pace of the morning has helped me concentrate on my tasks a lot better than before.  This also lets me leave my afternoons open to socialize or work on my own projects, which I’ve been lamenting for quite a while.

However, it’s harder for me to stay up late.  During the week I’ve been going to bed at about midnight or so, but on weekends I rarely get to bed before 4am.  Yes, my social life is just that draining.  I’m worried about flipping schedules again, but I think I’ll be able to maintain it.

I did unintentionally crash from about 5pm til midnight this past Sunday after a particularly draining night and a brunch with friends that didn’t leave me but five hours of sleep.   This is probably also a result of sleeping only about 6 hours a night; and my body wanting to play catch-up.  Either way, I’m going to need to find a balance, what with work and play once again coming into conflict

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

For the past few months I’ve been working with a friend of mine to establish a hacker space in Chicago.  When we started, ther was ofthen just the two of us attending, and whoever else we managed to unsuspectingly wrangle into attending.

For those of you unfamiliar with the idea of a hacker space, let me give you my vision of the project.  Most of the people involved in this, including myself, are interested in projects that don’t always fall along the traditional lines.  We’re interested in science, technology, crafts, and more often than not the intersection between these areas.  We want to tinker, to create, to share ideas.  To go about this, we’re essentially creating a mad scientist’s clubhouse.  We’re collecting power tools, electronics (both broken and functioning), building supplies, and anything else we think is useful.  I have an old ham radio I plan on jury-rigging up to *something* via serial port.

Since Eric, myself, and a few others started drumming up interest, we’ve come along way.  We drummed up an excellent name from a friend of mine at Verecundia; Pumping Station: One.  We’ve started to visit other similar groups, and look at now defunct groups (Dorkbot Chicago, I’m looking at you), garnishing interest.  Things started to take shape, and here we are.  Our evangelistic efforts have now placed our pledged initial membership  group to over 20 people.  This is not far from the target sustainability level necessary to keep the place afloat by membership fees.  We’ve registered as a non-profit organization in Illinois and gotten our IRS numbers in order.  We’re investigating spaces and soon we’ll have our financials set up, collecting membership dues, and vote on our bylaws.  And most importantly, we’re learning & creating.  In essence, we’re not far from having a grass-roots, non-profit, self-sustaining art & technology collective in the span of six months.

I invite anyone in the Chicago area, or anyone who may be passing through, to follow the progress of  Pumping Station: One.  We’ve got a lot planned, and we’re always looking for new members to contribute ideas.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

So here we are in 2009, and in between the hangovers and days off people are considering what they’d like to achieve this year.  I already accomplished my major goal (see last post), but there’s still much I’d like to do before I feel like I’m living a completely sane and productive life:

• I’d like to start working out again.  I don’t specifically mean getting pumped in the gym, but to get back into martial arts or somehow train myself  physically.  I’m not wasting away, but I want to make sure I still am in good shape.
• I want to be more of a polyglot, both spoken and computational.  I want to pick up Python and Haskell in the coming year, though using darcs, haskell’s community-standard revision control system, isn’t all that appealing to me.  Beyond that, I want a good excuse to start practicing my spoken languages again, as my German’s always been abysmal and my Spanish could use some polishing.  If I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I’ll pick up French; but that’s got a snowball’s chance right now.
• In addition to adding new languages, I’d like to expand my toolkit.  I worked as a web programmer for half a year a while back, and I’d like to re-vamp those skills in Perl so I can put things together myself, and actually work on the web projects I’ve had in mind for a while.
• While it’s certainly not a major issue now, I should be putting 15-20% of my take-home pay into savings.  I’ve got a couple recurring withdrawals set up to do that right now.

All in all, my goals are relatively modest, but I feel like that’s what makes them achievable.  Call me back in a year, and we’ll see where I am.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

When I turned 18, I was staying with my aunt and uncle in Champaign, IL; soon on my way to college.  The first thing I did that night was go down to the nearest convenience store and bought a pack of black and milds.  That didn’t quite strike my fancy, so I switched to Marlboro Reds.  Since then, I’ve been a pretty hardcore smoker.

I did manage to do a really good job of cutting back for about three months in the fall of 2006, where I was only having one cigarette a day.   Smoking was primarily a social activity for me, and my coworkers at the computer lab I was working at would often cut out about noon to re-center ourselves.  However, the stress involved with the last year of college compounded with a rather intense breakup plunged my addiction deeper than it had been before, and that’s where it’s been since.

I found that smoking is more often a psychologically fulfilling activity for me, and that was reflected in my choice of tobacco.  From Black n’ Milds, I switched to Marlboro Reds, to Djarum Blacks, and then to Lucky Strikes.  Cost & convenience switched me to Drum rolling tobacco in the end, which I’ve been smoking almost exclusively for the past three years or so.  My choices were often motivated by image, and I often relied on smoking as a fashion accessory as much as anything else.

Every time I get sick, I’d get nagged about how my revovery period is on the order of weeks instead of days, and that i should see a doctor.  I never considered it a major issue, because I knew what to expect.  However, recently after an illness, after I had recovered, I noticed that every time I laughed, I’d cough.  Every time.  It was violent enough to the point where i noticed myself subconsciously trying to stop laughing.

For someone like me who enjoys my sense of humor in life, I found this unacceptable.   So as of Sunday night, I have not had one cigarette.  I’ve gone cold turkey.

Today marks the sixth day since my last smoke, and so far I’ve resisted the temptation many times, between going out to Neo, where at any point about 20% of the patrons are outside smoking, to simply being around people who leave the main group, and missing the change to express my usual cynicism and wit in a more relaxed, one-on-one context of sharing a mood-altering substance.

I’ve also noticed that without the sweet, sweet nicotine coursing through my body, I’ve become quite irritable and a bit more misanthropic than is usual for me.  However, this is usual and expected, and is supposed to end after a month or so after hating everyone.  Hopefully, I can get over being an insufferable dick to everyone, and thinking that everyone is the same, and reclaim a much healthier lifestyle.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

Why yes, I *would* like to beat up my boss!

Aren’t there much better ways to go about this? Maybe like the USPS 100 Man Kumite? Stock Broker Bumfights? I’m sure they could do better than this.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

How do you like having an extremely extensible, mature, and stable text editor. I sure do. One thing that always bugged me when writing code is going through and finding all sorts of annoying trailing whitespace. For most major modes, tabs are converted to spaces for consistency, but trailing whitespaces are neglected. I was considering writing an elisp function to go ahead and take care this until I found This little gem. I suggest that anyone that has to deal with syntax where trailing whitespace is ignored to have a crack at this.

For that matter, the rest of the interface enhancements on the main page look like they’d be excellent additions to one’s ~/elisp/ folder even today; as for the most part, the code here dates back to the early 90’s. Emacs isn’t exactly a popular mail client anymore…

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com

I invite all of you to view the source of this site, which is exponentially hilarious.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

I’d never been to Hot Doug’s before, but I’m certainly glad I went:

That’s a half-eaten merlot and blueberry venison sausages, and a kangaroo sausage with chili mayonnaise, with duck fat fries lining the top right of the image.  Life is good.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

For being in Chicago for almost five years, I’ve been fairly lucky as I’d never been mugged. I always wondered if it was because I didn’t look like the type that would be packing a fat wallet, because I’ve certainly traveled alone at night enough to put myself at risk.

Last night, I was riding home on the L, and the train was one stop away from where I get off. I was pretty tired but still lucid; as it was 4:30, but I was still lucid thanks to a very early post-party breakfast. I was dressed to the nines as well, wearing a vest, tie & fedora as I often do when I’m out. The guy sitting across the aisle then very noticeably put his hand under his hoodie, and then started fidgeting in his seat. I think me must have thought I wasn’t paying attention to him, as I probably looked pretty zonked. I’d had a good night, but i was meditating on the craziness of the past couple months of my life in general, which put me in a bit of an irate mood, as well.

The guy, this cooked scrawny bum-looking character then leans over and says “hey, I’ve got a gun.” No he doesn’t. He has a hand under his shirt. I saw the fool put it there. He was fidgeting with it. I saw his round finger, not a cylindrical barrel sticking out from his stupid sweater. He’d given me like, a minute to look at him fool and try and get it right. I looked at him, and went back to to ignoring him.

He’s obviously pissed, so he says “hey, I’ve got a gun. Give me your wallet.” Dammit. I don’t want to put up with this bullshit. I’m used to aggressive situations; I’ve been in a couple fights as an adult before (not proudly, being jumped in a foreign country sucks), so I wasn’t going to lose my cool here. I drew a blank stare, and put my hand in my front pocket.

Getting away with that, too, told me that this guy was an amateur. If he was serious, I should have gotten my ass beat. No one carries their wallet in a front pocket. He was too concerned with getting his cash to realize that. Poor bastard didn’t know I was calling on a friend.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Mr. Twisty:

Mr. Twisty is an Italian-made Damascus blade “leverletto”, which means that he is an Italian-style stiletto knife with a German lever release mechanism. Not as fast of an action as a traditional switchblade, but much safer to carry. When I reached into my pocket, I palmed my knife and flipped the trigger down, into a ready state.

I was still giving this guy a blank stare, just waiting for him to move. When you’re in a confrontation where you have an obvious advantage, you never want to tip your hand, and that’s what this guy thought. He interpreted my deal look as fear, but it was just calm and resentment. Here I was with this guy sitting across from me trying to mug me with a fake gun, and I have my hand on the trigger of a switchblade. He kept on leaving himself open, and I debated the merits of kicking this guy in the face when he sat in the seat on his bench nearer to me. Finally, he worked up the courage to do something. “So are you going to give me your wallet, or am I going to have to take it?”

That’s when he got up, and that was my cue. I pulled Mr. Twisty from my pocket and sprung from my seat. The scraggly bum damn near shit a brick, as I watched a cell phone fly from under his hoodie (his very poorly done fake gun), and he started backpedaling as fast as he could manage. I yelled at him to stay back, and he did a good job of it. Thankfully, the train was just pulling into my stop as this all went down. “I’m getting off, you’re staying here,” I said, “I can’t believe you tried to rob me with a cell phone.” I then backed off to my bag, and got the hell of that train.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

My good friend Karl and I were on our way back from Lollapalooza last week when we happened upon this vehicle carrying two passengers from the Blackstone Hotel.

I apologize for the bad image quality, my Blackberry Pearl has crappy image quality.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

Google Labs just released Lively, a supposed contender to Second Life. I played the latter a decent amount to see what it has become, which is mostly a desperate cry for more and more attention. People will wander about looking for someone to talk to, and run into a variety of weirdos. I predict a combination of late 90’s AOL chatrooms, IRC gaming, or any other effort at suspended reality that just feels empty and unfulfilling.

The general cycle will probably engender the following:

• early technology adopters and cool-hunters enter the scene, encountering a vast wasteland; declare it simultaneously the next best thing and a complete waste of time
• tweens, internet-based subcultures, and perverts invade the start inhabiting the wasteland. The first page is already filled with sex rooms.
• the technology languishes on in limbo with Google occasionally trying to inject life into the project, only to be met with general disinterest and all-around frustration.

I should probably note that I haven’t actually tried Lively yet. There are a number of things that Lively does get right, and should probably be adapted by any future virtual worlds:

• Separate rooms. Mind you, they could have called it something else that doesn’t make it feel like IRC, but it’s the right idea. Keeping every area of a persistent world totally active in a distributed environment sucks resources that may *never* be used.it makes much more sense to just enforce a boundary & throw up a skybox on users and make them talk to each other.
• Browser integration. No one wants to boot up a full-screen app to just see what rooms are popular and maybe if your friends are online.
• An offline editor. Rumors persist that Sketchup 7 may very well allow people to design objects in a dedicated atmosphere instead of trying to do so in-game, allowing people to focus instead of deal with a bunch of furries running by in morally repulsive costumes.

However, there are some other areas where it falls flat on its face:

• Lack of user content from the get-go. Google’s Don’t Announce Anything policy does give them the freedom to drop something When It’s Ready, and the lack of user content is just going to result in a bunchor restless users who are tired of seeing the same fucking samuri squirrel run around. On another level, it does give them the ability to establish a look and feel to the program, but users may find that more stifling in the end.
• Platform lock-in. I know, I know, most of the civilized world uses windows, but most of the world who is going to write reviews of the software does not. Especially design professionals; the ones who will actually be the cogs in the virtual market they are so desperately trying to create.

The real problem is that no one’s found a good reason to use virtual world technology in a non-gaming context. Second Life general offensiveness in getting *anything* done in a reasonable time in-world has turned off a number of potential users, including myself.  However, there is a lot of potential markets that a decent implementation could access.  It’s that latter part that really means something.

In the meantime however, I’m just going to curse until someone creates a virtual world that doesn’t completely mock the cyberpunk ideal.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

Because I’ve never had one. Frankly, most poetry that gets handed off to me, I have a very low opinion of. However, a bit of googling led me to this highlights collection, and refreshes my opinion of the beauty of brevity of words. Can anyone else recommend poets that are capable of delivering the full value of their words without making it feel like a laborious, overwrought exercise? Just like coding, music and every other subjective field I’ve come across, there is beauty to be found in minimalism.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

…I left my combat boots in San Francisco. Seriously, when I was out in Sunnyvale for work for the week.

To clarify, my job shipped me out to the Bay area for a week, and a couple of long weekends. A couple coworkers of mine are spending their time off camping & climbing, I decided to hit San Francisco and stay with Christian Perry of SF Beta and Room Full of People fame. I’ve had a fun time cavorting in the SF social scene, and met some very interesting movers and shakers in the web world. In a twist of irony, I spent my week working down in Sunnyvale in an industry older than a PDP-11. Hardly what is to be expected in the Web 2.0 Mecca.

I suppose I haven’t’ clarified exactly what I do, so I’ll go ahead and run it down; since it’s a lot of fun to talk about and I’d like people to know. For the past couple months, I’ve been working for a startup backup software company called Zmanda. We’re currently a leader in open source backup technology, and a fair portion of our engineers work solely on open source software; myself included. I am heading up an effort to analyze & improve BackupPC, and potentially integrate it with our other offerings. This has led me to some really nitty-gritty systems level concerns, which are always fun to deal with; along with a unusually clever storage engine.

However, I’m talking about San Francisco, primarily. I had a great time. A bloody awesome time. The city always seems to have something to do and I am there to enjoy it. The people are awesome and welcoming, and I got to go see a lot of what the city has to offer. My first weekend I spent clubbing and spent time with my cousin Will, who took me out to see a few bands and then off to a bar with a Depeche Mode cover band. Some people may call that heresy, but it was a lot of fun.

The next weekend I got to hang out with a bunch of college friends, and got to see such wonders like an Absinthe bar, complete with lit ice cubes and pixies fluttering about. I also got to reconnect with a bunch of other alums that I hadn’t met before, but were second-degree friends.

Either way, it’s a really rough decision on whether to stay in Chicago, or go out to the Bay area. We’ll see what happens in the next few weeks.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

Depending on how well you know me, you may or may not know that I love music. Anything from trouncing about in goth clubs to mulling about indie concerts, I’m all over the place and enjoying myself.

I just bought tickets to the two largest music festivals in Chicago, the Pitchfork Music Festival and Lollapalooza. Pitchfork, is by all respects, these days an incubator for the next big things things in music, and a restrospective look at what is awesome. I mean, where else are you going to hear Public Enemy and Mission of Burma on the same day?

In contrast, Lollapalooza, *are* the big things in music. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of bands I made fun of or ignored completely, then discovered that they didn’t suck; such as Animal Collective, Battles, and CSS. However, I will Be avoiding G Love & The Special Sauce like the goddamn plague. So who else has tickets to these events?

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

I have been fighting with Samba recently, to get it configured correctly. I only wish this wasn’t such a black art, but it’s what I do. I had thought backups were working, but something far more sinister was happening, and I didn’t know what to do about it. A coworker of mine recently suggested that we hang out in the #amanda room on irc.freenode.net, so I hopped over to #samba. one half hour later; I learned a lot more than I thought I could in a chat room.

So here’s a hint for all you young programmers out there: open source is here to help, and a lot of us are bored and hanging out on IRC, because we are cool check it out! In fact, if anyone would like to talk about BackupPC, join me on irc.freenode.net in #backuppc.

Originally published at mcpantz.org. You can comment here or there.

If I haven’t already given you an ecstatic phone call or instant message, then I should tell you that I’ve just accepted an offer from Zmanda as a design engineer. I feel really lucky with this; as I’m going to be working in my most familiar language (Perl) to make some fairly robust code user-friendly. I’ll be heading up a new project to investigate adding a new open-source project to our lineup; so I’ll be in a lot of murky waters, but it’s going to be a lot of fun to work with, and give I’ll have the opportunity to collaborate while being fairly autonomous.

I’m sure I’ll be blogging more about the crazy things I’m going to end up doing in Perl as a result. Object-oriented Perl is simple yet quite bizarre, so it’ll be an interesting experience to delve further into its depths. I also have a couple fun ideas for some perl modules, so keep your eyes open.