lifebsideben

Wow, everyone wants to get gas at Costco these days, since it’s so much cheaper (today it was “only” $3.99 for 87 octane.) I tried to go to the Sunnyvale one as I needed to make a stop on the way home over there, and the line to get into the parking lot was going to take 10 minutes, let alone actually waiting for gas. So off to the one near my house, I went (Airport Blvd in South San Francisco).

It was pretty packed there, too… definitely the most folks I’ve seen there before. They closed one of the entrances so they’d have more room for lines, and I was directed by one of the attendants, to the second to last line. Fine, I pull in, OK, only one car ahead of me, then a guy with a trailer and a boat, and a couple guys at the pumps. The two guys pull out, and Mr. Boat pulls in. Hmm, won’t pull up to the front pump, huh? Great. So this is going to take longer. Mr. Boat and his buddy, we’ll call him Mr. Dinghy, jump out and try to figure out the pump. This takes a few minutes, and finally they start getting gas for the truck. Time passes. Folks in other lines are moving ahead. Finally they stop filling up the truck, and — you guessed it — start filling up the boat. This is when I get out of my car and ask them why they didn’t pull forward to the first pump. “There isn’t enough room” they say. Looks like there is, to me. There’s at least 25 feet in front of the pumps for cars to maneuver around, even if they stuck out 10 feet, it’d be fine. Grr.

OK, so, it’s a small boat. How much gas can it hold? How long can this take? Nearly 15 additional minutes, is the answer. I’m thinking this boat must hold a TON of fuel! I’m getting really impatient now, and I’m thoroughly bored both by NPR on the radio and by Valleywag on my iPhone. Hurry up already!! As I reach to honk in arggravation, they start capping up the tank on the boat. Sigh. So now the guy in front of me, and I, pull up to the pumps. The Boaties left their receipt. This ought to be good, I think, they must have spent $300 on gas. Hmm, only 24 gallons. What? Really? How can you only pump 24 gallons in 15 minutes? Lordy.

I swiped my card, pumped my less-than-7-gallons (the Prius has an itty bitty tank), and was back in the car within 3 minutes. That’s 20 fewer minutes I had with my kids tonight, thanks to the Inconsiderate BoatJerks.

Tags: bitching, Costco, gas, SFO

Normally, I like my Comcast service. I really do. I mean, it’s ridiculously expensive, yes… and I have the “triple play” (voice, cable tv, internet) so I theoretically “save” money. But usually, it’s pretty good. At least it has been fairly reliable compared to my past experience (many years ago, admittedly) with AT&T DSL, and it’s fast as all get-out for data. And the VOIP actually works, unlike Vonage or TomatoVine who should both be bankrupted as soon as possible for fraud, in my opinion.

However, last night was the exception to general Comcast goodness. Just before 10pm, Val calls down to me in the office… “the internet’s not working.” Usually, this is some wacky wifi issue on the mac, like the microwave interfering with it… oh wait, that’s right, she’s now hardwired in. Hmm. Let me check… sure enough, seems down. Check the router. The “online” light isn’t lit, but everything else is. Let’s try to reset it. Little switch on top does nothing, let’s try pulling the power cord… no dice, that’s right, I forgot. This is a VOIP modem as well, and we wouldn’t want that to die when the power went out, right? It’s got a big honking battery in the bottom. Sigh. OK, let’s actually call Comcast.

After digging up the number from a statement (paper statements, what a novelty! I guess they’re good in this case, when otherwise, everything is online and I can’t really, get online easily^*). Call them, navigate the voice menus, and “we’re experiencing difficulties in your area. there is no need to stay on the line to report this issue.” Grr.

OK, well, the cable still works at least. But yeah, no data. No voip (so no telephone). Meh. I did want to know how long this outage was actually going to have lasted by the time they resolved it, however, so I just set up a commandline to record pings: while true; do sleep 5 && date >>pings && ping -c 1 -t 5 www.google.com 2>&1 >>pings ; done and I figured I’d check the ‘pings’ file in the morning to see when it started having output. (I’m sure there’s a smarter, simpler way to do this… this was the 2-minute hackery version.)

Well, according to the file, pings started working at 1:25am. Three and a half hours Comcast data was down. That’s pretty sucky. I hope this was a major fiber cut somewhere that they dispatched everyone in the area to fix… for voice customers particularly, that’s really lousy, on a holiday night (hey, relatives can be calling! your great grandfather who served in the Big War might decide to call you from beyond the grave on Memorial Day, who knows?)

^* by “easily”, I mean, without walking upstairs. Yes, my iPhone would get me online. Yes, my 3G card would get me online. But mighty sloth, would not let me traverse the steps unless absolutely necessary…

Tags: bitching, Comcast, telephone, VOIP

Went to Maker Faire last weekend — had been wanting to go each of the last years and never quite managed to do it. Finally did, and wasn’t disappointed. It’s fairly expensive ($25/person), but well, then again I haven’t been to a State Fair lately, and in some ways it’s a similar sort of setup. Probably not really that expensive, considering all of that.

I was trying to explain to some folks what it was, and tried “family-friendly burning man”, which isn’t quite right although gets the spirit pretty accurate, and “high-tech state fair” which is close but no cigar as well. It is, to some extent, like a ham radio convention, skipped ahead a couple of generations. Well, but with (much more) weird, whimsical art. It’s hard to describe, but a fun time was had by all. Alex especially liked the Disney (sigh) section with WALL*E (ok, the $200 toy robot version coming out later this year actually does look pretty cool) and the DIY model rockets (with launches!). Oh, and the battling robots. Ohhh, the battling robots…! We saw some way cool robots that shot flames… and then promptly had their owners chastised by the local police/security folks. I think that was predictable

So anyhow, after a few hours, as we were getting pretty tired (the two kids make it a lot more unwieldy, but a lot more fun too) we sat at a bench and had some ice cream, and then headed back to see WALL*E one more time (please, Daddy, please!) When we emerged, I was checking out the t-shirts and Val ran up, “I think I lost my phone!”. After some frantic digging through the stroller compartments, we couldn’t find it. Val said she thought she might have recently lost it out of her back pocket when we were eating ice cream, so I went off to look. Nothing near where we were, and I asked the info booth if anyone had turned on in recently… they pointed me to the main info booth, they pointed me to lost and found, they said they thought “yes” one was turned on, and pointed me to security office. Off I went, halfway across the event in a sprint. After I got there, sure enough, that had one just turned in! The security officer held it up and said “is this it”? Of course, this was somewhat funny, as basically all iPhones look identical. But I unlocked it in front of her, and it was Val’s (right wallpaper, for example.) So, the Maker Faire bunch are also an honest, or at least helpful lot.

 

Tags: DIY, iPhone, Maker Faire, robots

I’ve been staying out of the HD-DVD / Blu-ray format war for a long time, but Val sucked me in to it. You see, she got me the BBC ‘Planet Earth’ DVD set for X-mas… only it was the HD-DVD set. One of the reasons I hadn’t bought it previously, is because I hadn’t wanted to get it on standard def DVD, since that would be a ‘travesty’ to lose 3/4ths of the detail that it was shot in, for such sweeping and compelling nature content. But, now she had bought it for me, and I didn’t want to return it. I quickly did some research, decided yep, HD-DVD was the format I preferred, and bought a Toshiba A3 from Amazon for $179 (this was January 2nd). Of course, a week later, and obviously because Ben Margolin finally jumped into the fray and cast my dice, Warner Brothers threw all their weight behind Blu-ray, and the couple remaining HD-DVD allied studios look soon to follow. Toshiba was taken by surprise, and canceled their press statements at CES a couple of days later. It looks bad for HD-DVD as a format. You’re welcome! You’re now free to buy Blu-ray now… but here’s why you shouldn’t.
Read more »

Tags: apple, Apple-TV, DVDs, format-wars, HDDVD, iTunes, movies, Technology

The neighbors behind us removed this huge tree in front of their house the other day. It was pretty sad, actually, it was a pretty tree (from my vantage point, anyhow). I suspect they’re selling the place and it didn’t give the best ‘curb appeal’, especially since it’s some kind of pine that doubtlessly was dropping needles all of the place. But what was really amazing was the speed with which it was dispatched. In about an hour, this majestic tree went from probably 80′, to big chunks on the ground, being fed to the chipper. I do have a slightly nicer view of San Fran off in the distance (in the gaps of another tree) now, but I miss this big one that was a popular stopping point for local birds, too.

Here’s some photos of the action:

About a dozen more in my Tree removal PicasaWeb album. And here’s even a video, if you’re really into forestry-type stuff :)…

Tags: Millbrae, real-estate, tree

Lenny Kravitz just released a new album, ‘Love Revolution’, and it’s a typical Lenny album: not groundbreaking, but eminently listenable. His is probably the only music that would be classified as straight “rock” that I listen to these days, and this album doesn’t disappoint, although telling it apart from his other CDs isn’t obvious if they’re loaded in the changer.

Anyhow, I knew the album was forthcoming, not because I follow him that closely, but because I went to the Oracle OpenWorld party back in… December? It was pretty amazing actually, quite impressive, with 3 separate stages, free for conference attendees (of which I wasn’t, but my friend’s husband was and gave me his ticket), and featured the likes of Billy Joel, En Vogue, Stevie Nicks, and our man Lenny. There were some bands that would appeal to a younger demo as well, but I have to admit I must be getting close to the Oracle vendor target market in age, because a couple of the bands were too heavy metal-ish (or what passes for it these days) for me, and a couple others were just plain going on stage too late. Yes, I am coming to terms with my lameness is later life. But, I got to see Lenny anyhow, and he definitely puts on a good show. I also saw him at the Shoreline many years ago, and was impressed with the energy he put into the corporate gig, it was about at the same level as his concert. He did play a track (the title track) from the new album at the Oracle thing, and it was Zeppelin-ish Lenny goodness, so I’ve been awaiting the new album.

So I saw it at Costco on Thursday night, but for $13, which seems un-Costco-like. I figured it’d probably be on sale cheaper at Target or similar, and sure enough yesterday I was at target to buy valentine’s stuff for my kid’s playgroup, and saw it for $9.99, with a “Only at Target” sticker that said ‘Digital Extras: Video downloads include a behind-the-scenes look at the new CD PLUS 2 acoustic songs and 4 of Lenny’s classic videos. Over 30 minutes in all! Also featuring the single “I’ll be waiting’ & ‘Bring it On’. Offer valid while supplies last or through 05/05/08″. Sounds pretty good. I’m going to buy the album regardless, but a couple acoustic songs sounds good. Now, how to go about actually getting to this content? Beats me. No insert in the (hateful) thin paper packaging (I don’t mind the reduced environmental impact, but there have to be more usable designs than this!). Nothing on my receipt. Nothing on the product page on target.com. Nothing on Lenny’s site. OK, I’m stumped.

Does it not make sense to publish an URL on the sticker? Maybe that checks against my receipt that I bought it? Or put an insert in the CD itself with a special code (as Kanye West has done)? How difficult is this?

Tags: bitching, Lenny-Kravitz, Music, Target

52.8 MPG. Yep, I am enjoying this so far!
(Update: so it’s more like 42 MPG after 400 miles of driving… but still about 3X what I was getting in the M3!)

Tags: cars, Prius

I upgraded to Leopard at home, which is awesome, because it’s a really great OS. Well, so was Tiger, and to be honest there aren’t a lot of really significant improvements, but lots of little ones that are nice. Definitely the new Finder is a lot more useful (I’ve stopped using PathFinder, sorry guys) and the speed of Spotlight is much improved (making Google Desktop Search a lot less critical). But, some software isn’t compatible, as to be expected. The worst bit is that you can no longer install the older Adobe apps.

You see, I own a copy of the ‘Adobe Design Collection’, which is basically what they called Creative Suite 1 before officially rebranding it that way. I use it occasionally (Illustrator mostly, but sometimes PhotoShop too.) I’m pretty happy with the older versions of the apps in it, but after upgrading to Leopard (and getting a new Intel Mac), it wouldn’t install and I decided to flip for an upgrade to the latest version, CS3, for $400. Pretty steep given my usage pattern, but heck, it’s pretty good software and I would like to be able to use it when I want to.

Some background: the Adobe Design Collection has all the exact same software as CS1 (PhotoShop 7, Illustrator 10, InDesign 2, and Acrobat Pro 5). It cost me $900 when I bought it. Since it has the exact same software as CS1, I thought the upgrade path would be the same. However, there is apparently two big differences between the ADC and CS1: 1. I have serial numbers for each individual product, instead of just one for the suite as a whole and 2. that means I can’t upgrade as if I had CS1, even though I own licenses for all the same versions of the apps. This really sucks, and I didn’t know that, and I didn’t figure it out until I got to the step in the installer (near the very end, 40 minutes in, after it’s actually installed) that my serial number(s) wouldn’t work. Grrr. I called Adobe sales and it went something like this: Read more »

Tags: Adobe, bitching, software

This was in the display of holiday cards you could order from Costco, at my local one in South San Francisco:

Pretty funny. Most Jews aren’t that big into Kwanzaa, but hey, who am I to judge?!

Tags: Costco, Hanukkah, humor, Kwanzaa

prince.org’s uptime as of this morning: 464 days, 21:54. This is with serving millions of pageviews (and tens of thousands of emails) each month, and some ins running out of disk space at least 3 times in that period, and significant upgrades of the SSL libs, webserver, etc. Pretty impressive uptime, I think.

(btw, the mysql database hasn’t had nearly as much uptime as I’ve tweaked it lately… but still, based on the averages, I suspect it’s done over half a billion queries in this time period.)

Not bad for a creaky old RedHat version mumble-mumble server! (Let’s just say “very old”… I don’t need even more people trying old exploits against my box )