Category: Geek

Just when I think I’ve got my blog looking the way I want it, along comes a compelling alternative: a WordPress theme that looks like “a command-line driven Commodore 64 interface”. I wonder if someone could build a Q*Bert widget to sit in the sidebar….

Excellent scene. The paper aeroplane contest was fiendishly difficult… More anon.
[Later, back home.]
The format was excellent – two series of “Ask Later” talks, each 5 minutes long with the slides set to auto-advance whether or not the speaker was ready! The topics ranged from teaching CS in prisons to IT ops with the US Marines in Al-Anbar Province, by way of such things as running your life on Outlook(!), social network tagging, bee-keeping, choosing business names, naturopathic “health hacks”, surviving Lyme disease, getting skeptical about security, hanging with the Touareg, and optimising the fuel efficiency of aero engines! The full list is here. I guess that there were about 200-250 people there: a nice crowd, all ages and quite heterogeneous.
Two things struck me. First, a lot of my friends at Amazon would enjoy this. Next time, let’s mob it. And second, if I were told that I had to do one of these talks, what subject would I choose? That’s an intriguing question….
Here’s a phone-cam picture of the paper airplane contest in full swing. The woman holding the target got hit quite a few times….
UPDATE: The crowd was larger than I thought: 351, according to the Ignite blog.. Excellent!

It’s time for another Ignite Seattle!:

Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking). The THIRD one will be held upstairs at the CHAC on Thursday, April 5th.

I don’t normally blog NSFW stuff, but this is simply too funny to suppress. And I know I’m late to the party: this stuff appeared last June – but if I missed it, perhaps you did too. I’ll put it below the fold, though.
Continue reading “Kill Dash Nine”

Here’s a Seattle museum that looks intriguing:

The Vintage Telephone Equipment Museum, now known as The Museum of Communications, is sponsored by Charles B. Hopkins Chapter 30, TelecomPioneers. We are located at 7000 East Marginal Way South, Seattle, Washington, 98108. The museum can be reached on (206) 767-3012 and is open every Tuesday from 8:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and by appointment other days.

Perhaps some of my Amazon colleagues will be up for a field trip some Tuesday lunchtime.
[Via BoingBoing.]

Where I’ll be on Tuesday evening: Ignite Seattle!

Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking). The next one will be held upstairs at the CHAC on Tuesday, February 13th. The Make Contest will begin at 6:30; the Ask Later talks will begin at 8:30.

If you’re in the neighbourhood….
UPDATE: Well, I didn’t make it after all – I got yanked into a 5:30-7:30 meeting, from which I’ve just escaped. The top priority now is food (and vino); I’ll have to defer ignition….

If you’re a Mac user, you should check out DotMatrix from b-l-a-c-k-o-p. Very cool retro graphics effects. I’ve uploaded a few funky self-portraits here; I’m going to buy a full version this weekend.

I just completed my first test of Flexcar, and I thought I’d write it up for fellow geeks. It’s a nice example of a business model that relies upon satellite data, cellular communications, and RFID technology.
At about 1 o’clock this afternoon, I decided that I ought to go out to do some shopping before Chris comes to visit. I logged in to the Flexcar website, picked my location, and saw that there was a car available all afternoon in the Uwajimaya parking lot. I selected a two hour reservation slot beginning at 2pm, and up came my reservation page:

(I’ve obliterated the sensitive bits.)
At 2:01pm I arrived at the car, an anonymous-looking grey Honda Accord with a “Flexcar” decal on the trunk. Below the windscreen on the driver’s side was a small box with three LEDs; the red LED was illuminated. I held my membership card over the box, the amber LED blinked a few times, and then the green LED came on and the car was unlocked. I got in, retrieved the car key from a holder in the glove compartment, started up and drove off.
The car was fairly clean, though a bit dusty, and the tank was full. It handled like a typical rental car, although there was more tyre noise than I was used to. In any case, traffic was light, and I reached the Whole Foods at Roosevelt Square in about 10 minutes. While I was shopping, I used the regular car key to lock and unlock the car, not the RFID card. I got my groceries, then explored the neighbourhood for a few minutes, but I didn’t want to dawdle. I realized that I’d need to get back to Uwajimaya and unload the car before 4pm.
The only problem arose when I reached Uwajimaya around 3:40pm and found another car – a humongous SUV – illegally parked in the Flexcar space. I parked in a nearby spot, then unloaded the car, and talked to the parking attendant. She arranged for the offending driver to be paged, and eventually the (presumably illiterate) bimbo owner of the SUV emerged from the store and drove off in a huff. (In the 30 seconds that it took me to start the Flexcar and drive over to the reserved space, another clueless SUV driver tried to park there, but the parking attendant told him off.) And finally I checked to make sure I had all my stuff, got out, and held my RFID card over the sensor to lock the car. By the time I got back to the apartment, the reservation history was up to date on the website.
I expect that I’ll always want to leave a margin of at least 15 minutes to allow for parking and unloading, so that realistically a 2 hour reservation is about the shortest I’ll use. That’s OK for running errands, but before I decide whether this can replace my own car, I need to try at least one extended reservation, so that I can check out refuelling and other features. The plan I signed up for includes a bundled 10 hours a month, so I need to “use it or lose it”.
The bottom line is that the system just worked. I’m a fan.
UPDATE: I mentioned satellite data communications and RFID, but not cellular; let me complete the story. There are a bunch of failure modes in this kind of system, some partial (e.g. “vehicle is not in correct location, what’s the correct – nearby – location?”), some more serious (“I’ve had an accident, and the car won’t be available for the next user”). Managing these failures in real-time is only feasible if all of the users have cellphones

The replacement batteries for my PowerBook finally showed up last Friday, which is a bit quicker than Apple promised. The instructions state that you should drain the old batteries before changing them, by (for example) playing a DVD. In my experience DVDs don’t really stretch the machine: I found a nice Java applet at the National Weather Service which did an excellent job of pegging the CPU at 100%. So I changed the batteries on Sunday, and mailed off the old ones today. (Note that you may have to take them to a Post Office in person; my company’s mailroom policy forbids the mailing of personal packages.)

The food cupboards and refrigerator are now fully stocked. Until now, they looked like what you might find in an Embassy Suites hotel during an extended business trip. I also have a fairly full selection of drinks, but I haven’t yet got somewhere to put them; none of the cupboards will accomodate a (vertical) bottle of Laphroiag, and the shelves seem to be immovable. Back to IKEA, I guess; until then, they’re cluttering up the kitchen.
This morning I removed the last of my stuff from the temporary apartment in Belltown. I spent a few minutes enjoying the glorious view from the balcony, then lugged all my bags down to the garage and departed. I still have to sort out the return of the keys, but for all practical purposes I’m out of there. It feels good.
The mountain of cardboard is substantially reduced, and there’s a good chance that it will be (temporarily) eliminated by this evening. [UPDATE: Success! See pictures.] Only temporarily, of course, because I still need to order a guest bed and some patio furniture. I’d like to think that all of the cardboard I’m disposing of will be recycled, pulped, turned back into more cardboard, and shipped out to China to help to package the interminable stream of stuff that flows east across the Pacific. For some reason, I fear I’m deluding myself.
Now for a happy ending. When I was preparing to ship my stuff from Brookline to Seattle, I spent a lot of time washing clothes. One morning, hurrying for no good reason, I mixed up my loads, and managed to dump some bleach (chlorine, not peroxide) into a machine-full of T-shirts. Most of them started out black, and wound up mottled black and rust-coloured. Among the shirts I ruined were all of my favourites from ThinkGeek, as well as a couple from J!nx. When I got here, I ordered some replacements, and they just arrived:

• “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1” (I love wearing this one. Once I was standing in line in San Jose airport, and a passer-by pointed at it and asked if that was my IP address. You could tell that he was so pleased that he’d got the terminology right. I hadn’t the heart to tell him, “Yes, this is my address. And yours. And hers. And his. And….”)
• “I’m blogging this”
• And the geek’s love poem:
  ROSES ARE #FF0000
VIOLETS ARE #0000FF
ALL MY BASE
ARE BELONG TO YOU

Equilibrium has been restored….