Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.
I got up a little early this morning in order to catch the Macworld keynote webcast, looked out my window, and what do you know — the snowstorm that the meteorologists have been predicting finally hit. By my estimation, there’s between half an inch and an inch in downtown Seattle right now, and it’s coming down strong.
Should make for an interesting day!
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Seattle’s library system has been in something of a state of flux ever since I moved down here. Just about the time I came down, the central public library moved into a temporary space just a couple blocks down 8th street from my apartment, across from the Seattle Convention Center. The old building was torn down, and construction began on the new library building.
As I’ve watched the new library building go up over the months, I’ve always been more or less confused by what I was seeing. Lots of diagonals, parts of the building jutting over other parts — it looked interesting, but it just didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Today, though, thanks to a pointer from mahalie, I finally have some idea at what I’ve been looking at all these months — and not only does it make sense, but I really like what it looks like the end result will be.
It turns out that the Seattle Public Library‘s Libraries for All site has an extensive collection of information on the construction of the new central library, including press releases and meeting minutes dating back to 1998 and continuing throughout the construction process, photographs of the library’s construction, and something I’d been wondering about for ages — a floor by floor breakdown of the new building.
Suddenly, it all makes sense, and where before all I’d seen was a confusing jumble of girders and construction equipment, now I can see where all this is likely to end up. According to the status report the grand opening is tentatively set for May 23, 2004 — and you can bet I’ll be there to finally see the end result.
eWeek’s Steve Gilmore just posted his round up of the Best and Worst of Messaging & Collaboration in ’03. Apple or Mac-dependent software got no less than three mentions in the “best of” category:
iSight/iChatAV — Apple finally does IP videoconferencing right. Cleverly embedded inside the Mac’s new Panther OS X operating system and its iChat instant messaging client, iChatAV leverages your AOL Buddy list for point-to-point videoconferences around the world. The secret sauce: sophisticated noise-canceling algorithms that erase distracting echoes and eliminate the need for headphones.
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Hydra — An OS X open-source project that allows networked sharing of document creation and editing. Another Mac technology that leverages the powerful Rendezvous system service, Hydra was used to great effect at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference to generate real-time transcripts of conference sessions.
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NetNewsWire — My RSS weapon of choice on my platform of choice, the Mac. Once you try it, you’ll fall in love with it. And I’ll stay married to it as long as author Brent Simmons continues to add information router features — persistent storage, embedded browser rendering, enclosures, a plug-in API for services from Technorati, search engines and rich media renderers.
The “worst of” list, while fairly solid, didn’t catch my eye quite as much until I got down to item number seven…
Microsoft firing of contract blogger — This poor soul made the mistake of posting a picture that suggested something other than an official Microsoft policy position. Someone should have fired his boss for putting the lie to the warm and cuddly notion that the “new” Microsoft is listening — watching — Big Brother style — is more like it.
I had to laugh. I’m never, ever, ever going to live this down!
Forget about all this selling your soul to the devil crap — he’s so incompetent, he couldn’t even get a wish to be “famous” right, and I ended up with “infamous” instead. Can I get a refund on this deal?
(via Scoble)
I had some errands to run this morning on my way in to work — hitting the bank, picking up a new bus pass and the like — so I ended up taking a different bus into Georgetown than usual.
As I got off the bus and started walking down the street, I heard a little commotion in one of the alleyways to my left. Looking over, I saw a young lady frantically running down the alleyway, coat open, trying to keep her footing in the fresh snow. Since Georgetown is a more industrial area, and there are occasional reports of problems in the area, this was more than enough to get my attention.
Suddenly, her pursuer rounded the corner of the building. He stepped into the alley, saw the lady, took aim…
…and a snowball went flying through the air, arcing up and then back down to explode across the windshield of a car that the lady had just ducked behind.
Laughing, she popped back up, scooped some snow off the hood of the car and hastily packed it together, sending it back towards her friend, then ducked around the front of the building, as he started running across the street to find another fresh patch of snow.
For a city that doesn’t get snow very often, a good old-fashioned snowball fight isn’t a bad way to start the day at all.
Happy New Years Eve Day, everyone. Have fun tonight with whatever festivities you may find — fireworks, friends, dancing, champagne, snowballs, or whatever you might have in store.
And save a New Year’s kiss for me (well…except for the guys, in which a hearty handshake will do just fine)!
I’ve got \$75 of gift certificates to Best Buy thanks to a promotion through work, and I need to get a new router — but I don’t know quite which one to go for. Anyone have any suggestions?
Here’s the deal. Right now I’ve got a Linksys BEFSR11 firewall/router, but I’m really not happy with it at all. Ever since I bought it a few years ago, I’ve had to constantly struggle with it occasionally locking up. It appears to still be functioning, the lights still flash as if traffic is passing through, but no data will actually move from my LAN to the ‘net at large until I reset the router by unplugging it for a few seconds. I’ve upgraded the router’s firmware a few times over the years as updates have been released, but it’s never cured the issue.
I’d avoided the hassle for the past few months by taking the router out of the network — my PC was having issues, which dropped me down to only two functioning computers, and as I’ve got two IP addresses available, that worked fine — but after spending some time resurrecting the PC yesterday, I needed to put the router back into the mix. Sure enough, not ten minutes after it was back on the network I lost my connection. Grrr.
So, I need a new router, and I don’t want another Linksys. Nor do I want a Belkin, after their little destination hijacking spam trick two months ago. I don’t need to spring for a wireless router (three desktops in my apartment, none of which have wireless access cards, and I’ve already got Ethernet cable strung around the baseboards), so that should save a few dollars.
Looking at Best Buy’s Networking section online, they seem to concentrate on products from D-Link. Anyone have any experience with their routers, good or bad?
(This post is mostly me whining. Feel free to ignore it.)
I’m so frigging tired of time and time again finally getting to a point where I feel like my finances are coming together and getting under control, only to have some catastrophe send everything spiralling downhill again. I end up in this same frustrating cycle over and over and over again, and it’s getting really old.
A few months ago, things were looking up. I had a good job, doing work I enjoyed, getting more experience under my belt, and getting a halfway decent paycheck (just a touch above $12/hr). I wasn’t out of debt — far from it — but I at least felt like I had a handle on things, and could foresee being able to pay everything off eventually.
Then I goofed up, and everything fell apart again. Suddenly unemployed, I had a month without any income, and if it hadn’t been for the kindness of friends and many strangers, I wouldn’t have been able to make rent that month. Even with rent being covered, all the other little day-to-day expenses (food, laundry, transportation, etc.) still ate away and what little savings I had, until things were looking pretty dire.
Thankfully that only went on for a month, but it dug a pretty decent hole, and now I’m facing troubles getting out of it. While I’m employed again, I’m earning about $2/hr less than I was before, and I now have more expenses (as my current employer doesn’t supply me with a bus pass as my last one did), plus I’m having to adjust from a weekly pay period to a bi-weekly pay period, which makes a huge difference in being able to plan and budget bills.
With the way pay periods since I’ve started have worked out, I had to float my rent check for December. The property management company apparently took their own sweet time putting the check through, which normally would be a good thing under the circumstances, but it ended up hitting my account at the same time some other bills did — sometime within the last two weeks.
I just deposited a $700 paycheck, and got my balance back as $175, indicating that I was around $500 overdrawn until my check went in — and another $650 in rent is due in about a week, with my next paycheck not appearing for another two weeks. ARGH!
Gah. It’s just frustrating. I’ll make it through, though it’ll probably be with a few bounced check fees here and there, and hopefully should at least be caught up to paycheck-to-paycheck living (rather than last-paycheck-to-last-paycheck living) within the next couple of months. I just hate being in the situation I’m in now.
Anyway. Just had to bitch and moan for a few minutes. Sorry ’bout that.
Nothing to see here…move along…
The real miracles of Christmas, according to me:
Miracle One: In thirty years of Christmas seasons, to the best of my knowledge, I have never seen either It’s A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story. Never. Not once. I haven’t gone out of my way to avoid seeing them, but I certainly haven’t gone out of my way to attempt to see them, either. For one reason or another, it just hasn’t happened.
Miracle Two: That despite having no less than three different versions of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” programmed into the in-store Muzak at work, resulting in my having to listen to that insipid song no less than 240 times over the past month (three times in a two-hour repeating block of music over eight hours, twelve times a day, 40 times a week, 240 times since Thanksgiving), not to mention being treated to innumerable different versions of every other Christmas song ever recorded every time I stepped out of the house since Thanksgiving, I still managed not to devolve into a gibbering psychopath and start randomly destroying speakers, PA systems, stereos, and random carolers whenever I passed them.
It was really, really, really tempting, though.
It’s been a nice Christmas holiday this year. Due to financial difficulties, I wasn’t able to head up to Anchorage to be with my family for Christmas, so I ended up spending Christmas on my own for the first time in my life. While I missed being able to see family, all in all, it really wasn’t such a bad thing — there will be plenty of other chances for me to head back up to Alaska in the future (possibly even a few that aren’t in the dead of winter!), and it gave me a few days of just “me time” to kick back and relax without having to deal with the rigors of travel.
I’d originally thought I was going to work on Christmas Eve day, but things were slow enough at work that I ended up getting the day off after all. A nice surprise, though if I’d known earlier, it might have made the trip to Anchorage more likely, so there was a slight element of frustration, too. However, not being one to complain about an unexpected day off, I spent most of the day just relaxing at home, with a few hours of wandering around downtown Seattle watching all the last-minute holiday shoppers hurry from store to store.
On the way back home from my wander, I decided that I might as well do what I could to celebrate the Christmas holiday in my own particular style — and ducked into the theater to see Bad Santa. What a wonderfully horrid little movie! The entire thing is very, very wrong, and very, very funny. Definitely not a movie for everyone, but if you’re into black comedy and don’t mind a film taking quite a few outrageous shots at the Christmas season, it’s worth checking out.
After a bit more time goofing off at home, I headed up the hill that evening for Christmas Eve at the Vogue. What better way to spend Christmas Eve than at a goth club with a lot of people dressed in black and listening to dark music, right? ;) Hey, it works for me — especially as there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun with the night, and among the songs played at the club that night were a few of the songs from the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack.
Today’s been another day of nothing. A little dinking around on the ‘puter, a little reading and zoning out, and seeing Return of the King for the second time. My only frustration was that I’d intended on calling home to wish Mom, Dad and Kevin a merry Christmas — but I don’t have long distance, and I discovered today that my phone card had expired a couple of months ago. Of course, this being Christmas day, I don’t know of any open stores close to me where I could pick up a new phone card, so I may have to take care of that sometime in the next couple days and call them this weekend instead. Hopefully they’ll understand!
That’s really about it — short and sweet. Merry Christmas (or Hanukkah, or Yuletide, or whatever celebration you might be partaking in these days) everyone!
…you know it’s been coming down pretty heavily. Just another reason why I’m glad I left Alaska!
All over town, people dug out Monday morning, moving 7 to 11 inches of new snow that had fallen since Sunday night. It was the sixth day in a row with significant snow, amounting to about 2 feet since Dec. 17 and more than 20 inches since Friday.
Sunday’s snowfall set a record of 5.3 inches — measured near the airport — for Dec. 21. The old record was 3.1 inches, set in 1954.
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City crews had been working 24 hours a day with 58 graders, blowers and sanders since 4 a.m. Friday, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich said Monday. Even without more snow, it would take more than a week to catch up.
(via Dad)