Brooklynonnolly.

Prospect Heights, how do I love thee? erm, Crown Heights, how do I love thee, erm, Prospect...

2009-08-10T20:11:00.003-04:00

So I'm not sure where I live... is it Prospect Heights? Crown Heights? Near Bed Stuy? Either way I love this goddamned neighborhood... My lease is up in 2 months but I'm pretty sure I refuse to move more than 4 blocks away in any direction. I've opened up my twitter (http://twitter.com/johnconnolly) and facebook (http://facebook.com/jeconnolly).

SRSLY

2009-02-19T14:05:00.002-05:00

Tweeting has replaced my ability to blog. If I'm microblogging, who cares about macroblogging? (That's how I segway into a macroblog post).

Things are different. Have I mentioned that I moved? Oh yes, I did. Have I mentioned that I'm in Barcelona for the MobileWorldCongress.com ? No. I'm here for work and I've seen some really rad stuff. TI, Nokia, Palm all have some really cool devices coming out. I got a chance to see some of them and I'm really psyched about linux and mobile computing, despite the economy. I got a chance to spread the word about BUG, but little chance to see the rest of this awesome city. I need to return soon. I get to sheepishly practice my spanish (though it's mostly Catalan here, not Castillan) and the residents of this city wink and placate my broken Castillan. I wanted to rent a moped, see some sights, get around a bit but I really didn't have any time. Is there a Catalan phrase for "c'est la vie"? I'll find out next time I'm here.

See? Twitter wouldn't let me post something so longwinded.

2008-11-22T17:34:00.001-05:00

So hungry. Where did my desire to cook go?

2008-11-16T20:28:00.002-05:00

Have I mentioned that I Twitter? I do. But erm, it's closed due to recent weirdness. Have I mentioned that there's a new bloggish thing going on at work @buglabs?. I'll post there fairly frequently.

How're you? I'm mainly working now... not too much else to do in November in Brooklyn.

Maker Faire, New Apartment

2008-10-22T19:46:00.002-04:00

I had the privilege of representing Bug Labs at Make Faire Austin this past weekend. There were well over 20,000 in attendance and it was just incredible. I practically lost my voice on Saturday talking to interested people, and the feedback was excellent. I wish I had more time to see the demonstrations and booths of other makers, but we were just so busy. Of note was Sparkfun's booth adjacent to ours, which had soldering stations where people could learn to get hands-on with tech, and Mitch Altman's setup in the Maker Shed with soldering stations and a number of interesting gadgets he has created. All in all it was probably my favorite work-related event, and I hope to make it back to every one of them.

I've also moved into a new apartment, sharing it with Jeff and Ryan, an elementary school teacher and a Citigroup Operations team-leader, respectively. The place is great, spacious and well-renovated... starting to feel like home though many of my belongings are still folded or packed up in the adjacent room.

Not feeling so hot today, I think between the travel and moving up 4 flights of stairs in 50 degree weather with a t-shirt in jeans I got sick. I'm going to veg out for a little while now.

As of 10/10/2008...

2008-10-12T16:34:00.000-04:00

I'm 28. Thanks for the birthday wishes.

Babylonnolly again...

2008-10-06T18:22:00.002-04:00

I started a post that was all "Well, I'm back in Long Island again until I find a place..." but, I just found a place. Cut a check for security, first month's rent due on the 15th of October, a week from tomorrow. Thanks craigslist.

The apartment is in Prospect Heights and it's 2 blocks from beautiful giant brownstones... the kind that radiate a warm light-washed woody glow. That is to say, I'm two blocks into a not-as-nice neighborhood, but it's not bad. Rent is cheaper than before, and I'll be living with two male perfect strangers. The two of them seem nice enough and I'm sure I'll get along fine. So long as I get the bigger of the opening bedrooms. ;D

So yep, Babylon for a week, then back into Brooklyn. Catch me if you can. ;D

nuttin' muchb

2008-09-16T05:47:00.002-04:00

Rode my new bike (below) to work yesterday. My route, close enough. It felt pretty good. I love the new bike.

Not doing it today though... need to go back up to Massachusetts for work. I'll probably microblog about it.

Summer is over...

2008-09-13T14:32:00.002-04:00

so sad. Not that it feels like it today. Muggy and humid in Brooklyn.

We were supposed to do a camping trip with BUG peeps, but it looks like that's off. Unless interested parties spontaneously decide on a late september weekend. I know I'd like to go.

Looking forward to the Great Irish Fair next weekend, a trip to NYC Resistor Wednesday of next week, and a party at Ashleigh's next weekend too. I'll also be going back up to ACT Electronics this week for work.

I also had the privilege of meeting Mitch Altman this week, which was pretty rad. He invented the TV-B-Gone and has some far out ideas for tech. Pretty cool.

It looks like I'll be having a party at my place for my birthday. Laura wants to do something so it'll probably be 10/10, a Friday, or the next day. That's all for now...

Vacation remorse, the Great BUG Leap Forward

2008-08-26T08:12:00.002-04:00

I took of Monday through Wednesday of last week and I felt like I missed a lot. 3 days and the pace is incredible. The list of features to accompany the new BUG platform number too many to enumerate (awkward phrasing), but the push to get it out the door very soon is successful.

The Monday Great Leap Forward for R1.3: BUG apps ... working, Motion, LCD, and GPS modules working. Full connectivity to the SDK. Knight Rider. Hotplug working all the way up to web services. VH support in Java. [ tweaked ] on-screen keyboard. among others.

It may not seem like much, but we ported to a new linux kernel, moved to a new platform, migrated things to udev, tweaking Poky to suit our needs, and xserver/matchbox to our hardware... it's a lot.

I'm going to run some apps on the BUG today, including something for the von hippel, now accessible from Java-lang (for better or worse), maybe with a web service to set GPIO pins or something... for the GUI apps, I'm going to use fbgrab to get screenshots, and post them on the forums. exciting stuff.

2008-08-16T21:12:00.003-04:00

I'm in Long Island, visiting mama Connolly, trimming hedges, weeding gardens, repairing fences, buying power washers. It's like living in Brooklyn forces me to squeeze all suburban misery into a single day.

Tomorrow Laura is coming out and we're heading to Noyack for some sun and sea before it's time to stop wearing white pants and straw hats. I'll be taking monday and tuesday off of work to kyack around noyack bay/shelter island sound, and maybe catch some fish. What I mean is, I'll probably bring this laptop into the kyack, make laura row while I ssh -t build@darner screen -x build to check on how the build is going on darner.

I'm super happy about this upcoming release and hardware push. My code will be running in the API, some of my recipes will help build our distribution, and it's just really gratifying. That said, I'll probably not sleep from Wednesday the 20th through Thursday the 28th, trying to make sure that everything is done... speaking of which. my download of zImage-bug.bin and bug-image-production.ext3 just finished. I'm going to go give it a try.

work stuff

2008-08-11T20:02:00.002-04:00

Sweet, got some sound working at the application layer for the BUG:

http://cvs.buglabs.net/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/com.buglabs.bug.jni.audio/?root=cvs

Since phoneME personal CDC builds without access to the java.sound API, and tritonus doesn't work out of the box with phoneME, I went with a pretty crude alsa wrapper of aplay. The idea is to get a more robust audio api out after R1.3...

more later

von hippel very near...

2008-07-21T17:38:00.002-04:00

Great things coming up for BUG. wifi is almost done on the software side, von hippel on the hardware side, and we're moving out platform to openembedded/poky.

I'm happy to be working on the Java bindings for our Von Hippel module at BUG. It's one of the coolest extensions to a product I think I've ever seen, much less worked on. It's really rad.

more later.

BUG goes for OpenEmbedded/Poky

2008-07-21T15:00:00.003-04:00

So hot. Screenshots to come, but it's the bomb. It's eye-candy, it's a vibrant open source community, and it means good things for BUG.

See the post from Ken Gilmer here:

http://bugblogger.com/bug-adopts-poky-linux-155/

screenshots and video of the sexy new BUG environment coming soon.

-John

10 day recap

2008-07-16T21:31:00.005-04:00

I'm working on a few panoramas using Hugin panorama creator. I've got some good candidates for a panorama, including one from the corner of Brooklyn Bridge Park in DUMBO, and one of the new space at BUG Labs. I'll post them somewhere once I've actually stitched them together properly.

I love Brooklyn though. I had a black leather loveseat I got from my sister's boyfriend when I moved here. Laura and I have since picked up a pull-out couch in better condition, so we were looking to get rid of it. We called an unnamed and well-known non-profit and it was scheduled to be picked up for donation. The two movers get here yesterday afternoon, and after a cursory glance at the couch, mover1 proclaims it un-donatable. There's a dime-sized tear under the fold of one of the arms, and it won't pass the thorough examination to be performed by his supervisor. He's got a friend though, who, for $20 will take it off my hands. They'd be happy to move it. Mover2: "but I'll have to work late tonight!" Mover1: "We're name-of-non-profit, we do things for people. just lets do this." So I give them $20, and he gives me a tax deductible receipt. All parties happy, they depart. Bunch of hustlers though.

I went to BestBuy on Bway and Houston this morning and picked up a PCI 802.11b/g/n card because we still don't have an ISP at the office and I want to leech off an unsuspecting access point. Except I forgot that getting the drivers for Ubuntu will require googling around. chicken: meet egg. So I can't get it installed and I end up working from home most of today. I got a lot of good work done, and just now I tried to get the drivers for the PCI card. I built ndiswrapper from source, installed the CD drivers on my alternate windows partition, pulled the WN311B.inf and WN311B.sys files from windows, and installed it that way. ndiswrapper -l, modprobe ndiswrapper and voila. I have wlan0 as a NIC. so hot, and it actually works.

Laura is up at her parents for the remainder of the week and I miss her already. (aww).

Posted some pics to flickr

2008-07-05T23:16:00.001-04:00

That's my brother. Enjoy.

bugblogger

2008-07-04T08:32:00.002-04:00

So I says to Jeremy Toeman, I says wouldn't it make more sense for me to be posting about work-related questions/observations/entries on bugblogger.com? I mean, since much of my traffic here comes from fellow technologists looking for the same answers I post about looking for, wouldn't it make sense for them to be seeing this on an official BUG forum? So Jeremy says to me, he says: "yes of course. Blog away." So beginning today, I'm going to begin using BUGblogger for these types of observations. Maybe I'll crosspost here, like "oh, so I haven't updated in a while? no no, check HERE for the latest action..." that type of thing.

The rest of of Brooklynonnolly will end up looking like brooklyn-related entries: woe is the 20-something with a heavy bicycle in urban Brooklyn... woe is the consumer with a 2-DVD queue on netflix. you know, the interesting stuff.

So, tah tah for now.

More work-related stuff

2008-07-01T15:00:00.004-04:00

So I'm out of QA and into the development team at Bug Labs. This is great for me because I'm a coder at heart and the allure of BUG is the wide-openness with regard to programming... lots of stuff to do, and it's all open.

So, along those lines, I'm looking to enhance the Sound API for our BUG. The BUGbase has an onboard speaker, and we have alsa configured to handle sound at the OS level. Command-line mp3/wav playback works. I'm looking to configure this at the application layer, but JSR135, the sound API for J2ME is owned by Nokia and it's not open source (yet?). This means that the sound functionality for phoneME is, right now, limited to .au uLaw playback which is *ahem* limiting.

Ideally, I'd like a BUG user to be able to attach an mp3 as a bundle resource for their BUG app and just call the Sound service to play it back. This means I will have to be fairly sophisticated in handling sound:
1) determine the file type and encoding either at the Java or C level
2) play it back
3) synchronize access to the Sound player at the App layer.

JLayer is out because it's written for J2SE and requires classes not implemented in PhoneME Advanced, Connected Device Configuration, Personal Profile, which is the VM and API we're using on the BUG.

What I'm currently working on is a JNI implementation, where I use some of the source from aplay (part of alsa-utils), to interact with the alsa driver. The method signature should just have a URI or File parameter (the latter is easier)... and the implementation will likely have the guts of the aplay implementation.

I've already gone through the hello world for JNI, and a simple playback tutorial for building a program using the ALSA API. Now I need to combine the two and make it intuitive to the end user.

Interesting. I'll document my progress.

BTW, it seems like many more people come across this blog as a result of my posts regarding tech, coding, and BUG, so I'm going to be pretty tech-heavy from now on. On the plus-side, this means I'll post more frequently as I hit stumbling blocks.

I love working for an open-source company.

behold the power of xeyes

2008-06-16T17:28:00.002-04:00

NEVER HAVE YOU SEEN SO MUCH POWER.

Things I'm excited about... both work and non-work.

2008-06-14T07:22:00.003-04:00

Work @ Bug:
1) R1.2 release is scheduled for Monday 6/16. There is a lot of cool new functionality in the API for Accelerometer control, more sophisticated WebService handling, and exposing the OSGi back-end via web-services. There is also a kernel-update utility coming with this release... so, with the new onboard audio support, there will need to be a kernel update. But this is made fairly painless with the new tool! No serial or network/daughter card required to update the kernel.

2) We got a TI beagleboard sent to the office, and we're looking to port our software stack to it. Since we're moving from our own homebrew linux distro to OpenEmbedded/Poky (by R1.3), this should be fairly straight forward. I'm not sure exactly how valuable it will be without our module hardware support, but it would still be a fun side project.

3) Oh that reminds me, R1.3. While R1.2 isn't released yet (my fault), I still can't help but really look forward to R1.3. It's going to be a comprehensive change of platform, and this will bring many cool things. For one, the MotherBUG could just be a Qemu emulated BUG (and resistant to the physical constraints of actually having a real BUG). In addition, the Virtual BUG, against which many of our loyal BUG users have been programming for the past year or two, may become a full-fledged virtual BUG, complete with the OS backend. This would be so dope.

Non-work:

Coney Island. Period. Laura and I have been making the most of our weekends by hopping on the F train around 7:30 AM every Saturday and/or Sunday and heading to the beach for a few hours. I have to say, despite its reputation as "one of the least bucolic beaches on the planet", it's really quite relaxing. The water is clean, there are plenty of other fat pale people on the beach (so I don't feel quite so awkward), and believe it or not I have yet to hear a single gunshot ring out.

Brooklyn Flea. I look forward to it every weekend. Good times, noodle salad. Laura and I have so far bought three pieces of furniture there (for dirt cheap. An american craftsman night table for under $100, for example. go ahead google it. they're almost always 10x that amount). It's a lot of fun, and eventually I'd like to get a bike there too. mine is too heavy. Oh that reminds me, I should put it on craigslist.

more about craigslist later...

Seth Kurtzberg.

2008-06-10T12:26:00.003-04:00

A coworker at Bug Labs recently passed. It came as a complete shock to us at Bug. He was one of the smartest developers I've had the privilege of meeting and working with. He has a long list of accomplishments and his contributions to BUG are too many to enumerate here. Let me just say on my own behalf that he will be missed.

Moved in, settled in BK.

2008-05-24T13:04:00.003-04:00

So I'm moved in! I'm flying out the door to catch the tail end of Brooklyn flea. Riding my bike... I'm going to load a GPS app onto the bug first, try to get a fix, and then ride around brooklyn. I'll post the data up on GPS Visualizer and then EveryTrail. I'll be navigating by dead-reckoning, so don't make fun of my crooked route.

I'm also going to take some pictures with my loaner BUG. Those pics will go up on flickr (and maybe a few onto twitxr).

Also, you can now spy on me at work: http://motherbug1.buglabs.net/service/picture . That URL takes a picture dynamically (as you request it). There's an application I wrote for the MotherBUG that is something like crowd-security. It snaps a picture when motion is detected between the hours of 6PM and 9AM (EDT) and tweets and twitches about them.

On a totally different note.

Laura got a drastic haircut in solidarity with her mother, who has undergone chemotherapy for an advanced case of breast cancer (which is now lymphoma). Pray for the mama cubana, and tell Laura how beautiful she looks. She didn't bic it. she should have, she could be an excellent swimmer.

Here we goooo

2008-05-12T06:54:00.003-04:00

Okay so it's been a long time since I've updated. I have an excuse!

I've moved to brooklyn. The apartment is beautiful and the neighborhood is fantastic. Furniture is coming in dribs and drabs, but the place is really great. Pictures forthcoming. So yeah, this is the first time I've been on my unpacked computer in almost two weeks.

Bug Labs also sent me to JavaOne this past week, in San Francisco I've posted some pictures I've taken with the BUG on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26414842@N02/. Those are mostly from the conference and lunch/walking tour with Bug Labs WestCoast. I've got some more coming of pictures I took, thanks to Mehrshad Mansouri for the whirlwind tour of SF. I mentioned that I'd like to see more than the 8 square blocks between the Moscone Center and Hotel Whitcomb in SOMA. Mehrshad rose to the occasion and too me on a breakneck tour of the city, from wharfs to bluffs, beaches to peaks all under an hour and a half. Breakneck. Those pictures should be great, and I'll post about it when i get them.

Oh, this is my first from Brooklyn... and I should probably shower/shave and get on the F train already.

Nothing like the last minute...

2008-04-15T06:33:00.002-04:00

Just filed my federal yesterday and my state this morning. Yow. I'm getting money back though, which is nice. I barely worked in '07, while finishing school. All this talk of finances!

Between the apartment & related expenses and tax season, I'm looking at long-term savings... Roth IRA holmes. I'm definitely going to dump 5K into an IRA this year (and the maximum allowed every year). To hell with an unmatched 401k, contributions to an IRA, it's the way to go. Especially with getting in at the economic ground floor, as it were.

More later.

I so can't wait to move.

2008-04-04T05:14:00.002-04:00

View Larger Map

One way, baby.

whoa XM and sirius merging, lastfm rant, buglabs open house, minicom and runscript

2008-03-25T05:51:00.005-04:00

How is it that there will be zero competition in the satellite radio market just 6.5 years after the official launch of XM? (Sirius officially launched about 9 months later, in July 2002).

I'm glad that I cling to WNYC, WSHU, WHYY, WGBH, and WBEZ like it's the only thing out there.

I wish Audioscrobbler/LastFM would scrobble the fact that I'm listening to a WNYC stream. It will scrobble information from their streams. Maybe I'll open a ticket about it.

Oh, that reminds me:

                                                                              
                                       G UGBUG                                  
                                          UGBUGB                                
                                            GBUGBUG                             
                  G                            UGBUGBU                          
                                                 GBUGBUGB       G              G
                           BUGBUG                 GBUGBUGBU                     
                            BUGBUGBU              UGBUGBUG                      
                               GBUGBUG  G       UGBUGB                G         
           G                      UGBUGBU     UGBUGBU                     G     
                  G     GBUGB       GBUGBUGBUGBUGBU       BUGBU         G       
                      GBUGBUGBU        UGBUGBUGB       GBUGBUGBUG               
                   UGBUGBUGBUGBUGB       GBUGB       GBUGBUGBUGBUGBU            
     UGBU       BUGBUGB      UGBUGBU              UGBUGBU      GBUGBUGB         
    GBUGBUGB    GBUGB          GBUGBUGB G       UGBUGBU           UGBUGBUG      
      BUGBUGBU               G    UGBUGBU    BUGBUGB                 BUGBUGB    
      G  GBUGBUG  G                UGBUGBU   GBUGBU   G                 GBUGBUG 
    G      BUGBUGB               UGBUGBUG     GBUGBUGB                    BUGBUG
    UG       UGBUGBUG        GBUGBUGBU           UGBUGBU          BUGBUG    UGBUG
    BUGBU      GBUGBUGB     BUGBUGB G      B       GBUGBUGB     BUGBUGB     BUGBU
     BUGBUG       UGBUGBUGBUGBUGB       GBUGBUG       UGBUGBUGBUGBUGB      UGBUG
      BUGBUGB       GBUGBUGBUG        GBUGBUGBUGB       GBUGBUGBUGB       GBUGBU
         GBUGBU       BUGBUG       UGBUGBUG UGBUGBUG       UGBUGB      UGBUGBU   G
           BUGBUGB               UGBUGBU       BUGBUGB               UGBUGBU    
           G UGBUGBU          BUGBUGBU           UGBUGBUG          UGBUGB       
                BUGBUG      BUGBUGB                 BUGBUGB     BUGBUGB         
                  UGBUGBUGBUGBUGB                   G UGBUGBUGBUGBUGB           
                    GBUGBUGBUG                           BUGBUGBUGB             
         G  G         BUGBUG                          G    UGBUGB               
                                              G           G

Bug Labs is having an open-house Wednesday night from 6-8PM. Angel, Al, Brian, Matt, Alex, possibly Amie, and myself will all be fielding questions and discussing BUG at our office at 915 Broadway (between 20th and 21st), on the 11th floor suite 1109.

PS I have a really cool automation tool for reconfiguring the kernel and doing all sorts of neat things via the serial connection on BUG. using minicom and its builtin scripting utility, runscript. Maybe I'll try to whip up a demo if anyone wants to see it. All of the documentation is currently internal, but we're open source so it will find its way onto the public wiki shortly. I'm having problems with the behavior of timeouts within expect blocks though... hopefully I can work that out this morning.

oh, by the way

2008-03-22T18:08:00.004-04:00

I'm in here just about every day, all day:

irc://irc.freenode.net/buglabs

I'm jconnolly or jbug, depending on whether i'm home or at work.

PS if you don't have an IRC client and don't want to bother installing one, firefox has a good add-on called ChatZilla:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/16

for the straight to the addon xpi

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/file/23735/chatzilla-0.9.81-fx+mz+sm.xpi

Today

2008-03-22T17:52:00.003-04:00

Saturday, 3/22 is a Billy Bragg & Wilco Mermaid Avenue Volume I day. I started off with Bob Dylan's Freewheelin' and self-titled, which have a similar aesthetic but it wasn't right.

So, in the name of a Billy Bragg & Wilco day:

Lease: Signed!

2008-03-19T05:51:00.002-04:00

View Larger Map

May 1st that will be my new block. Kinda hard to see because the streetview beetle didn't swing down Windsor Pl. So here's another one of a block behind Windsor, a close lookalike.

Curse of the blog

2008-03-16T07:59:00.004-04:00

It looks like every time I write something in here about finding a nice new place in brooklyn, something awful happens. The first one got rented out from under us... the second well, got ugly and complicated when the landlord decided that no, the rent is not $1800/month. No, it is and always has been $2100/month. always has been! No, it is not a 1Br, no, it's a 2Br! that 7x10 room is large enough to fit a full, so it must be a bedroom. no, it has no door, but it is a bedroom. anyway. incredibly annoying but not annoying enough to pay a private attorney a retainer.

So, today I'm not doing anything special. I'm not going to look at any places in Brooklyn today, no sir. Nope. I'm uh, just in the neighborhood.

back, curse of the blog!

back i say!

mmm. Friday.

2008-03-14T09:48:00.002-04:00

God's airconditioner was dripping like mad this morning. sunshowers my walk from 34th & 7th to the N/R at Bway and 34th.

We're wrapping up the last round of testing for BUG. Today I get to be a star in the video version of the howto.

Keep your fingers crossed that the place in Windsor Terrace works out. That'd be the bomb-digglesworth.

Back to work. ;D

not to jinx it...

2008-03-13T07:12:00.003-04:00

but it looks like I'll be calling Windsor Terrace home May 1st. I'm submitting all of the paperwork and stupid amount of money by Monday. If I had pictures, I'd post them... actually, I have pictures of a sister-apartment. The one I'll be living in is nicer, but it's pretty similar:

anyway. I'm working like crazy lately. Things should slow down a little by next week, but for now I'm really busy.

Whoa

2008-03-02T19:55:00.012-05:00

Dude, it's been a week since my last post. I've been pretty busy, bro. </keanu reeves voice>

Work with BUG has been a lot of fun and requires some long hours lately. Everything is coming along nicely and I'm really looking forward to launch.

Friday Laura and I saw St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark) and Foreign Born at the Bowery Ballroom. The show was great. She can really tear it up on the guitar, it was pretty amazing.

Anyway, Saturday afternoon I checked out a 1BR in a nice Limestone in Kensington, around Church St. Here's a small pic of the living area:

It's pretty large, ~1000 square feet with a small eat-in kitchen, a decent renovated bathroom, a large sunny living area, a small um, throughway room, could be a study... then the bedroom which is large enough for any of my needs. also sunny. Wish I had more photos but I don't. Anyway, the realty agent tells me I should hear back soon about whether I'll get the place.

Okay, I'm off to do some more goodness. I'm trying to get iTunes to work with Crossover with a hack to get hotplug working too. Then trying to get a youtube flv video burned onto a standalone-viewable DVD. i got it to burn, but it could be that the standalone player I have now doesn't read DVD+R's, and I might have to get DVD-R's. who knows. Then I'm going to work on BUG a little from home.

Fortune Cookies

2008-02-24T10:54:00.008-05:00

The other day I heard a pretty good interview with writer Jennifer 8 Lee on All Things Considered on NPR (via WNYC). It sounds like an interesting read, and despite my stance that a cursory glance at East Asian culture/history/art is simply impossible (IMHO it's a vortex, like jazz music or the Hotel California, there ain't no coming back), I might jump in.

Also, the interview reminded me of a NSFW skit on Upright Citizens Brigade.

Let me say again:

NSFW™

Weekender

2008-02-23T13:39:00.004-05:00

It's official, I can't sleep past 7 AM. I wish I could but it just doesn't work that way.

So yesterday it snowed obviously. I feel guilty talking about the weather though. Why? Yesterday in the lobby of my office building, a 60-something yo woman came in from the cold and the security guard said to her "it is snowing isn't it?" She replied "Oh, no my dear, we don't talk about the weather! Nothing to do about the weather!" She was the best, she said "no my dear", like a relic of old new york. like an old hiberno-american audrey hepburn or something. She had moxie and spunk and a suspiciously narrow nose and a twinkle or two in her eyes. Anyway, so now I feel dumb talking about the weather. Also I remember hearing a russian phrase to the effect of "Only fools discuss the weather." ow.

So, here's a picture of snowy scenic Jamaica from the window seat of my morning train.

Anyway, I'm off shortly to go move some more crap out of my room in Stony Brook. Pray for no hernia.

OSGi and Android

2008-02-22T06:40:00.003-05:00

Oh also, before I get going this morning, here's a link to a comparison of OSGi and Android by Gabor Pescy. I'm just getting into OSGi development, and given the recent hype around Android, the comparison makes for an interesting read.

good morning, snow.

2008-02-22T06:23:00.003-05:00

We got almost 5 inches here. see:

Sorry, photo is via crappy cell phone camera and 6:24 AM light. Anyway, Radio Lab, one of my favorite WNYC programs (one of my favorite radio programs, period), has a few new shows out/coming out. They also have a damned good blog. Radio Lab is kind of WNYC's Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich's answer to Chicago's WBEZ program (syndicated by PRI) This American Life, with a pop-scientific bent. Or at least that's what it sounds like...

more later.

2008-02-21T07:25:00.002-05:00

Goodbye Fidel (no, he's not dead).

2008-02-19T06:31:00.003-05:00

Hello Raul. It's not exactly a "devil you know is better than a devil you don't know" situation. Still, could it mean a softening of relations between the US and Cuba? A Гла́сность or Перестройка for Cuba? While Raul is no laissez-faire economic liberal, I'm so cautiously hopeful for Cuba.

Why so blue panda bear?

2008-02-17T23:26:00.002-05:00

I still love it.

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

2008-02-17T10:28:00.004-05:00

Well, I finally installed Ubuntu Gutsy on my machine. I've gone through a few Linux distributions over the years, SuSE, Debian, RedHat, Mandrake, Slackware (Backtrack), Knoppix (STD and others)... I've had some installed natively, sandboxed others in VMWare... but I never really committed to using linux. I mean, all signs pointed in the direction that it was time to dump windows: I installed Cygwin, had a BackTrack live-boot USB key, used OpenOffice instead of MS, tried getting Mac OSX on my system, etc.

Ubuntu is so incredibly easy to install, as are the apps. I got the lastfm plugin working for Amarok, Eclipse all set up with the buglabs Dragonfly SDK, my windows partition all mounted with access to music, Pidgin, a gmail notifier, OpenVPN, vnc, DC++ with Wine, Azureus, network printer access... what else? I have to work on getting the iPod Touch working. I don't know, I'll have to look. The look & feel is sweet:

I <3 NY

2008-02-16T09:10:00.003-05:00

I love(d) Upright Citizens Brigade (which was canceled after like 10 episodes, but BattleBots continued for multiple seasons, and I love robotics but, I mean come on). I love improv, and I love NYC.

I also love Susan Jacoby. She was on Bill Moyers last night and I caught the last 10 minutes of it. Ms. Jacoby is charmingly frank in her assessment of American anti-intellectualism or anti-rationalism.

365 days until next Valentine's day.

2008-02-15T06:33:00.004-05:00

Thank God. Pictorial from Pew Research about American's and love:

At first I was wondering how it was possible that 56% of Men were married and only %50 of Women responded as married. Then I realized that women not only outnumber men, meaning that more women are single (with the exception of Male polygamists?), but also that women outlive men, meaning that more women are widows.

Also, roses are almost as politically awful as Sierra Leonean diamonds?

From CES 2008...

2008-02-14T08:18:00.002-05:00

Want to see what I'm working on? Short video from the Buglabs installation at the recent 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

embed>object>

From here: http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/007627.html

oh also!

2008-02-13T23:11:00.006-05:00

Both BugLabs.net and Blogger went live with OpenID functionality yesterday (coincidentally). This means if you have an AIM screen name, a livejournal account, wordpress account, technorati etc etc... you can leave comments on this blog using that information. You can also use it to sign up painlessly for a bugnet account. OpenID is fun. sort of a swiss army knife to manage all of your IDs for the thousands of things you've signed up for and forgot about these years since the internets have pushing information around the tubes. almost like a useful answer to bugmenot.

Bug, client/server apps, JavaME, RMI

2008-02-13T22:23:00.008-05:00

One of my ideas for Bug requires some computationally heavy lifting. I blogged last week about trying to find a pure-java, open source, halfway decent OCR engine and so far I've had little luck. And I'm not going to code one.

So, short of asking for the dev team to distribute their embedded linux distro with tesseract installed, I'm currently working another client/server application. Bug (client), using the camera module, will snap a shot of some text. Bug will then call a Remote Method and the server (with tesseract installed) will return an ASCII representation of the text photographed. It seems to me that RMI is a better choice than implementing an entire client/server application for something so simple programmatically. Why not let the JVM handle all the overhead? It could also be that I'm dying to write an app using RMI. could be. I could code up a client/server app from scratch without too much difficulty.

The thing is, when designing apps for VirtualBug, I have access to the entire Java API. When Bug goes live, there will be a subset of the API available for development, and I'm guessing that RMI will not be part of it. Sun does offer an RMI package for JavaME, so I could be wrong, after all it is my first week and I'm just getting my feet wet. I'm meeting with the dev team this week and I'll run it by them... if RMI won't be part of the JavaME API distributed with bug, I'm better off just hand-coding the client/server app.

I'm not really going into specifics about what the intent of the project is... suffice it to say that I'd like to convert an image of text into ASCII text, what I do with it is 80% of the fun!

Hey, fun...

2008-02-13T06:46:00.003-05:00

Just noticed a post by Brussels blogger Florian Jensen noting that in January AIM adopted XMPP (aka Jabber). I suppose that means I can go back to my AIMMotionNotifier app and tweak it a bit. I can a) make it use the open source XMPP protocol, b) add additional functionality... among other things. I'd rather not get too bogged down in IM technology, I've got better ideas for Bug, but for now it might be fun to tinker with it.

Things are going great at Bug, I couldn't be happier with my new job. The QA team I'm with is fantastic, and the development team is great. Yesterday a bunch of us went and grabbed some lunch at a local vietnamese/southeast asian place. Good stuff, and cheap!

Anyway, I'm off. umbrella: packed.

New Years Resolution #3105

2008-02-12T07:37:00.000-05:00

Memorize the solution algorithm for the standard 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube. I've been meaning to do this for a while and I just got a Rubik's cube for christmas, making it a bit more feasible to memorize the algorithm. It'd be pretty hard to memorize it using my imaginary cube.

The other day I had a ricotta pastelito (Venezuelan delicacy prepared with a tender puff pastry dough, filled with fresh ricotta cheese, topped with parmesean cheese) and it was so plainly delicious. Like a vanilla ice-cream of pastries, though less sweet and with a touch of savory. It could have been because I was famished and had about 10 minutes to eat something... but I've been craving it since. Maybe I'm pregnant. what?

Off to work. Oh, and this is too long, but a funny premise (found on fark, so it might be farked though I would think youtube's servers could handle the load):

holy freezing.

2008-02-11T06:24:00.000-05:00

10°F, windchill of -7°. Hello, first commute! I'll be standing somewhere around here at 8:30AM. In by 9:37, at 20th and Broadway by 9:55. mama cubana scarf, vmware beanie will be very necessary.

Okay, shower, shave, christmas morning anticipation. more later!

DREAMY ROOM FOR RENT

2008-02-10T11:39:00.001-05:00

http://newyork.craigslist.org/lgi/roo/569272432.html

with pics! http://newyork.craigslist.org/lgi/abo/570159874.html

anyone? anyone?

anyone?

jailbroken, jailbreaked, jailbroke, um.

2008-02-10T08:44:00.000-05:00

I got third party iPhone apps on my iPod Touch. The easy way, by going to a site that exploits a flaw in Safari. No SSHing into the iPod necessary. Now I can play games on my commute (the AI in othello is pathetic).

Now I have to dump my music back onto it because I downgraded my firmware. d'oh. Who cares, it'll take 20 minutes.

Love,
John

PS why can't I sleep late?

speaking of bugs...

2008-02-08T11:03:00.000-05:00

not for the squeamish, and yes, that is a crayfish fighting a scorpion:

Here for more. Oh, also, where's the outrage?

Isn't Russian beautiul? / Разве не русский язык kрасивий?

2008-02-08T09:27:00.000-05:00

A poem by Marina Tsvetaeva marvelling at the telegraph system... circa 1923. Isn't it just aesthetically nice, without even understanding the text? Just look at it:

Провода

Вереницею певчих свай,
Подпирающих Эмпиреи,
Посылаю тебе свой пай
Праха дольнего.
По аллее
Вздохов - проволокой к столбу -
Телеграфное: лю - ю - блю...

Умоляю... (печатный бланк
Не вместит! Проводами проще!)
Это - сваи, на них Атлант
Опустил скаковую площадь
Небожителей...
Вдоль свай
Телеграфное: про - о - щай...

Слышишь? Это последний срыв
Глотки сорванной: про - о - стите...
Это - снасти над морем нив,
Атлантический путь тихий:

Выше, выше - и сли - лись
В Ариаднино: ве - ер - нись,

Обернись!.. Даровых больниц
Заунывное: не выйду!
Это - проводами стальных
Проводов - голоса Аида

Удаляющиеся... Даль
Заклинающее: жа - аль...

Пожалейте! (В сем хоре - сей
Различаешь?) В предсмертном крике
Упирающихся страстей -
Дуновение Эвридики:

Через насыпи - и - рвы
Эвридикино: у - у - вы,

Не у-

17 марта 1923

I'll work on a translation... no promises that it will be loyal. I only took 3 semesters of Russian.

One word:

2008-02-07T22:41:00.000-05:00

YES. okay, four more. I got the job.

woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head.

2008-02-07T07:09:00.000-05:00

Of course, the one morning I'd have liked to be up early, I sleep until 7. Again, my routine is 11AM down to Prince St. 1:30 down to Fulton and Water then up to 21st and Broadway at 3PM.

Gimme blue skies, nothing but blue skies.

Wish me luck! panini?

Conan v. Stewbert.

2008-02-06T14:26:00.000-05:00

Three stars have aligned because the writers do not write. Pretty funny if you haven't seen it already.

OCR, java, python

2008-02-06T11:58:00.000-05:00

So it looks like I can't find anything decent in java or python for Optical Character Recognition. Barcodes galore, and a java wrapper for hebrew OCR, but for english I can't seem to find any. All proprietary, and jocr is jOCR but really gOCR, written in C/C++, not java, as the leading 'j' would imply. And there's no way I'm porting it to java, or even trying to get all that native C++ code into java. What a headache, I've been involved with that once before and it was laborious.

One alternative is to set up tomcat, write some JSPs to accept TIFF uploads, run Tesseract-OCR on the image, and return the ASCII. I mean, theoretically it looks possible. I've had an idea for end-user bibliophiles and OCR for a while now... it would be fun to impelement it.

Oh, and if you think my blog is too tech? See here, where the second post is titled "URL's are People Too"

Hump Day.

2008-02-06T07:30:00.000-05:00

How is it that tomorrow is jam packed with appointments, but today I have next to nothing to do? I think I'm going to work on another bug app just for fun. Most of my ideas involved some kind of Optical Character Recognition, though finding open source & free OCR software written in Java (or python) might be a bit challenging. OCR is something of a holy grail for software companies, it can be richly profitable, so much of the sophisticated software is closed or unfree. First thing to do is dig around and see what I can find.

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering where "marvelous persona" comes from, it's not that I believe I have one, God. It's from the last two words in one of many creepy scenes from Harmony Korine's Gummo:

Bruschetta

2008-02-05T19:16:00.000-05:00

I know it's a faux pas to cite wikipedia, but finally, I have an answer, it is pronounced brusˈketːa. Yes, I am one of those annoying people who attempts to pronounce foreign words with their pronunciation of origin. I don't know what possessed me to look it up just now, although I did promise a food post.

Also, since the primaries in Nevada, it bothered me how everyone on NPR and CNN pronounce it "correctly" as nɨˈvæːdə. How Michelle Obama was heckled when she pronounced it "incorrectly". It's from the spanish nevar, "to snow", and it is nəˈvɑ.də. or even neˈvɑ.də.

Does that make me linguistically conservative? It's funny to be conservative about something.

2008-02-05T14:39:00.000-05:00

Can not get Vampire Weekend out of my head. I think I'm starting to hate them. They're upbeat but without the stink of California sunshine. Something like an unsweetened iced tea for the ears.

Success!

2008-02-05T00:09:00.001-05:00

It's a good thing, even if it makes no sense without context.

Gah!

2008-02-04T15:29:00.000-05:00

just realized after a couple hours of fighting with the IDE and some work that the heaton TOC2 code is um, silly. Well, I mean, it has all the protocol stuff right, but the one method to handle IMs is well, just wrapped in a while(true) loop. So, I have to make this multithreaded. No big deal, just a little extra work. It'll be up tonight.

;D

almost done

2008-02-04T06:07:00.000-05:00

I'm almost done with the AIMMotionNotifier app I've whipped up for BugLabs... I was hoping to have it up last night but a reasonably entertaining superbowl game got in the way. Still have to fix a few more things but I think I should have it up by later this afternoon.

Two phone interviews today with two different companies, one at 1:30PM and another at noon. Neither are at the top of my list, but both pay fairly well (choice? between this:
and this: ). Face-to-face interview with a Jersey City based dot-com publishing subsidiary Friday at 1PM. I'll also be downtown on Thursday for ~~two~~ three interviews, one at 11AM and another at ~~2:30PM~~ 1:30PM, the last at 3PM. Let's get a panini or coffee after?

Obligatory Go Giants Post

2008-02-03T23:14:00.001-05:00

It was a good game though. Or, it was a good fourth quarter. That one play around 2:39, where Manning squeezed out of a 5 man sack to complete a pass to David Tyree, who caught it only with aid of his helmet and held onto it with both legs! If you didn't see the play then that sounds impossible, but it looked a little impossible too.

toc2 working!

2008-02-02T23:14:00.000-05:00

okay, well, I abandoned using jaim... most of the conventions of TOC2 are similar to TOC, but there were enough differences to make it untenable to alter all that code. After reading up a little about TOC2 and looking at a few examples, I have a small tester app that works... it logs in successfully and sends/receives messages. I don't need to flesh out all of the other AIM functionalities (buddy adding, etc). I think I'll prompt for the login/password info on the LCD screen for some extra swank, then it's just a matter of triggering the IM in the motionDetected method. and that's it! (famous last words).

I'm going to finish it tomorrow hopefully. I'm going to a small super bowl gathering but I'll try to get it done before then. I'd like to have it up by monday.

Buggin'. AIM protocols...

2008-02-02T16:15:00.000-05:00

okay, sourceforge's jaim is a dead end, I should've noticed (last version released in like '03)... the TOC protocol used is outdated, AOL stopped supporting TOC in '05. But the Oscar protocol is proprietary. I think I can use TOC2 but I'll have to do some tinkering in jaim. doowop.

Tinkertinker.

Bug App progress

2008-02-02T10:34:00.000-05:00

Well, as I said before, I got the SDK loaded and the Eclipse plugins are nice. The Hello World example is helpful.

After kicking around a few ideas with my cousin Jordan, he had an idea of doing something like moment-of-impact photography. Good idea, though it looks like the SDK right now supports only the motion-sensor functionality of the Accelerometer/Motion Sensor module.

Right now I'm toying with an AIM notification of motion with GeoLocation information sent to a predefined screen name. The jaim project on sourceforge is a good place to start....

more later...

Microsoft + Yahoo = eek.

2008-02-01T14:10:00.000-05:00

Someone at microsoft sees the writing on the adsense wall. and the bid could go hostile? 44.6 billion is a lot. I may be generalizing a bit, but it seems like microsoft is interested in things I no longer care about, like hotmail or yahoo.

Bug app

2008-02-01T11:43:00.000-05:00

I'm going back to my house tonight to work on it... No more VNCing into my home computer, and I think if I tried to install Eclipse on one of the antique machines at my parents' house it would take me a week just to load it. Anyway, I have a few ideas for what I'll do and I need to narrow it down. No, I will not enumerate them here. obvious reasons. So it looks like the most apparent idea is taken, though writing that kind of application (integrating 2+ components) is probably larger in scope than the assignment requires. I've worked with AWT before, and though I prefer Swing, I bet I could do something neat.

At least I have the SDK and a few sample apps installed on my pc at home, that way when I get back I can go through at least the hello world tutorial and the MotionDetector tutorial to get a feel for it. This weekend will require much caffeine.

Stony Brook to finally get a law program?

2008-02-01T10:24:00.000-05:00

I feel bad for those who paid a ton of money for law school at private Touro, now to have the possibility arise that, if they'd waited a year or two, they could receive the same education (or better?) for almost a third of the price.

Although, I guess when you wait a year or two, you forfeit a year or two of earnings, which I'm sure comes to more than the tuition savings. Still, ouch.

yawn, stretch.

2008-02-01T05:59:00.000-05:00

Rabit Rabit. Leap Year February. This means I get 4 years of good luck! good--I can use it. I can use some coffee too.

Home!

2008-01-31T19:42:00.000-05:00

Well, the Bug Labs interview went well. I was 12 for 16 on the bug quiz, which is a 75%.

Also, hello to BugLabs people! I was told at the interview that someone in the office came across my blog (probably via blogsearch.google.com, I was in the top 3 for searching for "Bug Labs" over the course of the last 24 hours). I noticed a few more things from the contact page! That the Wiki link went only to "http://.../wik", which was nonstandard, but both links went there, so I wasn't sure if it was a design issue or what. what else, I don't know.

Anyway, I have to design a small java application as the final part of the interview process. I plan on starting it tonight and working on it tomorrow.

Off for now... more later.

weird.

2008-01-31T11:56:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I applied for an IT position at a small (~50 employees) insurance company in NYC. I had a telephone interview and I was fairly sure that it didn't go very well... They were looking for someone with 5+ years experience, which was not mentioned in the required or preferred experience. Anyway, by the time the telephone interview was over I was convinced I did not qualify.

Just got an email 10 minutes ago and they want me. I'd be backed up by a consultant until I felt comfortable enough to take the reigns myself.

this is like, 4 for 4! okay I promise to post something later NOT related to job hunting.

2008-01-31T10:27:00.001-05:00

i need glasses. the end.

Morning observation

2008-01-31T09:23:00.000-05:00

University of Minnesota's Radio-K is pretty damned good. I came across them on winamp's shoutcast radio. I was listening to Gimme Noise (also found by shoutcast), which has a decent playlist but is only broadcast at a 96K bitrate, which... sounds like crap. So I sorted by bitrate and saw that Radio-K was broadcasting at 256K which is "indistinguishable from CD-quality." So they broadcast in the highest bitrate of all stations listed on shoutcast, but they don't stream playlist information? So I can't see what's currently playing.

I emailed WNYC about this a while ago, about their Classical Music internet-only broadcast. A few months ago, they didn't broadcast information about the current track either. Half the reason I listen to classical music is to identify the piece. Anyway, they've since changed it and include play-list information real time. They broadcast in 128K, by the way, so you're getting Black Mountain and Yeasayer in high-def on Radio-K, but Mahler and Ravel in substandard mp3 quality on WNYC. We are talking about public radio though, and as WNYC is so careful to remind you every time you stream their station, bandwidth costs money. So whaddayoususpectofthem?

oh, and

2008-01-30T22:22:00.001-05:00

this is old, but for some reason I thought of it and I thought to post it:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/08/13/070813on_audio_saunders

George Saunders, 2006 winner of the MacArthur Fellowship aka "Genius Award", one of my favorite contemporary writers, reads and discusses Isaac Babel's "You Must Know Everything". Babel is my favorite Russian short story writer. It's fantastic.

okay, goodnight.

Music, etc.

2008-01-30T21:49:00.000-05:00

Been listening to St. Vincent, Blood on the Wall, Hot Chip, and Foreign Born lately. Well, foreign born only today. I just got "On The Wing Now". I have to write about this because I'm not in stony brook and I don't have audioscrobbler/lastfm on the computer here. And, ipods don't report playlists. That'd be a pretty cool plugin though, if the ipod recorded your play history and when you plugged it in, you could scrobble it. I wonder if it exists. I've been meaning to jailbreak my iPod Touch. At any rate it feels nice to listen to newish music. Enough Nina Simone, Cat Power, Feist, Blonde Redhead. Theme? female singers. why? that's why. why do I like St. Vincent? hard to say.

Interview tomorrow at 4! Keep your fingers crossed! I'm going to be quizzed on QA, which, so far as I know, will involve some debugging utilities. I've used Eclipse's debugger and JSwat, though they say experience with Bugzilla and QATraq, which, to my understanding, are just QA project management applications. Like CVS for bug-tracking. Anyway, I don't know exactly what the quiz will entail but I hope I do all right.

Also, I've disabled search-engine cataloging of this site. Just figured I'd put that out there. The views and observations presented here are in no way representative of any organization. Okay, said it.

Consulting, etc.

2008-01-30T13:50:00.001-05:00

Just got out of a lunch with the lead recruiter for a medium-sized consulting company I'm considering working for. The lunch was great, she provided a lot of insight into what exactly my position would require, among other things. She (over)estimates that my salary could reach 100K within a year or two, based on commissions received from placed candidates. The base salary is eh, at 50K, with full tuition reimbursement being a big selling point for me... The one thing that's hard to get over is that the office location way up in Westchester. So let's see, she undershot the commute time by one half, and if I infer that she inflated my earning potential by one half, that means I could be making 75K in a year or two. Which still isn't bad. Decisions!

I left it at "I'm actively interviewing now but I'll get back to you very soon." Suggestions? I've opened commenting to all, even anonymous.

Hootie Hoooooo!

2008-01-29T22:33:00.000-05:00

Bug Labs is interested! Check them out here:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/10/smbusiness/bug_labs_ces.fsb/index.htm?postversion=2008011014

http://ces.cnet.com/best-of-ces/8301-13855_1-9845049-67.html?tag=head

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/09/1613235

They're a fun young startup and some slashdotter calls them "THE LEGO OF GADGETS!!" Can you think of a better place for me to work? Me either. The pay is good (or at least, the advertised pay is good). And it helps that they're in NYC. I'll likely be meeting with them Thursday afternoon. My dad is away this week, so let's get lunch? or after-work coffee?

whoa, pleasant and verizon in the same sentence?

2008-01-29T19:32:00.000-05:00

I actually had a pleasant verizon wireless experience today. I mean, I had to go all the way to manhattan for it, but still... I was amazed. 4:20PM, drop off phone because my screen was flashing like a strobe... take a subway trip down to 8th and back and by 5PM it was done. They replaced the phone, kept the battery and the scratched up back-cover, but still.

not bad.

smells like new car. only, it's new blog.

2008-01-29T10:16:00.001-05:00

Hi. I dumped my LJ account in favor of blogger. I don't know why really, other than that I was dissatisfied with LJ. Like there was a mass exodus and LJ is the new friendster or something.

I graduated December 16th. Finally.

I've applied to like 15 jobs in the last few weeks, most of them in the last 24 hours. No more laurel-sitting! Dice.com is the best damned career site for IT people. Anyway looking at craigslist for rooms available in Harlem/Washington Heights/Queens/Brooklyn led me to notice some things: I don't have to settle for any stupid job. I don't have to live in Long Island anymore, and that renting a room in a house/apartment shared by unknown people is kinda fun. Hell, I'm doing it now in Stony Brook. So, I have just two goals... to secure a job I'll be happy with, preferably writing neato web applications using JSPs and HTML with some Ajax thrown in for good measure. I just loved doing that stuff. Either that or bridging the hemispheres of my brain doing something technical but requiring people or sales skills. You know, demonstrate my slick amiability. I have an lunch/interview this Wednesday for a position that requires something like that... drawback: corporate is in Yorktown Heights, opposite Bear Mountain over the Hudson. Like, uncommutably far. Northwest Westchester. ech. We'll see. Keep your fingers crossed that the NYTimes will want me for a web developer position. That'd be so rad. Oh! and the other goal, well, getting off of Long Island, of course. Not necessarily geographical Long Island, but certainly out of Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Kings and Queens counties might be ok. I'd like to leave completely though.

What else. Well, on a personal level, a whole lot, but I'm not sure I'm willing to expose all that writ large. knowwhatI'msayin'? feel me? Oh that reminds me, January 30th is International Delete Your Myspace Account day. I'm so ahead of my time (erm, I still lurk).

More later!