|
|
|
August 9th, 2004
06:31 pm - SBC Incompetence
Aaargh! As the culmination of my fruitless efforts to get my SBC/Yahoo! DSL installed, I arrived home today to no dialtone. So far, I've wasted about four hours on the phone (5 calls) or with technicians in person (2 visits). I've been asked what operating system I run four different times (and it's never relevant, since there's no sync!).
They won't even fix the results of their incompetence with anything resembling haste. They're going to send a technician out tomorrow morning to 'fix' my line (the DSL people claim the DSL will work then too... mumble mumble brooklyn bridge)... if I'm incredibly lucky I'll have phone service back by the time I get home at work. I'm just hoping to get back to square one so I can ship their DSL crap back and get something else.
p.s. the front line people are perfectly nice and polite, but the system manages to screw you over regardless.
|
July 9th, 2004
02:36 pm - Leaving on a jet plane
Well, this is it. I'm packed, and my stuff is semi-organized to follow me in a week or so (including the motorcycle, knock on wood -- it's a long story).
I'll arrive in San Francisco almost exactly one week from my wedding time. I've been counting days with respect to those two life-changing events all week: today is W+6, G-1.
See some of you soon!
|
July 2nd, 2004
08:28 pm - In 18 hours
In 18 hours, I will be a married man. (To clarify the state change involved, I am currently a man, but unmarried).
Bogdan and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) zestyping are here, supporting me and generally being great friends and helpers. This wouldn't be half as much fun without them. Thanks for letting me borrow them!
I am unlikely to write anything here about the experience (too busy!), but based on how much fun today's rehearsal was, I hope and expect that tomorrow will be one of the greatest days of my life.
Have a great weekend, everybody. :)
|
June 30th, 2004
06:31 pm - Ups and downs on the road to CA
Ups: I have my TN! (And there was much rejoicing)
Downs: I just found out I can't import my motorcycle. :( Even though I've had it for more than a year, since I haven't reached 7500 miles, it's considered new, and therefore forbidden. Aaargh! I wasn't really in the mood to switch bikes yet, and it's frustrating to have to take a big hit on selling/re-buying.
|
June 24th, 2004
12:04 pm - moving question #3 -- cellular phone service
I'm not a big cell-phone user here in Canada. We have an analog pay-as-you-go in the car which I sometimes take on long motorcycle rides, and that's about it. However, I think trying to set up a new CA lifestyle, especially being apart from M for 3 months or so, it would be nice to have a cell with some moderate plan. (Note: couldn't care less about phone cameras or other exotica -- just looking for communications)
Do you have any advice on technologies or providers? T-Mobile GSM seems like the cheap option, and Verizon CDMA+analog seems like the best-coverage option... any opinions? Is Verizon better enough to be worth the extra money? I was thinking with mountainous motorcycle riding, the safety net of analog coverage might be nice, but then again there's the probability of 2008 analog phase-out.
I can't seem to find any plans which include Canadian long-distance, so I assume I'll have to use land-line for most contact with M and home anyway.
|
11:59 am - moving question #2 -- WHERE to live
Okay, this is the biggie. As mentioned previously, I will be working for a non-evil corporation north of the 101 in Mountain View. Friends at said corporation mostly seem to live in Mountain View, to make bicycling possible or just to avoid a long commute. M and I enjoyed our visit to Mountain View for the interview, and it seems like a pretty nice place to live (at least the residential areas farther from the highways).
However, my rental consultant (who will be taking me for a tour during my first week) is trying to sell me on a 30-40 minute commute in order to get more value for our money. I guess prices are lower in Sunnyvale or south San Jose? I'm a little confused... prices for a decent 2bdrm apartment seem within reach when I look at Craig's List (I fortunately pre-sticker-shocked myself so that I wouldn't go bananas), but it's hard for me to tell how grungy they'd be in person without looking at them.
Basically, I'd rather avoid a freeway commute if there's any way to do it... but I don't want to have to take a big step down from our pretty nice 2bdrm apartment in Canada. A garage for the motorcycle would be sweet too. Something like 40 minutes by bicycle, 25 by motorcycle avoiding freeways, and 20 by car would be perfectly reasonable.
Any thoughts? I know to avoid East Palo Alto, any other neighbourhood advice?
|
11:53 am - moving question #1 -- banking
Okay, so I'm going to have to get a US bank account when I get there, because Canadian bank accounts just don't work so well. :)
Any suggestions? Anything to avoid? I assume you just pick a big bank and get a chequing account.
Do I need to have my SSN first? It's going to be pretty annoying living for the few weeks before I get that SSN...
|
11:38 am - moving questions intro
Thank you all for your kind support! Knowing that's there are lots of smart and friendly folks out there in the Bay Area helps me feel tremendously better about this big move.
I thought I'd ask a few questions here since I know there are lots of Canadian-Californians about. If you happen to know good web resources for this stuff, they'd be welcome too... it's surprisingly hard to find decent overview information in categories that are overwhelmed with marketing.
The details: I am flying into SFO on July 10th. I'll have a rental car and temporary housing in Santa Clara for two weeks, while I look for an apartment and a car. I start work at a certain non-evil corporation in Mountain View on July 12th.
I am super-excited, obviously, yet completely stressed out by the number of things which need to be planned and executed.
Did I mention that I'm getting married on July 3rd? It's amazing what an international move can do to make your wedding seem less scary by comparison...
|
June 9th, 2004
07:06 am - coming to California
Well, it's finally decided. I am coming to Silicon Valley to "begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure."
Details to follow, but it should be within a month (modulo immigration).
|
March 1st, 2004
09:51 am - logic and theism
I had an interesting spiritual/intellectual day yesterday (Sunday). Somebody I met a while ago in an old job found me on Orkut, and I ran across some interesting links on their webpage.
In particular, one was to a particular variant of the Cosmological Argument for God. Which basically involved setting up some concept of causality, using some kind of Principle of Sufficient Reason (everything is either uncaused or other-caused, etc.), then reasoning backwards to deduce the presence of a prime cause, which is then argued to have various attributes of God.
After investigating that, I ended up running into various interesting version of the Ontological Argument (Anselms and Godel's, as described by Christopher Small). I appreciated the opportunity to learn modal logic (S4 and S5), which I hadn't really seen before. I'm becoming a bigger and bigger fan of mathematical logic the older I get.
I have major issues with these kinds of purported proofs (completely orthogonal to my personal beliefs on the existence or non-existence of deity or deities). They seem to be based on extending some supposedly common-sense concept (like cause-and-effect) into an absolute logical principle about the universe, with some arbitrarily chosen properties. When you look at the proofs, they are always heavy on axioms and light on deductions -- anytime I see 7 assumptions about the universe leading to only 3 theorems (two of which are trivial restatements of the axioms, and the third is "God necessarily exists"), I get awfully suspicious.
I need to go learn Kripke semantics to make sure my mental models correspond to the way other mathematicians are looking at these things. So far, I'm not impressed with sloppy modal logic -- either it's just an abbreviation for first-order logic with a set of 'possible universes', or it's being abused to produce spurious theorems.
Working hypothesis:
non-mathematical philosophers are to metaphysics
AS
16th-century Popes are to astronomy
|
February 19th, 2004
02:05 pm - Most desirable motorcycles of 2004
( A couple of changes to the list this year, with a surprise from BMW. )
Reality: Only a few months until it's time to take the KLR out of storage (have to wait for the snow to go first, then for spring rains to wash all the corrosive salt off the roads). It's the true dream bike, since it's mine and I can mostly afford to ride it around. :-)
|
01:57 pm - Orkut relevance?
It so happened that I got an orkut invite.
And so I have warily stepped into these potentially treacherous waters.
I am alarmed by the terms of service and the privacy policy. Orkut seems to be reserving the right to do anything whatsoever with any bits that pass through orkut. Including, of course, passing on those bits to a successor company with an even worse policy.
What are the downside risks? Some future government analysing friendship networks to compute a Sedition Quotient? An employer tracking down what I do with my spare time? An enemy launching a subtle campaign of defamation, aided by an intimate knowledge of my life and social connections? Lots of low-probability + really-bad-outcome events, which makes it hard for me to quantify the risk.
Can anybody tell me what the upside is? What are the use-cases for this kind of social networking? Aside from time-wasting and ego-gratification, I mean. (I haven't even answered this question for blogging yet, and here I am tiptoeing into the twilight zone of internet culture). Is this stuff going to be seen as a pointless fad 10 years from now? How can all this semi-broadcast internet stuff actually enhance my real life?
Any suggestions?
|
January 5th, 2004
11:05 am - commitment and joy
On December 19th, 2003, Maria and I became engaged to get married.
We're happy. :) It's been a long time coming.
Now if only we can survive wedding planning...
|
December 13th, 2003
09:58 am - irrevocable delete in the 21st century
AAARGH! I have just been bitten by the totally unnecessary evil of irrevocable deletion by default. While deleting spam in mutt, I think I may have deleted a really important e-mail. Panic sets in immediately -- how do I get it back? Of course, once you've hit the magic '$' in mutt, it's gone gone gone -- the mailbox is overwritten on disk. I'm not about to dig out filesystem forensic tools on the off chance the old blocks are around; in this case, I know what I think I may have deleted, so I've gotten in touch with the hypothetical sender.
But it makes me crazy: it's the 21st century for goodness sakes, we've been creating user interfaces for a long time, and still a large fraction of software gets deletion wrong!
Really wrong: no trash folder, deletion is immediate and irrevocable (UNIX rm, mutt, etc.)
Still wrong: trash folder requiring manual and all-or-nothing emptying (Mac and Windows trash bins, most mail programs, extra points for original Mac trash which looked like it was about to explode if you put anything into it, encouraging early emptying)
Acceptable: trash folder with timed deletion, no other smarts
Best (that I can think of): trash folder with policy options, optional review before deletion, optional timed deletion, optional delayed deletion until necessary for performance / storage containts
I think eventually we're going to have to leave behind the uniform semantics which says 'well, everything is a file, so you use rm to delete everything' and demands least-common-denominator approach (ie you wouldn't want to move a 1 gig temporary file to a trash folder, so nothing can be moved to a temporary folder). I will happily use different commands in 'sysadmin' mode than in 'user' mode in return for more error-tolerance in user mode. A letter that I just wrote to somebody really is a different kind of object from some arbitrary file used internally to the implementation of the application I used, but operating systems treat them identically. We have the cycles and storage to burn on being user-friendly, let's use them!
I find it mindboggling that nobody in systems research seems to be tackling the big final frontier of usability: making the entire system tolerant to user mistakes. Come on folks, it wouldn't be that hard to build a system from the ground up where *everything* is undoable, and the history of the users actions is reified. Why can't I have a computer system with EROS-like reliability and near-complete recoverability from user error? It's not that hard, and it would be a great way to get a genuine, obvious competitive advantage in user experience over extant systems.
End of rant.
Update: turns out it was a false alarm, but I'm good and spooked now and I'm looking for a solution. There's a patch for mutt, but I like keeping things simple and using debian packages. Maybe I should move to another mail client?
|
December 3rd, 2003
08:19 am - time-wasting again -- these things are addictive, aren't they?
you are magenta
#FF00FF |
Your dominant hues are red and blue. You're confident and like showing people new ideas. You play well with others and can be very influential if you want to be.
Your saturation level is very high - you are all about getting things done. The world may think you work too hard but you have a lot to show for it, and it keeps you going. You shouldn't be afraid to lead people, because if you're doing it, it'll be done right.
Your outlook on life is very bright. You are sunny and optimistic about life and others find it very encouraging, but remember to tone it down if you sense irritation.
| | the spacefem.com html color quiz |
|
November 23rd, 2003
04:45 pm - bath and banality
I've decided to sound the depths of blog banality early on, in the hopes of rising above them later.
I just installed a new shower curtain liner, happily. It's clear, heavy-duty vinyl, branded "togo" (with macrons over the 'o's, any idea how to unicode that?), I think we got it at the Bay.
Previously we'd had a stint with a far-too-light-and-flimsy opaque white liner from the dollar store -- bad idea. It seems that weak magnets are not the solution to keeping the liner from billowing -- weight is.
Parenthetically, it's unfortunate that I can't seem to put in proper &em; dash entities.
|
November 20th, 2003
10:02 am - back to the grind
Ack! Back at work, slogging through the last testing before release. I really should have taken Monday off when I got back from California; travel is so garfling.
The inability to use images online is really annoying -- should I just succumb and get a digital camera? Or should I shore up my investment in film technology with a scanner?
I find myself wishing I hadn't spent so much money last year on a film SLR system... I thought I was being canny not rushing into digital but now it's just a drag on my ability to end up where I want to be (I hate to waste that investment!).
|
November 18th, 2003
08:18 am - is this thing on?
hello, hello, can anybody hear me?
Yes, it's true. I've succumbed to temptation. If no less a luminary than Ping is blogging, then I should give it a whirl too.
|
|
|
