I hate GoDaddy

They were billing me for hosting on a domain I don’t own anymore … it’s exasperating.

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Still alive

Yep. Unlike some people, I am still alive as of this writing. Also, I finished the single-player campaign in Portal 2. The game itself felt too short, even at more than double the length of the original; I don’t think they could have made it long enough to do it justice. The ending was suitably weird, even compared to the original. I won’t link to it here due to massive spoilers (you can find it on YouTube).

Some backstory can be found in this comic about Doug Rattmann, the delusional Aperture Science engineer who survived the events surrounding GLaDOS‘ activation.

EDIT: Okay, okay. Since those last two links at Combine OverWiki also contain lots of spoilers, here is the Portal 2 ending video. But it will make absolutely no sense if you haven’t played at least through Chapter 5 of the game.

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Fan Week is coming

When I was interviewing at Amazon, my manager-to-be explained that nobody had air conditioners here in Seattle, because it was only hot enough to justify owning one for about one week during the year. Coming from Florida as he had, this was no summer at all.

The weather here did make a difference in my relocation from California. I spent my childhood in the midwest, and while I don’t miss the hot sticky summers, I liked the summer rain. I missed the change in the air, the thunder rolling across the fields, and the way everything smelled after it was over.[1]

My first Fan Week was in 2006. It was taking a long time to unpack my things, so I had the fan but not the cover. The first time I ran it, the cord from the venetian blinds got caught in the blades. Etc.

  1. Smell that? … [The] smell of spring. All green and full of possibility. — Dr. Morgenstern, “Shades Of Gray” (ER, S04E19)
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Hello world!

Just set up WordPress. Will be migrating old content from /weblog shortly.

Hold onto your butts.

UPDATE: Imported. Will fiddle with URL stuff later

mamablogga.com – The ultimate guide to migrating from blogger to wordpress

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And there you have it …

And that wraps up a whole month of blog posts. Well, I missed a few days here and there. :|

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dream

I had a hella weird dream last night

It was quite a long dream … I spent weeks in my rural hometown. In the house where I was staying there was a wasps’ nest. I told someone about a childhood experience with wasps and it occurred to me that, in a sense, they were only harmful because I’d stumbled into them.

My grandparents took out a massive loan to convert their farm into a spaceport. We had engineers inspecting everything. Later I was in another spaceport where we were trespassing (for no particularly good reason) and watching little bullets whiz around, and the thought crossed my mind that the action in Star Wars Ep IV was far less intense than in Ep III, which didn’t make sense. Note to Lucas: if you remake the second trilogy to add more action, I shall be very sad ;-)

One of our teammates had uploaded a major chunk of code into an old robot that nobody used or thought was working, and when the others went looking for the code I kept trying to tell them the data they were missing was stored in that robot, but they kept digging around anyway.

Then we were setting up engineer workstations at the spaceport, in an office that had been built around an old tree, and asked for the workers’ feedback on the setup. Some people thought they were too close to their neighbors, but others in identical arrangements thought they were too far away. We reached a compromise. The dude next to the tree wasn’t happy. :D


At some point we transitioned to another dream entirely. My relative had convinced me to follow her and her friend to a church in another town. They stopped at a restaurant and ordered these big hamburgers with massive amounts of toppings. In the local economy these cost only five dollars.

I think I ordered the same thing but I didn’t like it, too much ketchup and generally sloppy but it cost $12 for some reason. Digging through my wallet all I had was a $5 and a $7 and a $25, and a handful of ones; and as soon as I spent the $7 I knew they were going to want to know where i got it from — or rather, they’d assume I was trying to pass counterfeits. I knew they must be legit, because they were really authentic-looking and worn, and obviously I’d gotten them from somewhere myself. Oh darn.

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password for IE6 app compatibility VPC

Needed admin rights for something on the IE6 VirtualPC image and couldn’t find the password on the web. Someone somewhere will have the same question, so according to the readme for the current image, The Administrator and IETest passwords are P2ssw0rd . Natch.

p.s. Happy National Blog Posting Month. Out of a misplaced sense of journalistic integrity I am not back-dating posts to fill in the days I missed already. :P

EDIT (2011-12-22) This information is now obsolete. :-( See comments below.

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I may never get lost again

Google Maps street level views are the greatest thing since sliced bread. All I have to do is drop the little dude icon in the middle of the freeway and it shows exactly what the visual landmarks are.
Street-level view of Alaskan Way Viaduct, Seattle
Argh!! I just missed the offramp! This is like the 3rd time!!

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Not all who jump ship are rats

I just finished an informal “interview” at blist in Pioneer Square. My brain stalled out when it was my turn to answer questions, but even so, I think there’s a >25% chance of getting an offer by Christmas. Before last week I’d never heard of them, but it sounded like they were doing something interesting, which would be a welcome change.

No. What they’re doing isn’t interesting. It’s mindblowing. It does for relational databases what Scripting News and Blogger did for writing. I mean, your grandma can keep recipes in this thing.

Pointless Section

The computerized recipe file, to me, is practically the Holy Grail of usability — a marketing cliché older than the IBM PC, a diversion to distract your 1970s-vintage housewife just long enough for you to plunk down fifty grand on a box that smells like solid-state cologne and comes with 512 bytes of memory.

She tries to love the recipe software, she really does, even when that means upgrading to 16K. But after data-entering enough recipes to fill two boxes of Elephant diskettes,[1] you are both horrified to learn what happens to floppies when you decide to use a giant horseshoe magnet as a bookend.

She doesn’t even get angry. But a month passes before she forgives you for throwing out all of her cookbooks.

blist will save your marriage.

But blist is not only a really smart UI. Consumer applications for blists are also a free demo for organizations who are traditionally dependent on IT[2] to build and manage database applications for them. Need a timecard application? Drag ‘n drop. Need a gradebook for your school? Copy an existing design shared by the community. Need a warehouse management system? Tricky — you might need an analyst. This is everything Access was supposed to be.

The other end of the system is a massive-scale database fleet on a par with AWS or Google, capable of providing enterprise-class service with the same economies of scale. I’m a hippie-geeky idealist like my dad, so it pays to be skeptical, but I think these guys have the experience to pull it off. The CEO, Kevin Merritt, is a nice guy. He’s also got a track record. Even without attending the Steve Jobs School of Mass Hypnosis, he’s got me excited about this thing.

And they understand that the UI is crucial — with only a dozen or so employees, they already have a full-time UX person on staff.

I think I want this.

Elephant. Never forget.

Elephant Memory Systems logo


Footnotes

  1. Okay, sorry, Elephant wasn’t around back then. But there are plenty of other holes you could have picked at besides this one. Oh wait, it’s the only one with a footnote.[3] Never mind. As you were.
  2. It always feels weird to speak of “traditions” relating to IT.
  3. I’m not afraid to admit I was wrong.
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spam spam spam spam

You can contact me at erictrue@spazquest.org. Junk mail is accepted if the subject line is absurd enough to make me laugh.

Apparently, someone read this and took me up on the offer, because my spam has been improving of late –

  • Two Geeks are making $100,000 per year with a ROBOT
  • We congratulate! You our client!
  • If only we could vote for Ronald again
  • Work it out I did, making my little calculator run for several days from its wall charger, while it calculated some of those coefficients.
  • To: erictrue You’re a moron (Yes, I checked, it was spam :)
  • You better not call me an IDIOT or a jerk
  • To: erictrue Switzerland To Be Devoured By Black Hole
  • {spamit_subject}
  • Dear erictrue@spazquest.org June 00% 0FF

I was ready to jump at that 00% OFF promotion, but they neglected to provide a link or other contact info. Sadness.

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