Mark Atwood

I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Kirkland, while my car gets its 60K service, plus Burning Man prep, plus getting a trailer hitch installed (also for Burning Man). It's going to take all day. Fortunately, this Starbucks isn't too noisy, has good wi-fi, and the seats are comfy.

David Friedman's novel Harald just came out as a free ebook. I love how the Baen Free Library has "send to my kindle" as a pushbutton option.

Also, I've been reading Cory Doctorow's Makers, serialized over on Tor Books blog here. I've never really gotten drawn in into any of Cory's previous novels (stalled out on both Down and Out and Little Brother), but this one is working for me.

I'm annoyed that neither Last.fm or Pandora do Portable Contacts / Google Contacts / Facebook Connect / etc for "find your friends". It's only a very very mild annoyance, since I don't actually use Last.fm much, but it sent me an email today, which reminded me that I had an account there. But if you care to link up to me there, I'm at http://www.last.fm/user/PegasusFallen and on Pandora at http://www.pandora.com/people/me22893

A related annoyance is that MySpace's "find my friends" still uses the "3rd party password" anti-pattern when pulling from Google Contacts, instead of using PoCo. IMO, Google and Yahoo should start blacklisting the IPs of the sites that still do that, just to kick them over to using PoCo, and stop teaching people that it's okay to give every site that asks for it their webmail password.

Speaking of which, I showed a friend of mine today that webmail is not as apparently anonymous as some people think. All the big webmail services insert a Received header that contains the IP address of the browser the email was sent from.

I am amused and glad to see that free public performances of the "Taming the Shrew" are being performed in Fremont, using the Troll as an ersatz stage.

I was sad to learn that Circus Contraption is closing up shop.

Why am I awake at 3 in the morning? The IM roster mocks me, as I look for someone to chat with. Away statuses are not to be trusted.

Amazon MP3 is a dangerous thing to have a few clicks away, to someone of a completionist bent. As I buy music from them, I mentally add features to the site that would encourage me to buy more. I wonder if I can make this skill generic. And would I want to? Thinking I might have a skill at commerce web site design with an eye towards optimizing it for increasing sales is a challenge to my identity...

Why are most online performances of electric string marred with an electronic percussion beat? The metronome is a teaching aid, not an instrument.

I've not posted much, recently. Not tech, nor personal musics, or even my journal. My life continues, likely to again become more public.

I just activated my eTrade RSA token. I now have 3 of the things to keep track of. That one, a Verisign PIP device that secures my paypal and ebay accounts, and a "Secure Computing Safeword(tm) Platinum" that secures the Sun VPN. They all basically do the same thing, generating a One Time Password based on a clock and a (presumably securely stored) key. Of the 3 designs, I approve the most of the PIP. It's exceptionally cheap to manufacture, the math of the resync trick allows it to not require a super-accurate local clock, and is very light. The Safeword is the worst, being big and heavy, and provably broken.

I went to Sierra's party on Saturday night. She was so anxious that it would turn out poorly or poorly attended. And yet it went great, and many interesting people came. I got more than a little overstimulated, and spent some time just sitting in the corner contemplating the flowery fractal artwork that she had painted on her ceiling.

Some of the people I know write the most amazingly introspective and philosophical articles. Finding a series of such articles is a joy, and will eat hours of time.

Camp Pi Shade Structure, Test 2 from EntropyWorks on Vimeo.

Sunday yesterday, Brian, Yazz, Amy, Christine, and I all hauled the expanded and modified shade structure over to Volunteer Park and did another practice build. I worked out much better this time.

Brian and I went to Volunteer Park today to do a practice build of our shade structure. There were lots of lessons learned. We will try again next week.

I kind of expect higher standards for the news articles run by NPR.

A number of people I follow on Twitter are now retweeting #iranelection stuff.

And while it's important and interesting and all that, I am not interested in realtime interruption for it, and the duplication as multiple people retweet the same stuff is annoying.

Rose kept turning up, but she was always in a hurry going someplace else

I was climbing down a flight of stairs while thinking "if this was a dream, i would be losing track of weight, and would just float down there, that would make this so much easier"

there was an old ruined bank building where my family used to go to church back in NC, but a organic food co-op had been built next to it

i was in a toystore looking at a book and this big beefy guy comes right up, starts talking about how neat the book looked, and started trying to pull it from my hands so he could see it, and then he looked really embarrassed, muttered an apology, and rushed off

there were a couple of people, women, who i knew i knew, but on waking, i cant remember who they are, that i was going someplace to meet

i was changing clothes in a back room, and a bunch of people come in just as im nude and about to start to redress, and i was a bit annoyed at them

Most of the time, I was wearing my heavy duster and a heavy wool blanket over it as well, and I could always feel the weight of it, and it rubbing against sensitive and touch hungry skin

Walked into a room, but couldnt at first see the person in it because she was wearing all bright red, with touches of white. She looked great in it, once I was able to see her.

Adrienne has dressed up as an old-school school teacher for a drama class presentation as part of her ASL courses. Thus, the hairspray based beehive hairdo.

While I was in Hawaii, I was reading about and practicing meditation.

One of the texts described a technique about attachment.

When you have something you like very much, be it an item, an experience, or a relationship, you should always already remember that it is already broken, lost, ended, or over. So that when it does become so, well, it always was so in your mind.

This seems sad to me, especially about relationships.

Even though it was expressed as "then you will have all the more joy when its there, because it is then a double gift".

Such a lack of attachment, especially in relationships, seems beside the point of a relationship. Unless it's one of just pure mutual use of each other.

It turns being with someone into little more than a longer term form of being in a group line or country dance: "Move to your next partner in the circle, take her hands, and do the steps again."


Am I just being obstinent, "unenlightened", or just entirely missing the point?

I remember seeing this ad while I was in SF for JavaOne last week.

I am walking down to 6th & Pine to watch Up

Last Saturday, Tigris and I went to Buddy's Birthday Party. He is a local personality and friend of hers. I think I recall that I almost met him the last time I was here, but that it didn't work out. The party was fun, especially after people started setting fire to grapes in the microwave oven. The house was big and lovely. It surrounded an open courtyard of a zen garden, such that the house's inner courtyard walls could be rolled open, a common design for nice houses here. The was a large collection of tuned bells and gongs and xylophones, all of various asian styles, that the guests had much fun playing with.

I met a lovely japanese lady named Momo, I should find out what her "proper" given name is. She and I chatted a fair amount, and set up to go hiking the next day.



The next morning, she picked me up from my cafe in her little VW bug, and we drove east, to and past Hawaii Kai, along the Kalanianaole Hwy.. I had done that same drive last time, but that time it was pitch black and kind of scary, being a poorly marked windy road next to the crashing surf. This time was very different, the day was blazingly bright, and the views of the ocean, of the mountains, and of the rich neighborhoods of Hawaii Kai were astounding. We stopped at Kapu' Head, and walked over to Pele's Chair. That was a fun scramble. I climbed up to the base of the chair, about a 10.3. If I had brought my shoes, I probably could have climbed to the top of the formation (if I had dared do it without a rope).

Then we hiked up the Makapu'u Lighthouse Trail. The main trail is a gentle smooth paved path. Which we didn't use much of. Instead we would often go off the main trail, and hike the actual ridgeline. Much more interesting, much more challenging. A couple of times I found myself scrambling and bouldering, instead of just hiking. This may have been unwise, since there were several places where a slipped hand or foot would have sent me bouncing down a steep slope of hundreds of feet of rough volcanic stones, and I would have woken up in an ICU, if ever. But still, it was exciting and I felt very alive.

We reached the pillboxes at the top of the ridge, then hiked down to the top of the "official trail", and then headed back.

Looking down over the edge, I could see some tide pools and a few blowholes. We took a detour, and scrambled down the 45 degree plus face. Standing over the blowholes was amazing, many hundreds of cubic feet of air pushed and pulled though holes in the rock by the surf. And the tidepools were full of brightly colored fish and other sealife. I finally got to see for real what big store aquariums are trying to fake. Then climb and scramble back up the face to the trail. Wow, if I do that every day, I would have the build of the local boys.

Then we hiked back down to the car, then drove west back to Honolulu, stopping for some raman, where I got complemented for my chopstick skills.


That evening, Tigris and I dressed up and dressed down, and headed out to a party being hosted by her friend Amber Ricci. Again, a bunch of interesting people, swimming in the pool, potluck food, and social games. The evening ended on a slightly sour note, in that someone accidently took Tigris's bag with her when they left early, taking her car keys, wallet, house keys, and street-safe clothing. Many messages were left with the early leavers, and then someone gave us a ride back home. From there, we broke into Tigris's house</font>, and then went to sleep, hoping that her stuff would turn up the next day.



The next Monday, Memorial Day, after working in the morning at "my" cafe (disturbed only a little by the sounds of the overflying military jets playing their part in the day's celebration), I walked down to Waikiki, and had lunch with Momo at Lulu's Restaurant. It was interesting to see how the city is knitting together in my head, from the time I've been here this trip, and memories of the last trip.

Tigris's stuff did turn up, and she was able to hitch a ride with her friend Mark Wood back to Amber's to get her car.

That evening, her neighbors invited us out to join their communal grill. The affordable neighborhoods here smell like a meat rosteria every evening, as people come out, and communially grill and socialize. I could follow snippets of the conversation around me, depending on how much Hawaiian and how much Pidgen that people were speaking.

Then later that evening, a bunch of people came over for a "Lafayette Morehouse 'Mark Group'" evening. This is something that I did last time, and enjoyed, even though it's a bit out of my standard comfort zone. Basically it's a set of communication exercise "games", teaching and exercising interpersonal communication skills. Most of the people there remembered me from last time, and some of the questions and interactions were about that, and about the time between, which was a bit draining. And then critique of my "interested question" engagement ability was pointed, but also useful. They are right, it's a skill I need to develop, to communicate and learn by asking interested questions, instead of just sitting back and silently listening.

It turns out that the what Tigris's neighbor does is grow bonsai banyan!

Cool.

There will be pictures.

Wanted, a LiveJournal client that can easily load and display old entries, and allow me to edit them and change the read permissions for them. Must run on the Mac.

Loading the .NET or the Air framework is not an answer.

Is there any such thing?



Or am I going to have to hack something together in elisp?

While auding and cleaning up my LJ, I found an old gym stats post from 2003 that listed my weight as 234.5. Right now I'm right over 190, and would like to lose just a touch more flab.

Flickr's EXIF metadata displayer has a field "Baby Age"..

???

I don't remember THAT from when back when I read the EXIF spec...