Older blog entries for robey (starting at number 32)

I'd like to offer the following links as a moderate alternative to the loud left/right babbling I have to listen to all the time from many of my friends:

Salon: There is no alternative to war
Why We Must Reject the Notion That America Shares in Guilt

You may assume that I agree with the meat of these articles and that debating me on them is a waste of your time and mine.

I don't want to write anything about the WTC because I'm sick of hearing about it. It's all anyone's talked about in the past two days. I'm also sick of hearing some people get really nationalistic and haughty in reaction, and others saying the US deserves it because the US government does not always make 100% perfect decisions. You all suck, argument over.

At the end of August, I went to Washington DC to visit my friends Nathan and Rabbit, and I had a really great time. I never go clubbing out here (because I hate the people and the music), but they took me out on each of the 3 nights I was there. It wasn't so bad: I still hated the music, but Nathan and Rabbit's friends were fun so I still had a good time. One night they dressed me up in A&F clubwear and put gel in my hair just to see what I'd look like if I was an aging club kid. It wasn't very pretty. Also we went to a Popeye's and had fried chicken and biscuits and gravy!

Shows I saw recently: American Analog Set: Excellent. I recognized most of the songs they played (even though I only got into them recently, through mfleming) and they played all the songs of the new album (which I like best) that I wanted to hear, except "Aaron & Maria". They had a t-shirt stand but apparently hid it in the back in an unusual place, so I missed it. No t-shirt for Robey.

Belle & Sebastian: Not too bad. The first half of the show didn't do much for me, maybe because I was behind two very annoying fans. I think I decided that I don't like B&S fans very much and that I needed to see B&S exactly once -- these guys had taken something special & chemical before the show and were pleading with everyone around to do "funny dances" to the songs and "show love" for B&S. And they wouldn't shut up! Finally I scooted away from them and enjoyed the 2nd half much more. Having never been to the Warfield before, I didn't realize that the main floor would be intensely packed, so I tried not to let all the cramming and jostling get to me, but I realized that I really have gotten spoiled by going to mostly smaller shows, and enjoy those much more.

My ex appeared at the show unexpectedly, so I tried to deal with it. For most of the night, we seemed to be getting along just fine, and I thought things would be okay. We even talked a little bit one-on-one about new CDs and Blaxploitation movies. But then on the ride back to my car, he just snapped and started yelling. My friends called (trying to meet at a bar after the show) and I had to call back because he wouldn't stop yelling at me. We've been broken up for over 2 months -- I thought the bullshit would be over. I was kinda bummed the rest of the night. I guess with some people there is never a reconciliation (you'd think from his behavior that I dumped him instead of vice-versa) and you just have to cut them out and move on. It still makes me sad, though.

Just to end this on a positive note, our water heater broke Monday night. I went without a decent shower (except for a quickie at a friend's house yesterday night) and it looked like a new one was being installed this morning, so I'm looking forward to going home tonight and taking a nice hot shower.

So I ended up missing that Poundsign/Fairways show because I was so exhausted on that day that I took a "nap" for 4-5 hours and slept right through it. That's pretty indicative of how my month has been going so far, actually.

say2/jabber: Work has been going as well as it can, I think. We decided to try out Jabber as a potential backend to some chat stuff we've been working on, so I got to check out what I see as the only real contender to say2 so far. They have a lot working, but a lot of it seems pretty half-assed and incomplete. I was left with the feeling that I was looking at the remnants of a "commercial open-source" project in the aftermath of the boom: a lot of construction that stopped midway and hasn't really received much TLC since then. When I ran into problems trying to get my Jabber adaptor working, I wasn't able to find much of a support structure left: a public jabber-chat channel with a few silent stragglers, and some empty webpages that haven't been updated recently. I suspect that they're like Nautilus, trying to adapt to a suddenly much smaller environment.

It did give me some ideas and motivation for say2, though. That, and Scott's nagging, finally got me to start implementing the say2 equivalent of "buddy lists". I thought the concept was pretty simple, so I could hammer out an implementation in one night -- very very wrong. So far I've worked on it off and on at nights all week long, and I'm only a little over half done. The concepts turn out to be pretty straightforward, but the implementation involves a lot of corner cases and new lookup tables. I hope to have the implementation basically done within another week, and to float out a trial release of jenova for clients to try out.

plaid: Last weekend I went up to the city to see what has been my favorite band for most of the last year: Plaid. Arlo called it "the day of the ex's" because he'd been hanging out with his ex Erin all day before the show, and we went to the show with my ex Greg. I had a really bad impression of Bimbo's from the last time I'd been there (crammed full of fratboys and no beer on top, only a few bottles), but this time there were far fewer people there because the headliner band (Squarepusher) had cancelled. They still had no beer on tap, though. Arlo and Greg holed up in a corner talking through all of the opening acts, so I sat bored and annoyed until some freaks stood right in my face and I gave up and stood in the front, just in time to see Plaid set up. They were awesome! It was worth the annoyance of dealing with SF traffic and people in a way that few things could be: awesomely weird videos played to new mixes of some of their best songs, with over 1/3 of the songs being ones I hadn't heard before. If you ever get a chance, you must go see Plaid do their act.

Plaid did not do an encore. Either this is some artsy "elctronica bands do not do encores" thing, or else they weren't prepared because they expected to be opening for Squarepusher. I hope it's the latter because I can't bear to think of Plaid taking themselves too seriously or pretending to be arty.

life: I have no life. But with the roomie gone for two weeks, I've had an amazingly relaxing time. When I clean things, they stay clean. The kitchen being relatively clean actually inspired me to start trying cooking again, too. And I finally bought FFIX and started playing it obsessively (but trying to keep it down to one hour a night). I was hanging out with some hardcore stoners for a while, but I figured out that they weren't any more laid back than anyone else: if anything, they're more dramatic and mood swingy. Also Commie (my cat) has finally decided that he trusts me enough to sleep next to my head, which is weird but somehow comforting, as long as I don't suffocate.

Also I'm reading a book called Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I bought it because I'd liked a much later book by the same author, and had heard good things about this one -- I had no idea it was so controversial. The first 100-200 pages were sometimes tough to read through, because he gets distracted a lot and spins 20-page yarns about something completely unrelated before returning to the plot, but as I've kept reading, I've gotten more and more enmeshed in it. Some rudimentary web searching turned up interesting info on the book that only made me more intruiged: Apparently in 1973, the judges of the Pulitzer Prize decided that Gravity's Rainbow should win that year. But the trustees were so frightened by the prospect that they declared there would be no prize awarded that year! To me that sounds more amazing than actually winning the prize!

I suck at writing journal entries, don't I? Oh well. Simultaneously a lot and not a lot has happened since the last time I wrote anything meaningful, but I'm not sure I have the patience to describe it all.

Monday I went to the Bottom of the Hill to see Kissing Contest, a cool local indie band that seems to contain a lot of my coworkers @ Danger in it. Wasn't sure what to expect until I listened to some mp3s the day before, and then I was pretty impressed. Live, they were pretty tight, and the songs were catchy and infectious without being simple. They were the first band of 3 playing that night, and at the beginning of the set, their co-workers and ex-co-workers (from Be, I think) made up about 1/3 of the crowd. By the end of their set, it was much less -- a bunch of people were drawn in. The following band didn't quite manage to live up to their opening act.

Some overdressed guy with a blond frat haircut was doing incredibly strange gyrations across the floor while they were playing. Didn't recognize him as a Danger person, so I thought, maybe he's a Be person? He was really getting into the songs, though he seemed to not know them very well. Then he did the same thing for the next band, and I found out that nobody knows who this dude is -- just took some bad drugs before the show I guess. People were literally moving a few meters away from him to keep from being a victim of a random spasm.

Wednesday I went back to see Mark Robinson, with Calvin Johnson and Whysall Lane. Didn't recognize the last two names, but wanted to see Mark Robinson, and I was pretty sure maybe Calvin Johnson had sung along with Lush and Heavenly before. Walt allowed himself to be dragged along merely on the basis that he liked a few Unrest songs and took my word for it that Mark Robinson had been in Unrest. Well, Whysall Lane turned out to be Richard-of-Versus, with an occasional friend, doing mostly acoustic stuff. It was cool! Never thought I'd get to see Versus, or even a subset of Versus, on the east coast. Then Calvin Johnson came on, and after the first song or two, I thought, "He sounds really a lot like the guy from Beat Happening." Well I'm a dork cause it soon became obvious that yes, he was the guy from Beat Happening -- the show turns out to be a veritable all-star lineup! His set was cool, though I only recognized one song he played (a Beat Happening song, natch).

Finally, Mark Robinson. Wacky wacky guy. He did no recognizable Flin Flon songs, but did several that he claimed were from his recent solo album (or albums?!) that I'd never heard of. (I picked one up after the show but haven't listened yet.) The crowd seemed more bemused by him than adoring; even when he played "I Hate Milk" and "Isabel", most people seemed to not recognize the songs. (How exactly did they hear about him if not through Air Miami or Unrest? The crowd was not very large.) He invited Calvin Johnson up to sing "Make-Out Club", which was hilarious, because Calvin obviously didn't know many of the lyrics, but had fun making up stuff and throwing Mark off so bad that a few times he was laughing too much to track where he was in the song. Then Mark invited Richard up, and the two of them did a two-guitars/two-voices duet of "She Makes Me Shake Like A Soul Machine", a really old Unrest song that I love and never imagined I'd see live. Richard did know the words, and they both played/sang it really beautifully. Very very cool. I doubt there are many people who would've enjoyed a show like this, so I was pretty gushed out that it could even exist.

Saturday, I go back again (3rd trip in a week) to see the Fairways and Poundsign, and possibly drag some of the 3440 crowd with me too -- whee!

Here are some bands I've seen recently. Tortoise and Mogwai were both at the Fillmore, which I've started detesting mor and more: $20 ticket price, Ticketbastard instead of Ticketweb, no decent beer on tap, lots of fratboys that don't know anything about the band that's playing. Since these shows usually sell out a week or three ahead of time, I'm left wondering why drunken fratboys are paying $20 3 weeks ahead of the show, to see a band they don't know. Anyway, here's a quick synopsis:

Tortoise: I expected a bunch of older guys (i.e. my age) puttering around on instruments and maybe wanking with feedback. Instead they put on a really brilliant show, doing a lot of songs that i recognized (even though i didn't remember the song names or anything) and really just wowing me throughout. Stuff that i thought had to be studio magic on the CD, they just whipped through on stage. And they had lots of cool gadgets, like a device that looked like a harmonica with a vacuum hose attached: the dude would blow into one end, and the other end was connected to a keyboard. The end result was a very harmonica-like sound, but using a keyboard so he had lots of range. The opening bands were very techno oriented, but surprisingly good. I was really getting into the last one, "Nobukazu Takemura".

Mogwai: They're big enough to play at the Fillmore for two nights, but they seemed a little juvenile this time. I liked most of the show, but it was all stuff from CODY and Young Team (except for one song from the new album): lots of loud fuzz and noise, separated by a soft rendition of "Cody" that seemed exactly like last time. I'm all into noise, but their new album is so quiet and different that i was hoping to see more stuff like that now. Also they were intent on knocking over drumsets and amps when they left, like it was 1991 again, and they did the "we're leaving everything feedbacking" schtick when they left the stage for the last time. My ears were ringing but it didn't leave a good taste in my mouth. Honestly i don't remember much else about the show -- just lots of long drifty feedback and noise excursions. But they're no Sonic Youth.

The New Pornographers: Aside from 1-2 poppy songs, it took a while for their one CD to grow on me, so i had no expectations going in, except that it looked like they'd be fun people. They sure are. They played every song on the album (in different order) and there was only one that i didn't really enjoy when they played it (i won't tell you which) -- somehow i was really getting into songs that i only sorta liked on the album. There were even a few extra songs and covers to fill in for the fact that they basically have only one album. Neko was present (yay!) and her and Carl (the other frontman) were both very crowd-friendly and chatty. I went all fanboy and got a t-shirt and would've bought other stuff if they'd had anything to sell. The opening band was a prettboy punkish band from Berkeley, and they were pretty cool too. Greg swooned and bought their EP.

I feel that some people may be getting annoyed that i generally use this site as a journal of my own thoughts and stuff instead of a journal of my tireless efforts to advance open source software and further the Cause and the Movement. therefore i will geek out a little bit.

Say2 has finally started seeing more interest and traffic on the mailing list, and Scott wrote a good beginning of a native GTK client for it, so i'm very psyched (but now that i'm employed again, i have less time to work on it). Some interesting topics have been argued -- the current one being whether nicknames should be allowed to be in UTF8 like everything else. Users already have an ascii registered id that can be used to identify them, so the nickname becomes just a visible, er... nickname. I'm starting to be won over to the idea that these should be able to be expressed in the user's native language. I wonder if any other chat system has tried that before.

My new server machine (for lag.net) is basically up and running. Apache and CVS and all that are already on it, and a half dozen of the users have already been migrated. The main headache i forsee is moving email. When i first started wanting to host email, qmail was relatively new, and sendmail was such a pile of manure that i rushed right into qmail, with the result that i know almost nothing about maintaining a mail server that uses sendmail. And after many years of running qmail, i'm really sick of it. So the new server machine is running postfix, which i find much more to my taste. The challenge will be to move all the qmail config (mailing lists, virtual hosts, restricted smtp relaying, etc) to postfix. I think i just need to sit down on some weekend and make a day of it.

New job: Yup, after only a few weeks (and it felt like even less) I started my new job on 4 June at Danger. Of the places i interviewed, this one was my top choice, so i was pretty happy that it worked out. That's also why i haven't had a lot of time to do journal entries either. More later!

It really pisses me off when conservatives claim that the energy crisis is because of California's desire to conserve resources and not trash the environment, instead of the obvious cause: an almost religious belief that because the western world won the Cold War, extreme capitalism is the ultimate answer, and we should privatize even basic utilities like electricity.

I have yet to see a clear line of cause and effect drawn from environmentalism and conservation to massive power shortages. But I've seen several very thoughtful articles on how the rush to deregulate everything in a fit of capitalistic zeal caused the power crisis to be nearly inevitable.

Of course, it's easy for conservatives to paint broad strokes and say "since California is having trouble, it must be because of their differences, like their belief in green causes". Logic becomes irrelevant, but this is nothing new to extreme-right arguments. I'm just annoyed that they keep repeating them, hoping they'll become more convincing with every retread.

I'm not a liberal. I want lower taxes, a smaller government, and more local autonomy. But by turning the power crisis into a California vs. US fight, the east-coast government has completely alienated me. And probably most other California moderates.

Do we really need to be part of the Unites States anymore?

Wow, i just noticed that Adam got on here a month ago -- cool! (Okay, i'm slow on the uptake.) It's fun to read the journal entries of my friends and [ex]coworkers to see what their take on things is. And a lot of the Eazel people have suddenly started posting entries again, which is nice.

You'd think with all my "free time" that i'd have plenty of time to work on say2 and other projects, but the reality is that i don't. Spent a lot of time doing housework that had been put off for too long, talking to recruiters, and going to interviews. Had a few interviews so far, and one offer. Probably have to decide next week what i'm gonna do.

Stopped for coffee at the Other Office a few weeks ago with Eskil and Arlo, then we collected Ian and went to Riacce, which is always an excellent place to have great food on a beautiful patio, get progressively less sober, and empty out the contents of your wallet. Certainly can't complain, though -- because i can't think of anything else like it in the bay.

Last weekend Rupe came over, and we poked around on his car mp3 player. It seems to be more for show than for practicality: it makes a big deal out of saying things like "Car MP3 player is now online!" over the stereo, but can't do things like playlists yet, and has a very tiny drive for storing music. Rupe pulled out of his trunk the large Compaq that makes up the bulk of the system, and we debugged a bit of the python(!) code in it. He was using threads. It was the first time i'd had to think about threading problems in over a year, which made me a little sad. We went to Fry's and picked up a new 40G disk for it, but then i remembered all the phun he's going to have with a larger-than-8G disk on an old Compaq pentium 133. So he decided to put off installing it till later.

Apple held a little recruitment/reunion lunch for ex-Eazelites on Thursday. Good sandwiches, and a hefty chunk of my ex-coworkers were all there (even Eric, the magic build guy!). I talked to several managers (or were they? actually i'm not sure what they were) that were doing cool things, but i couldn't tell how serious any of them were about doing interviews or anything, so i guess we'll see.

Friday i went with some friends to the "gay day" thing at Great America (a theme park). $60?! I'm not sure i got 10 burritos worth of fun out of it, but it was nice to ride a bunch of coasters at dusk with minimal lines. Chris and i talked Walt and Andy into trying the wooden coaster, which had a very short line. That short line turned out to be because the coaster can only run every five minutes! When we finally got to ride it, we found out why. I think my internal organs are still re-adjusting to their correct positions. Afterwards i had to assure the others that most wooden coasters are actually maintained, and don't shake you like a soul machine and give you whiplash.

Still playing Myst III like i'm obsessed, but i'm getting near the end (i think) so i've been slowing down. Also finished moving the say2 development stuff over to a new machine, and started dusting off bugs and working on them. Think that's what i'll do tonight.

I've been meaning to write a new journal entry for a while now, but been kinda bummed in general so haven't felt like it. Over the past few weeks it became increasingly obvious that Eazel wasn't going to manage to pull off any of the last-minute funding attempts, and that they would have to close their doors (the euphemistic way of saying "completely run out of money"). So all work (and all pseudo-work) came to a stop, and we basically just hung out working on our resumes and stuff. I caught up with a lot of the mailing lists i'd never had time to read, and then unsubscribed from most of them.

Eskil, Arlo, Ian and I (often joined by Adam, Mike, John and some other stragglers, in varying combinations) would go across the street for coffee and sandwiches at least once a day, usually 2-3 times. I started to pick up a bad coffee habit (still coming down) and they got to know us really well. There really wasn't much else to do. Sometimes i would try to sit in my cube (actually a large 4-person cube) and work on my own projects, but when your cube is the place where everyone collects to chat and be bummed out, it's hard to concentrate.

On the Thursday before the final announcement (the 10th), Greg asked me if i wanted to skip out on work and go down to the Monterey aquarium with him and his ex-co-worker Joanne. Well, uh, sure! Not like there's much else to do! It was a lot of fun; Joanne was cool. We did it just like we were skipping out of high school: first to Krispy Kreme for donuts for breakfast, then pack up on water and drive down to Santa Cruz. Neither of them knew how long the drive would be, so i had to be the bearer of bad news (it's almost a 2-hour drive from Mountain View), or good news (the drive was beautiful), depending on how you look at it.

The aquarium was much as i remembered it, but still fun. Greg took lots of pictures, especially of the jellyfish area. One room had a gigantic tank with a hodge-podge of things, including a big sea turtle! But just like last time, the sea turtle stayed up near the top and didn't become very photogenic. We checked out a new section on the "deep sea", which was a little corny but interesting. At the entrance, a plaque announced that the exhibit was sponsored by Chevron. At the end, suddenly there was a wall of photos of gas pumps, refineries, and (inexplicably) massive freeway traffic. Captions explained that even better than sea life, the deep sea was home to... oil! Glorious oil! So you see, the captions explained, the deep sea is useful! Joanne got seriously sick then.

On the way back, we stopped at Pink Godzilla and had an early dinner of sushi. (Well, why go to Santa Cruz if you aren't going to stop for sushi?) And then back to the city to watch ER, which apparenly Joanne is very addicted to. Afterwards we caught the end of a night of drinking at the Kilowatt by a bunch of ex-co-workers, some of whom had been there since 5pm! I always seem to miss the serious drinking.

More later; this is already dauntingly long.

Seattle was fun -- hung out with Josh, Sammit, Dennis & Vicki, and Selbie (at various times and never simultaneously). Josh's apartment was a different kind of mess than usual: boxes everywhere. He claimed he'd been cleaning up a lot recently, and at first i didn't believe him, but after the first day i realized this kind of mess really was a lot cleaner than the normal kind. It was still way past the point where i would've done a panic-clean, but for some people that's not really a priority.

Greg and i arrived on Thursday night and Josh took us to a little yuppie bar with good sake and acceptable sushi. We crashed and then Friday spent most of the day finding lunch and contacting friends while Josh went to work at Avogadro (the name that constantly confuses me because of my utter devotion to advogato). Found a burrito place and got a burrito, despite my misgivings that Seattle is not known for burritos. It was extremely bland and boring until Greg showed me his discovery: they want you to put the salsa and toppings on yourself! After this revelation, the burrito was much better. Then we met up with Josh at work and Greg took a nice panorama of the Seattle skyline from their top-floor balcony.

For dinner, we met Dennis [i am forbidden to ever call him Denny again] and Vicky at a Greek place, with Sammit. The food was awesome: i got good souvlaki for the first time in probably five years. Sammit was looking a lot better than I imagined, after all his scary talk on say2 about cancer. He'd lost weight and grown a little salt-n- pepper goatee which actually made him look more cool than old.

Afterward we hung out at a cool bar called Barça which for some reason had Boddington's on tap. Talked politics and stuff for a while until our voices became hoarse, then got dragged to a bar called "Cuff" which Josh and Sammit swore up and down was not a leather bar. Inside, we found various people in leather gear, several hundred daddy bears, and a two-story tall rendition of a Tom-of-Finland style leather man. Also a couple of guys were dressed up in full football gear. Since that's not a leather bar, i wonder what the real Seattle leather bars are like.

Saturday we hung out with Selbie and went to the Seattle World's Fair fairgrounds. There was supposed to be some sort of Japanese cherry blossom festival, but all we could find was a mall that had a bad karate demonstration going on. So we popped over the Experience Music Project (EMP to those in the know) and checked out probably about 10% of it before Josh finally caught up with us (another victim of the weird cell-phone vortex over Seattle) and we talked in the bar a lot.

Even though it's very cliche, a lot of our trip to Seattle involved sitting around in various places and drinking beer or coffee. I expected the Seattle-ites to go "no! we cannot live this cliche!" but nobody did. I certainly can't complain: sitting around and drinking coffee is a great way to pass time.

That night, more bars (this time with Josh and Selbie) and then sleep and then barely catching our flight back to SFO on Sunday afternoon. The rest of the week passed in a blur, because absolutely nothing goes on at work anymore except trips to the cafe across the street, moping around, and periodic news of our attempts to get funding. I actually feel guilty when i'm doing work-related stuff (mostly patches to various python gnome modules to make them work well with reef).