Wow. I just realized it's been six months since I made a diary entry. I used to do that as a kid too; I couldn't ever keep a diary going. In fact, it seems I'm a horrid flake about everything except code. "Not the kind of guy who writes letters".

Well, I really am still here...

Jake makes a few decent points about the web of trust. I didn't grant him master status on an unfounded, light-hearted whim regardless of his rampant modesty, although I must admit Jake may currently qualify as a 'lapsed-master'. He got in there and did stuff. He was his own Jake. He was creative with the knowledge he possessed. Who among the early Web snobs could forget 'Matthew and Jake's Adventures'. It was one of the first web pages I saw that had *pictures*.

So Jake, Isn't it weird that I'm talking about you as if you aren't reading this? ;-)

Anyway, Since Jake insists, I'm downgrading him to 'dimwit'. Oops, wait... where did that one go? Sigh, you seal yourself in a cave for six months and the whole world changes :-)

I see the 'old boys network' article... I'm afraid to read it becuase I knwo I'll spend the whole night responding. Of *course* anything of note is run by an 'old boys network'. Every human endeavor of more than one person is a social affair involving social webs, and those that arrive first tend to be at the core of that web. Is that *really* a surprise to anyone? The only time that's destructive is when those at the core are primarily concerned with staying at the core or abusing the position.

Jake (harrisj) is here! I've missed you jake!

(For those who don't know him, Jake was one of the world's first webmasters. He'll tell you of the stories of line-by-line HTML readers and how he used to get a message for every hit www.mit.edu took...

OK, back to what I was going to say (I've just really missed Jake).

So many months have passed since the last diary entry. "Not the kind of guys who write letters" keeps cycling in my head.

Vorbis went Beta. It goes Beta2 this weekend and hopefully 1.0 final before LinuxWorld in august. To quote jwz, "we're doomed/golden" (ask alternating hours).

[21:40:07] <cranky> xiphmont: the 128kbps sample you sent me sounds better than the sample I have with full quality at 128kbps encoded with fraunhofer's mp3enc!!

I guess it's a golden hour then.

I'm still gaining proficiency on my motorcycle, scraping floorboards on leisurely trips in the mountains, etc. Haven't dropped it yet, but I know the day is coming (hoping it to be an embarrassing 0mph in a parking lot event). Also spent weeks of brazing, cutting, wiring, customizing. BTW, the folks at Corbin saddles are a bunch of assholes. Don't buy from them unless you feel like dealing with the World's Most Abusive Customer Service. Think 'Bank of Ethel' except they yell at you alot more.

Another advantage of motorcycles has now become apparent; I no longer am limited to escaping my wife on foot ;-)

Wellp, back to work. Just found a bug in psy.c (a good thing!) that means I have to redo all the tuning for the high bitrate modes (a bad thing).

Not much to say today, I guess. Unless it's "Let the flaming begin"....

Well. The Grand Merge happened, and the bitstream format froze. It is a good thing. The libs are at 1.0. The missing features now are just that; missing features. Some moderately important (proper short packet handling, error return codes instead of just '-1', and so on) but still just.... missing features.

Oh, and tuning. There's more tuning to do. But we beat mp3 across the board now. That's what it's all about, eh? I can worry about other things for a little while before I try the Next 5 Month Plan To Improve Residue Vector Classification.

Oh, and another day without doing anything mildly embarrassing on the motorcycle. I must be improving.

Monty