beckstar’s Neighborhood

I'm over here now.

Lately I've been thinking of switching careers. I'm sick of sitting on my ass all the time doing work that, while being personally creatively stimulating, is not of much practical use to many people in the world. I'd really rather be on my feet, outside, using my hands to make something of lasting value. And I'd like to be more of a "real man" who could add a room onto his house, fix his car engine and hunt down his dinner. But I haven't really put any effort into thinking about what kind of change I could make, because, well, I'm lazy.

This afternoon I stumbled across a career quiz and thought I'd waste some time with it. So here are the top twenty recommended careers, with those I've seriously considered in bold:

1. Mover
2. Housekeeper
3. Drywaller
4. Plasterer
5. Airport Ground Crew
6. Hospital Service Worker
7. Fruit and Vegetable Grower
8. Professional Athlete
9. Animal Caretaker
10. Firefighter
11. Stock Clerk
12. Nursery / Greenhouse Grower
13. Animal Trainer
14. Ironworker
15. Flooring Installer
16. Stuntperson
17. Dancer
18. Zookeeper
19. Painter
20. Steamfitter

One of twenty. And I gave up on the dream of playing pro football when i was 18. I should just eat a gun now.

I meant to blog a little bit each day of OSCON, but I didn't get around to it after the first day. I was too busy being away from a computer, which illustrates the main difference between this year's show and the previous couple. I'm lousy at public speaking, so whenever I have to give a talk at a con, I spend the entire time stressing out about it, and usually I have to skip lots of sessions to sit in my hotel room and write the damn thing. Not having a talk this year, I was free to cruise around the talks and be relaxed and social. Made all the difference.

I looked around for talks on scaling web sites and chose to go to the YouTube one. It was interesting enough, but I didn't really learn anything I didn't already know. For instance, they found that eventually they had to partition their database and that they broke some table joins apart and re-implemented them at the application layer. This is the same story I heard from eBay and something that's been in the back of my mind for Cosmo from day one. I think probably the world of web site operators is full of little groups of people who've come to the same conclusions independently by bootstrapping themselves through months or years of booming startups. Apparently there were a couple of other talks at the show that had basically the same content, and I'm glad I only chose to go to one of them, but it's good to have that kind of volume, because maybe the next generation of developers and admins can learn something from them and go back to their job a little more prepared rather than having to figure it all out by trial and error and maybe killing their business in the process.

There were a handful of other talks I enjoyed, such as the open source voting one that I mentioned in the previous OSCON post, and several I meant to attend but didn't get around to, like the PHP 6 and Perl 6 ones. I guess I was too busy hanging out with new friends. The best moment of the show was when the OSAF and Metaweb crews wound up at the hotel bar and I preached semi-drunkenly on the merits of Atompub as a calendar server access protocol. There were many smarter people than me at the table, and none of them pointed out any particularly foolish claims, though perhaps they just didn't want to be rude. In any event, I very much enjoyed the social aspects of the convention, new to me this year, and now I'm waffling about submitting a talk next year and submitting to all that stress again.

This morning I ran the first half of the SF Marathon in 2:13:17 (a 10:10 mile pace). A year ago July I could not even run a half mile without stopping. I trained for three months, running six days a week, following a modified version of this program. Before that, I worked out with Keith and Raul at Bootcamp SF for ten months. In that same year I lost 90 pounds thanks to nutritionist Amie.

Here's a shot of me nearing the finish line. This one is just after finishing. And, for comparison, this one is from a year and a half ago, before I lost the weight. Thanks for the photos, Wayne and Heidi.

Huge thanks to everybody who supported me during the last year. It was hard on my social life, and a lot of people didn't support or respect what i was doing, but my real friends did, and I won't ever forget it.

I'm now an Abdera committer. The PMC showed suspect judgment in awarding me this honor based only on a handful of small patches I submitted for the server subproject. The first test of their trust will be the several patches queued up in my working copy that I'll commit once our Chandler Server 0.8 plans firm up. Thanks to Garrett, James and anybody else who voted for my participation. I'll try not to screw things up.

Started the day with a 6am run along the east side of the river and through quiet, extremely green neighborhoods.

Spent the morning at the keynotes, a Subversion talk, and a session on open source voting, which I find quite interesting. The voting guys are trying to put together a prototype system in six weeks before debate ends on some sort of voting machine bill in the California Assembly. I would fully have volunteered to help if I wasn't spending all of August on vacation.

Jim and I took the light rail across the river, meaning to go to Powell's, but we spent so much time finding a good place for lunch that we headed back directly so that he could hit the afternoon sessions. I was drag-assing from the run, so I went back to the hotel for some quick work and a nap.

Hooked up in the evening with Jim and the Metaweb crew for Powell's where I picked up I am Legend (must read before the movie comes out). Hit the gelateria across the street for coffee and chocolate hazelnut gelato and then met up with the gang again for dinner at Eleni's. This restaurant is unbelievably good. I had the Biftekia ("Painted Hills beef meatballs with onion, fresh oregano, mint and Italian parsley served in our special tomato sauce"), Manitaria Me Skortho ("seasonal forest mushrooms sauteed with pancetta, garlic, onion, and fresh sage, served over Orzo pasta") and for dessert a poached peach infused with port. Yes, two desserts in one night! I'd be concerned about packing weight back on if I wasn't running 25 miles in the next four days.

Picked up at the comic shop yesterday:

• Criminal #7 - part two of Brubaker and Phillips' second arc in this pitch-perfect crime series. Also features an essay by Steven Grant on Robert Altman's film adaptation of Chandler's The Long Goodbye. If you haven't read the first arc, "Coward", the collection is in stores now.
  
• Knights of the Dinner Table #128 - stories for gamers about gamers. If you've ever played D&D, this is a must-read.
• Jack of Fables #12 - begins a new arc entitled "The Bad Prince". I sense that Pris will be at least half-naked before this one's done.

Latro in the Mist

Gene Wolfe

Following up on my last post: my buddy Todd (Mr. Foxmarks) pointed out that to connect the FireWave to my receiver I just need three mini-jack-to-RCA cables. I didn't realize that back before the digital days, these inputs were how you got surround sound into the receiver. But when I looked, there they were, lonely, forlorn and a little dusty. Now I'll have something to plug into them. Whoopee! I ordered the FireWave via next-day air, so I should be watching movies off my Mini in full 6-channel glory before the week is done.

Saturday morning I was digging through the stack of Netflix DVDs on my stereo looking for something to put on while grinding hunting quests in Nagrand and found this great Coheed & Cambria concert DVD, Live at Starland Ballroom. It was sort of scratched and beat up, and the thought occurred to me that if I ripped the DVD, I could store it in my iTunes library and play it through Front Row. That would be handy.

I recalled using MacTheRipper once before, so I grabbed that again and ripped the DVD to my desktop. Super easy. Then I did a little research and found HandBrake, a tool for encoding DVDs. I used it to convert the ripped DVD to a Quicktime ready mp4, anamorphic, with AAC 5.1 surround sound. This took a few tries and some experimenting with settings based on a few threads in the HandBrake forums. The presets in 0.8.5b1 helped a lot. Now I have the movie in iTunes and can play it anytime I want without having to walk to the other end of the house where my CDs are stored (the DVD was part of a CD/DVD set) or leave the DVD lying somewhere around my stereo as I had been, letting it get abused.

I'm pretty stoked about this and am considering ripping all of my DVDs - I have a couple hundred. The biggest issue with that is adding storage capacity. My iTunes library is using about half of a 200GB hard drive, and I'd need at least that much more space for all of my DVDs, not to mention room to grow. I'm not sure how well iTunes handles spreading library media across drives - when i add a track or movie to iTunes, how does it choose which disk to copy to? Something to look into. Then again I need to back up all that media, and the theater Mini's disk, and my laptop's disk, so it's starting to look like I need 700GB or more in total. I wonder if single disks are approaching 400GB yet.

Then of course, there's the question of whether or not to replace the Mini with an Apple TV. Right now I can download audio, movies, YouTube videos and rip CDs and DVDs directly on the Mini and write them to locally attached storage with several hundred gigs of space. If i used an Apple TV, I'd have to download and rip on my laptop, copy them to network storage (USB 2.0 drives hanging off my the Airport Extreme), and then have the Apple TV copy the 160GB worth that I deem most likely to watch back across the network (or I could have the Apple TV stream from network storage, but I'm skeptical of the WoW latency that would introduce). So I think I'll stick with the Mini for now.

And of course there's the fact that I don't get true 6-channel surround sound from either the Mini or an Apple TV. There's a relatively cheap ($99) analog decoder called the Griffin FireWave that claims to overcome Quicktime's (or is it Core Audio's?) downmixing of AAC 5.1 audio to stereo (read more here, here and here), but the FireWave outputs 6 channels over 3 mini-jack outputs, for which my 2001 Marantz receiver doesn't appear to have the appropriate inputs, so it looks like I'll be out receiver shopping if I want to hear movies or concerts in surround off of any Apple product. Luckily I have an XBox 360 to tide me over until then, but it makes so much noise, and then I have to get off my ass and put the DVD into it, which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place...