Posted by Joel
Mon, 31 Jul 2006 07:24:00 GMT
I just upgraded to Typo 4.0.0. Looks about the same out here but on the admin side it is worlds better. I'm glad they finally made another release because I was sick of having to run off their trunk, as it has been ages since their last one.
Also, I have a weakness for serifs. Consequently, inspired by the new admin pages, I have just changed the site from Arial to my favorite serif font, Georgia. I apologize to those of you who can't stand them.
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Posted by Joel
Mon, 31 Jul 2006 06:17:00 GMT
Today tweren't bad. Basically a nice, relaxed weekend day. I walked downtown and did some more clothes shopping, and also bought myself some new running shoes. Then later I got a new book. Don't get me wrong, I still think Anthony Bourdain is great, but his book just has too much cooking stuff. Which is to be expected, sure, but his show treats it more as an afterthought, with the travel experiences coming first. The new book I bought is Snow Crash, which is sci-fi geek required reading. It doubles as a dystopian future novel, which my pessimist nature relishes in, and this is one based not on overly controlling socialist states but rather capitalism run amuck, with the world largely owned and controlled by megacorps, which I see as a more realistic outcome than Big Brother, although these days, we might well have a delightful fusion of the two. Also, it features Hiro Protagonist.
I'm still pretty cheap so beyond thrift stores I like Old Navy and Macy's. At least I've outgrown Marshall's and Ross finally. Maybe in the future when I'm making a gazillion dollars an hour I'll spend 90 dollars on a button-down shirt from fcuk or something, but for now, I'm sticking within the 20-40 range, or 5-15 in the case of thrift. My wardrobe is pretty lacking, so I expect I'll be continuing to shop and learn about this sort of thing. I'd buy clothes online, but I worry about it not fitting. Presently I have too many clothes which were made for species of entirely different proportions, and possibly extra limbs, that for some reason I brought up to the register.
Speaking of which I seem to have lost a little bit of weight, just a few pounds, over the last couple weeks. Not because I've been exercising -- no, I've only done that once -- but I think the regular walking around the city, especially one as hilly as this, has helped, as has the longer work days and the fact I've been skipping dinner nearly every day, and have fairly healthy lunches at work, although I still often have a chocolate chip muffin and mocha, or even McDonald's breakfast in the morning, a practice I will likely never repent for at this rate.
Today all I ate was some food at Lori's Diner, a lame 50s chain suffering an identity crisis as it also plays 60s counterculture hits, despite them being near opposites in theme. I basically wanted a burger and fries because I haven't had one in so long. That and I pass not one but two Lori's Diners whenever I go downtown so I thought it was worth a shot. I don't see myself going back. Considering I pass so many cool places I don't know why I go to a place like that at all, but really, I do go to local spots too. Like the Cable Car Cafe (sucks) and the cafe on the end of the block whose name I forgot (pretty good). Still haven't really eaten in Chinatown outside of House of Nanking which is basically a crime, and North Beach remains untapped despite being six blocks away.
I also picked up Wired. My longtime e-friend from d-smiley, Garry, was featured in this magazine, for his creation of Garry's Mod. Yay Garry. Of course, the article has some factual inaccuracies, but what can you really expect from Wired.
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Posted by Joel
Sun, 30 Jul 2006 09:39:49 GMT
Friday I got home and walked down to Grant St and walked up to North Beach and talked to Ryan on the phone. And then stuff which I don't want to talk about on this blog.
Saturday was ok. I got up at 3pm and went and got a tuna melt at the local cafe. Then watched more Densha Otoko, and I am very disappointed. The guy ended up reverting his nerdery state, and she accepted it, and it totally ruined the show for me.
Then I went with Eric to the mission, and we met his friend Seth at the Elbo Room. And then to Zeitgeist. Fun was had. We had a cabbie from Uzbekistan who spoke of St. Petersburg as the most beautiful city in the world; said San Francisco was second best. I really want to go to Russia now.
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Posted by Joel
Fri, 28 Jul 2006 08:18:00 GMT
Today work was pretty relaxed. I mainly did system administration on our servers, bringing them up to date and solving some horrible problems. Our servers are both based on Gentoo, which makes me glad that when everyone else was going to class, I was installing and tinkering with every flavor of Unix known to man. Gentoo was my favorite, but I considered it a hobbyist's OS. Honestly, it's quite good in the production environment because its tools are so nice, although whether it's actually faster or not is open to some debate; it could be said that Debian (testing) is more headache-free, Gentoo is by far the most advanced (and arguably fun), and FreeBSD is ol' reliable. I like them all. I still don't like Fedora/Red Hat, and Ubuntu, well... it's just too queer.
While doing laundry tonight, I started watching this show called Densha Otoko, a live action Japanese show that my friend convinced me to watch. I watched the first four episodes tonight and I'll have to watch the rest once the torrents finish. Thankfully, it's not that long of a series. I can relate with the protagonist pretty well, especially since it's based on a true story about 2channel, which is pretty heavily tied into the whole RH universe, and about a geek trying to de-geekify himself.
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Posted by Joel
Thu, 27 Jul 2006 14:44:16 GMT
From left to right, Hans, Brian, Me, Matt, and some guy I don't remember. Probably one of Matt's friends. Matt sent me this last night.
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Posted by Joel
Wed, 26 Jul 2006 06:47:07 GMT
Yesterday just sucked. Lots of trouble at work and I worked a long day and ultimately solved the major problems, but nothing I'd intended to work on at the day's start.
Today was great. Granted, it started with me getting my car towed, but I didn't even care. I went and paid the fee and picked it up and who cares. Was about a half hour late to work (like anyone cares). I had parked in a blatantly illegal spot I suspected was never towed and I was wrong. Yay, now I can die having had that exciting experience. But the rest was good just because stuff got done and it was an overall fun and happy day at the office. And a new intern joined our staff. And the site is just kicking ass lately, I'm so proud of LuckyO so far.
I'm worried about an oil war. Or rather, I see one is becoming inevitable. Not due to the natural scarcity of oil, which I covered previously as not that big of a deal -- we could adapt to that. The problem is that I fear the spigot is going to be turned off for political reasons and that war will result and it is quite possible the war and fallout from it will last the rest of our lives.
Also here is a video my cousin made
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Posted by Joel
Mon, 24 Jul 2006 04:17:00 GMT
This weekend was pretty cool. Friday, as I often do, I stayed in and went to sleep early. Saturday I got up and went to work out. Thirty minutes on the bike. This club is pretty nice, it has like a TV built into the bike, but I flipped through the channels a bit and then just read my Anthony Bourdain book which I really liked.
Then did some weights. Abs, shoulders, chest, biceps. It was pretty good, really, I enjoyed it and I think I'll be able to continue working out ok.
Called up Michael to see if he wanted to look for tickets to the Flaming Lips and Ween show in Berkeley. He said Paul was in town and they were going to go watch it at hippy hill. So I went out there and we listened to the show and it was a great time.
Paul and his friend Mohammed ("Mo") was in town. Mo grew up in Iran and he is really, really interesting to talk to; former muslim turned atheist and only came to the States in 2000.
We went to Blakes and then slept and then I came back here. I finished up Scarface and drank some Red Hook IPA.
We had some site stability issues at LuckyO over the weekend but I think I figured them out.
I realize everyone in the world is suffering from some horrible weather right now, but here in Nob Hill/Chinatown it's been in the high 70s all weekend. Suckers.
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Posted by Joel
Fri, 21 Jul 2006 04:44:00 GMT
Thanks to my iPod I've been listening to lots of the music I have that I've never really heard. I've also still listened to NPR a bit. It's pretty easy to switch over to the radio at 9 am to catch the Writer's Almanac, and if the Fresh Air interview is no good, go back to the iPod.
I am pretty happy with my productivity at work and I feel like I am really turning this site around. I feel like it's going to be successful and I'm going to keep trying hard. We are still fixing it up and adding some more crucial basic features before we start marketing to the customers and generating revenue. However, we have just been immensely popular amongst photographers, with loads and loads of photos coming in at a very fast pace.
Today Eric and I went to House of Nanking which was fun. He invited me to a party in Soma but I'm pretty tired. I still haven't started working out (although I've signed up and bought some clothes) and I want to get some sleep so I can actually start tomorrow morning. We'll see if that happens.
Yesterday I worked for about 11 hours and then came home and worked for another two hours. Today I worked a more normal schedule (maybe 8.5 hours). I keep learning so much more about scaling sites, and I've now learned how amazingly significantly speed can improve by indexing the right table columns (and how it can really slow things down if you index the wrong ones!)
Also, I'm starting to realize my current/stable branching setup is just insufficient for the real world, for a couple reasons. While I like decentralized version control, my coworkers don't use it. And second of all, sometimes you want to commit things in a way that everyone can use them, but they are more long term projects, or need to wait, so can't go live with the next release. In short, I'm going to set up some branches based on certain projects, and might return to using the "trunk" terminology, something like trunk/branches/live. Still no release numbers, though ;)
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Posted by Joel
Mon, 17 Jul 2006 02:59:15 GMT
The photos on the right of my blog are four random photos from Flickr. I never really used Flickr but I've been trying to fill it out with all of my old photos (I still don't have a new camera; I'll get one next paycheck).
Unfortunately it has a cap of some sort, and I have quite a few old photos I'd love to put in there (such as Japan, some college stuff). I don't take nearly enough photos but I really like the ones I have. I might just not use Flickr or I might pay for the pro Flickr thing which should remove the cap I think.
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Posted by Joel
Mon, 17 Jul 2006 02:55:02 GMT
Today was a really great day and it was something I needed. Last night I was talking to my friend mdl who has also recently left RH and is in dire straights lately. Anyway we talked about Mind Game and I watched it again. What an inspirational movie; I really think I can call it my favorite anime ever.
Got up around noon again (I stayed up late) and went to the de Young museum. It was my first time there but I was pretty in awe by Golden Gate Park. The art was some really great stuff, a few pictures in particular really struck me, and the aboriginal section was a trip too.
Afterwards I went to the Japanese Tea Garden next door and it wasn't very good. It charged admission, which I thought was lame, and it was just full of kids and people and felt like a Disneyland rendition of a Japanese tea garden. Still it had some neat parts, like a really steep bridge which I crossed.
I was walking by the Roman building thing on the way back to the parking lot and a normal looking guy with an iPod was dancing and singing Frank Sinatra. As I passed he commented that nobody wanted to have fun anymore, that everyone was so uptight. I agreed with him and urged him to keep singing.
When I got back to my apartment Eric was gone and his friend Jimmy was here using his laptop in our living room. I talked to him a bit and he is a financial advisor from New York and is moving here in three weeks, at the edge of Nob Hill and Pac Heights. He went to college with Eric.
I asked him if he wanted to go for a walk and get some coffee and so we did. We walked through Chinatown down to North Beach (just a few blocks away really) and got some espressos and talked about all sorts of things.
Anyway now I've got a six pack of Anchor Steam and I'm going to watch Scarface, and enjoy the luxury that is watching classic mob films in my own apartment.
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