Well, I took one for the team and went out with everyone for Dim Sum for lunch today… Frances, Matt, and all came out for the festivities, and Helen and Adam came along as well.. After lunch we stopped by the Restaurant Supply store in Chinatown and I fought off urges to buy kitchen equipment, which took quite a bit of willpower (I could really use a mandolin, for instance)… We then came back to the apartment and piled into the minivan of power and took a trip down to the Porter Exchange mall (which for the non-bostonian, is about 90% asian stores and restaurants).
All in all it was a fun day, and it was great to see Frances, Matt, and Karen again… It’s been so long…
Apparently the reports of Dim Sum’s cancellation were full of shit, because Matt called me at 9am to let me know everyone (who that includes is still a mystery) was meeting here at 11am.. Fortunately he called early enough to let me grab a shower, etc. Unfortunately, he didn’t call early enough to afford me a longer sleep (a.k.a. last night). Oh well, I jumped in the shower and am ready to roll…
I heard a rumor proxy Adam (when I asked him if he was going… he wouldn’t have mentioned it otherwise) that Dim Sum tomorrow has been cancelled, as western mass and connecticut have been hammered by this snowstorm (which has been a real let-down here in Boston). Of course, it would have been nice if I was told this first hand, but whatever… I guess I am perpetually out of the loop or something. I asked Matt to call me with the details after he talked to Frances, but I guess he forgot or something.
In other news, my headache did succumb to the powers of ibuprofen, which is a good thing, because it was starting to get out of hand.
Anyway, now that Dim Sum is (allegedly) not happening I have no reason to get up early tomorrow… Which is a good thing, because it is almost 4am and I am not really even tired… I am thinking of setting my alarm anyway to try and break this schedule, but the thought of waking to an alarm on Sunday is bothersome..
I headed out to MicroCenter before to get that switch I mentioned… I found one, was ready to buy it, and on my way to the register I decided to check out what their prices on DVD-R/RW drives were.. I had looked at the prices a bit after getting the DV cam, thinking it might be a way to spend some christmas money… But the cheapest decent drive I could find was ~300 bucks… So I couldn’t afford it with my christmas money..
I didn’t expect MicroCenter to have a fantastic price on DVD-R/RW drives! They had the Cendyne DVR-105 drive for \$230 plus a \$30 mail in rebate! This company makes Pioneer’s (very well reviewed) DVD-R/RW drives, and this particular model is apparently the same (internally, anyway) as Pioneer’s DVR-A05 drive. I decided to go for it, as the sale ended this weekend, and I picked up a few blank discs (of each format).
I currently have the drive installed in the PC, but I think ultimately it will end up in the Mac (once I find some tools that will work with it, or Apple releases a version of iDVD that works with non-superdrives) since that is where I plan on doing most of my video editing. The drive came with some basic DVD-Mastering software which I played around with a bit… I burned some of the Stellafane footage Chuck shot back in 2000 to a DVD-RW, but couldn’t get it to play in any of the DVD players in the house (Mine, Adam’s, or the PS2). My player doesn’t even read CD-Rs, so I didn’t expect it to work (the poor old beastie). I played it on the computer though, in PowerDVD, and it worked, but the video quality was kinda crappy… So I think I will hold off on the actual DVD Video fun until I get some better tools. In the meantime, though, it will be great for backing up data.. For once I won’t have to play so many games when backing up my workstations..
I was also thinking of backing up all of my mp3’s (~60g) to DVD media of some kind.. I bought a spindle of 10 generic DVD-R discs for \$25.. In a few months I’m sure that price will come down, so backing up all that music might be feasible. Granted, I have most of the mp3’s in original CD form, but reencoding all of them would be a total bitch…
Anyway, right now I have an annoying headache, but I pounded back a fistful of ibuprofen before (ok, fistful is an exaggeration, stop panicing) and am going to settle in and watch a Henry Rollins DVD… Did I mention that Chuck and I are going to see him do spoken word live here in Boston in February? Should be a blast!
Word is that Matt, Frances, , Hilary (one L or two?), and myself might be headed out for Dim Sum tomorrow morning, but I haven’t heard any official plans yet.. Should be quite a challenge for me as my sleep schedule creeped to 4-5am to 12-1pm while I was in NJ… I haven’t seen the lot of them in a month or so (since Rochester), so it will be good to catch up with them… Hopefully we have time to have some fun after breakfast too, although I bet all the playgrounds in the area are iced out.. :(
I’m feeling much better today, as far as frustrated whining goes… I know I was irrationally cranky yesterday, but at least I identified it and took proactive steps to avoid subjecting others to it, no? I’m pretty sure it was the shock of having two completely laid back weeks to dealing with mobs of people and “outsiders”. Regardless of the cause, it has passed… :)
I am feeling quite unmotivated today… I might walk over to Micro Center and get a cheapo switch so I can keep both the machines in here connected… I would like to get a KVM switch as well, but that might be a bit too rich for my current situation (since I would need one that does USB as well)..
I was hoping to hang out with my various friends this weekend, but they have all deserted me.. =) As often the case, I have the house to myself. I was thinking about cooking, but if nobody else is here i will probably just go with something fast.. Perhaps another bagel sandwich..
I suddenly turned cranky this afternoon… I went out before to mail something to and to hit up my safe deposit box.. I went to the bank first, and the cluebag there couldn’t find the vault key, so I had to stand around wanking it for like 5 minutes while she pulled her shit together… Call me crazy, but I would think that the fucking vault key would be something the bank would have an interest in keeping an eye on. Anyway, if I just had to wait 5 minutes, I would have been fine, but instead I had to wait 5 minutes wondering what the fuck my bank was doing losing the vault key.
I started to walk to the post office when I realized that I had forgotten the thing I needed to mail, which irritated me, but I brushed it off… I stopped by Carberry’s and got a hot tea, got some cold cuts at the Bread & Circus over on Prospect, and came home and made a sandwich utilizing the bagels I brought with me from NJ (since there isn’t a bagel worth a damn in a 100 mile radius surrounding Boston). I even watched some A Cook’s Tour on the TiVo while I was eating.. Any mild stewing that had occurred because of my earlier inconvieniences subsided… I gathered my stuff and headed back out into the wild.
I get to the Post Office and the line extends from the front desk to Madagascar. People are annoying me, especially the ones that can’t figure out the god-damned stamp vending machine.. Jesus christ, it isn’t that complicated. May I add that the Post Office itself is one of my least favorite places in the world… Every time I go to the post office I get stuck behind some crusty old bitches, all named Maude, who have to chit-chat with the civil servant who is supposed to be expediting my travel through the line. I know I am an irritable bitch about 100 percent of the time, but I really don’t think any human is engineered to deal with the Post Office.
I decided that while I was in Central Sq. again I would stop by the CVS to get my passport picture taken. This was the final thing keeping me from actually applying, and I figured getting it out of the way would motivate me to get the application submitted. I stop by, get the guy with the big nose to take my picture (which I look like a fool in, but whatever), and then have to wait like 15 minutes while he waits for some other cluebag to finish using the public-access digital photo printer. This guy just can’t figure it out, perhaps he should hook up with the stamp idiot. Finally dickwad makes his print and big-nose can print up my photo. 8 bucks later I have the pictures.
I hear something fall on the other side of my bedroom window. Thinking it is the remote sensor for my wireless outdoor thermometer, I take a peek… Turns out it was just ice, but my sensor had fallen off the building long ago, covered in ice. Since it would be pretty precarious getting out of the window, down the little incline, and onto the roof of the bay window on the 2nd floor, I decide against trying to retrieve it now, opting to wait until the ice melts… The sensor is still working, but I can’t imagine it is entirely accurate half-buried under ice… This pisses me off as well
So I think I am going into recluse mode today, at least until I calm down from all my crappy public interaction today…
As in “Stuff to Do” (of course, you BUGGER expatriates know that full-well)… Anyway, I need to run over to the enema bank and shove some stuff into my safe deposit box (title for VAN, insurance paperwork, workstation backup cd) and perhaps I will get the picture taken for my passport while I am down there and drop the application off at the post office…
I have SpamAssassin set up processing all of my incoming mail… I have had it mis-diagnose a message or five in the months I have been using it, but the occasional one of those is worth the thousands of messages a month it keeps me from having to read… But since those mis-flags are usually somewhat important, I currently have a “quarantined” mailbox where all spam that SA flags is shoved… I then quickly scan the senders and subjects looking for important stuff and blow it all away…
After awhile someone at CSH set up Vipul’s Razor which works in concert with SA to detect even more spam.. It is a collaborative database which tracks signatures of messages reported as spam by users…
I eventually reached the decision that once something has been flagged by Razor that it is definately spam and not something intended for me, yet I still had to manually delete messages flagged by Razor… So I created a few new rules in my .procmailrc to handle these messages and send them to /dev/null:
So that will eliminate some of the work I have to do dealing with this spam… I still wish that SA had two “thresholds”… See, right now you can set up SA so it will flag a message as spam above a certain threshold… I wish that you could set a threshold for messages that are “probably spam” and “definately spam”, so you can just delete a message that scores beyond a certain point…