I got my first “Report Card”, which is Graham-Family-Speak for “Pay Check”. It is about what I expected to get for one check, maybe a wee bit lower. I may have to re-evaluate my withholding situation after I do some math.
It is too damn hot in the place, so I am bugging out in 15 minutes. Adam and Rory are coming over for dinner after work today. It is nice having furniture now; people can come over and have a place to sit. :)
There are many benefits from working across the street from Fenway Park, and one of them is having your office directly above the Best Sausage Company.
Ok, I was here until around 7pm last night, which was a terrible choice, because there are home games at Fenway all this week… It was hell trying to walk the block between work and the Kenmore station against the baseball sidewalk traffic… I came into work later today planning to leave some time after 7:30p.. Hopefully the commute will be a bit simpler then, but who knows…
NSPR is pretty interesting, even if I am only using a limited subset of its functionality. I am working on modifying a load test client for one of our server packages. Originally, the test client compressed the data using Zlib, then sent it out over an SSL client… This put a lot of strain on our servers, and to see if there would be a benefit in using one of the hardware SSL accelerators out there, we decided to remove SSL from the client/server. Unfortunately, SSL and Compression were tied together pretty tightly in the test client, so I am rewriting quite a bit. One of the cool things about the I/O part of NSPR is that it allows you to add layers to the sockets, so I am adding a compression layer, and later I will remove the compression from the old SSL layer. Then we will be able to add the 2 layers in any combination with any other layers we dream up in the process.
I am here at work, learning the Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR), which seems pretty cool. I need to extend their socket routines, compressing the data that gets sent across the sockets… Using zlib, that shouldn’t be too hard.
The show was amazing last night…. James and I left my work around 6ish, and showed up at the Middle East about 20 minutes later. Since we were so early, we decided to grab something to eat, but as we were walking away, Jon Whitney and friends (Jessica and Ed) popped out of the club and said Hi. After some chit-chatting, we went to the (terrible, terrible, almost as bad as California) pizza shop and grabbed some chow. We then wandered down to this coffee house (1369, I believe) down the street. Jon must have bumped into like 20 people he knew on the way, and it took us like 30 minutes to walk 2 blocks. :)
We chilled outside the coffee shop for a while (I didn’t get anything, however), and we made our way back. When we returned to the club, the line was already around the side of the building, but Jon saw someone he knew and we cut into line.. :) This show sold out weeks ago, and there were lots of people trying to get in… I am glad I picked up the tickets when I did. We descended into the club and as we arrived the warm-up DJ (Rob Hall, I believe) was spinning, obscured by Matmos’ equipment. This DJ was only ok, a few notches above annoying. :) Around 9pm, Matmos took the stage, and they were amazing. They did a cool thing: Facing their equipment towards the audience, and (sometimes) sitting with their backs to the audience. While this would be considered travesty at a normal rock show, it was cool being able to see them at work. They turned around and aside quite a bit, so you could tell that they were doing this for the show. Their new album is entitled “A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure”, and it is riddled with lots of disgusting medical samples and visions. Their opening number had Drew (i believe that is his name) pressing some kind of biofeedback probe into his skin (not breaking the skin or anything), and another guy followed the probe with a video camera, projecting it onto a screen. Their set was amazing, and they were the first people I have ever seen to use a metal rat cage as a musical instrument (and it sounded really cool too).
After Matmos left the stage, Russell Haswell took the stage, with his laptop and little other gear. His wall of sound lasted longer than any of the other artists… He was only OK, but he needs to learn some control. He had some really interesting stuff, and some terrible stuff, but in either case, he stretched it out way too long…
Finally, Autechre took the stage, and by this point, my heels were killing me. I was right up towards the stage, and my boots were starting to really hurt my feet (Note to self: buy some Dr. Scholl’s). Fortunately, Autechre has a stage presence that doesn’t really command viewing… I made my way to the back of the club (the bar, actually, where I obtained a Margarita) and met up with James.. We were both taken aback by what Autechre had to offer, they were simply mind blowing. They amaze me with their ability to come up with music that is completely alien yet still sounds great. They wrapped up their set around 12:10, which gave us little time to catch the last train. We didn’t have a chance to hang around, say goodbye to Jon and friends, etc. I wish the subway ran later, especially on weekends… Oh well, it was still a great night, and I am looking forward to more great concerts in the near future. In fact, Other Music was handing out flyers to a free in-store show next week… Free music is always a good thing. :)
James left around 7 this morning, and while in theory I was going to go back to bed for an hour or two, I decided to just come into work and get it done with. Today will probably be a long day, but after it is done, I can go home, get some sleep, and be normal for the rest of the week. :)
I had a ton of fun this weekend exploring Boston with James, as it is the first chance I have had to really explore what is available to me. Friday night we wandered around Government Center, went to some stores and just enjoyed some of the beautiful (and not-so beautiful) architecture around. We got back really late, as we kinda got a wee bit lost and had trouble locating a T stop. :)
Saturday, we met up with Jon Whitney, who runs Brainwashed, which hosts the Coil and Meat Beat Manifesto official pages. He was a really good guy, and he showed us around Harvard Square, which is a wonderful area. It turns out that one of my favorite NYC record shops, Other Music opened their second store in Harvard Square recently, which is awesome in my book.. :) I also browsed around some other record shops in the area, and discovered that CDs are simply way cheaper in this town for some reason. I picked up a few CDs used:
Cyclo. (Ryoji Ikeda & Carsten Nicolai) - Similar sound to Pan-sonic, but by far more musical (and listenable (and enjoyable))
Sunday, James and I headed back into Harvard Square and ran head first into a street festival… We had some good Barbecue on the street, and heard some street musicians and looked at the vendor’s boothes (but I really couldn’t spend much money, although I could use a pair of sunglasses sometime in the near future). We then headed back and watched Galaxy Quest and the Sopranos.. :)
Tonight is the Matmos/Autechre concert, which should be lots of fun. I will report on it tomorrow… :)