So, as advertised, I am working a half day today. I am leaving Lexington at noon with Lund (one of the co-ops here) to head back to Rochester. He is hitching a ride with me to pick up a car in Rochester so he isn’t beholden to anyone here anymore. It looks like the weather will be real nice for the drive, and the iPod is all loaded up and ready for the trip.
I paid off my first major debt yesterday, my federal and state income taxes. I didn’t have any money withheld from my unemployment last year so I owed \$1200 between the two. It sucks that I am out that money, but taxes are simply part of life, and I’m cool with that…. Of course, being cool with that doesn’t mean I enjoy giving them my money.. :) I have had the checks written for weeks but waited until the 15th to send it.. As far as I’m concerned, if they aren’t going to give me interest on my refund when I overpay I am not going to allow them to collect interest on my money by giving it to them any earlier than I have to.
Pfft… I mailed someone yesterday about some code of theirs that wouldn’t compile, providing compiler errors. I also noticed that there was a mention in the Makefile about the errors I was seeing, but the comment didn’t actually provide any solution for the problem. I included the comment from the makefile in the message.
Today I got a message back saying something to the effect of “You aren’t using my Makefile, use it and it will work”. I was pretty angry, because I even quoted his damn Makefile…. I don’t ask much, but at least read my whole message.
Even as a scientist who doesn’t believe in anything, I am terribly excited to hear that Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is coming out as a Special Edition DVD on 6/22. Don’t even rent this movie, just go out and buy it.
So The Pixies get back together, and they tour, but they don’t hit BOSTON?!?!?!?!??! I realize that this is a warm-up tour and all, but still, like, they are a Boston band and they are giving us the finger? Wtf?
For those who haven’t been paying attention to CSH news, this Saturday is the latest installment in the glorious FUMN series. Showtime is 8pm, so make sure you are there.
I am planning on attempting the Rochester hat-trick (Nick’s, Dibella’s, Dinosaur BBQ) when I am there, so if you are interested let me know… I am leaving Boston for Rochester around noon on Friday, so I should be arriving around dinner time.. I will either be hitting the Dino on Friday or Saturday night, Dibella’s for lunch on Saturday, and Nick’s late night on Friday (post 10pm). If I end up going to the Dino on Saturday, it will be a pretty early trip (4pm) just so we aren’t late for FUMN (Saturday’s can be pretty hectic at the Dino).
I will be rushing back to Boston Sunday morning to make it back in time for Kill Bill Vol. 2 at 7pm with the SNFC, so I won’t really have any time to hang out on Sunday.
I had mentioned a few days ago that I was jockeying 100G of data around the network at home trying to decomission morimoto, my old linux fileserver. The need for a fileserver is diminished when you are the only one using it, and since the electrical situation at ’s place is less-than-savory I’d rather have less equipment than more. So the filecopy finished sometime last week, and I jockeyed the hard disks around so that all the large disks are in the Macintosh now. For those who don’t know, the G4’s name is carlos, because the machine came from ’s desk at Rovia and when we moved from the Fenway to Cambridge, he put a sticker on it with his name to clue in the movers. The sticker is still there, and it seemed like a fitting name. Anyway, the main hard disk in that machine is also named carlos. For a few days I had a 18G drive in the machine because I needed OS9 for a small project, and since I hated OS9 so much and it was such a “puny” drive I named that disk melvin, in honor of the second CEO of Rovia who drove the company into the toilet. I removed that drive pretty quickly for some other use.
So the two new drives I threw into the Macintosh are named footgolf and sitchmo, to continue the Rovia theme. While I would like to give everyone in engineering their own drive, I am out of space on the IDE controller…. :)
After all the data finally got copied over, I decided it would be a good time to do a backup of that data. While most of the MP3s were created from the original sources in my collection, it was a complete pain to rip all 400+ of my CDs in the first place, and I’d hate to have to do it again. Not to mention that I also have many albums from eMusic (back when it was cool) which aren’t really backed up at all. So I figured that since there is a DVD-R in the Mac I would put it to good use. Even with the 4.7G capacity of a DVD-R it is still taking me 18 discs to backup the collection. And my DVD-R is being finicky lately, reporting buffer underruns just when starting a disc. I have found that if I put the blank in the machine, put the machine to sleep and wake it a minute or two later it is enough to reset the drive and have it successfully burn a disc. But I am beginning to suspect that the DVD-R drive will need replacement in the near future, which sucks. It seems that there is some electrical nexus in Corinna’s apartment that is killing my equipment. :) Anyway, once I get that backup done I can do incrementals which should ease the pain. I also want to backup the “space partition” (which isn’t a partition anymore), which houses a bunch of video, iso backups of games/applications I own, etc. That will probably be upwards of 10 more discs…
Dogville was surprisingly good.. I can appreciate art films, but sometimes their pretension becomes too great and begins to irritate me (case in point: Gerry). Dogville was directed by Lars von Trier, a director known in part for the “Dogme 95” rules of filmmaking (only shoot on location, only handheld cameras, minimal or no artifical lighting, etc). When I heard that Dogville was filmed on a soundstage with almost no set at all, and instead of walls, there were chalk outlines of the buildings in the small town, my fun-o-meter became decidely unpegged.
Then Trier decided to completely surprise me… The novelty of the minimalist set melted away after the first 10 minutes, and it became clear to me why he felt it was important to “look through the walls” of the buildings.. A few irritations persisted (was it really necessary to foley in the sounds of doors opening and closing when the actors were pretending to open and close them?) But really, the “gimmick” turned out to be terribly important and really much more than it would have been without it.
I ran out this morning to close out my Safe Deposit Box at the Central Sq. Fleet. I had almost closed it out a few weeks ago, but I waited so I had a chance to go home and get my spare key so I didn’t have to pay the fee. But I couldn’t find the spare key this morning, it must have fallen out of my bag at some point… The person at the bank was cool though and waved the fee because apparently most people don’t even bother closing out the boxes and they need to get the locks drilled, so she was just happy that I was there.
I then got my hair cut at good old Eddie Priest’s, which is always a step back in time… I hadn’t had a haircut since before my Goodrich interview, which means it was like 2 months or more. I did some shopping as well and now the laundry is in the machine.. I rock.
Corinna is going to school later to work on a paper, but she is finishing up The Majestic which I recorded on the Tivo. She started it a few days ago, and I didn’t see the beginning, so I am hiding on the ‘puter with the headphones on until it’s over (so it isn’t spoiled). Tomorrow the SNFC is catching Dogville which should be quite the experience… It is almost 3 hours long, and it’s an art film, so we’ll see how tolerable it is. :)