grahams

Inconsiderate Watertown

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:25:46 GMT

So Watertown has a current, massive project to resurface and reengineer Pleasant Street. We live right off of Pleasant Street, on Howard Street. Directly behind our home is a former train right-of-way which is used by the town. It is bad enough in the winter when the town uses the lot to store snowplows even though they just built a big honkin' $1m+ DPW lot a mile or so away. But since the Pleasant St. project began, they have been using the lot as a temporary store for construction equipment and dirt storage. When I say "dirt storage", I don't mean anything long term. Throughout the day, dump trucks bring many loads of dirt and rocks, loudly and messily dumping into the lot. What is strange is that OTHER trucks come throughout the day as well, taking dirt away. It seems to me they could save a step there by never unloading the dump trucks in the first place, but hey, why bring logic into this?

Anyway, I've been pretty passive on this nuisance, in fear of turning into some kind of NIMBY crazyman. But there is presently a front end loader loading up a dump truck at 11pm. Every time the loader goes back for a new scoop of dirt it's reverse beep goes off. And then there's the big crash when the dirt reaches the dump truck. I immediately called the DPW, presumably getting their answering service, to file a complaint. They took my information and I will be expecting a call back tomorrow. This is unacceptable. It's bad enough my back yard and deck are effectively unusable between 7am and 5pm on most days due to noise and dust, but now the neighborhood has to tolerate being woken up by this noise at 11 at night?

Healing.... Slowly...

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:03:41 GMT

It is hard to believe that it has nearly been a month since the big accident. We are healing ever so slowly; each day we seem to be a little less frustrated with the pace. coco_b definitely had more serious injuries than myself, and so it isn't a surprise that her slow healing has cramped her style more than mine. But this week she was finally able to get back on her bicycle and ride to work, which was a huge milestone for her. I also think I noticed her sleeping on her left side last night, which as far as I know is a first since the accident. My injuries are mostly bruises, and while many of them don't show any longer, I can still feel them.

Dealing with the other driver's insurance company, which is Allstate, has been surprisingly painless and pleasant. I received the expected Blue Book value for Hawkeye, and they also reimbursed me for the damage to my computer. I decided, however, that I am not going to have the Macbook Air repaired. The estimate Apple gave me was for damage to the case and trackpad (which are apparently considered one unit on these machines). While everything else is in a reasonable state of working, I fear that the impact could have had caused hidden or yet-to-manifest damage. I don't want to lay out nearly a grand to repair the case to have something else fail in a month or two.

So with repair out of the question, my real decision is what to do next. What I will do in the near term is to bank the money and keep using the damaged Air. As I mentioned above, the computer still seems to work, although it does overheat and throttle itself more often now, which has tripped up my usage on several occasions... There is clearly a fan still working inside the thing, but perhaps this computer has more than one? Or perhaps the slight bend in the case is enough to disrupt the airflow? Who knows... I'm afraid to remove the bottom case: The 'screw dents' in the top case make me worry that taking out the bottom case screws may mean never getting them put back in. That would take a mostly-working computer and turn it into scrap.

So at some point I'll replace the Air. When I do, I think I will probably replace it with a Macbook Pro as opposed to another Air. The Air has been a great machine, but now that it's my only machine the lack of hard disk space has been a bit of a frustration. Honestly it would less of an issue if iTunes could deal with my network-shared 120GB music archive, but the pain of that is non-trivial. Also, while the Air's size and weight are great for the days which I walk to work with my laptop, those days are few and far between. I think that for the money I would spend on another Air, this time I might trade some size for speed/space.

Review: Netgear MCAB1001 MoCA Coax-Ethernet Adapter Kit

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:32:43 GMT

(Note: If you haven't already, and are interested in some of the background of my needs and this testing, you should read my earlier review of powerline networking hardware)

So after the disappointment of the powerline networking experiment, I decided to give MoCA hardware a shot. If it performed as advertised, MoCA made sense in our house: There were already live cable drops in both the rooms in question, and the technology seemed far less jankier than powerline. So I ordered the Netgear MCAB1001 MoCA kit, which included two endpoints. This review will be much shorter than the last one.

I love this hardware. In fact, I really only have two gripes which I could think of:

The configuration utility is Windows only, and is basically required due to...
One of the endpoints was configured in "All Pass", which lets MoCA overrun the frequencies used for television. One of the reviewers on Amazon mentioned this as well, so I knew to look out for it. Fortunately I was able to use the configuration utility in a virtual machine I already had lying around, so I wasn't stuck. But if you're a non-Windows user, you'd be screwed as far as I can tell.

Installation of this hardware was as straightforward as the powerline hardware: Hook up the endpoints and you're live. The endpoints even have a button which disables all of the front panel LEDs, which should be a feature on every piece of hardware. Time to cut to the chase and get to the numbers:

milgrim$ time nc -v -v -n pbook 2222 < big-file.bin
Connection to pbook 2222 port [tcp/*] succeeded!
      124.98 real         4.20 user        31.90 sys
 
(1,073,741,824 bytes) / (124.98 seconds) = 65.5464874 Mbps

Compared to the 15 Mbps I got from the powerline hardware, this was literally night and day. And this was using the USB Ethernet adapter on my Air, so I doubt it's fully flexing the bandwidth available. Almost as important as the bandwidth (and the reason I sat on this review for awhile) is the reliability. After I wrote the powerline review I learned that I was seeing all kinds of dropouts and failures. But the MoCA hardware has been seemingly rock-solid. I've done many large data transfers over the link and seen no trouble whatsoever.

I've been so pleased with this gear, that I've considered getting a third endpoint to put in the basement and move some 'headless' hardware down there (cable modem, Slingbox, time capsule, etc), as it'd be really easy to run a Coax drop down there. Actually, I think the only barrier to that right now is that all the power in the basement is on the common circuit of the house, so I'd have to install an outlet that comes off of our breaker panel. Anyway, I'm rather pleased with this hardware, and if you have similar needs, you might want to give it a spin yourself.

Even vacations regress to the mean.

Sun, 31 May 2009 03:04:48 GMT

Hawkeye Aftermath
Originally uploaded by seangraham

You may remember coco_b  or myself talking up our vacation to Spain about a year and a half ago. We'd often say we got so lucky and had the perfect vacation. Well, it turns out that even vacations regress to the mean.

We left Monday morning for Damariscotta, Maine. Corinna's boss has a place up there which she'll be retiring to in a few months. Until then, though, she's only there on the weekends, so she let us use for a few days during the week. The place was gorgeous, and we really enjoyed exploring that area. We had some great food, and it turns out that Maine is rather beautiful. We'll post some pictures from my iPhone and Coco's camera, but please forgive me for cutting this part of the story short. It turns out, it's not where the real action is.

Wednesday morning we packed up the car, Hawkeye, and continued on to Bar Harbor, Maine. Our plan was to explore Acadia National Park, which has always sounded dreamy. The beautiful weather we had enjoyed for the first two days, though, had given out and we drove up Route 1 in light-to-moderate rain. After about an hour of driving, we found ourselves in Rockland, Maine. In fact, we found ourselves at about 130 Camden Street in Rockland, Maine. It was at this point of the trip that another individual, driving a Silverado, in the oncoming lane found THEMSELVES crossing the turning lane and slamming into the front of Hawkeye at a non-trivial rate of speed. Hawkeye was rotated 90 degress clockwise and tossed into the parking lot to our right, and came to a stop.  The black Silverado pickup rolled into the parking lot as well, continuing to roll for a few hundred feet before stopping.

Once the car came to rest, and I got my bearings, I checked on Corinna, who seemed to be in pain but intact.  She was saying her chest and neck were hurting, but mostly her chest. It sounded like she had the wind knocked out of her, but she said she thought she was OK. I felt pretty banged up, my knees hit something, and my left elbow and thumb got banged up a bit, but while my injuries couldn't be considered trivial, it all seemed to be bumps and bruises, nothing broken or life threatening. I couldn't quite get my door open, but I managed to force it open enough to sidle out of the car. By the time I got around to Corinna's side of the car to try to open her door I noticed she was passing (or perhaps passed) out. Her eyes were rolled back into her head much like the time when I had my appendix out and she fainted while I was being prepped for surgery. I yelled for her to wake up, and she did, but was a little out of it. Afterwards she would tell me that she had a vivid dream while passed out, but I'll let her tell that story. At this time an off-duty EMT pulled up and offered her help, and a seemingly off-duty fireman also showed to do the same. While the EMT cared for Corinna, making sure she didn't move her neck or do anything crazy before the ambulance showed up, the fireman tried to pry the hood open enough to cut the battery cable, reducing the chance of the car blowing up (or something). I was pretty much out of the loop on this one, not really able to help anywhere, so I took the above photo of the damaged car and made my way over to the other car to check on it's driver. It was a woman in her 30s who claimed to have pulled out of a driveway across the street, lost control of her truck while it fishtailed, and plowed into us accidentally. I asked if she was OK, which she said she was, and she apologized while looking completely terrified. Everyone seemed to be skeptical of her story, but whatever, I can't imagine whatever it was she did was intentional, so there's little point in getting caught up on the details.

The fireman couldn't get to the battery cables with the tools he happened to have in the back of his personal car, but quickly the cops, firemen, and ambulance showed and with their equipment the cut the cable. Everyone thought it'd be a good idea if Corinna took a ride to the hospital to get her chest x-rayed and get looked at by a doctor. They got a collar on her and on a backboard (which seemed to take 3 hours, but obviously my perspective was skewed), and I grabbed a few of our belongings (her purse most importantly) and jumped in the front of the ambulance. Pen Bay ER was only a few minutes away, and they took her in while I gave the front desk her information. After I finished with that they brought me around to see her just before they took her for Xrays. Everything checked out fine, and the doc thanked her for wearing her seat belt and told her to take it easy. Her chest was pretty bruised from the seat belt and it would take a while to heal. We both walked away from that crash thanks to our seat belts, so it'd hard to be mad about our bumps and bruises.  Her chest still hurts pretty badly, even a few days later, and she's having trouble getting out of bed and has to avoid coughing, laughing, and sneezing, but she seems to be getting better every day. I know I can, at times, be prone to hyperbole, but this was without a doubt the closest I've come to dying in my life. A few things go differently, and it'd be my construct here typing this.

After Corinna was discharged it took awhile to get the rest of the day squared away. We were about 2.5 hours away from Bar Harbor, but we were 3.5-4 hours away from home, so we decided to press on. First, I needed to get ahold of the cop who reported to the scene, as he had my license and registration (as well as all the information about the other driver).  The ER staff were very helpful and gave him a call and Officer Daniels came right over. He had already prepared a little form with all the details I needed regarding the other driver, and even had a badass little baseball card-style business card, which gave us a laugh when we needed one. He took some other information from us and was really helpful and comforting. After he left I spent a bit more time on the phone with the other drivers' insurance and Enterprise rental who came over to pick us up in the rental. We stopped by the tow yard to take some pictures and get all our crap out of Hawkeye in the mud and pouring rain, and we'll probably never see him again.  He gave his life protecting ours, and while our final moments may have seemed a little unceremonious and ungrateful, I know he wouldn't have wanted any pomp and circumstance; He wasn't a hero, he was just doing his job.

While I was transferring stuff to the rental, the husband of the driver stopped by to see his car.. He seemed very cool, and reassured me that they had full insurance coverage and they had already told the insurance company that the accident was his wife's fault. We chatted briefly and shook hands, I don't think anyone felt good about what happened earlier in the day so there's no need to hold grudges. With Hawkeye cleaned out we grabbed a quick meal and set out, slowly, for Bar Harbor. We arrived around 6pm, approximately 4 hours after we had originally planned to arrive. It boggles my mind that so much happened in those four hours.  Upon arriving, I opened my MacBook Air to discover that it took some injuries during the crash. It was in my bookbag behind the drivers' seat, and the trackpad button got smashed and the case has been bent.  You can see the tops of the case screws pushing through the handrest in the above photo of Officer Daniels' baseball card! Fortunately, I'm hopeful that their insurance will cover this as well.

We did our best to make the most of the remainder of our vacation, but between our injuries and the rainy weather, there was only so much we could do. On Thursday, after sleeping in pretty late, the weather was decent for a spell and we got up to the top of Cadillac Mountain, but the cloud cover was below the summit, so the only good views were on the way up and down. After that excursion we returned to the B&B and rested before dinner. Friday the weather was pretty miserable, but we still managed to tour the loop road that goes around the park and stopped for a few very small hikes and vistas. The miserable weather and the tides did combine to make Thunder Hole pretty exciting, though. This morning we had breakfast at the B&B and hit the road pretty much right away, watching the bad weather melt away into a beautiful day as we travelled south.

Perhaps I'll come back with more details about the non-accident part of our trip in the future, but for the time being it is really all I can think about. Not to sound melodramatic, but I've seen the replay of that black pickup coming directly for us over and over again, and it hasn't lost any impact yet.

Powerline Ethernet Revisited

Tue, 05 May 2009 14:00:38 GMT

So the grand experiment with Powerline Networking has effectively come to a end. Besides the MUCH lower than advertised bandwidth, which I decided to tolerate (since it was better than my WDS WiFI setup to extend the WiFi range), I've seen many dropouts in the past few weeks. They are rather short dropouts, and always seem to resolve themselves on their own, they are significant enough to disrupt my transfers from the TiVo. It's not fun waiting a few hours to pull a 20GB HD Movie off the TiVo just to have the transfer get interrupted.

So I'm going to sell the Powerline gear on ebay and give some Netgear MoCA hardware a swing. Review TK.

IFF Boston 2009

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:35:00 GMT

While I missed the opening night festivities on Wednesday evening, choosing to go to the Sox game instead, last night the Independent Film Festival of Boston 2009 began for me. Last year's festival I set the goal of writing reviews of all 15 films I saw in the fest, but crapped out after 6 reviews. This year, I'm trying to set a much more modest goal for myself: Write a 140 character review on Twitter for each of the films I see this year. I've already posted my first two mini-reviews last night over there, and will hopefully do better than I did last year with the bar set so low.

My current plan is to revisit some of my favorite films after the end of the festival with more in-depth discussions, but we'll see how that plan turns out.

Also, if you're interested in joining me for some of the films I'm seeing, here's an iCal feed of the movies I'm planning on seeing. There are descriptions, links, times, and locations in there.

Small World Revisited

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:34:43 GMT

A few years ago I mentioned running into a coworker from Rovia several times since the companies unfortunate demise.

Well today I got a LinkedIn invitation from Matt, and it turns out he works a few buildings over here in the Arsenal complex. We've likely been working a few hundred yards from each other for the past 2+ years and not known it.

Review: Netgear HDXB111 Powerline HD Plus Ethernet Adapter Kit

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:15:31 GMT

Update: This equipment worked less effectively than I had thought when I originally wrote this review. See this post for an update.

When we first moved into the new house, I initially set up a single WRT54G access point (running dd-wrt) in the office in the back of the house. I quickly learned, however, that this location didn't provide much signal to the rooms in the front of the house, most notably, the living room. Fortunately, I had a second WRT54G lying around as well as a good place to hide it in the dining room, so I set up WDS and used it to extend the network to the front of the house. This has been our basic network configuration for almost two years now. The equipment in the front of the house which requires network, such as the Xbox 360 and the Tivo, all have wireless adapters which are served by this second access point.

This was mostly dandy for your everyday bullshit web browsing and checking email. But as I started to put more demand on the network by pulling HD content off the Tivo, renting HD movies on the 360, as well as things like Netflix streaming, it started to creak. Truth was that not only was the signal between the office and the dining room pretty lousy, but just using WDS halved the bandwidth available to wireless clients. It was time to find a better solution.

The obvious solution is to use wired ethernet to distribute the network around the house. Unfortunately, our condo is the middle floor of a 3 story house, which means no access directly below or above us to easily run Cat5. While it wouldn't be impossible to get some Cat5 snaked through the walls into the basement, it wouldn't be easy or fun. If I took on this project, it would turn into a complete mess. If we hired someone to do it it'd likely be prohibitively expensive. Neither

coco_b nor myself are interested in running Cat5 visibly around the house, so that's not an option either.

Unable to come up with a true solution to this problem, I shelved it, accepting the status quo. A few days ago it occurred to me that there had been some companies developing equipment to send data over the electrical wiring of a home. Reviews on this equipment seemed to be pretty mixed, though. Some people raved about how brain-dead simple it was and how well it work. Others complained it didn't work at all. After some hemming and hawing, I decided to just give it a shot and if the equipment sucked I could always just resell it. I ended up ordering the Netgear HDXB111 Powerline HD Plus kit. It advertised a top speed of 200Mbps, but of course, actual data rates may vary...

I received the equipment yesterday and spent part of the evening doing some basic testing. First off, the actual setup of this equipment is just as brain-dead as advertised. I plugged each of the units in on opposite sides of the house and within a few seconds had link. That was it, it just worked right out of the box, no configuration, software, or anything else required. There was one other optional, but important, step, which was to 'randomize' the encryption keys used by the device. Out of the box, the key is set to a default value, but there is a 'pairing' procedure which generates a 'random' key and distributes it among the devices. You hold the "Security" button on the first device, and it goes through some motions and decides it is the primary device and generates a key. Then you hold the button on that device again, a light starts blinking, and you have 30 seconds to hold the button on another device. This distributes the key to the second device and you are, in theory, more secure. It apparently uses 3DES, but that requires trusting Netgear, so as always, it's in your best interests to never rely on it. There is also some Windows-only (ick) management software you can install if you wish to use your own keys. Either way, it's a pretty simple procedure and when you are done, you have link.

Before I started testing the speed of this equipment, though, I figured it was wise to benchmark the existing setup. I created an empty 1GB file to use for testing. 1GB might seem excessive, but I wanted to make sure I had enough time to get past TCP's slow start and get a good idea of the maximum speeds involved. So the first set of benchmark numbers are sending data from my MacBook Air in the Office connected via 802.11g to Corinna's Powerbook G4 in the Living Room connected via 802.11g to the second AP:

milgrim$ time nc -v -v -n pbook 2222 < big-file.bin
Connection to pbook 2222 port [tcp/*] succeeded!
      968.65 real         9.04 user        44.13 sys

(1,073,741,824 bytes) / (968.65 seconds) = 8.45713106 Mbps

So the performance of my existing setup using WDS was so much worse than I had imagined. I had never really bothered to test it before, and was truly surprised at how slow it was. Next up, I plugged in the first Powerline adapter in the office and patched it into the WRT54G's switch. I set up the second Powerline adapter in the Living Room and connected the Powerbook directly to it:

milgrim$ time nc -v -v -n pbook 2222 < big-file.bin
Connection to pbook 2222 port [tcp/*] succeeded!
      545.85 real         7.88 user        65.73 sys

(1,073,741,824 bytes) / (545.85 seconds) = 15.007786 Mbps

For those keeping score at home, 15Mbps is much slower than 200Mbps. Even though I had never expected to get anywhere close to the advertised bandwidth, I was pretty disappointed. While 15Mbps was almost twice as fast as my existing setup, it was still rather slow. I tried removing some equipment from the equation, connecting the MacBook Air directly to the office powerline adapter (so the two laptops were, in theory, "directly connected"), but I got very similar numbers. I then wired both laptops directly into the same 100Mbps switch and re-ran the test, and got around 60Mbps, so the laptops themselves were not the limiting factor. I also tried placing the two endpoints in the same room, using different power outlets on the same wall, and the speed went up a bit closer to 25Mbps, although I managed to lose the hard numbers.

So where do I stand on this technology? Disappointed, but likely sticking with it for the time being. Even though the throughput is MUCH lower than I had hoped, it is still better than what I had. And until I can figure out a way to get real Cat5 between the two rooms, I don't really see any other solution on the horizon. I'm certain that the slow speed is due to some noise in my wiring, but being that the wiring is new within the past 5 years, I'm guessing it is some device creating the noise. I guess I could try to figure out what it is, but I probably won't. I'll likely keep dicking around with the devices to see if I can get them to run any faster, and until then I'll take what I can get. Someday I'll either get physical wire between the two rooms or find another solution, and then I'll unload the equipment.. But until then I guess it will have to do.

My Schnozz

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:55:11 GMT

I've been having difficulty with my nose/sinuses for some time now, and it gets much worse in the dry winter months. So after some prodding from friends, i finally went this morning to consult with an Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor.

He examined all of those areas with various implements, the craziest being an fiber optic camera he shoved up into my nostrils. He determined that my septum was slightly deviated, but did not require surgery. This slight deviation was responsible for the discomfort I was feeling though... Apparently, the deviation is causing turbulence in my nose (disrupting the laminar flow of air). In the dry months, this is causing my nose to dry out, and much like dry hands, the walls along my septum eventually crack and bleed. This causes scabs to form, mucus attaches to the scabs, and it starts a kind of feedback loop. Blow out the mucus, it takes some of the scabs with it, you bleed, rinse, repeat.

He said that I have nickel-to-quarter sized patches of dryness and scabs in each nostril along the septum. I had been using a Neti Pot to treat the dryness, and he said that provides immediate relief, but the water is absorbed and evaporates so quickly that after a few hours things are back to the same, never giving the damaged patches time to heal. So he told me to apply "gobs" of bacitracin each night before bed for a month. I should feel relief within 3-4 days, but I have to keep at it for a whole month so things heal properly. Then I will cut back to weekly or so maintenance, depending on the time of year and how dry it is. The whole thing sounds pretty gross, but much less so than surgery, so I guess I should be relieved.

3D Scanning and Printing as a method of replicating discontinued parts

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:22:15 GMT

I'm not huge fan of Jay Leno, but this is a great summary of some of the cool aspects of 3D scanning and 3D printers. He uses a scan/print setup to reproduce a part for an old steam car which hasn't been made since 1910. But in my mind, he missed the most revolutionary aspect of this production system.

Sure, you can make a 3D model of a part you already possess, but that's just an evolution of 2D scanning techniques. And 3D printers, with their ability to make these 3D models into physical, plastic objects, are simply amazing. But for the most part it is just an evolution of the same techniques used in plotters like the ones I used in drafting class in high school. Both of these technologies are amazing, and I'm not trying to downplay how cool it is to see a functional copy of a physical object made.. When this technology is truly affordable, I'm sure I'll be tempted to dive in and screw around with it. But there is nothing particularly revolutionary about any of this.

In my mind, what is revolutionary is that after you take this physical, tangible, object and scan it into the machine, it becomes content. Content which can be shared just like movies, music, writings, ideas, and source code online. Sure, it's cool as hell that Jay Leno can reproduce a broken steam valve a century after production was ceased and restore his car to working order. But what is even cooler is that once he is confident in his copy, he can share that 3D model online with anyone else interested in this part, who (with access to a CNC), can create their own replacement part.

Once the information is in the computer, it is just as malleable as other digital media. While it's not as cool as the Linux Kernel or The Grey Album, one could envision a hacker in his garage taking that 3D model and trying to improve it. This hacker is able to use a common 3D modeling package to tweak the existing part, printing up their own plastic test piece to test it for fit, and taking it to a CNC to cut one out of metal to actually test it in operation. If it does happen to improve the part, they can then go ahead and share their changes with the world again. They could even take their improved model, 3D print it, then take a mold from it for mass-production, selling the parts to people without all this equipment.

Maybe this is just obvious to me and others with a particularly nerdy perspective.. I still find it amazing though how computers and networking are fundamentally changing the way with think of information. Hell, it's fundamentally changing what we consider information. The 3D scanner takes something physical and turns it into information. And as we've seen time and time again, once something is information it will find a life online which no one had imagined.

If the nanotech vision of The Diamond Age ever comes to fruition, where even the idea of matter itself becomes information we can manipulate, things are going to get rather interesting.

2008 Films in Review

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:20:59 GMT

Another great year for film.. Trying to pick my favorites this year might have even been harder than in 2007.

To reinforce my tradition of not placing importance of one film over another in each category, I decided to alphabetize the lists this year.

Top 10 Films of 2008 (in Alphabetical Order):
- In Bruges
- Let the Right One In
- Milk
- Slumdog Millionaire
- The Bank Job
- The Dark Knight
- The Reader
- The Visitor
- Time Crimes
- WALL-E
Bottom 4 films of 2008:
- Cloverfield
- Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
- Speed Racer
- Waltz With Bashir
Best Remake/Reworking: Be Kind Rewind
Most Unnecessary Remake/Reworking: The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) - I admittedly haven't seen it, but that's just because I consider it to be so unnecessary...
Best Director: Christopher Nolan in The Dark Knight
Best Actress: Kate Winslet in The Reader
Best Actor: Richard Jenkins in The Visitor
Best Supporting Actress: Amy Adams in Doubt
Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight
Best Ensemble: Doubt
Best Original Screenplay: In Bruges
Best Adapted Screenplay: Frost/Nixon
Best Cinematography: Milk
Best Soundtrack: Slumdog Millionaire
Most Alarming Cinematic Trend: Repeating last year, "Remakes going 3 or 4 levels deep..."
Most Memorable Lines:
- Let the Right One In:
  - Oskar: How old are you?
  - Eli: Twelve... more or less.
  - Eli: What about you?
  - Oskar: Twelve years, eight months and nine days. What do you mean, "more or less"?
  - Oskar: When's your birthday?
  - Eli: I don't know.
- The Dark Knight:
  - Salvatore Maroni: From one professional to another, if you're trying to scare somebody, pick a better spot. From this height, the fall wouldn't kill me.
  - Batman: I'm counting on it.
Best Documentary (tie):
- Encounters at the End of the World
- Man on Wire
Least shitty Darren Aronofsky film of all time: The Wrestler
Best use of Special Effects in a lame movie: Speed Racer
Best Interviews in a Documentary: Encounters at the End of the World
Films I feel guilty for missing:
- Frozen River
- Rachael Getting Married
Films I don't feel guilty for missing:
- Day of the Dead (2008)
- The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Watertown Burger King BS

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:59:59 GMT

Watertown Burger King BS
Originally uploaded by seangraham

(Spotted at the Burger King at the Arsenal Mall food court)

So let me get this straight, Watertown Town Council President Clyde Younger:

It's a SAFETY issue that you can't offer cups of ice or water to customers, and has nothing to do with you trying to save a buck? Do you use some kind of magical, safe ice and water when I order a soft drink? Of course you don't, you are just not interested in giving out free cups of water to your customers. If that's your decision, fine, but don't try and pass it off as some sort of bogus safety issue!

Bizarre Dream

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:36:07 GMT

Last night, I dreamed that I had lost/stolen my MacBook Air. In the dream (as in real life), I knew I had good backups, so I was less upset about the loss as I was about the cost of replacing it. Continuing this uniquely rational dream logic, I decided that I needed a larger salary to be able to afford to replace it. I instantly found myself in the lobby of my former employer, Goodrich Surveillance and Reconnaissance Systems. I told the guard in the SRS lobby that I was here to see my old boss, who wasn't expecting me. I told the guard to tell Brian that I was looking for a job, so he'd obviously want to talk to me immediately.

At this point, Sue, who is in charge of HR at my current company, met me in the lobby; she was apparently working at SRS in this dream. She began to show me around the building, which was odd, because I had worked there for 2.5 years. Of course, the building looked completely different, and we came upon this large room with glass walls which looked more like one of the GCCIS labs at RIT. It was here where I ran into an old friend from High School, Doug Palermo. I haven't seen Doug in ~14 years, and while I did buy his aforelinked book, I haven't read it yet. In the dream, I asked Doug if he was working for SRS, and he replied no, he was just visiting.

Finally, I ran into an former coworker, Ed, who I chatted with for a few minutes before waking up. What amused me most about the dream was, once I first appeared in the SRS lobby, how strongly I rejected the notion of going back to work there. Before I had even talked to the guard I had decided there was no way I was going to come back and work there, but figured I'd play along so I could see some old friends. I wasn't banking on seeing old friends from High School...

Rather NSFW

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:52:26 GMT

BASTARD!!!

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:50:51 GMT

(via tofutti break)

Bad Brains Documentary?

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:25:19 GMT

ljdump -> Wordpress conversion tool

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 04:58:30 GMT

I spent some time this weekend hacking together a python tool that will take an archive from ljdump and massage it into something the Wordpress LiveJournal importer can digest.

The WP importer seems to be expecting XML in the format used by ljArchive. ljdump also stores each entry in a separate file, and comments for each entry in another file still. The WP importer is a web form which allows you to submit an XML file, and doing this once for each entry would be excruciating. Furthermore, there are some differences in the structure of the XML used by ljArchive and ljdump, so some restructuring was necessary.

My script, 'convertdump.py' is still a little rough around the edges, but it seems to work (with some caveats listed below). I'm going to hold off on a 'less geeky' release until I polish it up a bit, but for those of you who want to grab it now and start testing or playing with it, you can clone my repository here:

git://donkey.csh.rit.edu/ljdump.git

A few things to be aware of:

There are two arguments required on the command-line:
1. username of the archive to process
2. a number of entries to limit the resultant xml to. WP tends to time out on large files, so for people who can't adjust their PHP timeouts and file upload size parameters, they can create several smaller archives as opposed to one large one
My script is currently messing up when processing the security information for posts. Therefore it will make public any private or friends only entries. I also think that even if I was processing this information correctly, the WP importer would ignore them anyway and still import them as public entries. I'm going to look further into this, but my plan in the short term is to add a command line argument which omits protected/private entries from the archive file.
WP doesn't do any of the special LJ tags (such as <lj user=...>), so I think I'll modify the script to convert some of these special tags into normal hrefs. I probably won't try to do anything special with lj-cut, however, because that could turn into a can of worms.. :)

Anyway, if this is useful to you, and you aren't afraid of hacked together, barely tested software, give it a swing. I'm happy to hear about bugs, feature requests, or accept patches. :)

Update:

A few other things to know:

I'm a git newbie, so I very well may have messed things up
I'm (mostly) a python newbie, so this might not be the most elegant/neat/efficient python code ever produced
I'm not planning on abandoning LJ any time soon, I'm just preparing a set of contingencies "just in case". My plan is to be read to replace sean-graham.com with little effort and incident in the case of LJ's early demise.

Oh Yeah!

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:50:07 GMT

Being Blanche Deveraux

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:25:37 GMT

Goodbye; Hello.

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:53:09 GMT

"In America, The land of the free, they said, And of opportunity, In a just and a truthful way.

But where the president, is never black, female or gay, and until that day,
you've got nothing to say to me, to help me believe"

- Morrissey, "America is not the World"

Someone thought this would work?

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:01:33 GMT

(via urbaniak)

Pay it Forward

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 21:11:54 GMT

Last year, at Matt & Casey's anniversary extravaganza, we had a little car accident due to some really wet ice. Nobody was hurt, and there was only a little bumper scraping which occurred, but the person driving the car on the receiving end of our car was very nice and didn't even want to exchange insurance information. We were quite grateful.

Last night, after leaving the CfA, Howard and I were trying to pass the Sheraton Commander hotel in Harvard Square, but there was some Fire/Ambulance activity in front. Because of the emergency vehicles, a MBTA bus, which runs on overhead catenary wires couldn't continue down the road. We got a green light but after crossing the intersection approaching the hotel we were stopped. The cars behind us ended up "blocking the box" and were jockeying to get out of the way of the cross traffic. The car behind me tried to pull up along side me on the right to get out of the way, but ended up tapping my bumper. I could tell it was a fairly non-event impact, and seeing the terrified eyes of the woman who hit us in the rear-view, I decided to let it slide and just continued on my way. When I parked the car I assessed the damage, and it was a small amount of paint removed from my bumper, which is already very battle scarred from years of parking in Brighton.

Do unto others, or something...

Democracy @ Work

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 03:16:51 GMT

Democracy @ Work
Originally uploaded by seangraham

A few weeks before the 2000 presidential election, I voted via absentee ballot while attending RIT. My hometown of Hopatcong sent me a punch-card ballot with instructions to punch the card using a pen. After completing the ballot, I noticed a collection of little paper dots on my desk. It would be a few weeks before I learned that these were known as 'chads'.

I thought it would be fun to tape all of these dots to a piece of paper reading 'Democracy @ Work' and place it on my dorm room door at CSH. Fast-forwarding a few weeks to election day, and the drama in Florida which followed, this would go from being a sign of my pride and participation to a disappointing reminder of the inefficiency in our voting system.

Check your Address Book

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:40:57 GMT

I just turned off my @livejournal.com email address, as it had just turned into a spam pit... My extensive email archive tells me that only two people have ever used it to contact me, and both of those now know my real address...

If you need my email address, just leave a comment to any post and I'll receive it.. Even if you don't have an LJ account, leave an anonymous comment, and I'll be notified to approve it...

Goodbye Twitter (Syndication)!

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:58:45 GMT

In a discussion with Howard today, I mentioned how I hated when people post an update to Twitter to mention that they made a new post to their blog. This caused me to rethink about the opposite scenario: my use of LoudTwitter to most those "Daily Twitter Profundity" posts.. At first I liked them, but after thinking about it, and seeing how it seemingly completely floods out my Journal here, I'm ending that process.

In the future, if you want to see little quippy updates on how my day is going, keep an eye on my Twitter page. If RSS is your thing, you can even add my Twitter RSS feed to your favorite news reader.

Now, as evidenced by the 10:1 (100:1) ratio of the "Daily Twitter Profundity" posts to actual journal posts, it should be clear that I have been posting to my journal less. I guess this is because Twitter has become the place where I post little dumb updates and observations (which used to get their own post to the journal). This means that you'll see the number of posts here at LiveJournal go down a bit, but the posts that I do make should have a bit more signal and a bit less noise (hopefully).

Please feel free to thank me or tell me I'm an idiot in the comments, but I'm pretty sure this decision is final.