grahams

Labeling Insanity in the Fenway Bleachers

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 05:24:04 GMT

The way rows are labeled at Fenway Park makes no sense. Every game I attend in the bleachers, the first few innings are constantly interrupted by people who either mis-read the row number when they sat down and now need to move when the proper occupants arrive, or by people who think they are working their way down to their seat and find people sitting in them, only to find that they are in the wrong row.

This is always caused by the way the rows are labeled. Look at the picture below. As you can see, the side of the chair on the aisle is labeled “13″, but when people see the other “13″ on the step riser, which is far more visible as you are walking up the aisle, they assume that the “13″ refers to the level above it.

A much better way to label the rows is below:

As you can see, it is very clear which row is which. This would eliminate so much confusion and reduce the number of interruptions for bleacher fans. Please fix this.

Originally published at grahams' completely normal random rantings. Please leave any comments there.

2010 Films in Review

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:04:53 GMT

Even later than last year!

Top 10 Films of 2010 (in Alphabetical Order):
- The Fighter
- Inception
- Jackass 3D
- Kick-ass
- The King’s Speech
- Micmacs
- Perrier’s Bounty
- The Social Network
- True Grit
- Winter’s Bone
Bottom 6 films of 2010:
- Clash of the Titans
- The Human Centipede (First Sequence)
- A Nightmare on Elm Street
- Predators
- Salt
- Splice
Best Remake/Reworking: The Crazies
Most Unnecessary Remake/Reworking: A Nightmare on Elm Street
Best Director: Christopher Nolan for Inception
Best Actress: Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit
Best Actor: Colin Firth in The King’s Speech
Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo in The Fighter
Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale n The Fighter
- Honorable mention for John Hawkes in Winter’s Bone
Best Ensemble: Jackass 3D
Best Original Screenplay: Inception
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Social Network
Best Cinematography: Inception
Best Soundtrack: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Best Score: Inception
Most Alarming Cinematic Trend: Second Year for both 3D and Fake IMAX
Most Memorable Lines:
- Hot Tub Time Machine
  - Lou: Here’s a question. Was it morally wrong for me to exploit my knowledge of the future for personal financial gain? Perhaps. Here’s another question. Do I give a fuck?
- Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
  - Stacey Pilgrim: I mean, did you really see a future with this girl?
  - Scott Pilgrim: Like… with jetpacks?
- Kick-Ass
  - Big Daddy: Good job. I’m so proud of you, baby doll. Are you okay?
  - Hit Girl: Mhmm… but getting shot, Daddy… it hurt a lot more than when you did it.
  - Big Daddy: That’s because I used low velocity rounds, child… he… he…
  - Hit Girl: You’re the kindest Daddy in the whole world.
  - Big Daddy: No, I just… I love you…
  - Hit Girl: I love you, too, Daddy… I love you, too, Daddy. Sleep tight.
- Jackass 3D
  - Steve-O: How many stings do you think we can take?
  - Manny Puig: I think it takes about 100 to kill a man.
  - Dave England: Are you serious? Did you just make that number up? There’s 50,000 bees and it takes 100 to kill a man?
  - Manny Puig: I think it takes 100.
  - Loomis Fall: Then what are we doing here?
  - Manny Puig: Making a hit movie.
Best Documentary: Exit Through the Gift Shop
Guilty Pleasures:
- MacGruber
- Tron: Legacy
Films I feel guilty for missing:
- OSS 117: Lost in Rio
Films I don’t feel guilty for missing:
- Edge of Darkness
- Repo Men
- Babies
- Robin Hood
- The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Originally published at grahams' completely normal random rantings. Please leave any comments there.

My Movies of 2010

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:52:23 GMT

Here’s the list of movies I saw in 2010… I saw 147 movies this year, exactly as many as the year before. As I have done the past few years, my “Best of 2010″ list will probably come closer to the Academy Awards, so I have the opportunity to see some of the well-regarded films of the year that I missed.

As I mentioned last year, in 2010 I gathered more data about the movies I see. I also decided to no longer split up the list between “Theater” and “Home”, as the distinction doesn’t mean much to me anymore. I did, however, gather statistics about how I watched a film, which you can view after the split:

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at grahams' completely normal random rantings. Please leave any comments there.

Thanksgiving Comes First!

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 20:22:03 GMT

This isn't the "War Against Christmas", it is the "War Against Christmas Overload". Thanksgiving Comes First!

Originally published at grahams' completely normal random rantings. Please leave any comments there.

My Backup Strategy

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:27:38 GMT

I recently read an article entitled Mac Software for Advanced OS X Users over at AppStorm, and one of the tools it tipped me off to was SMARTReporter. SMART stands for “Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology”, and it is a monitoring technology built into most hard disks. SMARTReporter asks the drive for it’s status every once in awhile, and if there is trouble, it alerts you. This seemed like a good idea, so I installed it. Just a few weeks later, SMARTReporter began notifying me that OS X was reporting I/O Errors with the drive. Soon after the first few warnings the computer started hanging. I quickly attached one of my external backup drives, and while it took some time, I was able to update the backup to include any files that had changed since my last backup.

I took the computer to the Apple Store and while they were ready to replace the drive under warranty immediately, I had a non-standard drive. When I ordered my Macbook I chose the 7200RPM disk, which isn’t typically carried in the physical Apple Stores. They ordered the disk, and the next day they called me back to say it had arrived and to schedule a time to bring the machine in to have it replaced. They replaced the drive in about 20 minutes, and when I got home I hooked up that aforementioned backup drive and had my computer restored to normal in no time.

Now this entire ordeal was annoying, but I never truly got angry. The truth is that my fairly regimented backup strategy gave me the confidence to know that there was almost no chance of me losing any data. In fact, in the 24 hours between my visits to the Apple Store, I was able to continue to use my laptop by booting off of that Firewire Backup disk. I honestly didn’t expect the replacement to arrive in 24 hours, so I even went a bit overboard and MacGyver’ed a method of keeping my laptop portable while using the external disk.

In a few conversations I’ve had since all of this happened, some questions have come up about my backup methods, so I figured I would write them up here.

I love my MacBook Pro, but at the end of the day it is just a hunk of hardware that will go bad at some point. The data stored on that computer is much more valuable (to me) than the hardware itself. My computer contains email archives going back to the early 90s, photos going back even further, all of my music, documents, writing, code, and more. Preventing the loss of this data is worth a bit of hassle, but I promise you that my methodology is only a bit of hassle. In practice it isn’t anywhere near as painful as it seems. I start with the low-hanging fruit and then get into the more involved practices. The most important thing to take away from this is that no backup method is 100% reliable, so make sure you choose more than one way to backup your files.

The first line of my defense is Dropbox, which is where my “Documents” folder lives. Dropbox gives every user a free 2GB virtual disk that lives “in the cloud” (in other words, online). The Dropbox application which runs on your computer ensures that a copy of that virtual disk is also in a directory on your computer. If you add, modify or delete a file in the Dropbox folder on your computer, it will (almost) instantly be copied up to “the cloud”. If you are offline and modify files on your computer, the next time you are online it will copy any changes up. Furthermore, you can run Dropbox on multiple computers and it will keep all of them in sync. Want to get at your documents at work? Easy. This is one of those brain-dead simple tools that can be a lifesaver.
The next step is Apple-specific. Apple’s Time Machine is backup for everyone. It requires almost no configuration and can totally save your bacon. In a default configuration, you pick an external hard disk to use, and every time you connect it it will backup your computer automatically. If you leave that external hard disk connected all the time (as in the case of a desktop computer) then Time Machine will perform a backup every hour. One great side effect of this is that it keeps old versions of files it has backed up around, so if you accidentally deleted a file yesterday, or made a change which you want to “undo”, you can grab the file from last week’s backup. They have made the configuration so simple that the act of simply attaching an external disk to your computer is enough; Mac OS will ask you if you want to use it with Time Machine. If you are a 100% laptop user like me, you may want to invest in Apple’s Time Capsule, which is a network device which Time Machine can backup to over the network, freeing you from having to connect disks to your computer. As a bonus it is a Wireless-N router, so you can kill a few birds with one stone.
As if Time Machine and Dropbox got mashed together, BackBlaze backs up your hard disk to that pesky “cloud”. The service costs $50 a year, but for that you get a complete, off-site online backup of your computer. That first backup takes several days, but it just plugs along in the background and you will most likely not even notice it is working. Once it is all backed up, it will copy updated or changed files up to their servers on the fly to keep your backup current. Note the emphasized words back there, off-site. In the event of a real disaster (fire, flood, robbery or the like), any number of backups at your home might be destroyed. That is why paying for one of these services is worth it. BackBlaze has several competitors (Carbonite and Mozy, among others), so take some time and figure out which one works best for you. Note that BackBlaze won’t back up any files bigger than 9GB. This is much bigger than only the largest video files, but it is good to note.
One of the things that NONE of these previous methods will get you is a way to get RIGHT back on your feet after a hard disk crash. If you want that you are going to need to keep a live copy of your hard disk, and the best way to do that (on a Mac) is with Carbon Copy Cloner (which is “donation-ware”, meaning it is free but the developer could use your support). Get (another) external hard disk, particularly one that your computer can boot from (on most Mac’s this means a FireWire drive, but check to make sure). Then use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a clone of your computers hard disk onto this external disk. Once you’ve done this, try and boot your computer off of this external drive. If you were successful, your computer should boot and look exactly the same as it normally does (although the external drives are often much slower, so everything may take a bit longer). Repeat this ‘cloning’ on a regular basis so if the hard disk dies in your computer you have a quick way to get back on your feet. I have a calendar alarm every Saturday morning to remind me to connect my clone drive.
1. Advanced Tip: If you want to make life a bit easier on yourself, investigate CCC’s “Scheduled Tasks” functionality. You can cause a clone to happen automatically when you connect your external clone drive, and you can also cause it to only clone what has changed since your last clone (which should cause the clone to take much less time).
2. Extra Credit: Once you get a CCC workflow that works for you, you may wish to consider duplicating your efforts with a second clone drive, and keep that second clone drive off site. Keep it at your desk at work or even at a trusted friend’s house. I personally keep my second drive in a safe deposit box at my bank. So I am not going to the bank every week, I keep one clone drive at home, and I clone to it every Saturday. Then once a month or so, I go to the bank and swap the clone drives. This way I have a clone that is no more than a week old at home, and one that is no more than a month old off site.

That all looks complicated, but really only the 4th level requires any “manual” intervention. Once Dropbox, Time Machine and BackBlaze are all set up, they don’t really require any work on your part. And for those first three methods, the initial setup is really easy, even for the novice.

Please don’t let the apparent complexity of #4 scare you off easily, because having a clone to boot from can be a life-saver. Because of this cloned drive, when the hard disk in my Mac started to fail last week, I simply ran CCC to update the clone before the drive completely died, then I rebooted my machine off the clone and was back to the races. I then ran off of this backup until Apple got the replacement drive in, and when I got home from Apple I just used CCC to clone that external drive back onto the new disk from Apple. Given that it only took Apple 24 hours to receive the replacement drive, this might seem like a bit of overkill, but what if it had been a few days? Or a week? I added #4 to my regimen after my last drive failure, I was out of commission for a few days because I didn’t have a clone to boot from.

The key thing to remember, especially about methods 2-4, is that unless you configure them otherwise, they will backup every file on your system. Even files that you might not think are important will get backed up. To me, this is a key feature of good backup strategy. Unimportant files have a notorious way of becoming really important the moment after a hard disk crash. Any backup method which requires you to manually select or copy files yourself is doomed to failure.

Originally published at grahams' completely normal random rantings. Please leave any comments there.

Adventures in Interconnection

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:46:56 GMT

Back in February I ordered a pair of 15 foot 1/4″ cables from Monoprice to use for the radio programme as well as recording my guitar. When I opened the box, the cables seemed a bit bulky, but I didn’t put much thought into them. I used them for several weeks, bunching up the slack underneath the coffee table. One night, after the radio show was over, Corinna and Rory started busting my balls about how long the cables were. I had to admit they did seem just a touch longer than 15′. So we busted out a tape measure and found that my 15′ cables were actually 50′.

Bank error in my favor? I’d normally agree, but being I really only needed the cables to run the few feet from my mixer to the living room amplifier, it was a little ridiculous. Embarrassed that I didn’t realize this right away, I quickly resolved turn the two cables into four. One pair of shorter patch cables (as I had originally ordered) and a long pair of extensions. I also realized that my original estimate of 15′ was actually too long, so I decided on 10′ and 40′ lengths for the cables.

Fast forward several months to me actually getting off my ass to do this work. A week or so ago I ordered all of the interconnects I actually needed, and a few days ago I measured and cut the cables to length, and began assembling them. Or at least I had planned to. It turned out that the insulation on the cable was too thick to fit through the jack housing. Furthermore, my soldering iron was a piece of shit. So I set everything aside until I could make a trip to the electronics shop.

This morning I made my pilgrimage “You-do-it” Electronics, home of everything a nerd needs for projects such as these. I picked up an alternate set of connectors, some sexy colored heat-shrink tubing to color code the cables and extensions, a nice Weller soldering iron, a new pair of dikes, and a bit of random stuff that has nothing to do with this project but which one is susceptible to buying at Nerd Mecca. Once I got home with the right gear and parts, building the cables was a piece of cake.

My weekend project is done, I’ve acquired some new tools, breathed in some lead… So far, so good!

Originally published at grahams' completely normal random rantings. Please leave any comments there.

grahams’ completely normal radio programme goes public!

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:04:30 GMT

For a bit more than 2 years I’ve been doing a mostly-weekly streaming internet radio show called “grahams’ completely normal radio programme“. Since I kept it private amongst a small group of friends, while you may have heard me mention it on occasion, you most likely haven’t listened to it. Starting this Monday at 10pm EDT, I’m taking the show public (and legit). You can find the details to tune in over at http://radio.dosburros.com/ (which will redirect you to LoudCity).

The format is a commercial-free mish-mash of music I’m into, which crosses quite a few genres. I’m live on mic, and have been known to have guests in-studio or over Skype. I try to briefly review movies I have seen with the film club. I have real equipment. I have run contests. I have world premiered music. I usually manage to keep technical screw-ups to a minimum. I even have a terrible auto-tuned theme song that will get stuck in your head.

As you may be thinking, having all of this going on for an audience of fewer than a dozen people started to seem a little ludicrous. So I decided to figure out a way to conform to the complicated streaming royalty system, and ultimately settled on using the LoudCity platform so I didn’t have to do any hard work. The only catch is that in order to be covered under their royalty agreements, I need to have all of the links to the stream hosted on their domain. Which is why the above link will redirect you from dosburros.com to their site.

Obviously the programme’s web presence is limited right now. I’ve been mulling this decision for a few months but the decision to actually pull the trigger and get it done happened while floating on the Party Barge Regency Edition this weekend. In addition to the (currently) terrible webpage, you can follow the show on Twitter at @radioprogramme.

The people who have been listening for the past few years have told me it’s a good show. I hope you’ll think so too. Tune in one of these upcoming Mondays and let me know what you think. At a minimum you’ll be able to make fun of me for such a colossal waste of time.

Originally published at grahams' completely normal random rantings. Please leave any comments there.

Review: iPad

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 05:46:54 GMT

We’ve had a few iPads at work since April, and one of them is presently assigned to me as I optimize our web viewer for the WiFi iPad and iPhone. While I’ve taken it home a few times to give it a whirl, our Memorial Day trip to Michigan was my first real serious time using it. I decided to bring it with me instead of my laptop, just to see what it was like using it regularly. My experience was very pleasant. Here are some random observations:

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at grahams' completely normal random rantings. Please leave any comments there.

I was jack’s online journal

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:17:28 GMT

Back on June 25th, 2000 I posted my first entry over at LiveJournal. 10 years, 2,778 entries, and 6,347 comments later I’ve decided that it is time to move on.

Realistically, between sites like twitter, flickr, and my bookmarks over at ~~delicious~~ pinboard I simply don’t end up posting to my LJ as much anymore. LJ used to really appeal to me due to the large community and the discussions it generated. But now it feels more like just another abandoned alleyway on the Internet. I suspect that most people who read my posts do so through RSS or Facebook anyway.

So i have moved everything over to my new blog at http://sean-graham.com/. ~~For the time being I will leave a cross-posting script set up to post my entries over there to LJ, but I don’t know how long that will last.~~ I have disabled comments on my LJ, so if you want to discuss a posting of mine there will be a link at the bottom of each post to bring you back to my Wordpress blog.

The edges are still rough at the new place, and while most of the content and comments have imported successfully, there were a few problems (100 or so anonymous comments seem to have been assigned to the wrong posts), but so it goes… I have been manually going through and fixing these edge cases when I have the time. The look of the new blog will probably change quite a bit in the near future.

So there it is. Update your bookmarks, RSS readers, etc. This is a perfect time to also start ignoring me. I rarely have anything of value to say anyhow. :)

Originally published at grahams' completely normal random rantings. Please leave any comments there.

HOWTO: Surviving IFFBoston

Thu, 06 May 2010 02:36:55 GMT

The Independent Film Festival of Boston is one of the reasons I love living in Boston. In my opinion, if you are a film fan and you live in Boston, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don't go all-in on the festival. This year, despite seeing a personal-record 20 films in 8 days, I found myself much less wiped out than previous years. This is mostly due to to the all-volunteer staff and crew of the festival tweaking things year-after-year, improving things for everyone. Many festivals are run strictly for the industry but IFFBoston also tries to cater just as much to the filmgoer.

Aside from all of the things the staff does to make things run smoothly, there are many tips and tricks I've developed myself. I realize that sharing these after the 2010 festival isn't very helpful, but I wanted to get these written down for next year. This is mostly to augment my own memory, but hopefully you can find something useful here.

If you're going to be seeing a bunch of films, buy a pass. This year, the "Film" pass was $180. Even if you are seeing fewer than 18 films, you have to remember all of the fringe benefits of the pass:
1. Passholders get to enter the theater first, approximately 15 minutes before showtime. So you usually can sit wherever you'd like.
2. Sometimes you'll hear buzz about a particular film while talking to other festival goers, and the pass gives you the flexibility to rejigger your schedule once the festival is going.
3. Along the same lines, even as well run as IFFBoston is, schedules can slip and Q&A sessions are sometimes too riveting to leave. Being able to decide to leave when you want to as opposed to what your tickets dictate is very nice.
4. Passes help support the festival.
Simply accept that not only will you not be able to see all the films in the festival, but you likely won't even be able to see all of the ones you are interested in. This year, there were more than 60 films available, but the most any one person can see was 20, as there were sometimes 6 screens running simultaneously.
There are two ways to go about scheduling. You can either
1. Look at the list of films, going through them all and prioritizing films based on your interest. I did this in 2009, and while it worked, it was a little frustrating, as I would get hooked on the idea of seeing a film just to find out it conflicted with another film, or was logistically unrealistic (not enough time to get from the Somerville to the Brattle, for instance).
2. What I did in 2010, and which was much less frustrating, was to use the grid view of B-Side's "Festival Genius". Going day-by-day, look at the first time-slot and pick a set of movies which you are both interested in and which work logistically for that day. You'll still certainly have some sticky schedulting, but I found it far less frustrating.
When developing your schedule, try to remember to leave slack for Q&A sessions, schedule slippage, and traveling between theatres or venues.
Also remember to leave a bit of slack for you to get a bite to eat! Most years I've found some natural gaps between movies which gave me enough time to grab a quick bite, but review your schedule and make sure you have at least 30 minutes for some fast food (or an hour for real food, which is what I try to do). Another strategy I've fallen into is to plan longer dinners (i.e. my yearly meal at Redbones) during days like Friday or Monday, where you can get the food in before the movies even start. Save up quicker blasts (Anna's, Spike's, etc) for the weekend marathons.
After discussing things with several other fest-degens, we all seem to agree that the magic number is 5. That is 5 films in one day, 6 is just too many. By the 6th film you will probably be tired, somewhat dreading going into it, and largely incoherent afterwards. This year the schedule bound Saturday to 5 films and I felt great afterwards. That said, if I can squeeze 6 into a day next year I probably would.
You'll need to decide whether or not going to the parties is important to you. For me, I want to see as many movies as possible during the festival. Since most of the parties occur while movies are being shown, I almost never go to the parties.
Pack, pack, pack. I am be a bit obsessive in this department (doctors may say in ALL departments), but I find that a well-stocked backpack makes a crowded day of movies much more bearable. Here are some of the things I stock in my backpack:
- Reading Material: You'll likely need less of it than you may think, but a good magazine or small book can be clutch if you have an hour or so between movies.
- Granola/Clif Bars: As much as I love theater refreshments, sometimes you don't have time to wait on line between films.
- Water: Again, my love of refreshments aside, I try to bring one or two bottles of water on the long days.
- Face wipes: I love being able to freshen up when time doesn't allow a quick trip to the bathroom.
- Emergency Power: I tend to grind on my iPhone a lot during downtime between shows, so it never hurts to have a way to give it a boost if the battery starts getting low.
- Medications: If you take any meds, don't forget to bring them with you.
- Layers: Late april weather is insane, so be sure to pack a sweatshirt or leave room in there to stash it later.
- Small Umbrella: Most lines are outside. Don't get wet.
- Air-activated Handwarmers: I started bringing these this year, but didn't need them. A few miserably cold Fenway trips this year convinced me to order a big box of these things. Might be good 'last resort' on a strange cold snap or unexpected wait on line.
It's not the end of the world, but this year I tried to remember to check my wallet before leaving each day and reloading it if necessary. If you're trying to squeeze in some concessions or a meal into a tight schedule it can be frustrating to need to find an ATM. If you want to buy merch (supports the festival!) or even a DVD or other swag from a filmmaker, plan accordingly.
Thank all the volunteers profusely. They are devoting tons of time to make the whole thing go off, so make sure they know they are appreciated. And don't gripe at them if a schedule slips, or if you are waiting on line longer than you want to. None of them are getting paid, and i don't believe any of them are crowd control professionals. Also, often many of the delays are somewhat out of their hands. Imagine a local filmmaker with 100+ friends and family in the crowd, and all of them wanting to glad-hand him after the Q&A session.

That isn't a complete list, and it is pretty random, but it should do for now...

2009 Films in Review

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 03:35:24 GMT

Better late than never, right?

Top 10 Films of 2009 (in Alphabetical Order):
Bottom 4 films of 2009:
Best Remake/Reworking: Star Trek
Most Unnecessary Remake/Reworking: Friday the 13th (2009)
Best Director: James Cameron in Avatar (Not the best movie of the year, but the direction was clearly tops)
Best Actress: Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia
Best Actor: Robin Williams in World's Greatest Dad
Best Supporting Actress: Mimi Kennedy in In The Loop
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds
Best Ensemble: In The Loop
Best Original Screenplay: The Hurt Locker
Best Adapted Screenplay: In The Loop
Best Cinematography: Avatar
Best Soundtrack: Star Trek
Most Alarming Cinematic Trend: 3D and Fake IMAX.
Most Memorable Lines:
- In The Loop
  - Malcolm Turner - Fuckity-bye-bye then
  - Malcolm Turner - Y'know, I've come across a lot of psychos, but none as fucking boring as you. You are a real boring fuck. Sorry, sorry, I know you disapprove of swearing so I'll sort that out. You are a boring F, star, star, CUNT!
- World's Greatest Dad
  - Kyle: Bruce Hornsby's a fag.
  - Lance Clayton: He's got kids Kyle.
  - Kyle: You have a kid. And you're a fag.
- Star Trek
  - McCoy: Yeah. Well, I got nowhere else to go, the ex-wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce. All I got left is my bones.
Best Documentary: It Might Get Loud - I now own a guitar and am taking lessons.
Films I feel guilty for missing:
Films I don't feel guilty for missing:

Google comes thru for Red Sox Nation!

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:29:19 GMT

As I had earlier reported, Google Maps had a pretty egregious error with how it had labeled Yawkey Way. I am happy to report that this is now corrected.

The Movies I Saw in 2009

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 05:00:18 GMT

Here's the list of movies I saw in 2009... I saw 147 movies this year, which is just about where I was the year before. I think the number of films I can see in a year given all of my other interests and responsibilities is right in the neighborhood of 150. I haven't really sat down and thought about my "best of" list yet, as I usually take January to try and catch up on acclaimed movies I missed, but my gut tells me it was a pretty good year for movies.

I think in 2010 I'm going to keep more data about the movies I view, but I also think I may eliminate my distinction between "Theatre" and "Video" in the list I actually publish next year. We'll see.

The list is mostly in the order I viewed them, and I tried to italicize any films I had already seen.

Theatre:

1) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2) Revolutionary Road
3) Doubt
4) The Wrestler
5) Happy-Go-Lucky
6) The Reader
7) Waltz With Bashir
8) Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead
9) Coraline (3D)
10) The Class
11) The Dynamite Brothers (Cinematic Titanic Live)
12) Serbis
13) Watchmen
14) Gomorrah
15) Sunshine Cleaning
16) I Love You, Man
17) Adventureland
18) Sin Nombre
19) Crank: High Voltage
20) That Evening Sun
21) The Missing Person
22) Winnebago Man
23) In The Loop
24) Pontypool
25) Crude
26) Automorphosis
27) The Burning Plain
28) The Lost Son of Havana
29) Grace
30) Theo (Short)
31) O.W. Houts & Sons, Inc (Short)
32) The Archive (Short)
33) I Knew It Was You (Short)
34) Shouting Fire: Stories From the Edge of Free Speech
35) Food, Inc.
36) The Escapist
37) For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism
38) Art & Copy
39) World's Greatest Dad
40) Anvil! The Story of Anvil
41) Star Trek
42) X-Men Origins: Wolverine
43) Terminator Salvation
44) The Hangover
45) Il Divo
46) Angels & Demons
47) Moon
48) The Long Goodbye
49) The Hurt Locker
50) In The Loop
51) District 9
52) Inglourious Basterds
53) It Might Get Loud
54) Extract
55) The Baader-Meinhof Complex
56) Pandorum
57) Zombieland
58) Capitalism: A Love Story
59) Where The Wild Things Are
60) Pirate Radio
61) The Messenger
62) The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
63) Fantastic Mr. Fox
64) Strange Brew
65) Smokey and the Bandit
66) Invictus
67) Avatar

Video:

1) The X Files: I Want to Believe
2) Gangs of New York
3) Charlie Wilson's War
4) The Invasion
5) The Orphanage
6) Sleuth
7) Death Race
8) Forgetting Sarah Marshall
9) Welcome to Macintosh
10) The Trials of Ted Haggard
11) The Darjeeling Limited
12) Slumdog Millionaire
13) Doomsday
14) A Clockwork Orange
15) Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
16) Diary of the Dead
17) Poultry in Motion: Truth Is Stranger Than Chicken
18) 1408
19) Right America: Feeling Wronged - Some Voices from the Campaign Trail
20) Summer School
21) The Incredible Shrinking Woman
22) Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox
23) Crank
24) Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy
25) Pineapple Express
26) Bottle Shock
27) His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th
28) Shooter
29) RiP: A Remix Manifesto
30) Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead
31) I Drink Your Blood
32) Female Trouble
33) What We Do Is Secret
34) X-Men
35) Wendy and Lucy
36) Hostel II
37) Role Models
38) American Cannibal
39) Hancock
40) Letting Go of God
41) Devil's Playground
42) Grizzly Man
43) Sneakers
44) Teddy: In His Own Words
45) Glory
46) Code Rush
47) Greetings from Bertrand Island
48) Modify
49) Ferris Bueller's Day Off
50) The Bourne Supremacy
51) The Bourne Ultimatium
52) Lars and the Real Girl
53) BASEketball
54) The Lives of Others
55) Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip
56) The Happening
57) Friday the 13th (2009)
58) Valkyrie
59) God Said, Ha!
60) Eagle Eye
61) Ghostbusters
62) Star Trek
63) A Mighty Wind
64) Gran Torino
65) The Godfather
66) Observe and Report
67) The Ruins
68) Day of the Dead (2008)
69) Rambo (2008)
70) Toy Story 2
71) Brüno
72) The Prophecy
73) Classic Albums: Pink Floyd - The Making of "The Dark Side of the Moon"
74) Rescue Dawn
75) The Guru
76) The Hangover
77) Star Trek
78) Inglourious Basterds
79) National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
80) Bad Santa

My latest contribution to Red Sox Nation

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 16:17:44 GMT

I was using Google Maps the other day when I noticed something strange. Yawkey Way was mislabeled. It is my understanding (as it was before my time living in Boston) that Jersey Street used to run from Boylston Street to Brookline Avenue, past Fenway Park. In 1976, the stretch of Jersey that ran along Fenway Park (between Van Ness Street and Brookline Avenue) was renamed Yawkey Way, in honor of former club owner Tom Yawkey. But in the Google Map, these two streets are flipped over Van Ness, as seen in the photo here. I contacted Google Maps with this problem. This morning they let me know that I was correct and that the map will be corrected within a month. I'll post again when the fix is made.

Now if only Google could go back and correct Tom Yawkey...

Update: Google has corrected this issue.

Crate dates matter.

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:48:09 GMT

Turns out, eggs DO expire! I had always been under the impression that eggs don't expire, and boy did I have that notion dismissed fully and clearly.

Last Saturday,coco_b mentioned that she would like to use some elderly bananas we had around for some banana bread. So I whipped some up from a recipe we had gotten from our friend Audra. I quickly dismissed the expiration date from some time in September on the egg crate and baked the bread. Corinna ate quite a bit of it but I only had one slice. A few hours later I started feeling ill, and an hour after that I started experiencing a very sharp 10-15 second pain in my lower abdomen every 1-5 minutes. This continued all night, completely eliminating any chances of sleep. I had hoped that by morning this would pass and we could stick to our plans of meeting up with tjulian at Six Flags.

I "woke" up feeling just as terrible as I had the night before, so Corinna called Tom and told him we wouldn't be meeting him. I sat around the house in pain all day, pretty miserable. Tom came to stay at our place after he spent the day at the park, and we just chatted it up for a few hours before bedtime. He half-joked that he could take me to the hospital in the morning if I needed it. After another painful, sleepless night, I almost took him up on his offer.. I called my GP who was unavailable, and decided to go to the ER. It occurred to me that if he drove me to the hospital it would completely eradicate any chance he would have visit Boston during the day. So I called a cab at 8am and went to the ER, and Corinna met me there around noon. After lots of waiting, some X-Rays and CT Scans, and continuing pain, it was determined that I had an inflammation of my ileum. The ER doctor speculated that it might be Crohn's disease or IBS, but he deferred to the GI doctor I'd be seeing once After a full day in the emergency room, much of it on a stretcher in a hall, I was admitted in the late evening.

I went up to the 7th floor and put in a room, and like my stay a year or two prior for my appendicitis, I had a beautiful view of the Charles river. It took awhile for a doctor to come and see me, and a bit longer for the nurse to finally bring something for my pain. Each individual spike of pain probably ranked 6 out of 10, but after feeling it every few minutes for 2+ sleepless days, it was really starting to break me down. The GI doctor I talked to said that he thought I was probably suffering a bacterial or viral infection, likely caused by bad food. He said he had no reason to suspect Crohn's or IBS given my history (or lack thereof). He said they would run some tests and keep me overnight. He also put me on a clear liquid diet, which meant I was able to eat for the first time in 2 days (even if it was broth and jello).

I woke up feeling better, and more importantly, pain-free, and after lunch they advanced my diet to BRAT (Bananas, Rice, Applesauce and Toast) before discharging me. Well, the pain returned after a few hours and they kept me another night. Fortunately, I woke up without pain again (although still tender) and they once again advanced my diet to BRAT at lunch, and this time I tolerated it just fine. The doctors determined that I had a viral infection of my Ileum, and that it likely came from food, although they said it was also possible it had come through one of your usual viral vectors (handshakes, etc). It would take a few days to clear up and some continued pain was to be expected while it did. Finally after 2.5 days in the hospital, I went home with Corinna on Wednesday evening.

When I was first discharged I thought there was no way I was going to make the yearly Halloween Party up near Ithaca. But after feeling solid on Thursday and waking up and feeling pretty well on Friday, we decided to give it a shot. And I'm glad I did.. While it was odd not really being able to eat or drink anything at the party (We brought ginger ale and chicken soup for me), it was fantastic getting to see all my friends. I even did an epic live edition of my radio show/podcast featuring live music.

Back to work today and slowly advancing my diet to normal food... Still not quite feeling 100%, but getting close. This would have been much more awful and difficult if not for Corinna.

Quicksilver meet the holy wars...

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 02:54:31 GMT

Was just chatting with Howard, who has literally written the book on Quicksilver, and was trying to figure out why he finds so much more utility out of Quicksilver's keyboard triggers than I do... I find myself using the "Command Mode" in most of my interactions with Quicksilver, but Howard makes extensive use of keyboard triggers. We were chatting back and forth about this, and I struck upon a minor epiphany:

Quicksilver's command mode is somewhat analogous to the command mode in my editor of choice, Vi. Keyboard triggers, however, are much more like the meta-keystrokes of the Emacs editor, which is Howard's favorite editor. My brain is happy to deal with the notion of different modes for different contexts, where as the Emacs user is much more comfortable remembering a multitude of various keyboard combinations to get their work done.

It's pretty cool that Quicksilver is this flexible, and in fact it one-ups both of the editors by allowing you to seamlessly choose whichever method appeals to you on a task-by-task basis, and furthermore it's not mutually exclusive. I do use a few triggers for some common searches (like IMDb, Wikipedia, etc) but setting up those triggers doesn't prevent me from executing those searches in command mode. And in this way, allowing you to choose the solution to a problem from a whole menu of methods (commands, keyboard triggers, mouse triggers, gestures, etc), Quicksilver is also analogous to a combatant in another holy war, Perl. Perl provides many different ways to express oneself, and generally grants the programmer flexibility in expression.

Another way that Quicksilver is like Perl is that it is very tolerant of ambiguities and tries to resolve them as best as it can. Type "adress book" into the command window of Quicksilver and there's a good chance that even though "address" is misspelled Address Book will at least be among the top choices of Nouns/Subjects. Quicksilver's stated purpose is to allow the user to "Act Without Doing". While that motto is a little too metaphysical for me, I think that philosophy is what drove this tolerance programmed into QS.

Myself and many other programmers are frustrated by Perl's anything-goes philosophy, claiming that by being so permissive it makes reading the Perl code of someone who has a different style than you (or even reading your own code fro a few years ago) a difficult challenge at times. If I were to try to continue to stretch this analogy, I would say that the Quicksilver version of this gripe is that, as a user, you end up growing so dependent on your specific usage patterns that if you work on a machine with QS configured differently, not installed at all, or science-forbid, a windows box, it can be rather frustrating. You constantly attempt to invoke Quicksilver and fail, or even worse, learn that your carefully selected keyboard triggers vary drastically from your friends.

I have grown to really love Quicksilver, and I urge all Mac users to give it a swing! They've done a great job of pushing most of the really geeky features under the surface a bit, and it tends to be as complicated as you choose. I used it for a few years in straight command mode and found it to be super empowering, but over the past year or so (mostly due to prodding from Howard), I have found myself slowly expanding my horizons, and playing with more and more features of this amazingly deep tool. Not all of the features I play with stick, but when one does, it suddenly feels like your old method of doing something was so antiquated. For more information:

Update: Here is Howard's take on this subject.

Random Catching Up

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:03:52 GMT

Here are some random things which have been occupying my time:

My super Aunt Kathy passed away last week, and we drove to ONONdaga County to attend her memorial service. I was glad to be there for my family, and it was a nice service. An Irish style remembrance of all things which made her awesome with a great vegetarian buffet from a local restaurant they favored. It was tough to be sad with all these great stories about her going around, but I still managed. I was saddened to learn after her passing that she was a Buddhist. I would have enjoyed discussing that with her. I am SO glad that we were able to stop in and see her a few months ago on the way out to FUMN. I already miss her terribly.
Learned some lousy news regarding our property today... The (aforementioned) DPW lot behind our house is also getting renovated as part of the huge roads project in our neighborhood. They are turning 2/3rd of the lot into public parking, leaving the middle section as DPW (which isn't that big of a deal except during this roads project; Normally they just store some snow plows there). Anyway, along our back property line (and the rest of our neighbors as well) there will be a bike path, and they will be erecting a 6' fence along our property line. But looking at the area, I'm pretty sure they are going to have to cut down all of the shrubs and trees to make way for the bike path... Our downstairs neighbors are pumped about the fence, because it will block 100% of their view of the DPW lot.. But if all those trees come down we not only lose pretty trees but I'm pretty sure we'll have nothing blocking our view from the deck... Such is the price of progress, I guess, and hopefully my assumptions are wrong, but I doubt it. They are also going to hack down all the trees on our street when they redo that.. So it's going to look a little grim around here for the next few decades.... :(
Loving my new Macbook Pro. While the Air was a great little machine, I had kind of forgotten what it's like to have a balls-out monster laptop. This thing screams.
Doing well with our "no car" experiment... We've been without a car for about 6-7 weeks, and so far it's been fine. We use Zipcar from time to time to run errands or save some time on a trip to a remote part of the city, but most of the time we use public transit or walk, which is great. For long trips, like to Syracuse or NJ, we've been renting cars from the local Enterprise dealer. Even with the abundance of trips we've had to take in the past 6 weeks, if you add up the Zipcar, Rental, and Transit fees we've accumulated, it is STILL lower than what I would have spent on payments and insurance for a new car.
Going to NJ tomorrow night for the big summer party I've been throwing for a few years now. The guest list has gotten so big that I've had to start removing names from the invite list, which sucks. If you're reading this and are upset, I apologize. I tried to favor people I see less frequently due to distance on the invites, so if I see you a lot or you're from boston, you might not have made the cut. I plan on discussing some way to let this party grow a bit more for next year, but more than likely it would have to leave my parents house for it to do so... Which would mean that the cost would go up, which is definitely not good eats.
Red Sox have been playing terribly for awhile. That is all.

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.