Journal entries for September, 2005

Sometimes when I get out of work at 6 A.M., I stop by the panadería down the street to get breakfast. Often there's a homeless guy sitting out front begging for change or food. Today the guy asked me for a cigarette, and I apologized and said I didn't have any, but offered to buy him something from the panadería instead. He said sure, and asked for a coffee.

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Lately I've had a growing interest in experimenting with filmmaking. I'm familiar with the basic editing techniques, so I think I should be able to figure that part out with little trouble. The part that sounds more fun is the shooting itself. The problem, of course, is that unlike photography, filmmaking is more often fictional. You come up with a story and then interpret it for the camera. Photography can more often be about capturing what already exists.

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It's time to change my oil, so yesterday I stopped by Pep Boys to pick up the needed supplies. While browsing the aisles, I discovered that they sell used, "professionally cleaned" coveralls. They are stained with grease and oil and most had a hole or two in them, but they were cheap as hell; about $3-4. I was tempted to get some, but it scared me. The idea that some sweaty auto mechanic has spent days toiling under a hot undercarriage in them is difficult to get over, no matter how well certified the cleaners were. Still, now that it's time to go out and change my oil, I realize that I didn't bother to ship down my grease-stained coveralls when I moved to PR, so I guess I have to find my least-favorite jeans and t-shirt to sully. I kind of wish I'd spent the $3 on the hairy-man-sweat-laden coveralls at the auto parts store.

In a reply to a previous entry of mine about a big list of obscure English words, Bryan said, "This is precisely what's wrong with the english language. It's getting rediculous. Take a hint from XHTML; Simple and clean is better." My reply got reasonably long, so I figured I'd post it as a new entry.

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Last weekend I went to Charleston to visit Jessie. She was having a "Periodic Table Of The Elements" party. The idea for the party is genius, and I had an idea for a fun costume (the excitingly historied-Seaborgium", interpreted as a robotic sea monster) but I ended up not having time to put it together. Jessie took me to Party City and we settled on a Noble Gas. The day was saved.

Originally the plan was for Meg and Meej to make the drive from Clemson for the party, but Meej ended up having schoolwork to do, so they couldn't make it.

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I just discovered this very complete list of Adjectives of Relation. It lists 750 adjectives that describe a relation to some concept, such as eupeptic (pertaining to good digestion; cheerful), or morsal (pertaining to the cutting edge of a knife). Here's a few other interesting ones:

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In addition to the inconveniences of having to empty my bedroom and trying to sleep with jackhammering resonating through the house, we can now add disconnected water and intermittent loss of internet connectivity to the list of annoyances this remodeling has caused. I have to draw water from the pool in a bucket before going to the bathroom. Though it makes me feel like a character in a fantasy novel (or, you know, history), I'm eager for it to be over.

I apologize for being so silent lately. I've got a big list of seven or eight posts that I've been meaning to write, but friends and work have kept me busy and I haven't had the opportunity. Soon, soon, my little beasties.

Tonight I went to a Starbucks near work that I hadn't been to before, so I tried to write down the store hours for future reference, but they weren't posted anywhere. I asked the girl behind the counter what they were, and she said she'd write them down for me. While I waited, I thought to myself, "This would be a good way to give someone your number." But when she handed me the piece of paper, all it had were the store hours. Stupid girl. I guess it didn't occur to her. Ah well. I imagine minutes after I walked out she realized her missed opportunity and slapped her forehead.

In the wake of the recent loss-of-BinRock scare, I've decided to make my backup scheme more robust. I went out and bought a 200 GB hard drive and installed it in my Linux server at home to house the backups, and I'm using a clever script called rsnapshot to do the majority of the work.

Whereas before I was only replicating the database, I'm now going to be backing up pretty much everything important on the server, including everyone's home directories, photos, etc.; about 35 GB worth of data all told. However, because of the clever protocols like rsync (on which rsnapshot is based), I should have no problem maintaining these backups with my little home DSL connection.

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Today I stopped by Borders to pick up the new Death Cab For Cutie CD and came out with five CDs and a book. Among them is the soundtrack for Battlestar Galactica season one. With this act, it is clear that my nerdliness has apparently spread throughout the brain and is now unresectable.

The Battlestar soundtrack is so good though! It's somewhat reminiscent of Gladiator's, except without the full orchestra. And anyone who can tell me with a straight face that the Gladiator soundtrack is not incredible deserves both my admiration and my pity for their ability to cling to their misguided position in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

In a fit of vain hope, I tried connecting to BinRock again this evening, and was surprised to find it up and running! I logged in and looked around and everything seemed to be in order. What euphoria! I hadn't realized how empty my life is without BinRock.

OK, maybe that's a little sad.

Anyway, in honor of the prodigal son's return, I will post about a great baby's t-shirt I came across today. Perhaps you remember the big uproar in the early 80's about the Australian woman who claimed a dingo ate her baby (it was made into a movie with Meryl Streep). I read on PlanetDan that a woman has surfaced claiming she is the supposedly eaten baby. But what I really liked was the link a commenter posted to this shirt. It's so ridiculously cute, you almost forget that it's actually pretty damn offensive. Man, I want to have kids so I can buy them shirts like that.

I had the most wonderful experience last night. Andrés and I stopped by Michelle's house to see her before she returns to NYU. While we were sitting in the living room talking, we could hear her younger sister Gina and her friends shrieking in youthful glee upstairs. Her mom explained that it was Gina's 16th birthday and she had some friends over to spend the night.

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This was interesting. As I was catching up on the various blogs that I read, I came across this entry on Bram Cohen's site. Bram is the inventor of the well-known BitTorrent protocol. The entry discusses the pros and cons of living in a valley between two barely contained bodies of water, but what I found amusing was this comment posted by someone whom I apparently know, and who seems to think I was irresponsible in offering my friends free hosting on my server. It's surprising to find yourself discussed on the website of someone notable.

It's also somewhat annoying to have him suggest that I was "encouraging" people to host their irreplaceable data on my server, and never mind those mountains of water just over the horizon. For one thing, pretty much every one of the users on BinRock asked me if they could have space on my server; I didn't go out recruiting or anything. But even if I had, it's not like I was suggesting people come play on this cliffside with me or something. It's server space. Sure, it sucks to lose the files that were on the server, but nobody is going to suffer any material losses because of what happened. It's an inconvenience, and I apologize to everyone that I wasn't able to keep more complete backups, but I think there's much more significant things to worry about in the wake of this hurricane.

So you might have noticed the site has been down for a week or so. (If you didn't notice then you're a bastard and you don't love me). The server on which BinRock is hosted is (was?) near New Orleans, which is currently underwater thanks to Hurricane Katrina.

The site went down about the time the storm started to hit New Orleans, and has remained inaccessible since then. The server was on the second floor of a building, so it's possible that the only problem is a power outage. However, since I've read that 80% of New Orleans is under up to 20ft of water, I figure there's a very real possibility my server is currently making friends with a family of carp who have taken up residence in its spacious interior.

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