Daniel's Place

An update for all my readers: I won’t be updating this blog for the foreseeable future. Have a nice day :D

Happy new year! And with this joyous new decade comes, for me, a move to a smaller place. I’m unloading some fine items that have served me well for years. Now’s the time for bargains. Why pay retial?

$20 – 19″ LCD flatpanel 1280×1024: http://seattle.craigslist.org/est/sys/1539557409.html Sold

$10 – 20″ Magnavox CRT TV: http://seattle.craigslist.org/est/ele/1539538589.html Sold

$50 – Ikea “Galant” L desk: http://seattle.craigslist.org/est/fuo/1539553113.html Sold

$300 – Ikea “Kramfors” couch: http://seattle.craigslist.org/est/fuo/1539546083.html Come on now. You know you want it!

All items are cash only and you must pick them up.

Is Star Wars sci-fi or fantasy?

Probably SyFy, but I digress.

This minimally vexing question will bring out the nerd in all of us. I believe it’s fantasy but am too lazy here to do more than make a list of common straw-man arguments and poke fun at them.

For reference, there is a 12 page thread from 2001 on the same topic. I can’t bring myself to read past the first page.

Star Wars happens in the future!

You’re kidding, right?

But there are no dwarfs and mages and stuff

True, but they have ewoks. And don’t forget Jar Jar Binks whose race would never have survived even the most forgiving of natural selection.

The Force is basically advanced telekinesis

Some science fiction novels have fantastical or unexplained elements like telekinesis and things. Arthur C. Clarke once said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” That’s cool. However, The Force brings back dead people and makes them see-through.

In some cases, it can even go back and switch heads around, totally screwing over the dude on the left.

Magic.

Parting Thoughts

I love Star Wars. It’s got a kickass universe and has some awesome adventurous stories.

If I could be any Star Wars characters I would have trouble choosing. Probably Jango Fett because beheading by Samuel L. Jackson beats the hell out of losing control of your jet pack. And there’s an entire army of buffoons patterned after him.

When I was younger, I remember saying to myself that I was born too late. If I had grown up in the 70’s or 80’s I would’ve wrecked shop.I would have the technical vision to bring humanity to its present or better. And even if I was just a small participant, I would have done well. It would have been easy to see how all the pieces fit together.

Of course, this thought only makes sense with an impossibly futuristic dosage of hindsight. It should be more along the lines of: If I had grown up in the 70’s or 80’s, knowing what I know now, I would’ve wrecked shop. Futurists, authors, and strangers on the street profess to know which way the winds of change are blowing. What do they know? They’re not from the future and neither are we.

The fact of the matter is that we don’t understand what is coming next and only a few people can see and act on the relevant facets in this world to produce the “killer” program, product, or idea. Venture capital groups invest in loads of start-ups with the expectation that only a few of them will pan out in the marketplace. While this strategy seems to work, the world is so unpredictable that even our brightest and wealthiest minds make egregious errors (see also: everyone who trusted Bernard Madoff).

Now what?

To date I have not produced any killer apps, wrecked shops, or created any history-changing feats of innovation. But I have seen and studied people who have. One thing is clear to me: they work smart and they’re lucky.

Great! I’ll approach every problem with a premium on the users’ laziness, and keep rolling the dice.

Last weekend I went to BarCamp Seattle. I’m in the process of writing up that experience here. Matt and I got great feedback on our presentations and we’re working diligently to bring some of these ideas to life.

In the meantime, I am left with this warm glowing feeling that my blog can take a new direction from “ROFL C#” and “I Can Haz Right of Way? (another ranting cycling blog)”

Earlier this week I hit 337 miles of bike commuting. Cuz that’s just how I roll.

Commute stats - 337 miles

Milage is conservatively estimated estimated based on some cracked out computer’s idea of how I bike to work. Actual distance is a little higher.

Gas milage is also very conservative given the stop-and-go nature of city driving.

I do, however, get about 50 miles to the power bar on my bike. 337 that.

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.  -Simone Weil

Sometime around when the rest of the world is blooming, the weather here takes an interesting turn. A merciful display of care as the heavens open up, pause the rain, and pour forth a morsel of sunlight. It may just be a drop, but it’s enough to send citizens bustling into the sidewalks and streets. Best to apply sunscreen for skin will certainly combust in the face of so many photons. Now venture forth and join all the Seattle polite* folks out there; this reprieve will not last.

They typical Seattle skyline looks like something out of a game environment with the sky switched off:

Depth of field gives way to an endless, uniform grey. Don’t bother looking for the horizon, you won’t find it.

But on this beautiful tax day, as others were celebrating a Boston tea party, I found the texture and blue in the sky promising and invigorating. 

Maybe it was the caffeine from all the tea I drank at work, maybe it was something else. Something more primal. I raced home in a frenzy, music cranked to the max, tolerance for slow drivers to the min.

Like a drug addict clambering for a fix, I <events involving tight shorts removed> and was out on the street in short order. My blood cooled from boiling as my legs pushed the pedals.

Flying best describes it. Good, zero-carbon-footprint, old-fashioned, <tight shorts reference removed> fun.

Crossing the I-90 bridge was a little ironic when I waved at and passed cars traveling on the highway. On the other side was a beautiful view of Mt. Rainier:

The camera in my phone is admittedly not very good. But you can see something undeniably beautiful: a blue sky over Seattle.

It won’t be long before we’re stuck under Edgar Allen Poe’s oppressively low hanging clouds. This kind of weather won’t come around again until July 5th.

For one moment, on this day day, I snatched a few rays from the sky and called them my own. And beauty delivered on its promise.

* Seattle Polite is a behavior observed frequently in the northwest. It is characterized by an overt and impractical attempt to display niceness. Typically requiring little or no effort on the displayer (see this blog entry for example and analysis).

I started writing a long review of the Dulli/Lanegan show. The one where I discovered that the grunge movement is aging, balding, selling insurance, and raising children on the Eastside. I went on about the middle aged man reduced to tears amid a mosh pit that died before it started; a lifeless dead audience shifting from one foot to another in disinterested mediocrity. I’ve filed my complaints with the appropriate parties and sworn to move on.

For your benefit, I will not post that review. It is long, and some may construe it as offensive.

Grunge is, for better or worse, best left in 1996.

Dulli on the left, Lanegan in the middle. This world isn't the one that we once lived in.

Parts of the show were good. And I’ve moved on to exploring Seattle’s current music culture.

I was recently looking through my expense reports for the year so far and found an interesting anomaly in my Automotive expenditures:

Washington liquor control board = automotive expense?

As you can see, a payment to the Washington liquor control board was marked as an Automobile expense. Normally, drinking and driving should not have anything to do with each other.

Is Money trying to tell me something?

The new WordPress looks cool and appears to work. This is great news for me! Looks like they still haven’t figured out how to change the status of an article from “published” to “unpublished” though it still is possible to take articles private.

The new interface looks pretty cool though.