well there goes another one.

it's official, i will enter into 2004 with the best eyesight i've ever had. i went in for a follow-up exam and i now have 20/15 vision, which means i can see at 20 feet what your average person can see only when standing 15 feet away. i wonder if i can become a card carrying superhero now that i have amazing powers of eyesight?

i went in for lasik surgery today. it was quick and relatively painless. thankfully i had been warned about the smell of burning eyeball flesh that occurs when the laser is applied to the cornea. immediately after the surgery, things looked like i was observing them through a cloudy glass of water, which was a bit disconcerting. however, i've had my eyes closed for the better part of the last eight hours and my vision is noticeably improved. i think my vision might be better than what i could get with contacts or glasses. hopefully it will stay that way.

time to rest the eyes again.

i've forgotten most of this stuff over time. it's too bad i can't remember where my condenser mic ran off.

Home Studio: Recording Acoustic Guitars.

kris saw my post about what i wanted for christmas and ended up getting me an digidesign mbox , which comes complete with the industry standard protools software package. the setup was a bit of a pain, mainly because it took me a long time to discover that the version of protools that shipped with the mbox isn't compatible with panther , but a software update from digidesign fixed the situation.

now, my only problem is that my old seymour duncan "woody" pickup for my martin doesn't sound so hot. everything sounds thin and tinny, which is certainly not the natural, warm tone of the guitar. i think i'll probably have to invest in a good condenser mike soon. i think i used to have one, but who knows where it went. in any case, it'll be fun to roll up my sleeves and do a little recording, as i think it might be close to ten years since i've put anything down.

happy holidays and all that. we're having a relatively quiet christmas with friends and family, as we're not taking any long road trips this year. in fact, we only need to drive two miles down the road, which is a very nice change of routine. kris is finishing up her world famous carrot cake and i've just finished wrapping presents [ we're a family of "late openers" ] and then we're off.

kris and i saw return of the king last sunday and i've been holding off writing a review because, well, i wasn't sure how i felt about the movie. at first i thought my mixed feelings might be due lord of the rings oversaturation. via the wonders of netflix, we watched the first movie on friday, the second on saturday and went to theatre to see the third installment on sunday. about halfway through the return of the king, i started to decide that maybe i'd heard "frodo!" exclaimed one too many times. why wasn't everyone else getting tired of the tediousness of the "gollum plays frodo against sam" subplot? and why did it take 10 minutes of battle sequences for some genious to figure that you shoot the big, scary, enemy monster animals in the head? i mean, regardless if they are enormous trolls or elephants, it would seem to be a generally accepted fact that when you're given the opportunity you should probably take a few shots at the head.

so i left the movie theatre with mixed feelings. it was certainly a very good movie. and the entire series taken as a whole should be lauded, but i wasn't quiet sure that the third installment really was worthy of the heaps and heaps of praise it was reaping. fwiw, while i wouldn't go so far as say that i didn't like it, i do think that i'm more in agreement with tim bray than the vast majority of fans and critics.

now i'm not one to get all alarmist over a little "mad cow disease" possibly in the food supply, and i'd generally agree that human health risk is quiet low but the usda is certainly not doing itself any favors by refusing to release mad cow records:

"The USDA claims to have tested approximately 20,000 cows for the disease in 2002 and 2003, but has been unable to provide any documentation in support of this to UPI, which first requested the information in July.

In addition, former USDA veterinarians tell UPI they have long suspected the disease was in U.S herds and there are probably additional infected animals."

one of my christmas presents to myself was getting spamassasin working on cornerhost. although conceptually a simple thing to do, i needed a little helpful troubleshooting support from michal at cornerhost as to why i couldn't get procmail to do its magic. as usual, it was something dopey that i had done.

but i made it over that hurdle, and i am very happy to report that spamassasin is doing its thing very, very, very well. it hasn't missed a single piece of span over the past day nor has it marked anything as a false positive. so i haven't had to look at a single piece of junk in 24 hours. i feel like i've reclaimed my inbox, since thunderbird's bayesian classifiers were only catching about half of the spam.

i think i'll give kris the gift of a spamfree inbox as well. i'm sure she'll like that more than the powertools that i already got for me her.

so i've had this microsoft optical wheel mouse sitting around for awhile waiting for me to try to figure out how to get it working with os x and my ibook. today, i had the bright idea to just plug in the mouse and see if it would work. "no sirree, that'll never work." i thought to myself as i imagined the length of the how-to that had already been written by someone like myself after they spent days fiddling with configuration files and driver updates. to my shock and amazement, i have discovered that you can get a microsoft optical wheel mouse to work on os x by simply plugging the mouse into the usb port!.

i know, i gasped too.

but as i'm sitting and typing - the shock and awe slowly wearing off - i'm realizing that i've forgotten how to use a mouse. taking my hands off the keyboard feels wrong.

i stare at the mouse as if it's a fish on a bicycle.

john perry barlow has a new blog, although he doesn't really seem up to staying with it for the long haul:

"I'm wary. Am I too old a dog to blog? Am I actually too sick of things virtual to plunge myself deeper into electronic immateriality?"

Manipulating and guessing MP3 tags with Perl:

"Every self-respecting computer and music fan needs to be able to manipulate MP3s -- the defacto standard for recreational digital music use. In this article, Ted looks at ways to manage and manipulate MP3s (searching, tagging, renaming, commenting, etc.) using the autotag.pl application. Ted takes you through the application, illustrating how CPAN modules enable the application."

during my recent layovers in various airports around the country, i've noticed that the treo 600 is quiet popular with the early-adopting suits, which makes seems to jibe with the anectodes of treo madness sweeping the nation . i've been drooling over the treo , but i had a few reactions to seeing it in the wild that surprised me. firstly, it's uglier in real life than it is in print. i know this bucks the conventional wisdom, but i think it really is ugly and clunky. secondly, after seeing people pressing the device against their faces while making calls, i can't help but think that the tiny qwerty keyboard would be susceptible to accumulation of, er, face grease.

i know, nobody wants to talk about it, but facial oils are a reality and you have to wonder how easy it is to use the keyboard with a good layer of slippery face grease.

the xhtml friends network looks like an intriguing complement to foaf:

"XFN outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. In HTML and XHTML documents, these are given as values for the rel attribute on a hyperlink. XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they've physically met, and other personal relationships. Using XFN values, which can be listed in any order, people can humanize their blogrolls and links pages, both of which have become a common feature of weblogs."

interestingly, the authors dream of creating a "friendorati" service :

"XFN provides the basis for a world-wide distributed network of personal connections. Proprietary data-owning services like Friendster could be to be superceded by XFN crawling and searching sites—a sort of "Friendorati," as it were. The advantage of a Friendorati-style network is that it allows every individual to fully express themselves through personal weblogs and web sites, instead of to the limited degree permitted by a proprietary service's user interface."

if xfn were to see any significant adoption, i'm sure that this would be fairly trivial for dave to fold into technorati. i know it's early, but at this point it would seem that xfn is going to suffer due to a lack of tool support [hopefully this will change ], but more importantly, i'm not sure how useful it is to try to force a relationship model on a blogroll. taking my own "outbound" links as an example, i'm struck by the fact that almost none of the links could be usefully categorized using their metadata.

having said that, i think the concept of "blogroll" metadata is an interesting one and that xhtml friends network could be made more useful if it were extended to be a "blogroll metadata network" that included attributes for content categorization and "ratings". for example, there's a load of implicit metadata in my blogroll - meant mostly for my own consumption. the "chunking" of links and their relative order are clues to what i'm thinking. with just a few more types of attributes a foundation could be easily created that allows people to search for links that point to authors who have an interest, say, in jabber, os x and might be friends of kellan.

then again, at that point you're probably just creating an xhtml version of foaf. but i still stand by the assertion that i'm not sure how useful it is to impose a relationship model on a blogroll. so maybe we need a separate "friendroll", which has the sole purpose of being used as a public rolodex and can be used as a the foundation for decentralized "friendorati" service? i suspect i might be overanalyzing this just a bit.

one for the annotated bookmark bin, Migrating to a service-oriented architecture:

"This is the first in a series of papers intended to help you better understand the value of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), and to develop a realistic plan for evaluating your current infrastructure and migrating it to a true service-oriented architecture. It is intended that after reading this paper, you will understand why it is claimed that a SOA is the best platform for carrying existing assets into the future, as well as enabling the rapid and correct development of future applications. Additionally, you should have a better understanding of the major considerations in planning such a migration."

ugh. i cancelled the last leg of my trip due to catching a nasty head cold during my trip. so instead of going to l.a., i came home last night from minneapolis. i'm sure everyone on my flight was super happy to have a sniffly, sneezing, hacking, nose-blowing guy on their flight.

on top of getting a cold, i think this trip could qualify for the Most Number of Aggravating Delays and Mishaps award. i won't bore you with all the details, but here' a peak at how unsmoothly things went; it started with an hour delay at o'hare followed by a circling logan for an hour due to the airport being shutdown on account of a snowstorm. after circling and circling and circling, it was decided that it was time for an emergency diversion to the hartford bradley international airport in hartford, connecticut, since we were running low on fuel and it wasn't entirely clear when logan was going to reopen for business. the captain made it clear that he was leaning towards dumping us off at harford and either putting us up in a hotel or getting a bus to boston. at this point, it's around 9 p.m. EST and i've already got 4.5 hours of travel time invested in trying to get from grand rapids to boston.

but alas, it looks like all the planes that landed before us have depleted harford of all its busses, rental cars and hotel rooms so there's no room for another plane load of people. i don't know if that's good news or bad news. i do know that it has taken 2 hours to come to that conclusion, since we are updated of the problem at about 11 p.m. EST.

in case you're wondering, they never did let us off the plane.

so we're going back to boston, which means that the plane needs to be de-iced and refueled. naturally, one of the de-icers runs out of de-icing fluid because they didn't plan to de-ice so many planes. of course, the other de-icer gets a clogged nozzle. de-icing takes a long time. we finally take off around 12:00 a.m. EST and land in boston at 12:30 a.m. EST, which means it took about 8 hours to get from grand rapids to boston.

as i sit in the shuttle to the hotel, i notice that my head feels funny and hope that i haven't caught a cold.

although hardly recovered from my previous expedition, i'm playing the part of road warrior again this week. i'll be in boston tonight and monday, minneapolis/st. paul on tuesday and los angeles on wednesday.

i might squeeze in a post here and there, but things will likely be quiet for a few days. don't mess up the place and leave a beer in the fridge.

i've watching vh1's 100 greatest artists of hard rock and am bemused to see their rather expansive definition of hard rock. amidst the usual suspects, there's a veritable who's who of bands that used to make my parents worry that i was on a primrose path to hell.

who would have guessed then that years later artists such as bad brains, fugazi, the misfits, king crimson, primus, the pixies, husker du, anthrax, slayer, the rollins band, jane's addiction and sonic youth would be featured on vh1?

with no hint at irony, my 14 year-old niece is perplexed as to why anyone in their right might would listen to such crap.

and wowza. i've got two words for you. joan jett. back in the day, i briefly contemplated dropping out of grade school, tracking her down and professing my undying love, but i decided that i needed to learn how to play the drums first.

i went to our local lasik chop shop to see if i'd qualify for the surgery before the new year. the mothership is changing its reimbursement policy after december 31st, so it's in my best interest to have the procedure done soon. naturally, i've waited until the last possible minute and had to go in today for a preliminary in order to ensure that i could get penciled in for the surgery on dec 30th.

i think the testing lady was under the impression that i was more informed about what was going on, because she didn't do much explaining and before i knew it, my eyes were numbed and dilated. the dilation process started off slow so i didn't think it was going to be a big deal, but i knew things were going to change when the woman told be that i should quickly read and sign the long list of potential side effects and complications before i lost the ability to read the page. she then casually says that if i didn't bring any sunglasses, things will probably be pretty bright when i go outside. of course, i don't have any sunglasses and at this point, i'm thinking it might have been a good idea to have kris drive me to the appointment.

i convince myself that it can't be that bad. that probably people all over the country are leaving lasik exam appointments with dilated, numbed eyes right this moment and getting home just fine. and hey, it's not really that far back to house. if i stay off the highway, everything will be smooth.

i step outside into the brightest of bright sunshine, as i actually cower a little and try to block the sun, which is impossibly bright and coming in from all directions. as i open the car door, which forces me to stop blocking the sun from my eyes, i realize that driving is going to require having at least on hand on the wheel. i briefly contemplate driving home with my knees. i try to imagine explaining to kris how i crashed the car while covering my eyes and driving with my knees and eventually come to the conclusion that it's probably not one of my best ideas.

instead, i do a combination of squinting and brow-furrowing, while shading my eyes with one hand. i lean in a far-forward position, which should be familar to anyone who has seen their grandmother drive. i imagine that i'm doing a good job as i squint at the dashboard which isn't coming into focus, while trying to figure out how fast i'm going.

a chorus of car horns and passing vehicles indicate that it's going to be a long drive home.

i almost forgot to mention that morbus has graced us with an updated version of his itunes2html script which slices and dices your itunes xml file and produces a nicely formatted list of albums [sic] like this or this.

someday i'll get around to recreating my collection of mp3s which was decimated when the drives on my ipod and ibook died.

and now, we'll pause for a few words of wisdom from steve jobs:

" You know, again -- I'd rather just talk about music. These big-picture questions are just -- (Snores) I think we're all happier when we have a little more music in our lives."

well, the dogs have moved on from killing raccoons to squirrels. we discovered mauja happily munching on the beheaded carcass of an unlucky squirrel this afternoon. and since he's too slow to catch a squirrel on his own, we're guessing that cadence had a hand in executing the deed.

it's not like i'm a fan of squirrels and i'm all for "nature's way", but does it have to go on in our backyard? hopefully none of the neighbor's cats make the mistake of wandering into the dog's dominion.

oh ye great and bottomless annotated bookmark bin, i humbly submit a sacrifice on rendezvous and linux:

"If you have the need to advertise Linux services via Rendezvous, you can install Apple's Rendezvous responder on your Linux box. The setup described here is only useful to advertise services on one machine (i.e., one responder per machine), but since it is a very resilient setup (there is no single point of failure and no need to run a graphical app like Network Beacon), I decided to document the procedure..."

[ via salad with steve ]

so i'm trying to get from the conference at the georgetown university conference center to reagan national airport. i've given myself a more than adequate window of time to go the relatively short distance, factoring in traffic, airport security and getting lost. yes, that's right, whenever i'm in d.c. or the surrounding area, i've found that i need to allocate an extra amount of time to account for my getting horribly lost, since it's been my experience that it's a terribly easy thing to do. i think i remember an anecdote about the d.c. area street layout being designed to confuse would-be invaders and i can attest that it accomplishes the goal. one street turns magically into another and beltways turn into parkways which go over this bridge and that and before you know it you're in maryland.

anticipating problems i go to the front desk and ask them for directions to the airport and they oblige the request with an easy-to-read preprinted set of instructions. and sure enough, within five minutes i'm no longer on the street that i should be on and nothing looks familiar. so i start to backtrack and take another stab at carefully following every instruction on the piece of paper. no good. i end up on a street that's not to be found on the directions. i can see now that the fates are going to have their way with me, but i've got enough of a window of time to allow for a little navigational freestyling, so i decide to go with the flow and find a gas station with an attendant who can put be back on course. of course, i'm in the part of town where there doesn't seem to be a gas station. i think i see signs that indicate that i'm now in virginia. things are getting worse.

both my cell phones [ yes, i have two cell phones, don't ask ] are almost dead and i don't have a car charger for either. it's getting dark and i realize as i'm trying to turn on the roof light in the buick rendezvous to get a look at the barely usable avis map that roof lights are optional in this vehicle. so is the passenger "makeup light" under the visor flap. where should i find the one light in the car? it's a "makeup light" under the driver-side visor. i make a mental note that the buick rendezvous target market must be women with a need to apply makeup while sitting in traffic.

so the cell phones are dying and i'm trying to decipher an indecipherable map under the inadequate light without a gas station to be found. i decide to look for an avis number and find a listing of d.c. offices which, not surprisingly given the circumstances, doesn't include reagan national airport, so i call the dulles airport number instead, on the reasonable assumption that they'd probably know how to get me to reagan national. they can't. but the operator was nice enough to connect be to the reagan national avis office. i explained my situation to the bemused customer service rep. we tried to triangulate on the map where i probaby was located and she gave me a new set of directions and thought i could still get to airport under with enough time to make my flight. predictably, within 10 minutes, i'm not on any street she said i should be on and things are looking increasingly dire.

in situations like this, i try to become the detached observer, watching as the winds of chance buffet me here and there. i'm trying to come to grips with the fact that too many things are coming together that are out of my control. that i'm going to miss my flight and that it's all really very amusing. this approach is not working. at this point, i don't even know what state i'm in and i'm driving 50 m.p.h in a 35 m.p.h zone and muttering loudly to myself about the general lack of filling stations in the area. after about 15 minutes of this purgatory, i finally happen upon a gas station. i walk in with a crumpled map.

attendant: you're lost.
me: your powers of observation are overwhelming.
attendant: the map gave it away.
me: i'll need to keep that in mind next time. but you've guessed correctly. i'm so lost, that i don't even know what state i'm in and i've got to get to reagan national airport. fast. am i close?
attendant: [scratches head]. no. no, i wouldn't say you're close. i'm not really sure how to get there from here. lets look at your map. [time passes as he tries to decipher the it]. well, you're way over here. see. i think you should take this highway here for about 6 miles, get in the left lane and then take that highway there for about 15 miles and then you're on your own. there should be signs for the airport, but i can't rightly say exactly how to do it.
me: er. o.k. well, thanks for you help.

i'm back in the buick going way too fast and trying to figure out what i'll say to the trooper when i get pulled over. as luck would finally have it, there are no cops in sight, and i'm making good time. i see signs for d.c. and starting to regain hope that i might, just might, be able to catch the plane - if everything goes smoothly at airport security. i return the car, catch the airport transport bus to the terminal and run frantically to the to the united, with a mere 15 minutes to spare before the plane is supposed to depart. i quickly explain the situation and, surprisingly, the rep says that i've got nothing to worry about. "so i've got plenty of time to, you know, use the facilities." i say. she says, "you've got plenty of time," in an unnervingly calm voice.

the plane is delayed. it's more than delayed, it's not even at the terminal gate when i get there which is, officially, the time that is was supposed to depart. i see what look to be pilots and stewards and stewardesses milling around along with unhappy passengers. "ha! oh fortuna. their loss and my gain," i think to myself as i recklessly ignore tempting the vengeance of the travel gods. so i sit and i wait. and wait. i slowly realize that i an not ever going to make my connecting flight from chicago o'hare to gerald r. ford international airport in grand rapids, michigan. eventually, 45 minutes later, it is announced that the plane will begin boarding. "well, chicago is closer to grand rapids than washington, d.c." i think optimistically. "breath deep, young travelling grasshopper," i mutter to myself.

the tired and weary passengers have settled themselves into their seats, when we hear the pilot over the intercom. weather is bad in chicago and nothing is getting in or out, but they've decided to get everyone onboard so that they can get in the takeoff queue. "45 minutes to wheels up," he says.

20 minutes later, he comes comes back on the system and says that it might be 45 minutes more, which is met with a chorus of groans. at this point, i'm trying my breathing exercises and attempting to remember that this really is all very, very, very funny.

time passes.

eventually we takeoff and i listen to the airport tower chatter on the inflight sound system as i wonder what i'm going to do when i get into chicago.

an hour and a half of chatter later, the plane lands in chicago and i get off the plane to find that somehow, incomprehensibly, my flight to grand rapids, is in its final boarding call and only one gate away [ if you're familar with o'hare and united you'll know that occasionally you can walk a mile to get to your connecting united flight ]. i decide to withold any internal commentary on the relative luck or lack theorof that can be found in the situation and simply board, waiting for what comes next.

i'm in the exit row, which is good news considering that i'm 6'4" tall. the bad news is that all the "big guys" have requested the exit row. that's the good news. the bad news is that i'm in the middle seat, which means that i've what i make up in leg room, i lose in elbow room. "hi. ho." i think to myself. "it's only a 30 minute flight."

with impeccable timing, the 6'3" and 300 pound man next to turns the air nozzle on as i catch a whiff of a horrific fart.

and so i sit and wonder what i've done to anger the travel gods so, uncomfortably sandwiched between two large men who are larger than myself, forced to inhale stale farts, pondering what could possibly happen next.

i'm in georgetown at the relatively comfortable and appropriately named georgetown inn today and tommorrow. updates will be sporadic. this is the first time i've flown into reagan national in awhile. nowadays, they don't let you get out of your seat for a half an hour before landing, "for security reasons" - as if asking everyone to stay in their seats is going to prevent the determined terrorist. maybe they are more polite than i thought.

i spent a good portion of today attempting to install a dog door so the dogs can come and go as they please when we're gone. with reckless abandon, i used a jig saw to cut a rectangle out of our back door and put the dog door together. at this point, i realize that i've cut the rectangle out such that it spans two 'decorative' recessed areas on the door and the dog door panels can't lay flush and hence are efficiently letting in the cold air and letting out the warm air. great.

and to add insult to injury the dogs just stare at the dog door, perplexed as to why i'm pointing at it and imploring them to "go on! go on! go!" i decide to stand on the other side and coax them through with a bit cheese to no avail. so i change tactics and let them outside and go around front and start ringing the doorbell. mauja the malamute can't resist seeing who's come to visit and jumps through the door and comes racing the to the front of the house. the frame of the dog door is stuck around his midsection, which brings me to the realization that the dogs don't want to jump though the door because it's too small. d'oh!

so kris goes back to the pet supply store and gets a bigger [ and obscenely expensive ] dog door and i go through another round of cutting creating a larger and draftier opening in the back door.

predictably, even though the opening is now about the size of texas and the dogs can come through if enticed with a big enough piece of cheese, they are still refusing to jump through without the bribe.

although authorities are still investigating the issue, serious doubts were cast on walmart stampede store when it was discovered that the woman has filed 16 previous claims, 9 at wal-mart stores. so rather than the good-old-fashioned 'frenzied shoppers' story, we really have a good-old-fashioned story about fraud.

i think the more interesting back story can be found the annual rush to get out the first 'feeding frenzy' story out to press.

update: thanks to an observant reader for informing me that i meant melee and not malay in the title. oops.

i can't really say anything except that, in retrospect years from now, the comments to scoble's post on syndication formats will be seen being indicative of a low point in the history of the evolution of syndication formats. i mean, jeeez louise, it's all so inane.

personally, i've found that many of the 'dating design patterns' can also be used as 'marriage design patterns'. married men everywhere will be quiet familiar with the 'optimistic persistence, a.k.a. surprise statefulness' pattern :

"Store small unique key data and create impressed listener by retrieving it. Females consider retrieval of data regarding anyone but himself or any sports figure highly unusual in a man, and likewise highly valuable and appealing."

many old timers who know jorn barger as one of the original bloggers who maintains[ed] robot wisdom and were alarmed to see he had gone missing. the story takes an odd turn when people start to wonder why it took jorn's roommate 2 months to notice that he was missing.

it appears that jorn's 'o.k.' and "...no longer desired to be where he had been.":

"I called the Sorocco PD at (505)835-1883 requesting any information they might have. Officer Richard Lopez returned my call immediately and let me know that Mr. Barger was not considered missing or in danger.

They recieved a report from his housemate roughly six weeks ago and made contact with Barger several days later, as he was walking down the street. At that time he reassured them of his saftey and stated that, "He no longer desired to be where he had been.""

so much for keeping that one low-profile.

speaking of holiday traditions, the 2003 perl advent calendar is back. it goes perfect with a little eggnog.