Author: josh

Moved In

(Warning: this is a blatant and potentially boring “Life Update” entry!)

For those of you who haven’t moved across the country, let me give you a tip: even if it’s a good move (as it was for us), realize the amount of work you’re getting into before doing it. It’s a ton of work. Furthermore, when you add buying your first house to that equation, the result is a one-two punch that will K.O. your evenings and weekends for weeks to come. (For an added dose of Lewis-brand reality, add a five-month-old baby to that mix. And a new job. New wardrobe. New church. New commute.)

You can probably tell I’ve been a tad worn out. And frankly, I haven’t been doing most of the work! Steph has pulled far more than her fair share of the weight, and relatives and friends have pitched in generously (especially Steph’s dad). So it is with great pride that I announce we are done. Yes, done! Our boxes are unpacked. Things are generally where they’re supposed to be. The whole thing took four months from the first box in Cupertino to the last in Forest Lake. For those of you who helped, I greatly appreciate it.

That’s not to say there’s no work left to be done, but the work remaining is of the “individual, non-urgent project” type. We can function day-to-day without any problem now, and that’s a welcome change. The list of home improvement tasks stretches on (and always will), but hopefully it won’t stretch into the majority of our free time now.

In the last month or so I’ve also experienced a totally unexpected side-effect of owning a home: I now find myself automatically caring more about politics, the economy, and news outside the tech sector. (I’m sure having a child also affects this.) Somehow, there’s a tying down of a person that happens in the purchase of a home. Maybe it’s the weight of the size of the purchase sitting on my back that makes me want to be more aware of the realities around me. The heightened risk that loan represents makes me want to be sure to pay attention to the world, in case I’m supposed to see something and avoid a problem. I don’t really like the feeling, but something tells me this is just part of adulthood, and people who deal well with it learn how to not complain about it.

Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any) – Radiohead from Old Electronics

I’ve debated sharing this with you all since Tim showed it to me yesterday. My mind keeps coming back to it. So at the risk of turning this entire blog into a heap of popular geek fluff with no lasting, personal value, I present one of the coolest videos I’ve seen in years. It’s a cover of Radiohead’s song “Nude”, done by obsolete electronic equipment, some of which was never meant to play music. (If you’re not familiar with the song, listen to it over on Grooveshark, if only to understand the fidelity with which Thom Yorke’s voice can be reproduced by hard drive platters.)

The music starts at about 1:09. Don’t be put off by all the non-musical noise the video begins with, but skip ahead if you must.

Adium, Facebook Chat, and a Mac OS X Mystery

Adium (my favorite chat client) just released the Adium 1.3 Beta. As implied by “beta”, it’s not quite ready for prime time yet, but I decided to give it a shot anyhow.

I noticed they’d added Facebook chat to the client, added my Facebook account, and suddenly saw all my Facebook friends who were either actively online or idling on Facebook. It was a surprising experience for me because most of the folks in the list aren’t the type who would use a regular chat client, but there they were on Facebook, and I could chat with them. Chat, from my perspective, is something that usually separates the true tech user from the casual tech user. Casual tech users either don’t understand chat or just don’t want it. Chat requires a person to hang out near the computer, and the casual user has no desire to do so.

Still, I gave chat a try with Steph and with Eddie because they happened to be on at the time. Something strange happened during my chat with Steph that I think is very worth mentioning. When you receive a message, Facebook makes a soft “pop” sound. Steph had never heard this before, and said, “Do you hear that popping sound? What is that?” and then after the second or third message, “It’s my computer! Why is it doing that?” Facebook was open in a tab in Safari, but in the background. Nothing odd so far.

After I guided her to Safari and to Facebook, she chatted for a second and then closed the tab. Here’s where things get strange, especially if you’re a Computer Science person. She closed the tab, but she still appeared to be online in Adium, so I sent a message. A “pop” came from her computer. “Stop it!” she said.

She closed Safari. I sent another message. Pop.

She closed all other applications except the Finder. I sent another message. Pop.

Even if you’re not a geek, you probably know that should not be happening. Facebook should not be able, through Safari or any browser, to maintain some kind of persistent connection with your computer after the processes rendering and interacting with their website have been quit. I’m not saying Facebook is doing something malicious. It seems likely to me there is some strange bug in Safari that allows this live connection to linger after Safari has been quit. (Perhaps one of Safari’s frameworks is still loaded and active in memory since it is shared across apps, and it is talking to the networking layer? I don’t know. I’m mostly just taking stabs in the dark.)

Still, the bug isn’t easy to recreate. The only way we were able to stop the popping was to have Steph log out of her user session entirely. We tried to reproduce the issue without success.

Holding Out for Keynote Video

It’s keynote day! Today, Steve Jobs will take the stage at WWDC and announce some really exciting and interesting things. On a personal note, one interesting thing about today’s keynote will be that I won’t be able to see it live. I’ve seen just about every keynote for the last six years live, and a few in person. I hold to the belief that it’s more fun to watch via satellite than in person.

But even more strongly, I hold to the view that it’s far more interesting and important to actually view the video of the entire presentation than to simply read about it in text on a third-party website. Based on all the keynotes I’ve seen and all the third-party coverage after the fact, I’ve found that no matter how many news sites I read and how many truncated video clips I watch, there’s always something really interesting and frankly, really crucial that is missing from their reports. It’s never the same type of thing, but it always happens. People get facts wrong. People forget certain sections of an announcement. People skip a seemingly-unimportant aside made by Steve that actually says a lot more than it seems on first glance.

For those reasons I’m going off Twitter and I’m going off Google Reader until I can get some keynote video. I don’t want to hear other people’s interpretations of a keynote before I see it for myself. If you’ve never watched a full keynote, give it a shot! This might be a good one to try, even if it’s geekier than Macworld in January. (The WWDC audience is full of developers.)

If you’d like to see keynote video, go subscribe to Apple’s Keynote Podcast. That’s what I’ll be waiting to see. I really hope they post the video this afternoon or tonight rather than getting around to it on Wednesday.

Big Check

OK, I’ve got a bit here. I think this would really work in the context of a larger story. It doesn’t work as well as a standalone joke. How well this worked would be heavily dependent on the actors playing the parts.

A man walks into a bank with one of those giant sweepstakes checks made out to him, having just won a big prize.

Man: “Hey, I’d like to deposit this?”

Teller: [Looks the check over.] Ah, you still need to endorse this here, sir. [Teller pulls out giant three-foot pen.]

[Man awkwardly signs giant check. Teller puts giant check into giant check scanner behind counter, then hands Man a regular receipt for the transaction.]

Man: [Smiles] Aren’t you going to give me a giant receipt?

Teller: [Slightly put-out] Don’t be silly.

So, who could play those two parts best? We need someone slightly snooty as the teller, and a straight man for the customer.

I also have a feeling that this is just a variation on a classic that already exists.