Since I started my new job back in april, I was first having a 30 minute walk.  Now that I’ve moved to my new place I still have a 15 to 20 minute marta ride.  So either way, I’ve been listening to my mp3 player everyday on the way, whereas before I really rarely used it.

I used to have a pair of Nike behind-the-head headphones.  The earbuds on those were hard plastic and hurt my ears, really a waste of money.

Then I picked up a pair of Koss or Joss or something earbuds on amazon that were really cheap.  While owning them, I thought they were fine — though I did think the sound was a little muted and kind of sounded closed off.

Well those broke after about a month or so, and I decided to step it up and get a pair of Sennheiser CX-300B Earbuds, as the reviews for those were a lot better.  Compared to my previous earbuds these are amazing.  The sound clarity is hands down better, the bass response is much stronger and the highs are crisp and clear.  Plus they feel really solid in my ears, and came with three different sized silicon plugs for different sized ears.  I can jog in them and they never come out, they’re great.

Only downside is that the cord itself is a little on the short side.  I haven’t encountered an actual problem yet with using them and they wouldn’t reach, but I would if they were any shorter at all.  Just don’t expect to sit on your couch and plug them into a reciever on the other side of the room.

Plus, they work on iPhones/iPods straight out of the box, don’t need an adapter or anything.

I paid $38 for them last month… and for some reason they are selling for $19 now.  What the hell!

Click here to get them on Amazon… Sennheiser CX300-B Earbuds (Black)

I don’t think anyone ever actually walks all the way down to the end of this platform.  It was kind of eerie.

I put on my shoes to trudge out in it, as Hobbes the Cat lay curled in the blankets,
blinking sleepily, waiting for the lights to be turned off once more.

Not quite the turnout one would suspect.  Or maybe it is, considering its a dreary tuesday morning.

I feel like I should be eating a walnut & caramel covered apple or something.

They decided to move us all over on the other side of the building this week, here’s the view out our window now.

I always said, when someone finally figures out how to make buying music easier than stealing it, thats when people would stop stealing it.

Back in the day you had to drive to a store and buy an actual CD, un wrap it, ugh, what a pain.  Napster was 100x easier than that.

But then they shut down Napster, and Kazaa got filled up with malware, and IRC was *always* a pain.  So for a long time there I didn’t download anything at all.

But then Bittorrent came along made things bearable.  A solid check mark goes for getting whole albums at a time … but then you had to get whole albums at a time.

So last night I was wading through google trying to do mp3 searches of open directories and it was just getting me no where.  It seems spammers and squatters have setup camp on that whole methodology.  Then on hype machine, I happened to notice there was indeed a button for “Buy now on amazon”.  It was only $0.99.  I figured, F it, its worth $0.99 and amazon is DRM free.  One click later, and here comes the download.

So I guess they finally did it.  Buying music is easier and more convenient than stealing it.  Congratulations music industry, you’re figuring things out.

Slowly.

We just had a firedrill here in 101 Marietta, and after walking down all 17 flights of stairs, we were funneled outside.

And just who happens to be standing there, speaking on his cell phone?  You guessed it, freaking Al Sharpton.

Yeah, WTF is what I said too.  How freaking random can you get.

30 Days of Bootcamp sure did seem to fly by.  But, I made it, and had perfect attendance.  Our group started out with 45 (or was it 60?) people, and by today, the last day, we were down to like 16.

All in all it was a really great experience.  It was incredibly hard, but totally worth it.  I ran varsity cross country in highschool, and it seems since then I haven’t been in any kind of group environment like that, until bootcamp.  The instructors were great, the workouts were dynamic and challenging and everyone was really cool.

I think in all I’ve lost about 8 pounds.  In 4 weeks I think thats actually bordering on unhealthy, but I ate almost perfectly clean the whole month with no cheating, so combined with the intense workouts every single day, I’m not surprised.

I’m definitely going to go back.  They have 3-month passes that can be used any time over the next year.  I’m going to try a month or so on my own though, and see if I can take what I’ve learned and continue the same regimine on my own.  I seriously doubt it, but we’ll see.

Lauren: Do you know why my monitor makes a weird noise when certain images are displayed?

Brian Culler: Probably an improperly de-compiled DLL buffer overflow thats causing polymorphic packet separation across the distributed NAND gate interface, resulting in a frequency phase discordance pattern.
thus, a weird noise.

Lauren: how can it be fixed?

Brian Culler: Probably just need to regenerate the SSH keypath instance tokens and remount the eth0 virtual hertz sync daemon.
Or buy a new monitor.

Lauren: you’re just making up words!

Brian Culler: Those are real words.

Software developers should be in charge of running things because we literally spend our days solving complex problems.  Our careers are built around being able to objectively and efficiently analyze problems, continuing on to design elegant solutions for those problems and then implementing those solutions in a fashion that produces results.

We should hold the internet hostage until the world governments hand over the keys to running the place.  I’m pretty sure we could get everything figured out in a couple of years.  The current class of people running things (eg, “politicians”) are fucking things right up bloody well.  Morons.

So with this huge financial / mortgage crisis, there’s a huge “plot hole” that I’m just not understanding.  Perhaps I just don’t have all the information, but as I believe the situation to be:

• Some people over the last few years during the housing boom took out some risky mortgages using some crafty techniques like ARMS and what not.  The banks shouldn’t have loaned them the money, but they did anyway.
• Surprise!  The housing market contracts and people suddenly can’t pay those shady loans.  Whoops.
• The banks sell the “bad debt” off to securities firms who then repackage them, shuffle them around, and resell them out in the open market.
• Housing collapse continues and, the way the media has presented it, seems that every major financial institution owns some of this “bad debt”.

So here’s the part I don’t get.  Based on a quick google search, the foreclosure rate is 5.8%.  So basically 6% of people aren’t paying their mortgages.

Doesn’t that mean 94% of people ARE paying their mortgages each month?  Isn’t that a massive, immense amount of reliable, continuous, stable cash being pumped into the finance industry?

So you’re trying to tell me that the *entire* financial industry is going to “grind to a halt”, and that banks will have “no money” to make loans to people, thus sending us into some sort of death spiral (that apparently is all going to hit by next week unless we do the bailout) that will destroy the world economy?

All of that because 1 out of every 20 mortgages isn’t getting paid on time?  Seriously?

If the above truly is the case, then fuck your $700,000,000,000 bailout.  If the firms and the brokers over leveraged this bad debt and other dumb bond insurers insured it and now it is biting them in the ass, tough fucking luck.  94% of homeowners continue, each month, to pay their mortgages just fine.  “Banks” aren’t going to run out of money because they only sold off the “bad debt”, they should still keep on getting paid from their good loans, right?

I guess I’m just missing the connection between all the securities firms and brokers whining and crying saying they made really really bad bets and gambles, and that somehow translates to banks with good loans on their books not having money to loan to Joe Anybody on Main St USA trying to take out a small business loan.

I’m sure I don’t understand all of this.  But it sounds like such a damn huge SCAM is all.  Especially with quotes like this:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

(Forbes)

Ah, great.  So you don’t really know who the money is for;  You don’t know why you’re giving it to them;  But you know it has to be a lot.  Fantastic.

Maybe someone can explain to me what happened to the idea of letting companies fail when they run their companies poorly?

Dave bought this new revolver that shoots shotgun shells.  Srsly fun.

So its been a week since I started bootcamp.  General observations, in list form:

- Its really, really hard

- Waking up at 5:15 hasn’t been as difficult as I thought it would

- I don’t know if its my imagination, but I can already tell a difference.  Not appearance wise, just in my body’s ability to handle the workouts.  The first day I literally thought I was going to die.  By friday, even though the workouts got progressively harder each day, I felt like I could manage and control things better.  Yes, I felt exhausted the entire time, but I was able to cognitively go above it and still push myself.  Once I got my heart rate into those upper limits of where it can go, I felt I could stay there without keeling over or puking my guts out.

- Being in the group is a major motivational factor.  Never in a million years would I be able to workout by myself and push myself into the physiological zones that occur when you’re being pushed there by 60 other people.

- There is a significant difference between knowing how to eat completely healthy, and actually doing it on a daily basis.  My friends make fun of me because I sound like a wikipedia article (or maybe an infomercial) when I talk about nutrition, but I’ve never followed really what I knew one needed to do.  Getting 3 sheets to the wind on friday nights usually led to ordering bacon, cheese, and chili covered tater tots.

As a result I thought I’d share a couple meals I’ve made that, while being 100% perfectly healthy, taste so damned delicious that it makes me feel guilty for eating them.

• Fried egg (with PAM), over easy, on top of 1/2 of a toasted whole wheat english muffin.  Eggs are one of the best sources of lean protein you can get, and combined with the complex carb of the whole wheat, you’ve got a great breakfast.  But its just so damn good!  I love sopping up the egg yolk.
• Lean ground turkey burger (again, sauteed in PAM), with lettuce, 1/4 avocado, 1/2 tbls of ketchup, with another whole wheat english muffin as the bun.  These WW english muffins have been a life saver.  Toasted up, they really are quite good.  I would eat a turkey burger like this regardless of diet, its just that tasty.  And avocados are full of really healthy and vital essential fats.

-  Another thing I realized is that this program might quite possibly pay for itself.  Most everyone I’ve talked to has balked at paying so much money just to go workout in a public park, which anyone can do for free.  But, due to the fact that I’ve sworn off alcohol for just this month, I realized it might come close to evening out.  I never really pay attention to how much things cost, but when you have a beer or three as standard routine a couple weeknights throughout the week, not to mention actually going out partying/tailgating on the weekends, it really adds up.  Case in point, I went out friday after work for a coworkers going away party.  I had a salad with chicken, everyone else had pizza and several drinks.  My total was $11… I looked around, everyone elses was $45-$55.  Which used to be normal to me.  Then again last night, went to a grill type sports bar to watch the GT game where people were pounding down the pitchers and mixed drinks, meanwhile I just had my one entree and water.  Again, I probably saved $40.  Multiply that all up by 4 weeks and its going to come darn close to balancing out the cost of Bootcamp!  Or if not, it will certainly take the edge off of it being so danged expensive.

And of course again, one has to concede that these are all things I could have done anyway.  I could have simply stopped drinking on my own and woken up at 5:15 am on my own and worked out on my own and kept a log book of what I ate on my own, all for $0.00.  But I’m a realist, and I recognize the effect that the bootcamp “environment” can have on one’s motivation, which is something that just can’t be reproduced on your own.  So yeah, so what if I could have theoretically done all this?  We all know I wouldn’t have.  Its pointless to talk about things that could happen, instead we should objectively analyze empirical past evidence/trends and then base our behaviors on that reality.

I’m not going to pretend I’m “14 year old girl”ish enough to actually make a daily log of this thing, but I am just going to mention it.

Today I started the Atlanta Operation Boot Camp program.  It consists of 30 days of workouts, most of which take place at 6 am at Piedmont Park, as well as a comprehensive nutritional plan and guide.  It was more to just do something different and challenge myself than reach any specific health goal.

So today was the first day, which just consisted of the “PT” test, to guage our current fitness level.  At the end of the 30 days, we’ll do the same test again and go “oOoOoO” over the improvements.  I ran my mile in 7 minutes and 55 seconds, did 22 pushups, 32 situps, and 20 dips.  The fastest mile I’ve ever ran was 5:20 during highschool, and I in no way hope to get back down to that level.  But I would be happy with a ~6:30 or so.

The schedule went something like:
4:30am - wake up
5:15am - arrive at workout facility
5:30am - orientation
6:00am - begin warm up
6:20am - go on mile run
6:35am - begin pushup test
6:40am - begin situp test
6:45am - begin tricep dip test
6:50am - begin vomiting and dry heaving in bathroom
6:55am - clap and congratulate everyone on a good first session
7:00am - go home and fall back asleep

Overall, good first day!

Music takes on, literally, a whole new perceptory dimension when you listen to it with high quality noise cancelling headphones.  Audiophiles worldwide, you are vindicated.

So I got a parking ticket a few weeks ago, and finally got around to paying it this morning.  The Municipal City of Atlanta has a nice website that allows you to pay your tickets online.  Here is the email confirmation, verbatim, I got after processing the payment:

EPAYMENT AS PROCESSING RECEIPT SUCCESSFUL IN COURTVIE
Thank your for payment of        25.00 on 08/26/2008.  It has been successfully generated a receipt (receipt number: 392517) and applied to your case(s) is tendered paid complete. Please make contact the Municipal Court of Atlanta at (404) 658-6940 if you have a questions.

Now I know some highschool kid probably coded their website in Frontpage, but damn at least run the output by a copy editor…

And the night before I left, I came down with some kind of strep throat, fever, flu type thing.  I woke up the next morning to get on the plane and it had only gotten worse.  I spent the next 22 hours of my life travelling in the most agonizing, never ending prison of pain and suffering that I would not wish upon anyone.  I could have been floating in a pool of marshmallows and I still would have been in uncomfortable stress;  instead I was locked upright in a coach seat in the back of a 747 passing by the arctic circle.  Oh — and they decided to play, through everyone’s earsets and on all the tv screens, Fool’s Gold (starring matthew mconehwhatthefuckhisnameis) to top it all off.

But, I get ahead of myself.

It all started nicely enough:  the plane ride there.

And then the view from my hotel.

And this part wasn’t really quite accurate:

Yeah, more like the maglev took you to the farthest subway station away from the city, requiring you to change lines (with all your luggage) several times to get anywhere noteworthy.  Brilliant planning for all those travelers coming from, you know, the airport.

While there we went to convenience stores, a lot.

The 40oz beers were seriously like $0.31 a piece.  Add to that the complete absence of any kind of open container laws, you end up with a good time walking around.

We visited a temple…

Oh wait that is just all the faux temple built up around it full of people selling cheap chinese crap to you.  Ah, here’s the temple.

… which was also full of people trying to sell cheap chinese incense crap to you.  Glad to know they keep some things sacred.

Lunches were always served with boiling hot green tea.  Nevermind that it was 95 degrees with 100% humidity everyday.

Those receipts were cool though.  Anytime you paid for something, the receipts had little scratch off lottery ticket things on them.  All of mine said “thank you, try again”.

But, they have pizza huts:

And crazy big shopping malls.

Communism?  What communism?

Here I am drinking my communist water bottle…

In front of all those communist built skyscrapers and financial towers.  Oi…

We took a ferry ride across the river…

Good to know they forbid explosives.  I’m sure those signs keep things safe.

Some of the tallest buildings in the world are there…

As is some of the tastiest food.

Those dumplings were the best dumplings I’ve ever had in my life.  But, like french fries, were really only good freshly out of the steamer.  Yay for steaming hot food to go with our boiling hot green tea in the middle of the scorching hot day!

But it was worth it.

They had girls who apparently liked english writing but didn’t read or write it themselves.  Sucks for them, funny to me.

Ok hon, I’ll try not to breathe you.  Thanks for the heads up.

They had many nice parks,

But I doubt this would pass OSHA inspections…

Later, we paid $75 apiece for 1 pint of paulaner

Or at least, $75 chinese dollars.  Which is like $10 USD.  But, dave says thats still expensive.

We opted to get some more of those $0.30 beers from a convenience store and just walk around instead.

Later I went to the top of one of those tallest buildings in the world.

And looked right down the middle of it.

Glad to know more signs are keeping us safe

Gotta watch out for those psychotics carrying their baleful biology.

We managed to make it to the science and technology museum, which was hands down amazing.

And not even china can escape microsoft’s incompetance.

Hey guys I found china’s nukes!

Just fooling, those are simply models.  You think china would just leave their nukes sitting out in a museum?  Boy you are gullible.

We ended the trip with a last visit to the Bund.

Where I couldn’t help but admire the sites with good friends.

It was a great time.  Well, aside from the flight back.  That totally blew.  Literally.  But the rest of it was fun

I’ve tried to avoid this day as long as possible.  Mainly because there’s just something strange about something as personal as your email being branded by something as monstrous as gmail, but I suppose it has been inevitable.

And I’ve had a gmail account for a while, it was my spam mail account.  I simply liked having all my mail still being run through GT’s email-for-life program, with a real mail server running on a real unix box that I could ssh into from anywhere and start up pine if I wanted to.  Then for the longest time I just popped it out of there with thunderbird, which I loved.  The bayesiam spam filters in thunderbird alone were enough to use it.

But, with switching jobs, and having laptops dying or needing to be reformated, and getting new ones, it grew to be a huge pain to have to have thunderbird redownload my 30,000 some odd emails that I’ve racked up in the last 8 years.

When Tech announced they were moving to the Zimbra web platform I thought that would be satisfactory, but its just too damned slow.  It takes 20 to 30 seconds to actually open up and log in, which is just lame.  Plus the interface was slow and kludgy.  It looked nice, and was very powerful software, just wasn’t doing it for me.

So, whatever, gmail it is.  I have it popping my mail from tech still, and it lets me use my actual email address as the “from”, which is nice.  And it does load very quickly, and it is easy to search through.  I still dont really like the way it keeps your emails in “conversations”, and I hate how it doesn’t have a preview pane below the list of emails.  But, I suppose it will do for now.

You get to a stage in life sometimes to where you feel like there aren’t going to be any more eyes-wide-open, jaw-on-the-floor blowing your mind revelations that has the capability to change your very way of life.  Up until 5 minutes ago, I felt I was in that position.  One gets to be a few years out of college, you get into a routine, you’ve got your retirement plans and your health insurance, things start to seem like they aren’t going to change all that much for the next 40 years or so.

Then an event comes around and just wipes that out.  Its like hearing music for the first time, or the first time you see a rainbow, or winning the lottery.

I, Brian B Culler, have just been introduced to the magical phenomenon that is known as microwaving bacon. All my life I’ve eaten bacon from a frying pan and loved every tender morsal along the way.  As a quick snack, Lauren just threw a peice of bacon into the microwave for a minute, something I’d never heard of, seen of, or imagined could be possible.

And dare I say it was … better ? It was crispy without being burned, it was nice and dry and not greasy and seems like it would be great on a sandwich.

Screw the pan!  I very well may never again deal with the jumping hot bacon grease, the smoke, the dirty pan.  Today is a new day, my friends… relish it.

I think its time for another peice of bacon

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/mars-phoenix-tw.html

There is water ice on Mars within reach of the Mars Phoenix Lander, NASA scientists announced Thursday.

Photographic evidence settles the debate over the nature of the white material seen in photographs sent back by the craft. As seen in lower left of this image, chunks of the ice sublimed (changed directly from solid to gas) over the course of four days, after the lander’s digging exposed them.

“It must be ice,” said the Phoenix Lander’s lead investigator, Peter Smith. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice.”

I’ve been running Firefox 3 RC at home for quite a while now, in windows XP.  I really liked the new styling of it there, it was bright and fresh and clean.

Well, here I am at work, and Firefox Download Day officially started a couple hours ago, so I downloaded it here on my Macbook.  Good golly this thing is ugly!  Someone said they were trying to mimic the look of iTunes, and if so, good golly iTunes is ugly!  Its dark gray and depressing and the tabs come down from the top for some reason, its just awful.

I hope someone releases new themes for it that make it look like the XP version.

For reference you can take a look: http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2008/05/14/firefox-3-themes/

Saw this gem on the way to work today.

True, true.

Coldplay’s latest single “Viva La Vida” remixed and mashed up with the “Reading Rainbow” theme song. Seriously its seriously awesomely serious.

http://hypem.com/artist/coldplay++weezer++cut+copy++the+blow++m+i+a+++reading+rainbow

Here I am being a nerd at the May 14th Atlanta ruby on rails meetup, hosted at the ATDC.

Yes, I liveblogged this.  On my macbook.  And only because twitter was down.

/sigh

It’s been a long, long time since a dumb advertisement has actually made me smile. Primarily due to the fact that I probably haven’t heard this song since the 2nd or 3rd grade, to the point that memories of such are nothing but dull vagaries of something familiar and safe. I’m not being afforded anything even so concrete as a specific time or place, just a dull nagging remembrance of childhood.

Of course the part right in the middle with some douchebag shooting a rocket launcher into someone’s house kind of ruins it but the rest was a home run. I won’t get into a whole discussion about how that entire show (future weapons) in no way deserves to be on Discovery’s programming lineup considering how the rest of their shows are dedicated to science, learning, and exploring the natural world — so instead, just enjoy the song. The cameo from a certain ’synthesized’ character near the end just made my day too.

Honestly this is a super-bowl caliber spot they’ve got here. Kudo’s to Discovery and whoever came up with the idea!

The key to finding something is knowing how to look for it

Every man dies.  But not every man truly lives.

So I’m sitting at work a few days ago rebuilding a PC and someone calls me and says they have an exciting new career possibility for me, and asked if I’d be interested about hearing more?

I’m like “yeah sure, knock yourself out.”

Fast forward two weeks to today, and here I am cleaning out my cubicle.

Turns out this exciting new career possibility was exactly just that.  A 40 person startup named Vitrue that just landed 2nd round funding was insourcing (ya know… the strange, rarely seen opposite of outsourcing) their development team and needed a couple positions filled.  The guys over at Revelation Partners somehow found my bad-ass mojo on the internet and thought I’d be a good fit.  Turns out I am.  Went in for a 3 hour interview and left with an offer that I couldn’t refuse.

It’s strange, my perception and attitude towards ‘work’ has always been that its just a job.  Other people put pictures of their kids all up in their office, personalize everything… I just sit at my computer and do my job.  My job isn’t my life, you know?   My life starts at 5 pm, the job is just something people do to kill time during the day.  It’s a strange dance of probability about who you get stuck next to or working with, and I guess I should be thankful that I’ve never even considered the fact that who I work with would be a contributing factor to wanting to leave.

I went to GT and got a couple of degrees and paid them $35k for the opportunity to do so.  Then I turned around and worked there for a couple years and let them pay me three times that in retribution, so all in all, no complaints.

It’s going to be nice to just be an alumni now.  Go Tech, but go on Marta!

So Lauren emails this to me today. Someone needs to get to work and stop tomfoolin around here.

 

A friend of mine got a Voyager yesterday.  Jealousy ensues.

I got to play with it, and as I suspected, its everything the iPhone is, plus better.

In normal operation its a full touch screen phone just like the iphone — but then it flips open to have another screen and a full *real* qwerty keyboard.  The web browser was also right up there with the iPhone’s, certainly blowing away anything thats on a blackberry or windows mobile device.  And the voyager supports flash too!  The only thing the iPhone has that the voyager doesn’t, is wifi support — and I’m sorry, but if I’m somewhere that there’s wifi, i’m going to be using a real computer.  The Voyager’s 3G certainly kills the iPhone’s EDGE.

Oh and the voyager has GPS built in.

So, anyone looking to get what the iPhone SHOULD have been — get a voyager.