Rand Wacker

PDAapps

VeriChat™ is an always-on, unified Instant Messaging (IM) application for PalmOS devices.

This Engadget posting made me remember that I’ve been meaning to complain about the new cell service I’m getting from Cingular wireless. We combined our phone accounts to take advantage of free mobile-to-mobile calling, and because the Cingular coverage was a bit better in two key locations: home and work. Since the switch though I have been less-than impressed with the overall call quality/stability, their lack of reasonable data plans, and no WiFi plan like the all-I-could-eat HotSpot account I had with T-Mobile.

Another thing I miss about T-Mobile, believe it or not, is their customer service attitude. They always seemed to understand that they were more than just a purveyor of handsets or a simple wireless phone company. They let you use their network for whatever kind of voice/data you wanted too. I prefer their $20/month all-you-can-eat GPRS plan to Cingular’s “please sign in blood for $80 per month” plan and Sprint’s draconian “if we catch you hooking the phone to your laptop we will back-bill you for whatever hundreds of dollars we think you owe us” policy. T-Mobile was even willing to send me the SIM unlock code for my T610, two years after I bought the phone from them and several weeks after I had already switched my number!

Alas, like I said, with T-Mobile I got practically zero reception at home or sitting in my cube at work, so the core feature wasn’t working. In that department Cingular wins, so I’m stuck with a new crack dealer for the next couple of years.

With my wife being gone for so long, my involved schedule with work and school, and the fact that literally 80% of our good friends are leaving/have left the Bay Area in the past several months, I’ve been experiencing long periods of loneliness, an emotion that I haven’t contended with much in my adult life. In some ways, this has caused me to re-think some pretty fundamental beliefs of my personality. I’ve always considered myself to be a bit of an introvert, but when I need to I force myself to be extroverted. I’ve always been comfortable spending time by myself, enjoy living and traveling alone, and have at one time or another been well-described by the famous Clerks interchange, “You hate people! … Yeah, but I love gatherings.” By no means do I think I would fall in to the typical extrovert category of people that are always the life of the party, the Animal House “damn glad to meet you” hand-shaker, or would I make a very good used car salesman. It seems that while I’m happy spending time by myself, I have a definite need for inter-personal interaction with people. Human beings are, after all, social creatures. I remember a few years ago when I was sick with a particularly bad throat infection and I couldn’t leave my apartment or even talk on the phone for an entire week. At the end of that cycle I came to the conclusion that I would not do well by myself on a desert island.

I need to figure out how to fix this, because wherever Lonely dwarf treads his buddy Grumpy dwarf is sure to follow, and I’m spending way too much time with that unsavory little character. It seems that for me any combination of stress, lack of sleep, loneliness, and various other crummy events will compound on each other to form a permanent rain cloud over my mood. This is a bad cycle for me, as bad moods usually reinforce bad moods. This downward spiral is well known by my friends, and stories of Rand’s grumpiness are somewhat legendary. I need to avoid reinforcing that view.

So what’s the fix? I wish I knew. I can manage my stress through adequate sleep and exercise, quality food always helps elevate my mood, and spending time with the few friends I have left in the area is a big help. I think I need to change my emotional frame though, and stop letting grump feed on grump. There’s a lot to be said for the “just get over it!” method of psychiatry, and maybe that’s what I should try to do.

I’m chomping at the bit to try out Yahoo! 360, does anyone have any invites for it yet?

cvsFinder

cvsFinder is an attempt to integrate CVS into the Mac OS file manager, Finder. The end goal is to provide all the features of command line CVS through integration with the file manager.

The machine that I host my domain on (radix.cryptio.net) suffered a major hard disk failure last week. We lost a number of users home directories and had to rebuild the system from scratch. Suffice it to say, last week was very long.

We’re slowly rebuilding the system, and services are coming back online. Of note, my gallery is down right now. I’ve just completed upgrading MovableType though, so I’ll be able to hopefully open up comments again later.

If you notice anything weird around here, please mail me.

I have an ongoing interchange with one of my best friends whose favorite repeated saying is, “Dude, you have a blog?” Its not that he has no short-term memory, its that his view on the whole thing is, “If I want to find out how someone is doing, I’ll call them on the phone!” (I’m not going to mention that this guy never actually answers his home phone though).

Yeah, I understand, and I somewhat agree, but the reality is that there is a hell of a lot of low-level activity in all of our lives that is interesting to our friends but not so important as to involve an individual phone call to everyone. And while a huge amount of communications happens over dinner/drinks/biking/snowboarding/whatever, the fact remains that person-to-person communication is a limited channel, especially when everyone is busy busy busy with whatever they’re doing.

While I track somewhere around 150 to 200 individual RSS feeds on a regular basis, the small group of 20 or so friends that maintain blogs are the ones that I try to read every day, as well as where I finding myself commenting the most. This is because its a fantastic way to stay tuned in to my group of friends who I don’t get a chance to see or talk to all that often. And I’d much rather receive information this way rather than in pushed email updates or what not.

Yes, I’m sure to most everyone in the blog space this is old news. Heck, LiveJournal built and sold a whole company based on this idea. To my friends that are reading this, I just wanted to give a quick tip of the hat. To my friends who aren’t well, I guess it doesn’t matter.

Last weekend I was running some errands down on 4th Street and ran in to a group of kids selling raffle tickets for some school fund raiser or another. Since I was relieved to not be approached again to buy a box of stale overpriced cookies I went ahead and bought a couple. As I was filling out the contact information I noticed that the girl I was talking to had something like 5 or 6 different colored armbands on, not just the all-too-common yellow Livestrong bracelet, but a whole series of purple, blue, red, even a mixed white/blue one. When I asked her what they were all for she instantly rattled them off, “this one is for cancer, this one is for cystic fibrosis, these are HIV/AIDS, and this is tsunami relief.” I collected my tickets and wandered off to my car.

Then I got to thinking, what is the real use of these bracelets, besides of course raising money? I thought, “What does a 10 year old know about cystic fibrosis? Has this interesting and noble cause just become another trendy style?” Then I realized, “Hey, I don’t know much about cystic fibrosis,” so I went and did a little research (turns out it affects children more than anyone). So, I guess if their purpose is to raise awareness of issues then they really are working!

Over the weekend I watched last year’s documentary, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. I’m not necessarily the biggest Metallica fan out there, but like any guy who went to high school in the 80s or 90s, I’ve got a few riffs burned in my memory somewhere or the other. The movie is definitely worth watching, regardless of how you feel about the music or the band because the story about the people is interesting and the documentary is well done.

I actually think that documentaries are becoming one of my favorite styles of film. Regardless of my interest level in the subject, a talented documentarian can draw me in and make a very interesting ninety minutes or so out of tidal current blooming or duck migrations for all I care. I really enjoy the new style of an immersive story line that usually doesn’t even have a narrator pointing out the plot but instead just letting the subject speak for itself.

I caught a discussion with Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame on Henry (Rollin)’s Film Corner today about this very subject (yes, its on IFC). His view was that documentaries are one of the few unbiased forms of media left out there because most other modes for production are so corporatized. Nowadays a filmmaker can get a top of the line camera and editing setup for about five grand, then distribute their films over BitTorrent or any of the other free distribution mechanisms, and if the buzz catches on then the Internet will spread the word of mouth better than any independent press did before. The result is a viable vehicle for people to tell these stories to the wider audience that was so difficult to access before.

Spurlock’s fantastic dive in to the greasy world of McDonald’s nutrition is aa example of the renaissance of documentaries in action. Even though the corporate behemoth tried to shut him down in every market they went to, the film was so widely viewed that McDonald’s actually gave up the whole concept of “Super Size” on their menus just a couple of months after its wide-scale release. That’s a pretty powerful result for a movie that was produced for about what I can finance on my credit cards.

Now I know we’ve long had entire TV channels dedicated to documentary purposes like Discovery and Animal Planet and what not, but I wonder how long until we get a channel that highlights only the best that the world of documentaries have to offer?

I used this quote on a coworker the other day and got a completely blank stare…absolutely no glimmer of recognition of this line from one of my favorite all-time work movies. Oh well, thats not what I’m here to complain about today.

Today my pet peeve is office coffee, and its general poor quality of production that usually leads to bitterness, acidity, and sadness (both in the brew and in the people who have to consume it). It never fails that the more advanced the facility and the business is, the less attention is paid to the most important part of the brewing process. No matter how sealed you auto-filling vacuum carafes are, how clean the automatic filtration water systems make your primary ingredient, the fact remains THAT MOST PEOPLE HAVE NO CONCEPT OF ACTUALLY MEASURING OUT THE COFFEE.

This is even more of a travesty when the office pays a premium for high-quality beans (or at least high quality grounds). For years I thought that Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend was absolutely fetid and bitter, until I had a properly brewed cup at a friend’s house one morning. I think I ended up drinking almost the entire pot! The problem in office environments is that there’s always some yahoo who thinks “the more grounds you use, the better the coffee”. Or worse, the more caffeine (there’s Red Bull in the fridge for that if you need it). Look people, there are well formulated ratios for ground-to-water combinations, and they’re not that hard to find.

Then there’s the old wives tale about keeping coffee in the freezer. The problem with this is that every time you take the bucket out and open it, more moisture will concentrate on the already staling grounds. Its not hard to disprove this one. For an even deeper understanding of this topic, Alton Brown is, as always, a fantastic resource.

Due to this sadly fixable problem, I find myself rarely drinking coffee at the office. I have however started bringing in some basic equipment to make a proper cup of tea and buying small portions of well-sealed leaves for my hot beverage fixes. There’s a lot to be said for the therapeutic properties of waiting for a nice pot of tea to brew in the afternoon. It’s a much better break from your day than the typical mad dash to the lukewarm, overly bitter, often empty pot of sludge that curses us from the kitchen.