(no subject)

(from an email I just sent to a social mailing list)

To my Waterville Transplant friends:

John Keimel, an old colleague of mine, has spearheaded an effort to set up a free, public wireless network in downtown Waterville, backed & blessed by the city's Main Street development council. It's currently operational, though not peakfully so; he tells me he'll be working this week on closing up the 20 percent packet loss it gets now, and then extending its range, adding more hotspots on Main Street and Silver Street.

Today, though, you can flip open your laptop on the Jorgensen's sidewalk, slip into the 'wtvl-1.mewug.org' network, and Bob's your uncle. This makes me a little jealous, because the Davis Square-area geekery have been mumbling about setting up public WAP for years and made, as far as I know, zero progress, even while it starts to flower in the little city I left behind.

The project's temporary homepage is at http://www.adsp.net/john/wireless/, including tech specs & photos of John's homemade antennas, for those who like to look at such things.

(no subject)

In related news, keimel chose to come out of the closet and admit he's been keeping an LJ for a couple of months. This means that all core Arcusoids, or at least the ones I've known since I joined MINT in 1998, now have presence here. Har.

(no subject)

I really hope this movie gets a screening in the Boston area. Look at the trailer!

(no subject)

Today was kind of dumb. Didn't get a lot of work done, then went to a two-hour meeting, then went home, feeling foolish.

I'm no good with long, pre-scheduled meetings, no more good than I was with lectures in school; if the subject at hand isn't of immediate relevance to me, I completely tune out after a 60-second timeout period, and then I am like unto one who is asleep, for all that the world hears from me, and I from it. So it's always embarrassing to suddenly hear my name, and find myself put on the spot to comment on the last 15 minutes of discussion. We're all friends, but still.

At least I'm more or less done migrating my project from MySQL to Oracle, learning about Oracle the whole time. Biggest blessing was learning about yasql, a Perl program that replaces the horrible, horrible SQL*PLUS that is Oracle's built-in shell. SQL*PLUS is straight outta the 1970s; not only does it not keep a command history, it doesn't even know what the left and right cursor keys do, it has a dinky line-buffer that prevents you from pasting in queries from the clipboard, it tends to seize up on rainy days, and so on. I know that Larry Ellison thinks that amberchrome dumb terminals were the pinnacle of computer evolution, but come on, guys. Oh well; at least I don't have to deal with it anymore.

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Happy non-ICCB things that happened during work hours today: getting a tech column proposal greenlighted, getting formal agreement from a friend to be my co-developer with MIGS, and getting an orker interested in MIGS, though not quite enough to sign onto the design team just yet, which is fine.

Last week I pledged to aim my free-time mind solely at MIGS for a while, and I'm finding it hard to do, because so many wonderful distractions keep blooping up. Last night I took lots of notes about my fiction ideas before forgetting that that's a no-no. So I pushed MIGS around a little, wrote a couple of topical emails, and then found myself reading a lengthy Emily Short essay about SF-IF world construction, and had to note all the ideas that brought about...

The thing I'm supposed to be doing is always the least attractive thing to do, even if it's entirely a personal fun-project. Argh. Must I start tricking myself into focusing on anything?