prog | Entries tagged with chestnut street

I played my first game of Scrabble in many years, last night, with housemate and his GF, after they hit the game store to pick up a new copy. The board is still biege, after all this time! God bless them.

I took an early lead with ZIPPER and then getting a bonus turn through winning housemate's challenging my GENT. (No, it's not an abbreviation. furrfu.)

All enjoyed cheap laughs from this bit of visual poetry:

    P
S N O U T
    U
  G R O I N

Alas, housemate won, as he has with the last 50,000 games of any type that we've played together. It's still good.

Current Music: THE SPIRIT II In The Style of S. F. 's Legendary KJAZ. - -

Now You Can Pick Up Anything; the chopstick game

You can play as either Carla or Karl. You need: prog's card table, a pair of chopsticks, prog's room, and prog.

Players take seats at prog's card table in prog's room that has prog in it. After choosing who goes first, they take turns choosing an interesting object on prog's table and trying to pick it up with the chopsticks, in the usual one-handed fashion. If successful, the object is added to that player's score pile. If unsuccessful, the object remains where it lands, or is returned to the center of the table should it happen to bounce into someone's score pile by accident.

You may dispute your opponent's picking-up method by turning around and asking prog about it, while he tries to read over in the corner. Unfortunately, he will always side with your opponent.

Current Music: Groove Salad 128k: A nicely chilled plate of ambient beats and grooves. [SomaFM] - -

Yesterday was nice. In the morning I brunched with

cthulhia at Sound Bites, which contains both muffins and a show of her V-day postcard artwork, much of which I hadn't seen before, since it's not all on her website. A meatspace exclusive! Go there and have a muffin and look at the art, if you haven't already.

We then quested to shoot two more of the Mysterious Critter Signs that had appeared in Somerville -- one by the powderhouse (which for some reason I had never seen before!) and another way off in the east. After making my capture, I returned home to play with iPhoto for the first time. Even though I have my own photo gallery thingy on my own website, I couldn't resist putting the resulting photos on my mac.com account, since iPhoto makes this quite literally a one-button procedure.

(I really have been becoming an Apple fanboy all over again, or so I feel over the last few weeks as I have been learning how to use Mac OS X "correctly", using the Terminal only for hacky business and not as my primary UI, as I would with xterms in any other Unix-based desktop, and as I was with OS X before this month.)

In the evening I was to meet M&N at the 1369 to discuss house plans, but only M was there -- N was stuck putting out fires in the machine room all night. We yammered in a caffeinatedly productive fashion, and then I showed her Chez Chestnut and some of its resident (and transient) humans and kitties -- CC is one possible candidate for our house plans, since half its population is going to bail soon. I am not sure what kind of impression it made on M. She lists lots-o-space as a prime requisite, and I don't think that's something we enjoy here.

Cthulhia came by again for a surprise visit when she and I decided to skip the late-late BUFF shorts show. (It included "Puking Zombies", which we agreed had a nice title but wasn't enough motivation to get us to Chinatown by 11 p.m.) She and M hit it off really well, and I always love to see that sort of thing happen. She verbally sketched the outline to her screenplay idea for M and I, which was fantastic -- she tried to do this for me during our Leonids misadventure months ago, but had to speak through the haze of emotional and physical discomfort that marked that trip, while this time she was in full form, and we could only gape at her storytelling-foo.

Scientific studies show that one or more of my housemates have the capability of going through an entire jar of peanut butter (modulo one sandwich-serving glop I removed at the start of the experiment) within a single 18-hour period. And without the use of bread.

(several minutes of helpless shrugging and aphyxiated facial expressions)

Today I got a little further than halfway through Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, taking notes furiously the whole way. God rain blessings upon PocketNotes for making that possible. While I got annoyed at discovering its incapability to export text, and its interface is a bit rougher around the edges than I'd like, it's still the best outliner I've found for this OS.

Replied to mail about my ISBN webservice thing and ComicsML.

I've spent the most recent three hours or so sorting out finances. Wrote many checks, web-paid many parking tickets, sent out some PayPal funds and sent out email regarding a precious few debts owed to me. Things are not as bad as I feared, and things are still not very good. I will survive, but I do start to have doubt about this whole moving-again-in-June idea. As Noah pointed out recently, none of us have full-time jobs, which makes one wonder how we expect to scrape together the capital to move to any of the neighborhoods we're eyeing. (Davis Square, ideally.)

Chez Chestnut will dissolve soon no matter what happens, though; Charles and SO Leslee want a place of their own as soon as they can manage, so they'll be leaving in September if Carla and I don't wander out before then.

I didn't realize until this past week what a steal our rent is, here; it's apparently comparable to some studio apartments. So Carla, who also receives income in freelancey fits and starrts, would rather not be the one to leave, and I start to wonder if maybe, given everything, I should feel the same.

Yesterday I was surprised to find myself having a mature and honest discussion with my mother about relationships, grown-up to grown-up. What causes my parents to sometimes see me as such, and sometimes see me as a nonautonomous child? Well, anyway. It was a good thing. Mom displayed more insight and wisdom than I would have expected... hrm. Then again, by the sounds of it, she is making a career recently of gently helping my two brothers through their own rocky relationships.

Do you recall how, last month, I cleaned a pile of paper off the dining room table and found a piece of individually-wrapped chocolate underneath it? Yesterday I cleaned off the entire table, and found, when I was nearly done, that one of the items contributing to the mess was, in fact, an entire box of chocolates. Granted, it had only four pieces left in it, all quite stale, and three had bites in them (later positively identified as belonging to Carla), but still. It gives one pause.

I love OmniDictionary. Everyone who uses OS X should use this; it's a wonderful use of the 'Services' menu, which I'm only recently starting to appreciate. After installing it, you can select any word in any application, and, with a keystroke, OmniDictionary grabs that word's definition from the Internet, and displays it. Yay.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Slimcea Girl - Mono - Formica Blues

Cleaning is its own reward, especially when there is forgotten Christmas chocolate underneath the rubble covering the dining room table.

(Really rich chocolate makes me sneeze.)

This morning my bank, bless them, forced me to own up to the fact that I have several entities who'd like money from me but who have no idea how to contact me anymore. Part of that horrible move last month involved having no address for a while (foolish; I should have at least set up forwarding to my parents' or something (but maybe the idea didn't reach conscious levels because of memory of my parents "accidentally" opening mail addressed to me in the past, and then giving me a hard time about the content they accidentally would read -- it's probably just as well that I never give them an inch anymore)) and I have never quite gotten around to setting up forwarding to Chez Chestnut. So this morning I couldn't sit in the 4-digit and finish this letter I wanted to finish, because no cash machine would give me any money. My bank is happy now, and my credit card is happy, and now I must face the insurance companies. Eek. I really hate this.

Saw The Movie yesterday, and it was basically a three-hour emotional assault, since I was on emotional overload to begin with. I was silently crying through most of it, and at several points it took effort not to sob. I have been in a funny way lately, let me tell you. After, cthulhia dragged some stuff out of me (ew) which I hadn't been very open about, and it's better this way, of course. I have yet to wholly word my thoughts on alla that, cuz it's very complicated, and also not something I talk about in weblog. Ho! But: it's good, better than it was, and getting better still. How's that?

I got my Xmas gift from Leah today. Bread! My breakfast plans spurned, I instead ate some of this, with peanut butter. Mmm. Thanks.

Strange fact: I am the only bread-eater in this house. ?! If you don't count Leslee, that is. I would offer some of this bread to her but it will surely be all et before she gets back from Hawaii.

This house officially Wins. I did good by coming here, and have said as much to the preinstalled peeps, with whom I seem to be swimming swimmingly. Charles acknowledges my skill at memetic boxing, and Carla invited me into her GURPS Discworld campaign. We've all played the official house game of Lost Cities many times, and we chat and share food and coffee and do this and that with respective other friends as much as you might expect, and yes indeedy my Social bar is perhaps greener than it's ever been. Even the cat seems to think I'm OK.

So yeah. Props to cthulhia for encouraging my move here, both in advising me and in speaking in my favor to the residents. I am a heppy heppy ket.

Neighborhoodishly, I didn't realize how quiet the surroundings are until my first or second night here, when I heard a very distant emergency vehicle siren and realized that it was all the traffic I could hear at the time. How different from the Medford/Highland intersection of my last apartment! This despite the fact that there's so much good stuff in walking distance; Trader Joe's 5 minutes thisaway, Bread & Circus 7 minutes thataway, and Central Square with its T station and coffee shops is but 10 minutes up yonder. Compare with my east Somerville place, where I had an array of convenience stores to pick from, and that was that.

Driving seems a puzzle. Cambridgeport is more or less griddish, but every day a random selection of roads are blocked off by construction equipment, making the neighborhood streets an ever-changing labyrinth. As for Mass Ave, it's just as confusing during the day as it is at night, but it rewards those with cool heads with as many chances to loop back and try again as they need, until they finally bang into their heads the pattern of which lanes to occupy when, so as not to get prematurely flung off at any of several flinging-off points. I have come to the conclusion that Massachusetts Avenue is not a single road, but a collective organism made of lots of smaller roads, each with their own personalities, who have nonetheless decided to band together under a single name. Learning and accepting this makes navigating it a bit easier, for me.

There is a dishwasher, a concept so alien that even after being introduced to it I refused to accept its existence and washed the dishes once by hand anyway before thinking: hm. Charles has since educated me on dishwasher protocol, which I appreciate.

Apparently I am alone among the three in using the house phone line, so all phone bills will go to me until I finally get around to nabbing a cell phone, at which point, Charles figures, we may as well cancel the thing.

Despite all this talk of assimilation, I still haven't actually moved in yet. The landlords return this weekend, allegedly... I'll go research this now. Wish me luck.

Have successfully penetrated the Chez Charla perimeter and spent the night snoring in the guest room. iBook is happily connected to house Ethernet. Assisted in unsuccessful bid to medicate cat.

Driving here was Interesting. I oversteeled my nervosity about driving down the sinister and labrythine Mass Ave at night, enough to make it most of the way over, but there's this bizarre vortex at Harvard Sqaure where signs suggest making a sharp left to stay on Mass/2A, and following their advice suddenly puts you on Mt. Auburn, heading in an unknown direction. ?!. Fortunately I had a decent map of Cambridge with me, and the street I slipped onto in order to better study it proved to be an even more direct route to the house. Yay.

Now I must do lots of THINGS.

The bad news is, the landlords won't be available until the end of next week, and they insist on meeting me before I can move in.

The good news is, Charles and Carla have offered to let me stay in the guest room until then. Cha's and I spoke today, and they expect my arrival sometime this evening.

Suddenly faced with the prospect of leaving Maine again, I am suprised to find a little internal resistance! But, it's just my usual inertia, backed up by a little nervousness, I suppose. I really do need to get this thing done. And: I'll be living (or at least guesting) in a house with broadband Internet again. Eeee! Now all we'll need is wireless.

I have yet to write about any of my silly Sims adventures here; I picked up that toy two Saturdays ago. I will mention that, as with any other gameworld that grabs me, I start to apply its metaphors into the real world, and so I imagine that living in a house with others will be good for me because it will keep my Social bar a healthy green. That's always the hardest thing to keep up for Sims who live alone.

This is assuming that I don't actually act like my Sims, and start beating up guests every time I catch one hugging a housemate. Twitchy little buggers.

Jim's response to my missing the meeting was "Eh, don' worry about it." Just like I told my worried parents it would be. I would never work for an employer who couldn't recognize an honest mistake.

Logged two hours of work today for Arcus, my first two ever as an independent contractor. Picked up plenty of useful advice from veteran contractor (and Arcus bossman) Jim, on when and when not to bill. Figuring out how to navigate the customer's whacked-out labyrinth of existing databases and APIs: bill. Thinking to self about how to solve the problem at hand: bill. Having chosen a particular attack path, figuring out how that is supposed to work, prior to actually applying it to the problem: do not bill.

I've been using a little OS X dock app called AtWork as my clocky tool, though Adam thinks I should learn how to use the time-tracking Emacs mode he heard about. GEEK

Charles says that he has successfully phoned my employment references, and presented this information, at long last, to the super-busy landlord and her husband. (Said employers corroborate this, though I do trust Charles, who, I remind myself, hangs directly off the small but succulent trust network I've built in Boston -- and views me in exactly the same way, with the same network.)

This news came in the nick of time, as, after speaking with my parents about the situation, I had resolved to leap at the other opportunity if the first was still stalled by day's end. And so, the waiting game continues, now through a second weekend.

The mail from friends, gaming groups, and social circles in Boston really makes me pine to be there again, despite the fact that I don't get out much, no matter where I am. :)

Gaming... there is RPG madness due to happen, a critical point in our Nephilim campaign, possibly a Big Fight, when I really should be there. Should I say "foo" and drive down and maybe hope for crash space? Dunno. OTOH, there is no lack of stuff to get done here. Like, oh, I dunno, the book? Mumble

I had better set about fixing my homesite, which is still littered with debris and broken internal links from the move. Between laziness and general disconnection from the rest of the world (something that definitely fuels the former), I haven't so far been bothered with it. Bad, bad. This is not the time to be ambivalent about my face to the world, friend.

I have been in Waterville a week now. Insert pointed drumming of fingers, just once, here. Near as I can tell, there has been no motion on the Cambridgeport front. I have been tentatively sniffing at other opportunities, just in case. Several phone calls to make today. I wonder how much more line I should let out for Chez Charla... while I really want to live there, my confidence will be seriously eroded if I find out today that we're right where we were two weeks ago. The clock is ticking on the prime immediate backup location, just to make things more interesting.

Interesting, yes, ah yes indeedy.

I'm sorry I am so grumpy. Here, look at pictures of a bunny with a succession of leaves on its head.

Other stuff from a letter to a friend:

I have been kept sane during my stay by hanging out all day at the offices of Arcus Digital. They have a wirless network, and I have a laptop. And they have couches and lots of snacks and soda. (And a tip jar.) Mmmm. It's a pretty good environment, but for that it's in the cultural wasteland of central Maine, and that it's all-male. Then again, there are none of the loutish males that appeared increasingly during MINT's decline, so that's nice, but working in a crossgendered environment is still preferable, to me. Then again again, it's not like I'm actually working here. Or even plan on staying too much longer.

I will, however, be doing some work. This evening Andy talked to me about my first piece of contract work Arcus'd like me to do... an easy task, good teeth-cutting, not just with here but with the whole freelance thing. Naturally, Jim & co is all about telecommuting, so I'm very much not tying myself to this geographic spot by accepting the offer (though I do expect to visit semi-oftenly).

At least undef is back in business, more or less... the machine has a fresh new copy of Debian Linux on it, installed under the supervision of Arcus people, who didn't let me set up any security holes this time, and had me install software to help keep the thing hardened. To which I say: good. I'd say that this will absolutely positively be the last Bad Move this box has had to make, but with three such events in 2001 alone, I really wouldn't trust myself with such statements anymore. Then again, the situation is totally different... it used to be an insecure junkpile running either on my apartment floor or in a company machine room, and now it's a very secure box maintained by paid professionals in a dedicated hosting facility. We'll see what happens.

That letter was writ two days ago. Since then, my domain has become fully world-visible once again, though I've yet to properly crawl through the whole site and see what's broken and fix it all, again. It's worth it. I say to the l33t h4><0rs: Come on in. And burn! Yesh.

The cafe upstairs, Jorgenson's, is for sale. Everyone at Arcus will be very very sad if it turns into something other than a cafe, because, mm boy, good coffee right upstairs, available through the afternoon? Friend, that's half the reason I took the job at O'Reilly last year, with the promise that it'd be moving to Davis Square and its three late-nite coffee shops. (Ed note: I took the job, and it didn't move. And then I got laid off anyway.) According to this news story, the owners are selling all their inventory and equipment along with the space, so that's a hopeful sign.

A photographer came in to shoot John and myself playing Lost Cities at lunch yesterday for that story, but they used a photo of a college student instead. Foo! Doesn't two hairy guys taunting each other over a bizarre-looking card game have far more visual appeal than some waifish bookworm? Bah.

The shower in my parents' house is from the seventh and a half floor. I have to kneel in order to wash my face.

Strange fact: three people in the last three days, two of them friends who are not prone to make such random outbursts, have independently exclaimed how very tall I suddenly seem lately. MaryMary and my Mom offer no hypothoses why this is so. Andy thinks that I used to slouch by default, and have stopped. I am totally unaware of any of this.

I've started writing again, pretending that I'm settled. Ellie has been sketching rough drafts of book covers. First there was a neat cover featuring two Arabian birds, kites, which editor Linda thought was wicked cool, except that they seemed to be about to kill each other. After Linda asked if she could tone it down, Ellie made one with some sort of fru-fru bird, which Linda labeled "milquetoast". Sadly, Ellie snuck me the URL to it, and just seeing a possible book cover with my name on it made me fall in love with the thing. Since I just finished Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, I emailed the URL to a friend: "Want to see my daemon?"

Ellie has since moved away from birds and now favors monkeys. Green monkeys. Monkeys reflect both the subject matter and the projected sales figures, she notes. ???

Current Mood: caffeinated
Current Music: "Life and How to Live it", REM

Things are... not going as planned.

In hindsight, they could go a lot worse. Though I have moved many many times before (14 times, in fact, counting from college on) this is the very first time I have moved without parental guidance, and the price of independence is not slight. So, I have learned and done many strange and wonderful things, and have made some critical timing errors. Yes, I should have started a month before I did. No, I shouldn't have held out for a Davis place as long as I did. I know that now, and am wiser for it. I think I did many other things right, not the least of which was rely on the network of friends and acquaintances I have made here in the last year to help me in the search.

But at the moment, it leaves me homeless, crashing with my parents in Waterville, Maine, and waiting for updates on the Cambridgeport front. Charles and I were hoping for a Wednesday night meeting with the landlord, but this fell through: LL wanted a bucket of rental, employment, and financial references before s/he would even look at me, literally. I forwarded what I could to Charles, and drove north.

Mind you, I would have driven north anyway, since I very badly wanted to plug poor old undef into its new home up here at Arcus. Only this afternoon we finally got it settled, and its webserver works again, more or less. Now I have to get the domain updated (a horrible process involving sending faxes to Verisign, waiting, calling them, being told that they never got any faxes, why don't you try this other number, repeat 1d4 times) and meantime jmac.org doesn't exist for the Nth time during 2001, and all my email is bouncing, and I don't have a phone number or postal address either, sorry. Fucking kiddies. Why'd they pick now to do this? Sigh

The party went OK. Nobody blanched at the costume, though I did maybe overblow the in-character shtick a little bit. I blame Cthulhia and her accursed Radio Free Vestibule album for the bad inlfuence. At least one or two people took photos; will post when avialable.

Quoting recent mail to Charles:

> I decided to rent a storage locker and have started to pile stuff into it.
>
> I forgot that I had a small bureau in the large-objects category, along with
> the couch. Bloody thing... its next stop after the locker will either be to
> a susboid who wants it, or to the dump. All thingies that don't lend
> themselves to moving deserve purging from my life. Must find alternate
> clothing storage solutions, he said in a rumbling monotone.
>
> After the bureau-moving debacle I am prepared on calling the couch a lost
> cause. Snf.
>
> Um, anyway: No matter what happens tomorrow night, I have to zip up to Maine
> soon after, so that I can exorcise the jmac.org server in the company of
> licensed profesionals (they tell me that I'll still get to shout "The power
> of Christ compels thee!" at it but this time I should lay off on the holy
> water) and then plug it into its new host setup, conveniently at the same
> place. If I'm an official resident of Chez Charlas by the witching hour
> tomorrow night, I'll sleep there and leave the next morning; else, I'll go
> north after the party and return the evening of the first, unless I should
> stick around for some reason.

So that's what I'm doing.

Not only did terrorists make me lose my job, but they're also making me paranoid about my halloween costume, conceived in August, being regarded in poor taste. Black humor is as popular[1] as ever, but black humor about nuclear weapons might not be, with some especially jittery people... and the current atmosphere (I am not going to name my band "Credible Threat", now, if I ever was) is turning many otherwise rational friends into borderline panicmonkeys.

I filtered the idea past cthulhia, and she seems to think it's terribly funny, though maybe I misunderstood her and it's actually just terrible. Was she laughing ha-ha-funny, or laughing ha-ha-defense-mechanism? Well, we'll see what the crowd thinks, won't we.

Anyway, that part of the costume is just a button, which I can remove should people react in a squirrelous fashion. I'll still be wearing the deely boppers I bought today at Jack's Joke Shop, and everyone loves deely boppers, in peace or war. Boy, did I luck out... there was only one pair left with spheres at the ends of the springs, instead of stars or hearts, which just wouldn't work on a superevolved cockroach.

I am in the middle of the move to Chez Charlas, at least as far as packing and cleaning up goes. My parents have chosen to insinuate themselves upon the scene, driving down from Maine and camping out in a Medford hotel for a couple of days, and those who know about me and my parents (including readers of Weblog A) would also know why this makes me go mumble, mumble. However, there's not much for them to meddle in, this instance, since I've already covered all the major details of this operation; it's merely theirs to insist on pushing me aside while they take over the task of my Highland Avenue evacuation.

And, to be honest, I welcome their help. While I do think I could have pulled off every aspect of this move on my own (well, with generous help from local friends, too), my parents are undeniably experts at all forms of managing stuff, and if they want to be adamant about helping me, I won't bar the door against them -- that would really be the immature thing to do, in this case. So tonight I went to the Star Market holding a list of tinctures and notions for total apartment scouring that mom instructed me to obtain before they returned early tomorrow morning. La.

Meanwhile, trouble has arisen in the form of a slippery landlord, who is running for office and very difficult to track down; Charles, bless him, is trying very hard to make the house me-ready by the first, a task made more difficult by my waiting until only a few days ago before I confirmed with him my desire to take the offered room (I spent much of November holding out for a room near Davis Square, and failed), but I can't start trucking boxes in until I sign some papers, and that can't happen unless the landlord's present. Charles fears that the next window of opportunity might be Halloween night. I gave him permission to summon me from the party if necessary. We'll see, we'll see.

[1] By "popular", I also mean "forced and lame", in many circumstances. Jim to me on the phone, after he confirms that he's sending me a package I requested: "We're also sending you some anthrax. Yuk yuk yuk." Okay.

Current Mood: caffeinated
Current Music: "Man, It's So Loud In Here", TMBG

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A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

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