my toot over on twitter appears to be the first-and-only googleable result for BEEFDECADE. in my humble opinion, it’s the 0xDEADBEEF of the short-lived 40-bit generation.

other contenders:
BEEFFACADE
BADABBAFAB
BEAFABBEEF
AFADEDFAD

why did i need an easily-rememberable 40-bit wep key, you might ask? because i got the extremely shit-hot WMWifiRouter application that makes my cellphone turn into a 3g-backed wifi hotspot. we’ll see if i can use that to get myself in trouble or not.

brandon martin-anderson is a cool guy, with cool ideas. back in 2007 i painstakingly recorded a gmap-pedometer log of each of my non-trivial bike rides for the year and recorded the url in a google spreadsheet. using his mad skills, brandon has taken the gpx data pulled out from those 215 gps records and in about five minutes thrown them into the image above. he’s cropped off the long bits – the ben country ride out to hood canal, the trip to whidbey, and the trek out to fall city. but the rest is there, an impressive trace of my rides around the city two years ago. the full-size version is even cooler. maybe i should start this project up again.

as for brandon, he’s got some even cooler ideas. do you have a bunch of your bike ride data saved?

do you like my pimp monacle?

it’s been a while since i’ve picked up new gaming hardware. now, thanks to the driving upgrade needs of safety monkey, i’ve got a 360. this does not bode well for my bedtimes or my kotor ii game. especially since i also have fallout 3.

this isn’t even a proper blog post, but it’s a request for comments from anybody still following this thing that happens to be a nerd. i’ve just been assigned a nice, new, relatively compact project at work. it’s a canonical example of a “apply new techniques” problem: a partial (and now broken) reference implementation already exists, i understand the structure, and i think i’ve got enough time to build it correctly while still learning a new trick or two along the way.

i’ve spent the last forever (forever!) building a mega-webapp that has turned out to be really badly designed in places. i didn’t really know what i was doing – i’d never built any substantial kind of web application. i learned a ton. i’m anticipating that my next job is going to have me building bigger, smarter, better-designed applications. possibly on the web. so i’d like to be less sucky next time.

with that in mind, i’m definitely not going to squander this opportunity by building another crappy hodgepodge of asp pages in vbscript, not least of which because i want this new application to live over on our departmental account. so i turn to you, internet. i’m thinking of using a web framework, but should i? which one to use?

here’s what i’ve evaluated-slash-heard of:

• catalyst: it’s perl, which is one of my “go-to” languages. i’m not quite as perl-savvy as i once was, and a significant amount of my old perl suffers from abuse of regular expressions. i was young, crazy, dumber and didn’t think that perhaps i should use a proper parser for things like xml. the downside of this seems to be that installing it relies on lots of cpan which my twitter followers will know doesn’t particularly love me.
• solstice, designed by the catalyst group at the uw. yeah, sucky namespace collision there. also in perl, possibly impossible to get running on the departmental server, and heavily customized for the specific applications written by the development team. on the other hand, i have weekly beer with the development team, and i’ve actually built a very simple application in it once.
• rails. the “build a blog in 15 minutes” video from like four years ago is still hot. bonus points that i converted jack danger to a full-time ruby developvangelist before i’d even touched it myself. in fact, my total code written in ruby to date: two little command line scripts. it somehow seems appropriate that i be roughly five years behind the curve. bonus: it’s already installed on the departmental servers.
• django, “for perfectionists with deadlines”. that seems like me, except i’m not really a perfectionist. python is still a little hard for me to wrap my head around but i think i’ve got some of it – i’ve been building some little things over on appengine, including a new homepage for my windows mobile phone.

so, what am i missing? should i not even bother with a framework and just devote myself to the ascetic practice of writing everything from scratch? what about the php frameworks that are out there?

there’s a constant tension between the present and the past. on the one hand i like to hold on to my old school street cred. you know, the use of pine (an improvement over elm!) and remembering manually putting together multipart mime downloads from usenet using tin. hell, at one point over a decade ago i had a .sig file for usenet posting. i gophered into wisc.edu to download .voc and .mod files. long before wow, when blizzard was just that quirky company that made warcraft: orcs and humans, i was off on bbs’ playing majormud. i used telix and wrote salt scripts to level me up. old school.

funnily enough, that sort of thing doesn’t count for much in the modern era. yes, i have vast quantities of street credit, but internet inflation is even worse than that in the real world. what was sufficient to buy me adulation a decade ago now only pays its dividends in derision. (just because pine’s quoting breaks gmail that doesn’t make pine bad.)

anyhow, in addition to making an awesome podcast, you can also find me on your favorite social networking sites. by which i mean facebook. technically i’m on myspace although i never log on anymore. having more than 5 friends on myspace is a liability because the odds increase exponentially that one f them is going to get hacked and spam your comments, bulletins, and messages with crazy advertisements and invitations to their secret nude webcam.

i’ve also started messing around with twitter though i confess that i can’t quite work up the will to have 140 characters of wit every twenty minutes. i am following some pretty smart (and funny people) though that show how the medium can be manipulated well: r. stevens, of diesel sweeties; lore sjoberg, of wired alt text and formerly brunching shuttlecocks; and john hodgman, of everything awesome in the last five years (but especially his book, the daily show, and being bruce campbell’s literary agent). like my pownce account, however, i’m guessing that i’ll largely be a data consumer and produce very little.

for a slightly nerdier thing that i’ve been working with, i’ve also set up my own openid provider. unfortunately, it seems like everything is an openid provider – i think even your safeway club card provides openid now. unfortunately nobody accepts the damn things, and even those that do seem to do it in this janky, half-assed way. not quite the promise of easy access to a million systems with just one secure login, is it now?

the last new technology that i’ve been playing with is actually an entire company, doing no evil into my life nearly constantly. i’ve googleized my life in a dozen ways: it started with dropping bloglines like a bad habit and switching to google reader – if only for it’s integrated friends lists. similarly i’ve got a couple google calendars, a bunch of files in google docs & spreadsheets, and my very own appspot hello world application.

meanwhile, i’m hopefully contributing to web 3.0, the personalized, decentralized, peer-to-peer world by creating a decentralized social networking application. it’ll be done eventually, although at the current coding rate it’s been… slow going.

maybe i’m still slightly hip.

once you get that song good and stuck in your head, you’ll probably be looking for some other, non-musical auditory enjoyment delivered directly through your cochlea to your brainstem. might i suggest listening to one of the newfangled internet podcasts that are available for your listening pleasure?

at the top of the list i narcissistically must place the rulezero.org podcast, featuring none other than myself, jon safety monkey grover , and paul the blogless springer. i know i’ve pimped it out before, but we’ve shortened up our format and we’ve got a few new episodes up for your listening pleasure. check out episodes 9 and 10 – you don’t even have to be obsessed with video games to like it now as much, although it still helps to like nerdy crap.

next up is the podcast that has (somewhat ironically, given the title) been hurting my podcast self-esteem since i first started listening to it. you look nice today brings the “three guys chatting about whatever” game to a whole new level. it even features interludes with john hodgman between the humorous lols from their twitterin’ principals: lonelysandwich, scottsimpson, and hotdogsladies.

lastly, and you kind of have to be a real nerd like me to like this one: the penny arcade podcast. it’s fair to say that this was one of the two biggest inspirations for my own podcasting desires (the other being the now defunct daily affirmation with kris and scott (scott and kris)). it’s a rambling look into the minds of creative folks as they sit around working.

with the passing of gary gygax it seems at once mandatory and yet cliche to discuss one’s d&d characters and their introduction to the hobby – to take someone’s legacy and reduce it to their impact on your fictional character. but yet, in a real way roleplaying games were his legacy, and the man remained a gamer to his death.

my introduction to roleplaying games actually came about through an entirely different angle. one summer i came across a copy of the robotech rpg, a series i was enamored with. i picked it up and read through it, and then begged my mom to purchase it for me along with the requisite dice set – two each of d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. (in the intervening two decades i’ve managed to lose four of those dice.) with just myself and my younger brother interested in it, our games were loose interpretations of the rules at best, but i kept devouring the stats and plotting grand adventures across the cosmos. in robotech, of course, my name suited the characters best – i could really imagine myself growing up to be a veritech fighter pilot just like rick hunter – so why invent a persona for a character?

eventually i was curious about the origins of role playing games, and luckily the public library had a set of several first edition advanced dungeons & dragons books behind the counter. unfortunately, they weren’t available for checkout. in their stead i checked out the dragonlance series of novels, and when it came time to return them i would wander down to the library while my family ran errands and sit studiously reading the rulebooks. i attempted to create my own characters for the fantasy world as i understood it, a mixture of hyboria and krynn and my own imagination. of course, advanced really meant advanced, and i found myself fumbling over rules and conflating concepts between the two very different approaches to game design. the end result, however, you can see above. i’d crafted a half-elven cleric-fighter-magic user named, brilliantly, leeardathas half-elven. he was a master of magic both arcane and divine, and handy with a flail to boot. minmax much?

eventually i picked up my own copy of the 2nd edition player’s handbook and my next character had a slightly more creative name, or at least one i’m more willing to own as a domain.

if you’re interested in hearing more, less-talented audio, might i direct you to episode 01 (nee 00) of the rulezero podstravaganza. in it, you will hear the poetic waxings of myself, jon “safety monkey” grover, esquire, and paul the websiteless. we discuss a few things about video games and d&d 4th edition, make some dick jokes, and generally banter about like you’ve probably seen us do in real life. we’ve got one more episode already in the can, and a halfisode made with too high of a beer-to-content ratio that will hopefully show up on the commentary track for the rulezero podstravaganza premium boxed set remastered platinum extended edition.

today is a day of feeling like a slacker, because christmas break is right around the corner. tonight if you’re in the greenlake area you should come by to cheer on the contestants in the third annual greenlake race of champions. and then tomorrow i’m gonna shake off my hangover and fly to bfe western oregon, and christmas break will have officially begun.

extras – ricky gervais at it again as a tv and movie extra who just can’t seem to get a break. each episode features a special guest star playing themself. key scenes for the humor – patrick stewart, and a full episode featuring kate winslet as a nun.

the other two are a little less mainstream:

garth marenghi’s darkplace – the premise is that it’s a bad 80’s mystery of the week / horror show, rereleased as a commemorative edition with commentary from the writer (garth marenghi, a bad stephen king knockoff) and the actors involved. it’s absurdist humor at it’s finest, complete with terrible special effects and “crap” acting. the title credits are worth the price of admission themselves, honestly. you can get all of the full episodes on google videos. note richard ayoade as dean learner playing thornton reed.

the it crowd – richard ayoade reappears, this time as maurice moss – nerdlinger i.t. employee and center of much comedy. once again, full episodes are available on google videos. the second episode is particularly hilarious.

hopefully those of you who are snowed in today here in seattle now have plenty of new funny to watch.