this is definitely going into my next dance party rotation.

you done good, old friend. good indeed.

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?

i’ve always had a bit of a love affair with cars. presumably i got it from my father, a consummate dickerer and deal-hunter; he would routinely spend his sunday afternoons poring over the thrifty nickel and the columbian classifieds with a literal magnifying glass looking for his next automotive adventure. he went through a variety of cars: a beater pinto, a bronco, a corvette stingray, and even a big dump truck repainted with leftover house paint. eventually the state caught up with him and demanded he register as a car dealer. instead, he switched his focus to classic ford tractors, painstakingly rebuilding them into fine showpieces.

in college i ended up working for the now-defunct autoadvisor, riding my bike there every day while my coworkers sold people on the american dream. the owner and his wife were both auto writers, and a system exists by which auto writers can have a new car to test drive every week. a steady stream of vehicles came through, each one getting a thorough testing (sometimes with unawares employees riding shotgun) and the office was filled with a steady buzz of car information and – other than myself and evilmike – car aficionados. i was always happy to talk shop with people, though i’d not had a license (and did not get one until 2005), i was excited to research new (or used) purchases and ponder what sort of car i’d end up with.

it turns out the answer isn’t that surprising: a car that i can use for the things i think a car is good at. i’m not going to be driving to the supermarket or around greenlake or to work. i’m not even going to be driving downtown and circling the block looking for parking. my bicycle is always better for those situations. but when it comes to weekend adventures it’s tough to beat a car – unless you want to spend most of your weekend (or more) just going out and back the car is the key that fits the lock of the american transportation system.

but to the gritty details: i got a 1999 subaru outback. it’s got 95,000 miles on it, and the previous owner was a little old lady that took it back to the same dealership she bought it at to change the oil every 3000 miles. when i was evaluating it the dealership gave me a printout the car’s lifetime service record – and it’s clear that this woman was thorough. she brought it to be serviced at the dealer when she spilled soda on the passenger seat. at $9500 after sales tax and licensing it’s the most expensive single item i own, and the most money i’ve spent in one day since i graduated college. my goal is to put about seven or eight thousand miles on it a year, and it’ll mostly live at cc’s house since i still dislike driving. i’m thinking of putting a little chauffeur’s hat in the glove compartment.

similarly, this evening i got around to measuring my bicycles. i’d had some conversations with alex about my swift folder and adjusting it to match the cockpit of my long haul trucker – a bike i knew fit me well for all types of riding. i set out with the measuring tape and lo and behold i was surprised to find that even though the swift folder is a 20″ wheeled aluminum fixed gear with bmx bars, it has the same bottom bracket-to-handlebar, bottom bracket-to-saddle, and saddle-to-handlebar measurements as the long haul trucker – down to a couple millimeters. the same held true for my trek. the pugsley was the outlier, primarily because it rocks (runs? rubs?) a lower saddle. across the board, without ever really consciously measuring out any of these bikes, i’d arrived at a very narrow range of comfortable lengths.

so, logically, i now feel an impetus to revisit my old workplace with a measuring tape and sort out the relevant distances that made me able to work there for many years without discomfort. and maybe i’ll take that old green chair, because for all it’s lack of adjustability, it sure never hurt my back.

1. i have been into computers since the fourth grade, when i discovered the magic of the oregon trail.
2. i have not always been into bikes – i basically gave up on them after my father passed away since there was nowhere to ride to in fern prairie, and only started riding again when i got my first job in seattle.
3. macaroni & cheese from the box is my staple food.
4. when i was a small child, i had curly blond hair, and i was cute enough that my mom got pictures for free from the local studio in exchange for using my portrait in their promotional materials.
5. i was active in 4-H, and as part of the replacement heifer program i raised a cow named teresa for two years.
6. had i been born a girl, my parents planned on naming me teresa.
7. i grew up in a small town. i would walk into the bank downtown and the tellers would recognize me as “peggy’s son”.
8. i didn’t get especially interested in music until i got my first computer, and then all i had access to was mod and s3m tracker files. space debris and war in middle earth were soundtracks to many simple console games.
9. i only rarely find myself laughing out loud at other people’s jokes, and i sometimes wish that i was not so humor-jaded.
10. i still use pine to read my email, having switched over from elm over ten years ago. i hate formatted email messages.
11. i tend to dislike competition, and prefer activities that focus on cooperation. when games get too competitive, i resort to alternative, disruptive and distracting tactics. this has not endeared people to playing settlers of catan with me.
12. i go jogging once a year, just to remind myself how much i hate going jogging.
13. the last major vacation i went on was to greece for two weeks. i have not inherited my mother’s love of travel – i am content to keep exploring the many forests, mountains, and coves in my own back yard rather than wandering the globe. the only thing i miss is the food.
14. once upon a time, i was excited about different things: going to punk rock shows, building my own computers, being good at video games. i am okay with the new things i am excited about, but sometimes wish i could feel the way i once did about the old.
15. i often play out hypothetical situations in my head. this has resulted in mild hypochondria, relationship breakdowns, and some general confusion. my brain is the sort that latches on to the ‘what if’ and runs with it, for good or evil.
16. even though it’s long past passe, i still like to title emails and blog posts with random snippets of song lyric.

quick facts:

• the new company is datstat, in fremont.
• they (we!) build data collection software and research management systems for universities and businesses.
• i’m excited to be done with classic asp and vbscript, but not particularly excited about asp.net. we’ll see.
• my first real day will be 2/9, but i’ve already picked up my laptop and started checking my email account obsessively.
• i did get a pretty significant pay rise, but that’s the nature of leaving the university.

i definitely feel like the university has been a good place for me, and i am sad to be leaving it. either as a student or an employee i’ve been there continuously since 1997, and it has been in almost every way the center of my seattle experience. fortunately, datstat is in a good location and has a number of former university employees so i’m hoping to feel right at home.

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?