Christmas Eve
On Christmas Eve, I headed out around 7:00PM to take a look at the
Christmas lights and decorations around town. There was a snow storm
predicted for around 9:00PM, so I decided to take the DeLorean out for
one last drive before the Wonderful Winter Weather(TM).
The snow started much earlier than expected. The snow was light and
slow, and despite the car not handling well in slick conditions, I kept
going for a while.
As I was driving I had the realization that I was having an experience
no one else in the world has ever had. I was driving a DeLorean through
my town on Christmas Eve, admiring Christmas lights and listening to
Christmas music as snow fell.
I looked over at the empty passenger seat and wished there had been
someone, anyone there to share this with. So for now, until
circumstances like this arise again, I will continue to be the only
person to have experienced this.
When I got home, I took this photograph.
[/dmc]
[permanent link]
Happy Birthday
I'm starting to get used to celebrating my birthday at TBM concerts.
This year it was about a week prior to my birthday at a show on December
1 held at New York's Gramercy Theatre.
Along with the tickets, I had also purchased the "VIP package." This
package included an autographed poster signed by all members of the
band, a "VIP" laminate on a lanyard, and... the opportunity to meet the
band prior to the show!
You may be thinking, "But they stick around after shows and mingle with
their fans anyway," and "You've already met them a few times!" Both are
true. And even with this "VIP" package meet-and-greet, they still make
time for all their fans after the show. What this provided was a
somewhat quieter meeting in a more intimate setting.
In fact the meeting was in a small lounge beneath the concert hall. Dim
mood lighting, mirrors, and couches set the atmosphere. I spoke with
Rainbow, Michael, and Nate first. Rainbow informed me his name was
Michael also and made a joke about the "power of the three Mikes
lighting the room." After a bit, they started moving me to Chibi who was
sitting on a couch after injuring her knee during a show two nights
prior. She tried to walk to me, but I told her not to. She said, "I'll
meet you half way then."
I gave her a get well card, knowing she had had surgery on her vocal
chords about 8 weeks prior and recently injured her knee. Someone
decided we needed a photo of that and she gave me the card back so I
could give it back to her. I believe it was Owen who said, "Act natural
and hold it for 30 seconds!"
I asked Rainbow about writing "Unfamiliar" because both he and OE were
given credit in the liner notes. He said it was mostly OE; OE started it
and Rainbow had finished it. I said I wanted to thank them because it
was a song that had taken on some greater meaning to me and I relayed a
brief version of the story of the moment I recognized that. It turns
out "Unfamiliar" is one of Chibi's favorite songs too.
Every one of the bands that night were amazing. All, remarkably, were
performing as duos. Creature Feature was a real fun band to see. Their
music is heavily influenced by old horror movies which gives them a
dark yet fun sound.
Aesthetic Perfection put on a good performance. Their drummer is
amazing and fun to watch. They heavily synth-based and while there was a
dark tone to most of their songs, they still had fun and lightened
things up with a Fine Young Cannibals cover.
William Control was the only other act I had heard before the show
(Thanks Last.fm!). He was great live and I'd love to see him again. He
reminded me a little of Dommin in that Dean Martin meets Glen Danzig
sort of way.
The Birthday Massacre was great. They played a good mix including songs
from every album. For most of the set Chibi was sitting on a speaker
placed near center at the front of the stage, wearing a knee brace. She
stood up and moved around occasionally, but not much. At one point
Rainbow sat down on another speaker and stuck out one leg in a similar
fashion to how Chibi was seated and laughed a little. It was easy to
tell by their interaction here that Chibi and Rainbow are close.
If you care (or even if you don't), their set list follows:
- Night Shift
- Down
- Control
- Always
- Red Stars
- Video kid
- Lover's End
- Forever
- Pins and Needles
- Happy Birthday
- Alibis
- Calling
- In the Dark
- Sleep Walking
- Midnight
-- Encore --
- Leaving Tonight
- The Long Way Home
- Blue
The band did not leave the stage prior to the encore as they normally
would. Chibi said, "This is the part of the show where we say thank you
and leave and you clap and we come back out and play some more. But I'm
not going to walk down those stairs anymore than I have to, so do you
want to hear three more songs?"
[/musings]
[permanent link]
Happy Birthday
I'm starting to get used to celebrating my birthday at TBM concerts.
This year it was about a week prior to my birthday at a show on December
1 held at New York's Gramercy Theatre.
Along with the tickets, I had also purchased the "VIP package." This
package included an autographed poster signed by all members of the
band, a "VIP" laminate on a lanyard, and... the opportunity to meet the
band prior to the show!
You may be thinking, "But they stick around after shows and mingle with
their fans anyway," and "You've already met them a few times!" Both are
true. And even with this "VIP" package meet-and-greet, they still make
time for all their fans after the show. What this provided was a
somewhat quieter meeting in a more intimate setting.
In fact the meeting was in a small lounge beneath the concert hall. Dim
mood lighting, mirrors, and couches set the atmosphere. I spoke with
Rainbow, Michael, and Nate first. Rainbow informed me his name was
Michael also and made a joke about the "power of the three Mikes
lighting the room." After a bit, they started moving me to Chibi who was
sitting on a couch after injuring her knee during a show two nights
prior. She tried to walk to me, but I told her not to. She said, "I'll
meet you half way then."
I gave her a get well card, knowing she had had surgery on her vocal
chords about 8 weeks prior and recently injured her knee. Someone
decided we needed a photo of that and she gave me the card back so I
could give it back to her. I believe it was Owen who said, "Act natural
and hold it for 30 seconds!"
I asked Rainbow about writing "Unfamiliar" because both he and OE were
given credit in the liner notes. He said it was mostly OE; OE started it
and Rainbow had finished it. I said I wanted to thank them because it
was a song that had taken on some greater meaning to me and I relayed a
brief version of the story of the moment I recognized that. It turns
out "Unfamiliar" is one of Chibi's favorite songs too.
Every one of the bands that night were amazing. All, remarkably, were
performing as duos. Creature Feature was a real fun band to see. Their
music is heavily influenced by old horror movies which gives them a
dark yet fun sound.
Aesthetic Perfection put on a good performance. Their drummer is
amazing and fun to watch. They heavily synth-based and while there was a
dark tone to most of their songs, they still had fun and lightened
things up with a Fine Young Cannibals cover.
William Control was the only other act I had heard before the show
(Thanks Last.fm!). He was great live and I'd love to see him again. He
reminded me a little of Dommin in that Dean Martin meets Glen Danzig
sort of way.
The Birthday Massacre was great. They played a good mix including songs
from every album. For most of the set Chibi was sitting on a speaker
placed near center at the front of the stage, wearing a knee brace. She
stood up and moved around occasionally, but not much. At one point
Rainbow sat down on another speaker and stuck out one leg in a similar
fashion to how Chibi was seated and laughed a little. It was easy to
tell by their interaction here that Chibi and Rainbow are close.
If you care (or even if you don't), their set list follows:
- Night Shift
- Down
- Control
- Always
- Red Stars
- Video kid
- Lover's End
- Forever
- Pins and Needles
- Happy Birthday
- Alibis
- Calling
- In the Dark
- Sleep Walking
- Midnight
-- Encore --
- Leaving Tonight
- The Long Way Home
- Blue
The band did not leave the stage prior to the encore as they normally
would. Chibi said, "This is the part of the show where we say thank you
and leave and you clap and we come back out and play some more. But I'm
not going to walk down those stairs anymore than I have to, so do you
want to hear three more songs?"
[/tbm]
[permanent link]
Signs of the Apocalypse
A friend told me this was from Glee. I found it amusing; thought I'd
share.
It's a fact that the book of Revelations predicted Twitter. It's one of
the seven signs of the apocalypse; Along with porn, unexplainable
weather anomalies, martian rovers, Barney Frank, the middle east and
MSNBC. It's like Kirk Cameron said, "It's never too late, until it's too
late."
[/musings]
[permanent link]
freebsd-update
I'm attempting to update my laptop from FreeBSD 9.1-Beta1 to 9.1-RC1. The
freebsd-update(8) utilitly was reporting an error finding the public key. A
quick search found this thread. As per tangram's
suggestion, I used
env UNAME_r=9.0-RELEASE freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.1-RC1
and then the update began working.
[/unix]
[permanent link]
unHide
After a friend's computer became infected with some malware that hides
files in your home directory and tries to extort money from you in order
to "recover" your data, I was inspired to write this little
program.
All it does is search for hidden, non-system files and unhides them. It
defaults to the user's home directory (My Documents), but other
directories can be chosen.
If anyone wants to try it out, please do. If you do try it, let me know
what parts I can do better. I primarily work on embedded systems and
Unix daemons professionally; the user only knows my software exists when
it isn't working. As such, I have very little experience with GUIs or
human-computer interactions. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
The Windows executable can be found at:
http://www.skinnymf.com/~mforde/unHide/.
Source code is available upon request.
[/code]
[permanent link]
Fun little alias
I use a console based RSS reader written in Ruby. It crashes often and
will delete my list of feeds in the process. It also has a tendency to
not fully exit, leaving a ruby process sitting in the background soaking
up close to 100% CPU time. For such occasions, I've added the following
alias to my .cshrc file.
alias killraggle kill -9 '`ps ax|grep raggle|grep -v grep|awk '\''{print $1;}'\''`'
[/unix]
[permanent link]
Just a Question
Given the following code fragment, I was asked to implement foo such
that the program would output "America." How would you do it?
int main()
{
char *p = "Hello";
foo( );
printf("%s",p);
return 0;
}
My solution involved allocating new memory from the heap to store the
new string, and changing p to point to that buffer. They didn't like
that answer. They preferred the method of putting the new string in the
data segment as well.
I personally would always avoid that, whenever possible. "Hello" is
stored in a read-only area of memory as is "America" in their preferred
solution. Any attempt to alter those strings will trigger a segfault.
This is an accident waiting to happen.
[/code]
[permanent link]
Races, Races, Races
I've been busy the last few weeks or so; I've done a few races.
-
On October 30, I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in Arlington, VA and
Washington D.C.
-
On November 5, I ran the Beavertown Fall Classic 5K in my hometown.
-
On November 6, I ran the New York City Marathon for the second time.
-
On November 19, I ran the Knickerbocker 60K Ultramarathon in Central
Park.
-
On December 3, I ran NJ Winter Trail Series Race #1 Half Marathon in
Wayne.
-
On December 10, I ran the NYRR Jingle Bell Jog in Prospect Park.
-
On January 7, I ran the Walt Disney World Half Marathon, part one of
Goofy's Race and a Half Challenge.
-
On January 8, I ran the Walt Disney World Marathon, completing the
Goofy Challenge.
In 10 weeks I ran a 5K, a 6K, two Half Marathons, three Marathons,
and an Ultramarathon, plus a few training runs in there...
And last night Wii Fit called me a couch potato.
In defense of the game, I hadn't used it in 547 days, and I'm now 11
pounds heavier than when I had last used it. It has no way of knowing
that the vast majority of that weight gain was lean mass. It also has no
way of taking into account all that I've done outside the game.
Even with that in mind, it's still a little frustrating to be called a
couch potato after running a marathon and a half last weekend.
Each of these races were pretty special. I ran MCM alongside some fairly
awesome people; people who I consider to be among my closest friends. In
the Beavertown 5K, I somehow managed to take 12th overall and 5th in my
age group without really trying.
At NYC and then at the Knickerbocker, I ran with the friend who got me
started running in the first place. I credit him with saving my life,
and it was an honor and a pleasure to run with him.
The trail half was my first trail
race (not counting my time on the high school cross country team) and I
ran that with a friend I hadn't seen since our days on the high school
track & field team (she was a runner, I was thrower). We have both run
full marathons in less time than it took us to complete this half.
The Jingle Bell Jog was a fun race with bells and hot cocoa, and it was
the first time I ran alongside my friend and former physics TA. And
lastly, I ran the Goofy Challenge alongside another one of my close
friends and training partners.
These races were a lot of fun. Some of the courses were quite amazing
to see, and these races were opportunities to spend time with some
pretty awesome people.
[/running]
[permanent link]
Disgusted
With the Goofy Challenge just 3 days away, I should be carb-loading. And
I am. And with each bite of my lunch I hate myself more. Every time I
eat, I feel fat. And every time I ingest anything that isn't ultra-lean
protein or high-fiber, I disgust myself. But I sit here, shoving food
down my gullet.
[/musings/self]
[permanent link]
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