Venti Peppermint Mocha: $4.20

Remainder of Amazon’s gift card: -$0.84

$20 bill: -$20.00

(Rings up — Change: $16.64)

36 cents in my wallet: -$0.36

Screwing with the Starbucks cashier over exact change: Priceless

There are some things money can’t buy.

For everything else, there’s MasterNerd

Thursday was awesome.

I got myself down to SOMA to go to a justin.tv tech-talk. Sure, they were talking about OAuth (which is pretty much a nice standard for authenticating to share data on the web) but of much more interest was who “they” are. But let’s back up.

The point of my going down there was [...]

A quick note before I make another post about why the other day was awesome:

My Ubuntu install on eponine had been freezing. Just up and freezing. So I built a FreeBSD install from scratch — decided that, for the desktop, it was lame (though the next time I overhaul fantine, my server, it’s going FreeBSD; [...]

Let me show you them.

I have new pictures up! 34 of them even. (Finally….)

http://flickr.com/photos/barakmich/archives/date-posted/2007/11/29/

This covers the rest of summer, Yahoo Hack Day, the New Pornographers concert, and the Embarcadero Lighting Ceremony.

I think this brings me current. It’s good to be current.

Go. Comment. Have fun. I’m going to sleep.

(You can always see what’s new by viewing [...]

Better make this quick; a fan in my laptop is dying and I’m going to call Apple on Monday; it’s momentarily fine, but it’s easily repeatable and needs fixing before the shit hits the fan. *drumfill*

Got my car an oil change today, then swung by Mekka. (Funny story — there’s free wireless, but it comes [...]

I wrote a long rant today on the Berkeley Oak Grove Protest in response to a post on the Berkeley LJ. I’m reproducing it here for view, posterity, and candor.

The Daily Cal’s version of the Open Letter that Prompted My Response

IMO, the whole thing is kind of an emotionally-charged psycho negotiation. But at heart, it’s [...]

Most hillarious misheard lyric in a long time. At Teresa’s karaoke birthday party tonight, someone sang Toto’s “Africa”, and the lyrics that came up on the screen (that all can see) were, honestly:

Like a leper above the Serengeti

Never mind the real lyrics are “Like Olympus” — I heard it as “Like a leopard” given the [...]

http://www.unsanity.org/archives/haxies/leopard.php

That’s what was wrong with my Leopard install. I was using (an uncompatible) hack to run Witch, a really nice power tool (which I hope, once they update, will remain Leopard-compatible)

My take on Leopard, now that it works:

New Finder really beats the pants off the old one. Not a hard task, but an important one. You [...]

tar -cvvf /Volumes/BARAKPOD/backup.tar michener/

So I got Leopard today, and, throwing caution to the wind, decided to upgrade my system.

bzzt Wrong! I am hosed!

So I’m lifting my userdata out onto my iPod — praise be unto the gods of the command line — and am going to do a fresh install.

I guess it all works [...]

Earlier tonight, at Mari and Evelyn’s housewarming party…

This toast is a little nerdy, so you’ll have to excuse me.

Groans and laughs of expectation

There’s an old saying that goes “May your house always be too small to hold all your friends.”

Aww.

Now as we know from thermodynamics:

Laughter

Given a constant volume…

I gesture to the [...]