Note to Emily — if you’re reading this early, we’ll be calling you tomorrow to wrapup — so avoid the spoilers

So Monday was my 23rd birthday and today was the celebration.

Something was clearly up with Mari and Patrick — I was to keep this afternoon free to do… something…, and after Lindy on [...]

So my little project while I’m bored at home is PumaCreed — a poorman’s Google MapReduce. (astute hunter-types will notice the anagram name)

I’ve been toying with the idea for the past few days since I got inspired by the MapReduce chapter in Beautiful Code. Mostly it’s a cute little project that’s trendy and scratches an [...]

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; [...]

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 [...]

A few days with it and everything seems to settle in a bit.

Network card works better (maybe when it got the updates something clicked) but the network is SLOWER. I dunno what they did wrong, but my Samba NAS takes forever, until I read this: http://jamespo.org.uk/wp/archives/190 — This seems to make it work fairly [...]

So tonight I took the plunge and installed Vista. Initial thoughts:

UAC is annoying, but thank god you can turn it off (along with other Windows nags, which I appreciate) Network fails on boot — but request an IP and it’s good again. Step up from XP, which didn’t have a driver for my NIC by default, [...]

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 [...]