Category: metaniv

10 days in

i’m 10 days in to the great experiment i announced 19 days ago. i’m no longer an AT&Ti employee, but instead founder and ceo of ottoneu, inc. i have a shared office and a laptop – that’s it. as i was telling people i saw over the weekend, i’m up here on this tightrope way above everything without any net and apparently all i’ve ever wanted to do with my life is walk a tightrope.

it’s exciting and terrifying and somewhat convoluted.

so i’m probably going to write about my development/start-up stuff over at about90feet for the near term, which again leaves me a gap in what i should write about over here. right now, i’m spending about 90% of my time coding and 10% of my time screwing around, and that 90% fully belongs at a90f according to its mission statement. keep an eye out over there for now, and i’ll be back shortly.

this is hardly abandoned, geoff

things i could write about:
1 – the various twists and turns in my fantasy season, where right now i am in 5th place but could swing up to 3rd in the next month
2 – various projects i am working on
3 – my process in shooting this
4 – the reasons why the ‘ground zero mosque meme’ makes me want to move to canada
5 – a review of kurosawa’s “dreams”, which surely will turn into me raving about how i love kurosawa, which maybe fits into the title of this site better than anything else

vote in comments.

transition

smell that?

that’s the smell of new server. and new host. i moved from a dedicated server on layered tech over to the planet yesterday. i left layered tech because my server there was having a massive hardware failure and getting a new server from them was just too expensive. i went to the planet because of good reviews from people i trust, as well as the good pricing. hopefully it works out well.

moving servers was surprisingly easy. of course, now that i say that, something bad will happen, but dump mysql, copy over some php and configs, and voila, everything worked. the two things that were tricky were timezones (apparently i have a remarkable amount of code that is very reliant on eastern time, which i guess is my bad) and perl’s mysql interface (the one i was using is uh… discontinued?)

anyway, just a note that i am alive, my server is new, and i hope to start having a presence here again.

a quick story and a promise for more

friday night, trills and erin and i went and saw matt good play in front of 150-200 people at the great american music hall in san francisco.

first of all, the venue is amazing. its an amazing ornate theater, plenty of space (especially when there aren’t that many people), tables (!), waitstaff (!!), and a nod towards local beers (lagunitas on tap!). pretty impressive, and highly recommended.

the concert was pretty fun, though i am not really up on the latest matt good stuff so i didn’t know a lot of the songs. also, the opener was brutal (automatic loveletter), completely clichéd. that’s right, ‘é’. but this isn’t about automatic loveletter or about the theater or about the concert, as fun as it might be.

it’s interesting how much this concert made me think. i was in high school when i first heard the matthew good band on muchmusic (the canadian MTV for those who don’t know). my parents went to toronto with my grandparents one weekend and they brought me back a couple of cds and i was hooked. i was one of the only people to buy their one american release from the tower records i worked at in college. trilling and i still talk about how awesome rico is. then they broke up, then i listened to matt good solo a little bit. song for the girl is one of the highest songs on my last.fm, especially when you remove the entire return from cookie mountain album (which you shouldn’t, ever). then matt good got a little too acoustic-y and i fell away from him a bit. but matt good was with me (and with trilling) through some pretty definitive years.

and 10 years later i’m sitting with trilling in san francisco listening to matt good. so of course, you think about those definitive years. and shit, there is a lot to think about.

at the end of the concert, trilling was drunk. and he decided, in his drunken state, to yell “sidney crosby is a pussy” incredibly loudly at the canadian matt good in front of only 150-200 people in a small, ornate theater in san francisco. needless to say, matt good heard him. and his response was why he is awesome.

instead of telling trilling to shut up or fuck off or ignoring trilling, he said “it’s funny that you should mention that” and then went into a 2-3 minute spiel about how wayne gretzky never got hit and sidney crosby does get hit and still gets back up and scrapped for that gold medal winning goal (huge cheer) and ryan miller was pretty awesome so at least america has that going on.

now, i’m sure the guy has a ton of experience with idiot hecklers, but he also has experience being a big rock star in canada, so the thoughtful, calm response was unexpected and awesome. of course, trilling wasn’t even thinking about the gold medal, he was thinking about alex ovechkin. which is a whole separate post entirely.

that was all rambly and nonsensical, but i just need to get something going, get anything going.

now, about that promise for more – ottoneu’s fantasy draft was yesterday, and i’m going to go through what my strategy was for the draft (this is the first year i had a strategy going in) and how well i did to my strategy. so look for that tonight or tomorrow.

also, boomgard pointed me to frightened rabbit, and their new album is meh, but their first album from 2008 (midnight organ fight) is really, really good. so go listen to that. and if you like jazz, i don’t need to tell you this, but if you’re interested in liking jazz, listen to coltrane+monk at carnegie hall. i might have not needed to tell anyone that. i just had to tell myself that. or admit to myself that i am an idiot for not listening to it until very recently. update: i should have thanked parker for helping me see the light on the coltrane+monk collaborations. and now i have, thanks parker.

also as i click the categories for this post, i’m realizing that metaniv and ravings go hand in fucking hand. which tells you a lot, i think.

reality imitates insane dreams

i have been dreaming a lot recently. 2 weeks ago in vegas was an all-time high in dreams (something they pump in to the rooms?) but my mind has been pretty active in general after i close my eyes. maybe this is a result of getting better at remembering dreams. there is a lot of room for consideration here, but that isn’t the point.

the point is last night i had a dream. and my dream had to do with me doing a spacewalk which intertwined with and eventually became a moonwalk. and my main concern, naturally, was how would i get my camera out into space with me – would it blow up in outer space? how could i prevent that?

and then i read this:

The D3S digital SLR cameras and AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED lenses ordered by NASA will be carried on the Space Shuttle and used to photograph activities at the International Space Station (ISS) in the future.
No special modifications will be made to these products. They will be the same products available to end-users, confirming the incredible versatility of the D3S.

seriously? today? after i dreamt about it last night?
creepy. and awesome.
UPDATE
now i am reading a long article about james cameron, director of multiple movies that i’m sure you’re familiar with, and i stumble upon this:

But, before bringing a camera into space, Cameron had to prove it safe.

WEIRD.

a collection of ideas for short stories

also known as “things that have happened”, a recurring segment here

1) i had red meat saturday night.  i had lamb chops at kokkari estiatorio, one of the best greek restaurants in san francisco.  the lamb chops are their signature dish.  they were very good.  honestly, i would have rather had the fish, but at least i’m past this hurdle (which i cleared to very little fanfare) and i can go about my business as a person again.

2) i got civ4 working in ubuntu.  downloaded the game through steam.  ran steam and then the game through wine.  i wanted to do a little write-up, but then #3 happened.  and yes, i know half of that was gibberish to you.

3) my car broke down on the 280, northbound, in burlingame.  the 280 is one of the faster highways around, people generally go around 80 on it, so this was… a scary situation to say the least.  but i managed it ok, and i didn’t cut anyone off or cause any issues, and i got AAA to tow the car off the right shoulder into a garage in burlingame and i’m currently waiting to hear from the mechanic at said newly-minted AAA approved ASE certified garage as to whether or not i just murdered my ’98 camry.

each of these bullet points deserves its own post, but life isn’t fair, so for now, i give you this.

resolutions

chad and i had a formal discussion, and the decision was made that our bet/pact ends when he gets on an airplane tomorrow morning to go to costa rica.  so today is my last day in which i am financial incentivized by a friend to not eat red meat.

i had to choose my words carefully just now.

i wanted to say “i am incentivized to not eat red meat”, but there is plenty of incentive built-in, both in terms of keeping myself healthy and in terms of helping the environment.

i wanted to say “financially incentivized” but beef is pretty expensive, and steaks are really expensive, so choosing not to eat those things has probably helped the wallet overall.

i can’t even say “incentivized by a friend”, because jen doesn’t eat meat at all, and she has been a huge supporter of this project.

so as parker has pointed out in the comments earlier, i have a reservation with two friends at a very nice steakhouse tomorrow night.  and frankly, i do not know what i am going to do.  right now my plan is napoleon’s (by way of casey from sportsnight) – first show up, and then see what happens.  if i’m tempted by the steak,  i will have one.  if i’m not, then i’ll stick with fish.

as for beyond tomorrow night, i’m pretty sure there are no pepperoni pizzas or racks of ribs in my future.  though i might have to make an exception for in ‘n out.