I was going to rant earlier this evening about the disaster earlier this evening. 300k people in a four-square block area. I can't get home on Muni. Fracking drunken bridgentunnel jackasses blah blah blah...then I thought better of it and went about my business in the relative safety of my living room.

About an hour ago, amidst the screaming and helicopters and dumping of trash cans, I heard a series of sharp pops. I figured it was just fireworks.

Wrong: five ten people were shot about 2 blocks from here.

The results of my handiwork this past weekend:

I hate Objective C but I can't stay away. I put together a little Preference Pane for the Mac that puts a random quote in your login window. It's basically a pretty wrapper around the old fortune program.

You can get it here. Lemme know if it works for you.

Props to thenopp and especially Ralf for helping me track down some bugs.

The BART ride from SF to Concord, as viewed by my PowerBook's WIFI radio:

I have this trick I do every morning. I wake up with a ringing in my ears and a crushing weight on my chest. But then as I wake up a little more, maybe have some coffee, I conjure up a personal reality distortion field and the weight is lifted and I can go about my business. And business is pretty good, so who am I to complain?

However, for some reason (jetlag?), I couldn't quite pull the trick off this morning. And unfortunately, it's that trick that for the most part keeps political blathering off of pcal.net.

I have nothing new to add to the discussion of the unmitigated disaster that is our current foreign policy. As they say, opinions are like assholes, and for the most of the current century, 300 million of them have been on prominent display in the US. I have no illusions that anyone wants to take a closer look at mine.

However, I will discuss someone else's opinion, one which appeared on the op-ed page of the Times yesterday. I do this mainly because it introduced some unusual disturbances into my reality distortion field that are still with me today.

Almost in passing, the writer describes having a number of sociologist- and anthropologist-type friends who had done studies on the middle east. One of these studies was focused on producing and analyzing the following bit of knowledge:

The revelatory power of this tiny fact is simply amazing. (Fill in the blanks: the Iraqi population is structurally incapable of setting aside clan loyalties and embracing a nationalist democracy). In capsule form, the sociologist offers an explanation for our current failures in Iraq. We see why we never had a chance of succeeding in the first place.

20/20 hindsight, you may say, but this argument was advanced (if less succinctly) by many of us well before March of 2003. Evidently, most voters at the time did not find the argument persuasive.

And that is where I find the source of the recent disturbance in my distortion field.

For whatever reason, in recent decades it has become fashionable in this country to deride the liberal arts. (Homeless guy asks: "Socratic dialog, anyone?" Hardie-har-har). But today, I can't help but wonder that if it were even just a bit less so, that if a few thousand voters in some swing state somewhere were just a little less inclined to reflexively reject conclusions of the so-called 'soft sciences,' then maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't be so completely and utterly, miserably, despairingly fucked as we are now in Iraq.

Or at least I got minze on order.

Kinda wish they had a 7200rpm drive option but no dice except on the 17". Did a taste test at the apple store, ultimately had to go with the matte screen.

I've released a bug fix update to MTMaps. Thanks for the bug reports, keep 'em coming. :)

Back in January, I experienced the dreaded Deaded Lower Ram Slot Problem on my 1.5ghz PowerBook.

Well, it seems to have happened again. Not sure exactly when it happened, but it may well have been right around the time I upgraded to 1.4.8. But it also has been running hot for long stretches of a time, lately - maybe that's the cause. Ugh, who knows?. Back you go to Apple for a new logic board, little PowerBook.

This all got me wondering how I could make my machine make an assertion at startup about how much memory it has. That in turn got me googling, which in short order produced a handy answer courtesy of one Matt Comi. Thanks, Matt.

And yes, I do need to get a new machine. I have needed one for months, but just can't bring myself to do it knowing that the Core2 Duos are just around the corner. Any day now, right?

We here at pcal.net have been enjoying the offseason, but it's time to get back to it. A lot has happened since our last entry; in the last couple of months, I

• Got married and went to Tahiti
• Bade adieu to my lovely new wife, Grace, as she moved back to Boston for the fall
• Left my job at Terracotta
• Began a new consulting startup writing some new Java BI software
• Went to a bunch of baseball games

• Leaving Terracotta was a tough call. I had a lot of fun there, and I'll miss working with those smart folks.


• However, I'm also having a lot of fun now. I set my own hours. I'm learning about data warehousing. I'm hacking again. I've been able to see friends more and get more things done around the house while still getting a lot of work done. As long as I can continue to stay out of the World of Warcrack, I should be fine.


• I got to see Oakland clinch the AL West at Safeco, and more recently win the ALDS. Going to ALCS this week. They really are going to go all the way this year.


• I fixed pcal.net so that you L7s using IE can see it without that lovely and helpful 'Operation Aborted' message. (p.s. The problem was actually in Movable Type maps plugin, MTMaps). (p.p.s. Get a real browser).

That's all for now. Sorry for being gone so long. I missed you, too.