Thou shalt never bite down on frozen boysenberries.

I’ve been thinking about giving inline hockey a try for a while. I had met a couple people skating around Wellington who insisted that I come down and see if I like it. Last night was the first night. I fell down more in 1.5 hours than I have in 4 years of inline skating, but I kinda expected that. As for sprint fitness, I’m a bit out of shape. I sat on the edge of throwing up for most of the first half, just a step away from asking to be let off the rink. My feeling improved over the second half, but not my skating. Granted, I was racing for the puck with a distinct disregard for my ability to stop quickly, sometimes even to the benefit of the team I was playing for.

In the end, I wasn’t horrible. I even scored a goal on a really bad wrist shot that barely trickled into the net. I’m pretty sore today, but not in a bad way. I could use a massage, but I think that’s almost always true.

I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later: the harddrive in my laptop is dead. It plays music instead of stores data. Chirps and whistles and a lot of clicks. I kinda wish I could have sampled it before killing the power. I’m not sure if there’s anything on there that I don’t have stored elsewhere. I haven’t remembered anything that has been irrevocably lost, and I hope it stays that way.

I have a couple options as to what to do with it now:

• sell it for parts
• keep it for parts (not really)
• replace the harddrive (and flaky DVD drive and battery), and make it a useful laptop again
• run it as a diskless laptop. The bios supports booting from a PCMCIA device, but I’m not sure if there’s a wireless NIC that would handle it. The onboard ethernet card would work, and since my battery is toast, I’m tied down regardless.
• drop it off the balcony. A waste of a nice LCD, though.

In relation to the comment on playlists, there is another sort of playlist that I depend on. There are times when I don’t want to have to worry about skipping a track that I really don’t want to hear, such as when I’m out for a run and I don’t want to have to fumble with controls. This playlist is more or less static, and only changes when I change it by hand.

What I’d like to do is export the playlist to a file, so that I can take snapshots and archive it from time to time. There might not be a hugely practical purpose behind this, but it seems like the right thing to do. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find a way to export static playlists with iTunes. I can probably do this with gtkpod, but haven’t had much of a chance to play yet.

While searching around for more information on Wellington’s infrastructure and long term plans, I ran across a couple local blogs that are holding a fair bit of my attention:

• WellUrban
• the Wellingtonista

There’s heaps of locally directed information and discussion, including a post regarding Wellington’s transportation strategy, complete with extra reading. This will likely postpone my comments regarding the MetLink comment request that I mentioned earlier.

The tranportation system in Wellington, under the unified name of MetLink, is seeking comments on a newly proposed fare structure. The Greater Wellington Regional Council provides an overview, which is very much a mirror of what is contained in the MetLink article.

There is an online brochure, which includes a comment submission form, or paper brochures are available alongside transit maps around the city.

I can’t encourage people enough to read the proposal. Transit is going to be an incredibly important issue in the coming years, and far too many people are far too complacent about its direction.

Just because I feel it’s related, I’m adding in an extra link to Option3, which is trying to put a spotlight on transit use in Wellington.

I stopped off at a Shoe Clinic store over the weekend to replace my ailing running shoes. Conveniently placed in the bag was an entry form for the Harbour Capital Marathon.

I’m looking forward to this race. I’ve run over most of the area already, which passes by my house around the 5km mark, and it looks as if there will be harbour views over the entire course. Most importantly, there’s a decent amount of time between now and June 25th to build up my training safely.

I’ve been looking around for a podcatcher for linux that can exist only in the background and still handle my feature expectations. I still have iPodder running, despite some sort of naming crisis going on, but I find that it has more GUI than I want or need¹. It happily runs in the background, and I never really use it beyond its scheduled download capabilities. I’ve seen listings that included cron-based podcatchers. It seems like a good idea to me.

I eventually saw a strong possibility with Peapod. It is a python-based command-line app that happily runs from cron. The website states that only python 2.4 is supported, but I haven’t yet run into problems with 2.3. The most attractive feature is that an external application may be spawned to manipulate any freshly downloaded enclosure. My first thought was to put together something to handle tag-rewriting, but that feature is already included, and is probably the second most attractive feature. That will leave me to put together some way to creatively assemble podcast playlists, probably based on prioritised queues.

There are a couple downsides that I’ve found early on, but nothing that seems difficult to overcome:

*Running an application with —help should not reach out and touch the configuration file.
*Path names are whitespace-sanitised, which annoys me and can easily be configurable.

I’m half way through reading the source, and it’s pretty understandable, so I might actually get around to submitting a patch or two along the way.

¹ Having said that, I think that PenguinTV looks pretty slick.

For a long time, my guitar has been a toy. I’d pick it up, and patterns would come out of my fingers. There was always musicality to it, but nothing original or interesting. Something triggered me to get past that yesterday, and I spent a couple hours with a mixture of technical exercises and actual musical playing. The results were far from spectacular, but the process was fascinating all over again.

My phone is set to display the current cell site on its display, but the middle of the phone display has been blank since Saturday. What has Vodafone done this time?

There was an in-house blood donation clinic today at work. It has been a while since I last donated, so I stopped off after lunch and gave them my right arm. The attending nurse got everything ready and gave me a quick poke. Then the worried look came over her. She missed. I kinda thought it felt weird. Another nurse came over and helped her, but to no avail. They pulled the needle out and asked if I wanted to give the other arm a try or leave it for another day. I was pretty determined, so I offered my left arm. They went through the prep work all over again and poked me a second time. This time, I haemotoma’d. I think it was time to give up.

There’s still the occassional weird feeling in my left arm as I type. I’m wondering if I should change my arm position or something.

Sure, opinions vary, but I’m fond of randomness. While I do listen to the occassional album straight through, my prefered playlist generator on my ipod looks like this:

if LastPlayed is not in the last 10 days
and
if Genre is not Speech
and
if Genre is not Podcast
Limit to 25 songs selected by random
Live updating

The playlist is then played in random order to keep from keying on whatever ordering might have been in place.

While this doesn’t mean that I’m guaranteed to listen to all of those songs that don’t get played often, it does give them preference over something just heard. The next question is whether I can implement something similar with Quod Libet. There seems to be a queue-stuffing plugin, but it seems to select based on rating only.

Following up on the flatmate situation, Amanda is going to be moving in on Saturday. It’s cool. It’s somewhere in between meeting the people that you move in with and moving in with friends. Ish.

I have stuff again. The movers came by to drop off my belongings yesterday afternoon¹. There seems to be more stuff than I remember. In fact, I think I got more than I was expecting. There is some kitchen stuff that I was planning on giving to Julie that arrived with everything else. I guess it’ll get boxed up again and either sold or donated somewhere. Also on the plus side, there is no apparent damage to any of the paintings. I was pretty nervous about this. Original paintings can’t just be replaced.

The plants are another matter. I had let the movers, Crown Relocations, pack 3 of my potted plants to bring down. There was no way that they were going to fit in the car, so I was pretty much out of options. Besides, the same moving company handled the plants wonderfully when I’d moved up to Auckland from Christchurch in 2004. I think the short story is that I’ll never use Crown again as movers. All 3 of the plants are near dying. 2 of them need to be transplanted right away, as a result of being mishandled and neglected. In addition to being left in a storage container without light or water for a week, it’s also obvious that all 3 of the plants had tipped over and suffered a lot of damage as a result. They were packed badly and it’s horrible that they had to wait in storage a week before being delivered to me just because it was more convenient for the moving company. That is not good customer service.

I still have quite a few boxes to go through. They’re just stacked up all over my bedroom at the moment. It’s almost enough to dampen the echoes from the bare walls, but it’s still far from feeling like home. It shouldn’t take long, though. There’s enough stuff that I’ve been waiting for that I’ll dig in and get organised quickly.

¹ They were only about an hour later than the original time I was given. When I was called on friday, I was told that they would be here between 2:30 and 3:00. They amended that time by half an hour as I was leaving the office, and then they were an extra half hour late. I’m a bit disappointed, because the weather was stellar, and I would have loved to get in a short skate if I knew they were running behind. I could have made it to the bank after all.

I got an email from Abby at Spiral Gallery in Auckland. It sounds like they’re closing their doors. It’s quite sad, but I’m sure there are good reasons. But there is a glimmer of promise within the email she sent:

It is said that the end of one thing is the beginning of another and in this instance the saying rings quite true. Although Spiral will not longer be available for all you artists and art lovers, our new gallery, Satellite, is opening in early June. Satellite is a fabulous, street level gallery located at the corner of St Benedict’s Street and Newton Road on the city fringe. There is great parking, it’s a vibrant area and, as a bonus, really great coffee just up the road at the fabulous cafe, Benediction. For more infomation about Satellite check out http://www.satellitegallery.co.nz/

I’ll have to head up there at some point and check it out. If the quality of exhibitions at Satellite is anything like Spiral, I’ll be easily satisfied with the changes.

Looking at the map, I think my run this morning was on the order of 13–14km. It’s hard to tell with the windy roads, and the map scaling makes it hard to measure out. Luckily, wind wasn’t much of an issue and the little bit of rain could have been much worse.

Afterwards, I went down to the Kilbirnie Recreation Centre to try to get a feel for skating on an incredibly smooth surface. I felt surprisingly cramped by the size of the rink, and I now realise that I’m going to have to learn how to skate all over again if I’m going to play inline hockey. Some turns were okay, but some were awkward, and high speed turnarounds are right out. It was nice to have a hockey stick in my hand, though. Shooting on net was trickier than I remember¹. All told, it was a workout on its own. I was sweating over 45 minutes of play-testing. I had to head off to volleyball, though. I was filling in on a team and didn’t want to be late.

I walked into the gym wondering if I’d recognise anyone from the other places that I’ve played volleyball in New Zealand. It wasn’t the case this time, but it didn’t take long before I started to get to know some of the other players. The game is very social, after all, and this one more than most. Teams of 4 play on a full court, and everyone is an eligible hitter. The game is fast, and you really have to watch your corners. I’m still trying to figure out how to cover spikes effectively. The block goes up, but there’s a lot of space on either side. Good spikers have a field day. Played a first game, and then stayed around to fill in for a second, which turned out to be even faster. By the end, I was empty. I was starting to get lazy and I was dropping blocks all over the place, which doesn’t do anyone any good. It was time to go home and make up for the light lunch that I’d had.

I’m going to hurt tomorrow. That’s a promise. I can’t go from slacking off for most of the week to fully on without side effects. Of course, this just means that I’ll have to pull up on the rest of my week for that balance. It’ll be good for me. All this slack has translated into extra weight and a bit of lethargy. I’ve had enough of that.

¹ The last time I’d played hockey, I was still in high school. That’s probably about 14 years ago.

I decided to head out for a bit of a run this morning, despite the drizzly weather. I decided to head south from the house, more or less on a whim. I hadn’t gotten for than 100 metres when I heard the arhythmic footsteps of many people behind me. I was still walking at this point, allowing the muscles to warm up to the motion, and the joggers quickly caught up and overtook me. Around that time, I decided to pick up my pace to a light jog, which put me about in pace with the group. Again thinking of a decent warm-up, I kept the light pace. I noticed that most of the joggers were dressed similarly, in team colours. They were all members of the Wellington Marathon Clinic, and nearing the end of their 1h40 run. I talked with them a while and asked a few questions about upcoming events. They suggested following them to the finish and they could give me a newsletter with all the information included within.

They meet Sunday mornings, and various groups will head out, organised by pace and distance. This sounds more or less perfect, but for one thing: Sunday afternoon is a volleyball game. I’ll have to teach my legs all over again to get over any thoughts of laziness.

It’s just as impulsive as always, but a bit indicative of changing times. I was driving home from getting groceries, listing to an old episode of the CBC Radio 3 podcast when one track grabbed my brain by the ears and refused to let go. I’d heard it before, and it’s always struck me as good listening. I took a look at the name of the artist and etched a little mental note into my eyelids. When I got back to the house, I jumped onto New Music Canada, which the songs from the podcast come from, and looked up Decomposure. Following the links through the official website, I found that I could order the newest album, At Home and Unaffected, online from Unschooled Records.

It’s on the way.

I moved into this flat a couple weeks ago, and I’m pretty happy with things. As much as I expected. The lady who owns the lease has since asked the other guy here to move out. I don’t really have too much of an opinion on this. I’ve met him a couple times, but I haven’t seen all that much of him. The ads for the flat have been in the paper for a couple days, and we had the first of the people who wanted to come and look at it stop by last night.

I didn’t think much of anything when I first heard her voice downstairs. When she came upstairs, I thought she was a bit familiar, but that’s not out of the ordinary for me. I think most people look somewhat familiar. But she recognised me, too, so something was up. She picked it up before I did. We were in a massage class together about a year ago. She’s finished her class work and I stopped to get residency, but she’s got a table and might just move in with it. I’d be cool with that. She was a lot of fun.

After she left, Sally exclaimed how unlikely that was, and I guess she’s right about that, but coincidences like that don’t seem to be that rare. Regardless, it’s quite cool.

I didn’t actually do any interesting work back then, but since starting this job, my life revolves around e^-jwt.

I just saw this in an email:

it’s time to start enjoying your ihug broadband!

Cool. Telecom actually kept their word on the start date. I’m actually a bit surprised. But nevermind, I’ve got a connection at the house. I’ve also got two computers sorely in need of an apt-get upgrade. I should have a 2Mbps download pipe, so it shouldn’t take all night to get the both going. I might have to mind my throughput cap, though. I can see a gig running through tonight, fairly easily.

I’ve discovered a new way to mess up a good evening of skating. A few days ago, I decided to pull apart my wheels and bearings and give them a bit of a clean. They were caked with dirt and grime, which made for pretty rough rolling. Towards the end of the process, I realised that my bearing oil was in a box in the back of the car. I decided to put it off until the next night instead of doing it then and there. One night became two, and when I went to put everything back together, I realised that I didn’t get enough of the moisture away from the bearings’ surfaces. Rust had taken control and I couldn’t hand-turn a single bearing.

The next hour and a half can only be described as willful destruction of my skates. I’d checked with my cyclist flatmate, and he didn’t have any sort of anti-corrosive soak, so I was left having to turn the bearings by force and get some oil in there. The only way I could think to do that was to mount the bearings in a wheel, put them in a skate, and turn the wheel by hand. The extra torque broke the rust, and I was able to free the bearings to the point where they could be oiled. In the process, I shaved a fair bit of the aluminum off the frame. I don’t think I damaged the wheels, but both the skates and the bearings had some lifespan stolen.

The lesson learned: don’t put off doing what really should be done.

I did manage to catch up with the people I was planning to skate with. I was both louder and slower than usual, but at least they moved. I guess I now have a little bit more incentive to get a new set of skates.

I’ve been meaning to hook into vim for blog entries for a while. I use textile for markup, which is a nice shorthand. While searching around for anything that’s already been done, I ran across a syntax file. It’s a small step, but definitely useful. For the time being, there are a couple autocmd’s that I’d like to add, but I don’t know if it’s enough to warrant an ftplugin file.

I just got a call from Alisa. The movers have arrived and there is more than a snowball’s chance in hell that I’ll see the rest of my stuff before the end of the month. Yay! But definitely not before the end of the week. Boo!

I was excited about not taking my car to work today. I was waiting at the bus stop outside my apartment block at 7am. By 7:30, I was slightly more than angry. In the span of less than 12 hours, I went from proclaiming the benefits of public transportation to being a victim of the system. Day 1 has been a failure.

I’d done some research beforehand. I had determined that the best route to take to work would require 2 buses and an hour for each direction. That’s not too bad, all things considered. I was looking forward to having time to sit and read. I’d bought the $80/month GoldPass, which I’d believed would cover Wellington City and the Eastbourne Connector, which would run past the office. This was working beautifully until the Eastbourne driver told me that I was wrong and I couldn’t catch his bus with my pass. While it’s true that I could ride that bus, I could not take it north of the train station, which is the direction that I needed to go. I ended up having to find an ATM to cover the $4.50 to catch the next (and last) bus to work.

My $80 mistake (in buying the pass that I bought) was due to misreading the website (check out this page layout. The screenshot was taken from Internet Explorer in case there were rendering difference between platforms). There is a PlatinumPass, for $149 that does what I had expected my GoldPass to do. (Coincidentally, the randomiser just brought up the perfect song: Morcheeba – Daylight Robbery.) Alternatively, there is an $80 GoRider that can be used in Hutt Valley. I don’t know if I can use it to catch a bus from Wellington, however, and it seems that it can only be purchased from a bus driver.(?!) I can’t believe how user-unfriendly this experience is turning into.

I have to work through the numbers again. It might not be worth taking buses at all. At the current price of fuel, it looks like it will be about the same price to drive as to take the bus, if I assume the $149 PlatinumPass. I need to talk to an actual person and ask questions that have answers. I tried this morning, but the man at the train station didn’t believe there was anyone I could talk to.

It’s a safe bet that I’ll be driving to work tomorrow. I don’t need the stress of a bus system that makes itself painful to use. I’ll try again once I find out how to catch a bus without spending $10/day. I’m sure I’ll be coming back to this topic again and again over the coming weeks. I have a lot of things to say about public facilities and the effort to stop relying on private vehicles for daily transportation.

Neil Gaiman – Coraline

I was wandering aimlessly through the bookstore when I happened across this thin-looking book touting Gaiman’s name. While the author’s name caught my attention, it was the cover art that held it. A girl and a cat, colourfully twisted between artistic styles, with the house innocently providing the background.

The story is quite brief, but equally compelling. I surprised myself with the intensity with which I took to the story. Coraline, not to be confused with Caroline, is a true adventurer. Exploration is her heart and soul. When she and her parents move to a new flat, she takes no hesitation to discover the magic and the mysteries of this new environment. Especially the mysteries. Such as the mystery of the door that goes only into a brick wall, and why she would get a message from circus mice that she should not go through the door.

Gaiman is a wonderful storyteller, but I think I found myself a bit disappointed that Coraline’s story is as short as it is. With fond memories for detail of American Gods and Neverwhere, I wish it could have been fleshed out just a little bit more, but I think that would change the target audience. I don’t think that it was particularly meant for the adult market, although many adults will love it just the same.

I can see a little bit of a computer componenet shopping spree on the horizon. Bits and pieces have been taking the downward spiral a little too seriously and are actually becoming problems.

Laptop battery

It is a given that all batteries will perform worse and worse over time. They store a little bit less power each time they are recharged. A workhorse that kept you running for 2 or 3 hours at a time might now struggle to give 30 minutes of love. I’ve had this one since August, 2002, but now the battery loves me no more. With the battery charger on, the light will flash, but no storage actually happens. There’s not enough charge to run from one power supply to the next. So now, the battery has been sequestered to the inside of the laptop case, only to be reunited with its host when power is already off.

I’m not sure how easy it is to get replacement batteries, or if it’s worth the expense. Currently, I’ve got a functional computer that sits in my lap as long as I’m within a certain radius of a power plug. The computer still runs happily, however. Used batteries might be an option, but I don’t know how much I’d trust one.

CDRom

The cdrom in the desktop was never mine in the first place. I borrowed it from the boyfriend of my first flatmate in Auckland as a means to get Debian installed on the desktop. It was a very old drive that made lots of noise, contrasted against the black front of the case and managed to work reliably for a little more than a year. Without warning, the drive tray refused to open. It makes a lot more noise now, whirring angrily, but with no other outcome. About the same time that the drive refused to open, I noticed a lot of errors getting dumped into the system logs about bad things going on with the cdrom.

Now it’s silent. I don’t ask for its help, and it doesn’t offer. It’s one of those silent mutual agreements; it want’s to retire and I want to retire it. Besides, I can get a DVD writer (with a black face, to match the computer case) for about $60 NZD. Given that my LCD display is actually better than the TV at the house, it might be better to watch movies on the computer than to go shopping for a DVD player for the house.

Planning ahead

Now that I’m living in Wellington, which has a bursting-at-the seams theatrical population, it might be nice to do some volunteer work with an amateur theatre group. I had a wonderful time working with Hidden Insanity back in Calgary, and I’d love to get back into that environment. Given the nature of my current job, it might be good to explore the state of audio processing under linux again. The desktop is a bit underpowered for it, however. Running a Celeron with 256MB of memory, I can’t expect to do a lot and keep it in real-ish time. Looking at the specs for the motherboard, I can put up to 2GB of PC3200 ram in there, which isn’t a bad option. That can be done for about $240 NZD right now. Another option is to change out the CPU for something with a bit more on-chip cache. That might be trickier, however. Socket 478? All of the price listings on pricespy are for socket 775 processors.

I think it’s a matter of evaluating the cost benefit. For roughly (I’m guessing) $300, is it worth changing processors? Or is it going to be necessary? Or will I find out, after puting in 2GB of ram, that I still just can’t do what I want it to do, but that it would have been cheaper to buy new than to upgrade the both (and the DVD drive)? I can only answer some of those questions before I do any shopping.

The DSL modem arrived faster than expected. I received the shipping box friday afternoon and promptly tore into it, and the spent the rest of the afternoon resisting the urge to configure it before I even got it to the house. It’s running partly configured at the moment; I’d written down the username:password combination provided by my ISP, but not on a piece of paper that came home with me. It’s not too important at this point, since my connection is not meant to be activated for another 4 days.

In the meantime, the little 3Com wireless DSL router is happily routing packets between the laptop and the desktop. Since the desktop is literally stuffed into a corner nearest a power supply, stacked upon its own boxes, it’s not the most ergonomically correct work station. For once, the laptop is actually more comfortable to use.

With the daylight savings shift having passed recently, there’s a lot less time after work with daylight. I’d left work reasonably early to try to get home quickly and get out for a short skate. Of course, my short skate got longer and longer, and by the time I was heading back to the house, it was long past sunset. I had my shoes with my, but I wasn’t averse to skating home.

What I didn’t know was that some of the street lights around the waterfront wouldn’t be on. It was nearly pitch black, and the only chance that I had to see the footpath over that stretch was when cars would drive by, briefly illuminating their way, and coincidentally mine. The blind stretch was only a few hundred meters, but long enough to be unnerving. The same region of footpath is also rough and narrow. While the odds of survival weren’t bad, the odds of not stumbling into injury were much greater.

This might, in fact, warrant a letter to the city council. I’m sure they’d welcome any comments I might have.