http://365immigrants.blogspot.com/2011/04/john-muir.html

http://365immigrants.blogspot.com/

My goal is to document 365 immigrants that made (or make) America a better place to live, one per day for the next 365 days. Right now I'm on day 57!

so i said in my last je in a response to shadow that i'd drop a quick update, so here it is.

life has been ridiculously hectic and incredibly busy. so i'm still working at the same company, but we have a new name. i'm tech leading a large project for one of the major device makers (think batwings) it's the biggest thing i've ever worked on. it's a huge project just finishing its first year. i don't get to do much coding, in fact i figure i've written less than 1% of the actual code. oh well, i still try to keep my hands dirty with whatever i can find, but managing is really a full time gig.

what else?

2 years ago i decided to pursue my masters degree (computer science) so i'm going to harvard and am about a year and a half away from finishing the degree. this semester (i only do one class per semester, which is more than enough, the sheer amount of work on top of the weekly lectures is enough exhaust most people) i'm taking mobile application development (android and ios.) it's pretty cool thought. never thought i'd actually enjoy going back to school, but alas, i do enjoy it. it's also very much a cultural thing here in boston. everyone you know takes classes, and well with my company paying 100% of my tuition it would be silly not to take advantage of that.

oh yeah, still in boston. still love it. i actually moved into a part of boston called the navy yard. right on the water, across the charles river from the north end of boston. absolutely love my neighborhood. i hang out with solemndragon once a week, and we still get in the odd game of warcraft here and there.

the music thing has been keeping me very busy. earlier in 2010 i had my first placement in an independent film soundtrack. this year will see my second (a documentary) the filmmaker producing the documentary has produced a couple behind the scenes shorts that include 2 cuts from the latest record. i'm trying to raise some money to get the new record pressed on vinyl. and i'm also going back to the studio to record 2 new songs at the end of february (one of them is for a compilation called "singularity" put out by glidescope records). yeah i love the studio, and my friend who owns the studio i use is awesome. the place is very very nice. i am also writing another record that i hope to have out before the end of this year. i've been debating shopping this future record to labels. that's still a long way away. also probably going to be working on a big secret project for the studio, which could be very interesting. i'd like to get another one or two film deals cooking this year.

i also have been getting back into design work. a couple weeks ago i won a design competition put on by mylene sheath records to design the test pressing cover art for one of their bands. i also just finished doing the cover art for an LP for this other label. what's cool is, both covers are hand silk screened. so doing the designs had to be executed with that in mind, very cool stuff.

let's see, other stuff. about a year and a half ago my lactose intolerance has become a full blown dairy allergy so i'm 100% vegan now. it's not bad at all actually. what else? i'm not dating, i enjoy being by myself, i enjoy living like a monk (as a friend actually observed not long ago) actually, and i do. i keep very busy, i do get to see friends here and there (like i said, hang out with solemndragon once a week, and other friends every couple weeks or so.) i get home from work and i get to work on writing music, producing demos for the songs i'm working on, work on other web development projects (keep my skills sharp) school, the day job. yeah there are very few actual idle hours during the week.

so yeah things are not horrible.

yikes. so yeah not dead.

just wanted to drop a quick update for folks who never made the "migration" that i've been pretty busy with the music stuff. spent the last year and a half writing and recording (in a proper studio) a record that was just released earlier this month.

it's nothing earth shatteringly new, more instrumental post-rock, but i got more ambient with it (which is really where i'm going musically)

yeah just more output, another contribution to the noisy attention-whoring part of the internets.

release info: http://skyflyingbymusic.org/
plans: http://skyflyingby.tumblr.com/post/2652663461/plans-and-aspirations

yeah i'm going to try to not neglect this place for as long.

oh for the love of all that is holy... who puts the "write in journal" link at the _bottom_ of the screen? i see /. is sucking as much if not more than usual.

Just a nutty question this morning: if you could easily/cheaply stream anything to your tv, what would it be?

haven't used this in a while, and don't really intend to anymore. took me forever to find the stupid "write in journal" button. decided I should get the friends-list and what not squared away so if I come back I won't be confused as all heck. "see you in another life brother."

To celebrate 30 years of "Pac Man", at this year's Retromañï½Âa (University of Zaragoza, 8th - 12th November) there's a Pacman programming contest (with prizes!). Information about the contest and rules can be found here:

http://www.retroaccion.org/sites/default/files/eventos/retromania/2010/concurso_pacman/RM10-ProgPacman-english.pdf

There's two categories - one for games programmed beforehand (so that people who can't go to Retromañï½Âa can put in an entry) and for those programmed during the event.

I'll myself be off to Retromañï½Âa, not for anything to do with the Pac man coding contest, but to demonstrate and explain the ethernet hardware that I've made for the ZX Spectrum (itself coming close to its 30th anniversary). Indeed that entire week is going to be an orgy of retro geekyness, the weekend leading up to it is R3PLAY in Blackpool (retrogaming event), then I'm off to Zaragoza for Retromañï½Âa, and then on the way back I go via Madrid for a small gathering of retroafficionados in a bar somewhere in Madrid. Three events in less than 10 days.

I've been 35 for almost a month now. I'm working at a place with linux-only guys, who think that the best solution is always free software. I feel like the old unix dude with the suspenders who still reads a.s.r. I feel ancient, as I've worked with big iron, or at least medium iron since my first job, and the guys who work in the IT department here are used to virtualization on intel platforms (so, machines considered big for their time, but not SPARCs or RISC machines).

Benny pestered me incessantly about what I wanted for my birthday. I couldn't figure it out; I was (and still kind of am) on the dark side right now, about a 4 on my personal 1-10 depression scale. It doesn't affect my ability to work, but it numbs and dulls my senses. Like I should've been elated to get the job I have now (which is almost perfect), but I wasn't. I couldn't express that level of joy. I'm still not quite there, but I'm digging out of it slowly but surely. Anyway, the day before my birthday, I figured out what it was I wanted. I wanted a guitar and lessons.

We headed to Guitar Center and I found a decent guitar, and we walked out with a guitar, case, book, picks, and an extra set of strings. I called up the music store in Castle Rock (which is where I work, 17 minutes from where we live, just north of Sedalia), and started lessons last week. I suck, but I'm sucking less at it every day. I practice until my fingers are tender, as many days as I can actually get the time, and I figure that has to be good enough.

I don't want to be the next Joni Mitchell, or even Lisa Loeb. I just want to make music, in the way I still take photos because I want people to see what I see in the world.

If anyone is looking for a 6-month gig in the Castle Rock, CO area, let me know. I'm looking for a mini-me, who can help me get the alarms in line. Someone who groks windows servers and javascript, who has a decent grasp of monitoring and alarming (snmp and nms experience would be nice, but not necessary.) I'm currently putting people through the "Chris test" by having my boss interview them first, and looking for specific skills later.

Why am I unable to mod things???? I click the mod but nothing happens. Brilliant.

Well, fame at last for my Spectrum +3, Spectranet and Twitter client, it's the only photo on the BBC's article about the Vintage Computing Festival :-)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10364135.stm

So the VCF finished yesterday afternoon.

It lived up to and exceeded my expectations, what a fantastic event. Unfortunately, I didn't really get to see all of what was going on since I was manning my own stand a lot of the time (four Ethernet-networked Sinclair Spectrums, with a MicroVAX fileserver - all of this connected to the internet! - plus a Vectrex since people seem to really like them). My stand and Chris Smith's were next to each other (he reverse engineered the Spectrum ULA for a book he's writing, which charts the history of Ferranti's ULA technology and Sinclair's use of it) - we were hoping to get his Harlequin (100% accurate Spectrum implementation consisting of 74HC logic ICs) onto the network too but his stand was so busy he spent all his time talking to visitors!

The Spectrum twitter client went down very well. I think there were about 8 pages of tweets from the Speccy by the end of Saturday. I really ought to have put a counter in the client to give a definitive count of how many tweets had been made.

I picked up a double density disc drive for my BBC Micro while I was there, and also fixed one of my 128K "toastrack" Spectrums (all it had was a bad transistor in the power section and a dodgy keyboard membrane). Unfortunately I forgot my USB lead for the camera so no pictures till I get home.

Probably the highlight of the show was the talk by Sophie Wilson (designer of the BBC Micro and the ARM CPU, that last bit being very highly significant). If I had the choice of seeing Sophie Wilson or Bill Gates at a computer show, it would be Sophie Wilson every time. She may not be 0.1% as famous as Bill Gates, but I think she is actually a lot more important and significant than Bill Gates. Nearly anyone could have been a Bill Gates, he got where he was due to luck and sticking his neck out a bit (at no real risk to himself, he was already backed by a very rich familly) - if Compaq hadn't cloned the PC, and if IBM had been more closed about the PC specification, Bill Gates and Microsoft may have been just another footnote, remembered only for their truly dreadful BASIC on the Commodore 64; once PC cloning happened, for Microsoft to make money off DOS was about as difficult as falling of a log. But on the other hand, ARM only came about through lots of real intelligence and thought and grit and determination - and today ARM ships 1.25 *billion* units per *quarter*, more than every other microprocessor architecture put together. When the ARM was designed, Hermann Houser jokes "we gave the ARM team exactly what they needed, no resources and no money" :-)

And without the microprocessor designers, where would software people be?

It's the UK's first Vintage Computing Festival next weekend, so I've been getting some stuff together for my Speccy exhibit. Of course I've been working on the Spectrum ethernet card, and while things like the network filesystem it provides are handy, I thought I needed something that VCF attendees could appreciate.

A while ago we did a "hack" of a Twitter client (over a pint of beer, in a pub in Oxford - while getting strange looks from all the "normals") but it was just that - a hack - with the tweet and the login details hard coded into a short asm program. This time I've written a proper http library, and some user interface. Most of the work is done by the HTTP library (parsing headers, putting headers into the request etc), and it's all written in C.

If you can't get to the VCF, you can at least watch a video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ECnN7jdgA4

I gave my notice for the contracting company. I'm going back into NMS with a passion that can't be denied.

Just 2 more weeks of waking up when other people are coming home from work.

Just 2 more weeks until I can take the dog to the dog park after work, or go to the normal park with her on her leash (we're right near Chatfield, and they have a great dog park, I've been told.

Just. 2. more. weeks.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/05/30/fanfic-contest

"For the benefit of the Lupus Alliance of America, John Scalzi, Wil Wheaton and Subterranean Press are running a fan fiction contest, in which contestants write a 400 to 2,000 word story describing the picture above. Any form of fan fiction is acceptable except slash. The winner of the contest will be paid for their story (10 cents a word), win a prize pack of books from Subterranean Press, and will have their story published in a special electronic chapbook featuring stories about the painting, written by Scalzi, Wheaton, Catherynne Valente and Patrick Rothfuss, to be published later this year, with profits to benefit the Lupus Foundation of America. E-mail the stories with the text in the e-mail to fanfic@scalzi.com by 11:59pm Eastern, June 30, 2010. One entry per person."

One must see the image at the link above, as it cannot be sufficiently described with words.

I posted this story but I have no idea if it will ever get accepted. Maybe they already posted this story, but I am too lazy to go check.

Culling through my books/DVD/PS2 collection and seeing how much I can get for trade-in at Amazon. Anyone here done this before?

Apparently I have several DVDs that are worth way more than I thought they would be btw! :-)