After about five months without mod points, they came back right after the redesign. Coincidence or not? Who can say....

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.

For a while over the summer it seemed like I was getting 15 mod points every week or two. Sometimes I didn't use them all up before the next batch came in. Then around September they all stopped. I don't think I've had any for three months. Were my mod abilities suddenly considered to be not up to snuff? Did a bunch of other Slashdotters come back from vacation, eager to moderate? Did my half-hearted stabs at meta-moderation work against me? (I *much* preferred the old metamod system and was much better at doing it then.) Maybe someone out there knows....

From http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2011818180_btipolice10.html

"When a top-secret prototype of Apple's new iPhone went missing recently, the computer giant summoned Silicon Valley's version of the cavalry â" an elite squad whose main mission is investigating crimes against high-tech companies.

Little-known outside the tech world, the unit suddenly entered the spotlight with its April 23 raid on the San Francisco Bay Area home of Jason Chen, the 29-year-old technology blogger who had gained possession of the phone.

The unit swept in after Chen posted a photo and details of the new iPhone on the Gizmodo.com website. But the raid itself became secondary to a larger discussion in Silicon Valley and the blogosphere: What is this high-tech police force, and who controls it?

"It's the iPolice," said Steve Meister, a former Los Angeles County deputy district attorney. "This whole thing appears, rightly or wrongly, to be law enforcement doing the bidding of a private company."

OK, you've done it again. When I follow a link from the front page to a story, I get the nice usable old style interface. When I comment on an article, then click on the link to the article at the top of the page, I get the screwed up are-you-mad-who-likes-this-manure beta interface.

Hmmm...

The link from the front page is: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/16/1335256
The link on the page itself is: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/16/1335256/Typography-On-the-Web-Gets-Different

Hey, Slashdot, when I'm looking at the page I can see the bleeding title on the page itself, AND in the link, I don't need it in the URL. And why the heck does the URL make a difference?

Please feel free post replies here on any topic.

There seems to be some confusion around my comments here. I get responses that mostly seem to say that site owners deserve what they get when they use obnoxious ads; and that posters will be damned if anyone tells THEM how to browse.

I disagree with neither of those. The point I was trying to make is that the web site owners have the /right/ to do whatever they want - including the posting of obnoxious, gouge-your-eyes-out advertisements. They even have the /right/ to try to force you to view those advertisements - this is their server, and they have control over how they want to run it.

I am not saying they will succeed in this - obviously there are many ways around any restriction in this open playground we call the Internet. But it is undeniably their /right/ - which is the only point I was making.

Conversely, you and I have the /right/ to control how we view those web pages. I use adblock, but will listen to a reasonable request to unblock ads. If a site uses evil ads (flash, java, java-script, animations) and tries to force me to view them, I tend to stop using the web site because a) it's no longer worth the aggravation of trying to circumvent - there is precious little content out there that I simply "must" have. b) if enough people do walk away, the provider has no choice but to reconsider his tactics.

But to reiterate my point - the content providers have the right to control what is on their web site. What we choose to do about it is up to us.

Now I can't even see the home page, it jumps right into some kind of RSS feed.

Quit the fuck fucking around with Slashdot, let us read the fucking thing without ten kinds of broken fucking AJAX crap.

Somehow Slashdot turned on the Beta index back on for me, and since I had no idea that it had been turned on I assumed this was more leakage from Beta back to the regular Index.

Good god.

All I can say is, they must be subcontracting to Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. It's appalling. It must never be released.