more motorcycles

Posted on May 19, 2005 by adrian

Been looking around at different bikes. From a stylistic standpoint, I’m all about the “cafe racer” look. Kind of vintage and minimalist at the same time without being an amorphous blob on wheels or a rolling chromed out two wheel land yacht.

But I’ll probably just go with something like a used 80’s/90’s nighthawk/virago/sv650/etc for now. They are cheap, and pretty easy to come by.

But I covet a Triumph Bonneville. Maybe I’ll get one and some leathers and meet zombiepops down at Brighton and beat the crap out of him while Who songs blare in the background. Or maybe just try to score a goal or two on him next time we play soccer. ;->

Posted on May 13, 2005 by adrian

On Wednesday, on the way home from work, I decided to buy a bike. So I
did. Nothing fancy (low end Diamonondback Wildwood “comfort” bike).

So, now I’m looking for interesting places to ride. I live up off of
duraleigh. The Crabtree Creek greenway isnt too far away (though
it would be a lot shorter if I could cut though the gated community…).

I’m also looking for a cyclometer/bike computer. Being a near-geek
and all. Any suggestions?

hometown blogging

Posted on May 11, 2005 by adrian

Saw a post somewhere about someone watching the technorati search results for a search on there home town. So I tried it. An interesting cross section of results. For “statesville”, lots of stuff about NASCAR, and the “JR’s” store there. And apparently a lot more Statesvillians that I would of ever expected to be blogging.

python challenge

Posted on May 10, 2005 by adrian

Python Challenge

Python oriented riddles and puzzles. I got up to level 7 yesterday. An
interesting waste of time.

Reminds me of similar puzzles xach setup
a few years ago.

google proxy/cache/accelerator

Posted on May 5, 2005 by adrian

Google has launched a web accelerator services (aka, a distributed caching, compressing proxy services). It seems to use a browser plug-in. I haven’t seen any dissection of whats going over the network, but I assume its adding some id tracking info along.

Which is kind of scary. Not so much because of the obvious privacy concerns (though, thats probably something to keep in mind), but because I think it might be closing the last chance for a competitor to compete with google. Why?

It seems the obvious way to gather a huge amount of interesting information about the web, and more importantly, how people use it. With a intelligent proxy setup, it’s very easy to track peoples paths though a web site, which link on a web page people actually follow, etc. And for google, thats very useful information to use when trying to return useful search results. And if nothing else, it gets them an easy way to see what links off of a google search result page people actually follow.

Since it’s not exactly easy to setup a large distributed proxy caching network, thats a pretty strong entry barrier to competitors. Not to mention it’s all but impossible for anyone to get a significant number of users to start using a system like that. OS and browser vendors and maybe AOL and google could do it. So something to possibly be worried about.

But theres also alot of interesting things you could do with it. Both for the proxy user and provider.

Throw in a browser plug-in, and you can easily add web site citation handling. Or Tivo style thumbs up/thumbs down. It’s a great place to plug-in a language translation layer. Or inserting “smarttag” style additional information. Or adding “whats related” info. And with a browser plug-in (or *cough*, a browser) you wouldn’t need to change the pages themselves like “smarttags”.

Maybe add in some bookmark sharing/syncing features for even more web meta info.

For the proxy user, you can provide a fair number of interesting value adds. Akamai style caching of large content. Pre-fetching of web sites based on likely paths though a web site. Site path based searching (find “cheese” in the pages people follow from this page).

interesting shows in winston salem

Posted on May 3, 2005 by adrian

Some interesting shows coming up in Winston-Salem

Fri, May 13, Autopassion cd release party
Old friend of mine plays bass and produced the album.

Sat May 14, Tommygun cd release party with Finks
More old friends, and the Tommygun cd is recorded by same folks as Autopassion.

Fri, May 20, Lighting Bolt
I do not known anyone in Lighting Bolt, but they are crazy spastic insane mathy weird ass intense rock. (some folks dub them “brutal prog”)

Posted on May 2, 2005 by adrian

Ouch. Sun burn. Mental note, sunscreen good, sunlight bad.

Posted on May 2, 2005 by adrian

Saturday headed over to Chapel Hill with base10 to see Battles (opening up
for Prefuse 73 at Local 506).

Got there about 10:30 to find a long line out the door and down the sidewalk. Apparently Prefuse 73 is quite popular. The line was moving very slowly due to Local 506’s very strict enforcement of the membership policy. And since the majority of folks there were not typical Local 506 customers, this just slowed matters down.

Just about the time Battles started, they announced they were at capacity counting Etix sales. So we waited around abit to see if anyone left (It was a nice night out, and you could hear the band at least, and see this a little bit though the front door), but eventually left near the end of the set. I really had no idea that the show would be selling tickets, and especially didn’t expect it to sell out.

Sunday went over and played some more soccer. Had a blast. Everyone seems a bit more prepared this time (or at least, everyone had more gear ;->). I was a bit off for the first half and didn’t do much running due to an ankle/shin that was bothering me for some reason. But it seemed to stop hurting for the second half, so was able to move a little bit easier. Got a goal or two and our team won. Just need to recruit some more folks to play.

Went and saw Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy (with badger, maegwynn, and ran into zombiepops and heatherivy there). Not bad. But I couldn’t help but think that it would be awfully confusing and hard to follow if you haven’t read the book. If there was one scene I would of changed, I think it would of been the babelfish scene, since I think the aside about it in the book helps establish the tone, the sense of humour, and the idea that the story can be a bit metaphysical and philosphical. I would of spent just a little bit more time covering some of the babelfish backstory.

os x 10.4 article

Posted on April 29, 2005 by adrian

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Review

Definitely the best review of “Tiger” I’ve seen. Very detailed, and even mostly spin/marketing/zealotry free.

Though, it does certainly dim my expectations of Tiger. “Spotlight” seems to just be the revenge of eazel/ nautilus/ medusa/ fam/ gnome-metadata/ gnome-vfs . (And I suspect, a lot of the same people are involved). Not a bad thing, but definitely not all that the hype promised. Seems like a decent first step though.

Automator sounds quite potentially useful, but hard to say without using it. Any thing that provides easy hooks for extending functionality is always a plus.

Even the shiny marketing hype made Dashboard seem kind of boring and useless, and with more details, it seems even more so. I can only hope there is a scrolling rss reader widget so I can pretend like it’s 1998 again. “Hey dude! It’s not a homepage, it’s a ‘channel’! And it’s on my desktop! Whoa!”.

CoreData should be useful for ISV’s, so hopefully some interesting apps will come out of it.