surfing in water

I spent the first part of yesterday trying to grind through various paperwork and online bill-paying and bookkeeping and such. These activities brought me to a fairly familiar state of low-grade anxiety and self-recrimination. (Lately I haven't been doing many financial things about which I later feel guilty. Quite the opposite.) Then some new Pacifica friends took me surfing; they provided a wetsuit, a longboard, and encouragement. We loaded some boards into the Element (finally this car fulfills its purpose in life!) and drove to Linda Mar. My anxiety at this point was directed at something about surfing, but honestly I can't remember what at this point. Got into the wetsuit, carried the board down to the water, got in, started paddling out...

Then
everything
else
disappeared.

Whoever created the pacific ocean, thank you.

musings on small pieces of paper

I tried the hipster pda with vanilla 3x5 index cards, $4 for 1000, popularized by Merlin Mann. I tried it, but the cards were too white trash for me. Literally. While I was planning my third cross-country move, I splurged on Crane pure cotton 3x5 cards. They were beautiful and strong, but really, $22 for 100, that's insanely expensive. I looked lovingly at Levenger cards; they register higher on the quality-meter than supermarket index cards. I indulged in these when studying for the MCATs, and I'm glad I did. I made a few hundred flashcards and kept them for a year; good design makes it easier to tolerate endless drilling. But Levenger cards cost too much ($44 for 1000) for GTD-style short-term disposable usage. I find Post-it index cards incredibly offensive, design-wise. The rules are far too dark, and the sticky backing literally attracts dirt and lint, which then ends up marring the face of the card behind the dirty/sticky card. The Real Simple index card deck caught my attention, but it suffers from horrible colors and too-wide rules. I honestly don't understand how the people who fetishize moleskine notebooks can tolerate all these loud, rough-edged designs.

My favorite so far: Paper Source business card blanks. Except that (ye gods!) these are $1.50 for 25 cards. Six cents per card? Yuck.

I just bought a deck of long, thin, oval index cards by Umbra and found them entirely the wrong size to play Freecell. (Which is a whole 'nother blog post: why it's better to have time-wasting fun activities that don't involve the computer.) Now I'm experimenting with combining them with a fisher space pen for a cool-shaped hipster pda. Thinking about it in the light of day, though: I paid maybe $5 for 52 cards. This is not a good long term plan.

My latest greatest innovation is using Umbra Meow Playing Cards as bookmarks. Each card has a lovely illustration of a different cat breed, and they're a great form-factor for bookmarks. $5 for 52 cute-as-a-button bookmarks is a big win.

And, ahem, Kitty Spangles Solitaire is really the bomb for mac os x solitaire.

american flag

Sometimes the mac shows a tiny american flag in the menubar. This bothers me. I don't want to think about the United States of America and all the issues surrounding the american flag every time I check the time in the menubar. I certainly don't want to program myself with the jingoism that (these days) images of the flag connote.
The way to turn this off is to go to the International preference pane and uncheck "Show input menu in menubar."

My new hosting provider,, textdrive was down for two days. Today dreamhost (which serves up download.openlaszlo.org and Scott Evans' blog went down for eight days straight. Jumpline hasn't ever had any downtime that I noticed, in three years of using it, but there webapp for controlling things was really out of hand bad; the equivalent of voicemail hell. Sarah Allen likes mediatemple, but she's got some sort of relationship with the CTO... and it looks like it's down right now. I'm not sure who hosts Adam Wolff's blog, (but he'll probably see this post because I mention his name). The heavy-hitters I know host their own servers at colos. But come on, I'm just a minor netizen. I want to post my blog and some photos and some swf's. I have this illusion that maybe someday I will want to post a Ruby on Rails app, but really, it hasn't happened yet. However, I think it's crucial that my site is served from my own top-level domain. Maybe Apple has the solution; $99 a year for .mac is not bad compared to $8-$200 a month for downtime-o-rama. Apple software just makes me happy; maybe Apple hosting will, too.
And look, for the record, I can set up my own linux box for development, but I know that I don't know enough to protect a server from all the malware in the world.
I don't think my demands are particularly outrageous, except perhaps that i want all this for less than $200 a year. I'll hang out with TextDrive for a while, maybe actually get a RoR app up.
Maybe this should start being a perk that medium and large businesses can start offering to employees. Companys pay for cel phones and laptops, right? My manager has a few times suggested that I blog on one topic or another -- and the essays that turn up i our blogs are a hell of a lot more readable, opinionated, useful, and timely than the http://wiki.openlaszlo.org which does get quite a bit of atention from the OpenLaszlo team. Email is not enough, people. Corporate IT now takes it as a matter of course that they must maintain email, networking, backups, and applications. I propose that corporate IT also begins supporting the digitial lifestyle of the technorati by solving the "where do I host my blog" problem fof me.

my new place

The sign says "Beach Bungalow" and while that might be technically correct, I'm going to have to think of something better. Any suggestions?

072706_20201.jpg Originally uploaded by sbshine.