jexe

OK, show of hands? Who uses OpenID? Anyone? If so, what do you think?

I hate managing usernames and passwords all over the place, and I know it's starting to get fairly widespread support (on LJ, por ejemplo). Just curious whether it's worth bothering with right away on a new site.

1.5 million-ish iPhones have been sold, up to the point a few weeks ago that they started being sold internationally. There are 8.2 million people in NYC, which is 2.7% of the 301 million living in the USA. Assuming iPhones were distributed evenly across the US, that'd be something around 40,000 phones here.

But I'm guessing that they're not distributed evenly, and that the coasts and tech centers have many times more than the middle of America. If anyone has any other good leads, step on up!

Hey there,

Well, I've quit the majority of my consulting and other work responsibilities and am joining Seed Wireless as a co-founder on the nerd-side ( http://www.seedwireless.com ). If you live in NYC, you should absolutely head over and sign up on the email list to be a beta tester for the product we're launching soonish. It's going to be awesome.

That's all your business spam for today!

http://wedding.jexe.net

Just trolling through web stats. Last month, somebody came to my site -- twice -- by this query string:

\ intel\ intitle resume or inurl resume nuclear or biological or chemical or nbc or hazardous materials or hazmat or weapons of mass destruction or wmd or explosive ordnance disposal or eod objective education experience or history

Who are these people? Is it time to take that "sleeper cell" experience off the ol' resume?

Hi LJ, how have you been?

Boo-yah! I'm five degrees from Super Mario Bros.: The Movie (1993):
1. I used to repair an instrumentation researcher's system all the time at Sandia Labs. He never stopped talking about how his step-son was
2. French Stewart, an actor who married
3. Katherine La Nasa. Previously, she had been married to
4. Dennis Hopper. In 1993, Dennis starred as King Koopa in
5. Super Mario Bros.: The Movie.

Which means all you lucky bastards are at most six degrees from this wonder of a film. But that's the so-called rule anyhow.. At least you know your path to greatness.

Also, I wanted to say that the second most entertaining to happen in the election the other day was that the The Rent Is Too High political party made it onto the ballot in my district. Eccentric party line all the way.

That's all for now.

Short Lessons

• Working at home and having a vacationer camping in your apt is very hard.
  
• Scheduling work can really put a damper on fantasy. That one thing we thought would be done next week will actually be done around August, if we are aggressive.
  
• Working at home and cohabitating in an open loft is also hard. (Nice small 1.65 person company ISO office. Do you hear that, craigslist gods?)
  
• After all of the tax forms are filed, the business plan, quickbooks, wiki, web site, source repository, and bank account are squared away, it came much to my surprise that there's still waayy more to do: the actual work we set out to do in the first place. That is, writing software.
  

Brief Human Contact

• Jorge, the artist/co-concepteur of this game thing insists on being able to play a worm.. Technically, a maggot, which is a baby alien chicken (they don't hatch from eggs). We tried it out in a play demo and it's very weird indeed.
  
• I built some business cards, and I like them. Jlx, however, says that I have to give more contact info than just my email address. Er, physical address, phone number, fax?
  
• I just got back from a "networking event" .. I gave up and went home. If I do figure out the human business interface component, I'm going to write a business book entitled "The Passive Executive", a sort of business-for-the-beta-male work. Stay tuned.
  

We here at the IRS know that you are a sloppy typist. We very much want to process your form correctly, so please follow all instructions carefully.
( Read more... )

Well, I'm starting a company.

There's too much work to do. Here's the deal: I'm working full time on five small-to-huge ongoing projects. We're also two other programmers part time as well as an artist, and could do with about one half more programmer. This doesn't feel like a lot of work, but I know it is because I'm procrastinating so hard that I'm actually updating livejournal (hi everyone!). So, a corporation it is. A real one, with shares, board meetings, an attorney and an accountant and such. No office yet, but when we do I swear it'll be painted dot-com green.

Hopefully this will all be nailed down next week. It's mostly just uber-freelancing for now (except for one project), but I get a feeling that there's rather more to do than just that.

Here's a funny thing about NYC business law: In starting an LLC, one is required to state your arrival on earth in a printed ad in three major local publications for SIX WEEKS. The cost of doing something like that? About $1800. It's some sort of wack holdover from the good old days, I understand that LLCs are relatively new inventions. An actual polo-shirt cigar smokin' golf playin' corporation is actually far easier, so there we are.

I figure I should somehow keep notes about my boring bureaucratic new paperworkful life, maybe here is a good place to do so. ....Or maybe not. :)

Really sorry to interrupt this log with actual real-world substance -- I'm going to Albuquerque eventually this month, getting in late on the 21st and staying to the 26th sometime. Jlx will be there from the 21st to the 24th. ! Any good nights happening? Anybody going to be there to cruise Montgomery with me? Will there be any excitement at the Frontier, or downtown, or that sketchtacular Denny's that is the only thing open on Xmas day? Anyhow, I'm sure I'll see some of you desert people soon.

One more. This may really crash a browser as it uses a bit of memory.
... I'm a little late to the party of browser applet crashing; how 1997. Am I the only person on the planet writing applets now?

http://www.jexe.net/play/infinite.html

I had a couple hours on the train up and down from to RI for Thxgiving.
Hope these work! Everything is interactive.
(playground)

Voltron Graffiti
(treo pic)

* I have nine gray hairs. Most of this is from the mortgage to which I am now indebted at least as much as I have earned in my entire life.
* I'm living in a quite sensible apartment with jlx, and we are Going Steady, as I have dated her for 17.3% of my life, or around 1 of every 5.8 days that I've been conscious.
* I would really like the black LG WM2277H Washer because it has an 1100 RPM spin cycle and 3.72 cu. ft. capacity. But it won't fit in my apartment.
* I went to sleep before midnight last night.
* I am right now listening to Pantera's Vulgar Display of Power ever so softly, and I don't bang my head because I'm worried about hurting my neck.
* The spectre of having children is no longer terrifying, it's now merely discomforting.

In other words, I am rapidly aging and I advise you all to come visit me one last time before I go senile and roll you over in my geriatric Segway.

Two monks were arguing on a subway platform. "The train moves!" said one. "The electricity moves!" counters the other.
Buddha crackled on the loudspeaker: "Ladies and gentlemen- due to construction, there is no Manhattan 7 train service. For service to Queens, please use the N/R line at 59th st."

Last year, back when I thought it was sort of cool to have a demiband (Cloud Full of Clowns) that had the same acronym as an ozone-depleting refrigerant, when I stumbled upon a white supremacist group called Caucasians for Caucasians. What a terrifying mixup that would be, though we haven't received any of their mail yet that I know of.

Last week I ran upon another one online: CFC Servants of the Lord! Couples for Christ. As it turns out, a pretty decent Filipino electronic musician is a member. Argh. fwiw, there are a few more as well. TLAs are a naming disaster. Just don't do it.

"There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms."
- Paul Boutin -- 1989, on what he believed would be the biggest computing problem we'd face in the 90's.

Nope, not really any.. hrm. Nothing to report.

But as this irish traveler explained to me last week, nothing to report doesn't mean that nothing is happening and it's all wasted time. In fact, lots of things are happening, inexplicable amounts of things are happening, it just means that all those things that are more or less inexpressible. Like, say, timid existential philosophy. So here's a question:

Is there a greatest tasting gummi bear?
That is, in an endless line of gummi bears, each different, is there one that is absolutely most delicious? Is there a finite upper level of deliciousness ("What is the farthest you can travel on earth"), or is it an infinitely high scale ("What's the highest number?").

Off through the cold. Of course, if you're anywhere close to nyc, be sure to check out The Gates.

I have reservations to go to abq. That is, I'm coming into town (or leaving town, depending on where you are) tomorrow morning, the 23rd, on the worst flight in aviation history (6am, newark, back middle seat, change in chicago (weather.com says change-planes time will be feelslike 0 degrees, snowing) for more than the cost of my trip to tokyo).

But it'll be fun to be in abq for a couple days. I'm staying for 118 hours, chicago changeover weather-permitting. I hope to see you there (or when I get back, depending on where you are). And if you know anything about OS X Cocoa programming, can you teach me?

Who else is coming? Will there be a party? Is sketchy Central Denny's really the only place open on xmas day?

Beware, NYC housing. It's almost inconceivable how many bad things can happen, and I'm exploring all of them. We've been kicked out or three apartments in two weeks: Gentrification, reneging on a contract, and illegal subletting of commercial space which we shouldn't be trying to live in anyhow (they let us move in today and then took the keys away from us). Well, that's that. I think that last one will actually work out tomorrow, but it sure is complicated. All this with everybody being fairly honest, even.

Living in a space where your stuff is inaccessible is a surprisingly reflective experience. Jlx and I are sleeping in our empty ISP factory with bare walls and one lamp and a towering bamboo plant, drinking white tea out of paper cups and hijacking someone's wireless network. The subway's ambient roars and flickering lights on the manhattan bridge come through every few minutes, the smokestacks out the windows exhale heavy plumes in sulfur lights. I can feel my inner 16 year old trent reznor wannabe leap for joy.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must go find my vinyl pants and chain up a pig's head out in the hall.

bon nuit

The thing I miss the most about the Clinton administration was that he presided over the absolute greatest era in the short history of techno music. Soon after entry into office, Underworld's dubnobasswithmyheadman was released, doing its part to incite an unprecedented techno gold rush from startups such as the Prodigy, Fluke, Bjork, Orbital, and, eventually even industry outsiders like Madonna and David Bowie became investors.

Something clever about the burst of the bubble and the Bush administration's mismanagement of electronic music goes here. The point that I'm meandering toward (from quite a distance) is that it's easy to forget the reasons that we like certain things. It's presumptuous and pretentious to claim these reasons for anybody else, but for me music and mathematics and programming have always been about the search for cleverness and elegance that comes from working in a limited system. It's not the music, but the representation of a universe behind music, something that transcends any kinds of senses. In that way, it's almost religious, it frames the way you look at things and people around you, the way you walk to work, the reason behind choosing, say, spicy kimchi noodle soup over fishcake in shallow steamy water. Yech.

And so ends my hippie tirade.
Hello, back in real life I've been suckered into writing a livejournal. theoretic.org is down for the moment until the new dopesquad server comes up. Last month, I was burglarized, outbid, and along with tki.net, kicked out of my favorite art ghetto apartment. This month, I think I'm buying a place in a toy factory, woe is my debt. So down, up. Packing and off to the west village with jlx for a couple months.