Posts from — November 2002

Complaints Office for Passengers & Pedestrians (COPP)
123 Main Street

New York NY 10016

Ms. Greta Holdshook
123 Main Street

Princeton, NJ 05821

Dear Ms Holdshook-

It has come to the attention of this office that there are several complaints levied against you, for your thoughtless and irritating behavior on New Jersey Transit’s Northeast Corridor line, and along several blocks of sidewalk along Thirty-second street in Manhattan. As the main spokesperson for the newly formed Complaints Office for Passengers and Pedestrians (COPP), concerned with making the daily commute into Manhattan a pleasant one for all of us, I have taken the liberty of preparing this document for you, which serves as a handy list of hints and “tips of the trade” to help you become a better passenger. Oh, and we’re charging you a fine for being such an asshole.

When the 8:13 express from Metropark arrives in Penn Station, discharging hundreds of passengers onto a slim platform, made even thinner by elevator cores added after the fact, you should realize that this is not the time to straighten your skirt, fix your hair, or check makeup. You were described as looking like “a hooker getting out of a John’s car”, for chrissakes. Keep it moving.

Secondly, should you be lucky enough to ease into a spot on the escalator, embrace that gift and do not squander it. That is to say, use the legs that carried you to the escalator to propel you up the fucking steps. Just because the escalator steps are in motion does not mean that you should not be in motion. Keep it moving.

Furthermore, the sidewalks along Thirty-second Street are indended to be used as a pedestrian conveyance, and they a limited resource. It should go without mention that this is not the place to embark on a window shopping jaunt. The vendors that line the street, their card tables laden with fake Nike windbreakers and bootlegged DVDs of movies still in theatres do not constitute a mall or shopping plaza of any kind. Their shoddy products are not worth your money; more importantly they are not worth my time, and that is precisely what you are wasting when you stop short at the “fi-dolla Rolex” table, forcing me to go around you.

By the way, unless you have taken to downing a quart of scotch in the morning, it is the belief of this office that you should be able to walk in a straight line. Your tortoise-like pace is annoying enough, the weaving makes passing difficult. Stop it; straighten it out.

We here at COPP are concerned with making the commute a pleasant one for all. As a result of your behavior this office sees no alternative but to fine you—let’s call it an even fifty bucks—payable to this office upon receipt of this letter. Failure to comply will result in a public reading of this letter to you, on the 8:13 express from Metropark, in front of all the people you are inconveniencing.

We hope that you can take these recommendations to heart, they will help you and in turn help all of us. Good luck, best wishes, and see you on the rails, you stupid idiot.

Hugs & Kisses,

Complaints Office for Passengers & Pedestrians (COPP)

I am not a yuppie. Again, I am not a yuppie. But I sure looked like one on Saturday. Saturday my wife & I managed to stuff six new dining room chairs, a medium-sized dining room table, a light fixture, a large shelving unit, some window dressings (rag-linen roman blind-type thingys), and a cheese grater into our car. The car is a VW Golf. The furniture was all from Ikea. I was wearing a fleece jacket and a baseball cap emblazoned with a computer software company’s logo on the front (and the website on the back).

Do not judge me. It sounds worse than it really is. We just needed some cheap chairs for Thanksgiving. It was actually a fun problem to have. Having recently moved from the city, we are not used to having room for eight people to even stand, much less to sit. As for the baseball cap, well, I needed a new one because my University of Florida (no, I didn’t go there) hat has taken on a permanent old sock funk. I decided I’m tired of lining the pockets of these greedy baseball owners & players, so I thought I’d line the pockets of a bunch of software developers instead.

I’m experiencing major problems with my web host. In fact, if you sent me email yesterday afternoon, you’d better resend it because I never got it. I’m working on changing hosts, and when it’s complete I’ll let you know….

(Jan 17 2003 update: See? I’m lazy. I knew Sevaa.com sucked back in November, and didn’t do anything about it, until I was forced to in January when they couldn’t replace a disk controller without trashing everything and waiting until that time to tell their paying customers that they don’t do backups. Let that be a lesson to you kids; back up your stuff, and don’t use Sevaa.com for your hosting needs, and you’ll do fine. To their credit, the folks at Sevaa are trying, but in my opinion they are too incompetent to trust with my site hosting. You get what you pay for, your mileage may vary, etc, etc, have a nice day.)

Last night, I was a witness to a rare event. Last night, I saw quality theatre.

“The Fourth Wall”, a new re-write of a play by A.R. Gurney, is in previews at Primary Stages in Manhattan. This is a remarkable piece of theatre. This is what theatre is supposed to be all about. Watching this play, you find yourself wishing you were involved in the production—and not in that Steve Stark, Councilman/Pharmacist (Waiting for Guffman) way either. I mean, it makes you BELIEVE in theatre again. It makes you want to write plays. You want to be an actor, a writer, or, failing that, at least a regular theatergoer. Most importantly though, the play makes you laugh. It makes you laugh, to keep from crying over the underlying messages that are so skillfully expressed.

Since I’m pretty sure all of my three readers live far from New York City, I can’t implore you to go to this play, but I just wanted to spit out these thoughts about my experience last night because it was just so damn refreshing to see theatre used as an instrument of dissent again.

A traditional review, where the plot is discussed and star names are dropped, I leave to the other more skilled practicioners. Suffice to say, there is a plot (in fact the very topic of plot is a humorous feature in this play), and there are stars. And they all do a superb job of acting.

But the real star of this show is A.R. Gurney, for applying theatre as a tool to achieve a lot more than entertainment. Indeed, perhaps the true star of this show is theatre itself. And that, folks, is something to be excited about.

My copy of UNIX Power Tools (Third Edition) arrived today. And it’s embarrasing how excited I was when it arrived. Newly updated to acknowledge the existence of OSX and the huge presence of Linux, it is an ADD sufferer’s worst nightmare—over a thousand pages of tips & tricks, code snippets and info for the UNIX user. You find yourself making one cool discovery after another, then get involved in a chapter that’s way over your head but you still feel like you’re learning something. Then you skip to another page and learn some other thing. Then you wish you had a good content management system to file all this stuff away, because you feel the discoveries you made at the beginning of your session are falling off the back of the memory tailgate as you make new ones. (I’ll tell ya, this book in digital form with a Google-powered front-end? Now THAT would be something else!)

At $70, it’s expensive, but let me say two things about that. One, this book has at least one useful suggestion per page, not hundreds of “history of UNIX” pages, or basic stuff, or ridiculous margins that only fit half the words/images they could. Second, I got mine for 30% off at Amazon. Not bad for all that’s inside it.

A friend of yours from college is on the Home & Garden channel, a kid in each arm, husband by her side, and she’s getting grilling tips from Steve Raichlen. Like I needed this today. My knees hurt, my back hurts, I’m tired all the time, and I recently discovered that all the music I like came out over a decade ago. And here is this woman—who I spent four years with, running around in the middle of the night, drinking too much, putting on shows, staying up too late, skipping class, and basically being a foolish youth—being all domestic and everything. She even voiced her concern about the gas grill, you know, like it might be a safety risk for the children.

I experienced a bit of age-panic. A hair or two may have gone gray. I think I even gained a pound. Then, to make matters worse, I suddenly realized that I actually HAVE one of Steve Raichlen’s books, and to make matters worse, it’s a damned low-fat cookbook!

Wow.

I love it when two of my passions overlap. Here’s an example.

It’s about some geeks who took to the skies in search of wireless access points (WAPs), a three-dimensional version of a technique called war-driving (where crackers drive around sniffing for unsecured WAPs).

Includes follow-up stories, and also some good security tips for those of you who have WAPs at home.

Well, I have to say I’ve never been a fan of Red Hat linux, but their new version 8 (V8) seems to finally be what the “Linux People” have been claiming about earlier distros for years—an easy to install operating system that works as advertised.

Earlier this week I installed RHLV8 on an old Dell (PentiumIII 450/256MB RAM), and it was nothing more than shoving CDs into the drive, selecting packages, and rebooting. I was duly impressed. Even more important, the application I wish to use, Radiance, compiled on the first try, with no modifications to the makefile required. Now, that is even more impressive than the easy OS install.

I have an extremely poor track record for getting Linux up and running and getting Radiance to compile, but I am slowly moving toward using Radiance in a production capacity at my job, so it’s time to get over that learning curve. My PowerBook, and particularly OSX have been instrumental in getting a working Radiance system together for my learning pleasure. But I can’t exactly leave my laptop running all night to do lighting simulations, and besides I can buy a lot more CPU cycles for my dollar with an Athlon box to chew on these Radiance calculations. So it was time to finally get a Linux box up and running.

In the past, I had tried RHL but had problems compiling Radiance. My friend Georg Mischler suggested I try SuSE Linux, which was a good deal easier to install, but soon after I got that distro up and running a fire in my apartment building destroyed that computer. A couple of years went by, and OSX came out, and well the rest is history. I always knew I’d have to return to Linux; for some reason I picked up Red Hat’s new distro, on a whim. Again, I can’t believe how easy it was to install, and I’m thrilled that Radiance compiled without a hitch.

It remains to be seen if my experience will be as pleasant on newer hardware, but I hope to find that out soon enough.