randyorr.net

Today is patch Tuesday and I have no machines to update. I still read about the updates, and you should too. I look around my apartment and see mac and linux, but no windows. This is very weird. No packages to push out, no updates to approve, no racks of servers with their endlessly blinking lights.

I did two things today that I should have done long ago.

First, I went downtown to the public library and got a library card. It seems odd that it took me this long, but having access to the university library probably explains this. My office was in the basement of the library for several years, and when I did move to another building I still walked past the library at least twice a day. There is a distinct smell associated with them that for some unknown reason I enjoy. One thing I always enjoy doing in any library or bookstore is looking over the tech book section. It’s interesting to see the choices that have been made. Which technologies they cover and even which books and publishers they tend to carry or display more prominently.

Second, I went to the Buddy Holly Center. This one’s just inexcusable. I really enjoyed this, there is some great stuff down there. It’s easy to forget how brief yet how influential the man was. It’s pretty cool how many big names come up in the story of Buddy Holly. In short, if you’re in Lubbock and haven’t been, go.

Made it through my first week. It’s been interesting.

Why must the west Texas weather play with me? Earlier this week it was in the 70′s, today I woke up to see frost on my windshield. I’m not saying it’s time for spring yet, but can we at least be consistent?

In other news, a copy of my resume can be found online now.

a silly little thing

Just saw The Science of Sleep. I’ve sat in front of the keyboard trying to think of what to say about this movie for about ten minutes. I’ve no idea what to say. I think it needs another viewing, and then the director’s commentary. Bottom line, I liked it very much. Since I can’t figure out what to write I will post a couple of sketches. Sometimes the hand just won’t do what the mind or eyes can see. I’m not giving up though.

Day three.

As promised, I picked two books off of the newly reorganized bookshelf so that I could write mini-reviews of said books. I chose one fiction and one non-fiction to try and keep things balanced.

“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard Feynman

The title nearly says it all. Richard Feynman was certainly a curious character. He was also one of the few people with a legitimate claim to the title “Genius”. The book has almost nothing to do with his work in physics, it is a series of stories that really show the character of the man. The one thing that stood out is his childlike curiosity and sheer desire to learn how the world works. This did not manifest itself only in physics, but in everything Feynman did. This is an excellent book, I can’t recommend it highly enough. You can find it on Amazon.

Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

From the guy that wrote Fight Club, this one’s not for everybody. The book tells the life story Tender Branson, the last survivor of a suicide death cult. Palahniuk has the ability to make you laugh and then be completely disgusted in the same sentence. If our celebrity culture drives you insane, you’ll probably enjoy this. You can find the book on Amazon.

Monday Feb 5th, 2007

Woke up at 8:30 again without setting an alarm, I guess this is the natural time my body wants to wake up.

For some reason I decided to clean off and reorganize the bookshelf in my living room. It had been collecting dust for quite some time and was in a general state of disarray. Just for the record, there are 105 books on my living room bookshelf. Tomorrow I’ll pick a couple and write a review. The only way to get better at writing is to do more of it.

This Salon piece was pointed out to me today, and is a pretty good read. Really makes you think about how writing has changed with the read/write web.

Ok, so this should have been written Friday Feb 2nd, but I was… busy. You’ll see.

Yes, it’s true. I quit my job without having another lined up. I’ll deal with why I would do such a thing later, but for now I just want to get down in writing what it’s like to not have a job.

8:30am – woke up

9:00am – shower, cheerios, etc

9:30am – check email and feed reader

10:30am – read Stephenson’s System of a World for a while. should have it finished in the next couple of days

noon – turned on the tv. There really isn’t anything worth watching, why do I even pay for this stuff?

12:30pm – made french toast for lunch. I love breakfast foods, who says you can only eat them in the morning?

1:30pm – watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

3:00pm – more email and feed reading. It’s amazing how much less email I get now. kinda nice actually.

4:00pm – went to the gym.

5:00pm – and that’s the end of my first non-working work day.

Not sure how long I can continue at this level of productivity. Somebody stop me.

I got rid of the wiki, so I’ll just be blogging this kind of stuff. This is OSX specific, but I’m sure alternatives exist on linux and probably even windows. I wanted to take a screenshot every couple of seconds in the background and save the files with some kind of unique filename. First, create an empty directory for all the files, then run this one-liner from a bash shell.
while true; do screencapture -x -s $(date +%H%M%S); sleep 10; done
The -x parameter turns off the sound normally output on each screen capture. Ok, this will give you a screenshot with the timestamp as the filename in pdf format. To convert from pdf to png:
for i in ./*; do sips -s format png $i --out $i ; done
This will convert all the files in the directory to png format. There are probably more elegant ways of accomplishing this whole thing, but it worked for me when I need it to.

27 was a good one

Started the day out here

Didn’t like that so much, so kept driving west and eventually got here

That was pretty cool, so we decided to go a little higher

And the finish, exhausted but loving every minute of it