One of my favorite events in Ypsilanti is the Shadow Art Fair. Since getting a digital camera for WaffleCon 2K6: CTP I've made a hobby of wandering around and taking photos, and about a year or year and a half ago something clicked in my head and I went from thinking my photos looked boring to thinking they looked kinda neat. So I decided as an experiment to try selling prints, as well as seeing how well the zines I made went.
Russ Allbery has released version 2.13 of remctl, a "client/server protocol for running single commands on a remote host using Kerberos v5 authentication and returning the output". It's an incredibly useful piece of software, and I'm using it a lot at home and at work. I'm especially happy because 2.13 includes with it my python client bindings, so you can make calls to a remctl server directly from python, without having to call the remctl client binary.
I walked down to the polling place and cast ballot 309 in the City of Ypsilanti's Ward 1, Precinct 2 this morning around 10 am. While it was busy, the poll workers had things moving efficiently and I didn't have to wait to vote. Much has been written elsewhere about Michigan's Voter Identification Law (MCL 168.523) and the State Supreme Court decision that upheld it. I won't talk about voter disenfranchisement or lack thereof, as others are much better at that than I am.
Sometime between my two trips to Cafe Luwak (after The Stupidest Bike Crash I've ever had[1] and the Kopi Luwak tasting previously mentioned) it managed to rain, which ment that when I showed up for bike polo this evening something finally tripped in my head and I figured out how to do skids on my bike. I even managed to do one on dry pavement in the parking garage after the game, so I think it might have finally clicked in my head.
Now, the Ugly Mug Cafe in Ypsilanti is my Coffee Shop of Record, but I have respect for Cafe Luwak down in Depot Town (and it is nice to have two quality coffee shops within a short bike ride). To celebrate the birthday of The Mayor of Depot Town, Cafe Luwak had a party and had on hand it's namesake beverage, Kopi Luwak (or Civet Coffee), which are coffee berries that are eaten by the Civet, which digests most of the berries but passes the bean, er, out the other end.
Whilst working on the Jackson Pollock Memorial Software Extravaganza ("Throw some crap around and see what sticks!") my co-workers and I are naturally inclined to make snarky comments. Today co-worker Steve S. and I were leaving one meeting and I said something to the effect of "Cluster, meet fuck. Fuck, cluster." Steve mentioned that this wasn't a clusterfuck, it was a whole collection of clusterfucks. Which, naturally, lead us to wonder what the collective noun for clusterfuck is.
I want a hermetically sealed bag with a slice of bread in it, with a tab on the side that I can pull, wait 45 seconds, open the package and pull out a warm slice of toast. Why doesn't this exist?
One of my co-workers is a member of the Dorsai Irregulars, an organization that provides various services to sci-fi, fantasy and related conventions (things like organizational help, security, etc.) He and another co-worker were at Fur Fright, where they came across a gentleman that reminded them of someone they new. Photo composition follows. Astute readers will recognize the photo on the left as one of me, in full getup after the Institute for Advanced Perpendicular Logic Studies investiture of Dr.
Earlier this year Bike Ypsi cohort Tom L. devised the Taco Tour: pick a handful of Mexican restaurants and bike a loop to all of them, having a taco at each place. The 2008 Taco Tour happened this past Saturday, 14 September. The remnants of Hurricane Ike were working their way into the Michigan area, and all morning I kept an eye on the NWS radar, watching the giant blob over Illinois.
From the "I can't believe this doesn't already exist department": I have at work on occasion the need to pound the shit out of things. What can I say, I like breaking things. A side effect of this is the need to go back, after pounding the shit out of things, and trying to decypher what happened. To help with this, I really want my log to look something like this: 20080814-134403 stdout> standard output here 20080814-134404 stderr> standard error here And, along with the proverbial pony, I really want to do this with a command like timelog , e.