Time is Relative
January 19, 2006 by Eric Richardson
I'm getting set to head home from work, and it's about 8:35pm. Over the last three days I've probably averaged close to ten hours a day in the office.
But you know what? That's my choice, not my employer's.
During high school I worked at a place I really enjoyed, and I'd go hang out at work just because I didn't have anything better to do. On the weekend I'd get up in the morning, drive to the office, and stay there until I had something fun to do in the evening. I was getting paid to play with computers; why wouldn't I be there?
That's sort of what I'm feeling like right now. I'm getting paid to mess around with computers. I mean, I either hang out here on the computer or at home on the computer and it just so happens that the stuff I'm doing here is cooler right now.
Checking Out Basecamp
January 19, 2006 by Eric Richardson
I know I've heard of Basecamp many times over the past couple months, but only sort of in the periphery -- one of those things where you know the name, but you don't know much more than that. Today, though, I was in the market for a system to manage collaboration between a few people here and two different clients as we tweak and bugfix an app that'll be going live in the next couple weeks. I found that Basecamp was actually what had been used for a previous project with different clients, so I took some time today to play around and see what all the hype's about. — Continue Reading...
I Guess That's Inflation
January 17, 2006 by Eric Richardson
In school I wrote all my papers using LyX, a document editor that lets you worry about the structure of your text while writing and handle the actual bits like how it'll look later. I love it before it creates really nice looking output, and typesets worlds better than a normal word processor like Word.
In any case, last week I started on a document using LyX running on a G5. Then Friday I got the iMac, but all I could find online were PowerPC binaries. So I figured, hey, it's open-source. I'll compile my own.
First, though, I had to compile QT, since it's used by the nicest of the LyX frontends. Simple enough. The open-source version of QT is a 25mb download. I unpacked it, ran configure, and started it compiling. Some decent value of a long time later it finished. And, well, the tree got a little bigger during the compile:
erichardson:~/src eric$ du -hs qt-mac-opensource-src-4.1.0
2.6G
2.6GB out of a 25mb download. Yikes.
First Impressions from the New Intel iMac
January 17, 2006 by Eric Richardson
Like I mentioned on Friday, I picked up one of the new Intel-chipped iMacs for work. Between playing around Friday afternoon and this morning, I think I can give some early opinions.
Bullet points: Big, bright screen. Silent. The universal binary movement is going to be interesting to watch. — Continue Reading...
So That's Why It Was Slow
January 15, 2006 by Eric Richardson
Yesterday afternoon I rode the Red Line up to North Hollywood to meet up with Kathy. The train was acting pretty funny: it showed up early, and then took multiple long stops at stations mid-route. Just before Universal we took the crossover to the southbound tracks and completed the trip on that side. 7th/Metro to North Hollywood, normally a 25 minute trip, took 40.
Turns out the slowdown was the result of an apparent suicide try.
A British woman was struck by a Metro Red Line train at the North Hollywood station Saturday afternoon when she stepped down onto the tracks in an apparent suicide attempt, authorities said.
The unidentified woman, in her 40s, suffered life-threatening injuries, officials said. Authorities said she left a suicide note in her backpack.
At North Hollywood half of the platform was taped off and there was a train stopped halfway into the station, so if I had to take a guess I'd say she jumped as the train was entering. Not all that great a way to take yourself out, though; the train's not moving that fast coming in.
Update (Just a few minutes later): The Daily News confirms my guess that the train was entering the station and slowing down.