mindlace

I made a plugin for jquery that lets you intelligently check your server for changes in a web page.

See the project page or the canhas post for more details.

So, as I’d mentioned before, PayPal can really mess you over. Especially if you’re a small business, you should avoid them.

Sorry for the downtime, I forgot to change a config setting. I just wanted to let my loyal reader know that I am blogging more of my techie stuff at canhas.biz – the little company thing that I do.

I’ll try to say some more personal stuff soon too.

I have liked many films, been moved by many, but never have I had a favourite until last night. Claudia is a fan of Klaus Kinski and rented Fitzcarraldo.  You must see it.  The exquisite camera work and extraordinary directing are riveting by themselves, but the jaw-dropping realism renders the surreal storyline a visceral verisimilitude that is utterly enthralling.

The fact that the story is a wish-fulfillment fantasy that seems to have been written precisely for a Don Quixote like me took the aforementioned elements, which alone would have sufficed to render the film among the greatest I’ve ever seen, and enthroned it firmly at the peak of my regard.

Sorry that it’s been so long since I posted; life has been busy, but fruitful.

At the moment I am trying to get a work visa in Germany, and living with the wonderful and charming Claudia. This features lots of kafka-esque moments, wherein I try to convince people that have no understanding of the work I do that I am sufficiently qualified.

Besides that, my zero-owned-matter quest proceeds apace:  I have fewer than 10 physical books now (an enormously difficult thing for me to do), and am in the process of selling off my car.

The clothing-rental thing would work if I were in the states; I haven’t looked here in Europe yet. Unfortunately it is not particularly cost-effective to rent your clothes, and has rather dire consequences for one’s ability to make a sartorial statement.

In any case, once the car is sold the largest piece of matter I will own is an Aeron chair and associated desk. Not quite ready to give up on that, but for the moment it is in the states.

My work is interesting – getting to implement a scrum-like development environment for a web-development firm, as well as improving their toolchain all round – svn, redmine, automated testing, etc. I am enjoying the challenge of moving an existing team towards a better method of working.

I’m still shoveling through my mountain of debt, incurred while attending college, and it seems unlikely that I will be free from it until at least the end of ‘09; I am seriously looking forward to a future when I actually get to allocate more than a quarter of every dollar I earn somewhere other than “paying for yesterday”.

For those of you who follow my twitter feed, you know I’ve already broken down and pre-ordered a Kindle 2. Despite announcing it many months ago, I have not given away most of my books. I suspect my reticence is in not wanting to give up the content. However, I have a workaround. I’m going to use delicious library to catalog all the physical books I have, so that I can gradually re-acquire my library in ebook format.

Anyway, so this should get rid of the bulk of my non-car owned matter. As part of the move I’m going to try to come up with an estimate of how much mass remains in my possession, so I can accurately track its diminishment.

So of course on the way to material independence, I find a (few) new things to buy; a pen and a cot with wheels and a roof. The cot looks like it will assemble in my Fit with the passenger seat down, and I imagine I can insulate it against the cold. Have to see if they’ll even let me buy one, as they seem intent on giving them away; I’ll try to give and get.

I still have to watch out for all the places in which it would be illegal for me to sleep. I have to find someplace to park my car anyway while I am not in the Estados Unidos, so I will be looking for some long term parking where I can sleep and preferentially get watts and in a perfect universe get bandwidth.

Of course, it’s not exactly a trivial pen, but I’m already planning on needing to plug in my book and half a dozen other bits of electronic lampreys. As much as I want to be a 21st century digital boy there are some thoughts I can only get out on paper, so at least this way I will get a digital transcription of what I write.

You have to use special paper, but I could use the discipline of only having one thing to write on. I also ordered some moleskin-alikes, so I should have a decent form factor. We’ll see if it works as advertised, as it is the latest in a long line of dead gadgets that tried to do something similar.

If it works, then at the end of every page I can (if I so choose) just rip it out and destroy it; the data will stay with me, so it counts as more portable than the few other old journals I never read but lug around anyway.

Now for a brief PSA:

In these Turbulent Times I feel it my duty as an American to whore myself out to the general public with more élan. It is in this spirit that I would like to formally announce the opening of the Mindlace T-Shirt Shop. Please spend all the money you were saving for that Senate Seat or Convertable Debt Swap Instrument.

The women’s T-shirt is made of organic cotton harvested using sustainable methods, so I thought I should mention that the ink on that shirt is made with the crushed bones of underage sweatshop workers.

(NSFW, or your momma.)

I hadn’t really thought about the fact that the talk Adam Kelsey and I gave was going to be uploaded onto archive.org. I was just reading an article in Nature by Cory Doctorow about the infrastructure archive.org uses, replicated on three continents, and designed for the Long Now (at least as close as one can get with racks in data centers, anywho), and it made me think of how this point in human history is like the short, hot time at the beginning from an informational perspective.

There will come a time, not long from now, that the notion that one would ever “lose” data is like the notion that one could misplace one’s ear, or more gentle parts; just not even considered, because everything naturally persists in multilayered, adaptive caches that cause all data to be conserved like the data at archive.org.