doit, doit now!

Sadly, this breakup threw me into severe acute depression, and it’s just now I am feeling a little like myself again.

I had lunch on Monday with Carol Lin, a former CNN and ABC anchor who has the distinction of being the first reporter to break the story of 9/11. (She is also friends with my friend Jason Bellini… Very small world. In one of email exchanges she said “Oh I love Jason! He picked me up in Kosovo and drove me to Macedonia.” How often do you get emails like that?). Her husband passed away from cancer at a young age and now her mother has it. When she found out her husband had cancer she decided that she was going to stop working and become his caregiver. Since his unfortunate passing she has decided that she wants to be a force for change in the world of cancer (and chronic disease in general). She’s a very motivated and passionate individual.

We were meeting over the possibility of me helping her out with a new venture she is trying to create. We got along great. After the technical and business discussions finished we began to get a little personal. At one point she started getting visibly and softly upset and said that in the midst of all of her sadness she one day realized that she just had to wake up every morning and choose happiness. She said it was work but that she had to choose it every morning.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a joyful person, that I love to laugh and take pleasure in the little and big wonders of the world. I take joy in joy itself. After my breakup I just felt crushed and horrible. And the day I met with Carol I felt horrible. But I decided that what I was going through was nothing compared to what she went through. I have great friends who care about me, I have a great business that I have built up by myself, I have a great apartment and a great dog and a great family. So what if some misfit kid stole my heart and played emotional and mental soccer with it?

I decided that I was going to wake up yesterday and choose happiness.

And yet the day sort of sucked, but I kept reminding myself to choose happiness. I got close to tears at several points during the day, as I am now. But I woke up again this morning and decided to choose happiness.

I am going to continue to wake up and choose happiness until I don’t have to wake up and consciously think that any more. There is too much in my life that is good.

My friend read me this passage from Amy Tan’s book Saving Fish From Drowning the day after I broke up with him. The astute reader will replace gender-appropriate pronouns where they belong.

I had other men as steady companions, and with each of them I experienced a certain degree of fondness but no heartsickness worth mentioning. Well, plenty of disappointment, of course, and one silly episode of cutting up a negligee bought for a night of passion, an impetuous disregard for money, since the gown was worth far more than the man. But I ask myself now: Was there ever a true great love? Anyone who became the object of my obsession and not simply my affections? I honestly don’t think so. In part, this was my fault. It was my nature, I suppose. I could not let myself become that unmindful. Isn’t that what love is–losing your mind? You don’t care what people think. You don’t see your beloved’s faults, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don’t mind that he is beneath you socially, educationally, financially, and morally–that’s the worst, I think, deficient morals.

I always minded. I was always cautious of what could go wrong, what was already “not ideal.” I paid attention to the divorce rates. I ask you this: What’s the chance of finding a lasting marriage? Twenty percent? Ten? Did I know any woman who escaped having her heart crushed like a recyclable can? Not a one. From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don’t have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.

From BoingBoing:

There have been some rumors flying that Apple’s implementation of Time Machine is going to go hand-in-hand with an implementation of Sun’s ZFS in OSX 10.5 Leopard. I was just reading about ZFS on Wikipedia and came across a very interesting quote on the physical limits of computation. In reply to a question about filling up a theoretical ZFS filesystem without boiling the oceans, ZFS Project Leader Bonwick said:

Although we’d all like Moore’s Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 10⁵¹ operations per second on at most 10³¹ bits of information [see Seth Lloyd, “Ultimate physical limits to computation.” Nature 406, 1047-1054 (2000)]. A fully populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2¹²⁸ blocks = 2¹³⁷ bytes = 2¹⁴⁰ bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2¹⁴⁰ bits) / (10³¹ bits/kg) = 136 billion kg.

To operate at the 10³¹ bits/kg limit, however, the entire mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy. By E=mc², the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2×10²⁸ J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4×10²¹ kg. It takes about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celsius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1 kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4×10⁶ J/kg * 1.4×10²¹ kg = 3.4×10²⁷ J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans.”

Everyone seems to love this picture, so I figure I would post it. It’s Feynman doing the sit-back trick, which he knows is the cutest thing he can do and will invariably get him attention.

I forgot to point this out earlier: the diNovo mouse, the Logitech MX900, has 4 extra buttons that can be reassigned to various functions. I like to use OSX’s built-in support for mapping those buttons to Dashboard and Exposé. It makes using both Exposé and Dashboard significantly easier and I think more useful.

You can map them to whatever you want in System Preferences -> Dashboard & Exposé. Figuring out which button is which takes a few tries, though, so I have slaved through that horrible chore for you. The results:

• Push down on the scroll wheel = Mouse Button 3
• Rear Thumb Button = Mouse Button 4
• Front Thumb Button = Mouse Button 5
• Weird little button on top = Mouse Button 6

Go to town, kiddos…

This post might be NSFW. YMMV. If you find it in fact NSFW then I apologize for offending your sensibilities beforehand, because this is actually pretty damn funny.

So my friend Sheila has several hundred dachsund puppies in her loft, or at least it seems like it when you go over there and hear them bark. Kevin and I had to dogsit for two of the little ladies about a year ago. A couple of days before the dogsitting was to occur our friend Pink told us that the dogs “69’d” on a regular basis. I was incredulous. “Pink,” I said, “dogs don’t 69.”

“No, no, they do! I swear!” he insisted.

“No way, Pink,” I said.

“Whatever, Nick,” he dismissed.

So later in the week the girls came over for their dogsitting trip. At one in the morning the fat one destroyed our comforter for no apparent reason. Feathers filled the air as we fired up the vacuum, much to the apparent chagrin of our landlords above. Meanwhile the brown one walked and peed at the same time, leaving odd, long trails of urine all over the house. Lovely. After they exhausted us with their horrible behavior adorable antics, we fell asleep in our comforterless bed.

As usual I got up the next morning an hour or two earlier than Kevin and traipsed into the office to check email and whatnot. The girls followed me in and collapsed behind me on the floor while our dog, Feynman, wisely remained sleeping in the bedroom. I was typically bleary-eyed and tired, so it took me a second to recognize the distinctive sound of tongue slapping flesh. My conversation with Pink immediately came flooding back to me. I peeked over my shoulder to find, lo and behold, the dogs doing this:

So if anyone ever tells you that there are not gay animals you can point them in this direction, pointing out that a gay animal himself posted a video of other gay animals doing the nasty.

So I’ve had a Logitech diNovo keyboard, mediapad, and mouse for a couple of years now. It’s a standard Windows-style keyboard and mouse that operates over Bluetooth. It’s really well-designed and has lots of features (such as extra buttons and a non-retarded shape) the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse lack. Unfortunately in OSX the extra buttons on the keyboard don’t work and the modifier keys are swapped (option swapped with command, etc). Logitech has explicitly stated that they have no intention of producing a driver for the Mac.

I have tried lots of different methods of getting all the keys to work and to swap out the modifier keys so they work properly. Apple allows you to change the modifier key behavior in Tiger but only on a global basis such that it modifies the Macbook Pro’s keyboard as well as the external keyboard. This is annoying since it requires me to change the settings back and forth whenever I take my MBP out of the house. However using Apple’s built-in software the mouse buttons can be assigned to various Exposé actions, which suits me just fine, though other people might want the forward and back buttons to work as they were intended.

There are also some hints of Mac OS X Hints that propose modifying keyboard layouts and such, but all of them are kind of kludgy and don’t really lend themselves to random playing or modification.

I noticed a great little Open Source app called HIDFiddler that accomplishes some of what I need, but it is very young and doesn’t have an obvious mechanism for the modifier-key-swap, just for the extra button thing.

Long story short: I have finally settled on using ControllerMate as the best way to acheive all of my aims. This great, super-cheap ($15!) program allows you to customize essentially every aspect of any controller you have — your mouse, your keyboard, pretty much anything. You can attach AppleScripts to certain keys or swap others out. If you find that you never use the Pause/Break key, for instance, or you want to disable caps lock, you can do that and more.

I spent an hour or so making a configuration for my diNovo Keyboard. I used some of the AppleScripts from HIDFiddler to attach to buttons presses (mainly for iTunes controls). I exported my diNovo ControllerMate files for others to use along with my modified HIDFiddler AppleScripts. Let me know if this is at all helpful to anyone.

So I am back from India and quite ill. I somehow came down with being sick on the last day of the trip. As I was smoking the hookah with Sethers and Justin I kept saying “every time I smoke a hookah I get sick.” Sure enough, I am hacking up a lung and and forced to use Afrin (I like to call it “Nose Magic”) even though I know that rebound congestion is going to get me at some point; I just can’t breathe without it.

Today is the first day I feel better, but I am still laying low. I’m not even letting people know I am back yet, that’s how crappy I feel. I of course keep reading all about the various diseases we did not get vaccinated against because we “weren’t going to rural areas,” and now of course I keep thinking I have Japanese encephalitis or some equally horrible rice paddy-borne ailment.

I just coughed so much I got dizzy. It’s sort of fun.

What is with the Indian predilection for doing things in the longest, most insane, least-efficient way possible? It really makes me think twice about hiring Indian programers. Literally everything we saw in India was designed with that same slapdash methodology:

• The train station didn’t have signs telling what trains were leaving when.
• The train station website requires you to go to one page to look up the name of your train, another to the look up the number, another to look up the class, and another to look up the time. All this and you still can’t be sure you’re seeing the right thing, and even if you are you can’t buy tickets online.
• Buying a mobile phone requires two passport photos, a copy of your passport, proof of residency, and payment. Each time we went in to the store to buy the phone, the clerk dropped another requirement on us, resulting in four trips back and forth between the store and home, all in 100° F heat.
• Indian bathrooms (though I know it’s not limited to just India but indeed most of the Eastern world) are just nasty. There’s not much more to say than that. Our entire trip somehow revolved around figuring out ways to not have to take a duke.
• The Indian government has nuclear capabilities and can launch satellites into space but it can’t provide clean drinking water for its people. This is true even for Indians; it’s not a “foreigners don’t drink the water” situation, it’s an “everyone don’t drink the water” situation.
• The power goes out several times a day every day for indeterminate lengths of time.
• There are some lovely parks near Seth’s apartment, with nice plants and whatnot. The trees around the park on the sidewalk where you walk from Seth’s house to the Defence Colony Market are obviously trimmed and taken care of, they are just trimmed two feet too low, requiring you to duck, bob, and weave your way around them. It’s just rather striking that someone would take the trouble to trim the trees but not trim them to the point where you can walk underneath them. Seth and I discussed hiring someone to come in and trim the trees all the way to the market; I bet you could have it done for about $10. Anyone want to donate to Seth so his hair doesn’t get mussed by the trees? If you ever visit him it will be the best $10 you’ve ever spent.

These things all pale in comparison to Indira Gandhi International Airport. This airport is HORRENDOUS. You can’t enter the airport without going through a huge line and a security checkpoint just to get in the building. Here they want to see your ticket, which most people of course don’t have, not having visited the ticket counter yet. Instead they’ll grudgingly settle for a printout of your itinerary (I NEVER bring my itinerary, I just happened to do it here). This is “ticket check (TC) 1,” variously requiring examination of your passport, your itinerary, ticket, boarding pass, genetic heritage, craniofacial features, fingernail dirt level, intestinal flora load, etc.
The catch is that there are at least four entrances and each leads to a specific set of x-ray machines. Each set of machines corresponds to a different set of airlines, but there is no obvious way to tell which line you are supposed to get into in order to get your bags screened. Once through the ridiculous line you get your bags x-rayed, again requiring ticket check (TC2). Note this is all before you get your boarding pass, so individual airlines can do nothing to maximize efficiency here or speed the process along—you’re limited by the speed of the Indian government.

Your bags are sealed after the x-ray, and then you attempt go get your boarding pass. Before that, though, American Airlines at least has its own security checkpoint (TC3), after which you take your bags up to the ticket counter where they are weighed. If they are overweight you have to break the x-ray seals, throw stuff away/rebalance your bags/take stuff out/etc, go BACK to the x-ray machines, get re-x-rayed, then repeat the process. Thank goodness I didn’t have to do that. You then get your boarding pass, where they check your passport etc all over again (TC4).
You then go through another security checkpoint (TC5), the usual metal detector/carryon x-ray machine, and then you go through ANOTHER one (not kidding, TC6!), and then you get your crap searched for liquids (TC7), and you finally get to the gate, where someone else checks your bording pass in the little machine before you descend the ramp (TC8).

At this point we are finally at the plane. As an aside, our flight on the way in was outstanding; it was a mostly-empty 777 and there were several very nice gay flight attendants who kept plying me with drinks. Furthermore, upon disembarkation, one of them handed me a bag with a bottle of champagne and 25 mini bottles of Skyy vodka in it! SO nice. Now earlier, whilst waiting to get our bags x-rayed, Justin and I spied the whole flight crew and we knew they are all going to be uptight prigs. They were all evil-looking middle-aged women, the kind who would have probably been good Evil Third Grade Teachers except none of them were smart enough.

So after 8 ticket checks and accompanying rigamarole I am a bit exasperated, and then Evil Boarding Stewardess confirms our suspicions of her being a snot. As I boarded the plane the stewardess said “Do you have a boarding pass?” in a disdainful tone almost like “There’s no way this guy has a boarding pass.” I was a bit exasperated and said “No, I made it through eight security checkpoints without a boarding pass” and walked past her to the rear of the plane.

Okay I am done typing, but not before I point out that Seth just sent me an email saying

I am waiting in the LONGEST line (perhaps) that anyone has EVER stood in waiting for a taxi. I know it will be a surprise to you - but the Delhi has a very inefficient system set up here.

Lastly, I don’t remember if I pointed it out in my last post, but all of my pics are up on our new Flickr group. When Noelle gets her pics developed we’ll post those, too (she actually took FILM pictures!)

Get out of my tent! Originally uploaded by hodulik.

That’s right folks, it’s not “hih-muh-LAY-uh”! We were corrected several times by the natives.

I just got back from a trek into the Himalayas of Utteranchal via Haridwar and Rishikesh (where the Beatles went to visit the Maharishi). We took the train from Delhi up north and met up with our guide Rajinder at the lovely Camp Hammock.

We stayed overnight there and the following day made our way to Teva village which served as our base camp for the trek up to the 3500m peak of Nagtiba (variously Nagtibba, Nag Tiba, or Nag Tibba, take your pick). Teva sits in a moist deciduous forest, which is apparrently different than a temperate rain forest. All I know is that it was very, very wet, and very, very beautiful.

Anyway more later, but photosets are up on my Flickr page.