moonlee.org

Mad Men

moon — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 20:11:52 +0000

Zoe and I have watched the first 3 seasons of Mad Men via iTunes, and have been thoroughly smitten by its excellence. We’re quite excited for the season 4 premier at the end of this month. I just read a fantastic (p)review of the series on Salon (“‘Mad Men’: Stillbirth of the American Dream“) by Heather Havrilesky, which I think quite accurately describes how the show embodies so much of the pathology of trying to live the American Dream:

This is the genius of “Mad Men,” its dramatic reenactment of the disconnect between the dream of dashing heroes and their beautiful wives, living in style among adorable, adoring children, and the much messier reality of struggling to play a predetermined role without an organic relationship to your surroundings or to yourself. We’re drawn to “Mad Men” week after week because each and every episode asks us, What’s missing from this pretty picture? … As absurd as it seems to cobble together a dream around a handful of consumer goods, that’s precisely what the advertising industry did so effectively in the ’50s and ’60s, until we couldn’t distinguish our own desires from the desires ascribed to us by professional manipulators, suggesting antidotes for every real or imagined malady, supplying escapist fantasies to circumvent the supposedly unbearable tedium of ordinary life. In show creator Matthew Weiner’s telling, the birth of the advertising age coincides directly with the birth of our discontent as a nation — and what got lost in the hustle was our souls.

There is no spoon

The summer of visits

moon — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:48:41 +0000

Arlo teaches Paul about the finer points of stoop sitting.

Well, in the last 3 weeks we’ve had a flurry of visits, all involving Colorado folks: Max, Ryn and Paul. And this weekend we’re off to NY to attend Tim and Caroline’s nuptials in CT. It’s been wonderful to see so many friends over the summer, and has made life quite a fun departure from the normal day-to-day routine. Come to think of it, we’ve either had visits or been out-of-town on visits every weekend since June 4. Nice! Who’s next?

Just wanted to thank all you guys coming to visit us and hang out, it means a lot to us and we love that Arlo gets to continue to get to know our family of friends.

Like yesterday. And not.

moon — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:18:37 +0000

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 12 years since we were all last together, and even stranger, that 20 years have gone by since we were teenagers graduating from Milton, casting off into the rough waters of adulthood.

Returning for the 20th high school reunion was a simple experience, not nearly as complicated as I had imagined it to be. People were more or less the same, perhaps a bit more weathered, but at the same time more relaxed and gentle, in the way that water and wind and a lot of time can smooth a rough stone. It was overall an opportunity to reconnect and catch up on the happenings over the last 20 years: the births, marriages, a few deaths. A lot has happened, but we fit together in that old comfortable way we always did — perhaps even better as any reason for discord has long been forgotten and the collective memory only retains the humorous and outrageous moments that good stories are made of.

For myself, I was reminded of the painful journey going from 13-18, and felt a little cognitive dissonance seeing it juxtaposed against the idyllic, privileged campus of Milton Academy. It really hit home how the fear, insecurity, anger, and everything else that governed my life at the time took away what could have really been something incredible.

Something that always applies I suppose…

After few months at the new school

Getting it straight.

moon — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:29:34 +0000

Not the most scintillating material for those who don’t sling code, but I thought I’d write a quick post extolling my new development workflow for 2010. Having spent most, if not all of 2009, in a coding frenzy for my clients, small and large inefficiencies really slowed me down. I have a variety of projects and spend time coding in many different languages and platforms including Python/Django, Ruby/Rails, PHP/Wordpress/*, Javascript/CSS/HTML, and even some Perl now and then. Some of these projects have development environments, some do not. Some are under version control, and others are not. Some I develop on local machines in my office, others I have to develop on remote servers. Somehow it all worked, but I knew I wanted to streamline and optimize things a bit from a development perspective and really gain efficiencies from a common toolchain.

So first I decided to consolidate all my development locally on my HackPro workstation, which is more than up to the task. But running all these different platforms and frameworks on my mac was a bit daunting; using the stock apache has always been a bit of a pain and compiling and configuring my own builds on the mac just seemed masochistic. Enter Bitnami stacks — self-contained development environments including Apache + MySQL + Rails/Django/PHP, with an amazing selection of every major platform built using these frameworks. Excellent… an atomic Apache + MySQL build for every development environment was exactly what I was looking for. And, as a bonus, once it’s installed, it’s portable: I can easily zip it up, copy it over to my MacBook, and take it with me without missing a beat. Bliss.

Oh, they also provide VM images and EC2 cloud instances if that’s more your thing.

Next task: accessing the utilities, libraries, and shell tools that I’m accustomed to developing with on Linux. For this, MacPorts is a must-have. With a few short commands, you can compile and install your own Perl, ImageMagick, ghostscript, etc., and all their dependencies in just a few minutes. Truly awesome.

Last thing on the agenda is getting everything in version control. That was pretty easy: I have a few Slicehost servers and it was not problem to set up a remote repository for my unversioned client code. If Slicehost isn’t your thing, there are services like Beanstalk too for Subversion hosting. All of the repositories I work with are Subversion based, and I’ve traditionally used the shell to manage my repositories. But this year, I’ve decided to look into some graphical SVN clients to see if they make managing my repositories and working directories any easier. The two main contenders on the Mac right now are Versions and Cornerstone; while quite close functionally, Versions seems to have the edge on the UI and polish, while Cornerstone has a bit more for advanced users. I’m using Cornerstone right now, and have been fairly impressed. Jury’s still out as I haven’t used it too much, and I’ve noticed the absence of some critical commands, e.g “svn merge” and “svn switch”. But it’s got most of the stuff I need, which might be enough, I certainly don’t mind using the shell for the heavy lifting. And I certainly do like a common interface to access all my repositories across a variety of remote servers.

Throw in your favorite editor, Textmate, Vim, Coda, or whatever, and now you’re cooking with gas! So that’s what I’ve got so far, and so far it’s been working pretty well. Develop on a mac? What works for you?

Nice Parking Job

moon — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:48:09 +0000

Over the weekend, while I was out running an errand with Arlo, we both witnessed an impressive feat of driving, performed by a rather elderly woman who perhaps should have turned in her car keys a few years ago.

Having trouble negotiating a turn off the main boulevard onto a side street, she got stuck after making her turning radius too wide. After attempting to straighten out and back up, she must have gotten flustered due to the fact that someone was waiting behind her.

Well, either she mistook the gas for the brake or she experienced the worst case of road rage I’ve ever seen, because, next thing I knew, I heard the squealing of tires and turned around just in time to see her backing up, full throttle, and drive her car up onto the hood and over the roof of the car behind her.

Madness: windows shattering, engine whining as she was still stomping the accelerator flat out, wheels spinning crazily in the air, and occupants of the car underneath throwing themselves out of harms way. Luckily no one was seriously injured.

It was very impressive and a bit freaky. I mean, that’s kind of the last thing you expect the car in front of you to do. Arlo was sure surprised.

It was fairly reminiscent of this gem of a video:

Mac 10.6 LCD Font Smoothing Bug

moon — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:26:05 +0000

For anyone out there using Snow Leopard (10.6) on their Mac with a 3rd party monitor (I use Samsung flat panels), you may notice your text seems harder to read. I personally realized that after a few long coding sessions in front of the Mac my eyes started completely bugging out after a few hours. Somehow the fonts never seemed to render right, but I thought I was imagining things. But no, it turns out I wasn’t: there’s a bug in the 10.6 LCD sub-pixel font smoothing setting when using your Mac with certain 3rd party monitors. In the “Appearance” setting, you’ll notice 10.6 has a simplified smoothing setting which simply offers to enable LCD font smoothing if its available. This is different from previous versions which allowed you to set this property manually, and it probably wouldn’t be a problem if it actually worked.

To manually enable it, just use this terminal command:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

As you can see from the picture, this setting makes quite a difference. Well this change is literally a welcome relief for the old eyeballs.

No related posts.

Food allergies update

moon — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:47:03 +0000

We got the results back from the blood test the allergist ordered for Arlo to get a better handle on exactly how allergic he is to certain things. Skin tests were indicating he had allergies to many nuts, soy, and milk. Well surprise, surprise. The blood tests ran indicated a class 2 reaction to some nuts (6 is max), but negative for soy and milk! It was definitely good news, but a bit disorienting; if we can take the blood test as authoritative, if it’s not a allergic response we’re dealing with here, what’s happening to Arlo with these foods?

We’re still maintaining Arlo’s diet as something isn’t quite agreeing with him with these foods, but it definitely takes some of the stress of knowing that should any accidental milk or soy sneak in there, we don’t have to worry about a anaphylactic response and a trip to the ER. Probably the silver lining to all of this is that the whole family is eating much healthier now as we’ve virtually eliminated all processed foods as well as eating out and Zoe is making most things from scratch now (soup bases, breads, crackers, etc.) and it’s definitely made a noticeable difference in our general health. Thanks Zoe!

Pajamas: Not just for sleeping

moon — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:55:11 +0000

Via BoingBoing

One interesting unusual cultural thing I noticed during my time in China was the fashionable acceptance of wearing your pajamas out in public like normal daywear. It was a common sight to see people (usually men) strolling down the street or waiting for the bus wearing a nice set of pajamas. I was initially confused, wondering if they knew what they were wearing. But apparently, they do. And now the government, in one of its public behavior campaigns, is trying to stop people from the practice in Shanghai, host city of the next World Games.

While I was in pre-Olympics Beijing, there were many such campaigns, including asking people to stop the rather common practice of spitting up huge phlegm balls and hucking them on the ground, both indoors and out. While discouraging this is understandable (if not entirely successful), I rather think the practice of pajama wearing is simply a dose of cultural flavor that simply adds to the experience.

Well we’ll see what happens.

VMware Fusion 3: Awesome

moon — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:03:46 +0000

For those of you running Mac OS X and some sort of virtualization software, I’m happy to report that the VMware Fusion upgrade is a noticeable improvement over an already solid product. While most of the work seems to have gone into the ease-of-use of the management, configuration and migration tools, there have been some significant performance improvements as well under the hood, including full support for 64-bit on the host Mac, improved 3D acceleration, and general improved performance on the guest VMs. Running XP on this version is much more responsive than on 2.x, and running Windows 7 RC handles aero glass effects without a problem.

Improved VM Management Interface

Generally, I haven’t been disappointed by Fusion yet, and v3 continues to build on and improve a great product. Their VM setup sequences make hands-free installations pretty easy, and they’ve even improved their Linux install process with automated VMware Tools installs as well. Throw in improved mac filesystem integration, a new menubar applet, and a high degree of customization, v3 does a nice job of striking that balance between the power and casual user in a single package. I’m definitely impressed.

Better Host OS Integration

If you’re running Fusion 3, drop a line and let me know what you think.

Happy Autumn

moon — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:14:53 +0000

Paul and I are somewhere in the back

I took a quick break last weekend and flew out to Colorado to see Paul and we spent a good part of a Saturday sitting in a hydrogen peroxide enriched hot pool at 8700ft next to Gold Lake. Looking out over the lake, we could see the distant snow capped peaks, and strong winds would occasionally blow snow over the lake to melt on our faces. I felt a bit like a Japanese Macaque snow monkey. It was bliss.

I’ve returned to a gorgeous Chicago autumn, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. It’s was even nice raking the ridiculous quantity of leaves dropped by the box elder tree in the front yard today. Yesterday we took Arlo trick-or-treating and were visited by many swarms of costumed children and young adults (some of whom I think should probably have quit trick or treating a few years ago, but I digress), who descended and swarmed our candy bowl like locusts on a field of crops. I actually had to go out and get more candy. We even had people driving in from other neighborhood blocks, forming lines in front of each house. An entertaining and surprising first halloween in the neighborhood.

Wherever you are, I hope you are taking a little time to enjoy the turning of the seasons as we settle down for the coming winter…