Peebo.net

I can always find something to do other than the thing that I’m supposed to be doing. Some little project (many little projects) reasonable enough in scope to stand a chance of getting completed and just engaging enough to make me feel like they’re worthwhile. I have surrounded myself with little projects lately. I am up to my eyeballs in things I feel I must do before I… before I what?

Before I write a blog entry for one thing.

Here are a few things I’ve been doing instead of writing.

1) Household Infrastructure

This is a broad, rich category of tasks. I can spend a lot of time in this mode. It covers the acquisition of kitchen appliances, cleaning closets, washing clothes, the assembly of bookshelves, the establishment of a wireless LAN and everything in between.

2) Thinking about Consuming

The abrupt shift from a 300 square foot studio to a two-bedroom apartment with a real kitchen has made me feel more like a homeowner than a squatter. (This is despite the fact that I still don’t own a home. Are you kidding? In this market?) Thus, I’ve had a strong desire to fill up the joint with stuff–to create a perfect environment in which to relax with my thoughts and largely digital entertainment forms. My consumer instincts, long dulled by a lack of physical space to contain any but the tiniest of consumer goods, kicked in with a vengeance during my first month in San Francisco, so I did a lot of shopping. Well, browsing actually. I weighed the pros and cons of a lot of stuff but I haven’t actually acquired that much new gear (see next point).

3) Why I don’t have a Home Theatre

I always told myself that when I had the space and a sufficient acoustic distance from my neighbors I’d setup a badass home theatre system: Dolby 5.1 surround sound with high-end speakers and an HD TV. I would create an audio-visual womb into which I could retreat after a hard day in the corporate trenches. Now that we have some space, a living room wall that isn’t also someone else’s bedroom wall and a car (thus providing easy access to big-box retail stores) I began to obsessively research home theatre hardware: speakers, televisions, receivers, DVD players and all the cables devices to tie it all together. This is what I discovered:

• HD CRT televisions provide a better picture than LCD, Plasma or any of the flat screen models. They are cheaper too. However, hey have the aura of something dated, max out at about 32 inches, are damn heavy and just don’t look as cool in a living room so they’re not selling well.
• The variety of digital audio and video connectors, standards, cables, outputs, inputs, resolutions, and competing technologies is mind numbing.
• Good speakers are really expensive.
• Everything associated with purchasing and installing the home theatre of my dreams is more complex and expensive than it should be.

Screw it.

I the end I bought a composite video cable, found and flipped the switch on my 15 year old non-surround sound amp that was causing a buzzing sound in my speakers, scrubbed off the black stuff that had accumulated on the surface of my television and postponed the whole digital womb thing indefinitely.

4) The Network is the computer

Now that I have multiple rooms it is imperative that I have a seamlessly operating wireless LAN to help me manage my digital lifestyle. (How else could one live, really?) This is the rundown [WARNING: extreme nerd content ahead!]:

• A DSL Modem jacks into a router with a static IP address.
• The router is connected (via Ethernet) to: Replay TV (poor man’s Tivo), Xbox and Airport Express base station.
• The Airport Express creates a wireless network for an aging Dell laptop, lampshade iMac and refurbished 12′ iBook.
• The iMac is a workstation (for fun, coding, email, typing), web server (all port 80 requests to the router are forwarded to the iMac), and media server (two external hard drives [named Grande and Frank] holding nearly 200 gigs of music, video, photos and backups); the iBook is the roaming, all purpose household client machine; and the Dell is for work.

All the macs work together in perfect harmony via Rendezvous (now called Bonjour) sharing drives, iTunes music libraries, and a printer but I can’t get Windows 2000 to play ball. (This is complicated by the fact that the Dell is really a work machine to which I have basic admin rights but lack the administrative user passwords necessary to alter some key network settings. Life is hard.)

The network is pretty stable now, but the storage/file management/file organization side of the house is still a mess. I’m still consolidating MP3 collections, organizing hundreds (thousands?) of digital photos and trying to come with a manageable backup routine for the whole mess.

3) It’s work related… really…

I’ve also been playing around with a lot of new tech (or tech that’s new to me). For example, I am completely fascinated by what is now being termed Ajax. Before it had a cool name I knew it when I saw it (and loved it), but when Jesse James Garrett (we do basically the same thing for a living, by the way) coined the term in his February 2005 blog entry I was like, “Yes. It is named.” Getting my head around the capabilities of a smart combination of JavaScript, CSS, XMLHttpRequests (and here), and good old iFrames and what that means for web interface design gets me completely stoked. As developers and interface designers become more experienced with these technologies the whole conception/expectation of how a web interface should function will change. The way we think about the use of online tools and information will change dramatically. Exciting stuff. Therefore, I waste a lot of time proving concepts to myself and boring the hell out of any co-worker/wife within earshot.

Also on within this category of geekly interests are: RSS, collaborative information sources, podcasting, bittorent, struggling with vi (my new host doesn’t have emacs!) and making my CueCat work. (An operating CueCat is the cornerstone of an ambitious book cataloging effort that’s also in the works.)

6) I know where to get good parking at Fisherman’s Warf

I’ve also hosted a number of visitors over in the past month. It was actually great timing because they forced me to get out of my neighborhood (not to mention my house) and explore the city. First there was Dan-the-Man (still crazy as a shithouse rat), followed by Leah and Brian (Queens in da house!) and finally rounded out with my Mom (she’s the shit—and doing very well, BTW) and her entourage of lovely ladies: Tanni, (the crazy one), Linda (the wild woman in conservative clothing), and Rebecca (the sane one).

I had a great time with all of them. I watched Dan trade one of his paintings for… some stuff… at Ocean Beach, played scrabble at Finnegan’s Wake with Leah & Brian, and saw every significant tourist spot in the Bay Area from the driver’s seat of a rented SUV with four delightful ladies.

7) And then there’s work

I’m still working as a contractor for my old employer. The pay is good and so are the hours. I hope it continues.

This week I’m starting work on a project (un-paid) for non-profit organization called the Poniecki Foundation based here in SF. I’d give you a link to their web site but… well, that’s the project.

I’ve also joined a few of User Experience/Interaction Design/Online Media type of organizations. The most interesting so far has been BAY-CHI (the Bay Area chapter of ACM SIGCHI). I’ve gone to a couple events down in “the valley” and I’ve been pretty impressed with the people, the level of discourse, and the sweet job opportunities.

The first meeting I attended was at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC, as in XEROX PARC, as in the place that gave us the Graphical User Interface (GUI), client-server architecture, and little thing called the mouse to name a very few.) To me this place is like a geek Mecca. The speakers that day weren’t so great, but I was just happy to be there. At another meeting an Intuit user experience team talked about the development methodology behind a new product they released this year. Before the meeting they announced they were looking for interface and usability people and then a guy from Yahoo stood up and said he was also looking. Sweet. (Every conversation ends with “send me a link to your website,” however, so add “develop work/portfolio web site” to my list of projects.)

How about the wife?

We’ve found time to go hiking (or at least walking with a view) pretty regularly and watch a few good movies. Katy is studying for the CFA exam, however, so she’s actually much busier than I am. She’s putting in 2-3 hours per night plus 4-6 hours per day on weekends. Jeesh.

She’s in London this week for work. Some sort of Risk Management training. We rendezvous in Little Rock on Friday where we’ll spend a little time with the extended Peebo family.

9) What’s a blog post without discussion of the blog itself?

During the move one of the boxes that made its way slowly cross-country via UPS Ground contained my iMac, which until recently was my primary web server and the home of peebo.net. During the move I redirected the domain to a hosting facility and slapped up placeholder page. I could have probably migrated everything to the hosted server before leaving NYC, but I figured the downtime would just be a couple of weeks. Weeks turned into over a month (see above).

After struggling for days with setting up a new Movable Type instance on the remote machine (fucking Perl modules) I chucked the whole app and moved to a very cool tool called WordPress. It’s free, open, extremely well documented and PHP-based, which makes it much easier for me to manage and modify. The initial setup takes five minutes.

After it was up and running I spent some time extending the functionality and tweaking the interface (the look-and-feel is just a slight modification of the default theme) and now Peebo 2.0 is alive!

There’s also a new subscribe/unsubscribe feature (see right column). I took the liberty of adding a number of you to my initial distribution list, but please feel free to unsubscribe if you don’t need yet another email or if you’d prefer to keep up-to-date via the RSS feed. (You can unsubscribe via a link in the notification email you may have already received.)

Enough?
So, there you have it. Another marathon update. I know I always say this, but I will attempt to post more regularly (and briefly) in the future.

See ya.
-peebo

posted by peebo on Monday, August 15th, 2005 at 6:23 pm
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