Recently in I'm a damn computer geek Category

I haven't been hiding; I'm just way too busy.

Busy with my musings.
Busy playing the consultant job for a while at PwC.
Busy admiring the delicate balance of everything around me.
Busy thinking about her.
Busy enjoying awesome news.

I upgraded the blogging engine at last. Jumping through hoops, trashing database copies several times, and just screwing up big time with a server migration has not been an easy task.

It's been enlightening, though.

Sometimes you need to leave the camera to the side and see the world; see it before you can think about framing it.

I'll be back soon with images; for now, it's a time to delve deep into what makes me move.

Hope life catches you well,

*m

About the title?

Well, N and I saw Counting Crows at last ...and it was sooo awesome.

The Traveling Circus and Medicine Show. Counting Crows and Augustana... they both hit the stage at the same time, and they both sang lots of songs.

Pure awesomeness. Two of our favorite groups onstage.



So what have I been up to?

Too many things to mention.

Some things have just been awesome, others have just been things you sort of have to do.

And as usual, here's the small (!) amount of things I want you to know... (110 photos this time)

Like a roadtrip to Bainbridge Island... driving up to Mukilteo, and then up, up, and a bit farther, just to cross over at Mt. Vernon, and then South I-5 again.

I like pie... I mean... ferries film (portra 160vc or ektar 100 -- dunno) on the m6:

























Moral of the story: Rewind the film before opening up the m6.

Now shifting to the f3 with good ol' portra 160vc. First some leftovers from Poulsbo:



















Now back to the Fremont Solstice Parade



I've realized that having more that 1 film camera screws things up. I know... maybe I just suck, but since sometimes I feel a certain camera would do fine, I leave another at home.

Anyway... when I ran out of portra, I put on a delta 400 on the F3. Still on the Fremont Solstice Parade...





















TMAX 400 on the m6 - leftovers from the Fremont Solstice Parade















I love the Seattle music scene. Looots of bands I really like. This makes me think about all the "cooool; trendy" hipsters that will go to the Killers' Concert (in either Mexico City or Monterrey). Been there... months ago. :). For what it's worth, these are from a Third Eye Blind concert. TEB rocks really hard!!!. This was with the m6 and Portra 800. These were edited in Aperture. I'm learning how to use it. Rocks on the MBP screen!! Not a big fan of Portra 800, though...







I hated the tones, so I just BW'd the rest...

















These are other frames from our every-days...

m6 + p160vc...























And that was it for that Portland getaway.

There's no sales tax in Oregon... so if you're thinking about getting a new laptop... you can go there... I did. :)

Anyway...

I took N to Ballard for a concert where Trespassers William played. Cool stuff... m6 + portra 400VC:















Then, near the end, came the big event where they took us downtown in buses... and closed down 520 and I-5 at rush hour. Yeah... I guess this is how Microsoft makes friends... oh well... it's mostly MS people in 520 anyway.





That same weekend we had hamburgers at Pablo's.... truly delicious delicious stuff... ektar (?) on the m6:





After a quick N-stop to Anthropologie...









Mariners! Well... I'm a Red Sox guy (since I met Hamza - credit where credit is due). Anyway... we went to couple of games... this is against the Blue Jays, I think... f3 + p400vc:





















Quick rewind to Portland... using efke25 on the m6... mostly personal stuff, so not sharing more than a few...:







Then, I got a delta3200 on the m6 to see what could happen:

























On a lighter note, I remember a conversation I had with my cousin about Tweeter.

Two types of people use Tweeter: Truly useful information sources or poser attention whores.

Now, I wonder what's the logic behind microblogging for the second type...

I'm doing some very very interesting/cool stuff.

...right.

No joke, I'm getting beaten up and the police has actual crimes to solve, so they're not coming.

Awesome. That last one was by Perez Hilton FYI...

Now... really... do we need a microblogging engine to know that a certain dumbass is waking up? or dressing up? or being just generally pretentious?

Naah... didn't think so.

Bitter Moon is on the TV now. Love that movie. I have not opinion about Roman Polansky, so I'll digress.

Still, it's a good movie.

Anyway... carrying on...

Approaching the end of this kilometric post... ektar on the m6:

















I made an arrangement with a friend... she'd cook delicious food, and I'll make her a portrait.

It was an awesome experiment.... apparently I don't suck terribly at portraits.

N was the art director.

Shot with the Rolleiflex T, using Portra 400VC -- perfect for the light. Here's my fave:



Say goodbye to long-ass posts.

It's hard to define the past six months of my life in a single thought. I guess not everyday you get to work on changing the e-mail management paradigm in the world, or work with the most awesome team I've ever worked with (IAM dudes... rock on!!!).

Also... I've never followed the phrase "Work hard; Play hard" so strictly.

But it paid off amazingly well... :)

I've got the tools for exactly what I want to do. My favorite camera ever, with the only two lenses I'd ever want for it - too bad I had to trade in two sweet two-eight's, and a CV one-four to get those, but well... there's a point in life where you know exactly what you want.

Last, but far from least... getting home, seeing N at home (working her genius and magic over long distance), and just thinking that I'd become an adult... in OUR place.

Can't really explain how that feels... I guess you aren't there, I could suggest to cut microblogging, the rest of your bullshit, and grow up... but anyway it's cool... I mean... not everyone can handle being a grown up, and being treated like one.

And this is now... in a break from all that... listening to the raindrops hit the glass behind me, in the big man-zoo that Mexico City is... raining at night as only it can rain in this wicked place.

There's no looking back, and there are no regrets.

This year has been better than the last; maybe as good as it gets.

Hope life catches you well,

J

For some reason I've been listening to music I don't generally listen to.

So I started with Train... and somehow remembered how someone always said "I'm like the song Meet Virginia from Train". So after listening to it, I realized how accurate that was (for best or worst).

There are many reasons why I'd always prefer Drops of Jupiter to Meet Virginia (and the girls they represent):


Aaaaanyway... onto something more interesting...

Being the geek at heart that I am... I decided to get N a copy of Delicious Library. It kind of mixes two things N loves, her macbook and books... and now that I think about it, it also encourages her sense of order.

That app is just impressive. It even works with the built-in camera of my Hackbook:



So this is what the system profiler reads:



No photos for now... have yet to develop a Delta 400+1, a Delta 100, and a Delta 400 120.

...and I'm waiting for a phone call to set up the details for the next six months in my life.

I hate all the red tape required to satisfy this wanderlust.

Hope life catches you well.

J

This is a configuration entry written from Mars Edit.

For now, I have my very own Mexico City entry waiting...

It's far from finished, but well... ya know... Photoshop takes some time... particularly with .NEF's.

It's veeeeery simple to pop your Leopard DVD and just click away "next" or "continue" and voilà... OS X 10.5 for the masses.

And what if for some strange reason the laptop won't read the DVD as startup disk?

When life is not that simple, you can just use a Mac Pro as brain for the smaller, less powerful laptop.

You might even need to end up doing this:



Yes... a huuuge Mac Pro used as a vile Target Disk. That's a very expensive external FireWire disk.

And so, I had to play around with dmg's, open firmware, and single user sessions (sooo in looove with the dark screen, and console appearance)... to finally get HERE:



And just like in American Beauty... I yelled: "I RULE".

Now... after about 35k lines of installation log... here are some useful tips I found. In fact, this is much more for me than you... so I remember stuff. If you couldn't care less... skip to the bottom of the separator...

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

• I hated the glossy dock... so I changed it. Since ObjectDock just won't work (haven't looked for it yet), I found a cool console command:
  

  defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
  
  killall Dock

• I also like to know where I am placed every instant I look to the toolbar, so I want to see a full path à la windows:
  

  defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

  ...ah yes... I am in /Developer/Applications/Utilities... that's why the regular system utilities are not here.
  
  Now I get it.
• Front Row. Yes! Awesome idea, Cupertino. But... if I don't have a remote how can I access it?
  
  Simple:
  

  Command + Esc

Thanks to D.W. Hoard at CalTech for his lovely site with OS X tips. You can learn how to change the login shell, and other practical stuff there.

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

I'm off for now... I've been having a headache today, and have still many photos to go through.

Hope life catches you well.

J

I was havig some troubles with a WinXP machine at work.

I could not see hidden files, even after activating them in options.

So I had to go to the registry editor and do the following:

Find: HKLM-Software-Microsoft-Windows-CurrentVersion-Explorer-Advanced-Folder-Hidden-SHOWALL

then DELETE the value CheckedValue in the right window. (Its type should be REG_SZ and data should be 2.)

Finally create a new DWORD value called CheckedValue (same as above, except that the type is REG_DWORD). Modify the value data to 1 (0x00000001)..

Voilà.

Yeah, yeah.. I know... I am slowly transferring entries from my old blog.

Upgrade to MT4 suuuucked.

17'' of pure joy.

Yeah, I know... some know me for being a Microsoft fanboy. Well, I still am.

I know I have more to learn.

I was reading the JavaCC manual and stumbled upon some interesting questions regarding its use. You have to love computer guys' humour when they snap...
 
4.8  Are semantic actions executed during syntactic lookahead?
No.

4.10  Are parameters passed during syntactic lookahead?
No.

4.11  Are semantic actions executed during syntactic lookahead?
No.

4.9  Are nested syntactic lookahead specifications evaluated during syntactic lookahead?
No!
This can is a bit surprising.

4.10  Are parameters passed during syntactic lookahead?
No.

4.11  Are semantic actions executed during syntactic lookahead?
No.

4.12  Is semantic lookahead evaluated during syntactic lookahead?
Yes. It is also evaluated during evaluation of LOOKAHEAD( n ), for n > 1.

4.13  Can local variables (including parameters) be used in semantic lookahead?
Yes to a point.