Messenger, Instantly

How could I run a blog without even mentioning Instant Messenger? I don’t know.

Am I becoming an expert on the matter? I have been working on this off and on since 2000, when Marshall T. Rose first started talking about his beloved BEEP (back then still BXXP) and a new generation of IM products and protocols. He was getting excited, sat down a while with a bunch of smart nerds, and there you are, out comes IMXP (soon to be renamed APEX). Marshall is an incredible man. Once he decides he is going to revolutionize the world, there is no stopping him – even if his revolution is not really what the world wants.

The Two Towers (2003)

Chance made me go to the opening night of “The Two Towers”, the sequel to last year’s “The Fellowship of the Ring”. A colleague had bought two tickets and had run amiss of his date, so that there was an immediate opening. We were very late, so that a lot of this review will be tainted by the spectacle of elves with elongated faces and flat hobbits. The Two Towers is the second book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. As such it is the toughest, having to build on a predecessor and not ending quite satisfactorily. And yet, it seemed a much better movie than last year’s. For one, the adaptation does not follow the book in its time frame and stops short of the end of book two. This will allow the script to continue unburdened into the last chapter, and didn’t fill up this movie with too much action.

Torrents

It’s been raining all day, in the first of a series of torrential flows that mark the beginning of the rainy season. Well, at least it’s in mid-December and not in November, like last year.

The rain feels so odd here. So out of place. Especially when it’s not drizzling, but pouring like it was today. We don’t see much of that, haven’t in the last seven eight months.

When it rains in California, the gutters explode. The water shoots from all sides, draining into rivers that gush over streets first, then highways, and then even freeways. The state, at least from San Francisco South, is not used to rain and takes each occurrence of a severe storm as an unplannable catastrophe.

YEP

Year end party.

Once a year, this company, too, throws itself into a frenzy for a good cause (the amusement of the employees) and spends a hopefully not startup sum to come up with an evening of fun and glory and debauched drinking.

Amusing how the company keeps its headquarters in the South Bay, but thinks nothing of throwing its party in the city. Is it because the big party goers live there, anyway? The rest of us, who moved down the Peninsula to cut on the commute, thank them by leaving early and thus making the party a real success.

Googlecounts

Yesterday, I had forgotten how to spell ’embarrassing’ and was too lazy to look it up on dictionary.com. Instead, I went to Google and typed in the two possible spellings I was considering: ’embarrassing’ and the more phonetically correct ’embarassing’.

Never mind that my Italian suggested the single ‘r’ where I should have known better; never mind that dictionary.com and any other dictionary are the right source for this type of information; never mind that what I got was just a corruption of a search; never mind that Google itself suggested the correct spelling.

Waking Up Early

4:30 AM. No alarm clock is bugging me, no need to wake up, the sun won’t be shining for another two hours or three.

And yet, something immaterial makes my soul levitate into consciousness. All of a sudden I function in wake-state, and the logical flow of my mind is restored where it was interrupted.

The transition is sudden, and sometimes it feels as if there had been one single moment when it happened, as if the soul were not, as it seems, a flowing entity, but one that makes leaps to reach from one end of the chasm to the other.

Big Island

Just got the Big Island book from the Hawai’i Guidebook series. Seems odd that an island that big would have that few sights, and worse still that few notable ones. If I compare this with the corresponding books on Kaua’i and Maui, the density of sights and their quality seems much lower.

I wonder why that is. Hawai’i sounds much more diverse and interesting than the other islands, as long as nature is concerned. Granted, it’s not the island for the thrill seeker or the party animal, but that’s not what I was looking for.

California Rain

It’s official now: the rainy season started. California will be enveloped in clouds for a considerable portion of the next four months, drowning us in three quarters of the annual rainfall.

And yet, although my biking will have to be cut back, it is not all bad. You should see the clouds lit afire by the setting sun, or the pink watercolors you’d see in the morning looking east. I sometimes try to catch those paintings with a camera, but they are as elusive as hummingbirds – of whom we see more now that they rely on the feeder to get through the winter.

Foothill Expressway

The day is gorgeous, albeit a little chilly. Another two hours or so, and I’ll be on my bike, riding to distant lands and trying to get back into shape.

Distant lands? No, my standard route is still unchanged. I leave the house, a few turns left or right, and I end up on Foothill Expressway, the Peninsula’s major biking thoroughfare.

Sometimes it feels as if everybody has to ride Foothill. In the summer, the packs of bikers are such that the main highway is cramped into one single car lane, while the buzzing of chains on gears can be heard from afar.

CanoScan N1220U

Yet another maddening piece of hardware that resists all attempts to make it run under Linux… SANE is kind enough to tell me the chip is a National Semiconductor, and that support is going to be built-in very soon, but I’ve had the unit for two years, now, and still no resolution in sight.

Who’s to blame? Canon and their blind policy of not releasing information? Linux and the lack of central authority? Marco and his attitude towards sitting down and write the friggin’ driver himself?