Home for the holidays

Drove from D.C. to MI today. Didn't get nearly as much reading on PHP done as I would have liked, but did just finish installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP on my laptop.

Still have to enable PHP extensions in the config file of the server and set up some virtual hosts. If I remember correctly, that means finding or creating a host file somewhere in my computer. And, er, sacrificing a virgin?

I'm glad to know how to do all this stuff, but I'm thinking perhaps I should learn about sports or something so I can talk to people. :)

Either way, I'm pooped. It's nice to be surrounded by family. Here's hoping T-- gets in okay tomorrow from the West coast.

My oddest impulse purchase to date

I saw this as I was checking out of Best Buy today.

Hi, welcome to my wassailing party. Oh, look, is that mistletoe you're standing under? I guess we should get it on.

Someone had discarded it on a shelf and I picked it up to see what it was. Clearly I couldn't put it down, just in case.

It turns out that most of the songs are delivered pretty straight, although God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen might be my new favorite song ever. With Idol's growl it sounds subversively aggressive.

A remembrance of things buttery

Today for breakfast I enjoyed a large cuppa tea and milk accompanied by two honest-to-God crumpets. The crumpets were vectors for a simply irresponsible quantity of butter and a much more carefully controlled dose of Marmite.

Marmite, for the uninitiated, is a bread-spread made from the yeasty detritus left over after brewing has been done. If I'm honest, it doesn't taste even so palatable as that description might lead you to expect. It's sort of like salty tar. If you grew up on it though, it's heaven.

Marmite's been easy to come by for years in the U.S., but I had no idea how close I lived to proper crumpets. Trader Joe's crumpets are the real thing. The first bite took me right back to my childhood in London and almost erased the trauma I suffered from biting into my first "English" muffin.

Thank you Trader Joe's.

I took the job

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Drink Britannia!

This is a little out of date, but last week Monday I went with my friend to the British embassy for wine and hors d'oeuvres. It was sort of funny because I met my country's ambassador to my other country (I have dual citizenship). The ambassador and his wife made a very gracious host and hostess, although I found myself unusually baffled about where to put my hands once I was done shaking theirs. I suppose I'm not used to meeting people who are important enough to represent an entire country.

It was a grand do and my friend, whose guest I was, remember, strictly discouraged me from taking photos. Sorry. This was particularly disappointing once Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell and Maureen Dowd all showed up eventually. I joked to the group I was with that I had to go deck Mr. Greenspan (for the economy stupid), because I have no idea when to keep my mouth shut.

It was a just a joke of course, since I quite admire Mr. Greenspan and I understand he has the good grace to consider our soon-to-be-former president an insufferable buffoon (I may be putting words in his mouth). Luckily people did laugh.

Maureen Dowd, who I like also - though in her case for her practical and/or provocative attitude towards both politics and feminism - was shortly surrounded by a number of young gentlemen. I assume they were trying to demonstrate that they were indeed necessary. I didn't get close enough to find out.

Indeed, I didn't say hi to any of the D.C. celebs because I'd have run out of clever things to say once I announced their own identities to them. I'm fairly sure they're all up to date on such news.

I am bummed I didn't get to ask the guy from BBC what he thought of pursuing journalism in the US. Broadcast journalists in the UK, in my humble opinion, are a bit more forceful when it comes to questions and follow-ups. I wonder if he notices cultural differences on that front too, or if I'm making it all up.

Anyway, I was a small fly on a big wall and I got to meet some interesting people and goggle at others. I was very glad to be invited.

Roundup

This guy was the hero of the article and makes me guffaw just about every time I see him.

Yesterday, while preening before the mirror of the Internet, I learned some things . . .

> My article made it to the home page of MSNBC. Yay!

This had a lot to do with my subsequent loss of time and goggled-eyed fascination with things said by others about yours-truly on various message-boards.

> People liked it. Or rather, some did. I'm told it was the most-read article on their site yesterday, and since it's only my second published article that fact leaves me a bit breathless. I gather too that some of the brass at MSNBC really enjoyed it, so that's very good news for me.

> People HATED it! One anonymous hater hated it with such hateful ambition they found this blog and left a post telling me just how much. Hey, it's good to hear so I can improve my writing. It also helped me formulate this theory about why and when people loathed it - and by frequent extension - me.

• If they felt I was critiquing technologies, people got angry. I poked fun at some much-loved and beleaguered gadgets/technologies, so that wasn't a huge surprise. Particularly the fans of underappreciated, minority-market-share technologies got pissed. Makes sense - no one likes to be put in a corner.
  
• If they read it the way I hoped - as a social critique of people who are thoughtless or heedless and use technology to either forgive or enhance that - they generally thought it was funny and cutting.

> No one defends Bluetooth headsets! Man - no joke - even many of the people who were helpfully pointing out that I'm probably poor, stupid, and a Luddite took time out to mention that they still agree with me on those things. One message-boarder referred to the earpiece as an "ear roach" and almost made me spit hot coffee out of both nostrils.

So, it was a fun day yesterday and now, thanks to the time I spent admiring myself in the Internet, now I have to spend all day mucking about with SQL and AJAX.

My second article

Yay, my second article is out. It's supposed to be lighthearted and funny.

My friend at MSNBC.com said that people there were cracking up over it, which is encouraging. I've been looking at it for so long that I couldn't tell any more if it was good, bad, or whatever.

today was a good day

Things are looking up slightly . . .

This coming Monday, it looks like I'll be raising toasts to the season at British embassy thanks to my good friend Farah who has wrangled me an invitation. She's kind of a force of nature when it comes to doing interesting things. Thanks Flail! I have to see if I still fit into my suit. Crap!

Second, my second "interactive" article will go up on MSNBC.com probably later today (it's like 1:00 AM now) thanks to my other good friend and all-around good person, Helen. She's awesome. Yay Helen. I'll post the direct link once it's up.

Third, I just had dinner with my buddy Stan who I got to know while I was in grad school. He's one of those friends you get so tight with that you can pick up years later without skipping a beat. His wife and daughter, who I met for the first time today are great too. I look forward to staying in touch with him better.

Working with computers makes me want to be a builder or painter.
pic by: Andreas Solberg on Flickr

And finally, the most personally relieving, but probably least interesting to the public at large . . . . I got my dev server working on my home computer, and even installed code(s) to diagram my MySQL database and let me play around with AJAX we should have on the website I'm building already.

Update 1 - job?

Where to start, where to start?

On the job front, I guess.
I'm hoping for a reasonable offer from this company I've just had a couple of interviews with. They're called hapax and their natural language processing software is off the bleeding hook - so much so, that it could probably parse this sentence and tell you that I think highly of their software. I don't know how it handles recursion, but I expect it does so well.

The short of it is that you feed the software text and it reads it and tells you things about it. Remarkable things - possibly even where it's easy to confuse the antecedents.

So, your civic Daniel-duty is to cross your fingers and hope that they offer me a job (and that the salary isn't less than what I was making two jobs ago at Consumer Reports).