Climate Change

Air conditioning simply isn’t used as much here in London; the indoors are kept a few degrees (F) warmer than I am used to in Chicago, which has a similar (outdoors) climate.

I’d expect that if I stayed here I’d sweat off about 10 lbs just doing standard office work, which could explain how the average frailty here is noticeably higher.

A Can of Coke

SI measurements mean a can of pop is 330ml, which is just shy of 11.2 oz. In the US, it’s a 12oz can. That’s about 12 calories less sugar per-can, which would be another reason why people here are thinner.

Metropolitan

Holy Christ as a cracker.

So here’s the thing: U.S. cities are mostly planned and Cartesian; they’re on a grid. It may not be perfect, but you can expect big long streets that run the length of the city, cross-streets that cut over, and a few exceptions that cut diagonally to help you get from A — C without going north to B, then over to C. Once and a while, a street will dead-end for some reason, and you’ll have to go around the block, or up and over a few to find an underpass beneath the expressway or avoid a one-way section of a street.

And for you native Bostonians, I recommend you come visit your cousins in Chicago and you’ll see what I mean… Hell, even Newark has a grid.

You can also expect the numbers to count up coherently: if I say that Madison and State are (0,0), and I live on 1800 N. Wells, you can figure out pretty easily how to get from Madison and State to my house by glancing at a map. The only information that isn’t encoded in the address is the X axis of Wells, which means that once I know 2D geometry (which everyone is taught the first year of High School), the only additional cognitive load required to find my way to any given address is the missing coordinate of the street the address is on. I have to learn that Wells = 200 West, that x = –200. And that’s something you can learn once and never forget. If I do have to detour for some reason, I know that I’ve cut over to Clark, which is 100 West, and can get back most any time I want.

Not so in London, at least Tower Hill, which is where my hotel is. Without some kind of map, it isn’t even possible to discern that you’re headed the wrong direction—even Sol has deserted you in your quest. The closest analogue I can imagine is that some mad fiend has turned the heart of a major metropolitan area into the cul-de-sac hell that is restricted to the suburbs in the US.

I’m not saying that Hell is wrong, but I can turn left twice and still end up travelling the same direction, because the streets all curve and stop after a block or two. Just sayin’

This also means that cabbies here have a tremendous racket, as they can legitimately meander around a neighborhood trying to find a street which only exists for a block or two. It also means that no matter where you are, where you’re going, or how you’re getting there, it will take you about an hour.

Transit Costs

The Underground is 2.3x more expensive than the CTA. Yes, things are much more posh, and London is more expensive in general, but it costs me 6 USD, rather than 2.5 USD to get anywhere.

Cheers

“Thanks, you’re a diamond, babe” is not something you’d ever hear in the U.S. for letting someone bum a smoke. (Well, maybe Boystown.) I tend to worry that I come across as something of an ogre for the businesslike, give-nothing-away, “thanks” I’m used to. We’re not assholes, we just play poker.

Update: If you’re tempted to take offense, please recall these are tongue-in-cheek, touristy observations of a confessed business-traveling Chicagoan who actually did enjoy himself, particularly on Brick Road the night before he left.

The reason is very simple: Apple chose control over openness, and they’re paying for it. The exclusive deal with AT&T meant they were stuck using the absolute worst wireless network, the shoddiness of which meant turning off users. The App Store big brother turned off developers and the tech saavy—the same thought leaders that Google catered (and I’d say still caters) to, the ones that went around switching everyone’s default home page from Yahoo! a decade ago…

Posting it here since it’s the second time I’ve had to find this…

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about privacy lately. Most of the shiny things here on the internet are some type of service where you abandon some degree of privacy to an intermediary in return for convenience or community: your blog, Facebook, Twitter, GMail, Amazon.com, and Last.fm take much of the random bits of your life and put them into corporate-owned databases so you can connect with friends, buy random things without moving, or not have to edit the same silly preferences dialogs 50 times. OKCupid, Google Latitude and Mint do so with your peccadilloes, your physical location, and your financial records.

There’s a certain amount of trust involved in participating in all this: the trust that your information is ultimately anonymous or only sold to advertisers. Of course, Google logs what you’re looking for, and everything that’s made public, and it’s worth pointing out that there’s really nothing preventing an organization from collating all this information together, which is an end to most of what we call privacy and the sense of freedom that comes along with it. About the only exception is medical records, which are protected in the US by privacy laws. My understanding is that it’s a crime to give unauthorized people access to those records, but I’m a little shaky on what happens after that privacy has been breached—that is, once the bribed clerk has given out the records, are there laws to prevent the recipient from distributing them further?

Minutiae aside, there’s a larger, unasked question of the social cost for all this. Does the lack of privacy manifest as a monumental chilling effect? Does it turn out after all your activities are cataloged and recorded that you’re less free? Do you self-censor and live in fear of being discovered, or (I’d say) foolishly assume that your privacy is a traditional social norm that will continue to be respected? Grab a green flag and march against the fact the only real privacy you have is “the two inches inside your own head?”

Whatever the social cost of this new world will turn out to be, we’re living in it already, and people are going to have to figure out how to make it compatible with the concept of a free society. Which is why I redesigned my blog to integrate the Lifestream wordpress plugin and display all of my publically-accessible activities in one place: the music I’m listening to, the movies I’m watching, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. I’d actually like it if I could put my Amazon.com purchases on there like Facebook tried to do without asking anyone. There’s nothing in any of these databases that a government agency, corporation, or partner couldn’t get their hands on if they wanted really to.

I promised I’d tie this back into GNOME at some point: possibly the most interesting thing about a project like Zeitgeist is that it puts that record of what you’re doing in a place where you can access it—it doesn’t solve the underlying conflict, of course, but it does let you use it for your own purposes.

As before, Excel 2010 allows you to open multiple workbooks with that maddeningly weird pseudo-MDI interface that is always a little jarring. I know the point of the taskbar shortcuts, and I know how they’re implementing it. Doing so changes the taskbar from a window management tool to a document management tool—albeit incompletely because the same doesn’t apply to sub-documents on non-Microsoft applications. In the end, it’s just an irritating adjustment from a working mental model to a broken one.

But that’s not actually the stupid part. No, the stupid part is that there’s a single, global undo history. Yes, that’s right, all your documents share undo history. In practice, this means you can usefully edit one spreadsheet at a time. It assumes that your life is a single stream of changes, and you want to rewind that life to a particular indistinct place in time. In my own usage, that isn’t the case. My life is a series of parallel streams of changes, and I want (read: need) the ability to rewind any one of them to any given point in time, and Excel has apparently broken this on purpose—at least, I don’t remember this madness from 2007.

It’s hard to talk about this without also discussing the Ribbon, and why the situations are different. Non-geeks who got used to muscle-memory-ing¹ through the old Excel were upset with the Ribbon, because it meant that their carefully crafted training was useless—it’s like being switched to Dvorak. I personally like the Ribbon, because it let someone like myself, who’d never used Excel for anything before 2007, learn and use the tool. You break how people find features, more people can find features.

But this isn’t the case with breaking how a particular feature works. IMO, that’s just dumb.

1. it’s a word because I say so.

She continued to rant at him all the way up to my floor.

On the way out the elevator, I called back that screaming doesn’t solve anything, though after getting better caffeinated, I wish I had told her to treat the man like a human being.

Most people—ordinary people—would not allow themselves to simply ignore the monumental shamefulness of that. They would consider carefully the national and international consequences of giving a Republican the 41st seat in the Senate. They would not allow a poorly ran campaign, or some bullshit about a sports team to get in the way of making the moral choice. Hell, I voted for Obama—south-sider and Sox fan that he is—for that very reason…

Fortunately, neither I nor most other people, live in Massachusetts.

I believe that Joseph Goebbels once said that the SS personnel in the concentration camps were the epitome of strength: they were so strong that they could keep their consciences and the wrongness of their actions from getting in the way of actually killing the Jews. It’s good to know that essential spirit is alive and well, particularly in the supposed bastion of coastal liberalism.

Firstly, on the hardware: AC adapters is the weak point of this guy. For my old MacBook, I had three: one in my bag, one at home, one at the office. While it was a decent extra cost, it was one I undertook after I forgot my adapter a couple times and had to go without for a while—something that everyone with a laptop deals with at some point.

This was particularly a pain since the one that Dell shipped with the laptop died after the first charge—which meant another three days of being unable to use it after I received it. Not cool, Dell.

With the power supply problem fixed, I moved on to getting Linux on the thing. The thing ships with Windows 7, which I wanted to keep on there as an option, and there’s enough travel and sensitive work stuff that I do on my laptops to justify encrypting the disk, which requires using the Ubuntu alternative installer. I also wanted to use LVM for my disks for when I start running out of space and want to shrink the Windows partition.

The way to make this work is non-obvious, and it required two attempts to get going:

1. Resize the Windows partition to something less than the full disk. I chose to give it 100G, and allocate the rest for Linux. This works out of the box in the installer, which is nice.
2. Setup LVM on the remaining space next.
   • 200M for a /boot partition
   • 20G for swap (SSD disk means I assume that hitting swap is nowhere near as painful as it used to be)
   • The rest for a root partitiion.
3. Setup encrypted volumes on the LVM partitions you created for root and swap (not /boot). You want to encrypt your swap as well, because Linux isn’t going to zero-out your swap volume when you shutdown, making it effectively an on-disk memory dump of whatever your applications were doing…

I tried setting up single root/swap partitions on top of a single large encrypted volume, but Ubuntu aparently requires your /boot partition be un-encrypted, so there wasn’t an obvious way to boot it after doing so…

With that issue out of the way, the rest of the installation went smoothly and things booted just fine. I’ll note that Windows 7 boots much faster than Ubuntu 9.10, but I’ve only actually booted the thing from a POST onwards a few times in the last couple weeks, so who cares? The time it takes to resume from sleep is much more important for a laptop, honestly.

With everything installed, I used rsync to copy my documents and such off my old laptop. I had enough disk to rsync my music collection off of my world book, so I went ahead and did that too, and I’ve written a simple upstart config that performs the rsync properly when the network comes back:

#!/bin/bash
# Script to dispatch NetworkManager events
#
# Runs rsync when WiFi or ethernet is connected.

set -x

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "$0: called with no interface" 1>&2
    exit 1;
fi

# Fake ifupdown environment
export IFACE="$1"
export ACTION="$2"
export USERNAME="me"
export REMOTE_USERNAME="me"
export REMOTE_HOST="stuff.mine.nu"

case "$ACTION" in
    up)
	if [ "$IFACE" = "eth0" -o "$IFACE" = "wlan0" ]; then
		if [ -z "$(pidof rsync)" ]; then
			sudo -n -u $USERNAME rsync -a /home/$USERNAME/Music/* $REMOTE_USERNAME@$REMOTE_HOST:/shares/internal/MUSIC
		fi
	fi
	;;
esac

I used to try and just mount the drive via SSHfs/nautilus and play via Rhythmbox, but it would skip the first 30 seconds of the song, requiring manual intervention every three minutes.

After that comes the custom repositories I’m using to add a little snazziness and breakage:

ppa:ricotz/testing

Latest and greatest GNOME Shell

ppa:telepathy/ppa

Bleeding Edge Telepathy/Empathy (my at-work XMPP server manages to consistently crash Empathy)

ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa

Nightlies of Firefox 3.6

ppa:cmsj/lifesaver

Lifesaver screensaver, search term “#fml”

ppa:chromium-daily/ppa

Chromium Web Browser nightly builds

Update: It seems positive, at least compared with the cheaper MacBook Air where you have to fuss with kernel boot options and whatnot.

It’s somewhat disappointing that real Wikipedia vandalism is as pointlessly childish as that…