Yes, I couldn't resist the quote, folks. o)

I'm currently sitting at my desk after a week from being back from the Taglit-Birthright Israel trip by IsraelExperts, and what a trip it was! I've got a *ton* of written material about the trip that I wrote out on my trusty Nokia N810 internet tablet, but until I get a chance to sit down and finish writing the last four to five entries, I want to hold off on posting them.

About three to four weeks before the actual trip, I got my bonus at work, and decided it was time to buy a replacement camera for my broken and aging Vivitar ViviCam 8300s (no link since Vivitar is retarded and decided to stop supporting the camera). So while I was out in Mountain View, California with DoC, we stopped by a Best Buy and I picked up a Nikon D40 digital SLR camera.

I took the camera with me on the trip, and took an insane number of photos — more than 700 — over several SD cards. While I'm still digging through them all, I've also started uploading into Picasaweb. My publicly viewable albums are all at http://picasaweb.google.com/june.tate, so feel free to have a look anytime.

Unfortunately I still haven't had a whole lot of time to get through all of those photos, so I've uploaded an album of photos I took near Sellah Park's pond near my home. Originally the photos excursion was just a little thing to get used to how the camera worked, but it turns out that I got some really cute shots of some of the ducks there. The photos are available for viewing here.

Anywho, time for bed. Ciao!

The symptoms are actually rather funny. The game starts up okay, actually. Even lets you get into the first part of the tutorial and play around for a bit — heck, I was even able to turn on anti-aliasing up as high as it possibly could go. Unfortunately, right after you dress your character and try to assign the tutorial NPC to your party (Trask) things start acting weird. Trask asks you to add him to your party, and brings up the party selection screen. Unfortunately, when it comes up, his character slot is still darkened, but selected with a green box around it. So naturally, I went ahead and clicked on it.

To my surprise, the 3D model of him never showed up with a caption on the right. Instead, I was treated to a caption that read "I am broken. So very very broken."

(to be continued)

I am at a loss. My resolve has all but evaporated, my drive gone, and all that is left is extreme sorrow. I promised her that I would give every ounce of help possible to get her through all of this, but her body was already stressed beyond its limits. One by one each part slowly shut down, and had to be replaced by a machine to do the same function. By the time she reached her end, she was more machine than woman.

We visited the hospital every day since she went into the ICU there, but there was nothing that we could do to help aside from comfort and talk to her. So finally on the 1st, when we were told that Lori was gone and had no hope of recovery, we — as a family (and beforehand by Lori herself) — made the choice to turn off the machines and let her misery end. She has been through a very taxing time, and all of us feel this is better than living on machines for the rest of her life.

I'm stuck between bouts of extreme pain, crying, and numbness. As a result, I keep pulling myself into various activities such as coding or watching movies to escape the pain. I wrote earlier that I seem to be the pillar of calm in a storm, but I did not realize the closeness that I shared with her, and I will miss her dearly.

Goodbye Lori, our wordsmith, mother, and close friend. We will all miss you.

Either way, it's a very impressive device, and with the additional test infrastructure setup by Tom Hoffman, I can immediately see the benefits of what the XO will likely do in developing countries — even if only to strengthen the social bonds between children. Seeing a Neighborhood screen filled with XO icons and various activities strewn about is incredible, and believe it or not, exhilarating.

Since activities are easily written in Python, I'll likely be writing a few here and there, so keep an eye on the Projects section of my site for some things to be popping up soon.

All in all, the feeling of goodness for donating $400 (actually $800, since my employer does 100% matching) to the OLPC project this year has been reinforced by just seeing a silly little screen filled with icons. Literally, my mind is popping with ideas of how this can change the developing world for the better.

Go, go, OLPC! ^,^

What I wanted to do was augment the DHCP information passed to it via dhcp3-client to include a set of domains to search through, and augment the resolver itself by adding an options ndots:2 option to allow for searching relative up to two dots into the domain searches. It's a neat trick that lets me type in "m" in the address bar of my browser when at home to get to m.theonelab.com, or to go to "officejet" instead of typing in the entire thing as "officejet.theonelab.com".

In any case, this was a really nasty thing to figure out because as I said earlier, resolvconf is under-documented. So after hacking around in the dhcp3-client entry hooks, I realized that this should be possible to set in /etc/network/interfaces with a simple set of dns-options and dns-search lines for each stanza. Simple, right? Well, while after searching around on the internet revealed this Debian bug and showed that simply prepending dns- to the part of the resolv.conf option I wanted would work, it wasn't entirely accurate.

So after digging around in the output of a dpkg -L resolvconf, I noticed that it happened to throw an ifup hook into /etc/network/if-up.d. A cursory look at this file shows that it recognizes dns-domain, dns-search, dns-sortlist, and dns-nameservers. Unfortunately, no provision was made for dns-options. So, to solve this, I simply did the following (diff -u):

--- /home/jtgans/000resolvconf  2007-10-30 14:37:11.000000000 +0000
+++ 000resolvconf       2007-10-30 13:50:51.000000000 +0000
@@ -28,6 +28,10 @@
        R="${R}sortlist $IF_DNS_SORTLIST
 "
 fi
+if [ "$IF_DNS_OPTIONS" ] ; then
+       R="${R}options ${IF_DNS_OPTIONS}
+"
+fi
 for NS in $IF_DNS_NAMESERVERS ; do
        R="${R}nameserver $NS
 "

So now I can just add a dns-options ndots:2 line to the stanzas I want to use it in. In the meantime, I'm going to be setting up a set of patches for resolvconf to be submitted to the debian-developers involved with the package.

Lori went into the hospital again the day before, with ammonia levels so high that she was in a coma, and has only now managed to come out of it with some ability to cognate. Rickey has started to crack, and Jennifer is doing everything she can to keep her sanity. As for me... ...I seem to be the stronger side of things around here. It's a little surreal for me, actually. I do what I can to keep the family sane and together — picking up extra chores along the way, helping to assuage fears and to be a shoulder to cry on if needed — but I never seem to have much of a strong reaction to what is happening around me. Maybe it's a result of the years of pain I myself went through in my earlier years. I honestly don't know.

For now, I'll keep listening to ろくばんめのえき, and just keep doing what I've been doing.

I finally did it. I finally bought a phone that doesn't suck.

I bought an unlocked Nokia E70.

And I haven't looked back.

This phone literally does everything I've been looking for in a phone, and since it's unlocked, I can easily take it overseas when I want to visit Doc and not have to worry about long distance roaming. Oh, and did I mention that both the N95 and the E70 have VoIP/SIP capability? Calling your boyfriend to hear his voice crystal clear and for free is the best thing ever!

Anywho... Somehow I managed to set the lock code on the darn thing, and apparently this thing is damn secure. No way to unlock it without an unlocking box in the slightest. Even wiping the phone with the handy-dandy-suck-the-phones-brains-out-with-a-vaccuum power on shortcut doesn't wipe out the lock code. So early tomorrow, I plan on doing some calling around to the various phone repair shops in town to see who can unlock the darn thing.

In other news...

...I've done quite a bit more travelling lately. I've seen so much of the world on the west coast now that whatever drop of wanderers blood I had has finally assimilated the rest of me — I can't stay in one place long anymore. Travel is as much a part of me now as my Italian lineage is.

On that note, I'm heading out to Mountain View, CA again to be with Doc and see the great Redwoods together. Now that I have a decent camera phone, expect to see lots more photos uploaded into the gallery as well. I'm also planning on heading back out to Dublin again in the very near future, but more on that later. =o)

As for Software...

My project to write a better open source alternative to Kevin Walzer's VuMan has met with limited success. To say I'm a bit clumsy at writing Objective-C code is a bit of a mis-statement. So far, my code has unit tests that crash instead of run, and the UI looks like a first time student's attempt at it. Considering this is my first major attempt at writing a Cocoa app, I'd say that I'm not doing too bad, but I'm not making enough progress for my own liking.

In any case, the initial code base is visible at http://svn.theonelab.com/refman for anyone's viewing pleasure, if anyone is so inclined. More updates on this project will be forthcoming.

Along the way, I subscribed to the macports-users mailing list and noticed an email come across by Kevin Walzer announcing a new release of the MacPorts frontend, PortAuthority. Seeing as I'm starting to get a little lazy with the port command and would like to peruse the archive of ports available in a slightly easier fashion, I took a look... ...only to discover that he's charging $20 for a license key to run the program!

NUTS! I said, and so I started digging through the app. Apparently it's entirely written using Tcl/Tk and the Cocoa port of the same toolkit, so it's mostly open source. The trick here is that his license prevents redistribution without express permission from his company. Very sad. His other applications are simply frontends to the UNIX commands find and man, called FindName and VuMan, respectively (both of which cost the same $20 as PortAuthority).

So I've decided to see about writing a quick little hack in Cocoa to do the same job as PortAuthority and VuMan, but be 100% open and free. More info to come.

20/May

I am on a train to Belfast now — most of the way there at this point. The train attendant says we should be arriving in Belfast at half 12.

• Tenements in Portadown

My travelling companion left about two stops back, thankfully. His name is "Moses" and says he's been living here for about four years now. And he's more than a little creepy. More than once he took both of my hands and caressed them in his own, referred to me as "baby" and at his stop, he asked me to kiss him. Thankfully I have his cell number, so I can ignore his eventual SMS and cell calls.

• Leaving Portadown

I woke at around 7am, waited at the DART station for about 20 minutes. The whole time, all I had as my companion was the sound of the environment around me. I honestly think I enjoy that more than strange human contact. With any luck, I can avoid him for the remainder of my trip. I've had little to eat until now.

• Stopping in Lurgan

At this point, I've had a cup of tea (thankfully not drunk entirely by someone else) and a danish. Not quite nutritious, but enough to stave off hunger until I can get some decent food.

• Leaving Lurgan

Ireland is a ranger's paradise. Greenery is the carpet and canopy of everything here — even the buildings cannot last long against nature's wild embrace. Slowness of nature seems to have even permeated the people, and yet, there are two wars being fought: progress against nature, and Irish against British.

• Fields of cows in Moira

My cell phone lazily buzzes at me in my pocket. Is it the dreaded "Moses"? Thankfully, no. It is a message from Vodaphone, letting me know my phone is registered for use on their network. Unfortunately, data access still doesn't work. Steel sprouts from the machine tilled ground — the plants of progress and industry — fighting to stay up and uncorroded in the sea of vines and trees surrounding them. Only to be ravaged and corroded as nature pushes back.

• Office units to let in Lisburn

Even nature's own building material — stone — once unearthed and re-used by the inhabitants, cannot fight or stand for long, as vines embed and entwine. So I'm off to Belfast, last vestige of the Brits, on rusted iron rails, to see the front of the second war: the war of culture.

• Careening towards Belfast

20/May — 18:45

Back on the train in Belfast Central station, my feet screaming like a pair of wounded hyenas, but feeling a little more travel worthy. I have managed to so far elude "Moses" and hope it can stay that way. As for Belfast, I found quite a different war: one of religion and nationalism. Belfast — and most of northern Ireland, it seems — is still under British control, though there are still many remnants of war and heavy fighting. Murals celebrate militias with three-letter acronyms everywhere, and the loyalists to Ireland draw strange ties to Israel and Palestine — as for me, being Jewish, I am more than slightly concerned, and feeling a bit unwelcome. Despite this feeling, it isn't a hatred directed towards me and my kin, but instead a strange stance from the Catholics here against the Protestants.

• A mechanized voice mentioned "...Depature..."

I've decided to move forward some to get away from one of my fellow passengers and ended up in the dining car. So far, I like it quite a bit — it's peaceful, and the bar is situated so that passengers look out the window.

The first couple of days there, I ended up with a nasty case of jet-lag that made the whole world a boat, and I a mere land-lubber passenger. I've been back in the states for about a week now, and it seems that the jet-lag has hit yet again, only this time in a slightly different fashion: I now get very tired right around 7-8pm, and usually fall asleep at 9pm, only to wake up at 7am all over again! Needless to say, it seems to have solidly embedded the "early riser" concept into my internal clock.

Anywho... This is just a note to let everybody know that I'm not dead yet — just been away for a long time, and attempting to get back into the swing of things. =o)

My goals are only just starting to be fulfilled.

Last night was rather crazy. I had to make sure that my one checked suitcase was under 50lbs, so I'd pack, repack, check and recheck, and finally stand up on a scale, while holding the bag to get its final weight — 42 — not bad (150 is, though! Must work out more). After packing, it was a mad dash to make sure I had everything all setup for the actual trip through the airports and security. By the time all was said and done, it was 11pm, and I had to wake up at around 6am.

With only 6 hours of sleeping time, I awoke quite groggy and slightly sore (what the hell was I doing last night? Fighting off gorillas?) with about thirty minutes to get myself put together, drag the luggage into the car, and get to the airport. Thankfully Rickey was driving, so I could focus on staying awake and fighting off more gorillas until we arrived.

From there it was a bit strange — I checked by bag at the ticket counter (wow — that scale is accurate. Damn!), got my boarding pass and headed off towards security. Despite the threat level being set up at orange, security was rather light and involved pretty much the same old routine: take your shoes off, put your metal items into a plastic bin, turn your head and cough, etc. Once through security, it was a simple matter of sitting and waiting for boarding on the first flight of the day to begin. As I was waiting, I decided to take a short tour of the terminal two facilities.

What never ceases to amaze me is how little Sky Harbour cares about this terminal. As I walked through the area, I noticed that after they restructured the security checkpoint, I guess they decided they needed to restructure the actual boarding areas as well. The old pizzaria was missing — in its place was a rather hastily erected drywall covering the entire entrace; save, of course, for the decorative grating on the ceiling. That little piece of art was apparently too difficult to take down, so instead they just cut a ragged hole through the drywall to let the thing through, and added two more on the opposite wall for symmetry. The ultimate visual appeal? Total crap. To replace it, they added a counter in the middle of the old gate 4 area and threw some refrigerators and cash registers to provide cold refreshments to customers — naturally, they left the old gate 4 sign up, and replaced everything else in the area with tables and chairs. Needless to say, with this kind of haphazard construction going on in Sky Harbor, it's no wonder people think Arizonans are morons — our own ambassador for the state, the airport, looks like rednecks built it!

Heading back towards my gate, no sooner did I sit down then my boarding zone was called — unfortunately I ended up in the middle seat of an A320, which wasn't exactly pleasant but thankfully this was just the first leg of the trip. No excitement was to be felt yet (though I could certainly feel the vibrations of the travelling clown next to me chewing on chips with his mouth open) but sitting in an A320 heading towards the same airport you've been to several times in your life is hardly exciting. Fortunately, the trip was over as soon as it started, but was long enough to let me gain a few levels in Final Fantasy III for my DS. Ahh... Chicago O'hare.

Finally in ORD, I decided it was time to actually do some walking and get some exercise for a change, and started hoofing it out of Terminal 1, towards the international terminal 5. And what a long walk it was — I even travelled underneath the tunnel of PCP-inspired rainbow colored neon lights. Quite a sight, considering the outsides of these buildings were meant to reflect a kind of rusted-out pier feel. After hopping a tram, and fighting my way through security, I walked around the entirety of the terminal until I finally decided to sit down in the lounge and get some actual work done. Out came the laptop, the EVDO card, and I was hacking away at my window manager settings to finally get it finished up for some actual work for a change. By the time I had it just about ready, one of the lounge attendants mentioned to me that my flight was boarding. Cool. Pack everything up, put the X60 to sleep, and hoof it back to the plane.

When I first boarded the plane, I expected the seating to be much like United's Economy Plus — essentially coach with more legroom — but the minute I mentioned my seat number (4D), I was directed to my left, in a small cabin about the size of a living room, filled with 24 luxury chairs, and tons of head room. I was immediately dazzled. Once I had packed away some of my carry-on baggage, I asked if I could move to a window seat. Thankfully, the cabin was far from full — there's only about fifteen of us in here — so there were lots of window seats available for the taking. And take I did.

Dinner, the only meal of the day for me (down tummy, down!) was incredible. It started out with some appetizers (cheese quiche, small pretzels, and a cracker with some kind of mushroom and red cabbage). I couldn't believe how nice the stewardesses were, and still are. Quite extraordinary (to me, at least). Now the excitement and wonder started to build — I'm finally on my way to meeting my personal goals of travelling the world and meeting its people! ...and I'm getting fed with really nice food for a change. The entrees were simply awesome, and the dessert was mind-blowing — a wonderful peach pie, with chocolates, and some perfectly brewed earl grey tea. It's amazing!

So now that I've dumped most of my brain into this blog and my thoughts have dried up, they're turning off the lights. With that, I should get some sleep so that I can function tomorrow morning. More on the trip later — and pictures to come!

In the meantime, I've put up a Gallery2 instance and am currently trying to integrate it as close as I can into the site. Time and stuff makes things difficult, though.

Today we were at sea yet again, but with one major difference: our sailing plan doesn't include re-docking with any of the earlier ports of call, and we are more than 800 miles from L.A. As a result, the Captain is pushing the ship harder than he was before in an effort to get back into port at a reasonable time. Looking out through the port holes and the open-air decks, it's hard to believe that a ship this massive is moving as fast as it is — we're actually travelling at around 15 knots (xx Mi/h, xx Km/h) and heading northwest.

...and it'll blow you away!

We're also travelling through slightly inclement weather at the moment. The fog we ran through on the way to Cabo seems to have hung around all week on this route, as this afternoon it was blowing through the topmost decks from bow to stern pretty hard. In fact, coupled with the 15 knots the ship is moving at, and the 15 knots the wind is moving in the opposite direction, it's like trying to walk through a zephyr! To us passengers, it's almost a 30 knot wind blowing.

Formal Breakfast

This morning we decided to see about getting some breakfast in a different place rather than in the Windjammer Cafe. Instead, we went to the Aquarius dining room, and the three of us were seated at one of the larger tables which had room for at least eight more people in addition to Lori, Rickey, and I. A few others came in and sat down at the same table, and we all had a good breakfast — mine consisted of a cheese omelet, some hash browns, and a piece of toast. Not quite traditional, but enough to keep me going for the day, I think.

After breakfast, the three of us decided to head back to the cabins and just zone out for a while. The trip had pretty much used up our energies for the week — half jokingly, Rickey suggested that we need a vacation from the vacation — so we were all pretty wiped out.

Mad Scientist or Just Plain Mad?

Being a slight bit crazy, I decided it was the perfect time to try an experiment with the Jones soda candies we bought on Monday; it was time to see if the candy could turn water into soda. o)

For the first part of the experiment, I filled up one of the glasses in the stateroom with some tap water and dropped in a cream soda candy. Interestingly enough, it did bubble, but apparently it didn't have enough of a reaction to actually break up and dissolve into the liquid itself. Instead, it remained at the bottom of the glass with bubbles coalescing over it like a cocoon.

Based on that reaction, I figured that breaking one of the candies down into a powder might have a more desirable effect. So, using the butt-end of the ice tongs we had available, I crushed one of the candies down into a slightly coarse powder and then poured it into the glass.

Again, sadly, there was virtually no reaction. The powder simply floated on the surface of the water and didn't seem to have any reaction at all. I took a sip of the water, and it didn't have any other flavor other than the slight metallic essence filtered water usually has.

Ah well — there's always a carbonated beverage to try later. In the meantime, I'd just eat them "raw".

Jammin' for Lunch

Time passes quickly on a cruise ship, no matter what it is you're doing. For us, we had just sat down in the cabin and started to relax when we all realized it was about noon and time for some lunch.

Even more shopping

Box of Jewels

Pina Colada is Buttery Goodness! Mmm!

Craving for French Fries

Towel Pal IV: Monkey

Concrete + Sun = Pain

...so does Skin + Sun. Ow.

More shop — this time after nightfall

Alexandrite revisited (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Gemstone)

Del Sol II: The Spa

Towel Pal III: Swan

More shop.

June the Bag Lady

Mi y Mia Zapados (Sandals)

Shop, shop, shop!

Mexican cabbies are crazy — almost as crazy as the Indian ones

Diamonds International is Charming

June descends into Hell for a pair of Alexandrite earrings

Met Mr. and Mrs. Brit

Ionothermy, Manicure and Pedicure

Towel Pal II: Scorpion

Explored the ship

Hot. Rock. Therapy. 'Nuff said. =o)

Pool and Spa! Swim around the pool... ...or is the pool is swimming around me?

Towel Pal I: Elephant

Point to the gallery

Import photos from this day into a separate album

Baggage drop-off

Breakfast in an Irish breakfast... ...place.

SOO TIRED OF DRIVING!

Rickey helped. o)

Met our stateroom attendant, Hyacinth (HEY! WOO!)

First dinner in the main dining room.

Met Rocket and Jackie Chan

Met Karen, Sarah, and Mr. Bill

Unpacked like crazy, acclimated ourselves to the ship's layout

Took a free tour of the spa facilities

I signed up for a hot-rock massage for tomorrow, and a manicure and pedicure for the day after that.

Rickey signed up for the ionothermy.

Second Life is already running.

Check your task bar for a minimized copy of the program.
If this message persists, restart your computer.

Unfortunately, this is neither helpful, nor portable. I don't have a taskbar — I'm on a Mac, and Macs provide a single-program-instance service already, so lock files are totally useless on this platform. Unfortunately, I have no idea where the heck this lock file is on my disk, so I'm afraid I'm out of comission for getting into SL for a while (at least until I can get a chance to look at it with a clear head). What's worse is that they don't even make an attempt at looking for the program in the process tables — ps clearly shows that the program isn't running:

omoikane:~$ sudo ps ax |grep -i second
16514  p1  R+     0:00.00 grep -i second

This kind of thing makes me really sad — especially with the disturbing trend of applications doing this. FireFox does this to me constantly, too. o(

In any case, if you like Final Fantasy music, and you like hard rock, I strongly suggest taking a look into the Black Mages — it's a band founded by Nobuo Uematsu that literally kicks tail! I recently bought both albums of theirs and have been quite happy since (though *Other World* sounded better with the raspy, death-metal singer from the game, but it's still good). If you're interested in a quick preview of what it is they've done, take a look at this YouTube video. I took one look at it and instantly decided it was time to get the albums.

Anyway, it's another late night, so I'm heading to bed. G'night!

1. /files/stupid-sl-lockfile.png

tank:~/Projects/websites/dc/rails/vendor$ ls -l rails
total 0
0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 june june  9 2007-02-16 10:56 rails -> .

Unfortunately, this is causing QuickSilver to consistently crash during it's catalog updates. What makes it worse is that QuickSilver is not an open source program, so despite the fact that I know exactly what is causing the problem, I can't fix it myself — I have to wait until the authors fix it. ARGH!

I took another look at what I've seen for the iPhone again toda, and I'm finding more and more that it just might be exactly what I'm looking for. But it wasn't this that brough up today's blog post — in fact, the part that brought this up is the fact that I was clipping out images of the various phones listed on my cell phones page, when I realized MacOS X has a serious lack of functionality when it comes to image editing.

I was taking a screen snap of the iPhone when I realized it was far too big to really fit on the page. I thought about using ImageMagick, or GIMP, but then I realized: neither are easy to use, and the latter is actually painful to bring up.

So... In all, it's nothing more than a rant going nowhere at this point. I'm going to go back to bed and hope Steve's reality distortion effect can kick the crap out of this sickness I have.

As a result, I've downloaded one of these betas to see how well it performs. Thus far, I've been impressed — VMWare Fusion has a much better integration with the MacOS X interface and underlying hardware than Parallels has had thus far.

In other news, I've been doing some thinking about my choice of window manager and the direction that the author (Tuomo Valkonen) has taken with it's latest design. Tuomo, unfortunately, is very abrasive when it comes to pet peeves, and is prone to pushing his views on how things such as Xinerama, multi-headed X, and antialiasing should or should not be directly into the ion code base — in essence forcing window management policy outside of the hands of the user and into hard-coded behaviors. In fact, his manner towards these subjects are so abrasive that I ended up unsubscribing from the ion-general mailing list simply because I became sick of reading such tripe.

While some, perhaps, may find Tuomo's software to their liking, there were too many major bumps in the road towards getting the window manager to function as I would like. So I have decided to try my own stab at the window management game yet again.