Spent yesterday kicking around with Jordan at work for the first half, and then took Caltrain into San Fran to meet up with Cyan and later on, Steve, Nehemiah, and Tom. We ate at El Toro over on 17th and Valencia, and then headed to Twin Peaks, the most amusing and comfortable gay bar I've ever been in. Fun was had by all, as we drank and told stories. The essence of a good time.

After Twin Peaks, Nehemiah and Steve went back to their respective homes, and Cyan, Tom, and I headed off to DNA Lounge. It's a pretty cool place! I had only known the layout as pieced together by the pictures on the website, after having actually been in it, I can appreciate it a lot more. Very neat space, cool music, and great friends. I met up with Bram, Dave, Darwin, Danfuzz, Jamie, Angela, Eric, and other various regulars throughout the night.

Woke up fine, headed off to lunch with Danfuzz down in South Beach and had some great chicken pesto pizza cooked by real italians. Note to eastcoasters: Good pizza does actually exist on the west coast, it's just hard to find. After lunch, hopped back on Caltrain out to San Mateo, met up with Jordan, spent some time kicking around at his office, then came back to his place to Jessie's delicious hand cooked manicotti. Unbelievable.

I will miss not only all of this, but all of what could be, when I leave this coming Thursday. I will miss the company of these friends as well. But I will never forget these times with these people.

I hope to return soon.

Jonathan Bachrach's Proto becomes GOO. It may sound like de-evolution, but it's not.

Oh yeah, I'm in San Francisco/the greater Bay Area, until April 4th (at least as things stand now). Email me if you'd like to meet up. My schedule is hectic, but flexible, especially for job interviews and related chit-chat.

My PowerBook is only getting around an hour of battery life. I am not pleased.

I leave for San Francisco tomorrow. 98% of my laundry is already done, but I have yet to pack. I'm really trying to minimize my load on this trip. To that end, I'll grudgingly bring only my Yashica T4 Super D point-and-shoot camera and maybe my Canon Digital Elph S100. I recently inherited my grandfather's 25 year old Canon F1, but after putting a test roll of TMAX ISO 400 through it (which I just sent off to have developed yesterday), I'm hesitant to use it without professional cleaning and calibration. I think my roll of film may be about the eleventh or sixteenth roll of film ever put through the camera, it's that almost-brand-new.

With the exception of a certain group of people, I find that I communicate very poorly. I chalk this up to actually thinking and investigating things that interest me, as well as current events, rather than merely parroting back soundbytes which subscribe to one or more fashionable biases. Related to this is my tendency to delve into too much detail surrounding any one given issue, which I do because I wish to understand systems, whereas most people just want quick answers and a general idea if you fall in the US or THEM category for any issue they take mildly seriously.

One thing I have been noticing lately is how true it is that the average group of Americans, when talking amongst themselves, prefer to try to talk over the other guy, rather than talk with the other guy. In conversations that try to maintain civility, there's a lot of verbal overhead spent in resolving speaking conflicts (someone interrupts and the speaker tries to calmly protest and remain in control: "please, just let me finish"). I notice this in myself too, but less when I was in Canada and Ireland. Perhaps I just run into more where I am now.

Today's quotable quote:

"If this weren't one of the big, universal experiences, James Joyce wouldn't have written 'The Dead' and Henry James wouldn't have spent so many words on this concept of 'the life unlived.' Life is a constant withering of possibilities. Every choice murders a possible future. We could easily be in a state of constant mourning and secret itchy remembrance. But there is an intoxicating fire in the life we have chosen, the doors that are open, the light in the eyes of the person we are with. All we have to do is slow down and look into the fire.

There is no solution, any more than there is a solution to death. This what life is like: This is the poetry of it."

-- Cary Tennis
<http://www.salon.com/sex/col/tenn/2002/03/12/tennis_19/index5.html>

I should probably explain the "Reboot for Kerberos" meme. I'd prefer not to though, so for now, I wont. I'm trying to build it into something on the order of "Andre the Giant has a Posse", which I'm sure everyone is familiar with in some form or another. I'll be putting up a store where you can buy t-shirts initially, and other types of schwag if The People demand it. I'm thinking of charging from $15.00 to $20.00 USD per t-shirt, because the base price of a CafePress t-shirt is $13.99 USD, and I'd like to make a little money above that to donate to a worthwhile cause. Comments and criticism welcome. I'll post the link here and elsewhere when the store is up.

If you'd like to contribute a design, feel free! It's real simple. Use any Kerberos related icon or graphic you can find on the 'Net, and come up with an interesting logotype (that's a line of snazzy looking text) that reads "reboot for kerberos". Capitalization, style, and extraneous punctuation are all up to you, but it must read "reboot for kerberos". Inspired l33tsp34k is okay if it's funny in accordance with my sense of humor. I'll take the submissions I like and put up t-shirts and give you credit. All submissions will at least get a hand-typed email of thanks and optional commentary on the submission. Email your art to dnm@pobox.com with the subject "RfK design submission".

I'm stuck in the Science Library of SUNY Albany at the moment. It's not so bad: I've been able to monopolize one of the many IBM desktops here in the room where they keep the microforms and use completely browser-based tools to read email, chat on IRC, set up a store on CafePress, and at least get something resembling the preliminaries of my daily work done.

John Wiseman linked to this here muck on his own highly entertaining and useful blog, lemonodor, which now obligates me to at least attempt to be interesting. I'll aspire to this ideal starting today. Thanks John!

A friend recently asked me what programming languages I play with on at least a semi-regular basis. Here's an attempt at a complete list (in no order whatsoever):

Common Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Python, Ruby, Java, C, C++, Ada, Prolog, Haskell, Joy, J, K, Forth, E, Perl, Dylan, Tcl, BETA, Mercury, Clean, Erlang, Icon, ML, Mozart, REBOL, PHP, AppleScript, Objective C, Self, Cecil.

The list makes no allowances for how much I dabble in each. My preferences do tend to be centered around Common Lisp, Scheme, and Smalltalk in general, but those tend to be things I make for myself. I almost never fiddle with C or C++ right now unless it's a particularly neat problem or idea I'm working on. I don't count fighting with compilers in the C or C++ camp. Also, at present, I use PHP strictly for paying web app gigs.

The list is far from comprehensive as it doesn't include domain specific languages, language hybrids, small one-offs and hacks in progress, independent dialects, or things like NASM, MIX, SPARC v8/v9 assembly, etc.

I'm doing some more PHP web app work for a friend's small company. I don't like PHP much at all, but I'm happy to be helping him out by letting him branch into the web app space and it earns me some cash I can put towards debts, which is good.

I've been digging up books that were packed away. Today I found my copies of Java in a Nutshell and Java Enterprise in a Nutshell. Since I'm ostensibly playing around with JSP and Servlets, the latter will probably come in handy soon. The last time I looked at it, I was trying to fumble my way through EJB for Viasec. I checked the back of the book for a quick blurb on EJB, just to see if it had a particularly insightful take on what EJB was all about:

"Enterprise JavaBeans, a component model that separates high-level business logic from low-level housekeeping chores like security and transaction management"

Is it just me, or does this not really say anything? Isn't the point of any component model to separate concerns, possibly by, oh, I don't know, building systems out of components? Compare this to the blurb about Servlets:

"Java Servlets, a mechanism for extending web servers that allows Java code to perform tasks traditionally handled by CGI scripts"

Alright, it's only marginally better, but at least after reading it, I can equate Servlets roughly with CGI scripts. I can't equate EJB to anything on the basis of its description.

I know what EJB is, there's no need to tell me.

At least, I think I do.

My point is that this, to me, points to a widespread and fundamental state of confusion as to what EJB is by all but a few people (relatively speaking), and that far too many people think they need EJB when in reality, they need more information.

None of this surprises me. I guess I just felt like dredging up this point of view on EJB to see if I still felt the same way. It seems that I do.

I'm visiting San Francisco and the greater Bay Area from March 19 until April 4. Get in touch if you'd like to meet up. Current plans are to have at least one large get-together with friends in SF, likely a dinner.

To explain the title, I submit the following:

"If your own power of insight is strong, the state of affairs of everything will be visible to you. Once you have obtained complete independent mastery of martial arts, you will be able to figure out the minds of opponents and thus find many ways to win. This demands work."

- Shinmen Musashi no Kami, Fujiwara no Genshin (Miyamoto Musashi)
Tokugawa Era, Third Tent Government of Japan (circa 1643 AD).

I've recently been finding new weblogs by idly clicking around on the weblogs I already read. I like this more than using Blogdex. I almost never visit Blogdex. I don't entirely see the point.