Linkstew

Heh, I was just rereading my post about my plans to buy a Game Boy Advance SP, and I glanced at the top of the page and noticed that the random tagline du jour was "Buy a new Game Boy, for the fun and the fashion."

How appropriate! In case you don't know, that's a line from Stuck in the 90s by Moxy Früvous, off of the fantastic (with a few exceptions) album Bargainville.

Which suddenly reminds me! Also on Bargainville is the Gulf War Song, which you should at the very least go read. It was written in response to that other gulf war, but it's just as appropriate today.

Well, I'm not out partying the night away tonight -- I'm a lot exhausted after today's sprint midterm composition, and I find parties more stressful than relaxing -- but I was at a party on Saturday, and I wore a costume! Check it out, I was A Guy with Short Hair:

Heh, as much as that qualifies as a Halloween costume all by itself, I actually had a costume in addition to that. I was Oz, from Buffy:

Of course, as Mark pointed out, I kind of dropped the ball, as I had an opportunity for an even more meta costume that I overlooked. If I'd really been on top of things, I could have worn the same Halloween costume as Oz wore in Fear, Itself: A name tag that said "Hello, my name is: God." That episode had a lot of good moments, not the least of which was the "Actual size" punchline at the end.

(And on the synchronicity side of things, when I was getting my haircut, Lonnie said "Y'know, it's funny -- I have another client named Ben who had all of his hair cut off just last Saturday." Funny how that works.)

Tonight, while doing my Astronomy homework, I was also watching Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. One of Space Ghost's guests was Moby (who Space Ghost kind of ate later in the episode... but anyway), who asked Space Ghost if there was anything interesting going on in space. When Space Ghost ignored the question, Moby brought up the recent (at the time... silly reruns) impact of the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter (Which Space Ghost of course also ignored)...

Anyway, I mention this, because in Astronomy this week, we heard about SL9, and one of my homework questions asked what the Roche Limit is and how it explains why SL9 broke up into smaller pieces when it approached Jupiter.

And it turns out that I'm actually enjoying my Astronomy class a lot more than I expected I would. It's still very basic, and the homework is just ridiculously easy, but it's a nice high-level sketch... For an introductory course, it's doing a good job of presenting lots of information and making me curious for more.

So on top of the 8,000 other things I've been dealing with in the last week, I did some experimenting with rsync for work. I really liked it, and decided that once I got a chance, I wanted to switch to using rsync to upload my sources for my web sites. And so the weekend finally came, and after sleeping straight through Saturday afternoon/evening, I woke up and started playing with rsync, when Kevin messaged me:

Benjy (10:23 PM): Time to play with rsync.
Kevin (10:23 PM): I know it. I'm looking into it.
Benjy (10:24 PM): No, I mean, I'm actually playing with rsync right now.
Kevin (10:24 PM): Oh, did you read my just-finished post?
Benjy (10:24 PM): no...
Kevin (10:24 PM): That's pretty coincidental.

So before, I was using a Makefile + tar --after-date=($TODAY) ... + scp + ssh to copy updates to the web server. This worked okay, but it was pretty messy, and I had to manually specify the directories to include, and I had to manually exclude certain things from being copied every time, and so on. But here's what the new rsync based Makefile looks like:

all: clean put

put:
        rsync -avuz --exclude-from=exclude \
	--delete -e ssh gimli/ bsii@gimli:

get:
        rsync -avuz --exclude-from=exclude \ 
	-e ssh bsii@gimli: gimli/

clean:
        @echo 'Removing those pesky backup files'
        find gimli/ -name "*~" -exec rm {} \;
        find gimli/ -name "*bak" -exec rm {} \;
        find gimli/ -name "*#" -exec rm {} \;
        find gimli/ -name "#*#" -exec rm {} \;
        find gimli/ -name ".#*" -exec rm {} \;

The directory ~/gimli/ on my local machine contains everything that goes in my home directory on my web server. The file ~/exclude contains directories that should never be touched on either side -- notably, log files on the server side.

Because I use the `-e ssh` option to rsync, it uses ssh, so all of the communication is encrypted. And the best part is, you can do all of this on a default Mac OS X install, because it comes with rsync and ssh and make and everything you need! Yummy.

And then, as I make changes, I can just periodically type `make`, and it uploads just the bits that are different. And the advantage of this over my old system is that, if I make changes on the server side while I'm away from my own computer, I can type `make get` later and it'll update my local copy with what was changed on server. If you want more details about my setup, please ask.

disclaimer! It would be very easy to blow away your files by just running those commands that are in this post! Before you start playing with rsync, make sure you have a backup of all of your files on both ends! Also, be sure to use the -n option to rsync for a dry run -- it'll tell you exactly what it plans to do. Finally, be really careful with rsync's --delete. And if something does happen to your files, it's not my fault!

On Friday in my (Visual) Perception lecture, I was playing with my glob of yellow Office: mac silly putty that I'd gotten at MacWorld SF. Stretching it and rolling it and making balls and breaking it and making sheets and so on.

Also on Friday in my (Visual) Perception lecture, Professor Palmer was talking about photons, and how they're emitted by light sources and bounce around and about and sometimes into our eye... And then he made eye contact with me, and said "so you can think of a photon bouncing around the room kind of like a bouncing ball of silly putty."

So I quietly put away my silly putty and managed to pay attention for about 5 minutes before getting distracted by a particularly uninteresting light fixture.

Um. I really don't have much else to say about it, other than I like the word when it's applicable, and I've used it a couple of times today, and I've seen it (or variants of it (in the form of the "resonance" one)) used three times today.

Part of my iPod purchase involved subsidizing the purchase by selling my Rio 500. I didn't feel bad about selling it to someone, because despite being a year and a half old it was still in really good condition, and still worked like a champ.

So I sent out the offer to misc, and Dima offered to buy it for his girlfriend a few minutes later. I met with Dima tuesday to make the sale, and I walked and talked with him for awhile.

He and I had bought our Rio's at the same time, so we talked about how they had been holding up. He said his still worked great, but compared to his mine looked like it was brand new. I can only hope that my iPod can go through as much abuse as his Rio and still work.

We also discussed head phones. I had bought a pair of Sony ear plugs on his recommendation when I had got my Rio, and I've been very happy with them for the last year and a half. But he asked me if I'd had any trouble with them breaking, because he's apparently gone through 5 pairs to the single pair that I've gone through in that time.

Of course, as soon as I mention something, if it's bad it happens and if it's good it goes away.

This morning when I picked up my iPod with the faithful headphones, I noticed that the side decoration had broken off of one of the plugs. The headphones were still fully functional, but I'm such a freak for aesthetics that I would have bought a new pair of headphones if the side piece had been lost. But the piece was sitting there next to the iPod, so I super glued it back on and that was that.

I was briefly amused by the thought of accidentally gluing a headphone into my ear, but then I remembered that as soon as I mention something, if it's bad it happens and if it's good it goes away. So I banished the thought from my head, and that was that.

So today, this highly amusing post to Craigslist was shard on our office misc list.

And as fate would have it, I came home this evening to find my roommate and a friend of his had gone out today and bought Magic 7th Edition (They're on 7th edition!?) and were playing it on the floor. "We were sitting in our GSI office getting all nostalgic about Magic, and so we went by Games of Berkeley and picked up some cards..." he told me later.

I've been sitting around trying to think of something to post here all day, but I was kind of at a loss. The best thing I could think of was to post about my dinner, and ramble on about food for awhile, but I couldn't quite bring myself to write about mashed potatoes.

And yet I'm here anyway, and the subject is still apparently mashed potatoes.

Actually, I just wanted to share that as I was debating whether or not to post about my dinner of mashed potatoes, I was chatting with Peter, and he said "I have this urge to post about mashed potatos right now..."

And I figured the synchronicity was actually more interesting than me writing about my potato obsession again.

And yes, there's a Pratchett reference in this post. Points if you noticed.

I've been yacking it up on IRC over the last few days... It'd been years since I went away, but when I came back, I found that many more people than I expected were still hanging around. Stranger still, I found that many of my old online friends had gathered in Phoenix (Tempe, whatever), AZ. It's very strange to know that people who met on the internet years ago because of common interests have now gathered together in real life because they got along online.

It leaves me wondering a lot of things -- How many other communities like this have developed over the years? How much more common is this going to become in the future, as more and more people from around the world are able to freely meet and communicate with each other? Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? So many questions, so few answers -- yet.

Anyway, the point of this post is that at one point, it came up that I was having my wisdom teeth out on the 19th (assuming my insurance works out). And strangely enough, a person I hadn't talked to for years is having her teeth out on the same day. What're the odds?

I was playing Crazy Taxi tonight, in anticipation of the impending release of Crazy Taxi 2, when I crashed into a black van and flipped it over. I made a joke about pissing off the A-Team and Keith said that, strangely enough, he had seen an episode of A-Team last weekend.

Finished with my fun and games for the evening, I retired to my room and began reading a few web pages. Then I got to Feedle's site, and he had a link to, well, All Your Base are belong to Mr. T (flash warning).

Another McSweeney's/Thief of Time coincidence. In "Barry Blitt's Vacation Postcards" in McSweeney's, there is a postcard filled with "Pebbles of the Red Sea", and one of those pebbles is labeled as "Filled with creamy Nougat", and another was labeled "Forged in a blast furnace called time. (The others if you're curious, were labeled "A girl", "The color of cRutney", and "Mistaken for marzipan by early spanish settlers, but these aren't relevant to the coincidence.)

And in Thief of Time, Pratchett bashes Nougat at least three times, and ends the story with the sentence "Even with Nougat, you can have a perfect moment."