Snag in the fanfic fabric

So just after com­plet­ing the first draft of the first part of my Clark-Bruce fan­f­ic, I decid­ed to go look at canon mate­ri­als as research for facts. Seems I’ve got the facts all wrong and it’s both­er­ing me.

I’ve pos­tu­lat­ed that Bat­man would be active and fight­ing crime a few years before Super­man, and that he would be a few years old­er than Clark. Clark in the Smal­l­ville con­text is 16 or 17 years old, and I was fig­ur­ing Bruce at … Read the rest

Back in the saddle

Went run­ning again today for the first time in eleven days. 4.4 miles with some hills, in 43:46. The last time I ran Fish­er­mans Wharf-to-Fort Mason-to-Mari­na Green I hurt my foot and end­ed the run angry, dis­cour­aged, and in pain at 51:35. A few days lat­er I got back out there and gave up after two miles because of the pain in my foot. A week ago I came to the office … Read the rest

Humbling moments in software development

http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/tmpl/comparison/comparison.html

specif­i­cal­ly the following:

Introduction

Go on, admit it: you’ve writ­ten a tem­plat­ing sys­tem. It’s okay, near­ly every­one has at some point. You start out with some­thing beau­ti­ful­ly sim­ple like

$HTML =~ s/\$(\w+)/${$1}/g

and end up adding con­di­tion­als and loops and includes until you’ve cre­at­ed your very own unmain­tain­able monster. 

…ummm…

mine actu­al­ly looks like

$codeblock =~ s/<!--\$(.*?)\$-->/${$1}/eg;

just close enough to be depressing.… Read the rest

So it begins.…

I packed my first box today. I’m a bit wor­ried about this move. I have a lot of work to do to be ready for it, and I’ve only a few week­ends between now and the move-in date. It’s becom­ing clear that there is no way I can fit all my stuff fill­ing up this one-bed­room apart­ment into my sin­gle bed­room. I’m going to have to get rid of some of this stuff.

Ulti­mate­ly, that’s a good thing. There’s no rea­son … Read the rest

Neighborhood

One more thing about this neigh­bor­hood I won’t miss: the “church” of rent­ed space over the laun­dro­mat with open win­dows and loud­speak­ers. I don’t know why any­one needs loud­speak­ers that can be heard three blocks away to preach to every­one in the same room.

I’m used to church­es being good things to be near: yeah, maybe some­times the choir is loud and some­times the park­ing is bad, but gen­er­al­ly they tend to be good neighbors.

Not here. Here the church­es are … Read the rest

This doesn’t cut it.

I have a pic­ture of myself here, it’s an ID pho­to for gain­ing entry to one of San Fran­cis­co’s jails from the days when I used to do out­reach in the jails. Damned if that picture—a pho­to tak­en by the Sher­if­f’s Department—doesn’t look real good. It’s not nor­mal for a pho­to ID tak­en by a munic­i­pal employ­ee to look good.

But here’s the thing: I was tak­ing care of myself and not in the half-mea­sures way that seems to be avail­ing … Read the rest

Cyberpunk

The lin­er notes read, in a mono­spaced type­writer font: idol@well.sf.ca.us.

So Bil­ly chose the Whole Earth ‘Lec­tron­ic Link for his con­duit to the online com­mu­ni­ty, back when it was a com­mu­ni­ty, and used it for his swan dive from fame to obscurity.

1993 was before the Web. I’m imag­in­ing Bil­ly Idol brows­ing Gopher sites search­ing for tfiles and read­ing Mon­do 2000. That was cer­tain­ly before PPP, but maybe he was dialed in with SLIP, or maybe he was … Read the rest

The bad old days

Clean­ing off my files on my ISP as I’m like­ly to be mov­ing my sites when I move my self, and I found this:

http://www.p90.net/mockups/rev_0906/

It’s a DHTML mock­up of a web­site that was nev­er launched. As far as I can tell, it’ll only work on MSIE, but I’m look­ing on a Mac, you might have bet­ter luck on the Win­dows side of things. OTOH, it may have been com­plete­ly bro­ken by MSIE 6. I was … Read the rest