stevengharms.com

Yesterday we moved over to a hotel, a certain favorite of ours near the SNA airport. After this we headed up to Long Beach and visited The Pike which is a sort of beach-side shopping area. It was rather cold and overcast, so there wasn’t much idle, sunny, beachside activity. We headed over to the Borders and met up with one of Lauren’s best friends from college. It was good to catch up and share some of our thoughts and experiences since we had last met.

Thereafter, we were joined by two other Angeleno friends of Lauren’s and we continued visiting. We then headed over to La Palapa Del Mar and had dinner. I would rate the food 3-star, the music 2-star, and the service 2-star. In short, it was not worth the clams.

We still seem to have enjoyed each other, though .

Thereafter we retired the Hot Java coffee house and had great service, great coffee, and had a great atmosphere. True to California, we met an interesting gentleman who gave us a free exemplar of his CD and told Lauren and I that it was his intuition that we were going to be a couple that would “go the distance”. It’s something I already believed, but it was interesting to have a stranger hone-in on that.

We’re crashed out in the hotel with heaps of dirty clothes and the slow ticking clock counting down to our departure.

Greetings to all and a Merry Christmas wish from Orange County, CA. Lauren and I hastened from Austin on Christmas Eve day and flew into SNA airport. Shortly after arrival my general sniffles and feeling of cold turned much more acute and it was only a matter of hours before I was impressing my girlfriend’s family not with witty bon mots and thoughts around the economic solutions to southeast Asian terrorism, but rather with coughs, sneezes, hacking, and general looking like I was sick.

Christmas day was an extravaganza of un-wrappings at the house. Thereafter we dined on breakfast quiche and let me say that it was nothing short of fantastic.

Thereafter, I proceeded to enjoy the comforts of their home: I was blanketed, warmed by border collie, fed turkey stock, and shooed back to bed. Fortunately, today, I am actually coming around the bed ever so slightly so I will be able to see some of the sights of the area. We’re planning on going to the Huntington Library.

( Update: Photos! )

More at Flickr

I’m a bit irritated about having to have spent such a long part of the visit under the weather and under blankets, but such things are simply beyond my control.

The weather has been sunny but cold with occasional visits from the Santa Ana winds. As I said there recovering I would hear the rush of palm trees in those winds and could appreciate the power of the winds. We’re going to enjoy the rest of our stay before heading home on Saturday.

ē ē

The WGA strike began during my unplanned writing hiatus, but as it’s still with us, I suppose this post is still relevant. Now this topic, when brought up with my writer girlfriend and The League quickly heated up passions in a hurry, so let me be clear first and foremost.

I think that the writers are absolutely right to be on strike for the reasons they’ve identified. They see the writing on the wall and know that digital distribution is going to be an important revenue stream that their ideas gave breath to. They are absolutely entitled to residuals / royalties / etc. The idea that Tim Kring, the visionary behind “Heroes” was not getting my economic yes-vote as I watched the DVDs upsets me ( maybe he needs one of those e-tip jars? ).

But let’s be straight here, the majority of network TV is absolute crap (above). It’s chocked-full of reality TV shows: American Idol, Top Model, etc., lame sit-coms with the impossibly hot wife with the fat, surly, paterfamilias of laffs ( “According to Jim”, “That show with Jamie Gertz and the Fat Guy”), and, uh, I’m sure some other stuff that I don’t know about.

Moving to watching “The Best” TV shows on DVD is effectively like getting network TV a la carte ( which, incidentally, we ought to be able to do on cable at a reasonable rate: ESPN Classic? No thanks. More HBO’s? Yes!) and the talent behind the most frequently chosen dishes should find themselves rewarded for crafting more appealing entertainment. My plea for peace done, let me move to my thesis.

If you hate having to come to the table against the fat cats that run the factory you live in, maybe you should stop working at the factory?

(more…)

Owing to the domain / DNS / hosting drama of the last few weeks, I’ve not been very motivated to post. Partly because I thought that investing any time and effort into the old site might make it harder to migrate to a new site. Further, after spending tons of time trying to get some non-responsive, irresponsible business owner to do what you contracted with them to provide, I just simply lost my zest for posting.

But, let me summarize a few things that tell where I’m at roughly.

Work

Decommission and migration are the orders of the day. I’m working on an interesting project now for horizontal aggregation of tag metadata across vertical data channels. That is, aggregating a blog post tagged ‘foo’ in System X with a forum reply tagged with ‘foo’ in System Y such that the correlation and breadth of this tag can be seen without respect to the application technology that holds the object that was tagged with marker ‘foo’.

Movies

I saw “No Country for Old Men”. It was outstanding. I love it when a good cinematographer gets into deep West Texas. It’s a rich landscape with a haunting power. I think that the writing of Cormac McCarthy is perfectly at home there.

Books

Ad Infinitum: A biography of Latin

Netflix

Hooray for the show “Heroes”! I really enjoyed season 1. I thought the plot arcs, while a bit watered-down for TV consumption, were still very solid. The characterization and the scheming were all very engaging and there were several times that I was on the edge of my proverbial seat. I’ll be excited for the next season - although the status and timing of that seems to be tied up in the WGA strike.

Computer

I bought a 750GB hard drive, backed up all my laptops and other smaller external drives and finally upgraded the MacBook to Leopard. So far it’s been smooth sailing as yet. I just got Rails re-installed and am currently re-reading my notes and book for a Rails project I have in mind.

Christmas

SoCal on my mind.

The one extra thing that I had no good reason to get into given my current list of exploration projects, but that I did get into.

Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong. So obscure, so powerful, so tempting.

In this months issue of Vanity Fair the piece on Katherine Heigl ( un-assuming yet beautiful “it” girl d’année ) reports that during one of the interviews she pulled out a cigarette.

I can’t believe smoking isn’t entirely passé in the overly-beauty-conscious SoCal region. It’s not like the social stigma hasn’t been ratcheted to an unthinkable level: to grab a puff while patronizing a bar is to consort with those behind the velvet rope, or hoboes, or, verily, both.

I can at least understand a celebratory cigar or occasional pipe with a fine brandy or when one wants to sample the good things ( hey, a 4-cheese fettucini is right every once and again, but not every meal ) - but the obsessive 20-to-a-pack box-of-death habit is something simply beyond me.

Update: Coincidentally, typographer Khoi Vinh, unbeknownst to me, was writing about his dislike of the smoking regulations in Paris. I’m so glad Austin finally put a smoking ban in place. I remember that when I went out my first step was, always, to wash that ashy smell off of me and and throw my clothes in some room ( not the closet, where it’d stink up the rest of my clothing ).

Latin I Test collection
Originally uploaded by sgharms

I checked out my grades for Fall semester and I got an A in latin. I think these test grades had something to do with it.

Thanks for following me across to my new site, note the new .net domain.

I’ve not written for so long owing to my fear of having to migrate more data or lose more data should the lost stevengharms.com die that I’ve completely fallen out of the habit of writing.

So far the folks at hostgator have meen a dream to work with, I opened 3 different support cases with respect to getting things set up and going and all three were addressed and dealt with between the hourse of 9 and 5. Totally, professional, friendly, and smooth.

I noticed a few links on the navigation tab are broken, i’ll be getting to those shortly, but for the moment my virtual home is safe.

I’ve been silent.

This started out for a very plain reason: I was finally going to move stevengharms.com to fronting another web site.

My current hosting provider, however, has been absolutely un-helpful in the process of moving. You see, I show this flag on my domain:

Registrar Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Registrar Status: clientRenewProhibited
Registrar Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registrar Status: clientUpdateProhibited

To move, I need this removed.

My hosting provider, personalsites.org has proved entirely un-responsive to support entreaties.

• 5 support cases
• > 7 voice mails
• Countless “I’m on line” web site chats
• AOL IM
• Yahoo! IM
• Mail to his personal site
• Mail to the admin site

It was during a “live chat” session 2 weeks ago that the administrator, Adam Stewart, said he would clear my lock. This has not been done. Requests for follow-up have been ignored. You know it’s a bad sign when the site’s forums ask openly how do we quit this site, where is the support, what’s wrong with this company, etc.

Now you might say, is the admin holding a vendetta because you’re moving? I should surely hope that’s not the case, but I must say that support has been categorically non-existent for the last 2 years, so I’m inclined to say not.

So, I’m kinda stuck. Do I want to generate more content that I will eventually have to move?

Regrettably, I’ve not found any option for getting around this block. And, to tell the truth, I’ve got all sorts of end of the calendar year things going on: school, work, etc. So, I’m hoping Santa will bring me an unlocked domain.

If anyone reads this an has any ideas on how to get the help I need, I’d be exceedingly grateful.

I’m busily studying for my class’ finals. I’ve also been trying to close out some projects at work before the first fortnight of December passes. Past that coordinating anything is a bit of a fool’s errand.