jeremyrandall / blog /

Meez Roomz and Games are now up and running on Facebook. You can create a Meez avatar, create a room, invite friends to chat in the room and even watch videos (YouTube, etc.) together in the room. I’m currently involved with Meez, so I know how much cool technology has gone into this.

Meez Roomz and Games on Facebook

Me, in my Meez Room on Facebook:

It’s 2008!

For the last day of 2007 I went to work, met up with a lunch group, came home, did laundry, called someone and made a date, took a nap and then took the bus to the Castro area to attend two New Year’s Eve parties. I met some fun new folks and marked the new year with close friends and an intimate late night. Then I walked home, enjoying the exercise, the cool breeze and the city lights. The Transamerica building is blinking its regular red light; the multicolored holiday light has been retired until next year. The holidays are over (except for having today, New Year’s Day, off, I suppose) and it’s time to dive back in to the regular day to day.

2007 was a big year for me; I have a lot of optimism about 2008. Out with the old, in with the new, positive choices, making progress.

On another note, my Mac is at the Apple Store getting a new hard drive, under warranty. I hope it’s back soon!

Work has been rather enjoyable as of late. I’ve been making good progress on projects and generally cleaning up and planning expansion of the environment for which I am responsible. I’ve been reminded lately, too, that I am much happier working in creative environments than in stodgy places. I find that companies with creative products tend to be companies with creative people, and those are the folks who are enjoyable to work with. It’s certainly nice to enjoy work, since it’s a cornerstone of daily life for me and, I believe, most of us.

I asked a friend how he was doing the other day and he replied, “you know, another shitty day in paradise.” I don’t think things are shitty; I go back and forth between enjoying the stability of a predictable life and looking for new and interesting things to do. In the past this would have involved some “troublemaking” or goofing off, but today it’s more about finding positive experiences to pursue. I get frustrated by some of the general annoyances that are part of my existence, but try to keep an eye on the bigger picture and find gratitude for the very great life that I have. I guess it’s all about balance, which I am good at in a lot of areas and still working on in others.

On the geek front, I am using a MacBook at work and have rigged it up to triple boot Mac OS X, Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux. It works using a combination of rEFIt, a Mac boot loader, and GRUB, the Linux boot loader installed by Ubuntu (and most every Linux distribution these days). rEFIt comes up first and will reliably boot OS X every time. If Vista or Ubuntu is selected, GRUB is used, but there’s a hitch. About 80 percent of the time the keyboard is frozen at the GRUB menu, which will boot the selected OS but will not allow selecting something else. To do so, the system needs to be restarted until the keyboard becomes active again at the GRUB menu. Even if the keyboard is frozen at GRUB, it becomes active once an OS is booted. It’s weird glitch that seems to be a bug with the MacBook firmware. I increased GRUB’s timeout and set it to boot the last OS selected, which reduces the number of restarts if I’m just going back to the last OS used.

Triple booting Mac OS X, Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux works without any glitches, all directly from rEFIt.

All of the operating systems work well on this MacBook, though I had to use ndiswrapper with a Windows driver to enable wireless in Ubuntu, and it’s not as reliable as the native wireless drivers used in OS X or Windows. Vista’s graphics performance is quite good on this machine and all of the hardware works great with the drivers provided by Apple’s Boot Camp.

Still no iPhone for me; boo on Apple for forcing AT&T on people and not letting the iPhone become usable until the A&T activation has occurred (there is an activation hack: search for a guy named “DVD Jon” to find it).

Finally, I went on a reading marathon over the past few weeks, re-reading all six of the Harry Potter books before I bought a copy of the seventh and last book, Deathly Hallows (from a local bookstore, of course). It was awesome. I’ve lost sleep staying up reading, reading, reading. I managed to avoid any serious spoilers before I read Hallows and was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. Now I find myself strangely bereft of the series, wishing I had more and wondering what to do now that it’s all over. I guess I’ll have to dive into something new.

And so it goes…

I’ve been listening to a lot of music lately. I’ve never been one of those people that sits around with a group of people talking incessantly about bands and songs; music has always been more personal to me. I don’t get any pleasure from analyzing songs with people, I much prefer to say, “hey listen to this new song/band I found; I think it’s neat” (yes, I actually say the word “neat” because, well, I like it). Since I got rid of the TV I’ve been buying more music than I used to over a given period of time.

I was looking at this stack of blank CDs on my desk at work today and thinking about the name, “compact disc.” Such amazing technology in the early 80’s. I only owned a few actual records that I inherited from God-knows-where; once I was old enough (teenager) to scrape together some funds I started buying CDs. I had a couple of those big binder things stuffed full of them. One was “high school music” and the other was, for lack of a better term, “my twenties music.” I still have one of them. The other, as far as I can tell, didn’t make it out of the apartment of an ex and I never tried to ask for it back; I suspect they got thrown out. That makes me sad, but life goes on. I’ve learned that holding on to things is never as rewarding as just remembering they were there. Plus, I can’t remember the last time I actually listened to an old CD anyway. I’ve been an iPod user for awhile now; the music is purchased with mouse clicks and gets backed up to a second hard drive. I guess I’m keeping up with technology pretty well; I text people from my [cute] cell phone, after all.

I was reading the blog of an old friend from high school. Actually I guess I could say the blog of two old friends from high school. The two of them met when we were freshmen or sophomores and have been together ever since. They have a baby now and, despite my lack of child-rearing interest, I find it cute and moving to see how their family is doing.

Thinking of them made me think of Tommy, another high school friend. He was killed early in Bush’s war; the guy never saw his thirties. I went back for his funeral and our high school named their stadium for him. Just a tragic situation. He and I used to sit around for hours and hours listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, a CD that I asked for, and was actually given to me by my rather progressive grandmother.

We’d listen to that album all the way through and talk about how the way it felt must have been like getting stoned, which neither of us had [yet] tried. I’d go with friends to see Floyd laser shows. I would listen to Dark Side of the Moon alone in my room. If I heard one of those songs on the radio in the car I would turn it way up. It was just so visceral at a time when I didn’t yet have many life experiences of my own. I even tried listening to it while watching The Wizard of Oz though I didn’t find it all that impressive.

I have no idea where my copy of that CD is today. It may be in the missing binder, it may be in the back of a binder that I still have, out of order, lost, quiet. I could just go on to iTunes and buy the album again, but for some reason I haven’t. I will, sure. Eventually.

Those old records had art on their covers, of course. CDs had art on their covers too. The downloaded songs include digital versions that pop up on the screen while the music is playing. There’s a certain continuity there which I like. It’s not about the packaging, it’s about the sight, the sound and the feel, as it always has been. For me it’s about memories, of building soundtracks into periods of my life and then coming back later to hear those memories anew.

Some bands I’m into right now: Tosca, Mindtrap, Cantoma.

That’s all for now.

I rarely talk about people I know here in the ol’ blog, which sometimes strikes me as strange since the relationships I have, with all sorts of different people, are so important to me.

In this case I have been specifically asked to be general.

Last week the company I work for had its holiday party in San Francisco. The following is a funny shot of men in suits getting wild, wild and crazy, crazy. They found funny hats and started dancing like the Village People. No policeman, though.

I asked the legal department at this company if it was okay to post pictures from the party. They said as long as I never identified the company by name (roger that), received permission from the photographer (got it) and received permission from the people in the photo(s) then it wouldn’t be a problem. Okay, so I’m doing a little “work around” on the last part.

Happy Holidays everyone.

I’m always amazed by the muted roar, for lack of a better term, that comes up from the street during parades. And of all the parades in San Francisco each year, Pride has to be the biggest.

I’ve been going back and forth from the street to home; seeing the parade in person and watching on TV as it streams past outside my window. I think it’s great to see families with their kids, police and government, media, corporations, medical organizations, religious groups and regular people from different places and walks of life celebrating diversity and love and hope. That is what progress is about, in my opinion!

One of my favorite unique music sources is SomaFM (somafm.org), which describes itself as, “Listener-supported, commercial-free, underground/alternative radio broadcasting from San Francisco.” It’s run by Rusty, a guy I worked with back in the “tech TV” days; they play about ten streaming electronic music stations, including three new offerings. I’m sure my attempts at description won’t do it justice, especially since I’m not really dialed in to all the different electronic music genres. I just know that I like more ambient, reflective, dark, middle-of-the-night-when-the-city-is-quiet types of selections. Whatever that means.

I’m currently listening to one of the new streams, called “Space Station Soma.”

My friend Ryan runs a show at 9pm on Monday nights via 90hz.org. 90hz is not on the air full time like SOMAFM; they offer scheduled programming run by, as far as I can tell, a volunteer crew.

Bay to Breakers is going on right now, streaming past my building. Earlier the “serious” runners came through; the crowds were light and it was still quiet. Now the throngs are strolling by, the crowds are cheering — it’s in full swing:

Life has been really busy lately in very good ways. I’m not going to detail all of the specifics here, but I have been doing a lot within the social groups that I hang out with, I’m taking a short-term class every other weekend, and I am getting a lot done at work, including finishing off a large project and getting ready to travel to Minneapolis on business. I always think “on business” sounds kind of silly, but it gets the point across. I have not been to Minneapolis before, so I am looking forward to seeing a new town, at the very least. Perhaps I can find some cool things to do in the evenings? You betchya?

I like to say that San Francisco only has two seasons, winter and summer. Winter descends sometime around November when the skies suddenly get gray with a little cold and a decent amount of rain for about half a year. Then around now, start of May, it lifts away and becomes sunny and windy and warmer for the other half of the year. I think it has something to do with the Pacific High shielding the area from storms part of the time. Well, “summer” seems to be here at last; the time has changed to daylight savings, the sky is light past 8pm and the sailing should be starting up aggresively pretty soon. Needless to say, of the two seasons here, summer is what I prefer.

I recently read Dry by Augusten Burroughs. I couldn’t help comparing it to A Million Little Pieces. I feel like kind of dick by saying this, given all the mainstream press it received a couple months back, but I read Pieces before it was discredited, and when I did it seemed defensive and disengenous and a little “off” to me. Really, it did, I am not jumping on the “hindsight bandwagon” here! Ask my friend Loretta. Anyway, Dry is cool because it is very close to the same story but I think it’s a more genuine portrayal of the struggle to break through addiction and how hard that can be. The precursor to that story, Running with Scissors is also a good read.

It’s raining. Again. Earlier it was just overcast. The waters of the bay looked kind of grayish beige, reflecting the skies above. Now I can’t really see the water. It just kind of merges in to the sky; there’s a ship anchored in the harbor that is just on the cusp of disappearing in to the mist. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen some really heavy fog or heard the foghorns, but surely they must be blowing out by the Gate.

I keep thinking that spring is going to appear any minute now. The weather will start to get clear, then the rain returns and lasts for days. I miss the sun and those nice days of sailing. Any minute now.

I am taking the day to stay inside my cozy place, reading (a cheesy treasure-hunter type novel at the moment, Wikipedia likely at some point), snacking, listening to music and puttering around my apartment with the heat on and the string of little lights glowing softly. I’m listening to the radio which is unsual. I, like so many others, listen to music on my computer and portable music player — I don’t even own a regular stereo receiver anymore. But that can feel so isolated. Sometimes I think I have no idea what is going on, musically, out in the world. Then I remember I can listen to a radio station via its Internet stream. Oh yeah.

It really is a different world than it was even ten years ago.

The great thing about listening to a local station on a rainy day is the DJs, looking out their windows at the same misty world that I am looking at, play rainy day music. Or maybe I just think that’s the case.

So I spent a good portion of this evening on MySpace. I added a few of my friends, and then kept looking around and found a bunch of other people that I know, and friends of friends, and old friends and people from other times and places in my life.

I haven’t had a chance to listen to this yet, but I noticed that KQED did an hour about MySpace on March 3rd.

Update: The Forum segment was focused on how kids use MySpace and what parents need to know about it. Not my area of interest, but it was a good discussion that hit on some important topics.