jeremyrandall / blog /

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…

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.