Cafe Bucky

“One .. Two.. You know what to do …”

So begins “Elevator Music” off of Beck’s new album “The Information”.

One, Two, I know what to do. Back and bloggin’. I never quite left. Tuned into Second Life and dropped out of the web for while. Needed the break, now comes the balance. How to tie my newfound love into my oldfound profession?

Much of the following will not make sense if you have never spent time in Second Life …

2L Builder. 2L Scripter. I have a one-man photo exhibit. Own land. Happy in many dimensions. Lovin’ Second Life. It appeals to my creative and technical bents. Web 3D.

And there are wonderful people and flakes. Wow, just like real life. And there are great places to see, and virtual strip mall big box regurgitations of suburban fucking hell.

Most Second Life builders do what Desktop Publishers did in 1985. Prims are tortured. Textures are stretched. Real estate and virtual buildings are The Wild West – some people here and there seem to know what they are doing. The landscape of Prefabs reminds me of Gary, Indiana. I’ve seen gaps and overlaps; rooms too small and doors too tall. You want how much for that? Ya must be jokin’

And there is no sense of day. If you dont like the sun, make it midnight. There’s a menu for everything, if only you can find it in time.

So what happened in Web 2.0 while I was gone? Suppose I’ll catch up. Suppose I’ll blend these worlds somehow. The 2.0, and the Web 3D. I’ll even put up with LSL until we get Mono. Not like we have a choice on that one :-)

Yeah, I’m back. Hi there. I want a gig in the metaverse. See ya on the grid.

What some numbers mean to me. One of those silly lists.

• 1 – Pacific Coast Highway, The Beach, West Coast. I may leave, but I’ll always visit.
• 2 – cats
• 3 – Nikons
• 4 – airport wireless base stations at home
• 6 – World Cup Soccer games (’94)
• 11 – countries visited
• 19 – states visited
• 26 – years of coffee
• 27 – years of programming
• 110 – mph on the track
• 130 – on a nice open stretch, uh, somewhere
• 155 – target weight
• 170 – current weight
• 185 – glutton weight
• 212 – favorite area code
• 250 – paid for a noisy, slow, clunky dot matrix printer in 1982
• 300 – my tech book review fee
• 400 – Atari 400, my first computer
• 501 – levis (when I lose more weight)
• 550 – levis (sick of them)
• 1999 – best year
• 3900 – miles driven in one cross country trip
• 5600 – songs on iPod
• 58000 – E36 M3 miles driven

2005 built character. Enough already.

There are some highlights from this year that I really enjoyed, such as living in NYC, driving across the country, and making significant progress on FlexiPhoto. My daughter got to go to a stellar school in NYC, and thrived. My wife got photos into a couple of exhibitions. I’m frikken healthy.

But there were mistakes aplenty. A bunch of “should haves”. Shoulda pulled the plug on working with AOLServer & Tcl much earlier (career detour). Shoulda rented out the West Coast house so that we could have stayed in NYC. I haven’t done a good job at marketing FlexiPhoto, or my own blog, or myself, for that matter (my resume and site need a going-over). I haven’t done enough to keep up with friends. Wasted a lot of time fretting about things I can’t change. bla bla bla. Terrible birthday [1], and worse Christmas (not in the materialistic sense, but in the sense of not being enthusiastic about either one).

It’s not a true “Annus Horriblus” (just sounds more dramatic than “year that sucked”). If it were, I may not be fortunate enough to write the words, right? No Hurricane Katrina here. No car crashes. No upside-down goldfish. It could have been a lot worse. Still, I’m glad it’s just about over. Onward.

[1] with the exception of being with a couple of wonderful folks in Mill Valley for a few hours.

Last year I wrote “Christmas Sanity”. Hmm, it still holds true. There’s an awful lot of JUNK being bought on this Black Friday. Go, Economy, Go :=/ I don’t need anything, but if someone insisted, they could check out my wishlist. I admire gifts that take a little thought (a plane ticket to, say, Sydney Australia would be excellent, or failing that, a Pastrami Sandwich from Katz’s in NYC). All I really want for Christmas is camraderie and yummy food.

I don’t want every post here to mention FlexiPhoto, but until I get the word out, and start some momentum on that site, I’ll get ta mentionin’ …

Ok, 2.5a4 (Jamaica) is out!

Now I can get to scary things, like Halloween and PHP Security.

I’d missed the last couple of years of Halloween on D Street in Petaluma. We get 3000 trick or treaters. No, that’s not a typo. It’s insane! We live next to some people who give out cartons of chocolate milk every year (they run a dairy), and everyone that goes there, comes here. 3000 of them. Ask me about my candy bill sometime.

The other scary thing (boo!) can be PHP security. Fortunately, there’s a new O’Reilly book out: “Essential PHP Security”, by Chris Shiflett. I was on the verge of buying the print edition, and was relieved to see it come up in Safari. I know it will help me whip FlexiPhoto into shape.

Back in June I wrote No More Than A Mac Mini For Now

How completely silly of me. I wish to use these pixels to express my nearly unbridled lust for the new dual-processor, dual core core G5. The machine is ffffast! Yes, I know there will be an Intel box (eventually), but there’s also the idea of Getting More Done Now. Yes, it’s irrational, and yes, it’s just a shiny aluminum box. It’s one of those “if you don’t know, you’ll never get it, and if you do, no explanation is necessary” things.

I bet Susan will get one first. We both use our 17″ PowerBooks as our main machines, and with just 1gb of RAM, we’re in memory to disk swapping hell. We could buy more ram, but what’s the fun in that? She’s going to come back from PhotoPlus Expo all jazzed (rightfully so) about Aperture, and will need a hefty Mac to make good use if it.

And with Winter coming, it doubles as a heater!

Quick mentions … The Party is Scaled Back!. Webzine 2005 was fun, strange, and inspirational. Wish I could have gone back for Sunday.

I’m keeping my eyes out for a contract. In the meantime, I’ve been putting a lot of work into porting FlexiPhoto to PHP 5. More about that when it’s time to post it.

I’m pretty happy to be back home in California. The echoes of NYC car alarms and other stimuli fade away. I’ll be back there in mid-August for a few days, and then comes the Long Drive West across the Country!

There’s a lot I can say about the pros and cons of NYC and Petaluma. If I were really hip, I could just podcast it in 5 minutes. To write it down has taken longer, and I’m not happy with the result.

The gist of it is that I love both places, but don’t want to spend 12 months a year in either.

A big thing I have learned from the bi-coastal experiment is a new-found appreciation for California, and for Petaluma in particular. No place is utopia, but Petaluma is undergoing a pretty significant change for the better these days. It’s a great place to be based.