Recovery Commute

They finished the railroads when they finished out in the West Coast - Anthony Quinn

I started my new job on July 16th, which means today marks two months there.  My first month at work, Mrs.Chaos was away, and so I spent it being 100% at the office and staying with a coworker up in the Berkeley hills or at my old temporary lodging in Palo Alto.  The commute was crazy, but I did get my exercise in.  I had to do "recovery commutes" to let my feet and shins heal up.

In my former job I went every two weeks and it involves a three hour drive down on Monday morning, a half-hour commute to my bay area lodging each day, and then a three hour drive back home on Wednesday night.  Not the greatest commute.  I told myself that every two weeks I would end up spending eight hours driving which meant I had about an eighteen minute commute each way to work - just spread out.

Now in my new job my commute involves much less driving.  Today is only my second time trying out the new office commute but it should be fairly nice.  A twenty minute commute from my home to the train station, a hour and twenty minute commute on Amtrak with power, WiFi, food, bathrooms.  Follow that up by a thirty-five minute commute on BART which is less pleasant, but since I get on the first station I get to sit and compute.  Then there is that final 1.2 mile walk on the other end.  I could swap to Muni to finish it up, but the walk does me some good.

This new commute?  It still ends up taking about three hours, but there is something magical about being able to do all that on the train.  I can read.  I can work.  I can sleep.  Magical.

Epic Fantasy War

Armies marched, fought, claimed victory or conceded defeat, all for the wellsprings... - Thormun's Journal

It was a long time ago that I bought Heroscape. 2004? 2006? I think somewhere in there. In the years that I've owned it, I really only ended up playing it once or twice a year. Part of it is that you need a certain crowd to want to play a complex epic fantasy battle and the other problem is the setup. That certain crown that wants to play gets obsessed over the fact that there are 20+ different characters all with their own stats and special abilities.
The way it ended up was we would spend an hour putting the board together followed by another hour of people just looking through the various army cards. Maybe we'd get to the point of spending another thirty-minutes selecting armies and putting them on the board. Then everyone was done for the day. No need to play. So unless I could get people to set aside a good six or more hours to play it wouldn't happen. And honestly, who is going to set aside that much time? Even I have trouble doing it and I love to play the game.
Recently it was proposed that instead of painstakingly studying every hero and squad card for hours before the game, why not just pick armies randomly? Randomly? YES! So at first we started by doing our best to randomly draw cards from the deck trying to get everyone up to but not over a number (like 400 points). Then I realized, you know what would be way more efficient doing this than us? A computer.
The joke was that to ramp up with my new job, I needed to build a PHP app using the Zend framework against the NoSQL database. In the end, I just wrote a web app. Works great on the iPhone. So now when we sit down to play we are just five seconds away from having randomly fairly balanced armies. The future is awesome. It's a little sad that only two years after they stopped making it did I find the secret to playing it. Live and learn. Also - come over and play a game with me, will ya?

You Have to PAX

I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth. - Jerry Holkins (Gabe)

After five long years of being out of the country for Labor Day weekend, I finally made it to PAX. My friends have been going for, basically five years. Whereas I have been busy going to Turkey, England, India, Korea, etc. But this year? This year I went to PAX !
Since my friends have been going year-after-year they have built up a set of traditions. Things which must be done. During Gabe and Tycho's Q&A session after the keynote and kid (12?) went up to the mic and started with, "This is my first PAX..." and Tycho immediately responded, "if it's your first PAX, then you have to PAX!" In case you did not immediately recognize that, it's from Fight Club. Rule #8 - If this is your first fight club, you have to fight. So this became the theme of the weekend. When a tradition was mentioned that I or Mrs.Chaos (did I mention she was there?) didn't want to engage in, the response was always the same: "You have to PAX!"
Going to Acquisitions Incorporated? You have to PAX! Going to see music night with JoCo? You have to PAX! Playing board games (Zombicide) until 4am in the morning? You have to PAX! Playing card games at Tap House during dinner? You have to PAX! So it went. To be fair, these are time honors traditions created in the before time; in the long ago (1-5 years).
So what did I love? The most awesome thing? NASA/JPL did a panel about the Curiosity rover. To start with, I have this speechless amazement that humanity has put a ROBOT ON MARS! I amazed how mundane this is. I wasn't alive for the moon landing, but I image the entire world was speechless for the moments when they took a giant leap for mankind. Today? Today people think, "well, we put another robot on Mars." Are you kidding me? WE PUT A ROBOT ON MARS!!!! In fact, we had a robot in orbit around Mars take pictures of the new robot landing on Mars! The fact that people consider this... common place? No big deal? This blows my mind almost as much as the fact that humans are currently controlling a ROBOT ON MARS!
Beyond that? The Q&A sessions with Gabe and Tycho are pretty impressive. The questions range from excellent ("What are you working on in your free time?") to interesting to horribly awkward ("let me explain in explicit detail the way my girlfriend dumped me... and by the way, PAX is cool."). They handle the riff with grace and hilarity. I approve.
The concerts were fun as well. Mrs.Chaos enjoyed Video Game Orchestra (cause who wouldn't?) and Paul and Storm. I was sad that she didn't get much from Jonathan Coulten, who is clearly the most successful of the bunch. Yet, JoCo's performance was tough to get. If you weren't part of the JoCo cult, it wasn't very good. On the otherhand, most people at PAX are part of the JoCo cult.

Cards against Humanity (a mature audience-only version of Apples to Apples) was a big hit. They gave out T-Shirts for questions and answers and if you were wearing one, random people would ask to take photos of the two of your together. It happened to all of us.

We ended up commuting with Gabe (Jerry) twice and Darkhawk did his best to invite him to play games with us at Blarney Stone. It never worked out
Did I mention there is a pinball arcade in the backroom of a bar? The pinball is awesome. That is all.
 

Penny Arcade Expo!

The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. - Homer Simpson

The internet has broken conferences. My friends have been going to PAX for countless years and I have never been able to attend because I've been otherwise indisposed (in Turkey, in England, in Korea, etc). For the first year I'm going to go and I am very excited about this.
Different sets of my friends have a habit of going to Anime Expo, Otacon and PAX. My budget doesn't let me go to all of things, especially taking Mrs. Chaos. So the idea is to figure out which of the conferences Mrs.Chaos likes the most and just go to that one. A couple of years ago we took her to Anime Expo in Los Angeles and I think she had an okay time. The biggest challenge for her to deal with was the complete and utter indecisiveness of my friends. So we would be walking around unsure where to eat and everyone would confirm they were hungry, but no one would want to make a decision or express a preference, "Yeah I'm hungry. I could eat anywhere." "How about this place? It's British Pub style food." Of course, my friends express displeasure in a place through very passive means so when they respond with "Yeah, I guess that's okay" no one is quite sure if they don't want to eat there or are really indifferent and this causes long delays in any kind of decision making. Beyond that, Anime Expo just ain't what it used to be. The basic pass doesn't get you what it used, and all of the concerts and special events charge extra. So what's free? The video rooms - which used to be how we discovered shows, but now we've basically seen everything they're showing. It just doesn't work out. Anime Expo got checked off the list and we're probably not going back. We'll see.
This year we are trying out Penny Arcade! The internet broke PAX registration. It was pretty impressive as we were all waiting for it to go live, no one knowing when it would happen. The moment it went live we all started messaging each other and trying to register. A couple people were able to register, but then they took down the site because it couldn't handle the mad rush of people. It went back up the next week, and we repeated the activity of messaging each other and registering. Amazingly, tickets sold out in about 4-6 hours during the middle of the work day. More amazing? All six of us managed to get through and get tickets during that time.
I've never been to PAX before and I am super excited about going. I also have extremely high hopes that Mrs. Chaos is going to have a fantastic time. The only problem is she will be the only lady this year, but maybe having an entourage of six handsome gentlemen opening doors for her will make her feel like royalty and then she can convince all the other ladies to come in future years. Really what is PAX? Just watching cool people do cool things all day and then playing board games and CCG until 4am in the morning. Perfect!
 

iPad Printing

Gene Roddenberry always talked about how amazing humans were, because we could do amazing things when we worked together. He was right. - Wil Wheaton

My experiment to replace my home laptop with my iPad is not going all that well. I find myself constantly reaching for my real computer for all sorts of needs. Even writing this, what I really wanted to was super-impose the two images to create a single image. How? What photo editing software on my iPad should I use? I tried doing it in iPhoto, but that's not really the point of iPhoto. So in the end I shrugged my shoulders, cropped it and just left it as two separate photos.

Earlier this week I was using the iPad around the house and made a purchase (or some such) online and got back a confirmation and though, "I would really like to save that." I took a screen capture (power+home) and so I have an image of it. Not that great a solution, is it? Still I know that there is this AirPrint thing and that I can print to specific HP printers. So I started wondering if it was possible to AirPrint to a PDF printer on my home server.
The answer is that there is a trivial way for $19.95 using an app called Printopia. It runs as a service on a computer and will share all printers as AirPrinters and includes a "Print to PDF" feature. Still, $19.95 sure does seem like a lot of money. A little more research and I cobbled together a pretty simple solution that I am quite happy with.

1. Install "PDF Writer for Mac" which gives you a virtual Printer that prints PDFs
2. Share your printer by restrict the sharing to whatever account is your primary one
3. Install "AirPrint Activator" and all of your shared printers magically become AirPrint destinations
4. The sweet spot! Make you the folder you print to automatically sync via dropbox: ln -s /private/var/spool/pdfwriter/jordan "~/Dropbox/iOS Printer"

So now what do I have? When I'm on my home WiFi I can print from my iPad to either my actual printer or to a PDF printer that ends up putting a PDF in dropbox which is then available on my iPad. BAM! Now the question becomes can I setup a VPN at home so I can do this while not here?

Hello Chrismutt My Old Friend

What would be the point of living if we didn't let life change us? - Mr. Carson (Downton Abbey)

I was going to write up a comment about how annoying the world is when automation keeps people from talking to solve simple problems, but as I was scanning through my list of things that jotted down to write about I noticed that they are almost all negative and I thought "I am not a negative person!  I am a very happy person who loves the world.  Why are all my notes here negative griping about the kids these days!"  Then I saw a picture of Travel Mutt and my heart melted a little bit.
A lot of people have a childhood stuffed animal or blanket that they grew to love.  I had a childhood stuffed dragon named "Sneezy" I think I got when I was born.  It was sometime very early.  Sneezy had a long neck and long tail and as a baby I took to twisting the head and twisting the tail.  Slowly this caused the joints to loose all their padding so that his head and tail just limply dropped.  I probably would have eventually squeezed the stuffing out of him, but my mother took him away from me with the intent to get him re-stuffed.
For many years after I lost Sneezy to the closet, I went without having a stuffed animal.    I did have a pile of blankets of similar make that I slept with.  I had a very important functional reason to sleep with them.  I am a stomach sleeper and if you sleep on your stomach with a pillow your neck has to be at the most ridiculous ninety degree angle.  I haven't discussed this in length with other stomach sleepers, but I assume we all have various techniques to solve it.  At that young age I found that by cramming the blanket under me it caused my body to be at about a thirty-degree angle with the bed and then my next only had to rotate about sixty degrees and the problem was solved.  The problem was solved for a time.
I kept growing.  As I grew the little kid blanket stayed the same size and it kept reducing the angle I was sleeping at.
When I was around twelve years old my mother gave me a stuffed animal named "Chrismutt" which I think was the free gift from Target for spending more than $50.  It was a throw away gift, except he was the PERFECT size for propping up my body while I slept.  Out went all the childhood blankets and in moved the mutt.
I took him to college with me.  How else could I sleep?  My sophomore year at college I went to the Goodwill store with some friends to find outfits to wear to a "sixties" dance.  There at Goodwill, in perfect condition, was another Chrismutt!  He was smaller than mine and instead of having Chistmas mittens around his neck he had a Christmas scarf, but I flipped out.  I assume he was the version you would have gotten for spending $25 at Target or some such.  My friends didn't share the same enthusiasm and I said, "oh just you wait !"  When we got back to school I showed my roommate (high school friend) and he appropriately flipped out.  He was deemed Christmutt Junior for the time.
Later in life I got a job and started to travel and I found that Christmutt Jr. was much easier to pack and take with me on the road, and so we put in the formal paperwork to change is name to "Travelmutt".  Really he was more like a little brother the Christmutt than a child, so I think we made the right decision as a family.
You might be wondering if I still snuggle up with and adorable twenty year old stuffed bear or his little brother.  The short answer is not really.  They were both very happily replaced by my wife.  Though when I travel out of town, Travelmutt still comes with me, and on the rare occasions when Mrs.Chaos is off I promote Chrismutt from his honorable place next to the bed to once again join me.

Monthly Fees

You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model - Randall Stephenson

I have to admin that I'm impressed in all sorts of ways with ATT.  I bought my very first phone from ATT Wireless which became Cingular which became ATT.  I held that original "ATT Wireless" SIM all the way through my iPhone 3G.  It mildly confused Apple geniuses at one point when I went in for repair and they told me they thought I had a knock-off SIM card.  No - sorry, it's just really old school.
As an old-school iPhone owner I am blessed grandfathered into the $30/unlimited plan.  I run about 2GB/month, so my only other option would be the $30/3GB plan which obviously makes no sense.  Even Mrs.Chaos is grandmothered in to her $25/2GB plan.  At her previous job she had no WiFi, and needed all that data.  Now that she is WiFi at home and WiFi at school she's running pretty low data rates.
ATT just rolled out the new "family data plans" which I quickly went to review.  Family data you say?  That sounds like a fabulous.  Since we jointly use about 3GB's of data, perhaps we can save as much as 50% on this?  So what is the cost of family data for our family?  We have to get the 4GB plan which is $70 + $40 for each smartphone.  Total cost to us?  $150/month.  I'm having a really difficult time understanding how this could be a less expensive option for anyone.  Can someone help me out here?
If you had five smartphones on 5GBs.  Old plan $250/month - new plan doing a shared 6GB is $265/month.  So if you have five devices and want to cut your bandwidth from 25GB/month to 6GB/month you can pay an extra $15?  I feel like I'm missing something... and yet... I've run all the calculators on the ATT site and it agrees with me.