On Saturday night, we went to see the LoCura CD release party at the Great American Music Hall - which is on O’Farrell near Van Ness. We had never been to the Music Hall before, and it really is fascinating place. The detail of construction is amazing, as is its long history. Totally not what I expected. No wonder it won the SF Weekly Reader’s poll for “Best Place to See Live Music”.

LoCura was also a pretty awesome group. The energy level was exceptionally, and the music quite good. You can check them out here.

And in the end, with some help from some folks in Redmond, I determined that it was because of Adobe Version Cue CS3. It was pretty annoying, I’d hit the Windows Key, type V, and the Explorer would crash - instead of allowing me to launch Visual Studio.

Once I uninstalled Version Cue, the problem disappeared. Just posting this incase it ever happens to you.

I haven’t really written any code since 2001 or 2002. Back then I had written some code that ended up shipping in Office X for Mac and a small app that displayed IP addresses that was for my use only. Recently I’ve only had time to futz with PHP to make changes to this blog. I did a lot more coding in college in Java.

Recently I needed to process some log files at work, and I had been using Excel but that would take literally 2 hours. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to write an app in Java to do this kind of stuff, after all I did a lot of that at Hopkins. Being that I had Visual Studio 2008 installed, I thought I’d try it out in C# instead. Boy, Visual Studio sure made it easy with all that intelli-stuff. And my little app now processes the logs in 20 minutes instead. Sweet.

It sure was fun to write some code again, hit compile, and a build the product. You get the results instantly, unlike writing a great spec. But still, I think I’ll stick with being a Program Manager and writing great specs for great features.

So there are people who signed up for mortgages they can’t afford to pay, for houses that are worth less than they paid for. These people are upside down/underwater.

There are plans afoot to use taxpayer dollars (meaning, your money and my money) to make sure these people can stay in their homes.

This one quote does a pretty good job of summarizing my thoughts on these plans:

UPDATE: Consumer Groups Decry Bear Stearns Bailout As Homeowners Suffer
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said a number of proposals that are geared toward helping homeowners facing foreclosure will actually benefit banks and other holders of bad mortgage debt — institutions that could “earn tens of billions of dollars at taxpayer expense.” He added that owning can be much more expensive than renting.

“It’s really infuriating for me that we pushed low- and moderate-income people to buy overpriced houses with really bad mortgages,” he said. “And even now, after it’s proven so disastrous, you have politicians that still can’t take two minutes and think for a second that maybe it’s not a good idea for everyone to be homeowner regardless of what price they’re buying at.”

I could say more - but I’ll just leave it at this for now.

Jensen posted his talk at Mix online - with a great history of toolbars in Word (how many do think there are in 2003?) and how the 2007 design came to be.

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog
Last week, I presented a session at MIX called “The Story of the Ribbon.” I talked a bit about the general design process we used to come up with the Office 2007 user interface, to iterate on it, and to evaluate it. As part of the discussion, I showed for the first time some of the early prototypes we worked on (and abandoned or refined) along the way.

It’s always fun to present substantially new content, and this was my first time giving large portions of this talk. The audience was great and, although you can’t hear them on the video, they seemed to be into it and enjoying the presentation. It was a lot of fun!

Tonight was the Series Finale of The Wire. Frankly, in the little free time I have, I enjoy watching this show. I’d highly encourage that you watch it as well - now available on DVD.

Personally, I enjoyed The Wire far more than the Sopranos, which I always felt was over-hype and over the top. The Series Finale in The Wire was definitely better than the “controversial for the sake of controversial” ending of The Sopranos.

It’s hard to describe what The Wire is, but one thing is clear: it isn’t a simple cop show. The New Yorker had a recent piece that describes it pretty well, and also goes into a lot of the detail behind the show, and how authentic it is. Actually it’s an amazing read as well.

Because I’m perpetually short on time here’s a bullet point list of why I liked this series:

• The show didn’t insult the audience. Plots were (generally) not dumbed down. Not every term was explained. There was never any “Partner, are you saying that Fred shot Bob with a 9mm and left his finger prints on the door?” kind of stuff. Either you got it, or you didn’t.
• No dream sequences. No nudity for the sake of nudity (coughNYPDBluecough). No jumping the shark.
• Good use of music - meaning none. I hate shows (and movies) that over use music. I also find that insulting.
• Scum on the show: Cops, Politicians, Drug dealers, Addicts, Murderers, Journalists, Children, Teachers.
• Heroes on the show: Cops, Politicians, Drug dealers, Addicts, Murderers, Journalists, Children, Teachers.
• Criminals have depth. They don’t exist just to advance the plot. They have lives, they have quirks, they have ethics and codes.
• Scenes are generally unpredictable - most of the the times I can predict what’s going to happen next on a show. Not The Wire.
• There are no rarely happy endings. Heroes die in unheroic ways. Reformers who try to make the place better get killed - literally or organizationally. The wins that do happen are more precious as a result. It’s more true to life.
• Baltimore: having lived in Balwmer for 4 years, and visited nearly every year since 2000, I recognize a lot of places. And there’s a lot of local stuff included - like the way people eat crabs there, the crime problem, the youth crime problem, the conflicts of the surrounding counties , celebrating in Atlantic City, and more. It’s a nice change from the LA/New York/Toronto/Vancouver scenes and culture. This season had a shot in a supermarket I went to frequently.
• The show has terrible ratings, but amazing reviews - frequently called “The Best Show on TV“
• The excellent writing, acting, and directing.

In particular, Episode 4 of Season 1 will always stand out in my mind. The official synopsis I linked to does absolutely no justice to that episode - there’s a scene towards the end of the episode which has few written words (actually, just 1 word, over and over again, conjugated in different forms) but yet is incredibly well written, incredibly well acted, and simply incomparable.

In the end, The Wire is about an American city which 650k people call home, for better or for worse. I’m sad it’s over.
Watch it - you won’t be disappointed.

One of my co-workers passed this around - I found it pretty amusing:

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

This isn’t Yelp, but I thought I’d share a review of this restaurant:

Old Port Lobster Shack - Restaurant in Redwood City, California

We were there over the weekend and overall it’s pretty good. I’d definitely go back. Very casual affair and pretty East Coasty considering it’s in a strip mall. You might want to call ahead though as a line does develop.

The reason I mention it is because of this entry on their menu:

What’s so special you ask? Well, notice that they call out Hellmann’s Mayo. Hellmann’s is a brand of mayo that’s found only in the East Coast.

I remember a few years ago, I was at Safeway searching for whole grain mustards (I’m picky), and there was a couple that was searching for mayo. Eventually the man exclaimed “Where are they hiding the Hellmann’s?”

I leaped to action and helped my fellow East Coasters in need: “Excuse me, they don’t sell Hellmann’s here. I think it’s called Best Food.”

Sure enough, a few years later, Best Foods mayo labels started saying “Also known as Hellmann’s”. In fact, according to their site, “Best Foods’s® is known as Hellmann’s® east of the Rockies.”

This topic came up at lunch today because a bunch of us Long Islanders went to lunch and it was observed that you simply can’t get Russian dressing here - which makes some classic sandwiches absolutely awful. Also having not seen the Best Foods website, Heather noted that Best Foods and Hellmanns were the same from her taste testing.

And now you know another useless fact.