MetaFilter

These are all good suggestions. One of my recommendations for visitors used to be the Musee Mechanique, but I haven't actually been to its newer location, which is in a super-touristy area. You might also browse through sf.funcheap.com to see if there are any particular events happening at the time you'll be here.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 7:04 PM on July 21, 2008

For SF/Fantasy stuff, Lucius Shepard has some good short stories and novels which have a sort of oppressive dread about them. And it tends to vary widely in tone, but at least one chapter of Thomas Pynchon's V has a similar feeling. Poetry-wise you're not going to do much better than Poe, But A. E. Housman had a morbid streak a mile wide and might end up in the area you're looking for from time to time.

If you're after more classic stuff, you… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 6:40 PM on July 21, 2008

I probably wear them about once every other day, maybe a little more often than that, but they still seem to fall apart awfully quickly.

parmanparman, what do you mean by waxing the bases? Is that the inside of the shoe? And wax them with what? (I'm not very familiar with shoe-related technology, as you can see.)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 12:03 PM on July 14, 2008

I'm not using any foot powder, no, and I almost always wear socks with the shoes. I don't usually put them in the washing machine, either.

What's the theory behind rotating shoes? I mean, assuming I'm doing approximately the same things, won't two pairs of Chuck Taylors just give me twice the lifespan of one pair? (That is, what's the advantage of buying two pairs at once over just buying them one after another?)

Have you contacted… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:00 PM on July 14, 2008

John le Carré is an excellent reader of his own books, which are English to their core and require someone with a good English accent. Along the same lines, Jonathan Cecil does such an incredibly good job at rendering Jeeves and Wooster that I can't listen to a PG Wodehouse book read by anybody else.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 7:45 PM on July 7, 2008 marked best answer

I've found the 1998 Kill Rock Stars + Lookout Records double-disc compilation A Slice of Lemon to be a great source of obscure tracks (so obscure, in fact, that I've been on the verge of posting questions about some of the bands on it, because they seem to not exist apart from the tracks on that comp). In particular the tracks from Red #9 and Solid Gold are awesome. There are lots of awful songs on the record too.

Beyond that, Unwound side project Long Hind Legs has a… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 10:56 AM on July 3, 2008

Python Module of the Week covers one module from the Python standard library every week.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 10:40 AM on July 3, 2008

For a somewhat substantive news type site covering goings-on in p2p, you might check out TorrentFreak.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 8:55 PM on June 24, 2008

I don't know if it's an option for you, but since I mostly used my laptop at work anyways, I was able to get my company to give me a key for one of the drawers in my desk and I just stash the laptop there, along with a change of clothes. When I do need the laptop over the weekend or something I'll bring it back in my backpack, but most of the time I'm a lot less nervous riding without it.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 8:26 PM on June 24, 2008

Frog Eyes.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 9:43 AM on June 23, 2008

I think learning Rails first actually might be a good way to go, although I'm personally much more of a Python aficionado. I think you should have the long-term goal of learning all three, but with that in mind, RoR has a lot of excellent resources geared towards getting you started with learning the environment, and all the magical scaffolding stuff makes it really easy to play around with stuff, and I agree that it will give you a solid foundation in MVC design.

Once… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 11:10 AM on May 30, 2008

House of Leaves fits the bill, I think. Also, it's hardly riveting reading but J. K. Huysman's novel À Rebours touches on many of the themes you're interested in.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 4:13 PM on May 27, 2008

Seconding The City, Not Long After, which from what I know of The Fifth Sacred Thing (a friend of mine has read it) should be very similar thematically, and also Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias trilogy, which features his characteristic sociological wide-angle view of a society.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 4:05 PM on May 27, 2008

I just saw the Signal, and while it was better than most mainstream horror these days I was a little meh on it overall; similarly the Orphanage had some great moments but didn't quite gel together for me either. I actually did like Cloverfield a lot for a big dumb spectacle movie. I haven't seen Paranoid Park or Errol Morris's new documentary about Abu Ghraib, but they are the only things that I've really been looking forward to. 2008 seems like kind of a wash so far, but on the other hand… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 1:58 PM on May 23, 2008

I agree with everything orthogonality said. MySQL does have the advantages that it's more user-friendly, plus it's got much better docs (last I looked) and a larger userbase (meaning a more active user community, helpful when you have questions, and more third-party tools), but its weird quirks and eccentricities always seem to wind up costing me time in the long run.

For the sort of tasks that I would tend to favor MySQL for - simple schemas and quick prototyping,… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 6:12 PM on May 22, 2008

First you learn to ride a loaner or craigslist bike if need be, then you go shopping and try new bikes in the store.

Seconding this - I actually did know how to ride a bike when I recently got one, but I was very inexperienced (I never owned one as a kid) and pretty nervous about riding in traffic. I ended up getting a cheap beater craigslist bike and riding that while I just got used to biking around town. When that bike broke (when, ah, I was hit… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 4:04 PM on May 22, 2008

SonicLiving and tourb.us are also options, and Last.fm also has concert listings these days.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:07 PM on May 22, 2008

Another possible technique, if you're committed to Python, would be to try to build a sensible, OO-based Python API on top of your core C++ application code (which would maybe be a layer of thin high-level Python service objects on top of a middleware of low-level Python code that calls your C++ directly using ctypes). Once you have a high-level interface like that in place, you can start rewriting the core bits in Java, and replacing your ctypes middleware with straight jython->java calls.… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 1:49 PM on May 22, 2008

I would consider getting in touch with the EFF, who I know have been involved in open-source related licensing violations in the past, and pretty much exist as an advocacy group for exactly this sort of thing. You might also want to post the same question in the debian-legal mailing list, which is a Debian list but has a lot of people who spend a lot of time dealing with this sort of thing. Good luck!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 7:32 AM on May 21, 2008 marked best answer

Python's online docs include a pretty decent tutorial, though I've also heard good things about Dive Into Python. Stylistically the online docs are probably closer to the Stroustrop book than any python book I've read, although because the language itself is much simpler than C++ one doesn't tend to need nearly as much in the way of core language documentation. I've also found this Python sidebar to be handy.

(Every beginning pythonista should from __future__ import… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 7:25 AM on May 21, 2008

Thanks for the discussion, all, it's exactly what I was hoping for, please carry on.

About what I'm carrying, it is indeed a big, clunky laptop, plus a few toiletry items (shirt, washcloth). The street I ride down (Market) is notoriously dilapidated, so I think I would feel kind of paranoid about putting the laptop in panniers, what with the constant bouncing around. The idea of getting all that weight lower on the bike and removing it from my sweaty back is… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 7:01 PM on May 14, 2008

So just as a follow-up to this, I have figured out a secure place to stash my laptop at work, and I went and bought a cheap ($40) pannier at a bike shop and attached it to my bike. Biking around with no backpack on has been nice and my back gets much less sweaty. I'm still not sure I would want to carry the laptop in the pannier, but it seems to be working great for just carrying a change of clothes and odds and ends.

Anyways, thanks for the discussion - I'm still not… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 12:48 PM on May 19, 2008

I started (but didn't finish) the couch-to-5k program myself after I quit smoking, and I liked it a lot. The idea of it is that you go very gradually and don't try to run super fast or hard at first, which minimizes your chance of injury (I'd imagine). You can do it at the gym or outside running around and all you need are a pair of running shoes. The CoolRunning site has some online tools you can use to track your progress, too, plus an encouraging message board community.… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 7:44 PM on May 13, 2008

If you want to rely on your semi-obscure MetaFilter fame (and I would, personally) I don't think you could do much better than a stencil of the wolf from Be Safe and Smart on Metafilter. Seems like it would be easy enough to either photoshop out the wolf face to print on an iron-on, or to get one of your many fans here to do it (I don't have the skills myself).

Besides that I'm still fond of "hurf durf meme repeater." And I kind of think that… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 10:17 PM on April 23, 2008

Just bopping over from the podcast. For something that is not up to The Wire's high standards, but which may still give you a crime drama fix, you might look into the Canadian TV show Intelligence. It definitely lacks the Wire's scathing political commentary, but it does have some pretty complex plotting and some good acting (with a cast including Matt Frewer, TV's Max Headroom). It's also kind of funny to watch as a Canadian analogue to the Wire - the criminals depicted smuggle weed instead… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 12:48 AM on March 27, 2008

Smog's song "Held" was used in an ad for I believe a minivan a few years back; it's more upbeat than average for Bill Callahan but most of what he does can qualify as moody and atmospheric. Apparently it was also used more recently for a kind of sickening SUV commercial featuring, weirdly, Bob Dylan.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 8:53 PM on March 25, 2008

My Google-fu is failing me, but here is the original in French, and here is Google's machine translation of it into English.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 3:01 PM on March 17, 2008

I agree with the consensus here. Perl is pretty much designed (and heavily optimized) for exactly this sort of task, you know it well, there are oodles of online help resources, and your task is I/O bound anyways; use Perl. For many tasks Perl will be as fast or faster than naive C implementations anyways.

As a side note, a common idiom in higher-level scripting languages these days is to write out your script in the high-level language, and if it runs too slowly to… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 6:18 PM on March 12, 2008

I just wanted to second the works of Thomas Frank, who has written pretty compellingly on the consumer aspects of coolness. His flagship essay on the topic is Why Johnny Can't Dissent. His prose style bugs some people I know, but I personally find him to hit the sweet spot of snarkiness, enthusiasm, and anger incredibly well, and he's one of my favorite contemporary essayists.

I think it's true that there are a lot of different meanings of… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 3:58 PM on March 11, 2008 marked best answer

For #2, creepy talking dolls are kind of common in horror films, but the Puppet Master series is one obvious possibility.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 8:21 PM on February 11, 2008 marked best answer

What D.C. said, although there's also a slim chance that your ISP is set up to drop calls after a period of inactivity, so if the above doesn't work you could try calling them or looking for a dialup FAQ.

eponysterical!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 1:35 AM on February 10, 2008

Just to expand a bit on one of adamrice's points, OpenID is a tremendously important idea which if we are lucky will be part of Web 3.0. There are a number of good presentations about this available online; this one is pretty good as an overview. (Personally, though, I'm looking forward to Email 2.0 much more than Web 3.0.)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:55 PM on February 7, 2008

Not in any way that would be useful, as far as I know, because even if you could add in an additional ID3 album tag, other MP3 software / players / etc will almost certainly look for a single ID3 tag and stop once they find it. I guess if you were on linux you could symlink files to one another, but you'd still have the problem of only having a single album name.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:24 PM on February 3, 2008

One not very well-advertised feature of autofill is that you can hit the delete key when you're on an autofill entry and it will be removed from the dropdown in the future. (This doesn't directly help you, but it might make narrowing down your options a little more faster.) You could also try looking in your browser history.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:18 PM on February 3, 2008

The Godfather also has an "organize" tab that's good for this kind of thing. It's a very powerful program, but not the easiest to use.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 1:05 PM on January 31, 2008

Swans's "When She Breathes". I imagine a lot of songs about drowning would fit the bill as well - the only interesting one winamp kicked up for me was "Death by Drowning" by the Birthday Party.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 11:14 PM on January 30, 2008

Samuel R. Delany would be a natural fit for something like this, especially his novel Dhalgren.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:27 AM on January 30, 2008

For funny stuff, Permanent Monday, the Comics Curmudgeon and (Metafilter's own) defective yeti are some of my favorites. I also like Arts and Letters Daily, mentioned above; it's more of an aggregator for high-minded magazine and newspaper articles than a blog.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 10:44 PM on January 29, 2008

I used to see behavior very similar to this on my WRT54G (v2). I would occasionally need to reboot my laptop in order to reconnect it (although I suspect that that was a consequence of some dodgy VPN software I had to use which didn't like to be spontaneously disconnected). Unfortunately I can't really give you good advice for fixing it, except what Burhanistan said. I eventually wound up wiping the firmware out and installing OpenWRT on mine, at which time I stopped getting dropped, but… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 10:08 AM on January 29, 2008

You may want to check Dell's support site for updated drivers - a friend of mine reinstalled windows on his machine and the generic Windows drivers only saw his ports as USB 1.1, but once he got the latest chipset drivers they went back to full speed. Sounds like a long shot, but 2002 also seems pretty recent for a laptop to be sporting 1.1 ports.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 7:38 PM on January 2, 2008

I haven't used it myself, but you might look into running MythGame from the MythTV distro. It's designed to be controllable via a remote, so it wouldn't seem like a huge stretch to use a gamepad instead. Plus you could use it as a media player.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 1:28 PM on December 27, 2007

There was a somewhat similar thread (in that I'm seeing a lot of the same recommendations) here, and don't forget to take a gander at shothotbot's excellent readMe wiki page cataloging older book recommendation threads.

I will personally nth the House of Leaves recommendation, I'm about a third of the way into it and I like it a lot (though you do need to have a certian tolerance for Pale Fire / Infinite Jest literary shenanigans to get into it, I suspect).
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:07 AM on December 20, 2007

Thanks very much for the suggestions, everyone, they're very helpful.

As far as the manure goes, I don't think I can get away with it, because I teased my friend mercilessly about buying a big bag of dirt when she started out gardening ("would you like to buy this fine stick from me? How about this rock?" etc). Anyways, I'll post back with what I end up getting for the curious.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 1:38 PM on December 10, 2007

There's a chance the problem is on your wifi router's side; you might try power-cycling that if you haven't already. Are you able to connect to the same wireless router from a different machine?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 5:09 PM on December 9, 2007

Shogun sounds similar to Attack! (which I haven't played) in that it's kind of a version of Risk but with more interesting combat and economic development options, plus a cool medieval-Japan setting. Sadly it seems to be out of print now, but if you can find a cheap copy on eBay it's a lot of fun and would fit your requirements very well.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 4:32 PM on November 21, 2007

In terms of just importing the .dat files, if all you're doing is opening them in Notepad and re-saving them as .txt files, you can probably just rename the files from foo.dat to foo.txt - Notepad probably isn't actually changing any of the data inside the files. Besides that, nthing the suggestion to get professional help - from your description this doesn't sound like an extremely hard technical problem.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 5:34 PM on November 19, 2007

Foucault's Pendulum, if you haven't yet read it, is just as good or better than The Name of the Rose. I think David Mitchell would probably qualify too, though he's maybe not as deep as some of the other writers mentioned here. I liked Ghostwritten a good deal, and I've heard good things about Cloud Atlas. And in a peculiar sort of way, I think Nabokov's Despair might qualify.… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 5:20 PM on November 19, 2007

Hey, as an update to this, the yoga mat is a little better after having been washed off (with Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap, coincidentally) and is a little better now, though I think I'm also sweating a bit less as well. It's not perfect, but I am at least able to do like a downward dog without having to grasp the side of the mat with my hands by the end of a session.

Next time I'll bring in a little dish/hand towel I can put up near the top of my mat where my hands… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 5:28 PM on November 14, 2007

Thanks everyone. I was briefly able to get this working - I used Putty to forward localhost:14300 to imap.isp.net:143, and was then able to access my mail.

Following that I got a little overambitious and spent some time trying to get just generic any-port tunneling working. OpenWRT runs dropbear rather than openssh, and it doesn't seem to support the same agent-forwarding protocol that makes SOCKS proxying work. Googling around I found this message on the OpenWRT… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 11:22 AM on November 6, 2007

Ok, everything is groovy now, thanks for your help everyone. Just for the record, here's the steps I took to get stuff working with SOCKS proxying:

1. Installed OpenSSH on the wrt54g.
2. Linked the authorized_keys file on the wrt from /etc/dropbear into /etc/ssh (this contains a key I generated via PuTTYkeygen on my laptop).
3. Set up openssh to disallow password auth access and poked a whole in the firewall from the work.com subnet to router.… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 12:23 PM on November 8, 2007