I just got off the phone with the RMV. After being on hold for about 30 minutes (annoying, but not a huge deal) I explained my problem to the woman who came on the line: that I gave them a California C & M1 license (passenger cars and motorcycles) and received a Massachusetts D license (passenger cars only) in return. She said she’ll pull my application, double-check that I did, indeed have a California motorcycle license and that my application was properly filled out to reflect that ... More ...

A couple of weeks ago, Memorial Day Weekend actually, Jessi and I finally got a TV. I had been planning on a 42″ Olevia 720p display with no tuner, because it was an incredibly good deal on Newegg, but then I found an even better deal at Best Buy, and was able to get a 42″ Insignia 1080p display with a tuner for just about $100 more. So we’ve now got a 42″ 1080p TV hooked up to some cheap rabbit ears I picked up at Radio Shack. It’s pretty awesome just for the irony... More ...

Anyone who pays attention to Apple news is, I’m sure, aware of their recent announcement of Snow Leopard, the successor to Leopard, which will be coming out in about a year. They’re also probably aware that Apple is advertising this release primarily as a code refactoring that will add stability, optimization, and ‘no new features’. Since that announcement there have been any number of blog posts explaining how there actually will be some significant new features, they&rs... More ...

After two years and far too many visits to multiple RMV offices I now finally have a Massachusetts driver’s license. A CLASS D driver’s license. The forms I submitted as well as the California license they took from me both clearly specified that not only am I qualified and certified for, but was applying for a CLASS D AND M license. Of course it’s well beyond business hours now, so I’ll have to wait until Monday morning before I can even attempt to rectify this situation... More ...

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently migraded my dy/dx tech website to a different hosting company. If you’ve really been paying attention, you may recall that not too long ago I had gotten a Media Temple hosting account with the plans on migrating all of the sites I host, both my own and clients’ to it only to discover that setting up Django on a Media Temple (dv) account is far more trouble than it’s worth. My estimation of that hasn’t changed, in fact I actually ... More ...

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to announce a big new project. Not because I haven’t had any, but because everything I’ve been working on lately has been so large that nothing is quite ready to go live yet. But finally, I get to announce a big project that I recently finished: the Becoming MOBOS video blog. As I’m sure many of you from the Boston area are aware, there is a new Mandarin Oriental that’s been under construction down by the Pru. They hired... More ...

Finally, after five failed attempts, I’ve managed to get my California license converted to a Massachusetts one. On Friday Jessi, who’s been using her Illinois license for the past 4 years in MA, and I drove up to the RMV in Lowell (we’d had enough with the one in Boston) and actually managed to get our licenses converted. At the moment we’ve only got temporary ones, but soon I should, for the first time in my life, have a license that actually has my current address on i... More ...

Currently I’ve got two projects hosted on WebFaction servers. So far, I really like them. As managed hosts go, they’re probably the best I’ve worked with, and they certainly make life very easy when building Django powered sites. Today I got an email from one of the clients whose project is hosted on WebFaction saying that their site is down. So I checked it out, and while I was able to access it, it was extremely slow, to the point where a less forgiving browser/LAN setup migh... More ...

I’ve been working away from home more and more often lately, and the 13″ screen on my MacBook has been feeling more and more restrictive. So I decided to replace it with a something bigger. Obvoiusly my first thought was a MacBook Pro, but they’re just so expenssive that it’s hard to justify the cost. So instead, I bought a ThinkPad. I got a T61 with a 15″ WSXGA+ screen, 802.11n, dual-layer dvd burner, 2.5 GHz Core2Duo… basically the exact same features (and ... More ...

I’m currently working on a fairly large Django project that I think I’ve mentioned a couple times in the past. In that Django project there is a Person model and an Organization model. Both Persons and Organizations have email addresses. Organizations are related to Sites (through a ManyToMany field), but Persons are not (they’re related to Organizations through an intermediary table). I’m currently attempting to create a contact form, so that people can email either a Pe... More ...

I posted a while ago about my plans for our TV setup. In the intervening months I’ve made a few changes to my plans and taken a big step towards getting it all set up. The biggest change is that I’ve removed MythTV from the picture. Originally I was planning on either building my own MythTV powered HTPC or buying a TVease Zodiac MythTV system. It appears that TVease has gone out of business, so that’s now out of the question. But in the course of my research on building a MythT... More ...

So as I mentioned, I was at the opening of the new Boston Apple Store on Boyleston St. last night. Unfortunately I was a little late showing up and didn’t get my free t-shirt. As I mentioned, it’s an extremely nice location with some extremely cool design. The entire top floor (of three) is dedicated to support with a gigantic Genius Bar that is apparently able to support several thousand people per day, and a ton of iMacs lining the walls where you can get one on one help/tutoring... More ...

I’m currently at the grand opening event of Apple’s new flagship retail store in Boston. I’ve only just gotten here, but so far I’ve hot to say that I’m impressed. It’s something like a cross between the 5th Ave. location in New York and the Miracle Mile location in Chicago. In short: three stories of beautiful, glassy architecture with a huge skylight topping it off and the iconic white Apple logo overlooking the Pru. Also, they’re giving me free beer a... More ...

Why is everything that disrupts parking labelled an ‘emergency’ around here? When it snows enough to disrupt parking it’s a ’snow emergency’. When they’re forbidding parking so that they can paint lines on the street it’s an ‘emergency’. Last night we walked into Porter Square for dinner and passed no fewer than two different ‘emergencies’: ‘Emergency! We’re painting lines on the street! Please file calmly, but quickly... More ...

So, currently there are signs up and down both sides of Somerville Ave. saying that there’s no parking on those streets due to an ‘emergency’. Well, that’s all you can read of the signs as you drive around looking for parking due to the fact that everyone who usually parks on Somerville Ave. is now parked elsewhere, anyway. If, however, you take a closer look at those signs, they say that there’s no parking there on 4/30 and 5/1 from 7:30 pm until 6:00 am or so beca... More ...

As you may recall, a while ago I got myself an account at MediaTemple with the idea that I’d move all my websites over to there. I had previously been using Dreamhost, but wanted something a little more high quality so that I could reasonably offer hosting services to some of my clients. MediaTemple seemed like a good way to go, and for the most part their service has been great. Unfortunately, I have run into a few problems. Most importantly, despite spending a fairly significant number o... More ...

For the past week or so, I’ve been running FreeBSD on my MacBook. So far, I’ve got to say, I absolutely love it. I have a lot of experience running a range of Linux distributions on all sorts of hardware including both PPC and Intel Macs, but just a week or so of FreeBSD usage has convinced me of the OS’ value over Linux. A standard FreeBSD install is incredibly simple. If you don’t want to dive into any messy details you don’t have to (though you do need to be com... More ...

Tomorrow night I’m flying to Dublin. Sadly, I’ll only be there a few days (Did I say days? I mean hours…) before I fly to Rome where I’m meeting up with my friend Evan. We’ll be spending 2 weeks in Rome, Venice, Vienna, and Munich. I’m taking my iPhone so that I can have internet access and all that without having to lug around my MacBook (or worry about it going missing), so I’ve been trying to find the best way that I can use it to post photos online.... More ...

Like many others I upgraded to Safari 3.1 last night. Also like many others I’m now encountering the ’shift bug’ in Gmail. If you haven’t yet read about it, what happens is that for some reason in Gmail on Safari 3.1, and apparently only in Gmail Safari 3.1, when you hit the shift key (or caps lock key) in the body of the message it changes focus. The result of this is that it’s impossible to enter capital letters or any other character that requires the shift key s... More ...

Tesla’s CEO Ze’ev Drori announced today that Tesla has met their goal of starting regular production of the Tesla Roadster today. This is big news. I’ve been watching Tesla for going on two years now and anxiously awaiting the day when their cars become available for sale (not that I plan on buying the $90,000 roadster anytime soon…). I really hope that demand will be high enough for them to keep on track to release their sedan in the near future (which I just might buy)... More ...