Manlio Rules

but this is an article i found on valleywag this morning that i thought was relevant to me

yahoo dumps green guzzler shuttles

Over almost 2 years, i rode the shuttles a fair amount, and let me assure you that being on a bus for 1.5+ hours at the end of a workday is pretty much the last thing anyone wants to do. Even after i got a working internet solution (n95 baby!), the last half hour stuck on 101 in traffic was the worst thing ever. except maybe for driving to San Jose at 4PM on a tuesday to make a 6PM class.

here’s the thing: people would complain about the shuttles even when they were working fine. “the shuttles don’t stop near my house”, “people are talking on the phone and i don’t like it”, “why can’t people put their seats forward so i can stretch my legs?”. and so on. after a year, i finally got fed up with taking Muni 30 minutes to get to a shuttle which then took me 1.5 hours, so i moved to get closer to the caltrain, leading to a year in that terrible apt in soma. questionable decision but maybe a net gain? i don’t know.

at the end of the day, there’s nothing that’s going to make a long commute in traffic “fun” (except being driven in a limo with a hot tub and champagne to drop one’s cell phone in). the best that can be done is to make it as painless as possible. sounds like the switch over to the other limo company went the wrong way. but hey, one could always just go live in Mountain View or San Jose. Being a cultured SF hipster requires sacrifice.

but maybe if the stock goes up as a result of cost cuts, everyone can buy 1.5 million dollar condos in SOMA and ride the caltrain.

As for me, i’ll continue to enjoy my job in downtown SF. where i make GAMES for CHILDREN. yes, i win.

Last weekend i finally got out of my “temporary” apartment situation in soma, after 11.5 months. so much for only staying a little bit of time. The new place is in Cow Hollow, making it slightly harder for me to get to work, but very easy on my new roommate who just moved here from Brooklyn and has no car.

some random thoughts on the whole affair:

The new place is objectively decent, but clearly it’s been awhile since i lived in a decent apt, because i think the place the ritz goddamned carlton.

of course, neither of us had enough furniture, so we went and let IKEA kill us with their affordable selections of decent quality. My credit card bill is not going to be happy with this. actually, i’m sure the bill will be ecstatic. i’m not going to be so happy about it. but who can resist a $59.99 bookshelf? not me.

our downstairs neighbors are 6 early 20-somethings. one of them told me in no uncertain terms that we were to be quiet when going up the stairs, because that was her room underneath. I believe she was also the one who banged on my ceiling to be quiet when i was building furniture last night. in her defense, it was midnight on a Wednesday. sorry!

the internet in the place is spotty. i was considering just doing leech-net, but it’s not going to be good enough. though i did finally get some use of my high speed modem in! yeah!

having a garage? priceless. actually it’s $250 a month. but soooo worth it, considering there is almost no street parking anywhere in the neighborhood.

this will be the first time in… maybe forever that i don’t have a specific “desk” (for working) in my apt. i’m not sure if that will be an issue or not. i usually don’t work from home too much now that i have a job in the city. i may have to go back to ikea for a small desk sometime in the future (curse you ikea!)

after all the horror stories i heard about the 30x to downtown, i was very pleasantly surprised. sure, there’s no seats to be had, but at least there’s some personal space standing room. when i used to take the 71L to van ness from the haight it was often so crowded that someone else’s shower selection that morning played a strong part in my morning.

I was having a strange issue today with Eclipse (on OSX). i am building a game and using the Tweener library as an extension. so, as is required, I put

import caurina.transitions.Tweener;

at the top of my class. However, every 2 or 3 times that i would compile (i use the flash cs3 ide as a compiler), i would get an error stating that my Tweener extensions could not be found. And when i would go back to my class, i would find that the above import statement had disappeared. As you can imagine, this was annoying.

I worked “through” it for a few hours, but finally decided that it was too annoying to just deal with. After a little trial and error, i found that the Actionscript prefs in Eclipse for that project needed to be updated with my external Actionscript folder, even though eclipse is not the compiler for that project. easy fix, strange problem.

I reinstalled Max/MSP on my new computer the other day, and opened it up to make a patch. i haven’t touched max since 2005, and as soon as i opened it up, i realized why that was. I have no idea what to do with it. Not that i don’t know how to use it, i still remember how to create a delay effect or spit midi notes all over the place. More like i don’t have any ideas for projects in which Max would be useful. I had the same problem with Processing a few months ago. i went through all the tutorials in the Reas/Fry book, but even after i was done, i couldn’t figure out what i would do with it that i wouldn’t just do in Flash.

the one thing i could do with Max is create VST plugins for my audio work in ableton. But right now i’m having enough fun messing with the attached plugins, so i’m not sure that’s necessary. I”m more interested in making a custom controller for my Ableton projects, which would be more of an Arduino project. And at the end of the day, i’ll probably just go to guitar center and buy something there, instead of burning myself with the soldering iron several times.

the point is, there are so many tools at my disposal, most of which i am fairly proficient with. but projects need to be about ideas more than tools. and most of the ideas I have (songwriting, design), don’t require anything more than an instrument or a piece of paper and some charcoal.

so how does one motivate to work with tools which would be helpful but for which they have no immediate need?