I would abolish, repeal and otherwise dispose of the odious, hateful and discriminatory California Proposition 8.

Vote No on Prop. 8

Thankfully, that process is well underway now, though not proceeding as quickly as one would like. I find the most interesting aspect of the court battle to be that the legally-defined defendants, the Attorney General and Governor of California, have declined to defend the law, and the "intervenors" (groups which wrote, promoted and are now third-party defenders) may not be able to demonstrate standing to appeal Judge Walker's ruling that the law is by nature a gross violation of the United States Constitution.



So the people who could defend it aren't, and the people who are defending it don't have any (legal, rational, secular) reason for doing so. Sounds like an easy dismissal to me, and the 9th doesn't even have to rule on the merits.

No, not Kitchen Stadium.

Today, August 22, is the five-year anniversary of the day I started at Avvenu in 2005. At the time it was a tiny, 25-employee Internet media-sharing startup in Palo Alto. In December 2007, we were acquired by Nokia and our Nokia start dates were backdated to match our Avvenu start dates. So Nokia just reminded me that I’ve been working for them for five years.

I don’t like working for large companies. I was definitely going to stay with Nokia for two years, to fully vest my retention bonus. That was December 2009, and nine months later I’m still there. The huge multinational corporate atmosphere is stifling. It’s soul-deadening. And that probably explains my lack of ambition or energy to start searching for a new job, preferably at a tiny Internet startup.

This anniversary, I’ve now resolved, is going to be the kick in the pants that I need to get my resume in order and get the job search going.

The current contents of my to-do lists. Some of these things have been hanging on for months. I apologize for useful-only-to-me abbreviations.

The to-do list

TECHY STUFF

• Sync manager thingie
• fix MP guide hotel pages / menu structs
• MP mobile guide pages
• full MP CSS to mobile MP
• MP mobile mirror misc URLs
• write “welcome to mobile MP” article
• @MP theme based on MP.com
• new countdown code in Pad
• new theme in Pad
• full Pad CSS to mobile Pad
• hack importing old updates
• add Pad mobile forum collapse
• sexybookmarks in Pad
• add ads to Pad mobile
• move social-network to rightnav
• MP menus (HTML5 “nav”)
• add intelligent URL detection to PCG
• improve Twitter box on MP main page: http://ukijs.org/
• automate/template MP DLR update hours/refurbs
• implement Twurl & OAuth for Tweet-from-CMS
• set up new external drive
• set up guest room media
• clean MBP keyboard
• migrate PIRR
• migrate Box of Kittens
• migrate MPA HOA blog
• fix GreaseMonkey script

GENERAL TODO

• update Craigslist glass post
• get car washed
• look into GTD or similar
• find reseller for car nose protector parts
• call XM
• call DirecTV
• laundry
• drop off dry cleaning
• cat boxes
• fill cat water dispensers
• check 401k funds

If you ask me for a funny movie, my answer is always going to be the same.

What made it so funny? When I was ten, it was the puns and the straight-faced outrageousness. It was taking an everyday event–going to the airport, getting on a plane–and making it totally ridiculous without any of the characters knowing the difference. It was great lines like "Don't you tell me which zone is for loading and which zone is for stopping!" and "The life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing: finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner."



Now, it's that plus thirty years of remembering watching it oveur and oveur again, plus knowing the previous "serious" careers of actors like Lloyd Bridges and Leslie Neilsen.



Airplane! is not just my favorite funny movie, it's one of my all time favorite movies.

If you’re using Hudson with a CVS-based project and receiving the error “cannot open CVS/Entries for reading” error when Hudson tries to check-out the repository, check to see that the branch tag you’re using is actually a branch tag and not just a revision tag. I was getting this error and it was driving me crazy, because I could run the same “cvs co -r branchname modules” command from the terminal and it worked fine. Until I realized that I’d created the “branchname” tag as a revision tag, not as a branch tag.

How to check whether a given tag is a revision tag or a branch tag:

cvs update -r tagname filename
cvs status filename

Look for the “Sticky Tag” line; if after the tag name it says “revision:”, well, it’s a revision tag. If after the tag name it says “branch:” then it’s a branch tag and, unfortunately, my solution to this maddening and uninformative error doesn’t apply to you. Best of luck.

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Update 2010-08-16: If you’ve gotten past the initial “cannot open CVS/Entries” error but now Hudson is failing when it tries to generate the CVS changelog, that’s due to Hudson issue 6312 which as of today is not fixed. The workaround is to disable CVS changelogs completely, which may be a good idea anyway with projects of any reasonable size. This post on i-proving.ca has the details.