Matthew Sachs's Journal -- LESS THAN 50% PEANUTS

Never After

2009-09-23T02:19:59Z

I'm in a musical this weekend, Never After, Saturday @ 8pm and Sunday @ 3pm at the Somerville Theatre. It's a new musical about a misfit princess cursed to be a lesbian, and her run-ins with adventure, true love, some very merry men, and her own identity. We're doing it in concert form, so minimal sets and costumes.

Tickets are normally $15 (or $12 for students/seniors), but if that's an obstacle for anyone, I have one free ticket available.

Free Stuff

2009-09-20T20:53:22Z

As Liz notes, we have some stuff free for the taking.

1 Hamilton Beach Toastation 2-slice toaster and Mini Oven (mint in box - we already had another toaster oven!)
2 DVD players with remotes
1 chenille throw, dark teal in color - never opened
1 dozen wine glasses, in good shape
1 Video game system carrying case, similar to this.
1 Radio Shack 8-in-1 Universal Learning Remote
1 ATI Scan Converter -- hook a computer with a VGA output up to a TV

Comment over in Liz's post if you want anything.

The Mystery of Irma Vep

2008-12-11T17:15:38Z

We're seeing a play in downtown Boston (Back Bay) Sunday evening. It's The Mystery of Irma Vep:

A werewolf, a vampire, an Egyptian princess, a cursed estate, and more haunt one "dark and stormy night" in this Obie Award-winning, uproarious high-camp tribute to Gothic horror films and Victorian melodrama. Lyric favorites Neil A. Casey (This Wonderful Life) and John Kuntz (Fully Committed) portray eight characters in a quick-change marathon and gender-bending "tour-de-farce" -- a treat for the whole family! "The funniest two hours unfolding anywhere!" – The New York Times"

We have season tickets here, their stuff is usually good. If anyone else wants to come, we can get you tickets for $5 off, so it'd be $35. It's from 7:30 to 9:30 at 140 Clarendon St, Boston, near Back Bay and Copley stations. We'll also probably be eating dinner beforehand if you're into that sort of thing.

Oh dear, they're trying to kill me.

2008-11-26T15:28:55Z

Yesterday, my office had a pie buffet. Today, a couple of the guys at work (who do this periodically, apparently just because they're nice guys) brought in Verna's Donuts (which are awesome, for those of you near North Cambridge) for the entire place.

And then, walking back downstairs from picking up my donut, I see that someone else had brought in Dunkies for the 5th floor.

mattsachs @ 2008-11-25T10:16:00

2008-11-25T15:19:15Z

Something that will only make sense to dgr8bob and ravenword... the chorus of Chanson du Bon Chose always sounds like it's describing voting up stories about the former Brandeis sysadmin on a social news site.

("I am Digging Graves...")

Who wants to buy an arcade machine?

2008-11-06T20:55:19Z

They're auctioning off all the stuff from Good Times.

Stream of Consciousness + Animals = Comedy Gold!

2008-11-01T20:46:08Z

Sometimes, the simple things are the best. (Really needs to be watched with sound...)

Like Hamster On a Piano (Eating Popcorn):

Or Boogie Boogie Hedgehog:

There's more where those came from.

Free Stuff

2008-08-10T20:50:25Z

We're getting rid of things like an air conditioner, a coffee table, and a TV. All free unless otherwise noted. From Liz's LJ:

25-ish inch Sony Analog CRT TV + stand. I have no idea how old it is. I got it as a free cast off from the media services department at Brandeis. Still works, has lots of connectors.
beat up old orange armchair. It's pretty comfy - if you feel like re-upholstering it, it would probably be pretty good. It has lived in many, many houses with cats, though, so I'm not sure the cat allergens would ever quite come out. :)
Ikea Lack coffee table in black. One of the legs is sort of loose; if you're more patient than I am, it could probably be repaired with some wood glue.
Window air conditioner, ok, I lied, not all free. Window air conditioner, with remote control (I think I know where it is, anyway) and owner's manual. I bought this for probably about $150 3 years ago and used it for a summer; moved to an apartment that had windows it didn't fit in, so I loaned it to a friend for a summer and it's sat dormant ever since. It was a great air conditioner, complete with thermostat and timer so you can have it turn itself on an hour before you get home. Great feature! It's yours for $70, OBO.

Claws von Stauffenberg

2008-08-04T04:02:32Z

Liz seemed to think that I shouldn't smash a bottle of champagne against him, but we've named the new cat Claws von Stauffenberg. (Some possible nicknames include Claws, Claus, (the) Count, and Bergie.) Claus von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Hitler. Claws von Stauffenberg currently likes to attempt to assassinate my glasses by shoving them off my face with his own.

There are some new photos in Liz's flickr.

Kitty!

2008-07-23T03:11:06Z

Not taking him home until next week, when we've "finished" moving in and Tabi's had some time to adjust, but... kitty! Name pending, possibly inspired by this list or this list. My current favorite is Claws von Stauffenberg, since it's a great name and he almost assassinated Hitler, but we'll see what he's like when we get him home.

Oh, and his eye was born like that.

Barack the Vote

2008-02-27T05:17:55Z

roguesylph and I are heading down to Providence to canvas for Obama on Saturday if anyone wants to join us.

I haven't quite managed to get around to writing up an endorsement for Zevils, but Liz has a thorough one up on her blog. RI may not be delegate-rich, but its polls close before OH and TX's, so a strong win there would be an important signal to voters in those states.

WIP teaser

2007-10-15T03:20:45Z

A teaser for a work in progress:

No, I don't like that yellow either, not on that background.

The Rule of Law

2007-09-16T21:39:14Z

(Or, So That's Why The Lady Is A Tramp!)

In Massachusetts, riding a freight train is prima facie evidence that you're a tramp. (There are also separate sections of the code dealing with vagrants and vagabonds. Tramps who also meet the criteria for vagrancy are deemed tramps, but not vagrants. These "statutory tramps" may, however, also be vagabonds. I smell a sequel for John Hodgman...)

Also, in our fair ~~state~~ commonwealth, it's illegal to advertise contraception, and only registered physicians may administer/prescribe it (and only to married persons.) I am glad to see that they took into account the needs of same-sex married couples when authoring this legislation.

Miscellania

2007-09-09T03:13:38Z

Liz had the audacity to claim that she had a weird dream last night. It involved attending a wedding-cum-broadway-play in which everything was going wrong. Yawn! I put her in her place ("p0wned", I believe the term is) by going with Bill S. Preston, Esq., Ted "Theodore" Logan, and the guys from my tabletop group to rescue either Bill or Ted's sister from the evil clutches of Demon-Emperor Zod at the satanic "Catholic" school where he was the headmaster. We were dressed as schoolgirls, except for valadil, who we decided couldn't pass for a schoolgirl, so he was dressed as a security guard. Zod tried to trick us with a hallway that forked and a sign directing us left for Emperor Nod and right for Emperor Zod. I don't think we fell for it.

I saw a frog hopping across the shoulder of I-90, looking like he'd just successfully crossed.

The Mass Turnpike's Charlton Service Center is great for three reasons. There's a doorbell in the men's bathroom (pressing it did not appear to do anything), you can get both pretzels and burritos there, and the souvenir penny machine has a sticker explaining why it's legal (because defacing federal currency is okay, as long as it's not for fraudulent purposes, according to 18 U.S.C. §331.

Finally, some quick research into how the Chinese handled telegraphs in the late 19th century. [wikipedia:Chinese telegraph code] indicates that the most common method for transmitting Chinese over telegraph was to use a system where each character was assigned a 4-digit number. I think that the number assigned to a character used a system where each digit indicated something about the structure of the character, but the only system, the four corner method, which I can find documentation for was invented in 1920.

The sender could translate the message to digits, or for an extra fee, the telegraph operator would do it. The message was then sent as a continuous string of digits, which the receiver would decode into groups of 4. There was also a system where each Chinese character was represented by a string of three English characters for greater transmission speed. Sending digits in Morse code is slow; they take five bits each (each decimal digit is exactly five dots/dashes.) Although if they used 10,000 characters — I'm not sure if every value in the coding system they were using corresponds to a character — in an encoding where each character is given equal weight (which isn't really the way you want to go, of course...) it would take between 13 and 14 bits to represent a character, and using the 4-decimal-digit Morse encoding, that's 20 bits per number, which isn't a terrible amount of overhead... I wonder if the fixed bits/digit characteristic of Morse decimal digits helped avoid decoding errors.

I'd've thought that they'd prefer using a romanization to a numeric encoding. The Wade-Giles romanization was invented in 1859 and revised in 1892, so those were around at the time. Cecil Adams's write-up of using romanizations for Chinese makes it sound like it isn't as straightforward a mapping to and from characters as I would've thought, though. It seems that it (well, Pinyin at least, I assume that Wade-Giles is the same) maps to a sound, not a character, so maybe avoiding that ambiguity was worth the trouble of the numeric encoding. I guess that makes sense, you can't really map English letters to anything but sounds... I hadn't thought about it, but it also makes sense that if Chinese has 50k characters, and each character is a single syllable, well, there's going to be a many-to-one mapping between written characters and spoken characters. A system for encoding the appearance of a character (as opposed to the sound of a character) also has the advantage of working across dialects.

Smarter Spam

2007-07-29T14:50:41Z

I just received a spam comment on my Diagnosis of Inferior Social Proclivity Disorder in Young Adult Patients: A Case Study entry (a "re-mix" of That's Why The Lady is a Tramp, written in the style of an article in a psychology journal) advertising medicine for OCD.

I really only update Facebook for events of this magnitude.

2007-07-29T04:36:03Z

roguesylph and I got engaged yesterday. We were going to spend the day in Newport and then head over to WaterFire in the evening, but she got a flat tire last night, and then there were thunderstorms, so we just had dinner in the city instead.

We'd been planning it for a while. It's not really a decision I wanted to make unilaterally, so that would've made it hard enough for me to have surprised her, and then we decided that we should both have engagement rings (since blah blah something about equality, but the important part is, I like shiny things), so the surprise thing wouldn't really have worked out. I still managed to get somewhat of a drop on her though.

We'd decided that we were going to do it on Saturday (our anniversary is on Monday, but we wanted to do it on a weekend so that we could celebrate in style), so I was going to "pop the question" (which was a pretty slim formality at this point, but hey, it's still, y'know, "the question") at midnight. She decided to go get a glass of water at 23:59, conveniently. I palmed the jewelry box while she was up, and when she got back, after making sure that my water had been securely set down, I told her, "Oh, before you sit down..." Drop to knee, &c. I don't think we particularly managed to surprise any family, or really, any of y'all.

There are pictures of rings and other assorted schmoopiness at images.sachsfam.org (but note that zevils.com and its associated images.zevils.com remain the canonical websites for my personal stuff....) Liz's post is here.

The wedding is tentatively scheduled for Q4 2008, but for the sake of everyone's collective sanity, we're declaring a moratorium on any further planning until mid-September (2007 :p).

I love you, Liz.

Scripty Goodness

2007-07-23T02:01:16Z

I've finally moved my personal repository over to Subversion and added some recent scripts.

g2export will grab all of the images from a Gallery 2 website,
preserving the album structure on the website as a folder structure on
the disk and taking file names from captions if available.

ul2shoplist is designed as an iPhone bookmarklet for doing shopping
lists. It takes the first unordered list on a page whose first list
item doesn't contain a class attribute and transforms all of the items
on that list into checkboxes; when the boxes are checked, they will
move to the end of the list, and they will return to their original
location if they're unchecked. We do our shopping lists on a wiki,
and this is designed to work with that; the "first list item doesn't
contain a class attribute" restriction is so that it skips over the
"table of contents" list that MediaWiki puts in. I used the ever-nifty John Gruber's Javascript Bookmarklet Builder to convert it to a bookmarklet.

sms2txt and jotter are programs I wrote to export data from my P910
UIQ smartphone; I wanted to move my Jotter notes and SMS messages stored in the P910's Mail application over to the iPhone.

Deathly Hallows

2007-07-21T04:25:51Z

The scene where Harry wakes up and he was actually Harry from Harry and the Hendersons having a dream is fantastic!

(In the grand tradition of Voldemort is Harry's sled, I haven't read it yet.)

Ratatouille

2007-07-01T23:32:49Z

(roguesylph, posting here since free accounts can't email to post photos.)

Standing in line for opening weekend of Ratatouille at The Alamo Drafthouse. They frequently have special extras and this is no exception. We got to meet the star himself! This is mom
with the big rat himself.

tabiPhone

2007-06-30T10:58:32Z

The best feature of the iPhone is that it has a quacking ducks ringtone which I can set for roguesylph.

IM IN UR XKCD REIFYIN UR MEME

2007-05-17T02:38:46Z

Adventures in Wifi

2007-05-15T01:59:48Z

roguesylph's Netgear wireless router was dying a slow, painful, death, and it finally bothered me enough that I got a new one for her and Tabi, the new Apple AirPort 802.11n base station.

However, I wanted to set the new one up with decent security; the old one was using WEP. But the Nintendo DS doesn't support WPA, and management determined that DS support was mission-critical.

The solution I decided on lets us use WPA for the laptops, WEP for the DS's, and has performance benefits to boot. I set the AirPort up to use WPA2-encrypted 802.11n (only; no a/b/g backwards compatibility) on the 5GHz band with 192.168.1/24 as the local network. Then, I plugged the old router into one of the ethernet ports on the AirPort, configured to use WEP-encrypted 802.11b (2.4GHz.) The trick was that I set the Netgear to also use 192.168.1/24 as its local network.

Now, clients which associate with the Netgear can get on the internet but can't talk to any of the machines behind the AirPort, since they won't send packets with 192.168.1/24 destination addresses to their default gateway, the Netgear. The Netgear is smart enough to deal with having itself be 192.168.1.1 on its inside interface while the AirPort is 192.168.1.1 on its outside interface. I wasn't sure if that would work, but it turned out to be fine. The two access points are using different frequencies so the signals won't conflict either.

This isn't perfect security. Really tricky clients could set up a static ARP table entry for an IP on the AirPort network with the MAC address of the AirPort. I don't think they'd be able to easily get the MAC of the AirPort's 802.11 interface without physical access, but it's possible that the 802.11n/WPA combo, or some other layer somewhere, exposes that unencrypted, since it's not generally considered sensitive. Liz's dad had a novel solution to that hole — turn off the Netgear when nobody's playing DS.

mattsachs @ 2007-05-06T00:05:00

2007-05-06T04:13:27Z

Now that rogueslyph is done with school, I thought it'd be nice to take a little vacation. We decided to go to Vermont for the weekend. Taking in some foliage? Quaint bed and breakfasts? Syrup farms? Touring the countryside?

Or we could take an eight hour long baking class.

allocatee, I have new-found respect for those delicious croissants you brought to game one night. Apparently one has to start these things at 3AM to have fresh ones ready for breakfast... Scratch baker as alternate career choice. There's a lot of stuff that can sit in the freezer overnight though, so I think it could be divided into manageable chunks for home.

I didn't realize that bakers got such cool power tools. Industrial sheeters are like belt sanders for pastry.

When Life Imitates Art

2007-04-04T14:14:24Z

As I was running down the sidewalk to catch a train this morning, I found myself ~~transformed in my bed into a gigantic insect~~ narrowly avoiding slipping on a banana peel. Yes, there was a banana peel on the sidewalk, in classic skin-up "starfish" pattern.

A block later there was a baby possum hide. Less entertaining, that.

Penguin Power

2007-03-20T23:32:51Z

natbudin and I wrote an award-winning penguin dating website this weekend, what'd you do?

BarCamp had a programming contest. Teams had to create a program which used at least four of the keywords which had been announced Saturday at 17:00 or so. I wasn't able to make it into Cambridge on Saturday, but I was sitting in a 2 o'clock session when someone bragged about their BBQ calculator on IRC. Well, I had to respond with some trash-talk, of course. That session got out early, so there I was, it's 14:30... hey, maybe I should go ahead and have a crack at that program I joked about after all. Judging's not until 15:30, there's plenty of time! I dragged natbudin into it when he got out of his session at 15:00.

Our code is available for browsing and download, but the best part is really natbudin's spectacular slides. Philippe Lejeune also took some nice videos of the event. We took home an honorable mention for "most efficiently developed" entry.

BarCamp Boston 2 was lots of fun. Oh, and because my employer, ITA, was sponsoring it, I got an extra-spiffy green t-shirt instead of the less-spiffy black/white t-shirts. Flickr tag 'barcampboston2' has photos.