cce blog

bossa nova

last friday i saw luciana souza at joe's pub @ the public theater. her album brazilian duos -- consisting of beautiful one-take recordings of souza singing samba & bossa nova with a single guitar accompianment -- has been my favorite album for the last year or so. but i've never seen her up-close before, singing these songs, so i jumped at the chance when my brazilian co-workers told me she was playing.

it was great. she had a jazz trio (piano, bass, drums) who effortlessly played the same tricky samba/bossa rhythms that still confuse me. the drummer was perfect, the pianist brought each solo to a perfect climax, and the bass player drove along a solid beat.

and then luciana started singing in english! the latest album's called north and south, and so they used jazz styles, beats, etc (north) along with the brazilian elements (south), and even covered "all of me."

in short it was an amazing show, so i bought the CD afterwards. then i went backstage and the brazilians i was with talked to ms. souza in crazy portuguese. i was shy and just stood there all bashful-looking, but they got her to sign my CD anyway. and then we said ciao (uhh, "tchau" in portuguese) and exchanged those european double-kisses that i haven't quite mastered yet.

in any case, go listen to luciana souza. you will be glad you did. okay!

happy birthday

Happy Birthday Mom! Thanks so much for tolerating my crazy travels this past year, helping me get set up in NYC, even hunting down furniture & the set of dishes in my kitchen right now. You're the best.

my job

Reuters/Wired says my employer is the best company for workplace privacy. This is pretty cool, as I'd been worrying about that sort of thing. There's a Slashdot article too.

Last week I saw Mandelbrot in the cafeteria. (And again in the hallway today at lunch!)

Finally, you have to watch The Prodigy, the crazy 90-second TV ad they've been running during the U.S. Open (Reuters). This 9-year-old little boy is supposed to represent Linux, so obviously a bunch of people like Shirley from "Laverne and Shirley", Harvard prof Henry Lewis Gates, and Muhammad Ali have to teach him about the world. All the boy has to remember is that there is no spoon, and he's the One, right? "Linux. The future is open." It's pretty funny/amazing/ridiculous, but it's still cool that they're pushing Linux so hard.

I saw this comment on slashdot:

Remember when IBM was The Man? Not as in "You The Man", but as in "You've sold out to The Man, man!" The Evil Empire? Big, corporate, bad guys? Now, they love Linux, they don't snoop on employees, they fight SCO-style crap, and so on? When did they get all nice-nice?

Does this mean I can stop saying "I work for the Man" now?

applicious

at some point this weekend everyone in my apartment watched the steve jobs keynote video at some apple developer's conference. it's made bryan and i apple converts, i think.

it's boring to write about the technical details, but he presents tons of new features to Mac OS X that pretty much provide the last incentives to unix people who've been holding out: a new finder, native X11R6 support, kerberos, AFS, NFS home directories, built-in samba, home directory encryption, beautiful "fast user switching," cool window management, etc.

then they parade out a bunch of executives from Adobe, Logic, IBM, Mathematica and other companies to talk about how fast the new G5 is. and it's really fast -- a PowerPC chip built in the same factory as the new supercomputer chips at work, except faster. and a cool demo showing a $3000 PowerMac beating a $4300 Dell machine on crazy studio video and music production hardware.

plus, since moving in i'm trying to make a place in my room for my US-428 controller & laptop, and make more songaday songs. but a G5 would just be so nice and fast, having all that floating-point performance. and code would compile crazy fast. and burn DVD's with those crazy DVD authoring programs.

so, i gotta follow mike and julian and get a mac. probably around when the new version of OS X with native X11 comes out, then i'll get a mac.

i suppose, since part of my job is hacking linux kernel code, this makes me somewhat of a linux sellout. but a BSD flavor must not be so bad, right? after all, whenever you buy an intel box, you're forced to pay tribute to microsoft. anyhow, i'll still use linux at work and on my thinkpad, even dual-boot and help with the ppc linux effort, since that's what i edit at work all day.

rumor was that they were thinking of making fast PowerPC (not intel) thinkpads that can run linux only. apparently, back in the early 90's, they made PowerPC thinkpads that could only run OS/2. after windows took over, they had to use intel only, but if ppc linux works well enough, who knows? a dual 2GHz PPC linux thinkpad wouldn't be so bad, either.

wow. this is probably the geekiest entry in my blog to date. i apologize.

scooter commuter

My commute each morning begins with a brisk walk up Broadway, crossing the Harlem River to the Bronx's Marble Hill Station. Starting from my new apartment at 207th Street, this trip takes about 13 minutes at a fast "I can't miss the goddamn train again" pace.

It usually ends with a close call, and if I'm lucky, the train arrives just as I get down to the platform. If I'm NOT lucky, however, I usually end up halfway across the Broadway Bridge cursing whilst admiring a spectacular view of my train chugging away along the river. This has happened to me more than a few times. It's the worst.

Simply leaving earlier would work for some, sure, but probably not me. Thus the next best solution is something with wheels. Here are some options I found:

• Roller Shoes. So cool! In HK the latest kids' sneaker fad was shoes with a big wheel in the heel, so if you leaned back you could use the heel-wheel to glide a few feet each step. I never ended up getting a pair for some reason.
  
• Strap-over-your-shoes inline skates. Probably a bad idea, because, lacking in-line skating skills, I might run into things. Actually, this can be said for the roller shoes too. These nicer clip-on inline skates and these "Italian-made" black leather roller boots are out of the running too for this reason. And these two-wheeled clip-ons would be cool if they didn't just hook on to ski boots.
  
• A bike or electric bike. This could work. Plus I already have a bike, so no purchase necessary. But then I'd have to either a] take it on the train or b] park it in the Bronx somehow. Neither option is desirable.
  
• Electric skateboard. WHAT? they MAKE these? It's almost like "Back to the Future"! This is very cool but I will certainly hurt myself on one of these.
  
• A foldable scooter like the Xootr. Hey, this seems like a good solution. Electric scooters are very cool, but too pricy. And I won't break myself: if this 73-year-old guy commutes 10 miles every day on a Xootr, maybe I should give a try. Plus it's an "adult scooter" so I don't have to hunch down to reach the handlebars. See how much bigger it is than a Razor?
  

Okay, so a scooter it is. Or was ... I did all this online scooter-shopping last Friday, when it was still nice outside. It's freezing now! Are scooters just a summer thing? As it gets colder will I still want to scoot around?