BrockLi Soup

Random guy at party: Hey, there’s a cat in here! Where did it come from and why is it so cute?

BP: Beer before liquor, never been sicker, liquor before beer, you’re in the clear….OK, I’m good. Man, I love poetry!

I had a feeling things wouldn’t go smoothly at the airport today. They had me stand in this little glass hallway, with no shoes or belt, right in the middle of the security area, until some guy could take me aside and check me over with the wand. To most people, this would probably be embarrassing, but I thought it was hilarious. Turns out, the rivets in my shorts were setting the thing off, so I think I’ll be wearing something else for the flight back.

It’s been a stressful week. Jeff, the guy sort of above me, was on vacation for most of the week. A project for one of our big clients is nearing completion, so I spent the week fielding all the bugs and changes he would usually deal with. I was also trying to get all my laundry done (it’s been accumulating on me for months) and pack all my stuff before leaving for home this afternoon, since we’re moving Tuesday and I didn’t want to do everything at the last minute again. I need to figure out how to get to U-Haul Tuesday afternoon, when Jym and I can go over and sign the lease, when we’re doing the move-out inspection at my current place, and how I’m going to get back after I drop off the truck Wednesday morning. And, somewhere in the middle, actually move all our stuff into the new place.

So yes, I’ve been a little on edge lately. Things keep popping up - oh crap, I forgot to cancel the cable…and the power - which makes this little balancing act more interesting. Hopefully, I’ll make everything happen at the right times, and it will all go smoothly, and I can sit on my balcony drinking a victory beer Wednesday evening.

Or, as customary, perhaps everything will go wrong in a most spectacular fashion. Someday we’ll look back on this and lauuuugh. For now, I’m going to enjoy a few days at home and in Rochester and try not to think about any of it.

I know you guys are MySpace indie poster boys and all, but seriously, Alec sounds like a drunk six-year old whining for some juice. How did you get so popular with such an ingratiating asshat leading your short-bus sing-alongs?

Jym and I started packing some stuff tonight, after stealing boxes from the Barnes & Noble cardboard dumpster.

I’ve been in Virginia for just a week shy of six months. It certainly doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but at the same time, it feels like a lifetime since I left RIT. DC has been good to me - it’s nice living in a real city - even if I haven’t met as many new people as I’d hoped to. Thankfully, I had quite a few friends down here already, which made the move down a lot easier.

As I’ve mentioned in passing, I’ll be moving really soon. Jym, Fotios and I will be taking up residence in the Crystal Plaza in Crystal City. It’s less than 5 miles from my current place, but it’s a totally different neighborhood. The place I’m at now isn’t too bad, but it’s certainly not good. We’ll be on the 9th floor of a much nicer building with some really nice facilities - pool, balcony (overlooking said pool), billiards room, two laundry rooms, two fitness rooms, and a little coffee shop, among other things. It’s also connected to the Crystal City Underground, which is basically an 8-block long underground strip mall, with all sorts of restaurants, shops, and even a couple doctors and dentists. Within 3 blocks, there are a few more coffee shops, the Metro stop, at least one bar, a liquor store, and much to Jym’s delight, there’s a McDonald’s practically under our building.

We’ll be moving next week Tuesday, right after I spend the weekend visiting family and friends in Buffalo and Rochester for Commencement/Memorial Day (and no, I won’t be walking). I started packing up some books and stuff today, because I want to have most of my crap ready to go before I leave Friday. I’ll be back here Monday around noon, then I’m taking a half day Tuesday so I can move in the afternoon.

It’s going to be a hectic couple of weeks, and I’m already looking forward to being done with it. As it is, the living room is full of Jym’s crap, since he moved in last Sunday, and the entire kitchen and bathroom cabinets are in boxes - I had to empty everything out when pest control visited our building early this month, and never bothered putting it back.

I hate feeling like my world is in disarray, with my stuff in boxes and crap in every corner, but it’s much better than the last time I moved; at least I know where I’m going, when, and more or less how I’m going to do it (UHaul, duh). I just look forward to being through with it. When all is said and done, my stuff will be in a much nicer place for at least the next year, and my car will be in the capable hands of FN (who needs it much more than I will, sinec I’ll be so close to the metro and a mere 8 blocks from work).

Oh, and our place has grills near the pool, and people will be visiting throughout the summer, and I’m going to make it to a couple bluegrass festivals. This summer is sure to rival last year’s.

I’m one of those people that’s easily frustrated if I can’t remember exactly when something happened and who was there with me. Maybe I just don’t want to lose memories, maybe I’m OCD…maybe I’m just anal, I don’t know.

Over a year ago (at least), I decided to start keeping track of things in my life. The idea probably started forming in the summer of 2003, when I found Jakob Lodwick’s (now defunct) list of people he knew. Despite the fact that wikis are typically used for collaborative editing, I decided that it would be the best way for me to record these details, mostly because of my two requirements: I want the ability to update it whenever the urge strikes me, and I want to be able to see revision history. Most wiki systems offer revision history (though I only considered MediaWiki at first), so the real hurdle was making it accessible everywhere. I’ve been getting into the habit of bringing my iBook everywhere I go, so I started off running it there. However, there are a lot of times that I want to use it elsewhere - if I’m typing a lot, I prefer doing it on my full-size desktop keyboard, and sometimes I want to add stuff at work so I don’t forget about it. As such, I settled on a wiki on a stick solution, and finally got everything working this weekend.

Now that I’ve got it all setup, I’m not even really sure what I want to put in there. Right now, I’ve got details on some of my time-based playlists - what music I was listening to during certain periods of time - and books I’ve read recently, but that’s about it. Before too long, I want to get back to that “people I know” part of the project: how I met people, how our relationship evolved, things like that. In my first attempt, three years ago, I only wrote about one person before (like so many of my projects) it fell by the wayside.

We’ll see where it takes me. I may make parts of it public eventually, but for now it’s just for me. I have this irrational fear of forgetting what I was going when, so I hope that will inspire me to keep up on it, but I have a habit of dropping personal projects when more interesting ideas come along. Having everything on a thumb drive will certainly make it easier to maintain, and maybe that will help this project stick.

I don’t know why I didn’t think to do more looking around before, but I’ve solved my wiki on a stick problem. Wikipedia has a comparison of wiki software, which includes a several that use flat-file databases.

As it turns out, DokuWiki works almost just like MediaWiki, in terms of formatting and revision history. In one of the config files, you specify the data directory, and it just works.

Unfortunately, it’s not a true wiki on a stick. It will run on any Windows machine right from the thumb drive; the instructions there use Uniform Server, which runs Apache, MySQL, and PHP right from the thumb drive. DokuWiki is installed in the www directory there, so I can run it anywhere I’ve got XP (or maybe 2000) and a USB port.

As I mentioned in my previous post, MAMP won’t run anywhere but /Applications/MAMP. Mark made the good point that I could create a symlink from the thumb drive to that directory (or vice versa? you know what I mean), but by that time I already had DokuWiki working and didn’t feel like spending more time on it. As such, MAMP runs on my iBook with a local install of DokuWiki that points to the data directory within the aforementioned www directory. Voila, everyone uses the same data, and I am appeased.

It isn’t as flexible as I was hoping, but I’m really only planning on using it in three places: my iBook, my home PC, and on rare occasions when I need to make a quick note, my work PC. I can’t run it on other Macs without installing and configuring MAMP and DokuWiki there, but for my purposes, this setup will serve me well.

Dear LazyWeb:

I want to share a MySQL database between two installations of PHP and MySQL on two different machines running at different times. Basically, I want a Wiki on a stick that I can run on Windows and my iBook. This is easy on Windows - just follow the instructions on the page linked there. Running a wiki on a Mac is unbelievably easy with MAMP.

The problem is pointing the both of them at the same MySQL data so I can update the info in either place. I can change the datadir in the MySQL config in MAMP, but it does me no good - MAMP has to be installed in /Applications/MAMP, or it just doesn’t work (it won’t even copy into other directories).

So I need to find another solution on the Mac, or a way to point the MAMP install of MySQL at an arbitrary directory. Anyone managed to do this?

Also, a couple notes:

• This isn’t a real LazyWeb request, since I’ve spent about 8 hours dicking around with this over the past few weeks. That’s not too lazy….right?
• I know about Tiddlywiki, but it’s not going to scale the way I want it to. This is going to be a big wiki and I don’t want it relying on having lots and lots of JavaScript in memory (their homepage made Firefox complain about running too long). I’d be open to other wiki systems (file based DB, maybe?) if they have the features of MediaWiki (revision history, mostly).
• I know I could just run this on the PC desktop and connect to it like any other website, but I’d like to keep it on the thumb drive if I can.

Any ideas are welcome.

I found a $10 fleece sleeping bag at WalMart today (the same one Rich has). Perfect for road trips and fun for sack races - what more could you want?

(I was flipping through the CD’s in Jym’s car)

Jym: Make up your mind! Me: I’m looking for music that doesn’t suck. Jym: Well you’re not going to find it in my CD player!

This afternoon I stopped into Shopper’s to get some groceries and a 12-pack.

Cashier: “Can I see your ID please? Wow, you was skinny, what happened?”

Me: What are you doing in there? S: Spontaneous cleaning. J: Aw man, I heard pans and thought she was making brownies.

E: It’s snowing! M: Yeah, that’s pollen.

I was cleaning up my apartment the other day, and finally got around to putting my new books in the bookshelf. Right now, my bookshelf is organized in a careful manner, where books belong exactly where ever they fit. “I should put these in order,” I said to myself (I say a lot of things, aloud, to myself when I’m home alone).

It’s a good thing I didn’t bother. This morning, as I was walking around my apartment, I said to myself (again, probably louder than I should have), “I should start boxing those up so I don’t have to pack everything all at once like last time” (oh, by the way, I’m moving again in a couple weeks).

I always seem to find time to organize right before I throw everything in random boxes.