Last weekend, I took a ride on the Portland Tram. The Tram opened this February and goes from the South Waterfront to OHSU on Marquam Hill. The tower is easily visible just south of Ross Island Bridge and just south of I-5. The cost was a rather large $4. I went on Saturday but it sounds like last Sunday was the first one that they are open. I rode to the top, took lots of pictures, and rode the next one down. There is a good view of downtown and the east side. The view to the south is blocked on the top but is good from the tram.
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Two weeks ago, I went to Silver Falls State Park with my coworker Tim and his wife Nariyo. This was my fourth time going to Silver Falls, which is east of Salem, and their first time. Only did a little bit of hiking and saw North Falls, walked the short trial to Upper North Falls. We had a picnic at the lodge. We hiked down to South Falls and took the trail that loops behind it.
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On May 12, I went to BarCamp Portland, an ad-hoc tech mini-convention at CubeSpace. I got there late in the afternoon and only went to a couple of talks. I went to a talk on Open Hardware and one on scaling Ruby. I saw a couple of people I knew but didn’t really chat much. It also looked at the most of the interesting stuff was happening in informal chats. I thought it was interesting that I didn’t see any sessions on Perl but there were lots of Ruby and Rails. I did play with an OLPC.
On April 28, I saw Gaelic Storm at the Aladdin Theater. They are one of my favorite bands, a high energy Irish band. They also turned out to be an awesome live band.
A month ago I discovered a nice spot that I didn’t know existed in Vancouver. Vancouver’s Waterfront Park starts at the east end of the Interstate Bridge. It connects to a path that goes along the Columbia River passing through Marine Park and Tidewater Cove. The road, Columbia Way, and the sidewalk also go under the Interstate Bridge to Vancouver’s downtown.
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I will giving a presentation on Slony tomorrow 4/17 at 7 pm for the Portland PostgreSQL Users Group at FreeGeek.
February 23, 2007 – 20:20
At work, they have been buying all the programmers new monitors. Everybody now has at least one 20″ LCD. Some people have two. The rest of us could have two monitors, one maybe smaller, if there wasn’t a shortage of dual-head video cards. I decided to hook up the second smaller monitor up to my MacBook.
The Mac is very good at handling multiple displays. It detected the monitor when it was plugged in. It didn’t get the resolution correct but that was easy to change. The menu bar handling is annoying; one display is the primary one with the menu bar and dock. The other can just have windows where it is hard to use the menu. Also, some programs get confused about the resizing; it would be nice if windows recgonized that they were touching a side and stayed that way. If the menu bar was moved to the monitor, then the computer would stay active with the lid closed.
Somebody pointed me toward Synergy which allows sharing keyboard and mouse over the network. The machine that has the keyboard and mouse (in this case my work desktop) runs the server. Other machines run the client and connect to the server. Each machine has to have a text configuration file. Once it is working, it is smooth to move the mouse off the side of the screen and onto the other screen. The keyboard follows the mouse. Also, it connects the clipboards. It isn’t possible to drag windows between screens.
The only problem is that the key bindings are different between Mac and Linux. The Mac uses the Option key (mapped to Alt) where Linux uses Ctrl. The clipboard commands are especially confusing since Gnome Terminal is also different. I have gotten used to the different key bindings when switching between the laptop and desktop but it helps that the laptop keyboard is different.
February 11, 2007 – 21:58
I saw Children of Men today. It has been out for a while but all the recently released movies are junk. It lived up to its good reviews. It was bleak but beautifully filmed. It did a good job of presenting the despair of a world without children. Some of the scenes of inhumanity to illegal immigrants reflected on our current inhumanity in Iraq. The best scene was when the fighting stopped because of the cry of the baby. The main characters, especially the mother, brought some nice humanity.
One thing that struck me was the realism of the violence. People were shot in the back while fleeing and collapsed to the ground. It was disturbing because of its matter-of-factness. People being killed randomly, or even worse executed deliberately. I heard quite a few gasps of shock from the audience. It was a contrast to your standard action movie where the violence is unreal.
Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon did a review from feminist perspective.
It has been cold in Portland for the last week or so. Last Thursday, there was a dusting of snow which caused problems with ice farther east. Yesterday was supposed to be the last day of cold. Instead, it stayed cold and we got moisture. The result was snow.
It snowed over night and this morning. We got a total of about 4 inches of accumulation. I worked from home since it wasn’t worth braving the roads or waiting for the bus. They ended up closing the office for the day. It always amazes me how different my neighborhood looks covered in white. The other interesting thing is that there are more people out walking than even for the weekend. I guess cold and snow is better than just cold or rain.
We haven’t had a significant snow in Portland in a couple of years. This one looks like it won’t be as bad as the one three years ago where there was ice on top of the snow and everything stayed frozen for three days. Since that winter, we have only had light snowfalls and ice storms.
Last Tuesday, I saw the Night at the Museum as part of a free screening through work. After a long hiatus, work has started doing free screenings again. They tend to be bad movies since the studios don’t need to promote the good or popular movies as much. I heard people complaining about the awfulness of Eragon, the previous weeks screening.
Night at the Museum was funny. The basic idea was that the exhibits in the Museum of Natural History in New York come alive at night and terrorize the new night guard. There were some nice touches like the T. Rex skeleton which acts like a dog chasing a bone and the tiny people from the dioramas. The plot was predictable from the setup and it is a little too cute and educational in places. But it was basically silly fun and I enjoyed it.