I just posted a mountain bike ride report on a blog I created to record my outdoor adventures. If you like to read about me doing outdoor/adventure/fitness type things, then you should probably consider subscribing. I expect the post volume to increase, as my "training" volume has been. My Garmin records, which are incomplete, say I've logged 400 miles and 21,000' of elevation gain in the past 30 days, mostly on bike but a bit on foot.

Here's an interesting thought in passing: HTTP stacks in our kernels, for clients and for servers, with appropriate syscalls. If TCP is in there, why not HTTP? It's fast becoming a "baseline" protocol underneath applications.

First question: where do you draw the line? What atomic unit of work would you like the kernel to do? A full HTTP parsing, every time, of every header? Construction of response headers from a data structure like you might hand to sendmsg()? Depending on the context, you often don't want or need everything, and parsing is slow. E.g., if there is a Location header present, clients generally only care that the code is not 4xx or 5xx, but not what it actually is. HTTP messages and their deconstruction (parsing) don't much resemble TCP or UDP packets and their deconstruction (mostly mapping things from network to host order). This argues for userland libraries that can be chosen to fit the situation.

What if the protocol, or chunks of it, could end up more uniform and fixed, requiring less parsing and more mere deconstruction? SPDY is a step in that direction. One could definitely imagine a set of system calls dealing with SPDY streams and frames.

Dear Lazyweb,

I'm looking for an HTTP client library for ruby which handles HTTP caching fairly transparently. It should work basically like a browser, in that if I hit a URL, it should cache the results, and if I try to GET it again, it should do a conditional GET with If-None-Match or If-Modified-Since. Does such a beast exist? I really don't want to write my own.

From their early 20s, many people go through a process I call lifestyle inflation. Flush with cash (and possibly credit) from their first jobs, they often buy nicer cars (maybe their first new car, and often on credit), jack up their rent or acquire a mortgage (thus extending expenses to include all sort of tools or paying others to do maintenance), and eat out a lot more often. In my case, high-end audio gear was also one part of that picture. Later in life, especially if they "do well", they'll jack things up again: perhaps a new luxury car (not a Buick or Caddy like their parents or grandparents, but probably an Acura, BMW, or perhaps a high-end Nissan), a series of expensive gadgets, a nicer neighborhood, an increasing alcohol budget (and more frequently sticking with "the good stuff"), a kitchen remodel, really nice furniture, etc.( Read more... )

I bought Cowen's Create Your Own Economy shortly after arriving in DC and have read about half of it. I'm enjoying it so far, but I think that's partly because I identify as someone with certain autistic cognitive and personality traits.

After starting the book, I also started reading Cowen's blog, Marginal Revolution. It's economicsy, but covers other stuff, too, like music and food. I reccomend it. I was turned on to Liszt's Transcendental Etudes by him.

If you happen to be in the DC area, his restaurant review blog seems good, if NOVA-centric.

I'm now starting my fourth Cory Doctorow book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. This is a fairly blazing pace of fiction reading for me, and I'm beginning to think it's mostly down to how easy it is to read on the iPod Touch (I use Stanza), especially in bed. This is the absolute best laying down reading experience I've ever had, and simply starting the app takes me back to where I left off; no bookmarks. The device is easy to hold in one hand and simple to operate with only that thumb.

Although I don't have a Kindle yet, I think, at least for bedtime reading, this is probably a superior situation, mostly because of its one-handedness and the fact that I can read it with the lights off (I use a red-on-black theme to keep from disrupting melatonin production). Also, because the iPod is almost always in my pocket, I can grab a paragraph or two in the tiniest of moments.

Of course it also helps that I love Doctorow's books and that they are free. But I have to wonder if I would have ever known how good they are without the freeness and the iPod. My previous experience leads me to doubt it. At any rate, I recommend both Doctorow and Stanza highly.

I have to confess I've never really cared much for "challenging" movies and music. I don't mean mere intelligent stuff, but barely-narrative movies that "make you think", or assorted noise that is supposed to be "challenging to listen to" (not in the same way that G.G. Allin is).

I suspect I'm unusual in that I don't particularly have a problem thinking enough. I do it all the time, indeed probably too much. When my brain gets revved up, whether building software, planning travel, or fiddling a budget, I have trouble turning it off to go to bed. Like Eckhart Tolle says, I sometimes feel like the instrument (my mind) is in charge of me, rather than the other way around.

No, generally what I want from movies or music is some combination of mood-augmentation, humour, entertainment, and beauty. I don't particularly think my brain needs more things to pick apart and decode in a given day. If anything, I'd prefer a life where I selectively switch it on to do the things I really love to (or need to) do with it, then spend more time being present in the present.

Weather today's pretty much amazing: wispy clouds hanging in a perfect blue sky, 57 degF, and alternating between still and a mild breeze. I walked about 5km on the beach to reach town and return, and was in short sleeves for most of it. Saw some great waves out here on the west coast and am now back at Birdsong with a bottle of local brews set aside for sunset, which should be pretty good tonight, unless the weather turns. I'm out back on the deck, without much of a sea view, because I really don't want to leave the fresh air and sunshine on my skin. More about my glacier trip, including pictures, soon.