While I was searching for electronic formats of my printed books, I stumbled on the book “Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age” by Paul Graham, published by O’Reilly and copyright 2004. I started reading it on a whim and basically got sucked in, reading on the plane and in between things for the past two days. About 250 pages later, I’m antsy to program and move to San Francisco more than ever! But first I’ll take a minute to recall the parts of the book I most want to remember before I don’t.
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Mom lent me the book "Anything You Want" a few months ago, and I finally lay down to read it. Overall I liked it a lot. It's in line with my recent endeavors to reduce my belongings and simplify things. I own way more crap than I should, and motivated by my impending transplant across the country, I've been finding it quite rewarding to get rid of stuff.
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This is a quick and dirty solution for use in Movable Type templates, but it should work!
<?php
$body = <<<EOT
<$mt:EntryBody encode_php="here"$>
EOT;
preg_match_all('#<p>(.+?)</p>#is', $body, $matches);
switch(count($matches[0])) {
case 0: break;
case 1: echo $matches[0][0]; break;
case 2: echo $matches[0][0].$matches[0][1]; break;
default: echo $matches[0][0]."<p>".$matches[1][1].' <a href="<mt:EntryPermalink>" class="actionlink">Read more »</a>'; break;
}
?>
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I had this account, zach_eastwood, on my Yahoo! buddies list for a long time, but I don’t remember why or if it was ever a real person. I thought I’d message.
[12:07] Charlie Gorichanaz: hi
[12:07] Zach Eastwood: hi!
[12:07] Charlie Gorichanaz: i don’t …
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Last Tuesday, Josh made me watch a movie with him, "Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead." Apparently he thought it was about steroid abuse for the sake of muscle gain or something, and it turned out to be quite a different movie. But we both loved it nonetheless.
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I started using Google's Picasa to manage my photos probably two years ago when I learned of its awesome facial recognition feature to largely automate tagging people. Then when I discovered Alan Lundeen's plugin to automate uploading to Facebook, life was blissful.
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I've never been one to use the same, simple password for everything, like many FBI agents and possibly 92 percent of Sony customers. For the better part of a decade, my strategy was to use a ridiculously long "secure" password for important sites, and a simple (but nondictionary) password for the rest. Then a number of years ago I switched to the much more robust strategy of using a complex sequence combined with parts of the website name following some formula. I didn't want to make it too complicated, though, so I limited the password to eight characters, as one of my banks had this limit on passwords.
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At Chicago Pride 2011, I was with my friend Ryan for most of Sunday after the parade. We were loosely tracking a group of Milwaukee gays and once in a while running into other friends. During one of our ditch-out-and-head-to-the-next-bar excursions, we saw some girls and a cute boy in the street pointing up at some apartment. I told Ryan I thought the boy was super cute, after which Ryan went up to the guy and asked his name. I was glad Ryan did that, especially when I saw how pretty his eyes were!
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Have you had the displeasure of meeting Septimiu Teodorescu, yet? I had that wonderful opportunity yet again this past Saturday night in Chicago.
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Apparently Facebook hasn't taken into account how to handle someone who pokes you and then disables poking.
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Yesterday I got a notification from RimuHosting about a complaint against my server.
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Tuesday night I went to Palermo for my long awaited dinner plans with Juan Manuel and Roberto. I may have guilted Roberto into coming with, but I know he didn't regret it. :-) Juan picked out a place called Taco Box for me to try. It was nice, though our waitress really sucked. We ended up giving her exact payment for the bill with no tip, something I couldn't imagine doing in the States. I walked out quickly without looking back. :-(
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Tuesday, Dani asked what I wanted to do, and when I mentioned reading about a famous cemetery online, we decided to go there. La Recoleta Cemetery is in one of the ritzier neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. It is where tourists from around Argentina and the world go to see the tombs of such prominent Argentines as Eva Perón. Somehow I missed that tomb, though. The place is huge, and you could walk around all day and still not see all the graves.
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Last weekend was the second "long weekend" of my trip, as Thursday and Friday were days off for many people. I wasn't clear on what the occasion was, but it became clear something was going on Thursday when I tried to make my way to La Plata for the weekend to stay with Damian.
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Tuesday I decided 'twas as good of a day as any to venture out to meet a new friend, Daniel, living in Balvanera, a tad west of Capital Federal and south of Recolata and Palermo. I also was going to finally try meeting up with a guy from my home town, Brandon, who happens to be in Buenos Aires this week. The problem, though, is Brandon doesn't have a phone here and barely has Internet access, so arranging a meet when neither of us knows our schedule is problematic. But he said he was going to hang out in the Japanese Gardens in Palermo, so I figured it'd be worth combining looking for him with meeting Dani.
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Saturday was my first South American clubbing experience, and it was fabulous. Despite losing contact with a new friend who had wanted to go out with me, I still found somewhere to hang before the club. My "longtime" Facebook friend Damian was going to his friend Victor's to have some drinks and hang out, so Damian asked if I could come along. I took the bus up to the Obelisco and met Damian outside the McDonald's there.
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The last few days have been great! I met a bunch of new people and am getting a bit better at the buses. I also was told I'm the first American ever to have stayed in Lanús, which is apparently not a tourist destination. But it's been fine!
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So far I've gotten cash by bringing paper dollars from the United States and converting them to Argentine pesos at the airport, getting pesos from an ATM and using my Chase Amazon Visa and my American Express Clear cards. All the methods, except perhaps the ATMs, produce basically the same results, but clearly not all are of equal convenience.
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Saturday Fernando and I got cards for the buses so we could avoid the moneda shortage problems, Sunday I went to an Argentine barbeque called an asado, and Monday Fer and I went to La Plata to fill out some papers for his apartment and check out the city.
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Friday was pretty interesting. Fernando took me on a little tour of parts of the central Capital Federal district where lots of historic buildings stand. We left the house and walked over a bridge to the nearest train station, Estación Gerli. Fer said we probably wouldn't need to pay, but when he told me it was less than a peso (less than 25 U.S. cents), I said we should, especially since they take paper money and not only the scarce coins. But then when we got to the paying booth, the person there just told us to go through, as they weren't currently open to take payments. So much for trying to pay!
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It's been a few weeks since I've written; I hope that last, depressing entry and the subsequent silence hasn't led either of my two stalkers to fear for my life. Things have been pretty good, but I've admittedly been slacking on the photo taking and entry writing. I'm not really sure why.
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I've been a slight mess of late. Not unprovoked, but I could certainly stand to take a deep breath and reassess more frequently.
Wednesday I was again expecting to do dinner and maybe a movie and spend the night with the guy I like. After hours of (infrequent on his part) text message exchanges, he basically changed his mind about wanting to hang out. And of course the whole night I didn't commit to anything else, including getting any real work done. So the result was a sad, disappointed and unproductive Charlie.
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We got a pretty big (historic, I guess) snow storm Wednesday, dumping about 20 inches of snow on Milwaukee.
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I have been quite unproductive during the last two weeks... but I've also been hanging out with the new friend almost daily. I'll just briefly recapitulate the recent happenings, as I need to eat, shower and get ready to maybe go to Madison soon.
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What a weekend! I had been hoping to get to Chicago for New Year's, but it was unclear I'd have anyone to stay with or even go out with until the late afternoon New Year's eve. I was unsuccessful in locating a friend to crash with, after asking a dozen people almost, so it was looking like I wouldn't do much.
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