As I was pulling into a coffee shop near my house early this week, I noticed a pair of teenage girls getting into their car next to the spot I was pulling into. Initially, there was nothing remarkable about them that would stick in my memory. That changed. The each opened their door and took a shining can of diet coke out of their car and set it in the parking lot. Then they closed their doors and slowly drove away. I picked up the cans and made eye contact and asked them, “Can I please throw these away for you?” They simply pretended to look through me and kept driving.

The best part of the story is that they were driving a Prius. I’m so glad they have real concern for the environment.

I’ve followed Larry Lessig’s writing on the topic of copyright for sometime. I share his concern about the RO (read-only) aspects of culture forced on us by the extension of copyright laws beyond their original intentions. If you would like more info, I suggest you check out a speech he recently made at TED.

Even if esoteric points of copyright law are not interesting to you, consider watching the video as a great example of how to do a presentation. It’s so spare and zen like, yet the words on the screen serve to completely enforce all the points that Larry makes. I would love to take my game up to that level some day.

It seemed as if the winter darkness set in earlier this year. Clearly, I need to get out more during the middle of the day.

Lately I have been listening to far too much of “The Hold Steady“. This isn’t just because I haven’t synced my iPod in a while, it was prep to see them live. Last Thursday I went to see them with Joe at the State Theater. The show was very high energy and the crowd was really in the groove, except for one sort of slow song no one recognized.

It was really hard to pick a favorite tune that they sang, but their rendition of “Cattle and the Creeping Things” was awesome. Here is sample from a verse, just to give you some flavor of their lyrics.

“he’s got the pages in his pockets that he ripped out of the bible from his bedstand in the motel. he likes the part where the traders get chased out from the temple. i guess i heard about original sin. i heard the dude blamed the chick. i heard the chick blamed the snake. i heard they were naked when they got busted. i heard things ain’t been the same since …” — Cattle and the Creeping Things

I’ve been working my way through “Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris” by Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro, Brendan Gregg. I have to say the book is a fantastic text that manages to go in depth on all the major performance monitoring/tracing tools in Solaris. It has a phenomenal number of dtrace scripts and gives you great tools for peering into exactly what is going on in the various systems your code may to interact with. If you work with Solaris, I think this is a must read book. Even if your only goal was to use it to look up exactly which iostat switches you wanted it would be worth the money.

I wonder what Windows development would be like if they managed to include something like Dtrace in Windows?

Today I caught up on some chores around the house. One of them was to take a box full of scrap metal in to the recycling yard. I had copper, brass and some old aluminum pans to get rid of. I had just finished taking the handles off the pans when I wondered if the pan set was collectible. Five minutes later and Ebay confirms that there is a whole category for vintage aluminum pans. Now we’ll see if my auction nets more than 55 cents/pound.