Really, it began back in June when I went vegan. I’d always considered switching to vegetarian for the health benefits, however Lisa and I had just finished watching the “Animal Rights” episode of 30 Days. After seeing the horrific conditions on factory farms, neither our stomachs nor our consciences would allow us to continue supporting such cruelty, disregard for common decency and a complete lack of regard for public health. Since then, we haven’t eaten any animal products (no meat, eggs, dairy, etc) and we’ve stopped purchasing other animal products, such as leather and wool. As a result, Lisa and I have significantly reduced our global footprints (more than one-third of all fossil fuels produced in the United States are used to raise animals for food). The food tastes great and I don’t miss a thing.

In December, during a long vacation, I decided it was time to work on my strength and conditioning. Not wanting the typical gym experience, I signed up for rock climbing lessons. Thirteen weeks later, I’m still going strong. I’ve been climbing 2-3 days each week, tackling harder and harder stuff. As a result, I dropped seven pounds since the start of the year (222lbs in January to 215lbs in early March) and significantly added to my upper body strength. More recently, I signed up for CrossFit classes in mid-March. CrossFit is an intense, full body workout utilizing aspects of Olympic weight lifting, gymnastics and all the sweat you’ve got. I’m just finishing up the last week of the fundamentals class and I’ve dropped an extra 3lbs over the last 5 weeks while improving strength through all muscle groups as well as my stamina. CrossFit and climbing combined have really woken up the dormant 170lb college kid in me. He wants out, he just has to finish chewing his way through the remaining 40lbs+ of fat.

With CrossFit coming to an end, I’m already looking for the next thing. I have ideas, but I haven’t decided on what to do, yet. More climbing classes. More CrossFit. Possibly pilot lessons. I’m leaning more towards pilot lessons since it’s new and I’m, evidently, all about new things this year. Whatever happens, I just wanted to share this with people. In a period where all of your investments seem to be losing value day after day, investing in yourself never loses value. Keep challenging yourself by learning and experiencing new things, a high rate of return is virtually guaranteed.

The application I built, which I call “Chatty Kathy“, grabs all of the Yahoo! Updates generated by your connections and distills it down to a list of your connections (sorted by who generates the most updates) and their applications (sorted by the ones they use most often). It’s not super interesting (although it helped me to find some new applications) and it’s not super complicated (I wrote it in about two hours last night), but it does provide a decent demonstration of how to build an application making use of Yahoo!’s social platform.

For anyone interested, I’ve made the source code available.

To start, you’ll need the net/http (included in Ruby’s core) and json (oddly absent from the core, but available nontheless) modules. The client itself is a mere 18 lines long, although I’ll admit there’s very little error checking being done in this barebones version.

require "net/http"
require "json"

class YMail
    def initialize(appid, cookie, wssid)
        @appid = appid
        @cookie = cookie
        @wssid = wssid
    end

    def method_missing(method, argument)
        body = JSON.generate({"method" => method.id2name, "params" => [argument]})
        url = "/ws/mail/v1/jsonrpc?appid=#{@appid}&wssid=#{@wssid}"
        http = Net::HTTP.new("mail.yahooapis.com")
        res = http.post(url, body, {"Content-Type" => "application/json", "Cookie" => @cookie})
        JSON.parse(res.body)["result"]
    end
end

Using the YMail class is simple enough.

ymail = YMail.new(applicationID, bbauthCookie, bbauthWssid)
puts "Number of Folders = #{ymail.ListFolders({})['numberOfFolders']}"

You’ll have to pass your application ID as well as the BBAuth cookie and WSSID returned during the authentication process to the YMail constructor. However, once you’ve done so you can easily call any method available in the Yahoo! Mail Web Service and get back a Ruby hash to interrogate.

During the first week, we focused on climbing safety. We learned how to get our harnesses on, how to tie in as a climber, how to tie in as a belayer and how to communicate with the climber/belayer during a climb. We also did a little bit of climbing, mostly to let ourselves get accustomed to belaying in preparation fo the belay test we’d all have to take.

During the second week we left the harnesses and the ropes to go hit the boulders. Bouldering is nice because you can climb solo, meaning you don’t need to find a partner to accompany you to the gym to get in a workout. We did some more safety stuff (learning to spot a climber, learning to jump/fall off the wall) and then proceeded to do some climbing. I completely burned out my arms during my first bouldering session, leaving my forearms and hands tired and sore for the next two days.

I’m really enjoying it so far. I was mostly looking for a gym experience that didn’t simply involve picking up some weight, setting it down and repeating. In that regard, rock climbing has been perfect. I can climb several different routes and get in a good workout without it feeling like a workout.

As for Planet Granite, I went to the one in Sunnyvale. It’s a really nice, huge facility that includes the bouldering walls, higher climbing walls, a full gym, locker rooms and yoga classes. It’s a bit more expensive than a normal gym membership ($70/month), but I think it’s worth it given everything that’s available for you (yoga classes are free with membership).

I have two more weeks of class left and when I’m done I’m pretty sure I’ll get a membership and then cancel my Gold’s Gym membership. Climbing has just been much more fun. It feels more like a sport or playing on the playground (the fact that there are always kids there helps it to feel more like a playground).

Give it a try, I think you’ll like it. Here’s some video to give you a taste.

• Occasional downtimes while I want to do something. I’m a night person and that’s generally when sysadmins think it’s a good time to take the system down since the users are sleeping. While that’s true in general, it’s not true when your customers are night owls.
• Shell access was often incredibly slow. System loads on the shell servers were often high and so were the latencies, making typing anything on the command line a brutal experience.
• You’re somewhat limited in what you can run. DreamHost picks out the Apache version and whatever modules are installed. They provide a base install of PHP, but (if you’re inclined) you can build your own version and run it using FastCGI. While it’s possible to do this, it’s kind of a pain in the butt.

So I’ve recently switched over to Slicehost. Slicehost does virtual private hosting. You get a virtual machine and are free to run whatever software you want on one of their OS images (they have several Linux flavors to choose from). Anyway, I’ve recently moved all of my unlcehulka.com material over to Slicehost, so…uh…welcome! If you’re interested in trying out Slicehost, feel free to use my email address when signing up to give me the referral (rckenned AT yahoo.com).

I’m hoping to use my newfound hosting freedoms to do some more interesting things with the site. I’m currently working on a simple side project that I hope to launch to the site in the coming weeks. In the meantime, if you see anything broken on the site, feel free to mention it in the comments and I’ll take care of it.

Poop by gtmcknight

Today was my day off. Like any day off, I slept in. When I (finally) awoke, I thought about what I should do today. Among the things that came to mind was to finally go and purchase and set up a new Tivo HD DVR. I know, at this point you’re saying, “but I already know how bad that DVR is, this is nothing new.” If you thought that and left the article, then you missed the punchline. It’s true, the Comcast HD DVR really is the be all end all of shitty DVRs. It crashes, it’s slow, it’s dumb (literally, it doesn’t understand when I say “only record new shows” that I mean I don’t want it to record reruns) and frequently needs a swift kick in the power plug. It’s also goddamn expensive at $16/month on your monthly bill. Tivo’s monthly service costs less than that, so I figured I could save some money (yes, not yet since I have to recoup the $300 for the Tivo hardware first) while having a superior DVR experience.

In order to use the Tivo HD DVR with your Comcast service, you’re going to need a cable card. The cable card handles all of the signal decryption stuff going on in the Comcast supplied DVR. In order to get one, you have to either go into a Comcast office or have them send a technician out to you. Since getting a technician would take days and I’m impatient, I opted to visit a nearby Comcast office to pick one up. That’s where the first problem occurred. I went to the Comcast website and tried to find local offices where I can get equipment. Unfortunately, you can’t find those offices on the Comcast website. You can however find “Payment Centers“. That didn’t sound like what I wanted, still…I decided to check them out. Maybe a local Payment Center doubled as an equipment place. Searching turned up three nearby offices. According to the website, the only equipment available for pickup at the offices was Cable Modems. So…I called 1-800-COMCAST. After faking out the phone system (hit zero twice to immediately go to customer service) I was routed to someone who informed me that the nearby Milpitas office could give me a cable card (even though the web site doesn’t say that they can, evidently Comcast doesn’t want you to know about cable cards). So began my journey.

I drove over to the Milpitas office, which is hidden way in the back of a shopping center. I walked in and a woman at the counter (with a freshly pierced hand, ouch!!!) asked if she could help me. I informed her that I was in the market for a cable card. She took my phone number and looked up the account. She asked if it was under my wife’s name, which it is, and I said yes. She then told me that because the first cable card is only free to people who don’t already have the HD DVR, it would cost an additional $7 (roughly) and that Lisa (my wife) would have to authorize Ryan Kennedy (me) to pick up the cable card for our account. She would have to call 1-800-COMCAST and give them her authorization over the phone. Stunned, I asked the woman if Lisa were to call in the next 15 minutes, could I just turn around and walk back in the office and get my cable card. She told me that I could.

So I walked outside, shaking my head, and tried to call Lisa. Busy. Must be on a conference call. No worries, I had other errands to run including the grocery store and Best Buy (to get the Tivo). I’ll just hit those to kill some time and then try calling Lisa again. So I drove over to the Milpitas Nob Hill, where I discovered just how much one store can completely screw up store layout. Seriously, who puts the peanut butter way over by the milk in the refrigerated section? Half an hour later, I emerged victorious from Nob Hill. I stowed the groceries in the trunk, got in the car and dialed Lisa again. Still busy. Well, off to Best Buy I suppose.

It was on my way to Best Buy that I started having a self-rant. I wondered (out loud) why it is that I can call up on the phone and order pay-per-view on my wife’s cable account but they won’t let me walk into the store and pick up a cable card. That’s when inspiration struck. I thought to myself, “what would Kevin Mitnick do?” When I arrived at Best Buy, I parked and got out my phone and dialed 1-800-COMCAST. Once again, I wielded the double-zero to great effect, immediately putting me in touch with a live person. I informed them that I needed to authorize someone to pick up a cable card for my account. They asked for my account number and I told them I didn’t know it. They asked for my phone number, which I supplied. They asked if the account was in my wife’s name and I responded that it was, so they asked me to verify with the last four digits of her social security number. I gave the operator the numbers and she asked who I’d like to authorize to pick up the cable card. I gave them my name and she told me I was all set.

I ran into Best Buy and purchased the Tivo HD DVR (this is another story entirely), put it in the trunk and headed back to the Comcast office. I walked up to the desk with the same lady I had talked with maybe 45 minutes earlier. “Welcome to Comcast, how can I help you?” Seriously? Did you have THAT many people in here since I was here last? I responded, “I’d like to get a cable card for my Tivo.” She asks for my phone number, which I give her, and she again brings up that the account is in my wife’s name, to which I respond “yes.” She then tells me, “you have a zero balance on your account”. We stare at each other for a minute and I, finally, respond “uh…okay.” She continues to stare blankly at me so I say “what’s the problem?” She tells me “there’s nothing to pay on this account.” At this point I figure she’s fucking with me, so I remind her that I just want to get a cable card. “Oh, I thought you said you want to pay your bill.” In my mind all I can think is, “holy crap…finally something to blog about after a few dry months.”

At this point she goes into the back, procures a cable card and brings it out and verifies that I’ve been authorized to pick up a cable card for my wife’s account. With cable card in hand, I leave the building, shaking my head all the way back to the car.

The moral of the story is (Comcast, you ought to be taking notes by this point), don’t be lame. The lady in the office could have saved me a lot of time if she had simply done exactly what the person on the phone did and ask me to verify the last four digits of Lisa’s social. Instead she completely passed the buck to their 1-800 phone operators, either because she didn’t know that she could ask for my wife’s social or because she didn’t want to be bothered with work on a Friday. Either way, Comcast you look like clowns.

UPDATE #1!!! (November 2, 2008): After activating my cable card, my internet access went down. Unfortunately, Lisa happened to be working from home at the time, forcing her to go into the office on Saturday because she had some pressing work to finish up. I called Comcast and ended up with the most clueless representative I’ve ever had to talk to. She scheduled a truck to come the next day (I’m not sure why they can’t remotely fix a something that they remotely broke). Anyway, the technician showed up the next day and found out that they’d somehow added a second cable modem to my account. As a result, no internet access for Ryan. After an hour of futzing around with their system, they finally got everything working.

UPDATE #2!!! (November 15, 2008): Today I went to return the HD DVR, making the transition to the HD TiVo complete. I took it back to the Comcast office in Milpitas and explained to the guy there why I was returning it, explaining that I was going to be using the HD TiVo from then on. He took it, scanned it, gave me a receipt and told me I was all set. Thinking Comcast got something right for once, I left for home.

When I got home, however, I noticed that all of my cable channels were…black. No Comedy Central. No Cartoon Network. No BBC America. No HD HBO. I went to their online help and started chatting with a support representative. They informed me that my cable card had been deactivated and that I would have to call on the phone to get it reactivated. At this point I was convinced Comcast had put me on a “make sure to completely fuck this guy over when he tries to do anything” list. I called 1-800-COMCAST and, after some fighting the automated answering machine, managed to get to a live person. I explained what had happened and asked if they wouldn’t mind reactivating my cable card WITHOUT taking out my internet access this time.

The technician took my account information and seconds later the channels sprung back to life. She asked me to check my internet access and I verified that it was still functioning properly. We have no idea what happened to deactivate the cable card, however I was just happy to have finally found someone at that company with half a brain.

I don’t get how Comcast stays in business given how much money they must be pouring into support to offset the low quality of their remaining workforce. Then again, people are dumb enough to pay $16/mo just to have their awful HD DVR.

Proposition 2, put simply, means to improve conditions for farm animals in California. Farm animals today are kept in confining cages that prevent the animals from moving, stretching, lying down and turning around. The proposition is very simple:

In addition to other applicable provisions of law, a person shall not tether or confine any covered animal, on a farm, for all or the majority of any day, in a manner that prevents such animal from: (a) Lying down, standing up, and fully extending his or her limbs; and (b) Turning around freely.

These aren’t earth shattering demands. Nobody is being asked to become vegetarian. It’s a modest improvement on the quality of life of these animals. If you want to understand more of what goes on in these factory farms, I encourage you to watch this mini documentary by Mercy For Animals exposing the conditions inside these farms. Keep in mind, if you eat eggs THIS IS WHERE THEY’RE COMING FROM. Look closely at the bloody, lice-covered eggs and realize that you can do something about it by voting YES on proposition 2 in November.

At the recent Yahoo! Open Hack Day in Sunnyvale, Ricky worked with a crew of three filming his hackumentary. I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for the film and I was delighted to see myself (pimple and all) a few times in the trailer (at 1:02 and again at 1:41). I can’t wait to see the whole thing, but in the meantime have a look at the trailer.

My Talks

I gave two talks. The first one went well, no drops in internet access (paying Ash’s assistant $50 to keep him busy during my talk really paid off). I lost internet access during my second talk, but was saved by Allen Tom and his EVDO-powered laptop. The talks seemed to be well received and generated a lot of questions.

My Job

I won’t mince words, I have hated my job for the past twelve months. Those who follow me on Twitter know that I’ve been a miserable person for quite some time now, frequently venting my frustrations loudly. I’ve simultaneously considered quitting the company, transferring internally and extended leave as solutions to my unhappiness.

It’s difficult to reconcile this attitude towards my job against my attitude leading up to the two previous hack days where I was proud of what I was working on and wanted to share it with the world. So much has changed since London, personally and professionally. It’s hard to accept so much change in such a short period of time, especially when it’s had such a huge impact on my mood.

Photo by riverspring

Which brings me to…

Mo Kakwan

Photo by Jinho.Jung

After a while, he asked if he could hang out in the room with several of us from Y!OS. Without blinking I told him, “of course”. For the next 17 hours (give or take) I was witness to the magic. Mo used me, mostly, as a sounding board for ideas in the early hours. In the later hours I helped him debug some issues in his hack. Throughout, I could see Mo go through all the hack day stages.

Mo started out passionate about the idea and quickly got to work. He was hammering out code, making things work. Before too long, he’d run into problems. After some quick thinking, he routed around the issues, determined to make the hack work. Hours later, as fatigue was kicking in, more problems. With the lack of sleep looming, you could see Mo getting frustrated as each problem mounted. He discovered he had a lot of work left to do and time was not on his side.

I crashed for two hours on the floor from 6:30-8:30am. When I awoke, he looked bad. The early morning had taken it’s toll on him. He’d hit the wall. He looked unsure of himself, disappointed that he might let everyone down by not outdoing his performance at the 2006 hack day.

Determined not to let that happen, I jumped in to lend what help I could. I pumped him up when he seemed down, helped to diagnose the snags he ran into and ran to get him help when I didn’t have an answer (thanks, Zach!). At around 2:00, only an hour before the presentations would start, he hit pay dirt. His virtual mosh pit sprung to life as physics engine-driven moshers hopped and bumped on stage with our recently digitized voices playing in the background. The joy on his face was incredible as we shared the (for me, anyway) most painful high-five, ever.

The joy of the hack is an amazing thing. That moment where your brain clicks in and says, “holy shit, after all that I can’t fucking believe it works!” It’s like the top of Everest to a climber. You get there cold, tired, beaten, exhausted and near death…but you will never trade that moment for anything else in your life. I relived that moment through Mo on Saturday…and realized how much I’ve missed it.

For the last twelve months I haven’t had my Everest. I’ve just been walking around the mountain…cold, hungry and near death. I need hack day. Not just one of them, I need lots of them. In fact, I need every day to be hack day. My happiness and my sanity depend on it.

So, how do I find a way to make every day hack day? I guess that’s my next hack.

I don’t miss meat, I don’t miss eggs, I don’t miss dairy. As long as I go to places that have several tasty, vegan options I’m quite happy. You really can’t go wrong with Thai (which I love) and Lisa and I have been able to find a few really great vegetarian/vegan spots. I’ve been going strong for more than two months now and I’ve never once had an urge or a craving to give in to.

My mom asked me the other day how my “vegan diet” was going. I don’t think she understands that it’s not a diet, it’s a way of life. It’s not just about what you eat, it’s about everything you buy and use. Lisa and I have been going room by room, switching everything we own to vegan. Just today I got my first two pair of vegan shoes: the Simple Shoes ecoS-Hemp and the Sno Tire-Hemp.

Of course, just because I don’t consider it a “vegan diet” doesn’t mean I haven’t lost weight. I’m down almost ten pounds since mid-May, almost 2/3’s of which is body fat.