Philip Fibiger

• Shrub / Amazon S3 Proxy
  (tags: s3 amazon aws development)

Many people are writing about David Foster Wallace’s death, quoting beautiful and weighty words he delivered in a Kenyon College commencement speech a few years ago. My memory of the man, and his writing, is a much less serious event.

He was one of a number of writers reading at a “Downtown For Democracy” event at UCLA, sharing the stage with Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Anne Lamott and Alice Sebold. Emily bought us tickets as surprise birthday present. He was reading a short story he’d written which, as far as I know, remains unpublished. I’ve forgotten the plot of the story, but the main character was a goody two shoes kid. The part of the story that’s important to this anecdote is a conversation between the child and the child’s school principal (who detests the kid). The child is getting more and more wound up in the conversation while the principal is quietly seething. Wallace read the child’s dialog in character, mimicking the child’s hyperventilating. He starts to smile as he reads, and quickly the smile turns to an attempt to stifle laughter. As he quickly shifted between the child’s excitement and the quiet hatred of the principal, it seemed to crack him up even more. People were laughing out loud, both at the story and with Wallace’s obvious enjoyment. He was unable to keep it up, forced to walk away from the podium and take a drink before continuing.

It was a charming scene, and I loved the fact that after obviously having written and rewritten this countless times, he was still able to crack himself up over it.

We spent eight days in Argentina at the end of July, most of it in Buenos Aires with an overnight trip to Iguazu Falls. Rollins does a lot to support faculty traveling abroad, and in looking into potential destinations Argentina quickly became the obvious choice. It was nice to get out of Florida in the middle of the summer. . . . Iguazu was warm (I haven’t really figured out the meteorology of that one, it was winter), but Buenos Aires was nice and cool, in the 50’s and low 60’s for most of the trip.

The strength of the dollar compared to the peso was another huge factor. The peso spends about like the dollar, but the exchange rate is three-to-one. The nicest boutique hotels in the city were around $120/night. A stunning meal for two ran 150 pesos including appetizers, dessert, and wine. As expected, the comparable meal in a major US city would be around $150. Coming back to a credit card statement with these $40-45 charges was very nice.

My mighty dollars also made it a great place to shop. Palermo, the neighborhood for our second stint in Buenos Aires, is a bohemian shopping district full of local designers. I ended up getting an amazing leather messenger bag for a fraction of what it would have cost in the US.

Buenos Aires felt very comfortable and western, and with our rusty Spanish we were able to get along ok. Our only real communication problems had to do with people expecting Castilian pronunciation: “Hon-dur-as” “Que?” “Hon-dur-as” blink-blink . . . we show written address “Ah, On-door-as.” Taxis were cheap and made it very easy to scoot around town, even for short trips.

Our two day trip to Iguazu turned into a one night plus one day trip after LAN airlines overbooked and booted us from our flight, leaving us to hang around the domestic airport for over four hours. In the end we arrived in time to enjoy caipirinhas on the patio of our bed and breakfast followed by a tour of the town (complete with views across into both Brazil and Paraguay) and a nice dinner out. We had a full day at the National Park / Falls, and that was plenty. We were able to cover all the network of trails and vantage points. It was absolutely stunning; Eleanor Roosevelt’s “Poor Niagara” quote definitely rang true.

I’ll make some recommendations for things to do and places to stay/eat, hopefully helping out any future Argentina travelers who might happen upon this:

Hotels:
Home Hotel: In Palermo, this boutique hotel was absolutely pitch perfect. An amazing complimentary breakfast, impeccable design, effortless service.
Art Hotel: In Recoleta, it was in a nice quiet location but was close to everything. A small room, but very cozy.
Secret Garden B&B: In Iguazu Falls. Comfortable rooms, John makes a mean caipirinha (or more accurately, three) and is happy to chat, dispense advice, or give you a tour of the town.

Restaurants:
La Cabrera: The steak was delicious and never-ending. An outstanding meal.
Cluny: Right in the shopping area of Palermo, we had a great prix fixe lunch here.
Gran Bar Danzon: It was a little hard to find at night, but the cooking was inventive and the wine selection was stellar. In a really nice room, too.
Un Altra Volta: Supposedly the best ice cream in Buenos Aires, it didn’t disappoint. We still dream of the dulce de leche ice cream.

Shopping:
Qara: This is where I bought my messenger bag, they had without a doubt the nicest leather goods in the city.
Papelera Palermo: As the name might suggest, they had a huge selection of very cool homemade paper goods.

Leonard posted a mix using mixwit and finally got me to go and make an account. The ability to search for pre-uploaded music rather than uploading it yourself is really nice, but it looks like they don’t cache any of it, so I have no idea how long the mixes will hang around. If they could borrow a page from Muxtape and cache the music on Amazon S3, it would really be a perfect service. Or at least cache all music for muxtapes that have been played in the last 30 days.

Regardless of how long it’ll hang around I put together a mix of stuff I’ve been listening to lately, either new(er) to me or re-found. Enjoy.

Wow. I can’t get over how young he looks here.

Tivo’s enabled “TivoToComeBack” (the opposite of TivoToGo) on the Series 3 for a couple of months now, but the only conversion guides I’d found ended up with standard def video on the Tivo. Following these instructions I was able to download a 720p sample video, convert it in VisualHub, and send it to my Tivo. Note that it has black bars because the film is a different resolution than my display.

My system for watching downloaded video is actually pretty neat (though prior to this it just handled SD content): Downloaded video are dropped into a folder which is a samba share on my headless mac mini, which is also my itunes/music server. An automator action watches the directory and when video files are dropped in, it fires up VisualHub and starts converting them to mpegs with the “tivo” set of options. When VH finishes the conversion, it drops the newly converted files into a second directory which is monitored by the Tivo Desktop software. So, I can just download a pile of content, drop it into a folder, and walk away. A few hours later (the mini is relatively old/slow) I have a bunch of content ready to play on the Tivo.