Story Archive (05/2003)

Archives (5/29/2003)

I finally got around to sorting out all the old entries. No longer does the Old Stuff link take you to one HUGE page of archives. Instead it takes you to a nicely sorted directory structure under the archives directory.

It was a bit of a pain. I peeled the old page apart by hand into its new format. I came close to writing a script, but it turned out to be only about an hour of work. My guess is that's about comparable to how long it would have taken to automate. Unless something went wrong with my script writing. Then it may have taken hours.

I have a few scripts that help me out. One that propogates my table of contents to all the pages. I was happy to see that it ran without issue on my Unix environment since it was originally written and used on Windows without every being tested for Unix. Sometimes I just like to think, "Damn I'm good."

Rain! Rain! Rain! (5/28/2003)

This memorial day weekend was jam-packed with fun. I spent the weekend in New Haven, CT, for my brother's graduation from Yale. There were scattered showers most of the weekend. Yet on Monday, the day of the outdoor graduation, it poured down rain! The commencement was just a sea of umbrellas.

On the flights to and from I finished up the book "Shadow Puppets" and got another few billion pages through "Cryptonomicon." I have decided that "Cryptonomicon" can best be described as mental puke. The author uses it as a instrement to write down every possible clever thought he has had in his lifetime regardless of its relation to the actual plot of the book. This makes 50%-70% of the book unrelated to the plot.

I also helped a friend to do some internet stalking. Through some various resources we were able to get lots of info to complete a long quest. It reminded me of a stalking adventure I once pursued for a young lady. I knew she had a brother at Stanford and so I had a friend at Stanford look up her brother which gave wonderful information about home address, phone number, etc. Isn't the internet a scary place?

Sweet (5/18/2003)

I hung out with the gang at Paul's house yesterday. It was great to drive up and see the wonderful U.S. Marine Corp. flag waving proudly in the wind. So I parked Shadowfax next to its friends, Sex Machine and Lemony Fresh Mobile. Tim hasn't named his new car and doesn't want to. Cristi is still hesitant to name it as well. They best not keep that up, or we're going to name it for them! We played Forgotten Realms with Paul running, but it was a pretty unruly crowd. Perhaps next time Merp II will continue.

I bought myself my first suit this weekend as well. It still needs to be tailored, but I thought a picture up once it gets fitted. It should be done in a couple weeks.

In my continued worship of Wil Wheaton, I've added the list of books I'm reading, DVD's I'm watching and games I'm playing over on the left. I know he does it on the right and he puts pictures, but I'm a strong support of low image sites.

Don't Touch My Bacardi!

For those who wonder how a dragon breathes fire, the answer is simple: Bacardi 151. My mother bought my a wine holder. Isn't it lovely?

Panic! (05/13/2003)

Isn't this not suppose to happen with a OSX system? I guess I can't blame it too much. I can cause this by attempting to capture from my USB Webcam inside of Virtual PC. It's some horrible hardware thing going on.

"You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button."

Home for How Long? (05/10/2003)

I'm back again from my second week in Chicago. In theory I'm going to be home for a bit. We'll see what happens. The project in Chicago could probably use another week or two of help. Another project (also in Chicago) is trying to get me out there. And a project down in San Diego is also trying to get some of time. All this, and Carbon is 95% open sourced. You can even read the documentation and download from SourceForge's Carbon Project.

Santa Clara claims wireless access in all sorts of places. Yet I went stumbling around campus today with my laptop can could only pick up a signal in the Engineering Quad. I have no desire to work from the engineering quad. I want to work from the Mission Bakery Coffee shop. I think I may spend one day this coming week working from SCU to hang out with my various friends/professor that are still there. My quest for free and convenient wireless is still failing

The Matrix is playing at Flicks this weekend. We also got tickets to see the Matrix: Reloaded on Wednesday night. I also watched all the Animatrix videos available on the web. I'm all set for the movie. I have a great Neo costume I wore for halloween way back in 1999, but Neo's costume has changed for the new movie. I can't resuse my costume!

And for those still curious:

The Windy City (05/03/2003)

The work in Chicago is crazy. The people out there are working fourteen to sixteen hour days as they try and finish stuff off. Being the tech. specialist brought in, I've gotten away with only working twelve hour days. It makes me wish I got overtime. We've always had a habit of under estimating to lower the price so we can win work. It burns people out at the end of the project. There's always reminders to the sales teams not to under estimate, but to discount to win the work so it's tracked easier. Whatever.

I still have one more week left in Chicago, but it should be a lighter week in terms of work. In theory implementation ended on Friday. Which really means it's ending over the weekend. I haven't gotten any calls or IMs from the team yet. That's good and bad.

The Manor Branch of the Alameda library system is suppose to be getting wireless connections soon. So I went around with my computer today in search of some free wireless. I failed. None of the major library brances has it. Though I did learn that the main San Leandro library has DVDs for checkout. That's pretty cool. It's mostly older stuff, but there's still some good things there.

Apples iTunes is not playing nicely with my MP3 collection. It doesn't like to play the MP3s across the network, instead it insists on copying them across into the local library. It also organizes entirely by ID3 tag, and I organize mostly by directory structure. It's just not what I'm used to.