that’s whacked

i am… LACTOSE MAN!

Tuesday, Aug 31. 2004  –  Category: Quotage

a snippet of an IM conversation i had with tammy today:

(15:56:27) tammy: did i mentin he has an archnemesis? (15:56:57) steve: what, you don't? all the cool people have archnemesises (how the hell do you pluralise that??) these days (15:57:19) steve: my archnemesis is a Dairy. (15:57:21) steve: (15:57:26) steve: erk. is Dairy (15:57:30) steve: not a Dairy (15:57:31) steve: (15:57:33) tammy: i guess that's mine too? (15:57:35) tammy: well, no (15:57:38) tammy: i don't fight it (15:57:43) tammy: i try to work with it (15:57:46) tammy: and compromise (15:57:53) steve: i don't really try. (15:57:56) steve: i confront it head on (15:57:59) steve: like any true super hero would (15:58:03) steve: clearly i am a super hero (15:58:08) steve: for eating ice cream and cheese (15:58:17) tammy: cause you KNOW dairy is evil (15:58:22) steve: damn straight (15:58:32) steve: just doing my part to help.... the ... little.. people. yeah (15:58:45) tammy: the billion people in china who are lactose intolerant (15:58:50) steve: yeah (15:58:50) tammy: you are a pioneer and role model! (15:58:54) steve: indeed i am (15:58:57) steve: kids should look up to me damnit (15:59:06) steve: i'm going to start smiling benevolently at people in the hallways now (15:59:49) tammy: so that they wil lknow that you are akin to a god? (15:59:56) steve: yup (16:00:04) steve: well, not a god... (16:00:07) steve: just a super hero (16:00:10) steve: i'm just like everybody else (16:00:12) steve: except better (16:00:13) tammy: like superman (16:00:20) tammy: maybe you should start wearing spandex (16:00:25) tammy: that's usually a good differentiating factor (16:00:32) steve: hmmm....intriguing idea... (16:01:14) steve: this is an absurd conversation (16:01:17) steve: i'm going to post it in my blog (16:01:23) tammy: hahahaha! (16:01:39) tammy: don't forget the utility belt!

ahhh…nothing like stroking the ego to build self-confidence. if anyone at work sees me walking down the hallways in spandex smiling benevolently at people left and right, feel free to stop me for an autograph or something.

Geeks

Saturday, Aug 28. 2004  –  Category: Photos

why light controlled outlets are bad…

Thursday, Aug 26. 2004  –  Category: Sun

oh man…funniest network problem ever. so in our offices here, we have a pair of outlets that are designated as ‘LIGHT CONTROLLED’ outlets, meaning when the lights get turned off, these outlets turn off. They’re for plugging in lamps, and monitors. It’s actually pretty neat, because the light is heat/motion sensored, so when we leave our offices in the evening, they turn off after about 30 minutes or so of no occupancy, thus turning off desk lamps, monitors, etc..

now, for the past few months, a colleague who will remain nameless has been having these annoying network issues where he can’t access his machine from home, and his terminal sessions all die after he leaves work. he hasn’t been able to start off an overnight run of some benchmarks or test suites for this reason. he’s been stumped….every morning he comes in and sees all his terminals with “Connection reset by peer”.

guess what he had plugged into a surge protector which was plugged into one of these ‘LIGHT CONTROLLED’ outlets. that’s right….his network hub/switch.

man… he’s been asking for help on all the Sun Solaris & networking mailing lists… he’s got all these brilliant engineers puzzled as to why his terminals keep getting reset.

well, now we know.

a hard day’s work

Sunday, Aug 22. 2004  –  Category: Musings

Spent a good long day getting tons of stuff done… I set Roomba about vacuuming our kitchen, living room, and bedroom and he (she?) did a great job. It’s funny how Wendy and I refer to Roomba by name. i.e.: we don’t say “use the roomba and vacuum the room”, we say “tell Roomba to clean up the bedroom”. bizarre. gadget freaks we be.

Zac & Jaime came over and we started the long task of finishing our basement. The basement currently looks like this. We managed to clean up and move all the stuff out (Wendy and I had dumped a lot of empty boxes, etc. in there), and put up all the insulation. Since we hadn’t put up the walls yet, I took the opportunity to start drilling and running cable drops for coaxial and ethernet (cat5) lines. I’m thinking of making the inner/shorter basement room a storage/server room. It’s central to the entire house, so it shouldn’t be too hard to run ethernet drops to all the rooms I want. We also started re-routing some of the electrical lines in order to remove the obstacles so we can mount all the sheetrock/dry wall flush against the walls. This is gonna be a long project, but a lot of fun..

I also bought a new water heater today… a monster 50 gallon one to replace our puny little 20 gallon one which isn’t enough for two showers. Zac & I moved it in, and I’ll probably hook it up in a week or two when I get the time.

… and last but not least, for the first time since I started downloading mp3s 7 or 8 years ago in high school, I finally properly tagged all the track name/artist/album, and most importantly: genres for my entire MP3 collection. I can now finally say “play all rock songs” and have it make sense. There’s nothing worse than having your entire collection playing on random, getting into a really cool ambient or trance groove, and then having Celine Dione (I keep it around for my mum, damnit!!!) come on.

row, row, row your boat…to dim sum

Sunday, Aug 22. 2004  –  Category: Musings

On Friday after work I met up with Wendy, Jaime, & Zac and we all went to the San Mateo County Fair. We gorged ourselves on fair food, rode the bumper cars, and had a fun time just relaxing at the fair. One note to the fair organisers though: when you have a food/cooking competition, throw the food out after a few days have passed. While I’m sure it’s nice to show the winners for the rest of the two weeks your fair is running… it makes me wonder when I see a green fuzzy fruit tart that won first place.

On Saturday we picked up one of Wendy’s college friends and another friend at SFO, and went back to Jaime’s place for dim sum. Jaime & Zac just excavated Zac’s dad’s old boat out of the backyard, so we dragged it to the dock by the river behind their condo and surprise surprise, it floated! We got in and rowed around for a while, heading out towards the mini-bay/lake by Foster City Blvd & Edgewater Blvd. Zac then pointed out that we could probably just row to dim sum, so we dug our oars in, and rowed our way across the lake and got out on the other side. It was a pretty funny sight to see 6 of us in that boat get out and walk across the street into a Chinese restaurant carrying 2 big oars and a smaller paddle.

A lazy afternoon of watching Olympics coverage, and then Wendy and I headed up to the city where Val & Jason had cooked indian food! yum! We gave them a TiVo for their wedding present, thus converting yet more unbelievers into the fold.

It’s a Sunday morning, I slept in ridiculously late, and am now puttering around in the study listening to Lighthouse Family. Very chill mellow music… quite content. Gonna try and cook some calamari steaks and crab for dinner tonight.

taxes

Thursday, Aug 19. 2004  –  Category: Musings

nothing takes the enjoyment out of getting a bonus than getting half of it taken back for taxes.

google news goof

Tuesday, Aug 17. 2004  –  Category: Photos

was doing my occasional google news check today at work when the following gem came up:

(for those of you not in touch with the most recent news, the story is about a gay sexual affair the New Jersey governor had, leading to his resignation.)

so who’s the Alien, and who’s the Predator?

m4i iopener atmel at76c503a goodness

Monday, Aug 16. 2004  –  Category: OpenSource

like jesse, i spent a good portion of my weekend eating bbq. this may be because we were both at the same two bbqs. go figure.

other than gorging on meat of various kinds, i also spent some time resurrecting my I-Opener. i wanted to use the m4i (Midori for Iopener) distribution, but it hadn’t been updated in over a year and a half. things in the OSS world move quickly, so it’d been left behind. meanwhile i had bought a free-after-rebate Zonet ZEW2000 USB wireless 802.11b network adapter (NIC).

so, long story short, i had to rebuild a new m4i flash image that included a recompiled 2.4.20 kernel (needed uhci instead of usb-uhci), and the at76c503a driver, as well as the necessary tools to configure said driver.

in the end, i now have an Iopener that supports the newer Atmel 503/505a based USB wireless NICs. yay.

why did i do all this?

so i can have a dumb terminal/dynamic photo frame in the living room. neat, yes. practicle? eh, not really…but who cares, it was fun.

internet demotion

Monday, Aug 16. 2004  –  Category: Linkage

Wired News had a great article/commentary today. They are now officially going to be referring to the internet and its various related technologies in lowercase: internet, web, and net.

Good enough for me! I’m definitely in agreeance with web, and net…. but at first I was still undecided about internet. For me, saying “I read this great article on the Internet the other day” seems analogous to saying “I read this great article in the SF Examiner the other day”. However, one key difference between those two? “on the Internet” vs. “in the SF Examiner”.

I subconciously treat the internet as a medium, NOT a noun. As such, I think I will yield to the great copyeditors of Wired News and go with using lower-case internet as well.

That’s san francisco in the distance.

Sunday, Aug 15. 2004  –  Category: Photos