that’s whacked

brrrrr…

Tuesday, Nov 30. 2004  –  Category: Musings

this was the first morning i’ve worn my down jacket to work. it hit a record low of 38 degrees this morning in Oakland…. it’s been pretty freaking cold since that storm came in over Thanksgiving. (yeah yeah, shut up Erik - i know Chicago is colder…but this is sunny calif. ;-))

we went to Northstar this past weekend, and it was the first time i’d had to put chains on my car. even with the chains, when lanes were merging, i hit a patch of ice and spun my car in a 180. it was a relatively controlled spin though and i managed to get off to the side of the road slowly and without any injury (to car or passengers). we left the house at 6:30am, and didn’t get to start boarding until noon…. but it was worth the excrutiatingly long drive up - the powder was amazing. at one point we were riding through the powder in the trees with the powder up to our thighs!

what a blast. can’t wait to go back up again.

just found out that i did indeed get onto an EBWL team, and we’re starting play this thursday! woohoo… winter ultimate, baby!

april 29, 1992

Monday, Nov 29. 2004  –  Category: Musings

i’m humming along at work to Sublime…. what an awesome group. they manage to hit some pretty hard-hitting topics in some pretty funky tunes. Date Rape is both a hilarious, and serious song. anyway, right now, my favourite Sublime tune is probably April 29, 1992 - a song about the LA riots that happened after the Rodney King beatings.

it pushed me to go onto Google and read some more info about it…found a great article published by the Los Angeles Times and hosted at LAFire. it gives a really good breakdown of the timeline of the events that happened during one of America’s craziest riots (in modern history, anyway).

converting m4a to mp3

Monday, Nov 29. 2004  –  Category: Code

ripped a bunch of CDs on Wendy’s laptop with iTunes, which saved them in m4a format. i see gStreamer supports the m4a format, but i’d rather have it in mp3 just for uniformity.

i know i know, “you should just switch to ogg”

anyway:

perl -e ‘foreach $file (ls *.m4a) { chomp $file; $newfile = $file; $newfile =~ s/.m4a/.mp3/; faad -w "$file" | lame -b 192 - "$newfile"; }’

i know this could be written as a much shorter shell script, but i know perl better than shell scripting, and this works under my linux system - so i’ll stick with it.

Friday, Nov 26. 2004  –  Category: Photos

this is what Black Friday looks like at 5:30am in front of Best Buy just us, the darkness, and 500 of our closest shopping friends

scream

Wednesday, Nov 24. 2004  –  Category: Musings

all accusations of child molestation aside… Michael Jackson’s Scream is still a great track.

had a great dinner last night with Geoff. my condolences on the fall of Liverpool… i’ll be rooting for them to overcome and make it to the next round. as much as i dislike Chelsea and Arsenal, it’d be pretty awesome if all four English teams (y’all knew ManU made it already, right? ;-)) made it to the knockout round.

how cool would that be, if 4 of the 16 final teams were English. well, we’re assured at least of ManU and Chelsea. i’ll keep pulling for L’pool and Arsenal.

woohoo. you know what’s better than a Friday?

a Wednesday that’s a Friday.

awww yeah. 4 day weekend baby.

the cost of not exploring

Tuesday, Nov 23. 2004  –  Category: Musings

Wired is running an excellent op piece by James Cameron (yes, he of Titanic fame) on the need for exploration. Definitely a good quick 5 minute 2-page read.

There is no more quintessentially human act than to use our consciousness to adapt ourselves to environments in which we could not otherwise survive. It’s what we do better than any other species on Earth.

Wendy and I have often had this discussion… why do I enjoy doing “stupid” (her word, not mine) things like climbing, trying to jump on my snowboard, laying out in ultimate, mountain biking, etc. etc. I suppose my answer is that you can get hurt doing everyday stuff (witness me ramming my head into a flower planter yesterday playing ping pong) - risk is a part of every day life. Everything we has risk… my commute to work has risk (case in point: the murder that happened on Fruitvale ave. on my drive home the other day). Why NOT risk it doing something worthwhile? I would die a thousand times happier falling to my death while climbing than I would crossing the busy intersection at Willow & Bayshore.

To me, there is no greater sense of feeling alive than when there is uncertainty. That being said, I’m all for preparing and trying to make sure there is a given plan of action. But let’s face it, when the shit hits the fan, and you find yourself sitting on a mountain peak at 11,000 feet when the sun is setting, that’s when you feel alive. It’s that uncertainty that keeps you going, keeps the adrenaline pumping, and keeps the blood flowing. Cameron makes the point that surviving is what has enabled mankind to stay at the top of the food chain all these years. Human beings have been engineered to survive… we weren’t engineered to sit at a desk all day.

If you knew everything life was gonna throw your way, then what’s the point of living it? What keeps my life going is not knowing what will happen…whether that’s laying out for a disc and hurting myself, trying to take a jump and landing flat on my back with my wind knocked out of me, or even just diving for a ping pong ball and slamming my head on a flower pot (which sounds not unlike a Chinese gong ringing… it’s a big flower pot).

solaris 10

Wednesday, Nov 17. 2004  –  Category: Sun

yay. new solaris logo. i like it much better than the old logo.

it seems “happier” or “friendlier” or something.

i also got my second and third Sun shirts of my short Sun career so far. i went over a year without getting Sun clothing of any kind, and now have gotten 3 in the past 3 weeks. sweet.

a moment of pride

Tuesday, Nov 16. 2004  –  Category: Sun

read Ashlee Vance’s article at The Register.

I have to admit, I felt a sense of pride when reading this paragraph: Its Solaris engineering team is arguably the best operating system design group on the planet. Sun pours billions into the operating system and has countless features that neither Windows or Linux can match. It’s secure, scales incredibly well and now, Sun claims, fast. Beyond all of this, Sun faces no real Unix competition from a big player in the x86 market. It’s Sun’s segment to win.

the 700m…

Monday, Nov 15. 2004  –  Category: Computers

wow. i find it interesting that up until now (355 entries!), i never had a “Computers” or “Hi-tech” category in my blog. strange. i’m sure i’ve had a lot to say on the matter… why did i never create a category for it?

anyway. i’ve successfully gotten (almost) everything working on my Inspiron 700m under Linux. the 12.1″ crisp and beautiful 1280×800 screen works. the wireless works. everything seems to be hunky dory. except suspending/hibernating. oh well. i realise for most people this is the whole purpose of getting a laptop. it isn’t for me. i don’t mind not having the suspend feature since for the most part, if i need to suspend, i just power it off instead.

anyway - it’s been awfully nice carrying a 4lb laptop instead of an 8.5+lb one on the train. and it’s sweet to be able to just easily whip it out and sync it up in the morning and reply to emails on the whole train ride down. and 5.5 hours of battery life ain’t bad either.

offline imap, part deux

Monday, Nov 15. 2004  –  Category: Musings

if oneself, after trying 4 different solutions to the problem, still has not found a working solution. then one should rethink the problem.

one being me. problem being offline imap.

solution? it wasn’t me…so it must be the server. after finding out that our mail server has a “special” (seriously, that’s what i was told) imapd running on a different port (145), and trying that out…. thunderbird magically worked.

sigh.