a cross-disciplinary productive day

i’ve had a fun day catching up on all sorts of little odds and ends i’d had on my to do list.

• finished the final step in my migration of all my users’ home directories and web-space to ZFS.
• setup drupal and started building the portal for my neighbourhood. our neighbourhood improvement association was blowing away $45/month on crappy webhosting for a phpBB installation that kept getting hacked, and a mailman list. it’d frustrated me long enough that i finally volunteered to be the webmaster. i’m in the process of building a new website from scratch that will be a full portal to our neighbourhood and provide blogs, message boards, mailing lists, and web space to any resident, organisation/club, or store in our neighbourhood
• did lots of research on various brake pads for my A4. i’m planning on replacing my front brake pads tomorrow. it’s been tough finding a good recommended brake pad that has a firm bite, not-as-much brake dust, and a proper connection for a wear sensor. i’m finding that it’s hard to find a good firm sport brake that will endure my, shall we say, vigorous, driving that also has a wear sensor.
• installed bugzilla on grommit. i finally got tired of hearing about our bug database sucking, and the points about project bug-tracking for externally driven projects (like ksh93) are perfectly valid. yes i realise there is much to be done on b.o.o., but due to the process, policy, and implementation of Sun’s bug tracking system, there are lot more constraints of b.o.o. i do intend to help internally anyway i can to make it better; but in the meantime, hopefully the bugzilla install will let external projects start tracking bugs and just make progress

my random thoughts for the day:

• the new vienna teng cd is incredible. her voice has definitely matured since her first two CDs. the music is less raw now, a little more polished/produced. this is neither good, nor bad… just different. the CD is brilliant. highly recommended.
• there’s nothing quite like a freshly bathed beagle as your soft/plush pillow when you’re taking a nap. lovely.
• it’s getting colder and gloomier out now. i took the dogs to Pt. Isabel, and actually had to wear a beanie. this was also my first official soft-shell-jacket wear of the season. it’s definitely fall.
• i’d always known Pt. Isabel was big… i didn’t realise it was the largest off-leash dog park in the nation. wow. go east bay parks
• the chili/sourdough baguette at the cafe at Pt. Isabel rocks. highly recommended.

Add comment September 9th, 2006

open up the sound of music

i’m in love with pandora

Add comment February 13th, 2006

whoa. 24 trance song.

listening to di.fm, i just heard the unforgettable 24 countdown and kiefer saying “the longest day of my life”

lo and behold… there’s a 24 - The Longest Day Armin van Buren remix. weird.

1 comment November 17th, 2005

audioscrobbler

following geoff, i installed the rhythmbox plugin for audioscrobbler.

you can check out my user page and see what kind of trash i’m listening to at work.

Add comment July 21st, 2005

ella foshizzle

i often like to just set my music player on my laptop to just play all my songs randomly… which often results in weird genre shifts.

witness my most recent 4 tracks: Jay-Z to Frank Sinatra to U2 to Ella Fitzgerald.

bizarre.

Add comment April 13th, 2005

music roundup

go download South by Southwest’s 2.6gb torrent of free music. 750+ songs from artists performing in the festival.

sweet goodness for your mp3 player.

on the music note… have you ever misplaced 5gigs of mp3’s? i thought i had. when i was aggregating all my music (scattered across 4 servers, 2 laptops, and one desktop) onto one big harddrive, i somehow lost 5gigs of music: almost my entire jpop collection, as well as a few good trance sets (including all my Tiesto sets!), and the Escaflowne original soundtrack (go figure, i really like it okay).

well, joyous happy day. while digging around on grommit trying to cleanup some free disk space i found ‘em all! now i just need to pay a visit to grommit in fremont and offload ‘em all (don’t want to saturate our colo’s pipe transferring my mp3s needlessly)

1 comment March 11th, 2005

duuuuude……sweeeeeet

sweetbox.com

picked up another random CD, 13 Chapters by Sweetbox. love the song “Killing me DJ”. it’s kind of pop-ish/r&b/groove-ish, but her voice and the music is great.

the interesting thing is that Sweetbox has actually been two different girls, paired with the same producer (from Germany). both girls were American, though the first was an ex-pat American (from Maryland) who ditched the states for Germany. in any case, the group is a huge hit in Europe & Asia… go figure… never heard of her in the states at all.

Add comment February 10th, 2005

i’m just not gonna be as hip

well. i decided on the Rio Carbon over the IPod Mini.

why?

two main reasons i suppose. 1) 5gb vs. 4gb, and 2) it doesn’t require funky software to transfer

you plug it in, it shows up as a USB mass storage device, and you drag music to it. i like this simplicity. i like the user interface, and all the reviews i’ve read have been promising.

so that being said… sorry Wendy, Dan, Connie, and Geoff… I’m just not hip and cool enough to join y’all.

Add comment February 9th, 2005

rockin’ the unknown

i’ve been listening to my ‘fobby’ playlist the past few weeks at work, and while working here in Taiwan. it’s basically a playlist composed of all my Chinese Pop, Rock, JPop, and Japanese Rock. i of course, have absolutely no idea what they’re singing about - so i’m basically listening just for the music - this is why it’s great coding music. i can vaguely tune out all the vocals and just have some sweet background music.

whenever i’m in a foreign country, i like to pick up some random CDs. when poorna and i were in Beijing, we expanded our Chinese pop collection by a few CDs, and i became a fan of J - a Japanese hard metal/rock band.

this afternoon, while strolling around downtown Hualien (eating a ridiculous amount of fried squid, i might add), i picked up a new JRock CD, Big Machine by the band B’z. i heard it playing in a store, hung around outside for a few tracks, and then went in and plunked down the $15 (ouch!) it cost me. oh well. the CD rocks.

Add comment February 9th, 2005

music association

music association is a funny thing. i’m working at home today which has the benefit of letting me blast music as loud as i want, and through speakers infinitely better than the cruddy freebie Harmon Kardon/Dell speakers in my office. Boyd Tinsley just came on, and I suddenly got a weird flashback to a couple of years ago when I would be sitting in Espresso Roma (the coffee shop at UCSD) from 6:30am until 5 or 6pm every day working on my thesis.

ahh…those of you who knew me then knew it was a dark time. quite depressing actually. i thought many a time that i should simply give up, take my BS i’d already earned, find a real job and quit this whole “academics” thing. anyway, i listened to Boyd Tinsley quite a lot during my thesis time as it gave me that good ‘ol DMB just chillin’ groove. it was comforting in a time of, quite frankly, some pretty strong despair. hearing it again now just suddenly flooded me with those same emotions, two years later.

anyway. interesting experience. just wanted to share (and take a break from work)

(and the album is called “True Reflections”. never got great reviews, but i happened to like it)

Add comment January 11th, 2005