ShinyPlasticBag

So, Mom and Grammy have been here for almost a week. So far, we haven't done anything especially epic: on Saturday, I took them down to Santa Cruz, but then a glitch erased Mom's memory card, so without photos, one can barely even say it actually happened. This weekend should prove to be more eventful: tomorrow is Mom's birthday and a Renaissance Faire is happening in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. I'm a nerd, but I'm excited.

I've been going into work earlier than usual so I can duck out a more reasonable time (usually between four and five). With the time zone switch, it took Mom and Grammy a few days to be able to stay awake past 7 PM, so the early leaving was important. Now, they're pretty well adjusted. Yesterday, I bought season one of Two and a Half Men on DVD. Such a great show! I just looked it up on IMDB and it has an awesome selection of tags (or, as they call them, plot keywords):

• Fraction in Title (my personal favourite)
• Womanizer
• Stalker
• Cleaning Lady
• Mother Son Relationship

Ah, the Internet.
Speaking of the Internet, my brain has been absolutely blown by an incredibly impressive tech demo/PhD project with the airy title of “Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene”. Check out the video on the page and prepare to be impressed. It's practically magic.

Anyway, I'm off to Half Moon Bay now. Until next time.

• Written on 15 August 2008 & posted at 04:36 PM.
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This is life at PBwiki in a nutshell:



And by nutshell, I mean banana suit. Obligatory dance party here.

• Written on 07 August 2008 & posted at 10:59 PM.
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Man, I love working at PBwiki. Also, I posit that EVERYTHING should be anthropomorphized.


Except, possibly, bathroom stuff.

• Written on 07 August 2008 & posted at 09:49 AM.
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Man, things at work are crazy lately! We have a ton of features all getting finished at roughly the same time. It's awesome! PBwiki of September 2008 is going to be a completely different, vastly improved product compared to PBwiki of June 2008. I'm really excited. Some changes that I worked on (new and improved RSS feeds) are going out today, which is always a blast. Progress marches onward, and PBwiki continues to be more like the ideal product we all want to be using.

In non-work news, things are going well. Life with a car is great. I'm carefully tracking my gas mileage and managed to get about 26 MPG from my first tank. I was reading up on hypermiling yesterday, but a lot of it is too extreme for my liking. It's stupid to drive dangerously close to 18 wheelers to get in their slipstream, and taking highway on/off ramps at twice the speed limit to save gas is equally moronic. People who care about saving gas should keep these things in mind or else they might accidentally naturally select themselves out of the gene pool and leave behind a culture even worse at energy saving than what we have now.

Anyway, there are features to launch. Until next time, world!

• Written on 31 July 2008 & posted at 02:47 PM.
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Okay, victory: I have successfully bought a car! I have christened it Chuck as the result of a strange series of connections in my brain: “Okay, it's dark grey, sort of charcoal...chaaaarcoal...Chaaarlie! Sometimes we call him Chuck!”. That's right, I've named my car after a prank call on an old Goldfinger album. Go me.


It's a 2004 Volkswagen Jetta, dark grey, standard transmission (of course). I picked it up on Tuesday, but I haven't really had the chance to enjoy it. My driver's test was today, so until then, me driving it was sort of in a legal grey area. As of about 2 PM this afternoon, I'm all legal'd up and I can drive the bejesus out of it. There's an amazing highway called Skyline Boulevard near my place that runs along the San Andreas Fault and up through some crazy forest-y hills. I'm excited!

So, obviously, I really like it! It's a lot of money to drop on a single object, which is sort of nerve-wracking, but it's in great shape and should hopefully last me quite some time. This is my “til I'm 30, or rich” car. I have no idea what I'm going to do when the time comes to move back home to Canada, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I'm sure I'll get taxed heavily on it...gah.

Anyway, back to work I go. Until we meet again, blog!

• Written on 25 July 2008 & posted at 06:11 PM.
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No idea what the source for these things is, but they're fantastic. First, Beaker:


And then a little Chef-Beaker-Animal action:


There are more on YouTube! It's amazing.

• Written on 21 July 2008 & posted at 02:20 PM.
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Two random things:
1. Over the weekend, about two minutes after I put my laundry in the washing machine, I realized that my iPhone headset was in one of my shirt pockets. Oops. I dutifully fished it out over the spin cycle and left them out to dry. This is actually the second time that this particular pair has gone through the wash, so I was expecting them to be completely dead. Au contraire! The previous wash had basically killed the left earbud. This wash brought it back! These magical headphones obviously need an even number of wash cycles in order to work properly. (Remember that time my phone got washed?)

2. I came home to letter from the US Department of Transportation. I figured it was something about my driver's license, but when I opened it up, a five dollar bill fell out. It's a “token of appreciation” for a phone survey they'll be inflicting on me sometime in the next few weeks. No wonder this country is in so much debt!

• Written on 14 July 2008 & posted at 08:50 PM.
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