shinyPlasticBag

I love the Muppets!

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:20:13 -0700

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.

Random

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:50:44 -0700

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!

The Disenchubbining

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:16:15 -0700

If I may coin a new word, I'd like to record my current disenchubbening efforts.

Disenchubbening, or the removal of one's chub, is the act of trying to get my stationary butt into slightly better shape. I had this goal in mind pretty much from day one of my California adventure: one of the many perks offered by PBwiki is a membership at Gold's Gym. When I first got here, I had trouble actually getting motivated as well as easy access to all sorts of new fast foods. No good!

About two months ago, Brian finally got me to start going to the gym. It's good that he's dragging me there, but I I hate, hate, hate working out. The whole gym environment is really weird to me -- strange evidence of how different our modern environment is from what we evolved for. That being said, exercising fills me with an enormous sense of well-being, so I deal with it.

A huge thread on reddit about the hundred pushups training program led to an office challenge. We're on week three, and things are getting hard. It's sort of funny: the first day of day three was ridiculously difficult. Our wiki has a grid listing who did how many push-ups. Yesterday's entry for Brian? A picture of the fail copter. Chris? Basically fail. Me? "83. Poorly." It was insane!

Anyway, hopefully I'm getting in shape. I'll post an update if I actually start to notice any benefit, other than feeling less gross about my lifestyle. :)

Fifth of July

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:52:25 -0700

So, I did the whole Fourth of July thing yesterday. I had a pretty good time -- I missed the fireworks by the pyramid in Alderney Park, but I did get to see some (foggy) fireworks, nonetheless. We went to a barbecue at Houseku (one of the many geek houses in the Bay Area), where there was (joy of joys) a Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball machine. I spent way too much time playing that, actually, and it has renewed my interest in getting a pinball machine of my own. Unfortunately, all of the awesome things in the world pretty much work to counteract my own wishes for an uncluttered apartment with only the things I really need in it. I am bad at this.

Some of the people at the barbecue had an apartment nearby with roof access, so we ended up watching the fireworks from the rooftop of an apartment building in the Mission District. It was awesome! We couldn't see the official fireworks, due to (a) fog and (b) a building in the way, but lots of random people were launching fireworks around the city. It was quite a few, actually. Plus, there were some delightfully stupid hoodlums setting off firecrackers in the middle of the street, which occasionally set off a particularly sensitive car alarm.

So, yeah, I had a pretty good time. Today, I'm trying to sort out potential car buying issues. Credit here in the states is sort of weird and continues to thwart my attempts at building it. I have to finance through the dealer, not through my bank, because I don't have 3 or more credit cards. Seriously, what the hell? Anyway, I think things will work out, and I've found a car I like, so all that's left is to actually do the buying part.

Speaking of driving, I have my driver's license road test on Tuesday. It's somewhat embarassing that I have to go through this whole process again, but at least I did okay on my written test (oh, how very mortifying would it have been to do poorly). So, this time next week, I could be all set up. Yay!

Happy Canada Day!

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:54:04 -0700

Happy Canada Day, everyone! I'm in exile here in California, but I hope all of you are having a blast. Hopefully, this Friday's Fourth of July (why don't they call it America Day?) celebrations will be a good proxy. I wonder if there are fireworks?

Movie season

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:32:54 -0700

It's movie season! 2008 has been really kick ass for movies so far: Indiana Jones (which sucked, but was nonetheless heavily anticipated), Iron Man, Get Smart -- it's great! It's been years since I've wanted to see just about every movie coming out. Wall-E comes out on Friday, and I'm crazy excited. Lynn hung a picture of him up on the wall of my cube in celebration of the midnight showing a bunch of us are going to go to on Thursday. We're going to go to it in Emeryville, which is where Pixar is, in the off-chance that we might see someone relevant to the movie. I'm excited! Wall-E is the cutest thing ever -- a cross between Johnny 5 from Short circuit and a Tonka dump truck.

Anyway, I am finally getting to resolve my geek drama with respect to my archive of old files -- the RAID controller in bitbox, the computer I built just for this, flaked out. I was worried that I had lost everything, but thanks to the diligent efforts of my cousin Darren, I have access to them again. I don't trust the computer anymore, though, so s3sync is chunking along, syncing everything to Amazon S3. If you have any files whatsoever, you should look into S3. It's ridiculously easy to use and makes your data pretty much invincible. It's only ten cents per gig a month -- my whole archive is only going to cost me about $12 a month to store, and I'll never have to worry about it again.

Apparently, Wells Fargo is planning a more user-friendly system that they'll try to market as the modern equivalent of safety deposit boxes. I think it's a great idea. Long-term storage is not something that computers are generally any good at. Hard drives can get stuffed full of data and seem totally reliable until you actually go to read the data again, at which point you realize that it's all gone bad and the drive just hadn't noticed. I'm not really sure what the answer to this problem is, though. Hard drives worked well when they were so small that you used everything on them constantly, but now that they've ballooned to hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes, the usage pattern is totally different. I'm curious to see whether solid state drives have better long-term storage characteristics. If only I could afford one!

Case spreader

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:19:58 -0700

I think i need a hobby. I'm vaguely enamored by the idea of meditation right now, inspired by Ian and his weekend morning shenanigans. I find the idea of taking time out of my day to just reflect on life in general to be quite interesting, but I hate the mystic crap associated with the concept. Maybe I just need something to fill quiet moments at home.

Usually, my idle time is spent surfing the Internet, which generally doesn't lead to a feeling of productive relaxation. Just a few days ago I spent several hours Wikipedia surfing, which is always an interesting game, since you never know where you'll end up. I found myself reading about old IBM mainframes and data processing and the sort of monolithic computer culture of the sixties and seventies.

I like to visual Wikipedia browsing sessions as being comprised of planet-like bodies 0 general concepts -- that my attention orbits. I'd really like to see something that tracked my Wikipedia browsing in general. It'd be intriguing to see how I shift from different concepts, and how long each broad category tends to hold my interest. Right now, I'm definitely fascinated by old computer stuff.

Speaking of which, I made an unusual purchase yesterday: a Macintosh SE, which is a tiny, compact Mac from 1988. It looks like the very first Macintosh and has a magnificent 20 MiB hard drive. It's running System 6.0.7, has a bitchin' 3D air hockey game built in, and that's about it. My long-term goals for the little system include replacing the hard drive with a Compact Flash card (a SCSI-to-IDE adapter should do it) and finding a way to get it online as an SSH terminal (possibly involving some sort of tiny Linux device as an intermediary).

It's also leading me to lust for a more functional classic Mac: I think it would be a fun project to put a Mac mini inside of a classic Mac case, replacing the 9" CRT with an LCD, of course. I think it'd be a fun project, but it would certainly be nerve-wracking to start disassembling a cute lil Mac mini for such an endeavor. Plus, both of those computer types are notorious for needing stupid, proprietary tools to disassemble. (The phrase "case spreader" seems vaguely intimidating to me.)

Thirteeeeeeeen

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:25:31 -0700

Happy Friday the 13^th, everyone. Try not to walk under any ladders, piss off any black cats, walk under any pianos being hoisted, ride a motorcycle through a crowed European city where there are people moving panes of glass, take any wooden nickles, be the first person to leave a table with thirteen guests, spill any salt without chucking some over your shoulder to counteract it, knock over any brooms, or break any mirrors. (In particular, that means you REALLY shouldn't ride a motorcycle through a crowded European city where there are people moving large mirrors.)

According to Wikipedia's article on Friday the 13^th, there are 4,800 unique arrangements of the twelve months, and Friday is the most likely to happen on a 13th (Thursday & Saturday are the least likely). I love that someone sat down and calculated that. Also really neat is the fact that on the next Friday the 13^th, February 13^th, 2009, the UNIX timestamp will be 1,234,567,890 at 11:31:30 PM GMT. That's fantastic.

Also, the Zune comes out in Canada today. How's that for bad luck?

Another retro tune kick

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:15:20 -0700

For some reason, "Never Get Over You" by Prozzak got stuck in my head yesterday and firmly lodged itself in my brain. I think it made a dent, because before I knew it, all kinds of Prozzak era songs were playing in my head while I worked, even total surprises that I haven't thought of in years. Remember "Weightless" by See Spot Run? That's in there! It's crazy. I wonder what my brain is doing half the time, and how I have room for so much useless data. Weird.

Anyway, things are excellent on this side of the world. Work is going well, and I'm finally checking some items off of my daily todo list that have been there for weeks and weeks. It's very satisfying. This weekend, I'm off to investigate the prospect of buying a car. I want something newish but not super expensive. I hate the idea of getting something that is likely break down at any point in the near future, because I hate dealing with car crap.

Also, Mom bought a set of plane tickets to bring her and Grammy down here for a few weeks in August. Between that and me coming home in September, I should be set for familial/Canadian contact for a little while. I'm looking forward to it -- I have to figure out some interesting things for them to do. Hopefully, I will have the aforementioned car by this point in time. Since it'll be the height of summer, I'm sure there will be lots of potential activities. The Renaissance Faire is on August 16th, for example. (Nerdtacular fun!)

Wish list: I wish YouTube would gracefully scale to let me resize the window to be just big enough for the video to float on my screen, without gunking things up with scrollbars.

Good Day, eh?

Sun, 25 May 2008 14:39:16 -0700

Howdy all. How are things? I am just relaxing here on a lazy, overcast Sunday. It's Memorial Day weekend, which means it's pretty much the official unofficial summer kick off. The weather doesn't really inspire any epic adventures, however. Tomorrow is supposed to be nicer, so that could be fun.

My favourite thing of the week has been the new Weezer music video, Pork and Beans. It is awesome. It features cameos from a surprising number of Internet memes, and they managed to get some of the better known people (Gary Brolsma from Numa Numa, and Tay Zondy of Chocolate Rain fame) in the video. It's great. You can see Charlie the unicorn frolicking in the background at one point.

Ye gods, I love the Internet culture. It's so hilariously random. I sometimes wonder what people will think in the future when they look back on this time period. The fact that a chubby guy dancing to Numa Numa could become an Internet sensation and stay resident in the minds of nerds four years later is pretty impressive (for certain strange definitions of impressive).

Anyway, I've got to go do my laundry, so I'm off to quest for some quarters. Bah.