Random thoughts, organized and categorized for your consumption.
Archive for December, 2004
Margarita v. 1.0
Dec 29th
Thanks to a generous gift from April and Steve, I now have the beginnings of a home cocktail setup. As my first action, I went out and purchased all the necessary ingredients to make a “good margarita.” Looks like the one thing you need is practice, which you cannot buy.
My first attempt came out really sour and reasonably strong. I definitely need to work on it further to get it to a good combination of taste and kick. Right now I have a lot of sour and not so much sweet. All of this is being done without the pre-made More >
Home, Rainy Home
Dec 27th
I’ve just gotten home from the joy that is holiday air travel. As is typical for me, it was freezing cold weather for most of the OK stay, and upon returning to “always sunny” San Jose it is raining. On the upside, that should mean some awesome new snow up in Tahoe, so I’m hoping for some really good powder to ski on soon.
Audio Enclosure Test
Dec 21st
This is a test of a new plug-in that should allow attachments to “just drop in” to this blog. Does it work?
MP3 Test
Wordpress 1.2.2 Upgrade
Dec 19th
After some fussing (and there are still some broken plugins) I have the latest version of WordPress, V. 1.2.2, installed and running on this site. Let’s see if it runs more smoothly than before.
Dearth of Newsletters
Dec 19th
I am having a hard time writing a newsletter to send out. What I have discovered is that after 3 years of using LCD monitors at work and on laptops I simply cannot stand to stare at a blurry screen for more than an hour or two.
This means that I either must crank the resolution way, way down or hijack someone else’s laptop to get a newsletter written. I could also get a new job, as that, presumably, would also have access to LCD displays again.
In the mean time I’ll spend a little time in front of the CRT and More >
Internet P2P Television
Dec 19th
A funny thing happened to me this week. Actually, something funny always seems to happen to me, it just isn’t usually ha-ha kind of funny. I discovered the wealth of TV shows archived and presented for my (and your) viewing enjoyment on the internet.
And it’s not just any old internet. This is the super secret world of back room P2P file sharing, growing up and making it more tolerable for the masses. Using a combination of BitTorrent technology with the P2P search engine of the moment, ISOHunt, and a suitable download client on Windows, called Azureus, I have found that you More >
3 Drives Enter, One Drive Leaves
Dec 16th
It was too good to be true. I had two drives that appeared to die so I pulled them out of where they were and added them to a new system. Everything seemed great, and they worked for 3 or 4 days. Yay for me.
The problem is that this morning I woke up, came down to work on the PC and found a “click of death” sound coming from my PC. It could only be one thing: a dead IBM hard drive, the Deskstar (affectionately know as the Death Star). Now I shouldn’t complain too much, as this drive is 4 More >
Shocking Discoveries
Dec 13th
In an incredible turn of events, two relatively new hard disks have died on the same day — today. What is more incredible is that both were in different machines, on different interfaces, from different manufacturers. Both were protected via my APC UPS, so power was not to blame. Worse, one is a RAID backup drive for my documents, so I have to replace it soon. It just makes no sense that this would happen all at once.
On to the saga that is replacing light switches: I managed to give myself enough of a shock today that I had to More >
Another Ski Trip in the Can
Dec 11th
I just got back from a ski trip to Heavenly and although its good to hit the snow this trip was a bit of a let down for a couple of reasons.
- Not enough snow
- Temperature was too high (48 F)
- Rocks on the trails
- Too many folks in lift lines
Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful to be up in Tahoe hitting the snow. But I just wish it were good, functional snow. 4 hours each way for crappy snow just isn’t much fun when you think about the time spent. Maybe next time will be better.
More >Vanity Googling Coolness
Dec 10th
I was just looking up some old colleagues of mine when I decided to do a vanity search on Google. Since I’m such a big, important guy, I expected a lot of hits and Google didn’t disappoint. What I didn’t expect to find is this:
???? ?????
Coolness! According to Tom’s Hardware Russian language site, that’s my name in Cyrillic. You learn something new every day.