Category Archives: My Diary

Monday Malais

Well, I’d hoped to announce the results of some of my experimentation with Asterisk, but the weekend didn’t conspire with me very well. My mom ended up in the hospital (she’s back out, but it was worrisome) and I was nursing a borderline migraine most of the weekend. Yesterday I ate most of a pound of chocolate M&Ms (first time I’ve done that in two years, ever since I started Weight Watchers) and was generally not very pleasant to be around. Today, I feel like crap, but it’s back to the sugar mines of Pixar Disney…

I’m glad Mom’s out of the hospital and feeling better, but Mondays still suck.

Busy Day

Well, today I was off at the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference at the SF Marriot.  I’m mostly an interested bystander of the VOIP universe, but have done some experiments and are likely to be doing more in the near future, and I thought it was a good place to collect a book on Asterisk and generally learn a bit more about VOIP technology and cellular phones.   I was also trying to put my brain in the entrepaneur/venture capital space, and understand what that’s all about.  I’m not sure I succeeded, but I was having a pretty good time, when all of a sudden people started coming up to me and congratulating me.   Yep, Pixar bought Disney.  Or something like that.   This move had been rumored for quite some time, so it wasn’t unexpected, but it was kind of annoying that it came on a day I had taken off to go do something else.   I decided to bug out a bit early and sample the buzz back and work, and get the scoop, but I got back at around 6:00, so lots of people had left.  But my card key still works, so I guess they are going to keep me, and my Pixar stock is 2.3 shares of Disney stock.

I’m burned out for now, so if you want to find out about some of the goings on at eTel, try  Dan’s blog for now, and I’ll try to get up some of my own impressions later, or maybe tomorrow.

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Christmas 1980

Christmas 1980, Kevin and I with my new Atari 400While i was home visiting my mom, we spent some time going through my mom’s collection of old photographs. We ran across this old Polaroid of myself (left) and my brother Kevin in Christmas of 1980. I was sixteen years old, and had saved for the better part of a year to get about three hundred dollars to buy this computer, and my mom kicked in the last of the money as a Christmas present. This little gem had 16K of memory, and I couldn’t afford any storage device (not even tape at the time), but I think I see the box for the Atari Basic cartridge in the foreground, so I must have sprung for that. I also see in the little shelf above my desk what appear to be prescription bottles, but are in fact small bottles of paints (I used to paint miniatures for Dungeons and Dragons). I also remember the Moosehead beer shirt that I am wearing: Kevin gave that to me, and I wore it alot, most of the way through my undergraduate years at college.

Just thought I’d share this blast from the past. Oh, and here’s a bigger scan showing more details.

I feel useful today…

There is an old joke about what men are good for: the punch line reads something like killing spiders, barbecue and oil changes.   I’d like to pretend that I’m a handy person, but when the truth comes right down to it, I pretty much consider myself a software guy, not a hardware guy.   Still, I think the software mentality teaches you to think about debugging in a more general sense, and occasionally it pays off.

Like today.  I mentioned briefly that my right windshield wiper had failed during my trip to Truckee over New Years.   While occasionally the wiper would twitch, it wouldn’t move very regularly, but would occasionally catch and flop all the way over to the left side, and then get in the way of the left wiper blade.   I was going to take it into a garage to have them charge me $50, but as I was waiting for my wife to get showered, I decided to give it a couple of minutes of my own attention.

I felt that it must be something minor, rather than a motor failure.  Had the motor failed, it would have been likely been catastrophic: the wiper blade wouldn’t twitch at all.  I felt it must have been in some part of the linkage that connects the wiper motor.  I had no idea what that linkage might be, having never really examined this stuff before, but it was a working hypothesis.

I marched out to the car, undid the rubber bands that Carmen had set up to keep the blades from flopping around during our trip home (while still moving I might add, a splendid McGyver moment for her) and stared at it for a moment.  I picked up the blade and tried to move it along its normal motion.  It moved easily, freely.   I then did the same to the one that worked.   It didn’t move at all.  Ahah!  I next popped the small plastic cap off at the base of the wiper arm, revealing a 5/8 inch nut.  It was finger loose.  Ahah!   Back to find a 5/8 socket.   A simple bit of tightening, and it worked.  For a minute.   Then it was loose again.   This time I really tightened it.  And voila!  It appears to function.

Saved myself a trip to the garage and some annoyingly large amount of money for a simple bolt tightening.

I feel useful today.

Back!

Whew. Back from my “vacation”.

I-80 was open earlier today leaving Truckee, but it took 2 hours to go 4 miles to the area where cars were screened for tire chains/4WD. My Expedition is of course the latter and had no trouble navigating the icy conditions through the Donner Pass, but was buffetted by the high winds which made the overall trip a little less than completely fun. As I finally began the long downhill slope to Sacramento, I breathed a bit of a sigh of relief, but then managed to get myself all worked up again as I neared Sacremento. When I crossed into Yolo county, the winds really picked up and there was significant flooding in the valley floor: in Fairfield on both sides of the highway you could see telephone poles sticking out of vast expanses of water where the river had jumped its banks. The weather was ugly (I’m beginning to use that word far too much lately) with blinding rain and heavy winds. Yuck. The ride which takes three hours in good weather took us nearly six and a half today. I also noted that my car’s right wiper has malfunctioned, so I need to look at that tomorrow. When I got home and collected my mail I found that there was no bills, and smiled a little, but then found a note stuck to my door by one of my neighbors about five housses down indicating that they had had a mudslide today, and that we should check our drainage to make sure that water was flowing properly. It was already after dark, but I hiked up the hill to check the two drainage culverts, both of which seemed to be be reasonably open and clear of debris, and water seemed to be flowing nicely. The piece of my fence that has blown down before blew down again though. I’ll have to trek up there and fix it in the next day or so.

All in all, virtually every time I got in a car in this vacation I ran into some brutal, inclement weather. The vacation was largely fun, but I’m exhausted. It will be good to get back to work and be able to relax.

Happy New Year everyone!

Flooding on I-80, AP Photo by Brian Zweernik

Addendum: Here’s a photo of I-80 the day before I drove on it. That would not have been fun at all.

Weather!

It’s ugly!

I’m spending some time in Truckee, CA with some of my old college chums, and currently we are getting hammered by rain and wind gusting to 60mph. I-80 is reportedly going to be closed due to landslides for the next two days at least, and the furnace in the place we are staying is out because water from flooding has filled the crawlspace and the furnace is now in standing water.

Exciting!

We are running the gas fireplace full bore, and the temperature is holding a lovely 58 degrees, but the temperature is supposed to drop down to something like 23 tonight. Still, we aren’t going anywhere anytime fast, so I think hot coffee and the like will be the order of the day, as well as lots of sweaters.

What this geek did in Paris…

Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble is apparently over in Paris, and decided to blog about the stuff he did in Paris, of which he only thought the Musee D’Orsay sufficiently interesting to mention, probably because their IT system apparently runs Windows XP.

Get some soul, man.

When Carmen and I went there for our anniversary back in 2003, we spent the entire day in the Musee D’Orsay, and at no time did we even think to ask what operating system their IT system runs. It just never came up.

Here is a by-no-means-comprehensive list of some of the things that this geek did while in Paris:

  1. Day one: Got in fairly late, but decided to go out for a midnight supper. Did a big circle from our hotel near the Place de la Concorde, all the way down to the Louvre and back. Caught some nice views of the Eiffel Tower lit up. Back to bed.
  2. Day two: Cafe au lait and pain au chocolat (forgive my spelling, it’s been a while since I took French, and my ability to type accents in HTML is minimal) for breakfast, er, petit dejuener. Some churches, the double decker buses, visited the Musee de la Marine, and then strolled to the Eiffel Tower via the Champs des Mars. Didn’t bother going up, but had a hot dog at the park underneath. Visited Napoleon’s tomb, and Les Invalides. Then, back to the hotel, where we thought we’d catch a quick nap before going out for dinner. We woke up around 10:00pm. Found out that the restaurant Au Pied de Cochon was still open, so took the Metro down to the station near Ste. Eustace, before wandering over to munch on a dinner of pigs feet (which seemed appropriate, given the restaurant), some real french onion soup, what was probably a laughable wine selection, and a terrific desert. When we got out, it was too late for the Metro, so we walked back to the Place de Concorde.

That was the first day and a half. We were there for a week. We saw the Louvre, including an exhibit on Michaelangelo and Da Vinci. We killed a day at the Musee D’Orsay, skipping their IT department, but did stop to have lunch in their “cafeteria”. We had dinner at Gourmard, the second most expensive restaurant I’ve ever been to, and worth every penny. We took an early morning train to Versaille, where we snapped some fun pics of us in the Hall of Mirrors. We fed birds that flocked to our table in Montmartre as we ate escargot, just because hell, we were in Paris. We went to the Paris airshow, walked around the Fete de la Musique, scaled the Eiffel Tower at sunset, took boatrides on the Seine, took pictures of Notre Dame, Sacre Couer, and other lesser known places. We visited Les Jardins de Luxembourg, and just basked in the late sun. We mastered the Paris Metro, and just all in all had a blast.

Didn’t really think much about blogging.

Sometimes, you just have to unplug, at least, until you get back and post all the pictures to make other people jealous.

That’s what this geek did in Paris. I’d love to go back.

It never fails…

I always seem to get sick around the holidays. Starting yesterday afternoon, my throat started getting sore, by the time I was home I had the chills, bodyaches and general lassitude (annoying, given that there is lots of cleaning and cooking to do). It’s now 5:11AM, and I’m up with a dry cough, slurping back a couple of liters of water, taking some ibuprofen, and hoping that I begin to feel good enough so that I don’t keep waking my poor wife up. I’m now working on paring back my holiday plans to levels that won’t kill me. 🙂

Two rooms to clean, I’ll let Roomba vacuum (that doesn’t suck), I need to mix up the turkey brine, and get the sweet potatoes cooked and peeled. Then, I will sleep. A lot.

Mysteries of the Universe Revealed

I admit it: I hate it when I don’t know stuff. I find not knowing what’s wrong with my car infinitely more annoying than knowing it will cost $500 to fix. It’s just part of my personality.

It’s also somewhat annoying that I’m a pretty light sleeper. Little noises can wake me out of a sound sleep, like when my son’s alarm clock goes off at the other end of the house, or a door opens, or someone opens the refridgerator down in the kitchen.

These two eccentricities collided this morning. I’ve been awoken a couple of times to a sort of low frequency booming sound, kind of like the resonant sound you get when you slam the lid on one of those big plastic trash cans, but it happens repeatedly, as if someone was doing it multiple times, just to annoy. And, of course as is the case so often, by the time I pulled on some pants and went outside to investigate, it would stop.

But I finally figured it out: it’s pidgeons.

They are apparently landing on my chimney, and doing something which booms down the metal lined resonant chamber and echoes into my skull. The little blighters have been plaguing my next door neighbor’s house, but a few seem to come and settle on mine, usually in the morning, and that’s why I can only get six hours of sleep instead of the nine I really need.

Still, I feel better now, although I suspect that maybe a chimney inspection is called for before the winter season really begins. Who knows? Maybe there is a pile of dead pidgeons (or, more likely, pidgeon droppings) lodged in my chimney.

Now I have something new to worry about.

Happy Birthday Adam!

Happy Birthday!

Well, Adam doesn’t read my blog, but today is his birthday. Happy Birthday, Kiddo. His girlfriend is coming into town this weekend, so we’ll be holding off on the celebration mostly till then.

The milestones of life just keep tickin’ by….

San Pablo Dam Excursion

For reasons which actually remain entirely unclear, my wife has been muttering about renting a boat at the nearby San Pablo Dam and taking it for a cruise. This morning she bounded up cheerfully and said that today would be the day. I dragged my sleepy body and bursitis pained shoulder into a hot shower, and we were off. We rented a small boat for an hour with a little six horse power engine, and took a nice relaxing cruise around the lake. We snapped some pictures. I must admit, it was relaxing and fun.

We’ll probably do it again.

My Day

Lake at Jack London State Park, Sonoma

Most of the time when I bother to blog about things that are going on in my life, I tend to do it in the form of an impromptu podcast. Today my wife woke me up and said that we should go out to Infineon Raceway and catch the qualifying for tomorrow’s Indy Racing League event. We had these discount coupons, and it sounded like it might be fun. But it turns out that our coupons were only good if we bought a pass for the whole weekend, so we decided to avoid the huge crowds and expense, and instead just bummed around Sonoma (which I hadn’t really done before). We ended up sampling cheese at the Sonoma Cheese Factory, hiked a bit in Jack London State Park, finished the day with a diet friendly meal at Fresh Choice in Novato, and just generally relaxed.

Oh, and I took pictures too. Sonoma is nice, and a little less… serious than Napa.

Playing Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters

Playing Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters

Oh yeah, while at Disneyland, we gave a shot at the new Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters ride. At the end, rather than trying to convince you to spend $12.95 to get a photo of yourself, they just have a bunch of terminals where you can mail your picture to yourself. Like the one on the right. I managed to outscore Carmen, but my score was pathetic.

Back at SIGGRAPH…

Sorry to both all of my loyal readers, but I’ve been off with the family enjoying a brief vacation stint at Disneyland. We took the opportunity to see the 50th anniversary celebrations there prior to this week’s SIGGRAPH conference. Both the wife and son are now back in the Bay Area, while I go off and enjoy the week’s conference.

I got in around noon today, and got checked into my hotel room and then trudged down Figueroa to the Convention Center to pick up my registration. Courtesy of their new barcoded acceptance letters, I merely had to wave a letter under a laser scanner, click OK and within 30 seconds, my badge was printed. My Badge Not bad, and beats the long lines of years past. I also picked up a Boston 2006 pin to clip onto my badge. Boston will be cool. SIGGRAPH was last in Boston in 1989, which was also my first SIGGRAPH conference. I think I’ll go. 🙂

It’s actually been about five years since I last went to SIGGRAPH. A combination of the dotcom bust, and various internal jugglings and departures made it seem un-fun to go for a number of years, so I just stopped going. It’s kind of nice to be back, although it doesn’t really seem to have changed much, except for the possibility that people are getting younger (or, more likely, I’m getting older in a field dominated by the young and enthusiastic).

I made a brief jaunt through the art show galleries. The coolest thing I saw was Sustainable: an installation art piece which consisted of a number of tanks of water, each with a gong suspended inside and a pair of hammers controlled by solenoids which bonked them in a periodic fashion. Each tank also contained a series of water level sensors, and they each can pump water from their own tank to the one on the right. Internally, they maintain some notion of how much water they “need”, and will vent or not depending on some calculation they internally perform. As the water level rises and falls, the pitch and falloff of each gong is modified. The ensemble of them creates an interesting, continuously varying cadence which I found pleasing. I would have snapped my own pictures of it, but I was immediately accosted by the resident security droid who informed me that photography wasn’t permitted, despite the presence of the artist himself, who assured me that he didn’t mind.

Anyway, check it out, it was pretty cool.

Tomorrow will be a busy day. I should be there for the first paper session, and have animation theater tickets for tomorrow night, so it should be a long day. Tonight, I trudged over toward the Wilshire Grand, and had a sweet sausage pizza at the California Pizza Kitchen. You can spot the SIGGRAPH attendees: they all look the same to me. More on that some other time.

Today’s T-shirt

Pac Man T-shirt

Today’s T-shirt comes from a simpler time, a time when computers had only eight bits, and all colors were simple primaries. It is just beginning to dawn on me that things which are retro are actually the stuff from my teen years.