brainwagon

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 […]

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 […]

While 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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….

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.