See you on the other side....
Continue reading Happy year, everybody..
December 2006 Archives
I think an awful lot of people mistakenly refer to a, "desert island," when they really mean a, "deserted island." And due to a quirk in the English language, neither "desert" nor "deserted" (both words that describe areas void of anything important) imply the other. Desert things aren't necessarily deserted...
Continue reading On a desserted island.
P.S. What's with this goober?...
Continue reading (P.S.)nowboarding.
Snowboarding, much like sailing or driving, benefits greatly from speed. The greater the pressure on the various involved components (from the board all the way up to my legs), the greater the stability and amount of available control. I think most of it can be attributed to getting all of...
Continue reading Don't fear the speed.
If you're an average American, you probably don't get this ad. That certainly doesn't mean it's complicated or that you're particularly stupid—but odds are that good that the typical American won't ever be even marginally persuaded by an ad like this. Remember, most USians were responding to ads like this...
Continue reading Beat the system. Don't be an idiot..
I've got a collector/organizer personality. I like long lists or arrangements of things, and I like the layouts to be uniform. This is probably most obvious in my music library, but applies to this journal, too. You may have noticed. Now traditionally, the media library has been a major source...
Continue reading I really hate inaccurate or inconsistent track listings.
I've got absolutely no idea how I missed this. Apparently the LeMay Collection (under the America's Car Museum name) is housed in Tacoma. The LeMay collection is the largest private collection of automobiles in the world—although I'm not sure whether that includes super car-nut despots like Mr. "of Brunei." This...
Continue reading The LeMay what now?.
Layla got me a Zune for Christmas. Yes, it's brown. I've wanted one of these for a while—the battery life, capacity, and build quality of my mobiBLU DAH-1500i leave a good deal to be desired...and come to think of it, the FM reception on it sucks, too. The Zune has...
Continue reading Zune'd.
The rear shock tower mounts on the E36 3 series are two of a handful of places where BMW's engineers failed to anticipate the abuse this car would receive. The stock shock mounts disintegrate over time and rattle every time the car goes over a bump. In extreme cases, the...
Continue reading Eat it, rear shock tower mounts.
The other film we watched yesterday was Sketches of Frank Gehry, a short documentary about Gehry, an architect. Gehry's got an unusual style—those of you from Seattle have probably seen his most famous local work, the EMP in the Seattle city center. It's got a free and flowing form made...
Continue reading Two movies: the up!.
Layla and I saw two movies today. One was fantastic. I'll talk about that one later (probably tomorrow). The other one ... sucked. We went and saw Night at the Museum because the previews looked mildly humorous, but mostly because it was actually showing soon after we arrived at the...
Continue reading Two movies: one up, one down.
With the recent power outage and subsequent headcolds, Layla and I have been going through a crapton of oranges. Specifically, small wooden crate box things filled with clementine oranges. Now, when I went to see what the heck we were up to last December, this post about being hooked on...
Continue reading Freakin' weird orange flashback.
The image at right is a picture of an unremarkable little car: the Datsun B-210. I'm marginally familiar with the B-210 because when I was about seven years old, my parents had an equally unremarkable Datsun F10—the B-210's front-wheel-drive little brother. Anyway, my parent's choice in cars isn't why I'm...
Continue reading Datsun and the dog-leg gearbox.
The graph at right illustrates the number of Puget Sound Energy and Seattle City Light customers without power due to the totally radical wind storm we suffered last Thursday night. In all, it's estimated that 1.5 million people lost their power. However, the greater Puget Sound err, region is served...
Continue reading People without power over the last few days.
I'm glad that after all of the power shenanigans, the fact that my file server refused to boot was simply a fried power supply and not a (costly and pain-in-the-ass) toasted motherboard. So we're back online with an old power supply I found tossed in the corner of the garage....
Continue reading The verdict: dead power supply.
After five days offline, I've finally got the server back up. The last two of these days have been spent with the server sitting in pieces while I get around to figuring out what's wrong with it—but the first days were spent completely without power. I'll be backfilling the details...
Continue reading ...and, we're back..
Even though we've now got power, the server isn't powering up. I'm not really sure why, at the moment—I've seen my old Intel SE440BX2 chipset refuse to power up after a mains loss, but pulling the battery backup on this machine hasn't yielded any positive results. It's likely that either...
Continue reading ...but the server is still dead..
Our neighbors in the subdivision next to us have had power since last night—but after 60-someodd hours with no electricy, we've actually got power back at the house! Hooray. Time to set all heaters on, "stun."...
Continue reading Power is back!.
It's fairly common that we take for granted how available and helpful heat is. We're sitting in our townhouse right now, heavily bundled against the low-40-degree temperature. It's cold. And it's certainly not the kind of thing I would have expected, say, last week. So far, we've been heating water...
Continue reading Fighting the cold.
I took some photographs yesterday of the damage here in northern Kirkland. Bear in mind that this area of Kirkland (specifically, Juanita Bay) is very gently nestled between two large hills. So the damage that you're seeing here is far less pronounced than that of the surrounding areas. We've heard...
Continue reading Again with the aftermath.
This morning we, much like nearly a million other residents of the greater Puget Sound region, woke up without power. It turns out that record winds swept through the area and took down trees, power poles, and a whole lot else. Now, Layla and I have been listening to the...
Continue reading Power out.
This is, without a doubt, the best thing to ever happen. Click through for the flash video....
Continue reading The Best. USB. Flash. Drive. Ever..
This just in: the KGB has permanently moved its headquarters into the Batcave....
Continue reading KGB now headquartered in the Batcave.
That's right—this Boeing B-1B Lancer landed with its gear retracted. More after the jump....
Continue reading The $7.9m landing gear screwup.
This came to me from NPR through a coworker through another coworker. I hadn't yet heard it. But, it's tubular. It's the song Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton, and it's some of the best unsigned online music I've heard since Brad Sucks. You can play Code Monkey at the list...
Continue reading Code Monkey.
I took this picture a while back at the local aquarium. It shows a picture of how to squeeze ... err, milt (sperm) from a fish and into a beaker. And then dumping all of that into a bucket of eggs. Oh, and those eggs were harvested from an ostensibly...
Continue reading How to artificially inseminate fish eggs.
My experience is that optical drives fail far more often than nearly any other PC component (with the exception, of course, of small fans). In the last, say, ten years of working with computer parts, I've lost one motherboard, two or three power supplies, only one hard drive (despite typically...
Continue reading On the reliability of optical drives.
Lately, I've been taking my work home with me. This weekend, I've built ... a chicken. With ... lazors. Note that the wheels on its toes serve to provide traction when the foot is in the "toe-down" position, which is both legitimate and non-lame...despite how it looks....
Continue reading On the job.
Ask me how I know to make sure the lid is well-attached to the oatmeal container before leaving it in the back of the car....
Continue reading Oatmeal a-splosion!.
Mouser posted a while back about two Beechcraft Bonanzas landing on top of one another out at Los Alamos airport. Today, I ran across the most fantastic "oops" list, which has three more pictures of small aircraft in compromising positions. Now, the landing in Los Alamos was somewhat unique in...
Continue reading They've docked!.
Following in Layla's footsteps, I'll soon be signing up for the 20/20 program. If you haven't already read her post on it, the 20/20 Lifestyles Program is a comparatively immersive diet and exercise program designed to (1) remove inappropriate foods from our meals, (2) identify foods that cause specific problems...
Continue reading 20/20 (2).
When I first met Freeman Dyson today, it was at a bank of urinals in a restroom in the building that houses a good chunk of Microsoft Research. Back in the meeting room, Dyson gave a fantastic lecture today about genetics and bioengineering and provided fantastic responses to the somewhat...
Continue reading Pardon, I did what next to whom?.
Not only was downtown Bellevue packed with people as Layla and I wandered over there earlier this evening to find dinner, but all of the parking lots were closed because they were completely full. And even though it was fairly chilly (admittedly a balmy 49° after last week's freeze fest)...
Continue reading Bellevue packed solid on a Monday night?.
Reading part of the Wikipedia article for the Pacific Science Center linked to by my previous post, I happened across this sentence: In the mid 1970s, the lower-level math area was dominated by the IBM Mathematica exhibit where demonstrators in orange jackets ("OJ"s) made soap bubbles and showed audiences how...
Continue reading Oh, the 1970s.
Huzzah! So, this first picture is from the robotics exhibit at the Pacific Science Center at the Seattle city center. Specifically, this is a screenshot (if you can call it that) of a controller program for a big industrial robot that plays tic-tac-toe. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the program misspelled "Putting"...
Continue reading Miscellaneous picture post.
It's Decemberish, which means it's time for a slough of office holiday parties. Tonight's is hosted by a big chunk of the Windows organization, and it's out at the Benaroya concert hall in downtown Seattle. They held this same party last year and, although it appears it wasn't then notable...
Continue reading Time for the annual holiday party.
Those of you who know what a 2JZ-GTE is will get a hefty chuckle out of this picture....
Continue reading Something for the Supra guys.
Layla and I just got finished watching Being There, one of Peter Sellers' last performances. A great reminder for how saying little is sometimes just what's needed. Five stars....
Continue reading "Life is a state of mind".
