2008 Apr 26, 11:45
Last weekend while Sarah was up in Canada for a spa weekend with her sister and her sister's other bridesmaids, I went to Saul and Ciera's
wedding in Three Rivers, California near Sequoia National Park. I flew into Fresno picked up a rental car and my GPS device navigated me to a restaurant with the wedding location no where in sight.
"No problem," I thought, "I'll just call someone with an Internet connection and..." I had no cell reception. What did people do before GPS, Internet, and cell phones?
A waitress in the restaurant pointed me down the road a bit to the wedding location which was outside overlooking a
river. Their wedding cake was made up like a mountain with two backpacks at the top and rope hanging down. Ciera's father married them and the ceremony was lovely. The music after included Code Monkey to which all the nerds were forced to get up and awkwardly dance.
Besides getting to see Ciera and Saul who I hadn't seen in quite a while, I got to see Daniil and Val, Vlad, and Nathaniel. Since
last I saw Daniil and Val they had a child, Katie who is very cute and in whom I can see a lot of family resemblance. The always hilarious Vlad,
Daniil's brother, was there as well with his wife who I got to meet. Nathaniel, my manager from Vizolutions was there and I don't know if I've seen him since I moved to Washington. It was fun to
see him and meet his girlfriend who was kind enough to donate her extra male to male mini-phono cord so I could listen to my Zune in the rental car stereo on the drive back.
wedding saul and ciera california nontechnical 2008 Apr 14, 10:22
It was warm and lovely out this past Saturday and Sarah I and went to a
new place for lunch, then to Kelsey Creek Park, and then out for Jane's birthday. We ate at Cafe
Pirouette which serves crepes and is done up with French decorations reminding me of my parent's house. We got in for just the end of lunch and saw the second to last customers, a gaggle of
older ladies leaving. I felt a little out of place with my "Longhorn [heart] RSS" t-shirt on. The food was good and in larger portions that I expected.
After that we went to Kelsey Creek Park and Farm. The park is hidden at the end of a quiet neighborhood, starts out with some tables and children's jungle gym
equipment, then there's a farm which includes a petting zoo, followed by many little trails going off into the forrest. There weren't too many animals out and the ones we did see didn't seem to
expect or want the sun and warm weather. We followed one of the trails for a bit and turned back before getting sun burned. You can see
my weekend photos mapped out on Live Maps.
That night we went out with some friends for Jane's birthday. Eric was just back from the RSA conference and we met Jane and Eric and others at Palace Kitchen in Seattle located immediately adjascent to the monorail's route. The weather was still good so they left the large windows open through
twilight and every so often you'd see the monorail pass by.
washington bellevue weekend nontechnical 2008 Mar 7, 3:26
Two weekends ago it was actually sunny and kind of warm so Sarah and I went down to Spud Fish and Chips and Juanita Beach Park. We ate fish and chips on the dock. I took a few pictures and this
time actually put some geographical information on Flickr so now I've got a map of my tiny fish and chips journey. On the map click on the floating marks to view the associated photos.
Flickr provides access to the geo data associated with your photos via GeoRSS feeds. And Google Maps displays
GeoRSS feed content on their maps allowing you even to edit the data but doesn't appear to let you easily export the GeoRSS. Live Maps does the inverse, allowing you to create and export GeoRSS data but not import it. I'd like both please. Oh well.
map photo personal fish-and-chips juanita-beach 2008 Jan 22, 9:56
More ideas stolen from me in the same vein as my stolen OpenID thoughts.
Fast
Pedestrian Crossing on Four Way Stops. In college I didn't have a car and every weekend I had weekly poker with friends who lived nearby so I would end up waiting to cross from one corner of a
traffic lit four way stop to the opposite corner. Waiting there in the cold gave me plenty of time to consider the fastest method of getting to the opposite corner of a four-way stop. My plan was
to hit the pedestrian crossing button for both directions and travel on the first one available. This only seems like a bad choice if the pedestrian crossing signal travels clockwise or counter
clockwise around the four way stop. In those two cases its better to take the later of the two pedestrian signal crossings, but I have yet to see those two patterns on a real life traffic stop. I
decided recently to see if my plan was actually sound and looked up info on traffic signals. But the info
didn't say much other than "its complicated" and "it depends" (I'm paraphrasing). Then I found some guy's analysis of this problem. So I'm done with this and I'll continue pressing both
buttons and crossing on the first pedestrian signal. Incidentally on one such night when I was waiting to cross this intersection I heard a loud multi-click sound and realized that the woman in the
SUV waiting to cross the intersection next to me had just locked her doors. I guess my thinking-about-crossing-the-street face is intimidating.
Windows Searching
Windows Media Center Recorded TV's Closed Captions. An Ars-Technica article on
a fancy DVR described one of the DVRs features: full text search over the subtitles of the recorded TV shows. I thought implementing this for Windows Media Center recorded TV shows and Windows
Search would be an interesting project to learn about video files, and extending Windows Search. As it turns out though some guy, Stephen Toub implemented Windows Search over MCE closed captions already. Stephen Toub's article is very long and describes some
other very interesting related projects including 'summarizing video files' which you may want to read.
stolen-thoughts windows search mce windows traffic closed captions four-way-stop windows-media-center 2008 Jan 21, 8:49
This past weekend Sarah and I went to
Laughs Comedy Spot in Kirkland and saw
Doug Benson who frequently appears on
VH1's Best Week Ever. Doug Benson seemed drunk or high and messed up a couple of jokes but otherwise was at times very funny. There were
three comedians on before him sorted from least humorous to most. The place was smaller than I thought it'd be and required a lot of work to flag down a waitress to obtain a drink.
personal doug-benson humor 2007 Dec 11, 12:31
I wanted to give a brief update on what's been going on for me this weekend and the previous two.
Two weekends ago Sarah and I went down to Santa Cruz for a long weekend and a belated Thanksgiving. I have yet to sort through the photos but Sarah has already put up the
photos from our California trip. There's some nice shots from the Monterey Bay Aquarium in there and the place where we
stayed. It was a good trip and I'll write more about it at some point in the future.
This past weekend Sarah and I went bowling with Eric and Jane and other friends. And no bowling experience is complete without a DJ and black lights. Surprisingly my work shirt looked great in the
blacklight.
This coming weekend Sarah and I will stay at the MGM in Las Vegas where I'll meet up with college friends I haven't seen in a while. Previously the only non-gambling thing I did in Vegas was buffets
and
the Star Trek Experience (I'm cool) but this time we'll see some more shows which should be fun.
lasvegas personal bowling california weekend nontechnical 2007 Nov 19, 12:35
Two weekends ago I went down to California for Angie and Kane's
going away party. It was fun despite going to a country western club. It was a very large place with plenty of space for line dancing, a dentist chair turned into a make-margaritas-in-your-mouth
chair, and of course a mechanical bull. Surprisingly, I did not fit in.
This past weekend Sarah and I went to the
EMP and SciFi Museum. The last time I was there was for the Star Trek convention (I'm cool) and Sarah hadn't been before. We also ate in the attached diner which
was acceptable.
emp seattle nontechnical 2007 Nov 9, 2:38Jon's leaving for Germany today which of course is sad. On Wednesday, Jon came over and we watched
Hackers. There's a few things you probably wouldn't
notice without repeated viewings of the film:
- Phantom Phreak is arrested and you never hear what happens to him. This is unlike Joey who is arrested but appears in the final hacking scene.
- Marc Anthony appears in the movie as a secret service agent.
- Everyone in the movie loves Coke.
- Hackers is the greatest movie of all time: it represents the pinnacle of human artistic achievement.
In similar ex college roommate news, I'm going to California over the weekend for Angie and Kane's goodbye party. They're heading for Australia for like a year or something. Angie's got a
blog about her travels but rarely seems to update it. I'll get to see Carissa and Elijah there too, almost completing the ex college roommate
experience. To avoid confusion I should mention that unlike everyone else I know, Carissa and Elijah aren't leaving the country.
personal nontechnical 2007 Nov 4, 11:20This weekend Sarah and I went to Tariq's house warming party in Issaquah and then to Seattle for Jon's going away party at Pike's Pub. On the drive over, just after getting through traffic on I-5
South, I saw emergency vehicles lights on the North bound side and suddenly found my lane stopped. I found out why when a man ran from the left most lane to my lane the right most, then darted left
one lane and back right again. Cars started leaving my lane and I could see the man now lounging on the pavement in front of a jeep. Apparently not hurt, he got up and started walking down the
highway. He didn't appear to be in his right mind and after walking by our car Sarah reported it to 911. The rest of the night went on as normal and I had fun with Jon and his friends. It'll be sad
to see him go next week.
nontechnical 2007 Aug 6, 4:07I've moved from my previous apartment in Redmond into Sarah's condo in Kirkland. Over the past week I'd been coming home from work and packing and sorting all of my belongings. Everything had a few
destination options:
- Sarah's condo
- Storage
- My office
- Recycle/Donate
I donated two carts of computer related junk (two CRTs, two desktops, six laptops, untold number of cables, piles of network and sound cards, etc) to
RE-PC and
six garbage bags of clothing that I either never wear or into which I have worn holes into friendly looking clothing donation bins. Of course I still need to find some place to get rid of my 15 inch
CRT TV, VCR, DVD player, and X-Box. I finally emptied my bags of coins that had been collecting for about seven years (one of the bags was from my college orientation) through Coinstar and got ~$160.
Some items seemed to fit very well at work like my
satirical RIAA propaganda poster and my
Darth Vader Nutcracker. This past weekend I had movers come and actually move my furniture. Most of its now in storage except for
my living room which is moved into Sarah's second bedroom. Now all I have to do is unpack...
move personal repc recycle nontechnical 2007 Jul 15, 5:08This previous weekend Sarah and I went to Canada for my friends Palak and Meghal's wedding. Our five day stay took us on
the route from Toronto, to Burlington (for the wedding), and then Niagra.
In Toronto we visited the
CN Tower, the
ROM, and the
Bata Shoe Museum. We generally acted like tourists walking around taking photos of things, putting on sun block, and not saying 'eh'. But we could have been worse
like the drunk American college students in front of us in line for the CN Tower asking the guide if the CN Tower is taller than the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. We stumbled upon the
Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibit which was really interesting. Sarah in particular recalls the cute stuffed animal
monsters.
After Toronto we drove to Burlington where Palak and Meghal's wedding would take place. We got up early and made it on time to the wedding which was
lovely. I hadn't attended an Indian wedding previously so it was a new experience for me. During the ceremony the child in front of me kept peeking over her parent's shoulder and staring at me. It
lasted all day with a break after lunch during which we drove around and experienced small town Ontario. After the break cousins performed dances for Palak and Meghal and then we all danced the night
away until the wee hours.
In Niagra we stayed in a hotel room with a falls view which was lovely. We went on the
Maid of the Mist tour that takes tourists
right up to the falls in a boat and drenches them. We also went on the
Behind the Falls tour which was not as fun. In both we are
given rain coats which are essentially glorified plstic trash bags. For dinner we ate in the hotel restaurant which had a lovely view of the falls. At night the falls are lit up in various colors
with gigantic lights.
niagra wedding personal toronto nontechnical 2007 Jul 13, 8:30I bought an external backup drive a few weekends ago. I've previously setup a
Subversion repository so I decided to move everything into the repository and
then back it up. So in went the contents of all of my %USERPROFILE% and ~ directories with a bit of sorting and pruning. Not too much though given its much easier to dump in everything and search for
what I want then to take the time to examine and grade each file. What follows are the notes I took while setting this up. It takes me a bit of time to look up the help on each command so I figure
I'll write it all down here for the benefit of myself and potentially others...
Setting Up the Backup Drive For Linux
I first changed the filesystem on the drive to ext3. I plugged it into my USB2.0 port and ran fdisk:
sudo fdisk /dev/sda
Useful commands I used to do this follow mostly in order:
-
m
-
help
-
p
-
print current partitions
-
d
-
delete current partition
-
n
-
create new partition (I used the defaults)
-
w
-
write changes and exit
Then I formatted for ext3.
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
I made it easy to mount:
sudo vim /etc/fstab
# added line to end:
/dev/sda1 /media/backup ext3 rw,user,noauto 0 0
I setup the directory structure on the disk
mount /media/backup
sudo mkdir /media/backup/users
sudo mkdir /media/backup/users/dave
sudo chown dave:dave /media/backup/users/dave
After all that its easy to make a copy of the Subversion repository:
mount /media/backup
cp -Rv /home/dave/svn /media/backup/users/dave/
umount /media/backup
Next on the agenda is to add a cron job to do this regularly.
Subversion Command Reference
On a machine that has local access to the Subversion repository you can check out a specific subdirectory as follows using the file scheme:
svn co file:///home/dave/svn/trunk/web/dave%40deletethis.net/public_html
Note also that although one of my directories is named 'dave@deletethis.net' Subversion requires the '@' to be percent-encoded.
Other useful subversion commands:
-
svn help
-
help
-
svn list file:///home/dave/svn/
-
list all files in root dir of svn depot
-
svn list -R file:///home/dave/svn/
-
list all files in svn depot
-
svn list -R file:///home/dave/svn/ | grep \/$
-
list all directories
-
svn status
-
List status of all files in the working copy directory as in - modified, not in repository, etc
-
svn update
-
Brings the working copy up to date wrt the repository
-
svn commit
-
Commit changes from the working copy to the repository
-
svn add / move / delete
-
Perform the specified action -- occurs immediately
Setting up Windows Client for Auto Auth into SVN
When using an SVN client on Windows via svn+ssh its useful to have the Windows automatically generate connections to the SVN server. I use
putty on my Windows machines so I read the directions on
using public keys with putty.
putty.exe dave@deletethis.net
cd .ssh
vim authorized_keys # leave the putty window open for now
puttygen.exe
Click the 'generate' button
Move the mouse around until finished
Copy text in 'Public key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_keys file:' to putty window & save & close putty window
Enter Key passphrase & Comment in puttygen
Save the private key somewhere private
pageant.exe
'Add Key' the private key just saved.
Checking out using Tortoise SVN
On one of my Windows machines I've already installed Tortoise SVN. Checking out from my SVN repository was really easy. I just right clicked in Explorer in a directory and selected "SVN Checkout...".
Then in the following dialog I entered the svn URI:
svn+ssh://dave@deletethis.net/home/dave/svn/trunk/web/dave%40deletethis.net/public_html/
Note again that the '@' that is part of the directory name is percent-encoded as '%40' while the '@' in the userinfo is not.
Windows Command Line Check Out
On my media center I didn't want to install Tortoise SVN so rather I used the
command line tool. I setup pageant like before the only
difficulty was getting the SVN command line tool to use putty. With the default configuration you can use the SVN_SSH environment variable to point at a compliant SSH command line tool. The trick is
that its interpreted as a backslash escaped string. So I set mine thusly:
set SVN_SSH=C:\\users\\dave\\bin\\putty\\plink.exe
The escaping solved the vague error I received about not being able to create the tunnel.
backup technical personal windows svn linux subversion 2007 Jun 11, 3:36This past weekend I was invited to two BBQs. Consequently, the weather took a break from the heat to drizzle.
The first was a lunch BBQ in celebration of Sarah's mom getting her Masters degree. Sarah and I went to her sister's house on the East-side where we had traditional foods you might associate with a
BBQ including some enjoyable sausage. There was a bit of Wii to be had and Sarah's mom killed at bowling. Sarah seemed a bit dismayed at this. I guess Sarah didn't expect it since she's had more
experience compared to her mom who was playing for the first time.
For dinner we drove over to Seattle to have a BBQ at Jeannie's house. Jeannie's family and my family became friends through our church when I was born and Jeannie even babysat me. The second bit
about the babysitting is how Jeannie would introduce me at the BBQ. I met her boyfriend who seems like a cool guy. He works for Microsoft as a consultant and has traveled to various countries for his
job. Guests had been instructed to bring side dishes and so there was quite a spread which was eclectic as well. We brought red potatoes, humus, and pita bread. As it turns out, one of the other
guests had produced humus in bulk as a supplier and apparently had a grudge against the big humus chains. We played it cool and she didn't say anything so we can only assume she didn't know it was
us. Jeannie was a great hostess and I had a fun time.
bbq washington personal nontechnical 2007 Jun 7, 4:35
A few weekends ago Sarah and I visited the
Woodland Park Zoo (Finding its website I'm amazed that its domain is 'zoo.org'. Somebody in Seattle was
quick on the domain registration.) I liked the zoo except for all the children. Human children... As visitors to the zoo... What did you think I meant? The kids are everywhere! Shouldn't they be
inside playing video games or something?
There was a gorilla that was wrapped in a dirty blanket. It looked like a homeless person and very sad. I'm reminded of the episode of the Simpsons in which
the octuplets work at the zoo and the scene in which while Homer is breaking out the children a gorilla tries to get him to take her child too. Looking for a
clip of this to post here I can only find clips from the Simpsons in German for some reason.
Like this one.
Two thirds or so of the way through my camera started running low on power. We were forced to choose which animals were camera worthy. Is it too common? Is it cute enough? Etc. Sarah
took a very nice shot of some hippos under these conditions. Unfortunately I couldn't get a good angle and view of the Elephants. But they were cool and had an interesting habitat (that's zoo for
large-ish cage.)
zoo personal nontechnical 2007 May 13, 12:16My parents and grandmother came to visit the weekend before this current weekend, starting Friday May 4th. They arrived via their new motor-home which is quite the machine. Of course its my parents
motor-home so its very well decorated inside including drapes and mini-chandelier. I didn't have a memory card for my camera at the time but I'm sure my parents will put up photos on their
new blog dedicated to their motor-home at some point in the future.
At any rate, they parked the motor-home in an
RV park in Issaquah so that Friday night I drove over to them and we ate at the conveniently
closely located
Pogachas. The next day they came over and I showed them the various cool looking things my computer connected to my flat
screen TV can do. This includes
Vista Media Center showing my photos from recent trips and
Google Earth mapping out our respective homes and my recent trips (and Paris). Additionally, we played Wii which, unsurprisingly based on anecdotal evidence
from varied sources across the Internet, was a seeming hit. Mom broke records playing bowling with my dad and I, Dad did an excellent job fishing, and Grandma's slow but steady win's the race
approach to cow racing worked very well.
The next day I drove them to Seattle and we walked around Pike's Place. My parents made dinner that night at my place which was very good and made my apartment actually smell like cooked food. Also,
we exchanged Christmas gifts. For the past two years I've flown back to my parents' house for Christmas and ended up with gifts I couldn't take with me in both directions. Those I left at their house
they drove up and I was able to give them the ones I left at my place. They started the drive back the next day. I really enjoyed seeing them here.
motorhome family personal nontechnical 2007 May 1, 3:48The Sunday of the weekend before last I had friends over and we watched Antitrust and Sneakers. Watching Antitrust makes me wonder if Bill Gates has seen it. Tim Robbins plays a character that is
essentially based on him but so over the top that its ridiculous.
A few days before that I watched The Prestige with Sarah. I can't tell if I was or wasn't supposed to know what was going on until the end but it was cool anyway. I didn't know until later but David
Bowie plays Tesla which is just awesome all the way around.
We also watched The Illusionist sometime before. Both movies are adaptations of novels with stage magicians set in turn of the century England. And I enjoyed both of them. I thought one would be a
rushed attempt by one studio to compete with the another on the same ground but that doesn't seem to be the case. I've noticed this before with those asteroid disaster movies and the two movies about
Truman Capote. It turns out Wikipedia has a
huge list of competing similar movies.
personal movies nontechnical 2007 Apr 8, 3:46This weekend was fun. Sarah and I went out for Jane's Birthday. We ate at a little Italian restaurant where our group was almost too large for the place and afterwards went to the
Viceroy lounge. The website apparently isn't very representative because although I looked at it before going out and I'd been to the place previously, I didn't
realize it was the same location until we got there.
I got several games for my Wii through Sarah's connections including
Wii Play and
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. We played both of them and I thought
Find Mii was especially fun.
Sarah's bunny is getting pretty big. Its been biting through wires now includig part way through the power cord to the cable box. You'd think after getting to the copper that it would learn to stop.
At any rate, it didn't hide any eggs. I don't have any new photos but you can see
the old bunny photos via my Vizicious
tool.
personal nontechnical seatle wii 2007 Mar 13, 8:16Over the weekend I went with Jon and Sarah to see
Zach Galifianakis perform at
The Moore who was awesome of
course. I hadn't been to The Moore before but it was very cool. The space is very vertical with two levels of balconies making it seem small in the other dimensions. We were on the middle level so
when Zach climbed off the stage to talk to the audience we couldn't see him.
Before the show we ate at
The Steelhead Diner. I enjoyed my chicken sandwhich but the place seemed a little full of itself with salt and pepper that had
been infused with this and that. At any rate it had a nice atmosphere and good food which I suppose is the point.
The opening act for Zach was another comedian whose name I don't recall. He was pretty funny but seemed to do just a tad too much pandering to the Seattle audience. "The administration should do
something different than what they're doing currently!" *Audience Cheers* is sort of equivalent to "Its great to be here in... Seattle!" *Audience Cheers*.
personal seattle nontechnical 2004 Apr 22, 3:52I actually have something to say which I thought would be appropriate for the LiveJournal format. Why I haven't posted to the LiveJournal for such a great length of time can be saved for later. I
spent Easter weekend and the Monday following, in Washington, the state. Microsoft paid for me to fly up and stay in Washington so I could do the technical portion of the interview with them. I hung
out with my friend Jeannie and she showed me all around Seattle on Saturday and Sunday. Each night we had somewhat expensive dinners, all paid for by Microsoft. It was cool. On Sunday I stayed at a
nice hotel in Redmond and the next morning I spent just short of eight hours being interviewed by five different people from different groups within Microsoft. Each sub interview consisted of two
portions. First there was the general portion where they would ask me why I wanted to work there, ask about my previous experience, and those sort of non technical questions. The second portion would
take the majority of the time and it would be me trying to solve some technical problem they'd present. By the end of the interview my hands were gray with dry erase marker ink because apparently
everybody's got a whiteboard and they all want me to write code on them. I have to go to class soon and I might post some more stories related to this trip, but mostly I wanted to say that last week
I received a great offer from them and I'll probably be moving up to Washington sometime (weeks or months?) after graduation. Also, I've changed my AIM name from SequelGuy to SequelDave. My email
address will also have to change soon, but I don't know to what it will change.
2003 Mar 1, 5:22Today will produce the Mardi Gras parade in my town. I haven't been the previous two years, but I'm considering it this time around. San Luis Obispo, as a college town, contains many teens and young
adults who enjoy occasional festivities accompanied with inebriation. San Luis Obispo, as relatively cheap beach front or at least near beach property, contains many vacationing elderly. As we all
know, voting increases proportionally with age and, as such, any person under the age of thirty in public after dark is arrested. Mardi Gras is yet another of the bouts in the battle between the
Youngsters and the Old-timers in the SLO ring. I will be very happy when this quarter is over. Chemistry may yet have a happy ending, but I don't know that Technical Writing can. I don't believe any
grade in that class would make me think, "I'm glad I spent all those weekends working on that report". The quarter's end will also mean I can devote some time to my attention starved
Polytope Tetris project. As a side note, I was tempted to, yet again, not write in the journal on account of my poor attitude tonight. However, a journal
of one entry does seems a bit slim.
Fast
Pedestrian Crossing on Four Way Stops. In college I didn't have a car and every weekend I had weekly poker with friends who lived nearby so I would end up waiting to cross from one corner of a
traffic lit four way stop to the opposite corner. Waiting there in the cold gave me plenty of time to consider the fastest method of getting to the opposite corner of a four-way stop. My plan was
to hit the pedestrian crossing button for both directions and travel on the first one available. This only seems like a bad choice if the pedestrian crossing signal travels clockwise or counter
clockwise around the four way stop. In those two cases its better to take the later of the two pedestrian signal crossings, but I have yet to see those two patterns on a real life traffic stop. I
decided recently to see if my plan was actually sound and looked up info on traffic signals. But the info
didn't say much other than "its complicated" and "it depends" (I'm paraphrasing). Then I found some guy's analysis of this problem. So I'm done with this and I'll continue pressing both
buttons and crossing on the first pedestrian signal. Incidentally on one such night when I was waiting to cross this intersection I heard a loud multi-click sound and realized that the woman in the
SUV waiting to cross the intersection next to me had just locked her doors. I guess my thinking-about-crossing-the-street face is intimidating.
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