gnuyen.org

11-25-05

We stayed at the Stratosphere because I like the rides and it was cheap. Plus I like the Blackjack there, but have since discovered the rules at the Tropicana are a little more favorable.

11-24-05

Thanksgiving went pretty well. Major thanks to Kym who gave me ultra secret turkey tips.

In typical bachelor fashion, I had paper towels for napkins, so my mom made my little brother fold them into little squares. They were actually much easier to use like that, so I guess there was a point.

11-23-05

Waited 45 minutes for a table at Sam Woo. Totally not worth it.

11-22-05

11-21-05

Danny Silverman says any blog post that beings with “I know I haven’t updated in a while” is already in trouble, so I won’t do that.

I’ve had a lot of things I’ve wanted to put up here, but haven’t because of the high geek factor. I think I’m going to have to use the categories, and hide the geek stuff from the front page.

In order to force myself to produce content for this site, starting today I’m implementing a new policy. Every day I intend to upload an image taken that day of something and write a caption for it. This will solve the whole, “writing is hard” problem, and hopefully will result in a journal of sorts. Here’s the first one to start it off:
11-20-05

I spent some time yesterday integrating gallery into wordpress so people could browse my daily images in a format more conducive to image browsing, and to give me a better interface for uploading. The idea is to have entries automatically appear when things are uploaded to that album. I had this idea before, for photoblogging with my cell phone, but cell phone cameras are so pathetically optically challenged, that it’s just not satisfying to use them.

Yesterday I had a mini UFC party to watch the ppv. It was totally a bunch of pathetic fights, don’t pick up the second showing. I did manage to catch Harry Potter: The Goblet of Fire on friday, and it was phenomenal. I really wish they’d keep Mike Newell on for the rest of the films.

Pets/Patches

Pets/merlin/

Looking for solutions in the aforementioned bug war, Scott suggested the Fool-A-Bug anti bug bowl.

This bowl is up on posts, and would require an ant to do some crazy gymnastics to get the food.

The bowl worked remarkably well; the ants never got into his food after that. Unfortunately, the ants were still EVERYWHERE so the problem wasn’t solved. My solution?

One quick call and the next day I couldn’t find a single ant.

The empire struck back a few days later however. Though the Ant Kingdom was in ruins, their enemies, the Spiders, without a foe, struck my camp. Toki was bit by some kind of spider or bug in the face. His face ballooned up, and I had to take him to the vet.

This is him all puffed up

This is what he usually looks like

I called Orkin back up and had them come in and do spiders (this is included for free with my previous service). Hopefully that is the end of that.

95% moved. Still have the fridge and the garage to contend with, as well as cleaning. The new house is a complete mess, but somehow I managed to setup my dvd player and surround sound receiver to watch DVDs. As opposed to finishing moving.

The cable guys came on Wednesday, from 3:30pm-7:00pm. I had them recable the whole house, and I tipped them (bribed them?) some money to lay cat 5 networking cable while they were crawling under the house. As a result, I have wire going to every room, in addition to my wireless network. The internet didn’t work so they had to come back the next day to remove a filter from a pole 1/4 of a mile away.

The ants are here in full force. I can’t put Toki’s food down without the ants getting everywhere. They’re incredibly efficient and wonderfully adapted creatures. With monsanto’s help, I am attempting to destroy them. If they aren’t gone by next monday, I’ll have the landlord call an exterminator.

Driver Ants are large and can be dangerous, they swarm severely, attacking openings in prey including nose, mouth and ears. They group together and sweep the forest floor in columns of up to 22 million, feeding on other insects as well as small mammals. They are the only ant known to attack people with the intention of food. Some people, generally young or infirm, have been unable to evade the ants and have died from suffocation.

I just signed a lease on a new place in Anaheim, off Katella and Euclid.




It’s more money per month than I’d like to admit, but has a huge backyard for Toki.

Post move in BBQ? Maybe…

Today I registered both my vehicles at AAA. Turns out my truck had $490.00 worth of parking fines attached to it. Damned street sweeping. That’s about what I paid for the Mazda!

Struck with a bout of insomnia, I rode out to Mae’s Cafe in Garden Grove. It was surprisingly crowded at 2:30am. I looked around at the customers and workers and I noticed an interesting “coincidence”

It seems all the servers were middle aged/older white ladies, and all the bus boys and cooks were Mexican guys.

Odder still, all the customers were Asian, mostly Vietnamese I think. I tried to think of all the ways this could have happened but decided all possible explanations pointed to a breakdown in the system. Segregation was deprecated as our system long ago, but something went terribly wrong.

I don’t think this is what MLK had in mind.

I signed up with Blockbuster Online. I haven’t figured out if they’re evil for essentially copying netflix and trying to put them out of business by undercutting them, or if that’s just the free market. All I know, is I had a netflix account for a year and a half, and they raised the prices on me so I quit. I don’t think they would have raised their prices if they had had the competition they have today. The funny thing is, I had it for one and a half years, and I had the same 3 dvds they initially shipped. I’d probably have never quit if it wasn’t for their greed.

Anyway, I’ve been watching a lot of movies I probably would never actively pay money for with this new all you can eat movie system.

I like the service a lot; especially since at my new apartment it’s a lot easier to send outgoing mail.

I wish I could put my history and / or queue on this website fed through some sort of RSS feed, but they don’t have that functionality. I sent them a note requesting that feature; I doubt it’ll go anywhere.

If there are any movies you think I must see, go ahead and drop me a a comment.

At the National War Museum in Tokyo, Japan, you’ll find this display:

Apparently, according to the text in the museum, the Japanese “expanded their defensive concerns” into Korea, helped “establish order and control” in China, and then were “forced into war” by the war-hungry American government.

Either Japan rewrote history, or my 10th grade history book, China, Korea, and the Nazi’s did.

Okay, so the JWZ thing really bugs me. Bugging me to the point of “Desktop Linux is Dead” level of bugging me. It doesn’t help that Danny Silverman wants to get rid of all linux on the desktop as well. Nor does it help that I bought an iMac for Final Cut Pro, introducing the first non linux OS to my computer usage in years.

But the fact remains, I actually think Mac OS X is sluggish and retarded in many ways. The DVD player is atrocious. It seems ridiculous to me that in order to do a lot of little things you have to pay $15 bucks for some application written by some guy which will probably be abandonware in a year, and basic upgrades to the OS cost $150. Or you can do a lot of piracy. The Dock is really really dumb. Task switching in OS X is dumb. No SFTP support in the finder. Quicktime Player is one of the worst things ever. iTunes is cludgy for music playback and doesn’t play ogg. iDVD crashes like a son of a gun constantly. The System Preferences panel is ridiculously organized. I can’t figure out a way to turn off the screen or blank it without suspending the damn machine because it doesn’t seem to have a simple “blank” screensaver.

The good things about OS X are, expose (!!!!), zero hardware configuration, I never have to open up vi for anything, iTunes for CD ripping and mp3 organization and burning, a reasonable way to actually backup video dvds, the iLife suite existing even if it crashes, and the finder is pretty damned awesome. None of these would justify owning one for me due to the high prices and lack of hardware compatibility. What would (and did) is Final Cut Studio. It is unrivaled in feature set and usability. It is the only reason I own a mac.

More later.

So JWZ switched to Mac. That’s got to be a bad sign. If an ubergeek like JWZ can’t make linux work, we’re in big trouble. He’s been using Unix since FOREVER.

So in keeping with my new musical mood, I recently aquired some nice computer speakers and a pro set of headphones.

The speakers are the Klipsch Promedia 2.1 THX certified computer speaker system. These bad boys have gotten awesome reviews everywhere and are well deserving of the praise. The subwoofer is capable of neighbor destroying tight bass, and the satellites bring a depth to music that my old speakers just wouldn’t deliver. When I plug my pro headphones into the headphone jack of the speakerset however, there is a slight hiss, which makes the headphone jack somewhat useless. Maybe ne day I will have a 5.1 system attached to my computer for gaming or dvds, but these are great for listening to music.

The headphones I got are the Sennheiser Pro 280HD closed headphone set. I know open headphones are superior to closed ones, but the apartment walls here are pretty thin, and I needed to be able to isolate the sound. These headphones are perfect for that. The point of getting these pro series headphones is for mastering and doing audio editing, but music doesn’t sound half bad through them either. They’re were designed to send the audio through without any enhancement and do this job fairly well. There are better headphones out there, but these are great for the price.

As an aside, “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera is my current favorite song, if not simply because the recording is so awesomely mastered.

I’ve lately been in a music appreciative mood. My collection of music isn’t fantastic, and I was wanting to add songs to it. Going out and finding a CD store that’s open at 3am is sort of a drag, plus with the cool new interweb thing it ought to be a cinch to buy music online. Well there’s option 1, the itunes music store. Here you get a lossy compressed single track of audio of 128bit AAC goodness. Forgetting for a moment that I’d have to transcode to get it to play on my mp3 player, this piece of music that you’ve “bought” can only be played on devices that apple wants you to be able to play it on. Contrast that with buying a CD, where you get uncompressed audio with pretty much no fair use restrictions at all.

So the ideal situation would be buying a CD on line and having them ship it to you and simultaneously allowing you to download digital versions of it. The ideal would probably mp3s, since they play in anything, but I’d even be happy with DRM encumbered files as long as I could play them until the CD arrived. This way, I still have to buy albums instead of single tracks, much to the delight of the RIAA, and I can impulse buy CDs. Seems great for the recording industry and artists, and it allows me to my music instantaneously. Some pioneering company should do this and make a gazillion dollars.

Oh wait, a company tried that and got sued for $118 million dollars for willful infringement of copyright. Not because anyone was getting music that they didn’t have the right to, but because mp3.com had a business model that threatened the stranglehold the RIAA had on the recording industry. So now I can’t give record companies my money to buy their albums without driving to the store during it’s opening hours.

Yet another example of how copyright needs to be updated for modern times.