The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for 2005
I haven’t actively pursued any Bay Area jobs… on purpose. I want to go and “see what happens”… “let the cards fall where they may”…. da da da…
I am all abuzz happy-like. I just got a tentative job offer from a company that I think would be great to work for! I’ve got an interview in New York City on Friday for this Bay Area job.
More as things develop….
My sides are hurting. Really. Oh my god those are funny!
Thank TJIC for the pointer.
In celebration of me upping my web hosting plan with Spenix, I present to you two videos that make me smile very very much.
A British Volkswagen advertisement for “The new Golf GTI. The original, updated.” It features Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain… updated. (5.6 megabytes)
An advertisement for DC Shoes, “March Madness at the DC Training Facility” wherein the improbable is commonplace. (8.6 megabytes)
Hint: I usually prefer to right-click save-link-as and then play the video full-screen. The resolution isn’t as tight but I can’t stand trying to watch postage-stamp sized video when I’ve got a 19″ monitor in front of me.
And of course, downloads of these files are going to blow my additional 10 gig of transfers/month in no time…. but hey!
Wow. 
When I went looking for a newspaper to find an apartment in the Bay Area, I came up extremely short. Newspaper listings were very slim and the ones that were in the paper didn’t look very good. That is when I realized that, in the Bay Area, print is dead.
If you want to find a job, a place to live, a relationship, a couch, most things… you go to Craigslist.
Now, taking this whole inter-web thing one logical step further: www.housingmaps.com
It’s amazing. It’s easy to use. It’s…. obvious. After years of nobody thinking to put all these kinds of elements together, this match is (in hindsight) perfectly obvious and perfectly terrific.
The days of print classifieds for a variety of items are numbered.
Is 
it live or Memorex?
This guy created some amazing CGI/real-life crossover images. He says, “…and anyone with a camera and a relativly fast computer can make this.”
I almost believe him. It’s still astounding that some guy with a computer and a little drive can make these images, which are more realistic than the best movie special effects from 5 years ago.
He goes on to mention
All you need is:
A digital camera
A reflective sphere (which you see in a few photos) to capture the lighting of the real-life scene which you want to composite your model into.
A small program called HDRShop.
Big program called 3D Studio Max.
and finally you need a good renderer such as VRay.
Then of course you need the tools to get HL2 models into 3dsmax: GFScape, a HL2 Model importer, and a texuture and model converter
(He neglects to mention the approximate $5k price tage of the software, but hey)
You 
know the cliché, “Hindsight is always 20/20”. Well, I should have realized that Panther Valley wasn’t the place for me as soon as I read the Rules for living here.
There are 15 numbered and 24 blue Roman Numeraled pages of rules to living in this place. The rules cover all the mundanity… everything from “burning of rubbish on Common Property is prohibited” to “no poultry of any kind shall be raised, bred or kept on any lot”. I’ve got no problem with any of the rules… well, some of them irk me a little but I realize that sometimes sacrifices for the common peace make for a better society.
The thing that should have told me to leave was how they started this manifesto. They could have opened with parking regulations, or noise ordinances, or garbage guidelines. But no. They opened with shit.
1. Defecation in the open by dogs and other animal pets shall be immediately removed and disposed of at the residence of the person owning, keeping, harboring or in control of such animals. Burying of pet fecal matter anywhere within Panther Valley is strictly prohibied.
I have no problem at all with this rule. Actually, I’m pretty much in favor of it. It’s just that…. they opened with…. shit. Or more precisely, “shitting”. Take a look at how the sentence reads. Putting that passive verb at the start of the sentence there is just a bit out of place. I’m convinced that they worked hard to intentionally phrase that so the word “defecation” would sit there at the top of the page.
Now, the rules aren’t really put in any purposeful order but we all know that the first things on any list are the ones you are going to remember the most. Why didn’t they put the more serious rule about firing weapons (not allowed!), or loitering, or poultry first? Obviously, the most important thing in Panther Valley is controlling and retaining shit. Isn’t there some Freudian archetype concering this?
I’m just not down with an organization who’s guiding principles put anal retentiveness at the top of the priority list.
Village III, Rule XI: Ball playing and group games shall not be permitted on all roadways and common property.
What the frig, man?! Playing ball in the street is a mainstay of growing up in America! And I won’t hesitate to mention that Village III is consisted mostly of a group of 20 very quiet, dead-end streets linked together by 2 main streets.
Village IV, Rule Q: No immoral, improper, offensive of unlawful use shall be made of any Unit…
That last condition, “unlawful” is clear enough, but who defines those first three conditions? Hmmm. I’m not liking this. Happily, I live in Village III so I can be as immoral, improper, and offensive as I want to be! If I’m imaginative, I could work it so this clause cancels out the doggie doo clause. Think about it!
You can find the full set of Rules and Regulations on the PVPOA website.
Getting ready. The House is an absolute mess. I’ve been packing and packing and packing. When moving, there are just so many little things you have to do, especially for such a big move like this… I’m moving via UPS. I will pick something up, and realize that it has to be “acted upon”. Then I will be running around the house for half an hour trying to do the thing that I have to do with the thing. For example, I found a pile of tax records from 10 years ago; I can throw most of the stuff out but I had to sift through it and find stuff that would be best that I keep forever.
I found this huge trophy that I had won in 1983 and I didn’t have a box that was big enough for it. I was running all over the house trying to find a box big enough and would be in a proper category. It would not have been right for me to put it in the big box with all of my camping gear because my camping gear is going with me on my car trip. I can see it now: the little man with his outstretched torched pounded 18 inches upside down into the earth because I didn’t have room for tent stakes.
So there I was, standing in the middle of the room with boxes strewn about me, waving this trophy around shouting “where does this go?!” I finally decided to throw it out. But before I do, I have to take a picture of it. So of course that means I have to get out the camera and set up my mini photo studio with the lights and backdrop. It’s already mostly set up because I’ve been taking pictures of things to sell on eBay but argh!
I’m planning on leaving on the ninth and leaving about 10 days for travel cross country. It would be a five-day trip if I drove it straight.
It’s admirable that most email mailing list providers offer a double-opt-in system. That’s when you go to a web site, click on a link to subscribe to a mailing list and then you receive an email (the double part) verifying that you actually want to be subscribed.
Why is it that 80%+ of the email systems don’t have a double-opt-out system? The vast majority of the time, it’s even more shallow that. You click on a link in an email and it jumps to a page that reads simply, “You have been unsubscribed.”
Duh. What if I clicked on the link accidentally? What if I don’t want to unsubscribe but change my subscription? When I ran a large list, fully 10% of the requests I processed were address change requests. It is often a real pain to find the link to subscribe… such a pain that it’s not worth doing.
Well,
if I’m going on a cross country road-trip, I’ve got to have tunes. Along the way, there will be spots where geography and the laws of electromagnetic propogation will conspire to reduce my musical choices down to God fearin’ Radio and God Fearin’ radio. So I got me a Pioneer DEH-P6700MP CD receiver with MP3 / WMA playback with Organic EL display. It is so tech. I just hope the display doesn’t pull a Trapper Keeper on me.
Quickie review: It sounds -nice-. The tuner is a tiny bit better than the tuner in the stock radio. MP3s sound sweet. It sounds very “full”. I’m a little worried that I’ll blow out my speakers if I crank the bass too much; the factory sound system has something like 12 watts, now we’re cranking 40+.
I freaked out when I was driving home in the dark. The display kept inverting every 10 seconds… first white on black, then black on white. It was as if my (ficticious) little brother was sitting next to me and flicking on a flashlight every couple seconds. After 5 minutes of that, I was screaming at the radio, “Cut it out! You’re driving me crazy!” I vowed that if I couldn’t find a fix, I’d have to return the radio. It turns out that…
Demo Modes: This unit has a Reverse Demo Mode and a Feature Demo Mode. In Reverse Demo Mode, if you do not perform an operation for a period of 30 seconds, the display begins reversing colors. It continues reversing colors every 10 seconds until a button is pushed…
What the frig is that “demo mode” for? Whatever. I turned it off. Chalk up 1 “win” for the day.
Here is how to disable the annoying “Demo” mode
There is another demo mode by pushing “Memory 6”. Read the comments for more…
One problem down, one to go. I just have to figure out how to make the screen about 1/2 as bright at night and I’ll love this radio.
(actually, I’d -love- if it could do .ogg or .flac but I’ll live. It just takes 5 minutes to convert an entire CD from one format to another.
update: Here is the Operation Manual for the Pioneer DEHP6700MP. And here is the Installation Manual.
(this entry was originally written 5-14-05. It was updated on 12-31-05)
There is a pretty good fan-created Star Wars movie called Star Wars Revelations. They made the movie available in DVD format as a .torrent file. Their torrent tracker had been down for a few months starting in early May 2005 so I hosted the .torrent here. Their server is back up so I’ve stopped hosting.
The Revelations DVD and the behind the scenes DVD are available via Bittorrent on Lysator again.
My site served the Revelations .torrent file almost exactly 15,000 times from May-December 2005. If 10,000 copies of the video were created from this, then 34 terabytes were moved… virtually for free. Bittorrent works.I recommend the Azureus bittorrent client.