A day of (nerdy) quotes

Posted on February 28, 2007 by Mike

“Web two-point-next”
“…most CMS tools and online advertising companies are spewing out code that would make Netscape 3 proud.”
Ethan Marcotte – Where Our Standards Went Wrong

“Give someone a fish and theyâ€™ll think youâ€™re a bit of weirdo; teach someone how to fish and theyâ€™ll wonder what fishing has got to do with web design.”
“The danger is that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Jeremy Keith – Interview

“Use tabs not spaces. Why would anyone be so foolish as to suggest any different?”
Robin Parmar – Tabs Versus Spaces

Official Letters Come in Small Envelopes

Posted on February 27, 2007 by Jules

(Mike made me include a picture. Apparently he deems my posts too pictureless. And I do believe this picture of the envelope is larger than the envelope itself)

Yay! I finally received my letter from the department of Plant Biology at Berkeley! I’ve been looking in my mailbox every single day for the past week and a half to no avail. But today, I opened my mailbox, and there was a little envelope from the PMB department. Now, if I hadn’t been contacted by the admissions professor beforehand, I would have assumed this was a rejection. Yay yay yay~!!!!! I’m so excited. And this time around, I don’t even have to pay for tuition, and they are paying me a stipend to do something I really want to do. How completely awesome is that???!!!

Now just waiting for the acceptance letter from the University. This one I assume will come in a big envelope.

[out]

Video Editing

Posted on February 26, 2007 by Mike

I made that short video last night and it took so long to edit that I didn’t even want to finish it. But I thought it was off to a good start.

Click-click-click

Posted on February 25, 2007 by Mike

My turn signal light burned out in my Jeep a couple of weekends ago. I didn’t know it had burned out at first. All I knew is that the turn signal light on my dashboard would stay on all the time, and if I wanted to turn right, the signal would click twice as fast as usual. Also, after going a mile or two on the freeway my dashboard would start beeping. The same beep you get when you’re low on gas or there is some engine problem. Except this beep would just keep going. It was relentless. It would only go off if you signaled to turn. So I pulled off the road and inspected my Jeep. Sure enough, my right-front signal light was out. Shucks.

This weekend I popped the light fixture out to take a look and hopefully replace the light. Unfortunately I ran into somewhat of a problem.

Here’s the light in three pieces. The bulb part (to the left) broke off from the base (upper right). And The fixture that you plug the light into is also there (bottom).

A closer look at the fixture reveals a lot of corrosion (blue green) in the socket.

You can still see a little bit of water in the light housing. I actually poured about a half a cup of water out of it when I took it off the Jeep. I guess that’s a good indication of bad things whenever you’re dealing with electrical parts.

You can’t really tell from this picture but there was also water in the socket where you plug the light into the electrical system of the car. The plug part (not pictured and attached to the jeep) also had a bit of corrosion. So now what should I do? Take it to a dealership and try to get new parts? *sigh*

I also took a look at my other light, and while there’s some moisture in the housing, there certainly isn’t a pool of water in it. So I’m trying to figure out how all that water got into the housing. It’s either from a small crack near one of the screws (which I doubt) or from the socket, which had water in it. The working light didn’t have any water in this part.

Emergence Day

Posted on February 24, 2007 by Mike

My brother pointed me to an article yesterday depicting a huge sink hole. I don’t know the details, can’t read “Bakken kollapset og slukte hus” but that’s an emergence hole if I’ve ever seen one! Now where’s my chainsaw gun when I need it? There will be some locust slicing action in the near future!

In other gaming related news, Jules has taken to playing New Super Mario Bros. on the DS. And by ‘taken to’ I mean she occasionally makes the recognizable outcry that roughly translates to “I’ve died 10 times on this same part! !(*&#^!@(*&”

Good luck Jules, we’ve all been there.

Molecular Gastronomy

Posted on February 23, 2007 by Jules

I’ve always been a bit confused by the trendy term “molecular gastronomy” that is being tossed around like so much salt at trendy, contemporary restaurants such as El Bulli and Per Se. Molecular gastronomy as compared to… what? This term, coined by a professor who needed a catchier phrase for the science of food, is used to label the use of stabilizers, thickeners, gels, and modifiers to make our food “different”. That olive you eat is not an olive- ham foam- cheese air- solids that are liquidized and liquids that are solid- I suppose they want you to think about your food in a whole new existentialist light. It just feels rather gimmicky to me. How does this involve more molecular biology and chemistry than any of the “normal” cooking that occurs to warrant this pompous, vacuous term? To create foam? To make a gelatin gummy pea? How is that different and more elite than pouring a bowl of Jello? And applying the term molecular gastronomy to this whole endeaver of adding artifice to our foods… I might as well eat a raspberry gummy bear (made of apple, grape, and artificial flavors to simulate raspberry with not an iota of raspberry juice) and call it molecular gastronomy. Or eat some granola and extol the wonderful molecular gastronomy involved in sticking the oats together. Ths whole thing is rather silly. I think that the science of food is fascinating. But “molecular gastronomy” makes absolutely no sense to me… let’s just call it contemporary cuisine and I shall be a much happier soul.

New Zealand: Mauri Haka

Posted on February 23, 2007 by Mike

A long time ago when I was a wee youngin and still playing soccer in a league, I played against a team that did a dance before the game. At the time I thought it rather comical. I don’t remember what they did or what was said, but I don’t think it was anything like the Haka that the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, perform before every match.

My brother sent that video to me earlier today and said it reminded him of when he went to play soccer in New Zealand and Austrailia. Watching it I noticed a guy in an Adidas ‘film crew’ jacket, so I looked through the associated videos of the previous one and found this commercial, which uses footage from the dance in the video above.

Ubuntu

Posted on February 21, 2007 by Mike

Ubuntu Logo I installed Ubuntu a couple weekends ago to see what all the hoopla was about. I was unimpressed. I couldn’t even install a video driver. At first I tried the 32bit version, and then I thought, hey I have a 64bit processor, let’s try that out. My conclusion: no 64bit flash support. How can I live without flash videos?

So last weekend I was trying to install apache + php + mysql in windows and was having a hell of a time (3+ hours). I was having a bad enough time that I went out and bought an external HDD, moved all my valued files to it (pictures and videos), and reformatted. After that I reinstalled the 32bit version of Ubuntu and quickly installed apache + php + mysql with relatively little pain (10 min). And then after thinking about what a pain it would be to edit files in Photoshop (windows) and then code in Ubuntu, I tried installing apache + php + mysql again in windows. This time I had great success (<1 min). I used XAMPP just like I did the first 3+ hour time, except this time I used the “I want to start XAMPP without setup” technique which worked like a charm. I unzipped the files into c:/xampp and everything works. Now getting imagemagick to work on the other hand, has proven to be quite painful and I’ve switched to GD Library for now.

Anyway, today I stumbled upon Envy for Ubuntu which automatically installs and configures an up to date video driver for you. How cool is that?!? It also worked like a charm. So I’m proud to say that I’m posting from Ubuntu in full 1680×1050 resolution. Woo hoo!

And one last thing. When I reformatted XP I forgot that it doesn’t have a generic ethernet driver that works with my motherboard. So that meant no internet when I reformatted. That was awesome…….. However, I was able to boot up in Ubuntu and it had no problem using my ethernet port. So I downloaded the appropriate driver (nVidia nForce4), stashed it on my thumbdrive and transported it to XP. And Linux is supposed to have poor hardware support. Ha! HA I say!

Rock Climbing

Posted on February 19, 2007 by Jules

So today, Stanley, Mike, James, and my coworker Grace went to Ironworks for a fun day of indoor rock climbing. I straggled in later, having been guilted by James to show up because my coworker was there, while I was not. But it ended up being really fun.

First, I had to go through the belay test before I could use the ropes to climb up the walls. James, the expert of the group, took me through the basics, which I fumbled through. However, he neglected to tell me that when the test giver says, “Belay?”, I’m supposed to say, “Belay on!” or some such. So I just stared stupidly, and went, “uhhhh” as the test giver said that twice, and then james goes, “Oh, I forgot to tell you that part”. Gee, thanks >_> But all in all it was really fun. I only climbed walls between 5.5-5.8 difficulty though. Hopefully next time I go, I’ll get better. Weeeee to chalky hands! Next time I’m going to bring my camera so I can take lots of pictures of mike scaling the wall. *clicky clicky*

Riding and Talking

Posted on February 18, 2007 by Mike

It’s not hard to imagine that it would be difficult to communicate with others when you’re riding your motorcycle. The only time you can talk to someone else in your group is when you come to a stop somewhere. And who likes to stop when you’re riding a bike? Other forms of communication like hand signals and such really don’t convey such messages as “your turn signal is still on.” And looking for signals takes away from concentrating on the road.

So last month I bought two FireFox throat mics to go with my motorola walkie talkies. Throat mics work by transmitting the vibrations of speech straight from the throat, instead of capturing them after they leave the mouth. This cancels out any background noise (like loud motorcycle engines).

The mic comes with a remote PTT (push to talk) button and the mic itself. So when I’m wearing it I have my walkie talkie in my jacket pocket with the remote cord going up my sleeve and the button on the side of my index finger on my left hand. This makes it easy to push with my thumb when I want to say something.

So yesterday I went for a ride with my brother down the coast starting at ocean beach. We made it down to half moon bay before turning back. As you can imagine I was excited to use these mics for the first time. But of course as it turns out one was broken. *sigh* So after the ride I went back to REI and exchanged it for a working one. Can’t wait for my next ride.

.the gpb kids.

Monthly Archives: February 2007