| Friday, October 24th, 2008 |
| 5:02 pm |
super pumped
I'm going to see Paul Zaloom's puppet show tonight. http://www.hobt.org/visiting/zaloom08.htmlThe first time I saw one of his shows was with an uptight girl who didn't appreciate some of the adult material. This time I found a potty mouth to go with so things should be ok. |
| Thursday, July 31st, 2008 |
| 5:07 pm |
Good News!!
It's no Geico, but I just saved about $1000 on my health insurance. Instead of going through my last company's COBRA I'm getting Instacare for $50 a month. Its like the Ramen of health insurance. I can only use it for 90 days, but I think I should switch to something with slightly better coverage. Getting new health insurance is the most annoying part about changing jobs. |
| Monday, July 21st, 2008 |
| 12:06 pm |
a good bachelor meal
The Target deli near me sells a whole roast chicken for $5. I think it's a good deal. I usually bring it home and eat half with something complimentary like a bowl of cookie crisp. Breckenridge Vanilla Porter pairs well with this. |
| Friday, July 11th, 2008 |
| 9:39 am |
Atlas Shrugged vs Water for Elephants
I've been interested in checking out Ayn Rand for many years and I finally decided to read Atlas Shrugged. It took a while to read and felt like a chore about halfway through. A Reader's Digest condensed version would have been awesome. She had some good points about preferring self interest over altruism, but I think she goes a little overboard. In Atlas Shrugged most of the "heroes" act like a bunch of stubborn assholes. They never convincingly try to get other characters to understand their viewpoint and then they complain about how the rest of society is stealing their hard-earned productivity. Water for Elephants was a lot more enjoyable to read and kept me engaged the whole time. It was mainly flashbacks to a circus setting told by a guy in a nursing home. So it seemed kind of like a cross between Carnivale and Bubba Ho-Tep (unfortunately there were no supernatural elements...). I think this book is marketed to book clubs because my copy had a bunch of discussion group questions at the end. I wonder if book clubs really use those. I think I will try to find more of these club type books. |
| Sunday, June 8th, 2008 |
| 11:09 pm |
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| Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 |
| 10:57 pm |
My cool trip
I went to California for my friend Amber's wedding. I spent two days in Palo Alto and two days in San Francisco. I got to see all of my friends that were also out there, but it would have been cool to hang out a little more. I also saw some touristy things, but it would have been cool to see some more of those too. The Monteray Bay Aquarium was pretty awesome. I liked the kelp bed exhibit with all kinds of fish floating around. Also, giant tuna are pretty amazing. The drive there took up the whole day. On Monday I was going to check out a museum, but it was closed on Mondays. I drove up to San Francisco and found that most of their museums are also closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. I did get into the museum of cartoon art. It is an interesting idea, but I think they need an acquisition budget to round out the collection. Right now it has mainly donated works. One exhibit called Sex and Sensibility seemed more like an advertisement for a book of cartoons by the same name. The Museum of Modern Art was also cool. I liked seeing some things by the same artists that have works at the Walker. On Tuesday night I went to a club called Glass Kat for a bachata lesson. The instructor was from the Philippines and there was a woman from the Dominican Republic heckling him on how the dance was supposed to be done. That stuff always amuses me. |
| Sunday, October 21st, 2007 |
| 9:33 pm |
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| Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 |
| 11:25 pm |
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| Thursday, September 13th, 2007 |
| 11:05 pm |
Spacewar rises again
I've been motivated to work on my spacewar game some more. I am doing Ruby development work fulltime and it is a lot easier to work on Ruby by day and night instead of Java by day and Ruby by night. I just finished cleaning up all of the test cases. 100% of my test cases pass and I have 100% code coverage too. It's been a long time since I've worked on any project with 100% test coverage. It feels pretty cool. |
| Thursday, September 6th, 2007 |
| 10:51 pm |
New job
I started a new job a few weeks ago. It is in the USA and not China. I'm kind of bummed out about not going to China, but it was getting more complicated logistics wise. I realized I would be better off financially working here and taking long vacations than going there and working hard with tiny vacations. My new job is awesome. I am using Ruby on Rails to build a spiffy application. The business users are very happy that the application is getting built quickly. During my first week I cleaned up a bunch of failing tests (90% failing - I got it to 0%). Then I sped up the tests so everything runs in 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes. Next, I'm running a code coverage tool to make sure the tests cover all of our code. Right now we have about 60% coverage. |
| Thursday, August 9th, 2007 |
| 8:37 pm |
note on my windshield this morning:
My mom has cancer. For whatever reason, it bothers her very much when you park your car in front of our house. Quite frankly, we need her to focus on more than your car right now.
We know it's a public street and the rest of the arguments you may have... but there is, in Mom's defense, sufficient room to park on your side of the street.
Thanks for your consideration
Colleen
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| Sunday, August 5th, 2007 |
| 10:12 pm |
New slice
I got sick of all the limitations on my shared hosting plan so I bought a computer slice from slicehost.com. It's basically my own virtual computer hosted at a nice data center. I have full control over the system right down to root access. At $20 it is only $5 more per month than my shared account. But I'll be able to do a lot more with it: 1. Multiple ssh accounts if I want to give someone else access 2. Full control of svn so I can use ssh to access my repository 3. As many databases as I feel like setting up (and I can create my own database users) 4. About 5 GB more disk space and 80 GB more bandwidth per month 5. Install my own versions of software. 6. Have as many interactive sessions open at a time as I want (before I could only have 2) 7. Host as many subdomains and websites as I want to setup. 8. Setup regular cron jobs for system tasks. 9. Configure the system using standard Unix commands rather than some proprietary web interface. I think issue 5 and 6 pushed me over the edge. I've run into some differences between my laptop and my shared host. I'm not sure, but I think some of the issues are due to different versions of my software. And my host only allowed 2 interactive sessions at one time. That meant I could only have 1 terminal open when I deployed from my laptop to the server. Lame! I would have gone with something like this a long time ago, but most of the similar services make you pay at least $50 a month for puny specs. Slicehost seems to have decent hardware for my needs - and I can upgrade if I decide I want more power. So far I've spent a couple hours setting things up. It is cool to be a sys admin again. |
| Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 |
| 10:58 am |
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| Thursday, July 26th, 2007 |
| 10:57 pm |
No Harry Potter spoilers from me
Whenever I see people talking about the new DH I think that David Heinemeier Hansson just made some crazy new blog post... Anyway, I am trying to study for a job interview next week. They are flying me to Chicago so I think they take me semi-seriously. I also had a 4th interview last night and that company should be making their decision early next week too. I think in a few weeks I could be heading back to China. I'm starting to look forward to this more now that I have a better idea of what I might do once I get there. |
| Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 |
| 8:52 pm |
I've been back from China for almost 2 months. I'm still on the fence about going back. On one hand it was a lot of fun and very interesting (both the good and bad interesting). There were so many cool things to do and explore that I didn't get a chance to try. On the other hand many places are quite polluted and sometimes just a little too crowded. Also, I would have a moderate to severe drop in income. But maybe the US dollar and real estate market will continue to drop and I'll come back a super rich foreigner! One thing I worry about is getting spoiled by the low cost of certain things. I still miss hopping in a cab across town for just $3. I had a few interviews last week and they seemed interested in me. For one of the interviews I had 45 minutes to write a program that traverses a chess-board and figures out the optimal route. I solved it in about 30 minutes, but forgot to handle the edge case of a 30,000x30,000 square chessboard. Oops. Luckily, I realized the problem and came up with a fix to handle it, but I screwed up my initialization on an NxN array and ended up with the same size N one-dimensional array references N times. I was unable to find that newbie mistake until after my time ran out. ARGGH!!! I felt so cool at 28 minutes and then it all came crumbling down. |
| Sunday, June 24th, 2007 |
| 6:44 pm |
GI Joe toys
I'm sorting and cleaning out all my possessions and I'm trying to decide what to do with things like my old GI Joe toys. All of my GI Joe figures were lost to a poorly protected school project, but I still have a bunch of guns/accessories and some vehicles/outposts. Most of the vehicles have at least one missing or broken part. If I give them to goodwill they will probably just get trashed, but I don't feel like "giving" them to some toy dealer for just a couple bucks so they can scavenge spare parts. I don't know of anyone with appropriately aged kids, although it seems like many parents don't want their children playing with military toys anymore. |
| Friday, June 22nd, 2007 |
| 3:20 pm |
Smashed up car
On Tuesday morning I was still sleeping in that stage where I am half-aware of things happening around me. I heard a loud thumping noise and then a little bit of screeching tires. Hmmm, that sounded like an accident just outside my window. I wonder if my car is ok? Then I fell back to sleep. A few minutes later the doorbell rings and the policeman started knocking loudly on the door to tell me that my car has been hit. Since I'm obviously not at fault the other insurance is paying for everything. BUT... there has been a rash of accidents in Minneapolis so the only rentals available are cargo vans. That was super awesome because I rode my bike to pick it up and so I just put my bike in the back. And yesterday I hauled a bunch of stuff to goodwill and the garbage drop-off. They also gave me free gas for the inconvenience of having to drive a van. When I went back to switch out for a regular car they gave me a Chevy HHR. This vehicle looks like an SUV that got kneecapped. But it's all cool because I can put my bike in the back too. I'm hoping my car takes a while to get fixed so I can go on biking expeditions around town. When I go back to China I might sell my car. Then maybe when I come back I'll get a little wagony thing - maybe a Forester. They are so groovy! |
| Thursday, June 14th, 2007 |
| 11:50 am |
Best movie I found in China
DVDs in China are pretty cheap for some reason (hmm...). Many places sell them for about $1, but I only picked up a few. One of them was SARS War. The "premise" is that Thailand was the only country to keep SARS 4 from spreading inside their border. What is SARS 4? It is a virus that turns you into a homicidal zombie when you die! Predictably, a little bit of the bug gets in and the stage is set for mayhem and carnage. It was a pretty wacky movie with a fair amount of gore and a little less scary than Shaun of the Dead. |
| Sunday, June 10th, 2007 |
| 1:23 pm |
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| Saturday, May 12th, 2007 |
| 1:31 am |
Almost out of China
Last week I went to Beijing to check it out as part of the required tourist duties when in China. Last week was also Chinese Labor Day Week. This means other Chinese people also visit Beijing that week. Beijing is big and Tiananmen Square can hold 1 million people, but even a small fraction of 1 billion people was enough to crowd the whole city into epic levels only seen at state fairs and major sporting events in the US. I extended my stay a couple extra days into this week so that I could visit places without so many crowds. As I repacked my stuff in Beijing I felt like my trip is going fairly well all things considered. I brought just the right amount of shampoo and toothpaste from the US and am nearly out. Flying back from Beijing I had a little cold and my ears started to hurt as we were landing. I went to a doctor yesterday. The hospital was modern in many respects, but there were many Chinese influences. The pharmacy has two sections: Western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine. You have to pay 7 Yuan to see a doctor ($1 USD). Then it is kind of like a mechanic, or timeshare operation, or something where the doctor upsells treatments to you. I found out I have holes in both ear drums and can't fly back to the US for at least 2 more weeks. This would be cool, except I am running out of shampoo and toothpaste. |
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