Kikkoman

Election night I got home early-ish to watch the returns. While a great night overall, it started out slow. That and I wanted to play Little Big Planet.

So I’ve made the first “productive” use of any of my TV’s Picture-in-Picture capabilities; news talking heads in a small picture and Little Big Planet on the big screen. The trick was that the TV could output the sound from the “smaller” picture.

Watching Obama win stirred a combination of pride, excitement, and historical significance. The nature and strength of the emotions stirred was similar to the feelings I got from the Pathfinder landing and exploring Mars.

It was between my sophomore and junior years and college, and I was back on Guam for the summer. I remember being glued the computer, downloading the “live” images of Mars from NASA’s website over our piddly 56k modem. Truly amazing.

Both of those events made me proud of mankind, excited about the future, and awed at the accomplishment.

Inspired by this article from Lifehacker, I set about suspending the cable modem, router, switch, and printer adapter from the underside of my desk.

This also provides much better wireless coverage / speed for the first floor of the house.

Great quote from Wired about it implying that it would induce “retinal diabetes”.

It arrived out of the blockbuster queue and would have truly been un-watchable without the fast forward button.

Awesome book. Went from good to great to awesome. It’s right up there with “Snowcrash”, but with a better ending.

Has taken on a new meaning for me lately. It has transitioned from the scholastic to the “manual labor” front with two home improvement / repair projects recently.

First the “The Pheonix Shed”

During a “wind storm” one of the trees in my backyard split itself down the middle. It was an odd tree in that it had a single “main” trunk to to about 5 ft, and then split off in to three smaller trunks. One of the “trunks” fell down, and naturally it landed on the shed. The first couple of pictures show the damage.

In a weakened state the shed eventually fell over. Mainly due to the fact that it wasn’t on flat / level ground, as can be seen in the 4th photo. So the project was to build a foundation for it.

This was accomplished with some smal CMUs and backfill (bricks on sale from Lowe’s and bags of pebbles).

Once the foundation was done the Shed went back up without incident. I am actually rather impressed by the design of it, aka interchangability of all the pieces.

The second project is “Finishing the Garage”. We are still in the middle of it so no photos as of yet.

The project is to repair all the holes in the garage’s drywall, and paint it.

Shawna was having a fairly serious talk with the kids in the other room.   I was out messing  with my computer.  Later when it was over.

Shawna : “So did you hear the talk?”

Milo : “Yeah.”

Shawna : “And?”

Milo : “uhmm … It was very talky.”

Going to Guam for the races for two weeks soon. Work has settled down, its now getting house stuff straight so I can leave.

Got Kelly’s mac mini setup; cracked the case open and installed a 1 gig ram chip. Used, a bunch of laminated and plastic cards (library card, old ITunes gift card, etc) to get the lid off.

Finished God of War last week. Fanstastic game. I am hoping to catch 300 while in Guam, but it is probably no longer in theatres.

As part of our new product release celebration, my company took the dev and consulting teams out for some paintball. Very fun.

We played about 10 games of various styles and on various fields, but my favorite games were “Normandy” and “Trenches”, the notable feature of all of those games played on fields that offered lots of sneaking possibilities.

In the “Normandy” game, 6 guys were the Germans and were stationed up on top of the field with good cover. The rest of us, about 15, were the allies, and had to go up the hill.

“Trenches” was on a lovely field with lots of berms, trenches, trees, and undergrowth. That game I took out 3 or 4 players.

Overall tho, I think I only “survived” 2 of the 10 or so games.

We had a good crew this year.

What amused me, was the post Trick or Treating candy bargaining process. The kids dump out their take, do a quality check, and then begin trading. Eg, ‘I’ll trade you my chocolate tootsie rolls for your orange tootsie rolls’.

A css file that blocks adds in Safari

The awesome Firefox Flashblock extension and AdBlock

Normally I love chuckling at the absurdities of daily life, but this one is just stupid.

I switched from cable modem service and the cheap $15 a month Vonage service to DSL and a regular phone line which is $16.
Why? Well at this point I need unlimited local calling more than 500 mins long distance on Vonage, and I want a phone that works regardless of what the network is doing.

Unfortunatly, having been spoiled by Vonage for several years now, I didn’t realize that CallerId isn’t a “standard” feature, and we need CallerId. It is an extra $10 a month.
So at this point, the stupid “regular old phone line” ($16 + $10) now costs me more per month than the DSL ( $20 ). Which is just Absurd.

The net result is I am paying just as much as before but:

1. I get a “stable” phone line with unlimited local calling.
2. Any long distance we need to do will have to go on our cell phones, which most of it was anyways.
3. My downstream bandwith is the same, but I do get another 15 kB/s upstream, which is nice.

Amber (the cat) and I have reached an understanding. Shawna is usually the first one out in the morning and so I am the one that always has to kick the cat outside for the day. Half the time she wants to go out and is waiting by the door. 40% of the time I have to pick her up and take her out to the door, and once there she is happy to go out. 10% of the time tho, I have to chase her down and really boot her out.

Today, she was sitting on my desk when I was ready to go. And rather than pick her up and carry her to the door, I was able to communicate to her that it was time to go. I looked at her, she looked at me, I snapped my fingers loudly and pointed over to the front door, and she got it! She got up, trotted over to the door, and I let her out.

I imagine that there will still be some “bad hair” days where she doesn’t want to go outside, and where I will have to chase her down. But still, what a good cat.

Today I was the last guy on the plane. The absolute last guy on the plane. A first for me.

Btw, our kitty, Amber is wounded. It looks like she got bit by one of the other neighborhood cats (probably Lionel), and one of the bite marks got infected. We took her to the vet yesterday (Dilum’s wife Kristy), and she took care of her.

Amber had actually licked alot of the hair away from the wound site, and it had swollen up to about half the size of a ping pong ball. But because she is long haired and is constantly licking herself anyways, we didn’t notice.

She seems to have her energy back now (antibiotics twice a day), but is not a happy camper given that she has a plastic drainage tube stuck in her and has to wear the kitty cone for the next few days.

Update: 2-22-05 Kitty is fine, and doing well. Thanks to Robert for taking care of her while we were gone.

I should not be given two big shots of espresso at 3 pm ….

One from me and one from Shawna.

Me first. About a month ago we did a little weekend road trip to Corpus Cristy to go windsurfing with Dan Fernholtz. I was driving, Dan was in the front passenger seat, and Shawna was napping or watching Troy on the laptop in the backseat.

Between the road noise, big trucks, and movie it was hard to hear what Dan was saying. So rather than ask him to speak louder, I found myself inadvertently reaching for the volume knob on the car’s stereo (it was off), ostensibly to turn up his volume. Very wrong.

Shawna’s turn. We’ve been playing World of Warcraft since it came out. The key thing for this story, is that the game is primarily played in 3rd person. Most of the time your view is about 10 to 15 feet behind and above your character, but you can rotate and move your view using the mouse. This lets you look around corners and other obstacles for navigation and to avoid/find bad guys. Right click and drag the view around.

Two days ago, she had a meeting for work downtown on the UT campus, which is not an easy place to navigate. Apparently she found herself wanting to right-click and move her view so she could look around.

With the Stargates on hiatus till January, Shawna and I have been watching Lost and Battlestar Galactica.

We got into a bit of an argument over some of the plot points in Galactica that eventually had to be resolved by our good friend Google. (This was right after the election, and we where both feeling a bit punchy.)

Anyways, I just wanted to point out to the world that I have a girlfriend that will argue with me about Battlestar Galactica. HA! Nener nener nener!

I just got spam adverstising”A Genuine College Degree in 2 weeks !” to my Duke Alumni email address.

I recently switched from AT&T wireless to TMobile.

That left me with two nice but locked and useless phones, my old t68i and the ATT t226 replacement. I’d like to give one to my gf and one to my brother for them to use with prepaid cell plans.

So little little Googling and I found gsm-software.com, where I was able to purchase a cable and unlocking services. I accidentally blew a “credit” ($12) reading the codes off my t68i when I meant to unlock it, but oh well. The total cost ended up being about $60 for the cable and 2 unlocks. More than I wanted to spend but it was fun.

Given the success in unlocking my old phone (which would be ok if I broke), I decided to try unlocking my new Nokia 3650. Unlocking the 3650 was a joke: $5 and no cables needed. Very cool.

FYI, if you have a SonyEricsson you can check your firmware revision number by: Pressing >*<<*<*

The firmware on my t68i is old, but never gave me any problems: R3C001 (apps) & R1A (os). The latestest is something like R8C (apps) & R5 (os).

I decided against upgrading the firmware on the t68i as it works fine now, and would cost another $24.

The Gen X version of Popular Mechanics to come out soon?

I don’t think we are any less creative than our forefathers, its just that we play with different sets of legos.

For example, here is a nifty wireless web “hack”

Froogle now has its WML version. So next time when I am in a bookstore, I can point my phone’s browser to wml.froogle.com and compare price directly. It is so easy for books because I only need to input the ISBN number.

Muhahahaha!     No more buying stuff “in the dark”. Eg you spot something nice at Fry’s or Costco, now you can find out if it is really a good deal w/out leaving the store.