Wednesday May 07, 2008

Ferrite Male Build bitchin' battle armor and leave the seat warmer out? R would have never made this mistake. And there would have been plenty of cup holders to boot. ( May 07 2008, 12:49:07 AM PDT ) Permalink

Tuesday January 08, 2008

Stiletto 2

I listen to a lot of music. When I was younger I would listen to music while working but over the last decade or so I've found that difficult. Attention wonders with words, thoughts, rhyme, and rhythm. Recently I've found I'm able to work to house, trance, and symphonic music. Until I discovered that my mechanisms for listening to music have been focused on either going to shows or listening to music in the car. I don't tend to listen to music when hiking as I like listening to nature. With my newly rediscovered interest in listening to music while working I was stuck with an old 20 GB Zen stuffed with music from another era in my life, a Zune I picked up sometime ago that I never really liked, and a 80 GB IPod I inherited from a relative which I'm slowly putting interesting music on. Over the past few years I have gotten really use to having Sirius satellite radio in my car. Those drives along 50, 88, 95, or 395 contain a lot of dead spots for conventional radio. Just in time along comes the Stiletto 2 Sirius portable satellite receiver. So far due to a wee bit of snow I've spent the last few days mostly inside. But one of the cool thing about the Stiletto is that it has a wifi interface that allows for easy access to the Sirius Internet feeds. Now I can work, wonder around the house, run on the treadmill, and, after changing my wireless router, shovel and snowblow to the end of my driveway while listening to whatever makes me happy at the moment.

Now that I've made it sound perfect I should mention that I havn't really used it receiving from a satellite yet. I tried at one point while snow blowing at a relatives house but the trees, cloud and show cover appeared to be too much. I really don't like the power indicator. Its a simple bar style indicator. What I really want to know is how much more time I can listen. The Stiletto will recharge via its USB connection but thats slower then slow. Even if its powered off that can still take a significant portion of the day. It recharges quickly via a power plug but usb cables are so much easier to carry around. I think it also uses a fair bit of energy while on standby (paused). Maybe thats the wifi? If you look at the list of stations when receiving from the satellite you will see the current song or program. But when receiving over the Internet you don't. Thats lame. Even lamer although expected in our current RIAA slavery you can't time shift off of the Internet stream. ( Jan 08 2008, 09:20:52 PM PST ) Permalink

Sunday January 06, 2008

memories AND adventure

There are many reasons to like music. I often see it as fleeting. As soon as a note is played it is over. A Phil Lesh quote would suggest that he and Jerry Garcia would have agreed:

Jerry put it the best, as he frequently did: ‘Let ‘em have it. When we play it, we’re done with it.’

The other day I was walking out of a Van Morrison concert at the Grand Sierra Resort talking with a friend about the show. It was the first time that either of us had see Van Morrison and while we had both enjoyed the show we were amused at the "curtness" of the show. The set started and songs came fast and furious and then Van walked off the stage with no encore. As we stood outside of the venue (inside the GSR) waiting for some friends we started chatting with another concert attendee. She was really disturbed with the show. Van hadn't played much that she had known and she had listened to all his recordings. My friend and I commiserated with her for a few moments and then moved on. At first I had been a little startled by our acquaintances reaction but then I realized that she saw live music as a way to retrieve memories where as I saw it as adventure. I have a pretty extensive collection of live and studio recordings. I see about 25 live shows a year. I don't want to hear what I can hear at home. I want/hope/expect that the band paints a sonic landscape that is another step beyond that which I've already heard.

I got a Stiletto 2 recently. That has reopened my interest in listening to varying types of music. My current presets include: 17 (Jam_ON), 19 (Classic Hard Rock), 20 (Pure Hard Rock), 27 (Heavy Metal), 28 (Faction; Punk, Hip-Hop, Hard Rock), 29 (Punk), 32 (Grateful Dead), 33 (Trance), 63 (Outlaw Country), 65 (Bluegrass), and 80 (Symphony). When I first started listening to Sirius in my car I had a limited number of presets and felt that the music silos were limiting. One of the things I liked about radio as a kid is that you were exposed to music you didn't know. Looking through this list I can see a lot of memories (I just shoveled my upper deck to 19 listening to nothing less then a decade old) but I hope I don't ever end up in my friend aboves state of never looking for the adventure in music. ( Jan 06 2008, 07:05:12 PM PST ) Permalink

why There are many reasons to live here. Even with all the hard work days like today are one of them.

( Jan 06 2008, 06:19:00 PM PST ) Permalink

Saturday January 05, 2008

glad I don't have to drive This is the reason to keep up with your snow blowing (roughly 36 hours into this storm sequence). But a little snow blowing and shoveling and at least we won't have to work so hard tomorrow!

( Jan 05 2008, 07:04:37 PM PST ) Permalink

Thursday December 20, 2007

adjusting to the playing field If you coping strategy involves the use of drugs I can see allowing their use in competitive situations. Adjusting your brain chemistry to be something closer to optimal is something that you can do throughout your life unlike adding more time to every situation. Still, most of these chemicals have had very little real time in the market. Buyer should be careful. ( Dec 20 2007, 09:43:01 AM PST ) Permalink

Wednesday December 19, 2007

Leveling the playing field? I was recently talking with a neighbor who mentioned that his youngest child in college was getting extra time on tests due to his ADD. This was an attempt at "leveling the playing field". My first reaction was to wonder how many of the resumes I'd recently looked at included this bias. You don't get to dumb down the smart guys or slow down the fast guys or even the playing field in any business competition. I think helping students build coping skills in the real world especially before college makes a lot of sense. But college is a time of learning how to be independent and learning how to deal with the real world in a somewhat softer environment. Reducing the amount of competition seems like a poor tradeoff to me. I found a fewlinks which cover this issue. This article gave me a better feel for both sides of the issue. ( Dec 19 2007, 10:49:46 AM PST ) Permalink

Monday December 17, 2007

Security Feelgood? While ordering things for Christmas I had a few large items sent directly to the recipient. One vendor requested that I contact my credit card company to put an alternate address on file. Neither the vendor nor the credit card company seemed to be able to do much in support of this procedure other then to mutter "identify theft". Now, if I was going to steal using a credit card I would think having the items send to a residential address wouldn't be so smart. It leaves a pretty easy to follow trail and to do any real damage would mean a pattern of purchases that would be easy to detect. Does the public at large think this increases their security by the same amount that it costs the credit company and ultimately the consumer? ( Dec 17 2007, 04:13:55 PM PST ) Permalink

Monday December 10, 2007

quick My current project team conducted a two day intensive review. We have team members in Ireland, the east and west US coasts, and Beijing. Generally we use a combination of email, phone, and irc to make this all happen. For this review we used a morning component that including our developer in Ireland. I took notes during this part of the meeting using Sun's externally available wiki. We then spent the afternoon annotating those. While we slept in the pacific timezone we got comments from our engineers in China and our engineer in Ireland did some additional annotation. And then we repeated it all. I'm sure there are better integrated tools to achieve this type of collaboration but these simple ones worked well for us. ( Dec 10 2007, 02:31:38 PM PST ) Permalink

Sunday December 02, 2007

not a cribbage board... I went into the liquor store at the stop of Kingsbury grade this evening and saw a sign stating they had poker chips for rent. The hand written sign didn't state a price so I asked the attendant. He said $4 per night. He followed that up with a comment that they had requests over a period of time so they had brought in several sets for purchase. Those wouldn't stay on the shelves so they decided to rent instead. Not sure I quite follow that as this liquor store mostly services local vacation rentals so I'm pretty sure you could squeeze people for a lot more both on markup and rental fee. I commented that people were probably too lazy to just go down to the casino and buy some chips to use for the evening. He didn't seem to get it stating that sometimes casinos discontinue chips. ( Dec 02 2007, 09:56:26 PM PST ) Permalink

Saturday November 03, 2007

cool stuff inside only Kudos for driving the economies of scale and some neat concepts in software in producing a 200U$ computer. Thats a price point that people are comfortable buying game systems at. And even without MS there is an impressive amount of functionality in this box. But to really make this grab the consumer it is going to have to look a little better then a cheap whitebox. A PS3 or Mac Mini form factor would be orders of magnitude better. I'm sure the chicken and egg issues of creating a market and having the resources to do the miniaturization are part of the issue but given the already existing industry in mini-itx and like cases that the gamers and others like that seems like a weak decision. ( Nov 03 2007, 06:15:51 PM PDT ) Permalink

Online Attitude After having not played any online poker for months I played a few sessions lately. Low limit NLH ring games, PLO8 ring games, or NLH tournaments to get my feet wet and see how the environment has changed. One thing that hasn't changed is that people still act in ways they wouldn't in meatspace. Its amazing to me that you could get interested in a competition like poker in which you gain from your opponents mistakes and be unable to not lecture your opponents when they make a mistake. In an amusing moment I misclicked between two windows and an action intended for one game ended up in another and then I ended up sucking out. For whatever reason these are the only times I feel a little remorse. The rest of the suckouts are just part of the lack of complete information and chance in the game. But before I could say oops my opponent started "helping" me with my game. Remorse gone. ( Nov 03 2007, 05:32:03 PM PDT ) Permalink

Monday October 08, 2007

Panic Welcome I saw the 9/27-9/29 concerts at the Paramount in Oakland, CA. The Paramount is a beautiful venue and Panic turned out 3 different but very good shows. Given the recent changes in the band I was worried that the shows wouldn't have the typical panic variety but there were no overlaps between the three setlists. Hopefully Jimmy's comments are good for a while because I think this form of the band could become ever better as they spend more time playing together. I started seeing Widespread Panic on 9/20/91. They have often been the then song in the back of my mind that kept me sane during the tough moments. ( Oct 08 2007, 11:01:36 AM PDT ) Permalink

Wednesday June 27, 2007

best map so far This appears to be the best map so far of the fire area. Its dated as it appears a back burn turned on the fire fighters and crossed 89 yesterday threatening tallac village and the area towards Tahoe keys and Venice Dr. ( Jun 27 2007, 12:18:30 PM PDT ) Permalink

Monday June 25, 2007

Angora Ridge fire This map (credit to Chris for the pointer) gives some idea as to the area of the fire. My house is above Chris's 1500' in elevation or so we are also not currently threatened. dmorr points to a prettier although seemingly less (?) accurate graphic from his blog. Current numbers seem to be that earlier this evening containment was at 40% with ~200 structures destroyed. Weather reports have light SSW winds tomorrow. Lets hope this leads to further containment tomorrow and that those that have been made homeless can find shelter and help. ( Jun 25 2007, 10:09:44 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]