my geek life

Well, I didn’t get around to writing anything and I should be on the road right now, but I thought I would say a couple things. I’ve figured out that I was at Soquel for 28 days straight. I didn’t work a total of 2 days during that time. I just gotta say thanks to my friends that hung out before and after. Also, a special thanks to a couple friends that noticed when I was at my lowest during the event. You know who you are, J and J, thank you so so much. That’s it for now, gotta hit the road and get back up there to finish packing gear up and then head back to Oakhurst.

cheers!

Well, it was that time again. Upgraded my blog software. Security updates, bug fixes, and all that jazz. I also took the time to upgrade my sidebar to the new dynamic blocks. Basically, nothing changed as far as you can tell without comparing code. So boring, blah blah blah.

Happy news! The upgrade fixed the problems I was having adding pictures to my posts. So, I should be able to do “daily” pictures more often.

Twitter evidently picked the same night to do upgrades. They’ve been down for a while now. Hope they come back before morning.

Update on what I’m doing this week. Just programming a Point-Of-Sale app that hopefully I can get finished quickly. For the geeks, I’m doing it in XUL with RoR serving up the webservices.

Last week/weekend at PUC–for graduation–went great. I got to see quite a few friends and make some new ones. Stayed up till 5 one morning playing video games and watching a dumb/frustrating movie, while hanging with friends that were guarding our sound system. Setup was quite easy and it ran smoothly. Set up and tear down was on quite hot days, however. When we were tearing down, we had to stop every half hour or less and drink a lot of water. Someone had left behind Red Hots; so, that helped re-energize us as well. We packed all our gear after grad and made it over to Soquel that night. Dropped off all our gear and finally headed home on Monday.

This week I’m calling the Hobbs’ house home and this weekend I’m headed over to the Curtis’. Then I think I’m back here for a few days and on Thursday we are all headed back to Soquel with more gear and will be there for about 4-5 weeks. Hmm, since I’ll be there so long, I might actually visit the boardwalk. I’ve never actually been there in season. Well, I should get som sleep.

cheers!

I’m going post and picture crazy! Back on April 19th, we did some hazard burning at Jim’s place. This is something I’ve never done before, so I decided I would mention it. For those that it has been a regular part of life, ignore me. I got a kick out of it. I was dragging branches and across the property using the lawn mower. Cutting them up with a chainsaw and burning ’em. I actually was dragging branches for most of the day before as well. It’s hard to believe that all the stuff we put on that fire burned down into that pile of ashes. Fire is pretty amazing. Well, once we finished, we decided that since we had a fire, we needed s’mores. So I’ve included a couple pictures of roasting marshmallows and a s’more that I made. Well, tons of fun for a “city boy”.

cheers!

I just decided that I shouldn’t wait as long as last time to post. So here’s what I’ve been up to: programming. Yup; that’s pretty much it. I spent the last weekend and week at my grandparents place–they rock!–just programming. I’m working on a point-of-sale system for campmeeting and got surprisingly far. I must hand it to the guys that developed Rails. It makes programming so much easier.

So, enough geeky stuff for now. I did take a little bit of time out to watch a couple movies with my grandparents. The first was Bonhoffer. Incredible story, but it seemed very abbreviated and you didn’t get to see much of what he actually did before being imprisoned. The other one that I can remember seeing was “Hello Dolly!”. I gotta say that I love Barbra Streisand in that movie. The other movie I love her in is “What’s Up Doc?” She plays a similar character in both movies that is just so much fun to watch.

Well, hopefully I can get some relaxing done this weekend, but I kinda doubt it. I haven’t been here in about a month and probably most people forgot that this is my home base. For that matter, I almost forgot. I hope all things are well with you, be you family, friend or stranger.

cheers!

So … it’s been a long time since I posted anything. I’ve been on the road a lot and gone whole weekends without full net access. Since my last post I have gotten a Blackberry 8703e phone which has enabled me to keep in touch with some via IM, but other than that, I’ve done very little interacting with the web. I’ve been really busy and away from home for almost a month now. Hmm … not sure if I can say that since I don’t even have a permanent residence at all. Just a warning, this post is going to be very stream of thought and most likely very random. Back to living quarters for now. I was living in my boss’s travel trailer since January. It was supposed to be shorter, but I’ve been holding out for a mobile home that is getting renovated right next door to where I work–when at home. (I just had to use the “–“, em dash, since I recently researched the proper usage. link
) Well, we started an installation job in Yountville, CA (that’s in the Napa valley) three weeks ago and … my temporary house got moved. My boss and I shared it for the first few weeks, but his family has joined him and I got the boot. Okay, that’s sounds harsher than it is. I knew from before we even started this job that I might be staying with some of the local church family. So now I’m staying with some of my boss’s friends. They are a wonderful family that have a very fast internet connection. Fine … fast downloads aside, I’ve enjoyedamazing food and hanging out with them has been fun. Back to lack of housing. The renovations on the place have been going on for well over a month and I’ve seen some of the improvements. I haven’t been back for a week and a half though. During the project in Yountville, I’ve visited my grandparents in Placerville twice and stayed with a very generous family back in Oakhurst once. So basically, I’m living out of my car since I don’t actually have a place to live. However, this doesn’t bother me. I’m not sure what the deal is. I should feel terribly awkward or something, but to me its just a fact of life. What would I do with a house? For the next 2-3 months I will be on the road 95% of the time, so what would be the point to paying rent? Might as well just stick with the storage unit. The time I do feel it is when I actually visit Oakhurst. I feel like I should have a place since I’m “home”. In some ways it makes me just want to avoid going there. It will be inevitable in 3 weeks when I have to go back to get some work done, but other than that, I’ve got plans any way. So, that’s the way it is right now.

Time for a new paragraph. I think I’ll describe a little about what I’ve been doing and what my job actually is right now. I’m helping install the new sound system in a church. This sounds a lot easier than it actually is. Its surprising how most tasks take longer than you would expect. I should already understand this from being a programmer, but I didn’t realize how much this translates into most kinds of projects. The first short week on the job we explored the options available for how to proceed with the installation. We also cut a few holes in ceilings and walls, good times! The next week found me mostly in the 2ft crawlspace pulling conduit in. Once in, then I had to get it mounted up and finishing touches on a corner done. That sounds like it should go fast, but it didn’t. For one, the first day I constantly fought claustrophobia, even though I don’t normally don’t get it. Here’s why: 1) I was in a small space that seemed even smaller because I had to make sure I didn’t step on the ceiling and go through. 2) I had to wear full coverage because of the insulation and it was warm already. 3) All I had for light was the headlamp. 4) I had to wear a breathing mask because of all the dust. Total) Small space, completely covered including nose and mouth, little light, and heat. I’m glad I had fire training, because that taught me how to fight panic and get past it. After the first day, I didn’t have to actively fight it, but I did have to make sure I didn’t overheat. This meant resting and not moving too fast. And that is why putting conduit in the roof was not just a one or two day job. While resting/waiting for conduit to be attached I enjoyed having my new Blackberry. Surfing the web and chatting is very relaxing. And yes, I was good. I didn’t rest more than I should have so that I could do those things. At any rate, week 3 was kinda short and involved installing the stage boxes–the in floor boxes that have the mic connections, etc. We also installed most of the conduit to those boxes. That brings us to this week. We’ve been finishing the conduits under the stage. And that’s the work story.

This post has now become too long and I should sleep. Although, I still wish I didn’t have too sleep. Its dreadfully inconvenient when you have to work all day. There’s not enough time to play in the evenings and still get a good night’s sleep. For those that have actually read the whole post, I feel sorry for you. I really do. I’ve tried to be as interesting as possible, but really, it’s a long post about a lot of stuff.

I also want to say sorry to my friends that I’ve been neglecting by not reading their blogs. I basically didn’t want to read them when I didn’t have time to comment. I’ve caught up on all of them tonight, but only commented on one (feel lucky(or cursed(or other)) kit). (I just got this sudden urge for crazy parenthesis nesting.) I will try to keep up now and you should be hearing more from me.

My plans for the next few weekends are to stay in Napa valley, visit grandparents and visit Oakhurst, in that order. Now that I’ve committed them by posting, they will probably change, but that is the plan for now.

cheers!

p.s. that seems like an abrupt ending, but everything else seems cheesy right now

I’m sure you’re wondering what in the world is that? Well, its a number that somehow makes it possible, or at least easier, to rip HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs to your computer so that you can watch them anywhere.

Here’s the story of how I came to writing this post. I received a tweet from Justine of tastyblogsnack.com that simply read “Poor Digg :(“. This piqued my interest so I promptly headed over to Digg and noticed that almost all the stories either mentioned HD-DVD, included the number above, or talked about boycotting Digg because of censorship. (Just for those that actually made it this far and can’t figure out how it can be a number, it is written in hex which is common on computers. Normally numbers are 0-9, well hex is 0-F, 0123456789ABCDEF.) I followed a few of the links to figure out what was going on and also check slashdot. Sure enough, slashdot had a story, Censoring a Number, and earlier story about the number being released to the public. To Digg’s credit, they have decided to stop censoring and take the heat.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. (blog entry by Digg co-founder Kevin Rose)

This whole debacle just makes me wonder how long it is going to take the movie industry to realize what the music industry has just now started to get. Trying to protect the user from doing what they want with something they bought is hopeless. The music industry tried at one point to make it impossible to rip CDs so that you could put “your” music on your MP3 players, like the iPod. That failed miserably. You can do that and they now encourage it, begrudgingly. The movie industry tried to protect DVDs from getting ripped so you could keep them on your computer or put them on your iPod or other video devices. That failed miserably, but they still try to say it is illegal. Now they think that just because the disc can hold more information that they will succeed? It’s failing!!! Its being cracked and most people don’t even know about HD-DVD or Blu-ray, yet. Can someone please arrest the people at the MPAA and the heads of the movie companies for stupidity? For a while, people were happy with listening to their CDs on CD players. Then came along the MP3 players and they didn’t want to buy “their” album a second time. Along came portable video players and people don’t want to buy “their” video a second time to put it on the player. Now comes along better quality video and they think they can go against the flow? It ain’t happenin’.

After all this depressing stuff, there is a bright light. EMI dared to partner up with Apple and possibly Microsoft to offer better quality and unlocked music files for sale. This means that, one person can buy it and share it with the whole world. Or, it means that I will finally buy some albums I want because I know that I can still play the files in 5, 10, 15 years when the tech world changes so rapidly. I can’t wait until this finally gets implemented. It should be this month sometime. With that ray of hope, I bid you adieu.

cheers!

[UPDATE: 05-02-2007 12:19 AM]
Wired has a good writeup,
The New HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Hack: What It Might Mean For Us