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Monday, June 29, 2009
a few things, related by the fact that they happened on the same day
Yesterday was Julie's birthday and to celebrate she wanted to catch a movie and have a nice lunch, out. Since we've had Zippy in our lives, we haven't had very many meals 'out', so the lunch was special, and the movie was a treat!
Lunch was at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Bellevue. It was delicious. I would go into more detail, but I would just end up gushing over the ribeye, which was entirely too much food for lunch, but totally awesome.
After lunch we went across the street, donned 3D specs (one side is linearly polarized, I think; is the other circularly polarized?), and watched Pixar's newest, Up, in 'Disney Digital 3D,' which, as far as I can tell, is the same as '3D,' but with a trademark attached to it. I felt the same way about Cars. I looked at the premise of the film, thought that it sounded kind of silly, and then completely fell in love with it during the first minute of its (short 1.5hr) running time. It was glorious and heartbreaking and I came out feeling both Uplifted (ha!) and manipulated. I could see the filmmakers laying out the timeline of the film and saying, "hmm, ok, we'll bring a tear to every eye in the theater... here, here, and here." And they did. Also, they had totally sweet cloud effects.
Quite a bit later, we were sitting down to dinner and popped season 2 of Extras into the DVD player. (quick aside: is it, like, totally lame to be watching things on DVD? is that akin to admitting to having a large collection of VHS? are all of The Kids These Days watching things on Blu-Ray or streaming it digitally or having it jacked, Matrix-style, into the back of their skulls?) I have a really hard time watching Ricky Gervais in either the Office or Extras. Not to say that he isn't completely brilliant, because he is. In fact, it's probably because he's so brilliant that he's so hard to watch. I feel like those shows, Extras even more than The Office, are the result of intensive scientific innovation. They are 200-proof distillations of squirm-inducing social awkwardness, served straight-up, without a chaser, by some sadistic bastard of a bartender. And, as Julie will attest, the shows drive me up the wall. I squirm. I writhe. I plead with the characters on the screen. I also laugh a lot because it's funny and, in a way, very real. And if you haven't seen David Bowie's appearance on the show, you owe it to yourself to watch. His singing, and Gervais' reactions, are perfect.
All in all, a satisfying day of being manipulated, once to cry, and once to squirm. A third time, if you count the huge steak still clogging my arteries with its buttery goodness, to overindulge.
Posted at 7:14:30 AM - link
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Last Weekend's 1337ness
Another weekend, another endless series of house-related tasks to do. Saturday was spent largely in the backyard mowing the lawn, committing mass moss murder, and blowing pine needles off of the roof. Then on Sunday I finished off the roof's pine needles, mowed the front lawn, and then practically killed myself trying to clean up all of the pine needles that had suddenly appeared on all sides of the house. I also had a lovely diversion on Sunday when the Mac OS X partition on my laptop ceased to function. Post mortem suggests a failed sector containing a key filesystem block. Time Machine saved me for a second time.
By 4pm on Sunday I was done with it all and, frankly, ready for an ale and some Xbox. But then I got to thinking. Ever since we'd moved up to Washington, we'd been using cable internet. Fast, sure but our primary machines had been connected through Wifi. And because, through tireless experimentation, mixed-mode B (for a couple of older machines) and G (for the rest) seemed to have wildly varying latency, we forced the whole network into 802.11b all-the-time. That meant that we weren't remotely approaching the proper utilization of our WAN link. In the apartment, it made sense to use Wifi. Who wanted the cables running from the living room, where the cable modem was, to the office? But in the house, why were we still wireless? I suppose that it was a combination of laziness and "oh, it's good enough." Sure, we couldn't stream Hulu to the office and turn around and stream it back to the Xbox. And WoW patches took, like, for-ev-er to download. But it was good enough. Right?
Wrong!
I made a quick list, got into some semblance of appropriate attire--turns out a sweatshirt in 70 degree Seattle weather made me stand out more than if I'd just stuck with the "I've been mowing my lawn" look--and hit the road. At Home Depot I grabbed a spool of Cat 5e cable, a crimper, some RJ-45 connectors, and a reasonably bright Mag-Lite (just another one of those things you forget you don't have in a new house); at Staples, a gigabit switch. Back at home I dumped out my loot and got to work.
The plan was to run a single link between the gigabit switch in the office to the 10/100 router in the living room. This would mean drilling some holes in both rooms, unspooling a length of the cable down one of the holes, attaching the cable at regular intervals under the house, poking it back up through the other hole, and then crimping RJ-45 connectors on both ends. For some reason this sounded like a perfectly reasonable thing to attempt at 6pm on a Sunday.
The first step, drilling the holes, was already done for me. In the office, there was a hole drilled in a corner to let in some cable TV coax. We weren't using it, so I snipped off the connector, pushed the coax down, and fed in a bunch of the Ethernet cable. Under the house I threaded the cable around pipes and over ducts, half-crouching/half-crawling, flashlight in one hand, broomstick in the other to clear my path of the ever present spider webs. I'm sure I looked like a lunatic. The living room end proved slightly because, while there was a hole in the floor with TV coax pushed through it, were actually using that TV coax. Under the house I poked around and, by some weird luck, there was a second, unused hole also drilled. I gauged its position relative to the coax hole, went up into the living room with a sharp, pointy object, and stabbed down through the carpet. Then I threaded a coat hanger through the hole, went back under the house and looped the cable around the coat hanger, went BACK up into the living room and gave the coat hanger a tug. To my delighted surprise, it actually worked. There I was, ethernet cable in-hand, look of pure triumph on my face. I was feeling so good, that I didn't even finish the job, then. I sat down and ate some dinner.
After dinner I grabbed a staple gun and swaggered my way into the crawlspace. All that I had to do was secure the cable to the bottom of the floor joists and I'd be done with the dirty, spidery, under-the-housery time. Five minutes, tops! I grabbed a handful of cable, held it to the wood with the staple gun, and squeezed the trigger. *Thunk* I put a staple right through the middle of the cable, severing two or three of the eight individual wires. I thought quickly. Could gigabit ethernet work with only 5 wires? The answer was simple: no, you mad idiot! I uttered a curse and pulled the cable free of the damned staple. Then I spent another fifteen or twenty minutes feeding more cable under the house, pulling it up in the living room, and doing a much more careful job of securing the cable under the house (stapling cable ties to the floor joists and then looping the cable ties around the cable).
It was quite a bit later than I had planned when I finally sat down with each end of the cable to crimp on the connectors. This was my first time crimping RJ-45. By the end I was a pro, but it took a lot of frustration to get there. Little wires, ambiguous colors (in such low light), and tired, shaky hands made it a struggle. When I finally had connectors on both ends, I was almost afraid to try it out. What if I'd kinked the cable somewhere and broken a wire? What if my connectors were crossed? I plugged the cable into the living room router and then plugged the other end into the switch in the office. Nothing happened. No link lights. I was on the verge of tears when the LEDs flickered, once, and burst to life. Oh Netgear switch, you're such a tease! The link was live!
I quickly threw in patch cables between the switch and the office computers and went to speakeasy.net to test it. I don't believe the numbers that sites like this report, but it seemed reasonable to draw some conclusions from the relative numbers over wifi and, then, over the ethernet. First, over the wifi, the site reported 4660kbps downlink, 3770kbps uplink. Then I disabled the wifi adapter, enabled the ethernet adapter, and tried again; 26,063kbps downlink, 7,188kbps uplink. Holy crap. Almost 6x. Totally. Worth it.
Posted at 3:01:55 PM - link
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Tuesday, April 21, 2009
whoa, dude, traffic's, like, weird
I haven't been in traffic on the freeway for a long time. I realized this while sitting in traffic on the freeway today after lunch (more about why I was at home for lunch, later). It was strange to be inching forward, putting unnecessary wear on my clutch, and feeling suddenly self-conscious to be singing along to The Long Winters. The southbound 405 more-or-less stopped at 85th and looked stopped for as far as I could see. I jumped off at 70th and took surface streets back to work, but the Google Maps traffic advisory cracked me up when I got back to my office:
Closed on I-405 between 14 and 17
Two center lanes are closed on I-405 southbound at MP 15.75 between Exit 14 and Exit 17 starting 1:53 PM, 04/21/09 until further notice due to spilled load
Due to what??
Posted at 3:30:08 PM - link
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Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Spring cybercleaning
A couple of weeks ago I suddenly became unhappy with my website. There's too much cruft; its color scheme is lame; IE chokes on it, and I spend most of my time in IE these days. Unfortunately, after spending the last three weekends delirious, exhausted, or working in the yard, I haven't found time to tear the site apart and replace it with something simpler.
Soon, though. I promise.
Posted at 7:53:24 AM - link
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Role Models, not entirely good
Julie and I got Role Models from Netflix a few days ago. I can't say that I enjoyed most of the movie. In fact, I despised most of the movie. The jokes were flat and the characters were stupid. Then, about 20-30 minutes from the end, it became a thing of such raw geeky comedic beauty that I can hardly type for giggling. It's like they thought of this amazing movie, wrote it, realized that it was only a half hour long, and then added a bunch of crap padding to make it full-length. I wouldn't want to ruin it too much, but it goes all LARP and Ken Jeong was amazing.
Posted at 5:36:30 PM - link
Thursday, March 19, 2009
UPDATE: coffee scramble
In my haste, I must not have checked every cupboard in the kitchen. Specifically, I must not have checked the cupboard labelled, in huge, high-contrast letters, "Cups", because it's full, to the brim, with hundreds of cups.
Posted at 8:51:37 AM - link
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
coffee scramble
My typical order of operations for making coffee:
1. Approach machine
2. Select type of coffee and cup size
3. Grab cup
4. Place cup under dispenser
5. Wait
6. Wait
7. Retrieve filled coffee cup
8. Enjoy!
This morning's order of operations for making coffee:
1. Approach machine
2. Select type of coffee and cup size
3. Grab for cup
4. Realize there aren't any cups there
5. Check alternate cup location
6. Realize there aren't any cups there, either
7. Observe coffee status bar creeping along
8. Mildly panic
9. Open every cupboard in the kitchen looking for more cups
10. Realize there's a coffee cup in my office, but it would take too long to go grab it
11. Panic a little more
12. Grab a milk from the fridge
13. Open the top and begin chugging milk
14. Realize I'm STILL not going to make it and pour a little of the milk into the sink
15. Place the opened milk carton under the dispenser with moments to spare and triumphantly watch it fill with coffee
16. Enjoy!
Posted at 8:57:13 AM - link
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
UPDATE: Right of Way FAIL
On my way home I had to look carefully at the same side street. Just to see, you see? There's a yield sign there, and on nearly every other such side street, which, really, makes a lot of sense.
I take it back, green SUV. You were just being a dick.
Posted at 7:34:40 AM - link
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Monday, March 16, 2009
Right of Way FAIL
To get from my house to the main arterial road, there's a street that snakes down the hill. Off of this street, at irregular intervals, several other, smaller roads feed in, on one side or the other. There aren't any stop signs, but I've never actually come to one of these intersections with someone else at the same time. For some reason, I'd always assumed that the person on the larger road had the right of way. This is wrong. They are regular uncontrolled intersections (something that I'd never seen before coming to Washington) and the usual Right of Way dictates the order of passage.
This morning it was tested. I came to the intersection at the same time as someone on my right. I ought to have stopped, and they knew it, but I didn't, so we both started into the intersection, freaked out and stopped, and then continued, awkwardly, through. I waved, embarrassed, as I suddenly realized that every morning for the past 8mo+, I've been thoughtlessly sailing through those intersections. Luckily this morning everybody was paying attention.
Green SUV, I sincerely apologize.
Posted at 8:40:15 AM - link
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
outsourced Magic
I eat a children's cereal for breakfast, most mornings. Amazingly, that shocking admission is not the subject of this post, but rather ham-handed and abrupt exposition.
This isn't one of those mainstream cereals, probably a little too 'adult' for most kids, even with its healthy coating of *ahem* frosting. It's pretty rare for there to be a toy in the box, but the last few boxes I've gotten have had the same series of toys. They are Disney Mini Pals, featuring, presumably, Disney's most beloved characters, in tiny, plush form. I didn't realize until this morning what is so odd about the selection of characters. Of course, there are the old standbys: Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, and Pluto. And then there are Lightning, Mater, Nemo, Sulley, Mike, and Remy. See the pattern? All Pixar. The only relevant characters to come out of Disney in the last eight years (Monsters, Inc. was from 2001) have, in fact, been from Pixar. It must be sobering for Disney execs to see, and helps explain why they fought so hard to keep Pixar a part of Disney.
Posted at 8:04:51 AM - link
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