coffeefog

snowboarding

I'm heading out for another weekend of snowboarding at kirkwood. If I'm lucky I'll run into Eve S. Dropper. She apparently hangs out at kirkwood mountain a lot. I hang out at kirkwood mountain a lot. I'd love to make an appearance on her site...

Girl Scouts Part 3

The girl scouts prank finally came to fruition sometime in the past 3 days. But I wasn't there for it, and Umesh didn't even realize it was a prank until today when I told him I wrote the note. Not Mihiri. Mihiri is sweet. So it took me showing the image to several co-workers before somebody (actually Ramesh) said "yeah, Umesh mentioned that." So I'm pretty sure Umesh believed that Mihiri is a vindictive little bitch.

For that last sentence I pray that her mother, who I work with, never ever finds out about my blog. Shouldn't be hard to keep a low profile... (unless someone out there takes that as a challenge)

Speaking of challenges, two years ago Laura (evil roommate #11, in Pittsburgh at the time of this incident) emailed a picture of me with my pants down around my ankles out to my roommate John (evil roommate #10, Cupertino) with the request that he spread it around the office. And he did. But it's not like that really bothered me, I was just like "oh yeah, we took that picture of me pantsless to make this joke about blah blah blah." And everybody was like "ha ha ur naked" and I was just like "yeah, but the joke was about... nevermind." I was, in the end, not humiliated.

If I find the picture I'll post it... I bet Adam has it. The one from the front of Wean hall?

fanatical mac people

I'm a mac person, and I obsess about it. Here's a good example. I'm sitting at my computer right now, at work, and I was just thinking about how much I love BBEdit. BBEdit is a text editor. Why the fuck do I care so much for my text editor? I don't have a clue. If I were on Windows I'd probably have choice words to say about my coding environment, but I doubt "love" would be one of the top 5 emotions. But I actively appreciate my text editor, BBEdit 7.0.2 under OS X.

The real irony comes from the fact that, when I was 11, I thought macs were stupid. Then I went to college and got all into unix, and then Apple bought NeXT and got all into unix. Oh well. Showed me.

While I'm at it, I also love Boorum and Pease bound notebooks($40 a pop!) and the Zeb Roller 2000 ($3!). My love for office supplies rivals that of Herbert K.

r u secur3?

I have two words for you, and they're better than "homeland" and "security." They are "coffee" and "cake." Powerful words and objects on their own, but when combined into coffeecake, that shit is UNSTOPPABLE. On my way to work I stopped at coffee society for a cup of coffee and a piece of coffee cake. WAS THERE EVER A BETTER PAIRING? There was not ever a better pairing.

When the homeland security status changes, like how today it went from orange to yellow, my desktop homeland security status indicator for Konfabulator (OS X only) is supposed to make a sound. And I wasn't in front of my computer when it happened, so fuck this. The status has only changed like 5 times ever. Will I ever get to hear the sound it makes? Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

Wait, I'm a hacker. I know how to dig around for the sound files it uses. Nevermind, I'm just getting all worked up over nothing. OK, here's the sound of the homeland security status changing. Thank god I found out. You must be so happy.

jury duty is bitchin

Since I've been blogging 3x a day, I might as well keep it up. Looks like I've got Jury Duty on March 17. This is my first time, although I've been registered to vote for the past 5 years. Maybe the last place I was registered to vote (Cupertino) doesn't have criminals. I'm psyched!

The cool part is that my employer offers me up to 12 paid weeks off work per year for jury duty. That just might kick ass. Then again, I've never done jury duty before. It sounds fun, but I'm basing that opinion on a Pauly Shore movie my mom took me to see in 1995. And 3 months off work could a) get boring and b) fuck the timeliness of the project I'm working on. I'm cool with it fucking my workplace responsibilities, but I'd hate to be bored.

the bizarro homeless

So I'm walking down the street in my neighborhood, and I give this homeless guy 40 cents. And he's all grateful, and he thanks me twice, and I feel a little good. So when I'm in the drug store looking for my Haribo gummi peaches (which they don't have. but check out that link - BULK DISCOUNT!), I pick him up a Clif bar, since I figure he gets hungry for "a blend of proteins and carbohydrates that the body can best absorb and use" on the street.

I get outside, walk back up the street to give him the Clif bar, and he doesn't want it. So I give him another dollar as he begins to explain his dietary scheme. And this dude has a full-on master plan. He starts talking about the Ritter Sport coconut, which is the center of his nutritional rations. As he elaborates, I get the impression this is his rationing plan for society, not just himself. He has a nutritional plan for society? That's not so odd, since he is homeless after all, and thus might be crazy. So I'm thinking the "Ritter Sport with coconut" must be some high protein energy bar akin to the "nutritional" Clif bar I just bought for him. He tells me they cost $1.59 at the deli on the corner, and the coconut is the best, but you can eat two in a row of the yogurt (but only one coconut). He then proceeded to offer me his second best piece of advice which was "padded toilet seats." Good for the lower back, apparently.

So I heed his advice and buy myself a Ritter Sport Coconut on my way home. It's a fucking chocolate bar. He's got this as the center of his nutritional scheme for himself and everybody else? Fuck that. It's candy. It's incredibly tasty though. I ate almost all of it before I pulled myself away. Tasty yes, nutritional no.

Did I learn anything tonight? I'm not sure. But as Emily always says, "you talk to strangers too much."

travel

Looks like I'm getting off my ass and planning a couple of trips for April. Here's where I'll be for my 2003 east coast tour. But first we must annex Austin with the east coast. Maybe, once Texas becomes its own country again, Austin WILL be on the east coast.

• Pittsburgh, PA April 11-13
  
• Austin, TX April 24-27
  

You know who you are:
THE STARS AT NIGHT, ARE BIG AND BRIGHT
CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP
DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS

it's a war on war

Mike contemplates an anti-war message, gets confused. All in all an average Sunday in the haight.

Wow - thanks to adam for digging up this cherry. I wonder if I alienated anyone when I wrote this. It was in reply to a thread back and forth on a cmu computer science discussion group about which OS was better(linux vs. ms windows), and on which hardware(intel vs. alpha or somethin'). Or something like that.

I love it when Ethan from 4 years ago makes me laugh my ass off. Keep at it, dude.

the weekend

The weekend involved drinking, robotic destruction, birthdays, golden gate park, the beach, an aborted trip to sfmoma, and an unhealthy amount of thai food.

And a bunch of cmu folk were in for the weekend. Many of whom blog, apparently. Wait, there's more. No, wait, that's it. It's like livejournal threw up in the html source code of this post.

girl scouts part 2

Today our girl scout cookies arrived. I ordered two boxes (thin mints and peanut butter patties), Dieter ordered one (thin mints), umesh ordered one (peanut butter cookies), and Ramesh ordered two (thin mints and lemon cookies). Why do I know this? Because they weren't around when the cookies got delivered, so I held onto them all day. You might be asking "ethan, what mischief ensued?" and that would be an excellent question, especially if by "mischief" you mean "lame gag that would amuse ethan and his fellow corporate drones."

Each bag came with a personalized girl scouts thank you note, which I took the liberty to alter. I replaced the original thank you note with my note (you should be able to tell the difference). Notice how I drew the cookie JUST RIGHT. (click through)

nerd attack

I was a nerd in junior high. Life sucked and I wanted to die. Life got better in 11th grade when I got to spend the last 2 years of high school in college. Then I went to real college after that. Life's pretty cool now. It's actually fun.

Anyway, I say this because Adam points to an explanation of why junior high is so hard on nerds. I read the whole thing, but I don't know why Adam says I "won't like the tone of the article." What's up, Adam?

Maybe I should have just emailed adam, instead of posting. But I think the "Life sucked and I wanted to die," line was pretty funny anyway.

the new amazon

The public library rocks, cause they're all hooked into the internet. This is your reminder to get a library card, or, if you already have one, to use the library more. Going to the library is cheaper than buying books, and it seems like a good place to meet girls. Or boys, or old people, whatever you're into. Anyway, here's how simple it is to get a book from the library nowadays:

1. During my morning web surfing I came across a cool sounding book
   
2. I surfed over to the SF public library and found the book
   
3. Clicked "reserve it" and typed in my library card number.
   
4. Sometime within the next month I'll get an email saying "your book is ready, come get it."
   

This was my monthly non-nonsense post. Enjoy it.

hide the evidence

So tonight I gathered up my jeans, my blue hooded sweatshirt, and some t-shirts and walked them down to the laundromat that's a block away. It's a nice laundromat - rarely crowded, and there's usually good reading material. And the vending machine has zingers. But when I got there, it was all police-taped off, and there was lots of crime scene type investigation going on. This is unusual, since I live in a quiet neighborhood full of families, med students, and the occasional yuppie. The cops on duty were nice enough to give me a run down of the events leading up to the crime scene'd laundromat:

1. Cops get APB for kids doing graffiti in the area
   
2. A patrol car notices a group of teenagers running down the street, flashes the lights and give chase.
   
3. One of the graffiti dudes breaks away and tosses their spray paint into a (running) dryer in my laundromat, presumably to hide the evidence.
   
4. 15 minutes later, the spray paint can explodes in the dryer. No one was hurt, but 5 dryers and a very nice pant set were destroyed.
   

I thanked the police for their detailed description, and walked 4 blocks to the next laundry place. It wasn't as good as mine, since it closed at 9:00 (mine closes at 11) and the owners were glaring at me until 9:22 when my pants were dry. It probably didn't help that I put them back in for another 15 minutes around 9PM when I thought they weren't dry enough. That seemed to make them pretty mad, but since they didn't speak much english I pretended not to know what they were talking about. Nobody likes wet pants.

For the record, this was all a lie. But this story occurred to me as I was putting my clothes in the dryer, and I thought it would be pretty cool to put a can of spraypaint in there too. And I just spilled some beer on my laptop, but it was just on the trackpad part, and that seems not to have destroyed any electronics. Hooray!

I wish I lived near a laundromat/bar combination like brainwash, but that's all the way on the other side of the city. And even if I drove my clothes over there I couldn't drink, because then I'd have to drive home. It just seems like it would be fun to drink 4 beers while doing laundry.

mmm... coffee & code

Wuzzon, people? I'm working from home today, and I'm cleaning up the comment style in this 5,000 line C file I own. It's full of comments that look like this:

    a+=3;     // now we're going to add 3 to a!

It's absolutely fucking hideous to put a comment off the end of a line like that. It's disgusting. It's horrible. It's strange that I've lived with this file like this for the past 2 years, but it's clean now. I chose to forgo actual work in favor of 3 hours of cutting and pasting each comment onto its own line, and in doing so sustained some sort of RSI shoulder injury. But I'm at home, so I'm about to fill the bathtub with milk and take a soak.



Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day. This picture marks the end of my presentation of "pictures of my neighbors' front porches" for this month, but tune back in for March's stunning "trash cans on my street" retrospective.


~

foggy music

I feel like pirating today. The Postman by American Analaog Set carried me through a beautiful drive through the fog to work today. Listen to it, love it, then quit your job and become a postman.

bizarre

This thing has amazed me since I first saw it 9 months ago, but I only got around to photographing it last night. Click through to the big picture.

The burning question is, would He-Man rather spend eternity on this dude's front porch, or would he rather have died an honorable death, his dismembered legs buried near a dog in the backyard?

I'm at work right now. I am the reason for the bad economy.

california is bullshit

I don't know if I should be happy for this or not, but I couldn't find the Zingers when I went looking for them just now. I got downstairs, checked the vending machine, and said "oh well, they're not here, I might as well grab some REAL lunch while I'm downstairs." So I walked over to the cafeteria and, on auto-pilot, got a big green salad and some vegan miso soup. That's a pretty frequent lunch for me. But let's think about it - I went downstairs looking for something "like twinkies but with more sugar on top" and came back with a salad. That sucks. Again, and without much reason, I blame California for my new healthy outlook.

snacks!

I had a great time snowboarding at kirkwood this weekend, but I keep re-living this one fall. At least obsessing about my backwards fall on "the wall" shaved off 20 minutes of conscious thought from my commute this morning.

While the purpose of the weekend may have been the snowboarding, the real magic came in the various meals we bought at gas stations. I'm the sort of person that values real food, but we ended up eating one dinner and two breakfasts out of the candy aisle at 7-11. I got to re-visit my grease-filled adolescence when my dinner on friday night consisted entirely of Zingers. They're like twinkies with frosting, and I highly recommend them. I'm probably going to run downstairs and check all of our vending machines to see if we have any. Since I live and work in California, our vending machines are usually full of shit like "fruity healthy nut snackers" and "wheat germ poppers."

Some people are totally fucking insane. These guys have reverse-engineered the Zingers recipe and tell you how to make them at home. Come on, people, two Zingers cost like 70 cents. Can you beat that with a recipe that requires 15 ingredients? You cannot. Also see snacks.cyberunks.org for in-depth reviews of 155 snacks, and a very sobering look at your future in that cubicle.

friday is over.... NOW

I'm going snowboarding at Kirkwood this weekend, and I'm taking my digital camera. So if my brain cells line up with the right combination of stupidity and disrespect for my own belongings, I'll take it up on the mountain and maybe get some interesting pics. Hopefully it will not die. In the past there have been tons of things worth photographing that I haven't had a camera to capture.

• 2 years ago I took a spill and had to get 4 stitches over my right eye. I had to ride down to the first aid station with blood all over the right side of my face - I could tell I looked fucked up because people would do double takes. But alas, no camera.
  
• Last month, snowboarding with my sister, I left her on the bunnies to go up to the top of the mountain. On the way down, through some trees way off the trail, I came across a shallow cave with two snowboarders sitting inside and smoking pot. I was about 150 feet uphill from them, and they were sort of down this steep embankment, so they might not have even seen me. I wish I had a picture of that.
  
• I have a really bad habit of taking inexperienced friends up black or double black diamond runs. I must be incapable of thinking through "it's easy for me, but it might be hard for them," cause I do it time and again. Pictures would be funny, though.
  
• Corey always tries to jump off the wave, and he always fails. Always.
  

new template

OK, now I've just tossed in a whole new CSS template file that probably won't have the scrolling problem. It looks a touch ugly to me, so hopefully I'll get around to changing it. But no more scrolling?

html is bullshit

So I made the width and margin changes to the main page, so maybe it'll look better now? I had made the width change a couple of days ago, but I put the new stylesheet in the wrong directory (oops). But you know what's fucked up? Now the page has a stupid horizontal scrollbar in my browser (safari). Standards are for the birds.

That's right - keep coming back and reading my blog, and you'll keep getting cryptic messages about HTML and CSS. That's my guarantee.

Do you still have annoying horizontal scrollbars? I changed the width to 80% in CSS. Lemme know if it's any better.

free book!

If you surf the same places that I surf, then this won't be news to you. But Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a sci-fi novel that you can read for free online, or buy in paperback. It made slashdot-type headlines a couple of weeks ago when it came out, but I ignored it at the time. Last night I stumbled across it again and started reading the prologue with the intention of stopping in a few minutes, getting up, and reading a real book. But Down and Out is simply a great book, and it held me transfixed for an hour and a half. Maybe I should buy the print copy so I don't have to stare at my computer for another 4-6 hours to finish it... check it out.

childish politics

I've got a lead on the "Horizontal scrollbar of death" issue that's been plaguing the IE 5.5 users. In fact if you google for "horizontal scrollbar of death," the first hit is a moveable type issue. But I've been lazy, so keep on scrollin' on, my scriggities!

"childish politics" refers to the way many coworkers bring around sign-up sheets asking me to help them support their 3rd graders spelling bee for extra crayon money at school. I don't give a shit if your son can spell 25 words correctly, but I still have to give you $20. You know why? Peer pressure. Yesterday someone I worked with 2 years ago came to my office with the spelling bee sponsorship sign up. I was thinking "alright, I'll give $5 or $10 just to get her out of my hair." But I look at the sign up sheet, and there are 7 people already signed up to give $25. What the fuck? $25? That's a lot of money for a 3rd grade spelling bee - I didn't put that much on the superbowl. I think she planted the first signature, so that everyone signing after that would feel cheap giving less than $25.

I kind of feel the same way about girl scout cookie sales in the workplace, but, on the other hand, it gives me a valuable opportunity to buy girl scout cookies. I've got a box of thin mints and a box of peanut butter cookies coming my way in a month or two.

coffee crud

Today I left the coffee maker on for 12 hours again. I left the apartment around 2pm and was gone until midnight. I even realized that I left it on when I was 5 minutes into my day. But I figured it wouldn't burn the (very old and flammable) building down, since it never has before.

When you leave a coffeemaker on for that long, it gets this really cool layer of condensed black coffee crud crystallised on the bottom. And you have to scrub with soap and hot water to get it out. Shouldn't any appliance with a heating element have an auto-shut off after like 6 hours? 6 hour old coffee is really nasty anyway.

earthquake

Today earthqquake nc51125525 woke me up at 10:22:58 AM. Earthquakes are losing their novelty and becoming just scary. It apparently woke up my neighbor downstairs, too, because here comes the Sunday morning techno. I wish I could say that the cheesy techno annoyed me, but I really kind of like the background music.