07 07 2008
I've been losing core strength since I stopped playing ultimate frisbee with the Oddworld crew. I never had much anyway (well, I did when I was working as a landscaper). But, now it's getting ridiculous. I keep thinking I want to start doing pushups or pullups, but those hurt, and not in a good way (joint pain). Then the totally obvious occured to me: yoga. I've done it in the past (though never enough (just once a week) to really get any strength benefit from it). And these days, I have a bunch of dead time in the evening after the baby is sleeping. Gonna give yoga a try. After screwing around on the web for a while looking for some decent yoga info, I finally found yogacards. Quite awesome.
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07 07 2008
Watching McCain's speeches, it's clear that Bush didn't beat McCain in the 2000 primary because of dirty tricks (though there were plenty of those), but because Bush, as ridiculous as he was and is, was a much better candidate than McCain. McCain is truly crap.
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06 30 2008
By the way, the moral of the keyboard story is: If you spill something on a keyboard, don't wait forever to fix it. Air it out, blowdry etc. If it's still broken, take it apart and get the liquid out so it doesn't corrode anything. I thought I had dried mine by shaking it and blowing on it, but apparently I hadn't.
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06 30 2008
A few months ago I spilled a pretty hefty glass of water on my work keyboard. I shook it out and air dried it, but the z and q and windows keys stopped working anyway. IT gave me a bit of hassle about just ordering up a new one (the conversation involving that cost more than just ordering a new keyboard, but whatever). Since I had the same keyboard at home (MS Natural Ergo 4000), and haven't really been using it, I just swapped them and brought the work one home to tinker with. I finally got some free time yesterday, and took it all apart. Like 30 little black screws, and a few tricks to getting it open (two screws hidden under the spacebar, so the spacebar had to get pulled, and also a little trick catch at the very front. So I got it all apart. A modern keyboard is really just three layers of plastic. The bottom layer has a circuit printed on it. The middle layer is just plastic, but has holes in the plastic where the keys are, and the top layer is a printed circuit similar to the bottom layer. when you press a key, it presses the top and bottom layers together to bridge the gap by the hole in the middle layer, and when they touch, you complete a circuit that runs back to the controller chip. I didn't actually see anything wrong with the plastic circuit layers, but I went ahead and cleaned them off with water anyway (and let them dry nicely). Plugged it back it, but z/q/windows still broken. Then I took out the controller chip. Has a little metal bar that hold the chip by contact onto the printed plastic circuit sheets. The contacts looked pretty dirty there, so I cleaned those. Still broken. I was about to give up, cuz it all looked fine, so something 'magic' must be broken (the controller chip itself). Then I noticed a little discoloration where the traces on the middle layer were exposed with no covering from the top layer. Indeed, two of the traces were corroded away there! I could even roughly follow those traces back through the windows and z key (q was too hard to follow). So the question, how to fix that? The first thing I though of is using that quick fix conductive paste stuff you use for repairing circuits, but I don't have any of that, and buying some would eat into the cost of just getting a new keyboard (as if the hour I spent trying to fix it I couldn't have earned enough to buy two). So I went poking around on the web, and found a pretty good suggestion: Aluminum foil and tape. I cut out a couple of itty bitty slivers of foil and lined them up on a trimmed down piece of tape, then put the tape over the corroded-away sections of trace. Turned it on, and still didn't work. BAH! I was really ready to give up then, cuz I was so sure that was going to fix it. I went to pull off the tape, and shut the project down when I realized I had put the tape over the top layer of plastic! That was pretty dumb. So I re-did it, by first pulling back the top and middle layers, and taped the foil to the bottom layer (which actually had the corroded traces). Plugged it in and eureka! Functionality! And, like all the other folks on the web who post about fixing their own keyboard, I too shall say: I'm typing on it right now. z q, hah!
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06 24 2008
I think we could discover smart folks on another planet, and we'd probably handle it ok. Science fiction has conditioned us pretty well. I mean, provided they don't want to nuke us or anything.
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06 24 2008
Apparently not fever-pitch enough to make me actually do it.
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06 09 2008
My desire to blog product reviews is reaching a fever pitch. I don't really look forward to doing that in vanilla hand-coded html (like this blog), but I also don't want a split blog either.
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06 09 2008
So far McCain's argument against Obama is that too many people like him. May have to find something a bit better than that. Claiming that Obama has no substance is also not too smart, since all that does is lower the bar for Obama early. McCain needs to find something about Obama that he can't do anything about. The problem is that unless Obama makes one of the classic political blunders (prostitute, inappropriate airport bathroom stall conduct, etc...), those things haven't worked so well against him yet. Hillary gave it a good go. Can McCain do 'better'?
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05 28 2008
The same argument that communism sounds great in principle but doesn't work in practice applies to the conservative movement as well. Conservatism sounds great until you put a conservative in power. Then what you get is a republican. And we all know what you get out of that. Government is set up in a way that rewards you for doing non-traditionally conservative things. I mean, consider the central tenent of conservatism: smaller government is better. But then you put them in government and they always make it bigger in bad ways (useless military business-serving maneuvers), while strangling the good things that government can do (ensure market competition, help people, etc).
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05 26 2008
Not really a whole lot you can say about parenthood that hasn't been said already. In a way it's the most boring topic around... been done so many times, all the losers are doing it too, it's bad for the environment, etc. Having a kid is pretty damn cool though. Really is worth giving up what it requires you to give up. The good parts of life now are just so much better than the good parts of life were before.
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05 26 2008
Piggybacking on Charles' music post. Here are a few I've been liking. These days all the music I listen to I find from random sampling (try tons, throw almost all away). I'm not gonna really describe any of it though, nothing I could really say of value.
Alive in Wild Paint - Ceilings
And Also the Trees - (Listen for) the Rag and Bone Man
The Grand Archives - Grand Archives
Colin Meloy - Sings Live!
Wow, the new Death Cab kinda sucks, though It's still a bit addictive, so I guess I'll listen to it for a bit. I guess I did say something, but it wasn't of value.
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05 04 2008
John McCain supports suspending the federal tax on gasoline for the summer. Hey cut him some slack, he's a Republican, he's supposed to come up with stuipid ideas. Just doing his job.
Hillary Clinton piles on and supports it too. Wha??
Barak Obama says suspending the tax is bullshit, and won't support it.
Every ecomomist on earth says suspending the tax is pointless (for a litany of pretty obvious reasons).
Hillary Clinton says that is an "Elite Opinion" and "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists".
Lol. Who does she think she is. George Bush? What a stupid stupid thing to say. She'd really give John "I don't know as much about Ecomonics as I should" McCain a run for his money.
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05 02 2008
So, the really depressing thing about switching to trains and hybrid cars and junk is the question: what if it's not enough? Demand for energy as a whole will continue to rise, and prices will continue to rise. There are just too many people to responsibly support the way we live, even if we optimize some of it. I'm starting to think that the next hundred hears will be the years when we realize the hippies were right the whole time, that you really gotta toss out all this high tech bullshit and really go back to basics. But, it's only going to happen under duress, and as expensively and painfully as possible. Yay!
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05 02 2008
Whenever I sit down to write code for myself, all I end up doing is parsing arguments and dicking around with strings. I hate that stuff.
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05 01 2008
Quicken et al suck horrendously. They make the only things I want to do (group my spending by categories, see various averages) super hard. I've decided to throw together a command line app to do it. It's called pfeinance.exe. I bet one could do this real quick in some scripty thing too. Stupid BofA only lets me download my account info 50 transactions at a time. How retarded is that. Why not just give it to me all at once in one file? What a pain.
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04 21 2008
On Friday I understand the world, and I think things are going to work. On Monday it feels like it's all going to come crumbling down under the weight of incompetence. Is that what the weekend is supposed to do?
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04 20 2008
Of course if you have half a brain you know this already, but News Military Analyst = Pentagon Lackey. Finger-puppets, one and all.
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04 17 2008
I get the sneaking suspicion that even Hillary is starting to like Obama. Imagine how much that would suck. These days I'm hoping he wins as much so I can be smiled at for four years as for his policies.
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04 17 2008
I 'hit the wall' on my bike for the first time in a long time today. Felt like I was going to puke and I had to sit down. It also felt outstanding to hit a limit.
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04 17 2008
I think the ideal social networking system is just a list of people. The more 'communication' features, the less I want to use it. A well maintained email address book would be just as useful.
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04 08 2008
Dude, Obama-supporters, stop calling for the ouster of Mark Penn! We want Hillary to keep him on. Election-wise, he's the kiss of death. Hillary has made the worst possible move by demoting him and claiming she fired him: everyone knows her top adviser was let go, but he's still around to screw up her campaign.
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04 06 2008
Charlton Heston RIP. Pardon us while we rip your rifle from your cold dead hands, you NRA hack.
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04 01 2008
Is Hillary Clinton crazy enough to lose the Democratic nomination, then run as an Independent (a'la Joe Lieberman?). I think I just ruined my own day thinking about it.
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03 29 2008
When we bought our house, in addition to the regular inspection, we had people do a video inspection of the sewer line. It was very useful to actually see what we were getting into. Only cost a couple hundred bucks, and they let us keep the video.
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03 29 2008
Our 1931 house has kinda sketchy plumbing. It's not horrible, but there's a bit of a sag in the main line that goes out to the street. It backed up a couple of times, and each time we had a plumber come out and run one of those sewer snake machines. The second time it happened, the plumber that showed up was this old dude. Everything he did, he did with a grunt. He did have one piece of golden advice. He asked if we happened to use Charmin toilet paper. At the time we did. He told us that many of his clients found that when they stopped using Charmin, almost all their sewer backups went away. We stopped (switched to Costco's Kirkland toilet paper, the best around in my opinion), and our sewer problems went away too. Nifty, eh!
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03 29 2008
I've been considering writing about baby stuff. Things that worked, didn't work, books that were good or weren't, toys that were fun or a waste of time or fell apart, all the crazy things we learned about the birth process (imagine how fucked up it is when you go to the doctor for a regular problem, They're even worse at handling births). Unfortunately there's this mythology of 'all babies are different,' and 'what works for you won't work for me.' Not sure where this came from, though I suspect it's so that people who feel like they are screwing up at raising their kids don't feel guilty when things that should have worked for them didn't. However, it does have one horrible effect, there's no good information out there on how to raise a kid. No, that's not quite it. There's enough information out there to justify anything you want to do. And almost all of it is wrong. It's as bad as having no information. If you don't say something like 'this worked for me, but it may not work for your baby,' you're just arrogant. So, we'll see if I can figure out a way to present some useful information at some point.
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03 29 2008
I wrote a while ago about how to run a meeting. I'd like to summarize again. Make an agenda, present it at the start, and stick to that mother-fucker. That's really all you have to do.
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03 29 2008
Jesus christ heating oil is expensive. Heating oil is just Diesel. Diesel is $4/gallon these days. Our diesel tank is 300 gallons. We chew through that in the three winter months easily. It makes feeling guilty about driving seem pretty silly. I want to switch to natural gas, so we can start upgrading our other stuff (hot water heater, range) to natural gas as they start to fail. Another item for the to-do list. Supposedly gas installers have a device that can just burrow underground and run the pipe to hour house without digging a trench. That's pretty neat.
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03 29 2008
Seattle area restaurant reviews:
Preets - Vegetarian Indian. Easily the best Indian I've had in Seattle or anywhere. Their Baingan (spicy eggplant), Mulai Kofta (balls of something) and Khadi (veggie fritters in yogurty sauce) are grand. Chai is scalding hot and good, Mango Lassi tasty as well. If you come to Seattle and you want to eat at one restaurant, you should probably eat at Preet's. Don't forget dessert.
Shun - Sushi. Not any more expensive than any other sushi shop in Seattle ($4-$5 per nigiri order), but it's good enough that we spend more there than at other places. Salmon is especially good. They don't dick around with coho either (that deep red stuff). Regular sockeye or whatever (the lighter pink stuff) is fattier and tastier. Shun serves sushi at the right temperature (not room temperature, not frozen). Spanish Mackerel is almost always on the menu, and they do a mean Saba Bouzushi roll (saba, rice, with sushi-ginger over the top). Fantastic Chicken Karaa-ge, and it's fairly baby friendly, esp for a sushi shop. Don't go at peak hours, or you'll wait forever.
Chiang's Gourmet - This place shouldn't be good. It's on Lake City Way, it looks like shit from the outside. But, it's one of the better chinese restaurants in the city. Can't really recommend anything specific, but it's all pretty good.
Nana's Soup - Oklahoma chili, clam chowder, southwest chicken soup, corn-bread muffins (order extra), and really top notch, simple salad. Not sure why the salad is so good. It's like what you'd make at home if you know how to make salad, but with good croutons.
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If you have a digital SLR, make sure you buy the cheapest, low f-stop prime lens you can find. For Canon's, you can get the EF-50mm with f1.8 for $85. It's cheap loud plastic, and 50mm is like an 85mm film camera, so it's pretty telephoto. The difference in sharpness over the stock lens is crazy though. It's much sharper than any zoom lens you can get for under $1000. And low f-stop gives you nice shallow depth of field (where only the object you focus on is in focus, with the foreground and background blurry). That's the key to the sort of stereotypical great-looking photo. On top of that, f1.8 means you can shoot in really low light without a flash. Basically if you're using a flash (esp indoors) you might as well not take the picture (we're talking high-brow pictures here). You can get a nice add-on flash and bounce it off the ceiling, but who has the time to keep batteries charged up for that, and lug the thing around. On a good modern DSLR with a CMOS sensor, you can crank the iso up to 1500, use f1.8, set the camera on Tv and take shots at 1/50 shutter speed indoors at night with ambient lighting that will look great. I never even use 15-55mm zoom that came with my Rebel XT anymore.
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03 29 2008
In a Seattle traffic jam, the slow lane is almost always faster. On days when traffic is light, but there are choke-points that slow down traffic (like the last on-ramp before the eastbound approach to the 520 bridge), the slow lane is ridiculously faster. When traffic is light, every duche-bag thinks the fast lane is theirs.
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03 29 2008
A lawnmower can server as a poor (or lazy) man's leaf-blower for clearing a walkway. Just run the mower over the walkway and watch as the debris goes flying.
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03 29 2008
How to unstick a clogged drain. First step, put down the chemicals. Seriously, they rarely do any good, and if you end up having to take apart your pipes to fix a clog, if you used the chemicals, you gotta work about getting that corrosive crap all over yourself.
Step 1. Go find a toilet plunger.
Step 2. Run the water through the drain so that it backs up and starts to fill the sink (if it hasn't already).
Step 3. Put the plunger over the drain, and start slowly pushing and pulling. This part is like a slow dance. If you do it too fast, you might blow your pipes apart.
Step 4. Remove the plunger, and watch as your drain runs more freely than ever before.
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03 29 2008
Finally watched Amores Perros last night. It's been a while since I've seen a movie so densely packed with emotion. Highly recommended. We also watched No Country for Old Men the night before. Honestly, if it hadn't been for the title, I wouldn't have known until the last ten minutes that the movie was about the 'old man.' Oops. It was still pretty great for the most part, just a bit confusing.
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03 20 2008
Obama really isn't that amazing of a politician. He's just really amazing compared to the horrendous politicians we've have in this country for the last 50 years or so. I mean, look at them. They can't speak well. They can't write well. They're totally uninspiring. No one takes any risks. Everyone follows formulaic poll-driven strategies, or plays this schoolyard 'patriotism' game (who wears a flag pin? AWESOME! What are you four years old?). Worst of all, they're totally incapable of hiding their craven lameness. I guess it's because no one is watching. It makes you wonder where the hell all the smart people went. Somehow Obama slipped through the filter. Or maybe they're all just smart but they're burdened by low expectations. Just listen to Hillary's response to Obama's race speech: "I did not have a chance to see or to read yet Sen. Obama's speech. But I'm very glad that he gave it. It's an important topic." Who wrote that? One of her high school interns? And don't even get me start on McCain. Some dude who got captured... I mean, I guess he's a war hero. In the same way that if a kid has cancer or something, you treat him really nice. If you got captured, you kinda fucked up right? You musta sucked at least just a little bit, you gotta admit it. Look into McCain's eyes. Don't you see the loser staring back at you. Do you want your country run by a loser? He touts foreign policy experience. Can you name any? There's a reason you can't. It's the same reason you can't name any of Hillary's foreign policy experience. It doesn't exist. Obama doesn't have any either, but at least he's not basing his candidacy on it.
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03 20 2008
If you haven't seen it yet, you might as well check out Obama's race speech (Yah yah it's on Huffington Post. Suck it up). If he wins, your grandkids might read about it in their history books.
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02 25 2008
You people don't post enough pictures, and you don't blog enough. Yar.
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02 20 2008
I edit this page old-school, by hand, in html, in emacs. Emacs writes those stupid temp ~ files though. I hate those. They make it so you could go to kuroepsilon.com/notesHis.htm~ and see the last saved temp file. Stupid. I'm sure there's a way to turn it off, but who has the time to learn all the advanced emacs crap. I guess I do. The answer is to put the following in your .emacs file:
(setq backup-inhibited t)
(setq auto-save-default nil)
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02 20 2008
Procrastination: The belief that the thing you need to do now might be easier to do later. Of course, it's rarely easier to do it later (usually, it's even harder).
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02 20 2008
I have one of those Vantec Nexstar 3 USB2.0 + eSATA external hard drive enclosures, but I never used the eSATA until last weekend. Sweet mary and joseph it's a lot faster than USB2.0! It's totally obvious that it would be faster, but somehow I wasn't expecting it to be that much better. Hi-def video editing is blazing smooth now, where before it was kinda chunky. eSATA is clunky compared to FireWire 800, but it's faster than FW800, and who can afford FW800 anyway. Also shoved a 250GB drive into the laptop. That brings the total storage in my home to 250 + 750 + 500 + 200 + 250 + 320 + 30 = 2300. Over 2 terabytes! In a couple of years I will of course be laughing at how small that number seems.
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02 13 2008
The baby is saying ahbabababa and mamamama a lot now. Sometimes, though, she mixes it it up and says something that sounds a lot like "Obama".
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01 14 2008
Trying to figure out what kind of car to buy for a second car. Most family cars get 19-23 mpg, which is pretty crappy. My civic gets 30-35 even though I have thrash it to keep up. The giant Honda Odyssey even gets 19mpg (I guess that's the allure of minivans, tons of hauling capacity for not much worse gas mileage than a wagon). The only way to really save gas is to buy a hybrid, then we're talking 40-45mpg. Unfortunately hybrids have two issues for me. First, they're too expensive (the relative gas cost difference is very little between driving a hybrid and a similar-sized/powered vehicle). You're just not going to recoup the extra cost. Worse though, any dramatic advances in hybrid tech are going to obliterate the used hybrid market. Resale value is pretty critical when buying a car. If Toyota comes out with a 100mpg prius, how are you going to sell your 45mpg prius used? You're not.
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01 07 2008
I've been wanting to do a 'reviews' section, to review some of the stuff we own. Whenever I search online for reviews these days all I get are these horrible aggregate user review sites, which are almost worse than useless. I end up just using the user reviews on Amazon to try to get tips on clearly bad aspects of products and then just throwing a hail mary. There are good reviews for digitcal cameras out there (www.dpreview.com. Consumer reports is pretty much crap (they tend to be 'generally' right, but don't give enough specifics to really make a decision. They also completely do not understand electronics so they can't be trusted in that area at all), but at least they give you something to look at (though you have to pay for it which is lame). For car buying (especially used), Wikipedia is a pretty good resource these days. They have all body styles back through the years, and do a pretty good job listing issues with them (I like the detail on the previous model of Honda Odyssey. That model run had major transmission issues that weren't resolved until 2004, the last year of that model. Consumer reports won't tell you that. Edmunds.com won't tell you that. Kinda a stream of consciousness post. Welcome to the internet.
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12 19 2007
Hot tip from our Japanese friends: frozen udon noodles bought in the states are much better than the ones in the refrigerated case. It seems to hold true. The frozen ones have much more bite.
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12 17 2007
Figured I should slip at least one more post into 2007. Updates since May:
* Our baby was born.
* We're learning how to live with a baby.
For those who are wondering, yeah, raising a baby is hard. But, on the other hand it's kinda easy too, because once you get started you have no choice but to keep going forward. It's hard, but there's no motivation required.
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05 08 2007
I moved kuroepsilon away from Lunarpages and stuck it on Dreamhost. I got a bunch of new hotness out of the move: more speed (hopefully), more reliable email (so far), a much better package of software, and the biggie: telnet access to my account. Now that I've got some new stuff, I'm considering moving these notes to wordpress so they're easier for me to edit. Meh we'll see.
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05 08 2007
I experienced the 'high' of gardening for the first time today. Growing up I was 'compelled' (you know, bribed, forced, etc...) to work in the garden. I never got the attraction. Last weekened I transplanted a volunteer tree of some unknown lineage from a mound of dirt in my yard over to the fence I share with a neighbor. Hopefully this tree will grow up and provide some privacy in that spot of the fence. The unusual thing is I find myself sitting here at work on this unseasonably hot day wondering if the tree has enough water, and really hoping it survives. Weird, huh. Maybe the fact that I'll be a daddy soon has flipped on the gardening switch? We'll see. I still feel no inclination to plant anything (except maybe some grass in the big mud-hole in the middle of the yard). Transplanting is my limit so far.
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04 05 2007
Wow two months went by quick. Been biking like crazy, though still not as much as I'd like. Time is running out before the baby gets here. We're gonna get our floors refinished next week, so I've got a lot to do this weekend (move ALL the furniture off the wood floors, cover things, shim the floor to remove squeaks, glue together split boards, remove a bunch of carpet, a bit of linoleum, and some nas-T tile in the dining room). I'm exhausted just thinking about it.
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02 05 2007
These days you really gotta not name your product or band or whatever something I can't search for. Don't call it DoA or Play+Soft. Unless of course you really WANT to die a slow death hidden in some dark corner of the internet.
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02 01 2007
I ordered a new road bike. It's a low end full carbon bike from Giant (The 2006 OCR Composition 3), so it's pretty cheap for what it is. I'm very excited. I haven't had a new bike since 1996 (well, not counting the tandem, but that's a shared bike, so um... it doesn't count). The giant is pretty comfortable, with a slightly upright compact frame, so I'm hoping it'll save me from the insane cracked concrete on the Burke Gilman trail. Since the Mrs got pregnant and it got cold for winter I haven't really done anything physical, and that sucks. Waiting for the bike to ship. Waiting waiting waiting... Photos will surely be forthcoming once I get it and bolt it together.
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01 16 2007
Knowing the right thing to do isn't hard. If you put 20 people in a room to solve a problem, at least one of them will probably have the right solution and know that they are right. Of the other 19, many are wrong and are convinced they are right. Convincing those people to pursue the right solution is hard, especially when all 20 have roughly equal power and respect. The problem gets easier if one of the 20 people is a well-respected leader, even if that person isn't one who consistently comes up with good solutions. That person needs to know how to recognize which of the suggested solutions is right, though. About half of the people who don't have the right solution (regardless of whether they have one of their own) can frequently recognize the right solution. Developing a solution and recognizing correctness are wildly different skills.
I'm telling this story backwards. In case you haven't guessed, I've been spending my workday in wall to wall meetings lately. I'm sure there's a good way to run meetings. I've been in some good ones in the distant past. Feels more and more like a chemistry thing than a procedural thing, though maybe chemistry can come from the procedure.
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01 16 2007
A fun thought experiment is to shift events away from their original location or owner and see how that changes perception of them.
Imagine if:
* The grand canyon was in Japan.
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Sony launched the XBox 360 and XBox Live.
* Microsoft launched the iPhone.
* Apple computers had 85% market share and Windows machines were the scrappy upstart.
* Americans lived on the land-mass of China and vice versa.
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