Who Is The Drizzle?

Press ‘9’ to get in

2011-12-19T17:30:00.001-06:00

I keep getting these phone calls from the apartment complex that Erin and I _used_ to live at, like 2 years ago. It’s gotten to the point now where I just press ‘9’ on the keypad and hear the beeping of the gate through the phone of an apartment complex across town as it opens. I know I should contact someone at that old apartment complex and get this fixed, but I keep imagining someone going to our old apartment, knocking on the door and being greeted by an elderly Filipino man.

Hard Drives and Gas Prices

2011-11-01T22:02:00.001-05:00

I’ve been thinking today about hard drive prices and shipping/transportation costs to Las Vegas.

It can’t be cheap to fly fresh seafood into the middle of the desert on a daily basis, yet every big hotel has an all-you-can-eat steak and seafood buffet. I heard a story on NPR about how Las Vegas is trying to push for a more balanced economy instead of one that relies so heavily on entertainment, but my guess is that Las Vegas has hit it’s current economic stabilization point for a reason. It’s going to be hard to bring in businesses to such an inconvenient location when they don’t have the same thing going for them that casinos have going for them, namely having throngs of tourists visiting with the intention of leaving behind non-trivial chunks of expendable income. Unless it becomes a hot spot for plastic surgery or massive numbers of cheap IT datacenters, I don’t see explosions of industry happening there.

I have a similar concern about hard drive prices and the effect of a spike in price is going to have on the proliferation of cheap online storage. (I’m looking at you Mr. “The Cloud”) AWS, App Engine Datastore, Hadoop, etc… these are projects that rely heavily on being able to throw mountains of inexpensive disks in to keep costs low and do interesting things with large datasets. I’m sure that when you’re purchasing hardware to build out datacenters, any small fluctuation in price can have a sizeable impact on cost projections. Given the online economic climate, I think that passing along these price increases to the customer would tarnish the relationship with the stereotypically cash-strapped yet still essential small to medium-sized business segment.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anything’s going to change or go away. I just worry about the various companies and enterprises that depend heavily on the high availability of low cost hard drives and cheap shipping to Las Vegas. I know it’s a small market, but just today over lunch, I was talking about how online storage is so cheap and will continue to be so. I hope pricing hiccups over the next 18 months don’t trickle through and prove me wrong.

Weird Cygwin–Fork problems

2011-10-28T00:28:00.001-05:00

So I’m setting up my new work laptop. It’s a Latitude E6520 with an Nvidia NVS 4200M (…or NVIDIA or nVidia or nVIDIA or however they’re capitalizing it these days).

I started getting all these weird errors and an occasional Segmentation Fault when trying to use ‘vim’. The only thing that had changed was I had decided to use the new HDMI cables I got in the mail yesterday instead of the ole VGA cable to hook up my laptop to my second monitor. I played with whatever settings I needed to extend instead of mirror the desktop and switched the default audio device from HDMI audio (no speakers on the monitor) back to the laptop speakers. I notice that in the same morning, I can’t do git-pull anymore. After some google searching for various permutations of “cygwin git” “fork” “died waiting for longjmp before initialization”

Not being completely new to cygwin, I tried running ‘rebaseall’ but that didn’t seem to help any. I remembered that I had a similar setup working on my dev machine at home so I cross-checked versions and both were on the same version of cygwin 1.7.9-1 and git 1.7.5.1 so it probably wasn’t an odd update.

Finally, searching around yielded this interesting article: http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-08/msg00119.html where someone gets the same error message except from a different application. They found that by updating the display driver to the latest version from the nvidia website, this solved their problem. Surely, this couldn’t be it, but after messing with this all day I was getting desperate enough to try anything.

Sure enough, on my Latitude E6520 with an Nvidia NVS 4200M after installing the latest display driver, I was able to make my “died waiting for longjmp before initialization” go away. ‘/bin/rebaseall’ from within ‘ash’ has solved this problem for me in the past and on other machines, but this time… for some unknown reason… updating the video driver fixed this problem for me. Double-U Tee Eff?!?!

Paring Back IM Accounts

2011-05-16T10:25:00.001-05:00

I’ve been lugging around old IM accounts for almost a decade. I’ve got an ICQ account I made after my first ICQ account got hacked. I’ve got a Yahoo account I made while working in N. Dallas because that’s the chat platform those kids agreed upon. I’ve got some AIM accounts and MSN accounts I’ve had for longer than I care to remember. I think it’s time to ditch some cruft, not for a facebook chat account (God No!), but in favor of Google Talk.

They’ve got AIM <--> Google Talk Federation live, and since I can use this to chat with my wife, I think that’s just about all I need. Chatting with her is like 2/3rd of my online chatting. In moving from my lugging my laptop everywhere and doing _EVERYTHING_ on it, I’m using my home PCs quite a bit more and need my chat client to be distributed. I don’t want to install clients on every darn machine. I was thinking about going the BitlBee route, but I don’t live in an IRC window, so while it would consolidate my chat client into a single point of presence, it wouldn’t be convenient most of the time. Google Talk scratches that itch because everywhere I check my email and on my cell phone, I can get these messages. I’m not yet really satisfied with multi-IM programs on my phone and iPod yet. I’ve thought about Meebo and was about to give the new Trillian a try when I thought… meh. Why bother.

So I’m in the middle of talking to people who I can only get a hold of on other networks and seeing how I can chat with them on something other than just MSN or ICQ or Yahoo. We’ll see how this turns out when and if I finally stop using Digsby.

There’s no alternative to PSN

2011-05-13T14:28:00.001-05:00

So when I finally decide to write up a short rant and post it on my old blog that I post to almost as frequently as I do taxes, celebrate my birthday, and wish everyone a happy leap year… Stupid blogger be busted. Blogger better not be out for weeks and weeks. Unlike PSN, I can just hop to Posterous or Tumblr and start posting stuff there if this short “maintenance” doesn’t shake out soon.

Little complaint about an Adobe Installer

2011-05-12T18:27:00.000-05:00

So I’m going through the download and install process of an Adobe product, which I’ve legally acquired, and somewhere near the end it prompts me to shut down “Google Chrome (chrome.exe)”. While I’m proud that you’re telling me the process you want stopped, it doesn’t help people in my situation who have cloud print enabled. I close down my browser, hit the <next> button, and expect it to work. Again, I get a shut down “Google Chrome (chrome.exe)” message. Certainly, you didn’t really mean that every person who has Google Cloud Print turned on (which runs magically by having a chrome.exe process run in the background), is expected to open up Task Manager just to kill the one chrome.exe that’s in the background. And why did you want me to close chrome? So you could install a browser plug-in. C’mon! </Rant>

16 characters? C'mon LinkedIn

2010-12-14T09:07:00.004-06:00

On the heels of the whole Gawker Media password debacle, I get an email this morning that I should change my LinkedIn password. Never a bad idea to do when someone asks you to refresh your password and I use a password generator/library to just generate me some long strings for passwords, so it's not a lot of trouble for me.

It's kinda of freeing to not know what my password is and trust it all to a (regularly backed up in clear text in a secure location) password app. When I open the app, I'm prompted for a master password, type into the search box the name of the site I need the password for... ctrl-c, ctrl-v... and I'm in. It's a rare enough occurrence that I don't mind the extra step or three for the peace of mind that having long randomly generated strings affords me. I can also have it generate passwords according to masks or just about any parameters I want. Snazzy enough. KeePass, it's neat. Give it a shot.

So I get an email from LinkedIn that they've disabled my account for security reasons. Fair enough. I run through the password recovery steps and instead of using one of the eight or nine regular password I use, I decide to go with a generated password. Create Password... Copy... Paste Paste... [Go]. 'Thanks, try signing in." Username... Paste Password... 'Invalid username/password' ??? I.. I just pasted it in from my ... did I fumble something up and paste a URL for my password the second time around or something?? Lemmie try again. 'Invalid username/password'. Hrm... Lemme see what's in this string that I'm pasting. I'll paste it into notepad. It's 20-characters long. I wonder what the problem is? There's no way that it could be truncati... Lemmie copy and paste in just the first 16 characters of my auto generated password. 'Welcome, Erik'... *sigh*

So when I pasted in my new password twice, it only took the first 16 characters of my 20 character password. *sigh* I open up my password app and remove the last four characters from my LinkedIn password because LinkedIn's password field only accepts 16 characters. If you type in over 16 characters, even though it's only accepting the first 16 when you first provide your password to them, password validation will fail. :-/

on my iFauxne

2010-07-06T19:13:00.000-05:00

So last night, Zach was asking me about my experiences with Skype on an iPod Touch. I was going back and forth over whether I’d recommend it or not and decided to write up a post about the Pros and Cons of having an Faux iPhone.

SkypeOut is insanely cheap. For $2.95 a month, I can make as many calls as I need. Although I only really need to make about 5-10 calls through Skype… I typically use whatever landline is next to me.

So, I’ve got a second-gen iPod Touch. I was able to upgrade it to the latest version of the iPhone OS, iOS 4. Unfortunately, the second-gen iPod Touch doesn’t have support for multitasking. The processor in the third-gen iPod is the same as the iPhone 3GS, an underclocked ARM Cortex-A8, which is why they’ve dubbed the iPod third-gen beefy enough to run multitasking.

Apple’s stance seems to be that second-gen iPods wouldn’t be fast enough to provide a good user experience. IMHO, I think they just didn’t feel like supporting an older platform. There are times when the keyboard doesn’t feel responsive… I’ll go to a text input field and have to wait just a little too long before I can either start typing or the letters I’ve typed register in the field. :-/ Also, whenever I plug in my Griffin iTrip Auto (charge and FM), I find that there’s a delay when I try to open up the music app to play a podcast. There are just little glitches where the software seems hung every now and again to make me regret upgrading to iOS4.

Don’t get me wrong, I like having folders… I guess… kinda. That’s about the only new feature that I see. Oh yeah… I can also do multiple exchange accounts, which makes it handy for me to be able to check both my gmail and my work exchange account. I get little dings when I have incoming emails with certain labels or in certain folders.

Anyways, I’m digressing from the original focus of this post. I was going to talk about Skype on the iPod Touch. I wish I had a multitasking iPod so I could leave the Skype App running in the background, but I’ve also read people complaining that running Skype in the background drains the battery a bit more quickly, which kinda writes it off for being a phone. What good is a phone when the battery dies in 6 hours. :-/

Running Skype on a non-multitasking iPhone is about as convenient as having to leave your chat client fullscreen to get incoming chats. :-/

That being said, I’ve got a solution that works for me. Over the weekend of the 4th, Steve & Jimmy were still half-impressed and half-baffled as to how I could go so long without a cell phone. It’s not that I don’t have a phone number. I’ve had a google voice account for a long time, so I have voicemail and an avenue to send and receive text messages.

This isn’t as useful because I have to have wifi access to be able to send SMS messages. I’m not going to be walking around, out and about, able to receive texts, which I guess is both a good and bad thing. Sending me a text that you’re running 30 minutes late only helps if the place I’m at has free wifi. In Austin, that’s rarely much of a problem… Driving down the highway, it’s definitely much more of a problem.

It works for me because I spend 95% of my time with a computer and landline right next to me. If you wanna get a hold of me, call my google voice number and it rings my office during the day, my house in the morning and evenings, and goes straight to voicemail sunday through thursday… A guy’s gotta get some sleep. Everyone who needs to get in touch with me has my email address, my google voice number to SMS me, and also knows the phone numbers to my office and my house.

It’s a VERY rare occasion that I need a cell phone. I guess when I got a flat in the pickup truck I borrowed when we were moving last summer, but how often does that happen. I ended up just walking towards a nearby gas station and discovered that Schlotzsky’s had free wifi. So I stood outside a Schlotzsky’s and SMS’d a few people for help. No big deal.

I don’t think I could recommend Skype as a full replacement for a cell phone. I think I’m going to try this other idea I saw, which was buying a disposable pay-as-you-go type of phone and linking that phone number up with google voice. When someone calls my google voice number, it rings that phone as well as any other lines you have setup. If I happen to lose the phone or just want to be dramatic and throw the phone in the lake, I just have to go buy a new phone and setup a new number tied to google voice. I think that’d be a bit more useful as an emergency phone than any sort of cost saving measures using Skype.

That being said, I think when Erin and I take our trip, I’m going to try to take advantage of our Skype To Go number, which gives you a local number when you’re abroad that routes to a set of preconfigured phone numbers… ya know for calling home to tell everyone how much fun we’re having or what’s going on.

Frustration & Growing Pains

2010-03-22T19:31:00.000-05:00

So, I don’t know when I began, but I’ve been really into a website for the past couple weeks. Even as I link to it, I’m hesitant to link to http://750words.com/ because the reason that I’m writing a blog post is that 750Words is currently down.

The thing I love about the site is that it’s completely private and I can jot down any thoughts or musings into a website and it’s not publically accessible. I know that anything you put on the internet is ‘public’, but I’m not worried about hackers or data miners trying to get at private blog postings comparing ‘Avatar’ to ‘Hurt Locker’. We’re not talking about big secrets here or anything, but as the site isn’t a publishing platform, I’m much less prone to self-censorship when I’m writing about who pissed me off or writing derogatory remarks about something I didn’t like. No self-filter which encourages more writing. More writing, about anything, is a good thing… right? I mean, I’m putting up a blog posting just to get these thoughts and frustrations vented so that’s gotta be a good thing, right?

So now the bad. I dunno what hit me but as I was reading the websites FAQ, I was really moved about the whole coffee shop patronage metaphor and… OK, so as a quick aside, I don’t typically purchase small bits of software. I buy large packages that I’m going to use everyday, but given the choice between the free scrabble-esque app loaded with ads and the ad-free version for $2.99, I lean towards the free app and just ignore the ads. BTW, iPhone & iPod Touch people, Words with Friends is Hella-fun. Go start up a game with ‘GilbertErik’. Anyways, I can put up a filter and not pay much attention to marketing and advertising and I’m making a choice to be a stingy, penny-pincher or whatever. (Actually, I think my personal bias is more against the Apple App Store ecosystem, but that’s something for another blog post.)

So I was reading this FAQ on the website talking about how he buys cups of coffee as a patron of the coffee shop and he encouraged people to buy him ‘virtual cups of coffee’ to help him pay for and make some money on the site and… It was a mix of the coffee shop metaphor (and me making more coffee at home) and the tone of the petition for assistance and probably the amount of caffeine coursing through my veins, but I decided to Paypal the dude some cash. (I think it was also related to a background project I’m trying to spin up with friends at work to reproduce a simple online game we used to play back in the day). So I don’t typically support small developers, but I thought, since this was a replacement for therapy, sending a few bucks to support the guy who made this little typing platform.

It really does some cool things. Check out the statistics it provides on each days entry that you type. It’s worth a few bucks for me to have a place to open up emotionally, dump out all the random thoughts that bug me in the middle of the night or that distract me right in the middle of a good conversation with Erin. It’s neat, and the value I get out of someone gluing all these stats together and putting together clean, elegant visualization should be rewarded. My cheap therapy is how I typically refer to it around the house.

The site is something that I like. I’ve even convinced my mom to give it a shot. I find it having value so I decided to ‘become a patron’. As such, when I go to the website and there’s some simple problem, I get a little frustrated. Actually, I get a lot frustrated. Probably exponentially more so because I decided to pay for it. I think it’s the mental divide between the increased scrutiny we put on things that a free and things that we’ve purchased, for whatever small sum. If I wasn’t paying for it, I’d just chalk it up to growing pains and be done with it.

To the guy’s credit, he did just start the site in December and it got featured at lifehacker.com by the ex-Editor in Chief in February. As such, he’s probably had a huge surge of users and has had to learn work on scaling up and increased serverload. It’s hard to blame him, but I’ve got the American ‘customer service’ mentality where everything I pay for should come with a money-back guarantee if anything goes wrong with it. I think I really need to wrap my brain around this new economy of buying services instead of products.

If it's not one thing, it's another

2010-02-03T18:59:00.003-06:00

*phew* This has been an up-and-down past few days. After procrastinating for years, I finally broke down and got an HDTV this past weekend. Erin commented that the next thing ya know, I'll be getting a cell phone (but I'm not holding my breathe for that one either).

We get the new TV home and everything is great, but then we realize that we need HDMI cables to hook everything hither & thither. Amazon's got 'em for $4 fer a 6-footer... les go get one at Target. A single 3' HDMI cable at Target ran us $17. WTF?!? (and that doesn't mean Wed-Thurs-Fri). We decide we're going to make do with a single cable and just swap around when we're going to watch one of the two Blu-rays we also purchased. For those of you wondering, Star Trek and Half-Blood Prince.

Sunday, after returning home from the grocery store, we begin to notice that nothing will connect to the internet. Another WTF moment or two passes before we figure out that it's not the internet service at all, but the wireless router which is alternating between ALL LIGHTS ON and completely turned off, about twice a second. :-( So I putter with the other router we had setup as a wireless bridge in the living room, reset a thing or two, change some settings and Bazinga! We've got ourselves another wireless router setup.

I hop over to the living room and realize, I've got a bunch of stuff in there that wants ethernet connections... and needs HDMI cables... and my Wii, oh yeah, I gave that component cable I couldn't use away so I better buy a new one. One big order to Amazon.com later and here we are today. The delivery guy delivered my new router to the door. HDMI cables should be here in the next day or three, as should the Wii cable, and I'm becoming happier and happier.

So through the course of the evening, I'm getting the new router up and running as a wireless bridge for the xbox & the tv & the blu-ray player, and the digital cable is stuttering like a bunch of bad actors in a Lifetime movie about an special needs Olympic soccer team. ARGH!!! I think it's time for test #2 to see if my stomach is back in order.

Ohh yeah, so I stayed home from work on Monday & Tuesday (and only went in part of the day today to catch up the state of things) because I caught some sort of HDTV flu. This isn't the fun type of 'oh-I-got-a-new-toy-so-I'm-*cough*-*cough*-sick-now' illness. This is one of those 'every-solid-substance-in-the-digestive-system-liquefies-and-evacuates-IMMEDIATELY' illnesses. I managed to keep half a bowl of soup in my system for around 45 minutes on Monday evening, and I was actually glad to wake up from a nap in a puddle of sweat and not because of ... uhm... let's just call it 'urgent evac problems'. So I'm home from work Monday and Tuesday the weekend after I get my new fancy-schmancy HDTV and I can barely even enjoy the flippin' thing! I spent more time in the restroom than I did watching TV!

The living room is a mess. Cables and crap everywhere. Components and shelves are strewn about. We've got a massive 53" rear projection behemoth in the guest bedroom that needs to find a more suitable home (anyone want a TV for cheap or maybe free).

See! The reason I don't write in this blog anymore is because I ramble and overshare. Thanks. THANKS A BUNCH! *geez* It's all yer fault...

Photo Booths & Origami Books

2009-11-08T12:00:00.000-06:00

So it’s our ‘Paper’ anniversary and in classic Garcia-style, everything was a little thrown together at the last minute.

Our original intentions was to make our anniversary weekend a little more memorable than most of our other weekends. We were going to celebrate our ‘Paper’ anniversary by getting an origami book and making each other … ‘origami’s (I suppose that’s what they’re called??). Also, we were gonna find a photo booth and take a few sets of pictures of ourselves every year.

Do you know how difficult it is to find an origami book and a working photo booth in the city of Austin?

Sunday afternoon, we discovered the photo booth at Phil’s didn’t have a curtain, and we didn’t wanna pose for pictures kissing with her sitting in my lap in a cramped photo booth being watched by people chomping down cheeseburgers. On the way home, we stopped by the Amy’s close to our place on S. Congress, and it _had_ a curtain, but the thing was unplugged. “We had to unplug it when it started smoking. We called someone, but they haven’t come out to fix it yet...” We snagged a small cup of ‘Anniversary Cake’ which was a tasty mix of mexican vanilla ice cream with chocolate and vanilla cake…with Strawberry Crush’ns.

Later in the afternoon, we’re getting groceries for our celebratory meal and made a quick detour only to discover the photo booth at the Amy’s by Central Market at WestGate had a sign over the dollar slot that had ‘Out of Order’ scribbled on it in highlighter. :-( “What’re we gonna do even if we _do_ manage to find a photo booth that works and takes some good pictures… How’re we gonna find a working one next year!??”

Our origami book search wasn’t as exhaustive, and we started that on Friday, but even that took us in a completely different direction. We decided our paper gift to each other was gonna be some really cool books we found at Domy. We also squeezed in a trip to the Hey Cupcake! airstream trailer on S. Congress. We live just down the road from all that stuff, but we so seldom make the time to just go run around that whole fun SoCo strip.

The evening of our anniversary, we stayed in, put on some music and cooked dinner at home. This may not sound like much, but since we’re always eating at restaurants, cooking at home has become more special.

“What are you up to in Austin?” “Uhm…”

2009-07-25T16:17:00.001-05:00

Short Answer: Nothing much.

Long Answer: Funny coincidence happened recently. I added Brandy on Facebook and I was looking through her wedding photos and some of the backgrounds looked somewhat familiar. After digging around more, I found another photo that … just happened to look like one of my recent wedding photos. What the?!? Oh neat! Brandy had her wedding at the same place that Erin & I got married. So I wrote her about this neat little coincidence. Erin & I got married on Nov. 8th; Brandy and her husband on Dec. 20th.

So she poses the question, “What are you up to in Austin?” …and after typing and deleting and typing some more and deleting some more, I realized that the answers I was giving weren’t any secret and it was most likely a question which I’d be asked repeatedly, so I might as well put a little time into it and give everyone more than a quick answer and provide a little update on the state of things in The Garcia Household. (That’s so weird to type, especially after Erin & I have had discussions on women changing their last names and effects it has on identity and…)

Hrm, so the best way for me to answer is probably in reverse chronological order.

Erin got a new job. She started this past Monday at St. Edward’s as the International Student Advisor. This may be surprising to some who knew it was just at the beginning of ‘09 when she started working at UT as an International Student Advisor. While she loved working at UT with inbound international undergrad students, I don’t think she could’ve passed up the larger responsibilities involved in going from being an advisor at UT to the primary advisor at St. Ed’s.

For two evenings a week for the past year, Erin’s been working on her Masters at St. Ed’s in College Student Development. Erin and I had been batting around the idea of buying a home, but when we heard that she got the job at St. Ed’s, we figured it would be pretty beneficial to be closer to her school and work.

So at the end of August, Erin & I are going to be moving from our apartment up in NW Austin to an apartment in S. Austin. We’ll be moving from an apartment conveniently located within walking distance to my office, to an apartment which is conveniently located in walking distance to her office. Erin’s on a much more traditional schedule than I, so I’m hoping this’ll shave a lot of time off her previous loop of: Up early in the morning to drive to work at UT, brave the 5 o’clock traffic to get down to St. Ed’s for class, drive all the way from St. Ed’s to NW Austin, straight to bed, rinse and repeat.

So we’re finally at the part of the story where I come into play. I’m still working as a software developer up in NW Austin. I’m fortunate enough to be in a position where I don’t have set hours in the day, they just urge us to be there from 9:30/10:00-ish till about 3:30-4:00ish primarily for any meetings we might have and interfacing with other people and all the things in work that requires collaboration. Other than that, we’re given project schedules and try our darnedest to hit milestone and release dates. I _love_ the challenges involved in creating software.

Our move is going to make a bunch of sense for both of us because Erin’s office is going to open to students, regardless of whether she’s there on-time or not. …and her graduate classes are going to start at their set time in the evenings, regardless of whether she’s there or not. I, on the other hand, have the luxury of thinking about and carrying around my work stresses in my head 24/7, and as such, my employer is cool with me rolling in after all the traffic has died down, and staying late until I get frustrated with the cleaning crews vacuuming at 7pm. :-)

So I guess if I had to sum up the long answer, I’m thinking a lot about moving. I think we’ve got a moving crew lined up. We’ve gotta go sign the lease for our new apartment in the next couple of weeks. We have tons of stuff to pack up. Our new apartment already comes with a washer/dryer installed, so we have to figure out what to do with our washer & dryer.

One that note, I’m gonna go play me some video games. I’m exhausted from playing Diplomacy last night until 4am over at Justin’s house.

on Deprecating MySpace

2009-06-09T23:22:00.000-05:00

This isn’t some lengthy diatribe on how social networks are going to become extinct or… well, maybe it will turn out that way but that’s not the original intention.

So here’s how I stay active and on top of things like facebook, twitter, my gmail account, etc. I’ve got my browsing/online experience optimized to pack in as much desired content while paring down the superfluous fluff. Digsby’s been my current tool of choice to manage a lot of that stuff in the background. One of my favorite features and one of my biggest problems with Digsby is that it notifies you for everything. While I’m not a full out Inbox Zero guy, I try to keep my unread count down to zero.

So what happens when you couple my ‘Unread Zero’ style with regular spammy friend requests on MySpace… I’ve given up on MySpace. All the friends I’ve got there are also on Facebook and Twitter or on IM, so why am I bothering with something that’s not adding valuable content while adding to the daily noise level.

MySpace… I’d like to say it’s not you, it’s me… but it is you… you can’t stop me from getting spammed with friend requests fast enough so you’ve been demoted. You’re no longer on the main stage, go take a seat in between Friendster and Plurk.

on newer versions of Windows Installer

2009-05-20T19:52:00.000-05:00

There’s all sorts of new bells and whistles in the newer versions of Windows Installer but I think the overall cost is a bit high to require users install it with a product.

If someone recognizes that updating system-level components via Windows Update is important enough for them, then they’ll jump through any (mandatory on VersionNT>=600) reboot hoops. Hell, if they’re running Vista or Server 2008, they’re used to the occasional pain points that come along with running the OS.

I just don’t think it’s fair to ask for customers who don’t (or for Group Policy reasons can’t) update system level components to reboot just to install an app. Yes, I realize there are many advantages to be gained, but part of this whole method of only relying on the lowest common denominator, excluding all you crazy DTF people (an unfortunate acronym as explained to me by Urban Dictionary, which in this case means Deployment Tools Foundation).

Don’t rely on anything already being installed and available on the target system. You typically write your Custom Actions in C and package the .dll which shouldn’t have any outrageous dependencies if you’re targeting systems which may not have the .NET framework installed.

Carting along the latest version of Windows Installer in my mind is laziness. You’d rather make each and every customer suffer through a potential reboot than do extra work to avoid a dependency on a new feature. Until you see the same sort of widespread enterprise adoption of Windows 7, I’m sticking to Windows Installer 2.0/3.1 compliance.

on Tipping??

2009-04-18T12:06:00.001-05:00

Man, I felt like a jerk yesterday when I was getting the car back from the valet but didn’t have any cash on me. Poor dude stood there expectantly but I just hopped in the car and zoomed off. No high five, not even a nice thanks. Luckily, I was able to find the guy and drop a five-spot on him.

What’s the standard amount you should tip concierge and valets at a nice hotel? A buck feels too little, and a twenty feels like a bit much… but I never know what to tip someone who does a minute of jogging and loads a single suitcase. I generally tip a buck for someone who steams milk for my coffee or pulls me pint, but I got no idea what the going rate for a jog, popping the trunk, lifting a suitcase and closing my car door for me is… If he lays his coat down over a puddle for me, do I have to go on a second date with this dude or something??

Houston, Part 2

2009-04-17T09:27:00.002-05:00

Streaming media like Netflix Watch Instantly and Skype rely on one thing that’s not always available. Bandwidth. Crazy Hotel Zaza’s got throughput caps of .5 Mbps down and .25 up. Just enough to get browsing done, but not enough to stream media. At least I can still stream radio… barely. *sigh*

Back in Houston, but I brought Erin this time. She’s here for a NAFSA conference and I’m here because I couldn’t be without my wife on her birthday weekend.

This is part deux of Houston because Scott & I came up last week for Dan’s 30th Birthday. I’ve got the cutest videos of Gabe that I’ll post somewhere. Last time I saw him, blah blah blah. This time though, talking sentences blah blah bigger. It’s the same story of how quickly children develop in their first few years. Go find that Louis CK joke ‘Daddy, I don’t like chicken’.

Sad I missed the gumbo cook-off at work

2009-03-13T22:12:00.000-05:00

Installing TeXmacs under Cygwin (FSF GNU project)

Just finished building TeXmacs 1.0.7 on cygwin. I tried building 1.0.7.1, but hit a snag so I decided to go back and try the stable version.

netpbm 10.26.60 worked as for me as well.

So I spent my Friday babysitting compiles while watching the end of Season 2 of Weeds, catching up the backlog of shows on our DVR and then catching up on BSG. I'd complain about staying in or being domestic or some junk like that, but I caught something awful Wednesday night, came home early on Thursday, and worked from home all day today so staying in and being a hermit with my wife was actually pretty nice.

Too many Firefox Add-ons?

2009-02-24T13:46:00.001-06:00

I’m gonna run down the ‘Add-ons’ I’ve currently got installed. I pared this list down by a few plugins since this morning, but I’m taking another look at which ones I still use and which could be replace by separate applications.

Add N Edit Cookies
Cooliris
Delicious Bookmarks
DownThemAll!
Evernote Web Clipper
feedly
Firebug
GCal Popup
Geode
Google Gears
Google Notebook
Google Toolbar for Firefox
Greasemonkey
jsLib
Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant
NoScript (FTW!)
Password Bank (my biometrics)
Read it Later
Shareaholic
SQLite Manager
StumbleUpon
Todoist.com Sidebar (currently evaluating)
Ubiquity
UrlbarExt
YSlow

I don’t think I need the SQLite Manager or Add N Edit Cookies to load with my browser EVERY time. These could probably be replaced by a separate app. I don’t need Firebug, YSlow or jsLib on a day-to-day basis, I’m a desktop app programmer not a web developer. I was a big StumbleUpon, Google Notebook, Evernote user for a while, but have been leaning more towards tagging with Delicious and Read it Later lately. I’ve got no idea why Microsoft’s .NET Framework Assistant wanted to install itself into Firefox, but whatever.

I _love_ NoScript. Being a maniacal micromanager when it comes to all my computer is loading, I like being able to segment based on a site by site basis. It’s somehow still both a little too granular and not granular enough… What if I only want to allow some javascript on a site?? Or only PDFs/Flash to load, but not all their javascript code??

Cooliris, Geode, feedly, Password Bank, Greasemonkey & Ubiquity are all underutilized add-ons and I really should dump some or favor the others, but as Don so eloquently put it… I’m a ‘plugin pack rat’.

So how many plugins and firefox addons do you use?

Wedding Photos

2009-02-08T21:09:00.001-06:00

We got the DVD from our photographer of our wedding photos a couple weeks ago and I’ve been hemming and hawing over the best way to make these available online after the current provider takes them down. Well, yesterday and today, I finally decided I was going pull the trigger and see which photo sharing service gives me the best access/privacy/security controls.

The first three guys up to bat are Flickr by Yahoo!, Picasa Web Albums by Google, and Live SkyDrive by Microsoft. Each of them had their strengths and weaknesses and I’m not really hear to provide a comprehensive comparison of each, but I did hit a few minor glitches trying to get 1.75 GBs of wedding photos onto their free service offerings (though understandably so).

I had some troubles setting up guest passes in Flickr and I discovered that you can’t rearrange folder structures in SkyDrive, but I’m gonna see what each let me do as far as sharing links with family, not requiring Microsoft/Google/Yahoo accounts, quickly re-arranging structures, sharing explicitly setup subsets of photos, etc. I guess the biggest thing I’m looking for is the management and organizational tools provided with each service.

When I get this all sorted out, be expecting links and hopefully some embarrassing pictures of you on the intarwebs. If ya can’t wait, go check out our pictures on pictage.com.

Snow = Fun, Ice = Boring & Dangerous

2009-01-28T11:49:00.000-06:00

All the joys of bone-chilling weather like wet, slick or icy roads, with none of the burdens of things like playing in the snow or sliding down hills or making snow angels.

What-a-fortune!!

2008-12-15T18:04:00.000-06:00

"After readying the every emotion, I see some understanding peer entering realm." What the hell is that supposed to mean? Wilson & I tried a few different ways of parsing that sentence, but we were still effin' baffled.

Snow?!? SNOW!!

2008-12-10T14:41:00.001-06:00

Two days ago, it was so warm that even with the doors to the balcony open, we had to resort to setting the A/C to _cool_ the apartment. Today, we have this... WTF Central Texas!! Get it together with the weather thing. PICK ONE!!!

Happy 9th of December!!

2008-12-10T00:08:00.001-06:00

Wow. I had a (vicariously) fantastic day. Erin got a call today telling her she got the job she applied for at UT. To celebrate, we decided to go out for a special dinner out at Hudson’s on the Bend. We had a lovely evening as we shared a bottle of wine, their delicious Smoked Duck Diablos, I had the Elk Wellington and Erin enjoyed her Strip Steak.

Turns out that our server, Cory, knew and worked with Brooks there at Hudson’s. Got to hear some of Cory’s story about finishing up Law School and he, in turn, congratulated Erin on her new job. Then, partway through our meal, Cory let us know that it was sleeting and snowing outside. We took a break from dinner to briefly run outside and check out the amazing weather.

Wow, the weather here in Texas is crazy. I think tomorrow’s high is lower than yesterday’s low. We had to turn the A/C on yesterday when Steve came to visit, and had to bundle up tonight as we braved the snow and sleet on our walk from the restaurant out to the car. Things sure do get weird after you’ve been married a month. :-)

2008-11-30T23:27:00.001-06:00

Heavy coffee and tea drinkers get stained yellow teeth. Heavy smokers get stained yellow fingers. I think I’m on the verge of discovering the effects of excess butter/bacon grease consumption. Over the past week… let’s just say that when we ate relatively healthy for dinner, I think I started to get the shakes. It really hit when we were unloading the car from our Thanksgiving holiday and we had to carry our luggage back up our apartment on the 3rd floor.

It's official

2008-11-10T23:57:00.006-06:00

Here's a photo of my wife and me holding our signed and completed marriage license. Before 100 of our close friends and family, we held a ceremony, hosted dinner, shared cake and danced and enjoyed the company of all who were able to come. Expect more pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Garcia as we get them.

Good? Evil? No, Nerdy & Minty.

2008-10-30T00:41:00.001-05:00

Over the past few days, I’ve been securing full online access to things like 401(k), savings accounts, & credit cards. Due to some changes to my regular online banking, Mint.com couldn’t access my credit card accounts and I hadn’t accessed my 401(k) online in so long that I forgot my PIN. With the economy being as interesting as it’s been in the past month, I decided to start doing analysis on how I could redistribute my contributions.

Between getting up to 100% Minty-freshness, I also managed to get up to Level 1 on projecteuler.net, which requires finishing at least 25 problems. Now that I’ve hammered through 25 problems while freshening up on Python, I’ve gotta decide whether I’m going to power through solving more problems in Python, or whether I’m going to switch it up and either start fresh or proceed with a new language. Seeing people’s solution in J and K have been interesting, but I think I’m leaning towards something a bit less esoteric while still academic, like Lisp, Haskell, Erlang, F#. I’d half considered Ruby and Scala, but languages in that ballpark got beat out by Python (only for the purposes of learning a language which I may end up using later).

Oh yeah, and my wedding is in 10 days. :-)

Sedarious

2008-10-24T15:14:00.001-05:00

“I look at these people and can't quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked."

- Author David Sedaris, on undecided voters

GRR Frakin’ Opera!

2008-10-01T17:05:00.001-05:00

Anyone else occasionally forget that ctrl-f4 closes a child window inside an MDI and alt-f4 closes the parent window. I apparently did three times in a row with Opera because all my popup browser windows are all within one MDI. *ARGH*

Installing Hotfix for Windows (KB942288)

2008-10-01T13:51:00.001-05:00

I’m not saying that I have or that I’m going to have any problems with Windows Installer 4.5, I’m just jotting this down in my blog in case I see a string of installation problems in the future and can’t remember or figure out what I did that might cause problems.

I don’t know if it was a good idea or a bad idea to wait on installing VS 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 after the 4.5 update. *fingers crossed*

What makes an ‘expert’ programmer?

2008-09-20T15:09:00.000-05:00

So I was listening to the latest Stack Overflow Podcast and they were discussing some of the methods they use to reward active users on their site. They also brought up some of the negative e-mails and negative press they were getting… e.g. they mentioned Crap Overflow which is a site that criticizes “programming questions” websites such as theirs.

I found it made some excellent, valid criticisms but didn’t provide any forms of guidance, synthesize reasonable solutions or even suggest a general direction. I think there’s a few big problems with websites for supposed programming experts.

Expert programmers became expert programmers through experience.

There’s plenty of instructions available on how to stand on the shoulders of giants; the trick is what you do once you’re up there. Once you’re up there, you tend to find like-minded people, meet associates and make friends with those who’re doing similarly interesting things. After some experience doing whatever it is you like doing, you being to bounce questions and ideas off this network of people you’ve met. This niche community tells you about the best bits of documentation to read, points you to helpful resources, and recommends insightful books. Friends and existing documentation usually go a long way before an ‘expert’ programmer resorts to sifting through a myriad of search results.

“If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”

Granted, these are the words of a sociopathic movie character… I think they’re true nonetheless. If you’re stuck and have to resort to a website which relies on the kindness of strangers to offer talent and expertise, then I think you’re in _quite_ a pickle. I think the paradox here is that ‘expert’ programmers are going to be busy working on problems that will get them some sort of financial reward instead of working on achievement points or completion badges for a website. Presuming that ‘experts’ qualified to answer your question are busy doing instead of busy helping, the majority of your community is going to consist of the very people who came to your website due to their own inability to solve their own problem. I predict this is going to result in an eventual negative feedback loop where the only ‘experts’ on these sites are people who don’t have a network of capable colleagues or don’t know how to ‘JFGI’ or ‘RTFM’.

People only like playing games that they believe they can win.

I hear the Stack Overflow guys talk about achieving ‘critical mass’ of their site between the combined readerships of their blogs, but they’ve completely underestimated the ‘critical mass’ of the community required to sustain life in the site and keep it relevant. They’ve done a lot of good things over at Stack Overflow to reward active contributors in their community, but I don’t think it’s possible to have a high quality site without a high quality community. While rewarding your community will give incentive to those who participate, it could also create a potential barrier to entry for newcomers who want to be a part of the group…and there’s the rub. They say they want the site to be the intersection of Wikipedia, Digg, bloggers and forums participants, but I think for anything meaningful to happen, you either have to be unified by an EXTREMELY focused goal (e.g. jugglers who whittle their own clubs out of driftwood from three specific beaches) or have to have a MASSIVE user base (on the same order of magnitude as people who use google or people who drive cars).

the Google hydra bites itself

2008-09-16T13:37:00.001-05:00

I’d become so enamored with Google’s browser offering that I’d decided to make it my default browser. Chrome was my default browser. The ‘was’ in that last sentence indicates that something has changed between then and now. The thing that changed was Google Desktop 5.8.

Turns out, after doing a bit of searching, that with the latest release, they’re working on Google Chrome support.

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Desktop_Something-Broken/browse_thread/thread/28373a1837c126b9#

http://desktop.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=58591&topic=11614#Known_Issues

Looks like it’s off to another browser. Chrome, thanks for the great party, but me and productivity… sorry, _I_ and productivity, gotta get moving. It was fun.

Update without asking?

2008-09-12T14:42:00.001-05:00

Rob Mensching published an article discussing the pros and cons of Google’s newest browser, Chrome, automatically updating itself behind the scenes.

Even though he’s argued for silent, automatic updates, I think the Microsoft perspective is deeply rooted in enterprise sensibilities where every machine in the organization should update in lockstep to ensure compatibility between all machines. The last thing you want is one person’s (‘old’) copy of MS Word not being able to open a file from someone else’s (updated) copy of Word. For innumerable reasons, I see the argument for leaving the choice of updating up to the user/organization/administrators/etc., I see it, I get it, I follow… OK?!

Now webapps are completely different beasts altogether. Anytime you hit a web page, you’re asking for the latest and greatest version of that page. I don’t care what was on BBC News yesterday, or what my RSS reader served me up yesterday. I want the most up-to-date information. Any time I use Google, Yahoo, $searchEngine, whatever… I realize and am aware that I’m using their latest algorithm to return whatever information I requested. I’m not sure everyone using a computer wraps their brain around that idea, but I’m OK with that too.

Google Chrome is following the latter model rather than the former. I want all users to have the latest security patches. I don’t expect my dad to understand why he would need a patch for an XSS vulnerability. I have to teach friends & family who aren’t as computer savvy as me, “Don’t click on those colorful banners with smiley faces!” I’m happy that Chrome keeps its users on the latest version. I think this is a good default behavior. Now, a big part of my happiness is trust that the Chrome team continues running serious regression tests on their security or malware updates. I’m trusting Google Chrome developers to not completely hose backwards compatibility.

For me, Google Chrome is still in the dating phase. I’m still going to keep just about every other darn browser on my machines. If something doesn’t work in Chrome, I’ll try it in Firefox or IE 7 or Opera or Safari or whatever else I may have lying around.

I understand that you gotta break a few old eggs to make a fancy new omelette, but two things that don’t make me happy are:

Why won’t you let interested people, such as myself, have any insight into what your planning on updating or why you’re updating whatever it is you’re updating? What’s with redacting your fixes in the Chromium source bases? Are you ever going to release this information?
Why am I not given the option to opt-out of automatic updates? If changes are made to “protect” me from malware, but I, being capable of making my own decisions, feel that it’s not in my best interest to change, upgrade or ‘tweak’ my default browser, why am I not allowed to stay on whatever version I originally downloaded?

I hope the Chrome team makes some changes to stay in line with the informal Google motto, “Don’t be evil.” Give me some basic options:

Leave silent auto-update on (default)
Notify user at launch that the app has updated itself
Turn off silent automatic updates and stay on this version forever

Anyways, while I’m on the subject of updates, I’d also like to rail on a recent offender from Microsoft, which is just as guilty of similar levels of ‘evil’. When Live Mesh pops up a new dialog informing me of an update, what’s the difference between telling me there’s an update and only giving me the option to update, but doing all the other work automatically?

What’s the point of providing users with an option to update without providing them all the details and information required to judge for themselves whether or not it’s in their best interest?

IMHO, being employed as a software developer gives me a drastically different perspective from, easily, 80% of the average Windows users. But how I look at it, Google is doing the same thing Live Mesh is wanting me to do, but took the manual step of me blindly confirming some arbitrary update out of my hands.

Granted, silently updating functionality in a browser could potentially lead to breaking backwards compatibility; I think the benefits of not providing the user a choice and forcing them onto the latest and greatest revision (provided there are enough safeguards before distribution) easily outweighs strongly suggesting, but providing users the option to opt out of, important security updates.

Fists & Lightning Bolts

2008-09-09T16:04:00.001-05:00

Out for lunch for Wilson’s birthday today, and somehow the concept of a logo got brought up. Roger asked, “Do you want a Lightning Bolt or a Fist??” To which I naturally replied, “I want a Fist HOLDING a Lightning Bolt!!” Inspired by birthday genius, Wilson retorted, “Nah man, instead of a fist holding a lightning bolt, how ‘bout a Lightning Bolt WITH Fists!”, which in my opinion is a brazillion times cooler than a fist holding a lightning bolt.

Introducing the all-new CNET!

2008-09-08T14:33:00.001-05:00

Introducing the all-new CNET!
Originally uploaded by GilbertErik

Great Job on the new website... hyphenating all-new and screaming your company name like it's a stock ticker symbol... *sigh*

65 days and counting…

2008-09-04T18:58:00.000-05:00

Labor Day Weekend was pretty fun, although our fun was stretched thin across a bunch of people. Went out with Dan and Robin, Scott and Cheyenne, and Adam and Sarah… I think at one point in the night, someone commented that this is the first time all four of us go out and we’re all dating someone. It’s weird that we haven’t had that happen before… We also went out with Glenn, Laura, Wendy & Rich and their boys for brunch on Sunday. Weekend brunch at the Hill Country Pasta House gets a thumbs up from me. Ruby and her husband, Barak (sp?) were supposed to stay with us on Saturday night, but they got held up so we didn’t see them until Sunday night. And on top of all this, my parents and sister were in town for the UT football game against FAU.

After a fun-filled, jam-packed Labor Day weekend, with everyone and their mother coming to Austin, it’s time to get cracking on wedding stuff. I think the thing that worries me the most is that Erin says I wait until the last minute for everything, and if I’m feeling motivated, either I’m still sick from the previous week, or it’s getting down to the last minute with this wedding business.

“I think it’s for you…”

2008-08-15T13:51:00.001-05:00

This has never happened to me before.

I had just gotten back to the office from lunch. Hopped in the elevator and held the elevator door for someone. As soon as we hit the button for our floor… the elevator starts ringing. Not the whole elevator, it was the panel with the emergency phone. “I think it’s for you…”, I said. “You mean that’s not your cell phone?!?” He opens the small panel which conceals the emergency phone and we hear… “…to reduce your satellite bills by up to 43 percent…”

A frakkin’ telemarketer got a hold of me in an elevator. I don’t have a cell phone… but the _STILL_ got a hold of me in the frakkin’ elevator! Unbelievable.

Stop Please Stop

2008-08-13T16:00:00.001-05:00

Let’s run down the things you should stop saying immediately:

Rio Grande River
ATM Machine
GCC Compiler

I’m sure there are MANY more out there, but I really need everyone on the internet to stop right now right stop please.

As Valley border fence work begins, questions resurface

2008-08-11T10:17:00.000-05:00

As Valley border fence work begins, questions resurface

One of the funnier points this article discusses:

"President Bush ordered all federal contractors to participate in the Department of Homeland Security's electronic system for verifying the Social Security numbers of their workers."

...so you're telling me Homeland Security has better technology than the IRS and Visa/Mastercard?? Why don't you share some of this all-powerful technology and put a little more effort ending identity theft instead of worrying so much about illegal immigration.

Cron: I finally installed it correctly

2008-07-30T12:17:00.001-05:00

I'd been fiddling with cron off and on to handle a number of miscellaneous system maintenance tasks I'd like run. I guess I wasn't setting up something correctly because I could never seem to get it to work. I'd try messing with service settings and permissions for a little while before I'd give up and just script up the dang tasks I wanted run. Turns out that there’s a much simpler solution to setting up crond in cygwin. cron-config takes all the guess work out of it for you. Much like ssh-host-config, this configuration script for cron finally got a working crond on my Vista system.

SourceForge.net, you crack me up sometimes!!

2008-07-28T16:24:00.001-05:00

SourceForge.net: Community Blog
Some of the more amusing categories include:

'Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation' & 'Most Likely to Get Users Sued by Anachronistic Industry Associations Defending Dead Business Models'

Both of these categories contain many excellent projects which I'm sure many people find invaluable to their productivity.

Maintenance what?!?

2008-07-25T14:36:00.001-05:00

Let’s add the word ‘maintenance’ to the list of words that’s overloaded at work. Along with ‘component’ and ‘license’, ‘maintenance’ has become a horribly bastardized word which has lost any significant meaning as it’s become more and more diluted.

“You keepa using that word. I doo-na think it means whatchoo think it means.” –Inigo Montoya

gmail spam?

2008-07-24T16:59:00.001-05:00

I’ve been getting an unusual amount of spam in gmail lately… is it just me or is someone firing off a successful spam campaign which is beating the gmail spam filters?

Now, it’s not a HIGH number of spam by any means, but having to mark 4 messages in my inbox as spam is unusually high for one day. Am I alone in this?

Doesn’t the word ‘Fly’ imply some sort of speed?

2008-07-22T16:40:00.001-05:00

Dropped off BioShock in the mailbox on Friday at noon… that pickup was supposed to happen at 2:00… GameFly didn’t receive notice that it had been shipped until this morning. :-( They did already ship me out my next title and I’m very excited to play Wall-E (no matter how bad a game it may be), but when I see the word GameFly, that conjures up thoughts of speed. Maybe it’s the post offices fault, but on my first game return, GameFly’s turnaround time has earned them the new nickname ‘GameCrawl’.

Slightly more stable…

2008-07-21T12:43:00.001-05:00

I’ve noticed that FF3.0.1 has been more stable than the 3.0.0 release. The main time I get crash notifications is when I close the app. It’s still *LOADS* more stable than it was, but not quite yet close enough to perfect for me. Still loading up streaming radio in another browser. :-(

FireFox-o Crash Numero Uno

2008-07-18T00:24:00.001-05:00

Came home from dinner wif Danny & Jill and am greeted by a FF crash report. :-(

Crossing my fingers harder…

2008-07-17T18:21:00.001-05:00

I hope that the FireFox 3.0.1 update fixes all the browser crashes I’ve been experiencing. I’ll post a note when and if FF3.0.1 crashes on me. (and I ain’t gonna turn off all my add-ons and extensions)

Almost, but not quite…

2008-07-17T01:23:00.000-05:00

YAY, My sister’s visiting for the week. We’ve been hanging out and watching movies and going out to eat a bunch. She’s been going out shopping with Erin while I’m at work. All in all, a good time is being had… by all.

So the other night, all three of us were playing on iminlikewithyou.com. It’s this weird dating-ish sort of site predominantly populated with a bunch of young hipsters and high school kids. Any time you do anything on the site, you earn ‘points’. Useless, but still motivating, much like ‘banana stickers’.

So they’ve got clones of popular games you’ve probably already played when it was originally released in 1986, 1994 or 2002. They’ve got “Blockles” which is a Tetris clone, '”Dinglepop” which is a Snood clone, “Draw my Thing” which is a Pictionary clone, and “Gemmers” which is just like Same Game. On top of the multiplayer mechanismWhile my favorite so far is Draw my Thing, I’ve had fun playing all the games on the site.

I guess my big gripe is that I feel like they’re flash developers who’re making games, instead of game developers making flash games. I feel like their motivation is more towards getting you on the site, into their little flash container, and keeping you there. I guess their plan is 1.) to amass users, 2.) ??, 3.) profit on advertising.

All the games lack a certain responsiveness I’ve come to expect from video games. When your stack in Tetris gets high and the blocks are coming down fast, you want precise control of where every block lands. When you’re drawing in Pictionary, you can’t feel bogged down by selecting pens and having floating icons in the way and such. I’m a huge fan of Bubblez because it’s written in a way that if I aim for a corner, it’ll (somehow) give me the benefit of the doubt and the bounce I want. With IILWY, the controls always feel just a microsecond too sluggish for my needs. When the action gets too fast, I’m not blaming reaction times or my ‘slow’ computer… I’m blaming the site and the game, and I think that’s the biggest detractor to the casual games.

Kinda fun, but not keep me coming back for advertising dollars FUN!

wedding website

2008-07-10T02:44:00.001-05:00

go check http://petersongarciawedding.com

Rentin’ Games

2008-07-09T23:41:00.001-05:00

Signed up for a GameFly membership on Monday, and they shipped me BioShock for the 360 and Zack & Wiki for the Wii. I got BioShock in the mail on Tuesday and Zack & Wiki in the mail on Wednesday. BioShock is the excellent game that everyone else has reviewed it to be, and Zack & Wiki is proving to be a fun puzzle adventure game.

This would’ve been great, but… those weren’t at the top of my game queue… err… GameQ. I had wanted to play some songs on Rock Band for the 360 and play through Wall-E on the Wii before the movie fever passes. *sigh* Oh well. I was concerned with a friend from work told me that he heard stories of delivery service and turnaround times getting worse the longer you’re with GameFly. We’ll see…

They better keep turning around games as fast as I can turn ‘em in… I initially signed up for a two months for the price of one month special, and then for some 20% off 3 months of service special they e-mailed me about, so I think I’ve paid for service clear past Thanksgiving. I hope they can keep a steady stream of good games coming my way.

2008-07-08T14:28:00.000-05:00

I can't tell if Dan's doing the Chicken Dance or happily prancing about his new home.

Nobody Cares…

2008-07-07T00:08:00.001-05:00

Reading my friend’s blog and not caring about it reminds me that blogs don’t matter… Well, no more than a guy on the corner handing out pamphlets.

Cute, Firefox, Cute

2008-06-30T12:54:00.001-05:00

So I’m ok with imagining that all the times you crash and I submit crash information, something’s actually happening with this crash information. If nothing, then ok. At least I feel better doing that… but this latest trick of yours… Dying and just killing the window and going away silently. Cute. I’m sorry that my experience (with all my ~~plug-ins~~ add-ons enabled) with Firefox 3 is such a poor experience. This is getting to be right up there with XP SP3… And ya know what, I didn’t like the 3rd Matrix movie either… Keep it up Firefox and you’re going in the same bucket as the _third_ Matrix movie… *sigh* Time to turn ALL my add-ons off and see if I can live in boredom browser 3.0. What’m I supposed to do to instigate random unpredictable crashes… and how do I know when turning an add-on back on three days ago causes FF3 to crash tomorrow??

Hooray!

2008-06-25T10:08:00.000-05:00

Erin got accepted to grad school. She had been checking on the status for a while now because it was taking longer than usual to get online confirmation that her GRE scores made it there. She's going to be a student come Fall ‘08. Congrats Erin.

Only the best ‘barista’s wanted…

2008-06-18T19:46:00.001-05:00

Ugh, I kinda hate myself a little for even using that word, ‘barista’. Sounds like a poor man’s mispronunciation for a UK lawyer.

So a while back, I knew some people who decided to move from Austin to Chicago. Something about someone’s significant other going for school or a job or something. Well, they were trying to convince the other people in their band to move up there as well. The Austin music scene can get pretty saturated at times and I can fully understand trying to establish yourself in another city. You can build up and energize a new fan base, call back from your library of old songs and see what works over better now, etc… Just in the same way a person who considers themselves a serious musician or an up-and-comer might move TO Austin to try and reach a broader or more discerning audience in a more competitive atmosphere; I can see how a musician might use a move away from the dense and congested Austin music scene to revitalize their music career in a less crowded music scene.

On a tangent, Adam got me hooked on 360 Primo. Great little coffee shop up near the Arboretum… correction, USED to be a great little coffee house. Switching coffee distributors has thrown me off a bit, but that’s another story. So there was this cool chick who used to work there and we would chit-chat while I was waiting for my coffee. It was the kind of friendly thing where I mentioned getting engaged to Erin with her and her being happy for us… as happy as a stranger can be for two strangers. So she ended up moving to Seattle a few months back, and I briefly wondered… Do people who work in coffee shops take their skills up to Seattle to ‘make it big’ (whatever that means). Like, are there people who are trying to bust into that hyper-competitive coffee shop attendant gig who just lack the social skills or can’t properly gauge the temperature of the milk or something, so they have to move to a less coffee-savvy city where they might have a chance to work into a position? Is there some sort of big leagues or signing deals? Some sort of hierarchy or preference system that I’m unaware of? “Hey, we should go hit up that new joint… that Gotham Coffee… they got this hilarious dude behind the counter who’s like a carnival guesser. He can tell you which coffee drink you wanted by the type of shoes you wear…”

FireFox 3!!

2008-06-17T18:19:00.001-05:00

Let’s see how the firefox 3.0 release holds up… I hope the released version is the last I blog about any problems I have with firefox.

FlakyFox3 Crashes Again!!

2008-06-11T18:42:00.000-05:00

I think I’ve reached kind of a sad point when I start to run pandora and gmail in IE because Firefox 3.0rc3 on Vista crashes given the broad range of ~~plug-ins~~ add-ons I’ve got running. I’m not going to go through the multi-day process of disabling all my add-ons and turning them back on one at a time until I notice random crashes start to happen when I’m typing stuff in the address bar (always when I’m fiddling in the new address bar *sigh* _right_ at the point where you wanna go to a site or do something specific).

I’ve got nothing against Firefox and actually prefer it as my supa-numba-one browser of choice, but it’s just a little frustrating that this is all the fault of some stupid plug-in that I’ve grown accustomed to using on a regular basis. *GRR* I’m going to be pissed if the StumbleUpon ~~plugin~~ add-on if gets bumped up from 3.18 to a newer version and the crashing mysteriously stops occuring!!!

MBFastTrak133 & Vista SP1

2008-06-11T12:14:00.001-05:00

So when Vista SP1 got pushed down to the stalwart desktop machine I keep running as a server in my guest bedroom closet, some hardware component didn’t agree with the new OS component. I’ve got a video somewhere of the Windows boot screen running for about 30 minutes. I (re-)install the OS, but this time from an Vista + SP1 disc, install various drivers to get running whatever I could in Vista, get to the point where I had to install some ancient RAID drivers and ka-boom!

Even though Vista will load the drivers for my MBFastTrak133 “Lite” onboard RAID controller, SP1 doesn’t like the drivers for some reason. They show up as some strange “Win.Net Server 2003 Promise MBFastTrak133 Lite (tm) Controller”, and surprisingly, they worked OK in Vista RTM, it’s just after I upgraded to SP1 that compatibility with this ancient piece of hardware was broken.

If I don’t hear back from the support incident I just filed with Promise, it’ll be time to load XP, pull off all the data of them striped 200GB drives and chalk up another piece of hardware as a Vista casualty. Or who knows, maybe that’ll be the turning point when I go back to XP for that old machine.

Ohhh Silly HP Drivers

2008-06-10T23:36:00.002-05:00

Reinstalling the OS and it's time to get drivers... most everything else installs easily and automatically, but for an HP USB printer, I have to download either:
» HP Single-Function Products Driver Bundle - IT Professional Use Only

09-2007 9.0.0 - 70.24M

» HP Deskjet Basic Driver

09-2007 9.0.0 - 35.87M

» HP Deskjet Full Feature Software and Drivers

09-2007 8.0.0 - 78.7M

Seriously... 35, 70 or 78MB are my options... SERIOUSLY!??! I want to install a printer driver. For a freakin' USB printer... where's the 'U' in that!?!?

Two Neologisms: Creepliment & Webinar

2008-06-10T15:19:00.001-05:00

Thank Kevin Purdy (via Gina Trapani) and Merlin Mann for these two:

'creepliment' (noun) 1. an expression of praise which makes you uncomfortable; a creepy compliment. (Origin @kevinpurdy)

"On the other hand, with a webinar, the marketing dude can't tell you left the room ten minutes ago. Talk about _win-win_."

Where does self-promotion stop and shameless self-advertising start?

2008-06-05T23:00:00.001-05:00

So I've got this blog... I've got a couple websites (which I rarely update)... I've got a twitter feed which updates my facebook status, a myspace page, (does anyone still use Friendster anymore?), some aggregation on friendfeed, an RSS reader, a few e-mail addresses, a google account, a yahoo account, an MSN/hotmail account... I still use ICQ for a few tech luddites I know... a lot of this which is accessible by Digsby (big props BTW).... *whew* So I just went out an started a Plurk account. :-( When does this stop?!? I know I've passed the point where a lot of my friends who aren't as addicted to the intAr-Webs would say, "Stop being such an asshole..." Or I believe I've been seeing the term 'webcock' thrown around lately...

Why do I get off this train, let it pass me by (as it loops around the track a few bazillion times), only to get back on and be sucked in by all the new hotness..es... hotnessees... hotnessis, hotnessi... whatever.

I was originally gonna use this page as an informational gathering spot so I could link to all the pages and services I use and if you use one of those, join in on the fun... but screw a bunch of that. Give me a call and let's go get some lunch or a beer sometime. I'll tell you a shitty story that you won't find funny, but will pretend to laugh while mocking me internally and wondering, 'this guy really thinks he's funny?!?'... just like the good ole days.

Firefox 3 RC1 Crashed Again

2008-05-21T16:25:00.001-05:00

Am I the only one getting Firefox 3 crashes 5~10 times a day? I'm glad I'm producing debug information for the Firefox-dev team, but it's starting to get a bit frustrating. Maybe it has something to do with the all the incompatible add-ons that're disabled... maybe it has something to do with FF3 still being an RC, but it sure is frustrating.

:-(

If you're thinking of making the leap like I did, 'caveat emptor'... err... What's the latin word for "one who foams at the mouth for the latest version"?

Firefox 3 RC1

2008-05-19T19:52:00.000-05:00

So I decided to test drive Firefox 3 RC1, and some of the add-ons I use on a regular basis aren't working so I immediately proclaim, I'll try it more later. I switch back to Firefox 2 and realize that FF3RC1 is using the same prefs folder that FF2 was... :-( Having to re-login to everything is kind of a pain. Oh well, I guess pulling all those passwords to the front of my brain ain't such a bad thing after all.

Sites cross-referencing sites

2008-05-19T12:53:00.001-05:00

So I've got lifehacker in my feed reader and had been really happy with it... ok. I saw 'Cool Tools' and decided to add that to my feed reader. Ok check. The lifehacker folks saw Cool Tools and added it to their feed reader (or whatever), and now they're doing entire articles which are just regurgitations of the Cool Tools articles that I read the week prior.

Granted, I read a lot of stuff on the inter-t00bs, but I'm getting really tired of slashdot, lifehacker, engadget, and a bunch of other aggregating sites not putting any effort, but still blowing it up into a full-blown article like THEY were the ones to find it.

...and it's not just in tech websites. News websites have been doing this for years, but news is suited to it because there's no one "making up" the news. Well, ok, the creative process should only minimally be invoked when reporting news... I'm looking at you 'Flowery-English'.

I think I would benefit from a website that presents, not just the news I read, but ... alright, I want Google Reader to have a contextual 'sort -u' option or have it scan the content and squash them into one article thread so I can choose where I want to read coverage that solitaire is a big time waster.

Twitter & Facebook Integration

2008-05-17T17:30:00.001-05:00

So the thing I don't like about my twitter and facebook status being linked is that 'tweet's are usually declarative statements where as a facebook status is generally an indicative phrase. It's tough to put the same content on one when it's preceded with your name in the other. :-(

Google Desktop vs. Vista Search

2008-05-15T11:40:00.001-05:00

Wow, I think the only reason I'm posting this is because Google Desktop wouldn't find a local file. Granted, I typed in the name of the file into Google Desktop and it started giving me web results in Quick Find, which is probably some pref that I have setup or some default behavior, but when I wanted to find a pdf file that I know I have in my personal documents folder, it would've been nice if it could've recognized that a file containing the words I was searching for was higher on the list. It took a sec for Vista Search to figure out that I wasn't looking for a program in the Start Menu before it pulled up the results for local files, but it still gave me closer results than what Google Desktop gave. Granted, I gave Google Desktop a vague search which has TONS more web hits, I would've just hoped that it would've suggested better. Looks like I still have some nuances of Search-Fu to learn. I still find both to be uniquely useful tools which, despite their overlapping functionality, serve excellent functionality.

That's my two cents...

Wii would like to play...

2008-05-11T18:21:00.001-05:00

I'd been meaning to publish this info for a while, but here's some of my Wii console numbers:

Wii Console Number: 6353 5412 7576 2465

Mario Kart Wii: 2879-0200-7052

New Toys

2008-05-09T16:47:00.001-05:00

OMG! I almost forgot to mention all the cool stuff I got for my birthday. Erin, my fiancee, made me the most awesome-est pair of cozy pajama pants with her newly discovered sewing talents. Wilson, one of my partner's in crime, made me a green switch. Erin's parents got me one of the most time consuming puzzles I'd ever gotten. I must've spent a couple of hours all told fiddling with 'Best Ever' (2008) before I figured it out. My parents and my sister came in town for the weekend and took us out to eat and we went shopping around town. They also got me the awesome games I'd had on my wishlist: Orange Box and GTA4 for the xbox360, and Mario Kart for the wii.

Between toys, a wedding to plan, and tons of new software I'm playing with (Trac seems super useful and I'm using Windows Live Writer for this and the previous post)... I think Erin and I have agreed that we don't have enough hours in the day.

Trac on Cygwin

2008-05-09T16:32:00.001-05:00

Wow... where to begin. I guess my latest excitement is that between doing RealWork™ I finally had success setting in setting up Trac w/ GitPlugin.

So I've been using git and CruiseControl for a while as a personal version control system. I've made a git repo on one of my build machines which ignores CVS/ artifacts, a clone of that repo on my laptop and my dev machine, pushing and pulling over ssh, development in either place that was fast and feature rich. I then throw CruiseControl on the build machine which builds every time there's a group of commits pushed into that repo.

I immediately see what group of commits does and doesn't build. When I get all the features in I need to for a large task or a complete feature, I then manually do a CVS commit from that repo into our CVS server. The only reason this is feasible is because I'm the primary developer on my piece of the pie.

Since I've got a personal repository to track every tiny change I make and my own build system to tell me when those little changes interfere with other pieces, it's time to tack on some project management. I figured Trac was a good fit. After some wrestling with the Windows port and trying to get the Git Plugin to work with Trac on win32 python 2.5, I gave up and found it was WAY too easy to setup Trac on Cygwin.

First thing I did was grab the easy_install setup and installed it in cygwin so it would go into my cygwin python 2.5 distribution.

Then I used easy_install to install the three required packages and the Git Plugin I wanted to try:

$ easy_install Genshi
$ easy_install Trac
$ easy_install PySQLite
$ easy_install http://trac-hacks.org/svn/gitplugin/0.11/

This all went off without a hitch. I followed the standard 'create an environment' action:

$ trac-admin $HOME/TestTracProject initenv

I made sure to follow the Git Plugin configuration steps to make the requisite changes needed to point to my git repo, then I started up the standalone server using:
$ tracd --port 8080 $HOME/TestTracProject

VOILA! I had a working Trac install which would let me create tickets and browse a git repo. The main purpose of this entry was to remind myself how painless easy_install made installing Trac on Cygwin. Let's see how many more times I can get that key phrase in here. :-)

frightening

2008-04-25T17:32:00.003-05:00

So I gave Lee some good advice earlier this morning and he came back this afternoon and said he liked my viewpoint...

me: why?
lee: haha, because it makes sense.
lee: of all people, erik garcia is the closest thing i've got to conscience right now!
me: OMG
me: that's a horrible horrible thing
lee: I KNOW!!!

The world is a sad, terrible place when _I'M_ someone's conscience.

Thanks Don!!

2008-04-23T20:33:00.001-05:00

I've had a long list of things I've been meaning to catch up on... and on that list is to be more active in blogging/twittering/facebooking/myspacing/friendster-ing... and other 'blog-tastic' things. (*UGH*) My writing this is proof that I'm committed to doing more blogging... at least for the next couple weeks or so, until I get bored and decide that my time is much better spent playing video games or playing racquetball or any number of side projects which can consume my time.

So on the subject of blogging, I was digging around in the blogger settings and forgot that I setup an alias to blog via e-mail. I thought this'd be handy for an industrious blogger to blog-blog-blog when away from an internet connection by queueing up e-mails containing whatever you wanted to talk about, and then sending them all batch when you get back in range or on the grid or whatever marketing term you want to use this week.

In any case, I decided that I wanted a method with which I could, without leaving a cygwin console, write a blog entry and email it up to blogger. I did some searching around for some command line methods of sending e-mail then figured I'd use GMail's SMTP servers and did some more searching and came across a particularly helpful article on using stunnel. Turns out, the domain name looked familiar, it was owned by my former manager when I was working in N. Dallas. What're the chances?!?

Again, thanks for that particularly helpful article on cygwin, stunnel and gmail.

Yay for logging!!

2008-04-23T15:57:00.002-05:00

Wow, it turns out that the logging functionality I added into the installer has already proven to be a valuable addition. We were trying to track down what values were set in an .ini file, and being the good little Windows Installer developer, I used the IniFile Table and everything done to the customers machine was recorded in a verbose log. We were all scratching our heads as to what went wrong and I was able to easily dig up these logs and search through them to see what we set to what values and why.

It's a good feeling when work that was intended to "pay off later", pays off.

Battlestar Ga-nerd-ica

2008-04-18T15:15:00.002-05:00

Back around his birthday happy hour celebration, Adam mentioned that he and Sarah started watching Battlestar Galactica and were really enjoying it. Well, Erin and I just finished watching the 1st season last night. Lotsa people say the first season was the best, but since they're wrapping up the series, we figured we'd play catch-up and hope to watch the end of the series as it airs on TV. We're tossing around the idea of trying to catch an episode of Lost or BSG at the Village Alamo.

Over lunch today, I remarked on both how odd yet how natural it was... A year ago, I would have never imagined we would be watching a complete season of a nerdy sci-fi show and talking about it over lunch together. She was in San Antonio and I was complaining about just wanting to have dinner with my girlfriend on a weeknight. :-) Back then, the nicknames began... Battlestar Ga-nerd-ica and Accounting in Space.

That being said, I was shocked with I did a search for 'Battlestar Ganerdica' and nothing came up. I got a few hits for for Battlestar Galctinerd, so I was excited by that... but figured it was time for me to leave my thumbprint on teh innert00bs.

Twitter who?!?

2008-03-25T10:59:00.002-05:00

Why are new groups of people randomly following me on twitter now? It's kind of bizarre... I've said it before and I'll say it again... it's like telling your friends about this great new band, have you heard of them?!? they're called the strokes... *sigh* Twitter was cool LAST YEAR for sxsw, and I didn't hop on the band wagon until after, but I have to wonder, at what point does a social technology die?

I've got friends on still on ICQ from 10 years ago. I randomly stop in on IRC rooms that've been going for ... forever, as far as internet time is concerned. I've got at least a handful of people on any number of disparate networks, but when do I pull the plug on something and say, ya know, it's not that important to talk to my 4th grade news report partner.

I know some of the big heavies are pulling in more and more people, but do we really need this many different gimmicks in internet communication channels? Push-chat, microblogs, tweets, updates, bulletins... I think my internet tendencies are cyclic. I tried a bunch of them out and now I think I need to simplify and consolidate. I know 'the market' will figure out the winner, but at times, I wonder why am I bothering with the back and forth of, we're all on myspace... no, now we're all on facebook... no no wait, now we're all on twitter... ok, now we're on supaChat... wait wait, now we're going old school with straight up snail mail postcards.

...and I just have to wonder where will the herd go next...

Vista SP1 isn't headed for my R1F today

2008-03-18T17:06:00.000-05:00

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is not available for installation from Windows Update and is not offered by Automatic Updates

After reading all the conflicts that MS advises against, I'm glad I didn't install a prerelease update package. My laptop (Asus R1F) has a UPEK Fingerprint Sensor, Intel 945GM Display Drivers, and I got a Logitech QuickCam for Christmas... I update the display drivers frequently after getting annoyed with a couple of revisions that broke the tablet's auto-rotate feature, and I updated the UPEK fingerprint drivers to the latest ones, but it's that darned Logitech mess that's probably keeping me from getting SP1.

Oh well, I know it's got some good things and I should see some slight performance improvements, but I guess I'll just have to wait for all my wrinkles to get ironed out by someone...

New toys

2008-03-14T16:14:00.002-05:00

Not that anybody who reads this doesn't know or particularly care, but I'm in especially good spirits since my new toys are just plain workin'.

My laptop hard drive was getting full... it was the 80GB 5400rpm Hitachi drive that came with my tablet. Well, with Vista SP1 coming out and Server 2008 / Visual Studio 2008 / SQL Server 2008 being available, it's time to grab the v6.1 Windows SDK and this led me to start running low on space. I wanted to upgrade to bigger/faster/better... naturally, but what was the shortest path.

I ordered a 200GB 7200 RPM Hitachi drive from newegg.com and it was this simple to upgrade:

Using the Windows Backup and Restore Center, I made a Windows Complete PC Backup to a USB drive I had lying around that had enough space to hold the 65~70GB hard drive backup
(go to lunch)
Removed the old drive and popped in the new drive
Boot using the Vista RTM install CD and choose Repair... -> Complete PC Restore
Pulled the 65~70GB image off the USB drive and onto my new hard drive
wait 30 minutes
Boot into Vista
Extend the partition using the Disk Management MMC

Dead simple and it just plain worked. I know that people complain about how unstable, unresponsive or idiotic Vista can be, but for every one of these people complaining, I think there are 20, 50 or even hundreds of people who are breezing along just fine with the usual bothers of UAC prompts, running an app as Admin, or enjoying their PC with UAC turned off.

Also, dag nabbit... Erin was ONE note away from getting the 'Perfectionist' achievement on GH3 last night. She wasn't even trying for it... man!

So remiss of me...

2008-03-03T16:05:00.003-06:00

I've got a new (old) website. I picked up http://gilberterik.com about a year ago, but never did anything with it since Microsoft had me locked into using their pokey site design tools, but since they opened it up end of Feb., I've decided to use ti to start expanding my web presence. Time to start carving out my own little slice and post up my own crappy stale content. :-)

Oh yeah... I've got a few posts that never got published over the past 6 months so I'll sum it up in a few sentences...

Still blissfully living with Erin
got plenty of practice making stuffing for Thanksgiving(s)
a first Garcia Christmas with an 'outsider' :-)
proposed to Erin (she said 'yes'!)
jot down November 8th on your calendars

I think that pretty much covers it. Ya know, tons of the usual... Halo nights with the guys, enjoying working, weekend barbeques and occasional game nights. Things be good... things be good.

Peanut oil is an inebriant...

2007-09-03T23:30:00.000-05:00

Had a fish fry at Justin and Kim's house. Roasted some potatoes, cooked up some corn on the cob & green beans. Out back in the deep fryer, we started with home made hush puppies, cajun seasoned catfish & we even deep fried sausages. We wrapped that up with Kim's homemade apple pie & homemade ice cream, neither of which we were allowed to deep fry. :-(
I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing that Erin & I, which can be fairly indulgent when it comes to meals, are actually further enabled when we have these monthly mini-feasts with our friends. Imagine your regular friends deciding that Thanksgiving dinner was just a preordained theme for the November feast, and a catfish fry, a rib feast, kebab extravaganza and chili cookoffs are just a few of the ways to pass the time until turkey comes around again... that's why I'm drunk off peanut oil.

MMMM

2007-08-23T22:05:00.000-05:00

Pan Seared Rib Eye, Asparagus w/ Lemon Butter & Baked Potatoes... My tummy is SOOO happy right now.

My life is still totally awesome...

2007-08-20T11:43:00.000-05:00

My life is good. Had ribs at Justin's on Thursday, celebrated Paul's birthday with Sushi at Korea Garden on Friday, eat some kebabs at Paul's on Saturday... Yesterday, had lunch with Erin at Phil's, we hung curtains in the new place, then went to the Village Drafthouse to see 'Superbad'. Earlier this morning, the new washer & dryer was delivered to the apartment. The past 5 days have been really good to me. My life is good.

Sleepover!

2007-07-10T12:15:00.000-05:00

Got the keys to our new apartment yesterday and Erin & I are going to get some snacks and some drinks, rent a movie or two and camp out tonight!

Exciting Times!

2007-06-26T00:42:00.000-05:00

Wow, there are quite a number of things going on this summer. The rain has been crazy and is scheduled to continue to be crazy. Guess it's time to keep my flip-flops in the closet. I hope this rain lets up somewhere in the soon to before I move in with my girlfriend time frame.

Weather in Texas Sucks!

2007-06-04T15:54:00.000-05:00

Ok, so we had hail and came this close to a hard freeze in April. APRIL! And the past weekend got SUPER hot and then went to thunderstorms yesterday and today. I really think god is mad... and it's probably something you did...

Marathon Day?

2007-05-19T14:18:00.000-05:00

Is today TV show marathon day? They're doing an all day marathon of Ninja Warrior on G4, Heroes on SciFi and Scrubs on Comedy Central. WTF? I guess it's the indoor version of my _EXTREME_ weekend... since I didn't follow up go-karts with paintball this morning.

Vroom Vroom

2007-05-18T23:51:00.000-05:00

For Katherine's Birthday, we went out to Iron Rock Raceway and had a blast. We got to run three 10-minute races and it was freakin' fun. There's nothing like zippin' around a corner and hoping your tires don't slip out from under you and put you in the plastic barricades.

Flash!! Ahhh-aaaa

2007-05-18T18:04:00.000-05:00

Lemmie just say that I wish my browser or the Flash VM were Terminal Services aware so I wouldn't hit that massive slowdown whenever I try to open a browser on a remote machine and get bogged down by the flash animations coming over the wire.

Everyone else is talkin' about it

2007-05-16T22:07:00.000-05:00

Well, I haven't written in a long time and I'm procrastinating

Awww scraps

2007-04-25T15:55:00.000-05:00

Out with the old and in with the new... I find somewhere that updating my display drivers should fix my 'Task Scheduler' DEP problems. And sure enough, somehow it has. But now the auto-rotate on my R1F is out of whack now. :-( Dangit Intel, can't you get everything working on your 945GM drivers!

Twittin' Away

2007-04-23T21:46:00.000-05:00

Twitter both kills me and fascinates me with the levels of insight it provides me. I'm surprised how differently it let's me communicate. I'm pushing an away message to my friends. It's like some sort of odd passive-aggressive IRC channel. It's like trying to be non-chalant by wearing a shirt that says, "It's My Birthday!!" I'm not chatting with my friends, we're all talking at each other. It's odd.

...and Wiiiiiiiiiiiii

2007-04-19T20:01:00.000-05:00

So super fun is the wii...

Google Checkout

2007-04-04T18:50:00.000-05:00

Man, I was both impressed and a little fearful of the nature of google checkout. I remember signing up a few months back because I was buying an item for a little less than $20 and they were offering a $10 coupon off if you sign up. Well somehow, I didn't apply the $10 off coupon or something... oh well, no biggie. I somehow get reminded that this coupon expires at the end of April and decided to put it to some use. I figured God of War II wouldn't be a shabby purchase, so I decided to see what sort of deal I could snag.

Paying with Google Checkout was frighteningly easy.

I'm used to going through the regular riggamarole with my credit card and the odd verification steps thrown at me, but I hit the pay with Google Checkout button, was taken to a secure page (I was already logged in to my Google Account) where I was presented with a summary of my purchase and big button. I click the big button and poof, quick as that my order is placed. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I'm in any way, shape or form amazed by teh IntarTubes or whatnot, I'm saying that it's terrifying that I can make purchases this quickly.
I need one of those 'Men In Black' mind-flashy neurolyzer things so I can make myself forget how easy it is to buy things on the internet. Alls I need is to stumble home from a pub and get click-happy at TechToyDiscounts.com or something...

Having another rough day

2007-04-04T15:13:00.000-05:00

I guess you can tell when things are going well vs. when things are going poorly because I don't really publish my blogs much when things are going well. I'm just having a tough day at work and I'm getting kinda frustrated with work. Alas, at least I'm employed and have a job to complain about. On the one hand, I'm frustrated with the constant inflow of interruptions, but on the other hand, I realize that in their universe, these are immediate questions that can be answered. Just because I'm a source of information shouldn't make me THE source of information. Well, while venting feels good, it doesn't get anything done for anyone else... back to the thing with the thing.

Bees are Latino?

2007-04-03T20:32:00.000-05:00

I know this is an old question, but when did bees and chihuahuas become latin? I can't wait until Ricardo Montalban starts voicing sharks on Animal Planet.

March is mistake month

2007-03-13T20:57:00.000-05:00

I nuked my laptop, and my router, and software everywhere. Crystal and Ben broke up. Holly's made some mistakes. There's lots of stupidity going around this March.

MySpace spammers are lazy and retarded!

2007-03-06T15:14:00.000-06:00

It's things like this that both amuse and infuriate me when it comes to myspace.

Stuff I _NEED_

2007-02-28T01:41:00.000-06:00

I've been talking a lot about things I really wanna buy these days and figured I'd write-up a quick list of things I'm thinking about so you can offer suggestions.

Webcam so I can skype
New Keyboard & Mouse for my home desktop
Save up money for a new car
new apartment
money for trip

Curse you MySpace!!

2007-02-21T16:29:00.000-06:00

I don't know why, but last night, ended up hanging out with Lacy @ D&D... and that was a good time and all... but for some reason, I got sucked back in to that mice-pace website. I spent more time on that damned site today than I had in the past two months. I swear, I got 17 friend requests, 94 messages, and somehow uhm, Tom called me at my office and wanted to see if I wanted to meet up for lunch. (I'd already made plans with Linda, so that was out). But still, it's quite bizarre how a modicum of activity initiates an avalanche of e-mails, friend requests, and messages. I think it's sentient... no no, I really do... I was going to take a picture of me flipping off the website, but we all know I'm too lazy and too busy for that. I want someone to photoshop myspace clinging to a chain, lowering itself into molten steel and giving me a thumbs up before it kills itself.

Efficiency in Laziness

2007-02-19T16:18:00.000-06:00

So my latest procrastination enhancement has been using google reader's folders feature. I added three of my favorite time-wasters into one folder (which starts with an underscore to ensure it comes up first in the list). I just have to open one folder to get the latest news feeds from engadget, lifehacker and slashdot. Digg seemed a bit too noisy for me to add to the list without cluttering it up with a bunch of unread articles. It's a good mix of 10-20 stories every time I get some spare cycles to check while doing a long build or something. I'm starting to optimize my time-wasting. What has my world come to?

What I know I know

2007-02-09T11:44:00.000-06:00

TheDrizzle's bookmarks on del.icio.us
Google Reader - Erik's shared items
digg / BigFlirt / news / dugg

So I've decided to start cross-linking stuff that's mine all in one place so hopefully the internet can eventually learn who I am and what I'm interested in. ...But until Skynet becomes self-aware, give a look see to the various bits of nerdery that I mark down.

I wish I could emit some sort of telepathic RSS feed of all the stories and jokes I already know, so when I'm mean to people about it, at least I'll prove that my rudeness was grounded in a very sane, non-malicious basis... I can just point to the list and say, "Last Saturday at the BBQ!!! Already heard it... quit wastin' ma time. GAH!!" ...or maybe even the opposite, when people launch into a story expecting me to be up on all the latest news. I can just point to my list and say, "Listen, I have no idea what's going on with TomKat these days... I don't read Teen People... *points to list*"

Teh internet is idiots

2007-02-06T13:40:00.000-06:00

I figured out why I'm not more active in internet forums and chat groups and comments and postings, etc. It's a mixture of a few things: me feeling ambivalent to contributing to conversations where I feel like I'm not going to reveal anything particularly groundbreaking or interesting, general lack of passion towards geeking out _that_ heavily on a topic, and the simple fact that most of these conversations seem trite and are being engaged in by idiots. I don't know how hard it is to take a quick break from your post, open yerself up a new tab (every browser should have it now), and do a little looking around and reading to see if what you're saying has any basis in fact... hell, even a basis in reality. There are so many conversations that I read where half of the things being said are corrected or later rescinded by the original poster. C'mon people, let's think a little before we talk (or type as the case may be).

Sorry, I just keep finding the same moronic patterns in forums. What is it about techie geeks or nerds or however you want to label them... why are people who're uninformed and ignorant, so passionate about things they think they know?

ConvinceMe - Astronauts vs. Cavemen, who would win?

2007-02-04T23:37:00.000-06:00

ConvinceMe - Astronauts vs. Cavemen, who would win?
Hooo-leeeeee Crap!
I can't believe that someone was actually masochistic enough to start this on the internet in this sort of forum. Pure and utter madness shall ensue!