The Zibblog

Makers Faire

2006-04-23T23:24:00.000-07:00

4-22-06Makers Faire 205
Originally uploaded by superviva.

I was playing around with posting to the old Zibblog from Flickr. If you are seeing this, then you probably haven't updated your newsreader/bookmarks to point at ziblog.com or coveringdistance.com/zibblog

The Zibblog has moved

2006-04-17T09:32:00.000-07:00

Yep, it has finally happened. A long time ago, I purchased some web hosting and the domain CoveringDistance.com, and I've finally moved the zibblog. You can now find me at coveringdistance.com/zibblog or zibblog.com (which will redirect you to the other url, but I thought that zibblog.com might be easier to remember). I've got a lot of stuff that I want to do with the look and feel, but I'm not sure when I'm going to get to it. Therefore, I figured that I'd just cut everyone over to the new zibblog and that way I can start posting to the new blog.

Some random links

2006-04-13T13:00:00.000-07:00

Recently, I started using FeedDemon on my work pc. It's part of the NewsGator suite of applications that includes NetNewsWire for the mac that I've used for a long time. What's really cool is that you can sync your read and unread news items across the different client applications. Mostly, however, I've been using FeedDemon which has a nice concept of News Bins. These are named folders that you can put items into. Lately, I've been keeping track of all the stuff that I wanted to blog about and here's some of them.

I read a really funny post this morning for a hypothetical Samuel L Jackson movie called Bears on a Sub. You have to read the post, if just for the pictures.

If you share a tivo with your significant other, at some point you may have wanted to tivo something that you didn't want other people to watch. From that idea comes this post.

There was an interesting article in the Merc about finding a job in the bay area that included some stuff about Netflix.

For all of you that have some sort of DirectTivo setup, it looks like Tivo and DirectTV have decided to extend their partnership.

Here's a funny comic about internet predators on Yirmumah. (I know, internet predators aren't funny, but this comic is.)

If you haven't watched The Boondocks on Cartoon Network (based on the comic strip of the same name), then you need to either tivo it or get the dvds. [Netflix page] Seriously, it's kind of like Spike Lee meets South Park. I'd give it 10 zibs (which is great unless you believe in the theory of the wrapping zibs metric originally put forth by Joe (or possibly Ryan)).

In other tv news, Prison Break is coming back for another season (supposedly, they are going to break out at the end of this season), Heist is pretty much cancelled already, and 24 is going for at least 3 more seasons. Current talk is that next season of 24 is going to take place in London.

Condo renovations

2006-04-11T08:22:00.000-07:00

Note: For the impatient people that just want to browse photos of my renovations, you can go to the Flickr photoset.

As you may or may not know, while I was in between employment, my parents drove out from Nebraska to "help" me remodel parts of my condo (where "help" means that my dad was doing the real work and I helped out where I could. I had decided to skip the kitchen for the moment because of the amount of up front work that was required in terms of ordering cabinets and such combined with the fact that it was probably going to be a lot more expensive. Therefore, the initial idea was for my parents to come out, assess the place, and determine how much of the living room, dining room, and guest bathroom that we thought we could do. By the time they got there, I had gotten a ceiling fan from Lamps Plus (a store that I would highly recommend) and some in ceiling speakers for the kitchen, but that was about it.

After my parents got out here, we settled into a routine of getting up for a real breakfast somewhere, heading to Home Depot and/or other places to pick up any necessary supplies, and working until around 8pm before getting dinner. In the middle of the week, Mike was kind enough to let my mom and I come along to the NCAA basketball tournament in Oakland since he had a couple of extra tickets become available at the last moment. We decided that we probably had enough time to do painting of the main areas (living room, hallways, dining room, and guest bath) along with crown molding, baseboard, and light fixture replacement. The ceiling needed to be painted as well, and there were multiple other little projects along the way.

As a result of all of this, I learned some valuable lessons about home repair.

Bathrooms are expensive (a lot of money was spent at Restoration Hardware)
Crown molding really does make a big difference (I underestimated the amount of the effect until I saw the difference).
Ikea is cheap.
The service at Home Depot is lousy.
Paint may not solve everything, but it certainly helps.

Anyway, as I posted in the beginning, there are a lot more photos here arranged loosely in a before and after format.

Logitech Harmony 510

2006-04-02T19:46:00.000-07:00

In the past few years, most remote controls that you buy will have some kind of universal remote features. For example, the tivo remote will let you control the volume on your tv set, and most DVD player remotes will let you do the same sort of thing. This was fine for me until I finally got a surround sound system. Since I don't have built in speakers on my plasma, the surround sound system is used for everything. It also acts as a video switcher controlling virtually all the video (except for the HDMI from the DVD player) going to the TV. At this point, it sucked to just turn the whole system on and off. I had read good things about the Logitech Harmony remote controls. After looking at the different models, I chose the entry level 510 model.

Note: At this point, it looks like the 510, which was mostly sold at Wal-mart and Target, has been replaced with the 550 that looks very similar. It is also virtually the same as the harmony remote for the Xbox 360.

The picture shows the remote control and all of the remotes that it replaced. The main selling point behind the harmony remotes is the idea of "activities". You set up an activity like "Watch Tivo" and the remote control knows what all of the buttons should do. The remote also has a scrollable list of LCD buttons at the top. To program the remote, you walk through a web application that asks you what the different components of your system are and how they are hooked together. For example, that your digital cable box is connected to input 3 on your tv. After that step, the application will suggest different activities like "Watch Tivo", "Watch TV", and "Play Game". For the most part, I thought that the application was really easy to use (except for the fact that it had a lot of odd characters show up on the screen when used with Firefox, which is why I use Safari with it), and the default setup worked pretty well. When you're relatively satisfied with it, you connect the remote to your keyboard with a standard USB cable and the remote is programmed.

One of the drawbacks of the remote is that the LCD button section tends to be pretty overpopulated by default, so it was one of the first areas that I cleaned up. The design of the web application overall is pretty non-intuitive at times when you are trying to figure out where some option is set up, but it has some pretty powerful features like being able to say that you don't want to ever shut off your digital cable box without having to modify individual activities. There's some ability to set up your own activities, but it wasn't easy to figure out where to go to set it up. When I was reading reviews of the remote, a few people said that the buttons were kind of small and the remote was too flimsy. I've got relatively small hands/fingers and I haven't broken mine yet, but your mileage will vary. In the end, I think it is a great remote, and I was able to get my mom using my tv setup and switching between different activities like tivo and HD cable with only a little bit of teaching.

Gainful Employment (aka An End to the Job Hunt)

2006-03-21T22:40:00.000-08:00

For all those that didn't know, I've been looking for new employment for the last month or so. For the last couple of weeks, it's been a nonstop flurry of sending out resumes, doing phone screens, and driving around for interviews. Most of the flurry being motivated by my mortgage. :) Anyway, for anyone interested, I signed an offer with NetFlix today to do web infrastructure development. I'm pretty excited about being really involved with a pretty high traffic website, and the team that I'm going to be working with seems like they'll be a lot of fun. My next decision becomes laptop or desktop for my work machine?

P.S. Thanks (or thanks again as the case may be) to all those people that were references for me, put me in touch with recruiters, or helped me figure out what I was looking for.

Really Big Whiteboard

2006-03-20T02:08:00.000-08:00

For the past couple of days, my parents have been in town. This means that there have been trips made to places like Home Depot, Restoration Hardware, Crate & Barrel, Ikea, Office Depot, and Best Buy in search of supplies for some condo remodeling. One of my first purchases was a 4' x 6' whiteboard from Office Depot for my office. It is the first whiteboard that I've actually bought, and I think that it will make a nice addition to my office. However, right now it is leaning against the wall of my hallway so that I can scribble on it in an attempt to figure out where I am going to work next, which is the primary reason that I'm up at 2AM (well, that and watching tonight's episode of The West Wing which was kind of disappointing because nothing in the episode moved forward the Josh and Donna romance).

100th Post

2006-03-05T22:01:00.000-08:00

My dashboard on blogger tells me that this is post #100, so I figured I'd celebrate it with a post in its honor. I've haven't exactly been regular in my posting since I've been doing it for 6 months, but I hope that everybody has had some fun reading it. I just got back from my trip to Trinidad, so expect a blog entry and some photos really soon. I'm also planning on reviewing some of the gadgets that I've gotten recently. Most of my month of March is going to be spent on a hiatus from work since I didn't take any time off after leaving Mercury. My parents are coming out here to help me work on my condo in the middle of the month, so there will probably be some in progress photos of that work. If anyone is interested in meeting the Zibmom and Zibdad, shoot me and email. There will probably also be a housewarming in April since I'll have the condo in as good of shape as it's going to be for awhile.

Rental Car Mix

2006-02-16T00:48:00.000-08:00

While my car is in the shop, I'm driving a rental car. For some reason, I decided that I needed to make a new mix for listening to in the rental car. The mix is presented below in all its glory. It was limited by the amount of space on a single CD so great songs like Dust in the Wind and Breakfast at Tiffany's didn't quite make the cut. Before you ask, I do believe that I own a legal copy of everything in the playlist. I'm sure that some of you will chuckle at some of the songs, and I can only think of about 3 people who read my blog that have probably ever heard of Larry Gatlin.

If You're Going Through Hell (Before the Devil Even Knows) - Rodney Atkins
Something More - Sugarland
These Words - Natasha Bedingfield
Nothin' to Lose - Josh Gracin
You're Beautiful - James Blunt
Sophmore Slump or Comeback of the Year - Fall Out Boy
Did You Get My Message? - Jason Mraz
All the Gold in California - Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers
Some Beach - Blake Shelton
It's For The Best - Straylight Run
Change - Sons of the Desert
I Know I Know I Know - Tegan and Sara
Don't Ever - Missy Higgins
Numb - Linkin Park
Where Does the Good Go? - Tegan and Sara
Bubble Pop Electric Feat Joh - Gwen Stefani
Geek In The Pink - Jason Mraz
Come By Me - Harry Connick, Jr.
Scar - Missy Higgins
Small Town - John Mellencamp
White Kids Love Hip Hop - MC Chris
If Your Gonna - Natasha Bedingfield

If you use iTunes, I recommend finding any listening to the first track as an example that you can have a song about how much life can suck and still have it be upbeat and catchy.

Update: Scott suggested that I make an iTunes iMix out of it and since I put it together in iTunes anyway, I went ahead and published the iMix here. The odd thing is the songs that aren't on iTunes like Numb by Linkin Park.

All Linked Up

2006-02-14T01:54:00.000-08:00

I'm going to start this post by declaring my distaste for personal networking web sites. I used Friendster for a little while and the idea of having a numerical value assigned to the number of friends that I have was kind of amusing and at the same time a little scary. I realize that life is not a popularity contest (except for when it is) and I like to feel like I've grown past the need for external validation (well, at least, as grown past it as the average adult with a good level of self esteem), but I've never been much for online communities so I tended to log in and see myself with only a handful of connections. Personally, I'm waiting for the eHarmony of business networking sites to come about (it worked for dating so why not apply its principles everywhere). It would set you up on business lunches and conference calls with random people chosen by your field and personality profile. That way, no one person would get a disproportionate amount of business contacts due to the load balancing of the system. Just think of the possibilities if you had sites to load balance everything based on surveys and stable marriage algorithms: dinner reservations, plane tickets, parking spots, etc.

Anyway, if you know me and have a LinkedIn account, link up and be part of the zibnet.

Type 2 Diabetes

2006-02-10T17:40:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I was listening to the Science Friday Podcast and they had an interesting segment on how scientists believe they have discovered a gene that help predict likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes. It seems to be very common on my mother's side of the family (my mother, uncle, and multiple cousins have it), which I didn't really know about until my mom was diagnosed. I originally thought it would be nice if you could have a test in a few years and get a basic percentage of how likely it was, but I now wonder if I would just turn into a hypochondriac if they started finding genes for all sorts of diseases.

Quesadillas are tasty

2006-02-06T17:50:00.000-08:00

In an effort to get my blog post count a little bit higher, I decided to blog a little more randomly for a while. For some of you, this may even seem a little more "Zibblerish". In the end, it mostly just means more head scratching for my readers and less links.

After many weeks of seeing quesadillas being made while I was waiting for my grilled chicken on a ciabatta roll at the company cafeteria, I decided that a quesadilla is probably fairly easy to make. After the superbowl, I decided to test this assumption. I'm one of those people who tends to eat food low on toppings, so I bought some chicken breasts, some pregrated cheese in a bag, some burrito sized tortillas, and a packet of taco seasoning. Personally, I've always been of the opinion that Una Mas quesadillas are pretty greasy, so I went with no oil in the final toasting of the tortilla with the cheese on it and I really liked the crispness of the end product. Everyone involved thought that the end product turned out pretty well.

On a totally unrelated note, if you haven't seen it yet, here is a page of facts about Chuck Norris.

Financial Software

2006-01-31T00:12:00.000-08:00

I was having a conversation this evening with Leslie about software to manage your finances. She, like I'm sure many other people, enjoys the power of custom excel documents for managing her money. However, she's gotten pretty tired of entering receipts and such into the spreadsheets. I showed her how easy it is to download data in Quicken and she asked the question I'm going to forward on to whoever is reading: "What program would you recommend for financial management on the PC?" I've heard mixed reviews of Quicken on the PC (I love it on the Mac), and I figured I'd see if anyone had an opinion. Thanks.

Microwaves and CBS

2006-01-17T23:39:00.000-08:00

For anyone that hasn't yet seen my condo, you can take a look at some of the photos here. I mention the pictures mostly to draw your attention to the photo of my oven unit. If you were just glancing at it (as I'll admit that I did when I first started the process of buying the place), you might be tricked into thinking that the thing above the oven is a microwave. It is in fact another small oven (it's really too big to be considered a toaster oven). At first, I had a hard time figuring out how I was going to live without a microwave. However, soon, I came to appreciate some of the things it does really well like heat up hot pockets (what can I say, I've got a thing for hot pockets). After a while, I realized the main thing that it doesn't do well is cook microwave popcorn. There is really nothing better than combining microwave popcorn and NCIS late on a Tuesday night. Like Joni Mitchell always said, "you don't know what you got til it's gone."

Wiring the condo: Day 1

2006-01-15T21:48:00.000-08:00

Now that I have my own place, I decided to take advantage of it and put holes in the walls. :-) The first project involves getting a home theater audio system, wiring the speakers through the walls, and mounting my plasma tv on the wall. The results of the day (after some cleanup), are in the photo seen here.

To prepare, I got an entry level Yamaha system, speaker cable, and other bits and pieces from Best Buy along with a tv wall mount from Fry's. JB was kind enough to offer to help out with the project so we got started around 1:30 on Saturday afternoon. It wasn't long before we discovered that there were screws for the walls that were no longer in the box. I had seen another wall mount at Target that was a little cheaper (I know that you're thinking, cheaper is all well and good until my plasma falls off the wall), so we took the wall mount back to Fry's and got the other wall mount from Target. At Target, we saw a man wearing an umbrella hat (before you ask, yes, it was a grown man wearing a hat that looked just like the one in the link). After we got back and opened up the new wall mount, we found that it was missing some washers that we needed, so we just bought some replacements at a nearby TrueValue.

At this point, we put up the plasma and started wiring the walls. It went fairly smoothly. Some of the high points included discovering that the wall we were cutting into had 2 half inch sheets of sheetrock on it, crawling around coughing on fiberglass insulation, JB fishing wires out of the walls with wire coat hangers, and finding out that my neighbor's bedroom shares a wall with my living room when I got a knock on my door at 11pm. From this experience, I learned a few things: JB is a good person to have helping you fish wires through walls, picture hanging wire is pretty handy to have for a project like this, insulation in walls sucks sometimes, fiberglass poles are pretty nice for pushing wires through insulation, and a fiber optic viewer would really come in handy when you've got no idea where inside your wall that a wire is.

Cool Stuff at CES

2006-01-05T17:55:00.000-08:00

If you were doing something else today (like working), you might not be aware that CES is currently going on. Most everything good is probably covered by Engadget or Gizmodo. Personally, my favorite two items for the day are the new Sony Reader and TiVo 3.

The Sony Reader uses eInk and the gizmodo article says that it should be around $300 - $400. Personally, my price point on something like that is more like $200, but everyone who had to carry a box of books in my move probably wishes I had something like that.

On PVRblog, there is a story detailing some of the features of the forthcoming TiVo 3 (with forthcoming translating to mid to late 2006). Some of the most interesting features include cablecard support for digital cable, mpeg4 support for downloaded content, HD support, and an external SATA connector for drive expansion. Hopefully, by the time this comes out, I'll be able to afford one. If you're feeling generous, you can also help the cause by using Awaken.com to rip your CDs. :-)

Starting the year off right

2006-01-02T00:46:00.000-08:00

Well, I've now entered the second calendar year for my blog, and I wanted to start off by saying thanks for reading. It's nice to know that people find my odd little blog interesting.

If you haven't seen it already, the short "Lazy Sunday" by The Lonely Island on SNL (available for free on iTunes) is well worth a watch. The graphic about how Mr. Pibb + Red Vines = crazy delicious is now available on Blue Collar Distro.

Color schemes

2005-12-16T17:40:00.000-08:00

Now that I have the condo, the next step is lining up all of the home improvement projects and supplies. First thing on the list is the selection of a color scheme to make sure that I don't purchase anything that will look out of place when I'm done. After some web browsing, I ended up on behr.com, which had some nice tools for picking out colors and putting together a color scheme. Here's the colors from one of my current favorites. Starting at top left and going clockwise, the colors pictured are

Sled
Raging Sea
Billowy Clouds
Laurel Mist

First look at the new condo

2005-12-12T10:49:00.000-08:00

For all of you that have been wondering what the new condo looks like, here are some photos that I took of the place on Friday night. You can either click on the photo or click here to see all of the photos tagged with "condo" in Flickr.

On a side note, I finally set up Flickr awhile back and liked it a lot since you can link up your yahoo account and it's mostly free. Anyway, they give you the ability to upload images, tag them, and set up a logical permanent url path. The other thing is that with it's popularity, you can probably find a nice upload program if you don't want to just use the web form. I used FlickrExport, which allows you to export directly from iPhoto.

Interview with Michael Cronan at PVRBlog

2005-12-09T10:04:00.000-08:00

You can read "Seven Questions with Michael Cronan, designer and creator of the name TiVo and the mascot" over at PVRblog. For any people who worked at Kintana (not to be confused with kintama), his firm also came up with the swirly hurricane logo.

Finally a Homeowner

2005-12-07T15:01:00.000-08:00

Last night I signed all the paperwork necessary for the title and loan, this morning I dropped off a check at the title company for the remaining balance of the escrow account, and by noon today, the loan was funded. I am now officially a homeowner.

Trials and Tribulations of Buying a Home

2005-12-06T14:46:00.000-08:00

If I haven't talked to you recently, you might think that I would have finished with escrow by now and have my condo in Los Altos all purchased. Well, this process has been slightly more trouble than I had imagined. For awhile, I was worrying about getting a document from Mercury stating that I had worked there for 5 years since I'd only been working at my new job for a week or so. Once that was done, the mortgage broker that I was going through found out that because a certain HOA doc was missing (guidelines for arbitration), the Fannie Mae guidelines state that it is "unwarrantable". This meant that the lender wouldn't come through with the loan, and it was already Wednesday afternoon before the Monday that I was supposed to close escrow. The loan broker was scrambling to find me some rates that didn't completely suck, and I took the advice of my real estate agent and Leslie and talked to someone at Bank of America to try and get a new loan. At this point, I am one day past the original closing date, and it is looking like I'm going to be able to sign docs for the BofA loan today. I'm crossing my fingers that nothing else crazy happens, but hopefully, in a few hours, I will be a homeowner.

Random links

2005-11-30T00:42:00.000-08:00

I'm too lazy to put up actual content, so here is some more random stuff for your reading enjoyment.

WordPress 2.0 - It's coming. Soon. Really. I believe that this is what will both put off the blog move and finally make me do it. In the meantime, I still need to move all the images from the blog over to flickr. I also really need to figure out what I want for a more permanent web presence for my photos. I'm tempted to use flickr, but I'd be interested in what other people do. I guess I could always just web dump from iPhoto to coveringdistance, but that seems so last year (or maybe the year before last, I feel left behind alot in the wave of Web 2.0).

Back in the days of XWindows and college, I used to play around with configurations to allow myself to use the mouse as little as possible. The idea being that it would allow me to pump out code faster. I've since decided that I don't know how much I believe in that since those were also the days where I had random wrist pains. Anyway, today I saw a post on lifehacker about using the keyboard with firefox.

While I was watching kron4 this morning (at one point, I watched Good Morning America every morning; however, at some point I discovered that the morning news on kron4 is much more funny), I saw a commercial for Chia Cat Grass that I thought I would post for all my cat loving readers. During the news, they mentioned myfoodphone.com, which is a site for helping you organize photos of the food that you've eaten during the week. I thought that stuff like that stopped getting built after the bust.

If you read any Mac news sites or blogs, you've probably seen that Think Secret is talking about a good chance of the next Mac Mini coming out in January at MacWorld San Francisco. If Think Secret is right, it'll have a lot of media center features, an intel processor, and a built in iPod doc. Depending on the price, it might be worth upgrading my first gen 12" powerbook.

For the tivo fans, there was a post in the tivo forum about the possible debut of products like an HD cablecard tivo at CES in January. There is also an interesting article related to tivo talking about the number of people that actually send in their tivo rebates.

Threshold bites the dust

2005-11-27T19:16:00.000-08:00

This season was the start of 3 new scifi dramas: Invasion, Surface, and Threshold (alright, 4 if you count Supernatural, but it's a little too WB for me to group it in with the other 3). I've been collecting episodes of all 3 on Tivo and my computer without watching any of them under the assumption that at least 1, probably 2, of the three would be cancelled after November sweeps and before February sweeps. It was announced last week that Threshold has been cancelled. Since there is no Joss Whedon involvement, I'm not expecting a Save Threshold campaign , and I'm going to be deleting the episodes from my Tivo. Just 1 more show to go.

Note: If you are wondering what will happen if all of them are cancelled before I start watching any them, the answer is watch more ST: Deep Space Nine on DVD.

Da Bears

2005-11-27T13:06:00.000-08:00

What is up with this season? Today marks the latest contribution to a 7 game win streak for the Bears. For awhile, I had decided that it was simply that the NFC North was filled with crappy teams. However, after more and more wins, it seems that the team might actually be pretty good. They have the highest rated defense in the NFL, allowing only 11 points per game; however, it can be said it is usually not your defense that gets you the wins in the post season. Right now, I really wish that I had NFL Sunday Ticket, but the NFL Network's content on Comcast on demand at least lets me watch 10 minutes of highlights every week.

For a rundown of the different football tv packages out there, I found this page interesting.

Things that I can't wait to happen

2005-11-21T23:45:00.000-08:00

As I am somewhat hopelessly behind on "news" due to work, random real estate stuff, and attempting to have a life, I decided to throw out a quick post about things that I'm waiting for in my life that for one reason or another seem to be both approaching quickly and not fast coming fast enough.

Apple putting out a laptop that I really want to buy. This hasn't really been the case since the 12" powerbook came out. This won't happen until they release one with a good sized Pentium M or something, but the rumors are that Apple is throwing a lot of resources at getting something out there soon.
Getting a home computer with USB2. Now that Applet has dropped Firewire from iPods, a lack of USB2 in my laptop is starting to make me sad. Probably this will have to wait until the previous item is addressed.
XtremeMax to send me my Nano case and my FM transmitter. I was originally told that my case would ship around Nov 3rd, and it still hasn't shipped yet. I can certainly understand issues with products selling out, but it is just an ipod case.
NetNewsWire to get NewsGator support and other features for people like me that paid for the application. This means that I'll be able to still use a great application for reading my news at home and also be able to use the NewsGator web application or FeedDemon on my PC and have all of my read and unread articles kept in sync.
Get into my new condo. It's currently looking like I'll close on the 5th. I picked up Home Designer 6.0 the other day at Fry's, and I can't wait to input the dimensions and start playing around with some ideas I've got.
Get some of my computer projects out of the way so that I not think about them anymore. This is feeling like more of a reality now that I'm back to doing more web coding. My css, javascript, and php have started to get unrusty, which will make cranking out some WordPress theme customizations, putting up a wiki, and styling the main website something that I might be able to get done in a reasonable timeframe.

Phrase for the day

2005-11-15T18:42:00.000-08:00

Today, I was writing some code in a jsp page where Eclipse wasn't wanting to do any automatic completion for me, and I made a spelling mistake that caused about ten minutes of head scratching. This caused me to use the term pulling a scott.

Idiom:
pulling a Scott Informal

To misspell something in your code. This can pertain either to a text in a comment or in actual code.

Information Overload

2005-11-14T23:08:00.000-08:00

Occasionally, I start to feel like I've overloaded myself with information in the general sense. Everything from blog feeds that I'm attempting to read to books on my shelf to projects in my head. Sometimes it feels like I'm about to explode. That's why, sometimes, it just feels good to watch some Stargate Atlantis. Oh yeah, Stargate Atlantis. You know you love it.

Hopefully, I'll have something more insightful to post tomorrow. Maybe I'll just write about how my Chicago Bears kicked some 49er ass on Sunday. Um ... actually, I just wrote that. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

The end of an era

2005-11-13T22:30:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've seen some blog posts about leaving work like the highly memorable Goodbye Mercury! and I Quit, so I decided to construct my own post on the matter.

The oddest part of the whole experience was the feeling of relief to be done with work at the same time as the odd feeling from realizing that I really was leaving. The best part of the experience was the nice comments I received from random people in the office when I was making my last walk around the cubes (well, that and the thought that I will never have to answer some question about code that I wrote in 2001). I worst was probably the awkward conversations with some people where I really just wanted to have the somewhat obligatory handshake.

After reading Scott's post about his vacation between jobs, I was wishing that I had taken off a few days to get caught up on my sci-fi book backlog (around 40 books at the moment), finally get my blog up at zibblog.com, get in some good running and yoga, get some use out of my netflix subscription, and organize my apartment. However, in the end, the book backlog can wait until my next trip to NE, my blog will get up in its own good time, I did some pilates and running over the weekend, and my apartment might as well stay unorganized since I'll just be moving in a month anyway. For the moment at least, the new job is fun, there's a lot of work to be done, and it's nice to be enthusiastic about my work again. In somewhat related news, I'm having a lot of fun doing some AJAX and CSS reading lately, so expect some blog entries on random web technologies soon.

iLounge Holiday Buyers' Guide

2005-11-10T11:22:00.000-08:00

For anyone that has an iPod or is thinking about buying an iPod, the iLounge Holiday Buyers' Guide is a great reference to various iPod related items.

Podcastery or Why I Love the Nano

2005-11-09T23:30:00.000-08:00

A little while back, I got an iPod Nano from a friend of mine. (This page on iLounge is a great resource if you have a Nano or are thinking about getting one.) Originally, I had been in a camp of wanting an iPod that would carry around all of my music, photos, etc. like the 60GB iPod with Video. However, once I started playing with the Nano, I realized what a gem it truly is. First, the amount of music that I listen to in any given day is certainly less than 4GB (I will say that I think that the 2 GB is kind of small unless you are using it more like an iPod shuffle). Second, the thing is tiny and skip proof so it's great for running. Third, the one thing that really makes the nano useful in my book is podcasts. I can't really listen to music while I run, but I love listening to podcasts when I can't just zone out into a smooth run. My experience with podcasts was pretty similar to this article that had something interesting notes on the iPod UI.

If you are looking for good podcasts, personally, I like to use Yahoo Podcasts because it gives you a change of pace from the ones that iTunes talks about. It simply has a nice little interface for helping you find the podcasts that you want.

Some of the podcasts that I'm currently listening to are (feed links):

NerdTV is probably my favorite in terms of real content. I'm currently listening to the interview with Tim O'Reilly which has been pretty interesting so far.

Mortgages (or Fun with Numbers)

2005-11-04T17:13:00.000-08:00

As I get ready to leave my current job, I have been given less and less real work to do with a lot of it being transitioning things and being around for people to ask questions of. While I was waiting for my server to build and restart, I was surfing the web for good mortgage payment calculators. After a little surfing, I found calculators.interest.com which has a few different tools for calculating things like monthly payments based on interest rates and the amount you are financing.

Eric's Ultimate Solitaire X

2005-11-04T14:32:00.000-08:00

Delta Tao Software has finally release the non-beta version of Eric's Ultimate Solitaire X. It is possibly the greatest solitaire game ever and the program that first got my mother using a computer regularly. What's great is that it plays well on virtually any Mac (my mom is currently playing it on my Pismo version Powerbook that I got in something like late 2000/early 2001).

Reinventing Superheroes (aka The Aging of Superman)

2005-11-04T13:00:00.000-08:00

I don't do a lot of comic book posts because I like my blog to be kind of relevant to most of my readers, so I hope that even people that don't read comic books will find this interesting. The rest of you might just want to click the links.

Back when I started reading comics regularly enough to get into the history of the different publishers (back then, pretty much DC and Marvel with some random Dark Horse books thrown in for good measure). For DC, it was the era that was Post Crisis and around the same time as Legends. To put this into some kind of context, it was an era where creators were trying to make books more relevant to the times. For somebody like Superman, this meant restarting the comic book with an updated origin and a hip haircut. Longtime readers of the book were simply told that many Superman stories simply didn't happen or happened in different ways that would be filled in later (this sort of thing falls under the umbrella of what is considered a "retcon" or "retroactive continuity"). For example, in the updated comic book reality, Superman's powers come about from his being a kind of solar battery. It took most of his youth to store up enough energy to give him powers like flight, so there was never a Superboy. For me, none of this really mattered since I never read many of the stories that were now considered to have never really happened. On a kind of side note, there was recently an in depth article about the history of Superman and all of the different changes in his origin that was really interesting.

What people who don't read comic books regularly might not realize is that with a few exceptions, the status quo is simply maintained across all of the major comics. People like Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne simply don't age. There are various exceptions, e.g. Peter Parker getting married to Mary Jane, Clark Kent marrying Lois Lane, 3 different Robins, etc., but by and large, everything stays the same and nobody ages. I thought about all of this recently in reading a column by Erik Larsen about this fact. His opinion is that there is always a new generation starting to read these stories and should they get stuck with characters like the son of Superman or should they get to experience the originals or some variation thereof. On a side note, Erik is the only person to write a long running title (Savage Dragon) that occurs in realtime so one year of issues covers one year of calendar time. Personally, I had never thought about the responsibility to preserve characters like Batman for the next generation.

Real estate part 3

2005-11-04T11:32:00.000-08:00

Thanks for all of the well wishes from everybody. It's cool to see that people are still reading the zibblog after some long gaps between posts.

For anyone wanting more information, it's an 1100 ft condo with a garage. At some point, there will be some pictures posted of the condition before I move in. Sometime in December, there will probably also be a housewarming/xmas party complete with geeky xmas tree and fiberoptic wreath (yeah, I still have the fiberoptic wreath). That way everyone can see the condition of the place before my dad and I put in hardwood floors and redo the kitchen. :)

Real estate part 2

2005-11-03T13:52:00.000-08:00

My offer has been accepted. I'm really happy and queasy at the same time. It's near Cuesta and Foothill Expy in Los Altos and only about 2.5 miles by surface streets from Leslie's house.

Real estate

2005-11-02T22:33:00.000-08:00

I'm less than 14 hours from having my first ever offer on a home accepted or rejected. The thought is both kind of cool and scares the crap out of me.

eSidekick

2005-11-02T21:55:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to get back to posting every day, so I'm starting to go through all of the articles that I've flagged for followup at some point. Polite Dissent, the same site that brought you the El Chupacabras page, brings you eSidekick. As a successful user of eHarmony, I thought it was really, really funny.

iPod with Video = portable anime and porn

2005-11-01T14:20:00.000-08:00

The iPod with video is an interesting idea. Stick a slightly bigger screen with a pretty good resolution onto an iPod, add in video playback, put some tv episodes on the iTunes store, and watch hijinxs ensue. I tried one at an Apple store and found the video to be a lot better than I thought it would be, but not really good enough to want to shell out the money for one yet since I love my Nano. However, if you want a portable music player that has a great screen for looking at digital photos and enough space to carry your whole collection, it's hard to beat the 60 gig version. The best review I've seen so far is this one at iLounge.

Anyway, the real reason for this post is to point out how in the weeks since the introduction of video capability, we mostly have porn and anime available for download. You can draw your own conclusions.

Fight the Man with Zimbra

2005-11-01T13:10:00.000-08:00

In all the hubbub about "Web 2.0", one of the products that everyone says is a shining example of what you can do with a modern web application is Zimbra. Zimbra is an open source alternative to something like Microsoft Exchange that supports standards like POP, IMAP, and iCalendar so that it can work with numerous different email and calendar clients. More importantly, it comes with a really nice looking AJAX based client. If you're interested, you can find some screenshots here.

Dream jobs

2005-10-31T10:50:00.000-08:00

Recently, I've been looking for other employment. Dave G heard about this and sent me a listing for an Assistant Editor for Manga Magazine (Craigslist). This is one of those jobs that would probably be interesting for a year and then make me want to pull out my hair.

On a similar note, after a conversation I had with Scott the other day, I ran across a notice about Yahoo looking for an RSS Product Manager. This is one of those positions that they will probably get a pile of resumes for. I think it would be interesting, but I can't decide if I think that there is a shape the world sort of potential there.

Anyway, for anyone that hasn't heard, I now have a new job that I'm excited about starting in about a week and a half. Therefore, the whole job hunting thing has thankfully become a thing of the past for the moment (or for a while depending on our success in providing CD ripping for the masses).

El Chupacabras

2005-10-28T01:52:00.000-07:00

In honor of JB, I bring you My Favorite Monsters #5: El Chupacabras.

For those of you that don't know JB, back in my early days at Kintana, we used to play a lot of StarCraft. That was before people had things like wives, girlfriends, and plasma TVs (or considered StarCraft somewhat more important). Anyway, JB's handle was Chupacabra which made me notice this page awhile back.

A little experiment

2005-10-28T01:30:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I would carry around one of my watches that has a stopwatch function and keep track of the amount of time that I spend watching tv during a week. I know what many of you are thinking "Do you really want to be confronted with a number that large?" Something like that was actually JB's comment, and my answer is that my tv watching was achieved a somewhat mythical status amongst my friends while I don't believe that I watch that much tv anymore.

In the end, the number was about 9 hours, although I'll admit that I forgot to turn the stopwatch on and off a few times. (A random fact is that about 90 minutes of this time was spent watching Fire Birds with Leslie.) I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine if this is a lot of time or not as much as you thought.

Got me by the Bawls

2005-10-11T16:16:00.000-07:00

I was in the cafeteria at work today and I saw that they were selling bottles of Bawls. I got hooked on it after Chris bought some at the end of some release at work along with other energy drinks, but I have a hard time finding it anywhere. As I was drinking my Bawls, I decided to visit the website and noticed that they now have a sugar free version (the white bottle). I'm all for sugar free, but I'm kind of used to blue Bawls. However, I suppose white Bawls might be more appropriate for me.

Note: I'm really sorry for the above comment. It's really only there because I feel like JB is disappointed by a lack of comments of that sort lately.

Content ... you know you want some

2005-10-06T22:30:00.000-07:00

As I've been playing around with WordPress and fixing bugs at work, I've been thinking about content for the soon (depending on your definition of "soon") to be launched coveringdistance.com along with a ideas for a theme to pull together the site. Given the name of the site, I feel like a running theme (or at least something with motion) is necessary. The first step is probably finding and customizing a WordPress theme. Themes.wordpress.net is a great site to try out different themes and see what fits. The site for the WordPress 1.5 Theme Competition has some nice info and spotlights some interesting themes.

Anyway, a theme and some fancy photoshopping is only part of the work (and the piece that will probably be left until my next trip home to Nebraska. The real goal of putting up my website is to provide some content that is at least somewhat useful and give myself an excuse to put something together. After some pondering, my first content will probably be a export of my rss subscriptions. Every once in a while I'll be at work or at someone's house and be unable to remember the url of some random rss feed that I read an interesting article on (happens mostly with comic book stuff). However, I believe that the real gem of my pondering is the idea of a Wiki for bay area runners. MediaWiki seems like it might be the best choice for the software, but I'm interested in any suggestions that people have for good free wiki software. I collect map images and PDFs for local trails, and I figured it could be a great resource if I can drum up enough interest. It'll probably be the next piece of software to go up after I get the zibblog cut over to coveringdistance.

Back in action (Serenity review)

2005-10-05T13:47:00.000-07:00

Life has been busy lately. Work is hectic and my parents were in town all last week, which has prevented a lot of posting. I've also been using random bits of free time to try and complete the move to WordPress for this blog (more on that in another post).

Anyway, Leslie and I were at Van's wedding this weekend. After the wedding, there was a suitably long gap until the reception and Jenny and Fred (one of my old managers and her husband) said that they were going to see Serenity, so I convinced Leslie to let us tag along. I had heard good things about the movie from Justin, but I wasn't sure if it would be an experience like the X-Files movie. I was also unsure if dragging my girlfriend along was a good idea.

Anyway, I was impressed that they had made an effort to make the movie approachable to those people that had never seen the television show. Random statements were dropped to clue you in on relationships between characters and there was a nice little sequence that explained the social and political events of the time. The movie theater had a lot of people for a Saturday matinee, but it was by no means packed considering it was the opening weekend. I believe that I heard that they spent about $40 million on the movie, so at least they don't have to make all that much money. In the end, I really loved the movie. I thought that it added a nice piece to the world of the television show. The special effects were not the most spectacular that I've seen, but they were solid and there is a space battle towards the end of the movie that was very well executed and incredibly fun to watch. The dialog was what you would expect from a Joss Whedon project (meaning sharp, witty, and on the whole, very good), and it was fun to see the cast together again. I give the movie 8.5 zibs. I should probably be giving it less (maybe 7.5 zibs) and would be if I wasn't a fan of the tv show. If you are a sci-fi fan, I would say that it is definitely worth your money to see a matinee. If you're not a sci-fi fan or haven't seen the tv show, I would recommend checking out an episode (or even the whole thing, since it was only 13 episodes) if you're feeling strapped for cash.

MERQEeeeeeeeeeeeee

2005-10-05T13:39:00.000-07:00

Today was kind of annoying as I woke up to a $32 stock price for MERQE. Stupid little "E" on the end. I guess the public dislikes hearing about "formal probes".

MAKE made my day

2005-09-22T19:50:00.000-07:00

A while back, I purchased an issue of Make magazine. What's odd is that it is something by O'Reilly without an animal on the cover. However, what it lacks in cover animals, it makes up with general geekiness. Anyway, when I purchased a subscription online, I selected to receive the next issue rather than the current issue since I already owned it. However, the current issue proceeded to arrive on my doorstep. Being busy with more important things, I decided to simply give away the extra issue, which ended up in the hands of Charlie. Figuring I was just going live with not getting an issue of my subscription, I suddenly got the following email today.

Thank you for subscribing to MAKE. In reviewing our files we realized that we began your subscription with the current issue (VOL 3). You requested that we start it with VOL 4 (which mails in October 2005).

To make up for our error we have added an additional issue to the end of your current subscription. As far as the VOL 3 that you received, please keep it with our compliments.

Thank you again for your support. We appreciate your readership.

It isn't often that one of these things works out without some sort of long phone conversation or email exchange.

Emptying out the desk

2005-09-22T10:24:00.000-07:00

We are having a cube move at work at EOD tomorrow, so I've been organizing my cube a little bit more each day. I realized today that most of my "organizing" is throwing stuff in the trash or recycling bucket. The last box of comic book stuff that I have at work is going home and staying home, which will leave me with maybe one box worth of stuff and my Shuttle PC. I then started pondering whether the fact that I seem to have less and less in my cube means that I am on my way out of the company or that I've just gotten tired of boxing up my stuff when I move cubes every few months. Are the two mutually exclusive?

Pulling images from Blogger

2005-09-22T08:49:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I talked about how the move to WordPress simply left the image links pointing to photos1.blogger.com. When I was clicking on images in WordPress on zibbler.com, I was getting some random errors talking about a failure to retrieve the image from the cache that were coming from the blogger image server. After a little bit of trial and error, I realized that if I viewed the image first using zibblog.blogspot.com, I could view it by clicking on it from zibblog.com. My only explanation for this is that the webserver for blogspot is reading for img tags as it serves up the page and makes those images ready to be served up. Images that are on blogspot pages that haven't been looked at for awhile, therefore, wouldn't be in the cache. It would be interesting to know how they've structured their serves to know exactly what this is optimizing around, but it isn't hard to guess a few schemes where this makes a lot of sense. This will make writing something to pull down the images a little more tedious, but it still probably not too bad. However, for the moment, the zibblog will remain here.

On an only somewhat related note, I've been playing around with the "DreamHost Control Panel", and I've got www.coveringdistance.com/zibblog pointing at the new zibblog. In all seriousness, despite the fact that I put it in double quotes and italics, the DreamHost admin features have been really nice. They put a nice gui around a lot of good features while still allowing you to do whatever you want. I used their automated install for WordPress and it worked really well. I'd highly recommend it for anyone wanting to set up a permanent domain without too much trouble and still have a good level of control.

CoveringDistance.com

2005-09-21T18:47:00.000-07:00

In my search for the domain name that screams "Zibbler!!!!", I've settled on CoveringDistance.com. It works as a running reference and it embodies some of my opinions on life and the zen of running. It will be the final home of the zibblog and all things zibbler. I've got some ideas for non-blog content that I've been wanting to put up for awhile, so we'll see how it goes. Thanks to all of the suggestions from friends of mine that included

s.az
shawnoftheneb.com
ilikepastries.com
zellerziggurat.com (based on a random joke about my opening up Zeller's Ziggurat Bar & Casino some day in Korea)

The Great Migration

2005-09-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

In between waiting for my development server to redeploy and restart (anyone that has worked with me knows how long that can take), I've been playing around with the migration from Blogger to WordPress. I found a nice tutorial with some updates to the standard import. It works by having you modify your blog entry template and set up your blog to deploy to your wordpress installation. It had problems about halfway through the deploy transferring with sftp, so I switched it to normal ftp and it went through fine. There's a few little things I'm probably going to change before the final move, but you can look at the results at zibblog.com. The biggest problem is that blogger has some nice support for uploading images. However, all my images are now on their server and I need to figure out some way to slurp them down and rewrite the links. I may just need to write some php or something since that is what the wordpress importer is written in.

HDMI is the bomb

2005-09-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

For anyone reading this blog that doesn't have one of the Panasonic commercial plasmas (for my blog readership, it is a surprisingly high percentage), those plasmas are built to accept either 2 or 3 (2 for TVs under 42 inches, 3 in TVs 42 inches and above) input modules that essentially convert from your display input of choice to something internal to the plasma. They come with modules for composite/s-video input and component input, giving you 2 independent inputs along with a 3rd vga input. For anyone interested, here's an interesting article I found the other day explaining component video. Component is necessary if you want to receive HD signals from a cable box, computer, or satellite system. After being on backorder for over a month, I got my HDMI input box and installed it in my tv. Now, I can have my TiVo, cable box (for HD and on demand programming), and dvd player all hooked up at once.

For those wondering about HDMI, you might find the following interesting. At some point, DVI came along for digital video input (I feel like it was adopted for computers first, but I could be wrong), so you'll find some dvd players, cable boxes, etc along with many computers that have DVI. However, it looks like the current push for home audio/video is HDMI, Home Digital Multimedia Interface. The nice thing about HDMI is that it is one cable for both audio and video, so I now have one wire running from my dvd player to my tv. The standard also talks about being able to send status information both ways along the cable. As I was looking into HDMI stuff the other day, I found a lot of HDMI to DVI converters (and the other way around), which made me wonder what the difference was. It turns out, HDMI is really just DVI video with some added features like the audio and status information. For any of you wondering whether or not HDMI/DVI is any better than component video, here is an interesting article, and for any of you wanting to wire up your entertainment center with DVI or HDMI, I recommend reading this.

Domain update madness

2005-09-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

While I was at work waiting for code to compile and deploy, I decided to play around with some domain registration. zellerfurniture.com is working and displaying a site coming soon message that dreamhost puts up. In preparation for a move of the zibblog to a "real" hosted solution where I can put up photos and other web pages, I registered zibblog.com and pointed it at the current zibblog. Scott swears by WordPress while other people that I know (like Rus and Dave) currently use Movable Type, so I'll probably end up needing to do some research before I finally take a plunge. What was kind of funny was that I looked to see the current state of zibbler.com and found that it is currently registered to Tucows and they have some sort of coming soon site up. I'm currently trying to come up with some domain that really screams at me for a more permanent url.

Pics of the card

2005-09-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

I figured I'd post a couple of pics of the business card that Rus was kind enough to work on. The one to the right was one of the examples that he put together to get a read on what I was looking for. I have the other couple of cards somewhere, but didn't feel like looking for them because I liked this one much more. Anyway, I threw at him some of the original text listed here with the idea that my dad's name should feature somewhat prominently in the design to differentiate it from anything involving my extended family members. I showed this to my parents and got some comments from a couple of friends, which brings us to what ended up being the final design for the front.

We played around with the image until we got to the card pictured here. In the end, I think this one has a more balanced look and Rus played around with the filters until he got a look that was a little brighter and not as white as the other one. I also thought that it would look nice if we used the back for contact information, which gave us the last image. All in all, I'm pretty happy with the end result. Now, I just have to find a place to print it at.

The other item of note is that I finally got a hosted account with DreamHost in order to host zellerfurniture.com and to possibly be the future home of the zibblog. Currently, there is nothing on the site, but hopefully, I'll get something up in the next couple of weeks. They had a pretty good hosting deal if you signed up for 2 years, so I figured why not and went ahead and did the signup for 2 years.

Sometimes things work themselves out

2005-09-14T09:28:00.000-07:00

Just when I start to think that my life is simply devoted to bug fixing, some stuff starts to work itself out. I sat down with Rus last night and after a couple of hours of playing with Illustrator and Photoshop, we tweaked Rus's original design for business cards for my dad until we were happy with it. Mostly, it was Rus trying out some stuff and me saying "more of that" and "maybe less of that". I'm really happy with them, and I'm hoping to get them printed up by the time my parents go back home to Nebraska at the end of Sept. (they get here at the end of next week). We worked up a version of the cards with my contact info as well so that if people see items like my soon to be built entertainment center and are interested, they can have a bay area point of contact.

In addition, I got a tracking number for the last backordered piece of my plasma tv. I was waiting for a module that plugs into the tv to allow it to accept HDMI signals. When it's in place, I can give the DVD player its own tv input, and I'll only have to switch cables between the xbox and digital cable box. It's funny how just a couple of random things coming together can make the whole week go much more smoothly, even when it's just bug fixing ... all day long.

HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray vs My Bank Account

2005-09-13T18:30:00.000-07:00

I was looking through my Amazon wishlist the other day trying to decide if I wanted to supplement an order I was putting together. As I was looking through it, I saw some random DVD movie collections like Star Wars in widescreen and the complete Matrix collection that I realized would probably be out on some form of next generation disc storage sometime. At this point, that is HD-DVD or Blu-ray in the kind of cage battle that consumers haven't seen since VHS vs Betamax.

On a side note, every time I think about the whole VHS/Betamax thing, I remember the story that Ronel Elul always used to bring up in econ class about how Betamax was the superior technology. As I was putting together this blog post (is it odd that I do research for my blog posts?), I found an interesting article about the truth about "Why VHS was better than Betamax" that mostly comes down to the fact that the Betamax technology wasn't really that superior and VHS ended up having a superior consumer implementation.

In the end, I found an interesting article that lists some of the titles that are supposed to be released in time for xmas for HD-DVD, and a lot of the titles that I would like to own, like the Matrix set, are on the list. It will be interesting to see which format survives because I'm certain that my bank account will probably be able to support at most one next generation disc format.

My integrated home audio/video solution

2005-09-02T14:20:00.000-07:00

I've been putting some thought lately into what I'm going to do for audio/video wiring in the entertainment center that I'm going to be putting together. Some of it will come down to what I want to do for an audio solution. If I went with something like a heavy duty receiver (e.g., Josh recommended some of the better Yamaha products, which led me to something like the RX-V4600), then I'd get something that would do video switching as well. This sort of thing has some nice benefits like supporting a pretty full featured speaker setup and some nice one touch switching between sets of inputs.

Josh's other audio recommendation for today was the speaker system all in one unit, the Yamaha YSP-1 (shown above). That has the benefit of being only one speaker and perhaps nicely integrating with the high concept entertainment center that I have planned. However, at that point, I'd be starting to think about some other system for doing input switching like perhaps a 4 to 1 HDMI switcher with digital audio switching. At this point, one of the main decisions is what to do with the various electronic components. One idea that I had was a wiring panel on the side of the unit that would have the 4 HDMI inputs that you would plug in, which would get routed through the switch into the tv. It's either something like that or have all the electronics in a section at the bottom of the entertainment center. I feel like I need to obtain a copy of AutoCAD or something and turn my vision into a 3D model.

My current thinking is that it will look something like this, but it will have the all in one YSP instead of the DVD section. If anyone wants to put in their $.02 worth about whether or not to have a section at the bottom to house the stuff like the DVD player, feel free.

Bluetooth is really cool

2005-09-01T23:56:00.000-07:00

I did a little bit of reading and found out that the screen on the RAZR is 176x220, so I did a little web browsing and played around until I got an image of Stewie that I was able to zap to my cell phone via bluetooth. You are now looking at the new wallpaper for my cell phone.

The Cougar has landed

2005-09-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

I was walking through Target looking through a few random items and I did my usual walk through the home entertainment section. Due to my wish to be up on the latest in pop culture, I find it interesting to see just what a store like Target is prominently displaying and what they are trying to sell on the cheap. During tonight's walk, I happened upon Words & Music: John Mellencamp's Greatest Hits. During the long bus rides to away games in high school (for me, basketball and track), someone was almost sure to pop in a John Mellencamp CD and play something like Hurts So Good or Jack And Diane. There is no way that anyone in his (or her) right mind can pass up a 37 song John Mellencamp collection if for no other reason than the fact that he once had a "Cougar" in his name.

Random filler material

2005-09-01T00:28:00.000-07:00

I keep meaning to get some "real" posts up, but a combination of attempting to fix tons of bugs, running, and listening to my girlfriend (it still feels kind of weird to say (or even type) the word) vent about work have sucked the energy out of me for today. I've got some posts in mind, but they'll have to wait. In the meantime, here are some random links that I've been accumulating.

There are those times when I just don't care about the environment. For those times, there is this comic. (On a side note, Yirmumah is a great source of random links and adult humor.)

For those of you who don't read Gizmodo daily, I bring you a link to a "Halo-driven Talk Show with a Game Boy Soundtrack". For those of you with an XBox Live subscription, a new set of 5 maps became free on the 30th. You can get them for free on XBox Live or buy them in the store for $20.

Someone finally created a comic book for fans for Batman and people that hate hippies.

I even found a random blog entry the other day about middle age programmers.

For all of the parents of young children that I have reading this blog (the number seems to be ever growing) there is the ThudGuard Baby Helmet.

For all of the UI designers that I have reading my blog (really, all the cool kids are doing it now ... well, Rus and Mandy are, which is enough for me to consider it cool) there is an interesting article on the mac ui.

As a final note, I've recently gotten back into the habit of doing watch research and it turns out that there are many really cool watches that never make it to the US like the Seiko Worldwide Atomic Solar Watch.

Well, I've now worked my way through a whole new set of links. Coming soon is an entry about Carmel, upcoming comic book covers, and why you should be like Matt K and read more comic books.

A new toy

2005-08-30T18:05:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been unhappy with my AT&T cell phone plan since I keep running over on minutes, so I decided to go online and find a better rate plan. After browsing the Cingular site, I found the plan that I wanted but could find no way of switching the plan without selecting a new phone. I was perfectly happy with my old phone, so I decided to give them a call and see what I could do.

The answer was absolutely nothing. It turns out that if you were an AT&T customer, you can only choose an AT&T plan (which are kind of crap in comparison). All of this makes sense if you assume that they want you to switch to Cingular. Anyway, once I came to terms with the fact that I "had" to get a new cell phone, I decided to get a cool looking cell phone. It also turns out that nobody makes cheap cool looking cell phones, so after some looking around, I ended up with what Motorola refers to as the RAZR BLK (it turns out that many people consider spelling the word BLK to be really, really cool). Anyway, it actually seems to be a pretty good phone. I'm not a huge fan of flip open phones, but I can appreciate something only half an inch thick.

I didn't know that I create viruses

2005-08-30T17:57:00.000-07:00

On one of my machines at work, I run Norton Antivirus. Norton is very diligent about making sure that my computer is protected from all sorts of worms and viruses, which seems to include the product I work on. Whenever I start the server, I see the dialog pictured here. It now serves the purpose of letting me know when the server is up and ready.

HDTV: The latest kryptonite

2005-08-21T22:55:00.000-07:00

I realized that my latest addiction was HDTV when it dawned on me that I was watching an equestrian sports show and about the only reason I could come up with in my head was "it looks nice in HD". However, I will not apologize for watching a Chicago / Earth, Wind, and Fire concert on INHD. There is nothing wrong with a man liking Chicago as long as it is not late Chicago.

The picture post

2005-08-20T14:14:00.000-07:00

Rus once noted that people like blog entries with pictures, so I figured I'd post the pictures of the new desk and plasma tv that I took to send to my parents. I am able to post these because my cable modem was delivered today. After a conversation with comcast tech support who informed me that I couldn't have any device between my computer and the cable modem (in my case, my airport extreme), I was able to get everything configured and my tivo was able to stop informing me that I really needed to make a daily call.

You paid for the pizza too?

2005-08-19T16:46:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was the big move from the old to the new apartment. Di had moved the previous weekend, and I had to be moved out of the apartment by the end of the day. After a trip to SFO at midnight to pick up Leslie, I got back to the apartment at 2 AM to finish packing. I got about 4 hours sleep and had most of the apartment except for the kitchen packed up by 9 when I went to get the uhaul, which played the role of an oversized dolly. It also served as recreation because everyone seemed to enjoy riding around my apartment complex holding onto the back. JB, Mike, Eric, Rus, Jake, and even Gregg (for an hour or so) came over to help me move and I was returning the uhaul at 1 in the afternoon.

At this point, I told the moving crew how to get to a local pizza place that I had been meaning to try: J.T. McHart's Pizza Restaurant. By the time I got there, everyone had sat down and the pizza had arrived. At some point, I decided that we were pretty much done, so I got up to pay the bill and we left a little bit later. Fast forward to Monday at work when Mike comes by my cube to ask for the money for the pizza. I was told that they paid for the pizza when they arrived and no one seemed to have told the people working the counter when I asked to pay the bill. I paid Mike back and went there after work to try and sort the whole thing out. After working through the whole explanation, the manager took my phone number and said he'd call me once he sorted the whole thing out. In the end, Mike paid about $65, I paid a little more with tip, and I ended up with $80 in gift certificates. The pizza was pretty good and I appreciated how helpful they were in resolving the payment issue, so if you are ever in Cupertino looking for pizza, give them a try.

Plasma cometh

2005-08-17T17:58:00.000-07:00

I received my notice from Pilot Air Freight that my plasma will be delivered tomorrow. Thankfully, I cleaned up almost all of the living room last night so that there is now space to set up the plasma tv. Now, I just need a sound system so that I don't need to just read the subtitles.

The not so mighty mouse

2005-08-14T14:37:00.000-07:00

At the post move lunch, I was talking to Rus and Jake about Apple's new Mighty Mouse. If you haven't seen it yet, the selling point is that Apple is finally producing a 2 button mouse where the top third of the mouse is a touch sensitive surface. Along with this, the scroll button is a scroll ball (kind of reminds me of arcade golf games) and there is a force sensitive button on each side. Their opinion after trying one is that it wasn't the most intuitive mouse to use if all you really want is a 2 button mouse, and I should definitely try one before buying.

It happened that I was wandering around Valley Fair later that afternoon and decided to stop at the apple store to try one myself. For anyone that hasn't tried one, apple mice work by pushing down on the entire mouse. To use the two button capability, you put a finger on the right side of top of the mouse (without touching the left side of top) and press down. It was one of those things that you could probably get used to after a while, but I find myself wondering why I should need to get used to some sort of new mouse paradigm when I'm fine with current 2 button mice. In the end, I'm going to wait and see if they improve the interaction model, and I probably won't buy one until/unless they make a bluetooth version.

I later found a pretty good review of the mouse on Macworld. It was perhaps a little nicer than I would have been but it wasn't too Apple biased.

Playing catchup with my life

2005-08-10T23:59:00.000-07:00

Well, I realized tonight that it has been a week since the last post, so despite the fact that I should be packing, I decided to throw up a blog entry with some odds and ends. After the weekend and the move, I'll be back to the prolific zibblog entries you all know and love, so hopefully, this will tide you over.

Awhile back, Chris posted a shout out to the zibblog giving me mad props. Stuff like that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. The burning question is still "where does Chris keep his blog with more controversial content?" Not that we don't all love the "texty", thought provoking familyandfriends blog but where is the http://awaken.typepad.com/keepthewomenandchildrenaway blog?

The other day, I got a FedEx tracking number from plasma.com that I thought was my tv but which turned out to just be some connectors. I now go back to eagerly anticipating the arrival of the plasma.

Awhile back, I read about Scott putting his bluetooth headset through the washing machine. This gave me a chuckle, thinking "silly, silly Scott". Later, I read about Nate doing the same thing. Given that I own the same model as both of them, you might have thought this would make me paranoid. Nope. This last weekend, I did the same thing to my own headset. I let it dry out, charged it, and it did start working again. However, I've been told that it's now a lot harder to hear me. I may see about getting a screwdriver that will allow me to open it up and see if there's anything I can do. However, I was also looking on amazon and noticed that you can get the next rev of the same headset (with a AAA battery slot instead of a built in rechargable) for $34.

I've got a few random blog topics running around in my head that I'll hopefully post during the weekend. I was thinking lately about something I read on someone's blog (can't remember what blog at the moment) about not letting the blog just be a collection of links. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. However, if I'm going to do that, I want to throw in the occasional link that makes JB go "huh?" (JB tends to be my measure of just how random a blog post is). In that spirit comes a song and music video dedicated to MILF by Kennedy. Link comes by way of Yirmumah.

Finally pulled the trigger ...

2005-08-02T19:22:00.000-07:00

on the new plasma tv. 42 inches of HD goodness wrapped up in a nice little Panasonic bow. Based on the experiences of JB and Josh (thanks for the info), I decided to get the Panasonic TH-42PHD7UY. It has a built in "Video Wall Processor" so that you can hook them up in a 2x2, 3x3, or even 4x4 configuration. I was tempted, but I just bought one. Hopefully, it will be here in time for the move to reward those people kind enough to help out with some Halo 2.

One of those days

2005-07-29T16:36:00.000-07:00

Lately, every day has been one of those days that starts out with me not wanting to get out of bed and turns into a day of bug fixing and random questions from people that prevent me from bug fixing. Yesterday was one of those days; however, for once, I had one of those evenings where everything was perfect. On top of that, when I came home, I had a new issue of Make and a bonus check in my mailbox, a new episode of TopGear on TiVo, and a hot pocket in the freezer. Sometimes, life is good.

Happy Birthday Wil

2005-07-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

This year's desk calendar at work is Star Trek, so it's got a bunch of random actor birthdays listed in it. This is how I know that today is Wil Wheaton's birthday. Instead of googling for his site, I had originally just typed in www.willwheaton.com which took me to a vastly different site. I think I may be one of only 10 people in the world that actually enjoyed the Wesley Crusher episodes. Anyway, if you are vaguely interested, there is a writeup in honor of his birthday on StarTrek.com.

One step too far

2005-07-26T00:54:00.000-07:00

I am one of those people that occasionally just blogs for the sake of committing words to "paper" and getting stuff off of my chest. In that spirit, I'm going to talk about one of my odd days. For anyone that I haven't subjected to stories of my love life (you must live on the east coast or in SF), there is a running theme of masochism (before you start, no, not like that) in the way that I put myself in positions that I know I'm not going to enjoy. For instance, I decided to email a woman that I parted ways with that had expressed what appeared to be a genuine interest in remaining friends (I've foolishly done this enough by now to know better), and I received the followup email that invariably contains a line something like "oh, and by the way, I'm seeing someone exclusively right now". After 2 or 3 of these emails, you'd think I'd have learned my lesson. Anyway, I also went speed dating Sunday night (post to follow) and through some scheduling problems of the company running it, there were only 2 women under 30 there which led to an email today that contained no matches (it was actually a kind of funny experience all in all, which warrants its own entry).

All of this combined to make it an odd day. As I was looking through some photo blogs for the San Diego Comic Con, I decided to look for photos of an event that a friend of mine (a female friend, of course) was at. It turns out if you know enough about a person and an event, there is probably a photo blog somewhere. After a trip to google and a look through some random web sites, I found the sort of page I was looking for and suddenly encountered a picture of her and her boyfriend. It was at this point that the thought leapt into my head that "oh shit, I'm a stalker". It is a weird feeling to know that some combination of someone else's actions and your feelings has come to that. For some reason, I seem to occasionally require experiences like this to realize that some "friendships" are just plain unhealthy.

WaterFire

2005-07-26T00:51:00.000-07:00

When I was in Providence for my reunion, I was at the bookstore and saw some interesting WaterFire posters that I didn't feel like taking on the plane. I finally remembered them tonight and found them online here. Personally, I kind of like the wide one, and I'm thinking about getting one for my new apartment.

Another bunch of links

2005-07-26T00:47:00.000-07:00

As I fall ever farther behind in my newsreading (846 items unread currently with comic book blog posts at 113), here are some random links that I thought people might enjoy. On Yirmumah, there is Mister Rasheed's Neighborhood which is a fun read. I ran across a pinball entry that a thought Josh might enjoy. For all those people that went to Brown, I even found a ProJo Blog. Not to leave out my homeys at Awaken.com (see all the free publicity I give you guys ... there are probably a whole 6 people who you haven't worked with reading this blog) I finally read an old news item on the iport in the wall. To finish out the links, I was reading The Absorbascon the other day when they had a series on life lessons you can learn from supervillains. The entry entitled Clayface, on Confidence made me want to just go around at work saying "Fools! The utter fools!"

Too many standards, too little time

2005-07-26T00:37:00.000-07:00

I was attempting to get caught up on my newsreading last week and and I ended up reading about the release of the spec for Atom 1.0. This sort of thing caused a relative flurry of posts about all the different standards for newsfeeds from blogs and the fact that there are now around 5 (I think) major standards and versions of standards that various newsreaders support. Of course, it got me to thinking about the fact that at some point I want to move this to a "real" website where I can have control over the software and do whatever I want. All of this also led me to an interesting article that ended up being a kind of roundabout discourse on blogging and what it means to be a blogger. I thought it was a fun read so, here's a link.

Screaming at the top of my lungs

2005-07-19T15:26:00.000-07:00

Have you ever had one of those days where you just feel like screaming at the top of your lungs? Not at someone or about anything in particular but just screaming at the world in general. I'd sit in my cube and do it, but my coworkers would probably look at me funny and I'd have to talk to HR. I really don't feel like talking to HR. In a totally unrelated note, they made our ESPP (employee stock purchase plan) at work less nice. The way it worked before was probably illegal or something. In a slightly more related note, Julie rescheduled our dinner that was supposed to be next Monday night. If I keep telling myself that we're just friends, at some point I'll believe it.

I need categories so that I can file blog posts under "rantings".

coolhunter ... yeah, I hunt the cool

2005-07-19T01:37:00.000-07:00

If you don't read thecoolhunter.net, you should. I know what you're thinking, "This is from the same guy that tries to convince us to watch JAG." Well, JAG was great show once whose time has come and gone, but at least we still have NCIS. How can you not watch a show that has Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin in it along with Mark Harmon and a former star of Dark Angel? Anyway, I've now seen this pic on both coolhunter and gizmodo. It's a lamp that responds to hand waving. Now that is cool. I know I'm buying one. The other interesting news item was about the book Good Advice for Young Trendy People of all Ages. Who wouldn't want to buy a book about being young and trendy? Bonus points to the person who goes to the trouble of finding the link that doesn't belong and knows why I linked it.

Extreme Makeover - Engineer Edition

2005-07-19T00:29:00.000-07:00

The other day, Cryztal made the mistake of offering to take me shopping sometime to revitalize my wardrobe. I figured why not, so we scheduled the outing for a Wednesday after work. Helen was convinced to come along and before long, the three of us were at Valley Fair at Kenneth Cole. At some point in my life, I realized that places where people work on commision are inherently evil. I never feel like I can take anything that they say seriously because they are trying to sell product and I could swear that I get evil looks when I decide to not purchase anything. I remember checking out at Eddie Bauer once and having the girl at the checkout comment on the fact that perhaps the shirt I was buying was too expensive (we ended up agreeing that the shirt was really thick and perhaps more of a jacket, thus worth the money). That's the kind of service that I want. Similarly, with Helen and Cryztal I have no fear of them telling me precisely how I look in whatever I've got on. I tried on a vast assortment of clothes in at Kenneth Cole and we came to a group consensus that none of the jeans fit me that well (arguably, I probably could have come to the same conclusion myself, but it probably would have taken longer), but I did find a shirt.

At some point, we ended up in Sephora having come to the conclusion that I need cologne. I'll admit that I wasn't 100% on board with the idea, but I decided that since the whole thing was my idea perhaps I had best go with the flow. One of the problems is that I come from a long line of people with very sensitive noses, so I ended up looking for as understated a smell as I could find. In the end, Zibbler's new scent is Allure Homme Sport by Chanel for Men. I'm still not sure that I'm convinced about the cologne thing, but if it's what the ladies want, it's what the ladies will get.

Further on into the evening, we arrived at Banana Republic. At this point, we were still in search of the perfect pair of jeans (well, I was prepared to settle for "jeans that don't suck" or even "jeans that make Zibbler's butt look good"). It all started to get a little odd when we started having conversations that went.

"Nope, too loose."

"You sure? These are what I normally buy."

"Oh yeah. Those are too loose."

It was then that I decided it was worth sacrificing a little bit of comfort to look good on a date. This conversation was repeated a couple more times until I ended up with a pair of jeans that was probably a good 3 inches smaller than what I would have bought otherwise. After some more wandering, I ended up with some hair stuff, shoes, and various other items.

The epilogue to this story is that I was having a conversation with Chris and JB today about the fact that JB needs to come speed dating. There was even talk of the zibblog and awaken.com sponsoring him and covering any incurred costs, so what I think we need now is to find women to take JB on a shopping spree with the Awaken corporate card and a digital camera to get some runway photos for the zibblog. That way, JB can be ready for speed dating. Wow, this may be my best idea in a long time (take that however you want).

MC Chris coming to a venue near you

2005-07-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

So I bought the new Harry Potter book yesterday. After reading the first three, my mom got me to read them and they turned out to not be too bad. Personally, I don't think they are as good as the Dark is Rising books by Susan Cooper but there may be a nostalgia factor involved there. Anyway, that got me to thinking about skit on the first MC Chris album where John Bowie is reading Harry Potter at a birthday party, so I went to the MC Chris site and it turns out he is going to be touring. However, the only stop he is making to the west coast is the Penny Arcade Expo which would require me to go to Bellevue, Washington just to see MC Chris. Anyway, if you haven't tried his music, you can download the first album and let is play for awhile. If you give it a chance, it will grow on you (unless you can't stand the fact that he sometimes sounds like a 10 year old).

Zeller lookin sporty

2005-07-17T10:53:00.000-07:00

I recently got an email about race photos from the Jungle Run, so I took a look to see if there were any that were good. Surprisingly enough, there was this photo that I believe makes me look very sporty.

Random TV show stuff

2005-07-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

I've got 3 or 4 blog entries in various stages of completion. While I'm waiting for stuff to complete on the computer today, hopefully, I'll finish them up.

One of my favorite shows of last season was House. The premise is that each episode, somebody has some problem that no one can figure out, so Dr. House and his team keep trying treatments that may or may not work (and may or may not kill the patient) under the assumption that if they do nothing, the patient will die anyway (patients with unknown, annoying skin rashes don't make for good tv. Anyway, I found some episode reviews that are around how accurate the medical treatments are in each of the shows. I read a couple and they make for some interesting reading.

I also figured that I'd throw out some show recommendations that you may or may not be watching because they are all BBC shows.

Top Gear: This bbc car show is a big favorite of Rus and I noticed that it is now on the discovery channel.
MI-5: This is another bbc show that is called Spooks elsewhere. As you might have guessed, the show is about MI-5, and, as opposed to US dramas, they aren't afraid to kill people off. A&E is currently showing this one.
Dr Who: They just got through airing what is the 27th season altogether and also the first season in a long time. Given what a geek following the show has, it isn't hard to find online.

random stuff for the day

2005-07-14T17:12:00.000-07:00

I modified my sidebar to add some blog links. I did it from memory, so I've probably left some blogs out. I saw today that Joe's blog at least has the homepage up so I added it as a link for some more incentive to add some content.

For the three or so people that read this blog that don't also read slashdot, there was an interesting review of katamari damashii 2. The original is Mr. Sung's favorite game so I figured it deserved a link. Also cool was concept art for a keyboard whose keys are all little lcds. Who doesn't like lcds?

It is rare that there are vault checkin comments that make me laugh, but today I happened to read "Avoid the Zeller induced merge for organizing imports" on a checkin by Josh. It's nice to think that, on occasion, my OCD has some impact.

I was born a ramblin man.

2005-07-12T00:35:00.000-07:00

I was trying to figure out today what my travel plans for the next year are. I had originally been thinking about New Zealand in October, but I think that my plans for purchasing a 42" plasma tv are going to push that out a little bit. From my research and talking to Greg D, the busiest time seems to be November to April, so next May sounds like as good a time as any to go. Chicago Bears tickets go on sale on the 23rd at noon. Jon and I need to figure out which game (or games) we want to see and be on our computers ready to purchase. Soldier Field now has the "normal" seats and the "club" seating. The club seats include access to various restaurant and bar areas but start at $200. The normal tickets start at $50, and the good games seem to sell out within the first hour. I may finally go to Hawaii in the winter since I've got enough Continental miles (thanks in large part to the Israel trip) for a free ticket.

Anyway, since I decided to get a place of my own, I've been thinking that now is the time to finally buy the plasma tv. A recent post of josh's about projects around the house got me to thinking about my dream entertainment center. Once I figure out what tv I'm getting I can start working up the plans for it. Omnimount has some nice cantilevered wall mounts that will go back fairly flush while still allowing the tv to be pulled out and rotated. The tv and mount will decide how thick I'll be need to make the entertainment center. After that, it's mostly a matter of figuring out the wiring for it, how it secure to the wall, and where to put the electronics. I'm still not sure about where the electronics are going to go, but I've got a couple of ideas involving glass and aluminum that might turn out well. If it turns out well, hopefully I can convince all of my friends with plasmas to buy one from my dad for their homes.

Random stuff for the week

2005-07-10T21:29:00.000-07:00

I recently paid for NetNewsWire and MarsEdit from Ranchero Software after playing with NetNewsWire for a month. NetNewsWire is their news reader that supports RSS and some other random features like treating results from search engines as feeds. MarsEdit is a blogging application that supports most of the major blog applications. I'd recommend them both to anyone. MarsEdit is still a little new, but it looks like it has a lot of potential. There is an interesting weblog article here about the reasons that they split off MarsEdit into its own application.

I finally started watching the current season of 24. I had all of the episodes on my tivo with the idea of doing "24 x 24" which would entail watching all episodes of 24 in one sitting (not to be confused with 24 x 7 x 365, which is a really odd way of saying all the time including holidays). So far I've liked it a lot. The show tends to have a lot of actors that I've seen in random shows and this season included actors from First Wave and La Femme Nikita. A little known fact is that Rob LaBelle who was one of the stars of First Wave got his undergrad degree from Brown.

Welcome to The Jungle (Run) part 2

2005-07-10T21:20:00.000-07:00

Well, today was the big run in Los Gatos. The run was at 7, so I got down there around 6:50, picked up my race bib, and found Mike with a couple of minutes to spare before race start. Our sentiment at race time was that there were less people this year. I looked up the results afterwards and in 2003 (the year that it took the place of the silicon valley marathon) there were 1098 total (700 1/2 marathon, 398 10k) and in 2004 there were 526 total (312 1/2 marathon, 214 10k), so it will be interesting to see the results from this year's run.

Both the 10k and the 1/2 marathon begin and end at the Los Gatos High School track. The first mile had a small uphill section towards the beginning that keeps the pack bunched up. After we crested the hill, Mike and I started picking up speed and passing whoever we could. We hit the first mile marker at about 8 miles exactly, which wasn't too bad for the first mile. The second mile has what is the longest downhill section of the 10k where we picked up some speed. Not too long after that, the half and the 10k split up. At this point, it became very apparent that there must not be a lot of people running the 10k because I feel like I could only see maybe 3 or 4 runners ahead at any one time. Our split for the second mile was just under 7 minutes, which I was pretty happy with, but I was wondering if we would be able to keep it up.

At some point around mile 3 Mike and I settled into our usual routine. Mike powers up the hills, I follow Mike up the hill as fast as I can thinking a combination of "I wish I was taller" and "Gotta keep up with Mike", I stride down the hill putting a little distance between us, and Mike catches up by the next hill. We ended mile 3 with a split of 8:02, mile 4 with 7:25, and mile 5 with 7:42. Somewhere around 5 1/2 came the conversation where each one of us was hoping the other didn't have some sort of blazingly fast half mile left in him followed by the agreement that no such half mile was going to be run. The last 300 meters or so takes place on the high school track, and as we entered the track there were 2 runners in sight. I took off and succeeded in passing both of them with a final sprint. Mike passed one of them and came in a few short seconds behind me. Total time for the 6.2 miles was about 47 minutes giving us an average mile of around 7:35. All in all, it was a fun race, but I wonder if we would have ran it a little faster had there been more racers around our speed.

Update: The results for the race have been posted online. I ended up 16th out of 158 for the 10k and got 4th in the men's 20-29 age group (I will admit that there were only 11 people in my age group).

More stuff on the back burner

2005-07-10T16:13:00.000-07:00

For all of those people living vicariously through my love life (I feel sorry for any of you) or for those just intrigued by the oddness of it, I figured I give the results of the run with Stacey. The run went pretty well, but somehow as we were talking afterwards, the topic turned to how she wasn't interested in dating anyone right now. I guess I'll just have to keep running with her and see if I grow on her (perhaps like a fungus).

Revisionist History

2005-07-08T15:58:00.000-07:00

I realized that Chris was right and I originally gave War of the Worlds 7 zibs. I had originally thought I had given Batman Begins 7 zibs, which would place War of the Worlds at perhaps 6*. Since I have control over the blog, this has become the reality.

* There probably needs to be a post explain the zibs scale as Joe has recommended. The thing to understand is that if you plot zibs vs an objective scale of film quality, you really have to use a logarithmic scale.

TGIF ... Thank Goodness It's Funny

2005-07-08T09:40:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else remember the TGIF marketing campaign that ABC used for its Friday night comedy lineup? For some reason, I now have a hard time thinking of TGIF without associating it with shows like Family Matters.

Anyway, I figured I throw in some random stuff here to finish off the week. The run with Stacey was rescheduled. As to the comments from the peanut gallery, I understand that the internet is public, which is why there is a lot of filtering going on in the blog. My coffee date went pretty well but not great. I'm trying to fill the pipeline, but my sales channels just aren't cutting it right now. Maybe I'll have better luck speed dating this weekend. To go off on a tangent for a moment, sometimes I feel like the analogy for my love life (that I'd make if I was a naval aviator) is like going in for a carrier landing in poor visibility where the crew on the flight deck is telling you to wave off, but you feel like you can make that landing. However, you were wrong, miss the cable, and go off into the ocean. At this point, you should just become a lawyer.

For anyone interested (which is probably 1 person), I randomly found an interview that David James Elliot (star of JAG) did with Runner's World while I was looking for something else. David James Elliot was being phased off of the show to cut costs (it sounds like he is going to do a tv movie for Lifetime ... there's one movie that I won't be watching) and most of the episodes in the second half of the last season dealt with person CBS picked to replace him.

As a final note since somebody was interested, I gave War of the Worlds 6 zibs.

The good, the bad, and the desk

2005-07-06T17:39:00.000-07:00

In reverse order of topics of the blog:

I got Charlie (and Charlie's Isuzu Rodeo) to help me pick up my new desk from a store in Los Gatos. Once I got the desk, I was able to find it online here. The photo doesn't do it justice and I really want to set it up, but I'm probably not going to unpack it for a while since I'm moving apartments in what is now a little over a month.

The bad is that I got stood up for my run last night with Stacey. It was very odd in that it wasn't like it was even the first time we had gone running. Who stands somebody up for a run and doesn't even call to apologize? I guess I'll just have to see if she says anything the next time I see her in yoga class. It actually really pissed me off because I was having one of those days where that was the only bright spot in the day.

On a more positive note, for all my troubles, I was rewarded by multiple posts to the Mark and Mandy blog. It's hard not to smile when reading blog entries written by Mandy.

At least I've got a coffee date for tomorrow morning. Nothing like a potentially awkward coffee date to start the morning off right.

Just another manic Tuesday?

2005-07-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been involved in one of those projects that seems like it just won't end and there is always something else left to do around the corner? Actually, many of the people reading this blog are probably on the same project that I am.

Anyway, I was at a friend's wedding over the weekend and saw someone who reminded me a lot of my "friend" Julie. I wish that someone who'd actually met Julie had been there to tell me whether or not I was right or if I just have Julie on the brain. The reality is that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

On a positive note, I have a run scheduled with my yoga instructor friend, Stacey, tonight. One of my problems is that I believe that life works like sitcoms, so I have a strategy for finding out whether or not she still has a boyfriend before I ask her out. Jon asked me, "Why don't you just ask her how her boyfriend is doing?" Nah ... too straightforward.

On a totally unrelated note, I keep coming back to the idea of buying a house, renovating it, and selling it. If I can convince my parents to put some time into it and find an investor, I think I may try and make it work.

War of the Worlds

2005-07-03T17:08:00.000-07:00

I figured I'd do a quick review of War of the Worlds. In the end, I'd probably give it 6 zibs (out of 10). You could certainly tell that a lot of time and money had been spent on special effects. Overall, the story was pretty good even if there weren't too many shocks. If you know how the original story ended, the movie's ending won't hold any suprises for you. The characters were pretty good, but if you're expecting a great plot and award caliber acting, you're probably not going to find it here. There's even a great section of the movie with Tim Robbins playing a pretty standard crazy Tim Robbins character. It felt like half the theater laughed when they saw Tim Robbins come on screen. If you go into the movie looking for some good effects, pretty good acting, and fair amount of suspense, you won't have wasted your money.

Random blog of the week

2005-07-03T16:51:00.000-07:00

The other day JB commented on how the zibblog wasn't nearly as frightening as he had expected it to be. I wasn't sure whether or not to take that as a compliment or a challenge. On that note, I somehow stumbled across the blog PostSecret and figured I'd link to it. Before you ask, that isn't what the zibblog is going to turn into, but I did find it intriguing.

Space Hotel

2005-07-01T20:06:00.000-07:00

The pick of the week on the cool hunter is the Space Hotel. We are now one step closer to JB's dream of producing movies in space.

A new catchphrase cometh

2005-07-01T00:09:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to acquire more and more useless information for reasons not readily apparent to me (I could just blame it on OCD ... that and autism get blamed for about every odd personality quirk shown by an engineer) I've started amassing a collection of RSS subscriptions far larger than I will ever read. At last count it was about 70 and I now see that I currently have 558 new items to read. Everybody and their mother has an RSS feed and for some reason I "gotta catch em all (Pokemon!)" (I know, it was kind of obvious, but even if the horse is dead, you might as well beat it, unless it is literally a dead horse, that'd just be mean.) Anyway, I was reading Progressive Ruin and came upon my latest catch phrase "Bitch Crazy". It's the sort of phrase that you can use anywhere. Somebody asks you, "Why doesn't that feature work?" You can answer "Bitch crazy." Somebody asks you, "Want to go to lunch?" You answer, "Bitch crazy." Gotta love a new catchphrase.

Cross marketing

2005-06-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

When I signed out of match.com today, the sign out page had this on it. It's nice of them to provide me the ability to quickly and easily search for "everything else", but am I the only one that finds this a little weird?

Humor in the workplace

2005-06-30T10:43:00.000-07:00

For some reason, seeing the following made me laugh. It's times like this that I see the value add in the most recent note functionality.

Most Recent Note: Reason for Rejection set to whoops

There are also times that I wish that my dating life was a workflow with a defined process and change tracking. Then, I could get notes like this from women.

Batman Begins

2005-06-30T00:40:00.000-07:00

Since Joe asked for it, here is my review of Batman Begins. There are probably going to be some spoilers in here somewhere and some background for people who haven't read a bunch of random Batman comics. All in all, I was fairly impressed with the way that they tied together some unrelated characters and packaged up his origin in what was mostly a neat little box. The movie plays a lot like Batman: Year One in terms of general tone and characterization, which is good since I still believe it is one of the most believable takes on the whole batman persona. They even threw in the bat summoning device in the boot from year one. The bat gear was pretty impressive, and I loved the depiction of Gotham.

On the down side, I wasn't all that impressed with the fight scenes. The camera work was really jumpy. I had hopes for something more in the vein of Equilibrium, but it there were still some good action scenes. The other main problem with a movie like this one is that you spend a lot of time doing setup for the rest of the movie. The section of story in tibet was pretty good, but I felt like it gave too much of an impression that Ra's Al Ghul was totally responsible for his training. In the end, I enjoyed it. I didn't enjoy it as much as the first Spider Man movie, but it wasn't too far behind.

For anyone interested in where the different parts of the story came from, there is a section on Danny O'Neil (the man responsible for Ra's Al Ghul) in this week's Lying in the Gutters. Christopher Priest is the one that came up with the whole "Bruce Wayne goes to Tibet to learn martial arts."

For all of you eagerly anticipating the Fantastic Four movie, you can buy a "real" Dr. Doom mask.

Coming soon to a blog near you

2005-06-29T14:53:00.000-07:00

Joe's comment to the previous blog entry has started me realizing that I am about 15 years behind on blog entries (the first 12 years of my life didn't contain much that I really believe to be blogable (is that with 1 g or two? (can you really nest parentheticals like this?))). That is why I am throwing this post open to all of my friends that have blog entries they just can't wait for. Some possibilities include:

the end of JAG
wasn't Tom Cruise supposed to be in Batman Begins?
Zibbler's guide to Zibbler's movie ratings
CDs currently in Zibbler's car

Feel free to put your ideas and/or votes in the comments.

Puddin ... nuff said

2005-06-29T10:14:00.000-07:00

Joe's comment to the post on titles reminded me of the fact that I can create and kill a catch phrase faster than anyone else I've ever seen. Should I be proud of that? "puddin" (as in the pudding snacks), "yup", and "nuff said" are merely some of my victims. A friend was talking about a Vegas trip the other day, which got me thinking about the fact that it is probably been around 4 years since the infamous "Vegas ... nuf said" email. Time really flies.

Eclipse 3.1 is out today. After trying out at least 5 prereleases (including the almost final RC4), I'm very impressed with its quality. I've gotten my setup at work to use the build automatically feature and it almost never grinds my system to a halt despite the size of the codebase. One of these days, I'm going to build a plugin just for fun. Thinking about the way the application is structured got me thinking the other day if my dream of pluggable feature modules as the next step in software development is somehow just around the corner somewhere. If your application were just made up of a lot of features like Eclipse plugins, it would be easier to outsource.

Some days I feel like Edison. Since I'm already including one link to Warren Ellis, why not link to a little exposition on Fell. It sounds like it should be interesting, even to non-comic people since it isn't full of superheroes or crazy stuff like that.