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| Friday, May 1st, 2009 | | 4:32 pm |
Why shouldn't god trust me? | | Monday, March 30th, 2009 | | 4:42 pm |
| | Saturday, February 21st, 2009 | | 5:28 pm |
biking
So the weather is freaking awesome today in Austin. That, combined with listening to this awesome Max Tundra music, forced me to go biking around with my shuffle. So I biked down the Shoak creek trail, probably too fast, but good music makes me bike fast. So then I got to Town Lake, so I biked over to the Waller Creek bridge where all the turtles are. Did I mention that turtles are f%#*ing amazing?!? So then I didn't know where to go next, so I decided to check the view on Pfluger Bridge. There were like a hundred bicyclists standing around in the middle of the bridge. I figured they were about go go biking somewhere, so I waited around for half an hour, but nothing ever happened. This Chris Baker number one came up to me and told me the deal. It was some sort of scavenger hunt bicycle race where they had to go to about six different locations in no specific order and that it cost money and canned for too compete. I got bored waiting for something to happen, so I decided to bike home via Johnson Creek Trail. Early on John Creek Trail, I noticed my rear tired had a flat. That's the one I just replaced the tube on a couple days ago! I should have checked my tire for crap when replacing my tube! I walked my bike all the way home, but it was still awesome since I was listening to Max Tundra on my Shuffle. Once I got to my street, some creepy Honda Element was creeping down my street past me. The license plate said "HAXXOR". Seriously?!? SERIOUSLY!?!? Then I took out my tube, took out the thorn in my tire, patched my tube, put it back in, pumped it up. I can still hear it leaking. Why do I always get the flat tire karma?!? In other Jacob news, I went to the Capital Metro Rail open house thingy at Airport Blvd and Lamar Blvd. The train was pretty cool because a few of the seats had tables, and their was a place to hang bicycles. The problem is that there are only four bike holders per car, and only two cars per train. That means only eight bikers per train. I don't see myself using the train anyways since there's not one near me and nothing near the stops that I would want to go to. I'll probably ride it once for funsies. | | 2:02 pm |
hummus + tabouli
I just made the best hummus and tabouli I've ever made. Here's the changes I made from my normal recipes: Hummus: Use crap loads more tahini. Use apple cider vinegar. Use fresh organic garlic instead of powdered garlic. Don't use spices. Tabouli: Use salt. Use cucumber. Chop everything a lot smaller. Use more water when soaking wheat. Avoid stems from parsley and mint. It was also probably the most expensive since I used almost all organic ingredients; Wheatsville didn't have organic mint, and of course the salt; but everything else was organic. Thanks to Susan for inspiring me and giving me tips from her hummus and tabouli recipes. In other random Jacob news, I started listening to Max Tundra, which I heard on KVRX for the first time last night. Awesome music. | | Friday, February 6th, 2009 | | 10:47 pm |
| | Sunday, November 30th, 2008 | | 9:11 pm |
Wow I haven't updated my journal in a while. There's soo much I want to say, but I can't say it all. Maybe I should start doing private posts so I can journal everything I want. I met this awesome person who is eating raw every day and exercises almost every day and is crazy smart. Everything I wish I could be myself, but I don't have the motivation. If she moves to Austin, she could probably motivate me, but I'm not sure that's going to happen so I must find motivation elsewhere. I've decided to visit a couple of my old friends from San Antonio. I feel like I haven't seen them in five years! So I finally get to visit Oregon... and I'm going to bring my snowboard with me. Should be a lot of fun :) The project at work is soo close to being done, but seems impossible to finish. There's always these crazy bugs in the Vista print spooler that I can never find ways around. Microsoft is like the brick wall of my trying to get to the finish line of my project. My coworkers aren't as helpful as I'd like. I wish there was a day when we could all get together and write up documentation and run through ideas and testing together. But there's one person in our group that always starts being negative and turns everyone else away from collaborating on the project. It's really starting to piss me off. The project has been almost done for months now, all it really needs is someone to help me with documentation and help find bugs so I can concentrate on fixing them. Though the vista bug is really fucking me over. I don't see why it works perfectly in Windows XP, but in vista, it fails almost consistently using SPNEGO over HTTPS or using the "print test page" button on the spooler. Also, if you try to delete the printer when the IPP connection is unavailable, the printer spooler gives you an error of "access denied" or "permission denied" and refuses to let you delete the queue from your spooler. The only way around that bug is to stop the spooler, delete the registry key for that printer, and start the spooler again. I wonder if Microsoft actually does usability tests for printers on Windows. I can't believe anyone would have let something like that go through. I'm on chapter six of Watchmen. During the first three chapters of the book, I was thinking that it was complete garbage, but around chapter four it actually became interesting and something that I wanted to read. I wish my friends would answer the phone. Or at least call me back. People used to complain that I never answered the phone. At least I called people back within a couple days. I seriously need to find more loyal friends, but I don't think there's many in Austin anymore. Current Mood:  confused | | Monday, September 8th, 2008 | | 5:36 pm |
Palo Alto + San Francisco
Went to the "Bay Area" last week. Finally went to the famous PARC campus to meet up with one of our vendors. It's a pretty nice campus... way better than the one I work for. Friday, my colleague Derek and I took the late flight out of San Francisco so we could explore the city. First we rode the cable car:  I've never been on one of those before... they're very fun, but seem very inefficient to me. I'm thinking that the only reason they still have them are for tourists, but I could be wrong, and maybe there is a good reason that they still have them. It is kinda steam punk in it's own way. We walked around a little to. Eventually, when we got back to the beach near where the cable line started, we saw a bunch of bikers on rentals, so we decided to rent bikes and bike to the Golden gate bridge:   Once we got to the bridge, we went to the old fort under the bridge that used to defend the bay:  I met some cool people inside the fort:  Nice breeze on top:  After we rode back, we met up with Travis at his new place. He showed us his garden:  We went to Herbivore and I had an awesome sandwich:  A few blocks from Herbivore is a 100% sci-fi book store:  | | Monday, August 11th, 2008 | | 6:07 pm |
rear tubes exploding and ubuntu needs better documentation
So last week I upgraded my work laptop's hard drive. I did a dd copy from my old hard drive to new one. Then I resized the linux partition (and kept the windows xp partition the same size). I've got to say, resizing a filesystem while it is mounted is very, very gratifying. I haven't had a chance to do that since the old days of HP-UX 11.0 many, many years ago. It's cool running the df command every few seconds and watching the disk free slowly going up. I wish There was an LVM that worked with both Windows XP/Vista and Linux, but I've yet to find a solution. Linux can see Windows's "Dynamic Disk" volumes, but has no utility to edit them. (though I did find one utility from like 2002, but was unable to compile it because it required ancient kernel headers... not sure if it could make new volumes or edit them anyways). So everything worked great, except because my swap partition moved, and I recreated it, it had a new UUID. For some reason, it has a new UUID everytime my system is rebooted. So I decided to use a LABEL of "SWAP" instead of using UUID. Seems like it's easier that way anyways. Then the only problem I had is when booting up after a hibernate, it never realized I had hibernated and would just boot up from scratch. Seems like it's one of those undocumented things in Ubuntu. You have to manually edit the file "/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume" to say "RESUME=LABEL=SWAP" and then run "update-initramfs". Once you do that, if you ever to rebuild your swap, just make sure give it the same label and then you don't have to mess with the initramfs or fstab anymore. Went biking for a few hours yesterday. First biked down to johnson creek trail. Took that to Mopac pedestrian bridge. Crossed over and biked to barton creek. Decided I wanted to go bike through rolling wood, so I biked that street that goes over to Red Bud Island. Holy crap that was fun. Going down those swerving hills at 30mph on a bike is like riding a crazy, more dangerous rollercoster. Biked to both ends of Red Bud Island. Biked over by the Oasis and the public boat ramps. Took all the west-most roads in tarry town up to mayfield park. Hiked down to the lake. Biked back home. Biked over to wheatsville and met up with Gabriel and then to Hyde park, but first going through that neighborhood where Hemphill Park is. What the hell is the name of that neighborhood? I'll probably never know. Once we got close to Mothers Cafe, my rear bike tube exploded. I replaced it after checking the tire for damage, and then once we got closer to Mothers, my rear tube exploded again. I'm not sure if I just had old crappy tubes, or if there was something I didn't see in my tire, or if I just need new tires or maybe I'm just reloading the tubes to carelessly. Ended up walking my bike home by myself from mothers the last two miles. It was a pretty long walk, being 102 F outside. Anyways, biked over 20 miles yesterday, which doesn't seem like, much, and I wasn't even tired after... but then an hour later, it hit me, and I had a huge headache. I don't understand why I always get a headache after I exercise in the heat, but don't feel a thing when I'm actually in the heat. Maybe I'm accidentally dehydrating myself, but it seems like 5 liters of water should be enough.... | | Thursday, August 7th, 2008 | | 11:39 pm |
first thursday
Biked down to first Thursday tonight. Ate a vegan wrap by Ararat. It was yummy. Watched fire dancers. Bike home. Feel like I'm going to pass out. Work is crazy. Have soo much software I need to write... and I'm the only software engineer on my team... ugg. A server died on us yesterday. It was weird. Sshed into the box and it was all like, "Segmentation fault" when ever I typed in a command. Checked dmesg, and it was all I/O errors. Coworker power cycled server. Hardware RAID manager said the array was offline. Only one of the three in the RAID 5 array was online. Something weird must have happened to the array. We set it up as RAID 5 with 3 drives, and the fourth drive as a hot spare. Now I'm thinking it may have been better if I set it up as a 1+0 array, but it may have been the raid controller that died. Either way, after many hours of trying different configs of: 1) Setup raid 5 array with 3 out of the 4 drives; 2) take one of the drives out of the system; 3) dd the filesystem to a remote system;; eventually, I found one that worked and only had about 20 filesystem errors and the machine works again on a different physical server. I'm really worried about this one IPP bug I'm seeing in Microsoft Windows Vista when using IPP over HTTPS with Kerberos (Negotiate/GSSAPI) enabled. I wish Vista was opened sourced so I could fix it... That's what I love about Debian and Ubuntu... Almost got the vmware HA/DRS cluster setup with failover and everything... It's going to make hardware failures soo much easier to deal with. It's kinda ironic that my main server dies while we are setting up the cluster to help deal with hardware failing. Yepp that's my life. | | Friday, July 18th, 2008 | | 10:20 am |
Central Park + Triangle
So I decided I should finally check out "The Triangle" and the "Central Park" by Central Market. So I biked over there, after first biking by the post office to drop off my netflix, and it's pretty crazy. There's a pond in between Central Market, The hospital, and those apartments over there. That wasn't too bad, but then I decided to bike a little bit north of that. It was insane. There were all these old buildings, and all the streets there had weird street names that were fake, but looked real. The creepiest thing about it was the fact that there was absolutely no one at all outside. So after a few minute of that insanity, I crossed 45th street into the "triangle". That place was pretty weird too. There was this band playing on the lawn sort by the middle, and there was only like four or five people listening to them. The triangle was a weird place. There's lots of parking garages, lots of apartments, and then some small, yuppie restaurants in the middle. At the north tip of the triangle, there's no crosswalks to cross the street. It seems like the triangle tries to isolate itself from the rest of Austin, ignoring the busy roads next to it. I would totally get cabin fever if I lived there. Also, the ugly house being built to the west of me finally got a yard yesterday. Since I've lived in my new place, it's always had empty dirt yard, and then yesterday, they installed automatic sprinklers, grass yard, and some ferns or something. My yard has always had a large deadspot next to the curb where the grass gets direct sunlight. It never looked so bad until tomorrow where it was finally compared to another yard, instead of dirt. Maybe I should just use sod like my lazy neighbor did..... | | 10:00 am |
Those annoying Democrats and their stupid party.
So one of those annoying Democrats from the Democratic National Collusion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCommittee came to my house the other day asking for money to support Obama. It really annoys me how they assume that everyone is wanting Obama to be president. And I'm sure they assume that if you don't want Obama, then you must be a Republican. I told him the truth, I don't know who I'm going to vote for yet, and right now Obama isn't looking so good. If he was such a great guy, why would they be begging for money to push his lies? Remember that one time when Obama was a bush supporter? It wasn't that long ago, just a few days ago, he voted to give Bush immunity for violating the fourth amendment. I'm not sure if that law is legal or not, but either way, it shows how much of a snake in the grass Obama has become. Remember that one time when he was telling everyone that impeaching Bush was a bad idea? Yeah, that was Obama. The man everyone loves supporting his friend Bush, the man everyone loves to hate. Why can't people get out of this stupid concept that they have to become part of a party to vote for someone. Why can't we have decent candidates? | | Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 | | 8:55 pm |
I love my new house and neighborhood!
So I moved Saturday into a duplex by 35th st and loop 1 (mopac). It's such a great neighborhood and house! I've wanted to live closer to downtown for a long time so that I can bike more places, but I was always worried that if I moved to the north side that I wouldn't have much parks to bike to so I was always thinking to move by Zilker park, but that neighborhood is crazy expensive. I think I lucked out that the place I moved into just happens to be about 4 blocks from the shoal creek hike+bike trail which goes all the way from 38th street to town lake! I can bike to downtown with only taking a few blocks of streets! Also, I'm about 2 miles from dhaba joy, wheatsvile, mount bonnel, some of my friends, and more :). So I still have a lot of unpacking to do, and organizing, and trashing/donating/recycling old stuff. Sunday I went biking with gabriel around the neighborhood. We went up bullcreek rd a little, down by windsor/enfield/hartford, and then took the Shoal Creek trail all the way back up to my neighborhood. Monday, Ross biked down to my place (which turns out to be about 25 minute bike) and then we biked to dhaba joy and had dinner. Tuesday, I biked to the HEB at 41st and red river, met up with Gabriel, and got some awesome whitewave vegan tamales (I've been looking for them for a while). Today I decided to finally bike to Mount Bonnell. It is a pretty steep hill, and I had to walk up it on the two steepest parts. Once I got to Covert Park, I carried my bike up the stairs to the top of mount bonnell. The sight was awesome as usual, but I forgot to take my camera. Then I carried my bike down back to the street and biked over to Mayfield Park (which I know as Laguna Gloria). I don't remember ever being there before, but I think my parents took me when I was a kid. I walked around the lake path and walked down to the lake. Yay red-ear sliders in Lake Austin! Then I decided to bike through tarry town and on exposition a little to go by Monica's library and what was NuAge Cafe. Looks like there isn't anything at the location where NuAge was; maybe one of us should start a new vegan restaurant there? :) Then I biked down exposition to enfield, took enfield to this street where there's a community garden, took that street to west lynn, went past where west lynn cafe used to be and biked all the way to 6th street. Then I went back up to 9th street, took 9th street to the BMX park. Unfortunately, there was no kids doing tricks at the park. Took the Shoal Creek trail up to 29th street, decided I was too hot and should go for some vegan icecream at dhaba joy. There new icecream is pretty good, but I miss the oatscream for some reason. I tried there new quiche. It was pretty good. I'm not really a quiche fan, so it wasn't what I'm into, but it's always good to try new things to break the monotony and make life more interesting. Then I went back down the the trail and took the trail all the way back. I guess I should do some more house work such as unpacking, organizing, setting things up, or maybe I should do some work from home.... | | Friday, March 14th, 2008 | | 5:48 pm |
Flickr
So I decided to get a Flickr account. It's a pretty cool website since they use openid and have lots of users to post funny comments on pictures and stuff. I'll probably upload all my old pictures there soon... but it'll take a while. http://flickr.com/photos/electricketchup/Here's a painting from highschool I just scanned in:  | | Thursday, March 13th, 2008 | | 12:33 am |
blocking I/O in gui threads
It's soo freaking annoying.... people everyone knows it's the wrong thing to do. Especially for free software/ open source projects where you don't have annoying deadlines, where you actually have time to code things out the correct way the first time. Firefox.... why?!? I hope this is something they fixed in Firefox 3.0. (I haven't looked at the sourcecode for 3 yet) Maybe someday I'll have all the free time in the world to fix all these annoying software bugs, but every year it seems to get worse. You'd think that we could have been making progress the last few years.... And why do people in the software industry have to be such pretentious douchebags now? They've got nothing to show for it. Maybe I should try KDE 4.0 soon. It actually sounds promising, but then I'm just getting my hopes up. | | Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 | | 9:07 pm |
| | Thursday, December 14th, 2006 | | 8:15 am |
Star Wars
So I was watching episode 5 the other day, and one thing stood out. When Luke is hanging out with Yoda, he relizes that Leia and Han are going to die if he doesn't save them. Yoda and Ben tell Luke that he should just let them die because he needs more training in order to stop Vader. Then Ben says, "That boy is our last hope." and Yoda replies saying, "No - there is another." So if Luke fails to save Leia and dies himself.... Who is the other? Did yoda assume that if Luke tries to save Leia, than he will die, but leia will live and become a jedi? Maybe... but from what they were telling Luke, it was improbable that he would be able to save them. Is there another Jedi out there in the universe that Yoda knows about that Ben doesn't? Maybe the Star Wars universe is filled with plot holes (the size of black holes). | | Monday, August 7th, 2006 | | 8:21 pm |
conservatives
Why do people call themselves conservatives when they aren't? Why do people call themselves liberal when they aren't? Why is most of the world confused over our own vocabulary? Has someone purposely changed the meanings of words to confuse us and take away our own free though like they did in the book "1984" ? The other day I was listening to some random talk radio show on KLBJ. Some lady had called in and was saying some crazy stuff like, "The liberals just need to wake up and realize this is a changing world and they better learn that we need to change with it in order to survive." Imagine that... a person who considers herself "conservative" telling the "liberals" they need to learn how to change like the conservatives have. The host agreed with her. For some reason, such stupidity makes me very frustrated. Do they really know they are making no sense? At least dictionary.com has the definitions I'm used to. I'll post them here just in case someone in the Ministry of Truth decides to change them soon in order to meet some sort of double speak requirements of the government. con·ser·va·tive Audio pronunciation of "conservative" P Pronunciation Key (kn-sûrv-tv) adj. Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change. Traditional or restrained in style: a conservative dark suit. Moderate; cautious: a conservative estimate. Of or relating to the political philosophy of conservatism. Belonging to a conservative party, group, or movement. Conservative Of or belonging to the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom or the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada. Conservative Of or adhering to Conservative Judaism. Tending to conserve; preservative: the conservative use of natural resources. lib·er·al Audio pronunciation of "liberal" P Pronunciation Key (lbr-l, lbrl) adj. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded. Of, relating to, or characteristic of liberalism. Liberal Of, designating, or characteristic of a political party founded on or associated with principles of social and political liberalism, especially in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. Tending to give freely; generous: a liberal benefactor. Generous in amount; ample: a liberal serving of potatoes. Not strict or literal; loose or approximate: a liberal translation. Of, relating to, or based on the traditional arts and sciences of a college or university curriculum: a liberal education. Archaic. Permissible or appropriate for a person of free birth; befitting a lady or gentleman. Obsolete. Morally unrestrained; licentious. If you are going to use these words (I recommend againt it almost 100%), please use the original dictionary definition of the meaning; not some silly alteration that means the complete opposite. Here's an example: If someone is going to modify the constitution to change the rules and take away peoples rights, that's liberal. When George Bush was trying to make an amendment that banned gay/lesbian marriage, that was being liberal. For some reason, everyone was saying it was conservative, even though it was a very dramatic change to the established fundamental law of our government. | | Saturday, May 13th, 2006 | | 1:02 pm |
| | Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 | | 3:01 pm |
went biking around veloway today with joshel and scott my stats: 3 laps time on bike: 39:46 trip: 9.2 miles average 13.9 mph max 24.1 mph total miles since I got my spedometer: 31 miles today is the big potluck http://veganaustin.org/event.php?id=58 and gabriel's birthday. Happy Birthday Gabriel! It's also the birthday for the earth. Happy Birthday Earth! So what's up with Kate on Lost? Was she killing a fish in the last episode? Has being stranded on an island really made her give up her vegetarian way of life?!? I hope not... it's kinda sad, but that's what it looked like. The latest nvidia linux drivers finally support acpi and work great under my laptop with suspend2. That makes me very happy. To bad I'll probably never get my smart card reader because TI hasn't provided specs for it and the specs for gencore's chips don't seem to apply for the ti pci6514. Someone else who was interested in getting it to work setup a wiki for it in case anyone comes across info or has time to reverse engineer it: http://wiki.teuwen.org/TexasInstrumentsSmartCardController. I wish I had more time to work on my veganaustin.org website, but work has been sucking away all of my time latly. I feel like I'm a puppet with many different people pulling my strings in different dirrections. Will I eventually rip in half? While I probably have enough time to work on the two official engineering projects I'm on, I'm helping out another group which is much more demanding and for some reason it seems like I'm the only one who can pull it off. Hopefully I'll find something to let me break the ice on this project. It's something that should be sooo simple, yet in reality it's been seeming to be impossible. | | Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 | | 10:52 am |
Just a spoon full of electrons helps the transistor switch... In the most delightful way! |
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