A Static Page

Monday morning sillyness

2006-08-14T17:55:17Z

Stolen from melodica.

Got at b3co.com!

I walked in Kobe, or I would have had one more.

Resolutions

2006-03-23T01:20:04Z

1. Spend more time with family.
2. Get up earlier and get to work earlier.
3. Leave earlier!!!
4. Be more productive at work.
5. Spend more time with friends.

I know I'm getting "too much" (aka enough) sleep when I remember my dreams.

2005-11-20T08:01:46Z

(This is from two weeks ago, the morning of Nov 7... details are a bit fuzzier now, so I'm going off my abbreviated notes that I took planning to make a post out of it then)

My mom's having me drive [a rarity] and for some reason, we're on our way "back" to a family friend's place in Salinas.

I apparently take a different exit than my mom wants me to take (backseat driving). But all of a sudden, we're on this really steep, rocky terrain [no road, imagine those steep hills they show trucks going up in television commercials... but in a minivan]. Following a sign that points to ... India.

Then, we arrive, and there's some structure with a pool underneath it. Somehow I'm now saving people, defending them from these other people with sharp pointy spears [sorry, don't remember exactly how now]

Then I'm swimming with some of the people, and one girl takes me through a portal at the bottom. [of course it's an attractive, pretty girl -- this is a dream].

There is a man, on the other side, who explains everything. Somehow, I know this all already. [reminded me a bit of Quantum Leap]

I go back through the whirlpool.

I rescue people.

I spear fight with some guy.

I fly through the air following some midget into another small portal.

I fight off two lovely deadly twin ladies that shoot lightning at us.

I free them partially from a spell that holds them. They break down, crying. One confesses to liking blue bubble gum.

I solve a set-like puzzle to escape.

I'm sneaking us all out through an office building, one of my old bosses is there.

I stop to look through the yellow pages, to find a Walgreens in Alameda at 3am to meet some druggist who will save them.

All in a good night's work.

I wake up.

Hi, I'm Derek and I'm messed up in the head.

That ain't right!

2005-11-20T05:27:03Z

Stumbled across this banner ad on sfgate.

Someone's got my 350 hours of sex!

Granted though, someone's also got most of my 420 hours too, but still... that ain't right!

argh...

2005-10-19T04:02:01Z

Why is it my thoughts are clearest and most eloquent when I'm walking alone in the dark... but are almost all forgotten by the time I can get to write them down....

This is cool

2005-10-14T18:07:13Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=vwl98dU0kY8

It is apparently real too.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~kimiko/iobrush/
http://web.media.mit.edu/~stefanm/research.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=i%2Fo+brush

China

2005-09-03T07:22:11Z

Bound for China Sunday morning. Be gone for a only a couple of weeks.

Doing so much stuff this week it's been kinda crazy, between work, other work, and trying to get some finances and other misc stuff taken care of... going to try to get my Thinkpad repaired while I'm gone... that thing should be called a Crackpad... so damn nice and useful and indispensible that I can't let it go.

Whee...

2005-08-29T18:33:40Z

Click here.
Take the quiz.
Post your results.

1) Is kadaya a college student? Yes.
2) How tall is bobddstryr? About as tall as me.
3) How would naerbnic conquer the world? carefully.
4) What rank would iamthenathan have in a giant robot army? Commander-in-Chief... and head mechanic.
5) Is melodica in a relationship? Yes.
6) Would you wrestle annarama in jello? Sure, sounds like fun. And then afterwards, I can play "escape the angry fiance!"
7) lorelai's hair color? Black.
8) Do you think melodica is hot? SEVENTEEN.
9) If bobddstryr and lorelai were spliced together, what would be its name? Blorelai the Destroyer?
10) What languages does elevensaid speak? English, Korean, and yermom
11) If duskcat took over the world, who would be happy? He would, I'm sure. I think it'd pretty neat.
12) Did melodica break up with you? Nope. Never.
13) Are annarama and tlaad married? Nope.
14) What planet should elevensaid be from? "should?" He's always been a bit out of this world.
15) How long have you known fallenfan? A few years.
16) Which of your friends should kurama_no_miko go out with? Whomever she chooses? I think she's partial to therax though.
17) What is kadaya's shoe size? What do I look like, a stalker?
18) Is kadaya dead sexy? Totally.
19) What would bobddstryr give elevensaid for his/her birthday? How would I know? I be they don't have a clue either...
20) Is dumdedum your best friend? Worst enemy!
21) Does annarama have a big secret? If so, I'm not privy to it.
22) Is kurama_no_miko 1337? `/35, 7()7/\11`/
23) Would therax go out with katanagasuki? Doubt it. They do have a lot in common though... including there heterosexuality!
24) Could you see naerbnic and lorelai together? Sure, probably not at the same time though.
25) Does iamthenathan know duskcat? Why yes.
26) One quality you find attractive in melodica?
27) Do katanagasuki and therax go to the same school? Previously, yes.
28) What is katanagasuki allergic to? Kitties... like me.
29) What do you disagree with katanagasuki about? My lack of a mac.
30) Are duskcat and melodica going out? Not last I checked.

meow?

2005-08-27T09:34:30Z

Stepped off light rail...

check watch... 1:05am... wow... tired... *yawn*

Look, a kitty, *meow*

"Hi kitty"... oh hey, it's not running away, that's odd. *petpet*
wow, it's friendly...

hm, no collar... wonder if it's from around here *pet pet* [kitty rubs up against my leg, my hand, my laptop bag]

wonder if it's a stray... hmm, maybe I shouldn't be touching it... what if it has a disease... what if it has rabies. but it's really really friendly for a stray... most strays run off... *pet pet* it looks like it just wants some TLC.

wonder if I should take it to the animal shelter... cute kitty.. oh, but what if it's someone's... maybe I should hold onto it for a couple days and post signs... ooh, wait.. I don't have anywhere to keep a cat... definitely an outdoors cat... could put it outside in the backyard... ooh, neighbor's dogs won't be happy about that... and neither will the kitty. Could put it in the garage... ooh, but have to leave the door open so it can go to the bathroom... *pet pet*

I wonder whose cat it is? Wonder if I should take it home for the night... come back and put up signs tomorrow... wish people had better collars... this one seems way too friendly to be a stray... I hope it wasn't just abandoned by its owner... then what would I do, I can't keep it... oh, it's so cute... *pet pet*

I don't want to leave it out here... at least it's not cold, but parking lot isn't such a good place for it... maybe I can put it through the gate of the housing complex... no, that wouldn't be right . Someone else will probably adopt it. *pet pet* Shoot, what are you supposed to do? Hmm, late, can't call anyone to ask... humane society is overcrowded, they probably have way more than they can handle... hmm, do I know anyone who wants a cat? Too bad Drew and Melissa have one already... can't think of anyone else who could take it... could I take it? Don't think I can give it the attention it deserves... barely adequately take care of myself as is... and I'm allergic! Shoot, dilemna, dilemna...

Man, wish I could just adopt it... yet another cat that knows exactly who's allergic... sigh. *pet pet* hmm, 1:15... I've been here for 10 minutes already? crap, should get home... before it gets harder to walk away... oh it's distracted in the dirt, now's a good time to leave... uhoh... wait... is it following me? *sneaks peek* yes... it is... uhoh, now what am I going to do? What if it follows me to my car and won't leave? don't look back, don't look back. Oh good, it stopped at the last row... I hope it's not too discouraged.

Get in car... oh, it's still there... shoot, I'm going to have to drive by it on my way out... oh no... don't know if I can face it.. guilt... setting in... okay, sit... think some more. Litter box in the garage... small bed... hm, that can't be healthy... we have two cars in the garage... okay, back deck? side yard? food dish? might be doable for a couple days, what to do, what to do... I'm not just going to drive off, am I? am I? 1:30. Wish I lived by myself... had my own place... make the logistics a lot simpler... what's this thinking... I should be able to take care of it, I should be able to do my part to make a difference. I should take it home, can't say "other people" will do right by it... I have to do something.... resolved.

look sideways... it's not there anywhere, where it was sitting. where did it go? Get out of car. walk around, look around, where did it go? walk back to the station, looking, looking, looking. it's not here... where did it go? is it gone? did it wander off? is it just resting underneath one of these cars? no... walk back to the tracks, no kitty... call out softly, "here kitty"... silence. no movement, nothing. Walk slowly back to car, still no kitty.

Sigh. Drive slowly home.

I feel like that was a test. And I failed. It shouldn't have taken me so long to decide.

7 days and counting...

2005-08-01T06:23:11Z

4:38p

Today is the 7th day in a row I've been at work. I expect that it'll be at least 10 before I get a break.

The company I ~~slave~~work for is being kicked out of its datacenter effective Monday 5p. They told us Friday at 7:30p. My boss called me at 8:30 as I'd just gotten home from work to tell me they needed me for the weekend, starting at 9:00am.

Spent yesterday at the datacenter with the CTO. We unracked a dozen servers, half of each redundant pair of load balancers, and hauled it back to the office. We also took off-site backups of our two database servers with two external firewire drives, two powerbooks, and two crossover gigabit ethernet cables. (How's that for an Apple commercial? How we ~~saved Christmas~~salvaged our business)

Repurposed a lot of the hardware and consolidated a lot to reprovision machines. On the plus side, our office will have a 45Mbit pipe (*drool*... I already grabbed some linux/bsd iso's at 4.3MB/s, heh)... didn't leave until midnight... and back in the office again at 11:30 this morning. It's a bit easier today, I don't have to deal with racking up the equipment here -- waiting on them to get the database server up so we can test the app servers against them.

Probably going to be another long night.

====

9:17p

Spent the last 30 minutes learning about some of the options of linux software raid... those that affect performance. I've gone ahead and just taken the defaults. On the plus side, those copies we did last night to the powerbooks external drives, I've voided the warranty on the enclosures to stick the drives in the machine directly... 35MB/s instead of 7. less than 2 hours instead of 8+

====

11:21p

Working on so many things I've taken notes so I don't forget to check up on the progress of things.

12 hours so far... not getting out of here any time.

meh...

2005-07-31T08:11:57Z

Don't count your chickens before they're hatched.

Treasure every moment you have with someone. You never know when they'll be gone from your life.

Happy 100k

2005-07-25T18:20:33Z

July 23, 2005

Dear car,

Happy 100,000 miles. Here's a picture to commemorate the occasion. I wish I'd remembered to watch your spinning dials turn, but I was watching the road.

I'll uhh... try to remember to take care of you better. (Hey, at least I gave you a wash Saturday morning!)

neverupdated @ 2005-03-07T10:18:00

2005-03-07T18:23:40Z

duskcat posted this list of the 110 most banned books. Supposedly, one is supposed to bold the ones you've read, italicise the ones you have read part of, and underline the ones that you want to read. Like him, I'm not going to bother underlining everything.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Kapital by Karl Marx
#37 Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker (not sure, but I think so)
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl (was there some hidden meaning I didn't get that puts this on the banlist? Was the Peach supposed to represent some forbidden fruit? I read this when I was maybe 6....
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck (not sure, but I think so)
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

neverupdated @ 2005-02-22T18:34:00

2005-02-23T02:33:57Z

Heh, nice.

Yay?

2005-02-15T22:35:48Z

So, I've noticed, more and more, I've been doing the same thing I always wondered how my dad could do:

Namely, leaving work after 6:30, and not finishing eating until 9 or 10. Basically, the train times let me conveniently leave at:

5:45 -> home ~7
6:45 -> ~8
7:20 -> ~8:50
7:30 -> ~9:10
8:15 -> ~9:50

As you can guess, or perhaps you've observed... I typically leave at 6:45....

Yesterday, I left at 7:30. I generally get into work at 8:30, sometimes at 9. Occasionally I'm running late and don't get in until 9:30. As my dad said last night... "How many hours were you at work yesterday?" (11). Ugh. Need to leave earlier more often.

Music links:
Def Leppard - Tonight (mp3) [no mp3 for now... can't get it off the iPod
Prince - Raspberry Beret (mp3)

neverupdated @ 2005-01-20T01:03:00

2005-01-20T09:05:54Z

mood not helped by doing a db server switch from 12 to 1

Oh my... an actual update.

2004-12-21T01:22:44Z

So I got on BART yesterday around 7:00 at Ashby.

I was stunned to see the following on the BART sign (the small, multi-colored LCD one in the agent booth, not the ones on the platforms)

The bottom line said:

QUIT :Ping timeout s12!~spare@148.[something].bart.

There were two different hostmasks of these. I stood there for a second, then fumbled for my camera. I waited for it to appear again. Unfortunately, then, my train came and I had to run through the gates.

ARIN says:

Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) BARTNET (NET-148-165-0-0-1) 148.165.0.0 - 148.165.255.255

I'm assuming the line was too long for the lcd to display the "gov" afterwards.

Hmmm, the possibilities for new Bart signs are endless....

Only halfway there...

2004-07-04T23:17:45Z

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Moderate
Level 2 (Lustful)	Moderate
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Moderate
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very High
Level 7 (Violent)	Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

neverupdated @ 2004-05-26T16:13:00

2004-05-27T04:21:59Z

So I was feeling kinda tired today, so I took a break and went for a walk. Ended up by Starbucks, so I said, "what the hell" and got a mocha. On the way back, I'm ready to cross the street... and there's these two girls a little ways over... two lane street. The car (Y) stops where? In the crosswalk... blocking me. Who's waiting in front of it? Me. The guy stops IN the crosswalk, to let the girls go. BASTARD!


========================
   |  |
------------------------
   |YY|YY->
========================
     *    x
    Me    Girls

Oh yea... the only reason I was at Starbucks was because I had a coupon for a free drink.

Oh... and I'm swearing off coffee products for drinks... it doesn't help my wakefulness any. The only thing I notice is the effect on my kidneys. I'll stick to tea and chocolate. At least those taste better.

neverupdated @ 2004-05-18T20:06:00

2004-05-19T03:10:33Z

*sigh*

It's just that kind of {day,week,month}.

Post... interrupted

2004-04-28T06:27:10Z

Apr 27@10:08pm
Mood: In a rut.

When I walked almost two years ago, they gave us cards, to answer a question, that they read as they announced our names. I hardly realized the truth of what I put down. I put down under, what will you miss the most, "my friends."

I never really had a whole lot of time to spend with all the people I wanted to. A lot of that was due to my own time mis-management, and now that location and a new daily routine has made that magnitudes harder, I really regret wasting that time.

All I do these days is work, eat, sleep... with a few hours of chatting before sleeping. I'm so tired after work it's hard to get together with people afterwards. And now, 10pm is "late" ... not that I've been going to sleep before midnight to get closer to 8 hours of sleep... All I really have are weekends, and those are usually hardly usable, to do all the stuff I need to do... plus the chores and other things my parents ask... well, lately it's been leaving me wishing for the work week. Sad, isn't it?

Having no wheels of my own, and especially living at home, probably doesn't help at all. I'm hoping to rectify both of these in the next couple of months, but before those happen, I imagine many of the people I wish to see won't be around, for the summer, or graduated.

I think me and the other engineer at work are really quite different in this respect. He hides himself away, would put up another shelf to hide behind if they'd let him, has Do Not Disturb time... basically everything but his "office hours." Me.... well, I sit in the corner -- not by choice, I got moved from my cubicle in the middle of a room. I don't socialize with new people so well, I need every bit of help I can get =p. The wall don't help.

Apr 28@6:15pm
Mood: Tired.
More and more, I find myself wishing I was closer to Berkeley. That's where the majority of my friends are. But it's not horribly practical. If I took BART and Caltrain from Berkeley, it'd be almost two hours. That'd mean to work 9-6:30 would mean leaving a bit before 7am, and not getting home until 8:30. By the time I'd be done eating and such, it'd be almost 10. And if I give myself 7 hours of sleep, that'd leave what... Maybe an hour before having to clean up and get to sleep. Two of my co-workers live near Rockridge and commute. Driving saves about a half hour solo, and about 45-60 min when they carpool. Factor in Berkeley-priced rent for a place I won't be in and ... well....

I've been offered to share a place in Newark, starting roughly June/July time frame. That wouldn't be so bad. Though I'd lose my train ride (aww, no sleep/email/reading time [maybe ACE + Caltrain? Dumbarton Express + Caltrain? have to look.]), it wouldn't significantly change the time of the commute. It would significantly raise the distance to my high school friends, who live no more than 10 minutes from me now. However, it'd put me maybe a half hour drive to an hour BART ride away, which would make a lot of things a hell of a lot more feasible.

Apr 29@12:51am
Rambling, rambling, rambling. Enough for now.

First Post

2004-04-18T06:02:37Z

Last post?