Greatest quote ever from Gordon Ramsay during last night’s Kitchen Nightmares: “Don’t take it personally, just take it seriously!”
Chef Ramsay
Nov 29th, 2007 by bwann
I hate Firefox
Nov 25th, 2007 by bwann
Sigh. I’m getting tired of this bug where Firefox forgets how to load CSS and/or render images. It’s getting worse. A search through Bugzilla finds a few people having similar problems, but nobody has nailed down a solid reproduceable case yet. I guess I’m going to have to resort to checking page info and try to figure out what causes it.
I’m amused, the FAA airport facility directory for the Empire, NV airport (1A8) has a remark “displaced threshold marked by 8 white tires.” There’s also a one-foot berm around the runway, presumably to keep all the dust clear.
I’m headed to Amsterdam either the week before or the week of Christmas. A colleague decided against going, so it’s now on me. I can only image the amount of hell the airports will be during this time. I’m hoping my frequent flier status will get me past a lot of lines or the company decides to send me business class.
Another colleage was browsing over his Continental miles today and realized he’s 170 miles short being elgible for silver elite status next year. I always thought the stories of people flying somewhere and back in a day for mile bonuses was silly, but now I understand. Spending the $108 to fly to Houston and back is worth it in his case. He also discovered that with the amount of miles he has, he can redeem them all + $61 for a trip to Amsterdam. I’m not that vested yet, but poking around today I figured out I can go anywhere in the US for my miles + $10. It’s odd, because the last time we checked into upgrading an international flight would cost X miles and a $430 service charge; here they just want $61?
My IKEA halogen lights burned out a transformer the other night. The lights were getting dim, and then I started smelling smoke. There was a little tuft of smoke coming out of the transformer on the wall. After killing power, I had to cut the wires leading to the light strand, as the terminals on the transformer were charred and melted to the point I couldn’t get the screws out. So of course, I went out and bought the same fire hazzard light set again. I need light in my apartment in order to search for a safer replacement!
I stayed up until 3 AM Saturday morning, then spent the rest of Saturday watching Heroes season one. I couldn’t stop watching! The fact there was so much Ali Larter, and later Missy Peregrym (ok, Hayden Panettiere too, but she’s like nine years younger than me), in high-def goodness certainly helped.
I ventured into the steam room at the gym the other day for the first time instead of the sauna. It was all nice and chokingly humid, then WSHHHHHHHHHT, the steam generator kicks in and this jet of steam shoots into the room. All of a sudden it got much hotter, and I couldn’t see the door nor the far wall. Quite frankly I thought this must be what it’s like at first being in a gas chamber.
And now the result of the Safari trial. The past two weeks I temporarily switched from Firefox to Safari at home (OS X Tiger) and work (Windows XP) to try out the Apple way. So far, I’m pretty disappointed and have already abandonded it at work after it screwed me on a ticket entry today causing me to lose a lot of typing. Safari is pretty basic and a lot of the little things I took for granted in Firefox just aren’t there. Pretty much all of my gripes exist in both Windows and Mac versions.
Here’s the gripe list so I can remember a year from now why I hated it:
- Safari either doesn’t cache submitted forms or I’m abusing some bug/different functionality in Firefox. In our ticketing system I frequently use the back button after viewing details of a ticket (the previous step to get here is even a GET request); Firefox will happily take me back to the previous page, untouched, whereas Safari complains the previous page has expired and wants to post the form again. IE7 does this too, which leads me to believe it’s a functionality of Firefox I’m relying on. This killed me in doing ticketing work as I frequently flip back and forth to look at information and don’t want to wait on resubmitting an action to our slow ticketing system. To make sure I was sane, I went back and duplicated the same action in both browsers and Safari did the same thing.
- Safari doesn’t handle plain text pages very well. If I try select-all on a plain-text page, copy, then paste into pine or a textarea form, it drops almost all carriage returns and linefeeds and turns it into a huge blob. This happened on both the OS X and Windows versions.
- By default, Safari also uses a proportional-width font in textarea boxes. This makes lining up command output and other plaintext things a pain in the ass.
- I don’t have a quick sub-menu drop down on the back button in Safari. In Firefox if I wanted to go back X pages, I could click on this and just go there. Safari requires me to go to the History menu, and then it mixes all tab history together.
- Safari doesn’t work well with some of our self-signed SSL websites. On one of our internal web development sites, it flat out refuses to work with HTTPS. Other pages it may work and one mouse-click later it doesn’t (says it can’t open a connection). This is what caused me to lose a considerable amount of work today.
- Safari doesn’t have a convienient flashblock application. The only plugin I’ve seen will disable all flash content until you go to a drop-down menu and re-enable it. Flashblocker in Firefox blocks all flash and then allows me to click on individual elements to play the file.
- Safari does maximize properly on my 2nd LCD, whereas Firefox will crop off the menu and title bar at the top of the screen when maximized.
- Safari doesn’t like the Remedy forms I use on a vendor’s website. It throws some parse error and I’m unable to submit the form.
- Safari doesn’t seem to save me in memory consumption either. After several days, Safari and Firefox used similar amounts of memory.
- Rendering speed, both seem similar.
Media fail
Nov 11th, 2007 by bwann
Last weekend I bought a Mac Mini to use as a media server to replace my modded Xbox running XBMC. I love XBMC, it is nearly my idea of a perfect media manager. It plays a wonderful selection of codecs and containers, very responsive and quick interface, and it supports mounting of remote shares. The problem is, it doesn’t have enough CPU to play 720×1280 much less 1080×1920 video files. While the XBOX itself can output a 1080i signal (set through the MS Dashboard) it can’t render frames to keep up. It either flat out drops them or has nasty artifacts.
The Mini has no problem with 1080p output. In fact, it looks rather nice on my Mitsubishi. The Leopard “Aurora” wallpaper looks sweet! So, I installed Perian to give me a ton of format support for QuickTime, which then gives me that support in Front Row. Front Row handled all of my content, surprisingly even DVD and VIDEO_TS folders.
Front Row lacked many things I was accustomed to in XBMC. FR is very pokey trying to scroll through 100+ items. No streaming support either, so no Nederlandse TV for me. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get Joost working; I don’t know if it was a Leopard problem or what. I would’ve really liked to see it on the big screen. Even better would be a way to launch the application from Front Row (or vice versa).
Handling HD content on the other hand, sucked. Nothing existed that would play true HD images. VLC, Mplayer, weren’t quite there yet. I could fish a version out of their Subversion repositories and try to build myself, but that sort of sucks. Downloading HD content sucked too.
In the end, I gave up. I returned the Mini and bought a Toshiba HD DVD player. I was really torn between Blu-Ray and HD DVD. I had planned on buying a PS3 for the Blu-Ray support. I don’t have great confidence that Blu-Ray will win out in the format war. Even if Blu-Ray is technically superior, history has shown the population will buy the lowest price device to get the job done. This holiday season is seeing HD DVD players being sold at fire sale prices. Wal-Mart and Amazon are putting HD DVD players into the hands of people for under $200. This is a good indication to me that it’s the format that’ll come out ahead. Best Buy had a great deal this weekend where I got 300, Bourne Identity included with the player, in addition to three more discs of my choosing. I would’ve bought these anyways, so it helped with the price tag.
In other news, I bought Guitar Hero III for the Wii. In the past I wasn’t interested in it. Somehow I got to playing it with Rob, Bob and Brady, and got hooked on it. I finally beat the easy level, yay! It’s the next Tetris as far as I’m concerned.
Gym, raaaaawr
Oct 28th, 2007 by bwann
With the exception of Friday, I’ve spent every evening at the gym. I’m having mixed results with swimming. The thin Speedo goggles I have leak, which is absolutely annoying when constantly tilting my head to breathe. My other larger goggles are perfectly airtight but seem to block my peripherial vision. I hit the lap pool on Saturday; I was much more tired (or lazy?) than I thought and just was not comfortable at all trying to swim. One of my colleagues happens to have been a swim instructor, he gave me a few tips to try. I need to find out when swimming lessons are scheduled at the gym and get in on that action.
Today was a easy 7 mile run. I let the treadmill put me on a cardio program. It insisted on having me jog 12:00-13:00 minute miles to keep my heartrate down. Afterwards I started into a leg workout. I can now leg press 420 pounds (I maxed out the machine at our apartment complex at 300 pounds); perhaps much more on fresh legs!
I bought Armin van Buuren’s ‘Shivers’ album today, which includes “Sereneity”. This was played at Sensation White 2004 in Amsterdam, you can watch the video on Youtube. It’s gooooood stuff, great for running. Also purchased the “Ultra 10” trance compilation, good stuff as well.
I’ve also lost five pounds over the past couple of weeks. yay!
Saving things
Oct 22nd, 2007 by bwann
I had the whole week off and didn’t do much. Tuesday I had a Line-X spray-in bedliner put in my truck; it’s fucking sharp and surprisingly thick. I also received my Canon 30D and one of my lenses. After getting my camera and truck put back together, I had intended to go someplace not Austin — perhaps a random destination Colorado or Louisiana, but never made it. In fact, I did very little at all. I only went cycling one day; the rest of the time I was reading, cleaning, running errands, evaluating investments, or doing random miscellaneous things. By Sunday I was quite bored.
Seeing where I’m at, I started running numbers through spreadsheets. A Bank of America savings account will yield 0.50% interest on any balance. The best return on a $1000 certificate of deposit I could find (according to bankrate.com) was 5.20%. After three months, the CD would be worth $1,013.08. Not very impressive. It’s obvious a person can put back more in the short term by [stricter] budgeting rather than putting money in a savings account, CD, money market. It’s almost a better short term investment to go out and buy a bunch of Euro and sit on it in hopes the dollar will continue fall.
But, putting aside $100-$200 every month, averaging 10% market gain, allowing for inflation+taxes, after 40 years the overall investment should be in the six-digit values.
Tonight was the first time I went to the new uppity gym that myself+coleagues joined. Swimming in the lap pool is way nicer than our pool at the apartment complex. I can actually go more than twenty feet without scraping my hands on the bottom. The pool at the gym is 25 meters long; tonight I was only about to make it 20 meters or so before I was winded. After a three mile run, I browsed around the facility and wound up in the dry sauna. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been in a sauna, and it was so very nice. After twenty minutes inside, I was a melted puddle of flesh, totally in extacy afterwards.
Roadtrip: South Padre Island
Oct 15th, 2007 by bwann
I went to South Padre Island this weekend. I left Saturday afternoon and came home this morning. I pretty much piled clothes into a bag, picked up my cameras and left. About a five hour drive down. I had a blast and recommend it to anyone looking for some sun. If you’re looking for a quiet spot on the beach, drive far enough and you’ll find it. Rescuing autos turned out to be a popular past time. First thing I did was wander up to the end of TX-100. There was a group of people at beach access #6 with an old 4×4 that waved me down; their battery was dead and needed a jump. After getting them running, I drove out onto the beach and promptly got myself stuck in the sand. I pondered sitting there and digging myself out later, but I had no idea if the tide was going to come up further. Up drives a couple guys in a Ford 4×4. I ask them for a pull, they said they needed to pull somebody else but didn’t have a rope. I pulled out my new recovery strap and head up the beach to help pull this other chap out of the sand. Then we come back and pull myself out. On the way out I pull out a car stuck on a sand berm. I was covered in head to toe in sand. All this within three hours of arriving!
I gave up on camping on the beach. I wasn’t quite sure where to park, the wind was kicking up and I didn’t have a tent. The big motorcycle rally was this weekend (tons of traffic all Saturday night), finding a room was difficult. Sunday morning I went back to the beach and pretty much spent all day there. A guy near #6 rented ATVs; I was hoping I could rent one and drive up the beach with it, but this was not the case. Nevertheless I rented one and drove around his six acre track on the bay. The rental guy showed me this pickup axle-deep in water out in the bay. The story was some guy drove out there when the tide was out, having now idea where the tide came in. So, tide came in and his truck is standed. While I was riding, another 4×4 pulled up a few guys hopped out with several coils of rope in attempt to tow it out. I never found out if they succeeded or not.
The daytime was very sunny and warm; it wasn’t hot but the sunlight would heat a person up. The beaches were clean and so was the water, with an emerald color at a distance. I received a nice sun burn after just a few minutes in the sun without a shirt on without sunscreen. My wooden boardwalk thing for Burning Man came in handy for driving on when on loose, dry sand.
Sunday night I landed a $29/night room at Motel 6. I left Monday morning to come home. Overall I pulled three vehicles out. I learned a few things: great place to go in October; let air out of tires to 15 p.s.i. while on the beach; get tide information; island practically shuts down after 8 p.m. I don’t speak any Spanish, but pulling out a recovery strap does a great job of getting intentions across without trying to understand each other.
Crooked spine
Oct 7th, 2007 by bwann
Over time, I’ve been getting annoyed at how my left shoulder always appears to be really drooped down in photographs due to my scoliosis. It’s also a functional problem too, when wearing a pack I have to snug down my left strap to compensate for the drop, yet my right shoulder tends to bear the brunt of the weight. Over the past few months I’ve been making a conscious effort to pick my shoulder up all the time and keep my back straight when walking to avoid becoming a hump back IT dork.
This got me to studying posture more. Another issue I’ve noticed is that I have a mild sway in my lower back. Whenever doing Krav Maga, the instructors were always telling me to stop leaning forward when throwing punches, then the corrected posture felt very exaggerated and unnatural. Running coaches would also always tell me to straighten up when running on level ground. I’ve always attributed this to having a screwed up back, but turns out this may not necessarily be the case. It could be a muscle imbalance that’s causing the pelvis to tilt forward.
I’m not 100% sold on it because I don’t know how well it fits me. There are four muscle groups that support the pevis: in the front are the abdominal muscles (recus abdominus, obliques), hip flexors; in the back are the trunk extensors (erector spinae) and hip extensors (hamstrings and gluteus maximus. If the hip flexors and trunk extensors are tight plus the abdominal muscles and hamstrings are weak, it will cause a forward tilt.
I’m confused as to what happens to muscles when they’re not used. One camp I’ve read says they weaken and stretch. Another camp says they lose flexibility and tighten up. Cyclists and runners are notorious for having tight hamstrings, maybe not strong, but very tight. Cyclists will often have over developed quadricepts, which work against the hamstrings. Sitting at a desk all day long will cause hip flexors to lose flexibility and get tighter too. The question is, what’s pulling more, the tight hamstrings or tight hip flexors?
The other half are abdominals. I’m packing 10-15 pounds more than I care for, and I don’t have any idea how strong my abdominals are. This is a big contributor to the tilt, I think. I’m determined to drop 15 pounds by Christmas. It’s clear that I need to incorporate a LOT more stretching, and build up my core and hamstring+glue strength. I’ve been doing this anyways, but this underscores how really important it is to do.
My coworkers have finally convinced me to join a gym so I can play squash with them. All the run-stop-run-stop should be of benefit, and maybe I can get with a core workout program or hire a trainer to help me with a few things. The problem with working out alone is that I need a spotter to tell me when I’m not properly doing a exercise or holding the right posture.
Running so far has been going well. I’ve been using the treadmill so I can remember what a pace feels like. Something has changed as now I can run a full three miles at solid pace without resorting to run+walk tactics. Today was a five miler, which I followed with a few miles on the bike.
Euro are valuable
Sep 21st, 2007 by bwann
The leftover Euro I have from my Amsterdam trip has increased in dollar value by 4% since August. Over the past year, the Euro to Dollar exchange rate has increased 10.1%. Pretty nice when you’re just sitting on currency. Sucks when you want to go back.
In other news, I found out the State mailed my CHL to me in July while I was in Amsterdam. Apparently the USPS decided to clean out my mailbox for me without letting me pick up my mail, so my license got discarded. I applied for a lost license replacement, get this: it takes 24-48 hours for the request (filed online) to “show up in the system” and then around 45 days for my replacement to show up. Clearly we’re not quite in the speedy information age yet.
.ca, .nl and BRC photos
Sep 13th, 2007 by bwann
I finally finished scanning film from Canada, Amsterdam and the Burning Man roadtrip. I’m disappointed some 40+ night time pictures at BM didn’t work. Last year I underexposed them all, this year I overexposed them and blew out all the detail. This should teach me to buy a meter or a digital SLR.
pictures – US / Canada border; Vancouver, BC
pictures – Amsterdam, Netherlands work trip
pictures – Burning Man 2007, Black Rock City, Nevada
pictures – Cleanup and the drive home – Renton, WA; Oregon; San Francisco; California
Friends’ photographs:
I cleaned up my playa bike and re-assembled my road bike after it made the trip back from Seattle. Most of my gear is finally clean and stowed. There was an amazing amount of playa in the bath tub after washing everything out.
I think it’d be a good idea take my bike to work so I can go ride around the neighborhood at the office in the evenings for a change of scenery. I started up my workout routine again after taking a three month break for trips. I can barely hold my arms over my head and after a set of 100 squats, it makes for tender steps down my stairs. Rogue’s half-marathon training started last week, so I need to get new shoes and get with the program.
