| kitten pictures |
[07 Oct 2008|11:20am] |
I think it's about that time again. These are all iPhone pictures and are of varying quality, but I think the cuteness comes through.
( shameless kitten pictures )
Also, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) debramcp and I hosted tigresa's birthday party this weekend (Happy Birthday tigresa!), which was the first time we've really hosted anything at our place since moving in. We both had a lot of fun, and I think it went pretty well. We'll have to start doing more of that kind of thing...
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| kitten introductions |
[04 Aug 2008|11:45am] |
Friday evening debramcp and I decided to introduce Roughy and Finnegan to each other. It consisted mostly of hissing, growling, hiding under the coffee table, and ugly-looking (though apparently not damaging) fights. After some hours of this, we separated them again for the night. We were worried that this was not going to go well...
Saturday we let them out together for short periods and got more of the same, though the fights were looking less ugly. By the evening, they had progressed to sitting in the same room glaring at each other between tussles, so we decided to leave them together overnight.
Then, on Sunday:
( cuteness )
Of course, they're still spending a lot of time chasing each other around and wrestling, but now it looks like two kittens playing.
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| kittens! |
[29 Jul 2008|09:03am] |
debramcp and I just got kittens! We started looking around the bay area shelters on Friday and brought the first one home on Sunday (the other had to stay overnight to be fixed). They are, of course, incredibly cute. One is a 2.5-month-old brown tabby with Super Kitten Energy™, and the other is a 5-month-old orange tabby who's much more reserved but very sweet. They're both boys. The orange one is Roughy, and we're still working on a name for the little guy.
( pictures )
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| Python |
[18 Jun 2008|02:15am] |
I played around with programming in Python a while ago, but I haven't used it in years. I decided to try it out again for a project I'm working on, and I made a neat discovery -- I helped change the language.
( details )
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| I just saved $1000 |
[11 Jun 2008|02:10am] |
( The wonders of VMware (geek warning) )
Also, I cut down a tree yesterday. It involved standing on my roof with what was basically a chain saw on a stick, which was somewhat exciting. It only took about half an hour to get the tree down to a stump; the cleanup is what took the vast majority of the time (and caused the vast majority of the scratches and scrapes). Amazingly, the entire 20-foot tree fit into just more than one (96-gallon?) yard waste container.
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| debramcp moving in |
[22 Jan 2008|09:30am] |
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This weekend, debramcp is moving in with me (Yay!), which means she's moving. We have enough people to manage the move already, but if anyone is free this Saturday afternoon near Sunnyvale/Mountain View, more help would make the job easier for everyone, and it includes dinner afterwards.
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| Goodbye PayPal |
[11 Jan 2008|06:30pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 sad |
] |
Today was my last day at PayPal -- I've worked there since August 1999, before the site launched. I decided several months ago that I wanted to leave and spend time working on some of my own projects. I told my boss in September, and since then I've worked part-time, wrapping things up.
I'm still glad I'm doing this, but today was hard. Cleaning out my cube, cleaning out personal files from my work machine, turning in my badge. Saying goodbye to people I've already said goodbye to, but having it be for real. I joined PayPal right out of college, and I've been working there now for over 1/4 of my life. It's a lot to let go of.
I'm sure I'll be happy about this soon, but for today I can be sad about it. In a way, it feels good to feel sad about leaving -- it reinforces what PayPal meant to me.
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| building a computer |
[27 Oct 2007|04:30am] |
It's been years since I put together a computer, but TF2 finally convinced me to update my system. I ordered parts last weekend, and they arrived Thursday. For the past two nights, I've been happily staying up way too late getting everything running. Figuring out cable management, installing the cpu fan without cracking the motherboard (those things are scary), setting up RAID 5, diagnosing memory failures, adjusting clock speeds. It should be tedious and frustrating, but man, I've missed this stuff :)
Now I should really sleep, so I can play DDM today before the party. Or maybe I should finish installing all the latest drivers...
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| more apartment stuff |
[17 Oct 2007|03:15pm] |
I took walkthrough videos of my new apartment before, during, and after the remodeling, and I'm finally getting around to posting them.
( videos )
I moved in six weeks ago, and I do intend to have a housewarming party, but it may be a little while yet. I'd like to get mostly unpacked first and have more furniture available to sit on than a single couch.
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| visual distortion |
[04 Oct 2007|05:50pm] |
Last night, as I was reading, I noticed a very odd visual effect. In a jagged, curving shape somewhat below and to the left of my center of vision, there was a rapidly-oscillating distortion. In that area, everything looked stretched out into lines to make the jagged shape, and it was constantly flickering with the underlying colors of what I was seeing. It looked vaguely like this:
( pic and more details )
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| TF2 |
[23 Sep 2007|01:35pm] |
Team Fortress 2 is finally coming out in a few weeks. This is a game that was originally slated for release in 1998, and it's repeatedly made top-10 vaporware lists, but it's in beta now, and people are actually playing it. I spent hundreds of hours on the original Team Fortress from 1997-2001, and I have lots of fond memories from that period. So I'm quite excited about this new release.
Most of you, I imagine, won't be. However, Valve has released some great, funny clips introducing a few of the in-game classes. These clips have been tested and approved by non-gamers for humor content.
( Heavy, Engineer, Soldier )
And while I'm posting youtube clips -- I saw a great video for Coin-Operated Boy at the Buffy sing-along Friday night.
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| new place |
[31 Aug 2007|02:50pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 stressed |
] |
For the past few months, I've been spending disturbingly large amounts of time on remodeling the apartment I bought (part of the yet-to-be-named community on Williams Way in Mountain View). I haven't actually been doing any of the work myself (well, very little of it), but it's amazing how much time the research and design can take. I wouldn't be surprised if I've averaged 10+ hours a week on it for the past three months. It's almost done now, though, and I'll be moving in on Sunday. I went through today and took some pre-move-in pictures:
( a couple pictures )
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| iPhone |
[08 Jul 2007|01:50pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 impressed... mostly |
] |
Last weekend, I had the chance to play with KB's iPhone, and I was impressed. My biggest concern had been the usability of the keyboard, and that actually turned out to be fine. I figured that if after 5 minutes I found it tolerable, long-term it would be no problem at all. So I got an iPhone this weekend. I needed a new phone anyway -- I had just been trying to decide which one.
( the skinny )
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| perl |
[20 Jun 2007|07:10pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
amused |
] |
I've just started playing around with perl. I'm still a bit ambivalent about the language, but the reference book rocks (Programming Perl, by the guy who created perl). I was inspired to comment on it as I ran across this in the index:
camels
bloody, 66
horses vs., 4
pink and blue, 647
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| death by keyboard |
[17 May 2007|01:15pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 accomplished |
] |
I just got a new global high score in Crimsonland Typ'o'Shooter. Not that there's a huge playership or anything, but damn, that was a good game.
Crimsonland is a great top-down shooter (screenshots, download). Typ'o'Shooter is one of the game types it includes -- you type the words over the bad guys' heads to shoot them. It's a really good typing skills challenge. With shotguns and zombies. What's not to like?
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| Fusion to Mars |
[23 Mar 2007|04:00pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
accomplished |
] |
I'm not sure exactly how I got onto the subject, but sometime last week I started thinking about intra-solar-system travel. Sticking to reaction-mass thrusters and not breaking any laws of physics, how fast would we be able to move around if we could improve the efficiency of various systems up to their theoretical limits?
The quick answer: An Earth-Mars trip could be made comfortably in 2-5 days (depending on the relative positions of Earth and Mars at the time). That's faster than current trans-oceanic shipping.
( details )
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| SpaceX launch at 5:05pm Pacific |
[20 Mar 2007|03:17pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
excited |
] |
SpaceX is going to make a launch attempt just under an hour from now. They're a private company that's attempting to get into the satellite launch business, with the plan of dramatically cutting the cost/weight of launches. This is their second launch attempt (the first one failed about a year ago), and, if successful, it will put a test satellite into orbit. They're launching from Omelek Island on a US military base in the Pacific.
If you're interested in this kind of thing, there's a live webcast of the launch available right now. T-50:00 as I write this.
Launch Status
SpaceX home page
SpaceX Wikipedia article
( updates )
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| the fountain |
[12 Dec 2006|12:45am] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
 spent |
] |
I've been meaning to write some new posts for a while now. About my trip to Italy, my magical birthday adventure, all kinds of good stuff. And I will. Honest.
But for now, I just wanted to say that I saw The Fountain, and I liked it. A lot.
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| TF2 |
[20 Jul 2006|10:40pm] |
| [ |
mood |
| |
excited |
] |
This makes me very happy. It's a teaser video for Team Fortress 2, and it's beautiful. Of course, I may be a little biased :)
( some background )
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