Author: cdwan

I’m finally getting around to installing the pre-release of Tiger (the new OS X), because I really want to have it in place before the general release on Friday. This is simply pride, but hey, it’s making me happy. Because I’m a big believer in clean OS installs (why not give it every chance it can possibly have to succeed, instead of forcing it to live on 1.5 years of cruft from my previous install), I’m nuking my laptop drive, reformatting, repartitioning and starting fresh. This gives me a chance to partition it out so I can dual boot with GenToo Linux, which will be sweet. I want to be the geek with KDE up on my Apple Powerbook.

Before doing this, I’m making a complete image of my hard disk as it stands now to a Firewire drive. It’s been going an hour so far, and it’s maybe a third done. 40,000 MB / (60 * 60 * 3) seconds = 4MB / sec. That sucks. That really, really sucks. I’m starting to understand why my laptop performance has been so crappy lately, if 4MB / sec is all it can muster off the disk. Keep in mind that this is streaming off a disk which is *not* the boot partition. Grrrrr.

Starting to relax a little bit about my impending trip to Asia. I asked if we would have access to the internet from the room where I’m giving the training. They said “yes!” (I wrote down “yes”). Sadly, they continued “our new corporate headquarters in Beijing is being finished this week, and we move in next week. Internet will be live by the time you get here (the Monday after that). I crossed out “yes” and wrote “no.” My contacts also seem to be the kings of expanding project scope. We’ve already gone through a couple iterations of “here’s the deal,” “okay,” “okay?” “okay,” “just one more little thing you could do for us…”. The next attempted expansion of duties will be shot in the head, even if it’s a reasonable request. They’ve had their couple of freebies, now they need to pay more.

Moved the melons to the soil out back beside the garden. They seem happier there, already, but maybe it’s just me that is happy and the melons which are just sitting there. Who knows?

Watched “The House of Flying Daggers” which was another gorgeous film with lots of kung-fu ass kicking. It was sweet.

Ad from LiveVault.

This reminds me of my first technical job.

Sparge: The process of filtering hot water through crushed, malted grain to make wort. My mind is the crushed, malted grain. My will to document is the hot water. This journal is the wort. Add yeast and it’ll be beer. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Tried out my electric lawnmower today. It’s awesome. I can tell that it doesn’t have the raw power of an internal combustion engine, and I’m already a little tired of dragging the extension cord around, but it’s (a) light (b) quick to turn on (c) quick to turn off (d) quiet. All in all, an excellent replacement for either the push-reel or the busted IC mower.

Other than that, I spent the weekend wrapping my head around Applescript, Objective C, and XCode (Apple’s development environment). Until it goes public, let’s just say that my company has a really stunning opportunity if we can turn out a nicely packaged demo by Wednesday.

Impressions: Applescript is quite powerful, but it’s chatty, and has some fundamental weaknesses involving case sensitivity and escaping keywords. Objective C reminds me of Lisp. XCode is pretty sweet. It makes the difficult trivial, but the trivial is sometimes really difficult.

Finally got another note back about “dwan.net”:

Their note

Allow me to sing the praises of mychinavisa.com.

I have, in my hot little hands, my very own passport with a Chinese visa in it. It cost me $200 for the same-day-rush service. I could have gotten it $50 cheaper if I was willing to wait a week. These people are located in Houston, near the Chinese consulate there. Apparently they have a special relationship with the consulate which permits them to get visas for residents outside the “consular district.” I was nervous about shipping the thing off to them, but in the end it worked out.

Given the amount of dithering and stress that I put into the process of getting the visa, the final solution was remarkably simple:

* Print out application materials from mychinavisa.com; fill them out. Attach a passport photo
* Provide a letter of invitation from the company in China with whom I’m doing business
* Provide a credit card number.
* Fedex it all to Texas (Wed.)
* Receive it back, completed, today (Fri).

This rocks. I’m good to go. Got my plane tickets, got my visas.

For those keeping track at home, I got the following immunizations updated for this trip:

* Hep A
* Hep B
* Tetanus
* Polio
* MMR (That’s Measles, Mumps, Rubella)

Three in the left shoulder, two in the right.

I’ve started working at my local Starbucks in the mornings, because I get distracted too easily at home.

Starbucks plays music, and people talk. For that reason, I bring my headphones and play my own music. This morning I discovered a problem: My very favorite classical ensembles are European (Academy of St. Martin in the Fields is today’s choice). They tune to an ‘A’ that’s just a hair flat of the American standard (440Hz rather than 444, I think, I could have it backwards too). I don’t usually even notice, not being blessed with perfect pitch. However, when the starbucks music and my headphone music are in related keys, the notes clash. It only happens every now and then, but it’s all, like, “ungh” and stuff.

Like.

I’m pondering the purchase of an electric lawn mower. Does anyone have any experience with such things? I’ve read the internet, but I wish that I had just one person I know who had actually touched one and could say “yeah, it rocked” or “no, it sucked.”

I’m looking specifically at the Black and Decker Electric Lawn Hog

“Under the watchful eyes of his Swiss developer and Qatari owners, the robot — dubbed Kamel — rode a racing camel for 1.5 miles, reaching speeds of 25 miles per hour in a non-competitive trial run.
…
Spurring the robots’ development has been vehement condemnation from human rights groups of the sport’s regular jockeys. Activists say there are about 40,000 boy jockeys, some as young as 4, who are either bought from their parents or kidnapped from their home countries and taken to the Gulf to ride. The boys live in bleak conditions and are underfed before races to keep their weight down.

In Qatar, ruling sheiks have responded to calls for banning the use of boy jockeys by embracing robots as the best solution.”

Maybe we should have robotic altar boys next.

By popular demand, pictures of the squash. Hidden by a “cut” for decency’s sake:

The pictures