Now you have a …

Check out (and come pick up) my free stuff.

Nevermind… 1 hour and it’s all gone.

My site needed a bath so I gave it one. More specifically, it needed an upgrade. This was brought on by a bunch of comment spam that Sarah got on her site last week. We’ve been using an old version of Spam Karma and for some reason it hiccupped or something and just stopped blocking spam. This resulted in about 5000 spam comments in a few days. If you recently commented on Sarah’s site and your comment is gone now, then I’m sorry, I might have flagged a few valid comments when deleting the rest.
Anyway, in order to upgrade Spam Karma, I needed to upgrade Wordpress, which I hadn’t done since I installed it a very long time ago. I had version 1.2 and the current version is 2.0.3. I had to upgrade to 1.5 before I could upgrade to 2.0.3. I avoided upgrading for so long primarily because I had made so many modifications to the core files when making my layout that it would have been a huge pain to try and migrate it all. Luckily Wordpress has these nifty themes and I was able to find a new theme that is almost as ugly as my original. Most likely I will use a different one when I find one, but right now I really don’t care. The main purpose of my upgrade was to get familiar with the process so I could upgrade Sarah’s. So her site is next. She just needs to find and pick a theme.

We got our kitties a cat tree / kitten castle, whatever you want to call it. After it was delivered, the cats slowly crept out of the bedroom to investigate. As soon as they came around the corner and saw the castle out of the corner of their eye, the got scared and ran away. Yes, I know. I’m ashamed of our cats. Anyway they eventually figured out that it was not going to move or attack them or anything and started climbing and playing. It’s fun to watch.

Note: If you have cats as timid as ours and scared of everything (when my cellphone rings, Boomer runs and hides under the bed), then it is not a good idea to pick one up and try to introduce him to a kitten castle.
Cats like to make biscuits. When they’re on the couch and happy, and they start kneading the cushion, this is called a happy couch biscuit. When they come and make biscuits on your leg, this is a love biscuit. When you pick them up and hold them like a baby and scratch their stomach, they then make happy air biscuits (same motion, just in the air). However, there is another form of biscuit they can make. Like for example when you try to forcibly introduce Boomer to a new kitten castle, he likes to make what I call escape biscuits. These are different because they are usually made with the back paws and are not happy or fun or love. When Boomer saw that I was taking him closer to the new and scary castle, he made an escape biscuit on the palm of my hand. It hurt really bad. And it made some of those horrible skin cutting noises as well. If you’ve ever been deeply lacerated by a cat’s claws before, then you know the sound I’m talking about. It’s like little pops as it rips through you’re flesh.

We got here just fine and the plane ride wasnt too bad. My punctuation wont be that good because i cant find the apostrophe key on this keyboard. I probably wont update too much while im here but i will do my best to update when i get back.

For the billions of you who have been trying to leave comments and read archives, I have fixed the problem that was preventing you from doing so. A few weeks back, Chris brought to my attention that people were hot linking my images. We got it fixed but that messed up my .htaccess file, causing the permalink function of Wordpress to break. Anyway, all is well now.

I haven’t updated in a while because I’ve been sort of busy. Not with anything too terribly important but still. Basically since my computer is running smooth and nothing has died yet, I spend most of my free computer time catching up on almost a year worth of lost DesertCombat time. Plus Sarah does a really good job of talking about what’s going on, like our road trip we took last weekend.
But a few things worth mentioning: I got my passport yesterday. If I haven’t mentioned it before, Sarah and I are going to try to go to Japan in the fall. Also, Sarah’s brother Daniel is coming to visit this weekend. And finally, if you haven’t seen it already, go to Sarah’s site and check out her Weather Channel video. It’s awesome.

The little skull fan cover was supposed to be an alien face. Makes sense since it would go with the theme. But I guess the company that made my case thought skulls were cooler. “My computer is so cool it’s dead!”

I also added a lot of other pictures here.
I thought of making a big huge post with pictures and stuff but decided to just add the gallery and then comment on the individual pictures so check it out.
Also, some of the pictures might look weird because I didn’t use a flash. I was trying to capture the look with the glow since the flash always drowns that out.

Battlestar Galactica starts tomorrow. They’re playing episode 1 at 8:00 and episode 2 at 9:00 on the SciFi channel.

Watch it.

If you happen to be one of the lucky few that has a Nielsens box, then be sure to watch both episodes really hard.

Everybody was born in December. Go wish my mommy a Happy Birthday.

I have a new phone number now. I sent out an e-mail with my new number to most of you. If you didn’t get it then send me an e-mail and I’ll give it to you. If you don’t know my current e-mail address, then write me here:

newnumber.yeehaw.kodama@antichef.com

In order to prevent getting spammed to death from posting my real address on the web, I’m using this one. It will self-destruct after 20 e-mails are received, so don’t write this one down as my regular address.

Happy Turkey Day

I just paid off my Discover Card and damn did it feel good. They’ve had me bent over for years. I’m going to call them tomorrow (when my payment actually posts) and ask them if they can lower my interest rate. More likely than not, they will say that they can’t, just like they’ve said the other times I’ve asked them. If for some reason they say that they will lower it, I will say, “I need a lower rate than that.” This will continue until they say to me, “I’m sorry sir; I cannot give you a lower interest rate than that.” At this point I will say, “Then close my account please.” And yes, I’m going to ask them for a lower rate just to be a dick. I have no intention of keeping that card.

If all this were a C++ program, it would look something like this:

account.payOff();
string answer = "yes";
while (answer == "yes")
{
   answer = askQuestion("Can I have a lower rate?");
}
account.close();
creditCard.chopUp();
cout << "pwn3d!" << endl;


Sorry about the code but I couldn’t help it. All I could think of while writing that first paragraph was a while loop. Deal.

Sorry there hasn’t been a post in a while, I’ve been busy. I’ve spent most of my free time this past week redoing Aasma’s site (skurt.com). If you go there to look at it and you think that nothing has changed, then good. That was the point. I was just upgrading her blogging software to a newer version. The problem was that in order to upgrade her software and make use of the new features, a lot of changes had to be made to her pages. I figured it would just be easier to rewrite them all rather than trying to make all the little changes all over the place. The purpose was to take advantage of a feature that forces commenters to register and wait to be approved before their first comment shows up on the site. After they are approved, they can comment normally without any further approvals. This prevents spammers and annoying asshats from leaving comments. This is a really cool feature and I wish WordPress would hurry up and implement it. But oh well.
My mom has put a new face on her site too. Check it out.
All of this work with sites lately has made me like web design a little bit more. I started thinking about maybe looking into it more and then I realized I shouldn’t be designing sites. If I were to design a site for somebody, then they would end up with an ugly piece of crap like my site (I know it’s not pretty but I still like the way mine looks). So then I thought to myself, I’m only good at implementing a design, not actually making a design. Fine by me… if I wanted to be creative I would have gotten a degree in creation… or something.

For those who don’t already know, my mom has set up a blog of her own. It is Elegant Nuts!!! What does Elegant Nuts mean? No clue. Ask her. I guess obscure domain names run in the family. But pausebreak is just cool. So stop by and leave her a message. She hasn’t updated in a few days so be sure and bug her about that. Granted the most recent post says she’s sick but I talked to her that that night and she was fine, so don’t fall for it.

I finished my 4 month “training program” on Friday. Starting tomorrow I will start as a regular employee. On Friday, we had a celebratory disaster of a field trip to downtown San Francisco to try and go to Alcatraz. Aside from “let’s leave now and all meet up at location x,” there was zero planning involved. As one might expect, a zero planned event usually ends up as a zero percent successful event. This was very much the case. Luckily, it didn’t last forever.
In other news, I started using one of those “let us use your idle CPU” programs. Like SETI@home, this program runs on your computer when you’re not using it, basically acting like a screen saver. The programs are great for computers that are always on and always connected, like mine.
Anyway, this particular program, the GRID.ORG Cancer Research Project, is for finding drug molecules that will help fight cancer. Though I don’t really understand (or care) what this picture means, here is a screen shot of the program.

I was always hesitant about using these kinds of programs, mainly just SETI@home, because while they’re running, they’re using 100% of your processor. If you come up and starting using your computer, the program stops running and gives you the use of your processor, like a screen saver would. The problem is, when it is using your computer, it’s using 100%. Granted, modern chips are designed to handle extreme heat and there are fans and so on to keep them cool. However, I’ve always been a little worried that this nonstop red-lining of my CPU can’t do that much for the lifespan of the chip. I’ve never had a computer long enough for the actual chip to go bad; it’s always been some other component or a need for a faster system, so it’s possible that I will upgrade my machine long before the chip will have actually burned up. I guess this will be a test run. If my chip dies before I decide to get a new computer then I seriously doubt I will use another distributed computing program.

Here’s an update just so I can say I did it.

Today was cool. I got to feel the wrath of plate tectonics. There was an earthquake in central California this morning. For those interested (probably just Mike), the U.S. Geological Survey link is here. That site is really cool. All that info is updated automatically. As soon as the quake was over I went to that site and the information was already there. The only difference was that before it said “This information has not been reviewed by a seismologist.” The gist is: Magnitude 6.0, about 150 miles southeast of Menlo Park.
So there I was being a good little code prophet when all of the sudden I start feeling dizzy and a little queasy. Then from the other cubes I hear people saying, “Do you feel that? I think we’re having an earthquake.” Needless to say by the time the vibrations reached Menlo Park, they weren’t any where near 6.0. I never felt any motion or saw anything move. Essentially I felt the effects of motion without actually noticing that I was moving, which is probably why I just felt dizzy and queasy. Sarah, who felt in it San Francisco, described it as “feeling wavy.” It reminds of one of the many great Ralph Wiggum quotes from The Simpsons: “Principal Skinner, I got car sick in your office.”

This has been a very food oriented past few days.

At the beginning of September, my first round project as a n00b was over and I started my second round. The new group I’m in now just recently had a major release so on Friday they celebrated by taking the whole team out for Indian food buffet. Lucky for me, since I love that stuff. I also like enjoying the benefits of all that hard work that I had nothing to do with.
On Saturday I finally got to eat some real chile con queso. By real, I mean not Chili’s. There is this chain called On the Border and there was one pf them in Milpitas, close to the insanity mall that we go to sometimes. And now today, Sarah and I went to this place called Mountain Mike’s Pizza for some pizza buffet. It was no Mr. Gatti’s but it was still pretty good.
Another cool thing about this weekend is that it was pretty cold the whole time. I had to go and buy pajamas. Yay! Jammy-jams.
After watching the US Open last week (or whenever it was) Sarah and I got in the mood to play some tennis. So we went and did that last week and we’ll probably start doing it a lot more. I really suck at tennis. And even though Sarah pwn3d me at it, at least I never knocked any of the tennis balls out of the court.