Dude, what a week. I worked late on Monday to get a presentation ready for a meeting on Tuesday morning. On Tuesday, the meeting went all right but man, the meeting room was cold! The meeting was an hour and a half long which was just that much worse. At the end, I couldn't feel my fingers and toes, and I think I started getting a cold. Just wonderful. The rest of Tuesday was spent drinking hot water and shivering.

On Wednesday I burnt my tongue.

I don't remember what happened on Thursday except for a lot of work. I would say I worked my butt off, but I just checked and it's still there.

On Friday, it was my officemate's last day work, so we had some happy sad festivities. He's a really funny guy and a cool officemate. I'm sad to see him go. He's going to work at a place in Canada that's near Toronto so we decorated his half of the office with a winter theme. So there was fake snow all over the place. We went to the Faultline brewery to say goodbye to the guy. I left before they had dinner. Then, Allen, Dave, Sri, Kelly, and I went to Patxi's for dinner. It's somehow related to the famous Zach's in Berkeley. Same chef or something. It's pretty good, but not quite Zach's. The crust was a bit different, harder. I liked that better. But the tomatoes that Zach piles on to his pizzas are missing. It's more of a chunky marinara sauce on it. Still, the spinach and mushroom pizza brought back memories of Cal. Actually, it brought back presentations by Microsoft and Sun. Not so touching anymore.

So my vaction starts today. And in true vaction spirit, I didn't go to work. But to take this vacation, I had to work really hard to get everything cleaned up. So how am I taking "time off"? It doesn't make any sense. I've already worked the hours that I'm going to take off. Bah, oh well. I'll just enjoy the !work.

Aside from hanging out with Sry, Styph and Dyvy at Coffee Society and replacing vowels with y's, I haven't done anything post-worthy in the past week. Mostly, I've been trying to get a whole bunch of stuff done before I go off on my first vacation in billions of years.

So y did we replace vowels in people's names with y's? Dave brought up something about a Zzyzx road. A quick Google search turns up a whole bunch of sites about this mystical road (or is it a city?), along with some companies named Zzyzx. Interesting....

For those of you who haven't been to my office, here's a picture of my shelf of energy drinks:

Here are some of my favorites:
Spaz Juice! This was a present from Mimi and Steph this weekend. It says, "All the energy you need to annoy everybody else" on the bottom. This could come in handy.

These next few are from co-workers:
Nelly's Pimp Juice. This drink caused some controversy when it came out. I don't see the big deal. I'd never drink the juice of a pimp. Most people shouldn't.

A can of Whoop Ass. This drink gives me some peace of mind at work. If I ever need to, I can always just reach over and open up a can of whoop ass if anyone gives me trouble. That was lame.

While I am a certified wuss, this picture says that no one can accuse me of not having Bawls. There is also a bottle of sugar-free Bawls on the shelf.

This one is slightly more exotic:
It's...Pitu. I'm not sure what it is, but it has a picture of a shrimp on the front so I call it Shrimp Juice. A co-worker gave me that drink. He was saving it for when he sold his stock and retired, but that never happened, so he gave it to me. Here's the best thing about this drink: I don't know any Portugese but I believe the text in the crudely-drawn circle means "40% alcohol by volume". That's 80-proof shrimp juice!

So if anyone's worried that I spend so much time at work, these pictures should put you at ease. Or not.

I woke up at 11:30 this morning. It's been a really long time since I last managed to wake up at that hour. Crazy. So last night, a whole bunch of us went to Allen's workplace to play some poker. Dave, Allen, Sri, Mimi, Steph, Nick, Mars, Jim, and Andrew were all there for this really long game. As usual, I was the second player to lose. I went all in on a straight draw (dumb idea) with ace high (attractive idea). The whole night I didn't have any really good hands. I was dealt a 2 and a 3 off-suit for a statistically impossible number of hands (although I lost a statistically embarassing amount of money on those). I won a few good hands though, which is much better than what I usualy do.

The "buy-in" was some number of push-ups. The first four people out had to do 80 push-ups (or sit-ups, or a combination, or twice as many jumping jacks), the next two had to do less (60 maybe?) and the next two did even less I think, and the last two were the winners.

Early on, Allen, as usual, dominated the chip count. Steph made some sizeable gains with her "I-look-like-I'm-bluffing-but-I-have-a-great-hand-so- you-should-call-my-bluff-you-sucker" strategy. Nick was first to go, and I followed. We played some fooseball for a while on the nearby fooseball table. And when we finished...everyone else was still playing! After Mars had to leave, people started losing. Allen saw his chips slowly leak away while Steph had so many chips she needed three people to manage her chips for her. Jim, who almost lost it all early in the game, came back in the end and him and Steph were declared the winners.

Push-ups are fun.

Yesterday was pretty relaxing. I spent most of the day working on a writeup for installing Linux on my laptop. In the evening I went to a party thing at my uncle's place. Good food. A bunch of us ended up playing hold 'em but we didn't have chips so we used go pieces: black for 5, white for 1. In my last round, just my cousin and me were in. He went all in right after the turn. I had a pair of Aces, which usually looks good unless it's me who's holding them, so I joined him. When the river came, he gets a straight, and I lose everything. Oh well, I had to go home about that time anyway.

No plans for shopping today. There aren't any really good deals that don't involve rebates. Might go to work later today.

Yesterday, I ended up waking up at 5am to start making the sushi for the pot luck. That stuff turned out better than Sunday's batch. The rice because dry and hard by the time Monday night rolled around so I figured I'd do it the morning before. And I used more water to make the rice. I thought the pieces looked kind of deformed but people I talked to said it looked fine. I didn't talk to anyone who at any though. Hmm.... But the plate was empty at the end. The food was pretty good. There was turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and stuff as usual, plus some really cool desserts. People were bringing in food all through lunch so I don't know what was there. I suppose it's kind of interesting that everyone who went through the line got a different menu. The test house we us, Global Testing, also had a Thanksgiing lunch yesterday so a bunch of people from PE went over there afterwards for more food. I was stuffed.

So, even though I was up early yesterday, I'm still tired today. At leest I'm not going to work tomorrow. Seriously.

I did some stuff this weekend. That's more than I can say for most weekends. Let's see...Friday night I figured out how to save data collected by a 'scope in the lab so I stayed for another three hours to make a how-to document. I think I left at 9pm or so. Then Steph, Allen, and I went to Sri's place to play Simpson's clue. Sri's brother was there too which made the game all the more fun. I played as Homer and I tried very hard to get myself to the Kwik-E-Mart and "suggest" that Homer killed Mr. Burns in the Kwik-E-Mart with the poisoned donut. And in the end, I finally did. That felt good.

On Saturday I went to work for a while. In the afternoon I went to the Sacred Heart Community Center to help fill food boxes. I ended up ripping up the empty boxes that the people filling food boxes discard. Destruction is loads of fun. I went back to work and did some more work. It wasn't so bad because I was watching LOTR:TTT while I worked. That was fun. I forgot how awsome the Tree Ents are.

Today's adventure involed making California Rolls for the company Thanksgiving potluck on Tuesday. Today was just a trial to see how much of a disaster Tuesday's batch will be. Man, that was a huge time sink. I started buying all the stuff at about 4pm and I finished everything at 10:30pm. Here's the recipe I used. And I referred to the trusty ol' Food Network website for sushi rice. I ended up making seven rolls, the first of which was a bigger disaster than the rest. They were surprisingly hard to put together. The rice was no problem: just cook it and drip vinegar, sugar, and salt on it. But spreading the rice on the nori is hard because it gets so sticky. It really helps to wet your fingertips before trying to massage the rice. A few more things I found out:

• I used the bamboo thing to start the roll, but I rolled the rest with my hands. But that's no good. Using the bamboo thing to roll the whole roll makes a much prettier Karifornia roll.
• Lemon juice on avocado keeps it from turning brown.
• Putting the bigger pieces of cucumber, crab meat, and avocado at the ends of the roll keeps the stuff from falling out when rolling.
• To cut the roll, it helps to have a sharp knife that's slightly wet.

I suppose the rolls turned out OK. They look kind of funny, but they taste fine. I'm not sure how to mess up the taste since all of it is prepared. I mean, how do you screw up the taste of a cucumber? Bah. Anyway, if the rolls are still OK tomorrow night, I might not make any more and just use the ones I already have.

A couple quick updates on the laptop: first, Slackware 10 is installed now; second, I almost three hours of use on battery before the 15-minute warning came on. I'm pretty impressed.

So Linux is installed now, but the 2.4.26 kernel doesn't seem to work with the fan. The thermal sensor says the chip is running at 65C and the correct ACPI events are generated but I can't seem to turn the fans on. I tried a 2.4.28 kernel but I messed something up so that the keyboard locks up when the login screen appears. Then I tried a 2.6.9 kernel, which works with the fan but a) the touch pad no longer works, b) less doesn't work in a console, and c) the VPN software for work needs a 2.4.x kernel. I'm either going to try hacking up the 2.4.28 kernel to get it to work or see if this new VPN software works with 2.6.x kernels and get the touch pad driver going. Once that's going, I'll add a HOWTO page here.

With the battery "test", I was using my laptop in the lab at work to VNC into my desktop which was ssh'd into a workstation in the lab (that I was sitting next to) which controls the tester I was using. I had the wireless LAN going on the whole time and the screen was on the 3rd brightest setting, and turned on the whole time. Not too shabby.

I heard a woman on the radio telling a story about how her dog went outside on a beautiful winter day (in a snow-able region of the world), and appeared horribly afraid of something. When she tried to calm the dog down, she saw what bumped the dog's scary bone: a snowman. Then she realized that often, "our fears will melt away when the light shines on them". (That was some sort of a paraphrasization of what she said.) Nice, eh?

A famous warrior, Jedi Master Yoda, teaches that "Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering." Diminutive Jedi-wannabe Anakin Skywalker was found to be full of fear. All he had to do was to turn on a light and melt away his fears. So they gave him a lightsaber, and yet he STILL turned to the Dark Side. What is wrong with you Master Anakin?

Please accept my deepest apologies for destroying a wonderful quote. Here's a picture of Senator Amidala from Episode II:

(Chinophobia is the fear of snow. Arrhenphobia is the fear of men. So chino-arrhenphobia should be the fear of snowmen, right?)

It seems like my updates are really geeky in nature. And it doesn't seem like that's going to change any time soon. But before I get to the geeky part of this post I did some non-geeky stuff this weekend. Yup, I helped Vishnu move some stuff to his new apartment in Mountain View. And then I went to work for a while.

Now back to your regularly scheduled geekiness. Today, my new laptop arrived. It's a Sharp MP30 aka Jodie. (Yeah, yeah.) It has a shiny new 90nm Efficeon in it, which is what I was working on all summer long. Here are some of my first impressions of this little beauty.

• It's little.
• It's beautiful.

The machine is about the size of the binder paper that you can buy for very little money and you don't don't know why until you compare it to a regular US Letter-sized paper and realize that it's smaller. I suppose I could have just said it's smaller than letter-sized paper. Considering there's an optical drive in there and a supposedly 4.5 hour battery, I'd say it's pretty impressive. The machine is light too, spec'ed at 2.8lb. However, it's been on a desk the whole time I've had it so I didn't get to enjoy the lightness.

The case is very nicely constructed. The case is all white, kind of like an iBook. There's a mix of metalic panels and plastic panels. Keys are all white also. In fact, it looks a lot like an iBook but a lot smaller.

The screen is 10.4", which, at 1024x768, makes text appear a bit small for my blind old eyes. But the screen is very nice. Text and pictures appear very sharp (ha ha). I watched Pirates of the Caribbean with the DVD drive and it played very smoothly. The picture was very clear and Keira Knightley is more beautiful than ever. Oh, and Orlando Bloom is hot too. The machine also has a neat feature that allows the LCD to flip upside-down. The manual says it's to make it easier to show whats on the screen to someone across the table.

They keyboard is small too. It took some time to get used to it, but VI seems to work pretty well with it. Here's eomthing I don't understand: there are no Caps Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock LEDs. What the heck? Another gripe I have is that the stupid Windows Application key is where I want the Alt key to be (to the right of the space bar) so I keep hitting it. I've never used that button for anything, and now it's in the way. Grrr. Anyway, I could type this whole post on this machine while Pirates of the Caribbean was running, so it can't be that bad.

I was really interested in the performance of this machine. It doesn't seem slow. No real lag in basic operation and DVD playing, which are the two thing I've done with this machine. It has a CPU fan though, which did come on a few times, once even on opening Acrobat Reader. But the fan doesn't come on for very long.

I plan to do a more thorough review of this laptop in the coming weeks, and, of course, install Linux.

Keira Knightley is beautiful.

Devesh sent me this link to some 1337 Jeopardy.

For the past few months, there was a neat grocery store on Stevens Creek and De Anza Blvd called Oakville Markets. They stocked a lot of natural and organic food that you can't find anywhere else at pretty good prices too. I especially liked the bananas at $0.29/pound! I suppose it's similar to Whole Foods or Trader Joes but I haven't been to either one in so long I don't quite remember what they're like.

So everything I have said about Oakville Markets is in past tense. Why? Because they've closed down. It's too bad because I was rather fond of that place. Now I'm not sure where to go buy all that crazy healthy food for the organic eating habits I'm trying to gain. Kind of a sad end to my day today.

This morning I woke up to some great news: Firefox 1.0 has been released! So I promptly downloaded it from Mozilla.org (which was acting really slow, as though a Slashdotting was in progress). The newer releases have included an installer for the Linux verson so installation was a snap. But even without the installer, it was pretty easy to start using it: just untar it to the target directory. Now the default Firefox startup script makes the proper calls to mozilla-xremote-client so I don't need to roll my own startup script every time a new release comes out.

The Firefox 1.0 release candidates and preview releases have all had ctrl-u bound to "View Source" by default. In previous releases, pressing ctrl-u in a text input area (under Linux) would clear the line. This is something I've gotten quite used to and to see the HTML source pop up when I tried to delete my latest typo-filled URL, well, frustrates me. So a quick Google search turns up this page. You can bind your keys as though you were typing in emacs. Here's the line I used in my firefox/res/builtin/platformHTMLBindings.xml file:

<handler event="keypress" key="u" modifiers="control" command="cmd_deleteToBeginningOfLine"/>
Stick that in the inputFields section, restart Firefox and voila! Ctrl-U deletes the line!

Now if only there was some way to not store all the URLs in my URL bar. It's not that I have a problem with people seeing all of them porn sites I visit. (Having them stored in my URL bar is a great timesaver, really.) I have a problem with being constantly reminded of all the wrong URLs I typed in. Yes, yes, I can set my history to 0 but since Firefox 0.9, that only seems to clear the URL sidebar when I restart Firefox. Restart Firefox? Sounds very Windows-ish to me...

Oh, and Sri just sent me this:

\o/ ^o^ o= /o\
YMCA with emoticons.

I spent most of yesterday working on running Linux on my TabletPC. I managed to get the wireless hardware to work but the connection to my fileserver via nfs was very slow. To make matters worse, the via-rhine ethernet driver for the wired network connection has some known problems with the kernel I used. I ended up dumping a compressed image of the restore partition to my fileserver using the wireless connection. It was actually pretty fast. Maybe only reading from an nfs mount is slow? I'm not sure.

At night, Steph, Sri, and I went to Pizza Chicago and ate a Billy Goat. No, Sri didn't start eating meat all of the sudden. The Billy Goat is a new pizza that had spinach, tomatoes, mushrooms and goat cheese. You want the goat cheese? Steph can't handle the goat cheese. So we got it with regular mozzarella. It was a Billy Goat without the Goat, which makes it a Billy. We ate Billy.

After the long period of deciding what to do, we picked up Allen and went to Blue Rock Shoot. Word of advice: never put Steph and Sri in the back seat together. It's like driving with 4-year-olds. If I had been a soccer mom I would have turned around and hit them while calling someone on my cell phone and putting on makeup. But I'm not a soccer mom so I didn't put on makeup.

Allrighty then. Here's the new site. The big difference: the background is brown. Yay. It's still pretty annoying right now because I don't have my blog program finished yet so I need to log in and edit everything with vi. At least I can still do that. I'd much rather write stuff with vi than any other text editor because I can keep my hands on the letter keys of the keyboard most of the time. If I type with any other editor or in a TEXTAREA box in a web browser, I'll either hit ESC and lose whatever it was I typed or I'll end up with something like jjjjjjkkkkkbbbbbdw:w:w:q somwhere in the text. That becomes annoying.

That's my rant for now. In the mean time, I'll be working on putting the rest of this silly website together.