Today is the day that we find out whether or not we still have a job. I was up at 6am...couldn't sleep. I have no idea what's going to happen. If I lose my job, I'll get a little vacation and maybe a new job. If I don't lose my job...well, I don't know if that's a good thing. I've spent the past three months (actually, more like three years) as someone's bitch. That someone changes daily, which does add a bit of flavor to my otherwise bland existance, but I don't know how much of that I'd like to keep doing. I guess I'll just see how the deals shape up today, and what my role will be.

If I do decide to leave on my own, it's going to be sad. This place is a hard place to leave mostly because all the people there are really cool. It's the first place I've worked at where a lot of my co-workers are about my age or at least act like it. I'm generally pretty anti-social so the fact that I could get along well with the people shows how kind and accepting these guys are. Another reason it's a hard place to leave is because, in my 2.5 years there, we've come so close to succeeding so many times. Every time things look like they're going downhill, something good happens and then everything doesn't look so bad...until the sky starts falling again. Fracking hockey sticks.

I actually woke up early because I wanted to go on a bike ride to clear my mind. But it seems way too frigging cold outside. I should get some cold-weather gear to bike in. The last ride I did was last Saturday with Vishnu and Curtis. We went up to Fremont Older from the Prospect side and came down on Coyote Ridge. That was pretty cool. Curtis may not think so because I was riding in front of him and spraying rocks into his face. And slowing down right before I'm going to die. We stopped by a garage sale near Monta Vista on the way back. They had this nice picture frame that said "Boyfriend" and "Girlfriend" on it. Vishnu wanted to buy it. I'm not sure why he didn't. They also had a cage. We also biked around the Cypress Hotel where we saw the last patch of grass in Cupertino and joined in an Easter egg hunt. Actually, it was just us. There were unattended eggs all over the place and they looked so tempting. It's like stealing candy from a child while the child isn't looking. And afterwards, we ate enough pizza to kill a man. I'd post picture of our ride but I just realized that my photo album program makes some really crappy pictures.

An apology: Pepsi Girl, I'm sorry, I drank Coke yesterday. It's all they had at the restaurant.

Argh. I think I'll head off to work now. I have a feeling that it's not going to be as fun at work as it normally is.

Work is great. Well, not really, but I've been doing a lot of "work" at work, if you "know" what "I" mean.

On Friday, we continued our long-standing tradition of working hard by watching Ocean's Eleven. Then I watched one of my co-workers go out to her car. You're thinking, "That's really exciting!" (Or if you're Sri, which you're not because he'll never read this, you're thinking, "Is she cute?") Well, what happened was that another co-worker took the hub caps off of her car and put shiny, plastic, fake spinner rims on her Mitsubish Gallant. She didn't notice until Friday, and by then, one of them had already fallen off. She tried calling me to yell at me, but I was on the phone. Phew. But I might as well not have been on the phone because I was laughing out loud rolling on the floor laughing my ass off. Apparently, two others fell off this weekend so there's only one left. That's too funny.

Last night, I stayed at work until about 2am doing "work". Originally we were going to just fill a guy's office (or at least make it look like it was completely full) with empty Crystal Geezer water bottles so we've been collecting bottles since last November or so. But after a critical re-evaluation of our strategy, the conclusion was that we didn't have enough resources to allocate to that project. These offices are pretty big. So we decided to move everything from his office into a cubicle, and move the guy in the cubicle into this office. Then we'd fill up the cubicle with bottles, or whatever. We ended up moving everything and dumping all the bottles we collected in the cubicle. Here's a shot of the cubicle as seen from the inside.


(Click it! It'll get bigger!)
Friday night, I went to Vishnu's place with to watch the new episodes of The Simpsons that I missed but Allen taped. Brilliant! There, we learned of that Pepsi girl. You know, that one in that Pepsi commercial. Bah, this one. Apparently, she is going to be in an issue of Maxim coming up. Here's a video of the most magical 13.8 seconds to ever flicker across a cathode ray tube. That's hot. Anyway, I'm a Pepsi drinker now. I've had about six diet Pepsi's since yesterday. Hey, if the commercial is good, I should support the product.

Uh, I'd write more, but I'm bloody tired and besides, I'm watching a Bollywood classic. Plus the DNS server for Komkast seems to be down. Bah.

This is it. One week from today is the absolute, final answer, no turning back, drop dead, oatmeal-rasin cookie last day the E-staff here at work (that's executive staff, not ecstacy staff because if they're on something, it's probably not E) has to announce what's going to happen to the company. I've heard it's going to turn out good for the company, but I'm not holding my breath. (Mostly because I might die doing that.)

So what's happened since my last post 10 years ago? Last Friday I fell asleep really early. I'm not sure what happened but the pink bunnies were getting annoying and the only way to shut them up was to render myself temporarily comatose.

On Saturday and Sunday, I spent quite a bit of time at work. It brought back a lot of fond memories. Plus I had The Super Milk Chan Show: Vol 2: Milk Shake with me. That was great. Best enjoyed while high. For those of you too intelligent to know about Milk Chan, she's a little kid with a vulcabulary (vulgar + vocabulary = vulcabulary) that would make a pirate jealous (argh!) who gets asked by the president of everything on special missions. That would make her a super-hero, but aside from yelling, "You dumbass!" every five seconds, she has no super powers. Like I said, best enjoyed while high.

Hi.

On Saturday night, I left work and went to the Elephant Bar to meet up with Sri, Steph, Allen, Dave and...Mimi! Awsome. Mimi was in town for the weekend so we got ourselves some drinks, watched ice melt and discussed Allen's hair. In fact, we discussed Allen's hair so much that we ended up going to his garage to watch him get a hair cut from Mimi's Mobile Hair Salon. If it had been Mimi's Hair Saloon, that would have been badass also. Those of us not trimming or getting trimmed played Scrabble, where Master Sri overwhelmingly beat us all from the start when he drops FAMINES on the board. w00t? I ended up with the Q at the end of the game again. I would post pictures of Allen's haircut, but I don't have that silly cable to hook up my camera to a computer. Bah.

Yesterday I got a new 160GB hard drive for my Myth TV but my stupid IDE controller thinks it's a 136GB. Bah.

Something else interesting happened this week but I can't remember what it was.

("tomato linux" was a search term that points to this site. "sushi new customer bad fish japanese" is also a search term that points here. There are others...)

Wednesday was a bad day. Actually, just a bad morning, but a bad morning usually becomes a bad day. I knew it was a bad morning because I made an omelet for breakfast. It wasn't just any ordinary omelet: this one had mushrooms in it. But the mushrooms aren't what made it special. The real treat was that, while flipping it, half of the congealed egg product ended up on the floor. It's what we call une Omelette de la Terre. Yummy.

Then, as I left for work, I realized that my hands were painfully dry. So I did what any manly man would do: buy some lotion. The lotion section at Target contains roughly 302 more bottles of lotion than was necessary. Do you really need to rub vitamin E-infused cocoa butter with wild cherry-scented aloe vera all over your hands? Another thing: all of the non-fruity flavors (yes, flavors, I tasted them all) came in 200 litre bottles. Dude, if I wanted to moisturize my elephant's skin, I'd go to PetCo, not Target. So I settled on a bottle of fragrance-free lotion for sensitive skin. My hands now feel silky smooth and smell like fragrance-free hand lotion.

To end my bad day, I met up with Cheng and Allen for lunch. Well, I was supposed to, but I didn't get the e-mail so I went to Quizno's. Right when I found parking at Rivermark, Allen called and said they were at KFC. Bah. It turns out, they would have gone to the Quizno's on First St. so I would have been wrong anyway.

Actually, it wasn't such a bad day.

Yesterday I got a new case for my MythTV from Weird Stuff. It had a working PII-400 in there but I took it out and put in my system. The case was a rack mount case from an F5 3DNS traffic management controller. (That's network traffic, not drug traffic.) I got it for a pretty good price too because they didn't have a price tag on it so they sold it to me as a bare-bones system. Inside, all the components and wires are assembled so carefully. Everything was tied down. Even the IDE cables had some glue stuff all over the connectors so they were a pain to pull out. I almost felt bad for taking it apart. Almost. Well, my MythTV system now has a permanent home. But I can't get my DVD drive to work. It doesn't seem to read DVDs very well. I can play VCDs nicely, but DVDs just won't play. Not even legal ones. Not that I have any illegal copies of any DVDs. I don't.

Today, we had a company lunch with some delicious Greek food. Man that was good. Last time we had a company lunch, there wasn't enough food. This time, there's more food and half of the company is sick, so there was plenty of food. Probably some germs too. Mmm, germs.

Do you know what makes me mad? The fact that I can't stay angry enough to type a whole angry post. Grrr. But I'll try anyway. Here goes...

Doh. Hang on, 24 is on.

Ah, commercial break. Where were we? Oh yeah. Every time something angers me, I'll start writing about it and then, while trying to formulate a semi-coherent thought that still conveys the correct amount of anger, I run out of anger. Kind of like now. Bah.

Yesterday, it was Dave's birthday so we went to Elephant Bar for some festivities. It's been a while since so many of us got together. It was a lot of fun. Like old times. It's hard to believe we've all been out of college for two and a half years now. It seems like everyone has gone through some big changes in life in the past few years. I'd say we're all acting grown up now, but I can't because some of us (ahem) still act like 4-year-olds and are proud of it. Yay for immaturity! Dave also said that now that he's 25 (and therefore "old") he can drink girly drinks. Does that mean that, since I'm also "old", I can wear that girly dress I've always wanted to wear? Hmm, I probably shouldn't--it makes my butt look big.

I'm not working on my MythTV as much anymore. For most of last week, I've been staying up really late working on this contraption. It pretty much all works now. I managed to hook up my 120GB external drive to it and I can record a bunch of shows now. There are two big problems with the setup: the capture card outputs really low audio levels and the remote control doesn't work under Linux yet. So if these problems can be licked, I think it'll be all done. Oh, and I want to use it for a DVD player too, so that needs some more work. This might be the perfect time for me to try hacking up drivers. My first attempt was pretty disasterous. The remote control receiver was recognized, but then the keyboard wouldn't work. Oh well. Hmm, and I need to do something about the boot time and the shutdown sequence. Dumping the user to a console isn't cool.

I'm thinking of building a new machine just for this project. I currently have an ATX motherboard and the cases that I'd like to put the machine into are micro-ATX cases so I'm going to need a new motherboard. But if I do that, I need to get a whole new system because none of my components can be reused. The way I've priced it, I should be able to make a new system with an 80GB drive that costs $260 not including tax and shipping. An 80-hour Tivo costs $200 after a $100 rebate. So $260 is not a bad price. Not to mention I won't need to pay for service. Of course, I could just find a case that will fit my existing hardware. That'll cost way less. Hmm, why didn't I think of that earlier? Oh yeah, maybe it's because all of my systems are really old. The fastest desktop at home is my Duron 900. There's also a Duron 750 or something, a K6-2 450, and probably some Pentium-class or PII-class machines. Not much to work with.

Geez, why is it so much easier to talk about hardware than it is to talk about being angry?

When will this year stop sucking? Yesterday, I learned that one of my co-workers died in a car accident in Santa Cruz. He was one of those really bright guys who was also cool to be around. He's only 35 too. Why did it have to be him? Sigh. Well, buckle up and slow down out there, kids.

In the past few days, I've been working on a MythTV. It's an open Linux-based PVR package that runs on Linux with MySQL and qt. I took my existing Duron 900 machine (Duron 900, ECS KT133 mobo, 256MB PC100 RAM, GeForce2 MX with 64MB and TV-OUT, C-Media sound card) and dropped in a $30 Sabrent TV capture card (Philips SAA7130 chip) and a $15 4.1GB hard drive. It's running a base Slackware 10.1 system with a custom 2.6.11 kernel and MythTV 0.17, which I think is the latest stable release. Last night, I finally got most things to work. The capture card seems to be running fine and, surprisingly, the Duron 900 is holding up pretty well. I'm doing live TV recording/playback at 480x480 and with the RTJPEG encoder at quality level 70 (the default), I don't get too many dropped frames. Most of the choppiness is when I first run the "Watch TV" option. I think I can record (but not watch) at 640x480 with the MPEG4 encoder at the default bitrate but I've only done one recording at that resolution, everything else was at 480x480. A 30-minute segment at 480x480 with MPEG4 comes out to about 300MB. I don't think that had commercials removed so it's an actual 30 minutes of TV. I'm going to try playing with that some more, and also try reducing the startup time (a bit more than a minute). Maybe I'll even post a little writeup too.

Here's the best solution I can come up with for printing a string of hex digits in binary format (hex is a char *):

1:  while (*hex) {
2:    char ascii = *hex;
3:    ascii = ((ascii & 0x40) >> 6) * 9 + ascii;
4:    printf("%d%d%d%d", (ascii & 8) >> 3, (ascii & 4) >> 2,
5:                       (ascii & 2) >> 1,  ascii & 1 );
6:  }
7:  printf("\n");

This assumes that the input doesn't match !/[0-9a-fA-F]/. With line 3, the thing to note is that ASCII 0 through 9 have a hex code of 0x30 to 0x39. The lower four bits are the decimal value of the number. ASCII A through F is 0x41 through 0x46 and a through f is 0x61 through 0x66. So for the alphabet characters, the sixth bit is a 1 and the lower four bits are 9 less than the decimal value of the number. I don't like the printf statement, but I'm not sure how to make it cooler. Perl has a really nice way of this with the pack and unpack functions (with $hex as a string of hex digits):

1:  print unpack("B*",pack("H*",$hex)),"\n";

Going from binary to hex in Perl just involves switching the "B*" and the "H*". All this time, I've been writing complicated functions to accomplish what this one line can do. Bah.

Oh, and I decided to burn my middle finger yesterday. It has made typing difficult. This year really needs to stop hatin'.

I don't know why I find that rally cry so amusing. Well, Martha Stewart was released from federal bake-me-a-pie prison on Friday. Is it a coincidence that the weather has been so great since then? This evening, when I left work, the air outside even smelled like summer. This is conclusive proof that Martha Stewart is the bringer of summer.

Why is it that everyone hates her so much? I don't know that much about her but from what I hear, most of the criticism stems from the fact that she's better at cooking than is humanly possible. So she's an alien and eveyrone else is jealous of her. Or hungry. That doesn't seem like enough hate juice to make enough homemade haterade for the annual Flea Circus Olympics (if there was such a thing, which there should be if there isn't). I think Martha Stewart manages to show eveyrone how much they suck at household tasks and people don't like to know that they suck. I really can't hate Martha for anything. In the paraphrased words of the famous rapper Michael Bolton, "Why should she change? You're the one that sucks." And as they say on the street, "Don't hate the player, hate the...wow, those are some lovely doilies. Did you make them yourself?"

Actually, I'm not that big of a Martha Stewart fan. I just like to say, "Free Martha!" every now and then. But now that she's out, I need to find something new to say.

And 24 is all about a search for a dude named Habib. Uh, w00t!

Here's a geeky question: using C, what's the coolest way to take a character array of hex digits (0-9, a-f or A-F) and print out the corresponding number in binary? I've been thinking about it all day but everything I've come up with seems ugly.

Yesterday I went up to Hunter's Point for the first time in about 6 months. Vishnu showed up at my place (10 minutes late because he had to finish a tear-jerker movie whose name he can't remmeber -- totally understandable) and we headed off. Right before we left, I drank an energy drink I had sitting on my desk. Wired, I think it was called. You know, drinking that stuff BEFORE going on a ride really helps! I used to drink them after rides so that I didn't pass out during the day. I passed out anyway.

It was raining pretty hard on Friday so I was expecting to eat mud but the trails weren't that muddy. The path along the railroad tracks, on the other hand, featured pools of muddy water and no visible way around them. It felt like we were Frodo and Sam, traveling through the swamp with the dead people in it while listening to Gollum tell us, "Come come silly bikerses, we knows the way!" But the only voices I could here were the ones in my head telling me to run barefoot through the mud. (I managed to resist that urge.)

The ride up Prospect wasn't that bad. Neither was the ride up to Hunter's point. It was still a relief to get to the top. And guess who we saw up there? Ben Ho, his brother, and his sister-in-law. Haven't seen that guy since gradution. That's high school graduation. It turns out he knows Vishnu, but Vishnu didn't remember him. I say people know Vishnu because he had quite a reputation (good or bad, I don't know) and he's named after a deity. That has to count for something.

Coming down from Hunter's Point was exciting as usual. Actually, I found it more exiting this time because there were all sorts of people on the trail which made me feel like I was a bowling ball and the people were the type of bowling pins that jump out of the way when the ball is about to hit them. Maybe those only exist in my head. When we got to the bottom of Prospect, Phill was there. What the heck? Really? Yup, him and his woman were there. So we went to Coffee Society and quoted Dane Cook for a while. I was in my kitchen washing a dish.

Afterwards, Phill took us home and...I basically passed out. Should have had that post-ride energy drink.

Ahh, March.

Yesterday my office was getting too cold so I took over a vacant office in the building. I think that's where all the warm air is going. Bah. Well it was much nicer. But this office didn't have a window. It appears I've been spoiled with my big window office. I didn't realize that it was raining until I left. If I sat in the middle of a building, I'd probably look out a window more often just to be in the know. Or maybe I'd live in ignorant bliss. That sounds more fun.

Today, I brought a jacket -- one of the few things on the short list of smart things I've done.