Golf and Memorial Day

Yesterday, I got out on a golf course for the first time since Christmas and I realized how much I enjoy golf. It is great to get outside, walk around, hit some good shots, miss some easy shots, and spend time with friends. Tee to green, I was playing really well yesterday, I just had a lot of problems with my short game that stem from not playing for 5 months. I really need to work on my distance control with my putter. Golf is a great social game, much more than things like tennis or poker. I should play more golf, but I'm going to need time to do that.

Happy Memorial Day to all of you. I'm really glad I don't need to go to work today. This is a much appriciated day off, in spite of the fact that all I plan on doing today is my laundry. I may go swimming or something later in the day, but no stressful code reviewing or customer problem debugging today! I do dislike how the Giants are off today. Every baseball team should play on holidays.

Blues Brothers and to RAID or not to RAID?

This is my chance to give my first movie review. After work, I went to the local public library and checked out Blues Brothers, the movie. I had wanted to see this movie for quite some time going back to when I was in Seattle. Phil and I signed up fro Blockbuster's plan where you can check out all the movies you want, 2 at a time per month.

I watched a lot of movies that summer, since it was convenient to just grab a movie after work each night and watch it. I managed to watch some of the greatest motion pictures of all time like "Chinatown", "Pulp Fiction", and "Caddyshack". I wanted to see Blues Brothers that summer, but the local Blockbuster never had it in stock. This event kicked off my quest to see the movie eventually. I noticed it out of the corner of my eye a the Sunnyvale Public Library after a long week at work and it seemed like the perfect time to watch a more laid back film.

I really enjoyed it as Aykroyd and Beluchi were hilarious. There were a bunch of cameos from great musicians and the soundtrack sounded great on my stereo. The plot goes deliciously over the top. It had everything you could want in a film, ridiculous stunts, enjoyable dancing, hilarious jokes, fantastic music, and Carrie Fisher trying to kill people with a wide variety of weapons. It really is a crime that the Redmond Blockbuster didn't have it in stock.

Today, I took advantage of a huge sale at Fry's to purchase a second SATA hard drive for my main desktop. It matches the specs of my first one and my computer would let me run RAID or redundant hard drives (so I could recover in the even one of them crashed). That of course would require rebuilding both drives, something I know I'm not ready to do until I stop traveling this summer. It does present some interesting ideas about what to do with a new surplus of drives. Likely nothing will happen until I get a new PC and I turn my current one into my new Linux server, which is probably not going to happen for another 2 years as I tend to be a bit slow on new hardware adoption and the fact that I've upgraded my current PC to be acceptable in performance for what I do now. For now, the decision is "not to RAID". I am aware that is a very important question to all of you and will keep you posted with up to the minute updates :).

Ready for a vacation; Giants with a 2 game win streak

I'm pretty sure I had it better back in grad school, where every day was a potential day off, but it sure is nice to be able to take full days off with pay and not have to think about work at all or make up for your missed time.

With that in mind, I'm torn over how to take my 3 weeks off. Do I save up and take a full week off, or do I take a day off every once and a while and spread the days over the year? I've elected the later strategy and taken a lot of 4 day weekends. Its nice to have a block of time off, but I think I need to take more days off when I don't have to travel.

The Giants are going to live and die with their starting pitching this year, so when they get consecutive great starts, such as those recently turned in by Morris and Lowry, they are going to be very competitive. At the time, I didn't think it was a good idea to cut Linden when the Giants DL-ed Roberts, but it looks like things are going to at least temporarily work themselves out with the two headed monster of Lewis and Ortmeier. They still need a lot more power from the corner infield spots.

I hate dust

Now my computer is much cleaner on the inside which hopefully means less noise and better cooling. This of course is one of the problems with having a computer in the same room as you sleep, you have to hear it all the time. I also have lungs that are completely filled with dust after not only clearing out my computers, but vacuuming our apartment.

It would be great if someone could figure out how to keep the dust down, but it sure seems like an artifact of life. I don't think I'm especially allergic to it, but it still makes me sneeze when I get a full breath of it.

Matt Morris had his big 12-6 curve ball going today and the Giants won easily. I haven't watched a win in a long time, so it was refreshing to see!

A bit of scheduled down time

Tomorrow, I'm going to try to clean all of the dust off of my webserver, which currently consists of my old P3 667Mhz hp computer. The computer was designed to be small, but it also is designed to be really hard to upgrade and have terrible air circulation.

The hard drive and the cd drives block access to the motherboard, so you have to unscrew the drives to make changes to the motherboard. In order to improve air circulation, a very large (and loud) fan sucks air into the box and blows it right on top of the CPU. This of course makes the computer very noisy and over the 7 years I've owned this PC, has resulted in a tremendous accumulation of dust on the fan, motherboard, cables, etc. Tomorrow, I will try to use compressed air (and maybe some WD-40) to make the fan have to work less hard and get all the dust off the box.

Another problem this machine has is there really isn't an easy way for all that air that is getting sucked into the box to get out of the box. So I may try to have another hole somewhere to improve airflow. This of course will require me to take my computer offline for chunks of tomorrow, but since I don't really need 5 9's of reliability, I think this should be ok.

RSS Reader and Iranian groceries

I'm trying to catch up to the latest technology, so I've tried to play around with a few RSS readers. I began with by far the most convenient one, the "live bookmark" feature burned into Firefox and found it not at all what I wanted. Its a neat feature, but I wanted to see all my feeds in one place in nice neat rows and very clickable.

Gene suggested using Google Reader and it seems to have most of the features I want, but it seems to be a lot slower in serving them to me that I would like. I'm sure they just batch crawl different feeds and crawl the more common feeds more often, but that means off-beat stuff (like probably this blog) don't get crawled right away. By the way, you can subscribe to this by clicking here.

Therefore, I'm debating looking into other perhaps online perhaps separate executable RSS readers. Anyone with suggestions shouldn't hesitate to send them to me. Also, if people know cool things that I should subscribe to (especially their own blogs), let me know as well.

My good friend, the great Phillip Fung, had a great restaurant suggestion over the weekend that I have to share here. Phil likes two things, good food and not wasting a lot of money and that is what you can do at Rose International Market.

This place has tremendous character and it actually is a Persian/Iranian grocery store with a truly phenomenal selection of English tea-biscuits and yogurt drinks. They also have a window full of many different types of feta cheese. But no, the reason we went there was not for the biscuits or dairy products, it was for the world class kabobs served out of sub-world class conditions.

You walk into the store, pick up a menu, then go right to the front and wait in line at the cashier. The guy we had was incredibly friendly and his phone was ringing non-stop off the hook with more orders for bbq. You then order at the cashier and he picks up an internal phone and yells out your order to chiefs. Exiting the store, you then walk to a small window and await your number being called. You are engulfed in the powerful smell of roasting meat. The yelp link above has a lot more information that I could add here, but its worth checking out for sure.

Bluegrass and ftp servers

So here is a psuedo-music review of the week. I'll admit it this is far from a proper review but I just checked out the "24 best bluegrass hits" or something like that from the Sunnyvale Library. I have to admit that I really enjoyed the movie "Brother, Where Art Thou?" so I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to experiment with a bit of bluegrass music.

I'm very convinced that all the best music of the country comes from south of the Mason-Dixon line. Bluegrass is so catchy, fast paced, and easy to get into. There was a line in I think the movie "Ray" where the Ray Charles character says he enjoys country music because of the stories and almost all of these bluegrass things have a funny or enjoyable story.

To make this rapidly dragging on story shorter, I would recommend that all 3 of my readers go down to their local public library and borrow a bluegrass CD, put it in their music system, and relax while enjoying a beverage of their choice after a long day at work.

Speaking of long days at work, things are getting a bit crazy at Code Green as we develop a seriously cool product and get closer to releasing it on an unprotected network near you. This has a strong relationship to the fact that I'm not posting here very much.

I have created an ftp server that apparently only I can use. I've asked several friends to log in and give or get pictures from me and apparently none of them can do it. I haven't had any problems other than running out of patience when I've tried to use it at work. I think I've already resolved the firewall issues. Oh well, I really only planned to use it for me :).