shinyPlasticBag

Grammy :(

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:26:35 -0700

Sadly, my grandmother has died. While she was visiting me in California, she tripped and broke her hip. She was airlifted back to Canada thanks to some amazing medical insurance, but died yesterday, a few days after having surgery to fix her hip. Her heart just gave out, which was the inevitable way for her to go.

When I got the news that she was fading, I hopped on the first flight out of SFO. However, it's a long trip from the west coast, so I was too late when I got here. She died two days after her 79^th
I'm very sad and will miss her a lot, but of all of the possible ways for her to go, I think this was probably the best. She died peacefully while surrounded by her family, and that counts for a lot. She had her moments, that's for sure, but she was a huge force in everyone's life. I always thought of her as a bit of an inspiration as I moved out to California. She had come over from Scotland during World War II when she was only 16. Crazy.

Anyway, this certainly isn't the way I had envisioned my trip home (yes, this supersedes my previously pending trip in September), but it is what it is. Drop me an email if you're around so we can at least do coffee together.

Visits

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:36:57 -0700

So, Mom and Grammy have been here for almost a week. So far, we haven't done anything especially epic: on Saturday, I took them down to Santa Cruz, but then a glitch erased Mom's memory card, so without photos, one can barely even say it actually happened. This weekend should prove to be more eventful: tomorrow is Mom's birthday and a Renaissance Faire is happening in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. I'm a nerd, but I'm excited.

I've been going into work earlier than usual so I can duck out a more reasonable time (usually between four and five). With the time zone switch, it took Mom and Grammy a few days to be able to stay awake past 7 PM, so the early leaving was important. Now, they're pretty well adjusted. Yesterday, I bought season one of Two and a Half Men on DVD. Such a great show! I just looked it up on IMDB and it has an awesome selection of tags (or, as they call them, plot keywords):

Fraction in Title (my personal favourite)
Womanizer
Stalker
Cleaning Lady
Mother Son Relationship

Ah, the Internet.
Speaking of the Internet, my brain has been absolutely blown by an incredibly impressive tech demo/PhD project with the airy title of "Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene". Check out the video on the page and prepare to be impressed. It's practically magic.

Anyway, I'm off to Half Moon Bay now. Until next time.

Peanut butter jelly time

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:59:12 -0700

This is life at PBwiki in a nutshell:

And by nutshell, I mean banana suit. Obligatory dance party here.

I see you

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:49:25 -0700

Man, I love working at PBwiki. Also, I posit that EVERYTHING should be anthropomorphized.

Except, possibly, bathroom stuff.

OMG features

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:47:04 -0700

Man, things at work are crazy lately! We have a ton of features all getting finished at roughly the same time. It's awesome! PBwiki of September 2008 is going to be a completely different, vastly improved product compared to PBwiki of June 2008. I'm really excited. Some changes that I worked on (new and improved RSS feeds) are going out today, which is always a blast. Progress marches onward, and PBwiki continues to be more like the ideal product we all want to be using.

In non-work news, things are going well. Life with a car is great. I'm carefully tracking my gas mileage and managed to get about 26 MPG from my first tank. I was reading up on hypermiling yesterday, but a lot of it is too extreme for my liking. It's stupid to drive dangerously close to 18 wheelers to get in their slipstream, and taking highway on/off ramps at twice the speed limit to save gas is equally moronic. People who care about saving gas should keep these things in mind or else they might accidentally naturally select themselves out of the gene pool and leave behind a culture even worse at energy saving than what we have now.

Anyway, there are features to launch. Until next time, world!

Sometimes we call him Chuck

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:11:37 -0700

Okay, victory: I have successfully bought a car! I have christened it Chuck as the result of a strange series of connections in my brain: "Okay, it's dark grey, sort of charcoal...chaaaarcoal...Chaaarlie! Sometimes we call him Chuck!". That's right, I've named my car after a prank call on an old Goldfinger album. Go me.

It's a 2004 Volkswagen Jetta, dark grey, standard transmission (of course). I picked it up on Tuesday, but I haven't really had the chance to enjoy it. My driver's test was today, so until then, me driving it was sort of in a legal grey area. As of about 2 PM this afternoon, I'm all legal'd up and I can drive the bejesus out of it. There's an amazing highway called Skyline Boulevard near my place that runs along the San Andreas Fault and up through some crazy forest-y hills. I'm excited!

So, obviously, I really like it! It's a lot of money to drop on a single object, which is sort of nerve-wracking, but it's in great shape and should hopefully last me quite some time. This is my "til I'm 30, or rich" car. I have no idea what I'm going to do when the time comes to move back home to Canada, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I'm sure I'll get taxed heavily on it...gah.

Anyway, back to work I go. Until we meet again, blog!

I love the Muppets!

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:20:13 -0700

No idea what the source for these things is, but they're fantastic. First, Beaker:

And then a little Chef-Beaker-Animal action:

There are more on YouTube! It's amazing.

Random

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:50:44 -0700

Two random things:
1. Over the weekend, about two minutes after I put my laundry in the washing machine, I realized that my iPhone headset was in one of my shirt pockets. Oops. I dutifully fished it out over the spin cycle and left them out to dry. This is actually the second time that this particular pair has gone through the wash, so I was expecting them to be completely dead. Au contraire! The previous wash had basically killed the left earbud. This wash brought it back! These magical headphones obviously need an even number of wash cycles in order to work properly. (Remember that time my phone got washed?)

2. I came home to letter from the US Department of Transportation. I figured it was something about my driver's license, but when I opened it up, a five dollar bill fell out. It's a "token of appreciation" for a phone survey they'll be inflicting on me sometime in the next few weeks. No wonder this country is in so much debt!

The Disenchubbining

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:16:15 -0700

If I may coin a new word, I'd like to record my current disenchubbening efforts.

Disenchubbening, or the removal of one's chub, is the act of trying to get my stationary butt into slightly better shape. I had this goal in mind pretty much from day one of my California adventure: one of the many perks offered by PBwiki is a membership at Gold's Gym. When I first got here, I had trouble actually getting motivated as well as easy access to all sorts of new fast foods. No good!

About two months ago, Brian finally got me to start going to the gym. It's good that he's dragging me there, but I I hate, hate, hate working out. The whole gym environment is really weird to me -- strange evidence of how different our modern environment is from what we evolved for. That being said, exercising fills me with an enormous sense of well-being, so I deal with it.

A huge thread on reddit about the hundred pushups training program led to an office challenge. We're on week three, and things are getting hard. It's sort of funny: the first day of day three was ridiculously difficult. Our wiki has a grid listing who did how many push-ups. Yesterday's entry for Brian? A picture of the fail copter. Chris? Basically fail. Me? "83. Poorly." It was insane!

Anyway, hopefully I'm getting in shape. I'll post an update if I actually start to notice any benefit, other than feeling less gross about my lifestyle. :)

Fifth of July

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:52:25 -0700

So, I did the whole Fourth of July thing yesterday. I had a pretty good time -- I missed the fireworks by the pyramid in Alderney Park, but I did get to see some (foggy) fireworks, nonetheless. We went to a barbecue at Houseku (one of the many geek houses in the Bay Area), where there was (joy of joys) a Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball machine. I spent way too much time playing that, actually, and it has renewed my interest in getting a pinball machine of my own. Unfortunately, all of the awesome things in the world pretty much work to counteract my own wishes for an uncluttered apartment with only the things I really need in it. I am bad at this.

Some of the people at the barbecue had an apartment nearby with roof access, so we ended up watching the fireworks from the rooftop of an apartment building in the Mission District. It was awesome! We couldn't see the official fireworks, due to (a) fog and (b) a building in the way, but lots of random people were launching fireworks around the city. It was quite a few, actually. Plus, there were some delightfully stupid hoodlums setting off firecrackers in the middle of the street, which occasionally set off a particularly sensitive car alarm.

So, yeah, I had a pretty good time. Today, I'm trying to sort out potential car buying issues. Credit here in the states is sort of weird and continues to thwart my attempts at building it. I have to finance through the dealer, not through my bank, because I don't have 3 or more credit cards. Seriously, what the hell? Anyway, I think things will work out, and I've found a car I like, so all that's left is to actually do the buying part.

Speaking of driving, I have my driver's license road test on Tuesday. It's somewhat embarassing that I have to go through this whole process again, but at least I did okay on my written test (oh, how very mortifying would it have been to do poorly). So, this time next week, I could be all set up. Yay!