Checksum Arcanius

After work yesterday, I returned home grabbed this laptop and my desktop, along with various peripherals, and headed to Erik’s for a LAN party. It had started at noon, and I planned on staying until midight or so, but due primarily to a large amount of Counterstrike playing I ended up staying there until 6:00am. I managed to make it back to my place around seven, when I fell fast asleep after setting ym alarm for 10:30. I got up around then, and though not totally lucid, was able to get myself (with my brother’s driving) to frisbee. Being outside, and the sun, and the activity woke me up, and managed to keep me awake, along with a nice shower afterwards, all through a very productive inagural TRC Hack Session. We had four people show up, with another four deferring their initial visits because of the aforementioned LAN party. Others may become involved as well. At the hack session, we talked about the SRS’s mini grand challenge, and about how we wanted to not only teach but also learn together during these hack sessions. Then Bobby took it away talking about microcontrollers. He began to explain binary numbers, and we went into the topic fairly in depth, and then began talking about logic gates. We then starting working out a system of logic gates to do simple addition of two binary digits. I’ve never done that before, and I found it imensely interesting. Fortunately, the others seemed to handle it pretty well. We made it to looking at circuit diagrams before we broke for dinner. During dinner, we talked about ideas for the bigger project, but by the end it was apparent that we needed a lot more work on the details before we have a good chance at looking at the big picture. While I managed to last all the way thourgh dinner, as I was droping people off afterwards, I began feeling the effects of staying up until 7:00 and then having fulls days of activities on 3 hours of rest. I even got so far as planning a movie with Dan, before deciding it was better that I cancel because I didn’t think I could survive until midnight tongiht. In fact, with this post, I think I’ll be falling asleep.

Email fun
Yesterday I modified my aliases file to send mail both to my mailbox on silverfir and to my gmail account. Its quite nice to access my main mail live while at work and whatnot, a d I’m noticing myself almost liking gmail better than thunderbird. Its hard to beat Thunderbird’s offline capabilities though, so I’ll keep it around at least to store all my mail locally.

Work
Work was good. I had two big stacks of boxed Flics than my head when I was done. Good stuff. I also sent out additional Gmail invites to members of the TRC that wanted it. Just another perk of the club. I don’t know how many invitations are normal, but I’ve had 14 given to me so far. Some people thought that there were usually a lot fewer than this. Anyone else have info on this?

After Work
I left just after 5, and tried to find a Big Five in Kirkland. The directions (Frm QwestDex.com) were crap, and I ended up on NB 405 again. So I turned around at 160th and just went to Gart Sports in Downtown Bellevue. There, I was mistaken for the store manager before I found out that they didn’t have any normal frisbees. I did get an interesting LED nightglow Disc out of the deal though. And ome cones. That might be nice at the next game. The reason for all this hoopla is that I was teaching (or just coaching really) a youth group my mom works with on frisbee techniques. Although it was the first time for a lot of them, many showed some good potential. They were invited to Saturday Ultimate at Robinswood park.

FireFox 0.9
I haven’t really had enough time to test it out extensively, but except for the ABSOLUTE CRAP default theme, it seems to be pretty good.

Belkin Sux
My brother not-so-recently bought a Belkin 54g wireless ethernet bridge. Except for absolutely sucking like no other, its very nice looking. Don’t buy anything from Belkin EVER, except maybe cables. My USB hub from them is a piece of junk as well. Well, I wanted to transfer some mp3s I had just ripped from my Santana CD to the hard drive on the desktop. And it was taking forever using the linksys WET11. So I swaped out for the Belkin. Well, its fast… at least 10 times faster in throguhput it seems. But, well, it seems to die once about every minute. The connection goes kaput. The more packets you try to stuff through, the worse it gets. So probally most of you will have trouble getting this page. But thats ok, it will only give me more incentive to get this darn house wired.

Goodnight, folks
Yay, overuse of subtitles.

Well, it seems that the Belkin Wireless Ethernet Bridge is not as terrible I I imagined. I ran a ping test overnight, and with almost 30,000 pings to the wireless gateway, none have been dropped. However, the latency has occasionally spiked to over half a second, presumably because of retries. I have not yet correlated this with periods of high throughput, but that is my suspicion. Perhaps windows networking is simply more fragile than I had imagined. Still, there are few excused left to avoid wiring the house, even if this is working. I mean, Gigabit Ethernet dude. Yeah.

Well, I take back the “it seems ok” comment on Firefox 0.9. I got it switched over to a nice theme (but only after my entire toolbar went wacky, forcing me to delete every item before going back to the default to get it to work properly). Then when I reloaded a page, it didn’t actually reload it, and my backwards history disappeared. I though for a while that my entire post had disappeared.

Bernie may have run into this problem himself when he left a comment on this very Blog and was unable to see it later.

Peace

Today went a lot better than yesterday at work. Thing got moving early, and I was able to get a lot done. I took a ridiculously long lunch break (2.5 hours, but it wasn’t supposed to be that long) in order to go up to a building that my brtoher manages to take a look at the sprinkler system, because suposedly I am an expert on the things because I spent a summer installing them a few years ago. With some ideas from the the maintenance guy, we got the water flowing again. Unfortunately, in a vain attempt to get water ut earlier, all the valves were manually set on. So I got to go around, braving the spraying water (which wasn’t too hard on such a warm day) turning the valves back off. But some of them were really hard to find. After that was done, it had been way too long and I didn’t really have time to try dinking around with the controller to program it. Either somebody else will or I’ll have the “opportunuty” to try it later.

After getting back from work, I got back to work and things went well through six o’clock. Then I wrapped things up and headed for Grass Lawn park via a place to eat. The place to eat ended up being Subway on Willow’s road. The park was extremely busy, so we ended up playing on some not-too-nie grass, but the game ended up being very good. My team got down by six at one point, but we managed to tie it. Unfortunately, the other team scored again with just seconds left and took the game. But it was still good, because I am noticing that I am either jumping higher or simply timing my jumps better and have a better idea of how high I can jump. I like to think that I’m jumping higher though. And my forehand flick isn’t up to snuff yet, but its improving, especially for lighter throws. The two-a-week frisbee is going to be good.

After ultimate, I tok Dan and Bob home, and then Bob and I talked about the TRC summer hack sessions for a while. We laid out tenative dates, and I will be checking with Larry for availability of his place and my mom for availability of some resources at the office park. What would be ideal is simply a place large enough for two or three groups of 3-5 people to meet where there are simple things like soldering irons and electricity. Ok, a milling machine, lathe, and bandsaw would be nice too. But still, that really isn’t asking too much, I don’t think, especially after a $2+ million addition to the school that benefits primarily the drama club. But hey, we have our very own room now (never mind that its smaller than the space we had before, and its all we have now, and its really just what the Drama club vacated because its too far from the new Perfoming Arts Center. Meh. Enough for now.

And after that, I came home. Pretty good nice long day.

If you are bored, go check out this update for the SRS site and tell me what you think. Then compare it to the current page. I think its better, but then, I’m not so hot on the whole beautification part of things. I think the text links could use some CSS beautification. Any suggestions?

That was my main project after a slow and frustrating day at work. I expect tomorrow to go better.

In other news, on a leisurely lunch break I took from work, I saw two (2) RX-8’s in the parking lot. One was a nice sparkly red, but it was an automatic. The other was sleek black, a manual. I think I’d go with a sparkly red with the manual transmission and the sunroof. The RX-8 is such a nice car! I’ll try to remember my camera next time.

Oh, and Terriyaki, etc! in Bothell competes well with Fuji Terriyaki in Bellevue, I have discovered. The prices aren’t quite as good, but the tastes are slightly better, from my latest experience. I am happy.

Sorry for the absence. I today reaffirm my goal to post once per Ryan-day, which means at least one post between when I awake in the morning (or occasionally early afternoon) and when I go back to sleep sometime between early evening and early afternoon. Generally, these times are within two hours of 8:00 am and within two hours of midnight.

The news of the day is that the house still isn’t wired for gigabit communications, Silverfir.net came back home after an aborted attempt to set it up at my mom’s office. She needed an email server, and I thought it was a good chance to get perhaps up to 864kbps upstream for sf.net (if sourceforge will forgive me for borrowing the term). Unfortunately, it was not to be because Qwest’s Actiontec DSL modem/routers are basically defective. Bernie, tell me about Blarg’s internet-only options, and do they come with their own routers? It would probally turn into a web hosting account too, so its a good business opportunity.

Other recent events that I’ve neglected blogging about, but I should probably mention:
IS Class of 2004 graduation
TRC elections (Female CEO, Male COO, Female CFO, male CAO)
Microvision work goes well, they seem to want to keep me around
Quarter ended at BCC, got an A- in Diff.Eq. and A’s in Photo and Tennis. Maybe I already mentioned that one, I don’t know.
Went to Bellingham few Sundays ago with Shai to see Beth and Greg. Had an excellent time. Ate at Lemon Grass, the best Thai food ever. Maybe I already mentioned this one too. Bah.

Current projects:
oasis (old desktop machine, future silverfir.net server) – I want to set up exim, imap, and mysql for virtual domains so I can have lots of “different” mail servers, and that each subdomain can have their “own” emai. I also want to get apache parsing its log files out to the virtual domains. And probally get rid of ftp in favor of scp (per bob’s suggestion).

I do wonder what happened to uberbog though.

Also, I still want to change bloggers. And get a better photo management solution. And…

Oh yeah, TRC hack sessions should be starting up soon. I’ll let you know about those.