Checksum Arcanius

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.

Today from 8:00am-4:00pm, Puget Sound Energy cut power to this part of town to perform upgrades to the grid. Hopefully this means fewer unscheduled power outages in the future. However, since I didn’t get home until 11:00, it also meant that silverfir faced its longest downtime in months. The good news is twofold: I was able to properly shut the computer down before this one and silverfir may soon have a new home. It won’t be much faster (sorry), but it should be a lot more reliable.

I worked 9:00-4:30 today, then I made it down to Fry’s Electronics topick up a gigabit switch, two gigabit NICs, and enough RJ54 jacks and faceplates to finally get this house wired in a semi-modern way. Hopefully the incredible speeds of gigabit lan will convince everyone to chip in some money for a high-capacity RAID file server. We’ll see how that goes.

The SIFF reviews, I guess, will just have to wait.

Today I finished up the last two Seattle International Film Festival movies that I had planned. So it seems like a good time to talk about my first film festival experience now.

I saw the following films, in the order listed, and give them the following overall ratings (from 1 to 5):

Uniform – Confused Drama – China – 1.5
Primer – Sci-Fi Drama – USA – 5
Nicotina – Dark Comedy – Mexico – 4
Ruby & Quentin – Light Comedy – France – 5
6ixtynin9 – Dark Comedy – Thailand – 3.5
A Problem With Fear – Confused Comedy – Canada – 2.5

Uniform was a tarrible way to start out the festival, except perhaps that it made me really aprreciate the next five I saw. It was almost a complete bomb, but for my passing interest in it as a documentary of day to day life in China. As a movie, however, almost everything was wrong. The plot mostly sucked (even though it could have been interesting), the cinematography was crap (but what can you do, when working with standard definition digital equipment that’s probally 10 years old?), the dialogue is uninteresting, and it just goes downhill from there. Avoid this movie unless you’re hoping to catch some rest and waste some money at the same time.

Primer was stark contrast to Uniform in that it was made with what may have been a similar budget (just $7000), but it was so much better. The writer, director, and lead actor was actually there at the screening, which was pretty cool because he answered some questions afterwards, and seemed like a genuine good guy. The movie is one which requires deep thinking – its definitely not a light popcorn movie. But the thought you have to put in is all worth it. Science is treated repectfully – it helps that the writer/director was a software engineer and a techie, and that he didn’t have the budget for bad special effects. The film does lack exciting cinematography, and it could use some help in the music and sound department (but in this case, all of the above were one guy). However, this doesn’t really detract from the movie, because the movie doesn’t require any of this to be very, very good. I highly suggest that you go see it when it comes out in theaters in september (thats what I hear). You can also visit
the website for a trailer and other info on the forums. Very highly recommended.

I will finish this another time, when I am not yawning. Have a wonderful day!

Having friends in high places is very nice. For example, I recieved an invitation to Gmail last night – which I hear is a highly coveted thing. So I had to brag about it a little bit. And I’m already being courted for when I get my first invitations… even though I don’t have any idea really how the invitation system works. But thats beside the point. The point is, Gmail is the best webmail ever, as far as I an tell. Except for pop3 support, it has all the gadgets that other webmails have, for free, and even more – and by even more I ean things such as autocompleting addresses – something which I never would have expected from web mail. But Gmail is different from ordinary web mail. As Tim said (who coincidentally wants an invite… :-):
“Gmail is the start of a new era of computing, internet applications.
Sucessful integration of internet applications to computers will mean
that your data can be reached from anywhere the internet is availiable.
Gmail is the start of this revolution by providing an easy to use, high
quality and large storage email provider. Once gmail supports POP3
access, it will be complete.”
Well said, Tim! It looks like your work in the TRC is beginning to pay off :-)

I can’t seem to get myself to fall asleep tonight. I just headed downstairs to have an after midnight snak, becasue sometimes that helps. I even felt tiredat kinds, but the shut-eye doesn’t seem to come. I’m going to work on setting up bBlog to replace greymatter as my blogger, to get access to nifty features like RSS, which I don’t even know what it is, but whatever. The real reason is that PHP beats Perl in my book any day. :-)

Just like the old days, I stayed up all night finishing a project for my differential eqautions class. I’m not sure if sleep is going to happen now or twelve hours from now. If it happens now I’ll probally be neding to use Dan’s darkroom. If it happens tweleve hours from now, the darkroom at BCC might suffice. Anyway, I still have to take the photos for the assignment that is due on tueday. Inspiration is somewhat lacking, but motivation is seriously lacking. At least I ahve no work today.