| repak shawahb | |||||
| mental defenestration for the masses | |||||
blogroll |
Fri, 30 Sep 2005
entertainment and sports weekend
A couple interesting things: I saw my uncle, Peter Bonventre, on ESPN this morning at the gym. That was cool. It also reminded me that I have to call him and say hi. On Sunday, because Katrina killed the Superdome, the Saints are playing a "home" game in San Antonio against Buffalo. Tickets were plentiful and cheap, so Mike, Matt, and I picked some up. An especially exciting aspect of this game is that I'm starting Willis McGahee and Ernie Conwell in my fantasy league this week. This means they'll actually have a chance of hearing me yelling at them to get me some more fucking points. (To be honest, I'd be yelling even if I were watching them on TV...) [ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ] I forgot to mention that Marissa and I hit Barnes and Noble the other night and I was sucked right into the sale rack. I was thinking "I should get a Chuck Palahniuk book," and Choke was sitting right there in front of me on the buy-N-get-M free rack. It was a sign. Also in my sights that night were Breakfast of Champions, The Big Sleep, and American Psycho. Unfortunately, since it was buy 2 get 1 free, Chandler failed to get the nod. I'll get some Sleep later. [ permalink | 4 comments ] Thu, 29 Sep 2005
a STi-mulating birthday present (to myself)
Even as we speak, my plan to reduce the number of vehicles I own is progressing. Unfortunately, before taking a step forward, one must often take two steps back. To that end, I've purchased a 2006 Subaru Impreza WRX STi (and in that color, too). Any comments about the rear wing (no, it's not optional, and yes, it's functional), how many miles it can drive on a pound of Uncle Ben's Long Grain, or how many illegal immigrants I can hide in the hood scoop will probably be, umm, right on target. I defy you to find a car more fun to drive, though. This thing is a fucking ROCKET. Up next: divest myself of the Celica and the Camaro. Yes, I've only had the Camaro for 9ish months, but I've realized in that time that as a form of transportation it's not terribly practical, and I have neither the time nor the shop space to keep it as a tinkering car at the moment. On the upside, I should be able to get out of it more than I put into it. As far as the Celica is concerned, hell, I've saved enough money on gas driving that piece of shit that any money I get out of it is just gravy—or perhaps remunerations for my suffering (and that of my passengers). That will bring me down to the truck, the STi, the Ducati, and the V-Rod. I have a sneaking suspicion that my father really wants my truck (my first clue was when he said "I want your truck!"), so I might dip into single-car territory before the year's end. What is the world coming to? [ permalink | 4 comments ] I'm officially 24. Yes, this makes two birthday blog entries in a row where I've made reference to that cartoon. So what? Wanna fight about it? [ permalink | 7 comments ] Wed, 28 Sep 2005At lunch today, Powell busted out with this one for the scrapbooks: "I'm not committed to the idea that women are stupider than men; I'm just committed to the idea that they're stupider than me." [ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ] I've recently grabbed a few new albums from the aether. While I haven't listened to any of them enough to form an opinion yet, I thought I'd mention it just in case one of y'all wanted to grab them. They include a couple each by My Chemical Romance (I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love and Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge) and The Mars Volta (De-Loused in the Comatorium and Frances the Mute), Out of Exile by Audioslave, Lullabies to Paralyze by Queens of the Stone Age, Pressure Chief by Cake, and To the Teeth by Nine Inch Nails. I'll report on them as I form opinions. [ permalink | 4 comments ] Mon, 26 Sep 2005Oh yeah, another thing that came of Saturday's party is a firm definition of the Armadillo Sunrise: (diet) Mountain Dew, Tequila, and a splash of Grenadine. I can't speak to how good it is, because I was already somewhat toasted by the time I decided to make it, but anecdotal reports from others on the scene indicate that it might not actually be fit for human consumption. [ permalink | 3 comments ] Saturday's Hurricane Party was a success. Decent music, ping-pong (I'm not bad at all when I'm drunk, except that I can't for the life of me hit the forehand with any accuracy), several drinking games (quarters, up and down the river, &c), and even a round of Settlers of Catan (which I managed to win by taking longest road and then getting largest army on a gamble) numbered among the festivities. Yesterday consisted of football, chicken wings, and dancing. I decided to ride Rosalyn on over to Mike's house to watch the games. In retrospect, it wasn't the greatest decision, considering that it hit 105 degF in the afternoon. Today it's only supposed to get up to 102, and by the end of the week we should have fallen all the way to the high 80s on account of a cold front coming through. Here's hoping for good golf weather next weekend. Thu, 22 Sep 2005 As I write this, traffic along I10 in Houston is moving at a whopping 2 miles per hour, and has been doing so for the last 14 hours or thereabouts. Better yet, every gas station in Houston is out of gas, and many people on the road are starting to run low. Pop quiz, hotshot: what exactly do you do when you have 5000 cars on an interstate all of which have run out of gas? On a lighter note, I'm encouraging Mike to have a Hurricane Party this Saturday (when it should be hitting us, more or less). It's gonna rule. [ permalink | 2 comments ] Tue, 20 Sep 2005At Elysium the other night I saw a dude wearing a shirt that said "Don't Make Me Go Zelda On Your Ass" and had a bunch of the power-up graphics from the original Nintendo game (potion, shield, sword, boomerang, bomb, &c). I was utterly compelled to walk up and pay him a compliment, at which point he informed me that he's an aspiring DJ who remixes video game music. Some samples of his work, he told me, can be found at his MySpace site. Wow! You do that for science? [ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ] Thu, 15 Sep 2005This is what's called convergence. First, I went back to my gym-in-the-morning schedule. It makes me 1000% happier. Anyone who doesn't get up at 6a is a heathen. Next (actually, I've known this since last week, but didn't blog about it), the Monitor ADC works. That was one of the first circuits to be in an known working state once we figured out that there was a PLL problem at powerup (and FIBbed some parts to fix it). It's also completely badass, because that fucker was complex as shit and I was worried that somewhere along the line I'd failed to specify some aspect of the digital controller properly with some catastrophic failure (think: powering the chip up causes a tsunami) as the result. Fortunately, no Pacific Islanders were harmed in the testing of revA silicon—as far as I know... Third, it appears that as of last night we're confident that the other ADCs are doing their thing. I haven't gotten to testing them just yet (I want to run the piss out of the MADC first), but Ion reported that he was able to get it working in a mode that requires several blocks, the DC ADC included, to work. Hua. Fourth, I'm spending all my time in the lab now. Damn does it make me happy. I'm an engineer again! I'm soldering shit, poking at stuff with meters and scopes, controlling the thing via USB... OK, scratch that last one (all real engineers—in the Roberge sense—despise USB instinctively). ...and finally, I think I'm becoming convinced that I can actually control the neon JUST FRIENDS sign that apparently floats overtop my head whenever women are around. Who'd'a thunk it? [ permalink | 14 comments ] Tue, 13 Sep 2005At the gym today, I was ruminating on how to run both an HTTPS and an SSH server on port 443 of a machine so as to allow it to both serve secure content and function as the outside endpoint for proxy tunnels which exploit open HTTPS access and/or HTTPS Until earlier today, I'd completely forgotten about Apache's mod_proxy, a cute little module that provides basic proxy functionality from Apache. Clearly, this little honey is exactly what we want, though: a proxy server which supports Setup is extremely easy on the server side. For you debian users, make the appropriate symblinks in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled and edit /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy.conf as appropriate. You can telnet to port 80 and verify that Now, armed with your hot new Apache build, you're ready to take on the world. The only thing left is a daemon for the client side. Mine is called sprox.pl. I decided to use a wrapper around the [ permalink | 0 comments (add one you lazy bastard!) ] Thu, 08 Sep 2005Today our first silicon came back. At the moment they're going over a bunch of digital stuff, but the first thing they tested was one of my circuits—the digital regulator. After some initial reports of brokenness, it was discovered that the sockets we were using, putting it mildly, sucked ass. One hundred soldered pins later, the Vdd18 regulator comes up and happily runs. Hooray for my first silicon circuit. [ permalink | 3 comments ] |
||||