Category: Uncategorized

So, as mentioned in her post, I went to a shooting range for the first (and probably only) time in my life.

I fired two different kinds of 9mm guns, and managed to hit the paper (at distances from 20 to 25m) almost all of the time. My take-away from the experience was this: guns are loud.

I was also more scared when was firing the gun than when I was.

Still at work at 8:15, reviewing design documents and workflows with my coworkers in a meeting that started at 5:30.

Then the building begins to shake. And it keeps going. “Earthquake?” “Yes, definitely.” It finally calms down after about 20 seconds.

“Meeting over?”

“Meeting over.”

I just have to share that every time I type the following bit of code it makes me a bit giddy inside:

foreach ($data as $datum) {
     /* do stuff with $datum */
}

and understanding why gives you a glimpse into my psyche.

So it seems that Comcast and the City of Sunnyvale have finally come to an agreement, because I got a letter in the mail yesterday warning me that Comcast will be doing construction, possibly interrupting service, etc. in preparation for giving us all the things we’ve been seeing advertised for the last few years. i.e. more HD channels and On Demand.

Within the next few months. So, yay, finally.

For reasons which I’m not entirely sure, I pay for Ign Insider at ign.com, a subscription for which I get the privilege of higher resolution videos, less ads and other miscellany. The stupidity of ign is that I still see the ads. Even in specific places where I’m not supposed to, like interstitials. I also get a very annoying “feature” where the ad on the front page of ign just sits there floating over the content where it’s clearly not supposed to be, blocking everything I’d want to see.

I emailed posted to the forum filled out their stupid web form for customer service, complete with multiple screenshots of this in action. Their response? Clear your cookies and upgrade to IE7. I did both, and sent another additional screenshot of the exact same thing in IE7, and they basically brushed me off saying it was a problem on my end, despite the fact that I’ve seen it on three different computers, three different platforms, with about 8 different browsers. Then they closed the ticket and that was that. So I did what any good nerd would do.

I wrote a greasemonkey script that completely eliminates the ad from the page.

http://www.hamusutaa.net/v/legofalcon.3gp (300k, 3GPP video)

After a false start (a shipping email that later got canceled), it’s in a box at my desk right now.

I keep having the problem of thinking about something I want to post, then forgetting about the post and it just rattles around in the back of my head for a month. Here’s what I can remember:

1) So for those of you who were paying attention, I started working at Yahoo! again as an engineer in the Travel vertical. My first week went as expected — setting up my work environment. My second week I started learning the code base and had my first project handed to me. The third week my boss was out of town and I continued working on the project and reading documentation. Then on the first day of my fourth week, my boss pulls me aside and tells me that I’ve been reassigned to a new project. I mean, a completely separate company-wide thing that has nothing to do with Travel. So for the last few weeks I’ve seen more PowerPoint presentations than the previous ten years of my life combined, all getting me and the other engineers up to speed on this new project. Oh, and it’s in Java, a language I’ve never programmed in. So I’ve been reading up on that as well. Eventually the PowerPoint to coding ratio in my job will settle back down to sane levels, but it’s still pointed the wrong way.

2) I really want to keep liking Eureka. But the writers are making it extremely hard this season. The technobabble is becoming less tech and more babble, and they keep shoehorning every story into the exact same framework. Here’s the random inhabitant of the town who does something normal that you’d expect any small town to have (like a dry cleaner or a church organist). Something weird is happening in the town. Oh wow it turns out that this new character we were just introduced happens to be a PhD in the random branch of science that relates to the weirdness. Nobody can figure out what to do until the sheriff makes some observation that none of the room full of very smart people could realize. Then everyone rushes off and makes some flashy solution to the problem that ends up wrapping up very nicely and quickly just in time for the end of the episode. Oh, and about two minutes of the ongoing storyline stuck near the end.

3) And that reminds me. Shows like Eureka are filmed in HD. I mean, they’re aired with the black bars around them, but my stupid cable company (Comcast) has been stuck in 2003 and still only offers 6 HD channels total, 4 of which I could get by sticking up an antenna. They say it’s because of a limitation of the wiring in my area but GET ON IT. This is similar to the complaint I have about the DSL in my area, I still only qualify for the lowest possible speed because of my distance from the substation. I live in the heart of the silicon valley, stuff like this shouldn’t be an issue, we should be on the forefront of home entertainment bandwidth things, not living 10 years in the past.

4) The new season of Avatar evidently started and I forgot to set my DVR so I’m going to have to brave the interwebs for the first episode. Also, yay Heroes tonight! And I’m also going to try watching Journeyman. I’m a sucker for anything that resembles Quantum Leap.

5) The FFXI/WoW pendulum has swung back the other way, I’ve been getting back into FFXI. The hype for the new expansion (due in two months) is starting up, and it looks exciting (and I get to buy at least two copies of it, one for PC, one for XBOX360 and possibly a third for the other account). I bet a lot of it is disappointing because they’re still limited by the stupid PS2. Also, I just get my Tier 4 head from the prince in WoW (which just about finishes my tanking set).

Haven’t signed up for Internet in the room yet. Sending from phone. Camera battery doesn’t hold a charge or something, so no pictures. I’m not going to shell out money for a new camera, and I’d never find the right kind of batteries.