Chaos and Disorder

The few, the proud,...

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 13:30:32 -0800

the homeowner. It's kinda old news now but I've been busy and it's probably new to you! With San Diego's housing market "declining", I decided to take the plunge and I bought a condo/townhouse in October. I'm fairly certain that the housing market hasn't hit rock-bottom yet so I didn't get the proverbial "steal" but the deal was good enough for me and we plan to be here for at least another decade. The value will go back up. :-) It's a 4 bedroom end-unit with a detached 2 car garage and within walking (biking for the lazy kids) distance of the boys' elementary & high schools. Unfortunately, I'm still ~40mi from work and the commute still sucks but as long as I can still lane-split, I can deal with it. ;-)

School Fundraising

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:30:33 -0800

It's that time of the year again. The pre-holiday school fundraisers are in full effect. I don't quite understand the fundraising blitz. They hand out a packet to every kid in school and say go sell stuff to raise money. So far, so good. But they limit the time period to 2 weeks and you can't go door-to-door. So every year you wind up hitting the same set of local friends, family & co-workers that are also being bombarded by every other kid they know. If things were stretched out a bit, you wouldn't have people being overwhelmed in this short time frame and over the long term, people would potentially buy more. I don't need 10 boxes of pecanbacks so I'm not going to buy that many upfront. But I may buy 2 or 3 a month if they were always available.

This year, at least, they're allowing us to broaden our range by setting up a site to sell things through: http://www.foryourschool.us/store/brochures.php?sID=rsc7977

The fund raiser ends October 1st.

RHF SS1000

Sun, 06 May 2007 21:52:44 -0800

Yesterday, I completed my first SaddleSore 1000 ride in 17.5 hrs. The SS1K is the entry level Iron Butt ride. This particular ride was a charity event organized by the Ride for the Heart Foundation. For the most part, I had no problems on the ride and I made pretty good time. Outside of Arizona's blustery winds, it was a good day to ride, weather-wise.

Lane splitting is legal

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 16:26:01 -0800

Owning a motorcycle in Southern California, I often get asked if I lane split and if it's legal. The answer is yes and yes. A local news station did a a report on lane-splitting a little while ago. It's a fairly balanced and pretty informative report (see the video) though the second condition mentioned was changed on the CHP website some time ago. The CHP website now states that lane splitting must be done in a "safe and prudent manner" with no mention of any speed limits.

St. Pat's Hat 2007

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:10:32 -0800

I spent another St Patrick's Day weekend chasing down a frisbee at St. Pat's Hat 2007. Once again, it was an awesome experience! Our team, Pot O' Gold (aka yellow), won the tournament!!!

Are you ready for some Prince?

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 12:47:43 -0800

Prince is performing at the Super Bowl half-time show!

And in case you missed it, he's also performing weekly at Club 3121.

Edit:If you haven't seen it, take a look at the Superbowl commerical at 3121.com.

putting CVS on timeout

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:28:49 -0800

At work, we've run into the age-old problem of tinderboxes hanging due to CVS timeouts. Unfortunately, the fix that was added for mozilla.org doesn't work for us as our build scripts pull from cvs rather than the tinderbox script. After dealing with this problem for weeks, I did a quick futile search and decided to write my own utility to workaround the problem. It's really simple and doesn't really attempt to be graceful about checking for running processes or making sure that the child process really died when the alarm goes off. I wrapped the cvs calls with this utility and I haven't had a problem with cvs hangs all weekend.

Denied!

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 13:31:44 -0800

Let me start by saying that I had a $%@$#*#&#()$! awesome Summer League team this year. We had no game plans, no special plays, no cheers, no drama. Nothing. Not even a team name. We just showed up on the field and played our game.

DUDE Summer League 2006

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 23:13:24 -0800

It's that time of the year again! Today was the first day of DUDE Summer League! This year, I'm on the Gray team. A few more years and I'll have the complete set of shirts!

A thousand down....

Thu, 11 May 2006 15:09:43 -0800

and thousands of more miles to go! In the past few weeks, I've put over 1k miles on the Ulysses and just took it in for service. About half of that distance has been from my daily commute, which still sucks btw. At least, I can skate between lanes now. People are being kind enough to veer out of my way and give me space (in most cases) rather than veering into me. Lately, the weather has been kinda crappy. That is the SoCal definition of crappy...overcast, dreary, light winds with the threat of a downpour. And a bonus...I "fixed" my ipod. I was worried that I would need to replace the drive but luckily, I just need to reset the connectors and then reset the ipod so that it was reinstalled from scratch. That allowed it to boot again and seems to have gotten rid of the clicking that I heard last fall.

DUI 2006

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 17:37:50 -0800

I spent the weekend up in Davis attending the DUI tournament. Once again, almost the entire experience was awesome. A pretty decent selection of the San Diego Ultimate scene got together and formed a team, Tijuana Temptation, for the tournament. (No, there was no Tequila involved.) Everyone seemed to have a very good time playing & partying together. We didn't get to play as many games as we had hoped due to teams dropping out. But thankfully, we didn't get any of the rain that was predicted for the weekend while we were playing.

St. Pat's Hat 2006

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 20:42:26 -0800

I spent the weekend in L.A. attending the St. Pat's Hat tournament. That was an awesome experience! I met a lot of great people and witnessed some awesome Ultimate plays (and even made a few myself :-)). To Sanguine-Hell's Bells-Pistachio-Irish Witt-Agave-Petron***, I am honored to have had a chance to play with you guys. The athletic ability of our team was amazing and everyone was very good-natured and I felt that we really brought out the true spirit of the game.

3121

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:04:21 -0800

Prince's new album, 3121, was released on Tuesday. What are you waiting for? Go get it! They even have it at Starbucks! Seriously, while Prince's style isn't for everyone, I think this album may be more accessible to non-Prince fans than any of his recent albums (including Musicology). Just take a listen to Beautiful, Loved & Blessed. This is perhaps the best track on the album.

Let the Odyssey begin

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:39:49 -0800

I've been talking about getting a new motorcycle forever. Well, I finally did it! I am the proud owner of brand new 2006 Buell Ulysses! I picked up the bike from the San Diego Harley-Davidson dealership earlier today! I can't stop bouncing! I'm so excited! Not counting the safety course I took last year or the Harley I rented a couple of weeks ago, I haven't really ridden since I last owned a bike, which was almost 10 years ago. So, keep in mind that all of my observations are tainted with inexperience.

Stop bothering me, Murphy

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 23:51:01 -0800

This past week was interesting. And by interesting, I mean "You've gotta be $%#$^*)# kidding me." I inherited a somewhat critical custom java/jsp timecard application. It needed to be moved to another machine temporarily. It's java. Write-once, run anywhere. No problem, right? No such luck.