zigdon

Not at work, thank god, but oh dear:

  sub wait {
  
     for ($y = 0; $y < 1000000; $y++) {
        ;
     }
  }
  
  sub moment {
  
     for ($y = 0; $y < 100000; $y++) {
        ;
     }
  }

So this was some list someone made of the top 100 sci-fi shows, which juldea decided should be a checklist.  So here's my list:

( Long list... )

56/100

Better than I expected, and also reminded me of a bunch of awesome shows I totally forgot about :)

Neighborhood: Southwest Berkeley   School District: BERKELEY UNIFIED Beds: 2 Type: SFR Sq. Ft.: 1,097 Lot Size: 4,000 Sq. Ft. Baths: 1/0 Built: 1920 $/Sq.Ft.: $382 List Date: 08/05/09

So it seems that if you make enough offers on enough houses, you might end up owning one!  I'm not at that point yet, but I made an offer, and it has been accepted!

Now, need to figure out the loan, and do piles of paperwork and legwork, but this is progress!

Here are the pictures snagged from zip before the listing disappears.

Hmmm, I wonder if I should go to Boston on my birthday and ride Hub on Wheels with Haplo?  Might not be a bad way to celebrate :)

Snapped this last night - the moon over the water always looks so nice.  Had to lean the camera on the rail though, but I should really get a tripod one of these days.

Remember that house?  Yeah, no.  Got a call yesterday from my agent saying he doesn't know the details, but they accepted another offer.  I'd like to think they accepted a cash offer, because that would mean nothing I could have done would have made a difference.  But if it turns out they just accepted a better one, I'd be pissed - I was ready to make a better offer, and was talked down by the agent, saying the house wouldn't appraise for more.

He's probably right, and it was certainly my decision to accept his advice, but bah.

Guess I should just start looking at rentals until something better comes up.

Just signed the documents to make an offer on another place - West Oakland, really beautiful house.  Downside - not the best neighborhood, but I think it should be fine.


(click for the rest of the listing pictures)

Keep your fingers crossed - if all goes well, I'll have to figure out what to do with *8* bedrooms ;)

Talking the other night to WBR, we were playing around with the idea of a playlist with a song for every hour.  There are a few trivial answers, but some hours are hard to figure out.

I posted this to twitter/facebook, and got a few suggestions.  I'll compile this list (and update it as more come in).  And no, rock around the clock doesn't count.  Actually, I figure each song should appear at one slot only.

Midnight	"Round Midnight." / Dexter Gordon These don't quite count: 2 Minutes to Midnight / Iron Maiden One Minute to Midnight / Justice 10 Seconds to Midnight / by The Divine Comedy
1am	One O'Clock Jump - Count Basie 1 AM / The Subways
2am	2 AM / Iron Maiden
3am	3 AM / Matchbox 20 3 O'Clock in the Morning / Dexter Gordon Wednesday morning, 3am / Simon & Garfunkel
4am	"it's 4 in the morning, the end of December..." - Famous Blue Raincoat / Leonard Cohen "Four a.m. in the morning, carried away by a moonlight shadow" - Moonlight Shadow / Mike Oldfield "It's 4 O'Clock in the morning and eeeyts starting to get-ta light." - Promise Me / Beverley Craven
5am	"it's 5am and your are lisssstening to Los Angeles" - Screenwriter's Blues / Soul Coughing
6am	"Six o'clock already, I was just in the middle of a dream " - Manic Monday / The Bangles  "saturday morning, baby / who's going to play with me? / 6 in the morning baby"  "6 am, day after christmas...." / Ben Folds Five
7am	7 AM / Deep Blue Something
8am	8 AM / Tom Helsen and the Summer Obsession
9am	9 AM / ATB (Instrumental)
10am
11am	Not quite counting this:  11:11 / Rufus Wainwright
noon	"Look at that big hand movin' round Nearin' high noon" - Ballad of High Noon / Tex Ritter
1pm
2pm
3pm	"Now it's three in the afternoon and I can't leave too soon, saying 'Thank you, I had a nice...time." - Cradle and All / Ani DiFranco
4pm
5pm	Five in the Afternoon / Panic in the Disco
6pm	Six O'Clock / Lovin' Spoonful
7pm	"It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock  Want to get a belly full of beer" - Saturday Night's Alright / Elton John
8pm
9pm	"It's nine o'clock on a Saturday..." - Piano Man / Billy Joel  Step Into My Office, Baby / Belle and Sebastian
10pm	"Ten o'clock and I know I gotta hit the road" - Detroit Rock City / KISS
11pm	Elevent O'Clock Tick Tock / U2

Fill in the blanks!

More guidelines:
- I'll write down close matches (2 minutes to midnight), but won't be too happy with them.
- Song titles are ok, but in the song lyrics is much better.  This applies to instrumentals too.  The idea is that you hear the song, and you should be able to hear the hour in question.
- No, I'm still not writing down "Rock around the Clock" for any or all of these.
- I think I'm not going to add more entries for hours with 2 or more entries.  Unless it's a really obvious one that more people (read "I") will know. ;)

Peeron (one of my four cats) died this morning.  Didn't wake up. 

It didn't come as much of a surprise, he's been sick for almost 3 years now, and no one really expected him to live this long.  He would have been 13 in 3 weeks.

I'll miss him.

An ok day ended up being weird, starting with me watching this: http://www.vimeo.com/1800647

Nothing there really new, but listening to it today it suddenly clicked in a way it hasn't before.  I suddenly understand what Bebe meant when he said a while back "I think I want to be poor".  At the time, both me and our mother had no idea what he was about.

I don't actually know what this means, if anything, as far as what I want to do with my self, both near and longer term.  But it got me thinking about it in a way I haven't in a while.

I love how music and memory interact.  I was listening to music on random on the drive in, and Calypso started playing, and suddenly I found myself in my bedroom in high-school, DMing a game of Star Frontiers for my brother.  It was quite strong - came with the sounds from the highway, the feel of the sunlight through my window, the firmness of my bed's mattress.

I love these random triggers, but they still surprise me.

I know I haven't written anything about the climbing trip yet, but the pictures have been posted.

Not really going to post about it now either, but I wanted to share my experiments with photo stitching.  The first morning, I got up at a silly early hour, enough so that I was up and about to see the sunrise.  I walked up to the top of the hill near our camp, and just snapped a series of pictures of the mountains around - no tripod, not really even stopping for each picture, just letting the camera grab them as I was spinning.

The original 9 are posted with the rest of the pictures linked above.  Then, I sat with gimp, and just tried connecting them.  It worked kinda ok, but the picture boundaries were really obvious (click to see the whole thing):



Then, I tried (still with the gimp) to see if I can hide the boundary lines a bit - mostly smudging, a little bit with the stamp tool (click to see the whole thing):



Better, but the exposure still needed correcting.  Then, today, Xavier mentioned Hugin, and I figured I'll give it a shot.  I think it really worked quite well (click to see the whole thing):



I think next time I'll try it with a tripod though - you can certainly see the movement as I spin to the left.

Remember that hobbit house?  Well, I finally decided to make an offer on it -- but I took too long to do it.  They apparently accepted an offer on Monday.  Oh well, I'll consider it a dry run for the house I'll actually get.  One thing I learned - making an offer is as simple as telling my agent "get it".

Good to know.

Went today to look at another house.  It's a tiny little thing in Fremont, but I actually really liked it.  It's cute, it has a really neat yard (not that THAT'LL keep), close to BART, close to the bridge I can ride my bike to work.  Not going to get a chance to do anything about it until after the climbing trip, but I suspect it will still be there. 



That's the listing picture - the ONLY listing picture.  I should go back with my camera to take more, of the indoors and yard.  But I really don't see anything wrong with it, I think the foreclosure people were just being lazy.

Of course, need to get it inspected, especially the roof.  But I'm cautiously optimistic. 

And if it turns out ok, it would be really neat - my monthly payment should be about the same as my current rent, leaving the extra I've been saving for taxes, improvements, etc.

Back in the day, when I was in the "hiking club" in high school, we went on a few climbing trips.  I didn't really know what we were doing, but I really enjoyed it.

Fast forward about 20 years, and I discovered (through a girl on OKC) that climbing is now available, *indoors*!  No more needing to get a big group together, or have all the fancy equipment, or even know how to use it.  So of course I started climbing, and have been really enjoying it.

Completely by accident, a few weeks after I started climbing (again), I met a whole bunch of people who climb quite a bit.  Well, yay, I now have climbing partners!  Not only that, but they go on climbing trips, and know what they're doing, and can teach me stuff!

That brings us up to this past weekend.  See, we have a 4 day climbing trip next month.  This will be the first time I've gone outdoor climbing since the 80s.  It will also be one of the other girl's first time outdoors.  So just to make sure we know what we're getting into, we went to a local rock in Berkeley, just for a few hours to try it out.  Then, there was ropes, and harnesses, and some scrapes and blood and a general good time:




Bottom line, it was awesome, and I can't wait for next month.  Only thing I'm worried about now is if I should get a new lens for the trip, since I think something with a little bit more zoom might be helpful.  Perhaps one of the 70-200mm lenses...  We'll see.

In general, I love my bank (ING Direct). They're awesome in all sorts of ways, one of which is that they email me every time I have a large transaction posted on my debit/credit card.

For instance, I ordered a new tape deck for the car this morning, and promptly got an email about it. Great.

But I just got another email from them:


It was good sushi, but I'm not sure I'd have gotten it if I knew it would have been a "Large Transaction"!

Riding home last night, I noticed a rhythmic bump on the bike.  Took me a while to figure out if it was on the road, or on the bike.  By the time I decided it must be on the bike, I was losing air in my rear wheel.

"Oh great, a flat."

Pull over, get on the sidewalk, and replace the tube.  It's not too cold out, not a big deal.  But as I was checking the new tube is in place properly, I notice there's a problem with the tire itself...  Yes, that's a hole the size of my thumb.



Damn, guess I'm not going to be riding home.  Ended up walking about a mile to a bus stop, and taking that home - so pleased the buses here have bike racks on them!

Today, I went to the bike shop, got a new tire, and while I was there, had them replace my cassette, which I somehow managed to bend:



Now, all that's left is to see if I can get some of those bike-commuting tax money that was passed with the big bailout!

Went riding around today with Stephanie and DC in SF.  Given that I've lived here for over a year, there really isn't any excuse for barely ever making it up to the city.

So we went riding around, and even crossed the Golden Gate Bridge :)  Fun day, not too much to report.  Pictures are here.

This year is starting off fairly well. Instead of my usual "sit at home and kinda ignore new-year's eve", I was actually invited to a NYE party, up in Sacramento. The party was fun (thanks, Matthias!), but the real reason to go there was a grand scheme - DC, Stephanie and I were going to ride out bikes down from Sacramento back to the bay area, about 60 miles total.

And so it was. We took the train up (with Christina), had fun, drank lots of booze, played lots of Contact, and went to sleep. In the morning, had tasty tasty French Toast, and around 1pm started our ride.

The ride itself was a lot of fun - I wouldn't have complained if it was 5F warmer, or if we EVER saw the sun, but it was still a good time. I love group rides, and I like hanging with DC and Stephanie, so really, there wasn't anywhere I'd rather have been.

We got to ride on two ferries, have a tasty lunch (nothing tastes quite as good as WARM FOOD when you can't feel your toes), got lost a number of times (or at least miss our the turns we were looking for), but we did make it without any serious mishap.

All in all, it was about 70mi, and took about 6:30 hours (counting the stops for lunch, oranges, ferries, pictures, map lookups, etc). Activebody was impressed - when I entered the ride data last night, it proclaimed that at this rate, I'll do 27k miles or so for the entire year. I think it's being optimistic, but that's ok :)

I sat down today and plotted what I could of the route on Bikely (with Stephanie's help, that is), and posted some of the pictures.

A good start indeed, and I have no reason to expect the year won't get even better :)

( List of questions )