Mon 13 Aug 2001

  • movie (American History X): Wow. What a powerful movie. Easily the most impressive movie I’ve seen in a long time. I understand all the fuss about it when it first came out, and wish I had seen it then. I can’t wait to see Edward Norton’s next movie. I think he’s a tremendous actor, and has very impressive control of his body.

  • movie (Rush Hour 2): This was much better than the original. It had more goofiness, and fewer race-gags which I liked. Jackie Chan is certainly getting older, but he still has moments of fun.

  • irony: I spent all day wiring up my wireless connection. I originally got it so that I could work in the living room on my laptop. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the reception I wanted originally, so I strung a wire to the middle of the house, and mounted the wireless hub on the cieling. I now get a great connection, though I’m ~5 feet away from where I wired to.

  • drills: Here are the things I learned about drilling today: 1) You need a masonry drill bit to drill through stone. 2) If you are drilling through a slate floor, drill through the slate over the mortar. The mortar is tough as nails – the slate is not. 3) If you are drilling through carpet, drill really quickly so that you melt the carpet. If you drill slowly, you just rip it up and get stuck. 4) It’s a good things drills can go in reverse 5) When drilling through wood, an old, cheap, blunt drill bit covered with melted carpet works a lot better than a shiny new masonry bit. 6) I know nothing about drills.

  • house (crawlspace): I took a grand tour of the underside of my house while wiring today. Apparently I drove the dog nuts while singing and hammering under there. Wheeee!

  • dishwashers: Our 1972 vintage, bright green dishwasher is showing its age. I fear it is time to retire it…

Wed 08 Aug 2001

  • toys: mkj and I got a cool powerball a few days ago. I don’t fully understand how it works. I don’t want to break it, but I do want to know how it lights up. Decisions…

  • work: Meridian Engineers meeting last night, where our new VP tried to work through some scheduling/resource issues. I don’t think that many of us feel like a lot of progress was made, though I feel like the managers were doing the best they could given their constraints. That’s all we can hope for.

  • nanotechnology: I finally understand why people on slashdot are so excited about nanotechnology. I finished the Diamond Age last night, and while I thought it had a weak ending, I thought it was an enjoyable piece of science fiction. Note the ‘fiction’ part guys…

  • sick: Two lovers were hanged by their respective families and friends in India this past Monday for having an intercaste relationship. I can’t believe it’s August 2001.

  • doomometer: We added a doomometer to our wall. It provides hours of entertainment. Well, minutes anyways…

Sun 05 Aug 2001

  • Code Red 2: interesting: # grep default.ida *|grep XXXXX|cut -c 12-28| \ sed -e ‘s/[- ]//g’ |sort -u |wc 57 # grep default.ida *|grep XXXXX|cut -c 12-28| \ sed -e ‘s/[- ]//g’ |wc 144

  • Code Red 2 (++): make that 58 and 145

  • CD: For some reason I am totally unable to make an audio CD. It’s starting to annoy me.

Mon 30 Jul 2001

  • Movie (Elizabeth): Very cool movie. Very very good movie. Sir Francis Walsingham was very cool. Or maybe it’s just Geoffrey Rush.

  • Hacking: Nautilus is so cool.

  • Dinner: We went to an Indian restaurant for dinner. They were playing a version of the theme song from “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” on the Sitar, with Indian lyrics. Very bizarre…

  • Denim: Went to the Middle Eastern deli yesterday for lunch. There was a woman there with a fairly short, denim mini-skirt. When she got up to leave, she bent over to pick up her bag, leisurely mooning the entire restuarant. It was extremely surreal.

Mon 30 Jul 2001

  • Blizzard: Came to visit for a week. It was fun to have him around. The dog especially enjoyed his company. After he left, I spent the afternoon and evening cleaning up. I even ironed a bunch of shirts.

  • Music: I broke down and bought a Moby album yesterday.

  • Hacking: I’ve been working on Nautilus the last week or so. Hopefully will get back to GTK 2.0 soon.