I was at World Market with my mom, and I stopped into the food aisle, hoping to find some Pocky. Mmm. Pocky. I digress. Anyway, I couldn’t find any Pocky, so I looked for something else tasty and Japanese. My eyes settled on this:

The brightly colored bag attracted me at first. Then, my eyes were drawn to the descriptive text on the bag. I’m quoting here.

“Its translucent color so alluring and taste and aroma so gentle and mellow offer admiring feelings of a graceful lady. Enjoy soft and juicy Kasugai Muscat Gummy.”

With ad copy like that, I’m not sure whether to be hungry, disturbed, or excited. They’re sort of tasty, if you can get around the smell, which has all the subtlety of green apples soaked in Pine-Sol.

In other, non-graceful news, I got Samba and svn running very nicely on Monolith (my new development server). svn is sweeeeeeeeeeet. Also, I ate at the Pagoda, which is the best overall Chinese I’ve had in town so far. You haven’t had rolls until you’ve had Pagoda’s rolls, thoroughly drenched in their homemade duck and mustard sauces. Eating their mustard is a bit like having your septum scrubbed out with hot steel wool; good times.

I wanted a TV for my office, but I didn’t have room. So I got a cheap TV tuner card and slapped it in my Linux box. To my indescribable shock, it worked! No config, no fiddling, it just worked! That’s the thing with Linux – if it just works, it’s great. If it doesn’t work right away, you’re going to slog through hell and it probably won’t work anyway.

Observe! You got your TV in my computer!

I’ve looked at installing MythTV (an open source personal video recorder, like a Tivo), so I can maybe get out of my monthly ReplayTV payment, but the install process looks horrendous. A installation guide that starts with “First, install a new package manager” does not fill me with confidence. That’s the computing equivalent of somebody telling you, “To change your oil, first repaint your car.” Some idiot thinks you should conform to their opinion before you can use their toys.

They’re building an addition onto my office building. They’ve started by tearing up a big patch of parking lot, and adding 10 inches of dirt to the resulting hole. Excitement!

One Konica Minolta DiMAGE Scan Dual IV film scanner,

Plus some film (with scissors to cut it up into managable 6-frame strips)…

And some latex to keep things clean…

Makes this.

w00t!

Interestingly, if I were to add a cheap processing tank and some chemicals, I could have a complete (although amusingly hybridized) black-and-white workflow (shoot on N75 -> process in tank -> scan on DiMAGE -> print on Pixma). I might have to do that.

There are some more pictures from tonight’s scanning here. Girls with guitars = good. I have quite a few more to upload. The downside to all this photographic happiness is that I’m doing it when I WISH I WAS SLEEPING. Hurray for insomnia.

Getting sick of the wall-to-wall Lance Armstrong on my TV now. I’m sure he’s a fine athlete and a great guy and all, but the thickness of the hyperbole wrapped around this guy is exceeding that of all seven of his yellow jerseys worn all at once. I actually heard an announcer on Discovery breathlessly exclaim “Lance Armstrong represents the very best in each and every one of us.” Uh…

He rides a damn bicycle. He’s not Jesus.

I don’t even think Jesus would like riding a bicycle. He was more of an on-foot type of fellow. Also, if the uncontrollable excitement of watching the live coverage wasn’t enough, now you can enjoy the stultifying exhilaration (double word score) of watching the endless, sickeningly over-analyzed replays. Yay! Now he’s biking on rocks! Yay! Now he’s biking on hills! Whoopee!

Make it stop now, thanks.

Doing Redshark, my car media player project, with a repurposed Xbox console was an interesting hack inspired by convenience, but I’d be the first to tell you that it’s far from the best solution. Indeed, it has some pretty huge problems:

• Slow boot time (Could be mitigated somewhat by tuning my Gentoo boot process)
• Power-hungry, and, therefore, hot
• Painfully gigantic in size

I’ve been thinking about a version 2 that would be more compact, more power-efficient, and would provide a better user experience.

A company called BuffaloTech makes an adorable little machine called a Kuro Box (link is to Tom’s Hardware, manufacturer’s site currently down). It runs some flavor of embedded PowerPC CPU, and has all sorts of useful IO like IDE, onboard networking, and USB2. It’s specifically designed with hardware hackers in mind; all the code’s open and you can tinker with it to your heart’s delight. It boots from Flash, which means near-instantaneous starts, and it runs on some sort of customized Linux kernel. It doesn’t have audio hardware on board, but it is confirmed to work with an external USB audio interface. It also has pretty low power requirements, as PowerPC systems tend to be. It’s less powerful than an XBox, but I think it would have more than enough grunt to play music and work the Redshark UI. With a power supply swap to make it run off of 12V, and a beefy hard disk added, I think it would make a greatly superior Redshark v2.

Hmm. Must find some resources related to procedural texturing and geometry. I have a game concept I’d like to mock up.

How do you know if you spend too much time at Best Buy (AKA The Temple Of Consumerism)?

I got a fairly radical haircut (not quite a Corgan like last time, but close). I needed a USB cable to help me transfer some files to a server I’m setting up at work, so I went to the Temple to pick one up. When I approached the Altar Of Spending (the checkout), the girl behind the register double-taked so hard she actually choked, pointed at me and said “You shaved your head!” Yep, when the cashiers recognize you and comment on your hairstyle, you officially hang out at the electronics store way too much.

Speaking of things you can buy at the Temple; if you like things that sound good, there’s no satisfactory excuse you can have to not pick up a copy of Pink Floyd – Live At Pompeii. It’s painfully good, including a tremendous performance of the “Echoes” suite from Meddle that demolishes the album version.

Speaking of Pink Floyd, at the Vic Wooten concert I saw with former work homeboy Doug two weeks ago, a tall, slender guy, looking straight from the islands with an impressive headful of dreadlocks approached me, pointing and waving animatedly in my direction. I couldn’t figure what the guy wanted with me until I dumbly figured out that he was pointing at my Floyd shirt, then back at the similar one he was wearing. “Right on”s and handshakes were exchanged after this bit of understanding was reached. The concert was good too.

Airspace CPU first boot… Finally got the programmer operating after some tinkering. The CPU is the smaller chip on the right of the programmer (in the socket labeled “EVALUATION SOCKET”…which I really must replace with a ZIF socket). The illuminated green, yellow, and red lights mean everything is awesome.