OMG ubuntu 7.10

Everything that is shiny and wow and slow and broken in Vista and
everything that is shiny and wow and slow in Leopard is shiny and wow
and fast and working in ubuntu 7.10. I love a working compiz. Oh, and
wpa2-psk ftw.

Hike?

Harvey West Park to Pogonip to UCSC to Felton to Henry Cowell to
Pogonip to Harvey West Park? Why Not?


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Pescadero Creek Co. Park Ghosts

First time at this park. I did the tarwater loop (very easy). THE most beautiful drive I never thought possible getting here from Hwy 17. The park was haunted and didn't want me there. I'm used to hiking alone, in strange parks, sometimes even in the dark. I don't freak out easily and this place freaked me out.

You know how it is when someone jumps up behind you? That happened. Of course, no-one said "Boo!", but there was that stomping sound right behind me and a pop of air (kinda like one of those air canons). Nobody, no tree limbs, nothing changed. And I stayed planted there listening for anything unusual.

Then I was investigating a redwood that had split clean in two (no idea why) and created two very nice bridges to the center. While balancing on the higher of the two, a nearby tree started falling (bending hard, snapping sounds). I watched pretty fscking terrified because there was no easy way for me to move further away if it decided to fall in my direction. It didn't fall. It was very close to other redwoods that were not even waving in the wind.

Near the end of the loop, thinking that all was well and enjoying the warm sun in a meadow a tree did fall ~100 ft behind me. Against the wind (or so it seemed from where I was).

Now, I know it's been a hot dry year and all that, but this park is in the fog belt and had plenty of green ferns that I have seen totally dried up in other parks. It was a warm day but not hot and some breeze but not gusting. I can't think of why two otherwise healthy looking trees would decide to (almost/really) fall on this particular day. The weird moment I had? Not a clue.

Was it ghosts from people flipping their cars on the crazy loopy dirt road I came down to get to the parking lot? Angry convict ghosts from the jail that is located in the middle of the park (yeah, weird, I know).

I thought it was one of the best parks I've been to so far and totally want to come back. But I won't be going alone next time!

Panoramic View from VirtualParks of the meadow on Tarwater Loop. VirtualParks also has the most kickass online trail maps available of bay area parks.

Not the I want to get in the habit, but..

Looks like I'm not the only one that can't stand some of the made-up
words that have come out of the intarwebs:
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/06/22/010255.shtml

Mark of the Beast

My last day of my old job was 6/6, and I joked about how it would have been more fitting if I quit last year on the same day...some people got the joke. I started my new job Monday and so far, the mark of the beast has followed me. Monday: My new computer has the asset tag 1666. Tuesday: Lunch call number was 66. Today: First cell phone bill I used 666Kb of internet time. I'm not sure what this omen is, but it doesn't seem good. Stay tuned..

ACPI Success!

My inner tech support esteem is now a little higher. I got this 12" toshiba laptop in March (U200-ST2091) and have been unable to get ACPI working correctly on it under Windows XP or any linux distro. I was tearing my hair out; always shutting it down.. But no, I refused to call Toshiba. Today? Updated my BIOS and ta-da! ACPI happiness (no other changes to drivers or software in XP). So, it wasn't me all along. Just in time for my new job starting tomorrow (yikes!). Wish me luck and a safe commute!

Music Genre Revelation

I was surfing through iTunes as I sometimes do and pulled up the genre column on the default display. Wow. It seems as if you speak in spanish, all of your music is "iTunes Latino". Pop, Mariachi, Rap, Ska... it doesn't matter. How fscking racist is that? Does language really matter that much, or does the sound categorize the music? I couldn't even list all the languages that my library contains and they are not categorized as such. Sure, I've thought of making an "Angry German Industrial" category, but even that has more to do with similar sounding bands. Long story short: iTunes- Get a life.

Hiking

I want to build a site. An awesome site. One with lots of pretty trail pictures that you can navigate around and decide on your own damn trail to take (not something listed in a book). Oh, and dog information. This is sorely lacking on every other site. Speaking of other sites ('cuz I don't *really* want to take the time to build my own) trails.com sucks. I can't find anything and I never get clear maps of trails. Giving me the text from 5 different books on the trail doesn't help me figure out if it's 10 or 100 miles from where I live. Hikipedia shows promise http://www.hikipedia.com/ but doesn't have many (or any) early adopters of the site other than the creator.Go-california.com? No trails in the north half of the state. Not so good. Thebackpacker is better, but it's got a lot of flashy ads and no easy way to query the database.

Trixxy SEO practice

A friend was zooming around teh intarwebs and caught a site that was totally legit execpt for some nasty nasty links in the sourcecode. He asked me what was going on and I noticed that before the links was a quick javascript: <script>document.write(String.fromCharCode(<<numbers
here>>))</script>

Results? <div style="display:none;"> then after the links another String.fromCharCode that closes the div.

Evil, but smart.

Toshiba laptop take two

I installed a variety of Slackware distros on the laptop with varying
degrees of finding the hardware and playing nice with the other
distros already installed. It seems that VectorLinux is the smoothest
of the slackware distros at the moment and Ubuntu is still the
slickest linux distro of them all (I use plain slack and debian for
servers, but when I would like something already fairly setup, I would
rather go with a desktop distro).

I've decided that having XP on this would be a good idea (as most of
my clients run XP) so I'm actually writing this from XP right now
(gasp!). The CD that comes with the laptop does not have drivers for
the network card or working drivers for the wireless (as well as a far
amount of other hardware). I had to resort to using Toshiba's website
to download drivers for 75% of the hardware that is on this thing. The
ACPI support still doesn't seem to be quite right as I can't have the
laptop go to sleep when I close the lid (you would think this would be
a given).

Next up is a reinstall of Ubuntu and VectorLinux and then hoping that
I can get on my WPA2 wireless from linux.

Cheers on Saint Patty's Day

New Toshiba laptop (U200-ST2092) and Vista Home Basic 1st impressions

My new laptop came, a customized U200-ST2092. This thing is as light as they get. I'm not digging to much on the 12.1" widescreen, but that seems to be all that is available. I am glad that the fan output is on the side and not (like all Dell laptops) on the bottom. The hard drive is pretty exposed on the bottom, I would hate to see it near any water!

Starting up for the first time had me run through Vista installation and then promptly blue screened. It was beautiful. After the initial BSOD, it started up fine and jumped into Vista. Without a whole lot going on, my Core 2 Duo processor and 1GB of memory are pretty maxed out. It could be the amount of extra programs running in the background or just the bloat of windows products. I mean, just as Microsoft finally gets their act together and releases XP SP2 they gotta throw this OS onto every unfortunate consumer who would like a new computer.

I guess now I just have to decide what distribution of Linux to install over Vista...stay tuned.

I hate "blogosphere".

In my not so humble opinion, every time I see someone use the word "blogosphere" their IQ drops 20 points. Multiple times? Good as a being technologically retarded. It makes me want to bash their head against their keyboard so that maybe their idiocy might sink in. There are some memes that just don't need to exist. Podcast and its friends "Artcast", "Blogcast", "Vodcast" are other meaningless words that stump anyone without tech-savvy english as their primary language. I thought after high-school we, as adults, were above creating our own "hip" language that uncool people wouldn't understand. I guess I was wrong.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

"Domo, Mako desu" y "Gung Hay Fat Choy"

Apple has their own set of ads for Japan (not dubbed over the US ads
like they have done for other countries). Couldn't resist a linky:

http://www.apple.com/jp/getamac/ads/
Also, today is the Lunar new year. Thought I would really screw with
the subject of the post by having three languages (romanization-ized).

Finally... a text editor that I like on a Mac

I've tried just about every text editor that you can get for a mac.I'm usually coding in html/css/php. There is this constant problem with programs that don't seem to be able to follow syntax highlighting
over multiple lines of code. You would think that would be a given.
When I'm on a PC, I use dreamweaver. I use dreamweaver for only two reasons: 1) good syntax highlighting 2) built-in ftp support. But, the current verson 8 for Mac is not a universal binary and can't seem to run fast enough to follow-through with a simple ftp request. I was unable to find a demo of mx2004 to see if that would be better. BBedit was too much for me. If I had the time to learn the interface and use the bells and whistles, it might be worth the cost. I tried the built-in OSX text editor and Smultron (FOSS) but they have bad syntax highlighting and no ftp support. Using two programs (free editor and a ftp program) seemed to be going nowhere as well.. Cyberduck has a bad interface and almost every other GUI-based ftp program you have to pay for.
So, what am I using? TextWrangler. Free. From the creators of BBEdit (a sort of BBEdit lite). Seems to be working like a charm. Built-in ftp support. My coding can now continue. Thank you Bare Bones Software.

Out of Warranty

I doublechecked the warranty status on my work computer. It was top of the line when purchased...now it's three years old. I've been here three years.

Tom the Toad