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Archive for May, 2009

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10 tips for killer robots from the future

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Having watched Terminator: Salvation the other day and witness Skynet once again fail to kill John Connor, I came up with a list of 10 handy tips for our future robot overlords to help them enslave humanity.

(Spoiler warning. Look away if you haven’t seen the movie.)

  1. Call for backup. Yes, you are big robots, and you are very strong, but if you have John Connor, say, in your GIANT KILLER ROBOT FACTORY, why not send more than one robot after him? This is not a judgement about the killing skills of any single robot, it’s just practical.
  2. Stay away from open protocols like USB. When John Connor can hack your robot motorcycles with what looks like a futuristic T-Mobile Sidekick, you may want to rethink your hardware interfaces.
  3. Make your robot motorcycles less comfortable for humans to ride. Maybe try replacing the handlebars and seats with, I don’t know, BURNING HOT METAL SPIKES.
  4. Invest in firewalls. I know that McAfee probably doesn’t exist in 2018, but you’re a super smart computer network; I think you can figure it out. Again, if John Connor just needs to attach a couple alligator clips to some wires and text you “OVERRIDE” to get into your buildings, maybe it’s time to rethink.
  5. Program your killer robots to investigate suspicious-looking open doors with wires coming out of them. This one is pretty self-explanatory and related to #4.
  6. Define user permissions in your computer network. Yeah, so Marcus is a super-cool advanced prototype, but was it really necessary to give him the ability to turn off your main gun turrets…WITH HIS MIND??
  7. Listen to the radio. John Connor makes a broadcast every night on a signal that is apparently strong enough to hear worldwide, and able to be picked up on what appears to be a crystal radio. In this broadcast, he basically details all the plans of the resistance. Like, all of them. Just give it a whirl.
  8. If you see Kyle Reese or John Connor, kill them immediately. Like, right then and there. No waiting to upload data to Skynet or BS like that. Even if you’re essentially a flying metal frisbee, just CRASH INTO HIM! You’ll probably do some damage.
  9. Make more of those huge building-sized robots. They’re basically awesome and seem pretty indestructible. Just stomp around and see what happens.
  10. (Most important) Squish our heads. I’ll admit it: if I could, I’d probably throw people through walls, too. It seems really fun. But if you’re looking to kill someone with efficiency, remember that you’re a REALLY STRONG KILLER ROBOT and that our skulls, while relatively hard, can pretty easily be squished. One strong clap should do it.
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Posted in Entertainment | Redwood City, CA | | 6 Comments »

Live Footage

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Live FootageTopu Lyo, an old friend of mine, recently sent me a copy of his band’s new self-titled debut CD, Live Footage. (Full disclosure: he sent the CD to me for free and asked me to review it here.) I have to admit that I felt some amount of apprehension before listening to it, because I was worried I wouldn’t like it. This isn’t because I thought it would be bad, I just had no idea what kind of music it was. What would I say if I didn’t like it? Should I lie? Should I be brutally honest? Should I say it got lost in the mail? So it was a few days after receiving the CD before I actually sat down to listen to it, and I found it impossible not to like. Honest.

Live Footage consists of Topu on electric cello, and Mike Theis on drums and synth, but if you close your eyes, you would swear that there were more members of the band. Topu makes extensive use of live looping on his cello, so many of the songs start with a small riff or melody which he loops, then adds to it more and more, with each loop building on the last. Two of my favorite tracks, “1976 Part I”, and “Freedom Happening”, both have beautiful cello melodies where Topu is essentially accompanying himself, which I thought was very cool. Lest you think this is the result of recording studio trickery, I recommend checking out the videos on their site for a live demo.

iTunes puts Live Footage into the “Electronic” genre, but don’t let that scare you off; I suspect it’s because there isn’t a genre around that really fits the band. It certainly isn’t what I think of when I think of “Electronic” music, at least. So if you’re looking for some new and interesting music, give Live Footage a try; they may surprise you.

Buy “Live Footage” on iTunes

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Posted in Entertainment | San Francisco, CA | | 4 Comments »

Turning a corner

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Recently I feel like I’ve turned a corner with Getting In Shape 2009. I’ve exercised 9 times in 10 days, which I’m not sure I’ve ever done: Monday 3-mile run, Tuesday top-rope climbing, Wednesday 3-mile run, Thursday bouldering, Friday 3-mile run, Saturday a 6-mile (and terrible, might I add) bike ride, Monday a 6-mile run, Tuesday terrible top-rope climbing, and today 3.25 miles of interval running. (As an aside, I really liked my interval training! This is the first time I’ve ever done it, and it made the miles fly by. It’s sort of makes running a game, and I didn’t even notice that I was working hard.)

In general, I’m happy that my runs no longer feel like torture, and even though I have the occasional terrible day of climbing, I do feel like I’m slowly getting stronger. I think the difficulty with exercising so much (besides the ever-present threat of injury) is that my body is usually tired. During climbing on Tuesday, I think my legs were still tired from Monday’s run, and they were shaking while I was up on the wall. Hopefully I’ll build up my strength and endurance and get my body used to being so active. That, or I’ll just be terrible at everything. Always. Whee! Project Eating Mindfully is going really well, too, and I feel good after meals instead of super stuffed. If I can stay healthy (read: uninjured), I think I could soon be in the best shape of my life!

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Posted in Fitness | San Francisco, CA | | No Comments »

Proposition 8 ruling

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

As I’m sure you’ve heard, the California State Supreme Court ruled today to uphold Proposition 8, but also that the same-sex marriages performed prior to the passage of Proposition 8 are valid. This was the expected ruling, but it’s still disappointing.

So the question on everyone’s mind is: what now? As I understand it, because of California’s Super Awesome ™ proposition system, Proposition 8 can only be undone with another proposition. Getting a proposition to overturn Prop 8 has been the plan since Prop 8 passed, but there’s been some debate about whether to get it on the ballot in 2010 or 2012. According to Equality California, 69% of their members voted to try to get the measure on the ballot in 2010, so because of that and a number of other reasons, they are officially recommending 2010. I, however, voted for 2012, and I know that puts me in the minority. I understand building on the momentum from victories in Iowa and other states, but I’m still not convinced that we can win in 2010.

First, like it or not, the California people did go out and vote to pass Prop 8. How many of them will change their minds in 1 year? What also worries me is the potential backlash from voters who voted in 2008 and are being forced to vote again on the same issue in 2010. I can imagine some voters feeling annoyed that this issue is on the ballot again, and voting to keep things as they are because of that. Finally, 2010 is not very far away, and it’s not long at all to organize a campaign that basically lost less than a year ago. While I want to have faith in California voters, and in the leaders of the marriage equality movement in California, I’m not sure if I can handle two losses in a row.

In case any of you are interested and haven’t seen them before, here are my pics from last November’s Prop 8 protest:

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Posted in General, Photography | Redwood City, CA | | 1 Comment »

Goodbye my darlin’

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

I packed up my 5D this morning and shipped it off to the Canon service center in Irvine. Ever since I bought it, there has been a slight misalignment with the rear scroll wheel which caused it to advance twice when I had clicked it once, or not advance at all, but there was never a convenient time to send it in. But seeing as I have no weddings coming up, and the fact that my 1-year warranty expires next week, I decided to finally bite the bullet and send it off. It shouldn’t take more than a couple weeks to fix (hopefully), and in the mean time, I’ll get reacquainted with my 20D and 10-20mm lens, which can produce some fun shots:

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Posted in Photography | Redwood City, CA | | No Comments »

Alys

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Debbie and Neil’s daughter Alys was born last Monday night, and this weekend I was lucky enough to do a small photoshoot with them. Alys is by far the smallest baby I have ever seen, and she sure is cute!



Uploaded to Flickr on 25th May, 2009.

The shots of Alys alone were taken with natural light coming in through the glass balcony door, while the family shots were taken with that natural light coming from camera left-ish, and flash bounced behind and to the right off the ceiling, I believe at +2/3.

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View the set on Flickr.

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Posted in Photography | San Francisco, CA | | 2 Comments »

Alexander’s Steakhouse

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009

Tonight I had an amazing meal at Alexander’s Steakhouse in Cupertino. The occasion was ostensibly to congratulate Matt on his triathlon, but it was also just an excuse to eat a lot of meat. (Hee hee!) I had been there once before for Matt’s birthday but thought it was only okay; the prime rib was too thick for my taste, the truffled mac and cheese that everyone raves about was too truffly, and we just ordered way too much food, so I felt pretty terrible when I left.

This time, though, we ordered much better and I think it was one of the best meals I’ve had in recent memory. So on to the food:

  • Amuse-bouche: Steak tartare. Tangy and flavorful.
  • Starters (for the table): Corn and bacon fritters, hamachi shots, roasted foie gras. The corn/bacon fritters were crispy and very tasty I was worried the bacon would be overwhelming but it was actually pretty subtle, I thought. Hamachi shots were super delicious, as always. I don’t like foie gras so I didn’t try any, but the others seemed to enjoy it.
  • Salad (shared with Babs): Leek salad. The flavors were nice, but the leek was a bit tough and stringy.
  • Palate clenser: A shotglass of some sort of raspberry tea.
  • Entree (shared with Babs): 24oz New York steak. Really flavorful and cooked well. I think I still prefer prime rib when it comes down to it, but the steak was delicious.
  • Sides (for the table): Green beans with bacon, creamed spinach, and mashed potatoes. The green beans were crisp, the creamed spinach didn’t feel heavy at all, and the mashed potatoes were smooth and creamy. I think they may have had a hint of truffle flavor.
  • Dessert (shared with Babs): Chocolate soufflé with creme anglaise, and cotton candy. The soufflé was light and airy not too sweet. It also came with tiny cookies. Cotton candy is always awesome. I think I amused everyone else with my ‘compress into little cubes’ cotton candy eating technique.

Lest you all be disappointed by my gorging, I still ate mindfully, and left comfortably full rather than stuffed. Going out to eat is much nicer when you don’t feel like dying afterwards.

This visit completely turned around my opinion of Alexander’s after a disappointing first visit, and now I wouldn’t hesitate to go back. Yes it’s pricey, but if you order right, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better meal in the South Bay.

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Posted in General | San Francisco, CA | | 3 Comments »

iTunes or Amazon?

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

The new Green Day album came out this week, and I wanted to buy it online since I’ve all but given up on CDs. I buy a lot of my music on iTunes, but every so often I’d buy from Amazon since they are in mp3 format, and (until recently) they were the only source of DRM-free music. Plus, they tend to be a bit cheaper. However, in this case, the playing field was basically even: iTunes has converted their entire library to DRM-free, and price is now not an issue.

iTunes had 2 versions of the album: a ‘deluxe’ version for $14.99, and the regular version for $11.99. The deluxe version had 2 bonus iTunes-exclusive track, while the regular version just had the album. The Amazon version had a the full album plus a different Amazon-exclusive bonus track, also for $11.99. I spent an embarrassingly long time trying to choose between the two before somewhat arbitrarily settling on Amazon, mostly because I don’t really like the idea of Apple having a monopoly on digital music purchases, but in the end, I don’t really care all that much.

When you buy music online, what do you use: iTunes or Amazon? Neither? Both?

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Posted in Entertainment | Redwood City, CA | | 6 Comments »

Website notes

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

The website updating has been coming along, and I thought I’d just give some information on hacks/modifications I’ve done to WordPress, as well as some other website-related news.

  1. When I imported my old entries from Movable Type, I noticed that not all of the line breaks were preserved, which left all of my entries looking squished. I found this support forum post which detailed some changes you could make to the Movable Type import code to insert line breaks on empty lines, which will preserve breaks between paragraphs. I made these changes and re-imported the entries, and it all seemed to work great, until I noticed that my auto-generated excerpts (which are the first 55 words of an entry) stopped working. I started poking around in the function that displays these breaks, and realized that the change to the import code must have inserted an ‘\n’ character into the empty excerpt field. Since the excerpt was now technically non-empty, WordPress would show that instead of auto-generating one. In order to fix this, I edited wp-includes/formatting.php, line 1483 (in function wp_trim_excerpt) and changed:

    if ( '' == $text) {

    to

    if ( '' == trim($text)) {

    So now WordPress considers the ‘\n’ as empty, and auto-generates the excerpt.

  2. I installed the Configurable Tag Cloud which is similar to the built-in Tag Cloud widget, but is more…configurable. I did notice one weird behavior, which was that my long tags were breaking out of their containing div:

    tag-cloud-unwrapped

    I looked through the widget code, and noticed that for some reason, all spaces in tags were being converted to non-broken spaces (tag-cloud.php, line 202):

    $tag = str_replace(' ', ' ', wp_specialchars( $tag ));

    So I just commented that line out, and everything was happy:

    tag-cloud-wrapped

  3. I was looking for all my entries related to my marathon training, and couldn’t find them, and then I remembered that I had made them in a separate running blog. So I went ahead and exported them from Movable Type and imported them to WordPress. You can find most of them by clicking on the national AIDS marathon training program tag, or by browsing the Fitness catagory.
  4. Finally, I changed the favicon to match the new look of the site: favicon. You will probably need to clear your browser cache to see it.
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Posted in Website | San Francisco, CA | | No Comments »

Debugging CSS?

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

This is a question for all of you webmonkeys out there (Chris, I’m looking in your direction): are there any tools to assist in CSS debugging? By ‘debugging’ I mean knowing which styles are affecting a particular part of the page, knowing the bounds of a particular element, etc. My usual method is to edit a style to have a border or background color so I can more easily see what’s going on, and this is inefficient, at best. Other times, I have no clue what is making a particular element look the way it does (e.g. having some offset), so I just hack around with negative margins and things like that until it looks right.

If there aren’t any tools, what are your strategies for editing and debugging stylesheets?

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Posted in Website | Redwood City, CA | | 6 Comments »

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