Super blown shocks
I
got out Sunday and mowed the
yard. A nice day, pretty out.
And made a timelapse of it. The movie is too quick, but my yard is so
small i should have just recorded it as a normal movie instead of a
timelapse..then i could just speed up the framerate and be done.
Then I proceeded to replace the shocks in the truck. I bought a little 98 Tacoma recently, as a daily beater, home depot hauler and to keep the miles off the RX-8. And maybe a little 4x4 action from time to time. I noticed that when driving 60+ MPH on the highway, if you hit even the slightest bump it dances around for a while....not very reassuring of your vehicle and probably not safe either. Further investigation showed that my shocks are shot. And one is blown so bad there is a hole in the side. Yike! So at the recommendation of Eddy, I bought some Bilstein's as a performance upgrade. They were about $300 total for all 4. The rears were the worst so I installed them first. And I made a neat little movie that is a 10 second how-to. Hope you can follow. The difference is amazing, no more wobbling on the higway and I only did the back shocks! Bumps are soo nice now! Highly recommended to you older Toyota owners.
6 hours of Friday
Well, 636 minutes of a Friday. The camera (a Canon S80) did well, I am suprized that it captured that much. Course, I had to restart it every 100 minutes or so (a limitation of the camera). I just restarted it whenever I thought of it. Overall, easy to do. Notice the x4100 on the floor. Thanks Burt! But the best part...check out the boxes moving, the darts dancing....Ian had a little fun with the cam while I was at lunch...hilarious!
It's been a good week. I've finalized 3 big deals for work that I've been working on for months. I almost didn't know what to do when I was done. So I took some time, did something fun and setup an internal gallery for everyone at work to use. I uploaded a few hundred pics I've taken into it. I used 'Gallery 2.1.1' as the package. It's gotten a lot better since the 2.0.0 days, I would recommend it to anyone that needs a nice picture gallery. I will probably migrate away from IDS that I've been using (and which hasn't been really updated) over the last 6 years.
Another video this week. I'm on a rampage! From a meeting of the San Diego Software Industry Council on Thursday:
John Don't Speak
Description: At a panel discussion where John and I will NOT be
speaking.
Supposed to rain this weekend. Hopefully there is a little sunshine so I can mow the yard and have time to get inspired to work on the truck and the Fiat.
More Timelapses
This clip of my monday workday is 100 minutes compressed into 10 seconds. Check out how the twizzlers move around. :)
Blogercize my Time Lapse
It's been a while since I have written anything in my little blog. I left Qualcomm and now work for an online video startup in San Diego called 'vMix'. Anyway, I've been working hard for a few months and haven't had much of a chance to get to blog-ercize. Or whatever.
But I did order some toys recently, one of which is a digital camera (Canon S80) that takes some great video and will do time-lapse sessions automatically. I've been fask-inated with time-lapse for years and have always been making movies of the sky moving or ice melting or activites of my neighborhood out my window. I was playing around with the new cam this weekend and made 2 quick time-lapse videos. One is of my boring activities on a Saturday Night:
The other is me installing CentOS 4.3 on an old dev server.
Zen Sand Garden
This is probably the coolest app I've played with in ages. How much fun.
I finally beat Metroid!
Earlier in the week I bought a copy of Metroid for my GameBoy Advance. I used to love that game, would stay up incredibly late with my friends and try to beat it back in the late 80's. I was never any good at the game and generally considered it the hardedst Nintendo game I'd ever played. Mostly because I didn't own it and never had a chance to get better at it...and no subscription to Nintendo Power to help either.
Anyway, I sat down tonight and started playing, no cheating. I didn't get very far. So I started trying to cheat. Like I always used to. I couldn't remember the one bitchin code that everybody used back in the day so I did some searching on the net to find a good code. I found this one:
NARPAS SWORD0
000000 000000
Which apparently puts you into a debug mode that gives you all weapons, infinite health and infinite missiles. Initially I thought this had something to do with a sword, but it makes a lot more sense for it to be: "NAR PASSWORD" where NAR means "North American Release". Hehe. I could barely remember how to get around in the game but I managed to beat it in about 1.5 hours. I didn't get to see Samus in the bikini but I did see the Leotard.
The code that was famous back then was JUSTIN BAILEY. According to the Wikipedia article it was just a fluke, not a programmer of the game like we all believed.
So, a few codes and 19 years later, I finally got to destroy the mother brain and see the credits roll. Hehe.
Greatest American Hero
This is old news, but new to me. I guess that they have finally released the Greatest American Hero on DVD. I didn't even know they were going to. Another memory from my childhood has been restored. Amazon link here. I probably won't be buying it, I didn't like the show that much...but it was a total trip to watch the trailer on the website. ;)
strange device on the I-5
Anybody know what this is on top of a 50ft utility pole? They're all along the I-5 just north of the 5-805 merge. Looks like a probe droid on a stick to me.
Klingon Fairy Tales
The holiday schedule has knocked my sleeping patterns all out of whack. And going on call hasn't helped that much. So, I've been doing a lot of late night reading. Wikipedia, del.icio.us/popular and catching up on the best links of 2005. One jewl I discovered is McSweeney's lists. I liked this one best:
"Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears"
"Snow White and the Six Dwarves She Killed With Her Bare Hands and the Seventh Dwarf She Let Get Away as a Warning to Others"
"There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe With a Big Spike on It"
"The Three Little Pigs Build an Improvised Explosive Device and Deal With That Damned Wolf Once and for All"
"Jack and the Giant Settle Their Differences With Flaming Knives"
"Old Mother Hubbard, Lacking the Means to Support Herself With Honor, Sets Her Disruptor on Self-Destruct and Waits for the Inevitable"
"Mary Had a Little Lamb. It Was Delicious"
"Little Red Riding Hood Strays Into the Neutral Zone and Is Never Heard From Again, Although There Are Rumors ... Awful, Awful Rumors"
"Hansel and Gretel Offend Vlad the Impaler"
"The Hare Foolishly Lowers His Guard and Is Devastated by the Tortoise, Whose Prowess in Battle Attracts Many Desirable Mates"
Personal Made Public: Wikipedia vs. Britannica
Personal Made Public: Wikipedia vs. Britannica: "Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively."
I can get lost in Wikipedia. For hours. But I always come out smarter. I love Wikipedia.