text twist

i've been playing alot of text twist online and it just occurred to me that ideas are kind of like those elusive 5 letter words in the game. sometimes you just have no idea what the answer is. but with a scramble and a different alignment of the elements (letters, technologies, whatever) that you already have, sometimes a completely new idea or application will just leap out at you. and it's so crystal clear that it's hard to see how you simply could not piece it together before. i find myself needing a scramble so often because i'll always hear about some new invention or web technology and be like "damn it's so obvious, why couldnt i have thought of it before and made a fortune on it?"

reno

i'm in reno, in a room of my own in a 2 bed suite (christine's with her parents in the other room) and scrolling around on tv - i havent watched food network, south park, or spike tv in a long time, but i hit up some music channels instead:

starting the year

today i go back to work and i'm looking for signs that the year will be awesome or shit. well, it's hard to say because it's been such a mix. my milk spilled completely from its container despite precautions to keep it upright, and i spent about 15 minutes in the bathroom washing my workout clothes and underwear in the sink while other guys peed in the urinals behind me. and as i reached down to sqeeze out the water the sink soap dispenser spooged on my sleeve three times. but, some nice guy brought a bunch of donuts and left them sitting around for people in the atrium, and dan brought in cookies. so breakfast was not lost. i forgot my password (really??) and got locked out of my login, but as a result i was able to implement a newer and cooler password. we'll keep count for the rest of the day.

thoughts

two pieces of hilarity, and one story to completely sober you up.

the last two or three nights have been great. i think i like the holidays most because the people who are in boston are forced to create their own sense of family and togetherness. for most of us, home is somewhere else, and sometimes going home for the holidays is like leaving our real home. similarly, when others leave to go home, we're left here in boston to find someone to be family. and to get mightily drunk with.

Monday

yesterday i met up with one of my best friends from high school, george. we had grown apart a bit in college after going to different schools. and although he did come and attend MIT (a goal for both of us as innocent high schoolers) we never did get to hang out much, and despite several high school friends now living in the boston area, i had lost touch with that aspect of my life. but we did finally get together (although under worse circumstances) and it was still great.

i joined george and his wife and coworkers for their 9th day of the 12 drinking days of christmas. we went to the highly pretentious liberty hotel, where the restaurant "clink" failed to serve us satisfactory food but didnt seem to mind charging for it. so when we left we headed straight to the closest, divyest bar on charles st, and with no one else inside but us we proceeded to order the cheapest beers and play all their arcade games. and that's when we started having fun. i spent about $2.50 for a pint and about $5 on games each round. there was a boxing strength game, and after a few sincere punches we all started trying to figure out how it worked - whether it was an accelerometer in the base, or a force sensor in the bag itself, and we spent a dollar just testing different ways to move the bag and seeing if it registered. we got 5 out of 1000 for each of those tests.

then we played a basketball shooting game, and after going head to head for about a minute we realized that one side gets 80 seconds and the other side gets 40 seconds, yet megan (George's wife) still got 45 points in those 40 seconds to mark's 48 points in 80 seconds. he was excited that he beat her before he realized that she had half the time. at some point we wanted to power cycle the machines to see if we could reset the timers. but the most money of the night was dropped on Terminator Salvation - we had a great system of switching off when one person died, and a drinking game based on killing streaks. at the end of the night as the bar started to fill up, we had gotten enough of the cheap miller high life and gotten our fill of bar video entertainment.

Tuesday

tonight, after CW practice, we all went out to middle east to have a drink/food with mike bartending. the crowd was jay, his dad, fredson, amy, dan, ana, cwilli and me. as we're sitting there eating hummus some very very drunk, skinny white guy stumbles and crashes into our table. so we're like hey are you ok? he starts muttering something about islam and was being a bit belligerent, so we told him "have a good night" ie leave now. as he's walking toward the door, he turns back, puts his hands down on the table and leans over me and cwilli, and starts muttering "have a good night? have a cheap night!" of course it makes no sense what he was saying but he kept looking back and forth at us, and i really expected him to start swinging. but i have to say at this moment i was the least scared i have every been in my life, even compared to a situation where nothing threatening is happening. because at the table there were probably about 50 total black belt degrees, and about a thousand pounds of muscle, and this guy is trying to start a fight totally drunk off his ass.

but basically the guy gets thrown out, and keeps trying to get back in the bar, but was barred from reentry by various people. i really wish he had a sober friend who would tell him in the morning, "look, you really picked the wrong people to start a fight." and it was a bit of excitement but i realize that our community is full of very dependable people.

final thoughts

so i guess the sobering thing is that this holiday season i met up with george because one of our friends from high school just had a terrible stroke and ended up in the hospital. we visited him but basically he was no longer going to live without life support. today i found out that he had passed. it's a terrible thing to happen, especially with the holidays. and it's cliche to say it but these things happen so quickly and without warning that it is making me appreciate every kick, every drink, every conversation with people in my life now. and maybe i'm even beginning to reconnect with my own past, which kind of disappeared when i moved away from nc, but now to find out that not only george and chris were in boston, but many others from my high school class are now in boston. maybe i should make more of an effort to see them, to get to know them, not as the high school stereotypes we all were but as real people now. because i've come to appreciate the real people in the world.

goodbye chris miller, we'll all keep living for you

music

started listening to a tight jazz playlist on youtube and it's slowly morphing...here's some cool stuff

from the jazzanova mix

bike mania

edit: yea...posted at work so i'll have to take pics when i get home

i did a bit more work on my huff puff bike this weekend, as christine puts it (my motorcycle is my vroom vroom bike). i took out my old schwinn roadbike, which is old, scratched up, the seat post is permanently rusted inside the frame, the pedals and gears are a but unsmooth and will probably break sometime in the future. but recently i cut the handlebars into bullhorns (see tutorial here) and suddenly the bike is highly awesome. i'm not sure what the exact appeal of bullhorns and single speed bikes are, but they're popular in urban areas like cambridge/boston, and i've long jumped on the bandwagon.

this week i finally got in touch with a few fellow bikers on craigslist and met up with a guy who sold me another set of drop handlebars and a set of road tires. i love meeting people and talking about bikes with them. this guy rode up on his track bike which was clean and basically simple to the point of being almost only a frame. he carried the tires, tubes, and apparently enough parts to almost make a complete bike, on his back, because he had gone around selling parts on craigslist all weekend. we chatted about track wheels vs traditional road wheels and how to use wd-40 to clean handle bar tape gunk.

so then i went home and put together the wheels for my old scwhinn revival. i used to have a set of thicker (>23 mm) wheels whose bearings were also worn and i had removed them to try to clean...but now i have a set of thinner wheels i had bought, a set of tires i just bought, and when i put them together they were a nice, sleek setup. so i had the bullhorns on the frame already, i put the two wheels on, and installed an old noseless bike saddle that i had spray painted because it was shockingly pink before. i had one bike chain left, and it happened to be a single speed which fit pretty well - i had to take off 6 links for it to fit on the largest gear in front and the 2nd smallest on the rear wheel.

i took the bike for a spin despite not having brakes. it starts a bit slow but it seems to have a good top speed because of the gear ratio - my other single speed has a bit too low of a gear ratio so i have to pedal a bit too fast. and thus my old heavy schwinn is on its way to becoming a cool cambridge city bike with bullhorn handles, a noseless saddle, and sleek wheels. can't wait to ride this one around.

new office

We just moved to a new office this week, and we got all kinds of fancy new modular furniture. so one of the things that is possible with this stuff is that the desks can be raised and i can set myself up with a standing height keyboard and monitor. apparently that's alot healthier for you than sitting at a desk 8 hours a day. Although most of these studies seem a bit exaggerated. however, why not give it a try? it might keep me from falling asleep sometime. next step: treadmill desk.

black friday my ass

i've decided that black friday is a complete waste of time.

yesterday i was quite insomniac in the evening, despite a large and pretty heavy thanksgiving dinner. i played dragon age late into the night and soon i decided it might be worthwhile to stay up to see what black friday deals are available, even though i had sworn i wouldn't do any of this stupid consumerist nonsense this year.

i remembered the one thing i did kind of want - a dremel set - and home depot would be a good place to go because i needed to return some other stuff and buy more plastic wrap for the windows. so i looked it up, there seemed to be a deal, and off i set toward home depot.

but first i wanted to check on microcenter - they have some sort of deal for a GPS system, who doesnt? but compared to amazon, this garmin nuvi seemed to be a pretty good deal in store. so i drive there first, which is the complete opposite direction of home depot.

there is a line of people waiting outside, and in my mind i think maybe microcenter opens at 8 (it's only 7) and i laugh at the fools standing outside in the rain waiting for the doorbuster. then i drive to home depot, get a nice dremel for $20 less than its usual price, and start heading back. it's now 7:45 as i pull into microcenter. the line's a bit longer but not appreciably. and i get tired. so i decide to take a nap until 8:05, just to let everyone bust in the door, do their thing, and if there's still a nuvi left i'd take it.

at 8:05 there's still a line that's not moving. i take another 10 minute nap. by this time i am dreaming of all sorts of weird things in my car. when i wake up, i notice the same people in line, but one or two people are exiting the store. what, they let you in one by one to buy what you want, then force everyone else to wait outside, prioritized by who is the most greedy and willing to get up at ungodly hours to buy temporary happiness in the form of portable electronics? yes.

some part of me, whether it's pride, laziness, or sleep deprivation, forbade me to enter that charade. i was already ashamed of having come to microcenter twice after declaring to everyone at thanksgiving dinner that i would not be up at 5 to shop. i drove home, happy to be free of this consumer culture that plagues america. i went home happily with a dremel set.

of course, now that i'm on the computer i went back onto amazon...they have an online black friday special as well...so i got a different gps system for a bit less, and it's probably the same anyways. so yes, i did succumb to the greed of america. but i did it in a modern way.

motorcycle tales 2

recently i was able to finish my motorcycle light installation. this is kind of how it went.

after taking out the old lights, reusing the wires that connected to the motorcycle by twisting the wires together with the new light fixtures, and using a 1003 bulb instead of a 1073 bulb, it was time to make things permanent. i bought a soldering iron but it didnt have a stand (i later saw the actual stand) so i used what i could - an empty wine bottle makes a the perfect classy soldering iron stand.



after soldering, the lights were in their fixtures and ready to be inserted. I used a dremel that the bus driver from work loaned me. dremels are useful tools. i was able to cut a small hole in the fairing of the motorcycle where the old lights attached, without doing too much damage. and finally, the lights just slid right in, the base plate fit well, and the wires clipped right into the old attachments inside the bike.

my stomach as a child

i was browsing reddit today and randomly came across a post reminding us how this got us all free pizzas as a child:



it randomly brought up a memory of when i was in elementary school. there was a program (school district sponsored?) where if you get a good report card, straight A's or gold stars or whatever they give you in elementary school, you could take the report card to redeem a personal size pizza.

we did it once. we took the report card to the local Kmart. and turns out you get the pizza from the layaway department, the place in the way back of the store where returns are processed. i wonder why they have pizzas there too. but i got my personal pizza, it was a small, circular cheese pizza, cut into four slices. i guess i was expecting one of the gooey cheese and pepperoni pizzas you see in ninja turtles. but oh well, it was free food, and we were a chinese immigrant family.

but maybe it was my lactose intolerance, but i ate a quarter of that pizza on the way back, and immediately felt sick, and threw up all the pizza in the car. i never finished the rest of the pizza, and never got straight A's again. well, not as far as Kmart could tell.

corner office conversations

I have my office on kind of a corner in the hallway - where it starts to change direction. for some reason, that makes snippets of conversation much easier to hear. as people come around the corner, their conversation instantly becomes audible, then almost instantly goes out of range, giving me a short window to listen in at the most strange moments.

overheard today:

A: beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
B: well, i guess so...
A: i mean, it's all a concept.
B: well is it new bacon, or is it "been in your mouth" bacon?
A: oh, of course it's new bacon!
B: ok then of course that makes sense.

woot!

last week, i officially successfully got my first bag of crap on woot.com. w00t! after a week of waiting, and receiving a ton of other things (a monopod from woot, motorcycle pants, a package of amazon food, and a soldering iron, see previous post) i finally got the bag of crap today.

and it came in a huge box that weighed 4.1 lbs so from the start i knew it wasn't a big screen tv or an xbox 360. but all i wanted was for there to be NO screaming woot monkey. those things suck ass.

and the official stash is:

3 garden sprinkler stakes (looked like sais to me)
3 hdmi cable bending connectors
1 pga golf hat
1 pga bookbag
1 carabiner camera - pink with flowers
1 citronella mosquito repellant lamp

kinda cool - no real bags of crap.

motorcycle tales

i received a package recently that was sent from thailand with very unreadable markings on it. i was scared for a second then i realized i had purchased some flush mount turn signals from a company called asiancycle.com, and it turns out they are located in thailand and ship direct. so here's the blog story documenting my first attempt at modding my bike with aftermarket products.




near the end of summer (september) i was riding down broadway and had a small accident. it was basically caused by the lack of paving on prospect which was a huge mess at that time, a little girl on a tricycle crossing the road, and a left turn. i remember thinking this is a typical accident situation, when my eyes met hers, then her dad's eyes, and i knew i had to stop and risk the skid. my back wheel slid out and i remember looking sideways at the road and my bike handle bars, and thinking SHIT my light broke off.

after the father helped me pick up my bike i rode off again after taking some pictures...but those are pretty useless so i never did anything with them. my knee kind of hurt and had a small scrape through the jeans, but my shoulder and arm were perfectly fine. i didn't even notice that the armored jacket had gotten scratched up until later...thank goodness for shoulder pads.

so i took the opportunity to replace my turn signals with flush mounts, which i feel might look better, and definitely won't snap off next time i take a fall. they came a few weeks after i ordered them, with everything except instructions.



then i had to search around to figure out how to install them. fortunately, keithinasia is a very popular seller and provider of kawasaki ninja 250 lights, and there are many forums where people have complete instructions on how to install his flush mounts. so the only thing i could do was go in, and try to pull out the lights.

the light fixture itself was attached by a few screws which came out easily. the wiring kind of plugged into another pair of wires that were inside the motorcycle frame and harder to get to, but they were pretty easy to pop out of the connector. however, i found out that the original bulb does not fit inside the flush mount enclosure - it was a 1073 bulb, and i had to go to advance autoparts to buy a similar but smaller bulb (1003). however, later i plugged it in and it works just as well, and is bright enough.

i would use the old fixture's wire connectors by cutting them off and soldering it to the wires on the flush mount fixture. i plugged everything in and hooked it back into the motorcycle and the turn signals seem to work fine. the next step would be to actually cut the fairing on the motorcycle so the back of the flush mount fits...because if the front is flush, all the crap sticks out the back. that's to come later.

food cravings

i want ramen (the college kind, with spam and an egg...thanks to silly facebook posts).
i want wonton soup.

on motorcycles and other mounts

today i realized why some motorcycles are cool to ride. one thing that makes a sport bike cool is the way the tail rises up, and the back wheel is almost not connected to the rest of the body. you look at this bike and you think wow it's like riding on something that's flying in the air.



then i realized maybe a part of me has always wanted to be in those cartoons/fairytales where you can ride a flying insect.



maybe i should call my motorcycle dragonfly from now on.

fall sunday night

it's chilly again. mainly it's the feeling that the weather is changing again and another year is truly passing. somehow this year i feel it sharper than before - it's like i could pinpoint the moment my windows started being chilly instead of breezy. this past week it started getting cold in the mornings and today was the first of many where it is harder to get out of bed than usual because it's so cold outside of my blankets. i ride around and there's a shuffle of leaves and crunching acorns under my wheels, and my hands become ice cold from not wearing gloves while biking. maybe the fickle boston weather will bring us some heat again. but it's the first real taste of the crisp air all day long, and the first real need of my peacoat and beanie. it is definitely fall.

more motorcycle documentaries

i've become a bit of a bike nut. and a documentary nut. here's a touching little story.

this kid can play

i want to enjoy something as much as he does. i get the same look of pleasure on my face as he does when i surf a good wave...that's about the only time i can think of that.

dansons sous la plue

edit: it was removed from youtube but another version (official?) now exists.

rollercoaster

i have a fear of roller coasters. and i will never go on one. i can simply experience it from the poor schmucks who get tricked into them for the first time by their so called friends. for example, this guy.



this is exactly what i would be like but worse, i'd be freaking the shit out and tearing out my hair in the first 5 seconds of the clip. "are we done? are we done?" apparently that was a gameshow. a cruel, cruel gameshow.