Dad's Patent

Almost 50 years after he filed it, here is my Dad's patent on Google.

Early Music for Electronica

So, last week I bought the highly acclaimed independent video game Darwina. If you look at the screen shots, the whole aesthetic is of primitive 70's/80's video games (although rendered in a 3D that was impossible back then). Additionally, for their sound track they use a genre of music I never knew existed, Demoscene Music. Basically, music written and performed on long-obsolete music chips from old hardware (Atari ST machines, for example). You could call it a digital parallel to the Early Music phenomenon in classical music.

Some links:

Scene Music
DMA-SC
Trash80

It's so delightfully (and authentically!) retro, I'm really enjoying it.

I Look Forward to Killing You Soon

One of the most spot-on funny sites on the web, Ask a Ninja. Go see it!

Sick

Been sick with a cold since Wednesday, probably going back to work tomorrow. Still coughing nastily as I type this. Blech!

Being home made me realize how hard Diane works when I'm at the office. Normally, she's half-asleep when I leave and making dinner when i get home, so i don't see how much she does. She studies like a fiend, and all by herself! And she dotes on our two cats. And does lots of boring chores that I always attempt to appreciate and thank her for, but lets face it, laundry is a hard task to throw oneself into with gusto. Yay for Diane!

History of micro-computer TV ads

Oh, that finger move Shatner does on the VIC-20 ad was long parodied by my brother and I.

Computer ads

Cat and a Tissue Box

Cat with head stuck in tissue box, or clumsy semi-robotic feline?

Do not Gaze at my Gazebo

We'd ordered from Smith & Hawken a nice metal gazebo to go over our new outdoor table and chair set, and it arrived on Thursday. But the boxes were pretty banged up, so Diane cleverly signed for as damaged. My friend John came over on Sunday to help me set it up, and we noticed that two of the corner pieces had pretty serious dents in them, and then noticed that at least one of the long metal bars that connect the corners was no longer truely straight. So we decided to return the whole thing, and really, it's probably nicer without a gazebo, since the nice thing about a yard in San Francisco is having long sight lines with no interruptions.

A little disappointing to do all that work and not have anything to look at afterwards, but John and I did go to Spices on 8th Ave. for lunch, and that was really freaking good.

Deadwood Pancakes

For anyone who is a fan of the HBO series Deadwood (Diane isn't, but I am), this short film will amuse.

Now With Motion Pictures

Added my first item to Google Video (a birthday video from Clark). Link is on my main page. More to come.

Spent much of the weekend using Picasa to post pictures to my Picasaweb account. It's really so much easier to do than it was with my old system, so there's already hundreds more pictures up than the old site ever had. I'm only up to 2002 so far, so plenty more to add.

Happy Birthday to my baby

Yesterday was Diane's birthday, so I took her out to a meal at
vegetarian stronghold Greens in Fort Mason. The fog was just rolling in
as we sat by the windows. We don't eat out much these days, so it was a
treat, and the Chocolate Marquis was a just yummy desert.

Hmmmm, I've been quiet for a while. Let me explain.

As of January or so, the computer in my garage that mahlen.org ran on for many years would no longer start. Probably a burned out power supply, and it was a weird computer from 1998, so I was unclear on the availability of a replacement. "Great!", thought I, "I've been working on a port of mahlen.org to Ruby on Rails for a while, so I'll just host at a real hosting service for a change (i.e., not inside my house), and lower my electric bill to boot."

Then our main computer, the one that I had written that port on, and also the one Diane used for grad school, that very important computer, stopped booting due to hard disk errors. Any recent backups? Ha, I say, ha! Oh, it was to laugh. After giving some serious money to the nice folks at Drive Savers, we had our data back. But my MySQL setup was hidden from me. So, to get the Ruby on Rails port of mahlen.org working, i would have had to recreate a bunch of state. Plus, there were a few months of posts that were still trapped on the old computer in the garage, and I was afraid they might be lost forever. It was all very depressing, and I was rather disinclined to think about it all.

And did I mention that I was trying to get up to speed at Google during all this? Just a bit busy there, too.

So, I now officially give up. Now that My Esteemed Employer has some form of almost all the things my site did, I'm going to stitch together my site from various online services, and let other people worry about backups and restarting machines and so on.

More soon.