Monday
October 13th, 2008

Last weekend, Cieply and I made another trip to Nine Corners to clean up some old problems and possibly work on some new ones. I was hoping to knock off The Origin, Everything in the Bible is True, Pop or Drop, or Chillin', but managed to send none of them. Progress was made on all though, so the next trip should see at least a few new sends. We also met a few guys there who climbed somewhat close to our range, so we worked a few problems with them before Cieply had to leave to get to work.

Tuesday, I drove down to Hamilton to check out Colgate's climbing gym. The guys we met on Saturday were also climbing there that night. It's a small gym with mostly vertical walls, but the back wall has a nice overhanging cave-like area. Worth the 40-minute trip and $5 admission (for non-students). Probably will be spending a massive chunk of my free time there over the winter.

Hamilton College also has a monster climbing gym, but unfortunately only open to students. It's rough being one of the proletariat.

Saturday, Cieply and I made our first trip to Snowy Mountain in two years. Again, two of the guys we'd met the previous week (Adam and Brian) showed up to climb. As is typical for me lately, I didn't come back with any difficult sends, but managed to eek out an 11-point day of mostly easy V0 to V3 problems. Everyone but me sent Direct Pile, but I made enough progress to feel good about sending next time. Coitus and IHOPP have a chance of coming down this season too, depending on my training, or lack of.

Friday
September 19th, 2008

Very little can usually be said about Utica's weekend music scene, but... wow. This weekend we have:

• The Utica Music Fest
• Lupe Fiasco at the Stanley Theatre
• Lifehouse, also at the Stanley Theatre
• Rusted Root at the Saranac Brewery
• Alarm WIll Sound at Hamilton College

Granted, I'm not a huge fan of any of the above. My interest in Lifehouse and Rusted Root probably comes from long-lost and inaccurate high school memories. I'm impressed by Lupe Fiasco's first album, but haven't bothered with his second. Hard to say how well he translates into a live show. Alarm Will Sound is, I think, a classical collective of sorts. They released an album of acoustic Aphex Twin covers a few years ago. I'd see 'em based on that alone.

Really not sure what to make of the Utica Music Fest. With over 200 bands expected to show up, at least a few should be decent.

But none of that really matters, since I'm going to Albany for the weekend. Nice planning, Zac.

Thursday
September 18th, 2008

Keeping up with this writing nonsense is about as difficult as I remember. Activities requiring diligence and consistency generally give me trouble. It doesn't help that most of the past month has been: eat, sleep, work, exercise, drink beer, go climbing. (Though less of the beer drinking than usual, I'm pleased to report. The end of Saranac Thursdays for the summer has helped.) I'm not sure the Internet wants to hear about my recent workout and diet discoveries.

Ha! Sorry, Internet. You'll have to humor me.

So, as mentioned, I've been doing a lot of training for climbing. Mostly on my HIT strips, but Cieply's also gotten me into some free weights -- dead lifts and barbell rows, mostly. After a bit of web research on lifting form, I found stronglifts.com. Specifically, the article on gaining weight for skinny guys. Which was obviously written specifically for me. So that's been occupying a lot of my free time.

Apparently if I want to get stronger, I also need to eat more. Especially protein. So, as a vegetarian, I've been doing a bunch of research on non-meat protein sources. And it turns out it's not that hard for vegetarians (and even vegans) to get enough protein. The tricky part is getting complete protein.

So far I've learned:

The human body creates muscle by combining twenty amino acids to form protein. Twelve of those can be synthesized by the body, but the other eight must come from food. Those eight are called the essential amino acids. Animal-based foods generally contain all of the essential amino acids; therefore, they're complete proteins and can be converted to muscle. Most non-animal foods, in contrast, only contain a few of the essential amino acids. But, fortunately, all of the essential amino acids can be obtained by combining different foods. Rice, for example, contains some of the amino acids that black beans lack (and vice versa). Eating them together provides all of the essential amino acids. The body can stockpile excess amino acids, so complementary foods don't need to be eaten at the same meal, but my guess is that closer together is better, especially when you want your body to have immediate access to protein (after a workout).

There are also a few non-animal sources of complete proteins. I've been eating a lot of quinoa lately, having just discovered it in the grocery store. I'm still not sure about it; it has a weird nutty flavor. Very unsettling for a food that looks like couscous mixed with rice. But it's protein, easy to prepare, and tastes alright. Amaranth is another complete protein, but I've had no luck tracking it down yet. Might attempt to grow it next year.

Anyway, enough of that nonsense. I'm still a skinny doofus.

In tangentially-related news, Cieply has a new climbing blog, wherein he expresses more emotion in two sentences than I probably will over the life of this journal. But it should be interesting to have a record of his progress. And mine. I suppose I'm "gettin' psyched", as they say.

Monday
August 25th, 2008

It's been sitting on my bookshelf for over a month, but I finally got into Unreal Tournament 3 over the weekend. Predictably, online multiplayer kicked my ass, but not as bad as I'd expected. Probably due to my "hide in the corner like a little girl" strategy. Which was surprisingly effective until everyone noticed the bushes were shooting flak cannon shells at them.

On a similar note, Super Stardust HD is ridiculously entertaining. I downloaded it over the weekend for something to jump into for a few minutes at a time instead of spending all day worrying about storylines and adventures. And then played it for four hours straight. So be warned.

The weekend wasn't all video games and mindless nonsense. Coach and I (and his girlfriend and her brother) ventured up to New Hartford's Sherril Brook Park after hearing that the local Mohawk Valley Astronomy Club was holding a public viewing. The club members set up their telescopes in the park for anyone to use, and gave mini-demos and lectures as needed. Plenty of astronomy ensued. Neptune was a fuzzy bluish dot, but still very cool to see. One of the guys showed us how to use Pegasus to find the Andromeda Galaxy. Jupiter was bright and easily visible, but the highlight (for me, anyway) was its four Galilean Moons. They only appeared as tiny specks of light, but seeing another planet's moons so clearly was surreal. There were also some double stars and globular star clusters, but nothing I'd be able to locate again on my own.

So: thumbs up for astronomy. Who wants to buy me a telescope?

Maybe the stars worked some sort of stellar magic on me, but I've also decided to re-learn Calculus. So I dug out Calculus Made Easy. It turned out to be the exact opposite of easy, so I tossed it in favor of my old Calculus textbook. An hour of brain-numbing effort on what I had thought was Calculus brought me to the end of the "Preparation for Calculus" section. This will probably be more difficult than I'm hoping.

Ah, climbing update. Got back out to Moss Island for a few hours on Friday, and felt stronger than usual. Possibly the training is working. I suppose that's how it goes. Some kid watched us while we goofed around on the overhang traverses. He asked a lot of dumb, yet endearing questions, including, "are you guys pros?" So if nothing else, we have the ten-year-olds fooled.

There's also a group of retarded people that sometimes walk by in the evening while we're climbing. They're friendly, insist on shaking hands, and love to warn me, "you better not fall, or else you're going to get hurt!". I almost think my mother sent them to keep an eye on me.

Sunday
August 10th, 2008

The past few weeks have been more productive than usual, climbing-wise. Following up a multi-hour workout in my basement Friday, Cieply and I took a trip to Moss Island this morning. The rain threatened all morning, but we hoped to get at least a few good hours of climbing in. Silly idea. Thunderstorms kicked in about twenty minutes into our warmup. So we hid under the Profile Rock roof and attempted every possible traverse and eliminate until the crash pads were soaked, our shoes were slipping, and the rain finally found its way under the overhang.

So we packed up and left. The storms subsided and the sun came out immediately, of course. Since we'd only managed an hour of climbing, we headed home and put in two more hours on my basement wall (actually a set of HIT Strips with some random footholds tacked on). It was a good session -- my one-arm lockoffs still need a lot of work, but I'm finally noticing some strength improvements. I even managed to keep up with Cieply (mostly) for the entire workout. He usually runs circles around me. I'm still a scrawny pipsqueak, of course, but that's fine as long as I'm climbing hard when September and October roll around.

On non-climbing days, I've also been attempting the one hundred push ups training plan. After two weeks, I'm still keeping up, but skeptical that this is going to work.

Wednesday
August 6th, 2008

Finally figured out how to stream videos to the PS3! It only took three months of tearing my hair out. After FUPPES repeatedly kicked me in the face, I gave MediaTomb a shot, and it worked right out of the box. Almost. It only plays a handful of MPEG video formats. No .avi or .mkv support (which, luckily, is most of my movie collection).

But it's capable of transcoding those formats to MPEG on-the-fly, after a bit of configuration and a lot of help from ffmpeg. These instructions mostly worked, but needed some tweaking (liberally stolen from these instructions).

Mediatomb's config file (probably found in ~/.mediatomb/config.xml) needs to be changed as such:

First, add these extension mappings to the <extension-mimetype> section:

<map from="avi" to="video/x-divx"/>
<map from="mkv" to="video/x-matroska"/>

Next, add these profile mappings to the <mimetype-profile-mappings> section:

<transcode mimetype="video/x-divx" using="video-common"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/x-matroska" using="video-mkv"/>

And add (replace video-common) the two profiles referenced above:

<profile name="video-common" enabled="yes" type="external">
    <mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
    <accept-url>yes</accept-url>
    <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
    <hide-original-resource>yes</hide-original-resource>
    <accept-ogg-theora>yes</accept-ogg-theora>
    <agent command="mediatomb-transcode-video-common" arguments="%in %out"/>
    <buffer size="10485760" chunk-size="262144" fill-size="524288"/>
    <avi-fourcc-list mode="ignore">
        <fourcc>DX50</fourcc>
    </avi-fourcc-list>
</profile>
<profile name="video-mkv" enabled="yes" type="external">
    <mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
    <accept-url>yes</accept-url>
    <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
    <accept-ogg-theora>yes</accept-ogg-theora>
    <hide-original-resource>yes</hide-original-resource>
    <agent command="mediatomb-transcode-video-mkv" arguments="%in %out"/>
    <buffer size="10485760" chunk-size="262144" fill-size="524288"/>
</profile>

The first profile, video-common, will handle most .avi files; the second, video-mkv, handles .mkv files. Create the transcoding scripts for each somewhere in your PATH (mine are in /usr/local/bin):

/usr/local/bin/mediatomb-transcode-video-common:

#!/bin/bash

INPUT="$1"
OUTPUT="$2"
VIDEO_CODEC="mpeg2video"
VIDEO_BITRATE="4096k"
VIDEO_FRAMERATE="25"
AUDIO_CODEC="mp2"
AUDIO_BITRATE="192k"
AUDIO_SAMPLERATE="44100"
AUDIO_CHANNELS="2"
FORMAT="dvd"

exec /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i "${INPUT}" -vcodec ${VIDEO_CODEC} -b ${VIDEO_BITRATE} \
-r ${VIDEO_FRAMERATE} -acodec ${AUDIO_CODEC} -ab ${AUDIO_BITRATE} -ar ${AUDIO_SAMPLERATE} \
-ac ${AUDIO_CHANNELS} -f ${FORMAT} - > "${OUTPUT}" 2>/dev/null

/usr/local/bin/mediatomb-transcode-video-mkv:

#!/bin/bash

VIDEO_BITRATE="4096k"
VIDEO_FRAMERATE="25"

#AUDIO_CODEC="mp2"
#AUDIO_BITRATE="-ab 192k"
#AUDIO_SAMPLERATE="-ar 44100"
#AUDIO_CHANNELS="-ac 2"
#AUDIO_FREQ="-ar 48000"

FFMPEG_PATH="/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg"
INPUT="$1"
OUTPUT="$2"
VIDEO_CODEC="mpeg2video"

mkvinfo $INPUT | grep -qE 'Codec ID.*DTS'

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
AUDIO_CODEC="ac3"
AUDIO_BITRATE="-ab 640k"
AUDIO_FREQ="-ar 48000"
AUDIO_CHANNELS="-ac 6"
else
AUDIO_CODEC="copy"
AUDIO_BITRATE=""
AUDIO_FREQ=""
AUDIO_CHANNELS=""
fi

FORMAT="dvd"

exec "${FFMPEG_PATH}" -threads 2 -i "${INPUT}" -vcodec ${VIDEO_CODEC} -b ${VIDEO_BITRATE} \
-r ${VIDEO_FRAMERATE} -acodec $AUDIO_CODEC $AUDIO_BITRATE $AUDIO_FREQ $AUDIO_CHANNELS \
-f ${FORMAT} - > "${OUTPUT}" 2>/dev/null

Make sure they're executable, restart Mediatomb, and the PS3 should now recognize and play just about any .avi or .mkv you throw at it. My modest setup (AMD Athlon 4400) can transcode and stream 720p video with only occasional hiccups, but chokes on 1080p. I haven't figured out yet whether it's a limitation of the processor or of the wireless network connection, but it's good enough for now.

One other minor annoyance: you can't pause, rewind, or fast-forward .avi videos in mid-stream. The .avi format relies on an index located at the end of the file, which a streaming player obviously can't read. Not sure if there's some way to quickly rebuild the index (probably not) or move it to the beginning of the file (again, probably not). But I've already wasted plenty of time on this for one weekend. Maybe later.

Monday
August 4th, 2008

In typical (for me) fashion, I've completely ignored this journal for almost a month. This is likely a sign that I should quit now while I'm ahead, but following my intuition has never been my strong suit.

The lack of posting is partially because I'm lazy and partially because I've been busy. Mostly lazy. But finally managed to get out bouldering again after a nice ten-month rest. Cieply and I made a trip to Nine Corners (last weekend) and Little Falls (last night). Predictably, we were both in terrible shape, but managed to at least get some good training in. Should be a good fall climbing season if I can manage to not be my usual lazy ass self for a month or two.

Still don't have my license, so that means biking everywhere, or getting rides. I feel like an idiot accepting rides from people, but I guess that's because I am. So I pretty much live on the bike. Which is fun, but surprisingly unimpressive to the ladyfolk. Eh.

The DMV was entirely unhelpful when I stopped in last week to check on the status of my appeal. Apparently there's a form you can fill out to reopen a default traffic conviction (i.e. didn't bother to respond to a ticket) and reverse a license revocation. So I did, and sent it in. DMV lady, however, knew nothing of such a form, and continued to insist that I had stopped in to pay a $750 fine and apply for a new license. So that visit was rather unproductive.

Monday
July 7th, 2008

Friday was July 4th, which meant a day off from work (!) and a canoe trip down the Moose River. It's been somewhat of an annual tradition for the last decade to go canoeing with my dad, brother, uncle, and cousins, but I've been busy and missed it the last few years. It was nice to finally go again -- I forgot how much fun paddling down a river can be. Almost makes me want to dredge up the old plans to buy a canoe.

I was out of practice and crashed into about a hundred banks. But in my defense, the river is a series of snaking switchbacks. And we still moved faster than everyone else on the river (there's a canoe/kayak rental shop near the end of our route, which seems to entice uncoordinated tourists to try their luck at not drowning).

After the trip, we hung out with a few (or more) beers at Uncle Bill's camp in Old Forge for the evening, enjoying the ridiculously nice weather. Then off to Inlet to watch fireworks. Then one or two more beers with my brother and his friends in front of the fire, where I fell asleep. Not a terrible Independence Day.

Saturday was spent watching my brother play a softball tournament in Croghan. Having no license means being at the whim of anyone with a vehicle. In this case, my parents. So we drove straight from Inlet to Croghan, which is actually kind of a nice town. Not much going on, but it's a nice, lazy, friendly place... that supposedly makes world-famous bologna. I suspect "world-famous" may not be entirely accurate, since I've never heard of it and I live an hour away. But I'm not exactly up on the bologna scene, so who knows.

Tuesday
July 1st, 2008

Since ordering the Veganomicon a few weeks ago, I've been trying to cook a recipe from it at least every few days.

Tonight was Spicy Tempeh and Broccoli Rabe with Rotelle. As is typical, I was lacking some ingredients and didn't feel like making a trip to the store. So substitutions were made: instead of broccoli rabe (which is... what?) and ground oregano, I used regular broccolio and some fresh leaves from my oregano plant. Also, I don't have a clue what fennel seeds are, so those got the boot. Oh, and vodka instead of white wine (which I swore I had). The broccoli ended up with a faint vodka taste, which I guess I should have expected. You can't just mix and match alcohol for cooking, huh? Everything else was great, except for the tempeh... although I don't like tempeh to begin with, so I'm not sure why I keep cooking it and expecting it to magically become edible.

So I pretty much had a plate full of pasta and broccoli doused in olive oil. It was a good one though. The full recipe seems like it would be good in the hands of a competent cook. Or, y'know, even someone who bothers to use the correct ingredients (hint: not me).

Motorcycle's revving his engine on the street outside. At midnight on a Tuesday. Awesome.

Tuesday
July 1st, 2008

One nice thing about a suspended license is that it forces me to bike to work on rainy days when I'd otherwise be lazy and drive.

I suppose that's also one of the annoying things about a suspended license.

Monday
June 30th, 2008

There was a torrential downpour last night, so I decided to go for a little jog. I actually like running in the rain, since I normally sweat and overheat like a fat man. And I figured that the rain would keep the usual Utica riffraff indoors. It did, mostly. Some homeless guy threw up on the sidewalk, then stared me down. Four thuggish young men angrily informed the empty street (or possibly me) that "niggas don't fuck with us" as I ran by. Dogs barked at me more than usual. No major incidents though. Well, mostly. Thanks to darkness and Yorkville's sporadic sidewalks, I ran face-first into a mile marker sign on the side of the road. Ended up a with a nice bloody gash on my forearm. I'll probably live.

It felt like at least 8 or 9 miles, but when I got home and retraced my route on the Google Maps pedometer, it turned out only to be a 10k. Which is a lot better than my typical half-assed training runs, I guess, but I should be doing more if I want to run a pleasant Boilermaker this year.

Oh, my license was suspended today. Blargh.

Sunday
June 29th, 2008

Today was brewing day! Finally got around to beginning my first homebrew beer adventure this afternoon. My hands still smell like grain, which probably isn't a good sign (should I even be touching anything?). The process went smoothly, although I'm a little nervous about whether I sanitized everything well enough. The online brewing gestapo has me worried that my beer will turn toxic if I even look at it funny.

I've yet to find a good online beginner's resource for homebrewing. There's lots of information out there, but nothing (as far as I know) that says, "hey, here's the equipment and ingredients you'll need to get started, and here's how to do it." It's actually ridiculously easy, once you figure out the difference between full and partial boils, whether you need carboys (and what the hell a carboy even is), and such. I should get off my lazy ass and write something up before I get too comfortable and forget all the moronic novice questions that I've been asking lately.

Saturday
June 28th, 2008

I'm recovering from a bit of a cold, so decided to talk to Coach today using OS X's say command. It's fun. You can do something like this:

say this is a huge waste of time;

And the computer will say, in its default "Alex" voice, "this is a huge waste of time." There are other voices too, which can be invoked with the -v flag:

say -v Ralph this presents too many opportunities for adolescent humor; 

The list of voices can be found in /System/Library/Speech/Voices/:

Agnes Albert Alex BadNews Bahh Bells Boing Bruce Bubbles Cellos Deranged Fred GoodNews Hysterical Junior Kathy Organ Princess Ralph Trinoids Vicki Victoria Whisper Zarvox

Since I'm an immature child, this obviously led to a variety of amusing obscenities. Then Coach begged to try it. So he spoke in "Alex" for nearly two hours while I started in on Gaia's Garden, a book about permaculture that Brian recommended to me. Despite the unfortunately new-age-y title, it seems very practical and grounded so far. From what I've been told, permaculture is, essentially, an agricultural system that focuses on working with the land and its natural tendencies, rather than against it.

Yeah. I know, new age nonsense. Not entirely ridiculous though.

For example, growing plants in "guilds" that naturally reinforce each other. The common example I've heard thrown around is corn, beans, and squash: corn grown in the center provides a pole for beans to climb, and squash grown on the perimeter prevents soil erosion.

Another example, cited in the book, is setting up a hedge barrier around a property to manage gluttonous deer. Planting deer-friendly vegetation on the outer edge keeps the deer from venturing inside and chomping on the real goods.

I'm especially intrigued by the idea of the niche cascade -- that one can build miniature self-managing ecosystems. For example, planting rows upon rows of densely-packed tomatoes will primarily attract predators who want to feast on tomatoes. But planting a variety of plants in a system together will attract a variety of creatures who will keep each other in check.

There's obviously a lot more to it. I have no idea whether any of this actually works, but it's interesting enough to try. Photos and write-ups to follow! (Except in the likely event that I fail miserably. Then I'll delete this post and pretend it never happened.)

Oh, about the photo. I picked and ate a bowl of blackberries from the yard today. There's probably enough left out there (not ripe yet) to make a few pies, but I don't imagine I'll have the ambition to actually learn to make blackberry pie.

Saturday
June 28th, 2008

So I upgraded the Ubuntu box to Hardy Heron a few weeks ago. The upgrade didn't complain too much, so I assumed it went well. I've since been happily interacting with it via SSH. But this morning I was foolish enough to attempt a GUI session.

Upon reboot, the login screen came up fine. Logged in and... nothing. Blank screen. Not a big deal, xorg.conf was probably whacked in the upgrade. So, as usual:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

But rather than video settings, it just asked a bunch of questions about my keyboard layout. (How hard can it be to autoconfigure a keyboard?) Upon another reboot, still a blank screen. A bit of Googling revealed that xserver-xorg doesn't do much in Hardy anymore. There's a GTK-based utility, but (as the previous link points out), a GTK application is quite unhelpful if you can't actually start a graphical session. It's almost as if they dreamt up the most ironic catch-22 possible, and implemented it for amusement's sake.

I'm not going to waste my day debugging this nonsense, so I can live with a GUI-free system for now. Which is sort of annoying, 'cause if I'm going to be running a headless server, Ubuntu's not exactly the go-to guy.

Wednesday
June 25th, 2008

Today was supposed to be development run night, but I'm fending off a cold and trying to rest up so I'm in good enough shape to make it to Saranac Thursday tomorrow. My priorities are terrible, I know.

So instead of running, I biked down to the Utica Marsh to grab some photos of the graffiti on the bridges. It's nothing special, but there's one particular "I Love Utica" robot that I find amusing. The bright evening sunlight filtering through the trees pretty much ruined it though, so I'll probably make another morning trip one of these weekends.

More pictures were taken, following by a leisurely bicycle jaunt home through some of Utica's finest areas. Which really aren't that fine at all.

And then there were fireworks. Have no idea what was the occasion, but they appeared to be coming from the baseball park down the block. Coach and I checked 'em out from the back deck for a few minutes, then I grabbed my camera and wandered over to the park for some pictures. Nothing terribly good came of it, since I didn't have a tripod or time to fiddle with shutter speeds and apertures much, but I managed to dash off a dozen or so blurry shots.

Tuesday
June 24th, 2008

What's with all the hype over Git lately? It sounds awfully powerful, but the learning curve is intimidating. Although it's entirely possible that I'm just either 1. too lazy or 2. too dumb to grasp it properly. Still, I have this nagging feeling that it must somehow be superior to CVS and SVN. Not that I even have a problem with CVS or SVN. So I'm not sure why I'm worried about this in the first place.

The Ruby on Rails guys seem fond of Git, which sort of scares me away. Since, after all, they're fond of Ruby on Rails.

I finally fixed my bike wheels last night. And by "fixed", I mean "replaced with new ones." A series of six flat tires in two weeks eventually convinced me that the 37-year-old wheels were toast. (Truing, replacing wheel tape, and sanding rough edges were ineffective.) But, like every other project I dive into, I know absolutely nothing about replacing bike wheels, so I shouldn't have been surprised when moving the freewheel from the old tire to the new one turned from annoying and problematic to completely impossible.

Turns out you need a special tool to detach the freewheel from the hub, which none of the bike shops in my area sell (I needed the Sun Tour 2 prong). But a helpful kid working at Dick Sonne's bike shop offered to help me out. He did it for free, so I imagine I'll probably end up back there out of guilt, happily wasting money on bike supplies I don't need.

The derailleur seems a bit finnicky now, so I probably messed up something else along the way. But at least the bike rolls again. And I have shiny new rims to impress the ladies.

Monday
June 23rd, 2008

The weekend finally presented an opportunity to finish all the gardening miscellanea that's been nipping at my heels.

Coach's girlfriend stopped by on Saturday with some herb donations that she didn't have room for in her own garden: basil, oregano, parsley, spearmint, and chives. Also, a trumpet vine. I'd never heard of a trumpet vine, but Wikipedia quotes such as "highly invasive", "may dismember them in the process", and "ruthless pruning is recommended" lead me to believe it will probably eat my house.

While preparing those, we stumbled across some lemon balm and lamb's ear that the house's previous owners must have planted. The lamb's ear is ridiculously ugly, but feels nice and soft. Like a lamb's ear, I suppose. The lemon balm is more exciting, mostly for its cooking potential. And it might be tasty in, umm, an alcoholic beverage or two.

If you squint just right, you might see my homemade tomato cages. I finished building the last of them Saturday evening, out of concrete remesh sheets (roughly $6.75 per 3½' x 7' sheet at Home Depot). They were relatively easy to build:

1. Using wire cutters, cut each sheet widthwise into two pieces
2. Bend/roll each piece lengthwise into a 3½' high cylinder (mine were more heptagonal than circular)
3. Standing the cylinder on end, snip off the bottom horizontal wires, so the base becomes a series of "stakes"

These can easily be pressed into the ground without hammering or staking, and should provide a solid support for the tomatoes.

Most sources seem to recommend diameters of 18 to 30 inches for each cage. I built them about 13 inches so they'd fit in my 15-inch square plots, and to squeeze two out of a sheet. Your mileage may vary. I suspect my tomato plants are planted too densely, but hope they'll prove me wrong.

Plastic fencing was also installed around the edges of the garden, to keep the critters from snacking on my harvest. It's been effective so far, but they may just be waiting for the good stuff to show up.

Friday
June 20th, 2008

My cucumber and cantaloupe spouts were chewed up by some woodland critter today. He (she?) also sampled a few swiss chard leaves, but left them mostly alone. As I'm a bit of a gardening novice, I'm not quite sure how to deal with these things. For now, I'll probably just hack together some cheap plastic fencing and hope these guys don't know how to dig. Or jump.

Friday
June 20th, 2008

The term "fish tacos" always makes me giggle. I'm very juvenile.

It's hard to tell for sure, but I think I woke up drunk this morning. Thursday nights aren't doing any favors for my liver.

Thursday
June 19th, 2008

Holy lord. Stopped for gas on the way back from lunch: $54.38. Seriously? I haven't paid much attention to gas prices lately, but wow. I remember when it only took $15 to fill up my 12-gallon tank. Good thing I finally picked up some new bike tires yesterday.

Wednesday
June 18th, 2008

I ran the 10K development run tonight at the parkway, against my better judgment. My ITBS has been acting up since last week, so I expected I'd have to stop and turn around by the first mile. Worked out alright though -- no knee pain at all, and I finished faster than I'd expected. Doping up on ibuprofen and Zyflamend all day didn't hurt, I bet. But still, good news. Unless I do something stupid (very possible), it looks like I'll make it to the Boilermaker. Which is mostly just an excuse to drink beer at 10am.

Hmm, yeah. Now my knee's starting to swell. I guess running when I knew better already counts as "something stupid".

Coach stayed home and played video games instead of running. Not a bad idea.

I haven't played it yet, so I'm most likely being presumptuous, but I'm confused by all the hype over Grand Theft Auto 4. Coach just runs around stealing cars, frequenting strip clubs, and killing people. Yeah, I realize there's more to it than that, but I'd only put it in the "mildly interesting" category, not "almost the best game ever."

The game does occasionally manage to impress me. Its soundtrack is great. Coach was riding around in a stolen car last night with Aphex Twin on the radio. I find myself sitting on the couch watching him play just to hear the different cars' music. Until I get frustrated by his inability to read the onscreen map.

But I still don't get it. Maybe I need to become invested in the story or something, but what is this, drama club? If I'm playing games, I want games. This trend of epic story games is becoming irritating in general. Portal's story was fun (and I'm told the Half Life series is similar), but only because the gameplay was engaging. Incidentally, I realize this is probably why I haven't made it to the end of a novel since the age of 12. Fiction just bores the crap out of me.

Tuesday
June 17th, 2008

Coach and I have been bickering about the necessity/cost of an air conditioner for the house lately. I'm in the "quit your whining, you're not going to melt" camp, in contrast to his "I'm willing to shell out money for a perfectly climate-controlled environment" attitude. I didn't entirely refuse to get one, but I made it clear I'd be spending no money on such frivolities.

So Coach called my bluff and bought one anyway. And then I whined about how I wasn't going to pay for any of the electricity it used. I eventually relented on that point, but not before ordering a Kill A Watt meter to measure the power consumption of Coach's ridiculous new appliance.

It finally showed up today, so I set about measuring some of the random electronics strewn about the house. The results were somewhat surprising:

Along with the Kill A Watt, I received 15 large bags of salt and vinegar Kettle Chips from Amazon. I don't even really eat chips much, but hey, they were 40% off.

Tuesday
June 17th, 2008

Finally managed to do some grocery shopping last night. Giant burritos were tempting me all day, but I figured it'd be cheaper to make my own. (Haven't actually done the math, but did I spend $7 on burrito ingredients? Hope not.)

There was an attractive girl in the checkout line next to me. She became less attractive when I saw she was only buying prune juice.

It's interesting how laziness can be self-reinforcing. Since my bike's been out of commission for the past two weeks, I've been driving to work. Paradoxically, I feel more tired and less motivated when I don't get to bike a few miles a day. Walking to the grocery store gave me a nice energy boost, though. Not enough to accomplish anything serious, but at least enough to toss a few burritos together. Which ended up mediocre and likely unhealthy, but probably better than the bowl of gummy bears I'd have snacked on otherwise.

Had a beer with Coach when he got home from wherever he hide all day. It's almost a chore trying to slog through the remainder of the Caramel Porter case I picked up a while back. I guess "stocking up" on a bunch of untried beer was a rather poor idea (in contrast to all of my other beer-related decisions).

Speaking of beer... if the UPS man shows up today like he's supposed to, some sort of brewing disaster should take place this weekend. Given my inability to handle even a frying pan competently, I probably shouldn't be venturing into the land of homebrewing. Even so, I'm excited about the undrinkable swill that's bound to show up in six weeks or so.

Sunday
June 15th, 2008

I forgot to brush my teeth today.

Or, rather, I never got around to it. Days without toothbrushes are rare, and typically indicate that I lazed about and accomplished nothing.

Today was a bit different. After wasting (i.e. enjoying) roughly 8 hours yesterday playing Burnout Paradise, today should have been a frenzy of productivity.

I woke up early to clean the kitchen. Halfway through organizing the recyclables closet, my parents stopped by for their usual after-church Sunday morning coffee routine. After some chit-chat and pastries, they left and I got back to the kitchen. But amateur cleaning requires music, so I took a "quick break" to put together a playlist.

Lately I've been fiddling around with FUPPES, trying to get it to stream movies and music from my Ubuntu server to the PS3. It mostly works, but the PS3 won't play .mkv video files. Which is inconvenient, since my movie library is entirely .mkv files. No problem though, since FUPPES claims it can use ffmpeg to transcode to x264 on-the-fly. But ffmpeg is wary of building with libx264 support. And when it finally conceded, FUPPES wouldn't build with that ffmpeg. So I wasted an hour failing to make that all work, even though my current task (cleaning music!) didn't require video at all, much less on-the-fly transcoding.

And that left me with a broken setup, which wouldn't even play music. Negative progress so far. So more time was spent returning it to a working state. Then I hit the home stretch, configuring the network. I would soon have been enjoying some audio-enhanced domestic productivity, had I not needed to fiddle with the server's IP address. Which, of course, led to "Gee, does my router do static DHCP? It probably should. I'll set it up quick."

It doesn't. Entirely distracted, I went searching for alternate open-source firmwares. When I last checked a year ago, DD-WRT didn't support newer versions of the Linksys WRT54G (I have v8.0). Now it does (one especially magical property of the Internet is that if you wait around long enough for something, you'll probably get it). Tack on another hour to unearth the proper firmware files, flash the router, mutter and pace in frustration after ostensibly bricking it, realize I'd skipped part of the directions, fix my mistake, finish the flash, putter around exploring DD-WRT for a while, and finally set up new static IPs for the various internet enabled devices around the house.

So music was had and the cleaning could finally be done, and it was. Lunchtime rolled around, so I boiled and ate six of the eggs my mom brought from a friend's farm. They were good, but six eggs isn't exactly a proper lunch. I'd need to make up for it with dinner, so a grocery shopping excursion was planned. And along the way, perhaps stop by some local greenhouses and grab some vegetables (kale, maybe?) to fill out the last few rows of the garden.

But then Coach arrived home and distracted me wondering how to display his digital camera photos on the TV. Which got me thinking that I'd like to see my digital photos on the TV too. But they're all stored on Flickr, and while I could plug my laptop into the TV and load up flickr.com, what I'd really like to do is view them directly from the PS3. (The naive tech snob in me will tolerate nothing less than total digital convergence.) A quick Googling confirmed that the PS3 will only display photos directly from its hard drive or from shared UPnP media servers. But hey, FUPPES is a UPnP server (!), so if I can somehow get my Flickr photos on the Ubuntu box, the PS3 will slurp 'em right up. I don't really care to copy my billion gigabytes of photos from Flickr though, so that seemed to be a dead end.

Having skipped the day's grocery shopping trip, this would have been a nice time to wander down the street for a burrito.

But then I stumbled across flickrfs, a FUSE plugin that lets you browse Flickr sets, tags, and photostreams as if they were folders on your PC. Exactly what I need! More researching, downloading, compiling, cursing, recompiling, and installing. Argh. But it worked, and eventually I ended up with a "folder" full of my Flickr photos.

Expecting the PS3 to read these photos was sadly optimistic. Half an hour of hacking later, the PS3 steadfastly refused to acknowledge the presence of these new pseudo-photos.

Defeated and lacking burritos (the shop closed two hours ago!), I finally brushed my teeth and decided to start a journal, so at least maybe I'd feel like I accomplished something for the day.