December 3, 2006
10:04 PM - add new comment
I am going to sum up the last couple of months by saying "Hey, I moved into my first apartment!".

In reality, it was a very drawn out process that is finally coming to a closure. The biggest factor is that my dad moved into a new house at the same time. And let me say that after 12 years of living in a farmhouse, we accumulated a lot of junk! Multiple yard sales, junk dealers, boxes, and bonfires later, we were finally able to get the house cleaned out.

As for me, I did not have very much stuff so the actual move was relatively painless. I actually used the opportunity to get rid of a good bit of junk too though since it was much easier than dealing with it later.

The fun part came after I moved in and realized that I needed to buy another truck load of stuff to conduct my day properly. So I pulled some money aside and bought a TV, couch, bed, carpets, and many other household items. Let me add that Robin was very helpful during the selection process as buying shower curtains and window blinds is not really my thing.

One of the things that still needs attention is the MythTV box that I plan on building to display pretty pictures on my new TV. Initially I was set on building a cube sized Micro ATX form factor PC to house all of the hardware. But I soon realized that trying to fit all of the necessary components into the little box while keeping the costs down is not very realistic. So I settled for a case that I had lying around and the following components.

• Hauppauge PVR-500 card since it has two tuners and decent Linux support
• nForce4-based Athlon 64 motherboard
• Athlon 64 3000+ processor that I have lying around
• GeForce FX5200-based graphics card with no fan
• Turtle Beach Riviera sound card since it was cheap and has working S/PDIF support in Linux
• 420 watt power supply that is quiet and not power hungry

Anyhow, I will be sure to make a post sometime in the near future on how it all works out.

August 19, 2006
11:44 PM - add new comment
I did a whole bunch of really cool things this summer, but none of them are really worth writing about at this point. The usual Eagles Mere, camping, beach, BitLeap....

More to the present, I just returned from a week at LinuxWorld in San Francisco yesterday. A small company, GroundWork sponsored me and numerous other open source project heads to attend this year. It was really cool to be able interact with developers from other open source projects (including Tobi Oetiker from RRDtool) and discuss our respective projects.

The biggest surprise of all is that all four of the additional Cacti developers managed to make it as well. This made the week much more enjoyable as we were able to hash out cool ideas, discuss the project, and eat tons of expensive food. One of the developers also took the liberty of renting a van so we spent the last day exploring the bay area.

One of my friends from elementary school whom I recently met for the first time in years happens to attend the University of San Francisco. We got together on Tuesday and hit up a cool restaurant on Haight street. Afterward we went to some upscale bar called "The Matrix" where one of his friend's band was playing. I wish I could do that more often.

On an editorial note, I ditched my old custom made photo gallery in favor of the mature Gallery project. There are photos from most of my summer events if you are interested.

June 5, 2006
10:28 PM - add new comment
Last Saturday we had our yearly LAN party hosted for the first time at the Murata Business Center. Their large conference room provided the perfect environment with plenty of table area, seating, power, and Ethernet connectivity. We played the usual Unreal Tournament 2004 and a good bit of Quake 3 Arena DM/CTF. Lots of people showed up and nothing went horribly wrong, so hopefully Murata will continue to host in the future.

While we were wrapping up the LAN party Guy gives me a call and says that the traffic to both of our colos seemed to drop off according to the Cacti graphs. Turns out an NFS mount on one of the VPN severs died. While this has happened in the past, the following kernel message which resulted from trying to unmount the NFS mount is new.

VFS: Busy inodes after unmount. Self-destruct in 5 seconds.  Have a nice day...

Luckily the box did not decide to self destruct, but it had me going for a second or two.

May 24, 2006
11:55 PM - add new comment
A couple of months ago I received an email from someone that I met briefly in high school who asked me to do an interview about Cacti for the In the Trenches podcast. Of course I agreed since it is always fun to ramble about Cacti whenever given the opportunity. We conducted the interview over the phone last week and it was packaged up and posted to their website today. The end result was surprisingly good, so be sure to check it out.

May 23, 2006
12:01 AM - add new comment
DJ Tiësto totally brought the house down with an amazing set last Thursday at club Fur. Mike and I left my house around 8:30 PM or so and ended up arriving at the club around 11:00. As I anticipated, the place was packed. You literally had to swim through the crowd to get anywhere on the main dance floor. It was totally worth being less then 10 feet away from the biggest DJ in the world though.

From 12:00 to 3:00 AM, he put on a non-stop trance/house set that kept the crowd going the entire time. The sound system in that place is fucking amazing... 100,000 watts of crystal clear sound.

I am pretty sure that is me in the picture above towards the right in the white striped shirt.

Mike and I ended up leaving the club around 3:30 AM or so because we were getting pretty worn out. It took all day Friday to recover, but it was totally worth it.

May 18, 2006
12:04 AM - add new comment
I finally graduated from college last Saturday. The graduation ceremony did not have much intrinsic value for me but was fun because it was held outdoors and it poured. It is nice to finally put the last four years behind me, but it will not feel like much of a change for a good while. The last semester or so was pretty easy and I am going to (obviously) continue working at BitLeap until the bitter end.

The party afterward certainly made the day worth it though. Some of my family visited during the day which is always good. Afterward, Guy, Robin, Lindsay, Kelly, Alana, Lizzy, and a bunch of their friends came over. We had lots of hard liquor and it got pretty crazy so they tell me.

Earlier this evening I did a phone interview for the In the Trenches podcast about Cacti. Surprisingly it was a lot of fun to ramble about Cacti for 30 minutes over the phone. Now I cannot wait to hear the show once they edit and publish it. The talk on Cacti that I am giving in June at CPLUG should be a lot of fun as well.

Tomorrow I am heading down to DC again to see DJ Tiësto at club Fur with a friend from school. Last week I saw Paul van Dyk at The Nation nightclub which was amazing. Hopefully tomorrow's show is just as good.

April 5, 2006
12:58 AM - add new comment
Typically I spend money on my computer hardware once a year around this time. Last year it was an upgrade for my file server which included a bunch of hard drives. The many years before that were upgrades to my workstation. However this year I realized that it would be a waist for me to buy new computer stuff since everything I currently have is still sufficient. As to prevent unnecessary holes from forming in my pockets, I decided to do some sound upgrades instead.

So my old Alpine CDA-9815 head unit in my car decided that it would be a nice time to die a slow painful death by refusing to play CD's. I will admit, at least it was pretty good about waiting until the warranty had expired. Needless the say, fixing it would have cost roughly the same as buying a new head unit, basically eliminating that option. Instead, I decided to buy a shiny new Kenwood XXV-01D head unit to fill the void in my dashboard.

Based on the many reviews that I had read about this head unit, I had pretty high expectations opening the box. Without a doubt, it certainly lived up to its praise. The only users which gave this head unit a less favorable review complained that it had too many options. Of course, this is basically a requirement for me. Before playing with any settings on the unit, I immediately noticed that it sounded better than the Alpine. I suspect that this is because of the improved frequency range, because the highs especially sounded so much crisper. The second thing I noticed is that the OLED-based screen was very bright and easy to read. Even though it defaults to some stupid repetitive motorcycle animation, the all text display mode is perfect. As expected it has the usual cross over, EQ, and delay settings, but I really liked how it has presets for the cabin and speaker sizes in your car which it uses to set reasonable defaults for most of the advanced settings.

For a while now, I have kept my eyes open for a good pair of headphones. While I wanted wireless, in the past I have had pretty bad experiences with them. The two pairs that I had owned both suffered from problems with interference and had problems with intermittent static... neither of which are good qualities for a pair of headphones. Recently however, I ran across the Amphony 2500 wireless digital headphones. These headphones got excellent reviews from many of the same people that had similar problems as me with wireless headphones. The model I went with operates on a 5.8 GHz frequency, making them less susceptible to many common devices. The sound is transmitted without compression from an analog, digital coax, or optical input on the base station and they sound great so far. Here's to hoping that they help tune out some of the distractions in the office at work!

March 29, 2006
12:59 AM - add new comment
Seriously though, has anyone here ever walked into Best Buy and bought 3 terabytes worth of portable hard drives? Lets just say it probably gave the employees involved something to ponder for the rest of the evening. You cannot beat Guy's response to the employees' obligatory, "I just have to ask..." question.

We just got high speed and want to do some downloading.

March 6, 2006
7:20 PM - add new comment
Hooray, happy birthday to me. My 22nd was a lot less eventful than my 21st, but I guess that is to be expected. Not really too much more to say about that.

Yesterday I headed down to Philly with a friend from school to see Deftones on their Taste of Chaos tour. The Tweeter Center was a pretty cool venue since it was laid out less like a traditional arena and more like a large movie theater. We had the perfect seats too; close to the front, but not so close as to be obstructed by the standing crowd. I had mixed reactions about the show however. First of all, there were twelve total bands that played throughout the night. The only two bands besides Deftones that I somewhat enjoyed was As I Lay Dying and Atreyu. The most disappointing part was that out of five hours of music, Deftones only played for about 45 minutes. It was a pretty good night overall though.

Almost completely out of the blue, my spring break starts this Thursday. This semester is proving to be the most painless one yet. As a result, it is somehow already half over and it still feels like we are just getting started. After spring break, there are six weeks left for actual classes until finals and then graduation!

January 1, 2006
11:21 PM - add new comment
Happy New Years! I posted the pictures from Lindsay's party for those whom are interested.

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