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I just finished a marathon session with Max For Live and have two new devices to show for it. Download the Devices KeyStepper ChordRipper What I wanted was a way to play a chord of MIDI notes on one track, and have the individual notes from the chord sent to different tracks, so that I could have different instruments playing the different notes from the chord. Once the notes were at the destination track, I also wanted to be able to sequence patterns of note pitch variations and rest patterns in arbitrary

Bottom Line NGINX has just open-sourced a project that drastically reduces the effort required to add HTTPS support to your NGINX webservers. This project makes use of NJS (which allows for extending NGINX with JavaScript) to integrate an ACME (Automated Certificate Management Environment) client into NGINX itself. This client communicates with ACME services like Let's Encrypt to manage SSL/TLS certificates automatically on your NGINX server. If you want to try it out, head over to the njs-acme repository f

Prior to 2023, I had never received a jury summons. This seemed odd to me, given my eligibility for over 30 years and that it is supposedly a random process. It was something I'd mention here and there as friends and colleagues received their summons, but always with a little superstitious hesitation. Lo and behold, a summons arrived in the mail in February 2023, with an April appearance date. I had just started a new job, and I was imagining things would be in full swing come April, so I chose to use my on

Marina, Naomi, and I decided last April to book a trip to St Lucia. When we were deciding where to go, we didn't know we wanted to visit St Lucia specifically, but we did know we wanted a Caribbean vacation. After doing a bit of internet research (e.g. googling "how to select a caribbean island") as well as looking at flight times to each, St Lucia came out on top for us -- it's a very nature-oriented country and is not terribly difficult to get to. It ended up being a great decision. We flew on a redeye fr

Yesterday after work I was reading my personal email, and a very sincerely interesting email was waiting for me. My strategy of putting my email address everywhere has been paying off in the contacts I've been making, and today was no exception. Good Ben Sulzinsky shared an idea of his for a modulation machine that I loved from the beginning. His idea could be accomplished a string of the stock Live LFOs, but the ergonomics of that solution were really lacking. Ben's idea was to have explicit controls for l

I thought it would be good to write down the programming languages I've used and the context that I learned them in. So here we are. 1980 - Logo (Turtle Graphics) My earliest computer programming memory was from a computer lab with Apple ][ computers in some school at night when I was 6 years old. I was there for a computer class (I can't remember the lead-in to that), and was blown away by being able to type things and have the computer draw what I asked it to. I learned the 'repeat' command either this ti

For the last couple of weeks, I've been nerding out on some home networking stuff. I blame my friend Eric for introducing me to the wonders of TrueNAS and pfSense. This post outlines how I use TrueNAS to back up my pfSense configuration, and a special trick I used that I feel was cool enough to write about. Background TrueNAS is an open-source network attached storage (NAS) system that can run on pretty much any hardware. I use it for centralized, reliable file storage for the house, to host a photo sharing

yo I'm a constant optimizer and evolver with basically everything. I also enjoy working with computers, so challenges around technology are more fun for me than they are chores. This post captures my current solution of using TrueNAS for home network file sharing, media serving, and backups. Context A while back, I wrote about how I was using a Raspberry Pi as a fun Linux server for the home. I attached a couple of 2.5" 4TB HDDs to it and shared them with Samba for general file storage and Time Machine back

As an Ableton Live user, I appreciate its approach to interface. Part of their interface philosophy is the extreme consistency within the Ableton-provided devices. This allows for a deeply opinionated model for user experience, since many basic constraints like "device height" are controlled. This allowed Ableton to make the decision to devote a slim portion of the bottom of the interface window to present a track's devices. This component scrolls horizontally to display more than a screen's width of device

In my experience, one attribute that makes a great software engineering team is their level of customer focus. By customer focus, I mean understanding their customer's needs and placing that front and center in decision making. It's critical for a team to understand that the only reason they exist is because their customers find value in the product or service they are offering. Without the deep understanding of that customer that comes from direct engagement with the customer, the team will likely impede t

Where does the data go? Where does it go after you die, after the app company folds, after the powers of the world shift? Your phone is a single generation of a very long line of obsolete devices. Your computer and its backup drive in your house is subject to fire, flood, or earthquake. An online backup provider is but one solution, each with an average corporate lifespan of 5.4 years (I made that up). "The Cloud" is a single corporate entity that you chose for your specific data. It's subject to regime cha

In February 2022, I left my job at Splunk to take some time first to relax then to focus on finding a fantastic next job. I managed to do both during my three months of funemployment, landing a job at Stripe in the Atlas team in May. I was laid off in November 2022, along with most people who were hired during this time. Despite it being a very short stint in my career, what I learned at Stripe was nothing like I had experienced in more than 20 years in the industry. The intent of this post is to capture th

Early Yahoo! was a very special place. It was magical and rudimentary at the same time. I joined probably past the true magical era, and was hired in Yahoo!'s first hyper-growth, bulking-out phase (empno 850) at the beginning of 1999. What made it special? We were inventing how internet-connected distributed apps can work at scale (well, one way!). Nobody had ever solved problems like these before, and Yahoo! made some very smart decisions along the way. I was hired to work on My Yahoo!, a customizable inte

In November 2018, I decided to order a Tesla Model 3. So far it's been a joy to own and drive. This post details my history and experiences with the car, and gets into just how much money I've saved by choosing this car over something comparable. Spoiler: It's seriously no contest. History I owned a Volkswagen e-Golf since 2015, and while it was a super fun car, its meager range (realistically 80 miles on a full charge) made anything but an around town trip something of an anxiety-fest. Fast chargers that w

So your teenager is old enough to learn to drive. That's awesome! For a parent, it can also be terrifying. I mean, they're the most precious people in our lives -- isn't it irresponsible to put them out there with all those crazies?!?!? We all know that car accidents are the #1 killer of teenagers. How can we reconcile this, and let our kids grow up to be responsible adult drivers? I wrote this post to help parents help their kids survive to adulthood, and not wrapped in a cocoon locked in the house. Give t

Last week I had an idea for an effect. I was thinking that a reverb effect should give you control over the pan position of the reverb at a given time after the initial impulse enters the reverb. This could make for some neat movement, since it's not just panning the whole reverb signal -- each moment of the reverb's tail has its designated pan position. After a walk through my current reverb plugins, I decided that I needed to build this if I wanted to hear it. My first attempt was to mock up the idea with

I really enjoy working in Max/MSP, especially on Max For Live devices. This is something that sets Ableton Live apart from other DAWs, and really speaks to the Art+Science part of me. I didn't always enjoy working in Max. As a beginner, it all seems so opaque, and others' patches just seem to magically work. But I've worked with computers for long enough to know that when anything feels like magic, I just need to learn more about it. This post exists to help others get over the hump of feeling comfortable a

tl;dr If you just want to install it, then head over to the GitHub project page for download links and instructions. Context In Ableton Live, once you assign an automation source to a control, you cannot assign additional automation sources for that control. There are situations where it would be nice to have two sources for one parameter, for instance an LFO at a vibrato frequency modulating filter cutoff, while larger manual filter cutoff moves are provided by a MIDI control surface. When combining signal

I'm a big fan of purposeful physical interfaces to computer interfaces for the same reason why I'm a big fan of fully keyboard-controllable apps (bonus points for modal interfaces and a bias for the home row – 'vi' for the win!). When we can use our whole hands, including fingers, we are easily an order of magnitude more productive compared with the single point and click nature of using a mouse or touchpad. I'd wager it's more like two orders of magnitude in terms of real value, given the much lower fricti

I'm an efficiency freak. In either my personal or professional life, I'm always looking for ways to eliminate steps in a process, especially if those steps are ones that a person has to take. Sometimes, process changes are big and fundamental and sometimes they are micro-efficiencies. A micro-efficiency may save 2 seconds of waiting time, or eliminate one mouse click. If that savings happens frequently, then the investment in finding the efficiency can pay off. Another advantage of finding micro-efficiencie

If you're reading this, then please allow me to welcome you -- a fellow person of specific needs and preferences! It has bothered me several times in the past that I can't use my text editor of choice everywhere I can edit text. There is an insect brain muscle memory that comes from being a long-time vim user. For example, I regularly find myself resorting to vim commands/shortcuts in places like GMail. I think it's just my body trying to get me back to using mutt to read email again. Regardless, this isn't

The Access Virus is a music synthesizer that was first sold around 1997. It was one of the first "virtual analog" synths, which means that it uses computer code that simulates the behavior of analog circuits, rather than using computer code to play back samples. This approach brought more liveliness to its sounds compared with other synths of the time, and this appealed to a lot of different kinds of musicians. The Virus was a staple of many studios in the late 90s and through the 2010s, with people like Ha

Here's a quick tip if you're using git for revision control in developing Max/MSP or Max For Live devices. Perhaps you have been here? $ git diff diff --git a/cool.amxd b/cool.amxd index c7a9b88..afdafb1 100644 Binary files a/cool.amxd and b/cool.amxd differ .amxd files are basically JSON, but with a non-JSON file header. This binary part at the beginning makes git fall back to binary file mode when trying to show diffs. Usualy that's not very helpful. There's just a bit of configuration to make the git dif

My fastest mile ever happened on the right shoulder blade of Mission Peak. See, Mission Peak sits facing Fremont, the Bay, the Peninsula. Watching over it all in its regal pose. For those lucky enough to know what it is like to stand up there, we get to share in that grand view; in that fortunate place. Mission Peak was my training ground. It motivated me in ways that no other place has, with my personal connection to it as well as its endless views, and the ultimate challenge it offers. Mission Peak is ste

I have 25+ years of experience in the Internet applications space, with that time split between IC and management positions - but always hands-on as an engineer. I have worked in all layers of the stack in many very different roles in many different languages, frameworks, problem domains, and organizational structures. The moments that I am most proud of are when my work results in a multiplicative improvement for my team / org / company / product / systems. I love to blend creativity and engineering discip

This post details a significant update to my original Faderboard device for Ableton Live. I finally made time to learn enough Max for Live to do this in the way that I always wanted. The prior version worked fine, but changing sounds was very cumbersome, requiring updating the sample loaded into 8 Simpler devices. This new version uses a single sample "drop zone", and offers some nice usability and capability improvements. Demo Here is an instance of zs-Faderboard3 playing the example sample, sent through a

=================== UPDATE AVAILABLE I've re-implemented this as a self-contained M4L device with more similar functionality to the original Faderboard, along with some additions like MIDI note control and multiple outputs. Read about the updated version here. =================== Original post is below... Hainbach released a video today on the Vestax Faderboard. As soon as I saw how it worked, I knew that this was something very cool and interesting. What Hainbach demonstrated over the next half hour was me

When most people hear the phrase "pair programming" they probably imagine two programmers in front of one keyboard and monitor, taking turns typing alternate letters. It's a silly picture that doesn't do the idea justice. This document is intended to better explain the benefits of Pair Programming and different styles of practicing it. Benefits Before we get into the ways that pair programming can be done, let's first explore the role of collaboration in software development. Programmers do what they do bec

This Max For Live device uses Javascript to implement a fractal MIDI note echo effect. This allows for easy creation of very complex patterns that, due to their nature in following a scaled pattern, tend to be pleasant to listen to and can inspire creativity you didn't know you had. Here is an example of a song I put together: What is a fractal MIDI note echo effect you ask? Well, it's a device that sends note echoes, but each echo follows the rules of fractals. Before we get into the fractal part, understa

Here's the tl;dr: Your job is to grow your team. Write down expectations of team members, broken down by level. Quantify your team's capabilities. Remember good work and areas to improve. Plan appropriately -- individually and with the group. Now read on for more detail, including actual tools to implement the above. In my career as a software developer, I have ping-ponged several times between being an individual contributor and a manager. In all but one case in the past, the team needed a manager either b

My earliest computer memory was with my dad in his office at The Gap in Kentucky in the early 1980s. He would sometimes need to go in to work on weekends, and for reasons I don't remember, he would bring me with him and let me sit in front of an Apple III (yes, three) and noodle on it with VisiCalc or BASIC while he worked elsewhere. Later on, they started to get some IBM PC systems, and I would love to go in and play with Lotus 1-2-3 and make formulas and graphs. I think I was 7 years old at the time. One

I noticed yesterday evening that my room had become a pinhole camera. The sun shining through the blinds was projecting an unmistakable circle on the opposite wall. I knew that this was an actual projection of the sun, rather than just a diffuse circle of light. I watched it for a while, then shot this time-lapse of the sun setting through some branches of the tree. Because of how the pinhole camera works, the sun appears to be going up, but that is just because a lens or pinhole will flip the image. Here i

Gone are the days of managing installed versions of interpreters (Ruby, Javascript/Node.js, Python, ...), compilers, servers, databases, and caches on your local machine. A combination of free hypervisor software combined with LXC (Linux Containers) yielded Docker, a beautiful way to run many things in one machine with controlled isolation. Being able to gracefully network between containers, mount file systems between containers and the host machine, bring up entire config-managed collections of services w

Since the 1600s, people have experimented with light-proof rooms, chambers, or boxes with a small hole in one side, known as a Camera Obscura. With the advent of photographic film or paper, this idea evolved into the Pinhole Camera -- a light-proof box with a tiny hole on one end, and a photo-sensitive material at the other. The hole is uncovered for a period of time, and the light from outside is focused by the tiny hole on the material on the other end of the box. The hole is then covered, and the photo-s

I love kimchi! It's sauerkraut's Korean cousin and is useful in many dishes as a side. I'll eat it with a sausage on a tortilla with mayo and mustard for lunch, or put on top of an aloo parata with some sour cream. Add to fried rice for a spicy and sour kick, or use it to elevate eggs and potatoes. It's satisfying to make, as it self-fermets on the counter from a lovely spicy vegetable melange into a delicious and complex spicy sour fiesta. It keeps super well in the fridge, so it can always be there for yo

The Problem I've got a few computers at home and a few random external hard drives that sometimes back up those computers. Since some are laptops, I need to remember to connect the external drive to them, which of course doesn't always happen. Also, there's no slick way to share files between computers, aside from setting up specific shares on each computer. What I need is a network storage system. Something that's always there, accessible via WiFi, can be used via Time Machine on my Macs, reliable, and mos

Inspired by Hainbach's video on Pinging, but lacking outboard hardware, I decided to explore creating a feedback device in Ableton Live. Normally, when you want to build a feedback loop in Live, you would use a Return track set up to feed back to itself, either directly by enabling its own send, or via an Audio Track set up to take input from the Return track and sending some of its output back to the Return track. While this does work, it's fairly clumsy since there are multiple tracks involved. Creating a

This was some of the most fun I've had with music making recently. After watching this video from the great producer, engineer, and mixer Sylvia Massy where she demonstrates re-amping a synth line to give it power and space, I tried the same thing with one track of the song I was working on at the time, 100 Squares. You can hear the net effect on the arp'd synth line starting at about 1:45. For that one, I connected my bass combo amp to the speaker out on my main audio interface. I put one mic directly in f

I've just learned some things about mastering and I thought I'd write them down. During my last project, I took several recordings I think sound really good in the genre I'm working in (dub-ish techno?) and looked at their waveforms. What struck me is that for the most part, they peak at around -4db. This was a very important piece of information. Looking at my prior work, I had always set the limiter to peak at -1.0db, and my songs always sounded so bassy. If I brought up levels of non-bass instruments to

Anyone who knows me reasonably well knows I have a soft spot for Mission Peak. I grew up in Fremont, and begrudgingly hiked up the Peak with my family every so often, complaining the whole time. It was hot. It was dry. I was thirsy. I was tired. Except for the time was a teenager and took a detour around the Hidden Valley area and headed off-trail, straight up the peak face. That was adventure! (not recommended, of course!) Fast-forward to my late 30s. I was out of shape, overweight, and wanted to do someth

Photos and instructions to make a useful tabletop shelf for your music studio.

If someone involved in Internet services is asked to name a metric in that domain, chances are you will hear the word "availability". On its surface, availability is a simple measurement to understand or describe -- it's just a measurement of the proportion of time a service is up and running within a given time period. Right? The reality, like with most top-line measurements, is far more nuanced, and without detailed context, the metric actually says nothing. This document seeks to explore the topic of ava

M&N Roller skating

Time-lapse mode on GoPro Hero 9, vertical orientation.

Top o' the hill to ye. Recorded on GoPro Hero 9.

As the leader or member of a software development team, you may be encouraged, inspired, or even forced to track particular metrics of the team’s performance. This post seeks to identify those metrics that lead to the best outcomes for the team, the products they are building, and for the business. We will also look at some "industry standard" metrics and we will see how they can be counterproductive, since they don't actually lead to a stronger team, and are susceptible to being gamed. The Power of Measure

The girls are great roller skaters!

There is a direct connection between distance to a commitment date and team morale. The further out a given commitment is made, the more toxic that commitment is to the organization. Your job as the leader or member of a team is to ensure that team is as functional as possible and remains as functional into the future. You can do your part in ensuring the functionality, happiness, and productivity of your team by reshaping your commitments away from far-future due dates. First, let's look at some typical sc

As a software development team, we should be relentness in our pursuit of efficiency. Not only in our algorithms, but more importantly in how our team gets work done. Efficiency Let's first clarify this concept. What do we mean by 'efficiency' in this context? The simple definition of efficiency is the amount of output for a given amount of input. In the context of a commercial software development team, the input is the amount of time the people in the team give to their jobs, and the output is the amount

There are as many systems of working as there are development teams. One important dimension in evaluating a system of working is identifying the role of leadership in the team. Here are a few systems of working that you may encounter in the wild: In this corner: Command and Control On one end of the leadership scale is what I call "Command and Control". This is the typical single-leader taskmaster model. In this system of working, there is a fleet of "resources" (they are never referred to as "people") who

Interviewing is hard, on both sides. The skills of an interviewer are often overlooked in software development, and people are usually left on their own when it comes time to interview a potential teammate or coworker. This does everyone a disservice. This document outlines a framework and a set of principles to be used when interviewing, hopefully to bring calm, structure, and excellence to the hiring process.'

If you use docker-compose to run an app, more than likely you use container links in the form of "depends_on:" in your docker-compose.yml, like this: services: api: build: . depends_on: - db ports: - "8080:8080" db: image: postgres:9.6-alpine ports: - "5432:5432" environment: - POSTGRES_USER=user - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=pass - POSTGRES_DB=db The problem is that your app ("api" in the example above) will start immediately after the command to start "db" and "redis" is invoked. If the service you depend on takes

It was a Thursday night. I was sound-making. I had an idea to get some sounds from my kitchen. Maybe something with a bowl. Maybe dropping something on the floor. Silverware can make some cool sounds. I had my Rode i-XY plugged into my phone. The Rode i-XY is a stereo mic with integrated app. It records with great detail and clarity, and it's pretty straightforward to move recordings to my computer using FTP (though AirDrop would be even easier). As I walked into the kitchen, the sliding door caught my eye.

For me, music-making has two phases -- sound-making and song-making. These are two very different disciplines. Sound-making is fun and spontaneous. Song-making can be those things too, but it also becomes extremely detailed and deliberate as the song inches closer to its final version. Sound-making exists in many forms. It may be a playable instrument sculpted inside of a synthesizer, where sound-generators produce waveforms that are modified and shaped by other processing units. It may be an existing recor

Harbour Air

Harbour Air

Woohoo! Highlight of the ride.

Saratoga Gap Trail, Castle Rock State Park

Beto passed it first and was speechless. I was right behind him and jumped about four feet into the air and squeezed my water bottle and sprayed water everywhere.

Amazing

M&N were up there.

Stopped recording just as disaster struck. :)

Marina was so nervous for Naomi. :)

Taking it easy down this technical section.

From a run in said park. The light this day was majestic.

Taking advantage of a natural slide on the Lake Ranch Trail.

5th Grade Graduation

Well, the 2016 Ohlone 50K is in the tie-dyed goodie bag. This year was such an experience in learning, growth, and overcoming adversity. The story starts toward the end of last year when I started running with "Club Nina" -- a loosely organized group of about 20 local trail crazies led by the gregarious and motivated Nina G. My routine went from "a couple short neighborhood runs during the week and a weekend trail run" to "pre-dawn weekday trail runs with Nina and friends and a longer weekend run." My weekl

I really like foaming hand soap. I love how it goes on, and how easy it is to wash off. I also love how it's really frugal -- one pump is really all you need to wash your hands. What I don't love are the pungent fragrances, even on "natural" products, or the price. So with some DIY we can do better, right? Yes! What you need to make your own foaming hand soap: A dispenser - You can use an old dispenser (e.g. Method) or buy [a nice glass set](http://www.amazon.com/mDesign-Foaming-Dispenser-Bathroom-Accessory

Marina got to also do some flying at Nika's birthday party today at iFly in Union City.

Naomi's last flight from Nika's birthday party today.

With the Original Mr Chris.

While mindlessly surfing the internet I stumbled across Autechre's website and saw they were planning a North American tour. The San Francisco date was coming right up on October 16, 2015. Well heck yes I was going to go! Anyone who has listened to music with me knows that Autechre is #1 on my list. So I got in touch with a couple of Ae-friendly friends. It happened that Ben was as excited to go as I was, so I got us some tickets. Good thing I jumped on them, since the show sold out that week. I drove up to

I've run the Skyline to the Sea (SttS) 50K race for the last two years (2013 and 2014). This year I decided I'd skip it. The Ohlone 50K was moved to three weeks before Stts, and I had plans to do the Levi's Gran Fondo bike ride one week prior. But then I got to talking with my friend and awesome runner Donnie about SttS. He's placed well in the race before, and we were talking about how it would be fun to run the marathon distance option for SttS. The 50K course adds a grueling, steep, exposed 5 mile loop t

I've been cooking a lot lately. I love cooking! I love the creativity of it, the chemistry and process, and of course eating good food. Given the choice, I'd take an environment like "Chopped" over a cookbook any day. Give me a few good ingredients and an empty plate and let's see what happens. Mostly I've been experimenting lately with making Indian food. With a few spices and some newly learned techniques, an entire world opened up to us. The girls' new favorite is Masala Dosa night. But not every night c

Amazing place to sit and rest and contemplate and appreciate. https://www.strava.com/activities/368217437

Short clip of our Maui Easy Riders ride.

Lava Adventure

Outside the Bamboo Forest

From our class field trip to YSI at Sanborn Park.

Running thru a couple hundred sheep today was a bit surreal.

We found another Fun Zone in the Ulistac Natural Area today.

Fun in the rain, filmed by Andy.

If you have bought a Cannondale mountain bike, you may be surprised at the limited number of fork options due to Cannondale's non-standard straight 1.5" headtube choice. Most bikes use a straight 1 1/8" headtube. Nicer frames use a tapered 1 1/8" to 1 1/2" design. The larger diameter is stiffer and provides for a larger bearing surface, so Cannondale wasn't being totally arbitrary with their choice, but it's nonstandard nonetheless. If you're looking for a replacement, there are very few options. I got a 1.

Perhaps your company is at the point in its growth curve where you need a person dedicated to security issues, or perhaps you're looking to reboot your security team because of some of the problems outlined below. What follows are over-generalizations about the best way to build a functional information security team, but that are in line with what I have seen succeed (and fail) in small and large engineering organizations. Note that this is really focused on information security for 'production' systems (t

It's been a while since I did a night run on Mission Peak. With the great weather and full moon, today was a great day to pick that up again.

Upgrading from a regular hard drive to an SSD seemed complicated at first on this computer, but with the right tools and instructions it was easy.

It's easy to make a user an administrator on OS X using the GUI tools. But if you do not have access to an existing admin account, this is impossible. By booting into Single-User mode, you can make a non-Admin into an Admin using the command line.

The Shimano PD-A530 is a hybrid pedal -- clip-in on one side, and platform on the other. The platform side is not that great, so I decided to fix that with some studs from another set of pedals.

Near Shoreline Park

While walking out in the bay at low tide, the girls spotted a big crab and we followed it for a bit.

A report from a week with some awesome upgrades to my bike. I learned a lot about bikes, adjustments, and found some great resources in doing this project.

After we got home from the Pleasanton Tri For Fun, I was excited to tear into my weekend bike project. I had gotten a new driveline (gears, cranks, shifters, chain etc) for my bike to upgrade what came on the bike originally. I had been planning it out all week, and Saturday was the day that I could execute the plan. A couple of hours into the project, I was working at the bench in the garage when I heard the familiar thrum of a hummingbird nearby. Sure enough, a little grey and green hummingbird was in the

It all started in May. Actually, it all started 11 years ago when Arti and I signed up for the 15th annual Tri For Fun in Pleasanton at Shadow Cliffs park. Swimming, biking, and running were all things that I did not do, but we thought this would be fun. Well, Arti did at least. We spent the next several months preparing for this race. There was a 400 yard swim, 11 mile bike ride, and 3.1 mile run. We would go to the community pool in Mountain View two or three times a week and swim a couple of thousand yar

Last October I decided to run the Ohlone Wilderness Trail 50K. Leading up to that decision was a few years of hiking in the East Bay hills, a newfound enjoyment in running, and daily trips to Zombie Runner where I learned about the race. After 6 months of training covering 435 miles and climbing more than 80,000 feet, the race is now in the bag. It wasn't all so easy though. In February I got over-exuberant with my training and ended up with a knee injury that took me off the trails for two weeks. The guys

I chose to celebrate Bike to Work Day by going for a run this morning. My plan was to do the O50K climb up Mission Peak, but turn right at the top of the ridge and visit Mt. Allison before heading back over and down Mission Peak. 9.7 miles, 2750ft climb, 2h05m. There were a few spaces in the Stanford Ave parking lot when I got there at 8am -- I guess the chilly, foggy morning scared a lot of people away. Or maybe the active people were out riding their bikes to work. Anyhow, it seemed like a good day for a

Since getting serious about running at the end of 2012 in preparation for the Ohlone Wilderness 50K, I've learned a few things. Here they are: Foam Roller + Stretch Every Day The foam roller is a kind of self-massage that uses your body weight to bear down on your muscles. I'm not sure why or how it works, but there is no doubt that it does work to make tired muscles feel fresh, and to make tight muscles looser. Tight muscles can lead to pain and injury -- my own knee injury in February was due to an overly

It's two weeks until O50K, and my training plan calls for shorter runs to taper to the event. Today I chose to start from Ohlone and run up and over Mission Peak then over to the bench at Mt. Allison. It was a total of 9.1 miles with a 2520 foot climb. The route I chose was to go up "Buttburner Hill", which you can get to if you take a hard right turn after first gate after the initial long climb from the Ohlone parking lot. Buttburner Hill is 0.6 miles long and gains 821 feet (27.5% grade). There is 0.2 mi

I got a pretty early start today, getting out of bed at 5:30a to do the last long training run before the big race. Hit the trail at 6:45 with a plan to do the O50K course for 13-ish miles, then turn around and retrace my steps. It was a lovely morning, with cool air and a warm breeze that was a bellwether for the warm day that was to follow. My plan was to take it really easy so that I could cover the full distance without falling apart. The first 4.5 miles up Mission Peak were an exercise in restraint, bu

24 miles today starting from Sunol Regional Park -- 12 east, then 12 west. 5600 feet climb, 6 hours.

For today's long run, I chose to go from Ed Levin County Park in Milpitas, up to Monument Peak, then north past Mt. Allison, behind Mission Peak, down to Sunol Regional Park, then turn around and run back. 22.5 miles / 5000 ft ascent / 5h20m.

I set out today to tackle Rose Peak once again. I hiked it a couple years ago, but haven't done it since I've been running. It behooves me to practice it, since it's 1/3 of the Ohlone 50K. I set out at 9am (dang it DST!) and got to the peak in 2h30m. Took only a little less time to get back to the parking lot. Compared with the last time, I knocked 3 hours off my personal best (har!). Loving Strava's calorie counter (5165kcal)... I could see the Sierras from the summit of Rose Peak. Super clear day! Bring t

Beautiful morning in the East Bay Hills. Clear skies, mid-50s, tons of turkeys, a protective mama cow, and one baby coyote (sorry, no video of that). 9.5 miles, 2750ft, 2h03m

What an ideal day for getting back to the trails above the bay! 9.5mi, 2750ft climb, 2h03m. No knee pain during or after. The hardest part was starting the descent after getting to the top -- I really just wanted to keep going!

Ice and stim treatment for my knee.

I put this Google Spreadsheet together to plan out how the heck I'm going to build up to 31 miles distance. My prior biggest run was 18 miles, and have never done any mid-week work. This week I started running an hour each morning three days a week and plan on continuing that to build a solid base. Getting sweaty in the morning has been awesome so far. My outlook through the day is definitely more positive, and I have more energy in the evenings when I get home. The only downside is that I'm sweating until

This is a project I've wanted to do since we moved in. With just a few simple parts, I installed independent remote speakers into our dining room. What I wanted was a system that was simple, controllable from an iPhone via AirPlay, and that didn't require going to another room and turning something on before we could listen to music. Here are the parts that will do the job: In-Wall Speakers: Polk RC85i - $150/pr Amplifier: AudioSource AMP-100 - $90 Sound Source: Apple AirPort Express - $100 Speaker Wire: Ge

With the Ohlone 50k looming in May, I've been inspired to get back out there on foot on the trails. After a few weeks away, this weekend was the time to get back into it. My initial plan was to follow the O50K course up and over Mission Peak then run down to the gate at Calaveras Road and back (about 15 miles total), but at the point where I'd start running toward Calaveras I decided to cut it short. Mimi and Pop are coming into town, and we're going to decorate the tree with them and Kanta. Also I needed t

Just got home from three days at Thunderhill Raceway with the GGC BMWWCCA. Friday was an Instructor Training School. The club does this once every couple of years to refresh old instructors skills, and to haze/vet/train new instructors. I was assigned a new recruit (who had more years instructing than me, just with other groups) and my role was to play the "bad student". Andy, the candidate instructor, was a great guy and we got along well all day. I tried hard in the morning to be my best Knucklehead McStu

Almost cracked 100 miles on the bike this week. On Sunday, Arti and I went for a 24 mile ride with the Kohlers through Saratoga, through the hills around Quicksilver, then back to their house. Good times, and the ladies showed us up with their hill climbing powers. Obviously it was because of their road bikes, with Sean and I battling friction on our mountain bikes... ;-) Monday and Tuesday I did the usual train commute (6 miles). Wednesday I rode home from work (3 miles in the AM, 28 in the PM, 2 hours). T

Took the train up to Stanford today to interview some promising college Grads. Then took the train to Mountain View and talked with Pablo about a new project, then left to ride home at 4:30.

Rode up Mission Peak with PeterE for the first time this morning. Crazy wind!

Second time riding home from work. It took 30 minutes less today, despite taking a bit longer route. This is mostly due to not taking wrong turns and having to backtrack ;-).

I started at Groupon more than two years ago now. I was excited about the company then, but I'm way more excited now. This may come as a surprise to someone who only follows the market or the Silicon Valley tabloids, but for me, Groupon is the place to be. Here's why...

I hit the trail at 8am today in Ed Levin County Park. It was a beautiful, cool, sunny morning ... mid-50s. It was an ideal day out there today -- warm sun and cool breeze. I covered 16 miles, 4200 ft elevation gain, in 3h40m.

I decided to ride my bike home from work today. Ended up taking about 2.5 hours, and covered 27 miles, most of it on the Bay Trail and Guadalupe River Trail.

18 miles / 6000 ft climb today up and over MP to Calaveras road and back. Now soaking in cold tub. Ahhhhhhhh..... Took the Ohlone 50K "way" up to the peak, then down to high-five the gate at Calaveras Road. Retraced steps FTW.

Had a nice hike/run today from Rhus Ridge, up and over Black Mountain and down the Indian Creek Trail a bit. Distance was 14 miles, 5000 feet total ascent, and took 2h50m.

Rode up Mission Peak today with Sean Kohler. I was expecting it to be harder than it was, but it was still a doozie. We did about 10 miles total, 2700 feet elevation gain. The first stretch up the peak was 2.8 miles and 1750 feet gain -- unrelentingly steep. From there we went around the back of the peak and up to Mt. Allison, then came back and went down the Grove Trail past the farmhouse (sweet technical section!) and rejoined the main trail. I'm really happy we did it!

Ohlone == 53:05 ==> MP == 33:48 ==> Ohlone. Starting to track my downhill times. A big old tarantula (6" legspan) crossed the path on the way up. First time I've seen one alive.

Sean convinced me that waking up at 5am on Saturday to go for a ride was a good idea. Had a great time again with him going up Kennedy Trail, this time at sunrise. We started out when it was barely light enough to see. It was really gorgeous when we got up above the cloud layer...

We celebrated Labor today with some bicycle-oriented garage projects, and I went for a ride with Sean Kohler, after 12 years away from a mountain bike.

Our friends Deanna and Nathan and their dogs compete in dog agility contests. We drove down to Prunedale today to see them do their stuff. They're getting ready to go to nationals this year in Denver. There were some impressive dogs and handlers there today!

I took my new favorite shoes out this morning (New Balance MT1010) for a run/hike in Sunol today. This was the most enjoyable running time I've ever had. This could be the start of something new...

Beautiful Friday night hike/run up Mission Peak from Stanford Ave in a new pair of New Balance MT1010s.

Difficult and long hike today -- 16.5 mile roundtrip from Rancho San Antonio up the PG&E Trail, Mine Trail, Black Mountain Trail, Summit, Black Mountain Trail, Chemise Trail, past Deer Hollow Farm and back to the car. Took just a bit longer than 4 hours.

We changed the coop a bit today to give Twilight and Paisley (our new larger hens) more space to enter and exit, along with better rain protection.

HANS-compatible clip-in Quick Fit Pro. Now I just need a trackday...

I met up with Brendon at the Stanford Ave trailhead this morning. It was a beautiful, clear day. I managed a 56:00-ish time by working in some running up the hill. My goal is to be able to run the whole way up by the end of July... title: Clear Day, and a new PB

Venus cruised in front of the sun today. Here is a photo of it...

Marina tears into her first big masala dosa at Tirupathi Bhimas in Milpitas... She ate pretty much all of it!

I spent the bulk of yesterday replacing the shocks on Arti's car -- a 2007 328i wagon. We bought the car new, and it has about 90K miles on it now. Overall, it's been a great car and still looks and drives very nicely. I've noticed though over the past year or so that it feels a bit "wallowy" in some situations. Usually I felt that in in sweeping turns with some undulations -- the car felt like it was moving around more than it should, and felt less stable than it should. Sounds like the shocks are done!

In the weather app I use on my phone, there is a map view with configurable overlays. One of the most useful is the Doppler Radar overlay, which usually shows precipitation level on a colorful scale.\n\nOne thing I've noticed on the radar overlay is that there is an area in the north bay, near Fairfield and Rio Vista that appears to always have storm-level activity over it.

It's easy to capture amazing close-up photos with your smartphone. All you need is a nerdy motivation and a little magnifier...

Today I decided to try something new, since I'm pretty sure I've gone up and down Mission Peak, Mt. Allison, and Monument Peak every possible way now. Looking at Google Earth and talking with Arti, I decided to see how to get up Black Mountain. It's a 2800 foot peak to the west of Mountain View and Los Altos. Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve is the closest park, and provides a great route up.

Beautiful day today at Laguna. Mid-50s, partly cloudy, snow-capped peaks in the distance, dry track. I decided before this event that I'd push the car a little harder than normal -- so there's a bit more countersteering in this video than others. \n\nManaged to pull out a couple 1:46 laps (a new personal best), then had a front swaybar bracket break at the end of this session. I removed the swaybar and went out again -- the car was surprisingly well behaved, but a few seconds slower.\n\nE36 M3 daily driver, 245/40-17 R-888s, PF-01 pads (like!)

Like most people, email is a big part of my workday, as well as personal life. Over the years I've worked out a very efficient way of going through the tons of email I receive, never missing an important message, and never having an oppressive number of unread messages. I've realized that email can be used effectively as a to-do list, and use it accordingly. Hopefully someone may find these tips bring more efficiency to their email lives! Ditch the Mouse The mouse was a revolution in user interfaces. It al

The girls assembled this themselves in the backyard...

Marina's latest clay obsession...

Of the 30 Studebakers my Pop has bought, restored, and sold over the years, the black beauty known as "S2D" is still my favorite of all...

It was Marina's idea to do this project ... I just helped her with the order and told her what the planets looked like.

A few laps at a PDC day around Thunderhill with Marek. E36 M3 daily driver, Contour HD mounted to helmet.

First chess game with Marina. She did great!

I got a pair of New Balance Minimus shoes at Zombie Runner this week. Really love how they fit and feel, but I wasn't crazy about the big silver N on each shoe... So out came the seam ripper and 20 minutes later... I call this new shoe "Miniminimus".

I use my phone a lot to find satellites and stars, but it's bright white light ruins my night vision. Enter red cellophane...

Almost seven years ago I did my first BMWCCA Car Control Clinic as a student. The CCC is an all-day high performance driving school, with a focus on real-world skills. It's also a prerequisite for the club's driving schools held at local racetracks like Laguna Seca or Infineon Raceway. The CCC is held in a vast expanse of pavement, either in the Candlestick Park parking lot or an unused section of tarmac at the Marina Airport near Monterey. The school centers around three exercies: An emergency braking and

Thanks Ernest for the continuing coverage of visible ISS activity! Here's a video shot with an iPhone 4 of this evening's pass. It's interesting how visible it was considering how bright the sky still was.

Nice light at the Chinese restaurant in Pleasanton.

Below is a letter I sent to Clipper's customer service and Caltrain's Board of Directors... To whom it may concern - I have called 6 times and spent more than three hours on the phone this month with Clipper customer service trying to resolve an issue with my auto-loaded Caltrain monthly pass. These conversations have exposed some things that I feel need to be addressed in Clipper and its customer service agents. Please bear with my story below to understand my suggestions: This all started when I realized

We have a situation at work where we're using a git repository as a data source. The quality/correctness of the files checked in to this repo is critical to the operation of a larger and very important system. To help ward off mistakes, we built a series of unit tests using Test::Unit::TestCase, and hooked it into our Rakefile so that before committing a change we (usually) run "rake test" and let the automated tests do their thing. It's so cool that it can do over 1000 checks in a small fraction of a secon

A case came up in doing a revamp on this site's software where I wanted to use one table to store metadata for "entries" (blog posts, flickr photo sets, tweets, etc) but wanted a more specialized class to be constructed when reading or writing records to this table to correspond with the particular source type. Rails provides a simple single-table inheritance capability by using a column called "type". When a record is read in, the value of the type column is used to instantiate an object of that type. Very

From our trip there to get her "big girl bed".

Footage from the instructor session after lunch. More fun driving, with some fog at the top of the hill. Mr. Umeh makes an appearance in the last few laps :-)

Beautiful day at the track. Started out overcast, got sunny, then foggy, then sunny. Great students and a lot of track time too. Shot with a Flip Video Mino HD -- my new favorite in-car camera. This is from the second session of the day.

This legendary reddish-brown critter thrives in our vegetable garden. It's motionless until you give it a gentle squeeze, then it twirls one part this way and that. Is it for digging or for tickling a predator's throat? And what is it exactly?

I started 2010 with a fat realization that I was too heavy! It happened one cold December day at a playground with Marina. She was getting really good on the monkey bars -- and I thought I could show her a couple things. As soon as I grabbed the bar and my feet left the pavement I realized that I was not prepared to haul quite this much weight around. I could barely hold on to the bar! Part two of the realization came when I saw after getting out of the shower that I was carrying a spare tire around my mids

In doing a project at work to more fully utilize our content delivery network (CDN) and nginx to cache static content, we ran up on a cookie problem in Rails. We didn't want any cookies returned to requestors in the case where the content would be marked cachable since cookies may contain personal info or provide access to personal info. My first attempt was to write an around_filter that iterated across the headers hash and unset anything matching my criteria -- in this case, Set-Cookie or some special X-

During an off-trail-excursion I slipped on some tall grass. What came next may very well be the world's next great sport.

Recently I was challenged by my company's CEO to make accessing internal sites as easy as accessing our email. He needed to get to an internal app from the road. He didn't have a computer that was blessed with a VPN configuration, and he's not the type to be excited about setting up SSH tunnels. We use Google Apps for email, calendaring, document sharing, and documentation. We can access any of these services from any computer in the world, as long as we have our company domain login and password. Google se

At the Field Museum in Chicago. These guys were incredible ... the video does not do them justice! <a href="http://mucca-pazza.org/">http://mucca-pazza.org/</a>

Arrival at Chicago Midway on a B737

I gave my Asolo TPS 520 a lot of chances to do well. Great reviews on Zappos, designed in the Italian Alps, how could they not be awesome? Well after 50 miles and sore, blistered feet I knew how. Zappos let me return them for a full refund, even though they were in very much less than new condition. My resolution was to find a great hiking shoe that was waterproof, could handle going "off trail" and that was, more than anything, comfortable. I work in Palo Alto on California Avenue. The best coffee in Palo

At Happy Hollow!

I took a walk through Ed Levin County Park today, but strayed from the trail early on and found some awesome trails outside the park.

She waited all day to show me this. :-)

Thanks teacher Carol for showing her how to swim!

I went up everyone's favorite east bay peak this morning to see just how quickly I could do it. Going from the Stanford Ave parking lot up the Peak Trail is just under 3 miles and the elevation gain is just over 2,000 feet. My goal was to do this in an hour, but I finished it in 1:04:20 without cutting any swithbacks or taking other shortcuts. Close enough where next time I think I can do it. I came down the south side of the peak and crossed over at Hidden Valley back to the Peak Trail. Map is below... Vie

After dinner hi-jinx.

At Great America

At Great America

I went for a big hike today. I've been up Mission Peak a bunch of times, and I've always been curious about the the transmission antennas on the peaks to the south. In looking at the map, I knew that the peaks had names -- Mt. Allison and Monument Peak. Mt. Allison is 200 feet higher than Mission Peak. From the Google Maps satellite view, I could see that there were trails on these other peaks. So I set out to make a route. This morning, I parked at Ed R. Levin County Park in Milpitas and started up the Agu

Pop and I went up Mission Peak on a beautiful January morning. We took the "normal" path up the Hidden Valley trail then cut across Hidden Valley on the Grove Trail to Horse Heaven Trail to get to the peak. That's definitely the best way up and down. http://www.ebparks.org/files/Mission_Peak_map.pdf We took Horse Heaven trail to the bottom, and the last 2/3 was a killer. It's VERY steep after Hidden Valley. Photos from the hike:

I firmly believe people are well intentioned. We really want to be good and do the right thing. One thing that helps to guide us through life are our beliefs: Who is in charge? What does this all mean? Why are we here? It is a faith in our own answers to these questions that guides us through decisions in what to do with our life. It also acts as a filter on our experiences that colors our perception of those experiences. We're stubborn creatures, and we're particularly good at attributing the cause of an e

Divide By Six This one is simple, but I'm surprised that not enough people know it. My tip secret to divide the bill total by six. Others use shortcuts like "twice tax", but that works out to over 18% now. Still a decent baseline to round up or down from. Another shortcut is "divide by ten then add half again". Divide by six is equivalent to 16.6%. Let's do a few tests to see what is easiest... The bill is $24.52. Divide by six gives you $4 pretty quickly. Divide by ten and half again is $2.45 then what's h

Photos available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thenobot/sets/72157622954200256/

0035-CRW_1580, originally uploaded by thenobot. Some pictures from Thanksgiving weekend 2009.

Kite at Don Edwards Wildlife Refuge, originally uploaded by thenobot. No kites allowed!

Normal: Silly: Lyrics: Going for a walk Going over the corn field Come to a cave Stretch out your hand Touch a wet nose Oh it's a bear! Open the door, Home at last...

My folks used to live in the Santa Cruz mountains -- where it's nice and dark. They had a hot tub outside. When I'd visit, a dip in the tub at night was usually a nice thing. A couple of times, I'd luck out and spot a satellite zooming overhead. It was always a neat experience imagining this thing out there that people made -- doing its job, or just caught in orbit around the planet. A couple weeks back, I came across a site that publishes the time and path of visible satellites called Heavens Above. You te

I started a job a few weeks ago where we're using Ruby on Rails. I had never used it before, and am starting to learn why it has been able to grow as quickly as it has -- it's just damn cool in a lot of ways. One technique we used a lot in my previous company was to allocate a column in a database to be a "catch-all" for various attributes, in the form of a serialized hash. The advantage here is that if we want to add an attribute to a table, we would not need to alter the table unless we absolutely had to

Marina helped me get our vegetable garden beds ready for spring this past weekend. There were lots and lots of critters living in there, but she was really taken with this slug ("Sluggy -- she's hungry!"). So after a night of captivity, I took some photos and a video... 20090301 Sluggy Has Dinner from Zack Steinkamp on Vimeo.

She's been working on this for a couple of weeks now... Naomi Rolls (5 Jan 2009) from Zack Steinkamp on Vimeo.

Derek and I drove up to Thunderhill on Sunday morning for a free test day there. Anyone with an SCCA racing license and a race-ready car could just show up and enjoy a full day of driving, err I mean testing. This was also going to be the first time we tried out doing the "arrive and drive" thing with Evil Genius Racing. We pay them to house, transport, and prep the car, and we just get to show up and get in! Fish and Justin of Evil Genius had the car all set for us when we arrived a bit after 9am. Engine w

Such a lame blog title I know. "Great, another self-absorbed hippie with a blog". Well, maybe. Anyhow, this is the story. Anyone who knows me well knows that I am motivated by my dreams (ref: Marina, etc) -- or at least I talk about being motivated by them more than most people I know. Abouta year ago, I had a dream about killing an animal. The dream opened at a tense moment. I was across a table or countertop from a furry animal like a cat or a rabbit. I had a knife in one hand. My mission was to kill the

There are three primary aspects to a photographic exposure: How sensitive is the recording material? How bright is the light contacting the recording material? How long is the recording material exposed to the light? I've found it useful to map the task of getting the "right" exposure to the act of filling a bucket (the film or digital sensor) with water (light) through a hose (the camera and lens). The sensitivity of the recording material (measured in ISO) is akin to the size of the bucket. A smaller buck

I came up with this today. Maybe it's not original, but I think it's pretty cool. The overall concept is that there is a DOM node that holds an output template. A template is defined as some HTML that contains some strings to be replaced. In this case, the "to be replaced" strings look like @this@. The template processing function takes a key:value map and a handle to the template element as arguments. The keys in the map are matched with the string between the @at-signs@. The whole @mess@ is replaced with

(sent to me by a friend) With the election in just a few weeks, here are some interesting questions to consider: What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review? And, what if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class? What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said "I do" to? And, what if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards? What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicte

We just released a new kind of photo viewer. It will search Flickr for whatever you're interested in, wherever you're interested in it and give you a fun way to flip through photos with an interactive map alongside. Check it out...

Don't Lift!

I like to make my own camera mounts. I've finally gotten around to taking photos of the one I did for the rollbar in the Miata. Parts needed: Aluminum angle stock (90-degree "L"), about 8-10" 3/8" bolt, 2" long 2 nuts for the bolt Hose clamps big enough to go around your rollbar plus an inch or so Ball head mount Scrap piece of rollbar padding (cheap foam kind) Step-by-step: Drill a 3/8" hole in the center of the aluminum, diagonally through the bend. Slip the 3/8" bolt through the hole -- the bolt head sho

Pictures - Video from the school. I'm now ruined for lapping days. This past weekend, Derek and I went up to Thunderhill for the SCCA Driver Licensing School. This is a mandatory step to being able to compete in SCCA road races for those who don't already have a racing license with an accepted organization. It's a three day school, offering at least two hours of track time per day. On the last day of the school, the "final exam" is in the form of two races with our fellow students. The week prior to the sch

I didn't see any mention of this in the news stories about the new Apple TV software or on Apple's site, but I noticed it today. iTunes now lists Apple TV as a remote audio device, ala AirTunes. This is really nice, since you can now play music through your home stereo, but controlled via the iTunes interface rather than using the Apple TV on-screen interface. Me likey!

Here is a timeline from Dipity! Embed away!

After checking out what OpenDNS provides, I was excited to give it a try on my network. I use a Linksys WRT-54GS with the excellent DD-WRT firmware. Since the original WRT-54 firmware was Linux based, Linksys had to release the source code to it, which spawned lots of variants offering better feature sets. DD-WRT gives a lot of control over the router's behavior, and offers nice things like the ability to SSH to the router (it's running Linux, ya know!). Another nice addition is the use of Dnsmasq to act as

Painting with new glitter paint!

Marina dances solo, then with the &quot;yiddle wamb&quot;

Marina has figured out how to get into her crib alone. She hasn&#39;t yet braved the exit...

Marina sings songs for us.

Today we released a big upgrade to Dipity on Facebook. Previously, you could look at your Facebook Photos and Facebook Events and see a visualization of how you "connected" with your friends through these objects. It was a read-only experience. With the current release, we've taken a fundamental step forward. You can now create your own Dipity events. You can put these events on not only your own personal timeline, but on your friends' timelines too! We see timelines as storytelling devices -- whether you'r

Ocular Dexterity

Being away from the waves for too long makes one long for waves...

"Waaah! Waaaaaaaaaaah!""BZZZZZZAP!" Found this morning in our backyard underneath where the shed used to be. The people we bought our house from lived here for 50 years.

OK, so it was only three months at Pinger. Here's the story: About a year ago, I had an idea for a web application that was different from any other web application. In short, it allows its user to view information from the future, present, and past in a new and different way. It can help to bring people together, as well as bring more understanding to where we came from. Sounds like a big idea right? Well I think it is. So I worked on this idea for about a month. I took some time off of work and built a pr

I start my new job this coming Monday! Pinger was started by Joe Sipher and Greg Woock, who were instrumental in the success of Palm and Handspring. They had an idea for a new mode of communication that filled the space between having a phone conversation and sending an email. Pinger merges the strengths of both -- the speed and content of a voice message, but with the convenience features of an email. To send a Pinger message, you simply dial the special "send" phone number, say the name of the person in y

I've started a new blog to chronicle the birth and life of a little racecar that Derek and I are building. It's called "spec.this.miata " (http://specthismiata.com/). We're building a Spec Miata, which is basically a Miata with a hardtop, rollcage, and improved suspension. We'll update the blog whenever we do something to or with the car. It's on track to go to TC Design on January 8 so that Tony can fabricate a roll cage and seat brackets. I'm signed up to go to Laguna Seca on January 22 with BMWCCA, where

To provide contrast to the naptime crazy hair photo...

Arti went to do some shopping for the new house just after Marina fell asleep for her morning nap. I took the opportunity to do a few small things to the Miata race-car-in-progress. After an hour, I came back inside because I knew she'd be waking up soon. A bit later, I heard her stirring. She normally will stand up in her crib, hands on the railing, and bounce up and down chanting "maMA maMA maMA maMA" or "daDA daDA daDA daDA" (which is naturally my favorite). "daDA! daDA! daDA!" I walked into her room to

NASA held its annual "25 Hours of Thunderhill" race this past Saturday and Sunday. It is an endurance race where teams race continuously from 11am on Saturday until noon on Sunday. The team that completes the most laps during that time is the winner. I got involved with this pretty much by luck. It started when I read an article that announced Car & Driver and BMW of North America would be campaigning two 335d's at the race. The BMW 335d is a Europe-only 3-series sedan with a 3.0 liter twin-turbo diesel eng

Just finished putting together some pieces for my "2.0" version in-car setup. For my previous trackday at Thunderhill last weekend, I built a camera mount for the roof to get a good view of the car's line on the track. In-car footage doesn't let you really assess how close to curbs you're getting, but putting the camera on the roof does. Click this picture to watch a video: One thing I miss with the roof cam is the ability to see what's going on inside the car with the steering wheel, gauges, knees, and hea

She climbed up there all by herself!

PDC is a casual group of track junkies organized by Mark Dadgar, who is also the driving events coordinator for the Golden Gate Chapter of the BMW Car Club of America. He also runs justracing.com and races a J-Prepared 325i with BMW Club Racing. Mark has three rules about who is allowed to drive with his group: The person must have 10 days of on-track experience, with at least a few of them "signed off" driving solo. The person must not be an idiot. The person must be referred by a current PDC memeber. Up u

Porsches have ruined me for other cars. Every time I'm able to drive one, I realize just a little bit more of the magic of what makes people coo-coo for them. It all started with the '05 Boxster S (987) that I test drove before getting the M3. Sweet Mother of Handling Grace! The car is amazing in all kinds of turns, from tight 90-degree city street elbows to sweeping freeway connectors. The balance of the car is just amazing. Then Derek got his 997 Cabriolet. I recall the first time I really got to drive it

Quarterfinals Semifinals Finals

Back now from a great day at Infineon with the PCA Coastal Driving School. They're an outfit associated with the Porsche Club of America's Monterey Bay and Loma Prieta regions. Sunday morning I prepped the car for track duty -- bleed the brakes, put the track brake pads on the front, put on the track wheels/tires (OEM BMW 18x9 wheels with 255/40-18 Continental street tires). I also dialed in some additional negative camber in the rear to try to solve a slight tire rubbing problem (it didn't solve the proble

I've been doing HPDE events at local race tracks for the past 10 months in my 05 ZCP, and have been pretty happy with how the car felt at higher speeds. Prior to this past week, I've had the following modifications to the car: GC Coilovers (Single Adjustable Konis, 440f / 550r) GC Camber plates Front end: Camber: -2.6 deg, zero toe Rear end: Camber: -2.0 deg (the minimum for the ride height), 1/16 toe in Motul RBF-600 brake fluid Stoptech SS braided teflon lines PF-01 pads on the front (Axxis Ultimate for A

What a fantastic day at Thunderhill! High 70's, clear skies, green grass -- it doesn't get much better than that up in Willows.I met my folks at the Best Western in Willows on Thursday evening. They had driven down from Washington, and were visiting family in Chico. It's a half-hour drive from there to Willows. JohnR and I caravaned up from the Bay Area for the event. It was my first outing with NCRC, and Pops' first time on a road course. We shared my car, running in two different run groups. NCRC does a g

January 2005 I stood in line at 6AM in Valley Fair in January 2005 to be one of the first people to get the original Power PC Mac Minis, and was rewarded with a fantastic computer that became the computing hub of the house. After attaching two 250GB Firewire hard drives (mirrored using the RAID software built-in to Mac OS X), it stored all of our music, photos, videos, and coding projects. It was the house's music server, web server, mail server, and file server. I would use Photoshop to work on images, L

Today, I wrote a little bit of code to combine stories, photos, and videos into a single RSS feed. Previously, there was a feed for stories and a feed for pictures. With Marina, driving events, the DV Cam, our Macs, and iMovie HD, we've been making and sharing lots of videos. I thought about making a feed just for videos, but that seemed like a worse solution than just rolling a single feed. So from now going forward, there is just a single feed from the Nobot. The old photos feed will still work for a long

Zack and I decided early on that when Marina could walk and communicate, she should also be potty trained. We couldn't see ourselves changing the diaper of a two year old after being instructed by her to do so. Hence, our potty journey began. I had talked with my mom about how she potty trained my brother and I. She told me she would hold us over the toilet when she thought we had to go and by the time we were about a year old, we would take ourselves to the bathroom. Simple as that. When Marina was a few w

Paneer is a staple of Indian vegetarian dishes. It is made by boiling milk with diluted lemon juice, then separating the curd. The curd is placed in a cheesecloth and run under water, then pressed under a heavy weight to press out the water. You can buy it in an Indian market in slabs resembling Tofu. Paneer tastes a bit like fresh mozarella cheese, albeit less fatty and more mild. Oftentimes, Arti's mom will make a really tasty dish with Paneer, red bell peppers, and onions in a very rich and spicy cre

It's been a while since I've written anything here. I've mostly been consumed with day-to-day stuff: Marina, Arti, work, projects. I thought it would be good to write down what Marina has been up to in the past month or so. As the video shows, Marina is now really really good at rolling herself onto her belly. She did it for the first time maybe three weeks ago, but only did it once. Then days passed, and she did it twice. There was a 1+ week lull of any rolling activity, then she seemed to just get it. Now

Shortly after we returned from our Christmas/New Years trip to the Galapagos, Arti knew she was pregnant. A home pregnancy test and a trip to the doctor confirmed this. This was great news, since we had decided to take the next step and "pulled the goalie" a few months back. That was cool -- a baby conceived in the Land of Darwin, a group of islands on the equator and full of unique animals. After a few weeks, we had an appointment with our midwife for our first ultrasound. Looking at that tiny, rasberry si

During last weekend's BMW CCA Car Control Clinic, I realized that the BMW tuned the E46 M3 for understeer. I think their intention was safety -- with so much power available, it's all to easy for a beligerent, leadfooted driver to spin the car exiting a corner. By making the front tires lose traction first, I think BMW was trying to avoid the M3 having a reputation as a car that is hard to control. Plowing around the different exercises at the Car Control Clinic wasn't as fun this time as last year in my ol

It all started when I saw these photos that George R. Lawrence took of San Francisco right after the 1906 earthquake. He had been working on using kites as aerial photography platforms, and had nearly perfected his technique when the quake hit. I had run across some other sites online where people had used kites and weather balloons as photographic platforms, and it really seemed like fun. The last straw came yesterday when I saw that my friend and ex-coworker Mikel had been doing some experiments with a po

vimmers -- i've been writing LOTS of perl and CSS lately. one thing that has been frustrating for, oh, the last FIVE years, has been how VIM indents perl comments and CSS properties with 'cindent' enabled. since they look like C preprocessor directives, perl comments are shoved back to column 1 (e.g. "# unintelligible regex"). CSS properties are given the same treatment, since they look like C labels (e.g. "margin-right:1em;"). i like everything about cindent, except for the two cases above. for the work i'

Well, there it is sunning itself up in the upper-right corner of that kidney-shaped pool. We could see its little heart beating away. From crown to rump, it's 13mm -- half an inch. Imagine a raspberry inside your belly with organs and a brain and it makes you feel sick every day. Things are right on target. We have another appointment in 5 weeks. We'll be able to find out the sex of our little friend in 10 weeks or so. Exciting times! My mind is blown....

If my years at the Big Y! have taught me anything, it's that UNIX -- speficially FreeBSD -- rocks. It's incredibly reliable (there are busy production servers at work answering more than 50 requests/second that haven't been rebooted for three years), and extremely efficient. Shortly after starting my job, I installed FreeBSD on a machine at home, and have been reliably serving this web site from it ever since. Imagine my curiousity when Apple revealed a few years ago that its new operating system, "OS X", w

When I was in college, my dad worked for a company that had a relationship with a mattress-maker. He was able to get products from them at a good discount, so when I "officially" grew out of my childhood twin-sized bed, he got me a Queen mattress. It was awesome! Fast-forward 10 years... Married for a couple of years, and still sleeping on that same mattress. My back started to hurt a few mornings per week; and with the sheets off, there was a noticable dip in the middle of the mattress. Time to to mattress

I put the finishing touches on our new bed today. It was inspired by the Leggero Bed from Design Within Reach. All in all it was a fun project, with very little monotony or frustration over the project. This is a simple platform bed. The platform is made from 1/2" plywood, and has no heavy bracing to counteract flex caused by a load (ahem -- about those 20 lbs I've gained since getting married...). The secret of this bed is the bowing of the "slats". The slats aren't pieces on their own -- they are created

After months of sitting in the living room built, but not finished, I finally did the final sanding and finishing of this table. It's a smaller companion to the coffee table I made about 4 months ago. The fun parts took about a day -- making the design (the funnest part), buying the wood, then building the structure. I learned from the coffee table that a table like this needs two kinds of braces between each leg -- the "shelf", and a crossmember that sits just below the table top. This helps to hold the le

What a trip! We returned from our Ecuador / Galapagos vacay yesterday. Pictures Here Here's a synopsis: Sunday, 12/19 :: Depart for Quito, Ecuador - We flew with Pardis and Nick from SFO to Houston, then on to Quito, lugging carry-on bags up a flight of stairs, we all realized that 9,300 feet is REALLY high. Arti and I met up with very friendly person from Metropolitan Touring in baggage claim who took us to our Hotel. Say good-night to Pardis and Nick who made arrangements in a different hotel. Monday, 12

I'm packing up now for our trip to the Galapagos. We head out from SFO at 11am on Sunday 12/19 to Houston. A brief layover, then we head on to Quito, Ecuador. We land late at night, then go to the Swissotel in downtown Quito for a night of sleep. Monday morning, we get on a plane for the two hour, 600 mile, flight to the island of Baltra in the Galapagos. We then get on a boat to go to the island of Santa Cruz where our hotel is located, the Finch Bay Hotel. Should be a fun trip -- Pardis and Nick are trave

(from The Onion) WASHINGTON, DC—The economically disadvantaged segment of the U.S. population provided the decisive factor in another presidential election last Tuesday, handing control of the government to the rich and powerful once again. Bush and Cheney accept victory. Above: Bush and Cheney accept victory. "The Republican party—the party of industrial mega-capitalists, corporate financiers, power brokers, and the moneyed elite—would like to thank the undereducated rural poor, the struggling blue-collar

So we have this big LCD TV in the living room. It has been doing a good job of being both a TV and a computer monitor for a few months now. But its untapped Hi-Def capabilities have been disrupting my sleeping patterns (see the previous article). I've been casually looking at our options in the HD world. Here they are at the moment: Dish Network HD package pros: cheap addition to our current bill cons: not many channels, $1000 for the HD PVR Comcast Cable HD pros: many channels, especially FSBA HD (the loca

Had to write this down -- it was the first dream I had that took place off Earth... Went into a metal contraption thru a door, sat down, got up, and opened the door and was "on the Moon". It was daytime on the Moon. There were 4-6ft bundles of blue/red paper/cardboard stacked three high by a hundred wide 50 yards away in the distance. Thought to myself that it's as good of a place as any if you want to keep something like that around. Maybe there is some kind of recycling facility here. Lots of trash and st

Over the course of the last nine days, we have doubled the amount of artwork we have in our display cache at home. Not only have we been blessed with a lovely three-years-late wedding gift from my lovely mom, but there has been much photography going on here, as well as it being the time for Open Studios in San Francisco, where folks like us can get neat stuff on the cheap! Here are the stories.... Mom painted us a vibrant colorful swimming pool in the AM scene. I don't think she named it, so in that case,

Saturday, Arti and I drove up to SF to check out some art that some folks were showing as part of Open Studios. This is a great event, and is held in a lot of places around the country. Artists interested in showing their work register with the Open Studios organization, who then includes them on their maps and in their annual catalog. Each artist is assigned a "weekend" where their home / studio will be opened to the public. It's a great chance to discover new local talent, and most of the time to actually

Today marks a milestone in the Nobot household. It's a red letter day around here. Yes, today marks the first day where the final CRT has been laid to rest. This process started a few years ago when I decided that it was time to replace my old 17" trinitron with a flat panel display. That was an excellent decision. The clarity of an LCD cannot be touched by even the finest of CRTs. So the score: CRT: 3 (arti's computer, work computer, TV) LCD: 1 (zs computer) Soon after, my machine at work started looking w

when i was 16, i had a 1977 VW Scirocco i raced with my dad in D Street Prepared SCCA Solo II. being young and poor, i couldn't outfit the car to the maximum spec allowed all at once. so i saved and saved until i could come up with the $500 or so for a set of Koni SAs -- the end-all, be-all piece of hardware for me and my fellow VW buddies. the Koni shocks for this car were externally adjustable on the front ("Firm->" knob), but on the rears you had to remove the shock, compress it fully, twist to adjust it

Greetings from the Singapore International Airport. Totally doesn't seem like we've been travelling for 19 hours (13 hours SFO to Hong Kong, 2.5 hour layover, 3.5 hours Hong Kong to Singapore). Our flight left San Francisco at 1:30AM, so it was lights out nearly all the way. It stayed dark outside for 95% of the trip, so much sleep was had by all. We landed in Hong Kong at 5:30AM local time, just as the day was breaking. I was amazed at what it looked like there -- tall lush green hills rising from the Sout

Well, today's the day we pack up our stuff for a three week trip to India. We're leaving from SFO late tonight, flying 15 hours to Hong Kong, a short layover, then a few hours to Singapore. 12 hours in Singapore (with a pint sized hotel room), then another 4 hour flight to Bangalore. You can see our itinerary here. We're covering basically the length of the country during our stay -- starting in the coastal areas of the south, meeting up with my parents in Mumbai, heading to Delhi to meet up with Arti's par

Went home from work friday feeling prety low. I had the achy body, the beginnings of a sore throat, and an unconquerable headache. Took a big nap and some vites, and felt quite a bit better toward the evening. That was good since Pop and I had planned to fly one of the Tomahawks from WVI to SBP. We would meet up with Arti and Mimi who would be driving the pickup loaded up with our old oven and microwave to deliver to Em and Mark. We met up with Mimi and Pop at Ocean Air at about 9am Saturday. The fog layer

Got the new TV last night ... well, it's not so much a TV as a giant computer screen. It's a 37" Sharp LCD/TFT display. It will do 1280x768 resolution, and can also do a side-by-side screen from different input sources (computer, tv, dvd, etc). So far so good -- I've connected my laptop to it, and it's just awesome to be able to compute from across the living room. A note to anyone who is trying to get the full widescreen resolution from their video card: In my case, the laptop has a Radeon video card in it

Here are two stories for the archives.... Sometime in 1995 when I was living on Orange Ave in Costa Mesa with Ryan and Mike, I witnessed a great lightning storm. It was around 9 or 10PM at the end of a mostly normal, warm, clear Orange County day. I can't remember exactly how we first noticed it -- I think I was coming home from school or work when I saw it -- but I recall seeing a flurry of lightning activity far in the distance, in the direction of the ocean. This lightning didn't let up -- it was continu

Since we got our new furniture, including home made TV stand, our glass-and-metal coffee table is sticking out like a sore thumb. It's cold, heavy, and hard -- especially when you hit your shin on it late at night with the lights off. Also, there's no place to put the TV remote, computer keyboard, or mouse when they're not being used. Enter the woodshop. Saturday morning brought Arti and I to a post-Peete's excursion to Southern Lumber. I had drawn up a plan the night before for a new table to fit our needs

I was working on our coffee table replacement over the weekend and needed to taper some 3x3 legs I had laminated from 1x3.5 stock earlier in the day. Previously I had used a home made jig I put together around six months ago. It was flimsy and inaccurate, but it was all I had. On the way back from Southern Lumber, i had an idea... I could use the "Shop Stop" on my Incra Miter 1000 SE to hold a piece securely for a good taper. Since the miter gauge goes all the way to 95 degrees in each direction, I could do

Thanks to all who came on Saturday to our house for our birthday get-together. It's always a great time to have the place filled up with friends -- everything just works out. Pauly and Ghizal drove up from San Diego/LA for the event. you guys are good at breaking out of your comfort zones. Em, Mark, and Ruby came up for a Waechtler party in Cupertino, and came with Mimi and Pop earlier in the day. Derek also was an early arrival -- good times. We'll have to do more of this stuff. Next time will be an outsid

At long last ... the TV stand is finished, installed, and operational. we were waiting until we got our new furniture to make sure the stain/finish on the tv stand matched. i put the final coat of polyurethane on last night (note to self: using a brush is for suckers ... dilute 50/50 with mineral spirits and wipe on several thin coats next time). it was dry this AM, so we hauled it in from the garage and i put all the stuff in/on it.

This AM I had yet another dream that took place in the building I used to work in when I worked for the travel agency in Newport Beach in 1993-1996. I worked on the 8th floor in this 9 story building. A recurring theme in my dreams is to be sneaking around this 9th floor, as if it is some top-secret executive meeting place or something. This morning the dream began on the roof of the building, there were lots of people there. I disappeared down a staircase, and ended up in the foyer area of this elusive 9th

finished up the 48 hour film contest (http://www.48hourfilm.com/) this weekend. derek directed, oren wrote, jefferson and ricky handled cameras, ricky did editing, i did sound recording and failed miserably at scoring. here are things to remember for the next time-constrained movie project: BEFORE FRIDAY find locations first. a good location is difficult to find, and indoor locations have the added complexity of getting permission from the manager/owner/etc. develop characters -- find a standard character a

watched the ISS pass over this past thursday. it was magnitude 0.0, which made it the brightest object in the sky. that thing really hauls, it was past in less than 5 minutes.