electric relaxation

Jai’s shoulder has healed to the point where he can play basketball again, so we’ve resumed our morning workout + games of 21 at the UCSF Mission Bay gym.

We cleared the record. After the first day, Jai was up a half game. He then followed up an exhausting stream of trash talking with an inexplicably poor showing resulting in back-to-back defeats (21-10, 21-15) and allowing me to recapture the lead.

However, Jai did snag the day’s highlight with a monstrous block on a left-side drive. His elation was exceeded only by my own shame.

Jai: 1 Ramesh: 2.5

I watched several good movies recently. A few of these were picked off of IMDB’s “Best Sci-Fi” titles list (sorted by popular vote).

• The Day The Earth Stood Still
  This is a classic Science Fiction movie (black and white, 1951), about an alien visitor who comes to Earth to warn humanity of the fact that aliens are closely watching their behavior. It’s aged remarkably well. Apparently they’re releasing a remake of it this year with Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly.
• The Prestige
  On the surface, this one seemed like it had a lot in common with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but it’s a fairly different concept and story arc. I enjoyed it, though I don’t think it deserves the #10 spot on IMDB’s list.
• Persepolis
  An animated film that was nominated for an Oscar in the animated category (where it was defeated by Ratatouille). Pretty good, though I feel like it didn’t have the impact on me that it was supposed to… Perhaps I’m just being lame. At any rate the Eye of the Tiger sequence did not do anything for me, but other than that it was definitely very engaging.
• Some Kind of Monster
  A documentary about Metallica. It follows the band through the two-plus years leading up to the release of the St. Anger album in 2003. This one was recommended to me ages ago by John Haggerty, a former colleague of mine at VMware. I have had it lying around for years and I finally got around to watching it. Very worthwhile though ultimately I was a bit underwhelmed by the band’s drama and disorder compared to like a Queen or The Beatles or someone of that nature.
• The Iron Giant
  I’ve been intrigued by the visual style of this animated movie and I loved the book so this is another one that I’ve been meaning to watch forever. The story was pretty cheesy but the visuals were nice (side question: have these guys drawn other films? Their style seems similar to Fox studio work like Anastasia or I dunno, maybe it’s just the coloring or something).

I wish I had found this years ago:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/rss/best_new_music

When I get bored or motivated enough I’m planning on writing a little RSS transformer that transforms this feed into one that sources Mininova. Actually I think that’s exactly what Yahoo! Pipes is supposed to be for…

Update: Holy fuck, that was easy. I’m impressed. This link works in uTorrent.

I had a slow leak in the rear of my bike which I managed to fix today. I knew that this was supposed to be really easy to do but a dangerous combination of laziness and unfounded intimidation almost lead me to bring it in to the shop down the street where I bought the thing.

Anyway, it took all of fifteen minutes to do. I simply followed the first guide I found on the internet, though I skipped the tire levers since I didn’t find them necessary.

I had no idea that Automobile was such a Z32 fan. They named it one of the 25 most beautiful cars in history, and one of the 20 best cars of the past 20 years.

I just got my car back from the shop (I took it in for what turned out to be an issue with the starter motor). While I was there I finally took the plunge and got a new exhaust, down pipes and tail pipes and new ECU. It’s now hitting 300HP at the wheel, with over 300 lb-ft. of torque.

Yes I’m retarded. Bring on the ridicule.

I spent this past weekend at the Schweizer ski resort in Idaho with Lisa, Matt and Vanessa. It was incredible. The resort is massive; it felt twice as big as Tahoe and half as crowded.

My personal on-board highlights included nailing a couple of real jumps -  I think I got close to thirty inches of air on the biggest one I landed, which isn’t much but it’s a start - and for extra bonus points, I tried my first rail slide. It was a fat pipe, maybe seven or eight inches in diameter, and there was no need to jump onto it, so it was definitely beginner friendly. I stayed on it for maybe three quarters of a second at most. But it felt pretty good. I also got a lot more comfortable with black and double black diamond runs, though I think a lot of that was mostly taking advantage of the fact that the snow was soft and plentiful.

Matt Ginzton and his folks generously accomodated us for the duration of the trip, so we had very comfy beds in their beautiful new house in Matt’s home town of Sandpoint, Idaho. Turns out Sandpoint is basically right at the bottom of Schweitzer. You can basically see the resort from Matt’s house, which goes a long way towards explaining why Matt’s a fucking ninja scientist on his board.

Almost forgot - Matt also tried to teach me how to do a 180. His method of instruction pretty much consisted of him busting effortless 180s in my face and then insisting that I follow suite. Surprisingly, it eventually worked. I was able to nail a frontside 180 off a small hop.

I bought my mom a Kindle for her birthday. My parents are visiting and they brought it with them so I could show them how to use it (it’s been sitting unopened in a box since it arrived a few weeks ago).

Not much point in doing a complete review since there are plenty of them out there. I just wanted to note that this thing is fucking cool. Also, I particularly liked the warm and fuzzy introductory note from Jeff Bezos about their goals for the device. It’s weird that I’m such a sucker for this sort of crap, but anyway sadly the little note that basically thanks you for being an early adopter made me feel a lot better about the amount of cash this thing put me back.

On a related note, a couple of weeks ago I was contacted by a recruiter looking for a senior Linux person to work on the Kindle. I was surprised at how tempting it was to find out more (a temptation which would have been even stronger had I actually played with the thing before I received the recruiter e-mail).

Update: Forgot to mention that the packaging is also really cool. As was the packaging on my new JawBone. I guess everybody’s getting the memo these days…

Baseless and unfounded speculation: the true cause for the decline in consumer spending is the Hollywood writers’ strike. People are watching less TV, and therefore they’re seeing less commercials, and therefore they’re less induced to buy goods and services.

Armchair economics is fun.

 From Wikipedia:

The Man Who Sold the World is a song by David Bowie. It is the title track of his third album, released in the U.S. in November 1970 and in the UK in April 1971. It was later re-popularised and introduced to a new generation by Nirvana’s cover on their MTV Unplugged in New York album. In the wake of this cover, Bowie bemoaned the fact that when he performed the number himself he would encounter “kids that come up afterwards and say, ‘It’s cool you’re doing a Nirvana song.’ And I think, ‘Fuck you, you little tosser!’”^[1]

I shamefully admit that I had no idea this was a Bowie song, though in my defense I’ve never been a huge Nirvana fan in the first place and I like to think that if I was, I would’ve done my homework.

I knew that David Bowie was fairly prolific, but I had no idea he had 36 full-length albums and sold 136 million records. Anyway, I’ve got ahold of all 36 of them and I queued ‘em up in a shuffled playlist.

I undertook basically the same exercise about a week ago with Led Zeppelin, and with Barrington Levy the week before that… The sad thing is that I think I end up spending more time reading the Wikipedia entries than actually listening to the music itself.

Shuffle mode is the key - otherwise one quickly overdoses before even putting a dent in the catalogue. So far, Bowie’s holding up well though; seems like perfect coding music. Or maybe I’m just in the mood for it.