SteveCook.net

Janet was laughing at me…

I found out today that Star Trek: The Experience is closing! I really am sad to see it go - I’ve been on it at least 4 times that I specifically remember, and probably a couple other times just to go with somebody else. So, Janet thought it was funny that I was actually sad to see it closed. Mean Janet! *heehee*

Fond memories of CES and Comdex always included stopping at the ST:E ride, then down to Quark’s bar for a nice Warp Core Breach.  Hanging out with Kevin, Larry, and Kevin’s friend from work - me and Kevin splitting a WCB.

So, I’m dragging Janet to the ride before it closes - we’ll stop by later this month when we go to see Craig Ferguson live at the MGM Grand. I’ll be sure to take as many pictures as possible.

“This is the Ferrari 355. The best car in the world. Ever.”
- Jeremy Clarkson

The beautiful Argento Nurburgring (silver) 1999 Ferrari 355 F1 Berlinetta arrived the weekend before last - on a truck from Scottsdale, where FMS Motorsports did a top-to-bottom (or was it bottom to top?) Pre-Purchase Inspection. Other than a few minor things (motor mounts - which I had them replace), the car is in great condition.

I’m still working on getting the F1 shifting down to a smooth and fast operation, but I’m getting better. The manual throttle blips on the downshift are great for working left-foot braking.

We originally planned on keeping the 308, but since kicking Janet’s Porsche “to the curb”, she’s getting weary of getting into a hot Cayenne… So, if a good offer comes along, I may part with it. I’m not in a rush, since it’s a “famous” car - it was on the cover of the 308 book!

So, last week HJ asked about any software to help track a weight loss competition (you know, like the Biggest Loser on NBC). He looked and couldn’t find a free one, then I looked around and couldn’t find a free one. There’s a couple out there that “look” free, but once you try to do anything (like actually have competitors in a challenge), they want to charge you.

So, I had an old diet domain that I bought a couple years ago called TrackDiet.com and though hmmm… this might be fun, so late last week and this weekend I finished the beta version of TrackDiet.com Weight Loss Challenges.  It’s just the basics for now (with some ajaxy jquery goodness thrown in), but I’ll add more features as more people sign up.  Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think.

About a month ago I was looking for a new book to read and found “The Lost Fleet: Dauntless” (Jack Campbell) from a few reviews on Amazon and Audible. I started with the audio book, and enjoyed the story quite a bit. It’s basically a story of a soldier that has been in hibernation/suspended-animation sleep for 100 years.  He was the commander of a ship that was destroyed in a sneak attack from the “syndicate” worlds - that starts a war that’s still going on after he wakes up.

It examines what can happen to a society (and the military) after 100 years and multiple generations of war have decimated both sides. It does take things to the extremes a little bit beyond what I’d think would be likely - I don’t think military tactics would be completely gone…  But aside from that, it’s entertaining and an enjoyable read. I’ve read the first three books (of the series of 6), and the final three have yet to be written.  They’re all enjoyable and so far the story arc includes some interesting thoughts as to the reason for the war and what’s causing it to last so long.

The only thing I didn’t really enjoy was the amount of repetitious descriptions of time-delays. The first book constant reminds you of how long it takes to communicate at great distances. I think most readers “get it” after the second, if not the first, explanation - but the first book brings it up repeatedly. It’s less in the second book, and even less in the third, which is good, because it seriously would have put me off if it continued.

If you enjoy sci-fi, and space battles in particular, I’d recommend the series, either on Audible or paperback.

I also finally read Ender’s Shadow, and it was very, very good.  If you’ve read Ender’s Game and then were not impressed with Xenocide, I’d still recommend Ender’s Shadow. It’s great.

So, over the past few months I’ve been trying to increase my work efficiency while programming and working on the computer. I’ve started trying using more shortcuts and a few utilities to help me work better. You know, put the “work smarter not longer” saying to the test. Here are some of the things I’ve found the most useful.

• Launch Utilities
  I’ve tried several “Launcher” type applications. All the ones I tried worked well, and have their plusses and minuses.  To me, the thing that slows me down the most is moving my hand off the keyboard and to my trackball (it’s a trackball because I always know exactly where it is - my hand doesn’t subconsciously have to search for it). My favorite launcher is now The Enso Launcher. It’s available for free at http://humanized.com/enso/launcher/ 
• Keyboard Shortcuts for IE
  A full list is available at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306832
  I’ve found that CTRL-E is one of the most useful - takes cursor to search box.
  CTRL-TAB is nice for switching between tabs. I actually keep a couple IE windows open with fewer tabs, depending on what I’m working on - making ctrl-tab even more useful.
  CTRL-L is basically the address bar.
• Keyboard Shortcuts for Firefox
  A nice list is available at: http://www.mouserunner.com/FF_Shortcuts1Printable.html
  I like CTRL-K for going to search box and ctrl-UP and ctrl-DOWN to switch sites to search.
• Upgrade Your Life
  The lifehacker.com book is FULL of helpful items to make you more efficient.
  Available at Amazon.

I’ve been to Japan a few times, and I return with interesting stories consisting of a silly mix of exploration and confusion. Jonah, after hearing these stories, really wanted to go to Japan someday (and I think his love of Ramen noodles and Samurai stuff helped too). Well, Janet suggested that I take Jonah to Tokyo for spring break, and so we went! Janet and Sterling stayed home (neither of us was masochistic or sadistic enough to take an 18 month old on a 13 hour flight).

We spent a week in Tokyo, with side trips to Yokohama and Kyoto.  We took the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) from Tokyo to Kyoto, and then back again. We also went to the Yokohama Science Center where Jonah played with nearly every exhibit there - until they closed the place down and kicked us out.

Part of Janet’s requirement for letting Jonah go to Japan was that he had to keep a travel journal and write at least one page a day. He kept to his word and wrote some interesting entries into his journal.  It’s interesting to read his perspective of the same events that I saw.  For example, we used to have Krispy Kreme’s here in Albuquerque, but they closed down a couple years ago. They were one of his favorite foods. Just our luck, the hotel we stayed at (Sunroute Plaza Shinjuku - I Highly recommmend BTW) had a Krispy Kreme less than a block away.  He wrote in his journal about the last day and trip home: “It was the best vacation of my life, and I got Krispy Kremes”.  Nothing like priorities!

We have a ton of pictures, but they’re in a protected location on another site. If you would like to access and see the pictures, send me an email, and I’ll send you the URL.

Some helpful hints about traveling to Tokyo:

• Take the train from the airport to the station nearest your hotel (Narita Express). It’s TONS better than the bus or Taxi.
• If you’re going to be going all around Tokyo and Japan via the railroad (I highly recommend), stay at a “hub” station - such as Shinagawa or Tokyo Stations. We spend a lot of time traveling from Shinjuku to those stations. Shinjuku is great, as was our hotel, but if you’re going all over, you’ll be going through those stations a lot.  It wasn’t bad - but it would save 20 minutes each direction if you’re travelling.
• The lines at Tokyo Disney are CRAZY long.  Fast Pass is the only way to go there.  Plus, they don’t have as many “snack” and ”eateries” as the California Disney.  AND, the strange thing is, most items don’t say “Tokyo Disneyland”, they just say “Disneyland” - which makes buying something a little trickier
• Be adventurous - but think ahead. We found a couple neat shrines and parks by just turning down alleys and parks. In Kyoto, we wandered around and found many shrines and temples. Near the end of the day we stopped at the Kyoto Tower to look around. If we had gone to the tower first, we could have mapped out what we wanted to see (you can see pretty much all of Kyoto from the tower). 

A few weeks ago I got a call from a great journalist at the Albuquerque Journal, Todd Lovato. My old friend Dan Mayfield pointed him in my direction for an article he was writing about geeks and nerds, and how they were either Alpha Male or Beta Males. The interview went well, and they also took some photos of me and my car. The article was in this Sunday’s Journal, and here’s a mediocre scan of the front page of the “Living” section:

There was more on the inside, including a nice black and white photo of me driving. Did any of you see the article?

I made a quick parody of the Mercedes McLaren Formula One car with more appropriate advertisers. (click on image for full size):

New Sponsors include:

• Ferrari - for all technical data that turned them from a second rate team to Ferrari speed. Nice turn around -cheaters.
• CheatCodes.com - using all the cheating they can, they’ve enlisted the help of the best cheat site online!
• SCHUMI Developed - The technology was optimized by Schumacher - need we say more
• Cliff Notes - Why do all you own work, when you can read somebody else’s?

Well, it took years in the making, but it’s finally available! The Ferrari 308 Buyer’s and Owner’s Guide! It’s available on Amazon.com! Pick up a copy and let me know what you think!

Finally finished the major coding sections for GameRadar.com’s Blog section. You can check it out at: GameRadar.com News.  Here’s a short article: GameRadar Opens!

I just finished reading and listening (mostly listening) to Ender’s Game for the fourth time. I listen to it while riding or while I’m running on the treadmill at the gym. Man, that’s a great friggin’ book.

And even through I’ve read/listened to it so many times, I still haven’t read Speaker for the Dead. And that, despite having listened to the epilogue by Orson Scott Card himself describing that the main reason he wrote Ender’s Game was for an introduction to Speaker for the Dead. So, for this month’s audible selection, I got Speaker, unabridged for 14+ hours worth.

Been working quite a bit these last few weeks on some major BidNip technical changes - hopefully fixing a lot of the load we’re seeing on Sunday evenings - Due to Sunday evenings being the most popular ending time, and the ability for sellers to pick ending times, at some points during Sunday nights (6:00:00, 7:00:00 etc,) we’re submitting thousands of bids per second… Causing some major slow downs. We’ve got the solution worked out, now we’re beta testing

CheatCodes and GameRadar are also coming along. We’ve added some intern pages and  admin pages to match. We’re also getting close with the news section (mostly story admin - I used TinyMC)

While I was waiting for the new season of Dr. Who to start (which it did this weekend, and it STILL ROCKS), I’ve been checking out some other shows on DVD (and from other sources *wink*). They’ve been really good so far.

• Hustle (aka HU$TLE) : A collection of con-artists doing various cons. Each episode is a different scam. The characters are funny and entertaining. I’ve watched the first two seasons on DVD, and the third season is over in the U.K. A&E (or BBC|America) was showing them, but I haven’t seen it on there yet.
• Life On Mars : This one sounds really strange, but I’m halfway into the first seasons, and it’s a really well written and acted crime drama with a twist. The twist? It’s about a cop in 2006 that gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. He keeps getting “flashbacks” and hearing things from his hospital room in 2006, while solving crimes in 1973. It’s interesting to see the HUGE difference in police work between 2006 and 1973. I hope they make a U.S. version of this show - it’d also be interesting to see the U.S. differences.
• Torchwood : This season is over, and it won’t have season 2 until next year, but it had a great season ending episode.

Anyway, if you get the chance, I highly recommend checking out these shows.

Thanks to a temporary order from congress, the Daylight Savings dates this year are totally different. This basically screwed up everything that takes care of DST automatically - cell phones, laptops, my TiVo, etc.  The other thing it did was really mess with some of our Linux servers. Luckily, it’s an easy fix _if_ you know what to do and where to look.

TechRepublic has a great article on how to fix the daylight savings time issue that helped a lot.

Basically, you need to do the following:

  # wget ‘ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007b.tar.gz’
# tar -xzvf tzdata2007b.tar.gz
# zic -d zoneinfo northamerica
# cd zoneinfo
# cp -r * /usr/share/zoneinfo/

  # zdump -v /usr/share/zoneinfo/CST6CDT | grep 2007
(making sure that the two Mar 11 and Nov 4 entries are there).

  # ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/CST6CDT /etc/localtime

And that’s it.  Not too dificult and keeps your linux box running with the correct internal UTC time.

For the first few days of this week, I went to the Bondurant Grand Prix Road Racing school at Bondurant Racing School. It was a lot of fun! I took a few courses several years ago, but with the businesses and getting my MBA, I haven’t actually raced competitively in a couple years.

Going to this school was the brainchild of Steve J. It was his birthday, and his present was to have friends and (most importantly) his new wife join him at racing school. Steve’s birthday was the 21st, so Steve, Erin, Brian R., and Rolex-Brian (It’s actually Brian K. but Rolex-Brian sounds cooler) met up in Phoenix. On Sunday evening, the day before class, we went to Brian R.’s beautiful vacation house just outside Phoenix and watched Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. “Shake and Bake!” That JUST HAPPENED!

Class went very well, with only one track “incident”, involving one of the people we didn’t know. He got lost on the track, went off course, and into the tire-wall, causing about $2500 in damage. He didn’t come back after that, so didn’t learn as much from his mistake as he might have. Racing really does take full concentration - if you lose focus, it can cost you BIG TIME. Racing also takes a lot out of you physically - after 7 hours at the track, you’re pretty much exhausted. We ended up not doing too much in Phoenix, other than going out to dinner, then going back and working a bit.

The cars we raced were C5 Corvettes (2003 models), that worked pretty well. They’re front-engined, so had very different characteristics when compared to all our Ferraris (we all had Ferrari’s except Rolex-Brian, who has a Porsche, which is even less like the corvettes!). So, we did more trail braking than you would in a mid-engine Ferrari.

We all got a chance to meet Bob Bondurant. He’s really cool. Here’s me and Bob next to the track - he’s on his Segway. He would take the Segway out to the center of the track and make sure we were all heel-toe downshifting correctly through the 8-9-10 turn complex.

We all had fun, and we’re planning on doing a Vegas or Laguna Seca sometime later this year. And, HAPPY BIRTHDAY STEVE J!