Another License Plate

Seen on the way to work today: NACL H20

California certainly has its share of geeky license plates...

s/California/Massachusetts/

There's probably a number of people out there who I haven't told in person, but we're inching up on the actual date in question, so I suppose I might as well just put it up here for the world to see, especially since I told a bunch of people at work yesterday, so it's likely working its way through the company grapevine as we speak.

It's been a great year out here in California, but I've come to the conclusion that I'm more of an east coast person, for a number of reasons I'd be happy to share offline if anyone's interested. As a result, I'm moving back home at the end of next month. I'll be living in Massachusetts, first spending a few months at my parent's house on Cape Cod (it's a rough life, I know) and then moving to Boston with a bunch of friends from RPI. Fortunately, I work for a wonderful and understanding company who is totally ok with me working remotely, so that's what I'm going to do.

The specific travel plans are that I'm going to be throwing everything I own into a little 6x7x8 shipping container on May 26th and having it driven from here to Massachusetts. Around the same time I'll be picking Rob up from the San Jose airport so we can have one more ill advised nonstop trip across the country. I have assured Rob that he will be back home by Tuesday morning (that weekend is Memorial Day, so we get Monday off, which is a big part of scheduling the move for that weekend) so he won't have to miss any work. Google Maps claims we can make the drive in about 2.5 days worth of driving, but we'll just have to see how that plan goes...

So if anyone's up for helping me move the few large (but not heavy really, just bulky it turns out) items of furniture I've got from my apartment to the moving company's terminal sometime on Friday May 26th please let me know. Volunteers will be rewarded with disgarded computer equipment and whatever else I have lying around that I don't want to bring with me to the other side of the country.

Camera Prices

So someone explain to me why all decent camera gear has a list price that's astronomical, but is actually sold for far less? I mean while I think it's nice that the Canon EOS 5D sells for just 3 grand instead of the 5 grand it lists at, but if every store on the planet sells it for 3 grand, why not just have it list at 3 grand?

(Yes, if you hadn't guessed, I've been spending far too much time looking at cameras and lenses and other assorted stuff recently, spending several days watching coworkers with way too many toys take pictures at the engineering offsite will do that to you...)

Too Much Junk Mail?

So yesterday I managed to burn out the motor on my shredder while working my way through the huge pile of junk mail I have sitting around waiting to be shredded.

The real question here, obviously, is if this implies that I get too much junk mail, that I let the junk mail pile up for too long before shredding it, or if I just should have bought a less bargain basement shredder...

The Downside To My Irish Heritage

So for the record, the next time I go to a baseball game someone needs to remind me that baseball games are played outside, in the sun.

I burn when I go outside in the sun. A lot.

Not that I didn't have fun at the Oakland/Texas game with Justin on Sunday, I mean we had great seats and it was a hell of a game, but the sunburn part is a a bit annoying.

This is clearly my punishment for being happy that I went to the Sunday game, where it was nice out, as opposed to the Saturday game where Paul and Justin got rained on until the 5th inning...

OSCON 2006 Schedule Up

Looks like O'Reilly posted the schedule for this year's OSCON.

I'll be giving a tutorial on monday moring (ick, 8:30 AM, at least I'll be getting it out of the way), and speaking on wednesday (5:20 PM - 6:05 PM) and thursday (1:45 PM - 2:30 PM).

So far, the only thing I'm annoyed about with regard to the schedule is that my tutorial conflicts with Theo Schlossnagle's Scalable Internet Architectures, which would have been nice to see. Other that that I don't seem to conflict with anything I'd been hoping to see, which is a nice change of pace, usually it seems like everything interesting happens to fall right when I'm giving a talk.

Anyway, go register, it's going to be a heck of a good time!

iPod Problems

So late last night I bought an album off the iTunes music store and hooked up my iPod to sync it across to listen to in the morning on the way to work. For no adequately explained reason it proceeded to hang transfering the first song, spinning beachball of death and all that. After pulling it out of the dock and manually resetting it I tried again, and iTunes informed me that I needed to do a hard reset in the iPod Update application. I tried that, and it gave me the beachball again. Now it refuses to even mount the iPod.

Oddly enough, it still plays music just fine, although anything that tries to write to it is just totally hosed. This will no doubt get more and more annoying as time goes on.

Anyone got any ideas before I cave and buy a new one?

Fun with Duct Tape

So what really cracks me up about this howtoon is that back in college Rob actually did it for a halloween costume, minus the "cut the duct tape covered clothes off and use them for something" bit anyway. If I recall correctly, he had quite a bit of trouble sitting down, because the duct tape covering his clothing made him pretty much unable to bend at the waist...

You know, it never would have occurred to me that the remnants of Rob's halloween costume could be useful for something. That's why they create howtoons, and I just laugh at the fact that Rob can't sit down ;-)

Only in Silicon Valley

I was driving into a parking lot today, and the car driving out of it had the license plate "GZIP".

Only in Silicon Valley...