Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in 偉民's LiveJournal:

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Monday, July 21st, 2008
12:16 am	Hi, I'm back from Hawaii! Which is where I was. Last week. Visiting my family. Who were a barrel of fun. I also snorkeled and tidepooled, and did a lot of driving around and eating. I'm tan and covered in bug bites. Yay hawaii. READ(3) , WRITE
Monday, July 7th, 2008
1:45 am	Just took all the spare change in the house to coinstar. Took quite some time to get it all in the machine. Half Dollars: 2 Quarters: 305 Dimes: 537 Nickels: 560 Pennies: 2331 Weight: 26 pounds. Total value: $182.26 Normally there'd be a $16.22 fee to get this as cash, but you can currently get e-Certificates or gift cards without a conversion fee. So what am I gonna do? Amazon e-certificate and buy a coin sorter. :P Current Mood: coinstar hog READ(7) , WRITE
Sunday, July 6th, 2008
5:44 pm	< andr00> Nothing I needed was open on the 4th of July. Except Ikea - I went there and bought a giant pile of Flort boxes. I spent my evening putting those together. < Helen> Oh man! The florts of July! Current Music: Human League - The Black Hit of Space READ(11) , WRITE
Saturday, July 5th, 2008
3:45 pm	I'm taking my old computers to Re-PC today. They're more than 2 years old. Some are, in fact, more than 12. I know they're not going to be on the market again. I am taking them there because Re-PC will recycle them responsibly, and perhaps even have a need for some of the rarer components within. I have a really hard time getting rid of things which still might work. I anthropomorphize machines to a compulsive degree. I saw "The Brave Little Toaster" many times as a kid. It's one reason I have so much patience for machinery. I know these PCs will go into the big evil crushing machine so their shards can be sorted into hazardous and buryable materials, possibly candidates for raw material re-use. And it's hard for me to throw them away in part because I feel there is hope for redemption for everything - everybody. I have a hard time saying, "this is broken and can never be fixed," or "this person is sick and will never get better." Throwing things out requires acknowledgement of that. If there is a point of no redemption, what about when I reach that point myself? Current Mood: I guess "grieving" isn't popular enough for an icon READ(8) , WRITE
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
2:02 am	PLEASE STAND BY we'll just assume that most people can support truecolor pngs with alpha now. Ok? ok. That said, now I need 40x40 numbers on a transparent background that are visible on a wide variety of colors. Hey.. you can draw. Draw me some. READ(3) , WRITE
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
10:03 pm	"The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below." 1) Look at the list and bold those you have read. 2) Italicize those you intend to read 3) Underline the books you LOVE. 4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them." [List follows with lots of children's books on it, among other immensely popular easy reading] [but with all the Terry Pratchett mysteriously removed] [and a few pieces of grande literature thrown in for credibility] The Big Read was a TV show/contest broadcast by the BBC in 2003 to find the "best loved" books, viewers would call in/SMS/submit via web their favorite book. Sort of a "UK's Next Top Book!" As far as I can tell, they never said anything about adults only having read six of those books, anywhere. I would be pretty surprised if anyone who managed to get through public school could avoid reading at least twice that many. Honestly. The Harry Potter books which were released at the time plus Animal Farm and Winnie the god damn Pooh get you up to six already. You won't find anyone who has read six, because that figure is a lie. A low-bar. You're sandbagging by being put in a context where you surpass average adults before you leave 1st grade. The fact that the list itself has been mutilated for distribution annoys me. Like it wasn't honest enough just to leave all four Harry Potter novels on there separately, and the FIVE novels by Pratchett. Why was Pratchett removed? Probably because whoever redacted the list didn't want it to seem like a product of BBC television viewers. There is a US National Endowment for the Arts initiative called "The Big Read", started in 2006 but it doesn't have anything to do with the BBC program, or a list of 100 books, popular or otherwise. They do have a list of 16 books you could really stand to read. They're a little more challenging than "Charlotte's Web". "The Modern Library" has a list of 100 best novels, a somewhat more bracing reading list for grown-ups. Six. Pfff. Current Mood: clearly a little cranky, after work and before dinner READ(12) , WRITE
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
1:04 am	I woke up at 5 am, ran the Vancouver half marathon with Helen, and now I'm back in Seattle testing an eNtErPrIsE application I wrote in kind of a hurry (2 days) with no specs or project management. I feel like I"m doing some kind of weird eXtreme nerdathon. Excuse me while I keel over and die. Current Mood: did you see the part where I ran 13.1 miles? Current Music: and then the exercise in iterative specification discovery. READ(4) , WRITE
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
9:37 pm	You probably don't know who I am, huh! Well I'm waiting for a profile.. so let's answer livejournal quiz things. 1. First Name: Andrew. Bet you're surprised! Never Andy. 2. Age: 32 (although I have to think about it now in order not to say "27") 3. Location: Seattle, WA. You know, that's in my user info, but I guess you just don't CARE ABOUT ME! *huff* 4. Occupation: Software Developer. I used to say "programmer", but I have to be more sure about my decisions than I used to, so I get to be a "developer" now. "Senior," even. 5. Partner: Helen, my partner of 7 years! She's smart, wise, pretty... no idea what she's doing hanging out with me. 6. Kids: Um.. I might get a kitty someday. 7. Brothers/Sisters: The family goes like this, oldest to youngest: Jill, Caroline, Me, Ian. I'm 6 years younger and 4 years older, so I'm a weeeeird middle child. 8. Pets: I have a pet plant named Fred. I might get a Kitty, as I mentioned earlier. 9. List the 3-5 biggest things going on in your life: Got a Hawaii Trip coming up in July. I just ran 10 miles, as part of my not-for-a-half-marathon-training. Got a new job recently with an awesome group of characters. I'm going to NVScene in August. 10. Where and for what did you go to school?: I went to UH Manoa and got a PhD in dolphin training. Actually I was getting a degree in computer science from some lame-o UH campus but quit and joined the DoT cOm BuBbLe! 11. Parents: I call em "Mom" and "Dad". Mom is 2nd gen Chinese, an English teacher with a Master's in English from Harvard. Dad died April 2, 1999 at about 10 PM, while I was out practicing with my band. He went to Caltech and Harvard, but quit the technical degree to get an MBA. He thought of himself as a folk musician and spent most of his free time doing that. 12. Who are some of your closest friends?: Helen, who I spend most of my time with. Kris, my friend since I was 5, who I don't get to see much, he manages live sound and plays with his own band. Ed, my friend since only a little after Kris, who is also still around but being a biochemist. Brett, who I met when I moved to Seattle and discussed many bad programming ideas with. He lives in NYC now but I "talk" to him every day, almost. There are more but I have to cut it off because my profile is done, and its like 11 pm so I should leave work already. Did I mention my new job is very challenging at times? READ(5) , WRITE
Sunday, June 8th, 2008
8:14 pm	Happy birthday my June 8th homies. That said, down to business: Right now is the time known to retail planners as "dads and grads". It's a time when retail activity spikes as people buy gifts for Father's Day and various graduations. Until this year, I hadn't realized it was an important strategic business concept, like the holidays. I'm sure it is something you learn in salesman 101. The terminology is fairly consistent across businesses, too. We gotta get this out in time for dads and grads, blah blah blah. So now that I know that, I see it EVERYWHERE. Even though those with dads may or may not care about grads, all the ads mention both. conDADulations! happy fatherDUATION, whatever. Lots of them actually say "dads and grads" right on the ad copy. As far as the retail world is concerned,it is a holiday named "dads and grads" which occurs in early June. Happy dads and grads! I'm not a dad and I don't have one to give presents to anymore, and I am not graduating and neither are you! Well, all right, Ed is. And Michael. And uh.. ok, so a few of you are. A few of you are dads as well. Thank you for driving commerce during the mid year slump! Have a nice electric shaver! READ(2) , WRITE
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
12:12 am	How old are you now? Happy 100,000th birthday to me! At first this sounds like it might involve lots of candles on a cake, but you really only need 6. READ(28) , WRITE
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
6:29 pm	Today's run was an 8 mile route along Lake Washington. I hope little black gnat bugs are good for you because I ate a whole lot of them along the way. In Seward Park, there was a demonstration occurring along the route wherein people were carrying jugs and/or buckets of water and wearing signs that said, "I represent a person without access to fresh water." So, there were at least 12 people without access to fresh water represented there. I did not recognize exactly what intended change the demonstration was meant to bring about, unless they were taking the water to the people (without access to it). It goes without saying that people without access to fresh water will die, and we definitely don't want people to die ahead of schedule, but.. do the bucket people have a plan, or are they just raising awareness? READ(2) , WRITE
Monday, May 19th, 2008
1:24 am	Hugs stats I got pretty sick at the end of last week and have been laid up at home not doing anything.. well almost not anything. I did port the hug counter to win32 because I'm plotting to upgrade the system it runs on, and since the hug counter is a binary, it has to compile on whatever it is moving to. It's not moving to windows! I was just seeing if the C is agnostic enough to go from place to place. So, while examining it, I got a bunch of statistics on the datastore you can ignore.. numbers make me happy. Lock Region: 360KB Size 401M Locks granted without waiting. 58 Locks granted after waiting. Mpool Region: 2MB 520KB Size. 335M Requested pages found in the cache (76%). 105M Requested pages not found in the cache. 257 Number of hash buckets used for page location. 545M Total number of times hash chains searched for a page. 5 The longest hash chain searched for a page. 579M Total number of hash buckets examined for page location. 1234M The number of hash bucket locks granted without waiting. 13 The number of hash bucket locks granted after waiting. 13 The maximum number of times any hash bucket lock was waited for. 593741 Number of data items in the database. 838 Number of hash buckets. What does that say? It says... my cache hit ratio kind of sucks (it is a tiny cache), I hardly ever wait for locks (0.000007% of locks wait), my hashing function isn't very well suited for this data (700:1 item to bucket ratio??), but performance is okay anyway for some reason. I do see some obvious improvement-shaped-holes in the code. Last commit on hugs code was in November 2005, and I've gotten two thousand four hundred and fifteen times smarter since then. The most important product of this project is not the hug thing itself (though you folks do seem to enjoy it), but the experience to write transactional code that can cope with tens of millions of hits per day on a sub-$400 resource. READ(2) , WRITE
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
9:12 am	Some criminal spamming service has started using one of my email addresses as From: line on their spam, so I'm getting lots of bounces from people I never sent mail to. Most of them are the "THIS MESSAGE WAS SPAM" or "MESSAGE UNDELIVERABLE" type, but there are a fair number of Out-Of-Office autoreplies in there, many of which contain peoples vacation dates and out-of-office contact numbers (or things like, "I'm no longer with this company"). So yeah, note to self, don't stick proprietary info in autoreplies. READ(3) , WRITE
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
12:32 am	I mentioned a new job, right? So with new job comes new gear. New laptop! My old one is about 8 years old, which is pretty old in laptop years. I mean, really. It came with Windows ME installed. Yeah. So, they asked what kind of laptop I wanted. I said, oh, a macbook pro. oh SNAPE But they said Ok. Two purchase order revisions later I have a 15" Macbook Pro with 2.6 Higagertz corn 2 dude peeplebladder and 4 Gigglebits of mammary, running Mac OSX Leper! I think that's what it says. First impressions: I HATE THE POINTER ACCELERATION. And there's no way to turn it off, or I am too noob to figure it out. I like the other semantic features of the multi-touch pad, but the accel is making me frown. During setup, for some reason, the setup program repeatedly claimed it had a problem connecting to the wifi network, though the info was right. After several dozen tries, I gave up (there aren't too many options to mess with, so you exhaust them pretty quickly.. this is very macintoshy) and just went on with the initial config. It immediately claimed there were software updates waiting, and lo and behold the wifi was connected to the secured AP at work. Okay. sure. It worked after that just fine. Not too much else to say tonight, I don't want to write a book about it and I gotta sleep like now. Within a couple hours I managed to brick the thing so bad that it wouldn't respond to the "force kill", the equivalent thing to the Ctrl/Alt/Del in Windows. (installed a keyboard driver for the macally icekey while my tomcat server was loading a very memory intensive app.. not sure which was to blame). And, I had this funny problem where the screen would dim at strange seemingly unpredictable intervals, then get lighter, then dim. Sometimes a little, sometimes lots, between 5 and 15 minutes apart. I eventually figured out that the light sensors that tell the computer how dark the room is (and therefore whether to lighten or darken the screen/keyboard) are on either side of the keyboard, so when I was resting my hands at the sides of the keyboard, they covered the sensor, the OS thought the room was dark, and it dimmed the screen. Derrr. So that feature had to get turned off. Got all my apps installed already, pretty much. Opera, IDEA, Quicksilver, Textmate.. oh and I can finally run xscreensaver again. Whee hoo, apple II mode. Current Mood: Rainbow beach ball Current Music: DONG! READ(12) , WRITE
Monday, March 31st, 2008
11:33 pm	The thing I couldn't remember yesterday? It was my MOM'S BIRTHDAY. Hello, Mom? Worst son in the world here! How are ya! Current Music: dial tone READ(4) , WRITE
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
9:40 pm	You know what makes my head hurt? Thinking. A dangerous pastime, I know. Why am I even thinking on the weekend? In a nutshell: new job. New job ramp up is making me think a lot, and I'm studying all the time. On the upside, when I need to think of something, it's easier! On the downside, all this thinking gives me terrible headaches. I must've not been thinking very much for a while there. So yeah now my head hurts and there's OGRES, ALL RIGHT? Feels like I meant to say something in particular. Um.. jrjrjrjrjrjr. I missed breakpoint due to that whole job crisis thing. My car won't start, the battery is acting almost dead for some reason. I hope whiteboard fumes aren't bad for you. I'm trying to take my dad's tube amp in to Condor to be repaired, but the car isn't exactly cooperating. It's in medium-lame shape, you can see a transformer hanging off its mount and stuff. It has an original maestro phaser built in, for that authentic fwooshing sound. Nope, wasn't any of those things. Hope everyone is having a nice 3/30/08. Current Mood: wambulance Current Music: phone posts READ(1) , WRITE
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
11:07 pm	Hey, remember way back when, I went to an LJ outing to meet brad and the crew to weigh in on ads and ad revenue and how they would affect LJ? I said ads move the financial motivation to the wrong place, and that once ad revenue drives the business, everything goes south. Cut to today, basic LJ accounts will no longer be created. You're either ad supported or you're pay. I'd say I told you so, but it's not like that would make anyone listen to me in the future, or even make me feel better about it. Brad says he's against it too, but gee, who could have possibly imagined that the horse would bolt if we left the stable door open? Current Mood: biz-cynical READ(9) , WRITE
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
10:34 pm	I made you a nachos I got a weird craving for nachos. But not the kind with chewy, baked on cheese. I wanted cheese sauce, but not something with polymers. It seemed reasonable to add a bunch of cheese to bechamel. Hey, it works! READ(6) , WRITE
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008
9:38 pm	Apartment inspection tomorrow. Cleaned until my spindly little nerd arms hurt, and then cleaned for about 5 more hours after that. Apartment is clean. I smell like cleaner. A heady melange of 409 and Windex with a hint of.. yes.. soft scrub. Current Mood: scrub Current Music: Wish I could say it was "No Scrubs" READ(13) , WRITE
Monday, February 25th, 2008
8:53 pm	glassplode There I was, emptying my dishwasher, which had long since cooled to room temperature. I had just started returning the glasses to their shelf when I picked up one of my old tumblers which had accompanied me from my house in Honolulu and it gently exploded in a shower of tiny shards of glass. "Huh," I thought, "just like a safety glass windshield." There was no impact, as there would be if I had accidentally bumped something. The glass just self destructed, thoroughly. Even the thick base, which I had been holding (since I picked it up from its inverted position on the rack), was shot through with cracks, rough bricks of glass splintered off its sides. Unfreezing, I set the base down on a plate, where it made quiet cracking noises intermittently, as if threatening to break even more. Surveying the aftermath, I found half my kitchen covered in tiny glass knives. My dishwasher and the remaining dishes were generously salted as well. My will to cook suddenly drained, I gingerly picked my steps out of the kitchen to fetch some gloves and begin the pick/broom/swiff/vacuum process of a glass cleanup. Effects: now I am very suspicious when picking up glassware. Also, who knew this much glass was in one cup? I swear there's like 3 cups worth in the pile. Current Mood: damage sustained: one tiny cut on finger Current Music: it made a really cool noise which I will never hear again READ(6) , WRITE