Welcome to cydewaze.org

These are pretty cool.

This website as DNA.



(from http://www.baekdal.com/)


This website as a funky graph.



(from http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/)

This wicked hawk I've been trying to get a good pic of. He's pretty elusive, and likes to hang out behind this particular group of houses where he stalks a cat.





Kitties...

Why is it that the majority of the time people flip you off on the road, it's after THEY'VE done something completely and utterly stupid.

Last night Jess and I were on the road home from the Kennedy Center after seeing the Nutcracker. I got a bit turned around in DC, because they sent us out the wrong exit, but I finally found I-66 which takes us to the GW Parkway, then home. The ramp from I-66 to the Parkway is just a piece of elevated highway, designed to be taken at speed. It's a VERY gradual turn, that's banked, and could easily be taken at around 80 in most cars without breaking a sweat.

Last night there was a Toyota Prius in front of us. Everything was fine until we got to that ramp, at which point he dropped down to the low 40's. I moved to the left to take a peek around him and see if there was anything in front of him that I should be worried about (debris, road damage, animal, etc) and noticed him slam on his brakes. I was following at a good distance, so I didn't even really have to take my foot off the gas. He's now down to about 35, and the brakes slam on again, this time harder. Again I was far enough back to be able to just coast and move my foot over the brake pedal, but didn't really need to use them.

By now we're in the high 20's, and I start to worry about someone rear-ending us on this high-speed ramp. We finally make it to the Parkway, and he FLOORs it, unleashing all 5 of his Briggs & Stratton horsepower (not a very green thing to do for a Prius driver). I decide that he's either drunk or texting, so decide to go around him. As we pass him, he shakes his middle finger at us frantically. I still have no clue what his problem was, unless the view out the back of that car makes everyone look like they're tailgating. As such, the incident calls for a few driving tips:

1) If you can't drive, it's not my fault. Take lessons and remember, there's always public transportation.

2) If you can't manage more than 35 on a ramp marked for 55, it's not my fault. Find a wet parking lot to practice in, or take lessons. Don't forget about the public transportation option.

3) If you own a Prius and feel like everyone's tailgating you, have a friend follow you at a safe distance. If he looks like he's tailgating remember he's not, and neither were all those people you've been flipping off since you got the car. They probably think you need psychiatric help. If you just flipped off your friend, you probably do.

4) Remember when you slam on your brakes going 35 in a 55, your action will accordion back through traffic. You could cause an accident and should probably stick to using public transportation. Road rage kills, and so might you.

5) Also remember that flipping off someone else for your screw-up doesn't make your screw-up go away. It just means you screwed up twice.

Thanks for reading, and remember that what's going on in front of your car is always more important than what's going on behind it. Keep that finger where it belongs, and keep your foot on the gas.

Our last show of this tour was Raleigh, NC. This makes seven shows we've seen this tour, with three of them being GA for me, and four for Jess. Of all the shows, Toronto 2 was hands-down the best (pics of the Toronto shows can be found in my gallery), with Raleigh a close second. The DC show was notable because of both the excellent organization of the FedEx field staff (they actually honored the fan-based numbering system, and had a narrow GA line) and the huge rip-off of an included parking charge whether you parked at the venue or not (and we did not).

The NC show was small, but homey. An excellent crowd who seemed to really appreciate U2 being there. They let me bring my good camera in, and I got some decent shots.






















In DC, I was stuck with Jess's old, tiny camera, so I only got a few good shots. There were the best:






So that's it for now, unless of course Jessica buys more tickets for the 2010 leg of the tour. Seeing them in Greece might be fun, since I have family there. We'll see how things (namely our bank account) go by then.

Jessica and I just finished a fairly fast-paced trip to the UK, where we saw U2 play at Wembley Stadium (two shows) and a show in Glasgow, Scotland. I'll write up a report soon, but some pics for now.

Wembley























Glasgow

Several weeks ago, I picked up a Garmin Edge 305 bicycle computer. It's one of the coolest toys, and I've been logging all my ride data with it. It tracks things like heart rate, speed, cadence, elevation, grade, and the averages of most of those things.

I plotted yesterday's ride, and it's interesting to see how things look.



There's a bit of a climb just before the halfway point, but other than that it's just rollers.

Curiously, max grade (around 15%) was toward the end of the ride.



I could also plot things like speed and cadence, but they tend to be tough to read (especially cadence) so they're only really useful as averages.

The 305 has a feature called "Virtual Partner" where you can race against yourself on a given course. Haven't figured out how to use that yet.

Btw, if you're a Costco member, they occasionally have the Edge 305 on sale for $179.99 with the heart rate monitor included. The cadence sensor is usually under $30 on Amazon.

Definitely a cool toy.

It's funny how quickly time flies when summer rolls around.

Jess and I have been doing pretty well. We're finally managing to get some riding in, and we've also done a bit of camping as well. Over the July 4th weekend, we took a drive up to Maine (state motto: Sorry about the traffic ticket, but we're really broke) for some camping. This ended up not being the best choice, because it was 12 hrs up and 14 hrs back. A lot of driving for one day of camping!

In order to bypass the heavy traffic areas of Baltimore, Philly, NYC, and Boston, we avoided I-95 and instead went up through Harrisburg PA to I-81, then across I-84 to Connecticut. It was a nice drive, until we got to CT, where I had to bump the cruise control up around 10mph to avoid becoming a hood ornament on another car. It seems that CT is full of ex race car drivers or something. Average speed of CT drivers: 83mph.

The rest of the drive was calm, until we got to Maine. Many years ago, I had to take a drive across Ohio on I-70 (talk about boring! The road was so straight, if you had a coronary behind the wheel, you wouldn't crash until you got to Indianapolis, assuming your alignment was good) and I never thought I would see that many speed traps per mile again anywhere else in the world.

Well, Ohio ain't got nuthin on Maine! While there weren't quite as many speed traps as Ohio, the intensity of them was much higher. We're talking several cops per trap, and boy were they adamant. There were cops dressed as construction workers, cops in plain white vans, cops on overpasses, and cops in SUVs on the wrong side of the road. It was mayhem, but we managed to get through the state (in both directions) without getting nabbed, despite Jessica's lead paw.

The camping was fun. It rained, of course. It always rains when I go camping. But the tent held up pretty well. I took Jess to the top of Cadillac Mountain (named after the same guy the car was named after) and we got plenty of cool pics. We ate a lot of food (too much food in fact) and we both tried Lobster for the first time (yes, after all these years I'd never had lobster!). It was fun having lobster the proper way - in Maine, on the water.

Other than the Maine trip, we've basically been hanging around the house, watching the Tour de France, and counting the days until we leave for England to see U2. We have tickets to Wembley, and also to Glasgow. Should be a blast.

I'll end with a couple of Maine pics. It's a nice place to visit, even if I only make it back every 20 years.

Ok, I haven't made any tech geeky posts in a while, so I thought I'd go ahead and throw this in. If nothing else, it'll give me an easy place to find it when I forget it myself.

Even though using tables for web page layout is pretty much considered a no-no these days, we still need tables when presenting tabular data. The problem is, if you're using an XHTML strict doctype, attributes like border="1" are no longer valid mark-up. So, how do we handle tables in CSS? Here's a quick reference list to most of the common table attributes.[table=HTML/CSS comparison][tr][th]HTML[/th][th]CSS[/th][/tr][tr][td]cellpadding="0"[/td][td]td { padding: 0;}[/td][/tr][tr][td]cellspacing="1"[/td][td]table { border-spacing: 1px; }[/td][/tr][tr][td]border="1"[/td][td]td { border: 1px solid #000; }[/td][/tr][tr][td]valign="top"[/td][td]td { vertical-align: top; }[/td][/tr][tr][td]align="right"[/td][td]td { text-align: right; }[/td][/tr][/table]

So this:

[codebox]<table cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" border="1" width="600">
<tr>
<td align="center" valign="top">
[/codebox]
Can be be written as:

[codebox]<table>
<tr>
<td>[/codebox]
With the following CSS:

[codebox]table { border-spacing: 0; width: 600px; }
td { padding: 5px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top; }[/codebox]

Other useful tidbits:

border-collapse (collapse|separate|inherit): When using the border property on both the table and the td, you'll get a double border between cells. Use border-collapse to compress it into a single border.

empty-cells (show|hide|inherit): Specifies whether to show empty cells or not. No more non-breaking spaces required!

Also remember that you can set top, bottom, left, and right padding to different values.

There are advantages to using CSS over the old method.

• Different padding values for all sides of the cell.
  With cellpadding you can only have a single value, but with CSS, you can have different values for each side.
  
• Different border thicknesses
  With the old border= method, you had a single value. CSS borders can not only be thinner, but they can be dashed, dotted, or a number of different things. Plus, you can have different borders for each side, or no border for some sides. And the table itself can have a different border than the cells.
  
• Table margins
  You can also use CSS to add margins around the outside of your table. This is not possible with attributes at all. If you have two tables on top of each other, you would normally need to use a space between them to separate them. With CSS, you don't.

The sky is pretty much the limit when using CSS. Experiment and see what you can come up with.

A few weeks ago, a foul smell appeared in our home office. It was a bit of a stench of burning electronics, or plastic, or both. I finally traced it to the root cause, which was the power supply on Jessica's PC. It seems that the PSU died and dumped a good bit of voltage into the rest of the system. The machine had been acting a bit flaky, losing USB devices and things like that, so it was probably time to retire it anyway.

Both of our computers were getting a bit long in the tooth anyway. Hers was a P4 2.4 with a gig of ram and onboard video, and mine was an Athlon XP 3200+, also with a gig of ram, and an NVidia 6200 LE video card. The drives on both machines were ancient IDE dinosaurs, and moved about as fast as one. I used the blown PSU excuse to get new machines for both of us.

I decided that Jess would be better off with a nice Laptop that she could take with her on business trips. We looked at a bunch of really speedy (and pricey) laptops before settling on an HP G60-230 which has 3GB of ram and a 2GHz dual core processor. It also has a nice 16" display, and it came in below $600, not counting the $60 rebate. I also picked up a copy of MS Office 2007 Professional for her, so that she would have the same software at home and at work. Unfortunately, the laptop came with Vista (yuck) which has yet to officially break. It's proving to be a bit of a pain with wireless networking though. Maybe once Windows 7 is mainstream, we can upgrade the laptop and be rid of Vista.

As for my machine, I kept my excellent Cooler Master case, and only replaced what I wanted to upgrade. This consisted of an Asus P5Q Pro motherboard, an Intel (first Intel chip in around 12 years!) E8400 Core2 Duo (3GHz per core), 4MB of G.Skill DDR2 1066 ram, an NVidia GeForce 9500 GT video card (512mb), and a Corsair 650TX power supply. For storage I picked a Western Digital Caviar Black 640gb SATA hard drive. The drive has dual processors and a beefed up platter arrangement. Very nice piece of hardware!



For my OS, I stuck with Ubuntu Linux, moving to the latest release (9.04) in the 64-bit version. I also went with the EXT4 file system, which is supposed to provide a slight performance improvement over EXT3. They're really getting good at the Ubuntu setup program, as I was able to install the OS in no time at all, with no major tweaks. Not even any minor tweaks. The only things I had to tweak in fact were optional programs that I run, like conky and my desktop manager.

This new release of Ubuntu was supposed to focus on quick boot times, and I have to say, they really hit the mark. I can boot from dead cold to the desktop in around 12 seconds. This is especially amazing considering that 3 seconds are lost in the grub menu (a short countdown to give you a chance to change boot options) and another short delay before my desktop manager launches. It's unbelievably fast. I can boot my Linux machine up, shut it down, and boot it up again before my old Win2k machine would be booted the first time.

The speed of the new machine is quite impressive too. I realize that moving from what I had before to what I have now will exaggerate the experience, but it really, really is quite speedy. Firefox opens faster than it used to maximize, and the machine is not phased at all by running multiple instances of pretty much anything and everything.

This machine should last me for another 4-5 years, which was sort of the point of me building it. My needs are pretty simple, so I'd rather pick some decent parts and forget about it for a while than buy cheap stuff and have to constantly upgrade.



Pretty packed in, but runs pretty cool nonetheless (34 deg C).

Ha Ha

I'm sure the greedy bastards will appeal now that their Cashcam bill was defeated in the MD Senate.

Here's a letter I just wrote to Gov O'Malley (who never fails to disappoint).


I'm sure he'll send me back some horseshit form letter telling me how all our children will be killed if we don't allow him to put Cashcams at every street corner. Sort of like how Bush told us that we'll all be killed by terra-ists if we don't let him steal all Iraq's oil.

Whether it has a D or an R suffix, greed is greed and authoritarianism is authoritarianism.

The new U2 album came out last week, and I've been listening to it during my morning commute. It's not bad, and the more I listen, the more I mentally process the works. So far my favorite songs are "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight", "Unknown Caller", and "Fez - Being Born". "Magnificent" is also pretty nice.

Tour dates are already starting to come out, and I expect it to be a year-long affair. Jess and I will probably head to the UK this time around, and see them in Glasgow and maybe London, we'll see. Fortunately we got a decent tax return (for once) so that'll help offset tour costs.

We'll probably also do Toronto and (of course) DC. If we do the whole GA line thing again, it'll probably be one of those two.

I'm wondering what song on the new album will be their opening song. Lots of possibilities. I guess we'll see once opening night happens.

I seriously love my Mini dealer. I just got my car back after getting a new clutch and transmission put in it, and I can safely say that the car has never, ever been this good, even when it was new.

I always hated the original shifter because whenever I would make and "pull back" shift (like 1-2, 3-4, or 5-6) the shifter would get caught whenever it passed neutral, especially when it was cold. The 2-3 and 4-5 shifts were fine, so I was always perplexed.

Well the new trans has none of that nonsense. All shifts are smooth as silk, and the car is so much nicer to drive. It's like getting a new Mini all over again!

Did I mention I love my dealer?

Back in 1995, I purchased my second new car; a 1995 Chevy Camaro Z28. It was a great driving car, and well designed, but not well built. Over the course of my 5 year warranty, the car was in the shop over a dozen times. Well over a dozen. In fact, the car was usually back to the dealer 3-4 times per year.

Every time I brought the car in for warranty service, a bill would be waiting for me when I went to pick it up. Since the car was still well within the original warranty period (not to mention the extended warranty I purchased), I was understandably miffed about having a bill for repairs that were clearly warranty items. Each visit would inevitably lead to a shouting match between me and the service manager before I would finally get my car back without paying for something that I shouldn't have been paying for.

That's GM quality, and GM service.

Fast forward to 2006. I finally gave up the American V8 muscle cars and purchased a Mini Cooper Sport. The service and treatment by the dealership have been second to none. On top of the three years of free maintenance that's included with the car, you also get a free loaner whenever you leave your car in for service (and a Mini to boot). But that's not what this post is about.

The summer before last, I started hearing a noise from the transmission in 4th gear. Nothing horrible, and it would go away once the car warmed up, but I still noticed it. This past summer, I started noticing a random noise from the clutch when starting off in damp weather. Again, nothing that affected how the car ran, and it would vanish once the car was warm.

Just to be safe, I dropped the car off over the weekend to have it checked out. Today I got a call from the dealer. Imagine how nice the following was after being accustomed to fighting with my old Chevy dealer about a gushing oil leak not being covered under the drivetrain warranty, or after Chevy telling me that I needed to pay $287 for a new strut for my hatchback that failed when the car was 6 weeks old, sending the 150+ lb lid crashing down onto the back of my neck.

Here's Mini's response:
- They could not reproduce the clutch noise, so they're going to just go ahead and give me a brand new clutch, flywheel, and all related parts.
- They heard the transmission noise, but rather than try to repair it, they're going to go ahead and give me a brand new transmission instead.
- Oh, and they fixed the dashboard rattle that used to bug the hell out of me.

This is all on their dime, and being done while I drive their loaner car.

A few months ago I took the car to a local shop to have it aligned. They could not perform the alignment because the tie rod ends were seized. They wanted $150 ea plus labor to replace them. I called the dealer, and they told me to bring it in. They replaced both tie rod ends, then did the alignment. For free.

This is all on top of the fact that this is one of the best driving cars I've ever driven, and probably the best car I've ever owned. It's comfortable, fun to drive, and gets 30-something mileage even under the worse of conditions.

Why would I ever go back?

A few months ago my wife decided that we should have a new flatscreen TV to go in our newly remodeled basement. We're not huge AV aficionados, so I wasn't after the biggest and best thing on the block. I ended up getting a killer deal on a Panasonic 50" plasma TV that can do 720p. Since our receiver (circa 1991) had a busted volume control (you had to get up and walk over to it and turn it up/down manually) I also picked up a decent Sony receiver, which I also got a pretty good deal on.

The back of the receiver is mess of wires, because however the signal comes into the thing, it has to go out the same way (so if we do component video in for the DVD, it has to be component out to the TV). So we had a mix of HDMI, optical audio, RCA, etc.

We always had a crappy DVD player. It's a "Shinsonic", which is a cheapo Canadian brand that my wife bought years ago. It has problems playing DVDs that aren't perfect, and the remote for it is pretty horrid. A few days ago, I picked up a nice new Oppo 980H, and it arrived on my B-day (what timing!). You'd thing a simple DVD player would be easy to hook up, right? Hah!

Since all the components we use now have HDMI, I stripped the mess of wires off the back of the receiver and just went HDMI for everything, since it can handle video and audio. Once done, I was surprised to have no audio. After 30 minutes of pouring through all the manuals, I finally got online. Guess what. Our receiver only does "pass through", meaning that it'll carry the HDMI signal from one device to another, but it won't process it. So we need to feed it audio in some other way.

This leads to another problem. On the back of the receiver, we have HDMI for "DVD" and "BD" (BlueRay Disc). We have optical audio for "SAT" and "BD". So, I can use the "BD connection for our Oppo DVD player, no problem. But what about the DVR? If I want to use the "SAT" optical audio connection for that, I'm reduced to component video, which is analog and not digital. A better way is probably to use the "DVD" HDMI connection for the DVR, which leaves me with something called "coaxial digital audio". I've never heard of this, but it sounds better than RCA jacks. I'd need to get a cable for that.

The only other option I thought of was to bypass the receiver altogether. The TV has 2 HDMI inputs, and an optical audio output. If I ran both the DRV and the Oppo to HDMI 1 and 2 on the TV, that would get the audio and video to the TV. I could then run a single optical audio cable back down to the receiver for sound, and just never change the device the receiver is set to. Then to switch between devices, I would use the "input" button on the TV remote instead of the receiver.

Oy vey!!

Maybe by tonight I'll figure something out and have sound.

Today after lunch I got a bit of a chocolate craving. I have a thing for Goldenberg's Peanut Chews, and they sell them in a 3-pack for 25 cents downstairs at Idiot Central (a.k.a. our in-building convenience store). Since I can never decide between the milk or dark variety, I usually just get a pack of each and save one for tomorrow.

So I walk up to the register, and one of the two girls is leaning back. She looks really bored, and she's actually too lazy to even shut the register drawer from the last sale. It's toward the end of their business day, so the drawer is stuffed with cash and coins. I hold up my two packs of peanut chews, and she lethargically rings me up at a snail's pace.

"Fiddy cen"

I hand her a $10 bill, which is all I have, other than the dime in my pocket.

"Awww, you ain't got fiddy cen?"

"No, all I have is this ten, and..." rummaging around in my pocket... "this dime"

"Ok then, I'll take that" she says, holding out her hand for the dime.

So I got 50 cents worth of chocolate for ten cents. I guess she must not have to reconcile her drawer.