Year: 2009

Sunny? Check.
70 degrees? Check.
No wind? Check.

Ultimate. Game on.

I’m shopping for a cheap video card (triple monitors, anyone?) and it’s entertaining reading the customer reviews of some of these.

With a selection of about a gazillion cards– all of which have pretty much the same specs and cost– I guess I should just choose the card with the most humorous reviews or something.

It’s Sunday night and I’m a little bored, so I was poking around some fractal software and found a package called Xaos which is pretty cool. It’s got a nice mechanism to do real-time zooming into areas of the Mandelbrot Set (amongst others).

I remember messing around with Fractint back in college– perhaps 15 years ago– and how maddeningly slow it was to calculate these images. You’d find an area that looked interesting and wait for the computer to churn through the numbers for up to a minute before you saw the detailed image. Now my laptop can generate zoom levels in the billions in fractions of a second.

For math geeks like me, that’s pretty dang cool.

I’ve said it here before, but I’ll say it again. AmaroK is awesome.

While the rest of the world apparently uses iTunes to manage their thousands of MP3 songs, I find the iTunes interface to be absolute garbage. (Thom agrees, but since he’s using a Mac he doesn’t have a lot of options.) When I mention some feature that AmaroK has, iTunes people wish they could do the same. Go figure.

Over the past few months I’ve gradually been rating all the songs in my collection. It’s a slow process, because I only do it occasionally. But over time I’m building up a good list of what I like. So today as I’m slamming out some code I decided to make a custom playlist of only the very best– the five-star stuff.

Nice! Now it’s nothing but the good stuff as I write PHP.

With Vonage we have a feature called “visual voicemail” which takes incoming messages and transcribes them to text, then sends the text via email. Most of the time the transcription is actually quite good. And sometimes it’s just funny.

I don’t know who Ron is. And Hans Stoner? What an awesome name.

“I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.”

— anonymous English professor

Today was a bit chilly (mid-30’s) but we played ultimate anyway. I’d been shopping for some wide-receiver gloves, which have special sticky grip surfaces (better to catch a speeding disc), but they’re thirty to forty dollars a pair and I worry that– unlike football– you actually do need to throw the disc after catching it. So I figured I’d grab my old biking gloves, which have a leather palm and cut-off fingers, and see if they worked. As it turns out, they were great. Fifteen years old, well worn and more than a little sweat-stained, but great in the cold weather.

Tomorrow I’m heading up to Seattle to visit Thom, and I figured I’d check the forecast to see what kind of clothes to bring.

I guess there’s one thing to say: October weather in Seattle is predictable.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, in preparation for our lunchtime ultimate game, someone in the group sends out a Yahoo poll to see who’s going to play. It isn’t all that important in the summer, when we regularly get 15-20 people every time, but as the weather gets colder it’s more useful to see if we have enough before heading out to the field only to discover there are only half a dozen hardy souls.

So I ran the poll today.

That last option is mine. Bummer. I’d laugh if it didn’t hurt so much to laugh with a separated rib.

On Friday our new TV was scheduled to be delivered, and the kids were really excited because we’d be able to use it for our weekly Pizza and Movie Night. It arrived during the day, so Laralee and I set it up so the kids could see it when they got home from school.

Of course this is in fact an old 19″ LCD monitor I had in the basement, but when the kids came home Laralee sung its praises. She told them how it’s really cool because it’s a plasma screen, and movies would look really sharp and colorful.

Zack was extremely put out. He was very upset that his video games wouldn’t be on the big screen. La told him that if he wanted, he could move the TV on to the coffee table we have in front of the couch– so he would be sitting about two feet away– and then it would seem bigger. He thought maybe that would be okay, but still kind of a pain.

Alex whined because he said he had been expecting something a lot more impressive. Despite La’s insistence that the plasma display would be really spiffy, he thought it was all kind of lame and that he really preferred our old setup.

Kyra was the only one who looked at it a bit and after a bit of thought noted that it sure looked a lot like the computer monitor La had been using on her desk. The ruse was up.

Ahh, the fun of playing practical jokes on your kids. We set up the real thing and it’s a little more impressive now.

(Yes, we had to swap out the speakers with the ones in my office because the old ones were too high for the TV to fit above them.)