06.03.08
Many Miles to Go Before I Sleep
05.11.08
Introducing “Mochi”
Fu and I adopted a kitten today. He’s only 2.5 months old, but since he’s feral, he’ll take a bit a training and a while to get accustomed to being around people. Hopefully he’ll provide good comfort to Kitty, who’s been really clingy since Jonah left us. Mochi is quite the “Ike-men” Cat. As for his “‘fraidy-cat-ness,” he follows in the footsteps of Jonah and the mysterious “ninja cat.”
05.02.08
Biking Milestone
I passed the 200 mile mark on my bike, according to the odometer. Considering it was not working for a couple of trips, I probably passed it a little while ago, but still, now I have proof. It’s nice at this time when gasoline prices are rising, my gas bill is actually on the decline.
04.27.08
The Brain
Lack of sleep and overuse of your brain probably leads to wild tangents and trains of thought currently spewing forth from my own brain. So I was just thinking, probably within the next 100 years, maybe less, that huge advances in neural research will occur, mapping the brain and finally interpreting its functions. I stands to reason that medical advances, stronger computers will lead to this greater understanding. With understanding of the brain, and I mean pretty much complete understanding, things like blindness, hearing loss can be cured because prosthetic cameras, hearing devices would be able to tap directly into and feed information just as real eyes and ears would. We’d know why schizophrenia, Alzheimers and such occur and possibly find a bypass if not a cure. There wouldn’t be a need for polygraphs or torture or doubt, as thoughts could be read completely. Surely, some new rules for human rights would have to implemented. These are the things I think about when I’m mentally exhausted.
04.14.08
Hail Be Time Machine
I want to take this opportunity to praise Apple’s Time Machine, part of Leopard. As far as backup solutions go, it’s beyond basic. There’s no ability to schedule when it does its thing and only cursory control over what it backs up. Certainly there is no control over how it backs things up. The control panel is basically a big fat on-off switch, an option for which drive(s) to use for backup and an option for which folders/volumes you don’t want backed up. As of 10.5.2, there is now a menu bar where you can tell it to stop backing up if you’re in the process of doing something.
You might think a control freak such as myself wouldn’t appreciate the lack of tight control over such things. Well, I kind of had that in Deja Vu and was pretty happy with it until after an upgrade my preferences got a little “tweaked” and it proceeded to erase my entire 500 gb harddrive! And as for Retrospect, well, it’s Retrospect. It’s good for archiving onto tape but the whole system is convoluted and arcane. I’ve used it for years and still find it to be a tedious amount of work.
On Time Machine, already, it has saved my hide by retrieving a file i accidentally saved over. Today, something went funky with my Adobe CS3 apps where none would work citing licensing problems. I tried deleting the preferences and such as prescribed by Adobe to no avail. So I went back in time one week when everything was working, bringing back setting files from then. Viola. Adobe asked “re-activate?” I did, and now everything is fine. Otherwise, I would have to uninstall all Adobe apps, reinstall (which took close to an hour the first time I did) then run through all the updates since the release. Forget it!
Like most things Apple, they’ve managed to reduce something as arcane as backup and by making it almost too simplistic and basic, it’s become elegant and exceptionally effective. There was one arcane bit, however. My backup was a little to complete and quickly ended up filling the 750gb drive used for TM. While I was able to ignore certain folders from backup, I was wondering how to delete the piled up backup previously made of them. Apparently, you go into TM, click on the folder, and choose “delete all backups.”
03.13.08
Biking For (My) Humanity
Three weeks ago, I started biking to work one day out of the week. Today I rode for the third time. Keeping up with the math? Good. It’s about 10 miles each way and takes a hair less than 1 hour each way. For my weight, it comes out to about 400-500 calories. So for the day, it’s closer to 1000 calories, which i great. My legs still aren’t used to the riding so even the stairs in my house are difficult afterwards. Still, it’s great exercise, and I figure I can keep it up until I get hit by one of those cars I’m warily avoiding. But this is LA, and you know how the drivers are. Today I had a flat tire while coming home. I was only about 5 minutes away. But when you’re walking your bike, it’s more like 25 minutes. Great! Extra exercise. Gotta look at the positives. Though I don’t see anything positive about owing $4000 in taxes (again) this year. But that’s another story for another time…
02.10.08
JD Update
Looks like JD poll was a huge hit. Already it has the desired effect of fans now watching Hana Yori Dango, among others. I realized that just in August 2007 I listed my top 10 JDs, and found that only 2 of them survived my latest list. The three new ones were my most recent viewings. Here my latest inventory as of this month:
So what does a huge pile of JDs look like? This case contains ONLY JDs.
02.01.08
A Sad iPod
I was listening to a Japanese podcast where they mentioned this site: iPod Death Clock.
Later that night, as I was moving my bag around, my ipod came flying out of it and hit the floor. Then I was greeted with this screen.
I tried everything, but to me it looked and sounded like the hard drive failed. I sent it into iPodResq to find out. I was told that it was indeed the case and that it would cost $200 to repair. Bear in mind that I can get an identical ipod (though now it’s dubbed Classic) for $250. Either way, I’ll be without an ipod for several months as I have no money for those options. I’m now as sad as the icon on my ipod screen.
01.31.08
Shuji Ranking
I’ve been studying shuji/shodou (Japanese Calligraphy) for about three years now. It’s been a very long road, but I’ve finally made it to shodan (first degree, in martial arts lingo). I have a black belt in brush work so you better watch out. It also makes me eligible to teach it (that’s what the red writing is all about). Early on, the long form you see below was where I was weakest, and what I most dreaded. It’s a lot of work getting all those kanji correct compared to the standard form which is only 4 kanji. Surprisingly, both my rank ups to jun-shodan (pre-1st dan) and shodan were obtained via the long form. I got a silver award to boot (upper right image). On to 2-Dan!
