Nate looks sort of like this, at least while on vacation. Disturbingly, the proportions are about right.
Artwork via Planearium2’s Southpark Studio (link is to the English version). (update 8/2006: moved to http://www.sp-studio.de/)
Category: Personal
“Get perpendicular” – new disk technology presentation is too cute by half…
Check out Hitachi’s Get Perpendicular animation. Make sure your sound is on, and your tolerance for Schoolhouse Rock take-offs high.
via Lawrence You on the SSRC mailing list.
I am at once saddened and amused.
As I noted on Tuesday, I am leaving my present position to start at USF, and gave notice that morning.
Today, my company announced layoffs… and I’ll be terribly surprised, having already given notice, if I hear one way or the other about whether I’d have been laid off otherwise. I’d like to think that my leaving voluntarily has saved someone else being laid off… and leaving certainly feels better than being laid off myself. From a purely personal perspective, I cannot help but be amused.
The economy here in the valley is certainly a lot better than it was during the bottom of the bust when Kana was having its big rounds of layoffs, and I am not nearly so worried for many of my coworkers as I was for various folks at Kana at the time. Still, these are never a good thing and I’m sad for both my company and for those coworkers who are being let go.
“Nate: The next chapter”
As of this Friday, I’ll be leaving my job at Panta Systems, and after a week off, I’ll be starting in the ITS department at the University of San Francisco.
I’m a little sad to be leaving Panta – they have good people, cool technology, and some very interesting problems to be working on. As for the job at USF, no, it’s not a teaching position (what with an only-90%-finished MS that’s pretty obvious), but it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. Beyond the fact that my title will be the mouthful “Web Programmer/Application Administrator” (or I may have the order of the two halves backwards) I’ll have more on what I’ll be doing there later.
Addendum: Had a good vacation, albeit with a bit of a cold (so no SCUBA diving 🙁 ) — more, along with possible photos, later.
Cool “round” numbers and the Unix Epoch
Via Lawrence You on the SSRC mailing list:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/17/169200
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday March 17, @01:38PM
from the everyone-make-balloon-animals dept.
initsix writes “Break out your party hats. According to
http://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm , Unix time is supposed
reach 1111111111 on Fri, 18 Mar 2005 01:58:31 GMT That’s only 1036372537
seconds from 2^31 (ie Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:08 GMT)!!”i.e. 5:58 PM PST tonight
$ perl -e ‘print scalar localtime(1111111111), “\n”;’
Thu Mar 17 17:58:31 2005
It’s sorta depressing…
To realize just how much my brother is cooler than I am.
Then again, I’ve got my own blessings to count, but other than spending 10 years together with the best girlfriend and wife in the world (Hi Marie 🙂 ) I don’t think I could name 9 others things I’ve done that are coolinteresting enough to interest anyone elseexpect anyone else to want to read through them.
Addendum: Mearls refers to a “10 things I’ve Done and You Haven’t” meme – I guess it’s a LJ thing?
Gas price watch…
(This was a comment I placed on Eschaton, responding to a question about how much people spend on gasoline… thought it would be of interest here, if nothing else for me to get a laugh at in a few years)
My round trip commute is around 90 miles (SF – Cupertino for those who know the Bay Area), and at 30 actual miles per gallon that means I’m paying almost $7 per working day on gas at Bay Area prices ($2.21-$2.39/gallon for regular 87-octane this morning)
I plan to be looking for jobs closer to home at some point.
I’ve got a relatively fuel-efficient small car (Acura RSX), which gets about twice the actual MPG of my old SUV (it got only 15mpg, and it was non-4WD with the smaller V8) and about a 20% improvement over both of my prior small cars (a Chevy Cavalier and a Pontiac Fiero, both 4-cylinder models, both of which got around 25mpg in practice.)
Funky six-degrees thing
The alumni association at Dartmouth College, where I attended as an undergrad, has set up a web application called “incircle” which lets alumni list their friends and then look up profiles, and see who their friends’ friends are. It’s interesting, as is the fact that it uses full middle names – it’s sort of odd seeing them for a lot of people who I knew in college but didn’t know their middle names.
In any case, if you’ve found my blog via the Dartmouth listings, hello and welcome and sorry that posts are so sporadic – we’re in a big deadline at work, and I just have not had the time to procrastinate that I usually do.
Merry Christmas…
…secular though my own celebration of it is, Merry Christmas to any readers out there.
I can’t believe I’m posting one of those stupid quizzes
Well, if you’re reading for the politics, just ignore these. Sadly, if I’m bored again there probably will be more.
| You scored as Mushrooms. Shrooms! You’re still goin for one of the most natural drugs. You’d like to visit a whole other world, and see things you’ve never seen before. Fucking trippy.
|
||
Yuck, mushrooms. I won’t even eat the non-hallucinogenic kind, so this was bit off. But heck, cute Smurfs, eh?
Oh, and my actual drug of choice: dark beer (especially brown ale).
Today’s Blatant Shilling:
Mr. Beer Premium Micro Brewery kit
In light of all the “Attack on Christmas” crud
There’s been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about the right-wingers’ claims of an “Attack on Christmas” and frankly it seems to be entirely hot air … to the point where I’m not sure whether the discussion of it at all in the left-wing blogosphere isn’t simply giving them undeserved attention. Or maybe it’s something that needs a response… I don’t know.
See this note on Americablog for an example.
Well, while I don’t know what to make of the current issue, if you haven’t seen it in past years, you MUST go and check out Saturnalia, a comic strip at e-Sheep which pretty much is the response I’d like to make to all the “Attack on Christmas” types.
For the record, I personally celebrate an entirely secular holiday which happens to also be called “Christmas” but which simultaneously celebrates crass consumerism and an annual mini-family-reunion… and which I think is far more dangerous to any remaining shreds of a Christian holiday than a generic “Winter Holiday.” After all, how much “Christ” is there left in such a “Christmas” when practiced by a mostly-agnostic/vaguely-deist-at-times and totally non-practicing Jewish guy?
A bit of blatant shilling…
I’ve added a link to my Amazon wish-list and an Amazon search box. The former is mainly for my family although I suppose if some anonymous fan of the blog out there wants to get me a gift you’re welcome to do so. The latter, well, is there if you are going to be ordering from Amazon anyway and don’t mind my making a few cents off of it. Lastly, I’ve added a WP plug-in which should let me link to various items on Amazon for convenience or the off chance you actually want to order them and don’t mind my making a few cents.
Harmless, and in good fun I hope even if I never make any cash.