Random Ramblings

Steve Jones

2007-09-03T01:32:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine from Bible Study has been spending his Summer in Kenya working with orphans in Kisumu. I found out recently that he has been posting to a blog regularly. Knowing Steve I have to say that nothing I'm reading about his adventure really surprises me much, but it is an exciting and encouraging read. I can't wait to here the story from the horses mouth when he gets back in a week.

The Photographic Evidence

2007-05-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

Well, I put all of the good photos together into a picasa album.

It's the first time I've used it and it is pretty cool.

Enjoy!

Jason

Ireland

2007-05-03T19:03:00.000-07:00

This being my first weekend at home in the 4 weeks since I got back from my vacation to Ireland with my brother I can finally get my vacation dumped to the web just in case anyone actually wants to read about it. :)

My brother finally got around to graduating college so we went on the trip that we had planned to commemorate that event. We flew out of LAX on April 8th in the afternoon and arrived in Dublin, via London Heathrow in the afternoon of April 9th. We had made tentative plans for the trip but we really didn't have any specific schedule. We had destinations, and we had plans for lodging for most of the trip, but that was it. Everything turned out great and we didn't really get stressed about getting to this or that tourist destination. We were free to wander around and change our mind at will. The original plan was to be in Dublin, and then go to Killarney and then Cork, and then Glasgow, and then London. In fact, we ended up going from Dublin to Killarney, and then Glasgow and Edinburgh and then home.

The first day in Dublin we found our way to our Hostel from the airport on the bus and had quite a bit of daylight to burn yet. We wanted to avoid jet lag so even though we were tired we were determined to keep ourselves up until at least 9pm. We wandered around the city a while, found a pub outside of the tourist area where all the locals were watching horse racing and there was not a tourist to be seen. We found our way to Dublin castle, and saw some other historic buildings. In our wanderings we went past the Olympia Theatre and as I glanced at the events I saw that Bare Naked Ladies was playing. I checked the date and time and realized that it was in an hour and a half. I went into the ticket office and came out with two tickets. We killed some time in a local cafe which served some very good coffee and then watched the show. As they told us during the concert we managed to watch the bands entire Ireland tour!

The concert was fantastic and we stayed until the second encore by which time we were both quite tired and ready to try and get some shuteye. The hostel that we were at wasn't terrible but sharing a room with 12-14 other people is not conducive to a good nights rest.
Mountain, The next two days in Dublin were well spent, we visited the Guinness brewery, the Temple Bar, the Irish Famine Memorial(eerie), and though enjoyable enough we were ready to get the heck out of the city by the time we caught our train to Killarney. Killarney was definitely a tourist town, but it was small and near a national forest. There was plenty of hiking and sight seeing to do there and after 3 days we decided to cancel our trip to Cork and spend the rest of our time in Ireland there.

We walked and biked our way around the Lakes of Killarney, visiting Torc Falls, Torc Mountain, Mangerton Mountain (Where I got sunburned. Who knew that Devil's Punchbowl would have no tree cover?), Ross Castle, the meeting of the waters, and many other parts of the countryside. On Sunday we went to a small local church which met in the Community Center. We had spaghetti with the pastor and his wife, and went to the farm of one of the members on Wednesday for a Bible study. We had tea by the peat fire while we studied. It was a farm that had been in the family for 300 years.

After Killarny we flew Ryan air to Scotland and after getting fleeced by a cabbie found our way to my friend Janet's place where we stayed for a few nights. We actually spent most of our time in other cities. We went to Stirling to see the Wallace Monument, and Edinburgh for some swing dancing. (I knew Janet from swing dancing in SLO before she went of to Glasgow for veterinary school) We then spent two nights in Edinburgh before heading back to Dublin for our flight home. Edinburgh was a city of great history and we enjoyed our time there but we didn't do all we could as we were running out of steam and getting ready to go home. My favorite part of our Edinburgh visit was a tour of Mary Kings close. A narrow street that was partially covered over by the foundation of a government building in 1753. It has well preserved 15th century architecture, the history of which is well known from public records. The tour guide was dressed in period garb and thoroughly enjoyed trying to disgust, shock, and amuse everyone with stories of everyday life in the 1600s.

Our flight back on April 26th was enjoyable, movies on demand were watched, cribbage was played and we arrived back in the states hardly the worse for wear.

So that is the short version of the trip. It was definitely a memorable vacation for my Brother and me. Many lessons learned about international travel were learned that, Lord willing, we will put to good use someday.

I will try and post again soon with pictures of the event.

2007-01-29T19:55:00.000-08:00

My pastor has put up a blog for the Calvary Baptist Church in San Luis Obispo. He also has his own blog where he explores various topics. I thought they were pretty decent so I thought I'd link them and see if 'The Great Search Engine' might up its ranking.

The Church Site and Randall Shanks' (the pastor) blog.

I really think the picture on Pastor Shanks blog is pretty cool.

Adventures in Wii seeking

2007-01-29T19:37:00.000-08:00

So I would like to purchase a Nintendo Wii.

Things have gotten to the point now where you don't have to get up 4 hours before dawn and wait in line to get one at a store, but they are still not making it to the store shelves.

Knowing this, and hearing that Walmart was going to have from 15-20 for sale on the 28th of January I decided to drive to the nearest one an hour before opening(6am) and see if I could get one.

I got there around 6:15am and noticed that there wasn't a line, there were a couple of people sitting in their cars who were clearly waiting for one as well. One guy was playing Mario Kart on his DS, and three others in another car were watching a DVD on a portable DVD player.

Around 6:45 this man and his two kids, who looked to be seven and ten years old respectively, parked their car and went and stood at the entrance. I took this as my cue and went and waited behind them. The guy who was playing Mario Kart joined me, as well as another guy who was trying to get one for his kids.

The two kids were terribly excited and telling the story how they set their alarms so they could get up on time. They were wondering if the people who waited all night on the opening launch were too tired to play when they got home, or if they played all day. They were practically crawling out of their skin with excitement.

After about 5 minutes of standing there a Walmart employee comes out and says "All right, who was here first." We all pointed to the guy and his kids. "Here you go, you get the last one." he said giving them a ticket.

I laughed thinking that it was a pretty funny joke and then I noticed that the ticket he gave out said 15/15 on it. Apparently the first 14 went to employees. I can't really fault the employees from snatching them up early. It's not like they get any other benefits for working there.

If I had been first in line I would have given it to the kids anyhow. They are probably going to remember this day for the rest of their lives, and tell it with distant eyes to their grand kids as they send them off to have their Nintendo virtual world immersion chip implanted in their skull.

Some people can be utterly useless

2006-03-17T17:26:00.000-08:00

So, I am having a great deal of trouble with EA Games right now. I may have another post that deals with that but first I am going to express my utter amazement at the level of help that I managed to get out of an open source developer. I was trying to run Wine on windows (don't ask) and I could not manage to configure it so I sent the following e-mail to the maintainer of the distribution:

<snip>
I've been through the wiki on WineHQ as well as every page I could
google, and I couldn't find out how to configure the windows version
of wine. I downloaded the windows binaries and I would like to run an
application using wine, and have wine report the version of windows as
Windows XP. (I am running Windows 2000).

I've been scouring the internet for the last two hours but everything
I find about configuring wine says to run winecfg which is not in the
windows binaries that I downloaded.

Is this functionality not yet supported? Or have I just not looked in
the right places for help.

Thank you,
Jason
</snip>

I got the following reply:

<snip>
You can't please check out
http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=402065&group_id=6241

Ivan.
</snip>

Ignoring the obvious problems with English contained in that e-mail, that happens to be just where I downloaded the binaries from. And the contents of the page at the time of this writing are as follows:

Release Name: 0.9.10

Notes:
These packages contains wine dlls and binaries built for Win32.
The files with mingw in the name are built with mingw debug symbols.
The other packages are stripped.
These packages are intended for developers only, if you're a user,
you don't need them.

Wasn't that wonderful? Thank you so much Ivan for your skillful resolution to my problem.

(Sigh)

Lifes little wonders

2005-08-06T23:21:00.000-07:00

I just spent some time with two good friends of mine Josh and Maureen and their 7 day old baby boy Sean. They just got him home from the hospital today as there were some complications with the delivery, and he was born with pneumonia.

By the grace of God both mom and baby are doing fine now.

When I was holding Sean it made me think big thoughts. He is still learning to experience the world that we all take for granted. He can't see more than a few feet in front of his face and he already has a curiosity and a desire for exploration that many people walking around this world have long since lost. At what point do we stop paying attention to what is around us. When do we stop seeing the wonders of creation and start just putting one foot down in front of another. Another day of work, another day of school, another day of the same old thing.

I know I pay attention to what is around me more than most, but I no longer have the wonder that I saw in Sean. For instance, this morning I caught a fledgling mocking bird and held it in my hands. I decided to let it go and get back to my affairs. Most people probably wouldn't have noticed it. I saw it sitting on a branch squawking at the sky, recognized it for what it was, pursued it and caught it. I remember doing the same thing when I was a kid, and I wonder if it was more exciting then or if I just think it was. Right now I hear bats hunting outside my bedroom window. If I turned out my lights and let my eyes adjust I could see their dark shapes flitting around. This world is full of life, full of fantastic miracles that so many people miss. The walk right past, or over, or under a million miracles a day.

It's sad really, but seeing Sean explore this grand new world he finds himself in reminds me that all is not lost. I'm going to shut off my lights now.

Touchy

2005-07-26T22:17:00.000-07:00

I don't know exactly what it is today, but something has put me in a touchy mood. I generally don't let little things get to me but something has been building up. Every minor thing is likely to set me off today. I can see the unreasonableness of this, and how out of character it is for me, and that just makes it all the more frustrating.

I seem to be able to work myself into a frenzy in no time flat right now. One offhand remark by someone can drive me to the edge of reason. The most frustrating thing is that I know none of the things that are driving me mad matter at all. I know this, and yet I can't make myself care that I shouldn't care.

I get this way every once in a while and the only solution seems to be a good nights sleep which of course is hard to get when I am in this condition.

Some days I really wish I had a good punching bag. Beating a heavy bag to drive myself into exhaustion would be an effective means of getting myself out of this emotional rollercoaster.

I come across cynical, but my motto for most of life is "Don't sweat the small stuff" paired with "It's all small stuff". Unfortunately my subconscious and my adrenal system get together every once in a while and conspire against me.

This really only leaves me with one response.

'GAH!'

Night Frisbee 3 Flies Up

2005-06-26T22:09:00.000-07:00

I have to say that this is an activity that I never would have expected to come about. But at the bachelor party of Josh Tang, a friend and co-worker of mine there were about 7 guys who had been drinking eating and carousing for the better part of the day. The party was held at a campground in Big Sur. It was getting towards midnight and several of us got it into our heads to go out and play 3 flies up in this open field nearby. We had a light up Frisbee and fun was had by all.

There was one bush in the middle of the field that got the worst of it. I think that I was the second person to run right into it but I wasn't the last. It got a lot of traffic. We were just fortunate it was a forgiving bit of foliage. I don't know if I can recommend this activity to everyone but it was quite amusing. There were no broken bones or stitches so overall I would have to say that it went better than could be expected considering the company and the terrain.

As bachelor parties go I would have to say that for good clean entertainment and enjoyment this was one of the best I've experienced.

Weddings, Regsitries, and Ants

2005-06-08T20:18:00.000-07:00

So for some reason it seems everyone I know has decided to get married. And none of them to me. Isn't that inconsiderate? Anyways three of them decided to get married this month which means I don't get any free weekends until July. This is allright with me though, as long as there is free food. Well, I suppose the food isn't actually free, since I have to buy gifts. Come to think of it, the food is really expensive.

Now for some short thoughts. Bed Bath and Beyond, which every trendy bride registers at, has put something very odiferous in their gift wrapping(bag stuffing really) which makes me nauseous. I don't know what it is, but I may have to keep the gifts far away from me until wedding time. Either that or dump potpourri in the bags.

And now for something, completely different.

Today at lunch I bought a bag of salsa verde Doritos. I finished most of them but since I was eating and driving there were still some crumbs in the bag. I played soccer at 6:00 today and when I got back in my car I noticed that there were ants crawling all over the Doritos bag. This is a mystery, how did they get there. How long will they live in my car? Is there an ant colony under all the junk in my back seat?

I might have to call in an exterminator.

Small Animal, hmm, Rat water anyone?

2005-05-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

So I work on the CalPoly campus and I was forwarded the following e-mail at work last week:
<snip>
I have been told by Dave Ragsdale in Environmental Health and Safety
that they are advising people on campus not to drink the water until
further notice. There is apparently a small animal in one of the
campus' water tanks, and it has been isolated, and staff are working to
remove it.

Dave said that this is not a health hazard, but they are just being
cautious. They will be flushing the water lines and testing the water
just to be safe. I will keep you posted on what I know.

Pat

Pat Hosegood Martin, M.S.
Associate Human Resources Director
Cal Poly Foundation, Building 15
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
</snip>

In my experience people in the public health field only say 'small animal' when they are afraid to say rat.

Oh, and if any of you are wondering, I drank the water anyhow. I am a strong believer in the power of dilution. :)

Cheers!

Providence

2005-05-14T21:31:00.000-07:00

So this sort of thing happens to my family all the time, some people would call it coincidence but I maintain that it is providence.

My brother came and visited me from Fresno this weekend and so on Friday afternoon I knocked off work early and we decided to go play some disc golf at Sinsheimer park in San Luis Obispo.

While we were walking through the park towards the first hole I saw what I thought was a cellphone in the path. When we reached it I found it was actually a silver zippo in a leather case. It was in good condition and had the Harley Davidson logo etched on it, but I couldn't get it to light. We figured that it was out of fuel, but it was a zippo, so I used the belt clip on the case to attach it to my bag.

We found our way to the first hole and started our game. I was doing worse than usual and my brother was doing o.k. so we reached hole number six with about the same score. We weren't in any rush so it had taken us about a half an hour to get to this point, at around 4 over par for each of us.

Hole six is on the other side of the course from hole 1, next to the railroad tracks. I had seen some people who were much better than me throw from an alternate tee location high up on some rocks much further away from the hole. I had never been up there before so we decided to go up and have a look. Standing on the rocks and looking down at the course I decided that if I had a really good throw I could probably make it past the actual marked tee location, but I wasn't sure how far.

On a whim I decided to try it. I noticed that there was a guy kind of wandering along the bike\jogging path that goes between the railroad tracks and the golf course. I delayed my throw to wait for him to get out of the way, but he backtracked and I would have to screw up my throw to end up towards him anyhow; so I threw. As soon as I let the disc go I knew it wasn't going to reach the standard tee location and as the wind picked up I realized it was headed toward the bystander.

I yelled "Heads up!" hoping to catch the guys attention but because of the wind and the distance I don't think he heard me. The disc skipped on the bike path where it turned towards the course and came to rest in a bush not 5ft. from where the guy was. He turns and looks up the hill towards us and I waved. I could tell from his body language that he was angry, and now that I was giving him a closer look I realized he was probably a member of the homeless community.

The transient stormed off to the right and yelled at someone who I hadn't seen and then heads toward my brother and me as we came down off the hill. My brother Matt had wisely decided to throw from the standard tee and was headed towards it. "Be ready for a fight." I said to my brother as the stranger headed our way.

"Why did you throw a rock at me!" the transient yelled.
"I didn't throw a rock at you, it was a frisbee. We're playing some disc golf." I said holding my bag and walking directly towards him.
"Sorry for the close call."
I don't remember if he said anything to me but he turned his back and headed towards the bike path where he was when I threw. His friend, who he had called over to back him up, was arriving on the scene as I headed over to the bush where my disc had stopped. Now that I was closer I could tell that these two hadn't seen a shower or a laundry mat in a good long time, but were otherwise harmless. As I reached my disc one of the men said something about losing a lighter.

"You lost a lighter?" I asked. "Yeah" the guy I nearly hit said, "I've been looking all over for it I can't find it."
"What kind of lighter" I said.
"A zippo." he replied.
"Did it have anything on it?"
"Yeah, it was a Harly Davidson."
"Here you go." I said unclipping it from my bag and handing it to him.
He took it from my hand and took a few steps away. There was some expressions of incredulity from both him and his friend and then he turned and walked back to me. I stuck out my hand but he wasn't looking to shake my hand so I accepted his hug and returned it. He didn't smell too bad, just like old sweat and cigarretts. I had experienced far worse body oder from college lab partners. I shook his friends hand noticing that he had an interesting sore on his forarm and wondering how he got it. His friend said "God bless you man. You're gonna beat that guy," referring to my brother. They watched me take my second throw, which was pretty good, and the friend said. "You're gonna win the whole tournament." I smiled, told them "God bless you guys." and went to take my next throw.

Matt smiled and said "Pretty, cool," and then mentioned something about providence. Funny how we think alike.

Slot Car Drivers

2005-03-17T21:10:00.000-08:00

First let me apologize for not updating this in a while. I had several things which I wished to post, and still intend to, but they all require pictures and I don't have a host to put them on yet. When I remedy that there will be some interesting material here.

With that out of the way, I would like to take a moment to whine about a certain type of bad driver. Bad drivers are everywhere, you can't avoid them. The best way to deal with them is to accept that they are going to be there and just let out a sigh when they do something stupid. I don't have much trouble with road rage because as soon as I start to get mad at another driver I just sigh out the words 'What an idiot.' and let that be the end of it.

However, there is one type of bad driver that can get under my skin. I call them slot car drivers. For those of you too horribly repressed in your youth to know, slot cars are little race cars which run on a track side by side with a peg in a little groove to keep them on the track. They are controlled remotely by an analog trigger which controls how fast the car goes.

Slot cars can't take corners at their highest speed without coming out of the slot and flying off the track. Slot cars are one car per lane, so there is no passing to be done. The skill to driving a slot car is to slow down just enough on the corners so that your car doesn't fly off the track.

The people who I like to call slot car drivers love to speed. They always have a lead foot. However, if the road takes the slightest curve they will slow down drastically. They seem to fear their car flying off the curve. They also have an inability to pass other vehicles unless given their own lane. They will fly down a two lane road at 90MPH until they get behind another vehicle, who they will tailgate mercilessly until a passing lane presents its self.

It doesn't matter if there is a dashed line and clear sailing to the horizon, these drivers will stay glued to the bumper of the slower car in front of them. Sometimes if you pass them, and the car in front of them, they will gain the confidence necessary to leave their lane. But even that isn't a certainty.

The thing that frustrates me the most about these drivers is when you end up behind one on a windy mountain road. For you can never pass them. They creep fearfully around the corners at half the recommended speed. Turnouts are an unknown quantity to them, and when you get to a long straight section of road where it might be safe to pass they push their gas pedal to the floor to try and make up the time which they lost to those horrible curves!

On my last long trip I got behind some of the worst slot car drivers I'd seen in ages. Just as I managed to put one behind me I'd find another. It was enough to drive me batty. Finally, I just gave up altogether and resigned myself to taking corners like an octogenarian out for a Sunday drive.

So remember folks, when you see someone who is deathly afraid of corners and seems glued to their lane, the slot car drivers are out there and all you can really do is *sigh* 'What an idiot'.

Rabbit fettuccini

2005-01-04T21:21:00.000-08:00

Over the holidays I decided to get revenge on the little rodents which caused me so much grief on my previous visit home.

You see, on my last visit to my parents farm near Dinuba I got in my car to drive home and turned the key. The car started but it sounded horrible and was rocking terribly. It was even worse than the time I stretched a rod when my oil light failed to inform me that my car had none.

I shut off the car and opened the hood. The problem was very obvious. On the top of my engine was a large amount of rabbit hair and shredded insulation from the remains of two of my spark plug wires.

Rabbits, like all rodents, like to chew on things to keep their ever growing teeth from becoming a problem. Wires are some of their favorite choices for this and they managed to get under my hood from a convenient log which I had parked next to.

So on this trip home I took a 22 rifle out of our gun case and went rabbit hunting. The hunting was easy, as there are way too many rabbits around. The rabbit herd needed some thinning. I got 4 rabbits with the gun, my brother got 1 with the gun and 1 with a pipe. (it ran into a pipe rather than hiding in a hole and I chased it out into his waiting club) Of these six rabbits 4 were good size 1-2 lbs. We skinned out these rabbits and used a recipe that my mother had saved from a field and stream or some such publication. And we had Rabbit fettuccini the day before Christmas. It turned out really good. Personally I prefer rabbit to chicken.

All in all it was an enjoyable experience. It added to the other happy holiday memories that my family enjoyed.

Adventures with Abit Tech Support

2004-12-12T17:58:00.000-08:00

I am having trouble with my Abit motherboard, it has issues with the CD-ROM and my computer will periodically freeze for no apparent reason.

The following is a transcript of my recent dealings with Abit tech support:

[I Call number listed in the manual as the tech support number:]
Woman answers: Thank you for calling Abit USA how can I help you.

Me: I am having trouble with a motherboard that I purchased recently.

Woman: Oh, you want technical support.

Me: Yes.

Woman: Just a moment I'll transfer you.

(Moderately accented asian man answers): Abit tech support how can I help you.

Me: I am having trouble with my AV8 motherboard.

TS: What model of motherboard are you having trouble with.

Me: A - V - 8.

TS: What problem are you having.

Me: When I have my CD drive in the boot order prior to a valid booting drive, and there is no CD in the drive it will hang when it says Boot From CD:

TS: Oh, I never heard that one before.

Me: So what do you want me to do.

TS: What is your boot order now?

Me: Hard-drive, CD-Drive, Disabled, Disabled

TS: So you can't install windows.

Me: No, I installed windows just fine.

TS: But you say you have hard-drive before CD-ROM.

Me: I don't have windows installed on that hard drive. I took my other drives out of the order temporarily.

TS: Oh, I never hear this problem before. Have you tried switching the boot order.

Me: Yes.

TS: Huh, No on has this problem before.

Me: I only called about it because I was having other problems with my CD-Drive in windows. The CD-Rom will only show up about once every 4 times when windows loads. It works fine when it shows up, I thought the two problems might be related.

TS: Do you have windows installed on your Serial ATA hard drive or your IDE hard drive.

Me: Both.

TS: Ok, but which one is windows installed on.

Me: Both.

TS: Which one do you boot windows from, the Serial or the IDE.

Me: Whichever I choose. I installed windows on my serial ATA drive when I had the CD-Rom problem on the IDE drive. I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just my old windows installation. So I have it dual booting, I choose which one I want.

TS: Oh. We never have this problem before. Have you tried taking out all the other IDE drives?

Me: No I haven't. Can we continue this when I call back? Can I have a number or something like that?

TS: You don't have a case number.

Me: Can I get a case number?

TS: You don't have a case number.

Me: Could you give me a case number.

TS: You no have case number.

Me: Do you not give case numbers?

TS: No.

Me: Ok.

TS: You should use the e-mail, that way you won't have to explain the whole problem over again.

Me: Right, I'll do that.
[click]

Needless to say, I'm not terribly impressed with Abit's Tech Support. And I'm not too happy that I haven't been able to fix my problem either.

The Beginning

2004-12-11T15:57:00.000-08:00

So this is where my blog begins. Blogs are an interesting phenomenon, they popped up because some people had the audacity to believe that their random ramblings would be found interesting by other people. The fact that their popularity has only grown shows that at least some of them were right.

Frankly, I find most blogs boring since most people don't have that many interesting things to say. People who use their blogs as an online diary tend to fill the days with meaningless drivel. I hope I never start doing that.

If I do, someone better let me know.

Except this one, don't bother me about this one.

This is just the beginning.