WARNING: Geek quotient high, proceed with caution

Today I went scuba diving. It was tons of fun. We saw tons of different fish, 4 turtles, eels, lots of puffers of all different colors, and an octopus (though he was pretty shy.) I also learned exactly how nice having a wetsuit is. I may have to get my own before venturing into the water again. It's probably a good thing that we don't have much time left on Maui or else I might be tempted to get my open water certification.

Also, I was looking in my spam folder and found the subject line: "erotic r Porn trousers washer" What exactly is erotic about a trousers washer? No, don't tell me. I don't think that I want to know.

it's what was for dinner.

I went surfing this morning. Click the image below to see me trying to stay up on a board. Unfortunately the photographer didn't get my totally awesome wipeout.

Poll #1178248
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Which glasses look better on me?

Since I stumbled upon it and kinda sorta halfway opened it myself already crankygirlie gave me my birthday present early! It's a set of Shun knives. They are scary sharp. There's one carrot already that won't be causing any more trouble.

obligatory post in reference to lj strike silliness.

seriously people, if you are upset then send postcards.

I have a date with burr86 on Saturday.  He's so dreamy.

• I'm in Mountain View, CA from now til next Tuesday.
• It was a big day for my project at work, very exciting.
• Virgin America is a totally awesome airline.  The mood lighting kinda wigs out your eyes at first though.
• so tired, been up since 4:45am.
  
   

I can't believe that I didn't post this earlier...

I'm an uncle! Jack Henry Wilson was born on March 4th. He's doing well and home with mom and dad now. I've already promised Jack that I'll help him annoy his dad. :)

My parents are extremely pleased. March 4th is their wedding anniversary. Good timing little guy.

I got my annual bonus on Friday so on Saturday I went out and bought Rock Band for my PS2. It's sweet. Turns out I can actually play the drums reasonably well. No one has tried the microphone yet... I don't expect that I ever will. ;)

I'll be in the bay area between the 19th and the 25th of this month (that's March burr86.) Who wants to hang out?

Inspired by prettyh I made a pound cake today (I used the recipe at the link above). It's pretty tasty, a bit like a muffin. I've run out of space for cakes so I ordered two more tupperware cake carriers on ebay. Having carriers means I don't have to eat all the cake myself :P

Also, waffles for dinner is a wonderful thing.

Today I went shopping and ended up looking at Shun knives. I didn't buy any because that's some serious cash, but now I know what I want so I can save up for it.

I got home in time to handle my on-call shift for work. Fortunately it was a quiet shift so I spent some time in the kitchen. I made french onion soup and an angel food cake. The soup was ok by itself, but once I added the cheese toast it became quite good. I think that my substitution of mead for the white wine resulted in the soup being a bit too sweet. Next time I'll use something drier. The cake came out quite well (I've been making it a lot lately) and we topped some with strawberries and macadamia nut liqueur. That was quite a treat.

In other food news I've been practicing making coconut cake. I've made it three times. The first was an unequivocal disaster (the cake was dry and the frosting thin resulting in the cake absorbing the frosting overnight effectively un-frosting the cake) so it went in the bin. I got it right the second and third times, but I think that it can be even better with some tweaking. I really like the 7 minute frosting, it's easy to make and quite tasty, not heavy like butter cream.

Work has been going very well. My project is approaching beta launch which is very exciting. I'll be down in the bay area in a few weeks, anyone want to hang out?

I went on a bit of a baking kick last weekend and made angel food cake, tres leches cake and dulce de leche (good on top of cake.) Then mid week I made another angel feed cake both because it's fun and because we had eaten the first one. I think that I'll have to make another tomorrow, but that's even better because last night I went out and bought a new hand mixer to replace the old one that's about to shake itself to pieces.

( Click here for appliance porn )

Otherwise I've been really busy at work with my project.  It used to be a side project but then it kinda blew up in my face and now there are 3 people (myself included) working on it full time, plus more than a few people helping out in their spare time.  It's been a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.

If you've missed the big news LJ has been sold again. In all honestly I think that this is good for LJ and good for it's users. For the most part the same people will be working on the code and the systems and they will get the help that they need to move things forward. 6A was good for LJ for a while but I think that this will be even better.

So to everyone joining Livejournal*, Inc. I salute you :)


*Hey! No more need to explain wtf danga is!

All you people reading my journal should go play SneezyMUD. It's like WOW but without the pictures getting in the way.

I made another cake tonight for Julie's Granny's birthday. I had some left over cake from leveling it so I made some petits fours and then covered them with ganache. I'd never made ganache before but it's so simple and so tasty that this will not be the last time. Next time I think the entire cake will be ganached :)

Saturday gordonmessmer and I rode over to Seattle Cycle Center where I broke down and purchased a Bluetooth headset for my helmet. I'm pretty pleased with the unit and glad that I waited til now to buy. I can connect up to 3 bluetooth devices including phone, audio (ipod) and a radio or intercom. They'll even work unit to unit directly. After that we stopped by the mall and had some oh-so-bad-for-my-diet orange chicken and did a bit of shopping.

We then retired to my place and got to work on my av switch project again. Working on it recently I realized that my problem all along was a lack of pull-down resistors on the address lines (RB2 and RB3) and once I installed those things really started to work. We did some brain melting bit math an shortly were able to reliably interpret button presses. It felt really good to get that working. After about an hour of re-re-wiring the AV cabinet I have reached my goal of simple yet effective AV switching.

Sunday I went shopping to pick up the essentials (and non-essentials) that only costco can provide. A short trip to Freddy's rounded off the expidition. I then set about making up new button lables for the AV Switch. The unit has interchangable button covers for different systems but it's a bit old so there's no Wii button nor did I have proper buttons for some of the older systems either. I popped open the buttons and sanded off the old labels and printed new ones to pop in there. In addition to having proper labels now they are also in the corrent font for each system. I'm contemplating replacing the green LEDs that backlight the labels with white ones but before I do that I need to find a good way to print full color transparencies that stand up to being backlit like that. For now the green will do.

Now to get to bed. Tomorrow is our first day in the new office :)

I ordered the replacement caps from digikey the other day and today replaced the ailing ones in the power supplies. Low and behold it worked! I now have a functioning console server. Phew.