Wibblelog

There are 37 ethernet ports in my apartment.

But only one in the spot where I put my desk.

*sigh*

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I moved into Boston.  I now live in the back bay - no more crappy suburbs.  More news to come as I start having time to breathe again :-P

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I’ve always thought system emulators are really cool, but this one takes the cake for me at the moment. JPC is a full x86 emulator written entirely in Java, and it actually runs at a pretty good speed. Very impressive. If you’ve been wanting to play with old DOS games you haven’t seen in a decade or more, here’s your chance!

If you’re more interested in a native-code x86 emulator, DOSBox is always good, but it takes a little bit more fiddling to get going.

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It’s hard to stay really upset about anything when there is a cat nearby posing like this.

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This Simon guy wrote a bunch of useful things about running a ZFS fileserver at home, including a discussion of why he chose it and why he went with OpenSolaris rather than FreeBSD/MacOS/Linux. He went through the same sort of setup process and decision-making that I did, but he did a much better job of documenting it for posterity. If you’re considering running (or replacing) a home fileserver, I recommend giving this a quick read. (via)

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I’m back in Boston. Been back since Monday, but too lazy to blog. Plus I’m sure you don’t particularly care. Anyway, I posted some photos from my trip:

Photos from around the Google mothership. I realized after I came home that I didn’t take enough pictures of the iplex, but oh well. I saw some cute ducks, and at least one prosthetic duck. Also, a nervous little dog.

I went to a Pi Day Party on 3/14 (duh). There was some amazingly good wine (that is a three liter bottle of 1996 Silver Oak cabernet sauvignon!) I liked it. Damian smelled it, at least. (He doesn’t drink.) There was also a pi pie or , some smoking of fancy cigars, comparison of battle scars (he was in a paragliding accident in Mexico), and a Schwim. Sarah said that nobody ever gets good photos of her, and I promised not to prove her wrong. Brandon did a better job of making her look good. :-)

I had a great time in Mountain View. As I predicted, I already want to go back. It was great to spend some time face-to-face with the people I work with on a daily basis, and it was lovely to visit some of my favorite restaurants again. I should really take another trip to visit our New York City office before going to MTV again, though. Manhattan is an amazing place, as is the Google office there, so I’m looking forward to that as well, but it just doesn’t feel like home like Silicon Valley does.

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Greetings from Mountain View, CA. I’m here for a week (til Sunday) to mingle with people at work and generally visit the mother ship. Look me up if you’re also in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area and want to hang out.

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My new camera arrived! I got me a Nikon D80 after like 6 months of deliberation. I was briefly tempted by the D300, and at one point was almost convinced to get a D40 instead, but finally settled on the D80 since the price difference between the D40 and D80 is less than the price difference between the $499 Tokina 12-24mm lens (which doesn’t work on the D40) and the $914 Nikon 12-24mm lens (which does) - and I want to get the Tokina.

I don’t really have any test images to post yet, as the lens I ordered still hasn’t arrived. The lens I’m using at the moment is an 28-80mm kit lens that I borrowed from a friend at work. Also, I have no idea how to use this camera. It took me an hour or so before I remembered that I can actually shoot at higher ISO than 200 and get useful results, even though that is one of the things I was most excited about when I decided to get a dSLR. I’ll get the hang of it eventually - I’ve just never used a Nikon camera much before.

(Update: it’s a 28-80mm lens I’ve got right now, not 18-80.)

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I originally intended this blog to be a food-blog, since I didn’t have much else worth posting. Having nothing interesting to say certainly hasn’t kept me from posting, but I thought it might be nice to start posting some of the recipes that come out of my kitchen at home. Jenny has a veritable treasure trove of recipes in her head, and I’ve started encouraging her to properly document them for posterity. Here are a few.

• Crispy Fried Tofu with Scallions and Ginger Sauce (also known as “#209″ to anyone who frequents Mandarin Wok in Champaign). This is our approximation of a golden favorite from that restaurant.
• Lobster Avocado Salad - this is an original from Jenny. I promise it’s good. If you’re initially freaked out at the thought of lobster and avocado together, I recommend getting over it. It’s great - at least in this recipe.
• Home-made Mayonnaise - This is just a simple mayonnaise recipe, needed as part of the Lobster Avocado Salad. Basically lifted from Julia Child’s book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Enjoy. Hopefully there will be more recipes to come. Let me know how it turns out if you try any of these.

(update: fixed the recipe links. Sorry about that.)

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The checkout guy at the local Blockbuster did me a favor tonight. He helpfully pointed out that I had rented five movies from them in the past seven weeks, and would therefore benefit from paying for their Upgraded Special Movie Card Thingie. This didn’t have the effect on me that was intended, I’m sure, because I’ve realised that I’m spending too much damn money at Blockbuster, and will instead now subscribe to Greencine.

(unless someone has a better suggestion, of course)

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