<krel> la laaaa na na da daaaa da da, dadadaaaaaa da daa daa DAAAAAAAAA <krel> daa daaaaaaaaa dada la laaaaaaa lala, lalalaaaa la auld lang syyyyyne~ <krel> merry new years, #sdcolleges~
So begins 0×7D7, 03727, 2007, or 0b 0111 1101 0111, depending on your radix.
Ian Macdonald’s amazing bash_completion script never ceases to amaze me.
Suppose you’re unpacking one tarball in a directory full of them. If you type tar xjf then hit tab, it will complete all the .tar.bz2 files in the directory; but if you try to complete on tar xzf, it will complete the .tar.gz files. A moment’s thought will show that this is absolutely crazy talk.
I strongly advise anyone who uses bash for more than five minutes a day to get this script immediately.
Garibaldi and the Redshirts would be an excellent name for a band.
Repost from my main man Michael Kelly
For the past 5 or 6 years or so, I’ve been wondering what the super-cool intro music to Escape Velocity is. I’ve heard the music since in a commercial for a History Channel special on Hitler, and a commercial for Submarina. I even emailed Ambrosia once about it, but they said they’d forgotten what it was.
Tonight, on a whim, I searched for `”Escape Velocity” intro music’, and the first hit was a thread on the Ambrosia forums talking about the EV music on Good Morning America (video here). Later in the thread there’s a pointer to another thread that has links to a flash and mp3 version of the full song. They mentioned the site that has the song available for purchase, which I had found previously, but couldn’t decipher to the point that I could go buy it. (Apparently I was not alone.)
In any case, enjoy “Face of the Enemy”. I’m playing it over and over and backing it up repeatedly.
Sorry for the heavy tone of this and the last few posts. Something about December always makes me a bit melancholy. It’s not Christmas, and it’s not the change of the year, and it’s not the sometimes dreary weather, and it’s not even my birthday. I don’t know what it is. But somehow this time of the year just makes me feel grateful for what I have, miss what I’ve left behind, and sad for what will soon slip away.
This is to all my friends and everyone I know, close by and faraway, whether I talked to you today or it’s been a few years, whether you ever read this or not.
Old and Wise
Alan Parsons ProjectAs far as my eyes can see
There are shadows approaching me
And to those I left behind
I wanted you to know
You've always shared my deepest thoughts
You follow where I goAnd oh... when I'm old and wise
Bitter words mean little to me
Autumn winds will blow right through me
And someday in the mist of time
When they asked me if I knew you
I'd smile and say you were a friend of mine
And the sadness would be lifted from my eyes
Oh when I'm old and wiseAs far as my eyes can see
There are shadows surrounding me
And to those I leave behind
I want you all to know
You've always shared my darkest hours
I'll miss you when I goAnd oh... when I'm old and wise
Heavy words that tossed and blew me
Like autumn winds that will blow right through me
And someday in the mist of time
When they ask you if you knew me
Remember that you were a friend of mine
As the final curtain falls before my eyes
Oh when I'm old and wiseAs far as my eyes can see
Life is much too short and much too long.
Last Friday night, Dylan, Brandon, Cody, and I played Hearts (a man’s game) at Cody’s. The game stretched on to the wee hours of the morning. And so it passed that I drove home at 3:00 AM.
The night was bitterly cold, just below freezing, and the moonless sky was crystal clear and full of stars. On a whim, I turned right on Hwy 1 instead of left, and drove south for fifteen minutes or so. No cars, no animals. I felt I was the only one awake in the wide cold world.
When I finally got home and stepped out of the garage, I looked up. The night sky was aglow with stars. There were the bright stars you can see everywhere but Los Angeles. And there were stars between the stars that fill in the outlines of the constellations. Details like Orion’s upraised club were so obvious - of course that’s a hunter in the stars. And then the stars between the stars between the stars, and you can’t believe how dense they are, and there really are seven sextillion of them. And then the stars between the stars between the stars, the stardust, because everywhere you looked it was never completely black. And I nearly fell to my knees, so struck was I with the beauty.
In a few short weeks I’ll be leaving for San Diego again, and with me I’ll take the memories of cold, clear nights, and the rain, and walking along the bluffs in the afternoon, and the fog in the evening.
Maybe in a decade or two I’ll come back to Cambria, just like I went back to Los Gatos. I wonder what I’ll find. I wish I could stop time and hold onto what I have, because my life right now is so amazing that I feel it can only go down from here.
Yesterday I drove up to the Bay Area, with a twofold purpose: To see Teresa, and to visit the places where I grew up.
I left at 7am and drove up Highway 1 to Carmel. 1 is a beautiful road, and I have a great time every time I drive it. I love driving on scenic winding roads; the more scenic and windier, the better. The road is so much better than my car: it’s a road worthy of a Lotus or Porsche or Ferrari. (Some day.) I made excellent time - an hour and forty minutes from the stoplight in Cambria to the stoplight in Carmel. Another hour and twenty put me at De Anza & Stevens Creek.
Louise Van Meter Elementary School is different; they’ve added a new driveway down what used to be the side of the field. The playground structures are all metal and plastic; back in my day we had wood and we got splinters, dammit! The field is so small. It’s about the size of Shamel Park, more squared-off. As a kid it seemed to take forever to run across it when that bell rang at the end of lunch.
Raymond J. Fisher Middle School is completely different; they’ve built a new administration building, with a gaudy facade of dark blue concrete and gleaming metal trim. Thanks, Dot-Com Bubble.
Los Gatos High still looks the same—big imposing quasi-Greek building with a big lawn. I’ve still never been inside.
What used to be Los Gatos Ferrari is now a Ferrari, Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin, and Lotus dealership. They have a Veyron on order for December. On Santa Cruz Rd there’s a Lamborghini dealership. Thanks again, Dot-Com Bubble.
I drove up Tourney Road, to the old house. The road was grippingly familiar; I even remember the way the rain runoff flowed down the roadside and pooled up at certain spots. There’s a new baby-blue monstrosity of a house along the road that was simply not there when we left. I’m surprised there was actually space for another lot; things are very close-quarters along that road. The old house itself looks about the same. It’s had a paint job (it’s a much warmer, less neutral grey), and there are more plants around the decks. I was surprised at its sheer size; it was a big house. I didn’t go in, just paused for a moment and let my mind run through it, evoking every memory of my childhood in a huge flood.
On the way back down, I caught a glimpse through the trees of the view. The old house’s biggest selling point was its panoramic vista of the whole South Bay, from the Saratoga hills across to the Coast Range. In the rain, like yesterday, it’s not so impressive, but on a clear day you can see all the way up the bay, and in the afternoon sometimes you can make out the gold sun reflecting on the office buildings in San Francisco and Oakland. Million dollar view.
I miss the freeways in the bay area. At night, they’re so much darker than those of SoCal, and there’s nothing on either side but soundwall.
Northern California rain is different, too. A million tiny misty drops, the whole windshield is soaked, a certain cadence to the rain as it strikes, washing up the windshield from the wind, wipers only slightly helpful.
It’s only been eight years since I lived in the Bay Area, but it feels like a completely different lifetime. I was a different person then. I lived in Los Gatos for the first thirteen years of my life, but I grew up in Cambria, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Do not let it slip to your girlfriend that you once did needlepoint & crossstitching (those most feminine of arts) back in like third grade. She will require that you make something for her. There is no arguing or escaping.
Paul: Cross-stitch is like analog pixel art. Except you get to draw between the pixels, too.
So my connections started getting finicky yesterday. Out of pure overlearned reflex, I popped open a terminal and started pinging google.com. The connection appeared normal, so I went back to what I was doing and left the window there.
I came across it again this evening just in time to see the sequence number cross 300. It took me a few seconds to realize what happened.
update
So I finally killed it.
--- google.com ping statistics --- 71507 packets transmitted, 69992 packets received, 2% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 94.539/111.947/1088.616/25.285 ms
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