It's been awhile, dear old friends. I've been neglecting anything related to this site, which is sad. It's like that one friend who you go just a little too long without calling, and you know that when you do get back in contact, it'll be a bit overshadowed by the ominous (and awkward) issue. Yeah, it's just like that.
So, you may have noticed that I have retired the ever-popular (and terribly outdated) 'moonunit' layout. I started from scratch this time, with a fresh install of Pivot (yum). It took a good chunk of my sunday afternoon, but that's okay -- it was far past due. I needed the practice too -- I've been doing a lot of 'non-design' coding as of late (see also: WORK). In doing the layout, I was pretty fucking impressed with the sheer amount of archives we have. How entertaining they are.
But yeah, new little section -- linkdump. I'll be updating it as I come across some interesting links.
Not too much is new with me, but I'll start with the highlight of my last few weeks -- something I like to call 'demand jacking.' It all starts like this:
I pay for cable internet, but not TV. When I first moved into my place, on a whim, I plugged my HDTV into the cable jack on my wall. To my surprise, I was able to pick up a fair amount of channels (~30) I noticed that a lot of 'high-numbered' channels had decimal points on them (115.1, 115.2, 115.3, etc). When I originally scanned them, nothing was on. I set them to be 'skipped' by my remote. A few weeks ago, however, I fat-fingered a channel number on the remote, which sent me to 114.1. Beverly Hills Cop was on. Weird. I scanned up and down and found a few more shows on (The Sopranos, Teletubbies). I was a bit confused, but didn't pay it much thought.
It wasn't until a few days later, in the evening, that I scanned the high numbers. There were a bunch of shows on, most of them in HD. Clearly, I was confused. It wasn't until I was watching Starship Troopers that I figured it out. A few minutes in, the show started fastforwarding. Strange. It finally resumed normal speed during that one scene where the chick shows her rack. The it rewound and watched the same scene. Then it paused. It all became clear to me: My TV can pick up other people's On-demand cable.
It's really quite interesting. You're watching TV, but someone else, someone you don't know is controlling it. It's pretty interesting. Over the last week I've had the following grace my screen:
- Beverly Hills Cop. Bronson Pinchot is awesome
- 3 or 4 episodes of Bobby's World.
- Hardcore lesbian pornography
- A show about semi-professional bikini models (lots of 'pause / rewind')
- The totally forgettable part in The 40 Year Old Virgin where the main character performs two 'magic tricks' which include pulling a novelty ear and a large coin from behind a young child's ear. The person watching this rewound, paused and played this 30 second scene for 45 minutes. Literally 45 minutes. Over and over again. I watched the entire time, in disbelief. Remarkable.
On the work front, things are going swell. There's been a lot of 'upward movement' of people in my group, leaving my tribe a little thin. It's been a lot of work to keep up, but I think I've been handling the pressure quite well. I come up for my 1-year review sometime soon. Crazy stuff.
I also just scored my first 'business' trip -- I'm heading to a tech conference in Boston. I'm excited. Must remember to take notes.
Today, my coworker didn't handle a somewhat serious issue today and left right early. Myself, about to take off to go play Mortal Kombat with Corey, realized there was an issue. Long story short, I ended up staying an extra 1.5 hours just to clean up what could have been done earlier in a heartbeat. Not pleased was I.
Every summer, there is a softball league within the company. I joined on the IT team. We have our first game yesterday. We didn't practice once. We lost. But only by one run. We weren't too bad. Amazing. It's a lot more competitive than I thought, but it's still all in good fun. Beer drinking is encouraged, which is, uh, pretty rad. I didn't too too bad, but I need to head to the cages -- I haven't swung a bat in over two years.
Well, that's about all I got at the moment. I love you all.
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