Dave's Blog

This Weekend & iTunes Update

2007-02-04T22:30:00.000-08:00

Chloe's 1st Birthday Party

This weekend we celebrated Chloe's 1st birthday by having a big party with nearly 30 friends and relatives showing up at Mission Bay Park. It was a huge success thanks to Wendy's great planning and organization, I think everyone had a great time despite there being a bit of wind chill on an otherwise beautiful San Diego day. We definitely needed a kite or 2 to take advantage of the wind!

Here's a pic of Chloe getting her first birthday cake and what happens when you let her eat it. We'll be uploading more pictures to our gallery soon!

iTunes Sucks Update

I got a few comments from people about my iTunes Sucks post wondering how iTunes customer service addressed the issue as well as commenting that either some people either had never had any problems with iTunes themselves or also had heard of others having problems with iTunes, too.

Here's what they had to say (they replied in about 6 hours to Wendy):

I understand that after downloading your purchase, your songs are not appearing in your iTunes library. I'm sorry to hear that your iTunes Store purchases are missing from your iTunes Library. Fortunately, those items may still be on your hard disk. To look for them, follow the steps in this
article:

Instructions for finding missing music and video downloads
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n301749

The instructions tell you to search your computer for all .m4v, .m4p and .ipg files on your PC, which was what I had done myself. They did nothing to resolve the issue that the iTunes application completely lost reference to a download and that all the downloads were now named download.m4p so had to be renamed manually as well as manually have all the song details (artist, album, etc) manually entered. Luckily it was only 5 songs.

The problems with the songs brings up an interesting issue, which is that when you buy a song off iTunes, that only entitles you to download the song once. If you lose it or if the download fails and you aren't able to find the file on your PC, you may be completely stuck.

Apple's remedy to lost songs is to make sure you back up your downloads. In my opinion, for $1/song, they should allow you to download a song more than once. 3 times seems like a reasonable number to me.

Now to figure out why downloads get stuck on this computer... since I can't seem to find any cases where downloads get stuck exactly the same way.

iTunes Sucks

2007-01-30T21:43:00.000-08:00

Welcome back! Yeah, it's been a long time since I've posted and people have been nagging for me to post something people can relate to. Apparently "fail2ban, dovecot and brute force attacks" just wasn't something that most of my readers could relate to. Rant mode on!

I must be an idiot, but for something that is supposed to be easy to use, iTunes just sucks. The iPod itself is OK, but that damn twirly thing either doesn't spin at all for me, or spins around the world, so yeah, that's annoying, too.

Wen calls me up today and says: I bought some songs on iTunes and they're not showing up! They ripped me off! So I'm thinking well, OK, billions of people use iTunes every day and I've never heard anyone complain about their iPod, so it must be a simple problem of not clicking in the right spot.

So I get on the PC and start clicking. Yep, iTunes Purchase History says that 5 songs have been purchased, but no songs are showing up in the Purchased area or the Music Library. A quick Google search reveals horror stories of people losing their Music libraries when upgrading to iTunes 7, but nothing that seems quite relevant to this situation.

A quick peek in the "My Music" folder and I find some suspicious .tmp directories named after the songs that were purchased, and inside 2 files, download.m4p and Info.plist.

I can play those download.m4p files with iTunes and they appear to contain the entire song, but now I don't have any of the song info. Aaargh! I want my freakin' music that I paid for and I just want it to work, damn it!

From what I can tell, iTunes downloads everything OK, but then when it comes time to move the download from the temporary directory to wherever it's supposed to move and do whatever with it, it gets stuck. Yuck!

Not to mention that browsing the iTunes store is an exercise in futility! The servers appear to be slower than a dead cat and rarely respond if at all, and never respond in a timely manner. Ugh!

Finally, I gave up on getting iTunes to recognize those downloaded m4p files and renamed them manually and assigned them the proper attributes. It only took me 3 hours!

Rant mode off.

Thanks, I feel a bit better now.

fail2ban, dovecot and brute force attacks

2006-08-31T11:22:00.000-07:00

I needed a way to help stop/slow down brute force password attacks on a dovecot pop3 server running on Fedora Core 5. I heard about fail2ban on the dovecot list, it can scan any log file and any time it matches a regex in the log, you can have it block a host using iptables.

When setting fail2ban 0.6.1 up, I also took the tips from The Art of Web ~ System: fail2ban and iptables which adds syslog logging of dropped connection attempts and cleans up the iptables rules a bit.

This regex matches dovecot authentication failures in /var/log/secure:
dovecot.*(?:authentication failure).*rhost=::ffff:(?P<host>\S*)

I also tweaked the SSH failregex to make sure it only matches sshd failures.

You can download my entire configuration file here: fail2ban.conf

Junk in the Trunk

2006-03-03T23:03:00.000-08:00

Meg's blog had a link to this store for babies online, and I ran across this onesie, it's awesome!

I can't believe it's March!

2006-03-03T22:40:00.000-08:00

Wendy and I are starting to feel a bit settled with Chloe. The toughest thing to adjustment is the drastic change in our sleeping schedules.

We are lucky if Chloe sleeps 4 hours in between feedings during the night, more often she will go about 2-3 hours in between feedings, so that's a lot of waking up. It's toughest for Wendy since she has to do the actual feeding, I will typically get up and make sure they get whatever they need (diaper change, a glass of water, words of encouragement or a kiss) and stumble back to bed.

Aside from that things are going well, Chloe is getting bigger every day, and seems to becoming more aware of her surroundings as well as making a wider variety of noises and funnier faces.

Next Tuesday she'll be a month old!

Here's a funny picture of her sleeping from the other day. Yes, she was really sleeping with her hands sticking straight up in the air! There's more of her in the gallery.

Pictures are Online

2006-02-12T12:50:00.000-08:00

I've finally gotten all of Chloe's pictures up, you can view them in our Chloe's photo gallery.

Here is one of my favorites:

T-shirt Folding

2006-02-11T15:44:00.000-08:00

I was helping around the house today and doing some laundry, and remembered this awesome T-shirt folding technique from this Japanese video. It's very quick and gives you professional looking folded shirts!

We're Home!

2006-02-10T14:59:00.000-08:00

In case you haven't heard yet, Chloe was born Monday Feb 6, 2006 (2/6/2006) at 11:33am. Read more and see pics about it at Wendy's blog.

Still waiting...

2006-02-02T11:41:00.000-08:00

Chloe is taking her sweet old time, but my friend Curtis' wife just delivered twins. a couple days ago!

No Chloe Yet!

2006-01-31T08:17:00.000-08:00

But we did take this cute picture of Wendy's Belly last night! Vote for Pedro!

I got a few calls yesterday from curious friends wondering if Chloe had come yet, you know who you are. ;-) Thanks, we appreciate the support!

Latkas, Houses and Fish Tacos, oh My!

2006-01-22T23:51:00.000-08:00

Our good friend Scotty stopped by today with some home made latkas that he and family made yesterday. For those of you who don't know what latkas are, they are pototo pancakes, kind of like hash browns, but with more good stuff in them than just potatoes. They've got onions and other things to tie it together. Topped with sour cream and/or apple sauce (Scotty brought both for us!) they were delicious after being reheated for 20 min in the oven at 250 degrees.

Later in the afternoon, Wen and I drove around the neighborhoods of University City and Clairemont looking at the neighborhoods and trying to figure out what areas we liked, as well as to stop at some open houses.

Of course, we had to like the more expensive neighborhoods in University City more, where houses are barely affordable for us.

We saw some pretty shady areas in Clairement, and I quickly came up with a new index to quickly judge the desirability of the neighborhood. The more cars (and the junkier), trucks, motor homes and trailers parked in the neighborhood, the less desirable it is to live there.

Wendy came up with her own. The more cute old people walking and dogs being walked, the more desirable the neighborhood.

It seems that the fewer cars you found, the more old people and dogs were found roaming the streets, so it's good that we agreed on what neighborhoods we liked.

We finished up the day by eating at Rubios (mmm, fish tacos) and hanging up pictures in Chloe's room. I don't think that Chloe's room can get any more ready, so Chloe, we are ready when you are!

My left arm has been slowly getting better. I nearly have full range of motion in my elbow again, but it still hurts near those points and when pushing or pulling on it in funny ways. The last couple days my wrist and hand have been more sore than anything, which is weird because they didn't hurt that much at first!

Old and Broken

2006-01-17T23:53:00.000-08:00

So last Sunday I decided to ride my skateboard to catch up to Wen on her daily walk. On the way while I decided to eat pavement while going up a driveway when the back wheels got caught on the lip.

I decided to break my fall by landing on my left arm, so my wrist and elbow took the grunt of it. I remember landing on my shoulder and feeling bones move around, but luckily I didn't break a collarbone or anything. I did manage to lightly sprain my wrist and elbow enough to render my left arm mostly useless for the rest of Sunday and yesterday. It even hurt to type!

Luckily it seems to be healing pretty well and I am getting range of motion back in my elbow, but it still hurts to do any moderate activity with the arm, so I'm taking it easy.

Before I went and busted up my arm (good thing I painted before I skateboarded!), I painted Chloe's room a nice shade of green that we picked out from the Disney collection. It's amazing how a little bit of color can brighten up the room! We're officially ready for you now, Chloe!

Come on out, Chloe!

2006-01-13T11:16:00.000-08:00

Just over 2 weeks to go until Chloe is due to be born!

Wen keeps on saying "Come on out, Chloe!" and I can't say I blame her, it can't be comfortable to carry her around in her belly any more, and she looks like she's going to pop!

She's going to be so cute, I can't wait!

Todd (Wen's brother) visited from DC the last couple days. They brought home PF Chang's the other night, yummy! He flew back this morning, but may be coming back again in another month. It's always nice to have family come by!

Another reason to not use TaxCut - Yeah, they suck!

2006-01-04T10:29:00.000-08:00

Apparently they've "mistakenly" exposed customer's Social Security Numbers as part of a tracking number on a recent mass mailing campaign. Last year I wrote about how insane their rebate policy was. Thanks for making it so easy to go with your competitor!

First weekend of 2006

2006-01-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

Except for what appears to be the beginning of a cold that I haven't been able to shake (thanks Primm!) the first weekend of 2006 was pretty enjoyable.

Wen and I didn't do much for New Year's Eve, we celebrated by watching episodes of "Law & Order: SVU" and Dick Clark as midnight appeared. Yes, I officially feel old now.

New Year's Day Wen's mom came over to have me fix the problem with the heater on her Tercel. It wasn't blowing hot air on her commute home from Borrego Springs to Shelter Valley and she noticed that the temp gauge would real close to the bottom of the gauge. Sounded like a thermostat problem, for some reason it wass opening up too early or stuck open so we searched for a thermostat and replacement radiator hoses as well.

4 car parts stores later, some crazy chicken (El Pollo Loco) and a gallon of paint for Chloe's room, we finally found one that had the hoses in stock. The install went pretty smooth, until it came time to install the top hose where I found that the new one was about 1/4" bigger in diameter than the old one. Wen and Mary ran off to another store which had one in stock which fit perfectly after some trimming. A quick test drive had the temp gauge sitting in the normal spot (slightly below half-way mark) and the heater blowing hot air, so problem solved.

I spent yesterday installing Eibach springs on my WRX, then returning the radiator hose which didn't fit and the spring compressor I borrowed from Kragen. Install was pretty straight forward, the toughest part was getting the top-hat bolts off. That bolt likes to spin with the strut-shaft, so you have to use an offset wrench so you can hold the shaft with an allen key and/or a strap wrench to loosen and then tighten it. Breaking it loose while the car was on the ground seemed to make that go a lot easier, too.

I think we caught the last rat which has been pestering us. Sunday night I heard a bit of a commotion in the attic which sounded like rat activity, so I made a mental note to go up and check on the traps we set in the attic with peanut butter. Found a trapped rat along with an empty one without any more peanut butter. Hopefully that's the last of them!

Next weekend there is more car maintenance due, both Wen's Civic and my WRX need coolant flushes and brake flushes. Hopefully I'll get to paint Chloe's room, too!

End of Year Catch Up

2005-12-31T10:43:00.000-08:00

Been a busy December, hard to believe that it's New Year's Eve!

I did a bit of traveling for work this month. A few weeks ago, I visited Chicago (more accurately, Crystal Lake, a suburb about 30min from Chicago). This was just a few days after that Southwest flight slid off the end of the Midway airport, but I wasn't too worried about my flight since I was flying into O'Hare and no snow was in the forecast while I was there. It's a lot colder there than here in sunny San Diego, the warmest it got was maybe 32F. It hardly dips below 50F here! Luckily, I didn't need to spend too much time outside, so it wasn't too bad.

This week I drove to Primm Valley w/my coworker Micah for the annual Frear Cup golf tournament. For those of you who don't know where Primm Valley is, it's what used to be called Stateline on the California/Nevada border along I15. They've got 3 casinos there, Primm Valley Resort, Buffalo Bill's, and Whiskey Pete's. I can't say that I'd recommend staying there, they all seemed a bit run down and were very smoky inside.

The Primm Valley Golf Club is on the California side of the border a few minutes from the casinos and consists of 2 18 hole golf courses, the Lakes and Desert course. Both are fun, challenging courses, and we were lucky that there was no wind the first day and only a light wind the 2nd day. Apparently it was blowing 40-50mph the day before!

Wen and I spent Christmas up at her mom's house out in Shelter Valley which is east of Julian in the desert. I worked on a bunch of projects around the house while Wendy and her mom cooked up turkey, green bean casserole, stuffing, mashed potatoes and pecan pie. Yummy!

Tomorrow (actually in about 10 hours because of the time zone difference) my cousin/sister gets married in Thailand! Congratulations Nu and Rick!

Happy New Year everyone!

Post Slack

2005-12-30T10:52:00.000-08:00

Yes, It's been a while (more than a month!) since my last post. I'm sorry that my laziness has prevented your entertainment. My next post will be juicy! Just for you, Pedram!

Turkey Day!

2005-11-23T02:07:00.000-08:00

We've got a busy weekend ahead of us.

Wendy's Mom is coming over tomorrow night.
We pick up my cousin Daniel at USD early Thursday morning.
Drive to Los Angeles/Glendale. Meet my Aunt along the way (probably around Anaheim) to pass off Daniel.
Hang out with my family who will be spending the weekend in SoCal. Daniel and his parents will meet us in Glendale in the afternoon for Turkey.
Send Wen and her Mom back to SD on Thursday evening.
Hang out with family Friday.
Drive to SD with Family Friday night.
Miss Kathy and Jarrod who will be in town Friday.
Hang out with family more Saturday.
Send parents off to LA Saturday late afternoon who will drive back to Mountain View Sunday.
Visit Tristan's parents in Temecula/Murietta Sunday (I think!).

Whew! Anyone else have a lot planned for Thanksgiving weekend?

If it smells like a rat, looks like a rat, it must be a...

2005-11-13T20:06:00.000-08:00

For the past couple months, we would occasionally get woken up by the pitter pattering, scratching rats running around in the walls of our condo.

We had the pest company come by and try to catch/kill or otherwise keep the rat out of our walls, but after a month, multiple visits, climbing in the attic and multiple rat traps located around the exterior of our building, the rats continued to show up.

At least the scratching provided for hours of entertainment for our cat Emmy who would jump into the bathtub and listen to the rat scurrying around behind the walls.

Last week we had some contractors working up in the attic replacing damaged rafters which had been eaten away by our other pests, termites. Later that night, we noticed an aweful stench when walking under our attic access hole.

The contractors mentioned that they had seen some rat poop in the attic, so I figured that the rat must have died and was now crawled into some cranny and was now rotting away to the dismay of my nose.

So I crawled up there and started sniffing around, trying to isolate the source of the stench. I was having some problems finding it, so I asked my friend Scotty to climb up and help.

As soon as he stuck his head up and turned his head, he nearly fell down the ladder after catching a particularly nasty sniff. I ripped up a board and found it, put it in 3 plastic bags and threw it away.

I hope no more rats decide to die in the attic!

Number of the Day: 9

2005-11-13T19:58:00.000-08:00

Went to one of my favorite eateries on Friday with Wen and our friend Scotty, Chipotle.

Last time we went there, we tried to figure out how many bites it would take to finish one. So we had a little contest to figure out what that number is. In case you haven't figured it out yet, that number is 9.

Chloe in 3D

2005-11-06T10:01:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Wen and I went to get 4D ultrasound (3d movies) pictures taken of Chloe, she is so cute!

Wen has more pics up on her blog. Less than 3 months to go before Chloe is born!

California Unclaimed Property

2005-10-28T01:04:00.000-07:00

Found out that California is holding $4.8 billion dollars in property for California residents that it's not able to get a hold of.

I found a check for Wendy's brother for nearly $200 that he didn't know was missing.

I wasn't missing anything, but you might be!

CA UCP Inquiry System

Funny Stuff

2005-10-14T19:07:00.000-07:00

Got some funny movies for you kids to watch today, enjoy!

JibJab released their latest flic today, called Big Box Mart.

Wen pointed me to this movie on Badmash.

Fun for all ages!

Sucky Mexican Food

2005-10-10T15:58:00.000-07:00

Twice in the past 2 months now I've eaten what I've considered to be bad mexican food here in San Diego.

Most would agree that San Diego is probably one of the best if not the best place in America to get good Mexican food, but to eat at 2 different bad ones in the past 2 months is not a good sign!

The first one about 2 months ago was some Mexican food place at Seaport Village, the second one was last night at a place called El Cotixan or something which I have now deemed "El Crap in your Pants".

Both places the food was fairly bland (though the place at Seaport Village was worse). Usually you expect the cheese on top of the beans and rice to melt, but at both I faced with luke-warm at best beans and rice, no melting of cheese going on here.

Yuck!

Those kinds of experiences make me want to stick to places I know are good, but where's the adventure in eating at the same place all the time?

Sunset by Jody Swope

2005-09-23T08:31:00.000-07:00

You can see the full size image of this drawing by Jody Swope (Wendy's cousin) in our gallery.

Last Weekend

2005-09-22T00:21:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, Wen and I flew up to the Bay Area for my 10 year high school reunion. It was a pretty good turnout and I mingled with a lot of people I used to hang out with back then.

You would think that people would change a lot over 10 years, but it seemed like people were mostly the same. Most seemed a bit more mature, some didn't seem to have changed at all. A number of people (mostly guys) gained a good deal of weight and were now quite tubby. A few people (mostly girls) lost a good deal of weight. I found it harder to recognize the people who lost weight compared to the ones that gained it. Weird!

Wendy's belly keeps on getting bigger. She is happy that she can feel Chloe kicking her now. I wonder when I will be able to feel it?

Due to popular request...

2005-09-16T15:28:00.000-07:00

Someone commented that I should update my blog again, so here goes...

Last week has been busy. Spent last weekend with Wen shopping for various baby stuff. Went to Sears, Babys R' Us, JC Penny, Target and who knows what else. I've had babies dancing in my head all week! Good thing all the baby stuff is so cute. We're using all the shopping to help decide what to put in Chloe's gift registry (hint-hint) and I think that we've got just about everything for the first 6 months figured out.

Wednesday I flew to Las Vegas for the G2E (Global Gaming Expo) and got drove back last night. Spent the day walking around viewing vendors' wares. It's pretty amazing how many girls are hired as models for the show, just about every decent sized booth had at least one scantily clothed model, many had 5 or more! Plenty of booths with free drinks and beer as well. I spent most of my time researching video content distribution systems and looking for something cost effective that would let us distribute dvd-quality video over an IP network. I found a couple of potential solutions, but they may be cost prohibitive.

Wednesday night Paltronics rented out the GhostBar at The Palm. Free food, drinks and dancers = fun! Thanks Paltronics!

June Lorraine Browning Brown Bowler-Piehl

2005-09-07T11:43:00.000-07:00

Wendy's grandmother June passed away quietly this morning at 5am. Rest in Peace. I'm glad I got to visit you recently.

This picture was taken in late December of 2002.

It's a...

2005-09-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

girl!

See more pics in our gallery: Sept 2 ultrasound pictures.

I'm sure Wendy will be posting about it as soon as the power comes back on, it's been off since midnight last night!

Happenings

2005-09-01T20:25:00.000-07:00

Whew, it's been busy around here.

Last weekend Wen and I flew up to Eugene, Oregon to visit her family in Roseburg. Unfortunately, Wen's grandmother June has been getting very sick and weak and is mostly bed ridden now. We are lucky that she is staying in a good nursing home with very nice caretakers and has loving family living a short drive away who visit daily.

It was extremely difficult difficult to see her, she has gotten very skinny since the last time I saw her a few years ago. Her dementia has gotten worse. At this point it seems that all we can do is to make her as comfortable as possible.

I've wondered what it must feel like to have one's mind and body degrade to that point. I'm not sure that I would have the will to live knowing the burden I would be placing on family members and it being difficult to appreciate and hardly acknowledge the world around me.

It is amazing what the body and mind will go through and continue functioning.

A new life grows stronger every day in Wendy's Belly. First thing tomorrow morning we go to the doctor where we hope to find out the sex of the baby!

Will it be a boy? Will it be a girl? I've been asked this question a million times in the past couple months and my answer has always been the same. It does not matter to me, all I hope for is that the baby is healthy! Although secretly I may be wishing for a boy. Or am I wishing for a girl?

It's so exciting to think of the small little human growing inside of Wen's womb, which is now about the size of a large sweet potato. What will it look like? What will it grow up and achieve?

Time fo a New Title

2005-08-24T01:43:00.000-07:00

So here I am wasting valuable sleep away browsing random blogs on blogger. Seems that about 40% of them are spam blogs (which I have been flagging as objectionable) as I come across them), 20% are real blogs with a real person behind them writing away, and the other 40% have a title with Random in them.

Since everyone and their mother has a blog named Random this or My Random that, I've decided it's time for a change.

So for now, I've temporarily changed it to the completely original "Dave's Blog". While the new title probably won't be as original as I think it will be, it will hopefully fool myself into thinking I am clever for a few weeks at least.

Google Talk

2005-08-23T23:41:00.000-07:00

So now we've got another instant messaging account to manage. That makes it 5 now for me. MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Skype and now Google Talk. Luckily I use GAIM to manage all of my accounts except for Skype so I only have to run one application to log into most of those services.

Most messenging services are similar now in their functionality. Skype has the benefit of also providing PC to Phone and Phone to PC calls for a very reasonable price, although I have often found the quality of those calls to be somewhat lacking. PC to PC calls always seem to be very good, as long as they don't get bounced around too many peers.

Skype has the benefit of encrypting all instant messages as well as voice calls. None of the other messengers support that. Although in Google's FAQ they do mention that they plan on adding encryption before before making a production release.

Google has the advantage of being built over open protocols having built their service using the Jabber protcol.

It'll be interesting to see what Google's real plans are for Talk. They have to integrate it into their advertising program somehow, will you start seeing Google ads in your Google Talk program with targeted ads regarding whatever you are messenging about? I imagine that as long as they keep it built on Jabber, they will have to add some convincing features into their client to keep people using that instead of some other Jabber compatible client if the ads get too intrusive.

This Weekend

2005-08-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

This weekend, Wendy and I drove up to the Bay Area to visit our newly engaged friends Raheleh and Pedram who were throwing an engagement party. It was held at Rah's parent's house and we had a great time! The place was packed with lots of family, friends and food, and everyone was celebrating the couple.

The party was pretty extravagant, Wendy and I thought it could easily have substituted for the actual wedding ceremony! There was a family exchanging of gifts, cake cutting, lots of flowers and (soon-to-be) bride and groom cake feeding! I can only imagine what the actual wedding will be like, I can't wait!

My dad recently got a new car, a Toyota Prius to replace his aging Camry. Actually, his Camry is going to go to my sister Denise and her car, which is about to fall apart, is going to the scrapyard.

I put about 100 miles on the Prius over the weekend driving to and from Rah's parent's along with a visit to San Francisco to help my good friend Tristan get moved in for his first year at USF Law. Overall, the car is nice to drive and certainly gets you from point A to B while getting very good gas mileage.

Coming out of my sporty WRX there were a number of things I wasn't quite satisfied with. The first thing I noticed was how high and hard the seats feel. I felt like I was sitting on an actual chair while driving. I would have preferred the seat to be at least a few inches shorter and the seats to have at least a little bit of side bolstering. It was way too easy to slide out of the seat going even a little fast around corners.

The next thing on the list was the very distracting and obstructive view out the rear view mirror. The rear hatch has a support going right across the middle third of the viewable area. You can still see OK out the back once you get used to it, but it is distracting.

Finally, the steering wheel feels a bit rubbery. I guess am spoiled by the leather wrapped MOMO wheel that is in my WRX.

I was suprised to find that the Prius seems to have plenty of pep when you need it, although I never floored it (my dad warned me multiple times to take it easy as it's still breaking in) the times I got into the gas pedal a bit the engine kicked in and the CVT let the engine rev up and make a decent amount of power. Going up and down the hills of San Francisco was never a problem.

My favorite part of the car is watching either the Energy Monitor or Energy Consumption screens on the center touch screen display. With one of these two screens running you can see in real time what mileage you are currently getting, where the car is getting power from (engine, battery) or if the car is using regenerative braking, as well as the mileage you've been getting for the past 30 minutes in 5 minute intervals. With these screens on, you quickly become obsessed with trying to get the highest mileage you can. It doesn't take long to figure out that speeds above 70mph will start hurting your mileage significantly as well as being too heavy with the right foot. During my driving, my mileage seemed to hover right around 50 miles per gallon.

All in all, the Prius is a capable and comfortable car and would work very well wherever you need to get from point A to B as efficiently as possible. It's no suprise to me that Toyota is having trouble keeping these cars on the lots! Now if they could build one that is a bit sportier they might convince me to get one, too.

google.com redirecting to google.co.nz

2005-08-03T10:21:00.000-07:00

We've had the weirdest thing happen to us at work the past couple days. Going to www.google.com redirects us to www.google.com.nz. Even when just using a telnet client to manually make the request it happens, so I'm sure it's not just cookies. And clicking on Go to Google.com still leaves me with a page that says Go to Google New Zealand. Weird!

Here's the output from the telnet session if anyone is interested (some lines are broken up so that they fit in the blogger template:

# telnet www.google.com 80
Trying 66.102.7.99...
Connected to www.google.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.0 302 Found
Location: http://www.google.co.nz/cxfer?c=PREF%3D:TM%3D1123089653: S%3D782JnXlZiZszEbUZ&prev=/
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=155668e6e3831c79:CR=1:TM=1123089653:LM=1123089653:S=xcmaIuHxEGXCUaQX; expires=Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com
Content-Type: text/html
Server: GWS/2.1
Content-Length: 217
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2005 17:20:53 GMT
Connection: Keep-Alive

<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>302 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>302 Moved</H1>
The document has moved
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My best guess is that google does some sort of IP address lookup to guess what country you are in and has got our IP address range wrong!

Maybe the Gangsta Programma can help explain, he works at Google.

Random Bulk Emails

2005-08-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

I've been getting some weird bulk email in my gmail account lately. One is from an organization called SPAMIS or Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam. A quick google search turned up this randomlog blog entry. Apparently they've had their domains suspended so they're nothing to worry about.

Another strange email going around is the Gouranga email. Another google search says that the motivation behind this bulk email is someone who is wishing happiness to everyone they can reach. I feel better already! Gouranga!

Visit to Callaway Golf Performance Center

2005-07-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

A bit over a month ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited to play in a golf tournament being sponsored by PDS Gaming in Las Vegas. Their VP is a chairman of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Las Vegas, so were offering raffle tickets and a putting contest where all proceeds would go to the charity. I bought $80 worth of raffle tickets and putts and at the end of the day was lucky enough to win a Callaway Big Bertha 454 driver along with a matching Big Bertha 3 and 5 woods.

All of my current clubs have have either stiff flex or firm flex shafts and the clubs I won were R flex, so I thought it'd be a good idea to get fitted and find out if the clubs I won would work best for me, and if not, get them reshafted or replaced so that they would.

Callaway's Golf Performance Center is right down the street from work, so I scheduled an appointment which was Tuesday. There is an impressive amount of technology in the room with an an array of cameras and computeres used to monitor swing speed, swing path, ball speed, launch angle, etc along with racks of clubs along the walls. Everything you need to know to find the perfect club. You hit balls into a net behind which an image of a fairway is projected so you can watch your ball flight after a swing.

After hitting about a dozen balls with a 9 irons into the net to warm up, I started with a driver identical to the one I won, a R-flex 11* Big Bertha 454. My swing speed ranged from 93-100mph getting higher as I hit more balls and I was getting around a 12.5* launch angle along with 2500rpm of backspin. That was right in the range that they like to see, they look for a launch angle between 12-14* and 2000-3000rpm backspin. I have a slight upward angle of attack to the ball and usually come inside out a few degrees but hang onto the club instead of releasing it which leads to the fade I play with which turns into a slice on bad swings.

Scott, the Callaway fitter helping me, explained that they normally put an R flex shaft into driver swing speeds of 85-95mph, firm flex from 95-105mph and stiff for 105mph+. That would put me at the upper end of a R flex, but since I've got a smooth swing he recommended to keep me in the R flex shaft which should also help release the clubhead and give me better clubhead feel.

He also gave me a few pointers in my swing where he saw I could improve, moving ball position up closer to my left heel, getting a straighter line from my left shoulder down to the ball at address and making sure I don't sway over my right leg during my backswing. It's like getting a swing lesson at the same time! He also suggested that using a softer shaft in my irons that matched the woods would be a good idea.

I haven't yet had the chance to take these clubs to the course or the driving range, so we'll see how they work in real life soon (hopefully tomorrow morning before work!)

I'm going to be a father!

2005-07-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't been watching my wife's blog Wendy's BELLY, I'm going to be a father! Wendy went in for her 13 week checkup yesterday and they ran some sonar over her belly to find the little monkey's heartbeat. It's a healthy 150bpm and should be the size of a jumbo shrimp.

Wendy's belly has been steadily growing the past 2 months and she's finally starting to show a decent amount. We looked at some cute maternity clothes last night and found some that she might like at Old Navy which doesn't cost a fortune. She's going to be a hot mama!

First Post on Blogger!

2005-06-08T18:28:00.000-07:00

Here is my first post on Blogger! I'll be moving all my old posts from my old blog here when I get the time.

To tide you over, here's a pic from my recent vacation in Kauai:

New Plugs, Clean MAF and Still Low IAM

2005-02-26T11:55:00.000-08:00

As mentioned earlier, my ECU doesn't seem to want to advance the IAM above 11-12 when running on the stock map, indicating that it's encountering detonation and reducing timing advance. Well, I've tried new spark plugs (NGK IX Iridiums, stock heat range) and cleaned the MAF with electrical contact cleaner, but the IAM remains the same.

So either it's normal for cars with the fuel I'm running here in southern California, or there's something else in my engine causing excessive detonation, possibly a manufacturing defect leading to a hot-spot, excessive oil blowby or ??? I need to find out what a normal IAM is for stock WRXs running on California fuel before going any further...

TaxCut Sucks

2005-02-26T11:48:00.000-08:00

I ordered TaxCut software back in October as they are a bit cheaper than the main competition (TurboTax) and were also throwing in free state with the purchase of federal as well. The price is for the downloaded version, and I immediately downloaded the federal version.

However, the state version (California) was not yet ready and was informed that I'd receive an email when it was ready for download.

1 month later (November) I received the email and set it aside knowing that I didn't have any of my tax documents ready so didn't need the software yet.

Last week (a bit over 2 months since I received notification that state was available for download) I go to download the State software and find that I can't. Apparently your download is only good for 60 days from the date of purchase, at which point you need to pay another $4.99 to "backup" your download for an additional 2 years.

At this point I'm furious as I've now paid for software which I've never received! I also find out that I need to turn in my rebate form within 30 days of purchase so I've lost out on that as well.

I guess that's what I get for not reading the fine print, but I contact their customer support anyway and tell them the situation. They do not budge after chatting with their customer service for 30 minutes.

Like it's going to actually cost them anything to let me download something I never downloaded in the first place! It probably cost them more than $4.99 to pay the customer service rep to chat with me for that long. I could understand TaxCut's position if I had actually received the software and then lost it but I feel like I've paid extra to get something I never received.

I imagine that a lot of customers have been caught by these loopholes and that is how they are making a significant amount of extra revenue. I feel that it is shady practice, so I am recommending to everyone to avoid TaxCut software.

Their main competitor TurboTax while costing a few bucks more up-front at least appears to offer an immediate rebate on the state product with the purchase of federal saving you from the hassle of filling out any rebate forms. In the future I'll be using TurboTax and recommending that product to all friends and colleages.

Subaru ECU Learning

2004-11-18T12:44:00.000-08:00

I've researching how the Subaru ECU in my WRX reacts to operating conditions to help me interpret the logs I've been getting from my Delta Dash. I found this thread "knock sensor activity in Deltadash?" at NASIOC which has some good information in it posted by Shiv from Vishnu Performance. I'll quote what I found important here:

The code at our disposal allows us to change the rate of retard, rate of advance, operational load range, operational rpm range, learning authority range, etc...

(The ECU) will pull back timing and store the knock correction levels in memory. If it does this in enough places in the table, the advance multiplier will drop and stay dropped until its sees consistent maxed-out positive knock correction.

The knock control system is active from ~2000rpm to ~6000RPM, give or take a few 100rpm based upon application/mapping. It's also active above moderate load (under boost). It is very unusual to hear audible ping within those conditions with deltadash consistently showing no drop-outs in knock correction.

BTW, if you try filling up a stock car with 87 octane, it will ping instantly, pull back timing, send the ignition advance multiplier well below 4 which will make the car run on its rich fuel map. For the most part, it will run ping-free. But every now and then, it will try to advance back to normal. And in doing so, it may ping audibly.

FWIW, I never look at the knock signal display. I only concentrate on knock correction as it's never let me down. Not only does it tell me when the car is starting to detonate, its behavior also gives insight to how severe or minor it is.

Recently I switched from the Cobb Stage 1 map back to the stock map. After a reset and a drive to work, the IAM advanced itself to 16. However, after driving a week, it's now down to 12 indicating that the ECU has detected enough knock that it decided to lower the maximum amount of timing it is willing to run. The trick now is to try and figure out why my engine is encountering detonation. Is it the poor quality gas we get here in CA? Is it something else in my engine (spark plugs, fuel filter, air filter, excessive blowby, or ???)? Until I figure this out, running a more aggressive map such as the Cobb Stage 1 will only lead to more frequent detonation and the increased possibility of engine damage.

Quote of the Day

2004-11-13T12:08:00.000-08:00

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official. The president is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else."

--Theodore Roosevelt

WRX Delta Dash Logging

2004-11-05T23:49:00.000-08:00

I recently picked up an EcuTek Delta Dash so that I could start diagnosing the audible ping I have been getting under full boost with my Cobb AccessPort Stage 1. I've been uploading all the plots and logs along with comments about each one. I have also started a thread about the logs/plots at both NASIOC and Cobb's WRX Forum.

So far, all I have been able to determine is that my engine is not happy running the CA Stage 1 maps. Audible ping and an IAM of 8-9 == Unhappy ECU. EcuTek has a lot of information about how the Subaru ECU adjusts for operating conditions, if you're curious you'll find it very interesting.

2004-09-16T23:15:00.000-07:00

Hmm, I'm only half asian, but I bet that this book could have helped me out!

Wendy and I am driving up to the Bay Area in my company's big F-150 truck. I get to drop the truck off in San Franciso for the managing director, and a little vacation on the side. It will be good to see the parents and siblings again, I haven't seen them in a few months.

Quick Update

2004-09-14T23:48:00.000-07:00

Haven't written much in a while, but not too much new stuff going on.

My buddy Tristan left for China a month ago to teach English. I even convinced him to start a blog and write about it. I hope he continues to write in it! He also has his own photo gallery. Not sure how much bandwidth he's got over there, though, so we'll see how much he is able to upload.

Going up to the Bay Area this weekend to visit family and friends. Will be nice to take a long weekend off from work, but there is soo many different things going on right now...

New Shower Door

2004-06-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

Had a productive weekend, and installed a new shower door in the bathroom. It looks so much better!

This is what it looked like before:

There is a few more pics of higher quality if you click on the images.

Roller Weblogger

2004-06-04T12:24:00.000-07:00

After setting up Roller for Megan to use, I did find that one aspect of managing the look/feel of your blog is a bit confusing. Not to mention that Megan got an ugly stack strace after trying to post her first blog entry.


Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
        at org.roller.presentation.weblog.formbeans.WeblogEntryFormEx.setPubTimeFormatted(WeblogEntryFormEx.java:95)

Anyway, it seems that I am not the first to write about these issues and the authors are working on fixing them. I should sign up to the development mailing list and look for ways to help, but I'm already subscribed to a gazillion other mailing lists...

StonGard

2004-06-03T23:59:00.000-07:00

I ordered a StonGard (pronounced Stone Guard) light kit for my WRX a few weeks back from RockBlocker. It's pretty amazing that after a year and a half and 31k miles of driving the car, how many small rock chips are in the fog and head lights as well as the front bumper. The StonGard is thick, flexible 3M plastic material which you apply over the area you are protecting. I figure if it keeps my head and fog lights from getting chipped they will pay for themself. I installed one fog light this morning. Some people recommend using a liquid solution when installing, but I found that it just made it tough to get the material to stick. I had to get the heatgun out to help evaporate the liquid which sped up the process. I will try the other fog light without any liquid as the guys at RockBlocker recommend. Now I have to decide whether or not to get some paint protection as well, my bumper is getting pretty dinged up and I wouldn't want it to get too much worse.

Hi Megan!

2004-06-03T23:55:00.000-07:00

Megan came down and visited Wendy and me last weekend while down here for her sister's bachelorette/bachelor party. She mentioned that she was interested in setting up a Blog of her own, so now she's got one!

PS - She turns 27 tomorrow!

Seasonic Super Tornado

2004-05-12T00:30:00.000-07:00

I picked up a Seasonic Super Tornado PSU after reading this review over at Silent PC Review. Seasonic claims that is is one of the most efficient PSUs on the market which Silent PC Review confirmed. It is also very quiet.

To confirm the efficiency claims, I used my handy Kill-A-Watt meter to measure the current draw of my main desktop PC PC at idle and full load using mprime. My old PSU was an Antec True 430 which sells for $65 over at NewEgg. The Kill-A-Watt reported a power factor of 0.65 at idle and load, and 107W at idle and 124W under load. After swapping out the True 430 for the Super Tornado 300, the power factor measured 0.99 and now only pulled 91W at idle and 107W under load for a power draw reduction of 15%. Having a near perfect power factor will also reduce the current draw through the house wires as well, in this case the current draw will be cut in half. As Silent PC Review also noted, I found the Super Tornado to be very quiet, I can't hear it over the CPU fan or hard drives in my machine.

I've now ordered two more Super Tornado 300s from Computer Gate at $65/ea to replace the PSUs in my Linux firewall/fileserver PC and my MythTV PC. Computer Gate has free shipping on those PSUs right now. I'll take before and after measurements of both when they get here.

I highly recommend this PSU as it's price is comparable to all other high quality PSUs on the market and has the advantage of being the most efficient and also being extremely quiet.

Selling Some Stuff on eBay

2004-05-09T11:26:00.000-07:00

Check it out:

PETCO Park

2004-04-26T23:20:00.000-07:00

I visited PETCO Park for my first time since it's grand opening a few weeks ago. It's a great facility located in the heart of San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter and right across the street from the San Diego Convention Center.

What made the trip even better, was that the Padre's beat the Expos 3-2 in the bottom of the 9th!

If you're in the area and have the chance to watch a game, I highly recommend going. If you can, get seats on the bottom floor of left field, they have a great view of the entire field. While you're there, treat yourself to one of the many restaurants within walking distance a few blocks away!

BackupPC

2004-04-24T23:11:00.000-07:00

I found some great open source backup software the other day called BackupPC. I encourage you to check it out if you want an easy way to setup automatic incremental backups, it's really a great piece of software.

MSIE Broken Again

2004-04-13T01:21:00.000-07:00

Well, Microsoft has managed to break MSIE again.

It turns out that KB832894 breaks the behavior of KeepAlive when under SSL. If you let your KeepAlive session then attempt to submit a form, the browser will not actually post any request parameters to your action.

One fix is to disable KeepAlive for MSIE clients. Unfortunately, this makes websites with multiple resources on their site quite sluggish because of the additional overhead of establishing a new connection for each resource. There was a similar issue ages ago (back in the MSIE 5.0 era) where a very similar bug would surface if KeepAlive was on.

A better fix is to install Mozilla or Firefox and use that as your browser instead.

Quotes of the Day

2004-03-19T01:05:00.000-08:00

"Why would I want to drive a car that looks like a basket?" - Me commenting about the PT Cruiser convertible

"My head hurts, unless I can get some catered service around here, I'm going to call the president!" - Troy from "The Apprentice"

Synthetic Oil Life Study

2004-03-13T11:25:00.000-08:00

If you drive a car, you may be interested in this http://neptune.spacebears.com/cars/stories/oil-life.html. These guys are running synthetic oil (first they tried Mobil 1, now they are running Amsoil) and taking samples of the oil every 1000 miles and seeing how it holds up. There are a number of different goals of this study.

To see how long you can safely run a synthetic oil.
How do Mobil 1 and Amsoil compare.

I've been running oil analysis reports for my Subaru WRX as well which has allowed me to comfortably run oil change intervals of 7500 miles.

The forums at BobIsTheOilGuy are a great resource for those of you interested in automotive lubrication.

Free Speech and eVoting

2004-03-12T12:24:00.000-08:00

'Why I Like Howard Stern' - Best summary of why people enjoy listening to Howard Stern I've come across. If things continue as they have been, it won't be long until the majority of good content will only be available through un-restricted formats such as satellite radio and the internet as media giants get bigger. Could these large media companies be shooting themselves in the foot by pulling the knee jerk reaction instead of thinking of the future?

While a lot of people are real gung-ho about eVoting, I'm not so sure it's ready yet. Being a software developer myself, I know how difficult it is to design and build a fool-proof, reliable and redundant system. Unfortunately, the current solution deployed does not meet those standards. See
'Campaign launched to ban digital ballots' and related links from google.

Links of the Day

2004-03-09T08:59:00.000-08:00

Here's Dan Gillmor's take on the recent controversy surrounding Clear Channel's decision to take Howard Stern off their channels.

Is it bad or good for you? This BBC article explains the benefits of strong coffee.

Of particular interest to me (and my wife, Wendy) is that inhaled steroids for allergy relief are safe for pregnant women and their unborn baby. Given that Wendy is allergic to just about everything under the sky and inhaled steroids provide the most effective relief, this is good news for when we decide to have kids!