Monthly Archives: September 2007

Scratch on the Eye

Just got back from the ER. Bay scratched his eye at J-school this morning. Apparently he was pulling a folder out of his backpack, and it came out kind of fast and the corner hit his eye. The doctor put in some yellow dye, then looked through a big magnifying glass that had some black lights on it, and showed me the scratch. It just looked like a tiny dot. It’s not serious, but we have to put some eyedrops in 4 times a day for a few days. Bay was a little disappointed that he doesn’t have to wear an eyepatch.

Sore Legs

After I run, my legs are usually sore for the rest of the day, and maybe the next day as well. But it’s a good type of soreness. Unlike a sore neck or back, it’s not a pain. 🙂 Maybe it’s tied to a sense of accomplishment. Whatever it is, to me it’s just another benefit of running. Although the frequency of my runs goes through its ups and downs, the sore muscles are always something that will follow.

RC Yacht

About 12 years ago, my brother and I got into RC sailboats. We had been interested in RC cars for a while, both owning 2WD buggies, and so when my brother saw sailboats cruising around Mason Park in Irvine, he decided to get one, and I decided to get one as well. We both bought 1-meter boats from Victor Model Products, me going with the “Spirit of ’92” (pictured above) and my bro going with the “America3“. The boats came unassembled, which was fine because I always enjoyed building models when I was a kid, and this was just a big (much bigger!) model. It took some time, but wasn’t difficult, and the ship was beautiful. I only got to put her in the water a couple times, but it was tons of fun sailing her around!

Fast forward to today, and I have caught the RC sailboat fever again. My brother still has his sailboat, but mine is probably long gone (I left it at with a friend before I moved to Japan, and I am not exactly sure what happened to it). I was doing some research on local clubs here in Austin, and there is a fairly active one that sails twice a month at ponds nearby. The boat that they mainly use is the Victoria by Thunder Tiger. It’s a smaller boat than the one I had before, but still sails well. The smaller size also means that it is easier to transport, and takes up less room in the house (The mast can also be quickly disassembled). I think the sailboat looks pretty cool, but maybe the wife wouldn’t think so.

At any rate, I am thinking of getting one again. The Victoria is actually cheaper than the 1-meter boat I had, and assembly is similar. I am going to check out the local club soon and see the sailboats and decide if I want to really get back into it. Seems like fun, and the cool thing about this hobby is that it isn’t an ongoing investment: once you buy the kit and radio control gear, your only further expense would be batteries.

AmazonMP3

Was listening to MacBreak Weekly Ep. 59 this morning, and they were talking about the Amazon.com MP3 store, so I decided to check it out. It’s pretty awesome. So simple to use, and songs are mostly 89 or 99 cents to download. They are DRM-free, and are encoded at 256kbps. It’s so nice to be able to just download an mp3, no strings attached, and then transfer it to any music player or music library. This is a really great alternative to the iTunes Store, especially because the iTunes Store on a Windows machine is slow as a dog if you have a large library.

Lack of Energy

Recently, I’ve had a drop in my energy level. Maybe it’s because I quit coffee a couple weeks ago? At any rate, I haven’t run in a couple weeks! But today I feel pretty good, but although I woke up at 5am (normal run time), I just lay in bed, since it was sooo comfortable. Oh well. Maybe tomorrow. :0

Ubuntu on My Laptop

My Dell laptop is now happily cruising along with a new, fresh install of Ubuntu 7.04. It’s so much better than XP on that machine. Why did I switch to that OS? Read on, if you dare.

The story begins with my ailing Dell 5100. The laptop has had some issues with its RAM for the past couple months. There is 512MB of it in there, which was adequate for that machine (Pentium 4), but for some reason, it had been flaking out and only seeing 256MB. I used to be able to shut it down, swap memory sticks, and then the bios would see 512 again, but that workaround stopped working after a while. I ran memory tests on each chip, and they both checked out fine. BIOS is current and I’m still not sure what the problem is. But the bottom line was that 256MB of RAM was just not enough to run XP Pro. It would take about 15 minutes for the machine to fully boot up, which was just too long. And once I was “in”, each program I launched would just make the HDD churn like crazy. The 5100 is the machine I use to watch Japanese dorama on in the bedroom, but because of the lack of memory, it was just too much of a hassle to start up and use.

What about the iBook? Well, the Mac is great for web browsing and email/IM, but that machine is not powerful enough to play the dorama I watch, which is usually encoded using Divx or Xvid in a resultion of at least 704×396. In fact, most Flash video like the vids on YouTube are too choppy to view. It’s a nice little laptop, but it’s old, old I tell you! (Mariko, I want a new Macbook!)

The solution to my problem (no, not a new Macbook) was to install Ubuntu on the machine. Ubuntu is a completely free flavor of Linux, and has a nice GUI and tons of apps. Just looking on their webpage made it look like the perfect solution. Plus, I had just read an excellent article by Ashton Mills about using Ubuntu instead of Windows for normal tasks. It pretty much convinced me to take the plunge. (continue reading by clicking the “read more” link below)