Archive for September 2010
Lost it
I can no longer taste “hot”, or at least the version of hot local restaurants sell. I’ve been trying “hot” at several eateries; one local Chinese place that I’ve had very hot food from before, and another that has a wide variety of hot foods that was new to me. I kept complaining about the lack of spice at the new Chinese place, much to the amusement of my dinner partner and the wait staff; today we went to a Thai place that was newish to me. I ordered a dish as “hot as you can make it”; I detected no heat in eating it. I clipped off the smallest bit of beef; my co-diner tried it and began gagging and sweating.
Much later in the meal, my lips were tingling and my nose began to run, but at no time did I get mouth burn or feel flush.
To further confuse the matter, I have a bottle of Dave’s Insanity next to my monitor; a couple drops heat a bowl of Ramen right up. WTF, over? It’s an interesting party trick, I suppose, but annoying. I’ll blame my changing palette or old age or that guy walking down the street or something. It’s something I’ve noticed over the last year, but only really focused on trying to find “hot” over the last few months.
This is not me.
And I’m tired of it showing up in Google Alerts. Although, killing Ewoks does appeal…
Crazy
This is the crime. This is the guy’s twitter stream. Couldn’t see that one coming, eh? Nobody thought, post-Columbine, to warn anyone?
Photo Mule adoption stats
Photo Mule has been out a few weeks, so I thought I would update the stats. The android dashboard says half of our paid users are active, while 32% of the free users are active. However, the number of paid installs doesn’t match the number that Google Checkout says have paid; it’s off by one.
The flickr stats are in line, now, though; the number of active installs and the number of authenticated users match. However, they show only about 40% of the downloaders ever auth. If 60% of our users are failing to auth, what on Earth are we doing wrong?
The next version will have an instrumented, and much more verbose, auth path to try to capture what we’re doing wrong. I’d chalk it up to people just downloading without realizing they need a flickr account if we didn’t say flickr everywhere.
GEMTECH flag
Some time ago, I won a flag in a Gemtech photography contest; I put some shots of the flag flying at Joe’s Boomershoot. One of those pictures is up on the Gemtech site. It’s like I won twice!
Soon to no longer be my view
I took a time lapse today from what will shortly no longer be my GSA issued cubicle.
I shot at 2 seconds per frame, 30 frames per second; the 7.5 minute movie covers 7.5 hours of Elliot Bay.
See if you can spot: the news choppers, the seaplanes, the jet that dragged ass on his approach to BFI, the crane that almost gets away, and some WSDOT guy who drives the ferry like it’s bumper cars.
Also, for the sharp of eye, you can see the little USCG skiffs that prowl the dangerous waters of Elliot Bay, looking for terrorists.
The Duwamish River flows in from the left, and the wind was out of the south (left) all day. It’s really cool to watch the wake of the foot ferry bend and focus as it fights the wind, the tide, and the current of the mighty Duwamish.
Watch it full screen in HD, please. I didn’t let a 1.5 gig file trickle up all night for nothing.
About that tweet
I had a killer headache Monday after work; went home and slept from about 1900 to about 1200 the next day. Called the doctor and went in: bp 160/110; funny, I went in because my gout is driving me further insane.
Regardless, put on Indomethicin and some bp meds. Scheduled for lab work and I’ll see him in a month.
Good news: I lost about 10% of my body mass since March, 2009. I suspect not having a vehicle, which severely crimped my ability to have late-night runs to Jack in the Box, has a lot to do with that.
openvpn certificate not yet valid
If you get this error after generating self-signed certs, the issue is that they are signed in UTC but the validity is checked in localtime. Setting the clock on my router to UTC fixed this issue; you’ll see other people waited until the GMT offset had passed (“it just started working”).
Hopefully this note saves other people some trouble.
