I am very passionate about my personal endeavors. I might suggest obsessive hobbyist, but I wouldn't want you to think I lock myself in a room for weeks at a time surrounded with bits of plastic, decals, and super glue. As often as not, a short half-life makes violent work of the germ, leaving my closet strewn with the skeletons of hobbies past. Surprisingly, this one appears to have flowered.

We'll discuss espresso at a later date, today it's all about aesthetics (latte art.) Click to enlarge.

A large plop	hmm, squiggles	Tulip?	beginnings of a rosetta
where'd that come from?	right shape, horrible leaves	rosetta!	this one ain't bad either

Tags: barista, cappuccino, latte art
Current Mood: hyper
Current Music: VNV Nation - Genesis

After waiting what seemed like a lifetime for those silly Germans to build and ship my car, I finally picked it up from the dealer a month ago.

After wash and wax:

Click for more

Did I mention this car is really fast?

Current Mood: bouncy

I'm catching a plane to Tel Aviv tomorrow. I'll be spending a bit over a week in Isreal with Jenna and her parents. I am going to try to keep a travel log here, no promises though.

CDW_Article.pdf


More pictures from the shoot:

BMW 135i Coupe
3.0-liter, turbocharged inline 6-cylinder engine
300 horsepower
Rear-wheel drive



( BMW 135i Poll )

Current Mood: excited

with a bit of a swagger (as long as I didn't get injured--then it's more of a limp).

Ice hockey is definitely worth a few cool points.

Current Mood: exhausted

A while back, I started a project to build a 1TB file server that was small, quiet, and fast. It has been up and running for over eight months, but I never got around to putting the final touches (bezel, activity LEDs and power switch) on it until recently.



It has a usable capacity of about 1.2TB and network transfer performance tops out at about 30MB/s but internally it performs much faster.

Credit for the design goes to Mashie and his uDat project.

( Detailed specs and work log with pictures )

Tags: serapeum crypt nas
Current Mood: accomplished

So I've got a draft skate tomorrow evening for a new hockey league. It is an indoor rink so I picked up a set of new (softer) wheels and bearings for the different surface. I attempted to install the new bearings in the new wheels like so:


It would be my luck that the damn bearings and wheel would make an air tight seal and every time I'd push the bearing in one side the one on the other side would pop out. I probably spent a good hour trying everything to get just one wheel assembled. About the only thing I accomplished was leaving a nice bearing shaped imprint in the kitchen floor. Well, in anger I also smashed one of the bearings to smithereens with a hammer. I felt better--but it still wouldn’t go in the wheel.

Now I'm wondering what the hell I'm going to do with 15 bearings.

Current Mood: aggravated

I've become a compulsive speeder. If I'm not going at least 80 I might as well not be moving. Driving nirvana exists somewhere between 85 and 90--and I achieve enlightenment on a daily basis. I wasn't sure at first what worked this change in me, what alchemical process turned my foot to lead. Well, It turns out I have no patience for sitting in traffic, which should have factored into my decision to move to Los Angeles. I have to go as fast as reasonably possible when the opportunity presents itself, thus making up for all the time lost spent unmoving. Commuting forty seven miles to work each way for the last eight months definitely didn't help. Monday I start my new job which is a measly fifteen miles from my apartment. I'm not sure what I'll do with all my newfound free time; something suitably useless brilliant I'm sure.

Tags: commute, work
Current Mood: relaxed
Current Music: Dio - I Speed at Night

So the NHL season is officially canceled, not that this comes as a surprise; we all knew there was no chance of the players and owners working it out. I could not care less; I don't watch sports^1.^^2 I hardly even watch TV. If the cable were suddenly disconnected it would be a while before I noticed. It pains me to confess (well not really) that I look down upon those that watch a few hours of TV every day. In truth, just turning on your television once a day marginalizes you. Elitist, condescending, and supercilious--yup, yup, and yup. And you better believe I'll decry your mindless entertainment while playing the game for multiple hours each day. I usually spew my vitriol from behind the pages of a novel but lately my reading has lost ground to this new beast.

It is February 18th and the first application is due in exactly two weeks. I will begin filling it out in exactly thirteen days. I've decided on the only sensible course after an extended period of career indecision: go back to school. Someone in my family asked me if I even want an MBA. After a moment of reflection punctuated by a healthy 'hmm' my response was, "not really, but I'd rather have it than a JD, less than a PhD^4, and school sure beats trying to figure out a career." It is just another form of procrastination, one that is likely to put me in debt but whatever. My sister piped up with, "I want to go too; we could live together in Berkeley." While I appreciate her automatic assumption that I could get into Berkeley again, she has never seen my transcripts or she'd know how very little I expectation I had of ever applying to graduate school. The lack of stellar marks poses a problem, a problem for the ego. I'm sure nibot knows where I'm coming from. You just can't (or at least would really rather not) attend a graduate school less prestigious than your undergraduate institution. Do you think they'll let me go back and retake a few classes I really hated and never did any work in? Not that it would be very productive; I still wouldn't actually study for them.

The firing of my current hairstylist after a drunken^5 cut right before I had to sit for a family portrait has left my hair in a state of unchecked growth. I despise finding a new stylist nearly as much as I enjoy procrastinating. Which when compounded means my hair will probably never see the shears again.

1) I only mention it because I share their plight. The lovely rain raining down washed out my game.
2) inertiacrept and other's prolific use of the footnote has brought to my attention that sometimes you just can't say everything at once without horribly disrupting the flow of your writing. ^6
4) The double foreign language requirement pretty much means I'll never earn a PhD in English unless I get the requirement waived due to dyslexia.
5) This is not hyperbole; he was quite intoxicated and offered me a shot of tequila.
6) It is a bit disturbing when your footnotes get footnotes--I apologize.

It has been raining non-stop for what feels like an eon but has probably only been four days. I'm waiting for Noah to come pick me up in his ark. You see, I live in California and while most Californians tow the line and believe in the existence of water falling from the sky, quite a few are still at least a bit skeptical that such a thing actually occurs. Gruesome wreckages of flesh and metal littering the highways after a bit of rain is a testament to our powers of disbelief. And damn it, these tires are all weather. What is the point of all weather tires if you can't weave in and out of traffic at speeds exceeding 90mph in your Ford Extinction while talking on the phone to your therapist--without signaling!? Mother nature, fed up with all the smog and seeing that wet roads act as no deterrent to the stubborn California driver, has resorted to dropping giant boulders in our path.

Umbrellas. Why is it that many school kids (and even some adults) would rather be soaked to the bone than be seen with an umbrella? I suffered from such a complex and had the lovely pleasure of being drenched by El Niño a number of years back. Sometime during my 4.5 years in Northern California I discovered that an umbrella is a pretty swell invention. Though apparently, I haven't actually mastered their use as evidenced by my failed attempts the other night to make an automatic umbrella open through brute force instead of pushing the little button.

Apparently, the shower after hockey is a lot like exploratory surgery, muck about for a bit and something painful is bound to turn up.

Current Mood: numb
Current Music: Angra - Wuthering Heights

A new dawn breaks over the night shrouded quest for a stimulating date, healthy relationship, or a good lay. These rays of enlightenment reach even the darkest recesses of our consciousness and sweep away the dross.

In the search for our One True Love, let's talk statistics for a moment. There are roughly 290 million people currently living in the US. Being of the straight sexual inclination, we can safely eliminate half the population from consideration. Of those, about 15 million are single and between the ages of 18 and 30. If I met one girl every other minute it would only take me 60 years to meet all the eligible women in the US. (I've gone and made a horrible assumption that my One True Love resides in the US, if I were forced to consider all 6 billion people in the world