Jeff Lawson

Any local Austinites interested in an old basketball backboard hoop with chain net? You'll just need to install some kind of permanent vertical post in your ground someplace, and then you can mount this backboard to it.

Cowhouse came with one installed in the front driveway, but I have no use for it so I took it down.

I'll probably post this on Craigslist in a few days if no one's interested, but I wanted to give the people who know me a chance to claim it first.

So I got a summons to go downtown yesterday and participate in jury duty for my first time. I was actually pretty excited about the opportunity and was hoping that I would be picked to be on the final jury. Unfortunately, I ended up being juror candidate 22 (out of 23 present), and they ended up only needing the first 6. Regardless, I chose to stay and watch the trial since it seemed kind of interesting and my boss already had the expectation that I'd be gone the whole day.

@#&$@#!!

Apparently a lady was riding her bicycle on the Town Lake Hike & Bike trail in February and almost ran into a loose dog on the trail. She shouted some profanity ("expletive deleted") at the dog's owner as she passed, and some nearby bicycle cops happened to hear it and gave her a citation for disorderly conduct by disturbing the peace. The cops testified that at the time she was ticketed, the woman admitted to shouting the profanity and apologized for it.

The jury ended up finding her unanimously not guilty, despite the absolutely horrible job that she did while representing herself and not actually providing any compelling arguments. The testimony of the two bicycle cops was basically insufficient to get the verdict.

(At the time of the ticket, she supposedly claimed to the police office that the profanity was part of a story she was telling to a friend she was bicycling with. But there was no exploration of why a profanity in a retold story would have been more appropriate in a public area, or why she changed her excuse to now being because a loose dog was in the path, nor why shouting a profanity at the dog's owner would have been more justifiable.)

If the jury had found her guilty, they could have fined her between $1 and $500.

My parents both retired a few months ago in December and have recently put their house up for sale, so that they can retire to Arizona. A few of my Austin friends (decibel45, dopplertx, snaxxx) got to see it in person when we went to New Zealand last year.

Part of the reason that my parents don't feel that the real estate market slump in California will have too much of an impact on their sale is the relatively unique nature of their house. It is a Japanese-inspired haiku house, which is a modern-day interpretation of a Japanese country house. It is supported entirely by long wooden poles that extend deep into the ground, and is made almost entirely out of redwood trees. My parents liked the design so much that they hired an architect to build it for them in 1981 on a carefully selected hillside in Pasadena, California. It would be impossible to build a house like it today in California due to recent construction regulations to reduce fire risk, plus the difficulty/expense of obtaining that much old-growth redwood.

Their realtors set up a little website with its own domain [1893kaweah.com] to host a description and some photos of it. My mom sent me some good details about the media coverage and open house interest:

"Our home was featured in the local Pasadena magazine as well as in the LA Times. The first open house had a lot of neighborhood people ... We had a couple serious parties. Our realtors (2 partners) were very surprised at the numbers showing up. The 1st [open house] had 175 coming through; our 2nd has about 100. It must have been a huge traffic jam since we got a phone call 1½ hr into the open house and the realtor sounded overwhelmed at the tremendous # of people going through the house!"

The house keeps itself very cool in the summer because of louvered windows that can open up along the entire bottom floor, and skylights and roof vents that open up on the second floor. All the hot air escapes at top vents and draws in cool air through the lower windows.

You can also see their house on Google Maps StreetView, though it appears that Google has mixed up some of the images if you move too far along the street. The realtor also has a bunch of photos on their website. I also have some of my own photos in my personal gallery. It's a little sad to think that the house I grew up in will soon belong to someone else though.

Finally after enough customer complaints Fry's Electronics now accepts American Express. I noticed the signs at the cashiers had changed when I stopped in last weekend at the Austin Fry's and the cashier confirmed it was true. A press release was put out just this week:
http://www.americanexpress.com/corp/pc/2008/frys.asp

It's my 30th birthday on Tuesday (Jan 15), but I was thinking of having a group dinner on another night instead. How does 7pm at Cheesecake Factory at the Arboretum on Saturday Jan 19 sound? Reply below so we can get a headcount.

On Friday night, I went and had dinner at Uncle Billy's BBQ and then went to see the band She Craves at Emo's Lounge. Then on Saturday we went to the McKinney Falls State Park and we did the 3 mile paved hike around the park. Next time I go I'll definitely want to try the other 3 mile unpaved hike they have. reanimated wrote a little more about it here and here.

On Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, I did a bit of electrical work on my car by installing an integrated XM Radio receiver into my Jeep. This was basically added on a hidden XM Receiver electrical box under the driver's seat with cabling that snakes up under the carpeting and into the back of my Pioneer stereo head unit. Even better is that it seems because the XM receiver I bought was factory refurbished, it is still activated and receiving radio content for free. Apparently the XM activation/deactivation signals are only transmitted occasionally for each Radio ID, so I may continue to get free service for a few weeks.

Sunday evening, snaxxx started moving some of her things into the Cowhouse, beginning mostly with her books. She'll be moving the bulk of her things next weekend.

Unfortunately, it seems that the commotion of going in and out of her car might have attracted some criminals, because in between car loads some vandal snuck into her car and my Jeep and looked for things to steal. The burglar must have been scared off as Snax was coming back her car, because my Jeep passenger door was left open with my car insurance paperwork scattered around. The only thing taken from my Jeep was less than a dollar in spare change in the cupholder (apparently ignoring my obsolete Garmin StreetPilot GPS). They similarly took a few dollars in cash and a digital camera from Snax's car, but seemingly not much else (also apparently ignoring her iPhone and iPod). The Austin Police were dispatched out and they took a crime report from us and managed to lift a few good fingerprints from Snax's car, so maybe something good will happen.

Maybe I'll try to get some infrared video cameras installed outside around the house. I had been playing with an open source Linux-based video surveillance package called ZoneMinder a year or so ago, but never really extended it to any permanently mounted cameras.

Over the Christmas holiday I went back to visit my parents in Pasadena again. We had the usual big group dinner at one of my aunt's houses with all of the other aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Then from Dec 26-28, I went to Las Vegas with a smaller group (Aunt Shirley, Uncle Chuck, and my 4 oldest cousins) to see the Cirque du Soleil: Beatles Love show [wikipedia] and do some gambling. The Cirque du Soleil show was great and incorporated lots of songs by the Beatles with great choreography and a fair bit of acrobatics. It didn't seem to have quite as much of the acrobatics as I think other Cirque du Soleil shows are known for, but it was still quite enjoyable.

While I was there, I also went on my own into the Star Trek: The Experience [wikipedia], saw the museum, the two attractions (Borg and Klingons), and brought back some souvenirs (including a Tribble). The recreation of the ship interiors there were neat to see up close--the ride and experience is kind of similar to the Star Tours at Disneyland.

Although I did a bit of gambling, I didn't really gain or lose very much. I mostly played Video Poker and some of the slot machines. I did much better with video poker than the slots, especially after finding this Wizard of Odds: Video Poker website. A $20 bill lasted me 2 or 3 hours in the quarter Video Poker machines with the optimal strategy.

My dad and mom had just retired, so there was also a big retirement/birthday party for my mom, which was pretty exciting. My parents are also in the process of selling their home in Pasadena, so I was helping with some of the packing and furniture moving to help stage the house for its sale. It's a too bad that they'll have to sell such a neat house at a low point in the housing market though.

So someone forwarded this article to me that lists this person's selections for ugliest campuses. As it turns out, my school (Harvey Mudd College) came in at #14. Pitzer college (just across the street from HMC and part of the Claremont Colleges consortium) is ranked even worse. IIT is also present. The first place was Drexel, which looks like it has an industrial smoke stack in one of its buildings and "prison-like dorms": http://campussqueeze.com/static/20-ugliest-colleges-in-the-USA.html

14. Harvey Mudd College- You’d think that because of it’s (sic) California location, it would actually be pretty. Well you couldn’t be more wrong. Being a Claremont College, that’s surprising. The buildings are old and faded, and the architecture isn’t relative to the California lifestyle. That’s too bad, considering how well some of the other colleges in the area are designed. Harvey Mudd got just slabs of concrete. It’s a pretty good school, too. What a shame.

I also found this other recent news article about my school that mentions that campus pranking now needs students to "opt-in" to being pranked: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/31/national/main3436701.shtml

Following complaints in 2000 from several students at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., about an annual prank where sophomores perform elaborate freshman room rearrangements - such as turning a dorm room into a campsite, complete with sod - administrators decided that rather than sacrifice their prank culture, they would refine it by creating a "no prank list."

"There is an implicit assumption that when you come to Harvey Mudd that you are willing to be party to pranks against you and your room," explains Guy Gerbick, associate dean of students. "We tell students during orientation, 'If you don't want to have certain things or yourself or any of your stuff pranked, let us know, and we'll put you on a list.' "

Over half the student body has registered. According to Mr. Gerbick, most make specific demands, such as not to interrupt sleep or meddle with a prized guitar or stuffed-animal collection. Only about 15 students have asked for no involvement whatsoever.

While visiting Austin over the last week, Ertyu has gotten me started geocaching by cooperatively finding 9 caches in the Austin area with me.

I've even gotten started by hiding my own cache (GC1718T) in the watershed area near me. However, I think I will need to look into more securely chaining it to something before the rain season starts, in order to ensure it does not get washed away.

It seems like every year I end up getting new business cards because something on it has changed (address, title, phone number, logo, company name, etc). So what are you supposed to do with all of the left-over cards that you hadn't given away yet? Build some origami out of them!

Here is just part of a "Level 2" Menger Sponge that I built out of my old cards and those of several ex-employees. Notice that this is actually the equivalent of 8 of the "Level 1" sponges that Ivo built last year.


(Click to embiggen)

Getting this far took a lot more patience than I expected, and I'm not sure I really want to build the 12 more L1-sponges that would be be required to turn this into the full "Level 2" sponge. In any case, it makes a cool piece of artwork.

Some of you may have already seen this already, but here's a short video I made a couple days ago of my company's Austin offices.

I think my music selection worked out well, with several interesting synchronization points and transitions in it. However, if I were to do this again, I would build myself a steadicam mount first. :)

So the company I worked for, United Devices, officially announced that it had merged with Chicago-based company, Univa. Our new company name will be Univa UD. Although they also focus on grid computing solutions, they have built their solutions around the open source Globus Toolkit and the Globus standards. The press reaction around the deal so far has been pretty positive.

The business negotiations had actually been underway for several months, although the final decision to merge was not finalized until a few weeks ago. In fact, most of my business travel over the past few months (San Jose, Germany, Boston, etc) were related to the merger negotiations.

I'm currently in Chicago (really Lisle, Ill) visiting our new team members as a part of a company-wide meeting and some cross-training activities. On Friday, we had an excellent presentation from our combined management team to discuss and plan the product direction. Afterwards, we drove downtown to the Navy Pier area, had dinner, and enjoyed a company boat trip to see the night-time cityscape.

One of the amusing things of the last week's kickoff activities was a celebrity look-alike contest. As it turned out, I won first place (and a small prize) for looking like Mike Shinoda, the singer from the band Linkin Park.

Since ivo and I had to spend the weekend here, I began looking for interesting activities. As it turned out, my Harvey Mudd College alumni association was hosting a tour of Fermilab particle accelerator the same weekend. Coincidentally, decibel45 was also in Chicago on a business trip for his own company, so we all went together to a guided tour by two HMC alumni who currently work for the facility. Since the facility was currently in a maintenance/shutdown period, we had the special opportunity of getting to safely walk into the underground tunnels that house the giant magnets that direct the anti-proton (antimatter) particles.

One surprising thing is how unsecured and open the facility is. No identification was requested, though we were told that during high-alert conditions the guards at the entry gates might actually ask for ID and record names. They encouraged pictures to be taken everywhere--there are no secrets. Additionally, most all doors are unlocked and unrestricted, except where safety of visitors might be a problem. If someone wanted to walk in an open door and unplug some wires or misalign some equipment, it would actually be quite easy. (click for pictures)

Just happened to see this old news article mentioned on Bruce Schneier's blog... Photo ID cards for Indian cattle:

"Thousands of villagers in the state's Murshidabad district bordering Bangladesh are queuing up outside photo studios to have their cows photographed for the identity cards.

...

Valid for two years, each laminated cattle ID card displays the picture of the animal and its owner. It also carries vital information about the animal, such as its colour, height, sex and length of horns."

Nice to see some improvement in equality rights for cows! Though I'm sure they'll also suffer from the typical bad license photo syndrome. I still intend to go to Texas DPS and get my photo retaken one of these days. :)

So last week when I was in San Jose on a business trip I decided to try to return back to Austin as standby on a flight that would depart about 1.5 hours earlier (at 4:40pm instead of 7:00pm). As it turned out, that SJC-AUS American Airlines flight was supposed to have regularly taken off at 9:30am, but had been delayed all day due to late equipment.

In any case I got a nice email crediting me some frequent flier miles for my "inconvenience" of flying on an earlier flight. :)

It's completely realistic for our valued customers to rely on the scheduled departure and arrival of their flights. For that reason, we were disappointed to learn that flight 1810 was delayed on June 20 and we wanted to take the opportunity to apologize to you for the disruption of your travel plans.

I realize that our expression of regret is of small consolation in light of the time you spent waiting in San Jose for your flight to depart. I hope you will accept the addition of 10,000 Customer Service Bonus miles to your AAdvantage® account as a more tangible apology. You should see this mileage adjustment in your account very soon.

It looks like I'll soon have enough miles to be Silver Elite on Continental and Gold Elite on AA this year (my first time for either).

And I'm going to Paris for 6 days in two weeks for JFC's wedding! reanimated is coming too, though neither of us have been to Paris before nor speak any French so I'm expecting we'll be wondering around semi-lost at least part of the time. After a couple of days Sravish will rendezvous with us and we'll head to JFC's wedding together. Bastille day (the day of the wedding) should have some interesting sights and celebrations to see also. Anyone have any recommendations of things to see/avoid in Paris? Wikitravel has some good suggestions and tips already...

In case you haven't heard yet, the grid.org distributed computing projects will be ending this week:

http://www.grid.org/home.htm

With seven years and five projects under its belt, Grid.org has successfully completed its mission: To evangelize the benefits (and demonstrate the viability and security) of large-scale Internet-based grid computing. Therefore, it is with great pride for all the accomplishments of this pioneering resource, and above all with the utmost gratitude to each of our members around the globe, that we announce Grid.org will be retiring on Friday, April 27, 2007.

It's certainly been exciting, but changes in business marketplace caused United Devices to re-consider what was important to focus its corporate resources and personnel on. Regardless, the work that had been completed by the grid.org users has already begun to produce some interesting and useful research results. A few of the identified drug compounds are already beginning to go through overseas laboratory testing for more real-world verification of the interactions.

Here's some press coverage about the shutdown:

• theinquirer.net - Grid.org shut
  
• hardocp.com - Grid.org Mission Complete
  
• the register - Reg readers total 3,238 years against cancer
  
• gridtoday - Grid From the Bottom Up
  

In other news, distributed.net has recently had its 10-year anniversary. If you're looking for a distributed computing project to move some of your computers to, we're always looking for more participants! Mathematical and crypto projects may not necessarily be as flashy as some of the other projects available, but they can still be pretty exciting.

Well, I'm back from my 2-week trip to New Zealand to visit Greg and Amy and celebrate their wedding. I traveled with Decibel, Heidi, Snax, and Doppler on the flights. Nugget and Monica met us there to join us for part of the time, before they split off to visit some of the other sights on New Zealand's north island. Our travels were exclusively on the south island.

I've uploaded my photos to two places. My gallery on my personal server has the complete set of over 400 photos, but I've also decided to try uploading a much smaller subset to Flickr.



( Read the full summary of activities... )

So a couple days ago, on Tuesday of this week, I had to do a one-day business trip from Austin to San Jose to help support a technical review with a customer. From a business perspective the trip went well, but I had to get up early enough to make the 7:30am boarding and then land back in Austin at 11:45pm.

Even though I made it to the airport on time, my coworker (dzahn) almost missed the flight entirely. When boarding started, I called him on his cell phone to find out where he was--he was still driving on the highway to get to the airport. Luckily he had already checked-in online, had only carry-on baggage, timed all of the stop-light signals just right, zipped through the security line, and was allowed to be the last person on-board.

In any case, I learned that the flights between Austin and San Jose have the industry-recognized designation of "nerd bird". Maybe that's old news to most people.

While in San Jose, I also had the chance to put my new Bluetooth GPS adapter to use with my cell phone for real. Google's Mobile Maps application for Windows Mobile could read my position and give reasonable driving directions on the fly. My dedicated Garmin GPS still has some important strengths over Google's offering, such as automatically matching with your current position with the upcoming navigation, the ability to save waypoints, voice navigation, and displaying your current speed/position.

Maybe I will have to look into one of the other commercial GPS applications for Windows Mobile to get that sort of functionality. I must admit that the convenience of Google Maps being able to get live map and business database updates over the cell network is still very attractive. All of the commercial GPS offerings seem to rely on a static database that is only updated once annually for an additional fee.

Last week was the United Devices third-annual company convention ("UD:07"). It is primarily a sales and promotional event intended to educate existing and future customers about the direction of the company and also the industry.

This year's event was held in Boston, MA but unfortunately this time of year meant that it was slightly below 20F for most of the time we were there. It was fortunate that the Prudential center is connected to most of the surrounding buildings with covered walkways.



One of the highlights of the entire event was an exciting software demo that I (and others) had been helping to prepare for the last couple of weeks. The demos showed how our new "Data Center One" product might be used to dynamically provision a new Virtual Machine or a new Bare-metal machine on demand. We also showed how both a J2EE application or a SAP application server can be dynamically scaled up in response to user load. I'm just glad that the event is over, so that we return our focus back to previous tasks that had been interrupted for the preparations.

During the conference, I learned that I may be getting called upon to start writing for a public company blog about grid computing. I haven't decided whether I like that idea yet--it's difficult enough to write my personal blogs. :)

And apparently there is still a possibility that I may have to fly back to Japan again this week or next. More frequent flier miles for me, if so!

The chaos surrounding the Daylight Savings Time change was the event that forced me to finally get my Sony T60 DirecTiVo back on the network. Ever since I moved into the new cowhouse (about two years ago), my Tivo had been with a satellite connection but without a phone or Ethernet connection. Every day my Tivo reminded me of this fact with another message ("The Recorder has not made a successful daily call for the past 720 days").

With the recent legislation to change DST, my TiVo would now begin recording my manually scheduled programs at the wrong times unless I allowed it to update itself over the network. Since I don't have a physical telephone line, and my previous attempts to use a IAXy VoIP device against Asterisk had failed, I needed to dig out my long abandoned TivoNet adapter. Unfortunately, I still couldn't get the TivoNet adapter to fit nicely inside of the DirecTiVo case so I have just left it sitting exposed on the outside of the case.

I had already started to search for boot disks in order to hack in the network drivers, but conveniently Moose reminded me that modern Tivo software now had the drivers and only needed a dialing prefix to activate the network support. After a few attempts and a replaced Ethernet cable, my Tivo is now updated for DST!

Although the lack of the DST update would only have affected a couple manual recordings (since I mostly use standard wishlists and season passes), I think the exercise was still worth it. Maybe I'll hack in the rest of the TivoWeb functionality again.

(pasketti also realized the need to update his Tivo, but unfortunately his Tivo experienced some data loss—my condolences to his Teletubbies.)

I thought it was finally time for a reorganization and cleanup of my website, so I've started migrating content over to a new URL at http://jeff.bovine.net/

(This new hostname allows me to eliminate the "www" and my username from the path, without giving up the ability to separate my content from that of friends I host.)

The new site is running MediaWiki, so it will be much more convenient to edit and maintain content. I'm hoping this will give me fewer excuses to avoid updating it.

I also updated to Gallery 2.1, which definitely seems to offer a lot of new functionality and improvements, despite the warnings against it that I've heard. I definitely like the ability to officially add links to other albums or external pages. It's also nice that I can now rename the auto-generated camera filenames (like "IMG_0248.JPG") after uploading, rather than having to do that before. I haven't yet decided whether I like having 2 more text fields for each photo (now there are Filename, Title, Summary, Description).

I'm also now trying out Dreamhost for some of my web hosting, rather than serving everything over my DSL. I definitely don't have any plans to move my email hosting to Dreamhost because I just don't want to lose any of the flexibility I have over filtering and delivery rules. Unfortunately, Dreamhost does seem to have pretty poor PHP execution speeds sometimes due to the shared hosting nature of their system.

By using lots of Apache "RedirectMatch permanent" expressions, I'm expecting my existing URLs and Google hits to transition over properly. I know nugget recently went through a similar transition and said that Google updated his existing hits and rankings pretty seamlessly.