Author: bryan

netflix is neat

So… since we have a tendency to rent a movie or two every week, I decided it would be cool to join netflix. The idea is you queue up a bunch of movies that you want to rent, they mail you up to three at a time, and when you’re done with them, you mail them back. You can do this as many times as you want for $20/month. So, we break even if we rent more than 5 movies a month (which I’m pretty sure we do). Also, since netflix is based here in the bay, I figure we’ll get the movies lickety-split. It also doesn’t hurt that I have *cough* a DVD burner.

One of the cool things about netflix is they allow you to rate all the movies on their site, and based on your ratings, they suggest future movies that you might want to rent. This is pretty cool, and I totally spent an hour and a half clicking through hundreds of movies and rating them. Now it recommends for me “the best of the muppet show” along with “apocalypse now redux.” Hmm.

In other news, my mother has shipped me all my old scuba-diving equipment from Austin. In combination with my brother’s, which is already here in CA, the idea is not to pay through the nose for the basic stuff (mask, snorkel, fins, boots, gloves) that they require you to have for the Open Water Diver class, but refuse to rent. If we were to buy all the stuff, it would be about $200-300/person. Blech. In any case, after this we will be duly trained/refreshed for our upcoming excursion to Mexico which I am so looking forward to.

buy me this

This is the coolest thing ever!

http://www.xat.nl/enigma-e/desc/index.htm

Leslie can attest to the fact that when I was in Baltimore with her, and we stopped by the NSA museum, I was ecstatic to get to touch and play with an original Enigma rotor machine. Right behind it were the bombes that the English in Bletchly Park to crack the original code (they were led by Alan Turing himself).

Maybe the next time I have $150 lying around.

this page is coming to you from palo alto

If you’re reading this, then I’ve succeeded in moving www.overt.org over to the new server! Also, gallery now lives here, too. I’m trying to incrementally move things over to avoid any big explosions. In the next few days I’m going to do the trickiest switch: moving everyone’s email over. I’ll make sure to let everyone who uses overt for email know before that happens, though.

a new overt

So, the time has finally come for me to move overt to another server, one I actually pay for. I ended up picking ServePath (www.servepath.com) for hosting, and it seems to be working out well so far.

The process of moving all the mail and web and what not over to the new server is somewhat arduous, which is why I left a couple of months for it to happen. It’s been consuming a lot of my free time recently, but it’s really a kind of recreation for me anyway (no, really).

When the time comes to actually make the switch, I’ll figure out a plan for letting everyone know about any possible downtime.

wine tasting in santa cruz

Today we went wine tasting in Santa Cruz. This might come as a bit of a surprise to those of you who already know that I don’t really like wine. Still, it seemed like something local and fun that we could do to get out on the weekend and breakup the monotony.

If you know anything about American wine, you’re probably wondering, “Why did they go to Santa Cruz instead of Napa Valley? Isn’t Santa Cruz just a bunch of old hippies and surf bums?” Both good questions. To answer the second, Santa Cruz has not only hippies and surfers, but also expensive boutiques and a some wineries (quite a few, acutally). To answer the first, we were too lazy to drive all the way up to Napa. Some day we will.

The place we went to is called “Bonny Doon Winery.” Now, I should say before I go any further that Santa Cruz styles itself as the “anti-Napa,” and proudly flouts conventional wine-making wisdom. Most of this irreverence was lost on me as someone who doesn’t know any of said conventional wisdom. But in any case, we had a lot of fun. The way it’s set up is each week they pick a new selection of wines (seven or so), then you come lean on a bar and a helpful staffer walks you through each one, describing it. They started us with a pink wine that was actually very good called “vin gris de cigare” which means “gray wine of cigar” (tricky, eh?). It’s called cigar because it’s a type taken from a place in france where it’s forbidden by law to land flying saucers (“cigars”) in vineyards. Ha! Very funny, isn’t it? We then went to a sushi white wine, which I also actually liked, then through some darker red, bitter stuff that I can take or leave, eventually finishing with some dessert wines. First, some sparkling red stuff so sweet that it could have come from a coke machine; it was aptly described as “a strawberry nehi spiked with vodka.” Then a rasperry concoction (framboise) that we actually drank out of chocolate cups (themselves aptly called “snobinettes”). We ended up with a bottle each of the pink, the white, and a fancy red.

To Sunnyvale from Singapore via Texas

So, the past week has been brightened considerably by the presence of a temporary house guest, Philip. Phil has landed a job at vmware in Palo Alto, and is moving into a place in Sunnyvale on Tuesday. He arrived last Monday, though, and so in the meantime he’s been occupying our floor. It’s always nice to have another geek around.

Things are rolling along at work, same-old, same-old, as they say. One exciting thing this week is I’m expecting delivery tomorrow of my Dell 2001FP 21″ flat panel monitor. I had previously fancied getting an Apple Cinema Display, but the price was just plain better from dell (the 25% promotion didn’t hurt), plus the monitor rotates from portrait to landscape and it’s just tough to beat the ooh-ahh of that. The technically inclined could peruse the Anandtech review.