It was only a matter of time. The newest addition to my console collection, the Wii, was mercilessly chipped this week, allowing me to boot “back-up” games on it as I can with the PS2 and the Xbox. The device that enabled it is called the “wiikey,” and we were able to install it in about 15 minutes with no headaches at all. I’ve been messing around with the new SSX and Trauma Center games, but I’m really looking forward to the new Mario game coming out in a week or so.

This weekend I rounded-out spring break with an overnight trip to Big Basin state park, a bit south of San Jose. I went with Jacob and some of his friends. I was told we would mostly be relaxing, but after we got there and set up camp, we promptly embarked on a 12-mile hike. Hiking is not my favorite activity but I was resigned to give it a shot with the group. It turned out to be tolerable, and there was even a nice waterfall toward the end of it:

Click on the picture to see a few more shots including a lizard and a huge banana slug. We rounded out the night with a fire and some sausages, and drove home early today.

Things will be pretty crazy this month as I work on a paper submission (due the 25th), and then they will just stay crazy until I wake up in Berlin in mid-June, married and probably moved out of Berkeley.

At last, finally, and after months of searching and much hand-wringing, we have a plan for the summer. Thanks to an introduction from James, I have an invitation to visit Marc Alexa’s group at the Technical University, Berlin. Yay! I’ll be there, getting to know people, doing some of my work, hopefully collaborating some with people there. The position should offer plenty of flexibility about when I’m in the office, which should be great for all of our plans to explore Germany and the rest of The Continent as much as our budgets will allow.

TU is nicely situated at the west end of Tiergarten, a huge park in the middle of Berlin. We’ll probably live in Mitte (“midtown”), which seems to be the cultural heart of the city. Here’s a cheesy little map I stole from Lonely Planet to give you an idea:

I very excited that we ended up with a big city. Hopefully, this will give us a taste of what life in Germany could be like for a longer stay, and also serve as just a cool adventure. Coincidentally, we also just finished the final lesson (90 total) of our German tapes. Hopefully by the end of the summer we’ll be making some real progress on that front, too.

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Comments

Debbie — 2007-04-11 15:03:38

You know the Tiergarten has a few naked sunbathing spots. Might be a nice way to relax on a sunny July afternoon. :-)

A few months ago I wrote a python script based on unison for synchronizing the iTunes libraries between my computer and Leslie’s. Although you can’t actually merge changes from both libraries, you can push or pull updates, which works well when one computer is a “master” where changes are made and the other is a “slave” where music is usually just played, but the library isn’t added to. You are able to manually push updates from the slave to the master if you like.

Anyway, I finally got around to commenting it a bit and I present it here for download in case others might find it useful: itunes_sync_0.1.tar.gz

I run it from a cron script hourly right now, which is maybe a bit excessive, but it’s all on the local network, so who cares? A better way of doing things would be to only sync when changes have been made, but I haven’t had time to fancy things up like that yet. I run the script only on OS X boxes, but I’m sure if you’re enterprising enough to get unison running on a windows machine it would work fine there too.

Today Ali and I completed what has become the biennial server upgrade. We added a pair of 500GB drives that should slake the endless thirst of our users for ever more space to put their photos and email. This was stressful for me, but even more of a pain for Ali who has to drive a couple of hours out to where the server is stuck in a data center. I imagine the thing had gotten pretty lonely sitting there in its little cage for the last two years, and appreciated the visit and TLC. Anyway, things seem to be mostly back to normal now. Let me know if you see any problems.

On a somewhat related note, I fixed gallery up so that you can post comments again. I’m glad I got this taken care of because I get about 20 emails a day from irate gallery browsers who want to chip in their two cents. Ok, not really.

One of my new year’s resolutions was to practice my guitar more, and thanks to our spreadsheet that tracks resolution-keeping performance, I’ve actually managed to stick with it. So my guitar has been getting much more of a workout than usual, and so developed an annoying buzz when playing certain notes. These notes come up a lot, so I eventually I decided that it had to be fixed one way or another. I dread this, because most places charge quite a bit for fixing up your guitar (I paid a place in Palo Alto $80 to fix the action on it after I bought it).

So I did some research, and found places offering to fix the setup for $120, and I’d just need to leave it there for 2-3 weeks, etc. I found one sketchy looking webpage that advertised repairs in the $20 range, and so decided to give them a call. Thinking the place must have gone out of business and the webpage was some 1996 remnant, I tried calling with little hope, but a friendly voice answered and told me to bring my guitar by. I did, and after they checked to make sure I’d parked somewhere that my car would be safe from ticketing, they pulled out my guitar, diagnosed and fixed the buzz, and handed it back to me in the space of about 2 minutes. When I asked how much I owed them, they waved me off.

The place itself was amazing… I little house on the corner in residential Berkeley, filled with hundreds and hundreds of guitars. While I talked with one guy about my guitar’s merits, another played some amazing licks on an electric in the corner while the third (who I presume was fat dawg himself) scheduled a jam session/“chance to smoke some fat dubes” with someone who called. Classic Berkeley.

When I got home I did some digging and found the home page for the place, Subway Guitars. It seems these guys made some huge scores of overstock guitar parts in the 60’s and have been building guitars out of the parts for dirt cheap ever since. They call them “proletarian” guitars, and I love the concept. Here’s an excerpt from Fat Do(aw)g’s philosophy of custom guitar construction:

You must ask yourself honestly: Will you be satisfied with what is adequate and functional? Or do you prefer to spend a lot more for super-polished and shiny appointments? If yes, there are many builders who will charge you thousands of dollars for it.

Madison Avenue and Hollywood have sold some of us a value system where our self-esteem is coupled to a superficial, shiny product. You must be honest and ask yourself: is this me?

I certainly am not in the market for a guitar at the moment, but if I ever am I think I know where I’m going to go for something adequate and functional. Guitars for the people, man!