Chez G

It’s a symbolic threshold, but the PDF of my architecture book is now 202 pages. That includes the fluff like table of contents and a bunch of outlined sections, but if you take a look you’ll see that it’s coming along. As a comparison, my thesis was about 150 pages.

CMU put up a article to announce that my very talented friends, Ciera, Kevin, and Marwan got awards at the OOPSLA conference. At the very end they mention the award that I got there two years ago too, so I’ve saved a copy here for posterity.

Congratulations to Ciera, Kevin, and Marwan!

The good news today is that I signed the official book contract, which means I’d better get this book finished! Overall the negotiation went very well and I’m happy with the terms. So far my editor, Alan Apt, and the publisher, Taylor and Francis.

As always, comments on the book are appreciated.

I was pleased to see that my Motorola phone charges from a mini-USB port. But when I tried to use my brother’s USB charger (for another phone), my phone rejected it with a message about it not being a genuine Motorola charger. I’ve just learned that you can charge your phone from your PC using a simple USB cable, but (annoyingly) you have to install the Motorola drivers under Windows.

I have a subwoofer, which takes a single (mono) input. What comes out of the stereo is, of course, a stereo output. I’d asked around for quite a while how to fix this problem, and found out that a simple Y-adapter will not work.

I finally found a discussion where someone answered the question (BTW, some searches are very difficult because the keywords are too common — such as stereo, mono, and speaker). Here is a link to an inexpensive product that will join your stereo subwoofer signal into a mono signal: Stereo to mono adapter

Costco sells a case of Mexican Coca Cola, in bottles, which is made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup like in the USA. I was expecting a taste explosion, but unless I pay careful attention I don’t even notice the difference. I was hoping for a taste of my childhood when coke was a real treat.

Possible reasons:

1. Coke is very careful to tweak their formulas
2. Re: my childhood, I wear rose-colored glasses
3. It’s a trap — it’s really the same stuff
4. Sugarwater is sugarwater, regardless

I woke up this morning to realize that I could breathe, which is a nice change. The flu is moving down to my throat and chest, which stinks, but at least I can think now (mostly). I’ve watched a lot of movies over the past 3 days, almost all on Netflix Instant over the internet on my laptop. It seems like they mostly have B-movies in their instant catalog, probably whatever the studios let them have.

Of these, the surprise winner was Planet B-Boy.

futz = (literally) fart around

I’m sick, which means movie time. I have two interesting tidbits for your netflix pleasure:

1. This website on netflix quality settings describes how to use Shift-B to manually force the netflix player to use high resolution.
2. If you are running Tomato firmware on your router with the Quality of Service (QoS) settings, and you should be, you’ll probably need to turn off QoS while you are watching netflix. I have seen folks asking what port it runs on, but have seen no good replies, so you can’t just set that port for high QoS. If someone knows the port, please post a comment and/or link.

I’ve been battling with the third chapter for what feels like forever. In reality it’s probably been just over a month, and I went to OOPSLA and had to do some edits for the publisher, but it really feels like a long time. The good news is that I completed a draft of it today and it doesn’t suck (it was sucking for a while). I’ll return to it in a few days and wordsmith the text, but I think the content is ok.

Things are moving ahead with the publisher. The first two reviews came back quite positive, so we’re looking at contract details.