Ittle Dew 2 Map

Just something that might be useful to others. I couldn’t find a copy of this anywhere else online. This should contain every point on the map. If anyone finds any more, please let me know!

New Laptop Cover

I'll try to post a picture when I get it integrated

As previously posted, I got a Macbook Pro last year and have been quite pleased with it. However, I got it for its hardware, and not its software (I run Linux and Windows on it generally). For reasons stated in the article ("glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy-cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work.") and the stereotypes as such for people that use them, I've really been wanting to get an overlay for the back of it, and my good friend Adam Shen has provided the cover art ^_^. So without further ado...

Picture of me at work

Everywhere I work is like a cave

One of my coworkers took this picture of me from his cell phone while at the office and I thought I’d share it. :-)

1337 car

Taking pictures at 70mph isn't easy

I’m currently working 60-80 hours a week right now doing contract work, so I don’t have much free time, but I’ll see if I can’t get my posting schedule a little more regular this month.

I noticed this car a few days ago while going down the highway. You can’t really make it out, but the license plate says “L33T”, which made me smile :-). It’s not easy getting a good picture with a shitty cell phone camera (1.3 megapixels) while going 70MPH down a highway!

I also encountered a BEAUTIFUL buck [deer] with 5ft+ high horns branching out in the most stunning patterns down in West Lake (south Austin) when I was pulling out of a parking lot, but I couldn’t get my camera out quick enough to get a picture before it disappeared back into the forest :-(. Alas. I might start more work in that area of town however, so I may get another change to see it again later on!

New Entertainment Center

Missed a day of posting :'(

Doh, I wanted to try posting at least once a day all month and I missed out yesterday because I was just too busy with other stuff, alas.

I had lots of work, mostly house work, to catch up on, culminating in transporting and setting up a new entertainment system, wee. I had to wire the darn thing twice because the first setup really didn’t work well and would have been damaging to the cords; and it takes like an hour each time to do the wiring. Grrrr, oh well.

I originally had all my entertainment stuff set up in my living room, as I assumed that I was going to have guests and would want to watch stuff out there with them on the couch. This has unfortunately turned out to not be the case in this apartment, and I usually only end up going to the living room couch mainly to snuggle with my cat, as she will only get close to me on the couch for some reason, while I have the TV on in the background while I work. Now I can have stuff running in the background whenever I want from my room, and can use the surround sound speakers to play my music, as I am getting tired of my crappy (though better than many) laptop speakers, and headphones are more cumbersome than not.

I bought the new parts of my entertainment system from some [married] friends who finished moving yesterday to a one bedroom in downtown Austin that couldn’t even remotely hold all their stuff, so they were desperately trying to get rid of a lot of it in a hurry. I got a 32" CRT TV [$50], the black shelving unit w/ glass enclosure [$50], and an older computer (512MB of RAM, 780mhz CPU, 80GB hard drive) [$20] to use as a new Home Server. All of these were at about 20% of cost, yay :-).

I really needed the new TV, as my current 32" TV is badly scratched up from being dropped on cement a few years back. I am leaving the old TV hooked up to my current Home Server, which I will now be using as just a multimedia station for that TV and a place for extra backup hard drives. I wanted the “new” computer as a new Home Server, as the current one uses way too much power for what it’s being used for, and is too loud to keep in my room. I’ll be just turning it on when I need it now instead; backing up and watching videos that require too much CPU power that the new computer won’t be able to handle.

The new computer is quite tiny and has no AGP slots, just 2 PCI32 slots. I am therefore looking into getting a $25 (w/ shipping) e-GeForce 5200 PCI card for tv-out. I hope it fits in the small case, because if not, I will just have to leave the case cover off.

Click for full size (I love my new camera ^_^ )

Skuld Kitty

Pets are the best!!!

Because I’m a super nerd, I thought I’d post pictures of my adorable kitty =^.^= . Her name is Skuld and I adopted her from a store on May the 11th of 2005 when she was 6 weeks old, so I just assume she shares my birthday, March the 28th :-).

She’s a tiny bit psychotic, but I love her to death none the less ^_^. She’s most recently become much more sociable, and she has always especially loved energetic playing; mostly wrestling with my hands and feet, and games of tag.

She has survived living with me at 5 locations so far with 5 moves!!! (Garland, North Dallas, Parent’s House [near-death appendix burst put me here for a while], Canada [1 month stay x.x; but the 26+ hour non stop drives there and back with Skuld were torturous]), Parent’s House [very very short stay], Austin). She’s been a very good sport about it, and I think she loves the Austin place the most so far.

Mouse over the thumbnails for larger copies. (Video clips to be uploaded soon.)

(2005-05-11) These are all pictures of Skuld on the night I adopted her.
(2005-05-11) Exploring on adoption night!	(2005-06-01) Skuld is a few weeks older here, lounging in a box, as she has always loved to do.	(2005-07-06) Skuld was much more daring in her youth and loved climbing onto very high things. She even went to the top of the TV on these shelves a few times which almost touched the ceiling. She is playing hide and seek with a friend of mine, Jamie, here.
(2005-07-28) Just curled up on some blankets sleeping.	(2006-02-16) Stretching out in crazy positions as usual.	(2006-02-21) I often took Skuld to the Qrush office for the 6 or so months we had it, as she got very lonely at home and there weren’t many of us at the office. She’s sleeping on some office supplies here.
(2006-04-13) Grooming herself in her favorite fluffy box bed.	(2007-07-15) During the stay at my parents house, I did weekend Dungeons & Dragon games at a friend’s (Brad’s) house in North Dallas (a 30-40 minute drive away) once a month, and the cat demanded to come along. She’s just lounging here.	(2007-07-15) Taken a minute or so after the last one, she noticed me taking her picture.
(2007-07-15) Eating later that day at Brad’s.	(2007-08-24) Sleeping on the >24 hour trip back from Canada in a cat cube my mother bought for her.	(2008-08-02) Taken about a week ago as I was testing out my new camera right before needing to use it at Angel Sword. She’s just chillin next to me in bed.
(2005-10-18) Olympic High Jumper (Video) - My dad took this video of me playing with my cat. My mother is the one in the background.	(2007-11-24) What I have to come home to (Video) - I was away from my place for about a week and my cat does not easily forgive. She meowed at me for hours on end like this.

Wedding Completed, Yay

Weddings (when participating in) are so much work...

It is now 4:44pm MST (5:44 CST, which is the time zone my website runs on) and I’m currently sitting in the Salt Lake City [Utah] Airport (SLC) with children crying all around me and businessman talking loudly on their cells... people, wee. Thank Thor for headphones + music :-).

Unfortunately, this airport, like most other airports AFAIK, does not provide free public WiFi (Wireless Internet) (examples off the top of my head are Dallas Fort/Worth [DFW] and Austin [AUS]). Phoenix (PHX) did provide free WiFi though, which was really nice. It was (and is, as I am flying there in a few hours for a layover) probably one of the nicest airports I have been to in a while. It even had lots of rows of comfy seats with small 1/.5 ft or so tables between them that had 2 electrical plugs on them, which was all very nicely designed and ergonomic too. Anywho, without access to the internet, I am stuck in 2D land (Snow Crash reference ^_^; ) and am withdrawn from the outside world.

You may notice however that this post is dated while I should be offline. Most of my work and entries for my site are done/posted on my laptop which runs a local web server, and then I move over batches of changes at once when I am finished. I will probably stop this practice once my website is more complete, but at the moment, it works better, and assures I have local backups. This is why, if anyone noticed, why 4 days of posts suddenly showed up yesterday :-). I’ve been on the move lately so I hadn’t had time to do a data transfer.

ANYWAYS, Luis’ wedding was really nice, though a ton of work. As one of the groomsmen I was trying to help out with stuff all day, which all the groomsmen were helping lots too. The bridesmaids had it super easy! I was on my feet almost all day in a heavy suit running around taking pictures, videos, and fixing things, but it was worth it. I’m so happy for Luis, and glad everything went so well ^_^.

Unfortunately, I was not allowed to be there for the actual marriage part (called a Sealing) as it was a Mormon/LDS (Church of Latter Day Saints) ceremony, which takes place in one of their temples, which is sacred and only practicing Mormon adults who have been confirmed are allowed in. Oh well ^_^;. There were probably 50 or so people in the temple to witness the ceremony and 5-10 people waiting outside with me. There were a couple hundred people that showed up for the reception though; the hall was one large mass of people!

There’s not many pictures I want to share publicly here from the event (this is not the place for their personal pictures :-) ), but I do have a couple; especially some I had taken of me in the suit I wore all day, as it’ll probably be a long time before anyone sees me in a formal suit again! ^_^; ... though it is nice to feel respectable sometimes and dress like that.

The weekend was well worth the expensive flight up here (and the suit), as myself and everyone had tons of fun and I got to meet a lot of great new people, and see a lot of old friends I haven’t had the opportunity to hang with for a while. It seems everyone is moving into opposite directions around the country :-\ ... or all the Mormons are just conglomerating in the LDS capitol of the world (Salt Lake City), but we won’t talk about that ^_^;.

The Happy Couple	The Groom and I	Me Dollar Dancing with the Bride
Me (Jeffrey Riaboy)

Angel Sword

“Swords are Cool!” Internet Anonymous

So I went to an open house at Angel Sword yesterday, which produces the world’s best swords. I first fell in love with their work when I saw them well over 10 years ago at Scarborough Fair Renaissance Festival in Dallas, and have schemed owning one since, which is not easy as their lowest series cost about $2,000. Of course, I could get smaller (and legal) blades from them like knives, but that’s just not the same or as fun ^_^; .

Their lowest line of swords, the Bright Knight series, holds at least the top two world records in ability from international competitions. I asked why they haven’t submitted their upper series lines (Angel Swords, Avatar series, etc) and the basic reply was “You don’t show your queens and kings if you can win with your jacks” :-). The master sword smith who started and still does most all of the work on the swords is Daniel Watson, whom has been working on swords for well over 30 years. The reason his swords are the best is that he uses combinations of ultra-tech with old tech to produce the best results. He has over 14 patents on processes and technology to produce the swords that he has been creating and refining over his lifetime that make no one able (easily) to catch up to his quality of work. The ultra-tech stuff includes cryogenics with quick freezing using liquid nitrogen and super heating, electromagnetic manipulating machines, metallurgy, and good old fashion hammer techniques, including cold forging, which most sword smiths apparently ignore.

I unfortunately had to miss a wedding of a friend of my sister’s up in Dallas for this, but I thought this more important/pressing as they only have these open houses every few [2-3] years, and I have reason to believe this may be the last one. It was supposed to start off at 9am. I got there 20 or so minutes early, well before anyone else, so I got some one on one time with Mr. Watson and another of his employees, Wolf (his real name ^_^). So I checked out his large stock of swords in the show room for the first hour or two while everyone else was arriving, and we all chatted and had general fun. There are so many beautiful swords and blades of every style, size, and make; pure works of art!

After that we went up to the forge and he did a demo with running commentary of reworking a knife, sharpening and fixing it up using types of buffers. That demonstration and everything else from the whole day was all quite fascinating. During this we also got a good list of accidents that have occurred in the shop, it was quite gruesome!!! :-D. After that we went back to the display room and had some more discussion.

Next was practical sword use ^_^. We all either borrowed swords or those who already owned ones used them, and we went out to their large front yard area (they are out in the country) and Daniel went over how to properly make cuts with a sword; proper torque and body movements to get the most out of a swing and such. Then each person that showed up (we had 10-15 people) got one wet tatami mat to practice on, which depending on your aim, one could get 5 to 10 solid cuts with. A single tatami mat, which is what most of us used, is about similar to cutting someone through the neck and a shoulder, while a double tatami mat, which they only had 1 made, is about equivalent to a solid cut through someone’s midsection. It was really fun ^_^.

We then broke for lunch with a lot more chatting about swords and many other interesting topics. The final part of the structured day was a voted upon sword creation process that we wanted to hear about. How he made his Avatar swords and the difference between the lines easily won out, as he had never released the information to anyone before (besides perhaps his apprentices and significant others). The reason he was now willing to tell us all about it was his final batch of patents on the processes went through very recently so it was safe to give it out. One of the guests video taped the whole talk, and I’m hoping to get my hands on a copy of it to post here with his permission later. He told me he wanted to edit it a bit first and show it to Mr. Watson before he did anything with it or released it anywhere. The main gist is that the lower lines just used the electromagnetic manipulation and other ultra-tech to achieve their chemical bonding properties so they can be cut to have much smaller angles on the edges without being too brittle, while the higher lines in addition have the hard work muscle and sweat forging and pounding put into them.

I think he ended his talk a little early to hit the 4pm mark when everything was supposed to end. A few people left then but I stayed around for over an hour to keep talking with the other participants. Everyone was really great and from many different walks of life and experiences all brought together by a common interest. After a few more people left, Mr. Watson brought out many of his whiskeys to let us try out. That’s the business he’s trying to break into and away from swords BTW, making whiskeys and rums and some other types of alcohol. I think I heard him mention to someone that some of the alcohols he was giving us were going for over $125 a shot!

I then left around 5pm, even though I wanted to stay longer, because I had another previous engagement I had promised to make... and then when I got there it didn’t even happen and I was quite perturbed about this, as they could have told me it wasn’t going to happen and I could have stayed at Angel Sword longer, but ah well.

I will probably be getting one of their blades very soon, as I just found out you can trade in their blades at no markdown to help get more expensive blades. So I can get a $2,000 one that I like and then have that around while I work up to a $6000 blade I really like ^_^. They also have a guarantee against breakage, chips, or damage, which is really hard to do anyways, so they can be used all you want without worry. He even showed us a sword that had been shot due to an accidental misfire of a .22 gun from the room above the show room. The sheath it was in clearly showed where the bullet went through, but there wasn’t even a ding or a scratch on the sword! The only remaining evidence was some copper that came off the bullet and etched into the metal a bit :-).

And here are all the pictures with captions that I took for the day! :-D Mouse over the thumbnails for larger copies. (Video clips to be uploaded soon.)

Show Room - Northeast corner
A large assortment of different kinds of swords.	Slightly left of the first picture, in the upper right corner are the few wakizashis on display.	Directly above the first picture.
The left side of the last picture. These two were BEAUTIFUL.
Show Room - Southeast corner
More assortments of swords. There were still a lot of areas in the show room I didn't even get pictures of.	The right side of the last picture.
Show Room - West side - Katanas and Knives
This whole wall was mostly katanas, with knives and other smaller blades in the glass display cases below them. Most of these swords were worth ~$3,500 a piece.	Directly to the right of the last picture.	Zoomed in from the last picture. The katana with the black and red hilt is the one I plan on getting soon, hopefully!
The Forge - Buffers and Sharpeners
Dan was showing us here how he sharpens and fixes blades with the buffers.	A zoomed out (and underexposed?) view of the buffer area. To the left is a larger belt buffer for larger blades.	3 short video clips spliced together of Mr. Watson working on a blade.
This is the sign in the 2nd picture directly above. I believe they take it to shows as a decoration.
The Forge - The Kiln
A normal heating kiln with tons of different types of hammers, tongs, and tools.	A different angle of the first picture.	This ones a little hard to see... it's a little better in my original large resolution copy. This is a shelf directly to the left of the kiln that contains racks of different types of metal sheets including (from top to bottom) steel?, brass, and copper.
The Forge - Mr. Watson hammering
Hammering on a piece of steel while describing the process of creating the different series of blades. Hopefully I can get a copy of the video someone took of this later.
The Forge - Electromagnetic Machine
All 3 of these are pretty blurry, but this is the electromagnetic machine used to rearrange the molecules of the steel and do micro hammering.
The Forge - The (High Pressure?) Furnace
This is the furnace. I believe it to be super high pressure, but I know it heats steel to over, IIRC 1400 Fahrenheit.	A picture taken from the same spot as above, but shifted slightly to the left. The LOUD and powerful mechanical hammer is in the way.
The Forge - Liquid Nitrogen tanks for cryogenics
A close up of a liquid nitrogen tank.	All 4 (or were there 5...?) tanks sitting next to each other.
The Forge - Unfinished blades
Blades that are being worked on. Mr. Watson is standing on the left side of the picture. He is currently standing right in front of the liquid nitrogen tanks from above.
The Forge - Other areas
A workbench. This is directly to the right of the kiln, shown above.	Another area of the forge with lots of other workstations and tools.
In the Yard - Group Photos
This was taken while we were waiting for Mr. Watson to come out and start demonstrating.	This one has most of the group that was there. The guy on the left side in the red shirt is Ingrid's husband. Lucky guy :-).
In the Yard - Mr. Watson teaching and demonstrating
	Using Angel (yes that's his real name... I think) as a dummy :-)
		Another "volunteer" 0:-)
In the Yard - Wolf cutting (video)
Wolf (real name) is one of Mr. Watson's employees. He did some of the first cuts, for demonstration purposes.
In the Yard - Angel cutting
Angel (yes that's his real name... I think) cutting. He seemed quite good. Probably the second most experienced guest there (maybe?), after Kendall.
In the Yard - Kendall cutting (videos)
Kendall cutting up his tatami mat. He is apparently quite adept with swords... has won some past sword competitions and is a martial arts instructor and such.
In the Yard - Ingrid cutting
Girls like swords too!!! heh. You may have seen Ingrid in a few other pictures (see Group #1) with her (5 month?) old boy that she brought along. Her husband was there too, they are both great people.		Video...
In the Office - Mythbusters Barrel
The final picture I took. This is the .30 caliber steel barrel used in Myth Busters that they kind of cut through in an episode.

Dakusan v0.5a

Everyone’s gotta start somewhere

This is a picture of me receiving my first real programming language, Visual Basic 4.0, for Chanukah [a Jewish holiday, like Christmas in terms of gifts] in 1995 [I’m the one holding it, age 11, 5th grade]. I had been using QBasic before that. I just thought the picture was too cute to pass up ^_^. The person next to me, Luis Merino, was my best friend during elementary and middle school, and is the reason why I just found this picture. I’m flying up for his wedding in Salt Lake City, in which I will be a groomsman, this coming Tuesday :-).

Windows 98

Nostalgia mode

So I just plopped in an old Win98 CD (in this case SP2) to grab the QBasic files off of it for the Languages and Libraries page.  I started browsing through the CD, and thought to myself “OMG... win98!”, heh. So I installed it, and wow, am I ever in super nostalgia mode.

Things I now take for granted that were major Pains in the pre-XP days (well, pre NT kernel....):

• Getting non-modem LAN connections on the internet: Win98 expected people to connect to the internet via phone modems, as broadband was still unheard of then. The “Windows Connection Wizard” was a pain in the butt and you had to know just the right place to go to get it to recognize a NIC as a valid connection to the internet.
• Shutting down windows improperly: If you failed to turn off the computer through the proper “Shut Down” method, the FAT file systems did not have certain type of safe-guards that NTFS does, and the computer was be forced to do a ScanDisk on startup. A ScanDisk is also run the first time windows starts after install, and seeing this old piece of software really gave me a warm fuzzy feeling... or was it a feeling of utter nausea?
• RAM allocation: The DOS-line-kernel of windows never properly kept track of memory from applications, and memory leaks in applications STAYED memory leaks after the program shut down, so RAM could very quickly get eaten up. Programs called “RAM Scrubbers” were around to fix these detected memory leaks and free them.
• Themes: Most people don’t know that windows themes actually originated with Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 (I could have sworn it was originally called Windows Plus!... need to find my original CD) software package, which also first introduced the ever-popular and addicting Space Cadet Pinball (check the games folder that comes installed in XP). Most Plus! options were usually integrated straight into later Windows versions or updates. I have included below all the Themes that came with Windows 98 SE for nostalgic value :-). Enjoy!
  
  Speaking of games, it seems 98SE also included FreeCell... I wasn’t aware it was that old. I think the “Best of Windows Entertainment Pack” (with “Chips Challenge”, “Golf”, “Rodent’s Revenge”, “Tetris”, “SkiFree”, and some other fun games) also originally came on the Plus! CDs, but am not sure of this. I believe the Best Pack also came with the CD packs that came with new computer from Packard Bell and maybe some other manufacturer for like 2 or 3 years in the mid 90s that also included the first game of one of my most favorite game series ever, Journey Man, as well as Microsoft Encarta, Britannica, a Cook Book CD and a Do-It-Yourself Book CD. Good times!!!
• Calendar: The calendar only displayed 2 digits for the year instead of 4... does this mean Microsoft was expecting everyone to switch from 98 immediately when their next OS (Windows ME [heh] or 2K) came out? See “The Old New Thing” for another interesting problem of the windows calendar of old.

Things that made me laugh:

• The first question asked during install was “You have a drive over 512mb in size, would you like to enable large disk support?”
• All the 3d screensavers were OpenGL. Though DirectX was out at that point, it was still in a state of sheer-crappiness so Microsoft still used OpenGL, which it wouldn’t be caught dead using nowadays ^_^.
• During install, there were lots of messages touting the operating systems features, including “By converging real-time 2d and 3d graphics ... *MMX is a trademark of Intel Corporation”. It just made me smile knowing that MMX was once so new Microsoft had to put a trademark warning like that.
• Internet Explorer (5.0) started up at MSN.com already... which immediately crashed the browser! hehe
• The windows update website informed me as follows: “Important: End of Support for Windows 98 and Windows ME
  Effective July 11, 2006, support for Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows ME (and their related components) will end. Updates for Windows 98 and Windows ME will be limited to those updates that currently appear on the Windows Update website.”

Things that I miss:

• The emotion behind the OS. For some reason, Windows 98 and 95 always had... a warmness to them that 2K/XP never had. I’m not sure why... but the newer operating systems always had such a stiff and corporate feeling to them.
• Winipcfg! Now I am forced to go to the darn command prompt to do it via ipconfig (which was available then also), which is a pain when you have too many NICs and it scrolls the console window or when trying to help someone get their IP Address or MAC address.
• Restart in MS-DOS mode! Man do I ever miss that. Especially for playing original DOOM. Good ’ol 640k ^_^. The 3.x/95/98 kernels were really based upon DOS so it was valid to have a DOS only mode, but there’s nothing stopping them from including it on newer computers... well, except that DOS didn’t support NTFS, I guess... so it would be confusing. Ah well.
• FAST load time. If I recall, Win98 always loaded bounds faster than XP... probably has to do with drivers.

Themes: (Owned by Microsoft?)
Baseball Dangerous Creatures Inside Your Computer Jungle Leonardo da Vinci More Windows Mystery Nature Science Space Sports The 60’s USA The Golden Era Travel Underwater Windows 98 Windows Default

Baseball: Dangerous Creatures: Inside Your Computer: Jungle: Leonardo da Vinci: More Windows: Mystery: Nature: Science: Space: Sports: The 60’s USA: The Golden Era: Travel: Underwater: Windows 98: Windows Default: