I got a little saucy the other day and decided to take the plunge and upgrade to Alpha 2 of Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04). What the heck, I had a 9.10 install disc so I could always back out if it got too ugly, right?

It got ugly.

During the update, the nVidia drivers choked and died; they were erroring out and leaving the isntallation in a half-baked state. I finally managed to get them uninstalled and finish installing everything else, sans nVidia drivers. Meh, I can live with the nv drivers. Read more

Now that my job has tanked, I suppose I have plenty of free time to do some side development. In a way it's a relief...commuting 1.5-2 hours each way every day was keeping me from doing a lot of things I wanted to do.

I'll dust off some old Python code I wrote that evolved 2D wheeled vehicles and post it up here soon. In the time I have between job searches, that is. :) Read more

Let's say you know the equation of a circle (r² = x² + y²), but want to calculate the area of a circle. And, uh, you forgot how to do that. Happens to all of us, honest.

Fortunately, we've got a little python program that uses the monte-carlo method to estimate the value of pi! Let's get going!

A couple of weeks ago, I was merrily developing some film. Had big plans for doing a dozen rolls or something, and everything was going great. So great, I hardly even had to concentrate on it!

In goes the film. In goes the developer. Agitate, wait, agitate, wait. Down the drain with the developer (I use one-shot). Rinse the film. In goes the fixer. Agitate, wait, agitate, wait. Down the drain with the fixer...wait, what?

Yup, I dumped out my film fixer that had about 20 more rolls of fixing goodness left in it. To top that off, it was the last of my fixer! Read more

I got this wild hair up my nose about "wouldn't it be cool to show a random item from my Amazon wishlist on my site?" the other day. I looked around, found plenty of wishlist scripts, but none of them did what I wanted. They all showed the first X items on your list sorted by Y, for various Xs and Ys. Nothing random out there. Read more

I'm getting back into the darkroom after a bit of an absence. Breaking out all the chemicals, I wasn't sure what to expect from year-old developers.

First up was Lauder Chemicals Formula 76, basically D-76 with a not-so-original name. Devved a roll of film, fixed, washed, take the roll out of the tank...completely blank! Even the frame numbers, gone. Stupid developer had completely died, and I'd fixed away everything. Oh well, out with the 76. Read more

About a month ago I was out tooling around, taking photos and whatnot, when I decide to make some beer. I never turn down ideas like this, so I headed over to SF Brewcraft to pick something up. Read more

I've got a Neuros mp3 player. A Neuros I in particular, a unit they stopped making sometime in the late Cretaceous, and which I just love to death. And I did just that...loved it until it stopped charging one day. It just didn't seem to recognize that it was plugged in.

I figured I was probably out of luck, but I emailed Neuros Technology about it and sent it in to get repaired. To my surprise, they told me that they no longer make the main board for that unit, and that they'd upgrade me to the next hardware version for the price of a regular repair. Read more

So I whipped up a goofy shirt a few months ago after my XBox 360 died The Death of Three Lights and stuck a link to a CafePress shop selling it on this site. See it there, on the right? Anyway, I hadn't gotten any email from the Cafe, and so figured nobody was buying it. A little bummed, but I really hadn't invested much in it. Still...a little bummage happened.

Today I check the mail (real mail, not electronic foolery), and hey...something from CafePress. Wait, what the?!? A check! I sold something? Read more

So apparently there was an accident or somesuch along my commute to work today, and 19th Ave through Golden Gate Park was closed off. Everyone was getting detoured down Fulton and trying to squeeze through all the little streets to get to the other side of the park.

I duck down one of these streets and end up driving through the beautiful, treed heart of Golden Gate Park, and I realize...wow, my morning commute is some people's dream vacation.

Hey, maybe this delay isn't so bad after all.