Least Significant Bits

This article documents upgrading the firmware of a built-in Memory Stick slot on a Linux-based Sony VAIO R505 laptop, to make it compatible with Memory Stick Pro media.

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Tri-Met is an entertaining way to get to work, most of the time.

Tri-Met is considerably less expensive than driving. Suppose your car consumes just under one gallon of gas completing a long, almost 20 mile one-way commute. These days, people feel lucky to find gas for $2.39/gallon. A Tri-Met all-zone fare is a mere $1.70. That's entertaining!

Tri-Met requires no mental energy, other than boarding and getting off, and is much more relaxing. Why worry about dodging out-of-control motorists on the highway when you can catch up on reading?

Tri-Met is infinitely more social than a single-passenger car. It probably beats most biking situations as well. Uh, most of the time. People seem a lot more competitive and cutthroat during rush hour, and sardines only look cozy. Nonetheless, there are some very colorful personalities to be found riding the bus. Simple openness can attract conversation from the strangest of the strange, some who discuss their psychiatric medications. There is also no shortage of attractive women. :-)

Tri-Met encourages physical activity. Rather than walking a total of 50 feet from your front door, to your car, to your work, Tri-Met can require jaunts of several city blocks to get between stops and destinations. Particularly in suburbia, stops tend to be fewer and farther between, and one can end up walking much greater distances.

Tri-Met is extremely slow. This is to be expected given how frequently the bus and MAX stop. What takes 30 minutes by car takes 90-120 minutes, including walking and waiting.

If there are clear-cut routes to your work destination, and the extra transit time isn't a problem, Tri-Met is highly recommendable, if only one day a week.

I am so bored!

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Today was Paul and Andi's wedding shower. Paul's aunt Amy held the event in Gresham. The event drew quite a crowd, although apparently less than a more formal family gathering for Paul's family. I got to meet five of Paul's aunts and uncles and their spouses, his maternal grandparents and two of their siblings, his paternal grandmother and great-grandmother, and about five of his cousins. They claim this event to have received a much smaller turnout than a "reunion" or "get-together" event. Ha! I had extreme difficulty remembering names and trying to internalize the structure of Paul's family. Perhaps unnecessary, it at least seemed like an interesting mental challenge, but felt a clear sensation of failure after leaving with a vague memory of about three names. Willey/Summerfield family: 1, Sam: 0. :-)

The wedding shower was smartly held indoors. Throughout the day, the weather varied between sunshine, drizzle, torrential downpour, and hail. Paul and Andi received a lot of gifts, mostly kitchen and domestic items traditionally given at weddings. There were enough of them to fill the trunk and back seat of their Honda!

I had a camera malfunction, but still wound up doing some of the picture-taking using Paul's camera. Pictures are therefore on Paul's home page.

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Well... I spent the afternoon with Ursa. Ursa can be a lot of fun. She took me around to do some things that I would never have done on my own volition. These include purchasing clothing, an artistic haircut, and removal of eyebrow hair. Ursa was extremely patient, waited and gave feedback as I tried on nearly 20 articles of clothing, arranged appointments for a facial waxing treatment, and even selected a hair stylist. Standard things you may say, but I'm a typically helpless male. :-)

The facial waxing was by far the most alien and interesting part of the afternoon. Some aquamarine fast-hardening wax was applied to the area around my eyebrows, to remove stray hairs and create a more contrasty border between eyebrow and non-eyebrow. Any trace of a unibrow has been removed. It seems likely that most people won't notice it.

Paul, Andi, and I did this same sort of haircut/wardrobe renewal activity about this time last year. Recently they seemed a little bit too busy preparing for their wedding, but on later discussion it turned out that they did almost the same thing today -- they went shopping.

Afterwards, we picked up Daniel and went out to dinner at Typhoon next to the Beaverton MAX station. Typhoon is a Thai restaurant chain emphasizing flashiness and presentation. Their menu is a bit shorter than both Thailand and Thai Orchid, and their wine and tea lists are quite a bit longer. It's something to be experienced once, but Thailand seems just as good and a bit less expensive. It might be appropriate for, er, a date?

Sadly there are no photos. I was dumb and didn't bring the digital camera. My mother and I have been discussing the need to upgrade, along with the idea that her Olympus D400Z is five years out of date and not quite the best hand-me-down.

Thanks Ursa!! I owe you for this.

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Tonight at Mike Badger's anime night we watched the first nine episodes of Azumanga Daioh. This series chronicles a group of Japanese high school girls, and two of their teachers. There is no plot to speak of, and very little actually changes between episodes except the point in the school year they happen to be at. It is very similar to an American sitcom, and the best comparison offered is with Seinfeld. Azumanga Daioh is also very similar to His and Hers Circumstances, which was the topic of anime night a few months back. His and Hers has more of an overriding plot, but is much less entertaining in parts not related to the plot than Azumanga Daioh.

A good feature so far of Azumanga Daioh has been its DVD booklets. They contain a sort of cultural glossary, explaining many of the details that we Americans find strange. A good example might be burning the remains of a cultural festival. Apparently they find burning/cremation a more dignified means of disposing of trash left over from a festival, perhaps compared to piling into a landfill or other sorts of biodegradation.

I'm honestly getting tired of this theme of Japanese high school life and feel that other options are being underexplored. I would rather Paul and Andi have arranged their own movie night, but they were far too busy preparing for their wedding.

Food was provided by me, and wound up amounting to some falafel sandwiches and baklava. It seemed to go over, but also seemed to clash slightly with the anime theme.

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Today, at work, instead of actually doing work, we went out and played some paintball! All of the development and QA staff involved in our recent Matrix Server 3.0.0 release were invited, and about 18 people wound up coming, including myself. Our host was Oregon Paintball, and we used a field east of town in the vicinity of Sandy.

We started around 1pm and continued until almost 5pm. There were two teams -- orange and yellow -- which remained the same for the entire day. We played nearly eight rounds, and I might be misremembering exact details:

• Rounds one and two had simple last man standing rules, with different chosen bases, a 15 minute time limit, and "regeneration" for casualties within the first five minutes.
• Rounds three and four could be won by moving a jug into the enemy base, with a similar 15 minute time limit and regeneration. The jug was large and rectangular, and could be used as a shield of sorts, but had to be dropped in place if its carrier were hit.
• Rounds five and six were capture the flag, with no regeneration and a reduced playing area, intended to make the match more intense. These were the most interesting rounds, with more gunfire and less sneaking around.
• Rounds seven and eight were "hanger" matches, with a 15 minute time limit and regeneration, but the most bizarre objective. Everyone got a plastic hanger, and the goal was to hang all of your team's hangers on an eye-level piece of duct tape stretched between two trees. There were a number of defensive structures around the duct tape, so the first team to get people in the area had the edge. The duct tape was supposedly equidistant from the two chosen bases, but that is incorrect, one base turned out to be quite a bit closer and have much better general access to the area.

I didn't get the make or model of the paintball equipment that this place rented to us, but the guns weren't very accurate. They seemed to land rounds within a radius of up to 1ft firing about 15 yards. Sniping is out of the question, and suppressive fire and careful teamwork seem to be the best strategies for dealing with distant foes.

A paintball is apparently filled with some sort of vinegar and fish oil compound, with bright pigments. It is perfectly safe to be hit by a paintball fired by one of their "markers" (read: guns). However, a paintball that hits without bursting can leave a bruise, and the paintball filling leaves a terrible taste when sprayed around one's mouth.

Many people wore extra layers of clothing, to minimize the chances of being bruised, if not just because it was cold with a chance of rain. I wore a thin buttoned pullover, was hit several times, and didn't receive any bruises, so extra layers might not make much of a difference.

Afterwards we went out to dinner at Calamity Jane's diner, a Texas-themed restaurant nearby. Eric found their selection to be lacking in entrees compatible with his vegan diet, but otherwise the place semeed okay.

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Saturday night Daniel and Ursa hosted a LAN party. It was excellent but small: the only other guests were Rick and myself. Mike and Pat couldn't come citing schedule conflicts with climbing class, and nobody else expressed much of an interest in coming. We piled our gaming paraphernalia into Daniel's living room and played a few good games of Age of Mythology.

It's interesting that the most agreeable game for us is a real-time strategy game. No Counter-Strike. No first-person shooters in general, except for Daniel's occasional stint with Unreal 2004, but it seemed like he was just showing off his fancy new equipment that he acquired last week. :-)

It's also interesting that our chosen game is published by Microsoft. Most of us tend to avoid Microsoft when possible, and this certainly presents an opportunity. Comparable games such as Warcraft 3 run flawlessly under Wine, and ideally would enable us to avoid Windows entirely. However, AoM has been the standard for a while, and Ursa is quite the master at it, both of which seem more concrete points than the counterarguments.

All of us except Ursa admitted to not having played AoM since the last LAN party, which was many months ago.

We tend to play together against a group of computers. Typically we play against three or four computers on the hard difficulty, or two on the titan difficulty, usually on the same team. With the titan difficulty, the computers seem to have a 2X speed advanantage for basic construction, training, and research operations, and can grow substantially faster than any one of us. Because of this, titans are very difficult for us to defeat on an open map, and are much easier on a "wall map" with natural compartmentalization to limit their growth.

Most of us are best with various Atlantean pantheons. I'm the exception, preferring Egyptians. I even tried to play a game using the Atlantean deity Oranos, and failed miserably. That game was also the only game we played amongst ourselves, with Ursa and myself being crushed by Daniel and Rick, a game also with a very strong showing from Rick. Previously I would usually wind up with the highest economy score at the end of the game, but found myself bested by Ursa in just about every game we played.

The food was excellent. We had pizza, beer, fine wine from Rick, and tasty but bizarre Mochi ice cream treats that I had first encountered at anime night.

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Tonight I joined Mike Badger's Anime group for a screening of episodes 18-26 of the series Noir. Friday of the week before, we watched episodes 10-17. I wasn't around the week before that, and missed episodes 1-9, but last week Kris gave a recap on what happened, and it seemed to explain the important details.

Paul and Andi missed out. Wonder what they did instead?

Read on for spoilers and analysis.

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I stayed up all night working, trying to get to the bottom of a series of problems with some code I wrote recently. It's not that it isn't any fun, it sort of is, since it's something to leave feeling halfway clever. However, it no longer represents something to look forward to, and it certainly isn't a matter of "following the golden path" as it used to be. Three years ago I was so much more enthusiastic about software development, the inner workings of operating system kernels and filesystems, etc.. Not so much any more. By comparison, tasks undertaken for work now seem to progress at a glacial pace. Computers as a hobby has only recently seen a mini-revival in all of this web stuff I've been playing with, including this site, and the network infrastructure behind it.

Paul and Andi were really nice to me tonight. They came, brought me Chana Masala from Swagat, and kept me company. Paul has a new movie review section up on his site. He uses bombs to rate movies. Way to go Paul!

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Like everyone else subscribed to the They Might Be Giants mailing list, I got a link to a new flash video featuring their song Bloodmobile. The flash animation is beautiful. The song is structured as a collage of voices, with a nurturing background melody reminiscent of an educational video. The choruses are voiced by one of the Johns, and sound more characteristic of the group. It has a very strong educational theme, similar to but perhaps more extreme than Mammal.

I really like it, but it wouldn't go on my workout mix, probably won't get stuck in my head, and would seem embarassing to be seen pumping in one's car. :-)

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