lifebsideben

A buncha folks are doing it, I guess i’m jump on the bandwagon; writing a post of specific 4-item lists about themselves. This seems about as self-referential and indulgent as blogging can get, so I feel confident I’m doing my part to destroy any wider benefits the medium might be capable of today. What will others think of me? Should I leave “Tron” off the movies list? Oh wait, no one reads this anyway, whew.

Four jobs I’ve had in my life:

1. Museum ticketing agent
2. House painter (well, more like assistant to house painters. I was the one who got to climb/fall of the ladders, which may explain a lot)
3. Engineering Director of a publicly-traded porn company
4. Yahoo! manager

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. Goodfellas
2. Wargames
3. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
4. Tron

Four TV shows I love to watch:

1. The Simpsons
2. The Daily Show
3. Frontline
4. NOVA

Four places I’ve been on vacation:

1. Seattle
2. Paris
3. Copenhagen
4. Detroit, unfortunately

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Filet mignon
2. Macaroni and cheese
3. Lasagna (which maybe should be considered a variant on mac & cheese?)
4. Hamachi sushi

Four websites I visit daily:

1. prince.org
2. Yahoo! News
3. Bloglines
4. my team’s Bugzilla queue

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Rolling around on the carpet playing with my son
2. Drinking coffee at a cafe on Las Ramblas in Barcelona with my wife uhh… edit! -Ben
3. Scubadiving off Fiji. Not that I know how to scuba, but I think I’d really like it…
4. Sleeping

Four bloggers I am tagging to do this as well:

1. Jeff Boulter
2. Dave Viner
3. Ubaldo Huerta
4. Russel Beattie

FYI: some other posts like this I’ve read…

Tags: Life, movies, nostalgia, travel, TV, work

About a week ago we were headed home down El Camino from doing errands, passing through San Bruno, and I spied on the other side of E.C.R. a restaurant that said “Filipino-Spanish cuisine”. Now, I had no idea what that might entail, but it sounded intriguing! We promptly decided to give it a shot. This isn’t a part of the my “walking distance” restaurant reviews, but hey, thought I’d spread the word anyhow.

Inside Patio Filipino (which yes, actually has a rather large, nice-looking Patio, but it was too cold for that), it’s tastefully decorated and cozy. It seems the specialties of the house are paella (unfortunately, all shellfish, which means the wife and I couldn’t share–so that’ll have to wait until next time), and various other fusion dishes. Yes, they really are Filipino/Spanish. It’s odd, but it works!
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About every year it seems, I have a harddrive die. I don’t know if it’s me, or demanding conditions, or cheap drives, or what, but the latest was a Maxtor 250G on my Mac Mini. It was mostly full (of backups of other data, downloaded movies, and MP3s), nothing critical, but this was seriously annoying… again. Of course, the drive is, wait for it…

out of warranty. I’ve decided that’s it, I’m going to build a RAID5 box as homebrew network-attached-storage (NAS).

First, I looked at the commercial offerings; my requirements were RAID5-capable and true NAS. Nice-to-have features included use of SATA drives, and sub-$1000. The only two devices that looked reasonably close were the Buffalo Terastation, which isn’t SATA, doesn’t have great performance, and gave me a “bad vibe”; the other is the Infrant ReadyNAS 600, which is pretty freakin’ awesome, but costs $800 without drives, so isn’t really going to hit my budget point. Homebrew is the way to go for me, I think, especially since I can reuse some hardware lying around…
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Last December, Caltrain was really late one morning. Looks like their mommy gave them a note, however: this was on every seat of the trains that afternoon…

Anyhow, I finally got around to scanning the note, which at least I found interesting.

Tags: big_business, Caltrain, travel

It really annoys me that the WordPress plugin administration page lists the plugins in a seemingly random order. Upon closer inspection, it’s actually the order they are discovered on disk, which isn’t necessarily the most useful, especially if you have a lot installed (like I do) and are scanning the list for something to activate/deactivate/etc. On my server, the list is essentially sorted in case-sensitive alpha order. I just wanted this to be sorted case-insensitively sorted.

So, I made a quick tweak to the plugins.php page to do this. Here’s the changes, if you’d like to do the same:

Right around line 73 of wp-admin/plugins.php (immediately following the call to get_plugins()), I added:

[code lang="php"]function iksort($a,$b) { return strcasecmp($a,$b); }
uksort($plugins, ‘iksort’);
[/code]

Next step: sorting the list of configurable plugins in the submenu under ‘Options’!

Every once in a while, I’ve gotta spend some time catching up on my music videos, to see what pop culture silliness is going on. And generally, I do enjoy the task–although lately it seems like most of the music is crap. I think this is a sure sign you’re getting old: when you don’t understand/don’t like the current batch of popular music. But, the videos are pretty entertaining. Here’s a little roundup of eight recent videos I saw…

Nas f/Genuwine: You Owe Me

I like Nas. I like Genuwine. There’s some sort of music going on during this video, although I was pleasantly distracted from it… and it wasn’t striking me as anything special… the music, that is.

Still, I managed to find a lot of redeeming value in this latest offering. Not sure it does much for Nas’ street cred, but I guess he figures Jay-Z stealing his style and ultimately doing it a lot better than he does was fate, might as well get some video hoes and put on a show. And Genuwine, well, this is the brotha who made it big with “My Pony (Ride it)”…

Note: Neither Nas nor Genuwine pictured in screengrabs, for your enjoyment.

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I now command you to go pre-order by brother-in-law’s book, “The Art of Maxx Marshall”.

Here’s the description from the site: “An animator and concept artist for gaming companies like Sony, Midway and Blizzard, Maxx Marshall’s designs have been featured in mega-hits like Diablo, Starcraft, and World of Warcraft. That’s all well and good for a day job, but when the sun goes down, Maxx’s mind drifts off to nastier realms, filled with bizarre creatures, foul aliens, and drop-dead gorgeous women, and this collection features his most outrageous illustrated monsters and maidens.”

Seriously, he’s mad talented yo, and this would make a perfect gift for that phat illustration art lover in your family, or yourself… or both. Hell, order 3! Satisfaction guaranteed!

Go ahead… check it out. I’ll wait. . .

“Prime Rib, Steaks and More” reads the business card. Not really a lot more, actually.

To inaugurate my new series, “reviews of restaurants within walking distances” (read: “excuses to not cook dinner”), we decided to try Prime on the Avenue, the newest restaurant on Burlingame Ave. We went the first week they opened, and amazing how quickly word must have gotten out: it was pretty packed. The menu says “senior citizens get 10% off all items”, and I’d say that is a successful draw, as the average patron age when we were there had to be in the 50s, easily. This location used to be a Chinese restaurant (actually, one I really liked), and it still has some touches of the old decor, although the redecorating overall is pleasant; tasteful paintings and new chairs are the highlights. The beverage/waitstaff island has been replaced with a raised area for the prime-rib cutting counter, which I guess is to give it that real “prime rib joint” feel. Aside from that, the layout seems pretty much the same.

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I bought the 40-Year-Old Virgin DVD right before the parents came to visit in December, but didn’t get a chance to watch it before they showed up. While they were here I offered, but they said they had recently rented it and only got through 15 minutes of it before giving up, thinking it was too stupid/not funny/?. This is the same thing they said about Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, so I almost took that as a good sign. But, still didn’t get a chance to actually pop the badboy into the player until a few days ago.

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I really wanted to try out this WordPress plugin called ImageHeadlines that created images of your title headlines from any TrueType font. It’s a neat idea, and you can make your headlines really look cool with dropshadows, etc. One not-so-minor problem: my PHP install doesn’t have a working FreeType installation. “Well, time to fix that,” I figured. Read more »

Tags: freetype, linux, php, plugins, wordpress