Posts from July 2012

After a disastrous attempt at trying to get quality seafood at the Seafood Grotto (out of clams, shrimp, scallops) I ended up at Jakes Famous Crawfish. Hands down it was the best seafood meal I ever had in a restaurant.

I got the dungeoness crab leg sauté. It was pre-shelled crab legs with artichokes hearts and mushrooms. It came with plain rice and string beans. If you ever had my mother's artichoke heart and mushroom dish, it was just like that with a ton of crab legs on top. It is exactly all the things I love in one. They might as well call it the Paul Visco.

Wow nothing says how much opensource is driven by men than a conference for open source attended predominently by men. I wonder if this holds true for all computer technology. I kind of thought it was a myth because we have a bunch of women at my work. Maybe men are more likely to attend a conference? It would be interesting to see some stats. I suppose github could answer that.

The conference was pretty good today. I attended the git session taught by the guys from git. Unfortunately the whole first half was old hat but there was some new stuff. Those guys put on such a great talk.

The afternoon I was going to attend the erlang session but at lunch they had the tables divided up by "tribe" and I met another PHP guy who convinced me to go to see the "Integrating PHPunit with Jenkins" using ANT, etc session. The session was taught by the creator of phpunit himself. I took a lot out of that session that I think I can bring back to work in a useful way for all teams, not just PHP.

The most enlightening moment was when the speaker suggested using yum, the RPM package manager to do server deployment. Not sure why I hadn't thought of that before.

The lunch itself was quite delicious. Though I forgot to take a pic ;( Now I am bored. I am so bad at socializing and I was one of the more social at my table. For a few minutes no one said anything.

Seems like a good start to the trip. I tried to go to dinner at Hamburger Mary's but as I was waiting for a table I heard them calling bingo numbers and decided I wasnt ready for that so I left.

The homeless population here is so confusing. Many of them seem to be opt-in teens and 20 somethings.

The conference schedule runs from 9am till like 9pm. Let's hope I have both the stamina and battery power for that. I only brought the MacBook air and I still haven't really tested out its battery at all.

That place is just too damn bright.

Their very nice and slippery dance floor makes up for it partially.

For years I would just drink vodka and tonic water but I am tired of tonic. My new favorite drink is absolut flavored vodkas and water as the mixer. Of all of them, my favorite so far, is either the Ruby red or the citron. Haven't tried pear yet and the peach was not as good as the citrus ones.

Terry's new favorite flavor is vanilla.

Mike has turned getting ill into a near Olympic sport.

I ate a hot dog with nacho cheese from a street vendor.

Wish me luck on my next plane flight. The one I just got off of was pretty turbulent.

We traveled on down to Palmyra in order to see the Mormon pagaent about their religions back story. As a total athiest this was still interesting just to see. If nothing else Mormons are amazing organizers and performers.







It was so weird to see all the same Christian protesters that protest at gay pride, Thursday in the square, etc. Its especially weird because despite a few key strangenesses, the mormons still believe in God and Jesus and the teaching of Jesus including compassion, love, etc. It was unbelievable to hear the one old protestor guy screaming about such insignificant differences like which city was Jesus born in (Jeruselem or Bethlehem.) Especially when there are groups with more fundamental differences like not believing in Jesus altogether. It makes me think the real issue is fighting over sheep and who can have the most. Nothing about the way these people act reminds me of the teachings of Jesus.



In general mormons seem like a friendly bunch of people. Not that I want to be one or that I believe in their nonsense, it just seems like they are not as bad as the evangelicals I am constantly exposed to in public settings. At the same time they still have that gay hate thing going on.

For more than a year our internet has not worked on the Santa Rosa PowerBook. It caused so many fights because the only way to make it in was to hold the mouse over the airport icon and no one wanted to do that while watching a movie.

The other night I thought maybe it was time for a replacement part. I ended up switching out the AR5BXB72 that came with it for a BCM94321MC. Strangely, they came out the same year. The AR5BXB72 that came with the laptop had three connectors while the BCM94321MC that I ordered had only two connectors. At first I thought it would not work but I just connected the two antennae on the left (black and grey), and left blue unconnected.

For 14.95 and an hours worth of work I solved the issue. Strangely, the replacement part has two antennae connectors instead of three but it still gets wireless N and never goes out. Its basically a miracle for a machine I thought was trash. I got the idea from this mac support page where someone else had success with the same thing:

Clearly the part needed replacement. It smelled like melted plastic in the worst way possible. I think its time to write an email to apple.

Its like a resurrection for the television.

This is the original AR5BXB72


This is the the new BCM94321MC

I cannot believe how dry it has been everything looks Saharan.

Considering we were only there for 24 hours we saw a lot of stuff. I think my favorite part might be swimming at Presque Isle state park on Lake Erie on the way home. The water was so clear there there hat I opened my eyes underwater. Unfortunately I got no pics of it.

It was making me crazy trying to get it to the native resolution of the macbook air 11 inch. Hopefully this helps someone else looking to do the same thing.

$ xrandr --newmode "1368x768_60.00" 85.25 1368 1440 1576 1784 768 771 781 798 -hsync +vsync
$ xrandr --addmode VBOX0 "1368x768_60.00"
$ xrandr --output VBOX0 --mode "1368x768_60.00"

The website seemed so promising Although I was was more than a little suspicious about the last minute venue change and the dropout of one of the headlining DJs.

I got these pictures in the last few minutes as the "police" were supposedly shutting down the party at 11PM shortly after it started. It sucked because the music was good and the floor was very danceable. At the same time it was about 150 degrees in there with no ventilation and no return entry.

Originally the party was supposed to be at a much larger venue. We I saw it was moving to the small Moose Lodge, I wrote and asked the promoter how 2000+ people were supposed to fit in there. He said, "don't worry we have it covered." Maybe, we have it covered meant we are going to cover all of the windows and doors and then pretend the police are shutting down after we steal all of your money.

It was pretty terrifying because they really had no exits. I didn't realize at first but the fire exists and windows were all closed up like on those horrible after school specials where everyone dies at the concert.





It was weird because as far as we could tell the police never showed up. So basically there were a bunch of drugged out ravers all over the street which was a pretty fun spectacle in and of itself.









Afterwards we ended up just crusing around Pittsburgh. We already had the hotel so we went to their version of Allentown, followed by their version of Chippewa. The dance club we ended up at called Diesel was pretty sweet on the inside. I feel like @lilho would have loved it.