PenguinFX

Some Before/After Pictures

2011-10-31T14:26:00.000-07:00

Finally going to take a break now that the house is mostly put back together. ...Probably time to go cut down some trees or something.

Broken Hound Dog

2011-03-30T10:41:00.000-07:00

So, the Hound Dog hurt her self yesterday. I came home to a patch of scruffy fur on her right side, which she didn't want me to look at, which, of course, I had to look at. She tried to hide across the room and woo'd at me. When she won't even let me look, you know the Hound Dog is hurt.

She ended up having a 2" gash on her right side, only about 1/2" was all the way through the skin. There's an ER vet just down the street. A few dollars and few stitches later and the Hound Dog is all better.

She's still a bit sore, as expected, and got to spend the night in bed. Walking up and down stairs seems to hurt a bit, but she's much happier this morning compared to last night. I think she jumped off the bed in the spare bedroom and hit the corner of the TV stand. There's no blood anywhere that I can find, but the stand is the right height and she spends all day in that bed.

From Doggies

Good customer service... really

2010-09-22T17:27:00.000-07:00

So, I've had some interesting customer service experiences recently from 2 different airlines... yah, really. A couple of weeks ago I was booking a flight on delta for February. As it turns out (well, rather frequently), the first of February and the first of March fall on a Tuesday; therefore March 22 and February 22 are both Tuesdays. Somewhere along the way I booked the wrong month, oops. I noticed a few hours later, called Delta Airlines and they said no problem, refunded the ticket and said just go book what you wanted. No fighting, arguing, or attempted fees.

For my flight next week, well it turns out that the one I booked was cancelled and I never got the email saying what it was changed to. The flight was changed from a red-eye to to a next day morning flight; pretty crappy. I noticed this today, a few days before I'm suppose leave. Landing at 5pm vs the original 10am is not acceptable. This time I call up Continental Airlines. They were a little non-helpful at first. The lady said emails were sent out over a month ago on August 7th and mine didn't bounce so they didn't call me. They verified my email address and I double checked my inbox. I was polite and insisted this new flight wasn't going to work; I had transportation, dinner reservation, airport rides, all lined up. At the very least it would have cost me another $100 since I would have to park at the airport. Erin, the CSR, said nothing for a few seconds and said there's a flight on a different airline that would allow me to catch the 2nd half of the original flight, but it would be 2 layovers instead of 1, but I land at the original time. It took her about 10 minutes to book it because she wasn't able to book flights on other airlines from her desk, but I thought this was really awesome. While I think a phone call should be required when moving flights from 1 day to the next, they handled everything OK in the end.

Stray cattle...

2010-05-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

So I came home last night to some stray cows stuck in my backyard. I was going to keep them, but they decided to break down my fence and leave.

From House

I own my brain

2010-03-05T09:32:00.000-08:00

I just made my final student loan payment today. I finally own my brain..

Happy Birthday Chloe

2009-11-27T22:38:00.001-08:00

...you're 2 1/2 today.

Grr... hound dog

2009-10-20T23:19:00.001-07:00

Callie figured out how to open her other food container today. This container tho, has a latch. She's bloated and gassy again tonight. I guess the dog food lives in the garage for now on.

Bad hound dog

2009-10-13T12:39:00.000-07:00

So Callie figured out how to open her store-n-feed food container. She did it once when it was full and easier to get in, but now she knows its possible and can do it pretty easily. I caught her getting it open while her tummy was still upset from the first episode of binge eating.

It took her a whole day and then some to get over her eating spree. She refused her nightly walk that night and really didn't sleep the entire night. Every 15 minutes or so she would fart, which would scare her and she would have to run out of the bedroom, followed by me laughing until my eyes watered..... repeat about 25 times throughout the night. I didn't get to sleep either.

Anyways, a few days later and here's the hound dog throwing a fit because Chloe hasn't finished her raw hide fast enough. See, Callie used to steal her sister's treats. Sister wised-up and snaps at Callie if she gets too close. Callie knows this and therefore, stands at the bottom of the stairs and throws a a tantrum.

Upset tummy

2009-10-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

The hound dog got the lid off her food container yesterday and had a party while I was gone. Her tummy was quite bloated all night... But the gas was the worst. Every few minutes she would let one rip and scare herself half to death. She would run away and be all edgy for the next 15 minutes. Repeat all night, but also add her needing to go poop every 2 hours as well.

Yup, Another....

2009-09-18T20:50:00.000-07:00

...loaf of bread met its demise to the hound dog's belly. You'd think we'd learn by now. ...Apparetly not.

Moved offices today

2009-09-03T17:44:00.001-07:00

I moved offices this morning - well, actually I came in this morning and all my stuff was moved for me. I walked over to my new home to unpack and say "hi" to everyone and the new boss dude says "here's your new Dell 2408WFP LCD." It's nice - 24" 1920x1200, portrait or landscape, HDMI, 2x DVI, VGA, Component Video, SVideo, Composite video, display port, built in card reader, etc etc etc. I'm currently driving 3 displays. On Tuesday I get to order a new development system - pretty much what ever I want.

New Job

2009-08-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

I have a new job, well almost. I'm not leaving Intel or anything, just moving a few buildings over. The paperwork is being done today and I'll going to accept it once HR gets back to me later this week. I've been doing the same thing for 5 years - it's time for a change.

I'm moving back into software; working on our OpenCL compiler. It's extremely nerdy (even for most nerds), but is a great transition from what I'm doing now. Oh, the only customer for OpenCL is Apple, so I'll be toying around with macs.

Hungry Hungry Hound Dog

2009-07-16T13:09:00.000-07:00

Callie ate a pound of authentic Italian pasta yesterday. Maybe one of these days she'll learn to hide the evidence and not leave the empty wrappings on the floor.

Busy weekend

2009-05-18T10:41:00.001-07:00

All day saturday was spent playing "Find That Stench". The lingering rotting garbage smell got rather bad with apparent no source. The entire downstairs tile floor got bleached and steamed. All the furniture got shampooed . Everything the dogs touch got washed. All the carpets got shampooed... smell is gone now; still not entirely sure what it was.

Sunday the furniture got cleaned again with plain water. Melissa's gross car got shampooed (some how, while she was at work). Then I managed to change my tranny and diff fluid. Btw, if you're not running redline MT90 in your tranny, you should be; after only 20 miles with it in, I'm very amazed. And finally, I took down and sold my 72 gallon fish tank for more than I bought it for. 6 tanks was getting to be a bit more than I wanted to take care of.

2009-04-15T10:04:00.001-07:00

Callie ate a loaf of bread and a giant horse turd the other day. ...I let her lick my face shortly after the turd.

Meow meow

2009-03-31T13:54:00.000-07:00

Introducing the latest addition to the zoo.

Dr. Pepper

From Doggies

Popcorn

From Doggies

New Doggie Pictures

2009-01-17T16:27:00.001-08:00

How about a before and after diet picture?

From Doggies

Bunches of new doggie pictures are up starting around here

Obvious switch

2008-12-05T10:30:00.001-08:00

I'm trying out Blogger, at least for now. I really don't have a reason to do my own hosting any more. I was using SimplePHPBlog since it was, well, simple, but the lack of updates for the past 9 months and several know security remote security problems with it make it more trouble then its worth. I tired WordPress and Drupal and some others and they were good, but all I really want is to post the occasional picture - I don't need my own hosting service for that. Maybe I'll change my mind if I have any problems with Blogger, but for now this is plenty good.

New Doggie

2008-11-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

Chloe came home Firday afternoon. She's a 2 year old underweight Shepard/something-else mix and as sweet as can be. She came from the Sacramento Independent Animal Rescue and we currently have her on a try-before-you-buy program. This group does a minimum 2 week foster for all their dogs before permanently placing them, which I like a lot more than the 30 minutes you get to spend with the dog that most rescues do.>

Callie is still being a bit of a poop towards her, but they play together when Callie thinks we're not looking :). Callie always is a bit stubborn anyways, especially since she's in her ideal weight range.

Chloe shows signs of being beat - walking up to people with her head real low, doesn't ask to go outside, just holds it in no matter how bad she has to go, doesn't make a sound, etc - which is a bit odd since she loves people and cuddling on the couch. She only weighs 38 pounds, and probably should be closer to 55 - 60 since she's about 2 inches taller, and quite a bit longer than Callie. An extra cup of dog food a day should fix that in no time.

New Callie Pictures

2008-07-20T17:00:00.000-07:00

We took Callie to the dog park twice last weekend. We were a interested in how she would react to the other dogs, if she would listen off a leash, etc. Turns out she's actually pretty good running loose.>

Also, we think Callie is actually a Harrier Hound (which is what I thought she was at first too) - the problem tho is that Harriers are extremely rare in the US and there are only a hand full of breeders registered with the AKC. Since they're so rare she would have been a rather expensive dog to have just been given away. We found a few breeders in NYC, 1 in LA and 1 in San Francisco. We've also found a bunch of Harrier community groups from San Diego to Portland. Callie's ears are a bit too pointy for a beagle, her nose is too long, she's too tall, she's naturally bow legged, and doesn't have dewtoes. All of these things perfectly match a Harrier though.

New Pictures Start Here

Happy 1st of Raunuary

2008-06-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

YaY!

:)

:)

:)

Arf

2008-06-15T17:00:00.000-07:00

Here's our new friend Callie. She's a slightly chubby beagle (maybe something else mixed in - I can't tell yet. Maybe I'll decide after the diet). She's 5 years old and needed a home. >

So far she's been a sweetie. She has no interest in table food, furniture, toys, and doesn't follow you around when you leave the room. The only sound she's made is a few whimpers to go outside. It took 2 days before I could get her to eat: I tried putting her bowls in the extra bathroom, but the traumatic bath experience keep her from going in there. As soon as I moved her bowls into the kitchen she chowed down; she was very well behaved during the baths, but oh well. She likes new smells, and new noises are scary, but only the first time. Her hobbies at this point include sleeping against the couch. She's not too fond of her kennel/cage yet and requires a shove to get in, but after that she's fine in it.

Callie's Gallery

Fish Stuff

2008-05-22T17:00:00.000-07:00

I built a rather simple hood for my 72 gallon bowfront last weekend, and finished wiring the lights up tonight. Some 1x4 pine, wood glue, screws, spray paint, and a miter box and off I went. AH supply, where I got new reflectors from, claim 30% more light enters the tank and I'd guess that's pretty close to right compared to my old and crappy reflector on my old fixture. The before and after pictures were both taken a f/2.8 to prove the reflectors were worth the effort, but when metered with the SLR said the new bulbs are about a third stop brighter when focusing on the tank.>

There's a little problem with my gallery if you haven't noticed; it appears that when I request a thumbnail, picasa says the image size is that of the original image, not the thumbnail; this forces the browser to do some nasty scaling. I'll try to remember to figure out it's problem, but until then you can go directly to the picasa gallery.

New Fishy Hood

My code is so powerful...

2008-03-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

...that I don't step through it looking for bugs, I STOMP on it looking for elephants and mananths.

I hate people my age

2008-03-22T17:00:00.000-07:00

Melissa, myself and Vincent went to see the >Presidents on Monday. Vincent wanted to go and was looking for someone to go with. There's this bar about a mile from my place that manages to get a lot of bigish and formerly bigish bands playing there almost every night. The first band was some local guys that just got their first song on the radio last week. Next was this guy. He was entertaining for about 2 songs after which he needed to die in a fire. Followed by The Presidents, who were good; worth my few bucks, especially since they own their own label so I don't mind supporting them.

Being at a crappy bar at 1am on a Monday night did remind me of something: there's a certain type of person that enjoys bud light, 500 people packed into a room that has a "maximum occupancy 200" sign, standing next to a classy girl with a newborn and stroller in 1 hand and a 2 year old in the other (no joke), at 1am on a weekday . ...Since I don't have a myspace page, I'm not one of them.

:)

More junky cars

2008-02-08T16:00:00.000-08:00

So the new 2008 Dodge Challenger SRT had its big party the other day. Maybe you've seen the news.>

425hp 6.1L "Hemi" V8

...ooohhh ....ahhh, right?

Look at rest tho. Automatic only. 13/18mpg. 4140 pounds and 3.06 final drive gearing. So thats 425hp / 4140lbs = 0.10hp per pound with crappy gearing. Sure it'll be loud and mean in have no problems destroying a set of tires in 30 seconds, but its just another big heavy and rather crappy american car. Please please please do something different for a change. A remake of a 38 year old design is nothing to be proud of. The Viper was exciting; even the neon-SRT4 was exciting; The challenger is not.

RX8 (1.3L Rotary):
238hp / 3053lbs = 0.078hp per pound
Top Gear lap time: 1:31.8

350Z (3.5L V6):
306hp / 3320lbs = 0.092hp per pound
Top Gear lap time: 1:31.8

STI (2.5L 4cyl + turbo):
300hp / 3263lbs = 0.091hp per pound
Top Gear lap time: 1:30.8

So dodge managed to make a car that performans as well in a straight line that the non-US car companies managed to do with half the engine and a 1000 pounds less weight, and this makes the news? ....and I bet it doesn't even turn...

If I had to bet I'd say it'll go the way to the "new" Ford Thunderbird; tho maybe having a "Hemi" will save it.

It's impossible to live in Folsom, CA

2008-01-13T16:00:00.000-08:00

>Based upon CNN's 2007 report

Median family income: $97,012
Sales tax: 7.80%
Income tax: %9.30
Average Auto insurace premiums: $2076
Median home price: $492,155
Average property taxes: $3,975
Amount spent on vacations per year average per household: $8,269

Lets Calculate how much we actually have to spend after typical expenses assuming CNN is correct:

15% into retirement: $82,460
Federal tax 25%: $61,845
State tax: $56,094
Vacation: $47,825
Mortgage $2200/mo * 12 month: $21,424
Car ($350/mo payment + insurance): $15,148
Utilities ($200/mo): $12,748
Food ($200/wk family of 4): $2,348
Gasoline (231 miles/wk EPA average at 22mpg at $3.30/gallon): $684.8
Health insurance ($4000/yr): $-3,315
Property Tax: $-7,290
Home owners insurance...
School supplies...
Car repair...
Home repair...

I'll just stop here. We know people are too dumb not to go on vacation, but even if we remove the 401k contributions we're still in the hole.

Noise making toys

2007-11-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

This is what happens when the guys I work with actually give their kids the toys I buy them (no more link to the movie - photobucket took it down). It's the train from the Pablo circus set.>

New Apartment Pictures

2007-11-11T16:00:00.000-08:00

Posted some pictures of the new place - the rooms that have been cleaned at least. Should finish the rest during the week.>

Apartment Pictures

Cool stuff with Ruby

2007-10-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a problem with 2 other guys this last week. Basically our SDK tries to guarantee we can't do anything bad to our PCI devices we are testing. Our runtime library does tons of stuff for us like state tracking, memory management, etc. The runtime does all of its tracking by giving us a 'handle' to whatever thing we tell it to track, be it state, memory, or something else. >

For some tests we have to burn through tens of thousands of handles with the goal of having as many different state changes in flight at one time. We can't always reuse handles because we can't be sure exactly when hardware is done using that piece of memory and we don't want any race conditions. While we have checkin privs to the runtime, it's really not our code, so drastic changes are too risky when a thousand or so people use it all day long.

The problem comes after a few minutes of burring handles like a party in Salem, the runtime starts spending so much time doing handle lookups that our execution efficiency quickly goes to almost 0. We tried using hashes and all the other obvious data structures to track handles, but they all fall apart when you have several million handles each of about 2 dozen types to track. The SDK has the ability to destroy handles, but knowing when its safe to destroy them is hard.

First we tried manually issuing destroys, which works great, except it requires modifications to every piece of code. Since each state is represented by an object we next we tried injecting a finalizer to each object at run time (Ruby doesn't have destructors - finalizers are called after garbage collection so it's good enough for this problem). If the object has been garbage collected we can't possibly still need its handle.

This mostly worked, except that the SDK tracks all handles created so that it can slap you if you try to use one that is already being used. This is very helpful, but delays the garbage collection because the SDK still has a reference to our objects and won't release them until we can hit a sync point. Sometimes we can generated millions of handles between sync points.

We came up with 2 solutions. First is WeakReferences. A weak reference is a Ruby proxy object that wraps another object. The cool part is the proxy object doesn't count as a reference and won't stall garbage collection. The bad part is that we never know when the garbage collector will kick in so it's annoying that an object you're working with can disappear at any point, which leads to really strange errors. You'll get exceptions from Ruby that you can catch, but the SDK internals aren't designed for exceptions (we abort on errors) so this is doable, but slightly painful.

What we ended up with is iterating over all objects currently on the heap using the ObjectSpace Ruby object. ObjectSpace exposes an iterator that touches every object that is currently alive. Instead of the SDK keeping lists of objects it needs to track we just simply iterate over all objects alive and check its type. This isn't as painful as it sounds; we only need to do the iteration about 100 times per handle/object type and over a 20 minute run the overhead is not measurable. Now we don't stall garbage collection until sync points and as soon as an objects finalizer is called we can

The results were, on average, 30% faster runtime performance and in some special cases (the reason we wanted to fix this) 90% faster runtime performance.

1 week left

2007-09-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

~2 weeks down, 1 to go. Time is really going by quite fast, being busy is probably helping that along. I could really go for a burger and a class of chocolate milk about now. More pictures are up if you want to dig for them.

Bannerghatta National Park

2007-09-21T17:00:00.000-07:00

Took a trip up to >Bannerghatta National Park today. Since we were a bit early for park tours and the zoo opening we talked through the near by village. They have wild monkeys that run around, which is kinda fun, but a creature capable of fling poo sitting in the trees above me was a bit distracting. Apparently the village has the occasional problem of elephants wandering out of the park and eating their crops.

The Bannerghatta Zoo was pretty disgusting. They had a ton of snakes pits with chain link fence around them - somehow I doubt the chain link fence if the snake was able to get near the edge of the pit. Since the pits have trees in them it was a bit odd.

The safari ride was mostly fun. The part of the forest was fenced in where the animals pretty much roam free. The safari driver was nice enough to take pictures for anyone if you couldn't get a good shot from your chair, but he usually forgot to wait the second it takes the auto focus to kick in, so most of those pictures are blurred and crappy.

On the way back I had lunch at a very upscale Indian restaurant. I had some chicken kebobs where are served on a sword and some other spicy chicken and lamb stuff. The kabobs were great, but what really surprised me was the freshly made Naan bread. I have a bunch of recipes for Naan, but never bothered to make it; I'll have to start.

As always more pictures are up. There'll be more when my battery recharges.