Ankaerith

Ramos Redux

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:08:57 GMT

Fruity Pebbles Pain Peru

Crab Hash w/ Bacon Scrambled Eggs
and Sour Cream Remoulade

A Day in the Life

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:04:35 GMT

Bokeh

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 07:11:28 GMT

I really like this picture. This is straight out of my camera.

Curves

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:08:07 GMT

See the rest.

Environmental Portraits

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:43:56 GMT

See the rest.

Photo 1(01): Fire Hydrant

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 07:46:15 GMT

I've enrolled in a night class at the local community college. From a strictly academic stand point, Photo 1 might not have been the best choice. Shockingly, I do know about things like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and depth of field. What Photo 1 is doing, is making me go out and shoot, and shoot manual. An unfortunate side effect of this is I'm rapidly filling up my file server with an enormous number of pictures. Because it is an intro class, the critique is rather restrained; I'd enjoy a bit more rigorous exposure bashing. I'll post a few of the best shots from each assignment. I'd welcome and appreciate any comments—good or bad.

All pictures are shot 100% manually; no post production work is allowed (not even cropping). These pictures are straight out of the camera. Assignment one was to shoot a single object at a single focal length from a variety of angles. Meet my fire hydrant; we became quite good pals. Click for larger versions.

See the rest.

DOB0 <3 California Speedway & BMW Driving School

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:18:06 GMT

I discovered something interesting last weekend. It turns out that thing we do in our cars every day on the way to and from work isn't driving. Rote operation of a motor vehicle, maybe, but not driving. Driving is altogether more elusive and thrilling. The first track session was all adrenaline and anxious attention to keeping four wheels on pavement. Session two entailed entry, apex, exit, and line, line, line. Braking, shifting, and throttle control were mixed in on the next run. Finally, to the song of a six cylinder choir, mind, body, and machine took a dance across the track in blissful embrace. I've fallen in love with my car all over again and likely acquired a new ~~hobby~~ addiction.

If you've never been on a skidpad, git yer butt off the intarweb and into a car control clinic.

Adventures with DOB0

Sun, 24 May 2009 06:09:38 GMT

It was a sunny California afternoon some indeterminate number of months ago and I was at the gas station filling dobo¹ with go-juice. While engaged with this task, an Asian gentleman gets out of his truck and walks over looking slightly agitated. He asks me if I know how to get to UCLA. Yes, of course I know how to get to UCLA, doesn't everyone? You get on this street here; head thataway; get on the freeway; go a while; get off the freeway; turn on some street; turn on some other street by some big buildings, and you're there. It dawns on me that either I've lived in LA four years and failed to learn a single street name, or anytime someone asks you for directions all street names immediately vanish from your mind.

The man walks back to his truck looking more agitated. I grab a squeegee and start washing my windows. If only I had access to some global information resource, too bad the Internet is only good for porn. But wait, I have a Jesus Phone!

Deus ex machina in hand, I walk over to the gentleman who is now loudly speaking on his cell phone. It occurs to me that he is likely speaking with his kid, a student at UCLA, who apparently doesn't know how to operate the Internet, a paper map, or direct his parents to his own school. I proceed to give him turn by turn directions to UCLA, which he proceeds to shout loudly into the phone. Why, I haven't the slightest, since I assume the person on the other end isn't the one most in need of directions.

Rescue of lost parents successful, I walk back to my car, get in, and drive away.

I'm not sure there is any story left to tell, but I will share two more bits. I didn't actually leave the gas station with the nozzle still in my car and the gas station attendant didn't even seem the slightest bit fazed when I pointed out the dead snake thing coiled at the base of the pump.

¹ : If you're wondering why I call my car dobo, you might find this illuminating.

The Best Marshmallow Ever

Sat, 23 May 2009 08:36:15 GMT

If you're ever within striking distance of San Juan Capistrano, make sure you hit up the Ramos House Café for brunch. Tucked away on the oldest street in California, it is positively divine.

not a coffee blog, honest

Thu, 07 May 2009 04:11:34 GMT

d90 + espresso = more pr0n

Sun, 03 May 2009 04:51:20 GMT

I won't subject you to any more of these for a while. I'm a bit disappointed in these pictures actually, but I couldn't bring myself to down another shot of espresso tonight just for a retake.

spreso porn

Sat, 02 May 2009 07:24:17 GMT

You can't buy espresso in a supermarket. It doesn't come from a bag; you can't press it, siphon it, steep it, or brew it.

It's extracted by forcing one to two ounces of 200 degree water under 9 bar of pressure through 14-18g of finely ground beans in 25 to 30 seconds. It's topped with crema, a melange of CO₂, oils, coffee solids, and other goodness, a bit reminiscent of freshly poured Guinness.

The four Ms of espresso: Miscela, Macinacaffe, Macchina, Mano (coffee blend, grinder, machine, barista)



Caffeine Extractinator	Naked Portafilter—scandalous


tiger flecked crema	rosetta? apple? ...not quite sure

After taking my old espresso machine to work; I've become the unofficial office barista. I was pulling shots for the president and two VPs last week. I feel I deserve a raise for taking on additional responsibilities.

If you pass through LA, swing by for an espresso; it's much more satisfying to make coffee for others.

Pseudo Synchronous Replication to Amazon S3

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 07:40:52 GMT

I've been using Amazon's S3 service as my "backup in the sky" for quite a while. Combined with s3sync, a ruby script that mimics the functionality of rync, you've got a small footprint backup solution that just works. Shortly after getting it running, I began to wonder how I could improve my super fancy backup system (a couple s3sync cron jobs).

s3sync uses file size and MD5 hashes to determine if a file has changed and if so update it in your S3 bucket. You can force s3sync to not MD5 each file but for a number of reasons, this option won't work for me. As you might guess, hashing every file your backup set will leave your disks and CPU thrashing for quite a while if you have a significant amount of data. I primarily use S3 to keep backups of all my digital photos stored on my file server, not a small amount of data. As a result, I only scheduled s3sync to run once a week. This creates another issue, if I add some photos on Monday, experience an act of god which destroys my file server on Thursday, I'll have lost those pictures since the cron job only runs every Sunday.

Wouldn't it be better if I could just sync a file after it is created or modified?

Enter inotify, inode based file system event notification—perfect. Instead of s3sync running amuck trying to determine if a file changed, the kernel will say, 'Excuse me sir, but I think your photo of Fido was just modified, better upload it to S3.' And that's exactly what you'll do.

Inotify compiled into your kernel by itself isn't that helpful since it requires various system calls to use—not what I'd call user friendly. Luckily, someone's already written incron, a cron-like daemon that uses inotify.

Inotify/incron aren't without some caveats. Neither will recurse sub-directories, which means you'll have to explicitly define each folder path to watch. The incron developer claims he is working on recursive directories but doesn't appear to have made much progress. The bash script I've written addresses the issue of directory recursion.

Get s3sync working with Amazon S3; this guide is a good start.
Set up incron and start it running.
Drop s3rep.sh somewhere on your system and edit it to adjust a few of the configuration options to reflect your system.
s3rep.sh -a /your/watched/directory

That's it. The script will recurse the path and add each folder to your incrontab and s3sync those folders. Any changes to files will be uploaded immediately in the future. You can also remove folders from the watch list with the -d option. By default the script does not delete items off S3 that are removed from your watched directory. You can enable it by setting deletion to 1. The script will also add and remove any created or deleted directories from the watch list.

I use a slightly modified version of s3sync which utilizes S3's content-MD5 header to ensure uploaded files match local copies. It also supports upload and download throttling. My friend Tienshiao is responsible for the patch, bug him if you'd like a copy. Finally, this is my first foray into bash scripting (and last?). I make no guarantees about the strength of my bash-fu. If it karate-chops your hard drive in half....please send pictures.

At some point I'll probably adapt the script to work with s3fs and rync.

You can download s3rep.sh here.

#!/bin/sh
#
#  S3rep.sh version 1.0
#  Copyright 2009 Matthew Staver
#
#    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
#    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#    the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or
#    (at your option) any later version.
#
#    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#    GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#    along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>

pid="$$"
# Set type to first argument.
type="$1"
# Set path to the rest of the arguments.
path="${*:2:$#}"

# Default incron mask, if you never plan to use deletion=1 and your
# directories are fairly static you can set this to:
#
# mask="IN_CREATE,IN_CLOSE_WRITE,IN_MOVED_TO"
#
# This may slightly reduce system load, but your incrontab file will
# not be cleaned of watched directories that are moved or deleted.
# I highly recommend you leave this with the default setting.
mask="IN_CREATE,IN_DELETE,IN_CLOSE_WRITE,IN_MOVED_TO,IN_MOVED_FROM"

# The location of your spool/queue directory.
queue="/var/spool/s3rep"
lockfile=/var/run/s3rep.pid
# The location of s3sync
s3path="/root/s3sync"
# The location of your incrontab file
incrontab="/var/spool/incron/root"
# The s3bucket you want to use
bucket="yourbucket"
# Set this to 0 to turn off syslog logging
syslog=1
# Set this to 1 to enable deletion from S3 of removed files/directories
deletion=0

function log () {
   [ $syslog -eq 1 ] && logger -t "s3rep[$pid]" "$@" || cat > /dev/null
}

case "$type" in
   'IN_CREATE')
      exit 0
   ;;
   'IN_CREATE,IN_ISDIR' | 'IN_MOVED_TO,IN_ISDIR' | 'IN_CLOSE_WRITE' | 'IN_MOVED_TO' | '-a')
      # If a file or directory is created, edited, or moved into a watched directory
      # symlink the it in the queue directory. If no uploads are currently running,
      # call this script with the UPLOAD option to start processing the queue directory.
      symname="$pid`date +%N`"
      ln -s "$path" "$queue/$symname"
      log "Queued: '$path' in '$queue/$symname'"
      [ ! -e $lockfile ] && $0 UPLOAD &
   ;;
   'IN_DELETE' | 'IN_MOVED_FROM')
      # If a file is deleted or moved out of a watched directory: Check to
      # see if deletion is enabled in the script.  If so, delete it from S3.
      [ $deletion -eq 1 ] && $s3path/s3cmd.rb --ssl --verbose delete $bucket:"$path" 2>&1 | log
   ;;
   'IN_DELETE,IN_ISDIR' | 'IN_MOVED_FROM,IN_ISDIR' | '-d')
      # If a directory is deleted or removed from a watched directory: Remove
      # the directory from the watched list in the incrontab file.  Check
      # to see if deletion is enabled in the script and if so, remove all files
      # from within the watched directory.
      sed -i "\|^${path// /\\\ }|d" $incrontab
      log "Removing '$path' and all sub-folders from watch list '$incrontab'"
      [ $deletion -eq 1 ] && $s3path/s3cmd.rb --ssl --verbose deleteall $bucket:"$path" 2>&1 | log
   ;;
   'UPLOAD')
      # Check for lockfile and being uploads if it doesn't exist.
      if ( set -o noclobber; echo "$$" > "$lockfile") 2> /dev/null;
       then
         # Trap exits and clean up lockfile.
         trap 'rm -f "$lockfile"; exit $?' INT TERM EXIT
         # Pop oldest symlink, store it, and unlink it.
         symlink=$(ls -rt1 $queue | sed -n -e '1,1p')
         linkpath="$(readlink "$queue/$symlink")"
         unlink "$queue/$symlink"
         # If it is a directory s3sync the files inside.
         if [ -d "$linkpath" ];
          then
            log "Syncing '$linkpath' and all sub-folders to S3 bucket: '$bucket'"
            $s3path/s3sync.rb --ssl -r --verbose "$linkpath/" $bucket:"$linkpath" 2>&1 | log
            # Recurse directories, stream edit them to escape any spaces with \,
            # append each directory to the incrontab file. NB: For some reason
            # incron does not pass trailing spaces in triggered events.  I've
            # added a trailing \ to the incrontab and this appears to resolve this.
            # I assume it causes incron to pass the trailing space and the \, and
            # bash ignores the \.
            find "$linkpath" -type d |sed -e 's| |\\ |g' -e "s|\$| $mask $0 \$% \$@/\$#\\\|" >>$incrontab
            log "Added '$linkpath' and all sub-folders to watch list '$incrontab'"
          else
            # Upload single file vis s3cmd put.
            [ -e "$linkpath" ] && $s3path/s3cmd.rb --ssl --verbose put $bucket:"$linkpath" "$linkpath"  2>&1 | log
         fi
         # Clean up lockfile
         rm -f "$lockfile"
         trap - INT TERM EXIT
         # Continue processing queue directory if symlinks remain.
         if [ "$(ls $queue|wc -l)" -gt "0" ]; then
            exec $0 UPLOAD
         fi
      else
         log "Upload $(cat $lockfile) in progress.  Failed to acquire lockfile: $lockfile."
      fi
   ;;
   *)
      echo "Usage: s3rep.sh [OPTION] DIRECTORY"
      echo
      echo "Options:"
      echo "  -a      add DIRECTORY and sub-folders to incrontab and sync to S3"
      echo "          NOTE: Do not include a trailing / after DIRECTORY"
      echo "  -d      remove DIRECTORY and all sub-folders from incrontab and"
      echo "          if deletion is enabled, remove them from S3"
      echo
      exit 1
esac
exit 0

This is Fuzzy Cat.

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 01:14:47 GMT

No, that's not her actual name, apt though it is. And I'm not here to talk about the Fuzzy Cat today. I'm here to discuss the Nikon D90. A magical, mystical, and wondrous device that has captured Fuzzy Cat in all her fluffy glory.

105mm, F5.6, 0.4s	105mm, F5.6, 1/60s, flash	18mm, F5, 1/3s

18mm, F5, 0.2s	18mm, F5, 0.25s	35mm, F5, 1/6s

This isn't going to be a technical review, if you want the nitty gritty details of how the D90 performs, its features and what not, ask the oracle of google. I'm going to simply tell you what I like about it.

The Good	The Bad
It's a Nikon It takes great pictures It's attractive It has a beautiful 3" LCD (the same as the $8000 D3X) It can shoot HD video It's fast, nearly 5 FPS continuous shooting It makes me never want to touch a point-n-shoot again It supports GPS for geotagging It can shoot RAW(NEF)+JPG Fine	It encourages excessive spending on glass NEF+JPG eats SD cards I look a bit like the borg with this thing stuck to my eye all day It makes me never want to touch a point-n-shoot again It's not a full frame sensor¹ It doesn't fit in my back pocket

My Kit:

¹ What's wrong with dreaming of a sub-$1000 DSLR body with a 35mm sensor?

Four interface pfSense based firewall on a mini-itx platform

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 08:42:45 GMT

For quite a while I was running m0n0wall on an old dell laptop with two NICs. This worked out pretty well because the laptop had a built-in screen, keyboard, and battery backup of sorts. It was also fairly portable. At some point I decided I wanted to do a bit more with my firewall and move to more powerful hardware. In particular, I wanted to try out pfSense, a m0n0wall fork. pfSense contains a package management system that allows you to install a wide variety of services including: Snort, Squid, FreeSWITCH, OpenBGPD, to name a few. I'll return to these in subsequent posts. I also needed more interfaces to be able to properly segregate my wireless network from my wired network.

I've been a big fan of the smaller form factor x86 machines for a while. Serapeum was built on a MicroATX form factor as well as my current desktop system. µATX is great for smaller desktop machines but is a bit too large for a firewall solution.

Mini-ITX seemed like the perfect option. I selected the Jetway J7F2 board with a 1.5Ghz Via C7 processor. Two compelling reasons for selecting this board were the Padlock engine, which provides hardware RNG, AES, and hashing acceleration, and support for daughter cards. Some quick OpenSSL benchmarks using the various engines provided these results:

cryptodev kilobytes per second:
type         16 bytes    64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes  8192 bytes
aes-256-cbc  10166.19k   10492.00k   10832.45k   10520.09k   10871.68k

padlock kilobytes per second:
type         16 bytes    64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes  8192 bytes
aes-256-cbc  69552.53k   221044.97k  475699.68k  662806.69k  745178.49k

The padlock hardware engine provides a 6850% increase in AES 256 encryption over the software based cryptodev. It peeks at about 5.7 gigabits per second. Cryptodev only achieves 85 megabits per second.

Summary of build hardware:
Jetway J7F2 VIA C7 1.5Ghz
Jetway AD3RTLANG 3 port GigaLAN daughter card
Corsair 1GB DDR2 533
Transcend 4GB CF 300x
M200 Enclosure
PicoPSU-120

Jetway J72F w/ daughter card	mounted in M200 case	PicoPSU 120W

first boot	closed up and ready to go	CF access panel

BEWARE TOXIC GAS

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:43:48 GMT

-Spotted by my roommate last week in China.

Barista Aspirations: Latte Art

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:47:55 GMT

I am very passionate about my personal endeavors. I might suggest obsessive hobbyist, but I wouldn't want you to think I lock myself in a room for weeks at a time surrounded with bits of plastic, decals, and super glue. As often as not, a short half-life makes violent work of the germ, leaving my closet strewn with the skeletons of hobbies past. Surprisingly, this one appears to have flowered.

We'll discuss espresso at a later date, today it's all about aesthetics (latte art.) Click to enlarge.

A large plop	hmm, squiggles	Tulip?	beginnings of a rosetta

where'd that come from?	right shape, horrible leaves	rosetta!	this one ain't bad either

See a pro in action

It finally arrived

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:00:14 GMT

After waiting what seemed like a lifetime for those silly Germans to build and ship my car, I finally picked it up from the dealer a month ago.

After wash and wax:

Click for more

Did I mention this car is really fast?

CDW Article

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:24:12 GMT

CDW_Article.pdf

More pictures from the shoot:

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 22:38:19 GMT

BMW 135i Coupe
3.0-liter, turbocharged inline 6-cylinder engine
300 horsepower
Rear-wheel drive

View Poll: BMW 135i Options

Project: Serapeum -- finished

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 02:00:02 GMT

A while back, I started a project to build a 1TB file server that was small, quiet, and fast. It has been up and running for over eight months, but I never got around to putting the final touches (bezel, activity LEDs and power switch) on it until recently.

It has a usable capacity of about 1.2TB and network transfer performance tops out at about 30MB/s but internally it performs much faster.

Credit for the design goes to Mashie and his uDat project.

CentOS 4.4 with XFS support
Antec Aria case with 300W PSU
DFI 855GME-MFG MicroATX
Intel Celeron M 1.5Ghz
2x256MB PC3600 ultra-low profile memory
Gigabit Ethernet
RaidCore BC4852 PCI-X controller
5 bay SATA Hot-Swap cage
6 Maxline III 300GB SATA HDs
1 Fujitsu 40GB laptop drive
1.2TB RAID5 array with hot spare

When I bought all the parts I was not entirely sure that it would end up fitting. Based on the stated dimensions I figured it would be a tight.

My canvas: Antec Aria MicroATX case

The first step was to strip off the bezel and various front connectors:

The hot swap cage is pictured beside the case for a quick size comparison. I'm still not sure how it all ended up fitting.

I've cut the necessary hole for the hot swap bay after judicious application of metal snips, pliers, a file, and a dremel.

Screwing the cage into position:

A tight fit:

I had originally planned to use normal memory modules but discovered they were too tall. I ended up buying some ultra low profile memory that was less than 1" in height. I had to cut down the CPU heatsink and mount the fan on the side. To get the enclosure connected in the available space required right angle SATA cables and right angle Molex power plugs. You can just see the power and data connections in this picture. There is about 2mm of clearance between the connections and the power supply.

Knowing the system would be generating a lot of heat I cracked open the power supply to replace the 120mm fan with a more powerful one. While testing the fan output with the power supply opened and on I bumped the metal frame into some of the internal circuitry. The PSU fried with a large spark and a pop. As you can see from the picture the power supply is far from standard. The price to buy a replacement was nearly the cost of a new case. I had accidentally kicked and dented one of the side walls of the case half asleep going to work one morning so the decision to purchase a new case was an easy one. With the arrival of a new sidewall and power supply I was back in business.

The system refused to recognize the controller card as a boot device. A beta bios from DFI solved the issue. The system was originally loaded with Windows Server 2003, but I was experiencing some performance issues in the form of consistent short freezes in disk I/O. The problem turned out to be related to the current Broadcom drivers, firmware, and SMART polling. Unfortunately, this was not discovered until after I'd made the painful switch to CentOS (painful because I had to backup 400GB of data to reload the OS.)

The first configuration of the system contained only 5 300GB Maxtor drives but I soon added a 6th as a distributed spare. The OS boot partition was part of the array which causes all manner of pain when updating the kernel. Can we say yay for binary kernel drivers? Every update would generate a kernel panic which would need to be resolved by rebuilding the ramdisk boot image with the correct drivers. It wasn't until I experienced some boot partition corruption that I discovered the true pain in booting from an array that requires special drivers to access. Let's not forget you can't issue advanced array configuration and rebuild commands without a functioning OS.) None of the standard Linux recovery and repair tools could read the boot partition and it was too much of a pain to try to insert the proper drivers into the rescue CDs. I mucked about with RIP Linux and others before giving up and installing a fresh copy of CentOS on a laptop disk and booting from that. The final configuration includes 7 disks, 1 laptop boot drive and 6 drives for the storage array.

It took me about 6 months to get around to finishing the bezel and activity lights but my gift to myself this last Christmas was Serapeum--completed:

The power button is a Bulgin illuminated vandal resistant switch. There are six blue activity LEDs. The boot drive is not included. It took two days of work with epoxy, saws, a dremel, and spray paint to finish the bezel. I was in a rush to finish it and never took any pictures of it in progress.

Serapeum in action:

A terabyte:

life starts at 80

Sun, 07 May 2006 19:50:31 GMT

I've become a compulsive speeder. If I'm not going at least 80 I might as well not be moving. Driving nirvana exists somewhere between 85 and 90--and I achieve enlightenment on a daily basis. I wasn't sure at first what worked this change in me, what alchemical process turned my foot to lead. Well, It turns out I have no patience for sitting in traffic, which should have factored into my decision to move to Los Angeles. I have to go as fast as reasonably possible when the opportunity presents itself, thus making up for all the time lost spent unmoving. Commuting forty seven miles to work each way for the last eight months definitely didn't help. Monday I start my new job which is a measly fifteen miles from my apartment. I'm not sure what I'll do with all my newfound free time; something suitably ~~useless~~ brilliant I'm sure.

My life as of late

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 07:51:07 GMT

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 10:25:03 GMT

So the NHL season is officially canceled, not that this comes as a surprise; we all knew there was no chance of the players and owners working it out. I could not care less; I don't watch sports^1.^^2 I hardly even watch TV. If the cable were suddenly disconnected it would be a while before I noticed. It pains me to confess (well not really) that I look down upon those that watch a few hours of TV every day. In truth, just turning on your television once a day marginalizes you. Elitist, condescending, and supercilious--yup, yup, and yup. And you better believe I'll decry your mindless entertainment while playing the game for multiple hours each day. I usually spew my vitriol from behind the pages of a novel but lately my reading has lost ground to this new beast.

It is February 18th and the first application is due in exactly two weeks. I will begin filling it out in exactly thirteen days. I've decided on the only sensible course after an extended period of career indecision: go back to school. Someone in my family asked me if I even want an MBA. After a moment of reflection punctuated by a healthy 'hmm' my response was, "not really, but I'd rather have it than a JD, less than a PhD^4, and school sure beats trying to figure out a career." It is just another form of procrastination, one that is likely to put me in debt but whatever. My sister piped up with, "I want to go too; we could live together in Berkeley." While I appreciate her automatic assumption that I could get into Berkeley again, she has never seen my transcripts or she'd know how very little I expectation I had of ever applying to graduate school. The lack of stellar marks poses a problem, a problem for the ego. I'm sure nibot knows where I'm coming from. You just can't (or at least would really rather not) attend a graduate school less prestigious than your undergraduate institution. Do you think they'll let me go back and retake a few classes I really hated and never did any work in? Not that it would be very productive; I still wouldn't actually study for them.

The firing of my current hairstylist after a drunken^5 cut right before I had to sit for a family portrait has left my hair in a state of unchecked growth. I despise finding a new stylist nearly as much as I enjoy procrastinating. Which when compounded means my hair will probably never see the shears again.

1) I only mention it because I share their plight. The lovely rain raining down washed out my game.
2) inertiacrept and other's prolific use of the footnote has brought to my attention that sometimes you just can't say everything at once without horribly disrupting the flow of your writing. ^6
4) The double foreign language requirement pretty much means I'll never earn a PhD in English unless I get the requirement waived due to dyslexia.
5) This is not hyperbole; he was quite intoxicated and offered me a shot of tequila.
6) It is a bit disturbing when your footnotes get footnotes--I apologize.

the now ceased, ceaseless torrent

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 14:40:10 GMT

It has been raining non-stop for what feels like an eon but has probably only been four days. I'm waiting for Noah to come pick me up in his ark. You see, I live in California and while most Californians tow the line and believe in the existence of water falling from the sky, quite a few are still at least a bit skeptical that such a thing actually occurs. Gruesome wreckages of flesh and metal littering the highways after a bit of rain is a testament to our powers of disbelief. And damn it, these tires are all weather. What is the point of all weather tires if you can't weave in and out of traffic at speeds exceeding 90mph in your Ford Extinction while talking on the phone to your therapist--without signaling!? Mother nature, fed up with all the smog and seeing that wet roads act as no deterrent to the stubborn California driver, has resorted to dropping giant boulders in our path.

Umbrellas. Why is it that many school kids (and even some adults) would rather be soaked to the bone than be seen with an umbrella? I suffered from such a complex and had the lovely pleasure of being drenched by El Niño a number of years back. Sometime during my 4.5 years in Northern California I discovered that an umbrella is a pretty swell invention. Though apparently, I haven't actually mastered their use as evidenced by my failed attempts the other night to make an automatic umbrella open through brute force instead of pushing the little button.