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Pepa wanted to take a peek at my morning route, so I figured I'd post some maps! These might take a second to load, be patient!
From my apartment to Qualcomm building AA, every morning:
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And the trip back, making good use of my unlimited bus pass:
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To go get groceries at our local Vons (because Whole Foods was scary):
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If I wanted to go into Qualcomm's main campus:
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22:33 PST — Made it! Got a taxi to the apartment complex, wandered around with my 40+ pound bag 'till I found the right poorly-marked building. Roommate had gotten here a few minutes before, seems awesome :-) The place is nice, everything looks good, hopefully! That's the end of this post, then!
21:22 EST — Turns out first-time in-flight WiFi is free; silly me! So now I'm posting this. From a plane. Awesome. 21:12 EST — We're over Albuquerque, apparently. I'm switching all of my clocks to PST. I should have waited to see if Apple's magic location-based timezone code works, but it certainly won't work here. 18:37 EST — I can't look out the window any more, it hurts my eyes too much. I wish I had this much light on the ground all the time (ISO 100, f/10-12, 1/400s, LOL! it's like shooting a lightbulb...) Should have put headphones in backpack; whoops.  18:31 EST — Here's some meaningless nonsense that Photoshop HDR just spit out. Garbage in, garbage out, I suppose... the plane is moving, the clouds are moving, I'm moving, etc.  18:23 EST — Took some pictures of clouds; neat! I have the whole half-row (the three seats on the right side) to myself... how bizarre? And most of the rest of the rows only have two people in them. Very empty flight, though there are still a lot of people here. We theoretically have in-flight WiFi, but I'm not paying for that sillyness! (someone should bring two wireless cards, and ...)   17:09 EST — Made it to my outgoing gate in Philly! The landing was a bit bumpy, but not horrible. Got off, had to take a bus to terminal C to get to the right gate; checked it on the display before I left, it said C24, by the time I got there it was C27 (I heard "San Diego *mumble*" on the intercom, so I made sure to double check). Got there in plenty of time, anyway, as it was only a few more feet. 16:12 EST — Apparently everyone (our stewardess especially) wants to go to San Diego instead of wherever they're going. Ha! Come with! 14:40 EST — Sitting next to two thirty-or-fourty-something test pilots in BTV having mid-life crises. Pretty funny guys (apparently they just became the first two to go through the training program for some bizarre new aircraft). 14:22 EST — At Burlington International; I got a " how many laptops do you have with you, sir?" at security. Only two, sir. Boarding at 14:58, hopefully.
Almost exactly two months ago, I wrote about the loss of Punkin, Vivian and Margaret's cat; I also mentioned his brother, Peanut, briefly.
Unfortunately, it seems that Peanut was unable to cope with his brother's absence. It came as a surprise when Vivian told me that he was ill on Wednesday evening; they had mentioned that he seemed a bit lost without Punkin, but I didn't realize just how much. By Thursday, his organs had failed to the point where they had to put him to sleep.
Peanut was the skittish of the pair, for sure. He would often dart away from affection; though that tendency weaned significantly in his later years. Still, when you managed to catch up with him, he could be just as loving as his sibling.
It's hard to believe he's gone now, just a few weeks after I last visited him (on Easter weekend); we'll miss Peanut dearly, but I think he's probably happier now alongside his brother, as he always was when they were both with us.
Goodbye.
It's no secret that my main machine, Kaylee, has been dying for quite some time. Between being bitten (for a second time) by the NVidia 8-series solder failure (which I've temporarily remedied by baking the logic board) and simple wear and tear from being beat on for many hours a day for the past almost-3 years, there wasn't much of a life left for that poor machine. I wrote a little bit about the various problems (and the many wonderful things we've been through)a few months ago, when I thought a replacement would be coming soon.
It took a bit longer than expected for Apple to launch Arrandale-based laptops, but they finally did, last Tuesday. Matt and I both ordered one on launch day; Matt to replace his RPI-issue ThinkPad, and myself to replace Kaylee.
I'm happy to report that I'm typing this on a shiny new black-and-silver keyboard: my new machine got here today! It's just as fast as I was hoping, between the Core i7 CPU and the Intel SSD that I installed in the optical drive bay and which is hosting my root partition!
I used the "Remote Install Mac OS X" tool that came out around the introduction of the MacBook Air to install (since I no longer have an optical drive in the machine)... it's definitely the slickest NetBoot interface I've seen; very cute!
And as for the name? Zoe, of course, keeping in the general naming trend (sci-fi characters, girls for Macs and guys for PCs). Zoe is the last (and second) of the Firefly girls who isn't either "Inara" (which doesn't roll off the tongue as well) or reeking of insanity and instability (River). So this is the end of the Firefly names, unless I get another PC before a Mac ("Mal! bad, from the Latin"). Luckily, Zoe provides an excellent jumping point into another (much larger) sci-fi universe:
This is a really bizarre picture (what in god's name is that thing on Daniel's face?) of part of the casts of Caprica and the recent reimagining of Battlestar Galactica.
In any case, Zoe Washburne, Zoe Greystone, let's say it's named after both!
Kaylee and Zoe meeting for the first time, this morning.
I got a 160 GB Intel SSD, and installed it in the optical drive bay. It's incredibly fast (incredibly; random read benches at something like 60x the speed of Jayne's disks, and more like 100x Kaylee's), and hosts my root partition, all of my applications, settings, things like that. It's incredibly rare that you get numbers like sixty times anywhere in the computing world, so I'm excited! I'm keeping my photos, music, and documents on the 500 GB magnetic disk that came with the machine (which also seems to be quite snappy as far as laptop hard drives go), since there's not nearly enough space on the root disk.
That's all I have to say for now. I'll definitely be back with more thoughts, after I've had a few days to play around.
A Summer Job
Good news! I've been offered (and have accepted) an internship position at Qualcomm in San Diego for the summer. It's an excellent offer, including relocation to and from California, housing for the summer (sharing a 2-bed 2-bath apartment with another intern), and various other things.
I'm not totally sure what I'm going to be working on (I'll talk more about that in the future, if I can), but it sounds like I'm going to be writing C for some manner of embedded platform for a mobile device, which sounds like fun! I'm really happiest in C anyway, so that works out well for me.
One thing that I was a bit worried about was Amy's graduation: she's finishing high school this summer, and I'm going to be just over 3,000 miles away. My parents decided that they'd fly me home for graduation, in any case, so that I wouldn't have to miss it!
A New Machine
Apple finally announced new MacBook Pros yesterday; I'll write more when it gets here, but thanks to Mom and Dad and Vivian and Margaret, there's one headed my way! I got the 15" with the Core i7, the 7200 RPM 500GB disk, and the 1680x1050 display (a much-needed upgrade from 1440x900, but not the resolution I wish it could be...). I'm planning on — at some point over the summer — swapping the rarely-used optical drive for an Intel SSD, depending on how Matt's experiments with said drive go over the next few weeks (I expect drooling to ensue). I just have to remember to take my external optical drive to California with me!
Anyway; it's got a name, but I'll share that later, when it gets here.
About three months ago, She & Him announced a few tour dates for their then-unreleased second album, the aptly-named Volume Two. I was scanning the list, noticing a severe lack of "Albany", "Boston", or "Burlington", when two dates in New York City caught my eye. The Bowery Ballroom - March 29th and 30th, they said. I asked Amy if she could go, but - being a Monday, a school day - she wasn't going to be able to pull that off.
Once I got back to RPI (in late January), I asked Carol (and Nate) if I could steal her for a day at the end of March. She managed to get a day off from work, and we got tickets to the concert and various forms of transportation. Getting concert tickets was a bit of a pain — the internet has made it very easy for scalpers to immediately consume the entire supply of tickets, especially to very small shows like this — but we eventually got it all sorted out.
As March drew to a close, it became clear that the 29th was going to be a disgustingly rainy day, both in NYC and Troy. "Oh, well," we said as we boarded a Megabus nearby the local Amtrak station — we were determined to make something awesome of the day, regardless of the weather.
We rode, chatted, and tried to nap on the top level of the double-decker bus all the way to Penn Station, getting in at just after 1 PM. After getting out and getting oriented, we meandered up Seventh Ave., heading in the general direction of MoMA, one of our potential plans for the few hours we had before the concert. On the way, we decided that food might be nice, and stopped at a small Chinese place called Ginger's which Carol spotted. The food was surprisingly good for a Chinese place, and we moved on, satisfied.
After a filling lunch, the subway seemed like a good option — in addition, we knew we were going to need to figure out the MTA so we could get to the concert on time. In retrospect I'm very glad we did this, as it turns out they made the horribly unfortunate choice (unlike Boston's MBTA) of putting maps after you've gone through the ticket machines, which through me off significantly.
The subway eventually put us relatively close to MoMA (ordinarily this would have been walking distance, but the rain coupled with the fact that we only had a single gigantic awkward-for-tight-NYC-streets umbrella with us led us to opt for the subway). We got down to the museum, only to spot enormous lines of people with the exact same idea. Walking through the lobby observing the crowds only cemented my belief that we'd never get in if we waited there. So, we gave up on that idea — we'll be back another day — and headed towards another classic NYC museum: the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Carol had been to the Met before, but noted that there was so much to see that she'd happily go again; I've never managed to visit either, myself.
Heading towards the Met, we walked through the puddles and mud up Fifth Ave., past many sights I've seen a few times before — Trump Tower, the iconic Apple Store, FAO Schwarz, etc. — up to Central Park. We decided that the umbrella would be less painful in the park, which seemed relatively empty, so we left the road for the somewhat-depressingly-wet park walkways.
I should note now that while it may seem like we shouldn't have been having a good time, between the weather and the crowded museum, we were actually having a lot of fun just enjoying the city and hanging out and looking around and chatting and such. As you'd expect!
The walk through the park was greatly improved by the various flowers just starting to pop out of the ground — it's pretty clear spring is on it's way, even if we have a month of rain ahead of us. We eventually got to the seemingly completely deserted Met, only to read the sign stating that they're closed on Mondays. I feel like I actually discovered this the last time I was in NYC, but I'd forgotten until we got there. I suppose that this somewhat explains the ridiculous lines at MoMA, but was rather unfortunate for us; we managed to spend a few hours wandering the city with our plan of getting inside out of the rain for a while continually falling down around us.
We decided to forego that plan and head (by subway, thank god) to Times Square and wander around some more (a pretty reasonable NYC backup plan, I guess!), which went well. I don't think Carol was particularly entertained by my reluctance to enjoy the various crazy stores (Hershey's, the M&M store, Toys R Us, etc.) around there, but nobody ever is! Oh, well!
At this point it was getting late — time for dinner, and to find our way to the Bowery Ballroom for the show. We decided to combine these things; the Bowery is smack dab in the middle of the Chinatown/Little Italy region, so we once again went underground and found ourselves in a new part of the city. After a short bit of looking around, we found (by found, I mean the guy standing outside the door managed to entice Carol to come inside with his descriptions of various dishes, while I was fussing with my phone trying to find things with Yelp) an excellent little Italian place, Paesano's, which served fabulous — if somewhat overportioned &mdash food. I don't think either of us came close to finishing our dinners, but we certainly both agreed that they were excellent, and were impressed that food wasn't the problem that it usually is on trips like these. The atmosphere there was nice, too... the waiters were really nice, and totally on their game the whole time. I'd definitely recommend it, if you happen to end up in the area.
Seven thirty eventually rolled around, and it was time to head over for the show, which started at 8 (or so I thought). We found the Bowery with no problem; it took us a minute to determine whether or not we could go inside, as there were tons of people standing around (apparently waiting for others). After making our way through the real-life-gigantic-scary bouncers, we found ourselves in a dimly lit room filled with the sort of crowd that frequents these sorts of things. I'm not totally sure how to describe them, but if you'd been there, you'd know exactly what I mean.
It turned out that the show didn't really start until 9:00, so we stood inside the ballroom for an hour, chatting and observing the crowd. Eventually the starting band came on — the super-hippie harmony group The Living Sisters. While it was clear that they were technically-competent and actually all had quite excellent voices, Carol and I were in agreement that it wasn't something we'd buy and listen to on our own. Still, they certainly entertained us... maybe nod in the way they'd hoped, but I suppose it was worth something!
It was at this point that we realized we had a serious problem — She & Him still hadn't come on at 9:30, and our train out was at 10:50, 20 minutes from where we were. We spend a good part of the intermission IMing and texting everyone from school trying to find someone who knew someone who lived in NYC, looking for a couch to crash on (there was no way I was going to leave without my concert!). After quite a bit of semi-panicked chatting, I decided to let Mom freak out, and sent her a text asking if she had any ideas. Luckily, I CC-ed Amy, who — after a bit of searching — found a bus company who had a 12:01 AM bus to Albany. Success!
If it hadn't been for Amy, we would have ended up camping out in Penn Station or the 5th Ave. Apple Store, neither of which would have gone over well with the staff, I suppose.
As it was, we only got to see about half of Zooey & Matt's show, but it was enough to make me very happy — it was exactly what I was hoping for, and I had a great time! Zooey is still adorable in person, they all sang/played very well, and thankfully played a mix of songs from both Volume One and Volume Two. You could tell when a song was from Volume One, as the whole crowd was able to sing along; Volume Two came out like a week before the concert, and nobody's really familiar with it (except for In The Sun, which was released as a single) yet!
All in all, it was one of my favorite concerts, even considering the fact that I missed half of it (she covered a lot of the awesome stuff; I only really missed Sentimental Heart, my personal favorite)! I'm really, really glad I went, I'm glad I dragged Carol along with me (I'm not sure the whole day would have worked out as well/smoothly with just about anybody else), I'm glad we waited, and I'm glad it all worked out.
So, yeah, the concert was excellent! Hopefully at some point in the future I'll get to take Amy and stay for the whole thing :-)
Most of the rest of the evening went off without a hitch; we got to the bus just on time, having taken a taxi (some random people saw Carol's distress at trying to hail a taxi and got one for her; that's something I probably wouldn't have been able to pull off at all!) to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Once on the bus, we realized that we should probably look up where it was going to, since it seemed unlikely to take us to the train station, where our car was. Indeed, the bus was destined for the Greyhound station in Albany, on the wrong side of the river (though only a mile from the car, it was 3 AM, not an ideal time to make that walk!)... back to AIM, searching for people at school who would still be awake at 3 AM!
Ryan had already been planning to stay up all night, so he came and saved us (for which we are eternally grateful!), shuttling us over the bridge to Carol's car. We got home at around 3:30, grabbed water, and promptly fell asleep (some more soundly than others, apparently).
All-in-all, it was an absolutely awesome day for all involved. We had a lot of fun, and perhaps we'll do something similar again (in a few months, after we've recovered from this trip!)...
Or, How I Baked My 400$ Logic Board In An Oven For Ten Minutes And Successfully Repaired It...
Take One
On one day nearly two years ago, one year after I'd acquired my current MacBook Pro, Kaylee, I opened the lid to a black screen. A black screen which stayed black, no matter what I tried to do. It was booting, though — using ioreg over ssh, I determined that it thought my video card (the now-somewhat-aging but still powerful NVIDIA 8600M) had suddenly become an integrated Intel X3100 — something which, barring the existence of gremlins or elves, had certainly not happened.
At that point, few people had heard of the NVIDIA 8-series solder failures. Approximately a week after my machine died, NVIDIA took a 150 million dollar hit to predicted revenue for that quarter to cover the fact that some of their mobile GPU lines were failing at "higher than usual" rates. Some people today believe that the entire 8-series was affected, even the desktop chips, but that the mobile chips failed at far greater rates because of the inherently more unfortunate thermal conditions within a laptop. It turned out that some of the solder connecting the GPU to the motherboard (or to the discrete card, in the case of the desktop chips) was of poor quality, developing cracks over time with repeated heating and cooling cycles.
I took my machine to Small Dog Electronics, who subsequently sent it to Apple for a logic board replacement. This was before Apple knew what was going on; before (almost a year, actually) the repair program was in place, so I convinced my parents (thanks, again!) to pay for the repairs.
Take Two
Fast forward to Saturday; almost two years after the first failure. Wake up Kaylee, no backlight. Power off, try again. Black screen, no backlight, but the disk sounds like it's booting just fine. I eventually managed to enable SSH (by pulling the disk out and attaching it to another machine) and noted that — once again — my video card reported itself as a Intel X3100. Grr...
This time around, I didn't really see repair as an option. While Apple now has a free repair program for this problem, I've beat my machine far beyond the point where any sane company would accept it for repairs even if I were to throw money at them. I didn't bother to even try. Besides, I'm really just waiting for new models and then I'm going to replace it, so it's hard to justify much effort to keep this machine alive.
On Sunday I stripped the MacBook Pro down, disconnecting everything from the motherboard, removing it, applying heat from a hairdryer and massaging the GPU... I figured, at this point, I've got nothing to lose, so I'll try it. I had to reapply thermal paste and reattach the heatsink, all that fun stuff. After reconnecting everything, no dice. I offered bits and pieces to other people (battery and memory are still useful), and put Kaylee in a box.
Monday rolled around, and my father pointed out that BGA solder doesn't actually melt at a temperature that you can achieve with a hairdryer, but that an oven at around 400°F should do it... so I decided that I'd try that as a last-ditch attempt.
Strip the machine back down, remove the motherboard again, throw it in the oven at 380°F for 10 minutes, wrapped in aluminum foil except for a small hole above the GPU.
Put it all back together, turn it on. The power light blinks... that's not right! I eventually realized that I forgot to put the RAM back in. Fix that, hit the power button again... GRAY SCREEN! And it booted, happily.
I still don't believe it worked — it's by far the most incredible and amazing repair I've ever performed, and I'm incredibly happy that it both didn't melt the CPU and actually managed to fix the GPU (I'm sitting here waiting for class to start, typing away on Kaylee...).
There's all sorts of exciting things to think about right now!
First off, this is spring break, so I have a nice week to relax without too much worry about school stuff. Second off, it's also show week for Amy, so that means there's going to be an awesome Colchester Theatre Company production to partake in at the end of the week! Dad says the set is enormous, and Amy hasn't started worrying about things coming together as much as she usually does, so it should be excellent! Being home also means getting to see Kaitlyn for the first time since winter break, which should be awesome :-) All wonderful things!
Next, Carol and I are going to New York City (center of the universe!) in three weeks (on the 29th)! I acquired tickets to see Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward (as She & Him) at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan, and I'm super excited! I haven't been able to stop playing Volume One since I first heard it (shortly after (500) Days of Summer was released). I think we're going to go down early enough to also spend some time in NYC — it's always a treat to hang out with Carol, doubly so with her only being in Troy on weekends this semester!
Ah, yes, there's an Apple logo up there. There really ought to be MacBook Pros coming out... this is coming close to being the longest time between MBP/PowerBook updates ever (or at least since ~2002)... just when it's time to upgrade. Come on, guys! But that makes me even more excited to see what they're working on (I hope!)... Luckily Dad's display clamps seem to be holding Kaylee together for the time being, so my last post about this topic was a little premature.
And finally, games! I was excited for Supreme Commander 2, but that already happened, and didn't totally deliver on the excitement (I don't like it when they dumb down übercomplicated games after you've gotten used to the complication). Valve, however, most likely won't fail me, so I'm allowed to frantically anticipate the recently announced Portal 2 as much as I want to! Portal is one of my favorite games, and was actually my first WASD+mouse game (make whatever of that you will), so it holds a special place in my heart (and how could you not adore the companion cube? it even speaks to you!). On top of that, they seem to be hinting at (with awesome fake Apple ads) an announcement of — gasp — a port of Source and Steam to OS X, which would be totally awesome, especially with a new laptop to go with it!
EDIT: Valve officially announced Steam + Source for Mac, as well as the ability to play games you've purchased in Windows on OS X for free. Awesome! They never disappoint... except Ep. 3...
I finished another part of my slow transition away from Dreamhost and on to Amazon's S3 for this site last night: I deleted everything related to this domain from Dreamhost. This meant setting up the Google App Engine proxy I've been thinking about for a while (which ended up being a just slight bit of horrific hackery upon shrub), and moving my DNS stuff back to the much-less-flexible 1and1 servers (which I get for free with my registration). This is a really ugly solution, because it adds another bounce for all HTML pages, but it still seems to be faster than Dreamhost, somehow.
It's mostly all working - unfortunately, GAE apps can't run on a naked domain, so the www is required now - any links to a subdirectory of hortont.com will redirect to the toplevel page. But I decided the temporary inconvenience was well worth the ~10$/month savings, so that's OK.
Also, links from more than 8-10 months ago are completely invalid now (I had a bunch of redirects, before, but they're gone now too in the shuffle). But that's OK, too. Really, who keeps around links to my blog? All of the internal links should be valid... I guess the big issue is things subscribed to RSS feeds with the naked domain. (I've already fixed a few random things I've found with this... I should check on Planet Gnome and stuff, too...)
I just have to move Carol and Matt, and then everything will be great - I've spent less than a dollar over the course of 2 months or so of S3... excellent!
I expect to find things broken over the course of the next few days... if anyone else runs into anything, let me know!
The proxy code is on Github.
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