Ch^H^H...Train of Thought

Oooh, that must have hurt!

Guy on Shop-At-Home Network get's hit by sword.

Stanford. For when your parents have so much cash that setting fire to it isn't fast enough.

At least somebody can admit the truth. :) Go Bears!
http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=15400&repository=0001_article

Go Bears!

Watched the Big Game with some friends (Happy Birthday Chris) today at TGI Sushi in Mountain View. Cal won, of course.

The game started out kinda slow and got better as the 2nd half started. Tons of penalty flags were thrown. Some of Stanford's players were obviously frustrated as demonstrated in their unsportsman-like conduct..... like steamrolling the guy in the punt return. Arrington and Lynch pulled off some crazy manuevers on the field. I thought the Stanford QB (Ostrander) getting taken down in pretty much every play was pretty funny. There was no rest for him as our defense just nails him everytime, even when the play was good. And you can really see after each play it took him longer and longer to get up. You gotta feel sorry for him and give him credit for that, as well as looking like he kept his cool despite the 0wnage.

I heard they wern't able to take down the goalposts. Heh heh.

Keep it real!

So my little sister Grace calls me and asks "does a company know if you're not really interested in joining?" She's about to graduate as some sort of business major from Purdue and she's been running around trying to decide which job to take and then also interviewing at some other places.

At the moment, she's also accepted a job at BearingPoint. So anyways, she's asking me about this since she just went to Accenture for a job interview, and noted that everybody she saw there who was representing the company was kinda stupid. Plus, another one of her friends was also there for an interview and they were kinda commenting on how stupid many of the candidates were.

Well anyways, in the end, she didn't get an offer and wanted to ask me why. It went something like this:

G: Yeah, so do you think companies know if you're not interested?
H: Well... kinda depends on how you act in front of them. If you act interested, they think you're interested. If you act like you don't care, then they probably don't want to even bother. Makes sense right?
G: Well, so yeah, I went to Accenture for an interview, and they didn't give me an offer. But yeah, the people who were presenting were kinda stupid. Like this girl who's powerpoint didn't really match up. And this guy sitting next to me with his eyes all darting around like he's afraid of being watched or something. There was this girl who was a pompous ass next to me too....
H: Heh heh, you were stuck between a paranoia guy and some guy who's a pompous ass. So did you act interested or not?
G: The pompous ass was a girl. Well, I was trying....but the place sucked so much I probably wouldn't want to work there even if they gave me an offer.....
H: Daniel (next door neighbor who used to work for Accenture) coulda told you that.....
G: I know, but I just kinda wanted to see.....
H: Ego boost?
G: Well.....kinda.....
H: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! You went all the way to a crappy company to interview just to look at how shitty it is, talk with your friends about how stupid the people are, and now your sad cuz you didn't get an offer?
G: .......well.........yeah.... come on....
H: No wonder! You went for all the wrong reasons. You're not going to get the offer cuz you're obviously not there to look for one. Dude, keep it real.

Anyways, the conversation ended shortly after, but that was pretty amusing. Congradulations, Grace, on getting what sounds like a pretty good job (BearingPoint), but don't feel bad if you spent the rest of your time messing with people and they don't seem to like you for it. :)

"stark raving mad"..... somehow I like that phrase.

This past Saturday, I went with Cynthia and Jennie to see Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. I thought it was a pretty funny movie. Though, if I had a girlfriend like Bridget, I think I'd go stark raving mad. Prior to watching the movie, Jennie made a comment about girls always backing up girls on relationship problems even if they're wrong. I think the jail thing covers it.

On a completely different topic, here's an interesting optical illusion:
http://questforconsciousness.com/conscious.html

I got it from somewhere in this thread which also mentions this other illusion.

"We might have voted for a loser, but at least we're not stupid."

I'm sure people have already seen this, but for those who haven't, here ya go.
It's a list of the average IQs of the population by state colored in depending on who the state went to.

Oh, and if your browser can't view PNGs, go download Firefox. And if you can't figure out how to download Firefox, get packing and move to Mississippi. :)

CrystalGuard and TDK

I recently found an article talking about TDK Japan making a new coating for CDs/DVDs and LCDs that is "scratch-proof." Reading the article, they claim that it's a fluorine/silica based resin. Kinda like epoxy. Kinda like that the description of that CrystalGuard stuff I saw at the G35 meet a few months back, which was described as a fluorine/glass resin imported from Japan. And considering glass and silica are pretty much the same thing, sounds pretty similar to me.

On the other hand, I didn't see the CrystalGuard guy let people take steel wool up to rub the car on display. But then again a CD is cheaper than a Lambo.

Smog Check

Today I learned about smog checks.

It seems that the state of California has both a "Test & Repair" certified site and a "Test Only" certified site. When you go to get your registration renewed, they will typically require that you go to a "Test Only" site. This is, most likely, because there's so many cars which make it through the first time, and they also don't want to flood repair shops with perfectly functional cars.

So I follow my mom to a shop down Almaden Expressway called Paragon or something like that. They tell me that I need to go to a "Test Only" shop because thats what it says on my registration renewal notice. A recommendation is made to go to "In & Out Smog Check," which I end up at shortly thereafter. It'll be about $58 and I need to wait for 3 other cars to finish. A 4runner, an Oldsmobile, and an Integra. I found out that, amazingly enough, the ancient Oldsmobile is rear wheel drive. Man, that just makes the heavy car even heavier.

Anyways, everything's fine so far. The dyno check worked out. The fuel cap pressure is good. And then they check my engine timing. On the hood, there's a sticker that says 15 +- 2 degrees BTDC (Before Top Dead Center). My engine was set at 21 degrees; whoever did it might have read the marks wrong. Whoops. So they tell me they'll have to fail it and I need to get that fixed. One of the guys down at the corner at a collision shop should be able to do it cheaply and they can test it again afterwards. Since it failed the first time, the first retest is free.

Now, something else I learned today is that many cars can change the timing just by rotating the distributor cap. It's reasonable, you just delay or advance the timing a bit by shifting when the spark happens. It's a lot easier than taking the timing belt off to readjust every time.

I also learned that my distributor cap is locked down. It was designed to be NOT a place to change the timing. Well that sucks. The mechanic wasn't exactly happy and explained that to me. He also said that there's one more way to do it without the time-consuming timing belt adjustments, but it'll cost more since it takes a while and isn't guarenteed to work. Okay, $50, I'm okay with that. I need this done today or tomorrow anyways to avoid late fees.

So while Honda decided that it was a good idea to make the distributor cap fit in one way only, I guess to prevent do-it-yourselfers from fouling that up, they did put in an electronic adjustment. In a black box that has way too many screws, there is what most likely is a potentiometer that electronically does the same thing. The bad news? It's under a riveted bracket. Freakin' a..... It's like they don't trust most people to do it right or something. Well, then again, this was 1990. Tweaking electronics was certainly not something people felt as comfortable with back then as it is today. And it's not like it'd be cheap to do this digitally either. Heck, the computer "bling bling" back then was a 486.

Anyways, after drilling out the rivets, he tweaked it as close as he could to 15, which was 16. Good enough. Sent me back to get it tested before he sealed it up. I went back, got it passed, paid for the smog check, and came back. He made a joke about it being a good thing that I didn't just run off without paying him his $50. Heh heh, it's nice that he trusted me, but then again he still had a few of my car's screws. Trying to dig up equivalents would just be too much trouble. He riveted the bracket back in, zip tied the other cables, and I paid him his $50.

On my way home, I was curious whether or not this will fix the starting problem the car has been having the past few days. Sometimes it'll work perfectly. Sometimes it'll start, run a few cycles, and then stop. Guess I'll just have to drive and find out.

Mutant Persimmon

So after working on the LCD panel, I took a shower and then went to Brian's to play Time Crisis: Crisis Zone, a PS2 video game.

When I got there, Brian was picking persimmons because there were so many on the tree in his back yard it looked like the branches were going to snap. That and it was getting hard to walk past the low hanging branches.

I help him pick some off the tree and we managed to find one that just didn't look quite right. (Link is to a movie taken with my camera)

We also saw one on the tree that looked like ass cheeks, but when you actually picked it, it didn't look all that special so I didn't take a picture of it.

Soldering, an engineering lost art.

It's kinda sad that engineers seem to be able to get away with not learning the skills necessary to actually implement whatever it is they're trying to design. Electrical engineers, for example, don't seem to be very adept with a soldering iron anymore. What does this also tend to imply? That while their designs on paper are probably sound on a theoretical standpoint, they're probably totally wrong from the practical standpoint.

I mean, someday I'll probably see somebody design a circuit and finally try to build it and ask me "where do I buy a 1 farad capacitor and an ideal current source?" Oi. When that day comes, I'll cry. And use lots of expletives. And probably fire somebody too.

Anyhow, today, in a demonstration of my alpha-geekiness, I got a picture to actually show up on an LCD panel I wired up myself. Not like "oh, I built my computer after buying a cheap combo deal from Fry's," but like "oh, I built my computer by wiring each gate on a breadboard." I soldered around 40 wires, by hand, in a tiny area that people normally expect only a machine to be able to do it. Nevermind that it took hours spread across days. And at least something about it worked. Sure, I don't know if the colors are right, but hey, at least I know most of it's right.

Oh, and no Metcal, no Hakko, no rework station, not even a Weller. I did it with a cheap ass soldering iron from Radio Shack, a tweezer, and a small piece of soldering braid. Respect my $10 worth of equipment! ph34r my 1337 5k11z!

I really ought to buy that Metcal off ebay sometime........