This past saturday was the luau at Brian's house. Probably something like 80 people showed up and it was really fun! (and tiring) The pig turned out pretty good, but unfortunetely there was no easy way to serve it so that not as much of it would have gone to waste.
We started the preperations for the event on the tuesday before, where we started digging a 4 foot deep pit in the backyard. Playing basketball and "pig" and "horse" didn't exactly help our progress, but we managed to get the pit to be about 2 feet deep that night. EJ mixed us drinks while we worked on the pit. May helped out also especially as the measuring stick :P Since we knew she's about 5 feet tall, we just tell her to stand in the pit to get a rough idea how much more we have to dig.
Some of the others came back to do more wednesday night, but I wasn't there. On friday, after work, we all rushed over to dig the pit, unload the rocks from the car, make some dinner, prep the pig with onions, garlic, salt, pepper, orange juice, red wine, and apples. Brian got drunk fairly early on so he nearly fell into the pit while it was on fire, not to mention falling on various other things. The fire took a while to die down so we couldn't get the pig until around 12:30 at night. The fan, a light, and a tiki torch fell in sometime too. :P Jason was twirling the flaming tiki torch around trying to put it out before it just broke apart. Yanting and EJ did a great job with the food stuff. It was about 4am by the time we decided that we covered the pit well enough to fall asleep. Pretty much all of us who helped stayed over that night.
On saturday, there were a lot of people. The Leland people, the Berkeley people, the Saratoga people, the IBM people, the church people, etc. Lots and lots of people. Kinson, Tanya, and I cooked almost all the meat on three grills. Too bad a lot of it was eaten before we could get to it. Kinson later did the last of the chicken and somebody did the ribs which we sorta forgot to bring out in the beginning. We took the pig out at around 3pm, I think. It took a lot of work cuz the dirt was all clumpy, kinda hard and stuck together, really heavy, and of course hot. With the help of some of the guests, we got it carried over to the table at which point, in true Lord of the Flies style, our horde picked apart the pig.
From then on, things were starting to get a little fuzzier in my head cuz I had a decent amount to drink. Some of us were taking turns taking care of Brian who was pretty much drunk before dark, and Eric who I think lasted maybe a half hour longer. I'm surprised I was relatively functional despite having around 4-5 shots of vodka, 2-3 beers, not that much food, and 3.5 hours of sleep.
Oh, while cleaning at noon on sunday, we were going to relight the fire to burn some stuff. After putting in the lighter fluid, Kinson was about to strike a match when all of a sudden the pit lit up by itself. Okay, it doesn't sound as cool when I type it out but whatever.
Things to note for next time:
- Particle board sucks ass for covering the pit.
- We need somebody who's got good knife skills (and not drunk by the time we need them) to serve up the pig so it's perhaps not as wasteful
- Wood takes forever to burn. Forever being something beyond 4 hours.
- Tarp tears easily with lots of dirt on it.
- Burning the remains is a bad idea.
- A 4 foot deep pit takes several days.
- Must put paper, then coals, then wood, then rocks in that order from bottom to top. Must also use lighter fluid as well as thicker oils down there to keep the flames up long enough to get everything burning. Oh, yeah, and a small fan too.
- Pole digger. 'Nuf said.
- A canopy is a very nice thing to have on a hot day.
- You're not likely to come out even on the money.
- If Brian says "I didn't buy it cuz this was cheaper," slap him.
I'll post a link to pictures as soon as I get them.
Yesterday, I completed a fully functional MythTV box. It's basically a Linux-based Tivo made out of old crap sitting around at my house and Brian's house.
It uses a Dell 733mhz Pentium 3, a Western Digital 120gb harddrive, a crappy Trident video card, an AiTech Scan Converter, and a Avermedia M179 video card.
While it's a bit choppy sometimes, hitting "rewind" once makes it smooth. I believe this is because the choppyness stemmed from it trying to play and record the same frame and the reading was getting ahead of the writing. Rewinding give the record a little more margin before the playback happens.
Overall, for an old machine, this seems to work pretty well. Now to actually install it somewhere in the entertainment center.....
Notes for anybody using this setup:
1) The AiTech Scan Converter kinda sucks. It does no scaling and you need to get custom modelines for it to work. You'll need to run it at 640x480 instead of 600x440. To do this, use the modeline info from 640x480 in the SVGAlib section, load it into X11, and then use xvidtune to tweak it to be about center. It will crop some stuff, so you don't have much choice.
2) MythTV with what I have doesn't seem to work below 640x480. I just end up with a blue screen when I select watch TV.
3) The M179, while most people say uses tuner=2 in /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv, might have more than 1 tuner type. I found that with tuner=2, channels above 11 or 13 or so don't come up on screen. Since I know I have a Philips tuner (by peeling the label off to see "Philips" stamped into the metal) I went into tuner.c and looked for how many Philips tuners use NTSC. The options were 2, 17, and 43. 43 fails totally. 2 is missing channels. 17 works nicely for me. I tested with channels 2 through 69 or so while skipping the ones MythTV just didn't let me see. Most of the ones MythTV disabled are ones I wouldn't get with a normal TV anyways. Even one of the ones enabled were ones that were supposed to be all static.
4) The us-bcast option is in the general setup, not the capture card setup. If it affected my ability to see channels over 13, it required a reboot to apply the setting. But I kinda doubt it.
Saturday morning, I went with friends to Yosemite and camped in Toulumne Meadows. I hadn't been there in like over 12 years. It was pretty fun!
While we didn't see any bears, we got bitten by a lot of insects. Well, except for SzuHuey who sprayed so much DEET, she's like a walking poison cloud :P
We walked a bit on saturday and encountered a shack with naturally carbonated water. It tastes rusty but supposedly safe. Shortly after, it started raining so we went back to clean up camp. After the rain, we cooked some food from the general store and then roasted marshmellows on the fire.
The next day, we did a 7 mile hike (round trip) to Cathedral Lake and then left for home.
Thanks to David for driving, Eric for the camping supplies, and Karen and Anna for doing most of the planning!
Last thursday and friday was the Apple Corporate Games. It's kinda like the olympics but much less physical. In fact, about the only two games that is actually sporty is tug of war and volleyball. The others, like Shark Attack, is more along the lines of old school Nickelodeon game shows. And a few are just brain games, kinda like Text Twist and Pictionary.
Anyways, the two FileMaker teams (Cheatahs and Wedgies) combined took gold in 4 of 7 events. Booya!
I was on the B team, the Cheatahs. We were dressed in tan shirts with whiskers painted on and black stickers for spots. :P We got gold in Water Catapult (launch water balloons and have teammates catch them) and set the all time record by 2 of 24 out of 25. We got a silver in Volleyball losing only to our buddies the Wedgies. And we got a bronze in X-Country, which is like a 12-legged race on 2x4s.
Sure, we probably had a better spread of people to put into the teams since most Apple teams were just formed out of their product group. And we did take a little time to practice. But yeah, for many events, there was no contest.
Incidentally, the Wedgies got 2nd place overall when it was looked pretty clear to us that they should have gotten 1st. We're all under the impression that Apple might have fudged the numbers a little :P Either that or the "Spirit Award" has got to be some amazingly huge ass bonus.
http://homepage.mac.com/hchung75/PhotoAlbum5.html
Last last week, while driving to work, I saw a truck hauling a pinball machine. I used to be really into those things as a kid. I think I want to design and build one. It'd be so cool! I understand all the electical, software, woodworking, and most of the mechanics of a pinball machine. Just need some artistic help and a theme.
The playboard can be fabricated from wood and paint. The electronics can all be LEDs and wiring. Stick in a pair of old PCs or whatever to deal with the intelligence and I/O. And then order the bumpers, flippers, basic mechanical units from some replacement parts store online.
.....
Okay, maybe this might be too big of a project for now. Maybe later. Need a theme too.
Last weekend, I went to go see some of the San Jose Grand Prix. As far as I know, it's the first time San Jose had one, so I was curious. I went on Saturday, so I didn't see the actual race, just some of the qualifying and demo races.
While watching some of the cars drive by, periodically I heard loud noises which I first thought was engine detonation. Turns out, as they pass by the banners on the fences, the air rushing by causes a big enough vacumn to whip the giant banner against the fence and therefore the loud bang.
On the other side of the track, they have to cross over the light rail tracks. Similarly, the impact of the tire against the track creates loud noises as the tires, suspension, and frame deform.
In the convention center, a car show was going on. There's a guy who took an old 1992 BMW 325 and mixed it up with a E36 M3 parts car and did a pretty good job trying to make something of it. Just read the article if you're interested.
A team that specializes in drifting was there too. They had a lot of their cars on display. I saw a AE86 that for some reason, the engine really resembled the engine on the Supra sitting next to it. Either it's cosmetic, or somebody's gone a little too nutty with the mods. On one car, a group of mechanics were fixing a blown head gasket.
After about 4 hours of walking around in downtown, I went home to take a nap and meet up with people for dinner.
Yesterday, I went to the beach with a bunch of IBM people. Played volleyball, built a bonfire. We probably also pissed off the restaurant owners at the all-you-can-eat sushi place in San Mateo too. 13 people staying around for a little over 2 hours with some guy trying to order 9 orders of salmon at a time can't be good. Wasn't too warm that day but, it was still pretty fun.