I am the one who has busts of famous composers.
I am the one who doesn't answer the phone.
I am the one who sleeps next to an UltraSparc 2 and a SGI and his Thinkpad W700.
I am the one who wrote Comet Search, or at least the first several prototypes.
I am the one who drives a plain Acura Legend.
I am the one who listens to music coming from Studio Reference Series Paradigms driven by a Nakamichi.
I am the one who has degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon.
I am the one who drinks polish vodka and fine single malt scotch.
I am very proud of and personally uses the Java Shell and Terminal that I wrote.
I am the one who does security audits on networks and networked applications.
I am the one who works too hard.
I am the one who plays too hard.
I am the one who administrates comet.
I am the one who threw all the wax on the kitchen ceiling.
I am the one who plays Everquest, Omega and Angband but not Final Fantasy.
I am the one who used to play too much Everquest.
I am the one that customized his own Anime List in order to sort by multiple fields.
I am the one who watched Rebuild in Japan. (My latest Review)
I am the one who archives Evangelion Wallpapers.
I am the one who has the largest bar tab at the bar across the street.
I am the one who has a nice looking resume, but I am also the one who removed the link to it because people keep sending me email thinking that I'd want a crappy job. Instead of having my resume online, I am going to put my good friend Natasha Katsura's resume here, because she is cool and she needs a job.
I am the one who owns a $1300 custom tailored W. W. Chan navy blue super 130s suit and very happy with the result.
New Laptop! PART 2
My current ThinkPad T60p, although a very kickass machine, is having issues; like not turning on after it completely drained another 9-cell battery. There
was something wrong with the way it deals with Li-Ion batteries where it wouldn't warn me that the battery was low and it would continue to drain it even
after the threshold. My 3 year warranty expired some time ago so I figured it was time to get the next best thing. I recently got an
HTC G1 Android and was really into it. A laptop upgrade would mean I'll be getting the
latest up-to-date tech for the 2 things that I carry around all the time. So Michelle found a great deal for a
Thinkpad W700, a laptop that I've been eyeing at the Lenovo website for several months now.
Based on the several reviews I've read about it since the end of last year, it's got a gorgeous display and it's stupid retarded powerful; oh, and it's
also stupid retarded big.
Unlike the last laptop upgrade, which was from a Thinkpad T42p to a T60p, this was a significant upgrade. The specs for the T42p and T60p were pretty similar
with the usual round of upgraded parts, they even look the same. Simply comparing the look of the T60p and W700 is ridiculous. Sure, they're both black and
have similar looking keyboards (sans a numpad on the T60p), but being as skinny as I am, I bet I look retarded with the W700 on my lap compared to my old
laptop which just, for lack of a better way to put it, looks like a regular laptop. The W700 makes me look like a 5 year old playing with their dad's laptop.
So the size is the first thing that surpised me. When I got around to installing Gentoo on it (slow start, see link at bottom), the second thing that
surprised me was how stupid fast it compiled everything. I got the world list (the list of all the packages that I asked to be installed) from my old laptop
and simply rebuilt the W700 with all the applications and games and everything, I even went all out on my USE flags this time so even more stuff got pulled
in because of dependencies. Compiling all of this is similar to rebuilding my entire system on my old laptop, which I had to do when I migrated to the newer
gcc, and that's something that took over 24 hours of just having the laptop compile in the background. The W700 does it in about 4 hours. I had walked away
and left it running thinking it would take all night. When I walked by and saw that it was done, I thought something had broke, and didn't believe the
green color of the emerge tool that everything went OK until I checked by hand that what I asked it to install got installed.
This brings me to the final surprise. After everything was done installing so that it was a mirror image of my last laptop, I went about setting up the
necessary stuff like X, OpenGL/GLX, WiFi, etc. It went by like I didn't need to do anything. With the exception of GLX, which was still an incredibly easy
fix, everything just worked when I said "go". The nightmare of getting GLX working on the T60p's ATI graphics adapter was a distant and forgotten
memory. Score one for nvidia and nvidia's open source drivers. Which brings me to another note. The display looks great. 1920x1200 spanning just 17 inches is
nice, but the contrast, color, and brightness are lightyears better than that of the T60p's 15 inch 1600x1200 display. Watching HD movies on this thing seems
almost better than watching it on my Samsung HDTV (admittedly, the Samsung probably isn't color calibrated).
Overlooking some of the surprises, it was more or less what I expect from a top-of-the-line Thinkpad; stupid powerful and rock solid construction. There's
the magnesium roll cage, no part of the laptop budges under significant pressure, and there's even water drainage holes for when I spell water on it (like
with the T60p). As for its reliability, I'll have to see as time passes. I'm pretty rough on laptops, since I'll be using it pretty much 90% of the time
that I am awake. So 3 years out of a laptop is a pretty good run.
Japan 2009
I was in Nagoya, Japan, from June 22nd to July 2nd, but didn't make any real updates. Didn't really do all that much aside from get drunk,
watch the Evangelion 2.0 movie. I had a lot of fun and
rockthing & Hiromi are the best hosts ever. I should scan the book that Hiromi drew (manga-esque) of my time there and post that instead
of writing about it, since those pictures are better than anything I can write.
I know I'm a little late to the party, but I think it took this long to get over the warm and fuzzy feeling of game 7 of the SCF, although I'm still not entirely sure about that. Who cares. The Pens won the cup.
7/21/2009
Skate 2 by EA Sports
This isn't actually new. I played the game like in January or February, but never thought of making a page about it until I tried to look for
those videos I uploaded to the skatereel.ea.com website today and decided to make a page with the videos embedded so that I wouldn't have to
search around for them again.
5/27/2009
Linux, EDID, and the Nvidia->HDMI->Samsung HDTV
I have a video server that's connected to a Samsung 40inch 1080p HDTV. Not that long ago, I decided to upgrade the crappy video card (old old geforce) to a newer one
that provided DVI/HDMI output so that I could connect it to the TV through HDMI instead of the analog VGA cable. The card is an Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT, nothing special,
but it has a SPDIF cable to connect to the digital sound output on the motherboard so that it can send sound through DVI/HDMI. However, I don't have a digital sound out
on my sound card, so I figured it would be fine to just leave it be. WRONG. I connect the HDMI cable to the TV, I let X use the EDID from the TV to set the 1920x1080 mode,
I connect the RCA sound out from the sound card to the RCA sound in of the TV, but no sound. I ended up having to connect the sound directly to my stereo and have to switch
stereo inputs whenever I want to watch something from the video server. Really annoying since I was used to not having to switch back when it was just analog VGA.
I did a little bit of reading and found that other people had the same problem, with no fixes in sight. Recently, I checked again for fixes but there was only a fix available
was for Windows 7. It ended up that the EDID that the TV was providing the nvidia card was telling it that it supported sound through DVI/HDMI, and the nvidia card was then
attempting to send sound through the connection (eventhough it had no sound input). When the TV got the HDMI signal, it sees that sound is turned on through there so it ignores
the RCA sound input, thus, no sound. There wasn't a way in the nvidia driver to turn off sound, but the nvidia devs said there would be something like that in the future
(apparently, ATI cards have that option). In one of these forums, I found a neat little fix for this: Provide your own EDID (via xorg.conf's CustomEDID option) except with the
extensions removed. This would give X all that it would need to display the correct video, but would tell the nvidia card that sound through DVI/HDMI was not supported.
First, these are the specs of the machine when I did this:
nvidia drivers 180.29 with acpi and gtk compiled in
First, I needed to extract the EDID from the TV. A lot of places told me I can just reconstruct it from the Xorg logs but I didn't see anything in them even with the loglevel
set to 6. Next, I tried using the read-edid utility, but X complained that the EDID I got from that had bad
headers. Finally, I got the nvidia-settings to give me the EDID:
# nvidia-settings --desiplay :0
This opened up the Nvidia X Server settings control panel (in gentoo, this is separate from the nvidia-drivers package), went to GPU0, then to DFP-0,then
clicked on Acquire EDID. Once I saved that to a file, I could get to opening it up emacs and zeroing out the extensions. But then I had to have a right checksum.
Luckily, the guys at AnalogBit had a utility that does this for you. I just ran it and I was ready to go. A
few things needed to be added into my xorg.conf file now:
This is a joke, someone managed to get a google search trend up to #2, but there were no search results, so I decided to help out.
1/6/2009
I worship Norio Wakamoto's cock
No, I don't, but he is by and far my favorite Japanese male voice actor. He is God. Angels weep and Devils jerk off when he speaks. I had a discussion about him and some
of his work recently and that got me so pumped, I had to add his picture to my home page.
Looks like a pretty swell guy, right? Well, he knows Shaolin Kung Fu, Kempo, and Kendo, and he was a member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Riot Police. I don't know how many
riots happen in Tokyo, probably close to zero since Wakamoto was part of the riot police. He also grew up in Osaka, Japan, which gives him a +5 to awesome. Here's another
picture of Norio being totally awesome:
To get an idea of how many anime characters were made awesome thanks to this man of men, just peruse his Anime News Network entry.
Impressive list, but some of the obvious gems would be:
Still not convinced that Norio Wakamoto kicks ass? Just watch him kick some ass in the Mugen fighting game or
give a speech in Metal Gear Solid.
Video games don't convince you? How about you check out the most manly rendition of "Oh my darling Clementine" or some VERY MELON?
If you're still not convinced, I don't know what to tell you, maybe that you suck? Well, even if you suck, you should enjoy this.
Petr Sykora and the Pittsburgh Penguins
I had to put this image up somewhere. On June 2nd, 2008, after over 100 minutes of play (that's 3 20 minute overtime periods) in Game 5, Pittsburgh vs Detroit in Detroit, of the Stanley Cup, Petr Sykora of the Penguins told the NBC commentator inbetween the team benches that he was going to score the winning goal, and told his teammates that his winning goal was going to be above the gloved shoulder of Detroit's goaltender, Osgood. About 9 minutes into the 3rd OT, during a 4 minute long Penguins power play, Sykora gets a pass from Malkin, and shoots it right above the gloved shoulder of Osgood, scoring the goal in sudden death and winning the game for Pittsburgh. Detroit fans were undoubtably disappointed since a win there would have been their Stanley Cup. Also undoubtably, everyone in Pittsburgh went apeshit. Not only did Talbot, the 6th man in for Pittsburgh after the goalie was pulled, tie the game 34 seconds before it was going to be over, Marc-Andre Fluery was a brick wall during all the overtime periods blocking every shot Detroit had. He blocked a total of 55 shots for the evening, which sounds impressive but really means the Penguins defense seems to be letting a lot of Redwings get shots off. I don't know who created this shop, but I laughed.
Sonatina
Here is a link of me playing Lennox Berkeley's Sonatina, 3rd movement, saved as an mp3.
Perhaps more music to come if I get around to getting the stuff I play recorded digitally...
News Archive
For older news entries that are either no longer relevant or just cause clutter, you can go to my
Old News page.
Here's a link to my friend Dave's site. He does some cool animation and programming.
Here's a link to my friend Paul Madonna's site. Paul is a VERY talented artist who puts out a weekly online comic, you should check out some of his work.
Here's a link to my Gentoo on a Thinkpad T60p page.
Here's a link to my Gentoo on a Thinkpad W700 page. Get your war on
Anime
For the sake of keeping things short, I've put anime related stuff on its own page.
Everquest
I've stopped playing this game, but I still keep in touch with a lot of the people that I met through the game. Many of them are
Every year, some good friends of mine throw a party in Stamford, Connecticut. Here are some pictures from the 1999 Gatsby party.
Single Malt Scotch Whisky is expensive these days, and I have a healthy drinking habit. For testing and evaluation purposes, I created a Google Checkout account.
But, if you're feeling generous for some reason and want to contribute to Jon's Scotch Fund, feel free to DONATE!
