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Greetings from Hawaii

I’m married now, woot! Angeline and I were wed in a quick ceremony in Rockville with 80 of our closest friends and family. I’m so lucky! I feel so grown up.

We’ve spent the last week on Oahu, and today we’re hopping on a plane to go visit Kauai for a week. Also, this marks the last day of free hotel internet, so I guess I might as well blog a note or two.

Our hotel is situated right on Waikiki Beach. I would definitely stay at this spot again – it’s extremely convenient to plenty of dining options and, while not the largest beach on the island, Waikiki Beach has plenty of charm. At this time of year it’s not too terribly crowded.

While here we climbed Diamond Head (a former volcano crater with excellent views of Waikiki), visited the Polynesian Culture Center for a luau, circumnavigated the island, visited a pineapple plantation, went swimming near the Banzai Pipeline (non-existent at this time of year), ate some incredible meals, and just generally relaxed. One of the coolest things was snorkeling in Hanauma Bay, where we saw a large sea turtle eating algae off of a rock. We were close enough that we could reach out and touch him, if that weren’t frowned upon by the park service.

It’s actually a bit too windy here to fly the kites, especially since I left my 150 lb line at home. I may try to fly my eddy this week on Kauai even so.

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Pokemon Rokkaku

Anyone who has been looking at my flickr feed has seen that I’ve had another kite in the works for the last couple of months. I’ve had this particular one in mind for a while but didn’t quite have the sewing skills to pull it off until now. So, I present, the Snorlax rokkaku:
Part of a foot
Assembled drawing
Partial appliqué
Snorlax Applique
Ange and Kite
Snorlax in flight

To build this, first, I stole a graphic off of Wikipedia and re-drew it in Inkscape, so that I’d have a vector version to work with. I saved an EPS version of the image then used the poster program in Linux to print it out, scaled way up, on regular letter size paper with cut and paste margins. After assembling all of the individual pieces of paper together into one huge image, I placed it on my glass coffee table, put black ripstop nylon on top, and a lamp under the table, so that I could then trace it with a white fabric pencil.

Next, I layered several large sheets of ripstop nylon: white on bottom, turquoise, gray, and the black which had the tracing of the design on top. I sewed zigzags along all of the lines, then cut out layers of ripstop from the front and back until the appropriate color was left. Finally, I added triangular panels of RSN for the top and bottom of the kite, hemmed the whole thing, and added spar pockets and reinforcements. I sparred it with carbon rods – SkyShark P400 center spar and a pair of P200s or P300s for the spreaders (I have both for varying wind conditions).

Now the rationale: I wanted to finish this one in time for our honeymoon, as Snorlax is something of a mascot for Angeline. At least, that’s what she got when she did the ‘which Pokemon are you?’ quiz (Keirsey has nothing on the internets). We don’t really know anything about the Snorlaxi but it seemed like the perfect cartoon to put on this rok, and now Angeline has her own kite to fly when I’m putting up my della porta in Hawaii!

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Best Buy is dumb

From: privacymanager@bestbuy.com

> Bob said:
> Someone signed my email address up for reward zone program and it wasn't
> me. Please remove it, thanks.

Bob,

I am Chazy with Best Buy Customer Care.

Thank your for contacting Best Buy about your Reward Zone account. I
will be more than glad to assist you.

I am pleased to inform you that in order to provide the best service
possible, we will need more information from you. Please reply to this
email with your full name, mailing address and phone number so we can
find your Reward Zone account.

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions or concerns. We
look forward to your next visit to one of our stores or to
www.BestBuy.com.

Thank you,
Chazy
Best Buy Customer Care Team


Yeah… I’ll get right on that, guy. I’m pleased to inform you that you are a moron.

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T-minus 1 month

We’re down to 31 days until the wedding, and pretty much everything is done, modulo the odd vendor meeting, dance lesson, and so forth. We have also sent sharp sticks by way of courier to the invitees who haven’t sent their cards in yet. *Poke!*

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I’m a slacker

I was thumbing through Joel Spolsky’s new book on hiring talented programmers at the bookstore the other day. He asserts in the first chapters that great programmers are ten times more productive than bad ones. Could that be true? I played around with git today to generate statistics to see how it looks on our refactoring project this year:

user    commits   files changed  LOC added  LOC deleted         
dev0:       453            4258     +81538      -100344
dev1:       152            2297     +54462       -45343
dev2:       104             550     +24779       -17475
dev3:        82             250      +6465        -7852
dev4:        73             209      +3920        -2782
dev5:        56             208      +5158       -10049
dev6:        24             116      +3297        -7823

Wow. Of course KLOC isn’t everything, but take it on faith that dev4 causes more problems than he solves (dev5,6 were only on the project a short time), and that dev0 is the most awesome programmer that writes on this blog. And I thought surfing the web 7 hours a day was too much…

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Wake up!

Dear Windows,

If you feel the need to download printer drivers at 3 AM, please don’t announce it by playing cutesy chimes. People are trying to sleep ya know? That goes double if the chime is just to announce a prompt to ask you if you want to search for updated printer drivers.

In other news, I’ve been using git at work a lot lately. There’s a steep learning curve and it took three tries to convince me that git is better than (version control of the day), but once I grokked it, I was hooked. So many hours have been lost waiting for subversion to show commit logs or perform commits. Also, I’m going back and forth to my laptop without being able to connect the latter to the network, so git-bundle and git-svn are much better than my previous solution of extensive use of patch(1). Branching and merging is so easy that I invent excuses to do them.

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Buzz


Buzz
Originally uploaded by bluesterror

It’s like those bees with dogs in their lap, and when they stand up they shoot dogs at you?

From my camera phone.

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sed

Sometimes I look at a long Unix pipeline and think, “I should do this in perl.” Other times, it is, “I bet I can do this all in sed.” So, here’s how to print just the lines of a file following a successful match in sed:

sed -n ':s; /^regexp$/{b l}; n; b s; :l; p; n; b l' file.txt

Lazyweb, is there a shorter way?

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July

I suppose I must make a blog entry this month so that I do not get logged out for inactivity. Like the blog, I have let the projects slide lately. I have a half-drawn schematic sitting in Eagle and a new kite in the design phase, but I haven’t hit these particular projects too hard. How have I been spending the last month, then? Here’s how:

  • Working. Yay for compulsory overtime.
  • Teaching myself Spanish. I don’t know why.
  • Various wedding things. Invites are in the mail.
  • Going to a baseball game.
  • Guessing the plots of Sherlock Holmes stories after reading the first two pages.
  • Being unmotivated to do other stuff.

Angeline and I had engagement photos taken and we got a couple of proofs back. Check out the one I put one on the website.

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Gibson pocket sled


Gibson pocket sled
Originally uploaded by bluesterror

Continuing with the dumb projects, here is my latest kite, a pocket sled (so called because you can fold it up into your pocket) with a Gibson guitar logo appliquéd onto the front. Mostly I was just practicing some complicated sewing here rather than shooting for the end product, but it came out well enough. I might tackle a large kite bag next, and then perhaps the big rokkaku I have been planning for a while. Or maybe another practice kite.

Oh, I’m going to hotlanta this weekend to make up some BBQ with the relatives. I think this is my favorite new family tradition. Pork!