Yearly Archives: 2005

weekend

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Checked out z_kungfu’s bar space. Went for a ride with z_kungfu and mrs_esterhaus.

Soccer Sunday. Again, proving I should exercise. Managed to twist my ankle a bit. Went for a another ride up around the Falls Lake area.

Then off to see Rasputina with badger. Opening band was called Tarantula AD, and was pretty cool. At various points reminded me a bit of Wetton era King Crimson, Fantomas, or Krakatoa. Picked up a cd.

Rasputina was pretty good. I wasn’t really familiar with them at all, so wasn’t sure what to expect. The primary vocalist has a very cool voice, at times reminding me of Laurie Anderson (particular on a song that I think was “Signs of the Zodiac”?) and Cyndi Lauper (a pretty strong accent…). Pretty entertaining. Spotted leslieerin and a few other folks.

weekend

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Checked out z_kungfu’s bar space. Went for a ride with z_kungfu and mrs_esterhaus.

Soccer Sunday. Again, proving I should exercise. Managed to twist my ankle a bit. Went for a another ride up around the Falls Lake area.

Then off to see Rasputina with badger. Opening band was called Tarantula AD, and was pretty cool. At various points reminded me a bit of Wetton era King Crimson, Fantomas, or Krakatoa. Picked up a cd.

Rasputina was pretty good. I wasn’t really familiar with them at all, so wasn’t sure what to expect. The primary vocalist has a very cool voice, at times reminding me of Laurie Anderson (particular on a song that I think was “Signs of the Zodiac”?) and Cyndi Lauper (a pretty strong accent…). Pretty entertaining. Spotted leslieerin and a few other folks.

[view at adrianlikins.com ]

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Friday after work, and Saturday afternoon I did a bit of riding. I decided to try heading southeast of Raleigh to see if there were any interesting places to ride. So far, that does not seem to be the case. Unless of course your looking for straight, flat roads lined with cotton farms. Perhaps some of the folks from that area could suggest more interesting places to ride?

Made some sushi rolls Saturday. Mostly normal stuff (tuna, spicy tuna, etc) but also tried a sausage roll. Not bad, but not great. The barbecue rib rolls worked much better.

Phasmatodea practice Friday. Fairly minimal setup for me. Not too bad.

I really need to start looking for a house. Really tired of living in an apartment.

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Friday after work, and Saturday afternoon I did a bit of riding. I decided to try heading southeast of Raleigh to see if there were any interesting places to ride. So far, that does not seem to be the case. Unless of course your looking for straight, flat roads lined with cotton farms. Perhaps some of the folks from that area could suggest more interesting places to ride?

Made some sushi rolls Saturday. Mostly normal stuff (tuna, spicy tuna, etc) but also tried a sausage roll. Not bad, but not great. The barbecue rib rolls worked much better.

Phasmatodea practice Friday. Fairly minimal setup for me. Not too bad.

I really need to start looking for a house. Really tired of living in an apartment.

[view at adrianlikins.com ]

O(n^3)!! The terrorists have already won!

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So, I was reading a friends blog, where he bought a rather nifty sounding device called a Watts up?.

Basically, it’s a power meter you plug in between a electrical device and a socket. And it measures how much power it uses. Simple, but clever. Apparently one version can even send info out over a serial port. Nifty.

So chip measured the power useage of various computers of his doing different tasks. The interesting thing is the dramatically higher power useage when heavily using the CPU. Now, this isn’t really news, but it got me thinking about how much energy resources are wasted because of inefficent code.

I never really thought of optimizing code as a enviromentally friendly thing to do. But at least for widely used software, it’s probably worth it just in the amount of energy saved. A couple watts here and there times a million boxes, and it’s probably more than worth the programmer time to look at additional optimizations.

I wonder how many kilowatt-hours are consumed playing World of Warcraft? Lets do a little dubious math:

Number of WoW players * Average Amount They Play * Average Amount of Power useage = ??

mmogchart.com puts the number of players at 2,000,000. Chip’s numbers seem to indicate ~180 watts of power used for a gaming system. We’ll call it 100 watts.

I have no idea how long people play WoW a day, aside from “too much”, but lets say 4 hours.

2,000,000 * 100 * 4 = 800,000 kWh a day.

Okay, so not all that much in the grand scheme of things. Considering Shearon Harris generates 860MWe.

Now if we figure out all the cpu cycles wasted decoding images of cats posted on the internet…

are you a mod or a prog rocker?

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Spent most of the weekend down at the Raleigh Rumble, had fun, and did plenty of motorcycle geeking. Even got in some bowling Friday night. I keep meaning to go bowling more often, I enjoy it. Anyone want to start a bowling team?

Got some pics up here and here.

Sunday went on a group ride over to Michaels for breakfast. Apparently Michaels is the cool place to go on a Sunday morning with your motorcycle.

Then headed over to Progday to catch Glen Philips and Mike Keneally. Two very guitarcentric sets. Pretty cool. Talked to a a guy named steve that plays weird music with a theremin for a bit. Er, make that two guys named steve that play weird music with a theremin. You would think that would be a small list…

Monday did a bunch of nothing, then headed over to Chapel Hill area to do some riding. Jones Ferry Road is a great motorcycle road. So is Damascus Church Road. And half a dozen other over that way. It’s doesn’t take long out of Chapel Hill before it gets pretty rural.