Nap Time

Black Star on KLRU

The documentary short on Black Star Co-op that was filmed at the October beer social (that we were at) just aired on KLRU. Here's a link to the program that includes a youtube video.

Duke

We walk by Duke's house most mornings on the way to Quacks for coffee.
He usually barks at us, but not this morning.

Live Chat

The latest fad in online commerce is live chats with sales critters. I've been playing around with a chat server that markets itself for that purpose, in addition to other things, so when I was making a hotel reservation today and a chat window popped up I decided to click on it.

I wasn't fast enough to get a screen grab of the chat in progress, but here's the "Thank You" screen at the end and here's the transcript of the chat. The agent's name was "Jessica" -- yeah right. The messages were obviously canned. I wonder how many sessions each agent handles at once.

Jessica	Hi Greg, I'm Jessica and just for visiting Days Inn today, we'd like to give you the opportunity to get $20 off your Days Inn reservation. Please type HI or HELLO in the space below to let me know you are there...
Jessica	Just type HI in the space below...
Greg	hi
Jessica	Hi Greg, I have great news! Just for chatting with me today, I can increase your savings from $20 to $30! That's a $30 cash back mail-in rebate on the reservation you just made!
Greg	ok
Jessica	This comes along with a membership to Days Inn, Travelers Advantage with the first 30 days FREE. You'll enjoy FULL ACCESS to our travel agency and get our LOW PRICE GUARANTEE on all of your eligible travel reservations!
Jessica	And even if you decide to cancel, you can still get your $30 cash back mail-in rebate ... it's our way of saying THANK YOU just for trying Days Inn, Travelers Advantage.
Greg	no thanks
Jessica	Keep in mind that by accepting this now, you are not obligated to keep your Days Inn Travelers Advantage membership... we'd just like for you to look over the fantastic savings and benefits...
Greg	i understand. no thanks though
Greg	have a nice day
Jessica	Okay, no problem, I'll note that you have declined the offer and you will NOT be enrolled. Please note that YOUR CREDIT CARD WILL NOT BE CHARGED. Thank you for your time and have a good day!
Greg	thanks

Parkour

This is completely insane. The real fun starts about 2 minutes into the video.



Here's some background on parkour.

(thanks to William Gibson for the link)

Blue and Green

This is how it turned out... good for another month.

Faded

Faded and shaggy, it's time to see Rachel. She's going to try reviving
the blue and covering the rest with green.

Fire and Ice

We had ice on the windshield of the car this morning! Not a lot, but still... hopefully the non-hot weather is finally here to stay.

Something between fire and ice would be nice -- I think it's called Fall -- but I'll settle for Winter at this point. We bundled up and had a good run at the dog park.

Double Dee

It has been two weeks since we bottled the Black Star Double Dee, so I decided to open one up and see how it's doing... the answer is quite nicely!

Happy 77!

Pete opening his barking dog birthday card at River Point...

Happy Thanksgiving

Forget the turkey, the stuffing, the mashed potatos and gravy, the
football games... I give thanks that the local espresso shop was open
this afternoon!

Texas Backroads

On the way to Turkey Day festivities... the cold front is finally
blowing in and dumping some rain. You can see the line in the sky in
this photo.

Guitar Hero

Luis pauses between songs on guitar hero. I'd never seen it played
before, it's pretty neat - sort of like dance dance revolution with a
guitar.

I don't know if you can spot them all in the photo, but I think Luis
has one of every game console on the market.

Pretzel

Rosie came from Forgotten Friends - Mixed Breed Rescue, with the name Pretzel. That's her in the middle of the screenshot.

She was apparently picked up, as a puppy, on the streets of Leander, TX. They just euthanize stray dogs in Leander, which is where private rescue groups like Forgotten Friends come in.

We got Rosie when she was 6 months old and she has been a fantastic dog. She's now almost 3. We've been supporting Forgotten Friends ever since.

Bad Blogger

Beth reminded me at dinner tonight that I hadn't updated my blog in several days... bad blogger!


I'm usually good about snapping a picture here and there and sending an update, but I think since I've been experimenting with Facebook and Twitter some of those updates have turned into status updates or twitters (twits?). I have to say that it's a bit frustrating to have so many places to post updates. I want a single unified blogging interface!

Here's a recap of the last few days:

Beth has been crazy busy with the final touches on her dissertation and related journal articles. Just two more weeks to her defense!

We got out to the Gingerman on Friday for a few beers with a new friend from Black Star Co-op, and met some even newer friends while we were there. We ran into the newer friends at Zen Noodles again on Sunday night.

Rosie and I got out to Walnut Creek on Saturday while Beth slogged through re-running her statistics in a new and unfamiliar stats package.

Saturday night we headed up to Hutto to hang out with some old friends. Jamie has just gotten into homebrewing and had his first beer bottled and ready to drink, a very nice Hefeweizen! He also had a cider experiment going that turned out amazingly well, organic apple juice fermented with a White Labs Ale Yeast! Normally you wouldn't use a ale yeast for cider, but he had a spare that he got along with a bunch of brewing and kegging equipment from craigslist.



This morning we all got out to Walnut Creek and then Beth headed in for more stats and paper whacking.



This evening we bought a stack of books at Book People and then met some friends for dinner at Zen Noodles. Trey is in the Arabic Studies program and had a job over the summer doing intelligence analysis of Middle East news sources - now he's doing the same thing on his own blog! He used to live in Yemen and has a good perspective on events in the Middle East.

Finally, Tom is working on generating Sudoku puzzles for an appendix to his paper and we're finding that Jellyfish are very rare. In a set of 10,000 puzzles that I generated, they only came up .03% of the time in ANY puzzle, and Tom is looking for puzzles that contain ONLY Jellyfish (and the core techniques).

Colossus

This " Bletchley Park's Colossus codebreaker to race modern PC in cracking Nazi codes" is great! Now I want to visit Bletchley Park even more.

Here's a link to the TNMoC's Cipher Challenge. Need to find Lorenz codebreaking software to install...

Escala Condominiums

This is the apartment building we used to live in, that we were
evicted from six months ago to make way for condoification. The
original owner bailed on the project, before even starting the work,
and sold the building. We weren't sure what the new owners would do,
but it looks like they went ahead with the original plan.

Big Stick

Tired of chasing the stick, time to chew on it...

Flash Test 1

I finally got an opportunity to play around with Flash and created this animation of my old Cabernet Consulting logo, as I envisioned it back then before things like flash animation existed.



Get it? "net" Consulting? I thought that was pretty clever back in 1994.

With the keyframe and 'tween' animation support it's pretty easy to do things like this. I don't know if I would want to animate an episode of South Park this way though. For that something like Anime Studio is probably better.

Sudoku Followup

As you might recall, I did my first Sudoku a week ago. Since then I've been reading up on the various solving techniques (tom has a good paper here) and playing around with code to generate puzzles. Here are the first few puzzles out of my generator:

Easy

3 8 9	4 8 2 1	6 4 3
2 6	5 7	1 8
1 6 2	3 4 1 5	2 7 4

Easy

9 4 2 1	8 3	8 9 5
3 6	5 8 1 2	4 3
6 5 8	7 4	9 6 1 5

Medium

3 8 6	5 1 6 7	9 2 8
1 5	7 2	3 8
5 6 7	3 8 4 5	9 4 3

Medium

8 2 9 5	4 2	1 9 3
2 3	5 8 6 1	7 2
1 9 3	7 6	5 2 4 1

Hard

5 4 8 1	3 6	7 5 6
9 4	2 1 6 9	8 5
4 5 8	1 4	6 5 2 1

Bottling

I brought back a suitcase full of bottles from calif, along with our
bottling equipment, and bottled the black star homebrew today. We
haven't bottled since we got the kegging system, but that's still in
calif and too much to haul out on the plane. Anyway, it all went fine
and we should be drinking homebtew in a couple weeks!

Walnut Creek

Our new favorite place to go off-leash hiking. Bigger than Turkey Creek and no endangered warblers to worry about.

Tomato Plant

Standing in our driveway this morning I noticed this volunteer cherry
tomato plant growing in our flower bed!

Congratulations

Last day at *****! Yay!

Sudoku

I did my first ever sudoku yesterday, online. Today I did two more in
the Palo Alto Daily.

I have to admit that they're more fun than I thought they would be,
but I still think I'm more of a crossword fan.

Will Taylor and Strings Attached

At Threadgills doing the Pink Floyd show...

B Scene at the Blanton

Giant balloon sculptures hanging from the ceiling (B Scene at the Blanton Museum).

Salvation Pizza

The aftermath... was too hungry to remember to take picture before we
ate. ;-)

Rosie is asleep under the table.