Long, rambling tales from a simple person

codingparadox @ 2008-06-19T22:53:00

2008-06-20T05:53:14Z

Avenue Q
A++++++++++++ WOULD WATCH AGAIN

Chile

2007-08-12T22:03:14Z

I'm not going to say a whole lot here, but Chile is absolutely gorgeous. I'll be taking pictures as I remember, and adding them to this facebook album daily.

Mmmm.... Wine...

2007-05-15T05:38:55Z

(Yes, Duncan's allowed to yell at me, and Leslie and Trix, but they don't read LJ, so only Duncan.)

Videos from May 4th Track Day

2007-05-13T09:33:04Z

If you ever wanted to know what PIR looks like, here's me driving around it on a wet day a week ago.

Unfortunately, I only got the 2 wet sessions, not either of the two (mostly) dry sessions, due to having the camera in the wrong mode. The car's also turned way down (12-13psi instead of 23-24), so that's why it's not as fast as you'd be expecting. ;-)

Session 2 (culminates in a fantastic spin).
Session 4 (no incidents, but a cobra spins out right in front of me on video)

Mmmm

2007-05-02T07:02:57Z

Wall, Complete

2007-02-20T04:17:20Z

Really, the majority of the work was finished as of saturday night. Sunday afternoon, we headed down to Lowes and picked up a 5 pound bucket of 2" deck screws and found some foam floor tiles that should hopefully help keep a fair amount of chalk and such off the carpet.

We brought all the plywood panels up, and only had to slightly adjust 2 of the 2x4s (apparently we hadn't quite put them up perfectly to measurement) for all the t-nut holes to be clear of them. A few hours later, the boards were all up. It was quickly established that the boards are really on there. They're totally solid, and don't move at all. Leslie quickly set up a few test holds, and it was established that the T-nut system was working fine, and that the wall was, indeed, solid.

I then got to set the first route! It's going to be interesting finding ways to do lots of different types of routes with this setup. I'm contemplating doing a small half-size ceiling panel, but for that I'm really going to need to get a crash pad. Leslie tried out the route and got angry at it.

As I started setting a second route, I realized that I needed to start actually marking the routes, and was having trouble finding tape that stuck to the wall. Duct tape stuck to the wall, but it quickly becomes hard to differentiate grey duct tape from... grey duct tape. I started out by using fiber tape, which was sticky but clear, and then putting colored electrical tape on it. However, that was a painfully slow process, and in the end, really didn't stick that well. So, tonight, after spending the day skiing, I went to Michael's art supply with Cary and picked up a bunch of different colors of duct tape. The duct tape works much better, and is much more visible besides. Here's the wall as it stands now, with two routes up, and my bedroom mostly cleaned up from the mess of building the thing.

At this point, I just need to let my hands heal for a day or two, and then get back to setting more routes and start really using it. Today, I woke up to go skiing at 7am, and most of the fingers on my right hand hurt like holy hell to move, presumably as a result of doing all the crimpy routes yesterday, as well as drilling a few hundred screws into the wall. Several advil, lots of painful stretching, and an hour later, it was a good bit better, but it's still sore. No pain, no gain.

More Progress

2007-02-18T02:46:32Z

Poker lasted until the wee hours of the morning, so there was no more progress yesterday, as expected. Leslie showed up in the middle of the night too, escaping from Portland for the weekend.

Waking up at the crack of 1pm, we started on the wall boards. The process is fairly simple, but incredibly repetitive and labor-intensive. I first cut the plywood to the right shape (see the whiteboard plans from yesterday) on my makeshift cutting table (read: two chairs.)

After the sheets are cut to the right size, I measure out and draw an 8"x8" grid on it, avoiding the wall studs in the appropriate places. Using a 7/16" drill bit, I then drill holes at all the intersections. When that's done, I power sand down both sides. The board is then prepped. The next step is to put the T-Nuts into all the holes. First coat the t-nuts in adhesive, and then hammer them into the holes.

Several hours later, the walls are all completed. They're now laid up against the wall and waiting for the glue to dry. And now it's time for Red Robin. Tonight, we will hopefully get it all up on the wall in my room. All the cutting is done.

Looking at the massive size of all the done boards, I'm suddenly not feeling good about the number of holds I bought. I fear that I might need to do a massive web order of bulk holds tomorrow. This is all I have right now, which doesn't seem like it's really going to cover 16'x8'.

Edit: After dinner, we brought the 2x4s inside, and finally got them all screwed into the wall by 11pm.

I then realized that I only had 3" screws, and that if I used them to screw the plywood to the 2x4s, I'd sink another half inch of them into the drywall. So, in the interest of less screwholes to fix upon moveout, I'm going to wait until tomorrow, and then buy a bunch of 2" screws, and then put up the plywood then. So close...

The Project Begins

2007-02-16T08:44:29Z

(As always with my posts, click the images for full size versions.)

It started out with just me wanting a hang board to do some basic training in my room on my off days. So, I looked into it, and ordered one. Yesterday (wednesday), it arrived. I went to the hardware store, bought some screws, a little piece of plywood, and a stud finder, and went to town. I soon discovered that most of the doorways in my room didn't actually have studs over them, just drywall. This forced me to put my hang board in a somewhat inconvenient place, over 8 feet in the air, requiring even me to perform a short jump to reach it.

I quickly realized and accepted that I needed some way to more easily reach this board other than a chair. While I may be able to jump up to it, it's not exactly the most pleasant way to start a workout, and shorter people are totally screwed trying to reach it. A chair is sub-optimal. So, what's the logical conclusion? Obviously, the walls around it need some basic climbing holds to climb up to the hang board.

So I looked into getting some basic holds. It turns out, as I expected, that most holds use the bolt system, which requires using T-Nuts and such in plywood. There are some screw-on holds, but I would still need to put some kind of base onto the wall to prevent me from doing too much irreversible damage to the drywall. So I'd need to get some 2x4s and some plywood, and form a little mini wall around the doorway.

Then again, I've gone this far - why stop there? I did some measurements, and it looked like I could really use the whole corner of my room for a little climbing area. Using the 2x4 offsets from the wall, I wouldn't even do too much damage to the wall - nothing a little putty won't fix when we move out! I moved my dressers out of the way and made some more detailed measurements. Said measurements and initial plans looked like this:

I borrowed my parents' minivan for this evening, and 200$ of lumber/screws/wood glue at Lowes and 275$ in climbing holds and t-nuts and equipment and such at REI later, I have everything in the garage to start putting this together tomorrow. After my soccer game, I took the remainder of the evening doing all the prepwork for the wall. I more carefully measured and drew out where all the studs in the walls are, so I know exactly where I'm going to screw in the 2x4s tomorrow.

Finally, I much more carefully measured all the walls that I'd be working on, and figured out exactly what to cut all the wood to tomorrow. Good thing I have a couple big whiteboards lying around. They make planning easy.

And now that that's all done, I'm ready to cut up all the wood tomorrow. It turns out that I bought 12 2x4s when I needed 14. Also, I only bought 100 T-Nuts, to complement the 35 or so that came on the climbing holds that I got. It was all that REI of Redmond had. From my calculations (the standard pattern seems to be a T-Nut every 8 inches, in a grid), I need almost twice this many to fully deck out my wall properly. So, tomorrow, I'm going to pick up 2 more 2x4s, and try to locate another 5 or 6 25-packs of T-Nuts, probably at the downtown REI, if possible, or any other climbing store that I can find in the area. If I can't, I'll probably end up ordering a few more sets through Metolius online, and they'd be here monday. I'd just only put up whatever I could properly fill up before monday, which would be sub-optimal, but okay. I'm probably going to need to buy more holds, anyway. As I slowly realize the size of this project, I begin to realize that I probably didn't buy enough...

Guster

2007-02-12T07:56:11Z

Oh, god. Guster concert for the win. *dies happy*

Autocross

2007-01-29T05:45:20Z

If I haven't made you watch autocross yet, here are two of my runs from earlier today.

codingparadox @ 2007-01-09T00:17:00

2007-01-09T08:18:16Z

Dan turned me on to the band "Kill Hannah", after finding them through Pandora.

It's great for several reasons:
1. It's awesome music
2. It brings back wonderful Freshman year memories...

Sigh

2007-01-04T02:07:29Z

Watch it

It's nothing new, but it's good to see it said so succinctly by someone, on popular television.

Happy New Years

2007-01-02T07:13:31Z

Successful party, all in all.

It was a pretty sweet day at Crystal

2006-12-31T05:54:47Z

I look awesome in my sweet snowboarding helmet. Also, my mom is short.

Matt sent me an amazing present from Europe

2006-12-23T07:26:56Z

Boxer shorts of Michaelangelo's David. A-mazing.

Wow

2006-12-15T19:01:19Z

It just took 2 hours for me to drive to work. I saw 2 functioning stoplights on the whole drive. From my drive, it looks like kirkland, kenmore, totem lake, bothell, and most of the u district are without power. There were downed trees blocking several major roads as well. Crazy. Somehow Children's has power, even though the stoplight out front doesn't, and neither do any other stoplights that I saw within about a half mile.

"About 700,000 customers of Puget Sound Energy were in the dark early Friday and about three-fourths of the circuits were down in the company's nine-county service area, spokesman Roger Thompson said."

Two pictures

2006-11-27T09:03:07Z

It snowed today. This is about 12 hours after said snow, and there's several inches less than there used to be, due to melting.

Also, Black Friday Rawks:

Jury Duty starts tomorrow. I'm... what's the opposite of excited...

codingparadox @ 2006-10-24T16:06:00

2006-10-24T23:06:44Z

Also, getting called for jury duty FTL.

On *nix

2006-10-24T18:55:07Z

While trying to teach Leslie how to set up a local web server, Dan got her to set up the personal web sharing on OSX, and then I told her to put her files in /var/www/html/. 30 seconds later, I get the following from dan:

[10/24 11:48:41] Dan Gidycz: leslie is not allowed in /var
[10/24 11:48:44] Dan Gidycz: okay? okay.

Driving Practice

2006-10-22T03:56:16Z

For 3-5 months a year, there's the public roads and autocross and track.

For the other 7-9, there's only this:

30$ of wood and parts from Lowes and Ace, and a couple hours carefully measuring, cutting, and assembling, and now I have a decent setup!

Good Times

2006-10-16T07:24:32Z

On the way home from dinner tonight, going towards 405 on NE 8th, I saw a red Porsche 968 with a Tire Rack sticker on it that could not have been owned by anyone but Steve Hui himself. I sped up to follow, only to see him kick his rear end out into the onramp and then zoom off around a slow minivan. When I got home, I sent him a poking email:

"I'm impressed, Steve. Nothing Annie could do to the poor 968 was able to get the ass end to come out, but you managed to do it twice in one onramp. ;-)"

He replies soon after:

"Oh, so that *was* you. :-P I was wondering (a) why someone would zoom up on me like that, and (b) why they actually entered the onramp at the same speed I did. When I saw that it was a silver RX-8, I actually figured it might be you.

Losing the tail at corner entry was totally unintentional and a bit hairy. :-P"

Good times, good times. :)

Hotttt

2006-10-06T16:35:25Z

Article

codingparadox @ 2006-10-03T00:23:00

2006-10-03T07:25:03Z

Also, I found this many years ago, and I think showed it to many of you.

However, if you haven't seen it, watch this:

The Cathedral - Katedra
On Youtube in a little bit bigger and better quality

codingparadox @ 2006-10-02T19:29:00

2006-10-03T02:30:17Z

P.S. Tyler - Blink the Brightest = A+++++

Conroe

2006-09-25T09:21:14Z

Interim settings for the new Conroe box:

356MHz FSB x9.0 giving 3204 MHz, for a 34% O/C, with a 75mV bump in VCore over stock (not sure if it's needed or not, just wanted to see if it'd be super-stable at these settings then go with less)
RAM at 1:1, with 4-4-4-12 timings, for DDR2/712MHz, with VRAM at 2.1V (.3V bump over stock), also very conservative for now

Now to see how well it runs at these settings for a few days, then maybe order a bigger HSF (using the Intel retail right now) and try for some more. People have been getting >4.0GHz with these chips on decent air cooling. Conroes are nuts.