Friday, May 8th, 2009 |
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It is animal rescue week here! On Tuesday Einstein found a wounded bird in the back yard and notified us. We kept it safe and watched it for a few days and today we brought it to a wildlife rescue hospital in Austin. You can read more about the adventures of the little bird here. The next day when I woke up and went to make Einstein's breakifest I found a lil snake curled up in the hallway. I think one of the cats had been molesting it as it had a few flesh wounds, although nothing too serious. I rescued him from the floor and set him up in a small 'hospital room.' Here is the little guy right after I rescued him but before I set up his hospital room.  And look at this cute lil lizard who was resting on the plumeria tree outside!  |
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Monday, May 4th, 2009 |
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Last night I saw a preview for the GI Joe movie and it actually looked really
awesome. I had heard about the movie a while back and figured it would
totally suck, since GI. Joes were just toys used to brainwash little kids into
joining the military (although I actually liked my GI. Joes as a kid, but I
always liked the villains best :-)). Anyway, I'm sure the film is still
largely full of militaristic propaganda, but it nonetheless looked really
cool. It reminded me (at least from the preview) of a juxtaposition of x-men
and 5th element (the good elements) and a bit of Armageddon/independence
day/etc thrown in so that it inspires recent high school graduates to enlist
and fills people with multiple 'support our troops' ribbons on their cars with
a sense of patriotic fuzziness. Anywho, long story short, now I want to see it. I remember I had a GI Joe as a kid that had like a long snake body. It was my favourite. It is the only one I can remember, but I remember playing with GI. Joes as a kid was always a rich and imaginative experience for me that was more like a turn-based strategic simulation than anything else. There really wasn't much fighting going on. In other news I officially walk on the 15th, so mark your calender!
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Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 |
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| Quantum Leap is a cheesy great show. | ||||
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Monday, April 27th, 2009 |
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Hell must have frozen over... Believe it or not I was trying to look something up and guess where I found the information I needed? At microsoft.com! Believe it or not! I kid you not: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib So I was trying to write to memory without polluting the cache. There is a SSE intrinsic function in gcc which lets one do this: _mm_stream_pi (__m64 *p, __m64 a) It uses the instruction movntq which moves a quadword (ie. 64 bits) with non-temporal storage (ie, try not cache it). The problem was that after I started using this intrinsic in my code I started seeing weird floating point behaviour all over the program. I couldn't figure it out and finding documentation on these esoteric routines proved extremely difficult (at least the first page of google didn't show much, and who looks at more than one page of search results?) Well there was a msdn.microsoft.com link which I avoided since a) it is microsoft and b) it is probably irrelevant. Well desperate as I was I followed the links and lo behold found my answer. In case you were wondering, the MMX instructions muck around with the floating point register set to allow the use of the __m64 data type and thus to enable correct floating point behaviour you have to restore the register states by calling _mm_empty(). Well that is it more or less. Anyway, I was delightfully pleased and surprised. Leave it to microsoft to have documentation readily available for such a unusual and infrequently used instruction. (Well of course Intel has tons of documentation on this, no doubt tucked away in pdfs away from google's prying eye). |
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Sunday, April 12th, 2009 |
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Happy Easter |
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Friday, April 10th, 2009 |
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I am now officially employed at UTSA You can see me listed in the directory here, but there is not really anything interresting to see. Check out Einstein's new page at mycorgi.com! And here are pictures of me and Einstein on the Poäng chair!   |
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Sunday, March 29th, 2009 |
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W00h00! So a couple of weeks ago the brew head seal on the expresso machine exploded. It was the original seal so it was pretty warn (and completely black from coffee (it was originally clear white)), and one day while Nele was operating the machine it exploded in a funnel cloud of meloncholy. If you look at the 4 o'clock position you can see where a big chunk of the seal is missing. I was too depressed and drained of energy without my coffee that I couldn't manage to order the replacement parts...thankfully the MRS ordered it for me. And hooray hooraw it arrived yesterday! Last fall I finally tried my hand at making a real vegan omelette. I have never actually seen such a thing; not in any recipe book nor in any restaurant (Kirby Lane actually has vegan omelettes, but they are really just omelette ingredients stir fried with tofu). It always seemed to me that it should be possible to make an authentic omelette using silken tofu... ....And indeed it is, viola:  What you see is soy cheese, green onions, and jalapeños wrapped in seasoned silken tofu and topped with fresh tomatoes and Provenceian herbs. Well I am my own biggest fan, but I can't tell the difference between it and the omelettes made from stuff that comes out a chicken's butt! I may post the recipe and tips once I perfect it (there are still a few tweaks and things I want to try). ~traesto~ |
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Sunday, March 15th, 2009 |
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I heard shocking news from ![[info]](http://piktures.deadjournal.com/userinfo.gif){kind=small} black_lilly that King of the Hill is being cancelled by fox. I cannot believe this since it is one of the greatest shows ever. To add insult to injury the show that is supposedly replacing it is "The Cleveland Show" (or something like that). It is a spin-off of Family guy focused around the character Cleveland. Now I quite like Family guy, at least early to mid family guy, Cleveland has to be one of the more lackluster characters. Furthermore we already have both Family Guy AND American Dad, which are basically the same show. Now I am impressed that American Dad has lasted so long; indeed it has proven that it can stand on its own, but how many animated MacFarlane shows can exist concurrently (on the same night even)? It is true that there are at least 3 or more forensics shows by Jerry Buckheimer running semi-concurrently, but considering that Family Guy has already been cancelled several years ago (and only renewed after gaining massive popularity in syndication on Adult Swim) it seems like only a matter of time before people get sick of Fox's 'animation domination.' Of course the danger there is that the few remaining staples of good television, such as the simpsons, may be at risk of being cancelled. You may doubt that anyone would actually cancel the Simpsons, but Fox is a network known for making bizarre decisions.Hopefully King of the Hill will be picked up by another network or renewed once Fox realizes the error of its ways. I'm ok if MacFarlane wants to make yet another formulaic show (even though I think it is a mistake, at least wait until one or both of the shows are off the air... having three similar shows on at once is begging for oversaturation), but not at the cost of King of the Hill. Another final point, the latest King of the Hill episodes are in High-definition (like the simpsons), but Family Guy and American Dad are not... This is not a huge deal, but lets face it, those black bars on each side of the screen decrease the hilarity of a program by 20-30 percent. In any event, if King of the Hill gets cancelled Fox is going to get a harshly worded letter on letterhead! |
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Monday, March 9th, 2009 |
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On the subject of unicorns: I was just reminiscing about a curious and alarming incident. When I first watched "Futurama, Bender's Big Score" (good film by the way), I was curious about the strange "sea-unicorn" creatures called "Narwhals." I assumed that they were made up since it seemed inconceivable that such a fantastic creature actually existed and that I could have gone 27+ years through life without learning about it, but something about the film portrayal of these fascinating sea beasts made me curious enough to do a quick google research. Sure enough, the narwhal is a real sea mammal!! WTF?!?! How could I go my entire life without knowing that there are freaking sea unicorns?!?! I wonder how many others are as ignorant as I was regarding the existence of these glorious creatures? Something is seriously wrong with the US education system if I could have gone so long without knowing about narwhals? It took a science fiction cartoon to introduce them to me! Someone needs to start a massive narwhal education campaign! There are unicorns in the world!! And they are even better than their mythological counterparts (since the fact that whales are better than horses implies sea unicorns are better than traditional unicorns!) I have no idea why this just occurred to me, but in an effort to 'blog' more I have to decided to try and post more random pseudo-sense. |
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Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 |
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At long last the day hascome: :-) |
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