Jeff’s Blog

I’ve been cleaning my room up like a madman for the past couple days. It hasn’t looked this tidy in a while.

Before

After

and because I can, here’s an MPEG movie from my new camera!

Pictures like this make me miss Berkeley.

Chapel Hill may be the southern part of heaven, but there’s something to be said for a shot of the campanile, the eucalyptus grove, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge together.
There’s an interesting thread going on over at the UC Berkeley LiveJournal community with such pictures.

OK, so I somehow got the consumerist idea into my head that I needed a new digital camera. My old one was bought in early 2000, has a whopping 1.3 megapixels resolution and is actually so old instead of a USB connector connects through a 9-pin serial connector (which I have actually lost since [...]

Every so often, I examine the statistics extracted from the logs of this site for things like search keywords and referals. Now, normally the far and away most popular search terms involve non-circular gears from a project I did back in undergrad (you can find links to it on the main site). This [...]

Google just beefed up their satellite imagery of Europe, apparently. I pulled up a number of the places I live or have lived in the past and I’m surprised at the variance in resolution. Actually, the vast majority of Saarbrücken has bad resolution, but for some reason there’s a big slice in the [...]

Today, I went over to Kessing Pool to swim a few laps again. It was fairly non-crowded and I was able to have an entire lane to myself. I still can’t swim backstroke straight, which annoys me, but at least when I have my own lane I don’t have to worry about running [...]

From yesterday’s Dear Abby:

DEAR ABBY: I am 10. I was born in 1994. My problem is I really, really wish I had lived in the ’80s. I know this sounds stupid, but the style was awesome — not skanky. The music was great — not rap. The ’80s seem awesome! I mean, they had good [...]

Interesting snipet out of a National Weather Service public information statement today (emphasis added).

According to storm data, a National Weather Service publication, the
U.S. Averages 67 reported fatalities per year. Due to under
reporting, the figures are more realistically about 100 deaths per
year. Only about 10 percent of people who are struck by lightning
are killed, leaving 90 [...]

At least that I’ve heard in a while… To give you background, they’re in the process of escaping from Alcatraz.

Lisa: Hurry, swim towards San Francisco!
Homer: What?? I’m not made of money! Swim towards Oakland!

So true. I miss the Bay Area.

Around 4am, I finished getting everything working on my linux box and managed to go to bed. Of course, I got up late since I had gone to bed late. Anyhow, after futzing around and getting some work done, I started to get ready to go over to the YMCA for my swimming [...]