I got to do this yesterday.  You get to fly around in a giant vertical wind tunnel.  There will be pictures, but I don't have them yet.  I'll update this when I do.

For quite a number of years now, I've been listening to Oysterband - a UK-based folk-rock-or-something group that's been around for over 25 years now, making great music.  They're very, very good, and apparently they put on an amazing live show.  I've never had a chance to see them live - they haven't come to California in a very long time, and it' ( Read more... )

I've been bad about posting some interesting things I've been up to recently, so here come three in a row ( Read more... )

This week, Google took all its West Coast employees to Disneyland.  Well, you actually had the choice of Disneyland or camping (in the desert, in February... in California, but still...) - I chose Disneyland.  They flew us all down, put us all up in a hotel, gave us a 1-day pass to the park, and we had exclusive access to the park (i.e., they ( Read more... )

As I biked home tonight, through the wind and heavy rain, I felt very honourable.  Honourable in my role as a green commuter.  Definitely honourable, not, um, what's that other word - starts with S-T-U... nah, can't think of it.  I didn't mind that my wheel rims were so wet that my brakes didn't work well - after all, if I wanted to slow down, I ( Read more... )

When I cam home, there was a PG&E truck on our street.  That soon grew to four trucks of various sizes.  Around 9pm, the power came back on briefly: it came on; 30 seconds later there was a KABOOM from outside; 30 seconds later, it went out again.  It came on for good (so far) around 9:15.  The house is warming up nicely.  There might still be a ( Read more... )

since we had power to our house.  There was a big storm on Friday that knocked out power to >1Million people, including us.  We've been in the dark since.  72 hours so far.  Put another way, we've been out of power for nearly half of 2008.

The power went out shortly after 10am on Friday - Mona said there was a bang outside and the lights went out.  ( Read more... )

Last year, Iain thought Christmas was nice - he enjoyed opening presents, but after he opened one, he'd play with it.  It took several days to open them all.  It was pretty calm overall ( Read more... )

Dear Diary ( Read more... )

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that since I had all my CDs ripped and losslessly compressed, it would be OK to do some manipulation of the (lossy) MP3s created from the (lossless) FLAC audio files.  In particular, it would be nice if the MP3 files were volume-equalised, so that no matter which album you were playing, the volume would be about the ( Read more... )