Older blog entries for Wheat (starting at number 99)

Python/MySQL

And then I prepared to install a Python/MySQL interface. And it didn't work. And I tried and tried to get it to work and the damn thing just wouldn't work. Something funny going on with the character sets.

Work continues at the GSC. I can't say enough good things about it. It's good work, honest work, hard work. Enjoyable and challenging. I have finished my first project. A web summary of recent "runs" done by the seven sequencing machines in the lab. It's all very similar technology to what I'm used to, but everything is different too: perl instead of python, mysql instead of postgres, red hat instead of debian.

The atmosphere is co-operative. There are few hard deadlines, yet we all work very hard to accompish as much as quality work as quickly as possible. They could bring in CEO's of software companies and charge them $4,000 a day. Teach them how to run their development teams more efficiently.

Venusmeetsmars.com

So the launch party didn't go so well. But Lindsay and Jay have launched, and visitors are starting to come in. Slowly, as word of mouth builds at first, hopefullly in greater number as the site gains momentum. Good luck guys!

http:/www.venusmeetsmars.com

13 May 2001 (updated 5 Jun 2001 at 04:17 UTC) »
networking

I battled with the network, but it won Connections got lost, messages got scrambled and the operating systems had bugs.

I will keep working on it and one day ...

GSC

I have started work at the Genome Sequence Centre, which falls under the auspices of the BC Cancer Agency. We've got a computer lab, populated largely by computation biologists. Then there's a regular biology lab with sequencers and other machines and test tubes and I haven't really looked around it that much but I suspect that they have bunzen burners.

Work looks like it should be quite enjoyable. The databases are complex and there is a massive flow of data and problems. I have started work on the sequence database front end - it generates reports and historgrams based on the performance of the sequencing machines.

Mehrdad works there - I'm going to kill him :)

watercolours

Painting and painting. I haven't painted in, erm, four years? Far far too long. So I broke out the watercolours last week and have been having a blast. My first two works were just warm-ups, then a semi-realistic prairie landscape for Lesa, who emailed "I miss the prairies and its desert sun". Then one for Suzanne, an abstract that was inspired by the cover of the weddoes Seamonsters album. This one is in part a house-warming gift, as she just moved, and in trade for an "absinthe night". Yes, I will get the absinthe. Yesterday I purchased more supplies, as most of my stuff was pretty old and crusty, and I'm working on a impressiontic rendering of the Cominco lead-zinc smelter in Trail, BC. Each painting is better than the last as I warm up to the old craft. It is so much fun.

living

David Gedge, "this is a William Shatner number: waaoaohh, woaoaaha, woaohaoAHAHAH!"

I can't find Felicity by The Wedding Present on Napster. I'll try again later, someone has to have it, although perhaps it's being indirectly banned - I don't think Midnight Music is part of the RIAA since they're just a small French indie label from the 80s. Stupid RIAA. Oh well, at least i got my vinyl.

Saint Germain

What a wild concert. Matt and I waited in line for 110 minutes for 110 minutes of music. Jellybean and Shoeshine had free tickets and just showed up and went in. The band had a big presence, there was eight or nine or maybe ten guys - a whole lot. The music was pure free flowing jazz reggae paradise. They had the crowd flowing, moving, jumping, clapping and cheering - which is pretty good for a Vancouver crowd.

They seem to have almost no net presence. A google search on saint germain brings up information on some saints and some soccer teams, but no band. They were apparently very strict about no photos or recording devices during the gig, which seemed kind of lame.

Men Who Make The Music

From Videomatica I rented "Devo: The Men Who Make The Music", their first video collection. It's interesting how they've spliced together scenes just for the video, along with live stuff and regular videos. It's pretty hardcore oddball stuff. It's good. "You're dying under daddy's cap, smeghead."

I also got Programming Python, which is like 200 pages more than Programming Perl. It's a wordy mother, looks like it could use some editing, but if you dig through it looks like there lots of good python joy in there.

Freddy Got Fingered is fscking funny. Tom Green is genius and hilarious. The movie lacked any decent plot, but there was plenty of oddball, strangeness. "Backwards man! Backwards man! I can walk backwards fast as you can!" "Daddy would you like some sausage." Just weird, yes, yes,

17 Apr 2001 (updated 18 Apr 2001 at 00:12 UTC) »
More Island

I've been taking pictures of the island: http://www.teague. ca/pender/. It's pastoral and relaxing out here. I've been hiking instead of hacking. The bread out here is simply amazing. It comes from nearby Saturna Island at Hagis Farm. Their Pleasant Bread is so, so tasty. It's all organic and freshly milled n' shit. It's got dates and molasses and sesame seeds. I love the bread, the sandwiches are so good.

Avocado

Camping on the weekend with Matt and Lesa, Lesa says, "Why do you pronounce it with a 'D'?" as we ate our avocado sandwiches. Apparently the fruit is commonly mispelled/mispronounced as 'avocado'. Here are some facts on the little feller: http://w ww.crfg.org/pubs/ff/avocado.html. Advogato's are known as the Alligator Pear to the English. The avocado tree is a dense, fast growing evergreen that can reach heights of 80 feet. Advogato's are high in oils, second only to olives in the fruit kingdom, and the fruit can reduce blood cholesterol. You can grow an avocado from seed if you follow these instructions.

Pender Island

Well, I'm out here on Pender Island house sitting and looking after my parents dog. What a sweet house it is! Today is day three of a ten day span. It was blow your mind sunny today. I took lots of pictures and went swimming in Roe Lake - it was pretty cold so I just swam out about 20 feet and then scurried back to shore. I brought my Linux box so I could do some hacking too, but the weather hasn't been inducive to staying indoors. It's got to rain sooner or later though.

The tide was out really low today. The bay turned into a big mud flat. The tide has come in now, and the beach has all but disappeared. Sitting around watching the tide come in and out - my vacation from slacking.

I signed up with the local ISP today. There's only dial-up access offered, but it's not too bad, I can pull 5.5 K/sec on the 56K modem in the iMac. One nice thing about dial-up is you can set-up an account really fast - just make a phone call and wait 10 minutes. Compare this to the 6 week waiting lists for DSL access.

Japan

Tonight, reading Hall's account of his trip ot japan. Using Amazon's honour system payment system I chipped in a modest $8 for the trip - good to pay for good content when so often I pirate bad content. I enjoyed the account of the capsule hotel and the description of Akihabara: "It was like the California tech superstore Fry's but it was denser. It was Fry's on meth."

During the day, Craig, Dario and I hiked around Buntzen Lake. It was a good 3 hour hike. The east side of the lake was too popular for my liking, people every 500 ft. We only saw 3 groups of people on the other side, as we hiked up a trail that climbed the western ridge called Lakeview Ridge - which was a complete misnomer as there was only one view of the lake on the entire section of that trail and it was a very poor view at that.

We are making plans for many more weekend hikes this summer. You can get up to some small lakes behind Buntzen on the Lindsay Lake Loop trail which sounds interesting. And we're going to also hike the Chief, High Falls Creek Trail and my goal is to make it up the Lions this year.

Shaw

Rogers Cable was bought by Shaw Cable. Then my modem started acting really poor, until Matt mentioned that Owain had the same problem and switching to DHCP fixed it. No more static IP for me, though that's not that big of a deal, and the modems fast again. It's going to be dial-up for the next week and a half as I spend it house sitting on Pender Island.

Opera

I like opera. Tech Preview 2 for the Mac (that's the old OS, not X) is out, and they have this excuse for releasing their software: "To fix the bugs most reported in TP1 and because TP1 expired." because TP1 expired.

Bitz

I smell like chlorine, from the pool at the Y. I am working or at least intending to work again. Earn money, work on projects, create stuff and transact with other people.

Javien promises a release in March. Erm, it's April know. I know this because my landlady was calling me asking me where my frickin' rent cheque was. Anyways, their job descriptions read well, a revolutionary internet start-up, yeah! Except there's that dot-com downturn thing. "Doesn't matter, we'll start-up anyways!" Fast paced. Energetic. Creative energy. Been reading to many job description postings lately. My favorites are the "must be experienced with new and cutting edge technologies".

30 Mar 2001 (updated 30 Mar 2001 at 19:06 UTC) »

Bad Mouse

The ps2 mouse i stole from Stormix just up and died on me today. One minute it was fine, the next minute nothing. Not convinced that mice can just die, i figure something is wrong with my OS. I'm running unstable and my packages are kind of messed up. So i spend along messing about cluelessly and then accidentaly do a rm * (i meant rm *~) in /etc/init.d/. Oops, that took an hour to fix. I tried doing some apt-get install --reinstall package but many of the pre-removal scripts would die when they couldn't find the right file in /etc/init.d/. Oh well, at least I have a better understanding of function and structure of /etc/init.d/ :).

So i finally figure maybe my mouse died, but i'm not sure, so i go to London Drugs and get the cheapest wheely mouse they got there - this iMac coloured thing from Certified Data for $25. Wow, i have never encountered such a cheap mouse in my life. The rollers are so flimsy that it's almost impossible to get smooth motion from the mouse -- the cursor just bounces across the screen. First thing tomorrow morning i'm taking it back to the store and getting a real mouse. Logitech. Now there's a mouse manufacturer. My Logitech wheely mouse cost $30, and it's a fine quality mouse.

Projects

SQL Poll is now at release 0.4.0. It's got skins and supports 3 databases. Still got some bugs, but it's getting a little better.

Zoperl is a little more difficult than I thought. I'd intended to just take the PythonScripts interface and slap it on top of PerlScripts (er, that's ScriptPerl), but it's a little more complicated than that. March has been a very unproductive month for me too (only 2 advogato entries so far), and the coding has been coming along slowly. Perhaps April will be better. It better be. Biatch!

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