Skot9000

Herb

2008-07-03T19:15:52Z

�Love makes this town go round, my loyal reader, love and hate, pot and booze, despair and buckets of black coffee, most of it stale. But when the wind is fresh off the sea and you�re walking in the sunshine with the foghorns already blowing way out there by The Gate, you know this is where you want to be, loving what you see, hating it only for not being what it could be.� - Herb Caen, 1976

six HUND

2008-04-15T05:42:31Z

Tollef was able to get an advance copy of my Rebate check from George W! Here is is:

Thanks george! I'm going to go stimulate the e-con-o-meeee!

bi-cycle!

2007-11-15T18:16:00Z

Dude, my new bike is rad.

click go big!

Jason, pictured in the previous post with the iPhones gave me the cool frame. Add a couple shiny parts from the internet and a few hundred dollars later you have a rad bike! Thanks to Cory for the deluxe photos. I'm about to ride to school to study for my Physics 4B exam on electromagnetism.

booyah! **UPDATE**
Jason sent me some photos of the Schwinn Worldsport when he got it.

kickstand!

look at all those gears

hello again

2007-09-06T23:01:00Z

So I am done with my internship at apple. It was fun. Our project was one out of a dozen or so picked from 300+ to present to the VP. That was cool.

I'm back at school and currently I am procrastinating doing my physics homework. I'm so crazy busy already this semester I have hardly had any time to do anything but school. I've got two physics classes and two math classes. nice and simple... right? Soon ridiculous words like "Vector Calculus" will be in the list of things i have done in school.

I've decided that I don't like studying in the library anymore. It's much more productive/interesting to study in unoccupied classrooms where you can go mad professor style on the blackboards. But then problem is what classrooms are unoccupied when? Hopefully all the time that I wasted making a CCSF Schedule parsing script can be made up with some quality uninterrupted study action.

I think i'm going to try and transfer to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It's a state school, but everyone says it's awesome for hands-on style education. It may mean another semester here at City College.. but what's the difference between doing nine or ten semesters at community college?

quick update

2007-05-27T05:44:57Z

I'm on summer break! finals are over! glory!

internship at Apple this summer. fun times.

also: fans of my muni fast-pass finder may have noticed it was broken. it's now fixed!
http://www.skot9000.com/muni/

OG

2007-03-21T16:59:55Z

The other day my mom was having some trouble with spam on her dsl email account. When she called sonic.net they told her that it was still under my name and she couldn't make any changes. (it seems they also gave her some internet buzzwords like firewall, software update and router that seemed to have nothing to do with the problem). Anyways, My mom calls me and says I should change the account over to her name because she is the one who has been paying for it and I haven't lived there for 7 years.

I went to check out the sonic.net website I noticed that we have been a member since 1995! Original Gangsters! I was 13 and had just convinced my parents that this internet thing was something we really, really needed to have.. I got my first non-AOL, real internet email address... very exciting times. I can't remember if I still had the 2400 baud modem or if I had upgraded to the 33.6k "crazy-fast" modem. I haven't used that email address since 1999, but it's still there. If it hasn't overflowed with spam a million times over, i bet it has some trippy dot-com era spam in it.

Unfortunatly, I also discovered that my mom has been paying around $59/mo. since the beginning for the DSL service and that same service costs $29/mo. now... and has for a long time.

in other news I hacked up a NextBus sms bus time prediction thing using textmarks.com. It's pretty slick. details at http://www.skot9000.com/nextbus/sms/.

hawking

2007-03-06T22:08:19Z

from an interview with Stephen Hawking on (http://www.pacificnews.org/marko/hawking.html)

TFR: Do you sense a connection between how the universe operates and why it exists?

HAWKING: I don't. If I did, I would have solved the universe.

wow.. what a bad ass. I am going to a soldout simulcast of a soldout lecture Hawking is giving at Berkeley next week. From the little blurb on the lecture website; "Hawking is widely considered to be the greatest scientific thinker since Newton and Einstein". Smarty Pants!

Sony Ericsson W800i theme

2007-03-03T04:29:00Z

When I first got my phone i was all stoked to go on the 'net and download some themes. I asked Tollef who already had the W800i where I should go to look for a good theme. Much to my surprise he responded that there aren't any good themes. This seemed unbelievable, but after some searching on my own I have come to the same conclusion. You have quite a selection if you are into import cars, cats, hearts, or crazy 'photoshoppyness' or some combination therein.

It turns out there is a decent program called Sony Ericsson Theme Creator available for OS X that will let you create your own themes (who would have guessed) but, best of all it will let you edit pre-existing themes. This allows one to not worry about all the little details of sliders, selectors, and buttons (assuming you can find a decent one to begin with) and just focus on removing animated robot cats and replacing with other things.

So i have created my own theme. It's called 'surf'.

sweet eh?
you can download it here. Once you have gotten it, just un-zip it and then send the .thm file to your phone via bluetooth. Your phone will know what to do next.

Yes, if you're not into surfing then this is probably just as dumb as an animated robot cat with a lens flare. sorry.

skot transformers

2007-02-12T00:46:49Z

those punks at skot transformers, uk, have got the number one result on google for 'skot'! then it's jez's friends friend skot that has the number two. then me.

number three! booyah!

muni sites are kinda weak.

2006-07-28T00:54:00Z

A while back i emailed the people at the sfmuni website to let them know that their list of ticket vendors is pretty impossible to use. I offered some suggestions, but they said they didn't have the budget to do it. (One way to get more money is to get more riders, and one way to get more riders is to make MUNI easier to use!)

Anyways, I wanted to mess with google maps API so I made it myself> http://www.skot9000.com/muni/

They also have nextbus.com which predicts the arrival times of MUNI busses and trains at each stop. It's very handy. However the website looks terrible, and it's even worse when you try and access it from a mobile phone. Also, even though it's been known for a while now that they have predictions for ALL electric busses, nextbus.com seems to only show the links for 3 of them. WTF?

I made a bare-bones site that looks decent on a mobile, AND it shows all the buses that I am interested in. check it;
http://www.skot9000.com/nextbus/

wow

2006-05-25T06:12:00Z

I haven't posted to this thing in a long time. in fact, it looks like the last post was shortly after last semester ended. Keeping with the theme, Spring '06 just ended for me today! In sculpture I made 3 abe heads spin on an assortment of wooden gears. it's pretty cool.

I don't think I have ridden my bike since the last post either, which is kind of sad. I think I need to get that in order. For my short summer break it looks like Tollef, Alex and I might drive to Chicago to visit Mr. Jez. should be excitment.

There are a lot of things that have happened since My last post.. this is kind of exciting.. kind of like meeting an old friend you haven't talked to in years...

My Volvo 1800 was totaled in a crash.. The other guy's fault. he rear-ended me with his giant suburban. I used the insurance money to buy a 2001 Toyota Tacoma. It's fun. and reliable so far.

I decided to major in Electrical Engineering. it's going to be a long hard time.. but I think it will be worth it.

I have make 1001 little electronics projects that are half-finished. look for a portfolio site with that soon.

My mom mentioned that she would pay for graduate school.. I would love to go to Ivrea in Italy. look like they do a lot of good stuff there.

I went to Hawaii for 3 weeks and had an excellent time. I didn't really have any plans or reservations. The first couple of days I hung out at a hostel and surfed every day all day. I think I must have been in the water every night when the sun set for 5 nights in a row. My brother gave me the phone number of this guy who lives there.. we ended up hanging out a lot and traveling around the island surfing and hiking and jumping off rocks. Then Ria met up with me and we camped, swam, kissed, saw epic sunsets, and stayed in the nicest hotel i've even even seen. The trip probably cost me a fortune, but man.. such a good time.

I have been really working hard at school.. it's a new thing for me. I'm kinda into it. I'm taking Trig and C++ programming (transfer requirements) this summer... it starts on June 12

dreams made of this

2005-12-14T23:26:00Z

as far as i can tell, these guys are living my dream: Squid Labs video tour

In other news Honest Abraham Lincoln has been finished. I made 5 plaster casts from the mold which was made from a plasticine model.

According to legend, Lincoln said, as a young man, on his appearance one day when looking in the mirror: "It's a fact, Abe! You are the ugliest man in the world. If ever I see a man uglier than you, I'm going to shoot him on the spot!" -from wikipedia

wobblie

2005-11-21T02:52:03Z

Last weekend on a trip up to Sebastopol I finally got around to making the onomatograph I have be meaning to build for a few years. A buncha years ago my mom's school cleared out all the Apple IIe computers from a store room. In true pack rat style I decided it would be good to take home all 12 monitors. The only reason being that IIe displays are actually just composite video displays that show video in a trippy green and white way.

Here is a short 8MB quicktime movie

Also last weekend I rode my bike up to Bernal Heights. It was a really nice day out, and I am way out of shape.

abandoned

2005-10-14T00:03:50Z

I love looking at urban exploration pictures. abandoned mental hospitals, storm drains, and caves make me shiver in my seat, yet keep me too captivated to stop looking. The one time I actually got to explore an abandoned hospital it was the same feeling but multiplied times 1000. I couldn't stop wandering around. we checked out every room on every floor. Every time i drive by the building it has something like a siren call that prevents me from taking my eyes off it.

There are tons of "ue" sites on the net. almost all of them are amazing. there are crazy people out there. http://www.opacity.us/ are absolutely some of the best I have seen. incredible photography. check it out.

growth

2005-09-22T06:33:00Z

In almost all of my free time since early August I have been working on the Breath of Fire circuit. Seeing this project through has been quite an experience... I don't normally feel such dedication to actually finishing things. If you have been feeling neglected or ignored, i'm sorry. it's not you, it's me. With that said, I hit a large milestone today.. it actually works! reliably! The performance out on the playa was a last minute hack, and the result was spotty if best. When this is actually finished it's going to be much better than that.

This has been my hang-out spot for the past few months.

It's not done yet. there is still much fine tuning to be done, and some actual testing. We didn't get to do any of that before burningman.

propane does have quite the impressive glow

In the mean time I'm also going to school for the first time in over 5 years. it's strange. But I think I like it...

Please keep your belongings with you at all times. - The Library is not responsible for lost or stolen items.

blogging?

2005-09-19T07:26:55Z

i've been doing lots of things.. unfortunately those things haven't been giving my websites the attention they deserve.

what's your net worth?

I am trying to learn PIC programming.

Breath of Fire

2005-08-10T22:16:00Z

I have been working pretty much nonstop on our project for Burning Man 2005, the Breath of Fire. This website has the info:

http://www.skot9000.com/bof/

who me?

2005-07-20T20:12:00Z

I'm still here, although for some reason I don't have the same level of time to kill in front of the ole 'puter. Quick recap:

- Quit Apple. I sent out this letter to (most) everyone I knew at Apple and got a lot of encouraging responses. Steve Jobs has yet to reply. I'm sure he is still thinking it over and trying to figure how to best capture his emotions in words.

- Mr. Jez lived in our house for a while and that was fun. One night we were joking about wikipedia parodies and the idea of wickerpedia was born. we quickly threw together the site, and wickerpedia.org had it's 15 days of internet fame after getting featured on boingBoing and even got it's own entry in the real wikipedia.org .

- Ria got laser eye surgery. she doesn't wear cute glasses anymore, but she also doesn't have too now.

- Mr. Jez moved out and Ria's sister Brett moved in. She is fun, i like having her around.

- My last english class is tomorrow... and that reminds me I should be working on that final essay!

ciao!

Cliffhouse

2005-06-23T23:06:00Z

Are you allowed to factor un-useable cliff space into your total acreage of a property? My parents live on 2 acres and most all of it is a slight hill � it's all totally useable. But at what point does the incline become so much that it can no longer be counted? I mean, if you lived on a giant cliff that was a 300 foot 90 degree drop off could you say you lived on a 2+ acre lot? Even though your horizontal space was actually much less? Common sense would say that whatever property is useable would be counted, but how do you know what is useable? in Santa Cruz there are houses hanging onto cliff sides (waiting to fall in, no doubt). I bet this has become an issue in Southern California where there are giant seaside cliffs that sell for tons of money. Someone needs to take a stand on this! The injustice cannot continue! WHO WILL SAVE US NOW!?

or.. maybe no one cares about cliff acreage.

In other news my last day at Apple is a week from today. exactly 7 days, 0 hours and 57 minutes according to this little countdown widget i got. I have to go to class after my last day at Apple, so the party will be the next night.

well..

2005-06-16T00:13:00Z

My last day at Apple is going to be Thursday, July 30th 2005. That is just over 2 weeks from today. If i remember correctly, I started on Monday, May 22nd 2000. Not including holidays, vacation, sick days, and weekend work, that is roughly 1320 business days for a total of 10,560 business hours. Having accomplished this, I feel like i'm in a good spot right now to do something else.

What's coming up next is a hopefully relaxing month and a half of just one evening class at city college, twice a week. The day after I leave my job here at Apple, I will register for fall semester classes full time, and come August I will actually go to classes full time with the exception of a small break for a shorter than usual trip out to the desert for burningman. During the relaxing month and a half preceding burningman I am going to work with Adam, Ria and hopefully others to finish the tentatively titled "Breath of Fire" which has been my official foray into the exciting new field of Physical Computing. After burningman and the breath of fire, I am going to finish up the fall semester and continue with CCSF until i have completed enough general education requirements to transfer to a 4 year college.

I don't have enough money saved to pay for school AND pay for rent AND pay for food. Assuming i'm not giving up on rent or food, I'm going to be looking for freelance jobs doing php/mysql coding, an possibly some Macintosh consulting/repair.

I bought one of those cheap, plastic, sand colored adirondak chairs at safeway the other day for our porch. When it came up on the register I though for a second that it said '1 CHAIR, DESSERT'. When I realized it was actually the dessert with only one 's' I wished i hadn't just burst out laughing.

I have a really nice wooden desk in my room that the sun from the skylights shines on during the day and is positioned right next to similar desk (okay it's identical) where my beautiful girlfriend Ria works. Ria is especially excellent because she is still wonderful to me even when I have soldered my fingers together and am pissed off because I have to write an essay about why Richard Wright mentions glass so many times in his essay "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow".

Soon before I transfer myself to a real 4 year college, i will have decided what exactly they call a major that involves "both electronics and art and doesn't have multimedia in the name", and then i will finally be able to answer the only question people seem to ask when they hear you are going to college. you know the one.

So, if I can stick with this plan for another 10,560 business hours, not including holidays, vacation, sick days, and weekend work, then i think i will be in another good spot.