Andrea (my wife) and I at our 5-year mini celebration on 2006-09-20:

Machaca is a common ingredient for much Mexican cookery, particularly in the Northern states (like the State of Sonora, South of Arizona). Historically, it was used as a kind of pseudo-beef-jerky, keeping well on the trails and in the kitchens of Old Mexico. Being a semi-preserved staple, it traditionally takes quite a bit of time to make (and even longer to make into something), but the modern equivalent holds much of the same flavor when done in just over an hour with the right tools.

Oh, and it's ungodly tasty when eaten fresh in, say, burrito form with some sour cream, brown rice and cucumber!

On Monday, 09/11/2006, I start a new chapter at San Jose State.

As an employee.

This is my third semester at SJSU as a student, and on Monday I become a sysadmin for the College of Engineering (I'm a student on the other end of campus in the College of Science). I took this job (and a hefty, though livable, pay cut) largely because I'm staring down the barrel of having to take mid-afternoon (or even late morning) classes in the next couple of semesters and working on campus makes this trivial--I can pop out for an hour-long class anytime and have zero commute time.

Imagine that you are a QA engineer--someone who finds bugs in software and/or hardware and reports those problems back to the product team. Further imagine that you found a specific behavior that exhibits itself under a precisely defined set of circumstances (say, when you click button A, button B gets disabled when it really shouldn't and error message 3304 appears). So you're duty-bound to report the problem, since this bug is blocking a bunch of other work. So you do, and it reads like this:

See the problem here? No notion of how button B is broken, no notion of when button B breaks, and no way whatsoever for the person reading the message to figure out how to reproduce the bug. If you were a professional QA person, you'd get fired quickly if you put too many of these in the queue.

Yet this is what sysadmins deal with everyday. From people who should know better.

The RIAA (music recording industry) has been suing individual people left and right for the past few years, fearing that these "menaces to society" are giving away their ridiculously over-protected, over-priced, and over-hyped music on file-sharing services. Among those having to deal with litigation: A deceased grandmother, a woman with no computer, and yet another who was accused of using a Windows program to distribute music (despite the fact that she had a pre-Intel Mac that was incapable of running such software).

Similarly, the MPAA (the video equivalent of the RIAA) has gone after individuals as well, along with any other file sharing service that can reasonably be targeted. They've even used trade law in foreign countries to arrest someone for helping distribute a DVD player program for Linux.

And now for something completely different...

Every now and again, I overhear someone planning a trip to Phoenix, or mention that I'm from Phoenix, or something and find that I need to enumerate some interesting things to do.

I find that there are plenty of guides that will recommend ball games, or art museums, or outsider-friendly restaurants. While those certainly have their place, I think Phoenix is overlooked in one area in which it is truly special: As a bastion of Sonoran-style Mexican cuisine. Folks like me who grew up exposed to Sonoran style food are loathe to experience the Tex-Mex or DF (Mexico City = Districto Federale or DF)-style food that is found elsewhere in the US (or worse yet, the Taco Bell-only enclaves of many parts of the country).

191 is a prime number. 191 was the year that Sarapion of Antioch became Patriarch of Antioch. There are 191 member states in the United Nations.

My score on the Computer Architecture final was 191 out of 200.

You might be asking yourself why this is such a big deal. But I just took that final on Wednesday (2006-08-02) and the class doesn't start until 2006-08-23. And I won't have to attend that class (beyond the first day--to turn in paperwork) because I already aced the final. As far as I've been able to tell, I'm the first person to ever successfully challenge an upper-division class in the Computer Science department at SJSU. Or at least nobody I've talked to has ever heard of any such thing.

Just loved this (doctored) pic of the PS3 too damn much:

When in doubt, the answer is probably "Ralph the Space Megasaur." Again.

Straight A semester (yay!). To wit:

Honestly, I'd have been extremely upset if I would've gotten anything less than an "A" in UNIX SA...