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Sunday night after Laur. came back from her day at work we were both a bit anxious to get out of the house. My friend The Social Bobcat had given me a ‘Go’ game as a groomsman gift (schweet) and so we decided to give it a, uh, go, at Austin Java on Barton Springs.

Go is one of those ancient games of farthest asia that always seems to attract nerdy computer guys faster than rumours that Jun Kunasagi (if you do any googling for her, it’s probably not going to be safe for work) is washing a car in the parking lot.

sound of a thousand be-Teva’d feet running to the door

The set is very nice, but the instructions left a bit to be desired. The sublime zen nature of Go and the sublime zen nature of engrish left us not entirely sure if we were playing right. The essence of the rules was discerned, but we couldn’t be entirely sure we were doing it right, or seeing the subtelty.

Nevertheless we played, trying to remember rules and then realizing that our relatively glacial rate of play had whiled away the hours to bedtime so we declared the game played and went back home.

I’ve found this very good interactive tutorial and plan on learning some more of the basics.

As you may have noticed from my rotating Flickr badge, there is a smokey gray sport-utility popping up and moving about.

Yes, folks, I have purchased a Nissan Xterra from the friendly folks at [Town North Nissan]. It’s an “S” model with 4x4. I’m hoping that we can use it this winter to go snowboarding in Colorado.

Now some of you will be noting that it wasn’t all that long ago that I was posting pictures of my recently purchased BMW. You might be thinking that I have a Scrooge McDuck like vault somewhere. No, that’s not the case at all. The bimmer was fun and fine in the Bay. I couldn’t have a house, I didn’t go much of anywhere, I didn’t do much of anything extravagant. Was that my fault? Was it the place? I think that the two were certainly both part to blame. Here in Austin, I’d rather load up a car and head out to the countryside, or take the car up to Colorado, etc. The sports sedan just wasn’t the right match for my current lifestyle. So, it’s time to put that sort of thing away ( for a while ).

After picking up the car and riding off, we headed on down to South Congress to go look about a bit.

After parking we first headed to Allen’s Boots, the exterior of which forms the white stone background seen in the picture below. It’s a really great western wear store, it smells like leather and cotton, which I suppose is the requisite smell for a place such as that.

After that we mostly ambled up the West side of the street and then back down. We were really impressed with the beautiful landscaping and architecture used at the Hotel San Jose. They use a very Californian Zen-garden style.

We sat at the San Jose for a bit drinking rosé and lounging by the small pool. After a while, though, we grew a bit warm so we decided to dip our heels into the pool. We sat in the dimly candle-lit poolside area, sipping our drinks as the playlist went through some of the finer songs of T.Rex’s “Slider” and a collection of Serge Gainsbourg.

After our visit to the San Jose we headed back home.

Sunday morning we woke up and went to go grab brunch at the Upper Crust bakery, but upon arriving we found out that they had sold out of the batch of quiches and the pickings were otherwise slim. We headed down to the Lamar location of Austin Java and had excellent breakfast ( steak and egg! ) quesadillas and breakfast tacos.

The rest of Sunday was spent getting ready for the week and making some progress in my understanding of JavaScript ( see previous entries ).

If you came across this web site because you’re looking for attractive, nude, naughty pictures, you’re at the wrong site. Go back to google.

If, on the other hand, you’re interested in getting a closer and better shave, hang out here for some interesting discussion.

I have always had a beard that makes most sandpaper jealous. I don’t remember when it happened exactly. I remember some time in high school feeling these hairy, like real hair, wisps lurking around the edge of my upper lip. It was some warm water, and two quick strokes from a Gilette that would properly have me looking dapper and respectable as per the Code of Conduct.

Yet things definitely took a turn for the more hirsute around 1992, soon my face was covered with hair. It was strong of will, unruly of direction, and knew no hint of grace. Forced as I was to shave daily, it wasn’t long before I was plagued with nasty razor bumps that the local dermatologist recommended an antibiotic for.

I never had a comfortable relationship with shaving for the rest of my high school career.

Off to college, I was liberated and, thanks to my Braun with handy close shave attachment, I could achieve a permanent 5 o’clock shadow that prevented my face from looking red and puffy.

Yet the ladies, fickle fillies that they are, preferred your humble narrator to by smooth of flesh, and so it was in vain that I searched for a solution through study abroad and into my return. I soon embraced the Mach 3 ( although my checking account did not ) and found it to do the job.

In 2000 i made a revelation: Hot Hot Water ( during a shower ) + Norelco ( Philips ) goo-shooting electric shaver + premium shaving cream ( “metrosexual shaving cream” to the Social Bobcat and his soon-to-be-bride ) was a combination that would allow me to shave daily without pain ( although this was a lengthy affair ).

This has held me until this year when I read an article on MSNBC about “How to get the perfect shave”. This introductory guide to wetshaving introduced a few important pieces:

Merkur Safety Razor

Premium Shaving Soap from England

Badger Hair Brush

Now, as with any change in shaving regimen, if you change, you need to stick with that change 21 days. As with my electrical method above, if you don’t give enough time to your hair to adjust to the new treatment, you will not be in a position to judge whether the technique under test is a match to your skin type. You simply can’t. You must be ready to go the distance of a few days.

Now, the natural question is, “Will I nick myself?” My answer: Yes. You will nick yourself because you are not used to using a real cutting edge against your face. You will nick yourself because you decided to mow a blemish. You will nick yourself because you were lazy.

I liken using a safety razor to using UNIX. Unix has famously been said to “be like a chainsaw, it will let you cut your hand off”. Shaving with a safety razor is like juggling chainsaws. If you wield the tool deftly like a Spanish rapier you will turn a blade meant to cut against your facial hair. If you err, you will turn a blade meant to cut facial hair against your face.

To this end, you will need a stypic pencil at first.

That said, I have gotten much better over the course of three weeks. The first attempt was on a leisurely Saturday. I was so timid that i went one direction only and missed a lot of spots ( hard spots ).

Since that time I have adopted a two-pass method. First i lather up and do a north to south stroke. That completed i carefully go through the patches of beard on my face that go in one direction. As I mentioned above, my hair goes every which direction. So on the right side of my face, against the grain is right to left; on the left side of my face, south to north; under my chin, east to west. It’s long but it is so very, very close.

Further this shave lasts the full day. The showerin’ electric method above had me in 5 o’clock shadow by 2pm, this method keeps me cool and close until well past dinner.

Besides, it’s just manly.

The initial costs to get going were not cheap - look to about $100.00 to 150.00 to get established. Nevertheless, you’ll be joining the great tradition of men who were men, who drank gin in the evening, who knew how to take a punch, and who knew how to get a damn close shave.

I love my Apple, pretty much all the time.

When I was a sophomore in college I made my first own computer purchase: Apple PowerBook 190cs. It had this rich color screen that was bright and it was only moderately back-breakingly heavy. It kept a charge about a good two hours and ran all the basic MS productivity apps. What wasn’t to like?

It was on this system that I dialed into the University of Texas VAXen and Unices. I wrote history papers and fancied writing a novel or two (didn’t really pan out). I took that computer with me overseas and taught it to suckle at the teat of 240volt - it never complained.

Upon returning I came back to an Austin that was chanting the name of Dell - I tried it out the x86 side of the street. I enjoyed my rich polygons and Quake - but within 8 months of frustration with Windows sucking I returned to my heart and soul roots - I became a Linux guy.

It started innocently enough, Red Hat 6, compiling, tarring, detarring, trashing crappy winzip for gzip, learning pipelining and Perl. I set up tools to help me find that computer in the sea of the Internet, I was blissed.

I came out to Silicon Valley at the heigh of the party. No one used Windows - everyone was on SPARC stations laughing as MyDoom variants brought weeping marketing bozos to our feet begging, hoping, and praying someone would patch that crappy OS they had foisted upon them.

Then came project CD burn or DVD burn. And man Linux just didn’t have it. The fonts were ugly too (i know this has changed, yes I’ve seen Ubuntu, and yes I recall the Veronica Mars dialog on the matter).

I love the power of unix, but i wanted fonts, and backgrounds, and easy multimedia burns, and that begat my flirtation with the iMac iLamp.

Furthermore, when in San Francisco don’t bring your PC. No one there uses PCs. It’s a town of art and beauty. Don’t call it ‘Frisco either.

The iLamp was beautiful and elegant, the screen rich and bright. The OS was smooth and rock solid. I had the best of both worlds: Mac beauty, Unix Power, and no interference from an annoying OS.

Ultimately the iMac flirtation led to the Powerbook of Joy so smooth and aluminum, so quiet, so beautiful. It’s smooth like Zen gardens or the Japanese countryside. It is hot on the legs (best used on a desk).

I went with my girlfriend recently to buy a replacement for her HP which unceremoniously lost its hard drive. As I walked through the local Fry’s i noticed that all PCs looked very cheap. As Will Shipley of Delicious Monster noted, and I’m paraphrasing here, “PC users don’t care about beauty or extras, they only care about suffering as little as possible as cheaply as possible. They made that stance abundantly clear when they settled for the Windows experience. “

I looked at the options. All of them had flimsy plastic cases that had “Multimedia control panels” (aka an LCD with 4 buttons for manipulating your music CD) smacked onto the edge. It was uneven, not a nice neat rectangle, but this oblong turd of plastic that had no sense of symmetry or balance. They all have these really annoying super-glassy looking monitors. I want my monitor to look like a matte piece of fine paper - not like my dentist’s aquarium. My poor girlfriend had been using my laptop for the last few days and in those days her tastes for taste had re-awakened, she had taken a bite of the Apple of knowledge and couldn’t really stomach the taste of the sloppy production of the commodity PC industry.

We headed, PC-less, back to the front and passed down the Apple aisle. With its white and silver the row looked like “2001”, it visually promised what the future was supposed to deliver (Right Elroy?).

When I was living in Holland I was struck by an idea: Whenever they built something that had a function, the form was not a total afterthought. Essentially it was: “If we’re going to build it, why not make it beautiful?” For those who look to the bottom line to explain why not, you’ll never get it, and that’s OK. For the rest of us, there’s Apple, de Kooning, and fountain pens.

My board, bindings, stompie and all
Originally uploaded by sgharms.

If you’re into snowboards, then you might want to take a look at these pictures. If you’re into cool black stuff, you might want to take a look at these pictures.

If you want to see me in my underwear, wearing snowboarding boots in the kitchen, you also might want to (or not want to) look at this photoset.

Would this face utter: Is Padmé all right?

I don’t know what it is about the summer that seems to bring on insomnia for me, but it’s been brought-ed.

Do you know what was a great toy back in my day? The Etch-a-Sketch Animator. Peep:

Here’s the setup.

• Big plastic (white) box with knobs per the E-a-S design motif.
• LCD 40x30 screen in which you can either set the pixel to active or inactive
• 8 big, soft, mushy buttons at the bottom: a pen-up, pen-down, a save, clear screen, recall last screen, reverse black to white / white to black toggle, erase, and the magic button: animate

You could save 12 “frames” of animation and then push the ANIMATE button and…viol?. Pushing ANIMATE a couple of times more could speed up the replay.

The animation had this odd eek-yyy-uurk-eeek-ee sound that went with animated frames. As I recall the frame flow was not evenly metered and some frames would drag a bit but the illusion of animation was still there - just like a flip book.

The instruction book came with 12 basic tasks for you to learn with and one enterprising netizen has made animated .gifs for you to look at to get the feel.

The down sides were that the frames were stored in RAM. Knock a battery loose - goodbye. Obviously this made working on more than one project impossible as well.

This limitation wasn’t too painful, I was 10 (or so).

Funny to think that the difference between this and a Game Boy was only more pixels, more memory, and different inputs. Heck, it’s the same principle as what was in mass market spinach-screen cell phones (those still exist, right?).

As I recall my animator started “flipping out” towards my growing out of it. I noticed the box in my closet back at my Dad’s house … maybe next time I’m there I’ll dust it off and see what I can do.

But really — shouldn’t there be an emulator for OS X for this?

Maybe this is my task to learn a new aspect of Cocoa…

In efforts to attract people to HD capable televisions, Comcast has provided the “INHD” channels.

Visual. Orgasm.

You’ve seen nothing until you’ve seen cave diving, in HD, on a wide screen. It’s absolutely astounding. The claustrophobia, the silt, the oxygen deprivation.

Beautiful!

Tivo, based on my recording of McLaughlin group and watching Charlie Rose seems to conclude that I would also like The Blow’Reilly Factor.

Tivo is wrong.

Last night mirth and merriment were to be had in the heart of the Mission. Tasty tapas were eaten, litres of sangria were drained, and then the high-class lowlife a-go-go mecca the 500 club was patronized.

So this morning while I was recovering I finished off Silent Hill 2 (PS2). I got the “In Water” ending. I would say that Silent Hills are a pretty good series of game - apparently falling into the genre of survival horror.

The new one just came out, but I’m not going to pick it up yet as I need to get the imprint of my butt out of my futon.