I've been living in California for just over 10 years. Prior to moving here I visited friends, Mark T. (game designer/producer who lived in Sacremento for a while before moving to the bay area then back to the midwest) and Paul Z. (Stanford grad and worked in silicon valley for a variety of network companies) and got a little look at the Napa county scene.

After moving to California in 1997 I made a few trips up to Napa and one Sonoma visit with Paul. On these trips we visited well known and lesser well known wineries. Generally the more 'successful' turned me off with all the clothing, kitsch and food related items they carried, along with some prices which defied my taste for their wines.

I'm no wine connoisseur, I simply know what I like and don't like. I have found inexpensive wines in the past I liked fine. They usually came from unpretentious rustic wine tasting rooms. I took a trip through the Russian River wine country on Sunday and revisited some of these places I had in the past to see what they had and if I could score a couple bottles of something decent for not much scratch. Shock. Rochioli, which has IMHO a good chardonnay which was $11 or $12 a bottle last time through was now up to $30 a bottle and had a book on the counter showing how fabulously their wines had been received at the White House. Oof. Time to go.

Around the corner is Hop Kiln, which had some decent reds the last time I visited was now selling all the merchandise lamented above and their wines had also gone up a lot. Bye.

Next to last visit of the day was Ridge/Lytton Springs. Reknowned for their Zinfandels, I recalled a couple very good bottles several years ago and thought we might visit their rustic steel pole barn, which was inhabited by several large wooden fermenters and a number of cats. Shock. All new building, fancy stuff all around. The Zins were still good, still reasonably priced, but it's obvious success has hit these places. Further someone mentioned how good a year it is supposed to be fore Pinot Noir. I don't know Pinot Noir from Guinness, but evidently the film Sideways branded the variety a hot property and novuea riche (or wannabes) were swarming around looking for it.

We elected to search for one of Paul's favourites, Rochambeau and found an empty lot. Looks like they're going to put in a spiff new tasting room etc. We'll see. Last visit on the road was Rabbit Ridge which featured some very good moderately priced wines. I wish them success, with moderation ;-)

On Feb 14, 2002, to the best of my knowledge (and Google searching at the time) I coined the following from the All Your Base meme:

Rose are red
Violet are blue
All my base
Are belong to you

A variation I could find I had posted on the occasion of Rob Malda proposing in a most geekish fashion, using his own /. web site.

Now it seems to be everywhere, even on shirts at thinkgeek.com (I didn't think to submit it to them so haven't seen a penny of that.)

About 4 years ago I adopted my current sig.

A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar

It was common to refer to a programming error as a foobar in one place I worked, as they were usually the result of testing, rather than the older acronym fubar which I felt carried a stronger definition of erring.

The sig actually was born when I was reminiscing about Deja News, perhaps due to Google's revival of the Deja archives for Google Groups and coined the term deja foobar without particularly attaching it to anything. Eventually I would associate the term with the feeling of making the feeling of repeating programming mistake. And wanting a new, more original sig for my slashdot account made it such.

This is more easy to track than the AYB poem. I was almost immediately set upon by people pointing out I had it wrong and it should be fubar. As the original meaning was rather private I didn't care and shrugged off these "correction attempts" over the years. I recently wondered if anyone had picked up the sig and posted it anywhere.

Shock.

Indeed it has been, spelled foobar and fubar. Some others have even gone so far as to use it in their sig as well. The number of matches is surprising and shows how far an original idea spreads. Both are found with the core idea of 'feeling of having made the same mistake before' Interesting. I should probably post it to thinkgeek.com before someone else nicks it. :o)

Google results for
Deja Foobar
Deja Fubar

So this MIT student walks through Logan (Boston, MA area) airfield terminal with a Proto Board on her jumper and the cops jump Her. Many that's lame, as lame as the half a fibre drum of nail trimmers I saw at an airport a few years ago. It doesn't smell like explosive, does it? I bet terrorists just laugh themselves sick at how jumpy they've made everyone. Like the british security agents who slaughtered the brazilian electrician.

Got me thinking about Proto Boards though. I was just thinking about getting a tiny one yesterday. I'm converting a webcam to an astro-imaging camera, by changing colour CCD to B/W CCD and adding some solid-state cooling to it. I've got a circuit board to make, but a small Proto Board would probably work as well and give me some flexibility the soldered PCB wouldn't. I'll have to see what sizes I can find.

A funny old fing. I got into the pirate character for all of my posts on the 19th of Sept., "arrrs" here, "avasts" there and such. A bit of mental gymnastics trying to fit it all together and try to contribute to discussion.

Oddly, most of my posts which were modded were modded Funny, not insightful or informative or even interesting. Oh a point here or there, but still 80%+ funny, though the content wasn't meant to be. I'm sure it'll all come out in a month when someone metamods these things and thinks 'wtf!?!' since they probably won't make the International Talk Like a Pirate Day connection.

Let's see if we can game the journal system by posting a stub with a date/time marker, then editing it to reflect something prophetical after the fact. This is my stub. Stay tuned!

Mandatory prophetical placeholder... SCO will lose...

The original post is dated September 9, 2007. This edit (November 20, 2007) should reset that date. Let's see what happens... Hey! No date change! Now what can I predict after the fact? I'll have to wait for something big, then edit this post to reflect my uncanny ability to predict the future... This might be fun!

If anyone out there wantes to start a thread under this post to get in on the prediction (to be (n|g)amed later), now's your chance!

In considering Echelon, the world-wide signals intelligence program supposedly capable of recording, transcribing, and analyzing most any voice communication anywhere, I was intrigued by the technology it would take to do it. Better yet, can I make my own Echelon system? The answer is truly surprising, not in how simple it is to do, but in how utterly cheap it is, at least on a small scale.

First, we need a method to record telephone conversations. Since the conversations are to be processed by a computer, it makes sense to capture them with a PC at the beginning. Let's start with an interface device made to record phone calls to a standard cassette tape recorder. Here's one at everyone's "favorite" electronics store, Radio Shack. RS has been selling this kind of device for 30 years. It simply plugs into a phone line and toggles the remote switch on when a conversation is present. We don't care about the remote switch, we just want a tap that will convert a phone signal into something we can use with the microphone input on a sound card. This device is about $27 if you're too lazy to a) shop, or b) make your own.

Next, we need a bit of smarts on the PC side. While I'm a Linux user, I'll be using a Windows machine for this project because of the availability of off-the-shelf software components. What we need is a simple program that monitors the sound card microphone input, and when a voice signal is present, record the input to a file. When the input is no longer present, close the file and continue to monitor the input.

Well, it turns out there is just the utility to do this. Try this utility. This little program does exactly what I described.

So what do we have now? Well, we now have a system that will monitor a single phone line and record any phone conversations on that line to a wav file. The file name is encoded with the date/time the conversation took place. It even captures the DTMF of outgoing calls. Wow, our little Echelon system is coming together!

What to do now? Well, there are a few options. One is to simply have another script email any new files that appear in the recordings directory to you. I'm thinking a bit bigger, however. How about filtering the files through a voice/text converter, such as Naturally Speaking? Then, store away the transcription (along with the original recording) in a DB, and index by key words? In reviewing the features list of Naturally Speaking, the Preferred Edition (list for $199) has a feature that monitors a directory and auto-converts any new sound files that appear in it. Perfect! A complete batched system is within sight!

I haven't done this yet, but I can see no reason why you couldn't. If I can defeat my lack of organizational inertia (read lazyness), I'll update this post and let you know how it works!

Notice: In most states, you are only permitted to record phone conversations you are a participant in. Some states don't even let you do that. If you were to make a system like this and have it record phone conversations you are not a party to, you would very likely violate state and/or federal law. Yes, I understand the contradiction. No, I don't like it either.

So why would I make such a system if using it is illegal? It's more of an exercise to demonstrate that, whatever your take on government surveillance, phone tapping, key word searching, etc., you can remove from the argument whether or not they can do it. They positively and absolutely CAN, because I can.

So I was looking at Apple TV and realized that this is the perfect living room audio jukebox, with auto syncing to iTunes (unlike Squeezebox which only streams). But it only outputs via HDMI or component video, and my tv is way too old for that. Anyone have ideas on how to CHEAPLY convert component to S-Video or composite? I don't really care about video quality, I just want to see the menus to select music.