coreyshields.com

Holy cow.. I read today that Google added street view for Indianapolis, but they added it for most of the cities throughout central Indiana!!

all of the blue lines are streetview coverage. Even the redneck city I grew up in, Brazil, has streetview coverage.. Coverage of the parking lot here at UITS.. Amazing..

This is quite a spread and a heck of a lot of driving! For example, Terre Haute to Muncie can be a 3 hour drive.

Pretty cool, Google..

We were out on Saturday doing a little shopping at the mall.. I was looking at some sleeper outfits for the kids, went to check a price tag and noticed this little warning:

hmmm.. Get the size that my kid will only fit in for a month versus something he can grow into..... for safety's sake.

Okay, yes, I understand there is a certain amount of validity here. Loose clothing will provide a bit more air around the fabric to fuel a flame with oxygen. But on the other hand, being the news addict that I am, I have yet to see someone interviewed on CNN after a house fire explaining how the kids would have been safer had they worn tighter pajamas.

Anyway.. had to take a pic of that. My initial thought was a bit more along the lines of the dangers of spontaneously combusting pj's when I read it. ;)

Comments are coming soon.. gotta upgrade, add spam protection, etc. etc..

Step 1: Ask your new iPhone customer where they will be using the phone
Step 2: Tell them that the location is somehow incompatible with their account
Step 3: GOTO 1

Somewhere after the loop is broken, said customer is unhappy.. Or maybe I have that wrong, as I haven't broken the loop yet.

Dear Sony,

I have to say that one of my guilty pleasures has always been Locoroco on the PSP. There were quite a few geeks working together at the time and I remember rushing the stores on "release day" to find out that shipments were delayed due to a holiday, then rushing the stores again the next day to pick up the full release copy. Playing it was fun, simple, and addictive. The music and happy-go-lucky sounds made it tolerable for my wife to hear in the background (she even liked it at times.. just so cheery).

I think my favorite part of it all comes down to the simplicity.. You can tilt the world left, you can tilt it right, and you can bump it to make the locoroco jump. Easy. I could play that game when I'd hit a half brain-dead state after a long day just before going to bed.

So, when I saw Locoroco for the PS3 I was excited. I figured the sixaxis controller would make the game easier still (tilt left, tilt right, bump..) I paid the $6 or whatever it was, downloaded it, and jumped right in with both feet...

...but you changed the gameplay altogether

Now there is this little butterfly lookin thing that you have to move with the paddle, convince the locoroco to follow it on their own, tilt only for things around the environment, etc.. I can't even seem to make it through the first level which is pretty depressing for that game series.

What happened here? The game was great and people like myself love it for its simplicity.. Now, a chance to play it on a home console and its all complex. Not fun..

I can't say that I want my money back, as it didn't cost much (thank you!), but I doubt I will pick it back up and try to play again. I'll stick to the simplicity of the PSP version.

Next time, please don't overdo a good thing.

Cheers,
-Corey

No, I'm not talking about the Billy Joel broadway musical (I like Billy Joel as much as the next guy, but.. broadway???). As many people know by now, we're moving out of Silicon Valley and the west coast altogether. We are in the middle of a move back to Bloomington, Indiana. Nicole and the kids are out there right now working on finding a house, and I'm finishing out my job here as well as packing up the house.

There is a lot involved here that I won't go into, but the biggest way to explain things is that I want to get the kids closer to their extended family. I grew up with family all around, and I want them to have a similar experience. We don't know how long some of those family members will be around with us so there seemed to be no better time than "right now".

So, I've taken a job with some former colleages at Indiana University to work as a sysadmin on the Big Red supercomputer. I'm excited for the opportunity, and anxious to be back with these colleagues. It will provide some new challenges and areas for me to grow in to (like parallel computing). The role is very similar to what I am use to, working in a service provider role. However, the end users are in a different crowd and I expect it will be a big change of pace from the commercial side of the world.

I have one more week with GNi, and then the plan is to drive out to Supercomputing 07 for a day or two, then back here to meet the movers who will be picking up all of our crap. Every time I move I admit more and more to being a pack rat. Doesn't mean I have to do anything about it, just makes moving more of a PITA. I mean, sure, I haven't touched that HP Jornada 520 for at least 5 years, but I paid too much for it in the beginning to just let it go to the goodwill pile, and nobody wants to spend money on it today so its not like I can sell it. Besides, in a few years someone will have it hacked and it will run linux. Then I'll have a fun weekend project of putting linux on it, put it back in the box and let it sit for another 5 years. :)

Anyway, the plan is to be back in Indiana the week of Thanksgiving.. and spend a week or two with my family.

So, I've always heard good things about international airlines (when compared to US domestic carriers), but taking these trips really does seal that statement for me.

Every flight I've been on, including 3 hour trips between Hong Kong and Singapore, have had full meals. Very good meals at that, even in coach!

But what really amazed me is this... I'm flying back to San Francisco on Cathay Pacific, with a layover in Hong Kong (sitting in the airport typing this now.. FREE WIFI. reminds me of Portland). The flight departure has been delayed for 1 hour. For a 14 hour flight that's just a minor inconvenience in my mind. But they immediately offered everyone a $40HGK (about $5 USD) refreshment allowance at any of the restaurants in the airport. I got a nice waffle cone from Ben and Jerry's. Now, mind you, this is a full 747 flight.

This means that a lot of people ended up with a $5 allowance. What did it cost the airline, maybe $1000? But this simple act wins my loyalty.

How long does the wait have to be before domestic carriers will offer a food voucher? I would venture to say that the wait would go indefinitely until customers start to complain. I've seen such delays before..

But to have a refreshment allowance for a 1 hour delay.. That's just awesome. Wouldn't expect it..

Now, I had better go catch that flight...

Today was all work.. Woken up around 3:30 AM by the guys back in the office, had a problem to fix.. Stayed up for a while checking on outstanding issues. Slept for another hour and a half and then it was off for the data center. Got the network equipment racked.. About a day behind where I want to be on this project.. Really don't want to extend the trip anymore.

Here is one side of the cluster:

Tonight's cuisine consisted of a 6-course Chinese fusion meal. One course included an excellent prawn and cuttlefish, and then there was this foie gras, oh divine! The real interesting thing was a sharks bone soup (using the soft bone from the fin, so it is very close to a sharks fin soup). This was interesting and had a very pleasant, subtle flavor to it. First time I had every eaten anything involving a shark, let alone the fin. Excellent beef dish, and dessert was a warm yam puree with ginko nuts. Second time I've had yam for dessert here.. Very different but it's nice for a change of pace in the typical "dessert" fare.

So the boss showed up today, and we took our IBM rep up on a quick trip to Malaysia for 9 holes of golf. Hey, a new country and a chance to play golf, why not?

Malaysia was interesting.. It is definitely different from Singapore. Singapore is packed full of people, but then as soon as you get across to Malaysia, you look out across endless seas of palm tree forests (and an electric fence on both sides of the road leading up to immigration!)

The golf course was gorgeous! The course itself wasn't the best I've played on, the greens were too sandy and the grass outside of the fairway was thick and weird (yes, I still need to play that grass a stroke or few). But aside from that, it was definitely fun and the landscape was better than any other course I've played!

Here I am teeing up:

And this is the hole I was teeing up at:

It was nice to take a little time off.. Nice to add another stamp to that passport, too!

Dinner tonight was at the Japanese restaurant here in the Ritz. You know a Japanese place will be good when the ratio of staff to guests is like 1:2. We had so much sushi and it was all excellent! Also had red miso soup for the first time today (had little shitake mushrooms in it). Had a certain pungent taste to it but was good. The beat-all was the Ohtoro sushi (a special, rare cut of the fatty belly of a tuna). So flavorful, and not in a fishy way. Oh, I'm tasting it again just thinking about it. It is very hard to find in the states (and probably not good at that) so I'm glad I had a chance here.

(btw, I have turned off twitter blog updates while in Singapore, so I don't wake up a bunch of people who are getting my tweets on their cell phones.. Also I heard that some people are watching my blog since I am in Singapore, so I'll try to post more)

So my days in Singapore have started typically around 5:00 AM (2:00 PM back home). This is so I can get up and spend a couple of US working hours sorting things out with my team. So, once that is caught up, I've showered, and had some breakfast, I call home via Skype. For those under a rock, Skype is an audio and video conferencing application. Before this trip I picked up a VGA portable webcam that clips to the top of the laptop, and Nicole has the iMac with a built in webcam.

I have to say that I am amazed at the quality of the video and audio that comes through skype. There is a bit of latency between Singapore and the US West coast (~230ms), and we can do full screen video both directions with great frame rates and good audio. It really helps the kids (and me!) to be able to see each other. I can still make faces at Trevor and watch him smile.

During today's call, for whatever reason, some of the audio was cutting out and sounded choppy. We ended our call a bit early and switched back to IM for the conversation.

Didn't think much about it until now. I mean, how awesome is it that I am in a small tropical island-nation, 24 hours of travel to get home, and I can have a real time full-video call back home (not to mention without a per-minute fee). That is quite a feat, something that 15 years ago, the BBS days, was unheard of.. And then there was CUSeeMe with the grayscale quickcams. That was so choppy, cheesy, and crappy looking that it was a joke. Today, such technology is a reality.

...and the sad thing about it is that I feel put out and inconvenienced when it doesn't work just right like this morning. Shame on me.. I really am quite happy to live in such an awesome time in tech.

Today's Singapore cuisine: For lunch we had some local chicken (roasted) and rice, with a very spicy dipping sauce, some garlic green beans, curry vegetables, and these rocking chicken wings that had a sauce unlike I had ever tasted before. Sweet yet roasted flavor. Dinner was a higher-end Japanese restaurant, where I got my Katsu fix. Jumbo Katsu with 3 different sauces, some cabbage, and miso soup. yummmy.. I could eat Katsu every day if the roof of my mouth could sustain the grinding effect.

:)

In the last month and half I've gotten a passport and been to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo for work.. I'm now on my second trip to Singapore. Staying for a few weeks while we build out a cluster of online gaming servers.

Singapore is great, I love it! The city is beautiful and clean, safe and well kept. If you had asked me 6 months ago to prioritize places in the world to go see, Asia would have been at the very bottom. The language barrier freaks me out, and even moreso where I can't at least guess the meaning of a word because it doesn't use a similar alphabet. This is definitely the case in Tokyo.. Singapore, however, is as much English speaking as any other language here (mainly English, Mandarin, and Malay are spoken here). So I get the comfort of my singular language skills with the total Asian experience. Suddenly this place jumped to the top of my list of places to visit.

I didn't know much about this place until I was told I was taking a trip here (the boss gave me a generous 3 weeks notice before my first international trip). I knew all about the whole graffiti caning incident back in the Clinton days (I always respected Singapore for having such strict rules and punishments.. USA is weak). Beyond that I didn't know much. Turned to the Singapore article on wikipedia for more info. I'd recommend reading it just as a quick trivial knowledge boost. Lot of interesting stuff surrounding this little island country.

I've had a lot of interesting food in the past couple of months.. Tried escargo last night which was not bad, but anything is good when you drown it with enough garlic butter. Had sashimi (raw fish) in Tokyo, see the pic below. The sashimi experience was the absolute best.. I don't think I will ever do raw fish back in the states, but this was prime fresh and prepared just right.

So I'm still here in Singapore for a couple of weeks.. Very busy (as I have been the past 2 months, too busy to blog unfortunately). Hopefully I'll get more pictures this time too. For now it's work work work so I can get back home to Nicole and the kids as soon as possible!!