Entries this day: Dream Music_Genome_Project-pandora.com Programming_images_code Sayuri_in_Shibuya Site fred-on-4d-coaster

Dream

11:11am JST Wednesday 26 July 2006

Trying to carefully climb over the bunk beds with YRUU and PB people sleeping: PB Stacy, YRUU Robin, others; Jesse had just asked me to get the tapes from the transcription project and try again to transcribe everything. I was not impressed with the dumbness of his idea; I had just transcribed them to the best of my ability; transcribing them again wasn't going to increase accuracy. He was like, "I know, but I don't know what else to do."

I apologized to those people I woke up, and stuck my head into the window where the tape office was located, and asked if I could come in. The woman was basically like "no" but was quick to obtain the tapes I needed, and said she would bring them over as soon as they were copied again. She was actually downloading them from her server, and I couldn't imagine why they had the audio in a digital format, but were then recording it onto casette tapes. Why not just email it to us?

Music Genome Project pandora.com

12:17pm JST Wednesday 26 July 2006

Wow. I just entered "nine inch nails" into pandora.com and it came up with "The Wretched (Remix)" which I played relentlessly in headphones while working at FSD back in the day. That's when I used to use terms like "until my ears were bleeding" after listening so long and so loud.

Programming images code

6:32pm JST Wednesday 26 July 2006

After a break of sorts, I have begun to make forward progress on my images code again. I was stuck behind trying to make it all optimal and shit instead of just knocking it out. It now can create most of the tables needed and detect when tables need to have data before it can be used.

I still need to write out table definitions for image_tags, image_events, image_people, and image_locations, but these should be supa-easy; they are just links to say which images have which tags, etc.

After that will be figuring out how to populate the tables.. more user interface design should be done first.

Sayuri in Shibuya

6:37pm JST Wednesday 26 July 2006

Will be meeting Sayuri in Shibuya soon. 7pm at ¥Ï¥Á¸ø¡£ This will be our first lesson; I hope it goes wonderfully for both of us.

May meet near a Yahoo!BB wireless port to give her the added benefit of email with corrections.

8:01pm JST Wednesday 26 July 2006

Nice. We're having great fun; I can hardly believe it's been an hour already. We're at Mickey D's and have just chowed and have started talking about days old because she was concerned about upcoming birthday.

I'm like "no worries, mate!!"

And super thanks to Hitomi for hooking me up with internet access here!!

8:11pm JST Wednesday 26 July 2006

Holy shit!!! Today is one of her 500 day anniversaries!!!!! (which one is a secret, she says)

9:18pm JST

We had a great lesson; I showed her some pictures from PB and Bali.. I suddenly realized I can make quick indexes for the PB pictures, so I did that.

We will meet again in 2 weeks at the latest; hopefully next week some time, though my Wednesday is already double booked with Miki and Miki.

Site

2:12am JST Thursday 27 July 2006

I officially love my website. I just got an email from Jimmy da Magnet, who said he is in SF, and I was able to pretty quickly find my San Francisco Wild Skating Adventure, a story I recently relayed to someone. Probably Hitomi or one of the Mikis.

Anyway, it was like "bang!" there it is - a journal entry I took time to write a long time ago, still there, just ready to be read.

Still working on my image indexer, but here are the pages for which I just whipped together static indices.

/images/travel/Pb/49th_May-Aug_2005/Best%2010%20get/
/images/travel/Pb/49th_May-Aug_2005/the_rest/
/images/travel/Pb/49th_May-Aug_2005/Francois/

fred on 4d coaster

##13:03 Wednesday 26 July 2006

Dude:

Rob - Fred called from magic mountain.  he said that the 4-D coaster was kick ass.  he said that he waited in line for 2.5 hrs and that the ride itself was 3 minutes long, and that it took 4 minutes just to swap seats when the coaster is done (only one coaster per track).  he said that the top speed was 70-ish MPH.  sounds kick ass, but 2.5 hrs is a long time to wait.  :-)))

Rob:

I'm guessin' the wait time at the new 4D coaster here is longer than that.... Thanks for the update!

Fred:

yeah. basically, it was worth the wait, in the end.  the ride is very well designed, smooth as a baby's bottom, no jostling, no sudden changes from one element to the next (recall XLR-8), and very natural changes from, say, facing backward, flying inverted, track sideways, low-ish g's, to facing forward, scooping down and back up through a very high-g valley.

but i don't recommend trekking all the way to fuji-q just yet; wait a while, so the line will be less and they might be running more trains.  for instance, x has no braking sections, giving a maximum of 2 trains (3 if you can have one on the lift hill?) (see below).  yesterday, they had only one train of 7 cars, 4 per car, and a total turnaround time of 7 minutes, perhaps longer.  so while the published capacity is 1600 riders per hour, magic mountain was getting maybe 400, max. idiots.  one of the operators said there was only one train available! i pointed out the six cars sitting on the ground behind the station, and he said they were just parts.

i was unimpressed with magic mountain.  i have never seen a park more empty, nor more inefficiently run.  i mean, they had only one train on the damn track, despite the "getting off" place being different from the "getting on" place.  that is only one of several examples. another: they had a "fast pass" for $15 per 4 passes, where you go in the out door, and skip the line.  at some rides (tatsu) no one was even checking cause there were almost no "fast passers", yet four whole rows were reserved for "fast pass" only.  at one ride (psyclone?) the operator let in the passers (a 30-45 second delay) after the cars were full, but before she had checked the safety harnesses.  so every fast passer caused a thirty second delay for every single person in line.  this happened basically every train. also, she wouldn't let me just go sit in an empty seat.

if i had it to do again, i would have ridden X first, before the park had time to fill, instead of saving it for last, and i would have gotten up sooner, in order to have had time to ride riddler's revenge, which, i think is a duplicate of one of my favorite rides, raptor, at cedar point.  (when i stopped by the first time, it was having trouble, and after i'd waited so long for X, i couldn't wait for riddler's revenge.)

a final note: maybe it was the shitty park food, and maybe it was the lack of water, but i kind of felt increasingly nauseated during some of the rides. am i getting old, or out of practice?

oh yeah: if you ride tatsu, or a ride like tatsu, do not wear glasses. but you probably knew that.