For a long time I've thought of RSS feeds as being pretty useless for me. Then I realized I was spending a fair amount of time checking different websites to see if they've changed. Well, this is where RSS comes in. Some blogging software will produce a RSS xml file that gives a summary of what is on the website or webpage. My blogging software, for instance, puts a link on the top right side of my blog that reads XML. The link brings up an XML file that summarizes the last 15 or so entries. Other websites, like slashdot and wired have RSS feeds that you can check (don't check /. more often than every 30 minutes, they end up blocking your IP address.) So instead of manually checking your favorite websites, you can let your RSS aggregator do it for you. I wasn't able to find any decent ones until I upgraded my Opera browser that has a built in "Newsfeeds" reader. All I do is find someones RSS link, click on it and then my browser will automatically import the RSS xml and then monitor that link every X number of minutes. I came across a free web based RSS feed reader today, bloglines. It works well, you type in the URL of RSS feed and it will monitor the feed for you. Plus you can access your feeds from anywhere and you're not tied down to a client sitting on a certain machine. I really think it's nifty that you can have some program do your website checking for you. It could really free up a lot of time if you have tons of sites to visit to see new things.

Everyone who goes biking should have a biking partner like mine. He just called to confirm that we were in fact going riding today after work. The last 2 weeks he's had to bail for lame reaons like "My son is shipping off to Iraq tomorrow and this is the only night he's in town." Whatever -- I don't see the commitment. He said today, "Look, I haven't ridden in a while, so we're going to be moving slow." I pointed out that we always have equipment failure and that's a good reason to turn around. He laughed, "Well, I brought my knife so I can have an 'accidental tire blowout' and we can go drink beer." That's what I'm talking about, willing to sacrifice the bike to get some beer.

I've been slowly moving stuff into my house, I had just a couch for about a week and then last weekend my parents brought back my futon from the beach house. Yesterday I came back from the beach with my futon frame so I have a real bed and am not just sleeping on the floor. Then my parents brought over 2 tables and some chairs I had left at their place - it's like I have a real house now! Well, it's complete now because I put up my new training board above my hallway door. Hopefully it's screwed into the header correctly and I won't pull it down when I'm working on it. It has over 15 different holds and I can actually use about 4 of them, so I have a lot of room for improvement.

On Saturday Trey, Ron, Tubby T Tom and I rolled down the the McKenzie river east of Eugene for a little bike ride. We used my birthday (which is today, in case you haven't sent me my gifts yet) as an excuse to go riding. Since I seem to have lost my camera (which is a good excuse to buy the new 5.0 megapixel version), I have no pictures of the ride. Which is too bad because then I could show everyone where Trey biffed it. We were crusing down the singletrack with Trey in front of me and he tagged his right handlebar on a tree and started wee-wabbling. That lasted about 1/2 a second until he fell to the left. We happened to be on the section where the left side is a steep embackment that changes into a straight drop onto rocks in the river. Luckily for Trey, there was a little tree that stopped both him and his bike from being totalled. But he was ok, as was his bike and we continued on our merry way. After riding we had some dindin at a restaurant in Rainbow,Oregon which is next door to Nimrod, Oregon. The dinner was pretty good (since everyone else paid for it, hahah). As half the point of the trip was to soak in a hot tub after running into rocks and trees on the trail, we then proceeded to hang out in the warm pool. We got scolded by the old people from Cocoon for hogging the hot water. Apparently standing near the hot water outlet stops the water from getting to the wrinkled ones.

Well, it's time to get stuff for my new home, and what better place than craigslist? I realized a while ago that I don't have time to make all of the things I really want, like bookshelves, coffee table and TV stand. I already bought a fair amount of paduk wood for a coffee table, so I better just make that. I made a bookshelf a few years ago and really like it, it'll just take too long to make shelves for all of my books (and National Geographic magazines). A TV stand will have to be made, I think. So I've been visiting craigslist again and finding stuff to buy from there. I'm gonna see a teak bookshelf today, hopefully it'll be pretty dope.

I started working on my house this weekend. I was super ambitous and thought I'd get both rooms prepped and primed this weekend. I tried this orange solvent to strip the paint off of the nasty window frame in the bedroom. It seemed like it was working well, but turned out to be a pain in the ass to clean off. On my 4th (of 6) trips to Home Depot I picked up a cleaning bit for Ron's cordless drill to take the paint and solvent off from the small spaces. The brushes disintegrated within a few minutes and didn't get too much cleaning done. I ended up taking out my big carbide scraper and taking all of the paint off with that. My dad helped me fix the ceiling of the bedroom, there was some water damage and the plaster was coming off. I used my new cold chisel to take the plaster down. I then put up some gyp board and mudded it. On Saturday I took the carpet and padding out of the room. What was left was tack board along the walls and about 200 staples in the floor. I thought to myself, "Hey, I can take staples out no problem." The needle nose pliers couldn't get a grip on the staples, so I had to take a screwdriver and a rubber mallet to get them up a little. Then I took the pliers and pulled the staples out. My last project was to start taking the security bars off of the windows. I'm using my buddy Vince's grinder for this job. It seems to take about 3 minutes a bolt, not too bad. I'm wearing a tanktop on my head to cover my neck and face from the spark showers that erupt from the grinder (which looks pretty cool.) I got two windows cleared, just 8 more to go.

My house closed last Wednesday as I was sitting in Ron's truck on I-84 in Utah. Now I can get excited about buying picture molding hooks. I started my move last night by taking over a bottle of Vodka and Southern Comfort. I looked throughout the house and saw how much cleaning I'll be doing over the next few weeks. Fun stuff. The refrigerator is standing in front of the hallway door, so I think it's about time to get a sub-zero undercounter unit. I think the first thing I need is a pull up bar. Gotta have priorities.

Ron, Henry and I just got back from Moab this evening. It was an awesome time, we had good rides and no one got hurt. We rode Bartlett Slickrock, Monitor Merimack, Slickrock, the bottom of Porcupine Rim and Amasa Back. My brakes wonked out on me again so I ditched them to get some mechanical Avid disc brakes and they work really well. So I'll be trying to hock my other brakes after I get them warranteed. It was Jeep Jamboree week and we got to see the thousands of Jeeps and other four wheeled monsters. We hung out at Potato Salad to see if anyone would mess up their rigs, and came up flat. But we got to watch as people threw their vehicles up the wall and get heckled by the crowd. One guy in a Toyota was having a hard time getting up and got yelled at by a young girl "You want to use my winch!?!" That was pretty damn funny.
Jumping at Porcupine Rim

Last night I received a response from the Lewis County District Court stating that I only owe $300 now. So it was better that I wrote a little letter explaining my actions.

One of my projects at work is a data server that uses SOAP as its communication protocol. A year ago I tried, unsuccessfully, to make the server multi-threaded. This was a bust because in C++ the support libraries are not thread-safe. So I spent over 3 months trying to fix this and got no where. A co-worker stumbled upon STLport, a thread-safe STL implementation. It was supposed to be faster than the normal STL, and in our micro-benchmarking, it was. I re-enabled the server to be multi-threaded with the snazzy STLport and expected the program to scale better, that is to say, handle more concurrent clients without performance degredation. And it sucked. We actually had a slower performing program. 2 weeks later we realized that STLport was in fact two times as slow as the normal STL when it was run in a threaded environment. Super. The threads helped the scalability a bit, but couldn't over come the slow STL. Another option was to use a Apache module and have the server plug into an Apache process. I spent about 3 days working on that before I realized it wasn't going to be smooth because the support wasn't really there. I decided to take the Apache process model and apply it to my server. Old school programmers would normally do a fork()/exec() for each incoming request, letting the child process handle the request. This isn't so great because it's expensive to spawn a new process for each small request. So instead, I used a different model of just spawning multiple processes at the beginning that all listen on the same port. When it came to testing this out, we saw a whopping gain of 18% when using multiple clients. Why so slow? HP-UX is my reason. The CPU is maxed out with one process and we max out both CPUs when multiple processes are running. This should gain you about 80% (a guess, really) performance gain owing to the increased CPU time. But HP strikes again and you only see a 18% gain. There must be another bottleneck, like the memory, disk or bus. Really lame. It's kinda funny to spend over 4 months on a project to see a net result of 18% for all of your work. I keep telling anyone who listens that we need to ditch HP and get some Linux boxes. I get nods of the head, but I guess we're not in a position to come and use present day technology.