Rough Draft

Blog Archive

This is an archive of the blog I kept from 2003-2006.

Blog Has Moved

My move to Vox for blogging apparently already unofficially happened, i.e. I've actually posted there in the last few months, which is more than can be said for this blog.

So let's make it official. My new blog is jaronmars.vox.com, and if you're reading via RSS, you'll want to update your feed.

And as a bonus for all you loyal readers, in conjunction with this switch, I'm launching a new homepage at JarOnMars.com. The new site is mainly an aggregation of the information on I have on various others sites across the web (Flickr, SonicLiving, Last.fm, etc). Let me know what you think.

Vox

Thanks to my friend Buzz, I have an account over on Vox, the new weblogging service from Six Apart. I haven't decided exactly how I will be using my Vox account yet. Right now I'll mainly be taking advantage of its ability to post streaming audio to share songs. I'll have to see if the community features and ease of media sharing it offers outweigh some of the technical and design freedoms I would lose by switching away from Movable Type,

Dana and Chris's Visit

Dana and Chris came out to California for a couple weeks. Their first full day here was Memorial Day and since I had the day off from work we went up to the SF Zoo and Muir Woods. The next three days they took Caltrain up to the city and did a lot of sight-seeing including Alcatraz, walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, and a trip to Japantown which yielded this bounty. Friday we went up to Yosemite National Park and spent all day Saturday there. Sunday was spent hanging around the 'Tino including a trip to Santana Row, mini golfing, and El Burro for dinner.

Dana and Chris spent most of the next week at Chris's brother's place in Monterey. They of course went to the aquarium and rented bicycles one day. I was quite jealous to find out they went skydiving one day. A couple of us at work were just talking about how fun that would be a few days prior to that.

I'm glad Dana and Chris made it out here. It definitely felt like the college days: coming back to the apartment, sitting around a table talking and playing games. Good times. We played many hands of Pinochle, which I hadn't played since my trip to Cleveland a year ago. The first couple days I played a bit too aggressively, but got better as the week went on. I pwned the last hand of each of the last two games we played, but that was purely due to being dealt a great hand. The first game I had all but 2 or 3 of the hearts and in the last game I got dealt a double Kings around! Chris and I called that last game a tie though, since we both made it over 150 and if Kings around was worth something more reasonable, like 16 points, I wouldn't have won.

One last note is we made good use of my GPS during their trip. So much so that we gave her the name Gina. I also discovered she can speak directions in Swedish, but I haven't come up with a good Swedish name yet.

Hopefully they can make it out here again when I can take a vacation day or two so that we can head down to SoCal.

Yosemite

Last weekend, on a whim, Dana, Chris, and I took a road trip to Yosemite National Park. We were originally planning to rent a cabin, but when Dana called Friday morning to make a reservation there weren't any vacancies. Not to be deterred we decided we'd just get a tent and camp outside. This turned out to be a bit of wishful thinking.

We arrived around 12:30 AM and drove around following signs to various campgrounds, but all of them had signs up saying the campground was full. After about an hour of this, we gave up and made our way back to the visitor's center at the park entrance and just slept in the car. Not the best night's sleep I've ever had, but hey, it was an adventure.

The next morning we checked the building where you can reserve a spot at the campground but were simply greeted with a sign listing all campgrounds as either full or closed. So with that in mind, we decided we'd just had home that night rather than trying to find a place to camp.

We spent the day hitting most of the major sites: El Capitan, Yosemite Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, Half Dome, and Glacier Point. Everything we saw was really spectacular. I posted a bunch of pictures on flickr. The pictures turned out well, but most of them don't even begin to give a good sense of the shear size of the mountains and falls.

Oh, and being the huge dorks that we are, we had to take time out after lunch to play Settlers. Good times.

If you haven't been to Yosemite, I definitely recommend you go at some point, but I highly suggest a bit of planning ahead of time (unless you really don't mind sleeping in the car).

SF Zoo and Muir Woods

On Memorial Day, I took a trip to the San Francisco Zoo and Muir Woods with Dana and Chris who are here for a visit on their CA vacation. This was my second trip to the zoo, but this time I had my camera! Pictures have been posted to Flickr.

There was a huge line to get into the zoo, but once inside it wasn't all that crowded. We got there kind of late in the day, 2:30, so the parking lot was full, but we got lucky and snagged a spot from someone leaving after only a couple minutes of driving around. The African Savannah area had been redone since the last time I was there. The penguin island was of course a big stop on our tour. I've got a cute video of a penguin waddling around on land and hopping up a step that I'll have to post at some point. Unfortunately, we missed the prairie dogs since the Children's Zoo closed at 4:30. However, we did just catch the koalas before their exhibit closed. And that yielded this photo that would have Japanese school girls yelling "Sugoi!" for minutes on end.

After the zoo, we headed to Muir Woods in Mill Valley (north of SF). This involved my first drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, which was pretty neat. Dana and Chris took some photos and videos that I'll post later. Not more than 10 minutes outside the city, we started our windy path through the mountains to Muir Woods. It was a really fun drive through lots of narrow, twisty roads.

Photos of the woods can be found here. Sadly, the pictures can't begin to capture the height of the redwood and sequoia trees we were surrounded by. It was a fun hike, and there were numerous paths we didn't get a chance to explore. I'll definitely be going back there.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I just read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon and I highly recommend it. The book chronicles the story of a 15 year old autistic child name Christopher. Or rather, Christopher is one the one writing the book. I really liked the way you always knew what Christopher was thinking, because he would tell you, in a very matter-of-fact way, exactly what was going through his mind as various events unfolded. It's a very quick read, so if you've not read it, I recommend you pick it up at your local library.

New Super Mario Bros

After a failed trip (though I did up getting several CDs as well as bubble tea on that trip) earlier in the day, I did manage to pick up New Super Mario Bros. for my DS today. w00t! During an afternoon trip for bubble tea with some co-workers, we stopped by Target and they said they wouldn't have it until tomorrow and the girl at Gamestop said they only had copies that had been pre-ordered, but if I came back tomorrow morning they'd have more. Lame. After getting back to the office, I had an IM from Andrew saying the game was on sale at Circuit City and Fry's for $28 instead of $35. So later on just before I left work I called the Circuit City that's just down the street from my apartment. The guy I talked to unconvincingly said they had some in stock, so I figured I'd head over there and see. Turns out they had at least 20 copies on the shelf, so I grabbed one and was on my way (after a quick perusal of the CDs...bad Jason).

Anyway, the game itself is pure, unadulterated fun...and I've only played about 10 minutes (I'm just beat the World 1 mini castle). It's got all the classic Mario platformer gameplay and music and a few new items/moves to keep things fresh. If you own a DS, go get this game now. As for me, it's time to go kick more Koopa butt!

PS3 at E3

Sony held their pre-E3 press conference today and announced the PS3 would be available in the US on November 17th. There's two models priced at $499 and $599. Ouch. The less expensive model has a smaller hard drive, no HDMI out, no memory stick/SD/CompactFlash slots, and no wireless. If you're going to spend that kind of money, seems like you might as well spend the extra $100. (Pricing info from Joystiq)

They also showed the new controller. Gone is the boomerang controller shown last year and in its place is...something not unlike the current PS2 controller, sans vibration but it's wireless and has sensors that can detect motion in 6 directions. Sony's press release says it doesn't vibrate because it would interfere with the sensors. Sounds like b.s. to me (especially given that the Wii control supports vibration). I'd say this little lawsuit they lost is more likely the reason.

I really don't see the PS3 dominating the video game landscape the way the PS2 did.

Tomorrow morning Nintendo holds their press conference. Definitely looking forward to that after reading the article in Time.

Super Happy Dev House

Saturday night, after Startup School, Josh went to this thing in Hillsborough (just south of SF) called Super Happy Dev House. It sounded like a really good time; lots of interesting people and just a fun environment to hack on something. It's apparently a monthly thing, so I think I'll have to check it out one of these times. If anyone else is interested in going, let me know.