Monthly Archives: July 2008

Linden Street on First Friday

By | July 26, 2008

Linden Street Brewery in Oakland has been throwing open houses on every Friday for the last 6 months or so, with free beer (two beers, usually their Common Lager and a beer from Drake’s), free food (contributions to the basket by the taps help buy next week’s food), and a shared gas grill (my friends… Read More »

Updating Substring in Column in MySQL

By | July 25, 2008

Today I needed to make the same kind of update to a field in a few rows of a large database table. There were too many rows to do it with a separate SQL update statement per row, so I hunted down the MySQL REPLACE function. Okay, it was only 6 rows, but I needed… Read More »

Population after Katrina

By | July 22, 2008

While analyzing a bunch of US Census data at work to build out an even more comprehensive geographical database for Voxify’s speech apps, I ran into an unexpected error. I wrote a Python script to parse a CSV file that contains population data from 2000 and estimates for 2001-2007. The code extracted the data I… Read More »

Healdsburg Harvest Century Bike Tour

By | July 20, 2008

Yesterday I rode the 60-mile route of the 2008 Healdsburg Harvest Century bike tour. Some friends and I did it at a very leisurely pace, finishing in a little over 4 hours, which included 20-30 minutes hanging out at the rest stops shoving down piles of food. Or at least I was doing that. The… Read More »

InBev Swallowing Busch

By | July 20, 2008

Love this cartoon by Ben Sargent on the InBev acquisition of Anheuser-Busch. Over the last few months I’ve turned on quite a few friends to the rich and varied aroma and flavors of Belgian beers. Although it’s just a cartoon, I agree with William that you obviously shouldn’t stereotype the palette of a person based… Read More »

Best of the East Bay

By | July 13, 2008

Last Friday my wife and I celebrated our 15th anniversary by going to Linden Street Brewery for their Friday afternoon open house and then the Oakland Museum of California for the Best of the East Bay party. Both were excellent. Some of our friends brought a penne pasta salad with fresh-grated parmesan and grilled tri-tip… Read More »

Blenheims are Back

By | July 9, 2008

We had a huge harvest from our Blenheim apricot tree four years ago, and this year the tree is bearing a similar amount of fruit. Rogue backyard animals got 30 or so, we’ve picked about 60 and I think there are another 75 apricots on what is now a very old tree. It had been… Read More »

Cyclo-cross

By | July 9, 2008

Maybe this is the year I finally buy a cyclo-cross bike and experience the gut wrenching thrill of shouldering my bike up a steep, muddy hill, bouncing down trails through the trees, and then afterward drinking Belgian beers and eating grilled sausages with the people who lapped me repeatedly. The July issue of Wired has… Read More »

D-Link DNS-323 NAS

By | July 8, 2008

Now, if that name doesn’t make a product just sell itself, I don’t know what would. Anyway, I bought a D-Link DNS-323 NAS from a friend who I trust to do all the necessary research. He bought it, but because he is really picky and it didn’t do exactly what he wanted, he built up… Read More »

State of Speech Reco and Synthesis

By | July 5, 2008

There’s a very detailed (and long) article on the state and future of speech recognition and speech synthesis in the New York Times from late June. Although the prognosis is not that positive, it is written almost with the challenge of a Turing test for speech recognition, i.e., a computer recognizing the semantics of human… Read More »