http://www.wombatnation.com Speech Applications, Soccer, Hacking, Intellectual Property, and Incinerating Toilets Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:28:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A few months ago, the instrument cluster on my Audi TT started behaving very oddly for the first twenty seconds after I started the car in the morning. As time passed, twenty seconds became thirty, forty, ... and then up to two minutes before returning to normal behavior. The colder ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2009/06/audi-tt-instrument-cluster The C3P0 database connection pooling library has worked very well for me, but I recently ran into a problem when I wanted to log the SQL that was being generated for a PreparedStatement if an insert failed. Then, if database problems caused inserts to fail beyond an automated retry period, ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2009/06/logging-sql-c3p0 Last weekend we headed up to Geyserville and I decided it was time to climb Pine Flat Road. The photo above is from the top. I started out way down at the bottom of that valley, around 3000 feet below where I took that photo. The dirt road is actually ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2009/05/sliding-down-pine-flat-road This image was forwarded by a cousin, who is a medical doctor, with a suitable warning that the CDC does not condone, encourage or reward the above activity. http://www.wombatnation.com/2009/05/patient-zero Lux Interior, lead singer of swamp rock psychobilly band the Cramps, recently passed away at 60, or maybe 62, from a heart condition. One of my roommates in college had several VHS tapes from Target Video. I remember watching this recording of their performance at the Napa State Mental Hospital, ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2009/02/rip-lux-interior Sadly, in 2008, Oakland lost two restaurants that served excellent fried chicken. Having grown up in South Mississippi, I know my way around deep fried poultry, and I can tell you that the cooks at The Southern Cafe and Declancy's Welcome Table knew what they were doing. Both closed mid ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2009/01/fried-chicken-in-the-east-bay One of the things I really love about my Audi is that it has heated seats. While the SF Bay area isn't the coldest place on the planet, it can still get pretty cold. Well, at least for a couple of weeks out of the year. The surface area of a ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/12/heated-bike-seat One of the many pleasures of our September trip to Europe was the thermal baths at Szchenyi in Budapest. The building was beautiful and the number of baths was amazing. Hanging out in the enormous outside thermal pool as the steam lifted into the night skies was particularly awesome. Here's a ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/12/enjoying-the-thermal-baths Maybe I just haven't been noticing all along that major US airlines are flying rust buckets, but when I looked out the window of a recent United Airlines flight from Houston to San Francisco, I was pretty amazed to see the sorry state of the wing. A few patches of ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/12/more-proof-of-airline-cost-cutting I went to the gorgeous Grand-Lake Theatre in Oakland tonight with wife and friends to see Quantum of Winter Solstice. I was totally expecting an educational film on astronomy, so the guns, car chases and boring villains were quite the surprise. However, I did take solace in the kick-out-the-jams performance ... http://www.wombatnation.com/2008/11/quantum-of-winter-solstice