May 2006

Bocce Ball

The VMware Hosted UI group (the group I’m a part of) went on a team-building exercise today. We had a nice meal and then went to play Bocce Ball, which is a game that until today I had very little knowledge of. It turns out to be a pretty cool game, with some strategy involved. Our team kicked ass 😉 I’m actually hoping to play again at some point soon. Perhaps we can buy some Bocce Balls and play in the hallways by our new offices.

Oh, yeah, so we moved offices at work. My nice corner office is no longer mine. However, the new office is actually bigger, and the view isn’t too bad. I’ve only spent a few hours in it so far, but it’s not as bad as I feared. I’ll have to take pictures soon.

Lost my hacking mojo

I’ve been trying to get out of this funk I’ve been in the past few weeks. It’s been far too hard to just sit down and code outside of work. I can’t even put together a release. A large part of this is due to the amount of work I’ve been doing for VMware as of late on VMware Server. I think another part of it is that I recently finished up releases of Galago, libnotify, notification-daemon, and Leaftag and

I know this is temporary, but it’s frustrating because there really is a lot of cool stuff I’m looking forward to working on. Some may say to enjoy it, take a break, play some games. Problem is, I don’t even feel like doing that! 😛 Perhaps after work calms down and I’ve spent long enough doing nothing at home, I’ll have more motivation to code.

How do other people usually deal with this?

The oxygen comes in two flavors

The oxygen comes in two flavors: “strong mint” and “grapefruit” and will cost 600 yen a can, including consumption tax.
MSN News

Where to begin…

I remember the idea of canned oxygen even back when I was a kid. It was a joke back then, of course, but the joke went that people are able to put absolutely anything up for sale and there would be people buying it. They could sell oxygen and people would pay for it. Well, it’s not a joke anymore, it’s now a growing market in Japan.

It seems like a silly idea. Pay somewhere around $5.50 and get a can of grapefruit or mint oxygen. At times of stress, or when you feel tired, inhale. But maybe it’s not so crazy. How often do you feel you need to step out of the office a while to get a breath of fresh air? How many times have you decided to forgo getting that fresh air because you just don’t feel you have time? If a can of fresh air is relatively cheap and is available at the local gas station, then maybe, just maybe it could catch on for the busy or stressed out worker who can’t take the time to walk outside for a while.

Oxygen has been sold for years, just not to people who intend and have the ability to breath it while surrounded by air. Scuba divers and people on oxygen tanks are consumers of the product. But they’re not buying it for the flavors. They’re buying it to live under certain conditions. It must have been a hard sell initially to convince people that they should buy oxygen for use when they’re surrounded by oxygen.

According to the article, normal air contains about 21% oxygen, while one of these cans contains 95% oxygen. They claim the high concentration of oxygen brings about “a feeling of invigoration.” I must wonder, though, if a person could get dizzy or in some way high off the stuff. Still, better than the alternatives.

I also have to wonder what it’s like to breathe mint or grapefruit. I would think the smell of roses would be a good choice, or perhaps pine. I’m sure if this takes off, there will be more flavors. Though, as well as it may do in Japan, I’m not sure it would be so popular in the US. I might be surprised, though.

Athena is dead :(

I woke up this morning to a disconnected SSH session between my laptop and my desktop, Athena. I checked gaim. Nope, still on the Internet. Maybe I got disconnected in the middle of the night, I thought? So I walked into my office room and checked on Athena. Dead. Just, dead. I couldn’t turn it on at all. Fortunately, there was nothing major on there, as I moved everything important to the Terastation, though I’m sure the drives are probably fine. It looks like the CPU fan died in the night and the CPU overheated, or something.

I’ve been suspecting this for the past week, for some reason, and have been pricing computers. I think I’ve settled on this Dell Dimension E510. It has a Pentium D dual-core 2.8GHz, 800FSB, 1GB RAM, 20″ Dell 2007FP LCD, 128MB ATI Radeon X300, 80GB HD, 16X CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) w/ double layer write capability, and Windows XP Media Center 2005 Edition with a full install CD. That’s all for $779. I plan to take some of the hardware from Athena and put it in this yet unnamed box.

Fortunately I use my laptop for almost everything nowadays, so not having Athena around won’t hurt my productivity much. Still, it’s a real shame. I loved that little computer. It’s kind of neat getting a new one, though.

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