Category Archives: Life

Food (Chocolate Pasta)

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Still feeling kind of meh (see yesterday’s rant), but I did some cooking today.

This morning I woke up early and made myself a tasty breakfast sandwich.

A mushroom omelette with cheese inside a toasted english muffin.

My camera arrived today, so I put it to work taking photos of my attempt at dessert: chocolate pasta.

1/2 cup whole wheat flour
3 tablespoons Ovaltine
1 egg white

Mix ingredients into a moist dough. It should not be crumbly, but should not be sticky. Roll out flat with a rolling pin and cut into strips. Boil about 5 minutes. Serve with cherry sauce, hot or cold.

12 cherries
1 tablespoon sugar

Cut cherries into small pieces and add sugar. Cook over low heat about 5 minutes until slightly syrupy.





It wasn’t bad. However, I would add more chocolate (so you probably want more like 4 or 5 tablespoons of Ovaltine).

Life

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Dinner today was a salad with mushrooms, grilled garlic-herb salmon, and some jalapeno cheese bread. It was fairly good.
I’m also currently working on a new incarnation of PPA TCG/Student Wars called People Wars:

Really though, I’ve lately been feeling like I’ve lost all my passion for things in my life.

I used to enjoy designing webpages. The last website I designed was my photos2 layout, and that was over a year ago.

I used to enjoy writing code in my free time. The last bit of code I wrote “for fun” was the backend for life.alanv.org, and that was mainly because I wanted a way to share photos (so more out of necessity than desire to code). I have a bunch of project ideas in my head that want to be turned into applications, but for which I can’t find the desire to work on.

I used to enjoy creating card games. Even as I work on People Wars, I keep feeling like it’s not something I really want to be doing. The past 3 or 4 TCGs I’ve started work on have stalled in various non-playable states. The older TCGs I used to like working on haven’t been updated in years (PSO TCG?).

I used to enjoy photography. Lately though, every time I pull out my camera, I feel more and more like I’m compensating for my utter lack of social skills. I rarely look through the photos I take anymore. I don’t really sort or tag the photos I take anymore. When I take photos, it no longer brings me the joy it used to. (Even the recent fourth of July and related photos were sorted mainly out of a sense of obligation rather than a desire to do so, and they still haven’t been tagged.)
I guess the purchase of the point-and-shoot was an attempt to get me interested again, but part of me is doubting that it will work… in particular after yesterday’s picnic where I kept finding myself wishing I had left my camera at home and was forcing myself to interact on a less superficial level.

I used to enjoy spending time around people. More and more, however, it feels like I’m incredibly out of place. There are times when, no matter what is happening, I can’t get myself interested. When there are people over I increasingly spend more and more time alone in my room clicking through the same 4 webpages or listening to the same dozen songs over and over. I simultaneously feel like I want more social interaction and social interaction would only serve to make me miserable and feel even more left out.

I used to be passionate about work and look forward to heading in to work every day. Lately though, it’s become more “same old, same old,” and I get up and get dressed and head to my desk every day out of necessity. Part of this may be the bad couple weeks I’ve been having WRT work, but I feel that it’s likely part of the larger issue where I’m losing interest in everything.

I guess I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong with me, other than I wish I had something I actually enjoyed doing instead of having a bunch of things I do to pass the time. Hopefully this is nothing more than a small rut and I’ll find my interests again. Maybe it’s time to go out and seek new interests. I want to enjoy, rather than simply live, life again. I just can’t seem to find activities that allow me to do that in the same way that I once did.

I should thank Greg, Tim, Ian, Mars, and Dan though. Sometimes I feel like you guys are the only thing keeping me sane, and when we play games or just talk, everything feels like it used to and I find myself being interested in things again.

Meh.

(I suppose this should include a small disclaimer that there’s still one thing I’m passionate about. You know who you are, and I hope that never changes.)

VM Fail

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Work today was full of fail.

It started out with a push-update to my Windows VM from IT. Simple enough, right? Well, this update somehow pushed my VM over the edge of hard drive usage and caused it to start reporting low space errors (the VM thinks it’s a 130GB drive, but it’s located on a 60GB partition, and it had eaten up around 59.7 GB). This meant I could no longer run automated tests in it, which was my primary work for today. Ok, fine, spend some time cleaning up the VM.

This, unfortunately, isn’t enough… since the VM HD files are in 2GB chunks, cleaning up stuff inside the VM and reducing the used HD space down to 26GB doesn’t reduce the VM files’ sizes any. So I attempt a defrag. The available space on the drive very quickly goes down from about 300MB to 110MB, at which point I decide this is a very bad idea and stop.

Spend the morning finding tools to resize the physical drive partitions to give the VM some more room (as it is now running in the 110MB of free space and is generally unusable). Finally fall back to Gparted and discover that the partitions are actually logical volumes, so I have to resize them within the OS. Great.

Spend most of the afternoon figuring out how to boot Ubuntu into a command line as root so I can unmount the appropriate drives to reduce the logical volume size of /home so I can increase the logical volume size of /. (Issues mainly stemming from the fact that all of the physical drive space was already allocated between the two logical volumes, so I needed to reduce one to increase the other, and reductions cannot be done while the partition is mounted.) Discover that I first need to reduce the file system size. Finally succeed at doing so and at giving / an additional 2GB of memory. This was around 4 PM. Success!

Finally get the VM booting back up, and it’s running mostly ok. I then stupidly decide to resize the HD size within Windows so it doesn’t eventually use up the newly allocated 2GB and die again (which is something most of the online conversations on VM sizes I’m finding recommend anyway). This kicks off and starts eating up the newly-allocated 2GB. Eventually, it has 0KB left on its partition, signals an abort, and kills the VM in the middle of the process.

So yeah, now I have a VM in an unbootable state on a partition with 0KB available space (so it can’t boot anyway). Awesome.
I filed a ticket to IT to either get a new VM or get help in adding a VM I have to the corporate domain, but that won’t happen until Monday. Blah. Unfortunately, as there was no VM backup and it was an image of my old Windows workstation, everything I had on there is lost. Oh well.

So yeah, I essentially got nothing done at work today because of stupid VM issues. As soon as I get a new VM working, I’m going to snapshot it and set it to revert to snapshot every shutdown.

Edit: For my own future reference, the relevant commands were:
umount /home
resize2fs /dev/mainvg/home 19609750
lvreduce -L -2G /dev/mainvg/home
mount /home
lvresize -L +2G /dev/mainvg/root
resize2fs /dev/mainvg/root somenumber

Europe summary

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Been back in SF for a couple days… today was my first day at work in a month. Spent most of the time going through my almost 1100 emails and getting my build working again.

The flights home were uneventful, although I didn’t get any sleep during the flight. I got to watch Bolt, which is actually a fairly well-done movie. Customs wasn’t nearly as annoying as I had been anticipating. It was my first time filling out the form and going through by myself and such, but they didn’t seem to really care and just waved me through after taking my form.

In any case, I wanted to post a summary of my Europe trip… mostly for my own reference later. The 10-day tour is really more like 7 days of actual sightseeing and such, but meh. I love how they count the “arrive at BKK” as a day, despite the fact that the company itself has absolutely nothing else to do at that point (at least Day 1 involves them getting tickets and sorting out baggage and such).

I still need to go through and post photos from the trip. I’ll do that once I’m feeling more normal.

Day 1 (June 6):
Meet at the Bangkok airport at 9:30 PM to board a flight for Italy. Take off at midnight.

Day 2:
Arrive in Italy, drive to Rome to see the famous fountain and the Spanish steps. After lunch, head to the Colosseum, then Saint Peter’s in Vatican City. Stay at the Admiral Palace hotel in Chianciano Terme. Special dinner of Italian food.

Day 3:
Travel to Florence to see Duomo/Santa Maria church and reproductions of various famous works in the area, then to Piza to see the leaning tower. Stay at the Novotel hotel in Florence. Special dinner of Italian steak.

Day 4:
Travel to and take a boat to Venice. Take a gondola ride around the city and see demonstrations of glassblowing. Explore the city. Lots of shopping. Take a boat back and stay at the Anthony Palace hotel in Marcon.

Day 5:
Travel to Milan and look at various statues in the area. Then drive to Switzerland through the longest tunnel in the world (17 kilometers), stopping at Lucerne to look at the famous bridge before heading to Interlaken. Stay at the Hotel Krebs (crab hotel) in Interlaken.

Day 6:
Take the cog-wheel train up to Jungfrau, the “Top of Europe”. Stay at Hotel Krebs again. Special dinner of fondue.

Day 7:
Take the bus to France, stopping in Strasbourg. Take the TGV into Paris. Visit the Triumph Arch. Take the Bateaux Mouche boat up and down the Seine, seeing different parts of the city. Stay at the Pullman Paris La Defense. Special lunch of Escargot.

Day 8:
Go up the Eiffel Tower. Walk by (but not into) the Louvre and the Joan of Arc statue in the area. Go to the Galleria Lafayette for shopping. Bus down to Versailles for a tour. Stay at the Pullman Paris again.

Day 9:
Head to the Charles de Gaulle airport for a 1:50 PM flight.

Day 10:
Arrive back in Bangkok at 6 AM.

Food and Star Trek and Food

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Back in Thailand for a day of fun.

My uncle took us to an awesome buffet today for lunch. They had a ton of gourmet-looking food from all different parts of the world, people to pull your chair out and push it in when you sit down, people to fold your napkin and place it nicely on the chair when you get up for more food, and the most amazing gourmet dessert bar I’ve seen. I tried more types of cakes and parfaits and more traditional Thai desserts today than I’ve had in the entire trip thus far.

Afterward, we went to the mall movie theatre and discovered that they were still showing Star Trek. After watching it, I can understand what all the excitement and hype was about… I was very, very, very impressed. One of the best movie experiences I’ve had in recent memory… at least since Wall-E. Yay for CMU-grad Spock. Also, I missed Randy Pausch’s cameo… anyone know where it was?

Afterward my uncle introduced us to the tastiness that is Crepe Cake… basically a few dozen layers of crepe and whipped cream, topped with strawberry sauce. They also had thai tea cake, which is likewise amazingly tasty. Om nom nom nom.

Tomorrow will be a trip to my aunt’s orchid orchard followed by more buffet dinner (Japanese, this time). The day after will be food with my uncle… or whatever you call the son of your grandmother’s sister. The following day will be flying home to San Francisco. I get back Saturday afternoon (before I leave from Hong Kong, actually… yay timezones).