johnny February 21st, 2010
I’ve been juggling off and on since I was fourteen, but I never learned much more than a three ball cascade or two balls in one hand. Sure, I could juggle that way indefinitely, but it was kind of boring. This summer in Alaska, I had the good fortune to pick up a juggling book behind a second hand book store free of charge. Suddenly, there were lots of new things to try and a few tricks I had even forgotten about! Combine with lots of free time and stir well.
These days, I’m up to four balls in a fairly solid pattern. But my three ball juggling has gotten a lot more interesting… at least for me. I learned a handful of new patterns and techniques and then started mixing and matching them, which lead to a few things invented on the spot. I drop things a lot more, but at least I’m not bored!
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johnny February 7th, 2010
So, it’s kind of last minute notice, but today is Jenn’s Birthday Anniversary. To celebrate, we’re throwing a burrito bash. At 2pm PST (yes, an hour from now!), anyone that wants to wander over for a couple of burritos is welcome. We recommend bringing your own chair.
Place: Slab City, USA. Corner of East Beal and County road.
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johnny January 22nd, 2010
Whew! The weather has been pretty nutty around here lately. We spent a couple of days in Quartzsite putting up fliers for freecampsites.net and got rained on every evening. One mid-day shower caught us while out on the scooter. Fun!
Quartzsite is just not our scene. Two days would have been more than enough even if the weather had been great. It was pretty crazy to pull into the BLM area the first night and see rigs lined up awning to awning just like a commercial campground. We had to go about a quarter mile deep into the area before we found a spot where we could get a mere hundred feet from a couple of neighbors. The next morning, we found out why the area was so ’sparsely’ populated as the kids in the converted school bus had breakfast and blasted the MTV version of the Grateful Dead over the world’s crappiest PA system. Ah, well… at least it wasn’t polka.
This morning, we got up ‘early’ to try and make it back to Slab City by dark. Apparently, I was still on California time and not really adhering to Jenn’s schedule. Still, we got out at a reasonable time and then sat in mid-morning traffic at Quartzsite while the rain started splattering. The wind had not stopped in at least 24 hours.
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johnny January 19th, 2010
After two years, I’ve finally started finding the joy of programming again. While in Fernley, NV, I wrote a quick patch to add a new playstyle to the crawl roguelike. Several days ago, I found and patched a bug in bcrypt, which I wrote nearly eight years ago and have ignored ever since. Best of all, I’ve started writing my own video game. It’s a roguelike, so don’t expect fancy graphics and a constant adrenaline rush. In fact, don’t expect anything for a long time as it’s barely more than a snazzy interface at the moment.
Not to be outdone, Jenn has been working on freecampsites.net quite a bit. I’ve tried to help some, but my PHP is very rusty and the codebase is quite large. I think she may have gotten a small taste of my frustration last night. Since she has expressed at least a passing interest in my game, I talked her through adding a couple of features to the codebase while we were driving to Quartzsite!
I was impressed. As a C neophyte, she was still able to extend my existing functions as well as find and patch a bug while listening to my disconnected ramblings of where the problem was most likely to be. All of that, and my program still compiles and runs this morning! I’m only sorry that I couldn’t talk her into finding a bug in the display code I spent a few hours trying to find yesterday. But, that code is probably overly complex and due for some cleanup. Hell, I get annoyed looking at it and I wrote it within the last week!
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jenn January 13th, 2010
Before we hit the road, I had dreams of building and using a solar oven. It’s one of the projects that Johnny was referring to in the last post. Up until now, it never seemed like the right time to make one. It was either too cold, too much shade, or we we weren’t staying in the area long enough for it to be worth the effort. Now that we are in the desert where it’s 75-80F degrees and always sunny, I am nearly out of excuses. We have also decided to stay for a while, so now I am completely out of excuses. However, being the ever resourceful person that I am, I found a new one…. Continue Reading »
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