thisStrangeEngine.com

Hey, gang. Just thought I’d drop a post real quickly to let you guys know I’m more or less still alive. I haven’t been very talkative because I’ve been busy and have had a few personal things distracting me. Wordpress 2.1 just got released, and I hope to do the upgrade and then get back in the saddle.

I’ve been thinking about hitting up Houston and Dallas sometime in February. I’ve been promising to come to Houston especially now that so many of you guys are there now, and I want to see a couple of my favorite girls while they’re still glowing with pregnancy. I’ll let you people know if/when I decide on dates, and hopefully you can make some time for me.

I feel like I should leave you with something to entertain you…hmmmm…

Okay, this is REALLY geeky in nature, but maybe you guys would like the spend 15 minutes learning the basics of a programming language. Here is a great online interactive tutorial on the basics of Ruby. Ruby is an interpreted language that is supposed to be intuitive to learn and makes it possible to put together programs rather quickly, and thus has become very popular as recently. The best part is, if you’re curious about it, you can download everything you need to write, test, and run Ruby programs for free at the official Ruby site.

So, I finally signed up for a YouTube account. I recently acquired a video capturing device, so I’ve started uploading some clips from stuff I recorded onto video tape that I didn’t think were already out on YouTube land. You can see what I’ve put up so far here.

Here’s an interesting article in the Austin paper the Austin American-Statesman about a tech company called Forgent and their sue-everyone-for-patent-infringement business model. Their revenue for the past few years have almost totally comprised of patent settlement money based from a single patent that claims to cover the JPEG compression algorithm, but that whole process is now starting to lose steam.

Why am I talking about this? I know these guys. When we were still our own company and no more than nine employees, Metreos squatted in their offices. We actually took up more of their office space than they did - there was only an administrative assitant and two or three executives. The whole time I was there, though, I had no idea what they did. I just think it’s interesting that all of this was going on in the background of where I was working for a while.

I just came back from a quick trip to the HEB grocery store down the street. When I went to the check out counter, something kind of weird happened to me.

The lady behind the counter smiled at me and said, “Well hello again!”

Now, Lord knows I don’t usually make an effort to remember who has checked out my groceries, so as far as I was concerned, this was my first encounter with this lady. Apparently, this was not the case. What impressed me was the fact that she remembered me, even if she had checked my groceries before, because I figure with all the people you see day in and day out as a checker, everyone would just be a big blur.

She started scanning what few items I had and remarked that I always seem to come late in the evening. It was about 10:30. I smirked and told her it’s the only time I really have to do things, which is mostly true. I was rather amused that she made that observation, too. It made me wonder if I’m just getting too predictable.

But it is a grocery store, so that’s not so bad. But one time…

I walked into a Best Buy and walked passed one of the employees, someone who obviously managed one of the sections. He took a look at me and said “Hey! Welcome back!”

Yeah, at that point I was pretty sure I had been going there too often.

I’ve just done a rare photo album update where I added some pictures of me and my friends doing a little pumpkin carving this past weekend. My friend Ara and I picked out and gutted the pumpkins, and the carving and designs were done by my friends Rami, Juan, and John. If you know these guys, you can pretty much figure out who did what.