Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
cynikal.net’s been reborn!
Posted by: aleks in Personal, Professional on March 28th, 2004
After an earlier incident with a badly packaged server, I finally got myself a good-condition Sun Ultra 60 workstation to host cynikal.net on. Unfortunately since I am leaving NYI, i wanted to host it somewhere else, and my good friend Seth in texas offered to help me out in that regard. So we’ll no longer be running FreeBSD, instead we’re off to Solaris world (seeing as how my new job will be mostly Solaris work, it’ll be useful to have a testbed for trying stuff out on, plus i’m always up for a good challenge).
darwin awards
Came across these pics somewhere on the interwebs. Figure i’d share, a good collection of some dumb dudes who probably won’t be around for very long at this rate. Enjoy! 
9/11 anniversary
I made it a point to go down to ground zero a few weeks after the dust had settled in 2001. Now one year has passed, and we are forever changed. I decided to commemorate this change in any way i could. So i took some photos from across the river.
In my gallery, more photos can be found.
vacation in thailand
After graduating Poly in June, I thought it would be nice to treat myself to a little R&R. I’ve been accumulating vacation time @ NYI and figure might as well splurge it all at one time. It wasn’t easy to get the bosses to let me take 6 weeks at once (they really depend on me, at least they used to, fortunately i’m not the only senior engineer there anymore).
So who better to go to a foreign country with than your girlfriend who is from there originally (ok, she was born here but hey she speaks the langauge). And actually might as well bring her parents too since the know the place like the back of their hands! So that’s what exactly what I did! The GF and I didn’t travel together. I went with her dad a little later (because they went for a full two months, where as I only could go for 6 weeks). Strange arrangements but it all worked out in the end.
Check out all the pictures here, but for now.. I leave you with some choice ones:
yummy apple powerbook!
Posted by: aleks in Personal, Professional on February 7th, 2002
So after a number of years of ignorantly bashing Apple and their supposedly crappy computers (and sadly also steering people away), I’ve decided to take the plunge and immerse myself in the world of Apple!
What made me decide to give this a try, you ask? My boss Erik showed me his laptop a few weeks ago and I was amazed by how nice it was. I’ve been wanting a laptop for a while but couldn’t decide what kind of wintel beast to get. Well he certainly helped make up my mind for me! I present you his laptop and mine, side by side (mine’s left, also slightly faster G4 667Mhz vs his G4 500Mhz).
People who know me probably are in disbelief but the reasons are twofold
- Since the inception of Mac OS X (the previous version was Mac OS 9), the underlying o/s is heavily based on FreeBSD, which I usually use at work. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished for a local FreeBSD/Unix environment (besides cynikal.net) that I can test stuff on
- Learning the new environment will be a fun challenge for me! I’ve been doing things the Windows way for over a decade now and trying something new should prove to be a breath of fresh air.
I have a feeling I’ll be spending a lot less time using my Windoze computer @ home now.
mr2 memorabilia
Since I luv my car so much, i figure i’d get some memorabilia to go along with it. I found most of this stuff on eBay over the course of a few weeks. And yes, I really have nothing better to spend my money on 
More stuff can be found in my gallery.
new camera: PC3100z
So at some point I realized that my first digital camera, an Olympus D460Z wasn’t going to cut it, so I purchased a new camera. After reading the reviews, I decided to settle on the Epson PhotoPC 3100Z. It had twice the megapixel and a better optical zoom (which is where it counts, digital zoom isn’t that great), but more importantly, I had quite a bit more control as far as shutter/aperture controls (with priority given to either, or full automatic modes available as well).
The sad thing is I ordered it before Sept 11th and it didn’t arrive until afterwards. I would have went to town with the new Epson if I only ordered it sooner (or it arrived sooner).
new day in infamy: 9/11
It was a beautiful Tuesday morning, when my mom calls me to awaken me from sleep. She tells me an airplane flew into one of the towers of the world trade center. She didn’t think much of it, actually calling me to tell me to hurry up and get to class. Well after the second plane, she was singing a different tune and now insisted I don’t go out anywhere. She herself was at work and managed to take this picture:
pic taken by my mom @ her work
It goes without saying that the country will change after something like this. My friend Dmitri and I were chatting online during the whole thing and we were both in just shock and disbelief when the buildings came crumbling down. It was surreal, i thought it was some really good special effects. It’s hard to comprehend how something like this could really be happening. In fact, this is what I saw with my own eyes:
As seen from my window, 15 miles away.
Well the only positive thing is that in the coming days, everyone feels patriotic and a sense of camaraderie, which is rare in a city as big as new york!
mr2 has a new coat of paint
When i first bought it, it wasn’t much to look at. But now that it’s got a new coat of paint, wow is she a beaut! Just need some new wheels now. I took this as an opportunity to get the 93 front spoiler installed, as well as J-spec clear corners (front turn signals) installed. I installed 94 tail lights myself a few weeks ago.
I got her done up at Keri Coach, in Westbury NY on a tip from my boss Erik. He said he used to take his Mitsu Starion there when he was my age and he had some incidents (I haven’t had any yet, well one slight, but nothing a new tire couldn’t fix heh).
More pics in my gallery as usual!
getting used to the mr2
The problem I had with the car the first two weeks wasn’t the car’s fault, it was my fault. I was not driving stick correctly. Instead of feathering the clutch while giving it gas, I neglected to give it gas. I’ve learned to feather very gently to avoid stalling, but this would only get the car moving fast enough to engage the clutch completely (get off the clutch pedal) if the road was perfectly level (or downhill). If the road was at all uphill, the car would install stall. I learned this the hard way, at a red light that turned green. 20 cars behind you honking.
I also had my cousin Tomasz give me a quick lesson near his house in Glen Cove NY on a pretty steep road. Kind of like trial by fire, but i got it eventually (good thing stalling doesn’t do any real damage to the engine).