Bluetooth
Over the past week or so I’ve had Bluetooth on my mind a lot. Why? It’s a silly protocol- low bandwidth, disgustingly complicated, still a bit on the expensive side.
Well, for starters, I’ve been messing with it a bit at work. One of the bugs I was tracking down in VMware’s virtual USB controller was triggered by a Bluetooth dongle. This required some reading of specifications, writing of debug tools, and playing with Bluetooth devices. (Incidentally, never buy SMC Bluetooth dongles. They’re crap. I have protocol analyzer dumps to prove it.) I got to mess around with BlueZ just a bit to test a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard on a Linux guest OS. It was actually much easier than expected, and I look forward to using their API. Kudos to the BlueZ folks.
Furthermore, tomorrow I should get my shiny new Nokia 6620 in the mail. I have all sorts of crazy ideas racing around my mind that somehow involve Bluetooth, the Python port for Symbian, an NSLU2, and GPS. Crazy ideas aside, I’ll at least be using a Bluetooth Stowaway keyboard, and possibly using it to network my Python apps with a laptop machine running Linux.
Modern cell phones really amaze me.. they’re what PDAs really should have been all along. Phones get smarter and “smarter”, but at their very core they will always be devices for communicating. Nowadays that might be email, mobile blogging, and multimedia messaging, in addition to old fashioned voice calls- but they are still communication devices. What’s a PDA? It communicates with nothing. Fundamentally, a PDA does nothing that a pad of paper couldn’t. Pads of paper never need new batteries, or OS upgrades.
On a similar note, my old Motorola V188 seems to be trying to make peace with me, as it knows its useful lifetime is now limited. It’s actually been working really well for the last week or so. No half-dropped calls, it’s actually been ringing.. crazy.
Travel
I already have another trip back to Boulder planned for the weekend before Halloween. It’s just a short weekend trip, leaving Friday afternoon and returning Sunday night. I wanted to try a trip that didn’t require any vacation days, since sadly they’re now more valuable to me than anything else VMware has to offer. I don’t have any plans for this trip yet, but anything is fine by me as long as I’m around my awesome friends. I’d kinda like to have a bit of a pie cook-off with David. I have yet to experience his pie-fu first hand, and it’d be great to know how to make at least a simple pie when I’m home for Thanksgiving.
Ah, Thanksgiving… I’ve just committed to being home for that. I’ll want to spend as much time as practical with my family, since my grandmother will be back in town for the first time in years. I’ll have to see what my friends are doing, I might still be able to spend the weekend with them. I need to go back to looking for plane tickets for Thanksgiving, but the prices depress me. It’s worth it to have full use of the two full days I get off from work, but blehh… I hate sinking so much money into air travel. It’s all going to go into Jen’s paycheck eventually 
Food
Sigh, not a lot to report food-wise. VMware’s cafeteria does nothing to curb my addiction to cereal and bagels. The most interesting thing I’ve cooked at home recently has been some random stir-fried beef and veggies.
Exploring
I’m back in a bit of an adventurous mood, slowly working toward some kind of balance between my life in Boulder and my life here. For the last few days I’ve been interested in urban exploration, though I still have this itch to find somewhere really dark. I’m certainly no astronomer, but I love staring at the sky. Near my apartment you can count all the stars on your fingers.
Thursday I biked to work. I need to investigate new routes. I wasn’t the only one biking on El Camino Real, but it still seemed just a tad bit suicidal. It takes me about 45 minutes, but I’m out of shape. I need to convince myself to do this on a more regular basis. Besides being fun, biking has always been liberating to me. I hate parking. A lot. Actually, I hate parking more than pretty much anything else. I’m sure there are plenty of things worse than parking, but I’m having trouble thinking of them at the moment. On a bike or on foot, you can go anywhere, stop anywhere, without all the time, money, and frustration caused by trying to find a place to ditch your vehicle. Thursday night on the way home I could effortlessly take a detour through downtown Palo Alto to grab a Gyro, then cut through Stanford just for the hell of it.
Friday night I decided to visit San Jose. I’d never been there before, or even really looked at a map. I was in the mood to get lost. I was driving in straight from work, so my first job was to find some parking. Blah, See above. After far too much driving around and squinting at rates, I somehow ended up in a big $18/day garage near the hockey stadium. I later found some cheaper ones, around $6.. but the damage was done. I figured I’d never need to drive into SJ again, Caltrain is so much more convenient. Well, I got lucky that night. I ended up leaving at around 2 AM. Nobody was manning the gate, and it was open. I crumpled up my ticket and laughed at the fall of the weak parking garage regime.
Overall, it was a great first impression of downtown SJ. It didn’t seem small, but it was in a way compact. You never had to walk very far to hit a restaurant, park, drinking establishment, or something culturally significant. It was different from most of San Francisco, where you end up walking through big pockets of emptiness. The crowds in town Friday made for good people-watching. The clubs were packed, so it was easy to spy on the throngs of twentysomethings waiting in line outside to dance the funky chicken and peace out to the latest hip-hop in their fishnets, or what have you. I found a great little burrito place that was still open and receiving a lot of business at 11:00.
By far the coolest thing I ran into Friday was an art car show outside the San Jose Museum of Art. Picture a darkened plaza, a circle of palm trees and a circle of the strangest vehicles you’ve ever seen. I suck and I didn’t have my camera with me. There was one covered with reptilian scales, a giant guitar, a Radio Flyer wagon.. it was a sea of LEDs and EL wire, with a few strobe lights for good measure. There was one painted entirely gray, covered in random plastic parts. Half a brick phone here, part of a Star Destroyer there, a Ghost Busters proton pack on the hood. Close up, it was a mosaic of plastic toys from the 80s. From farther away, it could have made a pretty convincing space ship. Or maybe a time machine. Heck, if it was a DeLorean I might have mistaken it for some kind of new-age TARDIS. Then, my eye caught the Phenomenauts stickers. It turns out the art museum was having some kind of halloween costume party and concert, which explained a lot of the interesting crowd that night. Sure enough, later that night I walked by a window in the museum only to see the Phenomenauts playing on stage. Yep, that was random.
Saturday I left the car at home and spent some time exploring Palo Alto, then headed back to San Jose to see Wallace and Gromit. What a great movie. Anyone that hasn’t seen it needs to, especially if you’re a fan of the short films. I had time for a little more wandering in SJ before and after the movie. I had my camera with me this time, but the cars were gone. The downtown crowd on Saturday wasn’t nearly as interesting. In fact, the city was a bit on the empty side- I got there during an SJ Sharks game. Pretty much everybody seemed to either be headed to the stadium (the big foam sharks on people’s heads were a subtle hint) or headed to a latin music festival of some sort in the convention center. Admittedly, I didn’t stay in SJ too late. I was a little tired, and the last northbound train leaves at 10:30. If I did want to stay later, I’d have to spend the night there, or maybe walk back. It’s only 12 miles or so between downtown SJ and Sunnyvale. Bicycles seem appropriate in this situation.
I think next on my list of things to hunt down is a nice dark sky. Looks like a lot of bay area astronomers camp out in Lassen Volcanic National Park.
