software upgrades galore

man, i have spent too much time on software upgrades this month. here's the list:

• Upgraded the OS on my home server from snv_38 to snv_72. This upgrade removed support for Apache 2.0, so i had to upgrade from Apache 2.0 to 2.2. The new version of Apache also required that i recompile php.


• Upgraded SpamAssassin on my home server. This required installing a bunch of perl CPAN modules.


• Updated my version of unison to the latest version.


• Upgraded the photo software on my site, Coppermine.


• Upgraded the calendar software on my site, WebCalendar.


• Upgraded the blog software on my site, Movable Type, from 3.x to 4.x. This required changing the database backend from BerkeleyDB to MySQL. This also required installing a bunch of perl CPAN modules


• Updated my music collection to use ID3v2 tags instead of ID3v1 tags. This required installing ID3v2 and id3lib, updating my music management scripts to use ID3v2 and running a batch job to update all my music.

photo blast

so i finally got around to uploading a bunch of photos. when ronda and i made our wedding bands i forgot to bring my camera, doh! so we took photos with my cellphone. unfortunately to get those photos i needed some special software and a special cable. well, i finally got that junk and uploaded the pictures, so you can see them here. i also uploaded some more random pictures from my cell phone that were taken in 2005. lastly, i uploaded my xmas pictures, my dads xmas pictures, and some pictures from a day trip to big bear to visit friends.

new years redux

My new years eve was pretty chill. Ronda and I prepared some tasty Omaha steaks (which were a wedding present) for dinner along with potatos, green beans, and cheese cake. We had a bottle of red wine with our dinner and toasted to the new year. We then proceeded to play some video games on our new Wii and watch "The Frightened Woman", a strange 60s flick that involved some interesting sadism, domination, and erotic dancing. After that and a few more toasts we went to bed around 1:30am. The next morning I called my parents at 11:30am to wish them happy new years, the only problem was that they were still sleeping since they were out partying till 5:30am. Turns out they didn't mind me waking them up since they had to get up anyway to start getting ready for the next part that night. It's kinda funny when your parents are partying way more than you are.

With this wing, i thee wed

I'm pretty sure that's what Ronda said at our wedding, her being giddy and all. While what she said was true, we no longer actually have the rings that we used for the ceremony. That's because the rings that we used for the ceremony were temporary silver rings that didn't actually fit too well. We replaced them last Sunday when we went to a jewelry shop (called Scintillant Studio) in the Mission and spent the day making our real wedding bands.

The proprietor, Adam Clark, made us the temporary rings that we used for our ceremony. We then spent the day together at his studio while us stepped us through the process of creating of our real wedding bands.

Unfortunately i forgot to bring my camera on that day. I did take some pictures with my cell phone that i still don't know how to copy them off the cell phone. Once i figure that out I'll post the pictures. In the meantime I've posted some pictures of the finished rings. (Note that they look a little scuffed up since they've already had a week of wear.)

I got to make Ronda's ring and she made mine. We fabricated them out of 18k white gold, which is basically 18k regular gold mixed with palladium. The process of creating the rings consisted roughly of:

• Melting the gold and creating an ingot.
  
• Annealing the ingot (basically tempering it). This involved heating it with a torch until it was red-hot, letting it cool a bit, dropping it in water, and then pickling it. (Pickling it involved dropping it into a acid bath which would remove any oxidation.)
  
• Hammering the ingot into a roughly square stick.
  
• Running the metal through assorted presses and annealing it occasionally in-between runs. This stretched out the metal and formed it into different shapes. For Ronda's ring we made three square sticks of different thicknesses. For my ring, the shape was one stick that was a half circle.
  
• Cleaning up one end of the metal sticks to make it very flat and smooth, then cutting it to a proper length for the desired ring size, and finally cleaning and smoothing up the other freshly cut end.
  
• Bending the metal sticks into a roughly round shape so that the cleaned up ends were touching each other and pressed together.
  
• Soldering the ends together. To do this we used a small torch and 18k gold leaf solder that had a slightly lower melting point than the gold we were using for the ring. In between each soldering step we had to pickle the ring to remove oxidation.
  
• Hammering the ring into an actually round shape of the correct size.
  
• Using sand paper to flatten out the sides of the rings.
  
• Using sand paper and assorted small grinder attachments to shape and smooth the inside and outside of the rings.
  
• Using a polishing wheel to polish the outside of the rings.
  

So the process for creating Ronda's ring was actually a little more complicated than mine. My ring was a simple band, but for Ronda's ring we wanted to incorporate her grandmothers yellow gold wedding band into the ring. To do this involved some extra steps:

• Resizing grandmothers yellow gold wedding band.
  
• Creating three pieces of white gold. One to go on each side of the yellow gold band and one more to go underneath the yellow gold band to fill in some blank space there.
  
• Lots more sanding and soldering to cleanly join the four metal bands together with no visible gaps.
  

The soldering of Ronda's ring was complicated by the fact that we didn't know exactly what alloys were mixed with the gold in her grandmothers ring and hence we didn't know the exact melting point of the metal. So we had to use a very low temperature solder to join the pieces together. There was at least one close call where i thought i accidently melted the ring, but in the end it all worked out much better than i ever expected. In the photos of Ronda's ring you can see that her grandmother's yellow band very clearly and it came out exactly the way we wanted.

Overall we spent almost seven hours working on the rings and we had a great time doing it. It was a really fun experience and now we've got a great story to tell about our wedding bands. Ronda also gets the added bonus of being reminded about her grandmother whenever she looks at her band.

If you're considering getting married, I'd highly recommend making your own wedding bands. If you're planning on doing this and you're in the bay area, I'd also highly recommend doing it at Scintillant Studio since Adam is a fun and laid back guy who really seemed to enjoy working with us and explaining the details of the entire ring making process. Also, compared to some of the other ring making services I've seen online, he charges very reasonable rates for his time and has no markup on materials.

just married

Well, Ronda and I got back from eloping yesterday. Just for the record, Ronda is not pregnant and all the parental units do actually approve of our marriage. (Of course none of the parental units knew about it until after it was done, but hey, we wouldn't have been eloping if they did.)

We both took Wednesday off from work and went down to San Francisco City Hall to get married. Chuck and Juju were present as our witnesses and photographers. All our pictures from the event are online here. It was a beautiful day and after the ceremony we went to take pictures in The Presidio and have lunch at the Cliff House. After that Ronda and I drove up to Sonoma and spent three nights at the Gaige House. We had a great time just hanging out in our room, which we only left to get mud wraps, massages, and food. (Ronda made some great dining reservations and we went out to eat at Ad Hoc in Yountville, The Girl and the Fig in Sonoma, and The Fig Cafe in Glen Ellen.)

Well, now we're getting back to reality and looking forward to the rest of our lives together.

a couple weeks of travel

So on Friday, Oct 26th, I went to Brazil for the first time. I was there for 8 days, doing presentations about opensolaris at four different universities. I flew into Sao Paulo, then i presented at FATEC in Sao Jose do Rio Preto on Monday, at the Ministry of Education and UnB in Brasilia on Tuesday, at FANOR in Fortaleza on Wednesday, and at FTC in Salvador on Thursday. Our travel schedule was pretty hectic, but we did get to see a bunch of different cities in Brazil and i was able to relax Friday and Sat in Salvador. Here are some of my pictures from the trip.

On Sunday i flew out of Salvador to beautiful Newark, NJ for a week of university recruiting. Tuesday night we (me and one of my co-workers) had an info session at Princeton University and Wednesday we had a full day of interviews at the Princeton career center, after which we drove down to Baltimore, MD so that we could repeat the info session and interview process at John Hopkins University on Thursday and Friday.

One evening in Baltimore was spent hanging out with some old friends, Jonathan and Frances, who moved to Baltimore a while back. They were leaving town early Friday morning, but we managed to catch up and chat over a tasty dinner at The Helmand on Thursday.

Saturday morning i rented a car and drove down to visit my sister near Washington DC. We hadn't seen each other for almost a year so we had a really great low key time just hanging out. We did some shopping, cooked some chili, tried some local restaurants, etc. It was near her birthday, so to celebrate we went to a spa to get massages and then we went out to a great dinner at Nora's, during which we were heartily entertained by an an incredibly arrogant and annoying french man sitting next to us. We spent most the dinner talking in Polish about him and his dining companion.

I finally got back home at around 11 am on Tue, Nov 13th. In summary, i ended up visiting about 8 different cities in 17 days. Man, was i happy to sleep in my own bed again.

my saturday

woke up to a backed up bathtub. bought a drain snake, used it and a plunger to unclog the tub. quickly scanned through a couple old issues of the economist. went through about a months worth of piled up snail mail. paid my bills. itemized my receipts from two weeks of traveling for work. cleaned up around the house. spoke to my parents. started planning for a lobotomy tomorrow.