patrick schneider

So recently, the Austin Chronicle ranked Vespaio as the best restaurant in Austin. I went there last night, and it was definitely not the best restaurant I’ve been to.

When we first walked in, the hostess sauntered towards us with turtle-like speed. Although we did get the obligatory “I’ll be with you in a moment”, the moment took quite some time because she was walking so incredibly slowly. This was not a huge deal in and of itself. However…

…as we were putting our name in (for the 30 - 45 minute wait), another patron approached and inquired about when her table would be ready. It turns out that she was skipped! Marked off of the list and everything! And then, nothing more than an “Ooops… you’re table will be next”.

Luckily, we found a first-come, first-serve table near the bar and ordered a bottle of wine immediately.

The food and the bread came out at exactly the same time. The bread fails miserably. It was cold. Not cold like “not warm”. Cold like “chilled”. The refrigerated bread was served with some kind of butter-ish-looking substance that was covered in a GREEN liquid. It was the most bland spread I’ve ever tasted. Oh, it was cold too.

Hm. The entrees were both good. And dessert was tasty as well. I guess those are plusses. But the dining experience in total was not worth the cover charge.

My recommendation? If you want Italian, go to the Tree House Italian Grill. I’ve been at least 3 times and been increasingly impressed each time.

I’ve updated the wobble board section of my website, which resides in the area dedicated to ProBodX.

There is now expanded information on how to make a wobble board yourself. Previously, I had just a snippet and some pictures. The pictures are still there
and haven’t changed, and hopefully the new explanation will help in understanding them.

The ProBodX system was written by Marv Marinovich and Edythe Heus. The basic, generalized idea of the exercise system is to combine lightly-to-moderately strenuous motions with an unstable base. The unstable surfaces are achieved through wobble boards, balance disks, slant boards, large PVC pipes, and exercise balls. This off-balance type of exercise, they contend, allow the nervous system to become integrated with the movements of the muscles and provide for a much more functional and usable type of stregth. Compared to conventional weight trainig which entirely isolates a specific muscle group, ProBodX is quite a novel and radical idea to fitness.

I’ve been using ProBodX for around a year and a half now, quite inconsistently. During the few consecutive week stretches that I have stuck with the program, the results have been fairly impressive, mainly in the realm of increased balance.

Shortly after I arrived at work this morning, I got news of an Austin-area tragedy — The Oasis on Lake Travis caught fire early this morning.

A wave of thunderstorms moved through the area around the time that the fire started, says the Austin American Statesman. The storms were loud and bright enough to wake me up, which is a fairly rare occurance.

The owner of The Oasis, Beau Theriot, says he will undoubtedly rebuild his 24 year old creation. I for one am very happy at this news and hope they can get everything straightened out swiftly.

We’ll keep you in our thoughts, Oasis. Good luck and speedy recovery.

The AWOL Machine made the local Austin news last night. The device has not been sold to any bars in the area yet, but Fox decided it was worty enough to comment on. And apparently me too. I suppose I’m mainly interested because last night was the first time I had seen this contraption.

A spokesperson for TABC (Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission) said a bunch of stuff like (I’m paraphrasing) “this might lead to greater than average alcohol consumption” and a doctor said something to the effect of “inhaling anything should be done with caution”.

Blah, blah, blah. Talking heads. This is the stupidest gimmick I’ve ever seen. Don’t inhale alcohol. Or anything else, for that matter. Except air. That’s my advice.

A Quine is a piece of self-reproducing code. There are plenty of resources out there to explain the theoretical side of this, about Quine himself, examples in other languages, etc. I don’t want to reproduce that information, but I’d like to walk you through the step-by-step way to making your own quine in PHP.

If you want more background information on quines, here are some places to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine
http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm
http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/quin.htm

So, on with the PHP example.

You will need two PHP scripts to accomplish the task at hand. My examples will be run from the command line, though you could just as easily run these from a browser.

First, create the ‘quine’ script:

#!/usr/local/bin/php
<?php
$dna = '*';
echo str_replace(chr(42), $dna, base64_decode($dna));
?<

Second, create the ‘generator’ script:

#!/usr/local/bin/php
<?php
echo base64_encode(file_get_contents('./quine'))."n";
?>

Now, run the generator:

$ ./generator

Provided the files are exactly as mine, you will get a long string of characters, like “IyEvdXNyL2xvY2FsL2Jpbi9waHAKPD9 …”. Replace the asterisk in the ‘quine’ script with this long string of characters, like so:

#!/usr/local/bin/php
<?php
$dna = 'IyEvdXNyL2xvY2FsL2 ... ';
echo str_replace(chr(42), $dna, base64_decode($dna));
?>

Note that I have not included the full string of characters here; I’ve put an elipses where the rest of the string should be. Including it would have caused it to run way off to the right of the screen.

Now, run the ‘quine’ script:

$ ./quine

Pretty!

Notes: To follow this example exactly, you’ll need to have PHP-CLI enable (so that you can run PHP scripts from the command line). Also, your scripts will need to have the executable bits set:

$ chmod +x generator
$ chmod +x quine

The idea for this was stolen from Sam Barnum at 360works. His original program is here. There’s no step-by-step method of how he made his program, though, which I thought needed to be mentioned. Thanks Sam for the idea!

Renewable Energy Access reports that San Antonio’s AGE Refining company will be offering B20 biodiesel straight off of their rack. This fuel is definitely gaining ground, and I will absolutely be buying diesel next time around (unless, of course, something even more awesome becomes widespread).

Today I browsed some of the pictures I have up here from the IKEA kitchen that I put in over a year ago. It’s finished now — the main page for it states that I’m still in the demolition phase. This is incorrect

So, what I would like to do is get a real web page for each individual picture and have text on each. Perhaps also I will create a little “Questions/Comments” segment on each picture where I can post/answer things that people ask…

If you have any other good ideas (and/or have an IKEA kitchen question right now) let me know.

I’m enamoured with biodiesel. And there seem to be more and more sites popping up with biodiesel information. Perhaps, actually, they’ve been there for some time, and I’m just now stumbling across them.

For those of you in Houston, here’s a great site I came across: Houston Biodiesel. Among some good information, I found out that MINI makes a diesel (it’s called the MINI One D and MINI One TD). Naturally, it’s only available in Europe… but can you imagine? This thing gets 58.85 MPG combined city/highway! And what if you ran it on biofuel — biodiesel or straight vegetable oil (SVO)?!? Unreal.

Rudolf Diesel was quite an amazing individual. Ahead of his time: Fattywaggons.com.

Oh — and Willie Nelson has taken quite an interest in biodiesel as well. So much so, that he started his own company, BioWillie. While I wasn’t able to find a website for BioWillie biodiesel, I was able to find a ridiculous blogger that is sticking-it-to-the-Rebuplicans with her (?) awesomely bad, feminist-and-biodiesel-but-not-Republican promoting agenda: The Goddess. Well, Goddess, I’m glad that we can at least agree on the fact that Willie Nelson is very progressive in adopting biofuels. But why do we have to hate Republicans also? I’m not too fond of the policies of any of the crack-heads up in DC. So can’t we just agree that, regardless of political affiliation, biofuels are a *good* thing? I would hope so.

For those of you in Austin, check out Austin Biofuels, LLC.

Here’s the link for BioWillie:

http://www.wnbiodiesel.com/

And another fantastic article on biodiesel/SVO:

http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Saveonacar/P115218.asp

Y’all heard of this?

Some guy approaches you, typically in a white van, pressuring you to buy really “high-end” speakers off of him because he works for an “audio company” and they “messed up and gave him extra”… so naturally, he wants to pass the savings on to you.

I was at the ATM today when a guy drove up next to me and gave me this spiel. I looked at him funny and he drove off. My first thought was that he was trying to get my ATM PIN, so I walked into the bank when I finished my ATM business and immediately changed my PIN. I mean… who knows how long he was next to me in his car?

This guy was actually in a beige SUV, not a white van. I imagine, though, the scam was the same. “I work at an audio company.” Really? I eat cows and like it. By the way, do you have any speakers you can sell me?

Anyway, don’t buy speakers in parking lots from people that are trying to pawn them off on you.