tmarthal.com

So, The University of Arizona basketball team is coming to Los Angeles this weekend to play USC and UCLA. Its been a tradition of our little AZ clique to go to the games for the last 5 years. However, UofA was a pretty good basketball team the majority of those years. Now with Rodgers gone, out of the top 25 rankings for the first time in 7-8 years, and Lute giving the kibosh on 3 point attempts (he should just tell Radenovich to stop shooting) things are swinging back into the LA team's favor. Which brings me to the issue of tailgates. It would be nice to actually have a truck to go to the basketball games and put the tailgate down and sit and have a few beers and kick back. Well, I used to be able to do that. Alas, as bad luck would have it (with the help of a few boys from a local chop shop ) my tailgate on my pickup truck was stolen clean. In the place where I park my truck at night. I mean, I see CLKs, H2s, m3's and all sort of $$$ MB cars next to mine. And they have...

So, last wednsday it really was like the movie. Some were saying that the peak on Wednsday was the biggest waves to hit the Los Angeles region since El Nino . My roomate snapped this picture from our house on 8th Street: They closed down Manhattan Beah Pier, but still checked it out from the strand (a safe distance up!). The whitewater on those waves were 10+ft high. Needless to say, noone was paddling out. And supposedly the LA County Lifeguards saved some woman that got swept away while standing on the bike path north of El Porto before closing off every beach in the SouthBay. And as you can see in the next picture there was lots and lots of erosion. Almost no sand is left on the beach halfway to the volleyball courts. LA county continues to import sand at a rate of 9 million tons per year ( * ) and the washing away of sand from this storm alone is going to cost lots and lots of taxpayer $$! And my brother says that San Diego was firing more than the South Ba...

Is there going to be a tsunami in Los Angeles? The swell model at Wetsand dictates a HUGE southwest push is coming next week. Which means that they are forecasting 38 foot waves. To those people not familiar with wave sizes, these waves are measured Hawaiian style from thier backs. That means the 38 foot waves next Wednsday will have 70+foot faces! Get the jetskis ready! For those who have not seen the movie Big Wednsday about the Malibu surfers in the 1960's (whose huge waves are shot in Waimea Bay, not in Malibu) it is an epic struggle of friendship throughout the years where the huge surf brings them all together. (It has Gary Busey for chrissake!) Will this be the year where they could have actually filmed the movie here in LA where it was set?! I think it might be... albeit up the coast a few miles from Malibu. When the tsunami hits LA next Wednsday, thankfully one of my crazy friends has agreed that we can 'hide out' in his cabin up in Mammoth Mountain . ...

this is an official blog now, I am going to write something about owning an ipod and using itunes. :D (next i discuss the war in iraq!!) so, i recently purchased an ipod nano a few weeks back (mainly for my planned trip to hawai'i). of course, i ordered it directly from apple.com: it seems that you can get it engraved for no extra cost. if anyone ever finds a black nano on the streets of LA with the initials 'tm' carved on the back (i didn't know what else to put!) then be sure to contact me, and i will give you $10 for it (seems fair to me ). Also, due to the huge fuss about the ipod nano's scratching, i haven't seen it. that could be because i cut the plastic protector thing the nano came with to fit the screen and left it on there, but im also careful not to put my nano in my knife sack (i ruined some good books that way, need to get rid of some knives i guess). which comes to the nature of this post: itunes . i dont like it. in fact, i've been usin...

If you want better formatting of this BLOG, use your favorite RSS feed reader and set up the display however you want it. Its like lots of people these days can't understand the difference between content and presentation of said content. Which is why I love the ytmnd.com website. Its ALL content.

so back in the day, i used to read some kung-fu magazines. i was a green belt in the country club's taek-won-do club, at 12 we were badass. anyways, in the back of the king-fu magazines, they used to advertise these little gadgets that were supposedly used for improving your finger strength by exercising them in ways traditional methods couldn't match for that supposed 'kung fu grip'. I never got one of those doo-hickey's, instead I had to rely on a plastic&metal combination wrist grip thing that I used religiously from when I was 12 to 15. [Which totally affected my awesome Nintendo skillz, but that is unrelated to the topic.] Fast forward to 1999. There is a bus, and one of my older brothers is leaving to join the Navy after graduating college. This is the start of the clothes ripping when every guy on the double decker bus is shirtless and covered in beer. Fast forward again to 2002. A friend of a friend's 27th birthday, got a bus to Santa Monica from...

So this weekend on Saturday, I will be playing in the Annual Top Gun Volleyball Tournament down in Neuport Beach (is it 'Neuport' or 'Newport'? does it matter?). I know that shennanigan's will ensue, either at the tourney or at the "Officer's Party" afterwards. I'll update this post this weekend with the outcome, <bad top gun pun>hopefully the pattern won't be full and there will be points for second place.</bad topgun pun> Update : Our team, 'Trough Gun' went 0-4. The level of competition has escalated in the past years; the Maverick division 6-man teams (of which we were 1 of 14) had various levels of sportsmanship (i.e. inverse ratio of drinking ability to seriousness) and teamwork (i.e. multiple blockers, short sets, outsite calls, back sets, and various other indoor club team abilities). Our team, wrapped only in our towels (with our dog tags!) and talking about the hard-deck on our gym bench (from ikea ) did ...

Note: this post was delayed posting a few days for no reason other than the fact that i forgot to publish it. so i think that i experienced the most coincidental set of events in a single weekend ever last weekend when a friend and i road-tripped up through new mexico and into the durango/silverton region of colorado. 1/ cross canadian ragweed ; c created a mix cd for me two months ago with one of thier songs on it; i was listening to that exact song on the way to pick up c driving to durango; we just happened to pick a restaurant (Ore House) Friday night in durango for which we have to wait 30 minutes. While waiting, the place right next to it has Cross Canadian Ragweed playing for 20 bucks. Its rock-country, the kind of stuff that they play on country stations. The dude reminds me of Skynard, and the show was extremely good except for the oklahoma people in the crowd. 2/ Jeep tour. My phone number is the same as thiers . The only difference is the area code. Duu duu duuuuh. 3...

i know everyone has heard that cnet wrote an article about google's ceo and included some basic personal information in thier article about privacy and intraweb crawlers obtaining 'private' information published on teh intarnets. well, it turns out that while 'marthaler' isn't that common of a name (there should be in about 30 years after me and my 4 brothers have 5 boys each...) you still can't find too much information about me on the web. it turns out that there is some powerful ceo/business guy in chicago with the same first and last name as me. and that there is a whole wisconsin /minnesota marthaler family. the only way that you can even see how i have impacted the documented world is by searching for 'physics' along with my name. and then you only get an article about how i won an engineering competition back in the day . Well, it turns out that there are better ways of obtaining personal/address/phone number/martial (and marital!)/age inf...

So i recently upgraded my mobile from a small Samsung phone to a thin flip form-factor Motorola Razor model. This is only the third ever phone model that I've had, starting with the smallish Nokia back in 2001. I forget the samsung and nokia model numbers... maybe ill look them up. Nah. My first Nokia was awesome. The software interface was very intuitive and kept track of everything in a very proper and sensical manner. Up/Down buttons accessed what I wanted things to access and menus were easy to navigate and things just worked(unless I didn't know better, and just assumed that was the way things worked for all phones). I bought the Samsung because it was the only phone that Cingular was offering in 2003 that was a non-clamshell small enough to be comparable to my nokia. It wasn't so good. There was an LED on the phone that would blink. All. The. Time.(1) Granted, you could change the color that it would blink from blue to orange and back to blue, but still, it was an...

In late July, BBC published an article about the process from which one species of butterfly can divert from another. The article's main point is that two very-similar species of butterflies living in the same geographic area only mate with others of the same species based off of a small mutation which produced marks only distinguishable to butterflies of the same species. "This has the effect of discouraging inter-species mating, thus encouraging genetic isolation and species divergence." Which has always been one of the aspects of evolution that I always found difficult: how could one individual mutate/evolve and then pass its modified genetic information onto its predecessors? How would its predecessors know to only mate with other evolved species? This article and study is very insightful in shedding light into that, and could be (speculation) the divergence between how fish became snakes became lizards became ????. Of course, I found that article from /. wh...

My friend jake sent me this. jake fancies himself as "j2bb" in his inner ibm web development rap circles. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67970,00.html It talks about how CS grad students around the nation (with whom i group myself) are creating verses about thier math and thier phat 'Algorythms' . "MC Plus+ rattles off lines like: "I'm encrypting shit like every single day; sending it across a network in a safe way; protecting messages to make my pay; if you hack me you're guilty under DMCA."" for once i am speachless. too close to home? you're god damned right.

LETS SEE JUST HOW FAST THIS BITCH CAN GO OMG LIKE HI LOL ROFL

while others post static content about what they are listening to, i choose to use a tool to keep all my raving fans complacent with auto-updates to my winamp awesome list using a tool called audioscrobbler : http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/tmarthal/ The thing that i like about audioscrobbler is the last.fm technology. it is like a combination of launch.yahoo.com with shoutcast . although, i dont completely understand it (see my comments in that other blog post about using technology that i dont 100% understand!), it is bad-to-the-ass . to listen to the songs that i am listening to, and only me, then open up my last.fm profile http://www.last.fm/user/tmarthal/ and click on the "personal radio button" and it will start a script to download a .m3u playlist file (that you can import into winamp ) and then get streaming music delivered to your computer that I PICKED ... by listening to them myself!! Note that there is a way to pick songs and whole albums from a web...

So there is this Blogger.com 'blogger' SearchBar and blog webring bar at the top of this page. I could have chosen to get rid of it using a simple CSS hack , but I chose not to, thinking that it would actually work, and that the average user could search this page. Well they can't. At least not yet. Cause google hasn't indexed this blog yet. For instance, using the google search "AWESOME site:tmarthal.blogspot.com" returns 0 results, when it should return 100 million. So while we wait patiently for the google robot to spyder these pages, we have to be content in the fact that they will eventually get here, and the SearchBar will eventually work.

I have finally imported my old items from my previous blog and updated the blogger.com interface to get the exact format that I wanted... it had to simulate the '1996' html so reminiscent of my early college page posting, but still use a web interface tool(deward says: "Welcome to 2005"). It is nice that blogger/blogspot gives us (intraweb progamamarts) the tools to hack at the published website html itself instead of relying on a limited amount of css templates designed by others (as seems to be the case at bloglines.com ). I guess I have a problem using technology that I don't understand that was written by other people. Now the only problem with this thing is posting content that is worthy of the name: i am finding that i hardly ever care about the opinions and happenings of other random people, so why should they care about mine? In fact, I was going to blog about how I try never to use any automation or tool that I do not understand in my scripting and ...

So, I had this index.html file all re-formatted and had updated some of teh syntax and spelling of the posts (and clarified the facebook one) way back when but did some more work on it before I uploaded it tonight. I still need to do soo much; it takes lots of time to get things exactly right. And I usually either do real stuff or idle on technological websites trying to stay on the bleeding edge when i have some spare time away from 'work'. Needless, after reading my friend enemy thaine's blog I needed a nice break from trying to understand the fine intracacies of using blue ink over black and cursive over block lettering when submitting applications to archaic business like schools that knowing Precious created a pretty darn sweet blog was a breathe of fresh air. p.s. run on sentences that make no sense are bad for comprehension. i hope you get the gist.

damn you ports 21/22, you suck ass. =( i cant upgrade this page with totally sweet updates because the intraweb service that the hotel uses does not let puTTy connect to aludra.usc.edu on any port. Update: The more that I research the problem, the more that I think it is an @usc domain issue where they are using a Nazi .htaccess file in thier Apache configuration. I guess usc isd sysadmins dont want Hungarian crackers using a proxy in the ABQ to access thier domain: use an Adelphia drone in the LA area instead. I'll open a ticket with them on the morrow.

http://www.exbyte.net/media/videos/906/Hardcore_dancing.html You should watch that. Since I am breathless from trying it myself, a diamond in the rough friend had this to say about it: "MOSHING IS NOT PUSHING PEOPLE AROUND AND LAUGHING LIKE AN EMO FAGGOT THAT VIDEO IS MOSHING THE DANCE IS VIOLENT AND PASSIONATE, AND IF YOU GET JACKED IN THE FACE THATS LIFE, IF YOU DONT LIKE GO HUG A WALL AT GOOD HARDCORE SHOWS WHERE PEOPLE ARENT MORONS THE OBJECT IS NOT TO HURT OTHER PEOPLE, NOTICE HOW PEOPLE ARE SPACED OUT ALSO ITS TOUGH TO DO IT FOR LONGER THAN 30 SECONDS AT TIME, ITS EXHAUSTING THAT IS ALL" And that is all.

Someone make an XQuery ( namespace ) IDE plugin for Eclipse . Shit, google just provided one... Update: I just realized how horrible the XQuery specification is implemented in any sort of off-the-shelf packages. We used QuiP (Note the use of caP1+Als) for a CSCI 585:Databases homework assignment. It sucked, especially since the syntax we learned in class and documented in the notes was the 04 APR 2005 Specification while on the QuiP site they have this gem: "The latest XQuery draft was released in May 2003 and though there have been no substantial changes, the syntax supported by the current QuiP implementation must be considered out of date." Pretty sweet when you're writing software and have to figure out the syntax by trial-and-error.