Entries by Ryan

You decide... We have been trying to catch this critter for so long it’s gotten too big for mouse traps. I’ve ordered up a “professional-style” 16 inch trap--let’s hope that does the trick!

And where is lazy, lazy Mojo? Passed out upstairs in Chez Mojo, of course.

     On the way home from dinner last night I noticed a homeless guy relaxing on a bench, his foot air-tapping to a distant jazzy beat. As the music got louder a trailer with the words “1050 Days Since Katrina” came in to view and finally--the source of the sound!



     I was too tired to hang out and give them a good listen (and I haven’t been able to find any mention of them in the news), but these guys were good. They had a great New Orleans jazz beat with a big, balanced brass and smooth Rollins-esque tenor underneath. And the sousaphone! Notice the thumbs up in the picture

      When someone that knows me goes to San Jose California they usually tell me because most of my family lives there. And I always tell them to eat at Original Joe’s, an Italian restaurant in downtown San Jose that has been run by the same family since 1956. Three generations of us have been frequenting it and as such no matter how busy it is they always greet us personally. Since the city has been fixing up the downtown area Joe’s has gotten very popular which is certainly good for business, but is yet another place that us “regulars” lament the good old days... Before they remodeled the awesome wood-paneled late fifties style interior to make it look like a nice place.

      For those of you who know me and are thinking this is just another hippie, vegetarian place, I present the wood-fired broiler, complete with 1.5 lbs hamburger patties and a gigantic cut of raw meat:



      One of the real treats at Joe’s is the bar. Not the “lounge” which still retains its wood-paneled-late-fifties feel (and serves tasty cocktails), rather the formerly-formica, now-marble bar that spans the entire length of the open kitchen. I didn’t want to sit there with my camera out trying to get the perfect picture, so here’s one I squeezed off at the bar that shows most of the kitchen:



      Now you know where to eat if you ever happen to find yourself in San Jose California!

This a YouTube video from a series (of two cartoons) called Simon’s Cat that is not only hilarious, but very Mojo-like.

     Apparently there is a local radio show here in Cambridge called Phoning It In on WMBR which is MIT’s college radio station. This show, it turns out, is all about people “phoning it in” and on February 21st one of my music-heroes, Eef Barzelay, called in and played a few songs. I’ve broken up the recording into separate tracks with the “talking” bits in between the songs as they were in the original broadcast. Despite being crappy phone quality, I was quite pleased to hear an unrecorded song, Buffalo, which (if memory serves) he played at the Ben Folds concert he opened for in Worcester MA. Enjoy!

     I probably shouldn’t (and won’t for now) embed the music in ChezMojo because it is ~650 MB and eight hours long, but I stumbled across a personal website that contains a hand-picked mix of songs that I listened to over the weekend and really enjoyed. The website suggest that you “Enjoy with your favorite psychedelic.”, but it works just fine with a homebrew. Anyway, it is a huge download and one continues eight+ hour track, but really flows well and functions superbly as background music while you work.

Music Mix (http://sweetpea.tentacle.net/beyond/)

     Back in The Day, when people would come to me teary-eyed at the prospect of trying to replace the MP3s they had carefully collected from Napster (before it was shut down), I would tell them to check their IDE cables. Those ribbon cables, I insisted, are far more likely to fail than your hard drive. Most of the time I was right and in fact this advice earned me gratitude and free drinks on many occasions. Of course, the introduction of the serial ATA interface--and the SATA cable--fixed all that, right?
     My newly minted computer, Dogbert, was birthed when I was fidgeting with the innards of my entertainment PC after a five mile run in the humid summer months of Boston. A drop of sweat rendered a component useless and after trying a few combinations of motherboards, RAM, and CPUs, I decided it was time for one of those new-fangled quad-core Intel processors I’d heard so much about. Dogbert was fitted with a 150 GB WD-Raptor--a 10,000 rpm SATA beast--for solidus (that’s forward-slash, the root directory of a Linux machine for you non-uber-geeks) along with a Hitachi 1 TB monster for /home. After about four months Dogbert became a little flaky as the ring buffer was filled with the dreaded “I/O seek errors” from the Raptor. What a piece of junk, I thought.
     After many moons the problem worsened and Dogbert occasionally couldn’t recognize the Raptor drive upon booting, which confounded my efforts at WOL from work--how else am I going to have the latest Blueray waiting for me when I get home? I saved an image of solidus and ponied up the dough for another Raptor, after all how could I live without Dogbert while his brain was in transit for warranty replacement?
     The problem worsened and I eventually bit the bullet and installed the new Raptor drive, intending to clone solidus to it before it finally died, but Dogbert switched off during the POST... What could be happening? I hit the power button in defiance only to see thick black smoke pour from Dogbert’s rear fan! Panic gripped me as I dove behind my desk and yanked the power cord. I’ve only seen black smoke come out of a computer twice before. Once when a PSU failed, taking the motherboard with it, and once when I accidentally connected a 110 V computer to a 220 V outlet intended for a British-made single photon counter. The smoke, however, was coming from the top of Dogbert, not the bottom where the PSU lives... I prepared for the worse.
     After opening up Dogbert and choking on the horrid smell of burning PCB and thick smoke pouring from every orifice in poor Dogbert’s shiny Cosmos case I removed the newly minted Raptor to find this:

Holy hole in a donut Batman, the hard drive burst into flames! While focusing on the faint odor of the incense I had lit to combat the vile smell of burning computer-flesh I reassembled Dogbert, though I decided to re-connect the old Raptor--the one that was home to solidus--using the fancy new reinforced cable that came with the new drive. Guess what? Solidus is back to normal, Dogbert is humming away like a champ, and his buffered reads are off the scale. The lesson here--take your own advice--it’s always the cable!

     The question remains, how did Clo become so skilled with a fly rod? The answer: lessons!

First Greg (her teacher and our guide on the Rio Grande) explained the basics.


Then she worked on the back-cast


...And getting the loop

     During our stay in South America Clo learned to fish and I have proof! Check out this expert flyfishing:
And (assuming this video play for you) here she is landing a rainbow in the Rio Grande near Esquel:

And here's a picture of her fish:

     All of my photos from South America are up on my photoblog (photoblog.chezmojo.com), but I wanted to share this photo of Clo which I think is one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken.

     While eating dinner at a bar in Chaiten Chile called “El Quijote” a friend of my father’s came in and sat down. His name was Nicolas and he had with him a cloth bag with what looked like a tiny guitar inside. With very little prompting Nicolas pulled the tiny instrument out and told me that it was called a Charango. It was too dark to get a picture for myself, but here is what they look like (for scale, the entire instrument is shorter than my arm).

     The Charango is actually Bolivian, but is played all over South America. My PhD adviser grew up in Bolivia so naturally I told him about this and he replied “You know those things are made from armadillos, right?”. Though Nicolas’ Charango was wood, the Charango was indeed originally made from armadillos.

     Anyway, Nicolas started playing his charango for us and fortunately I had my MP3 player with me (not an iPod!) and was able to grab a (low quality) recording. The first two tracks are some random songs he probably made up, but the third is a traditional Bolivian charango song. If you listen very carefully (Nicolas is very soft-spoken) he introduces the song before playing. The charango is a 10-stringed instrument with five pitches all in the same octave and tuned to a minor chord. The effect is a tiny instrument that puts out a rich wall of sound totally unlike anything I’ve ever heard.