Sigh tax time.

Both Kojo and Tracy have pledge to give me $1 each for every ab muscle I can show by the end of the year. If I’m lucky I will be collecting $4 at the end of the year.

I did a bike time trial in 22:24. The time is pretty good considering I didn’t feel that great and the wind was just a little bit stronger than average I’d say. Kojo’s was 20:07.

Damnit. I am now not the first person that comes up with you type “Hubert Chen” into google. This blog was created specifically for that purpose, and it’s failing me. So everyone, link to this page. And we’ll teach Hubert Chen from Caltech a lesson.

For some reason, I’m linked to a lot of old friends via Orkut, especially those from my days at UM. I’m not sure why my friends have all started to use it while friendster has been around quite a bit longer. Maybe it was the performance issues with friendster which really caused the site to suck. Maybe it’s just a localized thing with just this group of friends.

Congrats Dave. My friend Dave has won a satellite at Paradise Poker to win an entry into the $10,000 buyin World Series of Poker. He played a $25 tournament with rebuys and he did have to rebuy, so his $50 investment turned into a prize package worth $12,000. The package includes the $10,000 buyin plus $2,000 in travel money. So in May, he’ll be going to Las Vegas in hopes of becoming the next world champ. Because of the fad popularity of poker, this year is sure to top last years 839 entrants. There should be at least $2.5 million to first place and another $6 million to everyone else. It’s kinda funny, but Paradise requires that you wear their hat or t-shirt to the event. So look for a guy in Paradise Poker gear.

My friends who went to Stanford are all sorely disappointed at the early 2nd round exit of their #1 seed men’s basketball team at the NCAA tournament. However they can take solace in the fact star Josh Childress was a repeat on ESPN’s 2004 All-Hair team.

I went to a meeting of the UM Alumni Club of Silicon Valley. And I met some cool people. There’s also a lot of interesting activities that they plan that I forgot about.

Sun has an interesting demo of Project Looking Glass. It’s basically a regular windowing system but with a 3D layering system, so you can rotate and move windows in 3 dimensions, you can view them from the back and things like that. I really don’t think it’s useful at all, but it’s neat to look at some of the things a lot of extra cpu cycles can do for you.

People have been making a big deal about getting Sun to open source Java. Note that Java source is already available to people who just accept the Sun license and won’t redistribute it, but some developers want to be able to make changes to the code and redistribute it. Sun declined to completely open source Java and I think it’s the right choice. Opening up Java is correct if all application developers are writing only for Java and developers are most loyal to the Java platform. Unfortunately, Java developers are forced to write to the Java virtual machine of a specific platform. The big danger is that Microsoft takes the Java specification then makes a similar but slightly incompatible version and bundles it with Windows. This forces developers to write to code that chooses between Microsoft and non-Microsoft platforms. And developers usually choose Microsoft because that what their customers use. The resulting fracture of the Java platform would be a huge win for Microsoft. I also have no problems at all with the way that Sun has handled Java so far. Although it does feel like the standards process is a bit slower than it could be.

Big news in the game industry. World of Warcraft is now in beta. Unfortunately I didn’t get in so I am stuck just reading about it. I expect they’ll continue to add more people as they go and I’ll be able to get a look at it before the release. Because it’s a massively mulitplayer game, I’d be surprised if the beta wasn’t at least 5-6 months. So it wouldn’t surprise me if they only got it out for Christmas. Also I’m still waiting for Half-Life 2.

Still shopping for bikes. I tried the Trek Equinox 9 and I was pretty unimpressed. It wasn’t set up well for me, but even if it were well fitted to me, I don’t think I would’ve liked the ride. I tried the Felt S-22 and I liked it quite a bit better. The one I rode was a bit small for me, but it felt tight and fast.

Me and Kojo did our first open water swim of the year. It didn’t feel too bad. My runs still feel weak though.

So I took my bike in for a major tuneup and they said I ought to just replace it. The owner of Cyclepath is cool. He only carries Quintana Roo and Orbea for Tri bikes. He like the Caliente from QR. I am still looking at my other options. I looked at Bicycle Sports last year and they changed nearly every model they sell. I remember being interested in the Felt and Cervelos but those are all gone, I wonder what happened to make them change their lineup so drastically.

I’ve been trying to set up a new jabber server lately. Not out of a particular need, but just for fun. I’m trying the OpenIM server and it seems pretty nice, except the LDAP integration doesn’t work like I want it to. The author is pretty responsive to emails, I’ve already sent a couple to the mailing list and he’s tried to debug my problems. No luck yet, but I’m hopeful. Installing some new software also lead me to investigate some other interesting software like Maven(which is sort of like ant, but works at a higher level), and Apache Avalon (which is as near as I can figure like an EJB container, but for regular objects and not EJBs).

Also the Magic Online site has been just awful lately. It has been pretty much unusable for most of a week. With all the money that Magic brings in(I think it’s $80mil/year for hasbro) you’d think they could do better.