Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

A cool stylus

Saw this cool circuit board stylus from Spun Pens on Etsy (via a Make Online blurb) and decided it was just too cool not to have.

It was a little bit smaller than I expected, but that was just because the shiny and want factor kept me from reading the full description so I really had no idea how big it would be. It appears to be made with an actual circuit board, not just printed on something. It would be interesting to find out how it gets rolled up like that.

A dome of some kind of soft material allows the stylus to work with capacitive touch screens. It works really well, better than some other styli that I've used. It requires a little bit of a firmer touch than you'd need using a finger, but not too much and doesn't take long to get used to.

It's pretty cool.

Running faster

After a big November/December running lull (thanks to school) I've been trying to make sure I get out at least 2-3 times a week now. Signing up for the i5k (happening in a couple of months) has added a little more motivation.

On the good front, my "comfortable" running pace has gone down from 6:30 min/km to around 6 min/km and I can run a sub-30 minute 5k with a lot less effort than before. I think I should be able to shave 10-15 seconds off that comfort pace pretty easily by the time the i5k rolls around.

I think in a couple more weeks I'll be ready to increase the distance of my long runs.

Charleston Eats: Magic Cheese Truck

Buffalo Chicken Melt

Food truck feasting

Hit up the Charleston Food Truck Festival in Marion Square this afternoon. A gathering of all the mobile food trucks in the Charleston area which also gathered a huge crowd of people. Somewhat daunting.

Each of the trucks had pretty long lines. This time I hit up the Magic Cheese Truck for a Buffalo Chicken Melt. Pretty tasty. It had little bits of blue cheese in it, which I normally don't like, but not so much that I didn't want to eat it. It was good with the tomato-basil soup/dipper that comes with their sammiches.

Can't go to one of these food truck gatherings without hitting the Diggity Donuts truck. They always seem to have the longest lines, but today they seemed to be able to get the donuts out faster so the line went a little quicker.

So now that I've been to a couple of food truck gatherings, I'm a little torn. The fact there are enough food trucks in the area to put on food truck rodeos and fests is really cool. They do seem to attract a lot of people though, and can be pretty crowded. If all you're going for is the food, then perhaps not the best way to do it since you'll end up standing in line for quite a while. Better to just track them down at their usual haunts if that's the case. The rodeos are a great opportunity to people watch (and dog watch) and gather with friends though, which can be a lot of fun.

I think what Charleston needs is a craft beer truck now, to hang out at the food truck rodeos. I wonder if that would be legal. Somehow I think probably not. With 4 local breweries, it would be pretty cool though.

Naparima

This ship, the Naparima, heading out of Charleston Harbour caught my eye this morning. Had never seen so much red on a ship before.

Andru charger

I thought this little Andru phone charger was pretty cool, so I decided to pick one up.

It's even neater in person. There's a little stand it pops into when not in use and the little arms swivel and can even hold stuff for you.

And look, the eyes light up when plugged in!

Food truck lunching

Hitting up a food truck usually makes for a good lunch. When there are two involved, it's even better.

On the way back from my volunteer shift at the Aquarium, I stopped by the Roti Rolls and Diggity Donuts trucks for lunch.

Roti Roll's 60/40 (short rib burger with pimento kim-cheese) and a fried egg was quite tasty. The kimchee added some nice crunch, although I expected it to be a little spicier. Next time I'll add some of the Sriracha.

When you get to Diggity early, you get donuts fresh out of the fryer and topped with warm ooey gooey icing. So good. This time I went for the chocolate, chocolate & PB, and lingonberry.

Sleeping Nala

Running dreams

Most of my dreams these days are filled with running. I'm chasing after something or, more often than not, running from something. I never see what I'm chasing, or what's chasing me. I never catch it, or get caught. There's just the running and the chasing.

In the dreams where I'm running from something, there's always a problem with one of my legs. It's injured or, strangely, it seems like one leg is dramatically shorter than the other.

Sometimes it jars me into that kind of conscious dreaming state. Part of me is aware of dreaming, but I'm just a spectator in the dream. All I can do is watch and feel myself try to run with that distorted gait.

My dreams have been like this for a few years. I wake up worn out and with tired legs, as if I had been running.

Charleston Eats: Hello My Name is BBQ World Headquarters

The Hello My Name is BBQ food truck people opened up a new (stationary) eating spot today, the Hello My Name is BBQ World Headquarters, so I stopped by for lunch. It's located at 616 Meeting St, just north of where the I-26 exit crosses over Meeting St. Recognize the colours?

It's a nice little spot with enough space for 40 or so people to sit inside and a little deck area outside with four tables. Nice big windows make the inside bright and well lit

The menu isn't to different from the truck offerings, but the World HQ has the benefit of always being in the same place. It's reasonably close to work too, so now I can go get a Boss Hog without having to wait for the truck to stop by MUSC (although that won't stop me from getting a Boss Hog when the truck does stop at MUSC).

Downsizing the wardrobe

A year and a half ago, I didn't need a belt to wear these 36 waist pants.

Now they slide off me and I almost need a belt to wear the 32 waist pants I pulled out of retirement.

The comments I've been getting from people about how I've lost weight and how skinny I look? Pretty cool.

Time for a wardrobe refresh soon.

Door chime

My Star Trek door chime arrived in the mail today. The first time they showed up on ThinkGeek they sold out pretty quickly and I missed the window of opportunity.

They look just like the panels on the show, although perhaps a little more glossy. The sliding switch on the speaker part lets you toggle between the Star Trek door 'whoosh' sound (up) and a red alert klaxon (down). The red light flashes when the red alert goes off. Pushing the white button makes the intercom sound.

Around the back of the comm panel are a two switches that control the volume and which motion detectors (one on each side) are active. The panel can be set to use either left or right detector, or both. 3 AA batteries power the unit. Two slots for screws let you mount it to the wall.

Side view showing one of the motion detectors.

As far as I can tell, the white block doesn't light up at all, which is too bad. Would have been cool if it lit up when the button was pressed. I wonder how hard it would be to hack a light into it.

I think it's pretty cool.

Update: I decided to mount it next to my bedroom door. When I go to sleep I can set it to the red alert alarm and it will go off if someone tries to sneak into my room. Not that anybody ever does that.

Charleston Eats: Heart Woodfire Kitchen

Heart Woodfire Kitchen opened a while ago in the spot that used to house Daily Dose. Where the inside of Daily Dose was the kind of grungy-earthy (not grungy-dirty) bohemian feel, Heart Woodfire Kitchen is the opposite. Inside is a brighter, cleaner, although somewhat cool spartan environment. It's the kind of feel you get from all concrete/cinder block surroundings. The colours are nice though. The service is very friendly and the general manager seems to like going around talking to people at the tables.

Good food too.

Escarole, egg and proscuitto flatbread

Giant chocolate chip cookie.

Seminar topic: Energy imparted

Next week I have to give a presentation for my seminar class.

I decided to dump the one I've been working on for the last couple of weeks because I don't think I'll be able to throw together anything coherent enough yet using the data I have.

I have a week to finish up my new topic, which is essentially going to be something of a literature review.

Now I have to finish reviewing.

Happy birthday Simba!

It seems like it was only yesterday when I took this picture of Simba when he was 7 weeks old.

Yesterday he turned 6 years old, still a funny happy jumping bean of a dog.

I love my pups.

Update: Oops. I'm such a bad doggy parent. Simba's birthday was the 20th, not the 27th. I'm getting the days of the dogs' birthdays mixed up.

Setting personal records

According to Runkeeper, I finished today's 5.1 km run in 27.6 minutes, a (current) PR! Still about 10 minutes slower than what I used to do in high school, but that was a lot of years ago and I don't think I'll be running that fast anymore.

Today's run felt pretty good, and the pace didn't feel as fast as it was. I set out with a goal of finishing the 5 km in around 29 minutes so shaving almost a minute and a half off that was a nice surprise.

I think by i5k time, i might be able to get close to 25 minutes.

A full empty trash can

Ran into an odd situation with my computer (Fedora 16, using KDE) where Dolphin kept telling me the trash was full even though there was nothing in it.

~/.local/share/Trash has a three directories, presumably where things are stored in various states of "trashed-ness". All of them were empty but Dolphin insisted that the trash was full whenever I tried to move something there. Verified in Dolphin and in a terminal window that all the folders were empty. Even deleted them just in case there were any invisible hidden files.

The Trash folder also contained a file called metadata. Looked like a regular INI style file with just one parameter: size. In this case, size was set to some freakishly large value with like 20 digits or something (I didn't really count). Having run out of things to do at this point, I decided to delete the file and hope that if it was important, Dolphin would recreate it.

After getting rid of the file, the Trash worked properly again!

Apparently Dolphin uses the metadata file to store how much stuff is contained in Trash. It seems reasonable to assume that Dolphin checks the value stored in metadata against the maximum size for the Trash configured in Settings. If the metadata value exceeds the max size setting for Trash, Dolphin tells you the Trash is full. In my case, a messed up size value got written to metadata and Dolphin wasn't going to let me send anything to Trash even though it was physically empty.