Gaming, traveling, and other stuff
用了五年的hosting到期了，因为hostmonster的新用户价格要比续租便宜很多，于是跟上次一样重新开了帐号然后把现有的几个网站迁移过去。
因为都是些blog之类的站点不太在意downtime，迁移很容易就完成了。手工重建数据库用户和迁移域名稍微麻烦点，但也就是重复一下没什么困难。比较恼人的是新换的ip又是个被墙的，用hostmonster又想让国内的人访问的话得做好买独立ip的准备。
我当初买这个空间就是为了放blog，以及偶尔放点页面。那时候还是blog比较红火的时候，WordPress和blogger都很红且都被墙，国内还很多人用Live Space，各种blog提供商方兴未艾但比较下来还是自建比较爽。
一转眼五年过去，还写blog的人少了大约九成？互联网服务进步了太多。SNS网站满足了绝大部分人blog的需要，还做得比传统的弱联系blog站更push，连原文带评论全推到你面前。Twitter和大批clone满足了绝大部分基本不会写140字以上blog的人的需要。现在如果还有人要新开”blog”的话我大概会推荐ta直接去用Tumblr或者Calepin。
周三独立日放假一天，去Coney Island看了有名的美国吃热狗大赛。这比赛从小就听说，现在才发现就在离家一小时地铁的地方。也不用买票，比赛就在一个比较宽阔的路口搭的台子上，下了地铁循着声音过去就是。到了那儿我拍了张照想上传，然后就发现instagram上有张几乎一样的照片。四处看了看，在左边两米的地方发现师弟一位。。
这比赛在美国相当受欢迎。现场观众怎么也有几千人，ESPN还有转播。同事扯淡的时候张口就说出了这比赛纪录保持者的名字，就好像提到的是乔丹这样的体育明星一样。我觉得可能是因为这比赛够平民够无脑，虽然据说ESPN的解说还会煞有介事的分析参赛选手的技术要领。
今年男女夺冠的都是蝉联冠军，悬念不大。比赛是十分钟，男的冠军吃了68个热狗，女的吃了45个。基本上前五分钟还有人能勉强跟上他们，后五分钟差距就拉开了。这些人吃的时候还是有些小技巧的，有些人是沾湿了吃，有些是捏碎了吃，还有些人会小跳貌似要把东西颠下去。大部分选手的吃相是很努力甚至有点痛苦的，尤其是吃68个的奇人Chestnut。有点意外的是这个决赛的选手几乎没有很胖的，前几名都很苗条。难以想象那么多热狗是怎么装进去的。
这个比赛是Nathan’s Famous办的，结束之后立刻就有无数人去买这个店的热狗吃。我们在附近惊奇的发现一家Grimaldi’s，就是Brooklyn很有名的那个pizza。吃了一下之后不得不说和桥下那家总店味道差距很明显。
blog从一个半月之前就断水了，没错 ，就是D3发售前两天。。
这段时间的事儿还是不少的，主要是xw考了LSAT。今天成绩出来了还不错。总算是完成了一件大事。
昨天去了自然历史博物馆看向往已久的Creatures of Light，结果感觉比较失望。原本以为会有很多水母看，因为地铁里的广告就画着水母。结果仅有的一点活物是一些深海小鱼，大部分都是模型和展板，这就有些无聊了。
之后去林肯中心看了＂那些年，我们一起追的女孩＂。这是纽约亚洲电影节的活动，导演九把刀和女主演陈妍希都到场了！这电影并没有在北美的院线上映。我之前在家看过一遍，感觉很好。这次坐在影院里再看一遍还是很enjoy。说起来上一部我去电影院看第二遍的电影好像还是海角七号，我还真好台湾这一口。。
看了一小会儿我们就意识到之前看的是洁版了，因为这个片里面限制级的料还真不是一般的多，不过都是搞笑为主的了。在家看的那个版本能剪得那么干净也不容易。影片结束之后陈妍希说这一场观众笑得特别多，我觉得也是，好像整个剧场里的人看得都很投入的样子。九把刀被问到这个电影为什么成功的时候说得很好：每个人看这部电影的时候，心里都在放着一部属于自己的电影，所以这部电影的成功，要感谢大家都有那么美好的青春。
哦，九把刀还说＂I’m the king of jerk-off”，我觉得他是在讲真的，哈哈
Went to Breakneck Ridge to hike again this Saturday with lots of friends (7 people in total). It’s almost an exact replicate of my one-man hike 1.5 years ago: Breakneck Ridge loop => Little Stony Point => Cold Spring. The difference is we took a smaller loop this time, and had some drinks in Cold Spring.
The fun part of Breakneck Ridge is at the beginning. The first 0.5~1 hours, depending on how fast you hike, can be pretty challenging for people who don’t hike often. After that there are many trail choices, and you can plan a loop of almost any length. This time the 7 of us split to 3 groups: riki couple was really fast and went ahead a lot; Jack/Sharon/Xiang took photos and fell in the middle; xw and I were really slow and took the shortest possible loop…
Little Stony Point park has small beaches. It’s warmer this time so we hang out there for a while. Most of my photos on Instagram of this trip were from here.
The whole team rendezvoused at a French restaurant in Cold Spring. It’s an interesting feeling to walk into this beautiful town after 1.5 years. I saw those nice buildings, yards, bench by the river which had been so clear in my memory stayed exactly the same, only the season changed. Such a quite and timeless town.
It was actually my dream to revisit all these beautiful places I had been in US with xw again. Breakneck Ridge and Cold Spring are the first step!
A tiny side project for day to day works, hosted on GitHub.
Basically it’s a tool to import time logs from toggl to JIRA. It reads logs on toggl by toggl REST API, then pushed them to JIRA by some ruby wrappers (soap4r and jira4r) of JIRA SOAP API.
JIRA is heavily used in FreeWheel. In my current group, almost everything I do can be tracked by a JIRA issue. JIRA serves as the todo, report, and bug tracking system here, and keeps everything visible to everyone.
Fortunately we just upgraded JIRA from 3.x to 4.4 so the SOAP API is much better than JIRA 3. This upgrade made it easier to import work log to JIRA because the API is upgraded a lot. If we had JIRA 5, the new JIRA REST API would be an even better option.
I have been trying to track and manage my work time for a while. Most time-tracking tools are designed for works with billable hours, such as freelance programmers or outsourcing workshops. But I think it’s also beneficial to keep time logs for other jobs. I had tried quite a few ways or tools before, none of them worked very well until I found toggle:
Toggl is the best tool I found so far. Its client is very well designed and polished, easy to use and intuitive. It has a REST API so I can export the log and import to JIRA easily. Toggl also has pretty nice report features, but I still want to keep all records in JIRA for maximum visiblity. And all my needs can be satisfied by Toggl free edition, sweet.
In the last, I want to clarify: the purpose of tracking time allocation is definitely not to measure “how hard you work” or “did you work 8 hours a day”, but to analyze “where are our time spent” and “how long a project/task actually takes”.