No Maps for These Territories

There’s no there, there.

admin — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:24:10 +0000

Yeah, I’ve pretty much stopped updating this, sorry. The need for personal web space in the age of Facebook is hard to maintain the energy for. I’ve had dreams for years of revamping this space into an area to showcase my personal vanity projects instead of a blog, but that sure hasn’t happened yet.

If you’re curious what I’m up to, I run the Game Services (video game porting and engineering) divison of OnLive, and I live in Washington DC. And I love it here.

You can contact me at tobin dot coziahr at gmail dot com if you need to get a hold of me.

The night the zombies attacked

admin — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 09:35:54 +0000

We had a crazy night of fog here tonight, and when I looked outside, it genuinely looked like zombies had come and eaten everyone, and I was the only one left alive.

I love nights like this, walking around at 1am when the world is completely empty and the streets are abandoned. It reminds me of blizzards I’ve been in on the east coast where you can walk down a six lane highway and not see a single car.

I kind of expected to see a row of them shambling down the street.

I’ve got my shotgun ready at this point, the zombies must be right around the corner.

The arrow says “this way to zombies.”

Last man standing.

Traffic lights keep signaling, but everyone’s had their brains chomped.

The funny thing is, the camera actually was able to see better than me. Visibility was about 50 feet, but in these pictures it looks much farther.

New Orleans for a bachelor party? Okay, twist my arm.

Tobin — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 10:07:07 +0000

I spent last weekend in New Orleans, which is an amazing town that I hadn’t been to since I was about 8 years old. Of course there was an occasion, which was Kevin’s impending marriage. That means beers.

I was very curious what was in a “fish bowl”. That seems oddly unspecific.

Four really bad ideas. Hand grenades are made with moonshine, kool-aid, and regret.

It’s the “we hate our livers” club, on Bourbon St.

As freaky as this looks, it was actually an entry hallway to a grotto and a club called The Dungeon.

This is apparently the longest functioning Catholic church in the US.

Beignets and coffee can cure the world’s most powerful hangover. It’s true, I read it on Wikipedia.

Lafayette Cemetery is beautiful and peaceful.

Yellow fever? I think some of my family died of that. When I was playing Oregon Trail.

In this episode of Left 4 Dead, zombies come back from the dead and kill me.

I can’t explain this guy, but he’s a fan of the Saints. Who dat?

This was my home office. Not a bad view of the world to get some work done.

Seriously, someone needs to explain to me why this boat is here. It’s in a fenced in area, on land, in a public square. Is that the Mayor’s personal boat or something?

Bourbon St.

I LIKE BEERS BIGGER THAN MY HEART IS.

I’ll take the soup.

These guys are all hand rolling cigars. All day long. It’s hypnotizing.

Nice place for a wedding. I just happened to run across it while I was wandering around. They gave me a kazoo and we all hummed “Here Comes the Bride” together. Pretty cool way to end a trip.

I drove to Germany

admin — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 09:12:55 +0000

I visited Amsterdam for work, and I figured it would be fun to drive to another country, just because I could. We decided to drive from Amsterdam to Cologne, Germany.

We rented a sad little car that couldn’t really keep up on the German roads, and made the 2 hour trip. I left my camera on the dash, recording time lapse footage of the drive, and I was really happy with how it came out.

I’ll post actual pictures of my trip eventually, but I couldn’t help tossing up a video of the adventure, because I’m a geek who’s addicted to time lapse.

i made a twitterbot. and python is awesome.

admin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:43:22 +0000

This has been up for a while now, but I thought I’d share it.

dowcloses, my twitterbot. It posts every day what the DOW closed at, in case you’re a masochist and like to watch the decline of your net worth.

It was a quickie project that I did in Python, my new favorite language. I’ve been a C programmer my whole life, and I’ve dabbled with Java and perl when necessary, but nothing really grabbed me. Python is like no language I’ve used before, it really works with my head.

For a long time it dawdled along as a scripting alternative that lots of programmers just knew as “that language where whitespace matters”, but now that Google and several other big boys are really endorsing it, it’s getting more momentum, and I couldn’t be happier.

If you’re a programmer, and you use perl for your daily scripts, I can’t recommend Python highly enough. You can pick it up over a weekend, it’s insanely powerful and fast, and easier to use than any language I’ve ever tried. Honestly, it made me feel giddy with power, I was so used to programming being a struggle that I’d just assumed that’s how it would always be.

I’m doing a large scale project at work in Python now, and I’ve written several scripts to do web scraping, a la my twitterbot, or interacting with amazon through boto, and each and every time, I get up and running in a fraction of the time it used to take. Python is badass. Give it a shot.

playing around with time lapse

Tobin — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:03:27 +0000

My camera has a “time lapse” feature which I’ve been eyeing ever since I got it.

I bought a tomato plant holder from Home Depot that proved unable to hold the weight of the tomato buckets I put on it, so I decided to build my own tomato stand, which should hold four five-gallon buckets of dirt no problem.

A construction project? What a perfect way to test out the stop motion! I left the camera running while I figured out how to build a 6-foot tomato-hanging cage, and it came out pretty well.

I gotta say, stop motion is damn fun. Now I need to find more stuff that I can record.

Bay to Breakers 2009

Tobin — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:32:29 +0000

Every year in San Francisco, a bunch of really crazy bastards go up for Bay to Breakers, which is theoretically a race, but more like an excuse for thousands of people to dress up like it’s Halloween, and drink a lot.

I’ve never gone before because I have to wake up at 5am in order to get up there in time, but I figured that I’d man up this year and go for it.

Our crew went dressed as Wizards, which involves a robe of some sort, a wizard hat, and a wizard’s staff. You have to earn your staff by drinking beers, and duct taping them to the bottom of your next beer. Each new beer is “leveling up”, because we’re a bunch of huge nerds.

This is the view at Caltrain at 6:30am. A bunch of college kids, already drunk and dressed up.

I’m level 1! And it’s not even 7am yet!

The caltrain station again. Lots and lots of neon and buttcheeks.

Oompa loompas!

Yuzo and Nina, as Yuzo beards up.

The race hasn’t started, and the wizards are already level 4.

I’m trying my best to catch up. Look at those sexy wizards.

The construction workers don’t quite know what to think of us.

That’s not where the beard goes!

Colored hair and leopard prints abound.

Green man! I was so happy to see a Sunny in Philadelphia fan. Best show ever.

Oh yeah, and lots of people just go straight up naked.

This dude was a hero. Walking all by himself with a shopping bag, in his tidy whities.

Is that the Death Star? I can’t tell.

Grover!

Leveling up continues.

The lifeguard party float.

Wizards stop for a bathroom break at someone’s house. I’m not sure whose. They didn’t seem to mind TOO much.

I think this dude stole those girls’ slip.

Yuzo reaches level five! Ding!

The tiki bar float was popular.

Look at all those PEOPLE. It stretches as far as the eye can see.

Range in a mumu. They should have sent a poet.

Level…. uhh… not sure.

The camera cannot contain our staffs!

Awww, man hug.

The wizards cast magical spells of plant watering.

She’s ready for the flood with her floaties.

Awesome robot costumes.

It’s hard to see, but these guys were dressed as Mario Kart characters, and they even had their own karts! One of my favorite costumes of the day.

British cops?

Oh, hello, angels. I like your outfits.

Now this cracked me up. Impromptu PORT A POTTY PARTY! Aww yeah!

I love that people were using the port a potties while people danced above them.

I may have forgotten to apply quite enough sunscreen to my arms. Whoops.

All in all, that was a hell of a party. I’m definitely going back next year. You should join us, we could always use more wizards.

Tokyo Day 24

Tobin — Mon, 11 May 2009 00:58:37 +0000

I went my own way, to nerd out at Akihabara and Nakano Broadway. It’s nearing the end of the trip, I need more time in my nerd havens! Much of this has been photographed already, so there’s not as many shots.

I thought this was interesting because it perfectly illustrates the Japanese workday. Notice what times have the most trains? The ones where you work at 12 hour day. Ouch.

They loooove their translation machines in Japan. Every one of these is for either dictionaries or Japanese-English translations.

Oh so very many Godzilla toys. Yodobashi Camera is fun.

And boy do they love their collectable cards!

I so very badly wanted to buy a shitload of these, but I knew they’d just sit around my desk forever. They’re 8-bit colored pegs that you stick to a surface and make your favorite characters.

Bags and bags of different colored pegs.

Outside Yodobashi camera is a massive no smoking section of sidewalk. However, since there aren’t any OTHER places nearby to smoke, it works exactly the opposite, so you end up with dozens of dudes in suits, gathered around No Smoking signs, smoking like crazy.

No trip to Yodobashi Camera is complete without a stop to my favorite ramen shop in Akihabara! SOOOO GOOD. Don’t look away or I’ll…

Eat the whole thing in one swallow.

Here’s the joint if you want to check it out sometime. 8th floor, Yodobashi Camera, Akihabara. Chabuton, the ramen heaven. I miss you so!

Beat ass machine selling tickets, dudes slurping soup. That’s what it’s all about.

Yeay, Akihabara! I bid you farewell, and head to Nakano, because I want more useless crap to stick on my man bag.

Ah hah, there it is! Walls of useless crap that makes video game sounds! Hurray!

The flavors of popcorn available in this machine are “choco, barbecue, and butter”. I was very tempted to try barbeque. Only 100 yen!

Nakano Broadway is freaking awesome. Look at all those shops full of toys.

Later that night we went out for dinner at High Noon Cafe in Ontakesan. They don’t have an english menu, so I puzzled over the hiragana and katakana for like 10 minutes before we could figure out how to order. They specialize in “Americana” type food. This burger was quite delicious and as big as my head.

Tokyo Day 23

Tobin — Mon, 11 May 2009 00:45:32 +0000

I wanted to see the Beer Museum in Yebisu, so we headed out for a day of wandering around town. Can’t resist a beer museum! Paintings are for sissies.

Yebisu Garden Place is very nice, there’s a lot of public spaces for hanging out and eating, and a large covered area for live music.

YEAY! Life sized beer cans! Complete with fake foam!

Welcome… to the cavern of the BEER GODS.

They had paintings illustrating that women have been getting men drunk on beer and taking advantage of them for at least 100 years in Japan.

The essential ingredients of beer, being held in some sort of bizarre kryptonite-based prison.

Back when Egyptians discovered beer, they would get shitfaced and have to carry each other home. Apparently. I can’t read kanji.

Here’s my favorite part! The tasting room!

Of course, since it’s Japan, that means that tastings are done by getting a ticket out of a machine. We decided to go for the sampler.

Who knew that Sapporo made red ale and a wheet beer?

Yes, that’s beer-based jello.

Lots of it.

Next, we headed off to Harajuku to check out the shopping areas, and because we wanted to see the legendary 4-story tall 100-yen Daiso.

Seriously, what is this product? A fake swan head that you can attach to your daughter’s elegant ballerina outfit.. while a perverted child molester behind her pretends that the swan head is his phallus. I’m so confused. At least it’s only 100 yen.

What a tasty looking almond and dried fish snack mix!

Want to go green? Stop using power, and shred those papers by HAND, Nancy!

Sadly, trucker hats have made their way from the douchebags of the US to the douchebags of Japan. Everywhere you look, there’s huge trucker hats with complete nonsense on them in english. Like this one, stating “You are the one. All I need is you. It goes to meet. SO GREAT.”

Please do not fornicate on the ashtray.

Or on the package of band-aids?

Pink Latte is a store in Harajuku that is ALL PINK. With the body of a pink airplane inside the store. Full of pink goods.

Later that night, I headed to Shibuya Kaikan, which is a legendary 50-yen arcade. And MAN was it awesome. It ended up being six stories of gaming goodness, every floor having a different game theme.

The outside of Shibuya Kaikan.

Lots and lots of Gundam fighting games.

I believe these were for playing majjong, but I mostly wanted to show how comfortable they looked. Big fat ass leather chairs, and an ashtray. What more do you need?

The rhythm section was nearly empty, much to my delight. I ran around and tried nearly every one of these games, some of them were brand new and not in the US yet.

Like this one, where you need to touch the colored squares as soon as they light up, to music. It’s pretty neat.

Pop’n. This shows the audience perfectly, solitary otaku, and schoolgirls.

Halflife 2, the arcade game? Whaaa?

Here’s the retro room. Look at those awesome old games! Mario in a cabinet!!

See you guys later, I gotta go play some Bubble Bobble, baby.

Tokyo Day 22

Tobin — Tue, 05 May 2009 09:56:51 +0000

This is a day I was excited for the whole trip. The Studio Ghibli Museum! If you haven’t seen the Studio Ghibli films, you’re missing out. Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke… all animated and fantastic. It’s been called the Disney of Japan, but I think it’s much, much more than that. The museum is a bit tough to get tickets for, they only sell them at Lawsons, and the machines only work in Japanese. I convinced a clerk to buy the tickets for me, which he was very gracious about, and we headed out to Mitaka, a short train ride from Shinjuku.

It’s a very cool little town.

They even have their own bus that goes right from the station to Ghibli!

Just look at this place. It was built with the sense of wonder of all of Miyazaki’s films. Moss and vines, tunnels and secrets, huge robots and spiral staircases.

Totoro mans the admission booth.

Aww.

It’s hard to describe how magical the place is, I’ll let my pictures speak for themselves in some cases.

This is the inside. Large walkways crisscross the interior, and you’re encouraged to just explore. There’s no guides, no correct path, and very few signs.

Kids should wash their hands before eating, of course. Everything is built to encourage kids to be empowered and help themselves.

All the custom made stained glass has characters from the movies! How cool is that? Here’s a forest spirit from Mononoke.

A spiral staircase inside, where kids can go up three floors.

A massive atrium and fan.

Little kids playing on a massive stuffed cat bus!

Outside benches with built in noisemakers.

Crazy steampunk water fountain.

I want one at home.

Iron Giant has a bit of moss growing on him.

Cats watch you from the windows.

A working well…

With a man on the other side, ready to suck up the water.

More eyeballs!

Then we headed back to the hotel, before heading out to the Park Hyatt, where I wanted to check out the bar from Lost in Translation. The view from our hotel room.

The bar was fantastic, live jazz music, and a view to kill for.

I tried to get some pictures, but I couldn’t really do it justice.

And finally, as we walked around the neighborhood after the bar, in search of donuts, I found a great sign outside a bar. I think we’ve all been there before.