I've had to generate Google AuthSub tokens a bunch of times, and every time I have to re-read documentation on how to create these tokens. So here it is, step by step. How to generate a Google AuthSub Session token.

1. Log in to your Google account.

2. Visit this URL (you'll have to customize it a bit):

https://www.google.com/accounts/AuthSubRequest?next=http://nothing/&scope=[INSERT SCOPE HERE]&session=1   &secure=0

3. Authorize the request, then copy the token from the destination page. Note that it might have URL-encoded characters that you will have to decode. You now have your request token.

Your request token will look something like this: 1/hABD5BM2Ryoh9DEFbq14QvhBKYTIaYFmmR27Db4A

4. Upgrade your request token to a session token:

curl -i -H 'Authorization: AuthSub token="1/hABD5BM2Ryoh9DEFbq14QvhBKYTIaYFmmR27Db4A"' https://www.google.com/accounts/AuthSubSessionToken

And the response will contain your AuthSub session token, ready for use in your web application.

1 tablespoon butter 2 tablespoons canola oil 4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves 1 onion, chopped 3 garlic cloves, minced 2 tablespoons curry powder for mild taste, 3 for hot 1/2 cup diced apple 1/2 cup chopped dried apricots 1/2 cup golden raisins 1 14 1/2-ounce can chicken broth Salt Freshly cooked rice Melt butter with oil in heavy large skillet over medium heat. Add chicken and brown on both sides, about 5 minutes. Transfer to plate. Add onion and garlic to skillet and sauté until translucent, about 6 minutes. Stir in curry powder. Return chicken to skillet. Add apple, apricots and raisins. Add enough broth to just cover mixture. Season with salt. Cover and simmer until chicken is just cooked through, about 10 minutes. Transfer chicken to platter. Keep warm. Continue simmering fruit mixture until fruit is tender and sauce thickens, about 5 minutes. Spoon sauce over chicken and serve with rice. Serves 4

In college, Karen and I kept a "remember list" for Econ exams. It was composed of stuff we had to review later in order to prepare for the tests. Here's my 2010 "remember list" for stuff I have to review later for real life (because my Gmail inbox is getting too full of empty "todo" stub messages):

Minh: tell her you like her

Minh: ask ccowart if im right first lol

Lilly: don't tell girls yer interested in about other girls yer interested in..lol

Ian: so, status check. got any good dates?

Jeremy: like girls or the fruit or calendar days?

Ian: girls

Jeremy: nope, HTML is my only lover.

Also, you should listen to this song. Just click the onebox result (shameless Google plug). Pretty good. :)

Part 2 of this post is a Romesco sauce recipe. Thanks, Cowart.

• roasted tomatoes, red bell papers, and sweet peppers
• peeled almonds and hazelnuts
• garlic
• olive oil
• salt and pepper
• a little bit of red wine
• vinegar

Part 3 of this post is a text message from Minh:

Jeremy it hurts my xhewja.. sdidn I drop my phone. Hard. I hoe nor buy me a new honbabu local y u bye

And a voicemail from Lilly

Today, my beloved car, a 2005 Acura RSX Type-S (color "vivid blue pearl") will hit 40,000 miles when I drive to the Golden Gate Bridge for a run. Unlike a handful of my friends (you know who you are), I haven't given my car a name. In fact, over the course of the past year, I've downright mistreated my car, but nonetheless I still appreciate this piece of machinery more than just about anything right now. Forget my laziness and mis-luck with public transportation -- I could live without a car in San Francisco, after all -- but the real reason I appreciate my car is because it's been there for me during significant moments during the last five years.

It was a pretty usual night, actually. I went to Graham's birthday party (Mexican-themed) and then, on my way home, I would meet Julie and Jori at Homestead. I hung out for about an hour there, after which we went to get tacos from El Farolito (next to the 24th St. BART stop) in the Mission.

Every so often my life gets more frivolous than usual. This summer was another one of those times. This post will exist mostly as a log of this summer, but that's no good reason for you not to read it. What follows is the log of my "summer of love and adventure, mostly adventure, but a little love couldn't hurt too."

I'll use this Scratchpad entry as a way of logging the handy Vim tricks that I just can't leave at the door. Vim is mission-critical to my efficiency as a web developer and each trick I learn saves many me reps of finger pushups.

There are tons and tons and tons of (seemingly endless) Vim tricks and plugins. This entry will just log a handful that I need to remember.

Search and replace within a selection

Search and replace only in a visual selection, not an entire line:

 
:%s/\%VSEARCH/REPLACE/g

Find non-ascii characters

 
/[^[:print:]]

Delete lines matching (or not matching) keyword

Matching:

 
:g/.*foo.*/d

Not matching:

 
:g!/foo/d

A note about buffers, yanking, and pasting

"adw saves word INTO register a

"ap pastes FROM register a

These two bits I've been using for longer than I can remember, but every time I reconfigure a machine I need to Google the command syntax. Here they are, in an accessible format.

First, because I recently lost a whole ton of (good) work, here's a simple way to do Rsync for backups.

 
rsync -avz -e ssh REMOTE_HOST:REMOTE_DIR LOCAL_BACKUP_DIR

SSH keys, enabling password-interactive-less sign on, are a brainlessly easy two-step process. If you type your password more than once a day for SSHing into machines, you'll want to use SSH keys.

 
local$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048
 
local$ ssh REMOTE_HOST "cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys" < .ssh/id_rsa.pub

Sha-bam, you're done. Two commands and no more typing in that password on every SSH connection.

Luckily it wasn't my life this time. After I got back to my hotel from work to drop my stuff off, I realized I left my power adaptor in the office. So I decided I would swing back on by there after spending the evening wandering around Zurich.

Let me just preface this post with saying: I JUST GOT SHOT AT. Right now, there is a bullet hole two feet away from the driver's seat, which is WHERE I SIT WHEN I DRIVE MY CAR. Had the bullet flown two feet to the right, I'd have been hit. What the hell, man. WHAT THE HELL. This happened under two hours ago. WHAT THE HELL.

I did this once for my trip to Japan, but looking back on it, it seems to be a little too brief for all the great things I did. I've gotta get a head start now for New York before I forget! places to go:

• kgb -- a very tasty cinnamon vodka
• swift bar -- i think we went here, it is the really cool "hey! this is an old castle's forgotten library" place.
• yum yum bangkok III -- yum yum bangkok I and II are just posers, as are all the other yum yums.
• bleecker street -- for shopping and walking
• union square -- for hanging out, why haven't i been here before?
• kyotofu -- the dessert and sake place. now I know they also have japanese tapas here.
• sobaya -- delicious japanese food
• google office -- of course, the office that's also the attraction (76 Ninth Avenue 4th Floor)
• milo's -- fish-to-impress ($$)
• centennial -- ten shots for ten bucks
• brooklyn ice cream factory -- i hadn't had ice cream in a really long time

will i try this time? i hope so...

• PDT -- please don't tell (we were told!) [addendum: argh! we got our name on the list, but were never called. foiled! there's one easy solution: a return to new york city.]

must still do:

Persimmons and peaches are coming back to markets. And what does that mean? Summer is here. I apologize in advance for the randomness of this post, because it's going to be fairly disjointed, but also somewhat innocent. I'll begin with some concealed venting. Finding important things out via Twitter just sucks. The internet is great for information-sharing, but it shouldn't be replacing social interaction. Racism can suck it. Okay, let me now continue. Summer is here and it's my first summer living in San Francisco. I've got a wicked apartment that I'm slowly turning into home (half a year later, I've finally got a dresser and put some art up in my bedroom). My car is sorely, sorely in need of a wash, and I'm learning more than ever at work. Four years ago I said Python was a horrible programming language. Now I dream in it. I live and die by Vim, a text editor, and I'm considered an engineer. Of course, my CS-major-friends from school would never agree to that. I ran in Bay to Breakers yesterday. All 7.5 miles and then some. The bus to the starting point never came, so I ran 2.5 miles from my house to the beginning of the race. I shoved dry oatmeal down when I got there and slowly zig-zagged my way through the crowd, ending up with about an hour and a half time, which comes out to 11.5 minutes a mile total. I wish I could've zig-zagged faster at the beginning. I totally would've been able to cut off 10 minutes had the crowd not been so crazy. At mile six, I was so winded. I slept like four hours the night before, like usual, but at least I ate well for this run. At one point, I thought I might have to slow down to a slower jog. But then, I saw a free-water-giver-outter giving out liter-sized bottles of Crystal Geyser. I freakin' darted over to this guy, grabbed a bottle, slowed down my pace, chugged a quarter of the thing, capped it, and immediately got my second wind. I finished the rest of the race without issue. I ran running back-style to the end with that water bottle. I made it to the huge party-thing at the end, which was actually pretty damn lame -- especially compared to the one at the end of the Bridge to Bridge run last year, which had a live band (the Uptones, who I'm now a fan of). I screwed around at the big party thing, lent my phone to a visiting Scottish girl who lost her group, waited, decided to stop letting things screw with my head regarding the waiting, and left. Of course, I was too cool to wait in line for the Muni at the park, and decided to walk down to the normal N Judah stop. Bad idea. That bus took forever to came and in the meantime I grabbed a frozen yogurt. I got on the bus, with yogurt, at the same time this girl did. We suffered a 40-minute horribly hot bus ride together, and got off at the same stop. She stuck a cigarette in her mouth with a swift, determined, programmed motion and I decided to let it go. It was 90 degrees out, so I went home (which just so happened to be at the highest point of the race) and napped. Dinner was at Pyramid with whom I'll refer to as "kr3w2". They didn't accept my passport as a form of ID when ordering drinks, but they did accept a scanned version of my ID on my freakin' cell phone. Go figure. Alex and Sara and Stephanie ordered wrong. Shoulda got the meatloaf sandwich, mac and cheese, and salmon burger. I stick my tongue out at them for not listening to me. We watched one of the worst movies of all time after spending twenty minutes in Blockbuster. This movie could not have been made good by any amount of drinking or shenanigans. It was just bad. TV was better. TV was far better... Rock climbing 2-3 times a week. The Killers concert weeks ago was awesome. 90 degree heat in a packed auditorium. I came out freakin' dripping. I'm ready for the half-marathon in July. I'm going to New York, camping two miles out of Sacramento, and LA the next coming weekends. I have more work than I can shake a stick at, but it's great work. I sleep four to five hours a night. Ethiopian food rocks. Japanese too. I miss cooking. Daniel and I went to a cafe-becomes-night-club south of Nob Hill. Their coffee was bad. The nearby Japanese place was good. Their wifi kicked butt. Music is the most wonderful thing ever. So I guess I'm moving on with life and I'll still walk around with a huge frown. Old friends are moving away. I'll miss them... and new friends are moving closer. Trying to hold on to 'em. This year will be one to remember. Why the frown? Because it's fun to ease my frustration with one. Damn you, damn you indeed. >:) Not frowning here, but still pissed and, as Jarrett Randazzo (to whom I still owe a website) says, tired of waiting.

Sometimes, it'd be nice to enjoy a sunny day outside. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy sunny days outside. But that damn Blackberry, the amazing but infernal Android phone, the MacBook Pro, the high-speed wireless card. They mean I'm never unreachable and always plugged in. For me, there's become no concept of not being at work, and it sucks. As such, any time I'm not creating something, any time I'm not learning a new technology, I feel like I'm wastin' time. But, I'm totally not. Enjoying not-technology is far more important than being productive, and it's something that's tough to realize. I think I need to ditch the technology, except for the camera, and take "vacation" those nights and weekends. Or maybe I just need to go back to last summer's Japan, when I didn't care. That was pretty cool. p.s. I'm writing this from a cafe, while working on things. At least I'm sitting in the sun though.

A Sunday of rock climbing, hamburgers, arcade games, and a movie. It's like childhood without homework -- so pleasant. Let's keep it up.

Last night, I went to bed at 930pm after a day of traveling from Spain to California -- the end of a business trip to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. OK, even I'll admit, it was a little ridiculous for me to go to the event itself (my job function has everything to do with mobile marketing, but I have little input on the direction of things), but it was totally 100% necessary for me to go. Why? Well, obviously, I've never been to Spain. But, practically, I got to meet some of the people I've been working with over the last four to six months -- videoconferencing just don't cut it. Plus, 80% of the people I actually work with happened to be in Spain at that time anyway. It only made sense for me to be in their time zone. Mmm hmm. Take Monica, for example. This one is psycho insane. So very well-kept and articulate in email and in meetings, but just like any good Berkeley grad, totally awesome once you remove that layer of accountability. Sara was equally as cool, as were Robert, Anthony, Yasmina, Leslie, and others. I roomed with Monica the night before she left, and she left some of her clothing in our room. Jerk. She better come back to Mountain View to pick it up. Don't let me forget to mention how awesome Jeff, Kai, and Linda are. Yeah, it's crazy-ass trips like these that just improve your relationships with people. As Monica and I have determined, "work hard, play harder" is the theme of just about everything. OK, let me rewind. It's 530am here and I'm killing time working on a page before the bus leaves for Mountain View at 630. I went to bed at 930 last night because my stomach was repeatedly punching me in the face. I got food poisoning on the last night of the trip to Barcelona. Damn. What a killer way to end it. It's not like I get food poisoning often (ever -- this would be the second time in my life -- the first from Bear Sushi House in Berkeley which closed shortly after I got destroyed). Yeah, I ate all kinds of crazy, delicious foods, and drank all kinds of awesome drinks over the course of that week and a half in Spain, but Linda can attribute the food poisoning to my lack of washing the grapes I got at the outdoor market. If you've seen me eat fruit, you know I can down that stuff. Yeah, that was my lesson learned. From now on, I'm taking it easy with the fruit. Don't let me focus on the food poisoning, though. That'd be pretty boring. The flight back was pretty interesting, for lack of a better way to put it. The morning started with us grabbing breakfast at the hotel, then cabbing it to the airport. I still felt crummy, but powered through the airport just long enough to get on the plane. I chilled with Linda at the gate while Kai and Jeff (those uppity, frequent travelers!) stayed in that high-class executive lounge. If there were a phrase that enabled me to stick my tongue out at them, I would write it here. After a while, they came over. Jeff started asking me a technical question about JavaScript, and, like any good-natured programmer-wanna-be, I forgot everything else on my mind (including my sickness), and just spent the next 30 minutes answering the guy. The question was about implementing JSON and callback functions. We got on the plane, and we were ready to leave. But the plane itself just sat there. For nearly an hour. Why? Conditions in Frankfurt, is what I suspected. On our descent, I noticed the captain mention that he slowed our airspeed because there was no room for us in Frankfurt airport. Damn. We had a connecting flight. People started going crazy on the plane. All standing up, yelling, crazy crap. My debilitated stomach prevented me from doing anything, but I knew we'd make the next flight anyway. All those losers were stressin' out over nothing. Just have confidence, people! If the airport really is that congested, that flight ain't goin' nowhere either! Needless to say, we made the flight. I removed my sandals and sprinted like I meant it to the next gate. Running around barefoot on slippery airport floors is actually pretty fun. You can slide around all Sonic-the-Hedgehog-like. Try it sometime. On the plane to SFO, I sat inbetween two ladies who purposefully split themselves, because neither wanted a middle seat. Thanks a lot, ladies. I'm really very interested in your discussions. I offered to switch with one of them so that they could sit next to each other, but they both immediately responded, "oh no! we wanted it this way." Normally this is when I'd say "Jerks." and move on in my discussions, but they weren't exactly mal-intentioned or anything like that. Semi-jerks. There we go. The trip itself reminded me of my travels to Japan mixed with my travels to Italy. Outside drinking by bodies of water, loud partying, having fun with friends, traditional sight-seeing, new and old museums, endless walking around cities, finding landmarks with little-to-no directions, picture after picture after picture. It would've been nice not to worry about work (had one major launch, one launch that quickly escalated into the biggest failure of a marketing campaign ever, and many normal bug fixes and work-related items). Yeah, I didn't take this week off. Work hard, play hard, indeed. Items of interest on this trip? Losing my phone on the plane in Madrid. All of the incredible food that Jeff and Kai selflessly allowed Linda and me to tag with them on, Fast Good (the fast and good fast food place), the outdoor markets, the two Spanish dudes who will forever be known to us as "The Wallies," using Latitude on the G1 like it's meant to be used, running in to a chef of the French Laundry at a tapas bar in Barcelona, the Tokyo-style subways in Barcelona, launching Android.com the way it was meant to be launched, work-all-nighters in hotel rooms, and several items involving someone that would be far too embarrassing for me to write here. You can guess about that last one. If you've heard me whine recently, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Pictures here. Don't forget 'em. So, I received more invites to the London office from people on the Mobile engineering team than I can easily count. Now then, when am I going?

I went on a hike today. Darwin, the boyfriend of Lilly's friend Jenn, took us on a 12 mile hike in a state park between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. Funny enough, I hiked several days earlier in Will Rogers state park in LA for the first time in years. I froze my ass off, LIlly sprained her ankle, I froze some more, we ate smoked salmon and goat cheese sandwiches, and I froze my ass off some more. It turns out the hike was recommended as a summer hike (probably due to the weather), but it was amazingly awesome anyway. And, given the fact that it was my first real hike in... forever... and the fact that I thought it wasn't too bad -- Darwin said it was a 3/5 -- I guess I'm not doing so bad! It was pretty fun. I found an index of hiking trails in the Bay Area. Looks like I totally need to get started hiking these; so, yes, that would be an invitation to whoever reads this post to come with me. I'll make a tracker just like I did for miles run, so I can check off trails I've completed. Some pictures from today are here.

Ever since high school, stuff from Westwood, near UCLA, has been disappearing. It probably started with the Circuit City, in 11th grade. I never really liked them, anyway, since they refused to sell me Metal Gear Solid when I was under 18. Next was Lollicup, after going to college. We got our pictures on the wall, then it got shut down due to a roach infestation. Penguin's, next door, closed too. Then there was Tower Records, but I didn't really care, because Penny Lane (a better CD/DVD buy/rental shop), was right down the street. Then Penny Lane closed. After that, the EB Games turned into a Gamestop, and shut down. The Blockbuster is gone. Conor Chicken got replaced by a Pizza Hut Taco Bell. And the final nail was the closing of the Westwood Arcade, which I discovered yesterday. Where will I play DDR while waiting for movies to start now? I'll be damned when they take away Mongol King BBQ (yes, that's the official name) and Diddy Riese cookies. Cross your fingers.