Jeremy's Journal (All)
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I haven't said anything here for a while because I've been rathe busy. What else is new, right?
Anyhoo, this will probably be my last entry here. I've begun using Movable Type (MT) to manage a more modern weblog (or "blog"). If it goes well, I'll likely try and import all of this old material at some point. But that'll be a fair amount of work, so I'm not going to do it until I'm convinced that MT rocks. So far it's going well.
Check it out for yourself.
Hey, I've got a real weblog now. In case that seems a little strange, given that I've bee writing stuff here for a few years now, let me briefly explain. I'm going to continue writing about the odd things that happen in my life and the random crap that comes to mind now and then. I'll do that here. That other weblog is for stuff I think other folks might actually care about.
More work on chapter 11 for the book. I've been cutting a fair amount of material. What was 22 pages is probably going to be 15 or so. I've managed to greatly simplify things in the process. I just wish it didn't take so darn long.
Damned notebook keyboard. Grr.
So much to do, so little time. Lunch today with Craig Hughes in Palo Alto (Hunan Garden, yum). Then a visit to the root canal guy for a checkup. Then lots of mail, power point, and random shit.
Spent a lot of time with PowerPoint. And I got to be Ray's nurse and gopher for a bit.
Spent a lot of time with PowerPoint. And I got to be Ray's nurse and gopher for a bit.
One of my cats (Noble) decided to try an attack a cat outside today. It's not the first time he's done it. But it was the first time he was able to knock the screen out of the window. He seemed rather surprised by this. Upon coming face to face with the other cat, he wasn't quite sure what to do other than meow and howl loudly.
I had to go outside and retrive him. Then I had to punish him while I put the screen back in the window. Grr. He really pissed me off. I wish he was more like his brother (i.e., less stupid).
Lots of working on the book.
Brief walk to the store to get some exercise and sunlight, but some fruit and deposit a few checks.
Hey, look! It's a picture of me OSCON 2001. How amusing.
I got to be an asshole at work today.
Oh, the the elevators in our 1.5 year old building were down for reapir today. How sad is that?
The weather is back to normal. Nice and cool and night, nice and warm during the day.
Busy day of hacking on DBIx::DWIW at work.
Work was a bit odd today. Mostly because of the NBA Rhythm and Rims (or whatever it's called) festival-like thing that was going on most of the day. I was supposed to be flying to Seattle today, but that got postponed. So I popped on the headphones and managed to be relatively productive.
I skipped lunch so that I'd have room for dinner. Some of the Y! Finance gang took me out for dinner at the Fish Market. It was good food and good entertainment.
After coming home, I got the scoop on how the Microsoft thing just got more interesting. Things are never simple with that company.
Birthday. I'm older today.
Damn nice weather. I love the valley during late Spring and early Summer.
To work a bit late because of having been up late. A few books from my weekend Amazon once-click fit have begun to arrive. Lots of funny stuff by David Sedaris. Lots of confusion over firewall holes for database servers.
Called the bank to get payoff info so that I could send a final check for my car loan. That's my birthday present to myself--being debt-free.
Perl Mongers meeting after work. I gave my talk and it was well received.
It looks like the Microsoft trip will be postponed until next week. That's good, 'cause folks are already grabbing bits of my time for tomorrow.
Janet called today.
Got home around around 10 and had a few amusing messages on my machine. I was all set to get some work done when I made the mistake of checking my TiVo. I haven't done so in about 5 days, but it had captured parts 1 and 2 of the "Endgame" episode of Star Trek Voyager. Gotta watch it, or at least have it as background noise.
Went to work and got busy. Then headed over to Adam's place so that we could go up to San Francisco for the Linux Magazine dinner (which turned out to be a "Happy Birthday Martin & Jeremy" dinner. Woohoo!
We drove Adam's brand new Mustang convertible. Top down all the way up 101 and 280. Nice ride. Got to see the Linux Mag office and meet Charlie and Martin finally.
Went to dinner near Pac Bell Park. Good food and wine. Very good. The place was called MoMo's, I think.
Had a paperwork mishap that involved me staying up to 3am and on the phone with Adam to work out stuff for the Microsoft trip.
Got my question posted to Slashdot so that we have a better perspective on this week's Microsoft discussion.
Worked to revise my presentation for the Silicon Valley Perl Mongers meeting in a few days. Also took some time to bring my MySQL page a bit more up-to-date.
Saw Undercover Brother early in the day. It was fairly amusing but not quite what I had hoped for.
I may be visiting Microsoft next week. We'll see. Need to revise the Evil Plan, I guess. How long does it take to get a clone army when you need one in a hurry?
Discoverd the joy of isync today. It totally rocks. Ahh. someone else has figured it out too.
Biked to work in the morning. It was already quite warm. A nice ride.
Read and replied to an assload (that's a lot) of e-mail today. Damn.
The InnoDB/MySQL problem may or may not be fixed. I got a patch that seems reasonable, so we'll see.
Meeting and then lunch at Banana Leaf. Mmm.
To bed early. Gonna bike to work on Thursday (and Friday, I hope).
Was just reminded that I'm to speak at sv.pm next week. Uh oh.
A bumpy day wtih an apparent InnoDB bug at work. Lots of restarts and related "fun".
Found a good interview with Larry McVoy on KernelTrap.
Finally got around to making my reservations for the 2002 Open Source Convention (yes, I'm presenting again this year--3 talks!).
Today is another day of random crap, since there's no work. Yeay for government holidays.
Took some allergy medicine. It made me sleep for a few hours. Worked on MySQL upgrades and builds after that.
Lots of random stuff today (SpamAssassin, Razor, etc..)
Remembered at the last minute that tomorrow is a holiday and I should stay home from work. That means I can take a long bike ride in the morning and maybe try out the rice cooker later in the day.
Cashed my IRS refund check today.
Did a lot of laundry and contemplated seeing Star Wars tonight.
Listened to the last 2 weeks worth of Brandt's radio show.
Had a Trader Joe's rice bowl for dinner, which Noble cleaned up for me. Then headed to Trader Joe's for food--it's best not to go while hungry.
Spent a bit of time looking at virus scanning software that I can pulg into the mail delivery setup at WCNet. What I've found so far is detailed here.
Today was Josh's last day at Yahoo.
Back to work today to fix broken stuff. A fair amount of it.
Slept in, partly as an attempt to get back on west coast time. Checked a bit of e-mail and marveled at the fact that the stock market was open and that it was a Monday. It felt like a Sunday (again). Mom made waffles for breakfast. Yum!
I got on-line and enrolled in the American Airlines Frequent Flyer program (AA Advantage or something like that).
Dad worked on trying to re-install Win98 on his laptop for most of the morning and afternoon. I have no idea how he managed to fundamentally break a Windows installation every few months. And then it takes him several days to reinstall and reconfigure everything. Along the way he acts like he's never done it before and managed to ask many of the same questions he did the last time it happened.
Headed to Toledo Express airport for my flight to Chicago and on to San Jose. The airport, as usual, was NOT busy at all.
Had a 2.5 hour lay-over in Chicago, so I got a bagel sandwich and began writing an article for Linux Magazine about IBM's Robocode. It's cool stuff.
The flight back was good. I manged to snag an exit row seat with laptop power. Got caught up on a lot of stuff.
The cats were glad to see me. And I'm glad to be back.
Got up relatively early again so that we could head to the northeastern part of Ohio to visit April & Brian at their new house (which I hadn't yet see in person). They live in Huntsburg, Ohio (which, as Mom points out, sounds a little better than Footville (where they moved from)).
The weather was a bit nicer. Alternating clouds and sun, though it was still quite cold for this time of year. It's a good thing I brought jeans and several warm shirts.
Here are the pictures from April & Brian's place.
After leaving their place, we all went to Beachwood for a nice (big) dinner at Carvers.
On the ride back, I re-worked the software that manages my on-line journal (which you are reading) a bit. There's now a spiffy little navigation aid at the top and bottom of each page. It allows you to see all the entries, entries by year, or just the 14 most recent.
Got up and dressed and headed to Steph & Adam's wedding and reception and stuff. Here are the pictures I took from the event. The most amusing part of the ceremony was when Adam became a bit confused during the vows. While the details are a bit fuzzy in my head now, it went something like this...
There was a part of the vows when they were supposed to say something like: "and the gifts of my mind, soul, and hands." However, when I heard the minister say "hands," I heard "pants," which is terribly amusing. Adam also wasn't quite sure what she said (later we found out that he was expecting her to say "body") and just blurted out "What?!", which cause everyone to laugh pretty hard.Well, you probably had to be there, but at least I'll remember this a few years from now when I'm reading over it. Heh. :-)
After the wedding, we went back to Aaron & Kristin's so that I could torment the dog one last time, pack up, and head back to Toledo. The weather for the drive home was crappy. Lots of clouds and random pockets of rain.
Upon arriving home, I learned that Kitty (our family cat of roughly 14 years) had died the day before. She was put to sleep after a several month battle with asthma. :-( I'll have to see if I can dig up any pictures of Kitty. I know I have some somewhere.
Got up and messed around on the computer. Then went to Bev's Cat Boutique to get some new toys for the cats. I managed to drop over $50 on toys without trying very hard. I guess I'm not the only one who have expensive taste in toys.
Drove down to Aaron & Kristin's place just north of Columbus, Ohio. The ride down was a bit slow because of all the trucks on the road.
Got there around 4:15pm to the excitement of Unix (their little dog). I had my laser pointer with me and that means hours of entertainment for both of us. That little dog is insane.
After a bit of chatter and dot chasing, Aaron and I headed over to what is now called Buffalo Wild Wings. But we still like to refer to it as BW3. Had some good food and good times. Everyone I expected to see was there.
Once we'd had our fill of food and drink, we all headed to the Scacky house (Scott and Kathy, for those of you playing along at home). There we managed to remember some incredibly funny shit that happened several years ago. But more importantly, we devised the worst invention ever: transparent diapers. While to have the benifit that you can visually detect that he baby needs to be changed, you also have the unique opportunity to witness the transition from "doesn't need to be changed" to "needs to be changed." Nobody was too fond of that idea.
Don't ask how that came up. Really.
The baby discussion finally provided a segway to Janet & Sean to announce that they're expecting a baby. Kathy and I had known about this for several weeks but couldn't say a thing until they told the rest of the group. It was mildly entertaining to see Kathy get annoyed as the night wore on and Janet hadn't yet said anything.
While at the house we had some of the wine that I brought from California. (Thanks to the folks at MySQL AB's PR agency for that!)
We also decided that Mel and I have to go to South Carolina to visit Mike & Anne sometime maybe later this year.
At about 11pm or Aaron and I headed back to his place to torment the dog one last time and go to bed. We had an early wedding to attend the next day.
Flew back to Ohio today for Steph & Adam's wedding. I must say that American Airlines is now my favorite airline. Not only do they have that extra leg room in coach, they have laptop power available at most of the seats on the larger flights. The 757 that I'm on right now has 'em all over the place. My battery drained, so I just plugged in and kept on working.
If that's not enough, I didn't even have to use my aircraft style power adaptor. I'm just using the standard automobile cigarette lighter plug. Aside from first class or a private jet, this is the only way to fly. :-)
Oh, the other thing that surprised me is that San Jose airport is back to normal. The wait to get thru security was less than five minutes. I was bit worried when I was leaving my apartment at 6:30am for a 8:00am flight (it's a 15 minute drive to SJC). But I was able to do curb-side check-in and get thru security with no major delays. That's great, 'cause I had to get up at 4:45am as it was. And, if you know me, you know how unnatural that is!
The flight from SJC to Chicago (ORD) was pretty good except for some turbulence a bit before Chicago. We were racing a line of thunderstorms (you forget what those are, living in California) but it wasn't too bad.
I met Steve Jobs today and several VPs at Apple. Why? Because they were unveiling their new rack-mounted Xserve servers at a media event. Anyway, here are the pictures I took. I don't care what others say, but I think they should have called it the iRack.
Ray did a bad thing.
Get all productive and stuff at work today. I was impressed with me. :-)
Worked from home today (again). Went to the dentist around 3pm to get my suddenly sensitive tooth diagnosed. Last time I waited on this sort of thing, I waited too long and had 2 root canals as a result.
The problem is very minor and will be cured without any special equipment--unless it gets worse, of course.
I think I'll actually go to work tomorrow. That'll be odd. Whenever I work from home on a Monday (or, in this case, Monday and Tuesday), I lose all sense of what day it is when I'm at work. I'm sure it's quite amusing (or annoying) to my poor coworkers.
I'm going to visit Apple on Tuesday the 14th to see the new rack-mount servers they've announced. I wonder if they'll let me have one for a while so that I can rack it and review it for the magazine just like I did with the TiBook. That would be most excellent.
Got chapter 12 to folks for initial review today. Whew.
Don't ever write a book. It will expand to fill all your available time, and then it'll keep going. Really.
Well, today was rather amusing on multiple counts.
First off, the weather finally seems to have stabliized, so I decided it's time to try biking to work along my new route (just under 10 miles, but much nicer than the old way). As I was getting ready to leave, my cell phone rang. I answered it to find that it was a guy from London calling to ask me a MySQL question.
After I answered his question, he explained that his ISP or hosting company was rather clueless and that he wanted to talk with an expert. So he went to Google and typed in MySQL expert only to find that my name was the first item that appeared. That came as a bit of a surprise to me, but it's rather cool. :-)
Then, later that day, someone gave me a link to a picture that amused the hell out of me. Why? Because when I saw it all I could think of was a golf porn flick. I figured it would go something like this:
[...porn music plays in the backgroun...]Female Golfer: "Wow, it's really hot out here. I wonder if I've still got that ice scupled dildo in the freezer... Ahhhh, here it is! Let's have some fun..."Or something to that effect. Anyway, here's the picture. Judge for yourself.
Like I said, it amused me.
My clocks all conspired to trick me today.
Got up late and messed around with stuff. Was up late last night working on book stuff (surprise, surprise). Eventually went to the House of Orient to get some pineapple chicken for lunch/dinner. Got a nasty headache and ended up going to bed early.
Got up late today.
On the way to work, I heard about a bunch of upcoming concerts at The Mountain Winery this summer. So I checked out the list to confirm what I thought I heard. Meatloaf is coming on July 5th, so I got a ticket via ticketmaster.com (yuck!). I've wanted to see Meatloaf in concert for sooo long. Woohoo!
Got up early to visit the Apple Campus with Jeff Okamoto from Linux Magazine. We got to meet with a couple of Apple's folks to discuss OS X and related stuff.
I was up really late last night (and again this night) playing with the PowerBook G4 Titanium (TiBook, as I call it). This thing totally rocks.
As I left the apartment I noticed a large truck in the street. As I got closer I realized that it was a fire engine and that I smelled natural gas--lots of it. There was a leak across the street, and two PG&E trucks had blocked off both ends of my street. I arrived at Apple a few minutes late because of that.
The conference room we were in had one of the new Apple Cinema Displays along the wall. Damn, that is one fine monitor. Really, really nice!
Went to work and got random stuff done. Was getting ready to home when I had the opportunity to witness an impressive brute-force password guessing attack against a friend's web site. That was fun.
Went to Denny's at around 10pm with Ray and Mark. Had some apple pie (might as well finish the day with some apple). Came back to work to find a bug in my server graphing code. Went home just before midnight.
Wrote the TiBook review for Linux Magazine. Gave it 4.5 out of 5.0. It was so close to a perfect score. I really don't wanna give it back.
Finally went to bed around 4am.
Played with the TiBook that Apple has loaned me via Linux Magazine. It totally rocks. There's a lot of really cool Open Source stuff going on around OSX, Darwin, Fink, XonX, and so on. I'm really, really impressed.
Looking forward to the meeting with Apple tomorrow!
A lot of wasted time fucking with computers this weekend. I'm not too happy about it.
I've decided to sell off billg, my 21" monitor, and an old computer. I don't really need 'em.
Got 2.4.18 built on my notebook. Got USB working right, so my optical mouse is all strapped on now. Upgraded to XFree86 4 along the way.
Jeffrey helped me setup his cool book building system. Yeay!
Stayed up really late, which is bound to mess up the sleep schedule for a few days.
Back to the office today. Didn't get a lot done, due to a few things breaking, random meetings, e-mail, and a baby shower. Yikes.
Sent back markup from reading the latest (almost final) draft of Managing & Using MySQL, 2nd edition to O'Reilly. It is coming along well.
I realized two things today:
- Frozen veggies (like peas) taste FAR BETTER than their canned counterparts.
- My 1998 Acura finally rolled over 20,000 miles. I guess I just don't drive as much as I used to.
Feeling better today. Only a little sore.
Happy Birthday, Mom! (as if she reads this).
I keep waking up early--probably because my body is sore from being in the same position for so long. But still, waking up at 5:00am without an alarm clock is a little spooky. Hopefully that stops in a day or so.
I finished reading Peopleware yesterday. It was well worth my time. Now I need to make sure that some folks at work read it too. :-)
I was finally able to shower today, and boy did it feel good.
The shoulder pain has returned. It's very occasional but annoying. Kaiser called a bit ago to check up on me.
Wearing loose jeans is only a little less comfortable than sweatpants.
Didn't go to bed until about 3:30am. But I woke up before 8:30am and couldn't fall back asleep. Grr. I think by body is just trying to annoy me. If so, it's working pretty well.
Laid down on the couch and managed to sleep until about 11:00am. Ate some breakfast and took a pain pill because my shoulder was really sore. Talked to Adam on the phone. Read some of the mutt docs. The pill made me sleepy, so I laid down again. Slept until 2:30pm. That's more like it! :-)
Futzed around a bit and finished of the Jello I made yesterday. Perhaps I should make more. After all, there's always room for Jello.
Pain seems to be less after the nap. This is a very good sign. The should pain is now intermittent, which is just annoying. Really annoying.
I can't wait to shower again.
Went for a walk around 6pm. That made my shoulder hurt again, but it felt good to get outside for a bit. Once I got back, it settled down. I haven't really needed any pain medication after this morning.
I'm close to eating normal meals again, it would seem.
Played around with analog a bit. Neat stuff. Also discovered that Noble likes to eat Manhattan style Clam Chowder.
Surgery was yesterday. All in all, it went pretty well. I'm rather sore yet, but the drugs help with that. I've got a pill which is 5mg Hydrocodone and 500mg Acetaminophen. It does the trick and makes is really easy to sleep.
I stayed at Jeffrey's place after coming back from the hospital. Mostly just slept, drank some water, and ate a few crackers. I'm a lot less zonked than I was yesterday. As recently wrote to a friend of mine, "I can feed myself and use a computer, so I guess all the basics are covered."
Well, today was relatively normal--except that I somehow managed to sleep about 2 hours later than I expected. Oh, well.
Tomorrow is the big day. I go to the hospital at around noon, and they're supposed to yank out my gall bladder around 1pm or so. If all goes well, I'll be home tomorrow night in a mild amount of pain. But at least I won't have to worry about the Real Pain anymore.
Got my ass paged out of bed this morning (6am) because shit was breaking left and right. Wasn't a good way to start the day at all. So much for sleep.
Met my surgeon today. Dr. Bloom is the cheif of surgery at Kaiser Santa Clara, so I feel like I'm in good hands. He's done over 600 of the operations I'm going to have. And his partner has done even more of 'em.
I'm scheduled to arrive at the hospital at noon. I "go under" at about 1pm. Let's hope all goes well.
The netapp disk move went well. One minor fuckup that was easily fixed (any my fault).
I've been having second thoughts about my upcoming surgery, but then I started to get that feeling from my gall bladder again (in a very minor way) and was reminded of how much I really want the damned thing ripped out!
I'm not sure if this is funny or sad, but I didn't even realize it was St. Patrick's Day today until I visited Google to run a search. I saw their shamrock themed logo and thought, "hm. it must be the 17th today."
Needless to say, I didn't do anything special for the holiday. Oh, well. Maybe next year. But probably not. It's kind of a dumb holiday anyway. :-)
Today was a wash. I didn't do a hell of a lot. For some reason my Saturdays have just been this way for a while. I'm not sure why.
I did help get the MySQL servers on PeakWebHosting working again. Then I wandered over to Subway for lunch. Came back and futzed around. Went for a drive. Took a nap. Random other shit.
Finally got to meet with a doc and Kaiser. I'm scheduled for surgery [tentatively] for next Friday. I'll hopefully meet the surgeon in a few days.
Decided not to build a whole new system at work. I'm gonna evolve the existing system instead.
WCNet tech call today. Figured out what to do about spam filtering and other stuff.
Another new version of DBIx::DWIW should be going out soon.
I heard from O'Reilly today about the Open Source Convention. I'll be giving three presentations this year. Woohoo!
Had a dentist appointment today. In fact, this is going to be a busy week. I've got stuff on the calendar for almost every day. That's rather unusual. Meetings at work, gall bladder class, etc. Odd.
The new diet is working well. I'm down about 15-20 pounds now. I can't be more exact, because I only recently acquired a scale. Oh well.
Rumor had it that the BBC's Ogg Streams were running again. Indeed they are. :-)
It's been a while. Lots of random stuff has gone on, none of which I'm in the mood to document right now.
Busy day. But I came home early to hack on the book.
New feed launched at work.
The Microsoft evil plan is beginning to take shape.
Woke up at 9am and relized that I had to be to the dentist in 1 hour for crown stuff and a small filling. Not the way you want to start a day off work.
Played with Exim on wcnet.org hosts. Mail migration is complete now.
Finally explained what the hell is going on with Yahoo Mail's ancient POP3 implementation, to a small degree at least.
Sent in all my proposals for talks at the Open Source Convention in July. I had 3 for 90 minute talks, 1 for a 45 minute talk, and 1 for a 5 minute lightning talk titled "Why Larry Ellison should promote Open Source Databases." I just had the idea for that one an hour ago. :-)
Slept a lot today. A whole lot.
Caught up on a ton of e-mail, put a few updates here and worked on cleaning up my JitterBug queue.
Messed with the Tivo some more. I got the the service update, so now it's got a bunch more cool features.
Well, I've had the Tivo for a few days and I'm loving it. These things totally rock. I'm even thinking about getting one of the hard disk upgrades so I can store more shows on it. I never miss The Simpsons anymore. :-)
In other news, I've decided that JavaScript can suck my nuts.
In the last week or so, I've managed to convince at least one person to adopt Debian on his machines. I swear, once you've used it for a week or two, you can't imagine ever going back.
Oh, let's see... What else has been going on? I've been ultra busy at work because of the damned Exodus facility shutting down.
I just found out that I'll have my hands on nice PowerBook G4 Titanium for a few weeks. Yeah! New toy...
My Tivo arrived today... Life will never be the same.
Went to the dentist today for a cleaning. Went well. Scheduled my crowns for next week.
Spent a lot of time at the Equinix data center in San Jose with Jeffrey Papen today. Eventually we got hardware-based load balancing (via an Alteon switch) working for MySQL.
I slept in a lot yesterday. So I had to make up for yesterday's lack of getting much done.
Worked with Mailman a bit and wrote about it for the Project of the Month. Moved the Goon-Squad list over to it. In fact, I moved all the Goon-Squad stuff (except for DNS) over to my machines.
Did some cleaning up around the apartment and other random stuff. Managed to mostly do my taxes yesterday. That was entertaining.
Cool. I'm gonna have to fly through MSP more often.
It's snowing in the area. This is most unusual.
Slept in really late after being up late last night.
Ventured over to Subway for lunch. Came back and did some random stuff. Fixed my long-standing VMWare problem. Updated a few things. Caught up on e-mail. Deposited some checks.
Spent time screwing around with MySQL builds. Did get as much writing done as I had planned. :-(
Wow. This could be my next company.
Got up early. Before 8am in fact. Took advantage of being up early and went to Baker's Square for breakfast. Had a nice Belgian Waffle, scrambled eggs, and bacon. Not the healthiest thing, but it sure is good. And it's less than five minutes away.
Did dishes, took out the trash, went to the store for cat litter and bananas. Then came back and worked on chapter two of the book for several hours.
Sort of got hungry around 4p and had a big bowl of Trader Joe's Vegetarian Red Bean Stew. I've love that stuff, even if it does have some... uhm, aromatic side-effects.
Hacked on the book more. Chapter two is going to be rather meaty and contain several figures to illustrate locking and concurrency stuff.
Boring day today. Had fun with a regex bug, but that was about it. I'll post the details someday, as it was quite entertaining.
Sent in the preface and chatper 1 of the book to O'Reilly at about 1:30am.
Yeay
VMWare networking decided to stop working for some reason today. Damned commercial software. No error messages or helpful output. Just doesn't work. Grr.
Cats are back to normal. My sleep schedule isn't.
I had a very strange dream last night which involved two visits to the dentist and a nail being pounded into my jaw. Dunno what to make of that.
I just realized that my new bike doesn't have a bottle holder. But it appears that the one on my older bike can be transferred without too much effort.
Played around with DNS today. Discovered that BIND 9.x can be a pain. So I put 8.2.5 on litterbox.zawodny.com. Then I made family.zawodny.com and litterbox authoritative for zawodny.com. Yeay.
Here's my new toy. Of course, that link will stop working someday, so I'll just say it's a Raleigh C500 cross bike.
The cats are a little less pissy today. Not much.
litterbox.zawodny.com got installed at the PAIX today. Yeay!
Grr. The writing is slow going. Too slow.
Went to Stacks' in Redwood City for brunch today. Pretty good stuff.
A lot has happened since I last wrote. WCNet mail upgrade, multiple computer failures at home (and associated wasted time), etc. Let's just hope things improve.
Flew back to California today. Had to get up at 4:30am so as to leave Toledo at 5:00am for the 1 hour trek to Detroit. My flight was at 9:00am, so I got there about 2.5 hours early to find that the wait for security was only 10 minutes. I thank Murphy for that one.
Both flights (Detroit to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to San Jose) were VERY FULL, so I guess I was part of the post-holiday rush home.
Back in California, I can now go outside without layers and layers of insulation.
There's some good stuff over at dolske.net.
Went to April & Brian's again (near Cleveland) for Brian's brithday. Took the thinkpad to catch up on some e-mail and coding.
There's a lot of snow out their way. They got something like 14 inches yesterday. I guess I've seen my quota of snow for this trip.
Went with Mom to visit Kelly, Neil, and the kids. Did other random stuff such as upgrading Dad's linux box to Debian's "testing" distribution rather than the "stable" one. Gotta get a new kernel on that box and setup the software RAID for /home soon.
Went for a walk with Mom. It was really cold outside. But that's Ohio in the Winter, I guess.
Random computer stuff today and out to dinner and a show with the Traush family.
So I've been listening to the BBC Radio 1 broadcasts on the experimental Ogg Vorbis stream off and on for a couple days now. And I've noticed a couple things:
- It's very clear.
- The music is quite good much of the time.
- The DJs aren't nearly as bad as most of the US DJs.
In other words they have demonstrated, once again, how much better things could be.
Guess who had Pollyeyes Breadsticks with dinner today. :-)
Found some good reading on Joel's site. Specifically:
- Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don't Have Testers
- The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
- Two Stories
- Getting Things Done When You're Only a Grunt
- Painless Software Schedules
- The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing
- Command and Conquer and the Herd of Coconuts
- Painless Functional Specifications - Part 1: Why Bother?
- Where do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas?
That's quite a load, but like I said, it's good stuff.
After having slept a few hours (up late wrapping gifts), I was awoken by Mom (who managed to over-sleep) so that I could eat, shower, and get ready for the 2.5 hour trip to April & Brian's place.
We left a few minutes late and had an uneventful trip. I had my trusty ThinkPad with me, so I was able catch up on a bit more mail and start reading bits of the slimp3-dev mailing list (which I haven't touched for months!).
Dinner was good. We played a few games and were generally lazy. I gave the ThinkPad battery a good charge.
On the way home, I read most of the slimp3-dev archive that I've amassed. Lots of interesting development going on. Now only if I can spare a bit of time for it (just like I do with SpamAssassin).
I borrowed several DVDs from Brian. Hopefully I'll be able to watch 'em all before giving them back on Sunday when we make this trek again.
Got to San Jose airport for my flight to Detroit. There were NO LINES AT ALL, so I've got a lot of e-mail to catch up (and queue), I guess. At least I found a power outlet that the Northwest folks will let me use. :-)
"There is no smoking in the terminal. San Jose international airport thanks you for your cooperation."How many more times must I hear that today?
In Other News...
It occurs to me that I'm really dumb sometimes. While this doesn't come as any great revelation, I just realized the extent of it.
Like last year, I did virtually all of my Xmas shopping on-line this year. Almost all of it was via Amazon.com (which my fingers always want to write as amazone.com for some reason). I had all the stuff shipped to my Dad's work address so that he can bring the boxes home. Then I can just wrap the stuff when I arrive.
Now here's the dumb part. I'm arriving in the very early morning on Xmas day. It'll probably be 1:30am before we get to the house. I'm probably not going to be in the mood to wrap things. But when else am I going to do it?
Had I been thinking, I'd have used Amazon's gift wrap service and not had anything to worry about.
Duh.
Well, today has been rather uneventful. Since I'm getting ready to travel yet again, I've been doing laundry, cleaning, and various time-wasting in between.
Went to put a new sponge on my sponge mop today, since the old sponge has mostly disintegrated. Surprise! The new one doesn't fit. So I had to go to the store and get a new sponge mop.
Finished making arrangements for the cats while I'm gone. That reminds me--I need to go visit Josh's cats again.
The massive rsync is nearly done. 18BG in about 2.5 days isn't too bad. :-).
I downloaded the latest slimp3 software from slimp3.sf.net and played with it. I was pleasantly surprised to find a rather good (yet simple) browser interface. Now I can control just about everything remotely without line-of-sight to the device.
I'm considering adding the ability for folks to leave comments in response to stuff here. But don't know if anyone would actually use it.
Here's the rsync output:
wrote 69328 bytes read 17825946550 bytes 170769.36 bytes/sec total size is 19882286305 speedup is 1.12Nice.
For the curious, litterbox.zawodny.com (which will be up in January) is a SuperMicro 5011E system.
Unfortunately, it only goes up to 512MB RAM, so the extra 512MB DIMM I bought will have to be used elsewhere. Hmm.
The massive rsync of MP3 files has begun. I'm probably gonna soak up about 18GB of cable modem bandwidth when it's all done. Hey, at least I'm not charged by the bit. :-)
The replacement hard disk arrived today.
litterbox.zawodny.com is nearly ready to go. Should be on-line this weekend from the PAIX. Went and saw the Lord of the Rings movie today. Boring.
Yesterday was uneventful.
So was today.
I think I'll get a haircut tomorrow. But I'll fight with a Livingston (Lucent) RADIUS serven on Solaris 2.8 first. That sounds mildly entertaining.
In response to the most recent message in a mail thread with one of my co-workers, I wrote the following:
It occurs me that it'd be a lot more entertaining if work was more like a Greek tragedy... or comedy. :-) Wonder how we can arrange for that..If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear 'em. :-)
I did a fair amount of cooking today (for me, at least). I made the famous family recipe for sweet potatoes. They came out nicely, though I did let the potatoes get a bit too soft and the syrup was a bit runny. Not bad for a first try. I also made some pumpkin bread from a Pillsbury box. I had some eggs to use up soon.
Got a new Scotch at the store to try out. So far I don't think it is as good as the previous bottle. It's too bad it takes so long to finish off a bottle--there's a lot of stuff left to try!
Got up around 9:30am. Ate waffles. Hacked on a bit of code, cleaned up my jitterbug queue. Got tired and took a nap.
Awoke at roughly 5pm, mildly surprised. Ate leftovers. Caught up on e-mail. Played with the cats. Went to Derek's to watch movies.
Work was a bit unproductive today, but I guess that's life some days. Lots of talk and very little action. Oh, well. I've got some new machines to play with, so all is not lost.
Tried the bottle of wine I got from Marc Andressen at Loudcloud recently. It went pretty well with my Chinese take-out dinner.
We had some DNS problems on one of the WCNet.org machines today. Not sure what caused that, exactly. Very odd.
The NuSphere thing is nearly done, I think. And it's just in time, 'cause I need to put in some serious book time soon. I even ordered a new laptop battery so that I can work while traveling in a few weeks.
Went home early to meet Dan at my place. We did geeky stuff and finally hung my posters.
Happy Birthday, Janet!
It's official. My old desktop (peach.zawodny.com) lost its largest hard disk, a 60GB Maxtor that was about 14 months old. It's going to be replaced under warranty, but the data is gone forever. I learned my lesson. Backups. Backups. Backups.
And RAID. I'm gonna look at rigging up software RAID (just 'cause I'm too cheap to buy the hardware kind and I don't need the incremental performance boost from hardware--this IS a dual-cpu box).
Grrr.
Massive Update
I just realized that I haven't posted anything here for a while. That's mostly due to the fact that the power supply in peach.zawodny.com (where the master database sits) recently bit the dust. I paid a visit to Fry's a couple days ago and got a replacement, but haven't had the time to install it yet. Between the NuSphere thing, having to get my March Linux Magazine column done, the layoffs at work, and all the other crap going on, it's been busy.
Book Update
After some delay, the contract is signed. It's time to get my ass in serious gear.
Hm. What else is going on? I wrestled with installing gmat, the tool that O'Reilly uses for formatting books, today. It installs fine, but appears not to work at all. I think the installation notes are missing something or I really didn't read them right. So I sent a note off to tools@ora.com for assistance.
Work and Non-Work
The work I was involved in got Yahoo listed in InfoWorld's Top 100 list for 2001. We came in at #27. Here is the overview and here is the page we're listed on. John, one of my co-workers (who got laid off last week) saw it and thought they should have put my name in there. I'm all for that. :-)
In case the full text vanishes someday (it will), I've reproduced it here:
Yahoo, No. 27, www.yahoo.com
Yahoo replaced a home-grown system with the MySQL database server to power its Yahoo Finance services, including news headlines, stock charts, and insider trading. (For more, see "Content delivery adds value," "Giving the Web a voice.")There may be a press release about this in a week or two.
On a similar note, I'm being interviewed for a case study in Information Age magazine tomorrow morning. That should be interesting. If nothing else, I have a good reason to get up early.
Other Books
God's Debris (Y! Shopping or Amazon), the new book by Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) is quite excellent. I just finished it.
Remember Better
I upgrade my trusty ThinkPad 600E to 288MB of RAM recently. It is much happier running Windows 98 under VMWare under Linux. I've been shopping around for replacements on eBay, but haven't found anything really good yet. I may just order 512MB for it and keep it until the book is done. Then I can buy myself a "I finished the book" present.
Spam, Spam, Authentication, and Spam
I got exim's SMTP AUTH working properly against PAM on Solaris 2.8 this weekend. The key trick was making sure to run exim as root, so that it could read the password/shadow files.
I've been playing a lot with SpamAssassin on the WCNet and TurboSurf mail servers. As a by-product, I'm now on the mailing list and there are several changes in the later releases that are my doing. That's why Open Source rocks.
That Time of the Year
Family started asking, so I updated my wish list to make life easier. And, as a bonus, most of it can be purchased on-line with just a few clicks.
Back @Home
I was hit by the AT&T/@Home fallout. But I had DSL already running as backup, so it wasn't that painful. And the service was only out for a few days.
Party Pooper
Yesterday was Yahoo's Year End Party (YEP). I didn't go this year. Partly because of how shitty I think they handled the layoffs and mostly because I had a lot of stuff to do!
Random Other Shit
ratemypoo.com is amusing.
Dan is in town this coming week. Ray is out of town.
I can make pancakes.
Pump Up The Volume is a good movie. My DVD arrived, so I watched it just to make sure.
I won a charity auction for a parking spot that's on other side of the campus from where I work. I didn't think my low bid would actually win. Oops. Oh, well. It's for charity. What's $305, really?
That's it for now. I think I'm gonna get that power supply swapped out now and replicate the database onto my laptop, which I've been using almost exclusively for weeks now anyway.
Oh, I really want to learn more Python. Really. I'm not going to reveal my motives yet, but I think it's in my best interest to do so.
PHP mode for Emacs is quite cool.
Worked frome home today, waiting for PacBell. The assholes never showed up. Here is what their web site tells me. How fucking useless! Not even an way to contact them via e-mail yet. They KNOW my phone line is dead, yet they insist call.
Morons.
Made an appointment with PacBell for tomorrow. They'll be here between 8am and 4pm. It's a good thing I don't have a life or anything.
I went to the eye doc to get my new lenses for my glasses. They didn't fit, so they're gonna get re-cut. Oh, well. I managed to stop by Target and pick up a few new shirts, since the weather is a bit cooler now.
I tired to contact PacBell on the Web to tell them that I'm no longer getting a dialtone on my line. After putting in my phone number, I got this result.
I swear, they're worse than Microsoft.
Met with Larry and Marten from MySQL AB today. Marten is the CEO and Larry is their new VP of U.S. sales (and marketing?).
The teeth are doing fairly well.
Today was "double root canal day" for me.
Things went surprisingly well--much better than I expected, given my long and interesting history with dental/oral stuff.
Priceline.com rocks! I'm going to Ohio this weekend for less than $200.
Oops. I did it again.
Laid down at about 5pm for a short nap. Woke up at 9:40pm. Oops.
In other news, my workstation at work no longer crashes every week. It only took 1.5 months and 3 hardware swaps to get to that point. (I suspect the old power supply was to blame, somehow.)
Today was "find out if I get a raise" day at work. The news was good.
Out to dinner at Kabul Afghan Cuisine with Ray, Mark, and James.
Then Ray, Mark, and I went and saw Mulholland Drive in Menlo Park. What a strange movie. I enjoyed it a lot, but it was a bit strange.
Got a CD-RW drive for billg today. Took me a while, but I eventually figured out how to burn an ISO image from my Linux box with it. The software is supposed to be "user friendly" but was rather unhelpful in places. You get what you pay for, I guess.
Well, I swapped in DBIx::DWIW today at work. And there was surprisingly little breakage. In fact, I'm convinced that more stuff will blow up in the morning. I just have no idea what.
Finally got my SliMP3 (from slimdevices.com up and running. And since the server software is written in Perl, I'm gonna have a blast! :-)
I got search.textfiles.com up and running today.
Finished part two of the MySQL Performance Tuning article for Linux Magazine. Look for it in the December, 2001 issue.
I discovered TRAMP today. Now if only I can make it work right...
The thinkpad is now properly debianized with a 2.4.9 kernel and ReiserFS.
Janet woke me up really damned early and we headed to the airport. The lines weren't bad. Got on my plane and headed back to San Jose via Minneapolis / St. Paul. Slept a fair amount on both flights.
Got home, played with the cats, ate, took a shower, unpacked, and began working from home for the remainder of the day--well, until the season premier of Enterprise aired.
All in all, it's been a long day.
Third and final day of OSDS 2001.
Heard about RackSpace in the morning. Then I got to do my presentation. Things went pretty well other than the little external display glitch.
Had lunch with the usual crowd, which included an interesting discussion about whether or not SourceForge sucks or not (and why).
After lunch, Brian gave his MySQL tuning/scaling talk based on their experiences with Slashdot on September 11th. They've been down some of the same roads we have (and vice-versa). It was rather interesting (and entertaining) to listen to.
Once the conference was officially over, I hung out with Tim, David, Monty, and Brian talking about MySQL for a long while. Then Janet showed up and we headed to the mall to eat dinner at The Cheesecake Factory (but not before Janet found the belt she was looking for).
Dinner was good. We managed to cover a lot of ground so that we didn't talk about completely geeky stuff the whole time. We talked about what the Bush administration might have planned for bin Laden, natural foods, and lots of random other stuff.
Oh, I now have some pictures on-line from the conference, too.
After dinner, Janet and I headed to Staples (where Sean was still at work) so she could get bag for her trip to Washington, DC the next day. Then back to their place to veg out and go to bed.
I decided to take a shower at night so that I could sleep longer in the morning and not get up at 4:30am just to get to the airport on time. Unfortunately, the shower woke me up and I didn't get to sleep until well after 1am.
Second day of OSDS 2001.
Britt Johnston (NuSphere CTO) started off the day with his keynote presentation and then a follow-up presentation about the high-end benchmarking they did of MySQL/Gemini, InnoDB, and PostgreSQL. Interesting numbers and findings.
Lunch at the pizza & sandwich place across the street with Chris and Brian. Lots stories from our college days with computers. Sounds like we all did some funny shit in our respective days.
Several good talks today. Brian talked about MyPerl (his implementation of Perl procedures in MySQL). We had just chatted about it the day before and brainstormed a few new things (using packages and functions, as well as disable bad opcodes). Sounds like he'll toss that stuff in, too. :-)
In the evening we had a cocktail reception sponsored by the folks from RackSpace.com. Good drinks and snacks. Lots of good stories.
After food and drinks, we had the BoF sessions. The MySQL session was rather informal, and for a while it felt more like a talk show than a BoF. But Chris, Mark, Brian, and I ducked out a little early to go eat and play some games at Dave & Buster's in the mall. We met up with Britt on the way and he joined us.
Fun had by all. I especially enjoyed the game where I got to fly an F/A-18 on various missions. Well, that and Miss PacMan.
Got up way too early in the morning so that I could grab some of the breakfast food before the first OSDS session.
Ran in to Paul DuBois (author of the MySQL book) and chatted for a bit. Also met up with Brian Aker of OSDN and Slashdot. Chatted a lot about MySQL since they're pretty big users, too.
Went to lunch with Chris, Brian, Monty, and David at Hops (or Hop's?) across the street from the Westin. Chatted about databases, snow, marijuana laws, and lots of random other stuff.
It's funny how much closer my beliefs are to the "European Way" than typical US ideas.
More presentations in the afternoon.
Met up with a group of folks (mostly MySQL and OSDN) for dinner at an really good Italian place. And we got to try some of Monty's special drink with the plastic shot glasses we borrowed. :-)
Headed off to the 2nd annual Open Source Database Summit (OSDS) in Providence, Rhode Island. Being a Good Traveler, I got to the San Jose airport 2.5 hours before my flight. I walked right up to the ticker counter and checked in. No line. Then I walked right up to the security checkpoint and went through. No line. So I sat on my ass and read for about 2 hours. The airport was rather ghost-town like.
Landed in Minneapolis / St. Paul airport. It was also rather empty--or at least I'm assuming it was, since I'd never been there before. Got on the next plane and flew to Providence.
At T.F. Green Airport (Providence), I met up with Janet, who kindly drove me to the Westin Hotel.
Got up early (again). Met Brandt for lunch before he heads back to Ohio.
Took a 3.5 hour mid-day nap.
Caught up on a lot of e-mail. Thousands of messages. Really.
The DSL guy came today and determined that my line is marginal. The ball is back in Pac Bell's court.
I'm sorta caught up on stuff. It's an unfamiliar feeling. Not sure what to do. I think I'll keep working and get ... uh ... ahead on a few things, maybe.
I just found the best used car ad ever and am very amused.
My tax refund check came today. Too bad the economy is in the toilet.
Got up at the crack of noon and was still a bit sluggish. Managed to get some little stuff done (including a phone call with Brandt, who is in California for the week).
Then went out and met up with Mark and Ray for a late lunch (4pm). Came home, caught up on some e-mail, and then took a 3 hour nap. My sleep schedule was messed up anyway, so why not? :-)
Went to bed a bit early last night (meaning "before midnight") so I'd be able to get up relatively early today and to go hiking in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Got up around 8am.
After a bit of phone coordination with Ray and Mark, Ray arrived to pick me up and head on to get Mark. After fetching Mark, we went to David's place to meet up with him and his girlfriend. We then headed out for lunch (Togo's) and then actually started off for the park.
The ride into the park took about an hour. After arriving, we found that a deer was roaming about the parking lot (pictures here). We got the $2.00 park map and asked the person selling maps for a trail recommendation. A few of us wanted to see one of the park's waterfalls, while the rest of us just wanted to hike somewhere.
We started off on a trail to the nearest waterfall, or so we thought. Along the way we actually made three very specific mistakes which resulted in us being on the wrong trail for a while and generally wondering where we really were.
Eventually, though, we found our way to the most pathetic waterfall I've ever seen. The group of use could have pissed off a cliff harder than this so-called waterfall ran. Despite the disappointment of the falls, I generally enjoyed the day.
After the hiking was over, we headed out of the park destined for John's house. We had been invited over for dinner. Got there after a stop to pick up drinks. Had some good steak, fish (salmon & tuna), corn, potatoes, and more. Very good stuff.
We hung out there until about 4:30am, so I didn't get to sleep until about 5:00am.
Today mostly sucked. Nothing remarkable good happened, but some bad shit did. Our primary database server had an odd condition which manifested itself as lots of files vanishing from the root filesystem... Things like shared libraries, init, random binaries, and so on. It was bad.
We currently suspect a very bad experience with the rpm command (I really hate rpm files.), but nobody is quite sure. The machine has been rebuilt, but we're still running RedHat on it. Maybe we should try Debian next time. We won't have this sort of problem then.
In other news, Tien Fu II makes a really good veggie and prawn dish with garlic sauce. Yum.
The mysterious package from yesterday arrived at work. It was two copies of Paul's MySQL and Perl for the Web. I got to read about myself in the front of the book (I was a tech reviewer) and see that it's what I remember being in it. Good book. Buy a copy.
Began today by working from home while waiting for the UPS guy. I had no idea what he'd be trying to deliver, but there was a little note on the door when I got home last night. I really wish there was a way to tell UPS, "please redirect that package to my work" address. If I ever have the option, I never choose to ship things to my home address. I'm never there when they want to deliver, and they'll never leave stuff because of the tiny mailbox I have.
At about 5:45pm when UPS hadn't arrived yet (fuck them), Dan suggested I use the on-line package tracking. I did. I still had no clue who the package is from or what might be in it. But I did find that I can redirect the package right on the Web site. So UPS should attempt delivery at work tomorrow. I wish I had known about this long ago.
In other news, I finally got pictures of my new furniture on-line.
After the UPS guy never showing up, I went to a move with Mark and Ray. Left the apartment at about 6:50pm. We saw The Fast and the Furious, knowing it'd be bad. When I came home there was another UPS note on my door! What the fuck?! Was he WAITING FOR ME TO LEAVE?
To top it off, my machine at work was dead. Again. Even after the hardware has been swapped. It's either the hard drive (the only common piece) or some obscure FreeBSD bug that only I can trigger.
But hey, at least I got to hear my neighbors having sex. Not that it's anything special the 100th time I've heard it.
Got to work today to find a dead database server--the one that had recently been upgraded. Luck it was only a spare, I guess.
Still behind on the main INBOX.
Got new hardware at work today to see if we can keep my box from crashing. Similar to the old hardware, except that I have 384MB of RAM instead of 256MB.
I managed to accidentally sleep for 12 hours last night. Well, it wasn't a complete accident. I laid down around 9pm for a nap. I woke up at 4am and decided that I should probably just get up at a more "normal" time, mostly in the hope that it would help me reset my sleep schedule for the coming week. This past week has been a bit later than I'd normally like (getting up around 10:30 or 11:00am).
I had that strange dream again last night--the one where I'm captured by the Borg and have to escape with Seven of Nine and Capitan Janeway. I haven't watched Voyager for 2 months, so I really don't know where that one comes from.
The good news is that nobody has turned the water off yet. I was able to shower without incident. :-)
After a bit of playing with the cats, I managed to mostly clean out several of my INBOXes, send a detailed note off to one of the book editors (long story), and take a first swipe at editing the SNMP article for the November issue.
Amusingly, my "real" INBOX is something I'm still rather behind on.
I forgot to mention a few days ago that I finished reading a book titled "I Worship The Very Dirty She Treats Me Like". Sort of amusing, but I was a little disappointed. Not a bit deal though, because Ray and I stopped by the local B&N before seeing Jay & Silent Bob on Friday night. While there I bought five books that I've been meaning the get eventually. The pile of "books to read someday" is now menacingly tall.
The How to Write Efficient MySQL Applications article I wrote for Linux Magazine's June 2001 issue got linked on LinuxToday today.
Here is something to don't see everyday...
My water was off today--much to my surprise. Why? The vacant apartment next door was having some work done before the new folks move in. They had to change the faucets and turned off the water for all four apartments. And they didn't bother to tell anyone! Grr.
Went to Trader Joe's to pick up some food (what a great store!). Came home and made some spaghetti with little shrimp in the sauce. Good stuff. Even had some fresh bread to go with it.
Went and saw Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back last night. Very funny! Kevin Smith has made another excellent movie. I'll probably go see it again before it hits video.
It's been a busy week. There is a major problem with the book right now. Hope to get that sorted out next week. More on that after we figure out what's going to happen.
LinuxWorld is next week, and I still haven't decided if I'll be going or not.
My new furniture rocks! In fact, I have a few pictures of my comfortable chairs and couch, but haven't pulled them off my camera quite yet...
Got a mass "here's what's going on in my life" e-mail from a guy I went to high school with. I'm wondering how he found my address. Admittedly, that's not hard. But more importantly, what made him think to even look? Maybe he was leafing through a yearbook or something? Who knows.
So much crap to do...
Some guy from AT&T just came to my door to tell me that their installers would be in my neighborhood in a few days and that he was prepared to offer me 2 free months if I sign up for their cable modem service.
I opened the door a little farther, pointed to my existing AT&T cable modem, and asked him to guess how long I've had it.
The look on his face was priceless.
Got my new glasses. I can see again!
Went to lunch at a Sushi place with Ray, James, and John. On the way back, we ran into Tim Koogle (former Yahoo CEO) in the parking garage. He called the Porsche belonging to one of our co-workers an "expensive volkswagon". I was amused.
Hacked on the book. Went to the store. Made bread. Stayed up too late.
I decided to be a trouble maker today... On multiple fronts. Let's see how much of it comes back to bite me in the ass.
Ordered tickets for my trip to the Open Source Database Summit in Providence, RI in September. Hopefully they'll get my name spelled correctly on the Web site. Anyway, I got an excellent deal on the tickets.
This past week flew by pretty quicky. I was mostly geting caught up on stuff that didn't get done while I was traveling around with my parents.
I should get some of these cans o' whoop ass just so I can threaten opening one...
Slept most of the day. Really. I kept taking 2-4 hour naps until it was 7:00pm, at which point I finally got into a groove and became productive.
After becoming productive, I started working on the book. The good news is that I made some serious headway. The bad news is that I kept getting distracted and doing other things too. In fact, I even put out a new mytop release when I was supposed to be outlining.
I made cookies today. Yum.
Just saw the HOMOCIL commercial on SNL. It was hilarious.
We attempted to go Big Basin Redwoods State Park today, but traffic sucked. So we went and saw AI (the movie) instead. It was an odd movie.
Drove home from Sequoia. Make dinner and stuff. (Can you tell I'm sick of typing right now?)
Got up too early (Dad was snoring loudly) ate, showered, and headed into Sequoia National Park. Since we were only 1/2 mile from the park, it didn't take long. Once inside (and after a brief visit to the "dumping station") we drove to Hospital Rock. I'm not sure why it has that name. Took a few pictures, but they weren't that good. The lighting was much better on the return trip in the evening.
From there we drove about an hour and a half to Crystal Cave. Well, what we did was drive to the start of the trail which leads to the entrance to the cave. There is a restroom at the beginning of the trail. The guides advise visitors to use the restroom because the trail to the cave opening is quite an adventure (a fairly intense downward climb) and the cave's interior is about 45 degrees warm year-round.
The cave itself was really impressive and our guide was rather amusing. He explained, among other things, that are about 200 such caves in the park area, but Crystal Cave is the only one open for public tours.
Took a few pictures in the cave. Some came out nicely. Some did not.
After our 45 minutes of trekking through the cave, it was time to climb back up to the parking lot where we began our adventure. Mom and I made it up in about 30 minutes (it took 20 to go down). Dad took about 50% longer. I got a lot of good waterfall pictures on the climb up.
A few visits to the restroom and bottles of water later, we were back on the road and headed for Moro Rock. Mom and I climbed the nearly 400 steps (and many rock inclines) to the top. Along the way we were rewarded with spectacular views of almost the entire Sequoia area--including the controlled fire that was burning not too far away and the surrounding mountain peeks. According to the sign, we got to see The Great Western Divide.
Oh, and my head was out in the sunlight a bit too long. I really should have worn my hat. I thought about wearing it, but never bothered. Oh, well.
Not long after the rock (okay, it was more of a mountain), we found our way to the General Sherman Tree. It's literally the largest living thing on the planet; an ancient Sequoia which is really, really, really big.
Having seen General Sherman and the surrounding grove of Giant Sequoias, we drove a bit farther in the park before turning around and heading back to town for dinner.
Pictures of all the above are here.
We ate dinner at the place next door to our motel. It was called the Gateway Restaurant and Lodge. The food and view were good. The view of the (maybe legal but rather attractive) girl who worked the front of the place was very good. Must have been the skin-tight jeans and top she wore. :-)
During dinner, we were able to watch the ducks and a peacock play in the river and eat the bread that folks tossed down to them.. I had never really watched a peacock before. I've decided that it's quite an odd bird indeed.
The day ended with Mom and Dad watching The Sixth Sense in the motel room while I caught up on writing, pictures, and random other crap.
Slept in. Then got up and readied for the longish drive to the Sequoia National Park area. The trip out was rather uneventful. We found our way to the Buckeye Lodge (our motel) in Three Rivers with little difficulty and were greeted by a rather small room that appeared to be the favorite of the local ant population.
There are two really noteworthy (good) things I can say about this place:
- It is situated just feet from a fork of the local river. So we have some nice scenery in our "backyard" as well as the sound of rushing water as we're drifting off to sleep.
- They owners (who, amusingly, are from Bucyrus, Ohio) are font of cats. So there are various cats roaming the grounds. Some of them are rather easily spooked, but some are very friendly to strangers.
After depositing all our stuff in the room and reading some of the local literature, we decided to drive the couple of miles to the park's visitor center and get tickets for a tour of Crystal Cave tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, we arrived as it was closing, so that had to wait until morning.
In an effort to make up for that failure, we headed to the Sequoia Cider Mill for dinner. The place was rather empty. It appeared to be run by and old couple. The wife acted as hostess and waitress while her husband cooked. The meals were very good and very inexpensive. It's a shame that the salad dressing (they had a VERY limited selection) didn't get along well with my lactose intolerance. Several restroom visits resulted.
Returning back to our motel, Mom and Dad watched 3 back-to-back Johnny Carson "best of" videos while I began reading my recently acquired copy of Culture Jam. I'm becoming very fond of this book.
I also spent a bit of time futzing with ways of synchronizing my e-mail on a VERY SLOW dial-up connection. Too bad I thought of a truly excellent way of doing so after leaving my apartment. It required that I do an initial sync and snapshot of the mail folders that I wanted to keep up with. Oh, well. Next time.
Getting back into this whole "vacation" swing of things, Mom, Dad, and I drove down to Monterey and spent about 6 hours at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The good news is that the place was excellent. Lots of great tanks, exhibits, and so on. The bad news is that we didn't have time to do much else, and the weather had become a bit hostile by the time we finished up there.
I only took a few pictures there.
On the way home, we decided to stop at the House of Orient (one of my favorite Chinese places) for dinner. As usual, it was excellent. And, as usual, I ordered/ate too much. Leftovers.
Back to work for the first day in a while. I was rather swamped with crap to do. Phone calls, e-mail, and related fun.
On the good side, I learned that my talk proposal for the Open Source Database Summit (in Providence this year!) was accepted. Woohoo!
The story behind that is a bit funny...
While on a conference call, my 2nd phone line rang. I clicked over to it and some woman said, "hi, I'm __________ from OSDN calling to confirm the spelling of your name for an advertisement we're preparing to run in sysadmin magazine.""What?" I asked. And after a bit of discussion, I discovered that they were advertising for the database summit and were putting a list of "featured speakers" in the ad. Then I said, "So, I guess that means my talk was accepted, huh?" "Nobody contacted you to tell you?" she asked?There's a bit more to it than that, but that's the funny bit. :-)
Watched Entrapment on DVD.
Mom, Dad, and I took it easy today. Our only real excursion was up to the newly opened Chabot Space & Science Center in the Oakland area. We did the deluxe tour (exhibits, movie, and planetarium show).
The exhibits were okay. Nothing spectacular. But the planetarium show about Mars was pretty good, and the movie (in the dome theater) about Antarctica was very good.
After arriving back at the apartment, we cooked up some Taco Salad for dinner and Brownies for dessert. Then we watched Keeping the Faith on DVD.
Drove back from Yosemite early so that I could be home in time for my new kitchen table and chairs to be delivered. We appeared to have some time to spare, so we stopped at Yahoo! to pick up a few packages that had been delivered to my cube while we were in Yosemite.
Then we stopped off for some Korean food as a late lunch. I liked it. Mom and Dad weren't as fond of it as I was.
The furniture delivery people arrived just as we did. The table and chairs are excellent. Having actual furniture in my dining area, however, will take some getting used to.
Watched American Beauty on DVD while we all pigged out on popcorn.
Awoke early so that we'd be ready for our guided driving tour of Yosemite. For many hours, we rode around on a little bus with a guide who took us to the various scenic spots. Our guide was great, the scenery was great (lots of pictures), and the weather was great.
I could go on and on about all the stuff we saw, but we pretty much saw everything there was to see (within reason). It was a good day.
This was our first full day in the Yosemite area. We began with a 1-hour ride on the old Narrow Gauge Railroad. Pictures are here. It was a fairly leisurely ride that allowed us to get a good taste of the forest that is Yosemite National Park.
We then got into the van and headed into the park for a lot of driving... And I mean A LOT of driving. Starting from the south entrance to the park, we drove down to the Yosemite Valley floor and then on toward Tioga Pass. The trip took many hours and brought us up to elevations as high as 9,000 feet.
Took lots of Yosemite pictures along the drive.
Along the way we saw many good sights, I walked in the Yosemite Creek and a lake, and Dad managed to slip and somewhat fall into the creek. Heh. :-)
We eventually reached Tioga Pass at the eastern edge of the park and drove on to Mono Lake, which is a really large salty lake--not as salty as the Great Salt Lake, but close. Oh, and Mono Lake is nearly in Nevada. So you could say that I've crossed California by car.
After playing by the lake, we stopped for dinner at the Mono Inn Restaurant. We initially thought it was going to be a hole-in-the-wall type place and figured we should just suck it up and eat there since there was literally nothing better in the area. Upon entering the restaurant, however we found it to be quite a nice place which specialized in Mexican and southwestern cooking.
Our meals were very good and our table afforded us an excellent view of Mono Lake as the Sun was setting.
Following dinner we headed back (West) into the park, knowing that we wouldn't be back to our motel until well after nightfall. Matters were ultimately complicated by the fact that we overshot the motel by about 12 miles. The sign was rather difficult to spot (at least when heading south).
Drove (with my parents) from the Bay Area to Yosemite National Park (just south of it) today. We didn't get up particularly early. Left my place around 11am and got here about 4pm. The trip was a bit longer than I expected. But that's mostly because I didn't quite factor in the extra driving we had to do to get to the south entrance. Damned mountains kept getting in the way.
The driving got a bit twisty for a while and it gave me a bit of a headache. But that passed quickly after we made it to our hotel. We're staying at the Narrow Gauge Inn, which is just south of the South Gate to the park itself.
Along the way, I snapped a few pictures of the local landscape. I also got some of our view from the room we're staying in, as well as the balcony/deck which is out back. If you don't have a chance to see the pics, let's just say that our "back yard" is a national park with lots of trees and mountains.
Before I sat down to write this, I was trying to decide what the most impressive thing I saw all day has been. Then I remembered that the sky was likely very clear. And we're a few thousand feet above sea level. And there's not a lot of ambient lighting (no big cities nearby--and the mountains would likely obscure the light pollution anyway).
So Mom and I ventured outside.
Guess what? We were greeted with a sky FULL OF STARS. In the course of just a few minutes, I managed to spot three shooting stars. Mom saw a fourth one (that I didn't see). The view was the most impressive that I've seen since the Prout Spring Break Trip in 1996 when we lived in the mountains of rural Tennessee for a week. Of course, we had the added bonus of a comet in the sky during that trip.
Most of the drive out here was really hot (outside the van). Once we got near the park are it cooled off a fair amount. The gain in altitude helped. Once the sun went down, it was downright comfortable.
The humidity here is VERY LOW. So every time we talk about hot temperatures (over 100 in the lover elevations), we joke "Don't worry! It's a dry heat..."
Mom and Dad arrived today. We ran random errands and really didn't do too much. We did have an early dinner at Chef Liu's in Mountain View.
The word of the day is rejiggered. Please use it in a sentence at least once tomorrow.
Bought a kitchen table and chairs today. Should be delivered this week. That's the short version.
"The long version?" you ask. Sears can bite me.
Here's what happened. I woke up and decided that I should finally invest in a decent kitchen table and chairs. So I wandered to the nearby mall where there is a Sears Home Life store. I remembered seeing a nice set there when I was hunting for a new couch and recliners a few weeks back. I wanted to buy them.
I arrived to find that the set I wanted wasn't there--or at least wasn't located in the same place as before. I wandered around the store to see what else they had and found that the set I wanted was there, just in a different place. It was a 42 inch round table with 4 chairs. The table was about $400 and the chairs were about $75 each.
The info for the table mentioned that it was available in multiple finishes, so I attempted to track down a sales person who could show them to me. I found one, but she couldn't show them to me. She ended up asking someone else after flipping thru a few books. It turns out that the original finish was probably the one closest to what I wanted anyway, so I decided to go with that.
I asked about delivery dates, hoping that I could have the table & chairs in a week or so. I was only off by a factor of 6 or 8. Grr.
This sales person mentioned that I was lucky that the 10% off sale was going on for one more day. "Cool," I thought. "I'll save about $70 on this." Then she mentioned that all I had to do was put it on my Sears credit card. I told her that I didn't have one. She said that I could apply for one on the spot, get "instant credit" (what an American invention), and then use the discount.
I told her that it was stupid to get a new credit card just to save on a one-time purchase. She tried to explain the benefits of the Sears Card, but they were mostly lost on me. Then she passed me off to some other sales droid to actually take may order and work out the delivery stuff so that she could go have lunch. Heaven forbid! A potential sale might disrupt her lunch plans...
After waiting a few minutes for the sales wennie to finish up with the customers that I was in line behind, I came to the realization that if Sears essentially wants me to pay 10% more for their stuff just because I'm using the credit card of my choice, well... they can GO FUCK THEMSELVES.
So I walked out on them after they thought they'd already made the sale, and went over to Town Square Furnishings and found a table and chairs that was:
- cheaper (by $200)
- available for delivery in a matter of days
- much nicer looking
- more solidly constructed
I ordered that table and set of chairs and went home happy about the fact that I got what I wanted, but pissed at Sears for what they wanted me to do.
Cats appear not to completely understand cause-effect relationships. It's rather strange, 'cause they're selective about their understanding...
Should be having dinner at The Fish Market with Adam in about an hour or so. Yum.
Went and saw Startup.com in Palo Alto with Ray, Mark, James, and Jorn. Good movie. We also had some good eats.
Very busy day. Got up early and went to work. Did random things until the 10:30 Finance meeting. Most folks got there late, and that bugs me. Then went to lunch after that. Then I got ready for my presentation.
At around 12:40, after some technicaly difficulties which involved convincing my ThinkPad to display on an external display, I gave my MySQL Server and Application Performance Tuning talk to a group of Yahoo! Engineers. It was mostly just a pratice run for the Open Source Convention in July. I really had no idea how long the talk would go.
Things went pretty well. I then was late for a conference call with a feed provider that took a while to understand what we really need from them. But I think they finally get it.
I think my cats are on Crack.
Dinner with Larry went very well. He's an interesting guy and alwyas has something to talk about. He even had a great Bil Gates story! :-)
Yeay! I got my wireless network working, thanks mostly to the fact that I figured out that I had a troublesome ethernet cable and the fact that I went out and bought a D-Link DWL-650 card. It plays pretty nicely with Linux.
The weather today was amazing. It was even nice in San Francisco, Oakland, and points in between here and there. (I took a longer than expected drive earlier today.)
I keep wanting to eat. Several folks in the neighborhood have been cooking up stuff that smells really, really good. It all smells beyond my cooking ability, but my stomach doesn't know that. :-(
Oh, and rumor has it that I'll be eating dinner with Larry Wall on Monday night. That should be fun.
I attempted to telcomute this morning, but the coporate network was being ultra flakey. So I went into town (East Greenwich, I think) and had lunch at place called Julia's. It was a great lunch (soup and sandwitch). Both were very large, very filling, and very good.
Looked at flowers. Went to boring place. Went to Jamestown and had really good food at a deli. Saw a fort. Went to Newport.
Today most of us headed to Mystic, Connecticut to see the Mystic Aquarium and whatever else Mysic had to offer. The weather was still pretty good, but this was sure to be the last day of it. Temperatures were falling, but the sky was relatively clear.
We spent a few hours at the aquarium looking at the various sea life (including whales and penguins) before we went in search of lunch. It was already past mid-day (around 2pm), so we thought we should eat light, since we had plans to meet up with others around 5pm and have dinner before Janet's bother and sister hopped on a plane for Ohio.
Dinner ended up being pizza (breadsticks for me). We watched a lot of "Whose Line" on TV. I was rather amused, since it's one of my favorite shows anymore.
The day ended uneventfully. I was able upgrade from the air matress to the pull-out couch bed. Yay!
Got up and mulled about. Ate breakfast and showered. Waited for others to do the same so that we could head to graduation.
Amazingly, I found the University on my first try, so we were easily on-time for things. It was warm and mostly sunny out (something that would prove to be rare on this trip). It wasn't quite as hot in the gym as the last time I was at a URI graduation ceremony. But it was still uncomfortable.
The ceremony was relatively fast compared to last time, and before we knew it we were headed back to the house so folks could change clothes.
Headed up to Sean's dad's house. He and his wife (not Sean's mom) were throwing a New England style Clam Bake for about 24 of us. There was a lot of food (clams, lobsters, veggies, swordfish, sweets, etc), people, and fun. I was very stuffed and very happy. The food was simply incredible.
I decided to leave my digital camera in California, so there were no pictures from the trip--none that I took, at least.
Got up early. Finished packing, showered, and went to work. Arriving at work, I transferred my luggage into Steve's car and he shuttled me to San Jose Airport for my 8am-ish flight to Detroit.
The flight was mostly uneventful. All attempts at sleeping failed, due to the two annoying kids on the plane who simply wouldn't SHUT THE FUCK UP for a few minutes. Thankfully, I had brought a nice set of headphones and my Nomad MP3 player. You can imagine how pissed I was to find out that the batteries were DEAD.
The flight from Detroit to Providence was much more enjoyable. I had a better seat, no screaming kids, and it's a short flight.
I arrived as expected a bit after 7:00pm, was picked up and shuttled across the street from the airport to Legal Seafoods for a good seafood dinner with much of Janet's family.
Went back to their place, unloaded, and became tired. Went to bed not long after (if memory serves).
Up late packing. I leave for my east coast and midwest trip tomorrow. I was going to go back to Ohio in a week for Aaron & Kristin's house warming party. But then I found out that Janet's gradution (PhD) from the University of Rhode Island is the weekend before. So I decided to combine the two trips into a sinle mega-trip after she convinced me that I could telecomute from her house during the week between the two weekends and not burn up lots of vacation days.
Made sense to me. Any excuse to get back to Rhode Island in the spring time is good enough for me. :-)
This past week (known in some circles as "layoff week") has proven to be the longest week I've had in a very, very long time. I'm very glad the weekend is here!
In an effort to banish the various 50 foot long Ethernet cables from my apartment, I ordered one of these toys today.
Sponsor my bike ride! Look here for details.
Nap.
So I took a nap around 7:15. Woke up at 1:15am.
I think I'll watch a movie or three. Maybe part of the Scream trilogy. Or the Wrath of Khan.
Fuck Netscape
Fuck it with a big rubber dick.
I give up. I'm using Konqueror now. I'm going to remove Netscape from my system. It is a bloated piece of shit that dies as soon as I need it not to.
If I really cared, I'd drive over to Middlefield road in Mountain View tonight and leave a nice hot, steamy shit on the lawn of their campus.
What a pain in the ass.
When I don't write here, it either means I've been really busy or really bored/unmotivated. You get to guess which! Oh, the fun.
I hate daylight savings time. It's such an outdated concept. We don't need it at all anymore, but we keep doing it every year. Why not just stop. Really.
On another note, the wrist/arm pain is virtually gone now. I just had to make a few very minor adjustments in how I was working (as pointed out by the ergo specialist at work). Within a day or two, I was nearly back to normal. That's sort of old news... but I thought I'd mention it in case anyone was wondering...
...time goes by...
I should mention that it's nearing 4am, thanks to this stupid DST crap. I've been reading about BGP for a bit now. It's rather interesting stuff.
I should probably go to bed.
Played with exim and virtual hosting today. Also cleaned much of my apartment.
Today was a bit odd. I woke up around 9am, which is rather miraculous considering that I didn't go to bed until 5:00am. Well, the miracle didn't last too long. At 11:00am or so I laid back down and slept until about 3:00pm.
Decided to get lunch from China Stix. Got the Sweet & Sour Chicken. I was not impressed. Scratched it off the list.
The cats have been doing strange things today. They've been easily spooked by stupid stuff. And then they've just decided to act strange... Or maybe I just finally noticed something they've been doing for a while. Or maybe there is a earthquake coming. You know, small animals can always tell.
Reviewed chapter 8 of the book I'm reviewing. Found one typo near the end. It was a perfect chapter up until that point.
Pondering XML for a while...
Maybe people are now mailing me in the hope of getting listed here. I another example today:
From: Vincecarter642@aol.com To: Jeremy@zawodny.com Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2001 19:53:34 EST X-Mailer: AOL 5.0 for Mac sub 28 Subject: No Subject can u hack passwordsI left the X-Mailer header in for a reason. I think it speaks volumes.
Oh, and in case you haven't seen Microsoft's latest plan for World Domination "HailStorm", I suggest you read this.
On another note...
A friend recently sent me something that hit home rather well. So I'm posting it here (despite the awkward grammar).
Have you ever loved someone and they had absolutely no idea whatsoever? Or fell for your best-friend in the entire world, and then sat around and watched him/her fall for someone else?I thinkt that's all for now...Have you ever denied your feelings for someone because your fear of rejection was too hard to handle?
We tell lies when we are afraid--afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing we fear grows stronger.
Have you ever noticed that the worst way to miss someone is when they are right beside you and yet you can never have them--when the moment you can't feel them under your fingertips you miss them?
Have you ever wondered which hurts the most; saying something and wishing you had not, or saying nothing and wishing you had?
I guess the most important things are the hardest to say.
Don't be afraid to tell someone you love them. If you do, they might break your heart--but if you don't, you might break theirs.
Have you ever decided not to become a couple because you were so afraid of losing what you already had with that person?
Your heart decides who it likes and who it doesn't. You can't tell your heart what to do. It does it on its own--when you least suspect it, or even when you don't want it to.
Have you ever wanted to love someone with everything you had, but that other person was too afraid to let you?
Too many of us stay walled because we are too afraid to care too much--for fear that the other person does not care as much or at all.
Life is all about risks and it requires you to jump. Don't be a person who has to look back and wonder what they would have, or could have had.
No one waits forever.
Yeay! Friday.
Spent some quality time after work getting family.zawodny.com mostly setup as far as Apache and MySQL go. Still a fair amount to do yet, though. (At least I can stream my MP3s...)
