Jeremy's Journal (2000)


By Year: 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, All, Recent

Monday - December 25, 2000

Xmas day. I walked outside in a t-shirt and wasn't cold. :-)

Saturday - December 23, 2000

Bought a new mattress today. It will be deivered on Wednesday.

I'm surprised (for some reason) at how much a good mattress costs. I was expecting to pay about half of what I actually paid. :-(

Wednesday - December 20, 2000

Back to normal life again. The trip to Ohio (and my Xmas) is over. I get to take the cats to the vet for a check-up later this week. That should be a treat. Heh.

Sunday - December 10, 2000

You know it's been a bit too long when it takes you 2 hours to clean the bathroom. And my bathroom isn't that big. But damn if it isn't clean now.

Saturday - December 09, 2000

Slept in. Downloaded Mandrake 7.1 ISO image. Went to lunch. Got gas. Went to Yahoo to pick up trip paperwork. Went to airport to get tickets re-issued correctly (which took a long time). Went to Fry's to find tapes and see if they sold rackmount cases--they do, but they suck. Went to grocery store. Went to Jeffrey's to watch U-571.

Sunday - December 03, 2000

Slow day.

Friday - December 01, 2000

Had lunch at the Pines yesterday for Steve and Mike's shared birthday. I have yet another good Chinese place to put on the list now. :-)

Worked from home today. Got A LOT of work done.

Movie night tonight. Then tomorrow night is the big Yahoo! Year End Party (YEP, as we call it) up in San Francisco. Should be a trip.

Monday - November 27, 2000

In my battle with SMTP AUTH in Sendmail 8.11.0, I have prevailed. Yeay.

Sunday - November 26, 2000

I've been on the Dark Side recently. Whic is to say, I've spent a good chunk of the break learning Python. It's not nearly as bad as all the Perl bigots have made it out to be.

Getting SMTP AUTH working in sendmail isn't as easy as one might hope.

Wednesday - November 22, 2000

Chiropracters amaze me. They really do.

Sunday - November 19, 2000

Slept late today... Really late. But that's probably because I was up until 4am. But that's because I slept late yesterday. What a nasty cycle. Heh.

I've managed to shrink the TODO list at work considerably this weekend. Yeay.

Saturday - November 18, 2000

After 11 months, I managed to figure out how to reassemble my weight bench. If only I had considered the possibility that the moves had lots a few of the parts, things would have been much clearer. :-(

Tuesday - November 14, 2000

This has been what you'd call a long day. I was working late from home. At about 2:00am there was a power outage at one of our biggest co-location facilities. Lots of machines went down. I spent time fixing some of what broke.

An hour or so later, the same thing happened. Repeated the above, wasting more time. Finally got to sleep around 4:20am. Two hours later, my pager started going nuts. It turns out that our news feed processing was WAY behind. Hacked on that for a while. Then I discovered that all our Reuters news feeds were dead.

After a couple hours, someone managed to switch our Reuters feeds to a backup machine and things began working again. I finally got to bed around 9:30am and slep until about 12:30pm. Got up and went to work.

What a day.

Oh, and the Reuters feeds died again this evening. Who knows what's next...

Sunday - November 12, 2000

The doctor gave me some Naproxen for my messed up back. It seems to be helping quite a bit.

Saturday - November 11, 2000

Since it's almost that time of year again, I've managed to update the list.

Thursday - November 09, 2000

Work has been ultra busy.

Monday - November 06, 2000

Woke up at 5:45am for reasons unknown. Managed to stay in bed until a more reasonable hour arrived, however.

Played the first night in the Silicon Valley Foosball League this evening. Our team did okay--we'll play better as a team after some practice back at Yahoo.

Started messing wtih my Creative Nomad Jukebox. Damn! This little device is impressive.

Sunday - November 05, 2000

Sent in a small patch to the MySQL manual today.

Lots of code hacking for the upcoming launch at work.

Saturday - November 04, 2000

Went for a drive. A really long one. I was just sitting around on Satuday, preparing to go to Subway for lunch when I thought to myself "Why don't I drive to Big Sur today?" So I did.

After the trip, I watched my newly arrived Keeping the Faith DVD.

Friday - November 03, 2000

A new Macintosh G4 with a 20-inch monitor arrived in my cublicle at work today. Too bad it's not for me. :-(

Thursday - November 02, 2000

TOGO's = Yummy

Played with BitKeeper a small amount.

Ordered a New Toy so that I won't have to mess with sending gigs of MP3s to work and whatnot.

Saturday - October 28, 2000

The most interesting thing happened to me last night (or this morning, I guess...). While I was taking that "nap", I was dreaming and somehow realized it was a dream. I wasn't able to control the dream in any strange way after I realized that, but I decided that I ought to wake up.

Somehow I managed to gradually wake myself up from my dream. It was a very strange experience. I actually felt myself moving out of the dream state and back into the normal waking world. But the odd part is that it was very gradual. It felt as if 15 minutes passed from the time I stated until I actually woke up.

To my knowledge, that's never happened to me before.

Friday - October 27, 2000

Came home from work and took a nap. Woke up around 2am. Whee...

Thursday - October 26, 2000

Me: (yelling out) Whose machine is N-O-T-T-Y ?

My boss: (laugter)

Me: Oh. Nevermind...

Tuesday - October 24, 2000

A co-worked recently got a new car. It's a hybrid made by Toyota. Seems very nice.

The disk space problem at work is now gone--for quite some time. Yeay!

Perhaps when TV advertising it much more targeted, I won't have to watch commercials for Erectile Disfunction.

Sunday - October 22, 2000

Laundry and random stuff.

Spaghetti for dinner. Yum!

Saturday - October 21, 2000

Gave Keith the tour of some of the Bay Area and took lots of pictures along the way.

Friday - October 20, 2000

Thai food for lunch. (The quotes team was interviewing some guy.)

Keith came to Yahoo. We toured around and played a bit of foosball. Then some of the folks from the foosball league came over so we could practice.

Keith and I went to Pepermill for dinner.

Thursday - October 19, 2000

Kick-ass lunch at work today. Then a presentation from one of the founders of Akamai. I was very impressed by what they do.

Then dinner at House of Orient (yum) with Ray. And home to find @Home fucking with their routers. While off-line, I organized the pictures from Janet's wedding as well as those from the Prout trip to Newport on the day after the wedding.

Monday - October 16, 2000

I wore shorts and a T-Shirt today. I love California.

I just realized that I see ads for Disneyland a lot on TV. I used to see Disneyworld ads. It only took me 9 months to notice.

Note to Perl hackers: please don't do this in your code:

local($/) = undef;
open  FOO, "<file.txt" or die "$!";
$d = <FOO>;
close FOO;

Instead, do this. It will make my life much easier.

{
    local($/) = undef;
    open  FOO, "<file.txt" or die "$!";
    $d = <FOO>;
    close FOO;
}

Really. It will. Yours too.

If you don't understand why, you really shouldn't be programming in Perl.

Sunday - October 15, 2000

This is going to be a long one...

Going to Fry's is always an adventure. Take yesterday for example. Here's the story:

I stopped in to pick up a few more X10 controllers. The appliance modules I wanted typically go for about $15 each.

I happen to know exactly where they are at, so I walked in and grabbed them and jumped into the checkout line. All said, I was at the register in less than 3 minutes. However, as I was in line I noticed that none of the price tags on the 3 packages I had agreed. Package #1 had a $15.99 tag on it. Package #2 had a $14.99 tag on the front and a $16.99 tag on the back. Package #3 had a $149.99 tag on it. Yes, someone seemed to think this appliance module was worth a lot of money.

I momentarily considered putting them all back and grabbing 3 that all had the same prices on them. But it seemed so funny to go up with three identical products with four different prices on them. Part of me was curious as to which was correct and part of my just wanted to see their reaction to their own incompetence.

Bad move.

The cashier apparently has to fill out a form whenever there is a mis-priced item. The form requires that she peel off the bad label and stick it on the form. That took about 5 minutes per label. And there were three labels.

Not only does she have to fill out a form and attach a label, she has to Xerox each label and product as well as showing it to the guy in the metal cage where they keep all the expensive stuff (like RAM).

So it took me 5 minutes to drive to Fry's, 3 minutes to walk in and find the stuff I wanted and get to the checkout counter, and 15 minutes to get checked out.

*sigh*

Just for the record, I paid about $15 each for the devices--just like I had expected.

I posted a FreeBSD version of discid.c today. Thanks to nekobe@netforce.com.tw for the patch.

My "fun" with Continental Airlines...

Continental Airlines has decided to mess with me a bit.

Weeks ago, I booked my trip back to Toledo in December. I was to fly from San Francisco to Cleveland and then to Toledo. The return trip was supposed to be Toledo to Detroit to San Francisco. I had picked out times that would allow me to sleep and fly rather than fly during the day and waste useful time. (Leave around midnight, arrive around noon.)

Well, I just happened to check the Yahoo! Travel site today to see if my flight was still on. What I saw was a whole bunch of flights, none of which I had been confirmed for (despite that fact that I already have printed tickets in my possession). And none of them were my original flights. The web site told me to call Yahoo! Travel (which is really run by Travelocity).

So I called.

They looked and told me that Continental Airlines had changed my flight times. And they told me I had to call them and figure out what's going on.

So I called.

It turns out that they changed my SFO to CLE flight. They moved me to a SFO -> IAH (Houston Intercontinental) -> CLE -> TOL flight which got me to Toledo over 3 hours later than my original itinerary.

I explained to them that:

(1) They never notified me of the changes.
(2) I didn't want to get to Toledo that late.
(3) I certainly wouldn't have booked the flight in the first place if I had known that I'd have stops in Houston *and* Cleveland.

After 30 minutes of trying to explain what I thought would be a reasonable compromise, they changed my flight plans to something a bit more sane. I'll once again be flying SFO -> CLE -> TOL. But I'll leave SFO a couple hours earlier and get to TOL a few hours earlier.

I'm glad I checked.

Then they explained that I needed to have my tickets re-issued. But they can't do that over the phone, so I either need to visit a Continental Ticket Counter or contact Travelocity.

So I called Travelocity and waited on hold for about 20 minutes to talk with their Re-issuing Department. After speaking with the re-issuing person to explain the situation, he said "that's strange, let me call Continental. We usually don't have to re-issue in a case like this."

So I waited a bit longer. Then the re-issuing guy said, "yes, you do have to get those tickets re-issued." It turns out that I can either send the tickets back to Travelocity or I can visit a Continental Ticket Counter and do it in person.

Given that I can drive to San Jose Airport in 10-15 minutes, I think I might just do it in person to see that it gets done right.

Saturday - October 14, 2000

The Golden Trout is apparently our state fish.

I found a Pokemon in my Pot Tarts box. I gave it to the cats to use as a toy.

Installed ReiserFS on a 2.2.17 Kernel today. This should be fun. :-)

Saturday - October 07, 2000

Updated code that puts these journal pages on-line. Now there's a lite version which contains only the most recent entries, and there's a complete version which contains all of the entries.

So if you check this often, you'll find that the lite version downloads much faster if you are on a slow network connection.

Spent some quality time with xvidtune trying to figure out the optimal settings for my new monitor. Finally got it right. As it turns out, the strange shape deformation along the left edge of the screen is now gone.

Just for the record, xvidtune gave me this after I tweaked for my Philips Brilliance 201P:

"1600x1200"   220.00   1600 1616 1808 2036   1200 1204 1207 1244 +hsync +vsync

Isn't that special?

Friday - October 06, 2000

Got up very early for work. Got to the Finance Product Review at just after 8:30am to discover it was standing room only. Doh!

Work was productive--if you consider finding lots of brand new bugs and attempting to fix them all a productive use of time. :-)

Came home around 6:30pm. Laid down for a nap. Woke up just before midnight. Had my leftover Sweet & Sour Chicken from The House of Orient for a late dinner.

As it turns out, after watching Blind Date and then Star Trek The Next Generation, there's not a heck of a lot on this early on a Saturday morning. But then I stumbled upon the Discovery Channel. They've always got something interesting on. This time it was one of their specials about storms. Woohoo!

Wednesday - October 04, 2000

Felt a little better. Went to work and found that Josh now has it. So he's home for the day.

Tuesday - October 03, 2000

Stayed home and worked from here. Still sick. No point going to work and spreading it. Apparently Ray caught something, because he is also home today according to e-mail.

When you're feeling sick, it's okay to have Eggo Waffles for dinner, right? I thought so.

For the record, Advil Cold & Sinus is pretty decent stuff.

Monday - October 02, 2000

Woke up to get ready for work and found that I had caught a cold in the middle of the night. Damn. So much for having dodged that one. :-(

Work sucked mainly because I was sick.

Picked up my new 21 inch monitor. Came home.

Database server died hard. Had to help fix that (at 1:30am, of course) after having taken Nyquil and gone to bed for the night. Grr.

Sunday - October 01, 2000

Got up at about 4pm to finish packing (that's 1am Pacific time) and head to Providence airport. While attempting to board my plane back to Cleveland, the ticket person looked at my boarding pass and said "we have a better seat for you..." and proceeded to rip it up and print off another. She then handed me the newly printed boarding pass with a first-class seating assignment on it.

Riding in first-class was most excellent.

Landed in Cleveland, got on next plane and flew to San Francisco. Arrive at about 11:30am Pacific time (but I was on Eastern time, so it was already 2:30pm).

The baggage thingy broke, so it took me 45 minutes to recover the one bag I had checked. Then Ray arrived to drive me back to the Yahoo parking lot where my car was patiently waiting for me.

Came home, unpacked, ate, and took a nap.

Realized that I was luck for not having become sick. A lot of folks at the wedding were sick. And I was rather sleep deprived, so I might have caught whatever they had. But I didn't.

Saturday - September 30, 2000

Post-wedding day.

Got up a bit late and ate. Waited around for others. Managed to organize a trip for breakfast.

Headed to Janet's for a bit before we trekked up to Newport for the day.

Drove up to Newport. Wandered around the cliffs. Looked at the ocean and big houses. Enjoyed the weather and being with friends.

Had dinner. Bad stuffed shrimp.

Back to Hotel. Played cards and went to bed.

Friday - September 29, 2000

Wedding day.

Got up at 8am. I had gone to bed early, so I still managed to get about 10 hours of sleep. Which means I still averaged less than 6 hours for the past two nights.

Showered, drove to the store, ate some breakfast, and went for over an hour walk along the coast to take a bunch of pictures and generally relax. Got about 60 pictures.

After arriving back in my room, I happened to notice Tyler, Steph, Adam, and Chris walking by. They invited me to lunch at the Cost Guard House, so I joined them. Wasn't hungry so I just had an appetizer.

Went back to hotel to put on Tux. Then got pictures taken with other tux-wearing people. Then got on the wedding trolley and rode to the church where we waited around for quite a while.

Wedding happened. No problems. Went well.

Headed to reception. No problems. Went well. Good time apparently had by all. Yeay!

Went back to hotel to change into more comfortable clothes. Went for a late walk with Aaron and Tyler. Went back and slept.

Thursday - September 28, 2000

I figured I'd have about 4 hours to sleep on the flight from San Francisco to Cleveland--until they announced that they'd be showing "Keeping the Faith" in a few minutes. I had wanted to see it since I first saw previews, so I managed to stay awake and do so. Good movie, as I expected.

Managed to sleep about an hour or so. As it turns out, that was the only sleep I was destined to get for the day.

Arrived very early (around 6am) in Cleveland. Then flew on to Rhode Island. Managed to land just ahead of schedule and found my way to Mr. Tux at about 9:05am (that's 6:05am Pacific time for those of you keeping track.

Drove to Janet & Sean's place. Found most people awake but hadn't showered yet. Found that Sean was going to get his Tux at 3pm, so I planned on going with him.

After all the showering was complete, we headed out for lunch. I had Fish & Chips. It was better than I expected.

Picked up Tux. It fit very well and was very comfortable. Yeay!

Checked into my hotel room with just enough time to shower and head to the rehearsal. Rehearsal went well. Rehearsal dinner was very, very good. Some of the best stuffed shrimp I've ever had.

Went to bed and finally slept.

Wednesday - September 27, 2000

Flew to Janet's wedding Rhode Island on a late flight out of San Francisco.

Sunday - September 24, 2000

Installed the 40GB drive on my Abit BP6 motherboard. Fought with Linux for a bit before it was able to realize what I had done. I now have room for finish encoding all of my CDs into MP3 format. Yeay!

My system had been up for about 80 days before the disk adventure.

Friday - September 22, 2000

Bike ride cut very short this morning by invisible rain.

Wednesday - September 20, 2000

It's been a busy few days. Lots of stuff to do.

I started bike riding again and found a good route to ride. I go out for about 45 mintes to an hour each morning before I shower and go to work. Nice quiet neighborhood in Sunnyvale with very nice houses to look at.

Had Kung Pao Chicken for dinner. Yum.

Found myself writing this Perl bit in response to a question:

  print if m/(\d)\1(?!\1)(\d)\2(?!\1)(?!\2)(\d)\3/;

Bonus points to anyone who can describe what it does. :-)

Sunday - September 17, 2000

Was awoken at 1:30am by... guess what...

Neighbors having sex.

That's what I get for sleeping with the window open, I guess. Damn, she can be loud.

Friday - September 15, 2000

Good day. Launched a new feed and interviewed a candidate.

Thursday - September 14, 2000

Database server go boom. :-(

Tuesday - September 12, 2000

Usability tests at work today. Interesting stuff.

Happy package arrived today. And, of course, there was much happiness. I wasn't expecting it until tomorrow. UPS's web site seems to be a bit more behind than it used to be.

Coyote Ugly soundtrack isn't bad. Still not sure why I ordered it. But I was surprised by how good Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes turned out to be. Too bad nobody told me a few years ago.

Furniture/Box moving after work.

Just discovered and evil new feature on Amazon which as forced me to add several new CDs to my list of CDs to get:

Sigh. It's a never-ending battle.

This CD set is at the top of the list now. :-)

Monday - September 11, 2000

Lots of stuff at work. Busy, busy, busy. Big news coming tomorrow night, hopefully. :-)

Thursday - September 07, 2000

Tux measurements today. And a power outage at work.

Wednesday - September 06, 2000

Busy day.

Tuesday - September 05, 2000

You know it's gonna be a late morning when you're still up at 2am and think to yourself, "Hey, I can get a jump-start on today's journal entry..." and you actually do it.

I just relized how long it would have taken to download yesterday's Mandrake 7.1 ISO image if I didn't have a good network connection. I'd still be waiting. That 128kbps ISDN back in Ohio just wouldn't have made it quite this easy.

According to the logs, Google has been crawling my web site a lot in the past week. That makes me happy. Their service continues to amaze me. I want Google stock.

Finished random bits of hacking on my prototyped new home page for WCNet. It's gonna be all high-tech with PHP and a MySQL database and whatnot. Welcome to the late 90's, right?

Anyone know what's up with ProFTPd and passive FTP clients? They don't seem to play well together. Emacs' ange-ftp mode and Perl's Net::FTP (both of which I use a lot stopped working when I upgraded ftpd on one of WCNet's servers to ProFTPd 1.2.0rc2.

Anyone wanna place bets on how "normal" my sleep schedule will be this week?

I didn't think so.

Rumor has it that some strange shit is going down at my old company--the kind of stuff that would make me want to now be there. Luckily I got out early.

I've managed to avoid the oh-it's-addictive-and-I'm-up-too-late Napster for a few days. This is progress. :-)

Wow, I've managed to catch up on a lot of stuff and managed to pick today to jot it all down. Heh.

Monday - September 04, 2000

Got up at about 11:00am after having gone to bed at 3:00am. Then I laid back down again at 11:45 and slept until 2:00pm.

Watched Scream on DVD. Noticed that Amazon.com has the Scream Trilogy on DVD available. Hmm. :-)

Upgraded my ThinkPad 600E to Mandrake Linux 7.1. Managed to get sound working finally! You might want to read about how I did it if you're in a similar boat..

White laundry day.

Sunday - September 03, 2000

Remember to make clean after you reconfigure.

Anyone know why I got this really strange e-mail? I don't.

Nice day. A bit cool, but nice. There wasn't a cloud in the sky (and it was very clear until late evening. And even then it was just a few colouds over the mountain tops of the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range.

Now I remember the other reason I moved out here. :-)

Saturday - September 02, 2000

Napster is a hash mistress. Very harsh. I made it to bed at 3am as a result.

Watched "Very Bad Things" this evening. What a messed up movie.

Friday - September 01, 2000

Got up early. 8:30am.

It was cloudy. Then it rained--real rain this time, not just a heavy mist. Yeay!

Long weekend ahead. That's a good thing.

Thursday - August 31, 2000

Grr.

Grr.

Grr.

Time passed.

Watch the Thomas Crown Affair. Decent movie. I enjoyed it, though it was a bit slow.

Wednesday - August 30, 2000

Still cloudy.

Tuesday - August 29, 2000

Woke up today and found that is was cloudy out. Very cloudy. No blue sky showing at all. Haven't seen that in several months. And the clouds didn't go away. How depressing.

Went to a meeting with CBS Marketwatch up in San Francisco. It rained on the way there. I had forgotten what rain was like.

I just got a coupon flyer from the local dealership where my car goes when it needs service.

One of the coupons is for a "Winterize Special".

I don't get it. Winter out here means that it is in the 50s and 60s instead of the 70s and 80s. And it rains some days.

Monday - August 28, 2000

What is with all these Coke commercials?

Sunday - August 27, 2000

Finally went to bed at 6:30am. It was a productive night... err. Morning.

Woke up around 10am. Ate breakfast. Laid down again (bad idea) at about 11:30 after sorting thru some e-mail. Slept until 3:30pm. Got up, showered, paid bills, walked to grocery store, registered strapiton.org, and did other random stuff.

Mike sent this picture today. Nice.

He sent that in response to Dan who said (roughly):

I am considering officially replacing Winona Ryder as the Actress I would most enjoy waking up with every day with Christina Ricci.

It would appear the Mike agreed.

On a strangely related note, my neighbors just had sex very loudly. That was an interesting distraction for 15 minutes.

Just finished writing up my latest hack.

Saturday - August 26, 2000

Went to bed at 11pm last night. Got up at 9am. Took at nap at 11am woke up at 4pm.

I feel pretty awake now. :-)

Watched The Waterboy. Not exactly the best movie I've seen.

Finally got my new music list on-line. Let me know if you find bugs.

Friday - August 25, 2000

Yum! The grocery store has most excellent apples again.

Genuine work on the book will begin soon.

Watched Entrapment tonight. Good movie.

Thursday - August 24, 2000

So I was sitting on the couch watching a movie after work. Then I notice three fire engines pulling up outside my apartment with their lights on and all. Rather surreal.

And yes, I do like to repeat myself. :-)

Monday - August 21, 2000

Hm.

Sunday - August 20, 2000

Well, Ray and I headed to Circuit City today to pick up my new TV. I love the fact that you can order on-line and go pick it up a little while later.

I figured that I'd have to spend some time watching it today. You know--to make sure it works and all. as you can see it was pretty easy to do. TNT was playing 80s movies this weekend, so I got to watch The Breakfast Club as well as Ferris Beuller's Day Off.

Excellent.

Saturday - August 19, 2000

After 6 months, finally assembled my new TV stand to replace my old TV stand.

Went TV shopping. I think I've settled on the TV I'm going to get--the Pansonic CT-27D30. It's a 27 inch set rather than a 32, but I can live with that. I seems to have all the features I want at a reasonable price.

If Circuit City can deliver one in a reasonable time, I'll probably get it there. When I asked at Fry's, I found that they can't deliver anything until early September. What they hell is up with that!?

Discovered that The GIMP runs really well with 384MB of RAM.

Friday - August 18, 2000

Watched Dogma. Excellent movie.

Thursday - August 10, 2000

Wow. It's Thursday already. I was up until 4am, so I didn't make it to work until about noon. But the next mytop made it out the door.

Sunday - August 06, 2000

Lots of Perl hacking last night. Automating web stuff, mostly.

Was up until 3am this morning. Time just sort of flew on by. So much for my ``get up early and drive down the coast for several hours'' plan, I guess.

Saturday - August 05, 2000

Automation is a wonderful thing. As is watching Wrath of Kahn with a nice bowl of popcorn in your lap. :-)

Lots of hacking yesterday and today on version 0.3 of mytop. Aiming to get 0.3 out to test shortly as a development release. And then 0.4 stable not long after.

Friday - August 04, 2000

Lunch today at Chef Chu's in Los Altos. Damn yummie.

Looks like nice weather. Not too hot, not too cold. Gotta love it.

Thanks to VA Linux for all the goodies they sent!

Project Book should begin shortly.

Tested out a new and very kick ass Y! Finance feature today. Worked very well (just one bug). But it's a secret for now, of course.

Friday - July 28, 2000

I've been busy lately.

Saturday - July 22, 2000

Building a new gcc can take a while, even on a fast machine.

Lots of upgrading tools on Solaris machines today. Trying to keep three machines reasonably in sync with their toolset.

I'm mostly caught up on back-logged e-mail from the time I was in Monterey for the Conference.

Thursday - July 20, 2000

Just got back from a few day at the 4th Annual Perl Conference in Monterey, California. While I'm not in the mood to write an exhaustive summary, here are the highlights:

Wow. There's so much more I could go on about, but I'm a bit tired now and need to catch up on e-mail.

Sunday - July 16, 2000

New keyboards arrived today. These are better than the last batch I tried.

Friday - July 14, 2000

New keyboards arrived today. These are better than the last batch I tried.

Thursday - July 13, 2000

Visited the eye doctor today. She was very nice.

I'm getting new glasses. It's been 4 years since my last pair, so I'm overdue.

Got pictures of my eye taken today. Damn that flash was bright. Really really bright.

Having decent vision insurance in a Good Thing. Saved me about $500.

Exodus Networks kicks ass.

Wednesday - July 12, 2000

Pager went off at 5:45am. Yuck.

Fixed major bugs at work today. And had some good foosball as well. :-)

Tuesday - July 11, 2000

Released mytop to the MySQL community yesterday.

Came home at 7pm. Slept. Got up at 10pm. Ate. Back to bed not long after.

Saturday - July 08, 2000

Interviews at work today. I think there were about 80 people in total to be interviewed. I got to quiz people on MySQL and Oracle.

6 hours of hacking on a project I've been trying to complete at work for about a month. I just needed the uninterrupted time to think about it and work things out.

Went to a late dinner last night with a German, two Hungarians, and one other American. Good food and beer. We ate at Tied House in Mountain View.

Friday - July 07, 2000

Woken up by pager this morning. That's rarely a good sign.

Wednesday - July 05, 2000

Replacing your firewall is never fun. But at least I know my cable modem connection isn't the problem.

On that note, when compiling a new Linux kernel, it's not sufficent to tell the config program that you'd like to see the list of 3Com cards--you actually have to pick one of them, too. Sigh. :-(

Sunday - July 02, 2000

Scott and Kacky made it here yesterday. They slightly underestimated their driving time, though, so they arrived a couple hours late.

Cable modem service still sucks ass.

Saturday - July 01, 2000

AT&T @Home can't seem to keep their network up today or yesterday. Morons.

Thursday - June 29, 2000

Mom visited the hospital yesterday.

Tuesday - June 27, 2000

I went to work on Monday. Mom & Dad stayed at the apartment. They even did some cleaning. Thanks, guys! :-)

Today we ventured to the Napa Valley area. And, of course, took a few pictures along the way.

Wednesday we're supposed to be off to Santa Cruz and Monterey.

Sunday - June 25, 2000

Lots of pictures from today's trip: Hearst Castle, then Big Sur Coast, and finally Pebble Beach.

Saturday - June 24, 2000

Visited the Winchester Mystery House. Pictures are here and here.

Friday - June 23, 2000

Hit the coast north of SF today. Pictures are here.

Thursday - June 22, 2000

Parents went and toured San Francisco today while I went to work. Got an average amount of stuff done, but I did manage to win a fair amount in foosball.

Tomorrow we're goona hit the coast nort of San Francisco for several hours.

Wednesday - June 21, 2000

Parents arrived from Ohio yesterday.

We leave home and drove up 101 into San Francisco, hopped on 280 south and then down Highway-1. Stopped and took several pictures along the way.

Then we visited the Tech Museum. Then we headed to Birk's for dinner. Yum.

Thursday - June 15, 2000

Much cooler today. Back to normal.

Looks like plans for the trip to Great America on Saturday are coming together.

Did more work from home last night than I did at work today. Spent too much time doing things which will enable me to do work later.

T minus 4 days until my first visitors (Mom & Dad) arrive.

Wednesday - June 14, 2000

This is disturbing. It's 2:10am and it's still 75 degrees outside. Grr.

It hit 109 in San Jose today. That's an all-time record. Damn.

Tuesday - June 13, 2000

It was hot today. Very hot. But the humidity was fairly low.

My oscillating fan is a piece of shit. It no longer oscillates.

Infatuation is a wonderful thing.

Monday - June 12, 2000

According to the forecasts, it's gonna be HOT for the next couple of days.

In related weather news, I just discovered a cool new satelite view of the area here. (It only works during daylight hours, of course.)

Sunday - June 11, 2000

More sane sleeping pattern today. Only one nap--in the evening.

Went out and bought stuff to make it more comfortable for the out-of-town visitors I'll be having in a week or so. I got an inflatable mattress, pillows, and some more towels. Now I just need to wash all that stuff.

Speaking of washing... The kitchen floor needing washing. So I washed it.

Just for the record, I lost my Master Of Orion game yesterday. Guess I should re-read the manual.

Saturday - June 10, 2000

Woke up at 7am. Not sure why. It just didn't seem right, so I went to the bathroom and then back to bed. Got up again at 11:00am. That felt right.

Walked to the grocery store today. Hungry. Bad idea. It seems I'll never learn.

Took a nap from 1:00pm to 4:30pm. I guess I'm going pretty well in the sleep department this weekend.

Loaded Master of Orion II on my Windoze box. That should help to ensure that the rest of the weekend goes quickly.

Thursday - June 08, 2000

It was cloudy and chilly again today. But is was supposed to clear up later in the day. So I didn't think much of biking to work--until it rained on me a mile from the office. Luckily it was a light mist, really. And hell, I've ridden 25 miles in the rain before.

Good day otherwise. My foosball winning streak against Josh continues. Must play other people now that it seems we've doubled the number of players in our building.

Wednesday - June 07, 2000

Quote of the Day:

I wonder how that new asshole is working out for Microsoft...

Brandt Fundak, upon having read the judge's punishment.

Laundry day. And it's cloudy.

Tuesday - June 06, 2000

Got the cats a new toy last night. Here is a small picture and a bigger one. I was worried that they wouldn't like it. Turns out that they love it. Woohoo!

Monday - June 05, 2000

Got my hands on a few FreeBSD 4.0 boxes. I was able to reproduce the MySQL crash on it using GCC 2.95.2. Time to start making core files, I guess. Grr.

The so-called fun continues. I sure will be happy once this is solved.

My foosball game was rather on today. That's a good thing.

Threw out the cats' old scratching post yesterday. They had pretty much scratched the shit out of it. Got them a nice big scratch post on steroids thing today that they can climb all over and have fun with. For what I paid, they better like it.

You know something's up when Richard Stallman sends you personal e-mail.

Sunday - June 04, 2000

More hacking on the MySQL/FreeBSD 3.4 bug. Way too much as a matter of fact. I'm pretty burnt out at this point. :-( I've been going at this for over 5 days or so.

Finally put together and filed a bug report for the MySQL folks to digest. Hopefully they'll find something, because this is really starting to bother me. And I don't want to think that I've wasted all this time for nothing.

Grrrrr.

Oh. It's my birthday today.

Started to assemble a page for people who come to visit me and want stuff to do.

Saturday - June 03, 2000

Tracking down what first looked like a MySQL bug but now appears to be a FreeBSD problem. And it's taking forver because it involves a table with over 23 million records, and loading and indexing that data is a lot of work for most CPUs to do.

The folks at CBS Marketwatch have finally realized that they've been screwing up their data feed to Yahoo! Finance on the weekends, and that we have nothing to do with the problems. Small victory, I suppose.

Friday - June 02, 2000

The network died for a while at work. So Ray and I played frisbee.

Monday - May 29, 2000

I just found another reason that New Zealand is a cool country. In a year or two (or three) I'll be making a trip there.

The SoundBlaster Live card kicks ass.

Pager woke me up again. Apparently one of the boxes that never dies had died (or was shut down) today. Grr. Oh, it was a power outage. I guess the battery back-ups were dead then, too. Hmm...

Perfection... I walked to the grocery store around 11:00am today. There was not a cloud in the sky (the view of the mountains was quite clear), it was 64 degrees with 30% humidity, and there was a light sea breeze. Damn. This is a nice holiday. :-)

Trivia time. Anyone care to guess why the code name for My Yahoo! was Idaho?

I was banned from napster by Metallica. Time to create a new account, I guess.

Sunday - May 28, 2000

Yesterday I had a bright idea. I figured that with all the spare computer parts I now had (motherboard, CPU, floppy, network card, hard drive, etc.) I could build a Windoze box to run Turbo Tax, play Games like Master of Orion (in my copious spare time), and see all the multimedia stuff I can't [yet] in Linux.

So I went to Fry's to get some parts. I needed:

  1. An ATX Case
  2. A PCI Sound Card
  3. An AGP Video Card
  4. RAM (I want to keep all 384MB in my main Linux box)

That's about $300 worth of stuff, right? Yeah, that's what I thought, too. But you know how going to the grocery store on an empty stomach is a bad idea most of the time? Apparently something similar was going on with me...

Here's what I ended up buying, with approximate prices. (Oh, this list actually includes all three trips I made to Fry's this weekend. Don't ask. Just assume I'm a moron when it comes go getting all the right cables.

  1. Antech KS-399 Mini Tower Case ($70)
  2. A spindle of 50 CD-Rs ($30)
  3. 3Dfx Voodoo 3 3000 16MB AGP Card ($150)
  4. Logitech PS/2 3-Button Mouse ($15)
  5. 128MB PC100 DIMM ($100)
  6. Belkin Mouse Pad with built-in wrist rest ($10)
  7. 15 Foot Cat-5 Ethernet Cable ($15)
  8. SoundBlaster Live ($100)
  9. Belkin OmniCube Intelligent Monitor/Keyboard/Mouse Switch ($120)
  10. Lots of Cables for the Monitor/Keyboard/Mouse Switch ($30)
  11. One Pack of Starburst Candy ($1)

You do the math. :-(

Let's just say that I won't be buying a GPS any time soon. And I resisted the tempation to buy a joystick.

Anyway, that's just the beginning of the story.

To make a very long story short, I spent most of Saturday assembling the new box. It was to be called billg.zawodny.com in honor of the crappy ass excuse for an operating system I'll be installing on it.

I spent a very, very, very, very long time trying to get the damned thing to power on once I had all the parts in it. I couldn't get it to do anything. Not a damned thing. I checked the manuals for the board, checked the cables, replaced a few cables. Nothing. I gave up and went to bed, figuring that the answer might come to be in the middle of the night (instead of the odd dreams I've been having lately).

Well, I woke up this morning with an idea: This is an ATX case. The power is controlled entirely by the board. There's probably a short somewhere. I just need to remove the board from the case and try to run it that way first. So I showered and attacked the machine with screwdriver in hand and pulled the board out.

It worked. I held it out above the case and hit the power button. It came to life. Yeay!

So I put everything back in place and installed the network card just so I wouldn't have to mess with any more cards. Once everything was installed, it was time to install the OS.

My God. I had never tried to install Windows 98 before. And what a tiresome experience it was. It took hours. Yes, hours. I'm used to Mandrake Linux installs that are usually done in 20 minutes and only require a single reboot. I was sort of shocked and sort of reassured at the same time.

Whatever you do, don't install Windows 98 on your over-clocked Celeron. Bring the clock back down for the install and bump it back up later. It will save you hours of hassle. :-(

The good news after a few more hours of futzing and installing the Network, Sound, and Video drivers is that I have a working system. I can play games, use Turbo Tax (after I actually get a copy), stream cool multi-media stuff, and more--all on the world's worst operating system.

I did, of course, leave enough space on the hard drive in an un-allocated partition to dual-boot a real operating system. Perhaps I'll finally try out BeOS.

Thursday - May 25, 2000

Finally installed the Abit BP6 board at home. I'm now running dual celerons with 384MB of RAM. :-) Snappy.

Wednesday - May 24, 2000

Got my new keyboard at work today. It will take some getting used to.

Master/Slave replication in MySQL kicks major ass.

Monday - May 22, 2000

The bike ride to work (which is 4.5 miles--I recently learned) was rather warm this morning. It was another hot day. Not as hot as the weekend, but still rather warm.

Not a lot of interest to say.

Oh. I love it when banks to don't to themselves. The bank that has my car loan called me to find out if I plan on paying them. The funny part is that I already talked to someone about it a week ago. It was their fault that the automatic payments stopped in the first place. Duh.

I got e-mail from Poof today.

There may be a Yahoo Finance outing tomorrow. We're gonna go and see Road Trip. :-)

Sunday - May 21, 2000

According to the Weather Channel it is 91 degrees at 2:00pm. Damn. I think I'll postpone today's bike ride until an hour or two before sunset. Luckily the humidity is only 32% :-)

Saw Road Trip early this afernoon. What a funny movie! It's almost on par with American Pie. I laughed my ass off.

Wow. At 4:30pm it's 95 degrees outside. But the Heat Index is 94. And the humidity is down to 28%.

Went on roughly a 7 mile bike ride. It was a bit hot. I started off going west, directly into the sun for the first few miles. Then headed north. Then reversed course to head south, then east. The west part is always a bit harder because it's on a slight incline, the sun is in my face, and there's a head-wind. Despite the fact that it slowed me down, the wind was fine with me today. It helped to keep me a bit cooler. The second half of the ride went quickly, with the wind to my back much of the way.

Saturday - May 20, 2000

Warm day today. Made it into the 80s again.

Went and saw Frequency this afternoon. Enjoyable movie. And I didn't even know that Yahoo! would be mentioned several times in the move. :-)

Left for a 50 minute bike ride at 5:30pm. It was still about 80 degrees outside. Even now, at 8:00pm, it's 72.

At 11:45pm, I realize that there was apparently too much fiber in my diet today. :-(

Friday - May 19, 2000

I discovered that it only takes me 10 minutes longer to ride my bike to work than to drive. Cool.

This is Journal Entry #100. Woohoo!

More free beer at work today. How long can this continue?

After some late night hacking last night and some work today, the Canadian Newswire feed is almost ready.

Played foosball against a couple of guys from South America today. Won--barely.

Thursday - May 18, 2000

Went to Ergonomics Class today. Looks like I'll be getting a new keyboard. Finally found one that has what I want and doesn't have what I don't want (for the most part). Yeay. This is the keyboard.

The weather has turned very nice again. It'll be up in the 80s for several days according to the Weather Channel at least. I think I'll be riding my bike to work tomorrow. :-)

Wednesday - May 17, 2000

I'm headhunting. Know C/C++ and/or Perl really well? Maybe a bit of RDBMS theory? Wanna hack in a Unix environment at one the coolest companies in the world? Have a friend who might be interested? Let me know. Yahoo! has several openings.

Tuesday - May 16, 2000

Managed to wake up early because the cats were excited by birds.

Looks like Morningstar will launch on Thursday. The content is shaping up nicely now that things are coming down to the last minute.

Josh and I walked over to the other building (3420) to play some foosball. Neither of us had played since Thursday of last week. I had that traveling, and the cafeteria has been booked this week. I managed to win 4 of our 5 games today. :-)

I finished reading my book this evening. Now the pile is one shorted than it used to be. Unless you count the one that I got as a gift for being in the wedding. So I guess I really sort of broke even.

Monday - May 15, 2000

Free beer at work today. Yeay for international producers! :-)

No foosball today because the cafeteria is being used for meetings all day by the international producers. Boo for international producers. :-(

Managed to back-fill the journal since I've been gone for a few days.

Sunday - May 14, 2000

Got up semi-early to drive to my sister & brother-in-law's place east of Cleveland. It was cold. More cold than I expected. I hadn't brought many warm clothes. :-(

Arrived after about an hour and got the quick tour of their apartment and looked at all the vacation pictures. Parents arrived, we talked, ate lunch, picked on each other, and then I headed to Columbus to catch my return flight(s) to San Jose.

Once on the plane in Columbus I noticed a manager from my previous job getting on the plane. We ended up sitting next to each other and chatting most of the way to Houston.

In Houston I got my traditional peanut-butter cookie and hopped on the plane to San Jose only to find that a little child was just a few rows ahead of me. A noisy little child. Grr.

Luckily the kid slept most of the way back and I had some quiet time to read the book I had brought along and think about how much the flight attendant reminded me of a character from the Friends TV show (Susan's lesbian lover).

Came home, played with the cats, unpacked, and slept.

Saturday - May 13, 2000

Wedding Day

Slept in for a change. Got up around 10:30am. Headed over to the reception hall to meet Joe and get the sound equipment setup and checked out.

Made it back to the hotel just in time to wait for others of the Prout Collective to arrive so that we could go to Applebees for lunch. Scott ordered the Fish & Chips just to spite Janet, I think.

Got dressed in tux and headed to church.

The ceremony was brief, which is good since I was standing during the whole thing.

The food at the reception was very good, as was the music, I'm told. (I was the DJ for the reception.)

After the reception, most of us headed back to the hotel to wait for the rest of The Collective. We waiting a long time. Then, well after midnight, we all headed to Denny's for one of stranger dining experiences of my life.

At Denny's we experienced the strange green glow, the alien prostitute, evil clowns, and discovered how to make your food arrive at the table by willing it (and convincing Morris to believe what he says).

In retrospect, it wasn't as odd as it seemed at the time, but we were at Denny's at 1:30am and we were all rather tired, I think.

Friday - May 12, 2000

Managed to get up around 7:45am so that I could visit AAA and hack on one of Dad's computers. The AAA visit went well, the computer hacking not as well. Apparently my Partition Magic 4.0 CD is toast. And I never thought to bring my version 3.0 CD with me.

Headed down to Findlay to have lunch with the old gang from my previous job. Lunch was good as was catching up with people. It was Brenda's 40th birthday. If only I had known in advance.

Drove by the old house and headed to Cleveland to pick up my tux and find the hotel and church for the wedding rehearsal. Everything was pretty easy to find given the maps I had with me. Of course, I had two AAA maps, the maps from the invitation, and a dose of Yahoo Maps to boot.

Rehearsal was uneventful. The dinner was most excellent.

The bachelor party later that night was entertaining. We went to a dueling piano bar in the flats. Mike got to go up on stage twice. Once all of the single women in the bar were singing You've Lost That Loving Feeling to him. Plus he had many good drinks. I hope he enjoyed himself.

Thursday - May 11, 2000

Got up really early (5:00am) after staying up too late. But I was trying to get myself on east coast time for the flight back anyway. Got some last minute music stuff done before heading to work.

Short work day. Drove to the airport around noonish to catch my flight(s) back to Ohio. Surprisingly, both flights arrived at their destinations at least 15 minutes early. And on my flight from San Jose to Houston, I witnessed something I had never seen before. They served Cheeseburgers as the meal.

Arrived in Columbus and drove to Toledo so that I could spend the night at my parents' house. Stayed up until 2:00am talking to Mom since I really wasn't tired quite yet.

Wednesday - May 10, 2000

Won lots of foosball today. I have two new shots, and one of them is rather deadly. :-)

Got a haircut today. And some gas.

Getting ready for the trip to Ohio for Mike & Anne's wedding this weekend.

Tuesday - May 09, 2000

If you ever eat in the Yahoo! Cafeteria on Pasta Day, beware of the mystery red sauce. Really.

I thought the cats had taken my RAM. Luckily I had mis-placed it.

Monday - May 08, 2000

Bike ride wiped me out. Lots of rain and mud. And it wasn't particularly warm. But I made it. And my legs and ass are now sore.

Managed to take a 12.5 hour nap on Sunday after I got back. Heh.

Friday - May 05, 2000

Nothing out of the ordinary or noteworthy today. I went to a physical Barnes & Noble store today. That's dangerous. Luckily, I only spent about $50 there. I got off easy.

Tomorrow morning (early) I leave to head to Napa. On Saturday we're doing a picnic, winery tour, and pool party/bbq. Then on Sunday we hop on our bikes and wander the 25 mile route.

Thursday - May 04, 2000

Today sort of flew by. My cable modem servied died for a while. Apparently the whoe SF Bay area was down.

Signed up for Yahoo BillPay. No more writting checks.

Lunch on the green was good. There were really big subs. Like 15 feet long. I didn't win a shirt, nor did Josh or Steve. But Ray did. He's good at getting free stuff. Perhaps too good.

Old documents occasionaly come back to life. It's always interesting to see how.

Wednesday - May 03, 2000

Party of Five is officially over. It had a good run.

The weekend weather is looking good for the big bike ride. It looks ilke Saturday will be a winery tour and pool party. And Sunday will be sore legs and ass day after the ride is over.

Made my first payment with X.com today. I knew there was a good reason I opened an account with them a while back.

Tomorrow is "Lunch on the Green" at Yahoo. That means we eat lunch on the lawn and get non-cafeteria food. I think they're having Togo's do the food. For those of you who don't have a Togo's near you, think Subway but a with a slightly different twist.

That reminds me. There is a Quizno's out here. I need to go there. I like the one in Littleton, Colorado.

Uh oh. I don't look forward to trying to figure out why one of my Linux boxes decided to start saying SCSI transport error: timeout waiting to write packet while doing digital audio extraction. Something very strange is afoot.

Tuesday - May 02, 2000

Got up early. At work by 9:00am.

Installing the UltraPlex drive tonight.

The BP6 board arrived. Yeay!

Monday - May 01, 2000

Plane got in late. Long story. Perhaps I'll write it up. Need to sleep first.

Saturday - April 29, 2000

April's wedding is today.

Adjusted quickly to Ohio time.

Tuesday - April 25, 2000

Got up at 7:00am. Really.

On my bike at 7:30am to ride before work. Rode about 6 miles. Felt great. Felt great all day. I'm planning to do this every day--weather permitting. But given what I know about the climate here, I shouldn't have much trouble until sometime in November or so.

Lots to do with my weekends being booked. This weekend is April's wedding (my sister). Next weekend is the Napa Tour de Cure, and the following weekend is Mike & Anne's wedding. That's two round-trip flights to Ohio in two weeks.

The goon-squad.org project has begun.

They had Apple Crisp at lunch today. I was all over that.

I'm hoping to see a hacked I-Opener this weekend.

Sunday - April 23, 2000

Sleep schedule is majorly messed up at this point. Went to bed on Saturday morning at 3:30am. Got up at 9:00am. Napped from 4:00pm until about 7:00pm. Whatever.

I love LinkSys. All of my 100Mbps Ethernet Cards (PCI and PCMCIA) are now LinkSys cards. They are inexpensive, fast, and they list Linux right on the box as a support OS. Excellent.

Lesson of the Day (from Friday): hdparm -c3 /dev/hdb is good. hdparm -c3d1 /dev/hdb is not. In fact, it's rather bad.

Oh, I'm sick of my MP3 ripping taking so long. So I ordered the fastest DAE capable drive that I know of, the UltraPlex 40 Max.

Two bike rides today. Nice weather.

Finally got around to figuring out how to convert MP3 files to WAV files and burn them on to CD. Damn, that was easy. Now I can listen to my favorite MP3s in my car via CD. One of these days I'm sure I'll get a car MP3 player, but it's just not on my list of things to do anytime soon.

Friday - April 21, 2000

Rather uneventful day, with the markets closed and all.

Plugged in the new 10/100 ethernet hub. Now I need to put the new cards in all the boxes.

Thursday - April 20, 2000

Yesterday I visited the future site of Yahoo's campus. Not too much farther from home than the current buildings are.

Went to California Billiards tonight for a going away party. Lots of Pool, Foosball, and Video Games.

Wednesday - April 19, 2000

I was surprised today. I found that my Emacs Beginner's HOWTO was linked on Daily DeamonNews, RootPrompt.org, and LinuxToday. Wow. Very cool. :-)

Yesterday I attended a 3-hour class about the tax implications of Stock Options (ISO and Non-Qualified) and our Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP). Interesting stuff. A bit confusing. Very contorted. But worth the time.

Tuesday - April 18, 2000

Mozilla M15 is much faster. I'm going to try using it as my default browser for a while. It feels good so far.

Monday - April 17, 2000

I saw the full moon over the mountains.

Sunday - April 16, 2000

gcc is far easier to build and install that it used to be.

Time for a restaurant review: Panda Express. They sent me a coupon in the mail, so I thought I'd try them out. Bad idea. They are just another fast-food Chinese place. The food was bland, portions were small, and it was over-priced. The only good things I can say is that the place was clean and spacious. The little no-name Chinese fast-food place a block from my apartment was far better than Panda Express Rating: 3/10.

The rain continues.

Lesson of the Day: Never fall backwards out of a chair while holding a cat which has claws. The cat will panic.

Heh. I'm listening to We are the World by USA for Africa. That brings back memories.

This is distrubing. You can still get the album from Amazon.com. I figured it would be out of circulation by now. Yikes.

Saturday - April 15, 2000

I'm going to go and see either 28 Days or Keeping the Faith this morning. I'll go and see the other tomorrow.

Saw 28 Days. The movie was okay. Fairly amusing, but a bit of a let-down. Perhaps tomorrow will be better.

After the movie I checked my pager/cell phone to find several messages from a compter. It was crying out for help in its own little way. The simple but unmistakable cry was "can't fork". I knew that meant trouble.

Mailed my taxes.

Nothing like a nice mid-day 4-hour nap.

I'm both amused and impressed. Mike & Anne have a FAQ on-line for their wedding.

And just for the record, a cold front has come through. It's been rather cloudy today. And the temperature has barely broken 60.

Friday - April 14, 2000

Good day. Got some sponsors for the bike ride (see below). Found some folks to room with the night before. Actually, they found me.

I'm still at work. It's late. But I'm on a roll.

Thursday - April 13, 2000

Got up early somehow. Made it to work before 9am. Heh.

Registered to bike 25 miles in the Napa 2000 Tour as part of the Tour de Cure. Should be fun.

PLEASE sponsor me if you'd like to help the American Diabetes Association. You need not give much. I need to raise $50, so every $5 or $10 pledge sure helps. Basically, I'm going to ride 25 miles on May 7th in Napa. So even a $10 pledge is less than 50 cents a mile. Come on. You know you want to!

Contact me if you'd like to donate.

Wednesday - April 12, 2000

Woke up tired today. Stayed tired most of the day. Might have something to do with staying up late the night before watching Office Space. Or not.

Tuesday - April 11, 2000

Awoke to find stuff had broken during the night. I hate it when that happens.

Got my business cards today. They've been ready for a while, I just had to motivate myself to pick 'em up.

Looks like a good time to buy some Yahoo stock.

Got a web-based thingy for letting users forward (or not) their mail done for WCNet.

Monday - April 10, 2000

Heh. I checked this entry in "late" enough that my software tagged it for Monday. Oh, well. I guess I should fix that.

Anyway, I watched Pirates of Silicon Valley over the weekend. What a disappointment.

The movie did motivate me to read the copy of On the Firing Line which has been on my bookshelf for over a year. I'm suddenly interested in Apple culture.

I just disovered that Amazon.com is doing something that is either very, very smart or very, very stupid. Perhaps I'll explain in detail later.

Saturday - April 08, 2000

How I managed to wake up at 9am after having gone to bed at 3:30am is beyond me. But my request-driven MP3 streaming stuff is now working. Woohoo!

After hours of careful research, I have decided that the most twisted, bizzarre, anti-social, and all around messed up individuals in this country are employed by the Internal Revenue Service. They write the tax rules and somehow manage to justify them. And on a closely related note, Capital Gains Taxes suck. Their logic is stupid.

Return to Me is a good movie.

Thursday - April 06, 2000

Woke up. Ate. Showered. Went to work. Worked, ate, played foosball, owrked more. Then home. Then bike ride. The ate. Then watched "Whose line is it anyway" Then work from home while smelling up the room. Not sure what I ate to cause that.

Tomorrow is the Producers vs. Engineers Foosball Challenge, otherwise known as Josh and Jeremy play Dave and Dave while Laura gives us beer.

Wednesday - April 05, 2000

Quarterly earnings party today. Woohoo. Good food. Good earnings. Amusing presentations.

The party was good. We got to hear from the architect about the new Yahoo! campus which is being built near the Bay in Sunnyvale. Very cool place. Many acres. Water. On-site fitness center. Lots more.

I've partly got my groove back in foosball.

The new keyboard pissed me off, so I switched back to the old one. My right wrist/arm no longer hurts.

I tried load-testing MySQL. I broke it. Now I need to figure out how.

And for the record, life got really busy again.

Tuesday - April 04, 2000

Today has gone better than yesterday. Maybe it was the skittles.

I just realized that my two productions are the only two things on the Yahoo! Finance that have *new* graphics on them. They've been on there for a while, too. Cool. :-)

I should probably pull the graphics soon. Or just get my next project done so that I can move them to it.

Sunday - April 02, 2000

I looked intently at the xclock display trying to figure out how it was already noon, when only moments ago I had firm beliefs (reinforced by several other timepieces) that it was only 11:00am. This puzzled me. I pondered where the missing time might have gone while I showered. Was I abducted by aliens? Was I on crack? Was I just confused?

Then it dawned on me. This is the time of year when we perform the brain-dead ritual of adjusting our clocks by an hour. *sigh* And I had hoped to keep a semi-normal sleep schedule for the weekend so that I might return to work normal on Monday. Damn.

On a brighter note, I should have about 100 CDs encoded by the time the weekend is over.

Took a nice bike ride through a very residential area of Sunnyvale.

You know you're a geek when...

You wonder what the min and max temperatures (and rainfall) are like during the year where you live. And not finding any good source for the data in the form you want, you spend a few hours in the late afternoon and write software that will:
  1. Fetch historical data from the Weather Underground
  2. Put the data into a database
  3. Create cool graphs showing a year's worth of hi/low and rainfall data
  4. Let you do this for multiple geographic locations
And, of course, take great pride in being able to do all this without looking at the Perl documentation even once.

It is quite cool.

Saturday - April 01, 2000

Woke up at 7:30am. Whatever. But it was 70 degrees out already. :-)

Never saw the movie last night. There were no parking spaces. What a stupid theater. No, the theater isn't stupid. The morons who built a 20 screen theater with inadequate parking are the problem.

Made the 10:30am showing today. Pretty good movie, but not what I had hoped for. Oh, well.

Checked out the Santa Clara Library today. Has a nice grassy area out back.

Got tired and took a nap around 3:00pm. I knew the whole getting up at 7:30 wasn't for real. While napping, I had a dream that I installed FreeBSD and it was 3 times faster than Linux on my computer. Thanks, Dan.

I need to get cracking on those taxes.

I think there must be some sort of large item pickup day coming soon. Driving around today, I've noticed lots of big stuff sitting out at the curbs.

As usual, the TV Guide web site is slammed. So I decided to just send them a quick e-mail message. I doubt it will do anything. But maybe if I write a script that checks their server every 1/2 and sends that same note...

Friday - March 31, 2000

Incredible weather today. Lunch outside again. I see the beginning of a good tradition...

Victory. I managed to beat the 2nd best foosball player in Yahoo Finance today in a 1-on-1 match. Now the trick is to do it on a semi-regular basis.

Attended a rather pointless meeting late in the day. But there was free beer. We are having a party next week for the 1st quarter earnings report, and it looks as if there'll be some good food and drink there. Plus we get to see a preview of the latest big secret. I'd say more, but it still might be secret. I'm not really sure.

The new PacBell park is open. As if I care.

The forecast for this weekend looks very, very nice. Gonna have to do some biking.

Off to see High Fidelity in about an hour. Early reviews look good.

Thursday - March 30, 2000

Just found out that one of my co-workers is transferring to Singapore for a year or two. Yikes!

The weather was so nice today that we ate lunch outside. I'm gonna have to do that more often.

Some hacking with gnuplot late in the day.

Wednesday - March 29, 2000

The network is all messed up at work thanks for our ISP. That makes getting things done a bit of a challenge.

Tuesday - March 28, 2000

AT&T @Home service sucks. Come to think of it, service sucks from virtually every monopoly which hasn't felt the wrath of severe government regulation, massive consumer outcry, or both.

Napster is addictive. Very addictive.

Nothing like starting the day with stomach pain. Have no idea why.

Monday - March 27, 2000

Woke up at a slightly more sane hour... 10:00am. I consider that an accomplishment, given that I went to sleep at about 4:00am. It got off to a bit of a rough start, though. I was half done showering before I realized that I had planned on shaving before taking a shower. I hate it when that happens.

Lots of trying to figure out if the query optimizer in MySQL is smoking crack or not. The verdict: it appears to be.

Need to let the developers know about my interesting test results soon.

Foosball wasn't so good today.

Mom got the birthday flowers. Yeay!

I keep getting requests from people for copies of the Iron Eagle II soundtrack. Apparently you can't get it anywhere anymore. But I happen to have one. Heh. Some people only want one song or two. It turns out that two of them are fairly popular (and decent).

Sunday - March 26, 2000

Woke up at the crack of noon. I was up till 4am hacking on a web-based password changer for Solaris using HTTP::Daemon and assorted other toys. HTTP::Daemon took longer than it should have to get the hang of, but LWP's POST was there to help me with debugging output which told me my HTTP headers were screwed up. Oh.

Mom's Birthday is tomorrow. I hope she likes the stuff I sent along. I'll have to remember to call tomorrow evening and see. Guess it should go on my calendar, then.

After hours of hair-pulling over the past few weeks, I've finally "solved" a problem which has been bugging me for quite some time. You see, I happen to think that fvwm2 is the greatest balance of bloat vs. performance when it comes to X window managers. I simply love it now that I actually understand how to configure it well. But I noticed a problem recently.

After some amount of time in a given fvwm session, my key bindings and ClickToFocus simply stopped working. I tried everything. I tried switching to other window managers, but none of them seemed to fit me. I tried killing fvwm (but not X) and restarting it, but not dice. And in all this time I've been thinking that the stuff I'm doing is so common that a but like this sure has been squashed already. Eventually I even tried various fvwm snapshots from their CVS tree. Still no luck. Grrr.

Today I decided to do something I should have done long, long ago: browse the mailing list archives... And wouldn't you know it, others had similar problems. The solution was amazingly simple in retrospect. One person on the mailing list put it this way:

Check your Num Lock.

Of course! Num Lock is just another modifier. My key bindings never expected that I'd have the Num Lock on. So now I'm more careful about when I use Num Lock. I may get bored and decided to update the key bindings, but I'm a very happy man right now.

As a side note, I recently discovered the +ai argument to xterm. What a beautiful thing it is.

Possible Field Trip / Short Vacation

Well this doesn't happen every day, but I was just offered free admission and hotel stay to attend the InterWorks 2000 Conference. (I know some of the folks planning it.) I've always wondered what the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas is like in the Springtime.

If that isn't cool enough, I might get a chance to help out a bit (teaching) part of the Program Perl Fast Day-Long Technical Seminar.

Flights from San Jose to Vegas are pretty cheap. And I think I've got enough vacation to do this without crimping on my travel plans later in the year.

Saturday - March 25, 2000

Yeay! My quest to automate the addition of these journal entries is now complete... It now takes minimal effort which means that I'm far more likely to actually do it. It's even easy to go back in time and fill in missing days. (Perl + MySQL = Way Cool)

Most of today was spent playing with gnapster and hacking on my music database code. I sort of amazed myself by getting up before 10:00am today. I had only gone to bed at about 5:15am as a result of gnapster related fun.

I did manage to run a few errands, too. Apparently the local post office is open later than noon on Saturdays. Woohoo! And Circuit City still carries the wrist wrests that I've fallen in love with, so I got one for home use.

Well, rather than go back in time and figure out all the boring details of my life, I'll do two things: (1) summarize what's happened recently, and (2) post more often here. Nightly if possible. Now that it's so easy, that shouldn't be too difficult.

Anyway. The summary, in no particular order:

Okay, that list is a lot shorter than I expected. I guess I'm not remembering too well. Serves me right, I guess.

Friday - March 24, 2000

Yahoo! Commerce Pod (of which Finance is a major part) threw a big Spring Beer Bash. It started at 3:00pm, which seemed odd to me. But it was free beer, food, and fun, so who am I to argue?

Thursday - March 23, 2000

Finance outing to El Torito a local mexican place with really good food. The event was in honor of a member of Yahoo! Finance who is moving to a different group in the company.

Wednesday - March 22, 2000

A lot has happened in the last month. I'll see if I can't summarize soon. I'm working on an automated way of doing these so that I can better keep up.

Thursday - February 24, 2000

Woke up refreshed and ready to start the day. At 2:30am.

Made it work work at 4:30am. You can get a lot done at work between the hours of 4 and 8am, I learned. Wow.

Wednesday - February 23, 2000

Couldn't fall sleep until about 4am.

Woke up for work around 9am anyway.

Went home early (4:30 or so). Went to sleep around 5pm.

Sunday - February 20, 2000

The rain has returned. Oh, well. We had two nice days of sun and warm temps. Now it's just gonna be warm rain. Could be worse.

Friday - February 11, 2000

Went in late.

Attended presentation about the recent attack against Yahoo. Learned a fair amount about how it worked, why, and what we've done to prevent it in the future.

Thursday - February 10, 2000

Stayed at work until about 2am. MySQL rocks--especially on fast hardware.

Wednesday - February 09, 2000

An odd day overall.

Made great strides on a project at work. Should be unveiled soon. Tried Indian food for lunch. Not sure what to make of it, exactly. Can't say that I like and can't say that I don't. Need to try a few more times before I really form an opinion.

Kicked Josh's ass in foosball. :-)

Got more work done...

Josh kicked my ass in foosball. :-(

A pizza delivery man knocked on my door. I gave him a funny look, said "I didn't order a pizza," and then directed him down the street to the correct address.

A good looking woman appeared at my door around 9:30. He car had broken down. I had brief thoughts like "maybe I'm in a porn flick" but managed to supress those. She called home. Then asked if I could drive her home. More thoughts about porn flicks. I drove her home.

Like I said, odd.

Friday - January 28, 2000

Let me paint a picture of how today started. I hadn't managed to fall alseep until about 2:30am. I was awoken around 7:00am by the telephone ringing. My supervisor was on the other end. He was already at work and shit was broken. Important shit.

After a fair amount of time on the phone trying various things, I ventured to work. When I was 60 seconds from the building, he called back to tell me that things were normal again. Apparently one of the first things we tried did the trick. It just took a while to realize that.

In summar: I fucked up.

Josh and I got our asses beat in foosball.

Thursday - January 27, 2000

Late night today. Hacking on code to fix some broken pages.

Wednesday - January 26, 2000

Got up early today. We rolled out taxes.yahoo.com today. Granted, I had little to do with it other than fix a few scripts, push some files around, and argue with Apache. But it was cool to see a new property go on-line.

Josh and I managed to kick some butt in foosball. (side note: foosball rules are on-line) Okay, we didn't win by much, but it felt good to beat another team--especially when we're used to beating on each other.

Visited the Target in Cupertino. I now have more shirts. Oh, and my free CD from Hearts of Space was quite good.

The weather was very nice today.

Tuesday - January 25, 2000

The two people in my group who know lots of stuff about the things I'll be learning and ultimately supporting are out of the country this week. So I get to fight all the fires. Rather entertaining. I'm being forced to figure lots of stuff out, and sometimes that's the best way.

The Tax Center goes live in the morning. I don't even want to think about my taxes, yet I've already received W-<some_number> forms from several institutions already.

It would appear that the ``shuffle'' feature on my Apex AD-600 DVD player is a lot less random that one would expect. Hm.

My free CD from Hearts of Space came today. But the postman just left a little note on my door to tell me that I need to go get it from the post office. Grr. Why can't they just leave it under the mat like the FedEx guy does?

Aaron decided to page me today. From Japan.

Sunday - January 23, 2000

This weekend has been an exercise in odd sleep patterns. For some reason I managed to find myself going to bed at 4am and getting up around noon. This will make Monday morning a treat.

It has been an expensive few days. I've managed to visit Circuit City three times, Fry's once, and Office Depot once. The good news is that I have a new DVD player, stands for my rear speakers, a cell phone, and other goodies.

Thursday - January 20, 2000

Played Triopoly (Monopoly with 3 levels) until about 2am with some folks from work. I sure as hell didn't win, but it was rather entertaining..

Friday - January 14, 2000

Put some new pics on-line: last day of work at Marathon, and the Goon Squad party in honor of my departure. Enjoy.

Thursday - January 13, 2000

Once again, Bank of America decided to be a pain in the ass. It looks like www.BankOfAmericaSucks.com is taken, but www.BankOfAmericaSucks.net (and .org) are not. That gives me an idea.

E*Trade is running commercials in the Bay Area to get people to come to a pre-superbowl party on Friday (tomorrow). It seems that they are giving away tickets and that they are the official sponsor of the half-time show. I wonder if they'd like the Yahoo! Finance group to show up, eat their free food, and heckle them. Being in Menlo Park, they're not all that far away. :-)

Did you know that you can crash a FreeBSD 3.4 box if you try and mount an ISO9660 CD (with Joliet extensions)? Josh and I have both killed our boxes trying. So much for listening to his MP3 CDs.

The move is tomorrow. We get moved down the street to the newly constructed building. That means my computer will be off-line. Short day, I guess.

The weather was very nice today. Up to 62 and somewhat clear. The mountains looked nice in the afternoon.

Wednesday - January 12, 2000

Spent some time fighting with window managers, themes, etc. Managed to completely confuse myself by a set of mis-matched braces in a Perl module I was hacking on.

Learned that Bank of America wouldn't know customer service if it bit them in the ass. I'll have to go back in the morning when I hopefully won't be subjected to a repeat performance.

Got official notification of my stock options and strike price. It's always good to have it on paper.

Caught up on these entries. I've certainly forgotten stuff, but I'm trying. There's a lot happening in life all of the sudden.

Tuesday - January 11, 2000

First staff meeting. We have some cool people in the group.

Quarterly earnings report and big party to follow at work. Drinks and food had by all. Ran into John and Andy (and Randy). Josh and I played John & Andy in a game of foosball. We won. :-)

After the drinks wore off, I managed to convince Josh that we should go to Baker's Square again for dinner. I got the Stir Fry Pita this time and was very pleased.

The check finally came.

Monday - January 10, 2000

I broke stuff at work. Caused several data feeds to stop processing. Damn.

Dinner with Josh at Baker's Square. Yummie stuff.

Friday - January 07, 2000

Finance team lunch to welcome me & Josh.

Thursday - January 06, 2000

Several of us were talked into going to Starzone Karaoke Experiences in Sunnyvale after work. Drinks and embarrassment. What fun.

Wednesday - January 05, 2000

More of the same.

Tuesday - January 04, 2000

Random stuff at work. Lots of unpacking at home.

Monday - January 03, 2000

Josh started work for real today. His turn to be challenged by getting one of the only FreeBSD 3.4 boxes at Yahoo to work to his liking. Took me quite a while, but things sped up after getting root access (they always do).

Good weather continues. Mid-day temps in the mid 50s thru mid 60s. Blue skies.

The movers arrived as expected. Unloaded all my crap. I have a lot of work ahead of me.

Sunday - January 02, 2000

Went driving up 101 to San Francisco where I picked up Highway 1 to cruise down along the Pacific coast. Very nice view of the ocean. Took some good pictures (will link them later).

Spent about 6 hours at work with Josh. Started to play foosball. We both suck, so we can play each other and not feel bad. After all, it's sort of the official company sport.

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Updated on: Sat Jun 22 18:11:23 2002
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