Jeremy's Journal (2001)
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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...)
