Jeremy's Home 
Jeremy's Journal (All)
Jeremy's Journal (All)
- I don't always spell-check these.
- I write when I have something interesting to say.
- I'm often late.
- Many times, the stuff only interests me.
- Each page of stuff is listed from most recent to least.
I haven't said anything here for a while because I've been rathe
busy. What else is new, right?
Anyhoo, this will probably be my last entry here. I've begun using
Movable Type (MT) to manage
a more modern weblog (or "blog"). If it goes well, I'll likely try
and import all of this old material at some point. But that'll be a
fair amount of work, so I'm not going to do it until I'm convinced
that MT rocks. So far it's going well.
Check it out for yourself.
Hey, I've got a real
weblog now. In case that seems a little strange, given that I've
bee writing stuff here for a few years now, let me briefly explain.
I'm going to continue writing about the odd things that happen in my
life and the random crap that comes to mind now and then. I'll do
that here. That other weblog is for stuff I think other folks
might actually care about.
More work on chapter 11 for the book. I've been cutting a
fair amount of material. What was 22 pages is probably going to be 15
or so. I've managed to greatly simplify things in the process. I
just wish it didn't take so darn long.
Damned notebook keyboard. Grr.
So much to do, so little time. Lunch today with Craig Hughes in
Palo Alto (Hunan Garden, yum). Then a visit to the root canal guy for
a checkup. Then lots of mail, power point, and random shit.
Spent a lot of time with PowerPoint. And I got to be Ray's nurse
and gopher for a bit.
Spent a lot of time with PowerPoint. And I got to be Ray's nurse
and gopher for a bit.
One of my cats (Noble) decided to try an attack a cat outside
today. It's not the first time he's done it. But it was the first
time he was able to knock the screen out of the window. He seemed
rather surprised by this. Upon coming face to face with the other
cat, he wasn't quite sure what to do other than meow and howl
loudly.
I had to go outside and retrive him. Then I had to punish him
while I put the screen back in the window. Grr. He really pissed me
off. I wish he was more like his brother (i.e., less stupid).
Lots of working on the
book.
Brief walk to the store to get some exercise and sunlight, but some
fruit and deposit a few checks.
Hey, look! It's a picture
of me OSCON 2001. How amusing.
I got to be an asshole at work today.
Oh, the the elevators in our 1.5 year old building were down for
reapir today. How sad is that?
The weather is back to normal. Nice and cool and night, nice and
warm during the day.
Busy day of hacking on DBIx::DWIW at
work.
Work was a bit odd today. Mostly because of the NBA Rhythm and
Rims (or whatever it's called) festival-like thing that was going on
most of the day. I was supposed to be flying to Seattle today, but
that got postponed. So I popped on the headphones and managed to be
relatively productive.
I skipped lunch so that I'd have room for dinner. Some of the Y!
Finance gang took me out for dinner at the Fish Market. It was good
food and good entertainment.
After coming home, I got the scoop on how the Microsoft thing just
got more interesting. Things are never simple with that company.
Birthday. I'm older today.
Damn nice weather. I love the valley during late Spring and early
Summer.
To work a bit late because of having been up late. A few books
from my weekend Amazon once-click fit have begun to arrive. Lots of
funny stuff by David Sedaris. Lots of confusion over firewall holes
for database servers.
Called the bank to get payoff info so that I could send a final
check for my car loan. That's my birthday present to myself--being
debt-free.
Perl Mongers meeting after work. I gave my talk and it was well received.
It looks like the Microsoft trip will be postponed until next week.
That's good, 'cause folks are already grabbing bits of my time for
tomorrow.
Janet called today.
Got home around around 10 and had a few amusing messages on my
machine. I was all set to get some work done when I made the mistake
of checking my TiVo. I haven't done so in about 5 days, but it had
captured parts 1 and 2 of the "Endgame" episode of Star
Trek Voyager. Gotta watch it, or at least have it as background
noise.
Went to work and got busy. Then headed over to Adam's place so
that we could go up to San Francisco for the Linux Magazine dinner
(which turned out to be a "Happy Birthday Martin &
Jeremy" dinner. Woohoo!
We drove Adam's brand new Mustang convertible. Top down all the
way up 101 and 280. Nice ride. Got to see the Linux Mag office and
meet Charlie and Martin finally.
Went to dinner near Pac Bell Park. Good food and wine. Very
good. The place was called MoMo's, I think.
Had a paperwork mishap that involved me staying up to 3am and on
the phone with Adam to work out stuff for the Microsoft trip.
Got my question
posted to Slashdot so that we have a better perspective on this
week's Microsoft discussion.
Worked to revise my presentation for
the Silicon Valley Perl
Mongers meeting in a few days. Also took some time to bring my MySQL page a bit more up-to-date.
Saw Undercover
Brother early in the day. It was fairly amusing but not quite
what I had hoped for.
I may be visiting Microsoft next week. We'll see. Need to revise
the Evil Plan, I guess. How long does it take to get a clone army
when you need one in a hurry?
Discoverd the joy of isync today. It
totally rocks. Ahh. someone else has
figured it out too.
Biked to work in the morning. It was already quite warm. A nice
ride.
Read and replied to an assload (that's a lot) of e-mail today.
Damn.
The InnoDB/MySQL problem may or may not be fixed. I got a patch
that seems reasonable, so we'll see.
Meeting and then lunch at Banana Leaf. Mmm.
To bed early. Gonna bike to work on Thursday (and Friday, I
hope).
Was just reminded that I'm to speak at sv.pm next week. Uh oh.
A bumpy day wtih an apparent InnoDB bug at work. Lots of restarts
and related "fun".
Found a good
interview with Larry McVoy on KernelTrap.
Finally got around to making my reservations for the 2002 Open Source
Convention (yes, I'm presenting again this year--3 talks!).
Today is another day of random crap, since there's no work. Yeay
for government holidays.
Took some allergy medicine. It made me sleep for a few hours.
Worked on MySQL upgrades and builds after that.
Lots of random stuff today (SpamAssassin, Razor, etc..)
Remembered at the last minute that tomorrow is a holiday and I
should stay home from work. That means I can take a long bike ride in
the morning and maybe try out the rice cooker later in the day.
Cashed my IRS refund check today.
Did a lot of laundry and contemplated seeing Star Wars
tonight.
Listened to the last 2 weeks worth of Brandt's radio show.
Had a Trader Joe's rice bowl for dinner, which Noble cleaned up for
me. Then headed to Trader Joe's for food--it's best not to go while
hungry.
Spent a bit of time looking at virus scanning software that I can
pulg into the mail delivery setup at WCNet. What I've found so far is
detailed here.
Today was Josh's last day at Yahoo.
Back to work today to fix broken stuff. A fair amount of it.
Slept in, partly as an attempt to get back on west coast time.
Checked a bit of e-mail and marveled at the fact that the stock market
was open and that it was a Monday. It felt like a Sunday (again).
Mom made waffles for breakfast. Yum!
I got on-line and enrolled in the American Airlines Frequent Flyer
program (AA Advantage or something like that).
Dad worked on trying to re-install Win98 on his laptop for most of
the morning and afternoon. I have no idea how he managed to
fundamentally break a Windows installation every few months. And then
it takes him several days to reinstall and reconfigure everything.
Along the way he acts like he's never done it before and managed to
ask many of the same questions he did the last time it happened.
Headed to Toledo Express airport for my flight to Chicago and on to
San Jose. The airport, as usual, was NOT busy at all.
Had a 2.5 hour lay-over in Chicago, so I got a bagel sandwich and
began writing an article for Linux
Magazine about IBM's Robocode.
It's cool stuff.
The flight back was good. I manged to snag an exit row seat with
laptop power. Got caught up on a lot of stuff.
The cats were glad to see me. And I'm glad to be back.
Got up relatively early again so that we could head to the
northeastern part of Ohio to visit April & Brian at their new
house (which I hadn't yet see in person). They live in Huntsburg,
Ohio (which, as Mom points out, sounds a little better than Footville
(where they moved from)).
The weather was a bit nicer. Alternating clouds and sun, though it
was still quite cold for this time of year. It's a good thing I
brought jeans and several warm shirts.
Here are the pictures from April
& Brian's place.
After leaving their place, we all went to Beachwood for a nice
(big) dinner at Carvers.
On the ride back, I re-worked the software that manages my on-line
journal (which you are reading) a bit. There's now a spiffy little
navigation aid at the top and bottom of each page. It allows you to
see all the entries, entries by year, or just the 14 most recent.
Got up and dressed and headed to Steph & Adam's wedding and
reception and stuff. Here are the
pictures I took from the event. The most amusing part of the
ceremony was when Adam became a bit confused during the vows. While
the details are a bit fuzzy in my head now, it went something like
this...
There was a part of the vows when they were supposed to say
something like: "and the gifts of my mind, soul, and
hands." However, when I heard the minister say "hands," I
heard "pants," which is terribly amusing. Adam also
wasn't quite sure what she said (later we found out that he was
expecting her to say "body") and just blurted out
"What?!", which cause everyone to laugh pretty hard.
Well, you probably had to be there, but at least I'll remember this
a few years from now when I'm reading over it.
Heh. :-)
After the wedding, we went back to Aaron & Kristin's so that I
could torment the dog one last time, pack up, and head back to
Toledo. The weather for the drive home was crappy. Lots of clouds
and random pockets of rain.
Upon arriving home, I learned that Kitty (our family cat of roughly
14 years) had died the day before. She was put to sleep after a
several month battle with asthma. :-( I'll have to see if I
can dig up any pictures of Kitty. I know I have some
somewhere.
Got up and messed around on the computer. Then went to Bev's Cat
Boutique to get some new toys for the cats. I managed to drop over $50
on toys without trying very hard. I guess I'm not the only one who
have expensive taste in toys.
Drove down to Aaron & Kristin's place just north of Columbus,
Ohio. The ride down was a bit slow because of all the trucks on the
road.
Got there around 4:15pm to the excitement of Unix (their little
dog). I had my laser pointer with me and that means hours of
entertainment for both of us. That little dog is insane.
After a bit of chatter and dot chasing, Aaron and I headed over to
what is now called Buffalo Wild Wings. But we still like to refer to
it as BW3. Had some good food and good times. Everyone I expected to
see was there.
Once we'd had our fill of food and drink, we all headed to the
Scacky house (Scott and Kathy, for those of you playing along at
home). There we managed to remember some incredibly funny shit that
happened several years ago. But more importantly, we devised the
worst invention ever: transparent diapers. While to have the
benifit that you can visually detect that he baby needs to be changed,
you also have the unique opportunity to witness the transition from
"doesn't need to be changed" to "needs to be
changed." Nobody was too fond of that idea.
Don't ask how that came up. Really.
The baby discussion finally provided a segway to Janet & Sean
to announce that they're expecting a baby. Kathy and I had known
about this for several weeks but couldn't say a thing until they told
the rest of the group. It was mildly entertaining to see Kathy get
annoyed as the night wore on and Janet hadn't yet said anything.
While at the house we had some of the wine that I brought from
California. (Thanks to the folks at MySQL AB's PR agency for that!)
We also decided that Mel and I have to go to South Carolina to
visit Mike & Anne sometime maybe later this year.
At about 11pm or Aaron and I headed back to his place to torment
the dog one last time and go to bed. We had an early wedding to
attend the next day.
Flew back to Ohio today for Steph & Adam's wedding. I must say
that American Airlines is now my
favorite airline. Not only do they have that extra leg room in coach,
they have laptop power available at most of the seats on the larger
flights. The 757 that I'm on right now has 'em all over the place.
My battery drained, so I just plugged in and kept on working.
If that's not enough, I didn't even have to use my aircraft style
power adaptor. I'm just using the standard automobile cigarette
lighter plug. Aside from first class or a private jet, this is the
only way to fly. :-)
Oh, the other thing that surprised me is that San Jose airport is
back to normal. The wait to get thru security was less than five
minutes. I was bit worried when I was leaving my apartment at 6:30am
for a 8:00am flight (it's a 15 minute drive to SJC). But I was able
to do curb-side check-in and get thru security with no major delays.
That's great, 'cause I had to get up at 4:45am as it was. And, if you
know me, you know how unnatural that is!
The flight from SJC to Chicago (ORD) was pretty good except for
some turbulence a bit before Chicago. We were racing a line of
thunderstorms (you forget what those are, living in California) but it
wasn't too bad.
I met Steve Jobs today and several VPs at Apple. Why? Because they were
unveiling their new rack-mounted Xserve servers at a media event.
Anyway, here are the pictures I took. I
don't care what others say, but I think they should have called it the
iRack.
Ray did a bad thing.
Get all productive and stuff at work today. I was impressed with
me. :-)
Worked from home today (again). Went to the dentist around 3pm to
get my suddenly sensitive tooth diagnosed. Last time I waited on this
sort of thing, I waited too long and had 2 root canals as a
result.
The problem is very minor and will be cured without any special
equipment--unless it gets worse, of course.
I think I'll actually go to work tomorrow. That'll be odd.
Whenever I work from home on a Monday (or, in this case, Monday and
Tuesday), I lose all sense of what day it is when I'm at work. I'm
sure it's quite amusing (or annoying) to my poor coworkers.
I'm going to visit Apple on Tuesday the 14th to see the new
rack-mount servers they've announced. I wonder if they'll let me have
one for a while so that I can rack it and review it for the magazine just like I did with
the TiBook. That would be most excellent.
Got chapter 12 to folks for initial review today. Whew.
Don't ever write a book. It will expand to fill all your available
time, and then it'll keep going. Really.
Well, today was rather amusing on multiple counts.
First off, the weather finally seems to have stabliized, so I
decided it's time to try biking to work along my new route (just under
10 miles, but much nicer than the old way). As I was getting ready to
leave, my cell phone rang. I answered it to find that it was a guy
from London calling to ask me a MySQL question.
After I answered his question, he explained that his ISP or hosting
company was rather clueless and that he wanted to talk with an expert.
So he went to Google and typed in
MySQL expert
only to find that my name was the first item that appeared. That came
as a bit of a surprise to me, but it's rather cool. :-)
Then, later that day, someone gave me a link to a picture that
amused the hell out of me. Why? Because when I saw it all I could
think of was a golf porn flick. I figured it would go
something like this:
[...porn music plays in the backgroun...]
Female Golfer: "Wow, it's really hot out here. I wonder if I've still
got that ice scupled dildo in the freezer... Ahhhh,
here it is! Let's have some fun..."
Or something to that effect. Anyway, here's the picture. Judge for
yourself.
Like I said, it amused me.
My clocks all conspired to trick me today.
Got up late and messed around with stuff. Was up late last night
working on book stuff (surprise, surprise). Eventually went to the
House of Orient to get some pineapple chicken for lunch/dinner. Got a
nasty headache and ended up going to bed early.
Got up late today.
On the way to work, I heard about a bunch of upcoming concerts at
The Mountain Winery this
summer. So I checked out the list to confirm what I thought I heard.
Meatloaf is coming on July 5th, so I got a ticket via ticketmaster.com
(yuck!). I've wanted to see Meatloaf in concert for sooo long.
Woohoo!
Got up early to visit the Apple Campus with Jeff Okamoto from Linux
Magazine. We got to meet with a couple of Apple's folks to discuss OS
X and related stuff.
I was up really late last night (and again this night) playing with
the PowerBook G4 Titanium (TiBook, as I call it). This thing totally
rocks.
As I left the apartment I noticed a large truck in the street. As
I got closer I realized that it was a fire engine and that I smelled
natural gas--lots of it. There was a leak across the street, and two
PG&E trucks had blocked off both ends of my street. I arrived at
Apple a few minutes late because of that.
The conference room we were in had one of the new Apple Cinema
Displays along the wall. Damn, that is one fine monitor. Really,
really nice!
Went to work and got random stuff done. Was getting ready to home
when I had the opportunity to witness an impressive brute-force
password guessing attack against a friend's web site. That was
fun.
Went to Denny's at around 10pm with Ray and Mark. Had some apple
pie (might as well finish the day with some apple). Came back to work
to find a bug in my server graphing code. Went home just before
midnight.
Wrote the TiBook review for Linux Magazine. Gave it 4.5 out of
5.0. It was so close to a perfect score. I really don't wanna give
it back.
Finally went to bed around 4am.
Played with the TiBook that Apple has loaned me via Linux
Magazine. It totally rocks. There's a lot of really cool Open
Source stuff going on around OSX, Darwin, Fink, XonX, and so on. I'm
really, really impressed.
Looking forward to the meeting with Apple tomorrow!
A lot of wasted time fucking with computers this weekend. I'm not
too happy about it.
I've decided to sell off billg, my 21" monitor, and an old
computer. I don't really need 'em.
Got 2.4.18 built on my notebook. Got USB working right, so my
optical mouse is all strapped on now. Upgraded to XFree86 4 along the
way.
Jeffrey helped me setup his cool book building system. Yeay!
Stayed up really late, which is bound to mess up the sleep schedule
for a few days.
Back to the office today. Didn't get a lot done, due to a few
things breaking, random meetings, e-mail, and a baby shower.
Yikes.
Sent back markup from reading the latest (almost final) draft of Managing & Using
MySQL, 2nd edition to O'Reilly. It is coming along well.
I realized two things today:
- Frozen veggies (like peas) taste FAR BETTER than their canned
counterparts.
- My 1998 Acura finally rolled over 20,000 miles. I guess I just
don't drive as much as I used to.
Feeling better today. Only a little sore.
Happy Birthday, Mom! (as if she reads this).
I keep waking up early--probably because my body is sore from being
in the same position for so long. But still, waking up at 5:00am
without an alarm clock is a little spooky. Hopefully that stops in a
day or so.
I finished reading Peopleware
yesterday. It was well worth my time. Now I need to make sure that
some folks at work read it too. :-)
I was finally able to shower today, and boy did it feel good.
The shoulder pain has returned. It's very occasional but
annoying. Kaiser called a bit ago to check up on me.
Wearing loose jeans is only a little less comfortable than
sweatpants.
Didn't go to bed until about 3:30am. But I woke up before 8:30am
and couldn't fall back asleep. Grr. I think by body is just trying
to annoy me. If so, it's working pretty well.
Laid down on the couch and managed to sleep until about 11:00am.
Ate some breakfast and took a pain pill because my shoulder was really
sore. Talked to Adam on the phone. Read some of the mutt docs. The pill made
me sleepy, so I laid down again. Slept until 2:30pm. That's more
like it! :-)
Futzed around a bit and finished of the Jello I made yesterday.
Perhaps I should make more. After all, there's always room for
Jello.
Pain seems to be less after the nap. This is a very good sign.
The should pain is now intermittent, which is just annoying. Really
annoying.
I can't wait to shower again.
Went for a walk around 6pm. That made my shoulder hurt again, but
it felt good to get outside for a bit. Once I got back, it settled
down. I haven't really needed any pain medication after this
morning.
I'm close to eating normal meals again, it would seem.
Played around with analog a
bit. Neat stuff. Also discovered that Noble likes to eat Manhattan
style Clam Chowder.
Surgery was yesterday. All in all, it went pretty well. I'm
rather sore yet, but the drugs help with that. I've got a pill which
is 5mg Hydrocodone and 500mg Acetaminophen. It does the trick and
makes is really easy to sleep.
I stayed at Jeffrey's place after coming back from the hospital.
Mostly just slept, drank some water, and ate a few crackers. I'm a
lot less zonked than I was yesterday. As recently wrote to a friend
of mine, "I can feed myself and use a computer, so I guess all the
basics are covered."
Well, today was relatively normal--except that I somehow managed to
sleep about 2 hours later than I expected. Oh, well.
Tomorrow is the big day. I go to the hospital at around noon, and
they're supposed to yank out my gall bladder around 1pm or so. If all
goes well, I'll be home tomorrow night in a mild amount of pain. But
at least I won't have to worry about the Real Pain anymore.
Got my ass paged out of bed this morning (6am) because shit was
breaking left and right. Wasn't a good way to start the day at all.
So much for sleep.
Met my surgeon today. Dr. Bloom is the cheif of surgery at Kaiser
Santa Clara, so I feel like I'm in good hands. He's done over 600 of
the operations I'm going to have. And his partner has done even more
of 'em.
I'm scheduled to arrive at the hospital at noon. I "go under" at
about 1pm. Let's hope all goes well.
The netapp disk move went well. One minor fuckup that was easily
fixed (any my fault).
I've been having second thoughts about my upcoming surgery, but
then I started to get that feeling from my gall bladder again (in a
very minor way) and was reminded of how much I really want the damned
thing ripped out!
I'm not sure if this is funny or sad, but I didn't even realize it
was St. Patrick's Day today until I visited Google to run a search. I saw their
shamrock themed logo and thought, "hm. it must be the 17th
today."
Needless to say, I didn't do anything special for the holiday. Oh,
well. Maybe next year. But probably not. It's kind of a dumb
holiday anyway. :-)
Today was a wash. I didn't do a hell of a lot. For some reason
my Saturdays have just been this way for a while. I'm not sure
why.
I did help get the MySQL servers on PeakWebHosting working
again. Then I wandered over to Subway for lunch. Came back and
futzed around. Went for a drive. Took a nap. Random other shit.
Finally got to meet with a doc and Kaiser. I'm scheduled for
surgery [tentatively] for next Friday. I'll hopefully meet the
surgeon in a few days.
Decided not to build a whole new system at work. I'm gonna evolve
the existing system instead.
WCNet tech call today. Figured out what to do about spam
filtering and other stuff.
Another new version of DBIx::DWIW should be going out soon.
I heard from O'Reilly today about the Open Source Convention. I'll
be giving three presentations this year. Woohoo!
Had a dentist appointment today. In fact, this is going to be a
busy week. I've got stuff on the calendar for almost every day.
That's rather unusual. Meetings at work, gall bladder class, etc.
Odd.
The new diet is working well. I'm down about 15-20 pounds now. I
can't be more exact, because I only recently acquired a scale. Oh
well.
Rumor had it that the BBC's
Ogg Streams were running again. Indeed they are. :-)
It's been a while. Lots of random stuff has gone on, none of which
I'm in the mood to document right now.
Busy day. But I came home early to hack on the book.
New feed launched at work.
The Microsoft evil plan is beginning to take shape.
Woke up at 9am and relized that I had to be to the dentist in 1
hour for crown stuff and a small filling. Not the way you want to
start a day off work.
Played with Exim on wcnet.org hosts. Mail migration is complete
now.
Finally explained what
the hell is going on with Yahoo Mail's ancient POP3
implementation, to a small degree at least.
Sent in all my proposals for talks at the Open Source Convention in
July. I had 3 for 90 minute talks, 1 for a 45 minute talk, and 1 for
a 5 minute lightning talk titled "Why Larry Ellison should promote
Open Source Databases." I just had the idea for that one an hour
ago. :-)
Slept a lot today. A whole lot.
Caught up on a ton of e-mail, put a few updates here and worked on cleaning up
my JitterBug queue.
Messed with the Tivo some more. I got the the service update, so
now it's got a bunch more cool features.
Well, I've had the Tivo for a few days and I'm loving it. These
things totally rock. I'm even thinking about getting one of the hard
disk upgrades so I can store more shows on it. I never miss The
Simpsons anymore. :-)
In other news, I've decided that JavaScript can suck my nuts.
In the last week or so, I've managed to convince at least one
person to adopt Debian on his
machines. I swear, once you've used it for a week or two, you can't
imagine ever going back.
Oh, let's see... What else has been going on? I've been ultra
busy at work because of the damned Exodus facility shutting down.
I just found out that I'll have my hands on nice PowerBook G4
Titanium for a few weeks. Yeah! New toy...
My Tivo arrived today... Life
will never be the same.
Went to the dentist today for a cleaning. Went well. Scheduled my
crowns for next week.
Spent a lot of time at the Equinix data center in San Jose with
Jeffrey Papen today. Eventually we got hardware-based load balancing
(via an Alteon switch) working for MySQL.
I slept in a lot yesterday. So I had to make up for yesterday's
lack of getting much done.
Worked with Mailman a bit and
wrote about it for the Project of the Month. Moved the Goon-Squad
list over to it. In fact, I moved all the Goon-Squad stuff (except
for DNS) over to my machines.
Did some cleaning up around the apartment and other random stuff.
Managed to mostly do my taxes yesterday. That was entertaining.
Cool. I'm gonna have to fly through
MSP more often.
It's snowing in the area. This is most unusual.
I
couldn't agree more.
Slept in really late after being up late last night.
Ventured over to Subway for lunch. Came back and did some random
stuff. Fixed my long-standing VMWare problem. Updated a few things.
Caught up on e-mail. Deposited some checks.
Spent time screwing around with MySQL builds. Did get as much
writing done as I had planned. :-(
Wow. This could
be my next company.
Got up early. Before 8am in fact. Took advantage of being up
early and went to Baker's Square for breakfast. Had a nice Belgian
Waffle, scrambled eggs, and bacon. Not the healthiest thing, but it
sure is good. And it's less than five minutes away.
Did dishes, took out the trash, went to the store for cat litter
and bananas. Then came back and worked on chapter two of the book for several hours.
Sort of got hungry around 4p and had a big bowl of Trader Joe's
Vegetarian Red Bean Stew. I've love that stuff, even if it does have
some... uhm, aromatic side-effects.
Hacked on the book more. Chapter two is going to be rather meaty
and contain several figures to illustrate locking and concurrency
stuff.
Boring day today. Had fun with a regex bug, but that was about
it. I'll post the details someday, as it was quite entertaining.
Sent in the preface and chatper 1 of the book to O'Reilly at about
1:30am.
Yeay
VMWare networking decided to stop working for some reason today.
Damned commercial software. No error messages or helpful output.
Just doesn't work. Grr.
Cats are back to normal. My sleep schedule isn't.
I had a very strange dream last night which involved two visits to
the dentist and a nail being pounded into my jaw. Dunno what to make
of that.
I just realized that my new bike doesn't have a bottle holder. But
it appears that the one on my older bike can be transferred without
too much effort.
Played around with DNS today. Discovered that BIND 9.x can be a
pain. So I put 8.2.5 on litterbox.zawodny.com. Then I made
family.zawodny.com and litterbox authoritative for zawodny.com.
Yeay.
Here's
my new toy. Of course, that link will stop working someday, so I'll
just say it's a Raleigh C500 cross bike.
The cats are a little less pissy today. Not much.
litterbox.zawodny.com got installed at the PAIX today. Yeay!
Grr. The writing is slow going. Too slow.
Went to Stacks' in Redwood City for brunch today. Pretty good
stuff.
A lot has happened since I last wrote. WCNet mail upgrade,
multiple computer failures at home (and associated wasted time), etc.
Let's just hope things improve.
Flew back to California today. Had to get up at 4:30am so as to
leave Toledo at 5:00am for the 1 hour trek to Detroit. My flight was
at 9:00am, so I got there about 2.5 hours early to find that the wait
for security was only 10 minutes. I thank Murphy for that one.
Both flights (Detroit to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to San Jose) were
VERY FULL, so I guess I was part of the post-holiday rush home.
Back in California, I can now go outside without layers and layers
of insulation.
There's some good stuff over at dolske.net.
Went to April & Brian's again (near Cleveland) for Brian's
brithday. Took the thinkpad to catch up on some e-mail and
coding.
There's a lot of snow out their way. They got something like 14
inches yesterday. I guess I've seen my quota of snow for this
trip.
Went with Mom to visit Kelly, Neil, and the kids. Did other random
stuff such as upgrading Dad's linux box to Debian's "testing"
distribution rather than the "stable" one. Gotta get a new kernel on
that box and setup the software RAID for /home soon.
Went for a walk with Mom. It was really cold outside. But that's
Ohio in the Winter, I guess.
Random computer stuff today and out to dinner and a show with the
Traush family.
So I've been listening to the BBC Radio 1 broadcasts on the
experimental Ogg Vorbis
stream off and on for a couple days now. And I've noticed a
couple things:
- It's very clear.
- The music is quite good much of the time.
- The DJs aren't nearly as bad as most of the US DJs.
In other words they have demonstrated, once again, how much better
things could be.
Guess who had Pollyeyes Breadsticks with dinner
today. :-)
Found some good reading on Joel's site.
Specifically:
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 1.12
Nice.
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.
Some pictures are here.
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.
Mono Lake pictures are
here.
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 passwords
I 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?
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.
I thinkt that's all for now...
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...)
More strange e-mail:
From: "chapa"
To:
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 19:32:26 +0300
Subject: Five Processors.
Hello. I live in The Poland. I need to buy five Intel Pentium
III-800EB PC133 256kb cache Processors. I think You can help me to
do this. Email me please what is the total cost with all taxes and
delivery trough fedex or ups (aprox.), and what credit card and
shipping information You need for this Order. Thank You.
Whatever.
The Cable Modem Blues continue.
Work was okay. Josh and I had a very bad foosball day. We're out of
the tournament.
Evening meeting with Chris and Adam at Adam's place in Mountain
View.
Tired and going to be early.
Fairly normal Monday. Biked to work and wasn't quite as tired this
time. Do this for another week or two and I'll be back to
normal. (Well, you know what I mean...)
Westling with the new XML feed from Forbes. I rather underestimated
the effort involved in writing the parsing code. Oh, well. It's
probably good for me.
Tomorrow is round two of the Yahoo! March Madness Foosball
Tournament. Josh and I are playing a team that we shouldn't have much
trouble beating. The round after this, however, will get considerably
more difficult. We play Jeremiah and Jason. That's going to be hard
fought set of games, I suspect.
Packet loss sucks. A lot... But it's AT&T @Home's fucked up
network I'm dealing with. So it's not a real surprise. Here's me
pinging my first hop into their network.
jzawodn@pizza:~$ ping 24.15.219.1
PING 24.15.219.1 (24.15.219.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 24.15.219.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=725.0 ms
64 bytes from 24.15.219.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=40.6 ms
64 bytes from 24.15.219.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=86.2 ms
64 bytes from 24.15.219.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=194.9 ms
64 bytes from 24.15.219.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=12.6 ms
64 bytes from 24.15.219.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=255 time=43.9 ms
64 bytes from 24.15.219.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=255 time=11.5 ms
64 bytes from 24.15.219.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=255 time=230.9 ms
64 bytes from 24.15.219.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=255 time=28.2 ms
64 bytes from 24.15.219.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=255 time=57.5 ms
64 bytes from 24.15.219.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=255 time=12.0 ms
--- 24.15.219.1 ping statistics ---
12 packets transmitted, 11 packets received, 8% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 11.5/131.2/725.0 ms
Need I say more?
It looks like Tom might consider moving to California and coming to
Yahoo! for a job (yes, we are still hiring). That'd be
swell.
Update... I just sat thru a 45 minute outage. I can't wait
until my DSL installation kit arrives. Then I'll be able to tell
AT&T to put my cablem modem in the same place that their
collective heads appear to be.
Today wasn't particularly interesting. I finally finished checking
over the chapter of a book I've been reviewing. And I did random other
stuff--mostly laundry.
Got up early today... 8am or so. Ate some breakfast and probmply
went back to bed. Got up at 12:30pm or so...
Went to Fry's looking for a specific wrist rest. They didn't have
it, so I came home went for a 10 mile bike ride. That felt really
good.
Then spent some time doing a bit of programming, catching up on
e-mail, reading, and playing with the cats. Forgot to call mom and dad
to chat about their upcoming trip.
Met Adam in Mountain View for a later dinner and chat about
magazine stuff. Now it's official. I'm now the Technical Editor for Linux Magazine.
Well, I've got some stuff to catch up on here, I think...
I have to say that sometimes it's worth paying a few extra bucks
for quality and customer service. You see, I've often been skeptical
of buying cloting from catalogs. I'd usually go to the store and try
things on, make sure I liked the look and feed, and so on. Unlike
buying an Ethernet card, that stuff is rather important when it comes
to clothing.
Well, my favorite pair of jeans is starting to get rather worn and
old. I bought some new jeans a couple months ago, but they just don't
feel the same. So I decided to try and get some more jeans which are
just like the ones that I really like. But there were a few hurdles to
this...
- I ordered them from L.L. Bean.
- I ordered them over a year and a half ago.
- I had no idea what the catalog number is... or even if they
make them anymore.
Now this was Sunday night (after 11pm) when I decided I just had to
give it shot. So I went to their web site and poked around a
bit. Couldn't find much useful. (That's not to say their site was
bad. It's actually pretty good.) I really wanted to find my old
order. But it wanted me to login with a username and password that I
suspect I never created in the first place. But unlike most web
sites, L.L. Bean doesn't make their phone number difficult to
find.
So I called them. At close to midnight on a Sunday (Pacific
time).
I got an answer on the first ring. I was talking to a human within
seconds. I didn't have to wade thru 15 levels of horrid telephone menu
crap. I was able to speak to an actual person.
I explained to this person that I had this pair of jeans in front
of me that I ordered from them a while back, and all I wanted to know
what if they still made them so that I could order more on their web
site (as well as some other stuff).
The guy got a bit of info from me and found my old
order. Apparently I orded them in 1998--more like 3 years ago! He gave
me the catalog number and also told me that they had some in stock in
my size. And they were still priced the same as when I bought them in
1998.
I was very happy!
The entrie process took less than 5 minutes.
In summary, L.L. Bean rocks!
They appear to really understand customer service. I don't mind
at all that I pay a bit extra for the merchandise that if I had bought
it locally. The quality is great and the service is amazing.
Try getting that at your local Target store.
Lunch...
Since today is Friday, it's bascially lame food day at the Yahoo
Cafeteria. "Deli Bar" (aka, make your own sandwitch) was on the menu,
so several of us went for Korean food. I had never had Korean food
before today, but it was pretty darn good.
If I can remember the name of the place we ate at (near El Camino
and Wolfe), I'll recommend it... I'm sure I'll be going back there in
the next month or so.
I occurs to me that if I had never left Ohio, I'd still be stuck
working on NT (unless I switched jobs and stayed there because I had a
house), and I probaly wouldn't have had good Indian, Korean, or Thai
food yet. So you might say it was a good move...
Now there's an old but useful little program that I want nominate
for the Most Underappreciated Piece of Free Software Award:
screen. I've recently become re-acquainted with just how useful
it can be.
Without going into detail (its manual page is roughly 60 pages
long!), screen sort of acts like a a software terminal server. It will
multiplex virtual "screens" which are each tied to a shell running
something. And you can easily switch among them.
None of that is terribly revolutionary. Even DesqView (woah, that
takes me back) had figured this out back in the early 90s on PCs. But
the really cool feature is that you can detach the screen process from
it's controlling terminal and then re-attach to it later and it will
have preserved all the state of the associated screens/shells.
Huh?
Here's how I'm using it. As avid readers (yeah, as if I have a fan
club or something) will recall, my cable modem has been giving me fits
recently. When that happens I sometimes lose the SSH connection (to
work) over which I'm multiplexing about 8 terminal connections and 2
or 3 copies of forwarded X applications (usually GNU Emacs). Well that
just sucks because I have to re-login to all the machines that work
that I had shells on before things went nuts. And I have to remember
what I was doing on them--if anything.
It's just a waste of time and frustrating.
Enter screen...
Now what I do is this. While at work I run a single xterm with a
shell in it. Then I start screen. It allows me to spawn lots of
sub-shells. In each sub-shell I log into a different host that I may
need to work on. And using the hot keys, I can switch among them
quickly (without grabbing for the mouse and slowing myself down).
Then, when I get home, I can open a single connection to work and
tell screen to attach to the screen session I was using at work. And
it does. Suddenly I have access to the exact same shells. hosts, and
envrionments that I was using while at my desk at work. I can
literally pick right up where I left off.
As Cartman would say, "Kick Ass".
Amazing Sponsorship Opportunity!!!
(Sounds like spam, doesn't it? But wait! ... There's MORE!)
How would you like to do something that will not only help you feel
good about yourself but will also help get me up off my ass and help
others to continue working on solving an important healt
problem???
Of course... I knew you'd like to help out.
Just like last year, I'm going to be riding in a charity bike ride
(known as the Tour de Cure) for the American Diabetes Association. And
you can sponsor me on the ride. Actually, you should sponsor me on the
ride.
Here's the deal. I'm going to pedal my butt around for 25 miles and
you can encourage me to do so by giving a tax deductable contribution
to the ADA. It's really quite easy and painless. And you needn't give
lots of money. Every little bit counts.
Being the smart person your are, you recognise this as a Good
Cause, but probably want't know more. I can respect that. Take a
minute or two and visit the Tour de Cure web
site. After you've done that, think hard about contributing a
bit.
Lots of folks fron Yahoo will
be riding. Last year we had 50 riders on Team Yahoo (many of which
were from Yahoo
Finance). Everyone had a good time and we raised a lot of money
for this worthwhile cause. We even rode in the cold rain! (But we're
hoping for better weather this year.)
Feel free to contact me if
you have any questions or would like to donate.
Oh, and if I get enough donations, I might be willing to upgrade to
the 40 mile route. But I want to see a good showing of support!
Lastly, I should mention that if you dontate, you'll get 15 seconds
of fame by having your name listed here when I say thanks to the folks
who made my ride all the more important.
And now, on a humorous note, from the strange e-mail
department... I found this in my INBOX today:
From: Nokia <nokia530@sina.com>
To: Jeremy@Zawodny.com
Subject: You Gan Help me ??
Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 07:26:23 +0800
first :I explain I Know a little EngLish ,
I am is a Chineseman ,admire superexcellence hacker
Today I want you help me gained OICQ's pa
Any idea what the heck this is about? mail me your ideas...
Okay, that's enough for now. I feel caught up. Sort of.
When to dinner with Amol, John, and Stephen (from Down Under). We
had some really good Indian food. Thanks to Amol for knowing where the
good Indian food is! Too bad I can't remember the name of the place
now--I just know how to get there.
Lots of shit broke at work, and other stuff has changed from being
due in a few weeks to be due tomorrow. Yikes!
I did manage to convince other people to do something in such a way
that I wouldn't have to do any of the work involved... and it
worked. :-) One small step for me.
I got to participate in the MySQL vs. Oracle vs. home-grown Yahoo
technology battle on a new project. Wasn't quite as confrontational as
I expected.
Rode by bike to work today using a slightly different route than I
used last year. Seems a bit faster and less annoying. Went back to the
normal keyboard for a bit.
Apprently the root of my recent wrist/arm pain was my switching to
a Micros~1 Natural Keybaord. Either I'm using it incorrectly, or it is
simply evil... Bets anyone?
Sore wrist, weak grip, typing painful. :-(
Got a lot done today. Finished editing an article for Linux
Magazine. Got a lot of Multicast stuff implemented at work. Lots of
small random fixes and whatnot.
Another beautiful day, of course. :-)
Having worked on my 10 minute Perl script, I can now turn on and
off the lights and fans in my apartment via e-mail. Cell phone access
is next on the list...
Wow. The weather today was great. It probably hit 70 degrees. Was
nice and sunny with a cool breeze. I think the rainy season is over
and that Spring is here. If it's like this tomorrow, I'll have to lube
up the bike and start riding again.
Well, let's see... In need of inspiration and good food, I headed
to the House
of Orient for some good Chinese food and a table at which I could
work. While eating my Kung Pao Chicken, I figured out what was wrong
with the article I was editing (and I even had a pen with me). That's
a good thing, since it's been bothering me for a few days. The folks
at work who glanced over it (Ray and Mark) for me gave some insightful
feedback that probably did the trick. I just needed to sleep on it a
few times.
After lunch I wandered over to a pet food store I've been meaning
to try out. I decided to splurge and get the cats a new piece of
furniture--one of those carpet covered wood things that they can climb
all over, scratch at, and generally relax on.
They really seem to dig it.
I think I'll watch a movie now...
Woohoo! The Close Encounters of the Third Kind DVD is now available for pre-orders. This is most excellent.
AT&T @Home service is an amazingly fucked up organization.
I've long suspected problems with them. You see, they have been my
Internet Service Provider for roughly a year now. Occasionally I'd
call with problems and their front-line tech support people would
attempt to help me. They usually failed.
Several months back, after finding that my cable modem connection
would drop at random times, I wrote some software to reboot it if
things went bad. It has worked well for months. My internet connection
has been self-healing and outage have been fairly rare--maybe a few a
month. No big deal.
Well, I've been having connectivity problems for the past several
weeks. As I said, I'd have these sorts of problems once or twice a
month, but recently I've had them several times a day.
This morning, I awoke to find my cable modem being rebooted every
few minutes. My software was working fine, but the connection to the
@Home network was dead. Very dead.
I assumed it was just one of those normal problems. So I decided to
go to work and let it heal itself. And I made a mental note to
consider getting DSL. (I should have checked my logs...)
Mid-day arrived and I still wasn't able to ping my home machine
from work. I could traceroute, but it always died on the last hop to
my cable modem. Grr.
So I decided to, once again, brave the customer support phone queue
see if they had a clue this time. Luckily it was the middle of the
day, so I only waited on hold about 5 minutes (instead of my normal
30-75 minutes).
Once I got a human, I explained what had been going on. Told them
that my connection had been dead since early morning. The phone drone
looked into things and told me that they have had reports of
intermitent problems in my area for the last several weeks. That jived
with what I had been seeing.
From there the conversation went something like this:
Me: So when it the problem scheduled to be fixed?
Idiot: I don't know.
Me: The problem has been going on for weeks and you don't know when
it's going to be fixed?
Idiot: Right
Me: Well, can you find out?
Idiot: I'm sorry, I can't.
Me: Really? You can't find out?
Idiot: That's right.
Me: Well, I've been having problems with my service for several
weeks. You acknowledge the problems but have no idea when (or if)
they're going to be fixed. If it's going to be a day or so, I can live
with that. Otherwise, I'm paying for service that I'm not getting and
I might as well just order DSL. After all, high-speed Internet access
has become a commodity anymore.
Idiot: Sir, I don't know when it will be fixed.
Me: Well I'm giving you the chance to keep my business, and you're
not even trying. Does your boss know how little you care about your
company's customers.
Idiot: I can offer you credit on your account for the downtime.
Me: But until it's fixed, I have no Internet access.
Idiot: There's nothing more I can do.
We agrued a bit longer and he suggested that I try back later to
see if more information is available.
I hung up the phone and ordered DSL, figuring I could cancel it if
I found that it was somehow my problem...
Time passed...
I came home from work and futzed with the modem for a while. No
luck. So I called my friends at AT&T @Home again. After waiting on
hold for about 25 minutes, I spoke with Dan.
I explained the situation to Dan, and he looked into things. He
told me that there's a widespread outage affecting most of the San
Francisco Bay Area right now. I asked how long the outage had been
going on. He told me it has been like this since about 6:45am.
That, of course, prompted me to ask why the person I spoke with
hours earlier was blissfully ignorant of such a large outage. He said
that it probably wasn't officially noted until late in the day.
Being the curious type that I am, I asked how a problem that
started at 6:45am went "officially" unreported for 12 hours. He
explained that they need to get a certain number of complaints before
they really look into that sort of a problem.
That took a minute for me to process.
After I asked him to repeat that a few times, he offered me a $20
credit on my next bill. I took the credit, but it hardly makes up for
the trouble.
Well, at this point there wasn't much more I could do. It has
become perfectly clear to me that AT&T doesn't give a shit about
their customers. Waits of 30 to 75 minutes for their tech support line
are common, and their problem reporting process virtually ensures that
customers will be off-line for quite a long time before they bother to
see if there's a problem on their network.
I fail to see how this sort of behavior will benefit their
customers or their bottom line.
In summary... Fuck AT&T. My DSL modem can't arrive soon
enough. What a waste of my time.
Last night of the foosball league. We beat the team from Intuit. I
played better than I have in weeks. It felt damned good.
Downloading Mandrake 8.0 beta ISO images. Gotta play with some news
stuff on one of my machines...
Yeay, I fixed my back today...
Spent several hours in San Jose today working on an article. Then
went off to see a movie with Ray and Mark. We saw Monkeybone. It was
okay. I doubt I'll ever see it agian.
Well, not a lot of interesting stuff going on right now. I'm typing
this on a different keyboard than normal. I'm trying to give my
Micros~1 Natural Keyboard another try. So far I'm doing a lot better
than last time.
I've been having a lot of problems with my cable modem dropping off
the network lately. I'm thinking I might get DSL service and tell the
cable comapny to cram their ICMP filtering and crappy network straight
up their ass.
I've been playing with Multicast networking in Perl quite a bit
lately. Fun stuff.
Just found out that Scott and Kacky are engaged. That messed with
my head for a little while. I guess that means I'll have a wedding to
go to next year.
Things died in a most unusual way at work this morning. Of course,
the deaths happened to coincide with me adding a machine to the group
of machines that does news processing. After a lot of head scratching,
I figured out that DBD::mysql was too old on that box. Doh!
On the plus side, my posters arrived today.
It's been a busy week or so.
This weekend (a 3-day weekend!) I got a whole lot of important
work-stuff done, plus I managed to spend a whole day vegging out on
the couch. That was a long overdue vegging day.
Rather than recount all that boring stuff, though, I have an
amusing story. The newest engineer in Yahoo Finance started today. He
swung by my cube around mid-day and introduced himself and started to
tell me about his friend who wanted to say "hi" to me. This friend of
his claimed that I was not famous in the MySQL community.
Yikes.
Anyway... In other news, my printer arrived today. And there were
Linux drivers and instructions on the included CD-ROM. Yes. That's
right. Linux drivers. So I now highly recommend the NEC
SuperScript 1400 as a great, Linux friendly, and very inexpensive
personal laser printer.
My last printer (several years ago) was a HP DeskJet 682c that I
almost never used. In fact, I sold it to Asa just before I moved to
California. And I probably had printed fewer than 200 sheets on it in
the several years I owned it.
Why did I get another printer? Simple. I'm doing more writing
and/or editing. And I find it difficult to proofread something longer
than a thousand words or so unless I print it out and see it on
paper. I'm sure that kids would laugh at this notion, 15 years from
now, but that's the way it is.
Oh, and in case anyone is wondering, it is the rainy season.
I ordered 3 posters this evening. They are views of various places
from space: San
Francisco Bay Area, California,
and The United States.
It was in the 70s today, so I went to the park. :-)
After a mid-day nap yesterday, I went and saw the movie Thirteen
Days. Then I bought a cheap 30GB hard drive and went funiture
shopping. Had trouble finding a couch I like. :-(
So it happened again. Anymore I cease to be surprised by these
occurances and just realize that they're part of my life. I came home
on Friday (from work) at roughly 7:30pm and laid down because I was
tired. And because it's only early February it was already
completely dark. So I promptly fell asleep.
While sleeping I had a most unusual dream. It had something to do
with wandering thru a large hallway/alley with an ex-girlfriend and
meeting up with people I hadn't seen since my junior year in
college.
Then I promptly woke up at 2:00pm, played with the cats, and made
some dinner.
Hmm. What else has been going on lately...
Oh, yeah.
We got raises (and/or stock option grants) at work
again. Apparently the company is
worried that folks aren't making enough money anymore and may be
inclined to look elsewhere--like somewhere people can acutaully afford
to live! Imagine that.
In any case, this whole economic "downturn" appears to have cooled
the housing market a small bit. There was a vacatant apratment in a
building adjacent to mine for about a month. That's rather unusual (or
has been until recently).
Now if only we can come up with a way to deal with the
traffic...
That reminds me. I looked at the weather
forecast and noticed that it's going to be warm very soon. That
means I'll probably start riding my bike to work again. Yeay! I love
the fact that winter (as tame as it is) seem to last about 2 months
here. Okay, maybe 2 and a half.
Hmm... I'm getting the urge to hack on my music catalogging
software again. Perhaps I will.
...some other random thoughts...
The VNC Tight Encoder
appears to only be available for Unix. Bah! The real use for VNC is
that I can control a Windows desktop without having to deal with the
OS on a regular basis. I need the Windows version!
In a little over 4 months, I'll have visitors again.
I have 3 vacation days and 2 floating holidays waiting to be
used. It's odd to actually have time waiting to be used again. It's
not that I'm going to do it, but I can... :-)
Progress is a wonderful thing.
I finally got around to coming up with a better POP server for
WCNet. It's a modified gnu-pop3d that does quota checking and some
other nice stuff (like UIDL support).
After testing, it seems that it is WAY MORE EFFICIENT than
the server we've been suffering with. Nice. Now we'll see if others
have good luck with it.
Oh, debian totally kicks
ass!
Presentation went well at work today. Though I'm annoyed with the
fact that I managed to somehow wake up at 7am again. Grr. Hopefully
I'll get back onto a semi-normal sleep schedule.
Or not.
Tommorow should be fun. We've got movie night and Ravi is making
food!
I have more ideas for additions to the MySQL
distribution. Hopefully I'll be hacking on them a bit this
weekend.
Went out to lunch for Chinese New Year. Food was good. Lunch was
long. It's nice to have a New Year's celebration a most of the way
through January.
Yeay, the kitchen is once again clean...
Stayed up late after I got the idea to write myrepl.
Wrote it an announced it on the MySQL mailing list.
I decided I wanted a book. Ideally I wanted it in time for the
weekend. So I hunted around on-line and found that I could get the
best price (or within 50 cents of the best price) thru either
Amazon.com or one of two merchants on Y! Shopping.
I ordered the book from Amazon because they often ship from their
Nevada warehouse and I'd get the book in a day or two.
Well, the shipped it from Maryland, and now I'm pissed. But for the
wrong reason. I should REALLY be pissed at myself for not just going
to Computer Literacy and buying it myself. The fucking store is like
1.5 miles from work.
Grr. The Internet has officially damaged my thinking process.
Tied Intuit in this evening's foosball tournament games. At least
they didn't win. :-)
Discovered that one of my cats likes to be brushed with a comb
instead of a brush. How amusing.
Finished off part 1 of my 2-part magazine article. More on that
after part 2 is done.
Put my new flannel sheets on the bed last night. Damn it's nice to
have flannel sheets. Even nicer that I ordered them in less than 3
minutes on-line.
I recently printed 12 8x10 pictures thru Yahoo! Photos and they came out
really nice. Went and got frames for them today and hung 'em on the
walls. The funny thing is that I spent more on the frames than on the
pictures--and I got some pretty cheap-ass frames.
Finished part 1 of my magazine article.
Scrubbed the bathtub. :-(
It's been a while since I put anything here. Oh, well. Shit
happens.
Citibank fucked me over, so I'm pissed at them. When I get some
time I'll write up the story so others can avoid the problem.
I've been playing with multicast and have run into an interesting
problem which involves several programs running on one machine which
all are listening to different multicast groups on the same local
port. They see each other's data. Is that what is supposed to
happen?
Oh, I submitted my first two patches for core Perl modules to the
Perl5-Porters today. Wonder if they'll be accepted or not. They're
very small and simple.
If you're curious, look here and
here
for them.
Oh, in case anyone is counting, I've been in California over a year
now. That means my inital grant of sock options has begun vesting. But
they're worthless. Damn you, Murphy.
Xmas day. I walked outside in a t-shirt and wasn't cold. :-)
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. :-(
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.
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.
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.
Slow day.
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.
In my battle with SMTP AUTH in Sendmail 8.11.0, I have
prevailed. Yeay.
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.
Chiropracters amaze me. They really do.
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.
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. :-(
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...
The doctor gave me some Naproxen for my messed up back. It seems to
be helping quite a bit.
Since it's almost that time of year again, I've managed to update
the list.
Work has been ultra busy.
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.
Sent in a small patch to the MySQL manual today.
Lots of code hacking for the upcoming launch at work.
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.
A new Macintosh G4 with a 20-inch monitor arrived in my cublicle at
work today. Too bad it's not for me. :-(
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.
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.
Came home from work and took a nap. Woke up around 2am. Whee...
Me: (yelling out) Whose machine is N-O-T-T-Y ?
My boss: (laugter)
Me: Oh. Nevermind...
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.
Laundry and random stuff.
Spaghetti for dinner. Yum!
Gave Keith the tour of some of the Bay Area and took lots of pictures along the way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :-)
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?
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!
Felt a little better. Went to work and found that Josh now has
it. So he's home for the day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Flew to Janet's wedding Rhode Island on a late flight out of San
Francisco.
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.
Bike ride cut very short this morning by invisible rain.
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. :-)
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.
Good day. Launched a new feed and interviewed a candidate.
Database server go boom. :-(
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. :-)
Lots of stuff at work. Busy, busy, busy. Big news coming tomorrow
night, hopefully. :-)
Tux measurements today. And a power outage at work.
Busy day.
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.
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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
Grr.
Grr.
Grr.
Time passed.
Watch the Thomas Crown Affair. Decent movie. I enjoyed it, though
it was a bit slow.
Still cloudy.
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.
What is with all these Coke commercials?
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.
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.
Yum! The grocery store has most excellent apples again.
Genuine work on the book will begin soon.
Watched Entrapment tonight. Good movie.
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. :-)
Hm.
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.
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.
Watched Dogma. Excellent movie.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been busy lately.
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.
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:
- I came home with 6 T-Shirts and 1 pair of boxers.
- I was on the winning team in The Internet Quiz Show.
- I got to meet most of the Kick Ass MySQL development team.
- I attended Randal's Kick Ass Party (it was actually Stonehenge Consulting's party,
but that's his company).
- I sat in on several of Damian Conway's
talks and got to speak with him one-on-one for a bit. Damn, he's
amazing.
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.
New keyboards arrived today. These are better than the last batch I
tried.
New keyboards arrived today. These are better than the last batch I
tried.
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.
Pager went off at 5:45am. Yuck.
Fixed major bugs at work today. And had some good foosball as
well. :-)
Released mytop to the MySQL
community yesterday.
Came home at 7pm. Slept. Got up at 10pm. Ate. Back to bed not long
after.
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.
Woken up by pager this morning. That's rarely a good sign.
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. :-(
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.
AT&T @Home can't seem to keep their network up today or
yesterday. Morons.
Mom visited the hospital yesterday.
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.
Lots of pictures from today's trip: Hearst Castle, then Big Sur Coast, and
finally Pebble
Beach.
Visited the Winchester Mystery House. Pictures are here and here.
Hit the coast north of SF today. Pictures are here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
The network died for a while at work. So Ray and I played
frisbee.
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.
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:
- An ATX Case
- A PCI Sound Card
- An AGP Video Card
- 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.
- Antech KS-399 Mini Tower Case ($70)
- A spindle of 50 CD-Rs ($30)
- 3Dfx Voodoo 3 3000 16MB AGP Card ($150)
- Logitech PS/2 3-Button Mouse ($15)
- 128MB PC100 DIMM ($100)
- Belkin Mouse Pad with built-in wrist rest ($10)
- 15 Foot Cat-5 Ethernet Cable ($15)
- SoundBlaster Live ($100)
- Belkin OmniCube Intelligent Monitor/Keyboard/Mouse Switch ($120)
- Lots of Cables for the Monitor/Keyboard/Mouse Switch ($30)
- 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.
Finally installed the Abit BP6 board at home. I'm now running dual
celerons with 384MB of RAM. :-) Snappy.
Got my new keyboard at work today. It will take some getting used to.
Master/Slave replication in MySQL kicks major ass.
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. :-)
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.
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. :-(
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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Got up early. At work by 9:00am.
Installing the UltraPlex drive tonight.
The BP6 board arrived. Yeay!
Plane got in late. Long story. Perhaps I'll write it up. Need to
sleep first.
April's wedding is today.
Adjusted quickly to Ohio time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mozilla M15 is much
faster. I'm going to try using it as my default browser for a
while. It feels good so far.
I saw the full moon over the mountains.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
- Fetch historical data from the Weather Underground
- Put the data into a database
- Create cool graphs showing a year's worth of hi/low and rainfall
data
- 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.
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...
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.
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.
The network is all messed up at work thanks for our ISP. That makes
getting things done a bit of a challenge.
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.
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).
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.
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:
- Lost Important Foosball Game. Won Unimportant Ones.
Josh and I were in a Yahoo foosball tournament, but we got our butts
kicked in the first round. Doh! But I have been getting lots
better. I've lost very few games recently.
- My Car Got Hitched.
Really. I had a hitch installed so that I can put a hitch-mounted bike
carrier on it. It all cost a bit more than I would have liked, but now
I can take my bike anywhere (that my car will go) to ride
around. Pictures eventually.
- Stayed Up Way Too Late.
This doesn't apply to any specific day, but in general I've had an
abnormal sleep schedule lately. (It's not abnormal for me,
but it can certainly get in the way when I'm trying to function with
the rest of the world.
- Broke The Yahoo Finance Home Page.
But it wasn't actually my fault. I just happened to unknowingly
demonstrate a problem in a script used in building/pushing the
page. It is fixed now.
- Visited The Ocean.
Given the amazing weather we've had recently, I've taken several
little road trips to the cost (Santa Cruz, Half Moon Bay, etc). One of
these times I'll take the new camera and get some good pictures.
Okay, that list is a lot shorter than I expected. I guess I'm not
remembering too well. Serves me right, I guess.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stayed at work until about 2am. MySQL rocks--especially on
fast hardware.
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.
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.
Late night today. Hacking on code to fix some broken
pages.
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.
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.
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.
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..
Put some new pics on-line: last day of work at Marathon, and the Goon Squad party in honor of my
departure. Enjoy.
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.
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.
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.
I broke stuff at work. Caused several data feeds to stop
processing. Damn.
Dinner with Josh at Baker's Square. Yummie
stuff.
Finance team lunch to welcome me & Josh.
Several of us were talked into going to Starzone Karaoke
Experiences in Sunnyvale after work. Drinks and embarrassment. What
fun.
More of the same.
Random stuff at work. Lots of unpacking at
home.
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.
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.
The cats are sort of used to the corporate apartment
now. I'm getting stuff ready to move. And looking at the mountain of
paperwork that Yahoo gave me to read, fill out, and otherwise
process. What fun.
I'm supposed to move in to my apartment on
Monday. Good weather continues.
I already have my car. It arrived rather
quickly.
First day of work. Had [dis]orientation in the morning
(lots of paperwork, got talked at a bit, and pictures taken for
IDs). Afternoon was spent figuring out what is and is not setup right
on my workstation (FreeBSD running on a PIII 450Mhz,
256MB).
It hasn't sunk in yet. But the weather sure is
nice.
Time passed. Moves came to my house a few weeks ago. They
took all my stuff. I moved in with my parents for a week. Then I flew
to California with the cats so that I could start my new job hacking
on Yahoo Finance.
Living in a decent corporate apartment in San Jose. The
weather is excellent so far.
Last day of work. (See pictures here.)I'm unemployed for
a week and a half. Big move coming up. Movers coming in a few
days. Lots to do between now and then.
Moving sucks. I have no idea why I kept so many empty
boxes, bottles, containers, and random other junk in my
house. Really. I've been throwing out stuff left and right. I'm up to
seven bags of trash already.
I wonder why AAA takes so long to get more
maps.
Janet's birthday.
It's official. I'm off the job market. I'll be going to a
little Internet company in Santa
Clara, California. Now the packing/moving/etc. begins.
Why does the fact that I've accepted a job with one of the
coolest companies in the world not seem to deter some head hunters? I
don't know either.
Perl Harbor Day.
Yahoo!
Calendar kicks ass!
It's been an interesting week. A small little company out west is
interested in talking to a Perl Hacker like me. I guess you do get a
second chance sometimes.
Oh, apparently a little
company in Seattle is also interested now. Do I suddenly have
"Hire Me!" written on my forehead? Oh, yeah. It is on my
home page now. Fancy that.
Hacked on lots of Perl code. Discovered XMMS for
Linux. Watched Air Heads and South Park.
Made some spare change trading BEOS
today. :-)
I'm thinking of throwing a Monopoly
Party. :-)
Started reading Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
I bought a new chair which is more compatible with my
computer "desk".
I cut the grass in the back yard.
Nothing interesting to report.
CivCTP for Linux
arrived today. My days are numbered.
I need more applesauce.
Wow. I've just had a good day. Not the whole day--just the
last part. But it's interesting how a good two hours can make the
whole day seem great. And they were all little things. I fixed several
broken things. My ISDN call-bumping started working right
again.
It dawned on me a bit earlier today that I'm going to be
in Houston (again) in a few days. This must be trip #7 or #8 by
now. Guess we need to get those conference slides done and
stuff.
It's a good thing I have a leaf blower.
I noticed that the TV
Guide web site seemed to think that today is Sunday the 11th
(either that or Monday the 12th) and couldn't seem to tell me what was
I TV. So I caught up on magazines and read a bit more of Mastering
Algorithms in Perl.
I was dragging all day today. That's probably because I
didn't really fall asleep until something like 3am due to the heaving
napping yesterday. Gotta love the weekends.
Ordered Civilization: Call to
Power from Linux
Central, my favorite Linux distributer/reseller. It should be here
in time for the weekend. Looks like I won't be getting much
done.
The front yard is covered with leaves. Tomorrow's goal is
to get out the leaf blower and blow them into someone else's yard or,
preferably, the street.
Rather uneventful week. Ran across something really
amusing while browsing jwz's
bookmarks: Letters to
Wendy. Now that's what I call humor. Managed to temporarily
misplace the key to Kevin's house. Wonder where it'll turn
up.
A week from today I'll be flying to Houston. At least this
time I'm going while the weather is likely to be decent. I guess I
should really work on the presentation slides. Also found The Tao of
Programming today.
I've been away. I made it back from the week and a half
trip to Denver with pictures and
such. I got the job offer but wasn't thrilled with the pay, so we're
negotiating a bit.
Updated the List of Stuff to Get and
Do and List of Stuff I
Got and Did given that I have purchased quite a bit of new music
lately.
Catching up on reading, bills, laundry, etc.
Slept until about 4:00pm today. Not quite sure why. That's
gonna mess me up, I fear.
Slept a lot today. Went shopping for cat stuff and
food. By the time I reached the grocery store, I was quite hungry. I
now own stuff that I wouldn't normally eat.
Got stuff ready for class this week. Assignments, quiz,
and such.
Hacked on mp3shell a small amount. Refreshed my TeX
knowledge a bit. Customized mutt a
bit more. Downloaded and played with fetchnews. Found
a bug in it and reported it to the author with a fix.
Slept a lot today.
More hacking on the mp3shell. It can record entries in the
database now. And I'm starting the Apache/PHP browser front-end. Just
need to do the Amazon query module, too.
Read a little more of the new book, too.
Watched one of my cats amuse the hell out of himself with
a plastic grocery bag.
Turned in my application for the job today.
Read a fair amount of Mastering
Algorithms with Perl and started playing seriously with mutt as an alternative mail
reader. The default vi-like key bindings sort of surprised me. But I
got used to it.
Yeay! New books arrived. I don't know why, but it seems
that every book I pre-ordered from Amazon decided to come on the same
day. Both Mastering
Algorithms with Perl and Running
Linux came today. Woohoo!
Wow. The week is half over already.
Work stuff. Taught class. Gave quiz. Came home. Played
with cats, watched some TV. Decided to be introspective for a
while. Maybe I'll write more later--or just go to bed.
Marveled at how quickly time can fly at work even when I'm
not doing heads-down stuff. Managed to add lots of server side caching
to our Intranet home page on the test server. So far so
good.
The eagerly awaited job posting has not
appeared yet, so I wait another day.
Managed to get the homework and quiz ready for tomorrow
night's class. It'll be fun now that we're actually going to start
with C. I just hope that I don't lose anyone right away.
Hacked quite a bit on my MP3 shell. I think I'll call it
"mp3shell" since it is relatively descriptive. I can now
issue various commands (lookup, record, help, exit, catalog, dump,
play) and most of them do something interesting. Tried recoding
The Hits by Garth Brooks. Everything worked flawlessly with
the lookup, ripping, and encoding sequence. Now I just need to get the
database stuff working.
The campaign to unsubscribe myself from as many useless
mailing lists as possible continues.
After talking a bit with Josh a bit about the fun he's
having with fruhead.com, I have
renewed my interest in PHP. I'm going
to use it instead of mod_perl
for some work on WCNet, because I
need a relatively fast solution--not overkill.
I'm also looking to test some of the cool stuff I've seen
over at horde.org, especially IMP.
Slept in since I didn't have to go to work. Managed to
stay in bed past 9:00am before nature called. Got up and tried to work
on my MP3 database software. I spent 2 hours trying to figure out the
housing market in suburbs south of Denver, Colorado.
Went back to bed after allergy medicine kicked in. Got up
at 1:30pm mildly disoriented. Showered. Ate lunch. Finished reading my
Colorado AAA Tour Book. I feel so educated now.
Got a call from the Help Desk at work. Apparently a few
more folks are getting prompted for passwords when they try and "go to
the Internet" and I'm supposed to somehow diagnose this with no more
information. I tried to get some details, but they didn't have
any. Told 'em to wait until Tuesday unless the problems are
"urgent".
Submitted a few questions to Slashdot for Tim O'Reilly to
answer. If the moderators like mine, they might forward it to Tim to
answer. That'd be cool.
Managed to motivate myself to play with computer stuff
again. Finally ditched Gnus as my
Mail and News reader. Downloaded, compiled, and installed Pine 4.10 (returning to my
roots, I guess).
Did three loads of laundry. Did dishes.
Converted my internal network's domain name from
z.org to zawodny.com so that anal sendmail setups don't bounce my
mail. Now I start slowly migrating all my mailing lists from
jzawodn@wcnet.org to Jeremy@Zawodny.com. Not
only is the newer address cooler, it actually works with my internal
network, and it will make life easier on the off chance that I end up
living a thousand miles away in the not-so-distant
future.
Got bored enough to start on-line journal. Wonder if
anyone will ever read it. Apparently I suckered you into it,
somehow.
Mmmmm. Donuts and apples for breakfast/lunch.
Spent some serious time hacking on my MP3 database
software. Decided to throw out the old stuff and start from
scratch. Then changed my mind and re-used a lot of the old stuff in a
different framework.
Visited Kevin & Leah's cats. Gave them food and
stuff. Picked up the CDs that I left at work. Went to the grocery
store for a few items.
Napped. Made some spaghetti for dinner using fresh
ingredients.
Watched War Games for inspiration around
8:00pm. Then stayed up until 4:00am hacking on that MP3
software. Decided to build an "MP3 shell" written in
Perl. More work required.
Slept in.
Went to Toledo to go swimming at the parents' pool. Got to
see the mostly remodeled kitchen.
Visited MacQueen's Orchard on the way home. Picked up
apples, syrup, and donuts.
Thought quite seriously about the possibility of going for
a transfer at work and moving to the Littleton, Colorado area. Started
assembling facts, figures, and other stuff on a Littleton page that I put
together.
Updated on: Sat Jun 22 18:11:24 2002
Copyright 2002, Jeremy D. Zawodny <Jeremy@Zawodny.com>
Site built with Emacs, MySQL, HTML::Mason and some random Perl code on my Linux box.
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