What Now?

Trip Photos

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:11:29 GMT

M posted the better of our trip photos to her photo blog. See here

Emeryville to Las Vegas

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 04:09:24 GMT

Note: This was written by hand 3/4 of the way into a 4 shot Manhattan a few days later, so forgive me for being overly dramatic. I only corrected the spelling and a few gramatical errors.

March 7 2009

Normally I-5 South is my least favorite California drive, however, March has a feature that forces me to promote 680 to my least favorite stretch: cherry blossoms. Of the various fruits and vegetables that we produce here I never knew that we had such cherry orchards. In march the trees are full of soft white petals, some dust the ground lightly giving the orchard a fresh snow effect. The contrast with the dark green hills that I had only previously seen and my delicate nose felt as dry gold fields is striking with a clear blue sky. The miles melted away until we cut over at Bakersfield to cross the state line to Nevada and and my first visit to Las Vegas.

Vegas Baby! It looks like so much fun in the ads. I can't imagine the ads that would more accurately portray the feeling I had walking through the casinos. There was no party atmosphere; very little "woo!". There were lots of desperate looking people grimly placing bets and watching their chips raked to the house side of the table again and again. Our only gamble was in picking which celebrity chef restaurant to subject our snooty San Francisco palates. We wound up at Todd English's Olives in the Bellagio. Despite the feeling we were eating in the best food court in the finest mall in the States and our server, Ralph, pointing out that that third bound book on the table was the wine list as though it was some wild African beast we would never have seen in our much more usual and comfortable Olive Garden habitat, we had a very nice meal. My pork loin greens and polenta were all very well prepared and as good as anything I've eaten elsewhere. M's ravioli was "better than average" but I heard no noises from her side of the table that might otherwise be confused with something less wholesome than dinner.

After dinner we viewed the obligatory water fountain show in front of the Bellagio, got our Ocean's 11 photos, and a then took the monorail back to the Marriott. Yes, we managed to take public transit in Vegas and stay at a hotel without a single slot machine or other gambling apparatus.

One image dominates my view of Vegas: the row of men in t-shirts emblazoned with "Girls Direct" handing out cards with images of prostitutes in various stages of undress. The cards were obviously accepted and then discarded at various places along the sidewalk such that every step trampled on an anonymous cast off woman, like walking through an orchard of cherry blossoms falling slowly and forgotten.

My DSL line on AT&T copper part 2

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:58:25 GMT

A couple of weeks after my last DSL outage my line went down again. Same symptoms, loop length change, lots of noise on the line, etc. I went through the trouble-shooting bit with Speakeasy and Covad again, and that ended in Covad wanting to send a tech to my house to check my inside wiring. I'm a patient man, a carpet even, when it comes to things like this. I'm understanding. I work in IT, I know things go wrong. But even I have limits. I hung up the phone and started researching my other options.

In my neighborhood I basically had cable or something else as an alternate to AT&T's copper. Cable would be through Comcast and I really don't like their business practices. Our TV is through DirecTV and that wasn't going to change, so it really didn't make sense to get Comcast's service. I opted for "something else"; wireless.

There are a couple of wireless ISP options in the SF Bay Area, but I picked Unwired Ltd.. The network is run by a small local company whose founder was a poster to BAWUG of which I was an occasional email list participant. That makes Unwired my father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate, so you can see where I had to pick them. The dish went up a week ago and so far I'm mostly pleased. Web pages load super fast, latency is lower than DSL (14ms to my office!). The connection is pretty heavily policed though. I've been rsyncing a backup of my personal server in the evenings and the average throughput is around 512Kbps on a 6Mbps synchronous connection. My personal server is on a 10Mbps fractional T3 that was no where near fully subscribed during the rsync, so Unwired must be scaleing back connections regardless of available bandwidth. I'm not using a standard port for ssh on either end, so that might look like P2P traffic. I'll have to send them an email about that. The interesting thing is that my bandwidth wasn't limited to 512Kbps. New connections were fast and not affected by the limit. I wonder if I can apply some of the stuff they have set up to the conference wireless network...

This is your DSL line on AT&T. Any Questions?

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 06:43:09 GMT

My DSL line has been down hard twice in the past four weeks, most recently for five days. Being a big geek, I run my personal domain and a couple others on a home server. So, not having an internet connection is a bit more of an inconvenience than just not being able to read slashdot. I can't get my email, my wife can't get her email, and she actually makes some freelance money through her email. So, I was, let's say, disgruntled a bit. To be more accurate, I asked my wife how much she liked one of our cars as I wanted to back it into AT&T's phone box up the street.

I placed my service call on Thursday and, initially AT&T's tech was scheduled for Friday. That didn't happen, but the tech did come on Saturday while I was out. In the past the AT&T tech's haven't been able to get to the phone box on the side of my house because they'd have to walk down my driveway to get to it. Since it is harder to find than a scientist at a Huckabee rally, I drew a map and put it in front of my house next to the gate the guards the phone box. I even drew red arrows and a path to the box that would make Bill Keane proud. The tech bothered my upstairs neighbor insisting he needed access. The neighbor was ill and in no mood to figure out what the tech wanted, so he went on his merry way. I contacted my ISP, Speakeasy, again and the support guy rescheduled AT&T for Monday. I planned to stay home Monday to escort the tech to the phone box. Fortunately I checked the trouble ticket Monday morning (dial-up, ick) and found that Covad hadn't managed to get AT&T scheduled for Monday. They'd get around to it Tuesday, probably by 1PM. 12:30 PM roles around on Tuesday, the tech shows up. He's standing outside scratching his head looking at his work order and trying to figure out how to penetrate the fortress of phone boxitude, so I go out and sherpa him down the driveway. About an hour later my line is working again perfectly.

I asked him what the problem was, and he informed me that AT&T has been conditioning lines in the neighborhood to support "LightSpeed", their new TV service, which I later discovered (with my working internet connection) is part of their U-Verse bundle. He told me that the folks working on the line tested mine for dial-tone, found none, and CUT it, despite the caps indicating it was a loop in service (I have "dry-line" DSL). It seems that, shockingly, the same intrepid explorers that can't find my phone box have no problem slashing through our local jungle of wires. The tech assured me that it probably wouldn't happen again as they were done working in my neighborhood. I'm not holding my breath. Oh, the tech also told me that the pair I was previously on was a "party line". It seems the copper in my neighborhood is that old. Probably a good thing though. Back in the day, they didn't spare expense in stringing wire.

The only up side to this is that I got to use my pringles cantenna to bridge my network to my neighbor's. I had to hack my dlink bridge/ap a bit to use an external antenna, but any day I get to use a soldering iron is a good one.

Home Server

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:38:59 GMT

http://gizmodo.com/photogallery/microserveces08

The first few pages kill me.

LISA '07 in Dallas TX

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:43:05 GMT

I'm at USENIX's LISA conference in Dallas TX right now enjoying the meat meat meat. Sorry for the poor photo quality. My Treo 680's camera is something like .3 megapixel and has a horrible light meter.

Today is also my birthday. My co-workers decorated the "laptop lounge" in my honor.

Ringy Dingy

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 23:37:37 GMT

Mo asked me to make her a Harry Potter mp3 ringtone, so I did.

Props

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 17:34:29 GMT

I had a web cam pointed out my front window at the warehouse across the street which is undergoing conversion to apartments. The machine running the webcam died, and a couple days ago I took a picture to update the webcam view. I replaced the webcam image today and in doing so had a look at the developer's website as the apartments are almost done. I was surprised to see myself in one of their marketing pieces. Monica and I are walking back from one of our weekend morning trips to Peet's in the photo. Incidently, the photo is a creative depiction of the neighborhood. See here:

www.emeryvilleproject.net

You'll need to scroll down a bit to get the comparison photo.

Mo's photo blog

Wed, 23 May 2007 04:28:41 GMT

Monica now has a blog and has posted some much better edited photos from recent events. You can find it here:

http://monstermoni.blogspot.com/.

Hawai'i blah blah blah

Fri, 18 May 2007 07:21:27 GMT

Today was pretty dull, lie on the beach, walk on the beach, eat, walk on the beach, life in paradise, etc. Here's a brief movie, hopefully embedded. If that doesn't work, here's a link:

http://moto.delporto.com/~tony/hawaii2007/lanikai.mp4

Hawai'i continued

Thu, 17 May 2007 07:45:57 GMT

Last night culminated in our own version of plate lunch. We skewered some veggies and that Hawaiian favorite, Spam, put that on our little grill, and then served with rice. Delicious.

This morning I paid a karma debt. When I was about 12 my folks took us to Oahu, and one of the stops on that trip was Valley of the Temples, a replica of a Buddist temple in Japan. I was fascinated with the Koi pond. You see the Koi were accustomed to being fed with little pellets that, as I recall, were available from little gumball machines. My memory is poor, but I believe I started out feeding the fish pellets from the gumball machines. When I ran out, I switched to throwing gravel at them, a very un-buddist thing to do, especially since the koi continued to snap up anything pellet sized that hit the water. Eventually I was reprimanded by a monk that happened to notice what I was up to. I believe he told me that the gravel would kill the fish as they could not digest it. I've felt bad about that for over 20 years. When I found out we were going to Oahu, I made a list of things I wanted to do, one of which was simply "feed fish". Mo and I went to the temple this morning, and I fed the fish (fish food, not gravel).

After the temple, we meandered our way from Kailua to Hale'iwa on the North Shore. We made a few stops along the way including Kualoa Beach park which features a view of The People's Revolutionary Conical Head Covering and a lovely curved beach.

We had lunch at Breakers. I had a "Kalua" pulled pork sandwich, and no, that doesn't involve alcohol. Monica had the Terriaki Taro burger. Neither was horrible, neither was great. I give it three "meh's" out of five. Dessert was an entirely different story. We were both stuffed and not planning to eat more, but, we were on the north shore and everyone we talked with about our trip said that we had to get shave ice at Matsumoto's. We decided to split a small Guava. To say I enjoyed it would be an understatement.

Hawai'i

Tue, 15 May 2007 19:06:21 GMT

We're in Hawai'i, specifically Oahu, and just to be precise, Kailua. Yesterday we attended the wedding we came here for which was beautiful AND had great food.

I'm not sure what to mention really. We're in paradise. There is a beach 5 minutes from our vacation rental that is often mentioned in "top 10 beaches in the world" lists which I think we'll be off to sit on for the remainder of the day shortly. I've read a book in its entirety, something I haven't done in a very long time. All in all, I'm very relaxed and happy. I think I should take vacations more often.

I hate my phone line

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 23:55:18 GMT

I hate my phone line. My caller id lists the following calls over the last few days:

3/23 Out of Area 1 800 383 0583 9:53 AM
3/24 Out of Area Out of Area 9:53 AM
3/25 Coleman Linda 1 510 712 9592 7:15 AM
3/25 Research Center 1 231 224 2035 4:30 PM

Now, my phone only lists the most recent call from a given number, so the above doesn't show that "Research Center" is a daily call, and "Linda Coleman" who I don't know from Adam, called yesterday morning too. My answering machine tells folks who they've reached, so if Linda had a wrong number I assume she would have figured it out yesterday morning and not called us at 7:15 AM! I just paid our bill for that line which is about $30/month, half of which is federal tax. Now, I basically believe in everything the taxes are going for, rural access, third party access to the lines, etc., but I don't like that we pay $30/month so people can hound us for money, ask us to take "surveys", or otherwise interrupt whatever we're doing at the time, like sleeping!

There is a wireless internet access company in the Bay Area called Unwired that I'm considering as a replacement for our DSL line (that's another rant). At this point I see two advantages to having a "land" line: 911, and PG&E, which can't report outage information to a caller on a mobile phone. Even if that doesn't work out, Speakeasy offers dry line DSL that doesn't require phone service. The one final temptation is to have a line to play with Asterisk on, but, given that it took me about a month to set up web mail on the home server, I doubt I'll dedicate the time to Asterisk.

Something fishy

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 04:14:35 GMT

I finally accomplished something today that I've wanted to do for years: I made pasta from scratch. Now, those of you who have done this know that it isn't that big of a deal. Of course for my primary readers who, being search engine spiders, ironically, have no arms to do the kneading, it is impossible. I tried this once before in our small apartment in San Francisco with far less success. I take that as proof that our granite counter tops make me a better cook.

Two events converged to make my attempt possible: a week of forced vacation due to an unreasonable number of accrued vacation hours, and a free 6 oz. package of smoked salmon my friend got in a gift basket and did not want. During my stint in the Pacific Northwest I developed an affinity for smoked-salmon anything, but most especially ravioli with cream sauce. So, given smoked salmon, I need only make the ravioli and cream sauce to go with it. The interweb provides plenty of recipes for the dish or components there of. I also have a shiny pasta machine new-in-box (save aforementioned debacle in small SF apartment) with a ravioli maker attachment from our wedding gifts. Easy right?

Three and a half hours later, I had discarded the ravioli maker attachment and made a couple dozen reasonable ravioli using a cookie cutter and the third of three attempts at pasta dough. The filling was a sort of salmon mousse composed of smoked salmon, an egg, fresh dill, and a bit of (organic, so Bay Area) half and half. I cooked the ravioli and made a light sauce from butter, lemon juice and zest, Pinot Grigio and half and half. I served the ravioli with brussel sprouts and some bread Mo brought home from Trader Joe's. It turned out okay, but given the work I put into it, anti-climatic. Still, now I've made pasta from scratch and will probably do it again now that I know how to do it.

It's not just a good cabbage for soup

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 02:40:45 GMT

We went to Napa (well, Yountville technically) for lunch at Hurley's today. Now that the Holidays are over save New Year's Eve which we don't celebrate anyway we're trying to relax and spend some time together before Mo heads back to school and work and craziness. I had the "Vintner's special" which was a mediocre cut of steak seasoned and prepared exceptionally well, fries, and crisp green beans with butter along with a nice spinach salad to start, and the house Cabernet. Extremely satisfying victuals to accompany the conversation about where we're going to spend some vacation time after Mo graduates in May. One week in Hawai'i and a friend's wedding, two weeks in Mexico, or two+ weeks in Oz/New Zealand. No decision yet.

After lunch we spent a few hours at the Napa outlets searching for those after Christmas sales deals. I bought a pair of Levi's which I haven't worn in probably 5 or 6 years. I've been looking for new jeans for some time; it's hard to find something that fits reasonably and isn't "distressed". I have jeans that are naturally distressed. They're great for painting and housework, and yelling at the kids to get off my lawn. We went to a mall in Pleasanton twice earlier this week to get my new watch sized and managed to spend several hours on each occasion digging for deals.

/dev/random

Trader Joe's potato gnocci isn't horrible

The new Deftones album doesn't have any stand out tracks, but is good overall

I have three pounds of Peet's coffee in my freezer, one pound of Trader Joe's Italian Roast, and almost a pound of Tres America's in the cupboard. I guess the charade of giving up caffeine is up.

I am incapable of purchasing computer equipment without hours of research that I can predict the outcome of: I won't spend that much for what I want when I can get by with a few far inferior things and a little elbow grease

I will always play video games rather than expend elbow grease making aforementioned kludge work.

Media for the Masses

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 23:03:54 GMT

Monica and I attacked her cleaning list this weekend. Monica is one of those people who make detailed lists of things to do and our life is much better organized because of it. This one had sublists and check boxes, not nearly all of which now have checks in them now. I never thought our romance would lead to me on my hands and knees...with a green scrubby and a bucket of diluted ammonia.

Our Sunday goal was to organize our den and outdoor storage. This lead to pulling down those boxes we never look in from the closet shelf. Two of said boxes contained a couple dozen CDs that aren't a part of our regular collection and about 200 cassette tapes. Yes cassette tapes. Analog storage from our collective youth. Through move after move those boxes have followed us around finding a home in the back of a closet or on a shelf. Most of them went with the garbage men this morning. The few we kept were of sentimental value, although I doubt I will ever listing to "DSADI - Live From Room 17" again.

I imagined those three trashbags of tapes finding their way to a landfill, along with all the LPs, 8-tracks, cassettes, AOL CDs, floppy disks, and other obsolete media. At some point won't we run out of stuff to make these things with? Do we really need to individually own media when what we really want is to use the content? I've never thought of widespread availability of content delivery mechanisms (cable, internet, etc) as an environmental one, nor the DRM debate within that context. I guess we still have sufficient material and space to make it cheaper to churn out millions of discs rather than deal with the long term consequences of that production and packaging. I may rethink my preference for buying cds over downloading iTunes. Will I really want to listen to Jay-Z, Beck, or White Stripes when I'm 80 (assuming...)? Will anything exist to play my discs in 2054?

You can't go home again....or can you?

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 06:08:52 GMT

I've been in Seattle for 5 days now and have been enjoying myself immensely, aside from the working part. I was here to run the network for Mobisys '05 and added a few days for leisure. I've seen friends and walked the streets of my college days. Seattle is not exactly the city I remember, but it is close enough to be very comfortable, like an old pair of favorite shoes not wore in a while. Monica flew up to join me Tuesday night and we had our first full day of vacation in Seattle today.We had to switch hotels from the Red Lion on 5th to the Executive Pacific Plaza, which is actually a downgrade despite the names. I'll miss the view from my room. After switching hotel rooms we walked to the Seattle Center to go to the Experience Museum Project and Science Fiction Museum. After geeking out on all of the science fiction memorabilia (Monica's favorite - the hoverboard from Back to the Future; mine - the 1/2 size Martian rover) we had lunch at the overpriced museum cafe. Note to the chef: a sandwich without meat is not a vegetarian sandwich, it is just a sandwich without meat. My chicken club was okay, but the real treat was the waiter who sounded like he was announcing movie titles rather than the special of the day.

The Music portion of the EMP was a ton of fun for me. The museum portion featured an extensive section on Northwest music, including a large section covering the period of time I lived there (1992 - 1996, '98 if you count commuting from Olympia on a daily basis for two years). We saw posters for shows at clubs we used to go to as well as signs from the ones no longer in business. I was sad to see the O.K. Hotel sign among them. The O.K. was one of the only all-ages venues in Seattle and the best place for an under 21 music fan to see a band. The Moe's entrance arch was there too. I saw Marilyn Manson there in 1995 on the tour supporting Portrait of an American Family. The Jimmie Hendrix exhibit is the showcase and was good, and we also really enjoyed the demo room which has instruments with tutorials. Tired from banging on the drums all day, we took the monorail back downtown to catch a bus to the University district and a restaurant we thought we had lost forever.

Monica moved to Seattle 11 years ago this month, and that was the start of our serious relationship. The restaurant we ate at for special occasions was Ciao Bella and it has a very special place in our hearts. A few years after we left Seattle we discovered that the restaurant had burned down. On a lark, I looked it up shortly after arriving and found that they had rebuilt. We had dinner there tonight just as we did so many times while we were dating. The food and ambiance is still great, and the romance was the same. So, in a way, we went home again despite cliches to the contrary.

Monica's Pictures online

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 23:22:53 GMT

Monica's photos from Mexico are available here.

Bump

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 06:48:29 GMT

Been real busy since last post, what with Lisa '04, OSDI '04, and the holidays. Happily I touched bases with an old friend from Seattle during his visit to his brother. Oddly, his brother lives about 5 blocks from our place. I suppose muttering "small world" is appropriate. I owe a phone call to a friend from Sacto now living in the Pacific Northwest who I'll likely be able to see on or after my trip up there for Mobisys '05.

In geek news I'm about to replace my beige box firewall with a little green Soekris box. Presently I'm waiting for a lull in network traffic to converge with a lull in my own sloth to migrate service. My last utility bill is providing additional impetus. We keep the doors to the rooms closed when running the heater in the hallway so the heat goes to the front room and not rooms we aren't in. Often the den is warmer than the hall. The hall has a standard gas wall furnace; the den has a dual 1.8Ghz G5, 1Ghz Athlon, 550Mhz PIII, and 19" CRT.

I spent this morning at the Apple Store watching my boss's boss's powerbook do extended hardware test loops in hopes of proving, prior to the end of its warranty in 10 days, a RAM module bad. I was there for almost three hours, but did successfully get the RAM exchanged for free. Well, I will have when I go back in two or three days once the memory the tech ordered arrived. I must say I'm generally impressed with the folks at the Mac Genius bar.

Dad's cleaning house a little bit and I decided to help by removing my skateboards, two of the few possessions I still store at my folks' house. It turns out I can still skate a little. Maybe I'll skate instead of walking to work in the morning when the weather gets better. Maybe I better take out a large insurance policy on myself before doing so. My 13 year old niece informed me that my board was "hecka old" which makes me "hecka old" by relation. Being that my board is older than her, I guess I'd have to agree.

Dia De Los Muertos, Halloween

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 02:57:19 GMT

We went to Fruitvale today for the Dia De Los Muertos festivities. Monica tells me what they had was nothing like what she experienced in Mexico, but I guess that is to be expected while not in Mexico. We walked along enjoying the alters, many of which where not so much remembrances of those past but art installations with various points to make, not the least of which were political in nature. Hey, it's the Bay Area, what else would we do? Monica had her camera along and there will be pictures at some point. Until she gets the film developed I'll provide an image of our small alter.

We spent the evening carving our pumpkins and roasting the seeds. I haven't been home for Halloween the last couple of years so I took extra glee in making a Jack'O'Lantern for Nana as well as myself. Unfortunately our carving tool broke halfway through Monica's Mexican Mask leaving it unfinished. We've had a few kids come by, some too young to know to say "Trick or Treat", some too old to show moderation, decimating the bowl our upstairs neighbor left out in her absence in one greedy grab. Fortunately our bowl runneth over. I'd hate to run out of candy, uh, for the kids. Yeah. For the kids.

The last treat was digging out and dusting of the Sisters of Mercy, Peter Murphy, and The Cure CDs. Everyday isn't Halloween anymore, but Halloween, well, is Halloween. Boo!

let us remember

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 02:09:06 GMT

I went to Monica's 10 year high school reunion over the weekend. She and I went to the same school, but I graduated two years earlier than her. So, I knew some of the folks in her class superficially. It was odd how little many of them had changed, and odder how much others had. We hopped a few bars afterwards and didn't get in until about 1:30. Strangely I wasn't as tired as I should have been being up hours past my bedtime.

I was pretty tired the following day but mustered enough energy to visit with Monica's childhood friend K and her husband B, who also went to our high school. They recently had their first child, a girl. I don't hold babies often, and I have to say I was taken aback by that little bundle of joy. She has the deepest blue eyes.

Monica and I took a stroll through memory lane that night, leafing through our old year books.

The last couple of days I've been buried in a project at work and my eyes have been too sore to hack at the home servers. LISA is rapidly approaching and I'm in full panic mode about the projects that need to get done in the next two weeks. It would be fine if my work load until the conference was static, but the pile grows higher everyday.

Bringing Florida to a State near you

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 04:17:50 GMT

RNC funded voter registration company throws out non Republican registrations. Or not.

A voice called out in the wilderness

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 05:59:54 GMT

I got an e-mail and then later a phone call from a friend of mine from high school which I'll call B. We chatted for an hour or two about various stuff and I found that we still have a lot in common. He lives in Seattle(ish - Puyallup really) now so I haven't seen him in the flesh in about a year. Oddly, we kinda just pick off wherever we last left off. Makes me wish we lived closer. I've distanced myself from high school and college friends out of accident , neglect, or intent (and combinations thereof) and find myself missing those relationships at times.

Haircut went fine. I got compliments at my coworker's BBQ Sunday so it probably looks okay. BBQ was fun - got to douse charcoal with *lots* of lighter fluid and make it go FUMP! Coworker managed to rent a nice house from a law student who is working in DC for a year. After the cheese dog, BBQ chicken, potato salad and a couple Harps I was ready to take a nap on the patio.

After the ordeal of haircut I spent Saturday hacking at my home servers. The new web server is mostly up and running though I need to make Monica's virtual domain point at some content. Imap is running but needs a certificate for SSL. I'm going to try using CACert.org for that. Once I have imap running I need to set up sendmail to handle mail for the two domains we have and set up spamassassin to shuffle spam out of my inbox. Once e-mail has been moved to the new server I can see about replacing the current server with a Soekris box, and replacing the three year old Athlon motherboard and CPU in the "new" server with a C3 or something similar that draws less juice and makes less noise. I think I'll need to keep the current case although I'd like to move to something smaller. Eventually the home server project will be done and I'll be able to get on to other things.

I've dumped another 10 cd's worth of music in iTunes. Current track is the Doors "Alabama Song", which I know as that song about finding a Whisky Bar. It reminds me that I'm out of Scotch. Fighting with a SparcStation 20 and its occasionally enough to be maddening SCSI termination problem and crack rock addled sun engineer designed proprietary SCSI connection all day today makes me wish the Scotch bottle wasn't empty. I have a project which requires four servers running IRC, Wiki, MySQL, blog and redundancy for each, needs to be in beta in two weeks, and by the way has to be implemented with stuff we have on hand. Like a SS20 with a 40mhz processor and three machines I bought to be basically dumb terminals running X. I pulled a 2G hard drive out of an old Apple to give the SS20 enough disk space to put the OpenBSD source on it so I can patch the stupid thing. I'm starting to get a *little* frustrated.

who knew?

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 23:01:23 GMT

Things I learned today as a result of lurking on #sage-members

Germany and Italy declared war on the US. One chatter drew a parallel between our invasion of Iraq and our invasion of Germany stating that it was the same as Germany didn't attack us, suggesting our conflict should have been with Japan only. I didn't know how exactly we wound up on the European front, so I looked it up.

GW may have help on the stump.

wiki wiki wiki

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 04:57:08 GMT

I finally managed to get purplewiki running on the new conference server. I'm helping John Sechrest set up a wiki/blog/irc thing that is designed to foster collaborative work at our conferences and leave documentation of it laying around. Purplewiki itself was a breeze to set up; the difficulty lay in me being unfamiliar with how Debian manages its packages and base installation. I'm used to OpenBSD which lets you compile stuff out of the box. Debian provides much greater control over what gets installed. Consequently, the installer (your humble sysadmin) needs to know what the heck he is doing. Given that I don't play with Linux much, it was a bit of a challenge to figure out which package had the files I needed to get CPAN to build the modules PurpleWiki depends on. J, our senior guy showed me the milk in the refrigerator door and things went smoothly from there. The wiki is the first portion of the documentation project. Next comes blogging and logged IRC that generates wiki word smart pages. If this comes together in time for LISA I'll be pleasantly shocked.

Nana goes in for her teeth cleaning tomorrow. She's blissfully unaware that sedation awaits her. Hopefully she'll come through the teeth cleaning okay and be her grouchy self tomorrow night.

I finally got around to going to the grocery store tonight. I didn't have a plan for meals again and wound up with four cans of beans (each a different variety of course). Monica will be happy to be 1000 miles away this week.

Saturday is haircut day. I never know what to ask for when I go, so I don't go very often; every two months rather than weeks. Of course, the place I go to charges enough for three months of barber shop haircuts so it evens out more or less. Monica convinced me to go after months of resistance. It pains me to pay so much for a hair cut, but I have to say that the guy who does it gives me the best haircuts I've ever had. Note that the picture associated with this blog is that haircut grown out about five weeks. That picture was taken about five weeks ago. If you find yourself on the Ponte Veccio in Florence and stop mid way to look at the river you'll see the wall that is behind my head in the photo. I really do need to scan our vacation photos...

Watched the Vice Presidential debates last night. I must say I really enjoyed seeing Cheney and Edwards go at it; much more enjoyable that Kerry mopping the floor with GW. I'm looking forward to tomorrow night's rematch. GW might do better in a town hall setting personable guy that he is. Then again, he might be asked tough questions by the audience which, if last debate was any indicator, he won't field well. Kerry will have a tough time finding some charisma to carry his positions to the voters hearts. Either way, I'm not sure the debates will change the outcome of the election too much. Keeping a close eye on Diebold might be a better way to sway the election.

Oh, and thank you Dick Cheney for mentioning this. Sorta. If only there were journalists in the mainstream news media as critical of our politicians.