The Secret Life of The Dragon Zeku

All Sorts Of Busy

2010-11-17T12:11:00.001-06:00

Warm salutations, Humanity. Of late, there has been much to occupy me, and much to celebrate.

Back in October, I traveled by aircraft to the desert city of Las Vegas, to attend a bachelor party in Jahndo's honor. There were 11 of us. We stayed at the Monte Carlo, and a good time was had by all, especially the majority of us who did well at the craps table. Myself, I didn't warm to craps, and preferred to play poker. I lost money, but not a lot of it. Friday night we went down to Fremont Street in "old Vegas." That was a blast. The only low-light was that I was just a few pounds too heavy to ride the 800 foot zip-line that runs down the street. (Note to self: TREADMILL, FATTY!)

The bachelor extravaganza went on the following day and night, but I did not stay in Vegas for the second half. I flew home Saturday morning and attended Kayrin's wedding. It was very nicely done -- a small outdoor ceremony officiated by a friend of the couple, followed by drinks and and excellent dinner. Malallee and I are eager to have the newlyweds over to our place for a meal sometime soon; with mutually busy schedules, we haven't seen as much of them lately as we would like.

On election night, my home theater projector crapped out. As Malallee and I were watching the returns, I noticed that the brightness of the picture kept flickering. As I changed channels and switched to different input sources, desperately hoping that the effect was coming from the station itself, my cable provider, or my cable box, the projector finally went dark altogether. Then a tiny wisp of smoke came out of it. I, in a rare attack of naive optimism, decided that the lamp unit had burned out, and ordered a replacement. When it arrived a few days later, I installed it, remounted the projector to the ceiling, and turned it back on. The new lamp didn't light, but the rest of the projector did, with flame and sparks shooting out the sides. I guess it wasn't a burned out lamp after all.

A couple of weeks ago, my parents and my sister came to stay with us for a few days, mostly to shop apparel for my niece-in-progress, who is due to arrive in April. Aside from the shopping and the perhaps unhealthy amount of eating (TREADMILL, FATTY!), I went with my Dad to the classic car museum, because he's into that sort of thing. It was a pretty good weekend.

Malallee was unhappy with some recent organizational changes at her job, so she went looking for a new one, and found it. She's starting the new gig after Thanksgiving.

This past weekend, we flew to Boston for Jahndo's wedding. A nice weekend. Boston is a nice city, with nice restaurants. We checked out the New England Aquarium (where I was disappointed to find all the sharks and rays had been removed so the tank could be treated for a parasite), and ate at a great little family run Italian place, and a couple of good Irish pubs. The only thing I didn't especially care for was the hotel. Not that there was anything wrong with it, it was just absurdly overpriced. The accommodations were clean and comfortable, but no more so than at a Holiday Inn. I expect a bit more luxury from a place whose (completely average) breakfast buffet costs $30 per person.

When we got home I installed the new home theater projector. Well, installed isn't the right word -- I temporarily mounted the projector in such a way that the picture appears on the screen and is watchable, then ordered a proper mounting bracket for it, because the homemade one that the previous homeowner ginned up to mount the old one won't work for the new. (Just to be clear, it is an impressive homemade mount -- but it was obviously custom built for the old projector, and its limited degree of adjustability is insufficient to get the new projector aligned with the screen). For now, the picture takes up about 70 percent of the screen real estate, leaving vast and unequal regions empty at the left, right, and top.

I am shocked to realize that our week-long trip to the Dominican Republic is coming up in only a month. Egad! Not prepared!

Things Which Recently Happened:

2010-08-02T10:15:00.000-05:00

Malallee had a car accident while we were on our way to meet some friends a the drive-in, damaging her car to the tune of 6K. The next day, while she was using the Hail Mary as a substitute, it crapped out on her and I had to go pick her up on the UltraZekuHyperMegaSpeedCyberCycle. So a few days after that I bought a 2005 Mini Cooper, which I have taken to calling the Green Goblin. (Guess what color it is).

We went to my parent's lake cabin the weekend before this past one, to see my sister and brother-in-law, and niece and nephew while they were in the region. Brother-in-law was on leave from active deployment overseas. A good time was had by all, except possibly our dog, who was stressed out by the long car ride, constant exposure to new people, and my sister's three much more rambunctious dogs. She developed terrible stress-induced diarrhea upon our return home. I had to clean it up. It was unpleasant.

I collected payment on my first invoice, which makes me say Woo Hoo! Going independent was the smart move, and I love it so far, but waiting 6 weeks for the money to come to in had me stretched thin and stressing about it.

For some reason, there have been a lot of toads in my yard recently. They amount to a most unwelcome distraction for the dog when she has dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Her need to chase small things that hop away in terror trumps her need to void the bladder.

We had breakfast with friends at the OPH yesterday. I ordered and ate the apple pancake, which is approximately the size and consistency of a pie. This is why I weigh more than I should.

Stay The Course

2010-06-30T10:38:00.002-05:00

Greetings, Humanity.

Everything is good here on Planet Zeku. It is another gorgeous day outside, and I had a nice ride to my workplace on my recently overhauled UltraHyperMegaSpeedCycle.

It spent just under a week in the shop, getting new front and rear tires, a sparkplug, it's valves cleaned, and all its fluids replaced. The catalyst for bringing it in (actually having it brought, as it died on me) was that it needed a new battery. All the other stuff needed to be done because I recently passed 10K miles on it. . . not bad for less than five seasons of exclusively in town driving!

And man, was I thrilled to get it back -- I drive the thing all the time and it has never really had any major problems, so I kind of didn't notice how it gradually lost it's oomph. Until one day I had a bunch of work done and now it suddenly runs like it did when it was brand new! The difference is quite noticeable.

The workplace, by the way, is not the one I was referring to last time I posted. That gig fell through. I was told it was a done deal, and given a start date, but something went sideways on the business end of it, and the project never started. I should be deeply upset about that, having turned down a nearly-as-awesome offer to take that gig, but I was very lucky and found myself still able to reverse course and accept the position that I'd turned down, so in the end, no harm done.

Furthermore, I'm really impressed with this job so far. The team here is excellent, and the technology is a good mix. I've been able to get acclimated very quickly, and the culture is great -- all business with regards to the important stuff, and completely casual with regards to shit that doesn't matter. Plus, there is free soda, which given my caffeine habit is as good as getting an extra buck an hour. :)

My new office is in the tall pointy building just down the street from one of my previous jobs. I'm on the 12 floor, half-way up the tower, but that's plenty high enough to see an awful lot from the giant windows in the break room. I can see no fewer than three places I used to work from here. And the complex has a couple of great places to get lunch. So I'm pretty happy with both the job itself and the facilities. Plus, you have no idea how good it feels to work on a genuinely capable workstation again, after using woefully underpowered and overburdened laptop at Ginormous Healthcare Conglomerate.

So basically, things are awesome. I'm looking forward to a long weekend of staying right here in town over the upcoming holiday, even though going to work would hardly feel like an imposition right now.

Gaps in Continuity

2010-06-08T15:05:00.002-05:00

You know how sometimes you get all excited for the new season of your favorite television program to start, and then when that first new episode of the season finally airs, they've skipped forward like three years from "when we last saw our heroes," with no information given on what happened in the intervening period? And then suddenly Apollo is fat and Chief Tyrol is married to that bitch that shot Boomer?

I hate that. Anyway. . . Hi.

I'm not working this week -- in between gigs. My project at Ginormous Healthcare Conglomerate was scheduled to last another month or two at least, but a few weeks ago they abruptly announced that they were suspending all activity related to the government contract that my project was related to. Apparently, they've realized that it may take quite some time yet before the legal wrangling over that deal abates and it becomes a real, for sure thing. So, they asked us to spend two weeks tying our software up into a neat little package, and they are going to shelve it and resurrect it if/when they have the contract well and truly won. Hence, Friday was my last day.

Oddly, having a contract canceled early only serves to remind me of how lucky I am. Lucky to be in an industry that always seems to have work available, and lucky to be good enough at it that I don't have much trouble getting it. I remember the first time I got laid off, when I was a young whippersnapper back in aught three. I was out of work for a total of six weeks, and I spent every weekday morning of that period (8am until noon minimum) at my desk, sending out resumes with cover letters, doing interviews when I could get them, and scouring the job listings on sites like monster.com. And in the end, the job I ended up taking was at a significant pay cut.

Isn't like that anymore. Now, work pretty much comes looking for me, and my biggest problem is trying to decide if I should decline an excellent offer because I think I've got a better one on the way. That, and the fact that I have to keep pushing myself to live up to it so I might someday deserve to be so lucky.

Anyway, I'm starting a new gig on Monday, and I'm excited about it. Partly because I know who I'll be working with, and partly because it will be the first gig I take on as an independent, instead of becoming someone's W2 employee. I am officially the president and CEO of Zombie Eradication Technologies Intergalactic.

Okay, that's not really my company's name. That's what I wanted to name my company, but Malallee talked me into choosing something a bit more professional.

We went camping a few weekends ago, our first outing since we got Kaylee. (Changing topics now, folks, try to keep up). The main reason for the trip, besides an excuse to burn things and cook over the flames, was to see how well Kaylee would behave, and how we would get along with her staying in our tent. We have other camping outings planned for the summer, including later this month with a sizable group, and we wanted to know that the dog wouldn't be a problem.

People, she was awesome. She handled the tent just fine, and didn't make any noise to annoy the other campers. She chilled out and relaxed when leashed to a ground stake, was delighted to go hiking, and didn't have any problems with the fire. She's a great dog.

We went to my parents lake cabin for a long weekend over memorial day. The weather was kinda cool and very windy for most of our time there, but it did get quite nice for a handful of hours Sunday evening, so I was at least able to get in a nice long swim. Most importantly, we finally found the key to keeping Kaylee quiet and calm on the very long car ride to ND. We got something from the vet and drugged her. Best Decision Ever.

Jumping Ship

2009-11-09T14:21:00.003-06:00

So, I gave notice this morning that I will be leaving my job at the end of the week. I start a new one on Monday.

I think this gig is going to be a good fit, because I'm a little nervous about whether or not I am good enough for it. I always have these doubts when I start a new job, and they always prove to be unfounded. Apparently, I actually am pretty good at what I do. But if I didn't get a little nervous about it and have a stress dream or two, it would probably mean the job isn't worth taking.

I have mixed feelings about leaving my current position, which after all, I left once before only to return 6 months hence. The people I work with are still a great bunch, and if the project I were ostensibly working on would ever actually get off the ground, it would be a cool system to build. But the analysis paralysis that has set in here has left me without very much actual useful work to do most days, and I'm not a dragon who can be happy getting paid to stare at a wall. So onward it is.

In other news -- I'm very worried about Mezoez. One day last week I picked her up and found that she seemed to have lost weight very suddenly. I can't say a lot of weight, because she doesn't weigh much to start with, but proportionally it was very noticeable. She also seemed lethargic, not her frisky self. I put her into a separate cage from Oboe so that I can better monitor her food intake; sure enough, she isn't eating anything. I've been force feeding her a little bit of soft food the last couple of days when I can get her to open her mouth, and this afternoon I'm taking her to the vet, where she will stay the night.

I have no idea what the problem could be; I keep having to remind myself that Mezoez is nearly seven, which makes her fairly old for a domestic ferret in the U.S., and that she has in a sense been on borrowed time since she had an adrenal gland removed a couple of years ago. Still, I'd rather she stick around a while.

I Should Have Just Built It Myself

2009-10-09T08:41:00.003-05:00

I found the problem with my Mac Pro's network connection -- it was indeed a bad ethernet cable, and thus easily remedied. However, I'm still getting very poor throughput between that machine and the NAS, and the connection seems kind of bursty.

Ugh. Tracking down the exact nature of the problem is going to be tedious. And if it turns out to be the NAS device itself, that makes three big failures for the product. 1) The built in DLNA server doesn't work. 2) The transfer speed is too slow.

And 3) The company's support website is utterly worthless; the supposed downloads or updates for the plugins are nowhere to be found, and their "e-support" system requires me to register my product, starting with a dropdown list that doesn't actually contain my product as an option (lists NS4300, NS4300N, DS4600, and NS4600N for example, but no NS4600) and continuing to a form that requires 3 or 4 different identifying numbers from the box.

When I get home tonight and have those numbers handy, I'm going to try getting them on the phone. If they can't fix the DLNA issue, I think I'm going to have to return the damn thing. It will be severely inconvenient for me to do so, and create a major pain in the ass project for me to build a new media server myself, but I'm sick and tired of shit that doesn't work.

I smell a very negative Amazon review coming.

Media Server Malaise

2009-10-08T08:19:00.002-05:00

I am having technology problems that complicate my other technology problems.

I have been trying to use my new network attached storage device to stream video to other machines on my network, and it isn't going well. For starters, I tried to play video files stored on it from my Mac Pro, and the performance was abysmal. I could access the files, and start them playing, but the video was choppy, and would lock up for several seconds at a time. It was as if I wasn't getting GigE network speeds. Naturally, I wanted to blame the new device, and I tweaked it's ethernet settings a few times without getting any improvement.

Then I stumbled across the real problem: the Mac Pro is only connecting to the network at 100baseTX. If I change it to force 1000baseT, it loses its link. I don't know why, and I have only the vaguest idea of how long it has been crippled like this -- it's the kind of thing one would only notice when trying to move data between the Mac Pro and another device on the wired network, and I just haven't done that in several months. I am 90% sure that it was working in my old house.

So that's Mystery Number One; why can't the Mac Pro do gigabit ethernet, when every device on my LAN is capable of it? Maybe it's connected to the switch with a crappy ethernet cable?

But I figured now that I know the Mac Pro is the problem, I'll just move on and try to access video files on the NAS using my XBox360. That, after all, is the desired primary use case. Unfortunately, when browsing to the NAS device from the XBox360's video library, none of the video files show up. The NAS has a DLNA server running on it, and that service is clearly active; I can access it and see the directory structure, and playing music files works perfectly. But none of the video files are visible. The same files, if copied to another PC on my network that is running PlayOn DLNA server, can be played successfully from the XBox.

So that's Mystery Number Two; why is the DLNA service on my NAS not presenting any video files to client devices?

Finally, perhaps in desperation, I tried to play these files over the network from one of my home theatre PCs, just because I knew that its gigabit ethernet link was working. I wasn't able to play them due to codec issues in windows media player, and didn't have another video player installed on that machine yet. I think I tried to mount an ISO image of a DVD that was on the NAS and play that and I think I got choppy playback from it, which would once again call into question the network speed of the NAS itself -- but to be frank, by this point my memory of what I did and didn't try is blurry and blended. I could just be conflating my attempts to play an image from the Mac Pro with my attempts to play the image at all from the theatre PC and mixing up the symptoms.

So that's Mystery Number Three; is the network speed of the NAS itself performing to expectations? I'd like to confirm that before anything else, but since my other machines either can't see the files, can't decode the files, or are known to have a network issue on their own end, I haven't really even been able to perform a valid test yet.

What a clusterfrack.

October

2009-10-06T09:19:00.007-05:00

Lo, I return to you after many a postless week. Hearken unto me, therefore, and hear my many tales.

Yeah, yeah, okay; I'm not that interesting. I have been keeping good and busy though!

In September Malallee's sister brought her family to visit for a few days. Although ferret Oboe got a little bit too much attention the first night and became pretty stressed out for a while, it was a nice weekend. (Mezoez gets off easy because the kids know she's a biter). We went to the Renaissance Festival on one of the nicest days of the year, I think. Sunny, cool but not chilly, no wind to speak of, and not much of a crowd. Very nice.

We went to Jahndo and Megara's housewarming party, way the hell up in the northern fringe part of the metro, and held one of our own. Both events had lots of food. I seriously need to work out more.

We visited Door County for our first anniversary and had a very pleasant time. We rented bikes and rode the trails through the state park, took a ferry to Washington Island for a few hours, and visited a number of orchards and wineries; at one of them we found a lovely little high-top table and bar stools for our eat-in kitchen. Malallee had been having trouble finding a table she liked for that spot, so this was serendipitous.

I still haven't restored full capabilities to my media center since moving into the new house. The server hosting most of my DVD images had crapped out a few weeks before we moved, and the PC that I used to have connected to my TV for view them (as well as other things, like Hulu and iTunes) couldn't be connected to my projector for lack of a grounded outlet and an available input port.

Getting things set up again has been a long road; my initial plan to restore the media server by moving the RAID card and hard discs into an older machine that I had sitting around went up in smoke when I plugged that machine in and the power supply threw lightning at me and made loud snapping sounds. It was about 8 inches from my head when it did this, and it made my ears ring for a while.

So, abandoning that plan, I ordered a dedicated NAS device to host the RAID array, and set about the task of copying all the data off of the existing RAID, so I could put those hard discs into the NAS. Since the server hosting the RAID was broken as you'll recall (bad motherboard), I ended up sticking the controller card into one of my little theatre PC boxes, and snaking the SATA cables from it back over to the hard drives, which were still housed in the broken server machine (It wouldn't boot, but I just needed it to power the drives -- the machine that I stuck the controller card into wouldn't have had the wattage). Then I copied the entire contents of the raid onto a set of 400Gb drives that I had lying around, which took several days to accomplish using a USB drive dock.

When my NAS arrived, I promptly set it up and installed the wrong drives in it. I used the 400Gb drives that I had just taken all that time to backup my data onto. I had to start over, and copy it all again.

Then I set the thing up using the 1Tb drives as I had intended, and since then I've been restoring all the data from those backup drives. This too, is taking forever.

Which brings me to a rant: What the frack is it about copying a large set of files that windows explorer and OS X finder find so damn difficult? Anytime I select a large set of files, say a few hundred Gb worth, and try to copy them, it gets partway through and then starts throwing errors and stops. Yet if you drop into the terminal on OS X and simply use cp -R, everything is fine. And using copy or xcopy from the command prompt on windows usually works much better too, though still not very well -- when it is copying a large set of files and encounters a transient error with one of them, why can't it just restart that file and keep going? And if they are going to insist that I invoke the same command again, why can't I set a flag to tell it to skip the files that already exist at the destination? Fire and Rain!

I know there are tons of programs I could install specifically to make copying files work, but I shouldn't have to. The fact that third party tools for copying files from one spot to another are so prevalent is a testament to how fracked up the OS is.

I ended up having to write a script.

Anyway, once the data is all restored, I will be playing around with the NAS device's integrated DLNA server. Although I have obtained a smart HDMI switch and grounded outlet adapter to let me hook up a theatre PC to the projector, I may not need to. It is looking like I may be able to just stream everything to the XBox360.

In other recent developments, we adopted a dog. She is a year old, and supposedly a dachshund / corgi mix. I'm not sure if that covers all the branches of her family tree or not -- she doesn't have short legs, and in many ways looks like a miniature german shepherd.

Her name is Kaylee. She has asymmetric ear rigidity -- the right one stands up or straight out, while the left one is floppy. It's very cute.

She's settling in pretty well, and Malallee and I are pretty happy with her. She's turned out to be a very well behaved dog, considering she has had no obedience training and is still sort of a puppy. And she's pretty nearly housebroken too, which is a big plus. (We had one accident, but that was our fault in not recognizing that she needed to go out).

The only problem she has, really, is that she still has major separation anxiety. She cries for a while when we leave the house, then freaks out with excitement when we come home, and she seems to get a little anxious whenever Malallee and I aren't both in the same room with her. That being said, she's very friendly, likes to play, and knows when it's time to settle down.

She is very interested in the ferrets whenever they move around in their cage, but not unhealthily so; she just sits and watches them, curious but not particularly aggressive.

Altogether, I'm impressed, and glad we adopted a dog instead of getting one from a breeder or pet store.

Monocotyledonous Maintenance Engineer

2009-08-24T09:10:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I started up my lawnmower and ventured into my yard, the first time I have made this trip with an intent to accomplish work.

My new yard is bigger than my last one, and the lawngistics are more complex. Trees, roots, and lots of little bumps and valleys to navigate, plus there are the twigs and small branches that fall from the canopy. It ended up taking a while, and I did not particularly enjoy it.

While I was out there slaving away under the yellow face (It BURNsss usss, Preciouss), I had a depressing epiphany: cutting the grass is my archetypical labor, drudgery itself distilled to an elemental form, and doing this mindless, soul sucking chore is my real job. Software development pays the bills, and takes up significantly more of my time. But it isn't really labor. I don't sweat. I don't feel the same kind of boredom that I do behind my pushmower. Cutting the grass though; that is the chore that I'm stuck with, the burden I have borne since my human dad thrust it upon me at the age of eight, the tedious recurring thing I am forced to do with my weekends, dammit. At 32 years old, I have been a mower of lawns for almost a quarter of a century, and in another 30 years or so, after I am supposedly retired, I will still have to mow the fracking lawn.

I am Sisyphus, and grass is my boulder.

Crap.

The Natural Consequences of Moving

2009-08-17T09:19:00.004-05:00

I am a being in the grip of opposing forces. Caught between great slabs of moving granite that scrape and rumble as they grind laterally past one another, I endure the torsion and wonder how much shearing stress my mind can endure.

Today marks the passage of the first week in our new house. I have, on the one hand, a protracted catalog of the numerous improvements and acquisitions -- each quite insignificant when considered individually -- which I crave, to address the various shortcomings and unrealized potentialities of this new dwelling. I have on the other hand. . . nothing at all. Where my money used to be.

And so my docket of home improvements burns a hole in my hand, sending sharp electrical shocks into my palm that travel through the nerves of my arm to my spinal-cord, where they trigger a reflexive action that induces my other hand to reach for my wallet. As a result of some measures I have taken to curb my spending, the wallet is also electrified.

My hair is standing on end.

Despite being slowly ground into a fine organic jelly between my warring motives to get everything just right and to recover from the massive financial blood-loss that is moving, I nonetheless managed to achieve several further acts of settling in this week.

For one, I unpacked the office. It still has several little piles of cables and equipment that rightly would be stored neatly in labeled containers on a shelf in the basement, but I'll get to that. For now, they are organized little piles, and that's enough.

I made use of my fish tape to run an HDMI cable from the media center to the projector, following the same route taken by the existing component cables, which allows me to connect both the cable box and the XBox 360 and forgo the irritation of swapping out the connection manually when I switch from one to the other. (Can you believe I suffered under that yolk for 6 whole days?) I was exceedinly pleased that the process of running this cable went so smoothly. After the difficulties I had running CAT6 in my last house, built circa 1894, this was a breeze. What a difference 60 years makes.

While I was doing that, I dropped a couple of CAT6 lines to the media center as well. This week, optimistically, will see the other ends of those lines connected to the office, and to a server rack in the utility room.

Additional feats: installed a water filter on the kitchen tap, put together the second ferret cage, and retrieved our ancient, decrepid treadmill from the rented storage space.

Chateau de Malallee, or Castle Zeku 2.0

2009-08-12T13:08:00.006-05:00

We have claimed our new Laire, Mankind, and it is sweet. It makes our old house look like a mud igloo. In a festering swamp. With a rotting maggot-infested badger carcass hanging from the cieling.

Okay, okay, so the old place wasn't bad. But this is better by far.

Our packing, closing, and moving all went smoothly. We got everything loaded into a truck on Sunday, crashed at a hotel, and then went to our closings Monday morning. When we pulled up to the new house afterwards, the moving truck was just arriving, and they had everything unloaded in a few hours. I spent most of that first afternoon organizing the garage, while Malallee and her mother worked on cleaning and unpacking the kitchen and bedrooms.

After two days of unpacking and organizing, I'd say we are reasonably settled. Lots left to do, of course, but the place is livable, and all the remaining work can be accomplished at a more leisurely pace. The only room that hasn't been arranged yet is the office, and I plan to get started on that this evening.

One thing that I have been pleased to discover is that there is a very convenient hole in the corner of the office closet that leads directly into the unfinished half of the basement. It will make running network cables a breeze -- to all the places I need them to go, anyway. I have already used this hole as a temporary solution to connect the Xbox 360 in the basement media center to the network switch in the office. Once I have the time to cut custom lengths of cable, it is going to be a simple matter to wire the media center up with as many ethernet ports as I want. Score! Further, as long as there are adequate electrical outlets there, it will be pretty easy to keep my network equipment and media server in the utility area, leaving only my quiet Mac Pro in the office.

This hole is the greatest undocumented feature of the house that I've found so far.

Yesterday, our new sectional sofa for the basement was delivered, so though most of the basement is still empty, it is already a kick ass place to hang out. The projector works great, I have it perfectly aligned to the screen, and the picture it produces is awesome. I can't wait to have people over for a movie marathon of some kind.

There are still a million little projects to do. There are cables that need tacking down in the 4 season porch, storage rooms to organize, a ferret habitat to build, an old gas lamppost to remove from the back yard, a bar to build, and a workout room to set up. Not to mention a rented storage room full of crap that still needs to be moved over. But the hard parts are done.

I frickin' love this house.

Merlin had the right idea in that animated Disney version of the Sword in the Stone

2009-08-03T15:06:00.004-05:00

Establishing oneself in a new Laire is logistically painful. It's the translocation of worldly possessions collected over a few decades of life that makes it so. How the crap did I get so much crap?

I blame Malallee. Not because there is any truth in that, but rather because it is convenient.

We started packing up all of our things this weekend, and quickly exhausted our supply of small and medium-sized moving boxes. I have another pile in the trunk of my car that I picked up from the moving company over lunch. We have made good progress, but the need to leave a lot of things for the last minute makes me feel like we aren't getting it done.

Like the office -- the closet has been emptied, the file cabinet wrapped up in plastic, and all the desk drawers cleaned out. But it doesn't make sense to disconnect my computer or all the network equipment until this weekend, and I certainly can't pack up the ferret supplies ahead of schedule either. The living room and dining room are packed and rapidly becoming piled high with boxes, but the TV and XBox are still hooked up. The kitchen is the worst. We've got most of our dishes and bakeware packed, but we still need to eat, so a lot of the cookware is still out. It makes it hard for me to focus on what I should work on next.

We picked out a couch for the new basement yesterday, and I think we will be happy with it. It will probably be the only furniture we have down there for a while, unless you want to count speakers and entertainment system components as furniture. Priority one is the get the cable and XBox hooked up so that I can take advantage of my new cieling mounted projector.

Moving on Up Again

2009-07-02T14:45:00.004-05:00

The constant state of extra-anal tidiness and the hunt for a new house are both now over. (He says, knocking on wood). We sold our house late last week, just before heading off to ND for my sister's wedding, and our offer on a new place was accepted today. Both transactions should close on August 10th.

Now all the hard work begins; we have to actually get ready to move. I better start making lists of all the details to take care of, or I know I'm gonna miss something. Thank goodness we plan to make this the last move for the next decade or two, barring extreme crisis or opportunity.

I'm excited. The new place is in excellent shape -- not so excellent that there won't be a few projects to sink time into, but nice. It has 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, and a great big basement. Plus enough unfinished space that we can probably use part of it for the exercise area, and not have to take up space for it elsewhere. The 4 season porch is also a huge plus.

And it comes with a ceiling mounted projector! I hereby invite everyone over for the next Super Bowl. Bring snacks.

Increment

2009-06-15T11:05:00.004-05:00

I am thirty-two now. Yay?

Malallee and I had an excellent time camping near Lanesboro this weekend with all the usual suspects. We ate well, slept well, and did some biking.

I rented a three-wheeled recumbent (2 front wheels, one back) that was fun until the drive assembly collapsed. The rental shop must not have tightened the front tube latch correctly. Somehow, Squid got it back together and I was able to ride it back, but I have decided I will not be purchasing that particular style of recumbant bike in the future.

When we got home, we took showers and a four hour nap.

Late next week we head back to ND for my sister's wedding. I am looking forward to both the wedding, and the long weekend that it gives me cause to take.

We have had no further luck selling our house yet. I'm beginning to give some consideration to the idea of keeping it as a rental property. That's kind of scary, but it bears looking into. I should make some phone calls to start figuring out whether it is feasible for us. But then, there's a lot of things I should do. I am, as usual, behind on my todo list.

No Deal

2009-05-26T14:06:00.003-05:00

So we got an offer on our house last weekend and signed a Purchase Agreement, but by this past weekend the deal had collapsed. Suffice it to say that the buyers were out of their minds, and I am not losing much sleep over letting them go.

Other than that, it was a nice long weekend. The weather was great, and thanks to summer hours I had Friday afternoon off as well. We got in a nice bike ride, and had a fire in our outdoor fireplace. We also got to meet the recently born offspring of Jaisel and Katya, and went to a grill-out at Jaycee and Fern's place. Nice.

So what else is new? I'm losing my office window. Not sure when yet, but the word has come down that our group is being moved back to the 4th floor, or as I call it, the "realm of shadows." Boo.

I will finally get my braces off next time I go to the orthodontist. At least, most of them. Apparently they take them off in three stages, so it will take 2 weeks to get it done. Also, my next appointment isn't until mid-July.

I have fallen for a house that is for sale in Hopkins. I wish it weren't so, but I'm being honest with myself. I hope it is still available after our place sells -- for real, I mean.

Miscelany

2009-05-11T09:22:00.003-05:00

Hello, Mankind.

I've been starting a lot more posts lately than I have been finishing. Time never halts its inexorable march, and I never seem to get any less busy, and it has become routine for me to begin a blog post, put it aside, and return to it when the events I meant to relate are weeks old.

So I'm going to present the following factoids in random access fashion, as they come to mind, with no narrative to weave them together. Enjoy.

It was foolish of me to start looking at houses online, as ours has not yet sold. Now there are places that I want, and I am becoming impatient to sell my house.

Malallee is pretty much the best thing ever.

I've been doing some very cool things at work, but I'm concerned that I've been getting a bit too comfortable and ignoring my networking. I think there have been a lot of emails and phone calls in the last few months that I've failed to return, to people that I will wish I'd kept better in touch with if I end up seeking a new position.

I don't think I mentioned this here yet, but the fake-meat diet worked well. My total cholesterol in April was 180 compared to 269 in January. My mass reduction has been on a major plateau, however. I'm more than 30 pounds lighter than I was at the beginning of the year, but I haven't lost any mass in the last 6 weeks or so.

I got my iPhone replaced under warranty because of all the cracks in the case. If a new model comes out soon, as is rumored, it will be nice to give this one to Malallee so she finally has 3G. Also, it sucked to have all my apps out of order after restoring from backup.

I am seriously unhoopy, and do not qualify as a frood. This morning I went to the gym and forgot to bring a towel.

Roomba is seriously useful when you are trying to keep your floors spotless.

I've been swarmed by extended family on facebook. I have added them all to a list, and while I could block them from seeing certain types of updates, what I would really like is to be able to block them from my updates on a case-by-case basis, at the time that I post them.

Where would I go in the Twin Cities if I wanted to take up falconry?

I finally ordered a Logitech DiNovo Edge keyboard for my Mac Pro. It seems to be the only full-sized bluetooth keyboard for Mac available out there, and it is supposed to be very good. For $179 it better be.

Living on Tiptoe

2009-05-07T15:42:00.003-05:00

I am a guest in my own Laire.

The house has been on the market for 2 weeks, and my wife and I have been doing our best to keep it in show-quality condition 24-7. We are developing some pretty fastidious habits as a result, many of which would be ridiculous in any other situation. For example, every time we use a towel, it goes straight into the dryer, immediately, and the next time we need one we have to go to the dryer to get it. We don't keep our shampoo in the shower anymore. We keep it in the cupboard under the sink, along with the toothpaste, toothbrush caddy, and mouthwash.

Our dishes always go directly into the dishwasher now. I wouldn't dream of setting one in the sink, even for just a minute; that would make the sink dirty.

Oh, and we make sure all the lights are ON every time we leave the house. How messed up is that?

There have been 4 showings since we listed it, and the feedback has been pretty good, but no takers yet. We just adjusted the price, and the realtor is having an open house this weekend, when we are out of town, so my fingers are crossed.

One thing I did this week that I definitely shouldn't have: I started looking at real estate listings online. As one might expect, I got all excited about house-hunting and found several things that I want to go look at in person. But we aren't planning to do that until we at least have an offer on our place. There's no point, as anything we like might or might not still be available by then. But I couldn't help looking at what was out there.

It was encouraging, though, because there were a lot of houses on the market that seemed like a good fit for us, and listed for less than I would have expected to pay.

No Title Today

2009-04-14T09:17:00.002-05:00

Hola, Mankind.

I haven't been posting much lately, have I? Not much to report, I guess. I'm having a hard enough time just posting my facebook status and the occasional twitter lately. Perhaps I am entering a reclusive phase.

I'm as busy as the rain, of course, but not with anything worth writing about. It feels like the preparations for marketing our house have gone on forever. The end is near, though. Repaint the master bedroom, stage the office, clean up the yard, and we'll finally be ready.

Last week I finally bought a pair of winter riding gloves so I could commit to riding the Ultra-Zeku-Hyper-Mega-Speed-Cyber-Cycle to work, which does wonders for my outlook on life. And now that I've added the 12-volt outlet to it, I can plug my iPhone in while I ride -- this is an example of fortunate timing, since there seems to be something wrong with my iPhone lately. A few times in the last few weeks I've seen it suddenly go from fully charged to 10 percent battery life remaining in a matter of an hour, when I'm not even using it. One time I even had it on airplane mode, so it wasn't searching for a network connection or anything like that. The trouble is intermittent, but if it gets worse, I'll have to bite the bullet and replace it.

I've become addicted to Peggle on XBox Live. I'm sure I will get over it once I manage to pass the last few levels.

Last week I had three days of training on Adobe Flex. It went the way training usually goes, which is that I learned a lot of things I didn't know, but at a frustratingly slow pace. We spent two days covering the easy stuff that didn't need much explanation, and were rushed at the end to just hit the high points of the more interesting stuff. Still, it filled in a lot of the gaps for me.

The irony is that right now I have a lot exciting stuff going on at work, and my interest in experimenting with languages and tools is at a high point, and I would like to be spending more time in my home office working on side projects or getting a little extra work done. But instead, I am unplugging computers and monitors and moving them to storage, and rearranging my desks to take up less space, so that the office looks "staged" for potential buyers.

I fracking hate that people are so enslaved by their subconscious mental heuristics that the manner in which someone else arranges their stuff has a very measurable effect on how they percieve the value of a house that will be sold to them empty. But it does. Damn psychology.

Just Another Journal Entry

2009-03-30T11:45:00.004-05:00

I had a nice weekend, Mankind.

It was really great to have lunch with Krystel on Friday, and not at all weird like I feared it might be. She is doing well, and getting back in touch with people after what sounds like a pretty severe bout with depression that explains her withdrawal from the world. Anyway, I'm very happy that she had her epiphany and that things are coming together for her again.

It didn't feel like it could really have been six years since I'd talked to her. I guess that's one of the things about getting older that I'm learning to adjust to: time just keeps on speeding up. Even in the hindsight of my mind's eye, the four years I was in college seem like they take up more space than the decade since. Sometimes it feels like I am living every segment of my life simultaneously.

Anyway, it is great to be talking to my friend again. I didn't realize how much I'd missed her.

Malallee and I had an especially productive Saturday, cleaning the house top to bottom, doing (and putting away!) all of our laundry, and hauling a final load of basement junk to our storage area, all before lunch, which we enjoyed at the Herkimer. In the afternoon, we brought her bed up from the basement and set it up in the room that was formerly the ferrets. (They are now cage-bound, with an hour of playtime before bed, just until we move), and then Malallee went shopping for food and new curtains, to niceify the house. We are getting SO close to listing it. It will only be a couple more weeks now, I think. Finally. I stayed home and finally started my project to add a 12-volt outlet to the Ultra-Zeku-Hyper-Mega-Speed-Cyber-Cycle. Here's a picture of the finished result:

All that productivity, and we still had time to relax in our nice clean house and watch a movie in the evening.

Sunday, sadly, Malallee had to go to her office and catch up on some of her end-of-month crapwork. It ended up taking her most of the day. Meanwhile, I cleaned out the garage. That made it feel like spring -- but the three days of snow we ares supposed to get starting tonight are likely to erase that feeling.

Catching Up

2009-03-23T07:45:00.007-05:00

Wheels

The UZHMSCC is in the shop, which sucks because it was a beautiful weekend to have had it. I ran some errands in the Hail Mary, and it felt like a terrific waste. Now the forecast is for rain and gloom the rest of the week. Figures.

The good news is that it is mostly just in the shop for its regularly scheduled spring maintenance. The engine troubles I had with it last week were, according to the mechanic, just because I didn't get the battery terminal connections tightened down sufficiently when I reinstalled the battery. I had suspected that might be it -- I got them as tight as I could, but but one would have to posess the fingers of a pre-adolescent, anorexic elf to work effectively in the tiny compartment the battery lives in; or more likely, a cleverly shaped proprietary wrench from Piaggio that the shop has and I don't. Anyway, I hope to get it back this week and install the 12-volt outlet as planned.

Update: It's done and ready to go. I'd better pick it up this afternoon, because the rest of the week looks like it will be ugly.

Parteez

The last couple of weeks have been pleasantly bloated with socializing. Kinnda and Obrien were in town last weekend, so Malallee and I had them over for dinner, along with Kayrin and her boyfriend. I was busy at the TCSS all day, so all credit for the excellent meal belongs to the lovely and talented Malallee. I think everyone had a good time. We played Burnout 3 after dinner.

This weekend we had brunch with Ronin and Lilivet, and later went over to Squid and Lemur's place for game night. I abandoned all restraint with regards to my snack choices and literally gained 7 pounds overnight. I know that it's only because of differences in fluid retention, and will be gone again by tomorrow, but still, that's a blow to the ego. I was doing so well. I blame the salt-lick bars. (They are much more delicious than the name would imply).

Being Found

My presence on Facebook has reached some kind of critical mass. By the end of my first week on the service, I had connected to all of my actual friends, people with whom I hang out and am in touch. And all was right with the world. By the end of the second week, I had accepted friend requests from several aquaintences with whom I share mutual friends; these are fine people that know I think well of, I just am not especially close to them. All fine and good.

Then came the request from my ultra-religious far-right second cousin. Then this crazy chick who wouldn't leave me alone in junior high. Then a few people with whom I have had no relationship whatsoever beyond the fact that we attended the same high school. I mean, there's this one dude that sent me a friend request, and the total extent of our preexisting relationship is that I know his name and can match it with his face. The most recent request I got scores slightly higher than that one, at least, because I at least sat next to him in 7th grade science.

The diamond in the rough, though, is that I heard from my friend Krystel, to whom I had not spoken in almost six years. We're meeting up for lunch on Friday to catch up.

It's a little bit wierd for me, because to an extent I lost touch with her on purpose. We'd been drifting apart for years, and when it became apparent to me that I was the only one trying to keep our friendship going, I stopped trying. Our relationship had been stretched so thin that it consisted entirely of me calling her every 2 or 3 months to see if she wanted to get lunch, and her always taking a raincheck. If I didn't get her on the line and had to leave a voicemail, she never called back. I told you I hadn't spoken to her in almost six years; I haven't actually seen her in eight. And before that I hadn't even seen her in over a year.

So I quit calling her. We'd been close in college, but at this point we just didn't know each other anymore, and I felt ridiculous and pathetic trying to pretend that we did. I didn't bear her any ill will, and I didn't stop thinking of her as a friend; I understood that she had a lot of other things going on in her life, and so did I. So there was no "falling out" per se. I just concluded that any relationship that was so one-sided couldn't be healthy, and if she wanted to talk to me she knew how to find me.

It took six years and Facebook.

I am glad to talk to her again, I'm looking forward to it in fact. It's just a little wierd, is all. I kind of want to ask "What the HELL, Human?" but I'm not sure if I should even bring it up. I guess I'll play it by ear.

House

We had an estimate from a foundation repair company for some basic cosmetic work to our exterior, but we've decided that it is too pricey for what is really just aesthetics. Our realtor wants us to call the estimator back, however, and ask him for a written report on the state of the foundation structurally, just so that we have something in hand should a potential buyer be concerned about it. One more thing to add to the never ending todo list.

This week the last few fix-it jobs that are still on the list should be done, and with a little bit of luck and dedication, we should be able to get the rest of our crap into storage and do our staging work over the next couple of weekends.

We're touching base with our mortgage agent this week, too, to see if anything has changed since we last talked -- it was in September, and the economy has gone further into hell since then, so who knows. By now they could be requiring eighty percent down.

Just the Bullet Points

2009-03-06T08:48:00.003-06:00

I've been very busy lately, and I don't have much time before the day gets well and truly underway, so here is the Ultra Brief Report on All Things Zeku:

Malallee: Awesome.

My Job: Very frustrating.

Personal Mass Reduction (YTD): 2 Stones

Plaster, Drywall, and Painting Repairs: About half done.

Recent Unusual Occurrences: Car smashed up by teenager in an SUV, home security system upgraded.

Upcoming Plans: Modifying the UZHMSCC with 12-volt outlet and built in garage door opener, attending the Twin Cities Software Symposium again, putting the house on the market.

Recent Relaxation Techniques: Getting into Season 1 of Six Feet Under, creating custom maps for Age of Booty on XBox360.

Later, Humanity!

Makework

2009-02-23T08:40:00.004-06:00

I am, by trade, a software engineer. I hold a degree in computer science, have no fewer than 9 computers in my home, and have been tinkering with their insides since I was 14.

And sometimes, I still want to smash the frack out of 'em with a ball-peen hammer.

I decided last night that it was time to reinstall windows on the machine that hosts my RAID array. It is about 5 years old, and I'm pretty sure I hadn't had to reinstall the OS in at least 4 years, which is pretty good for windows. But it had gotten pretty bloated with software I no longer use, drivers I don't need, and so on, and reinstalling seemed a quicker path to happiness than tedious uninstalling and reorganization.

Some people say that nothing ever gets taken down from the internet. Not true. Need proof? Build a machine, get it up and running. Wait five years, and lose the companion disk that came with your motherboard. Now try finding a working driver for the onboard audio controller chipset. Good Luck.

I know the exact model number of my motherboard, and the chipset in question, and I still haven't found driver link that doesn't lead to a 404 page, a driver for a different product alltogether, or an ActiveX driver update utility that just crashes if you allow it to run.

This morning I managed to find a downloadable version of the manufacturers live update utility, so when I get home I'll give that a shot.

In other news: Malallee and I had a busy and productive weekend. On Saturday morning we rented a truck and moved an apartment's worth of furniture and boxes into a rented storage space. I'm shocked by how much crap we have that we aren't using, but don't want to get rid of. Mostly, because we expect to use it again once we have more space. Waking up to several inches of snow that morning didn't help. I say again: I want it to be spring now.

On Sunday we did our taxes. Woo, good times.

Damn That Groundhog, Damn Him I Say!

2009-02-16T12:30:00.006-06:00

Last night the wife and I, as we often do, allowed the ferrets to run around in our bedroom for a half-hour or so while we were settling in to read / watch tv before turning in. The master bedroom is like an amusement park for them. There are gym bags to climb into, shoes to drag around, and dresser drawers to infiltrate. They run around thoroughly excited whenever they get to be in there.

They won't be in there again for a while. Last night one of them (astonishingly, I'm pretty sure it was Mezoez) took it upon herself to climb into a laundry basket full of clean clothes, and crap right on my jeans.

Other than that unfortunate incident, it was a pretty good weekend. We rented ourselves a large storage space so we can begin moving our junk and excess belonging out of the basement and make room for the upcoming home improvements and staging. We had a very nice Valentine's Day dinner at Crave in Edina, then attended Mikail and Zusset's fancy coctail party, which was awesome. And I reduced the fatness of my XBox Live avatar by one click, in recognition of my having now lost 20 pounds or so.

Today I am looking out my office window and physically aching for spring to arrive. The week of warm temperatures convinced my brain that it was just around the corner, even though it was really only early February, and now I can't stop thinking about riding the UZHMSCC, walking around without a coat, and tuning up my bicycle. It feels like some form of torture that the temperatures are back down in the low 20's this week, and that we are supposed to be getting snow.

A couple weeks ago Kayrin mentioned that she's planning to do a 100-mile bike ride this fall, and Malallee and I are thinking about joining in. I think I could do it on the bike I've already got, with a new saddle and some thinner wheels, but Malallee will probably need a new bike if we are going to go for it.

Fire and Rain. Will 50 degree days never arrive?

I am also envying all those people lucky enough to work somewhere that treats today as a holiday.

Buzz Buzz Buzz

2009-02-11T08:17:00.003-06:00

It has been warm this week, warm for February anyway, and that has me getting excited for Spring. Last night I popped the battery out of the Ultra-Zeku-Hyper-Mega-Speed-Cyber-Cycle so I could charge it up, having inexcusably let it go dead over the winter. I am eagerly awaiting the day I can start it up and all but abandon the Hail Mary for several months.

One of my priority projects this spring will be to modify the UZHMSCC by adding a 12-volt DC outlet, so that I can plug in my iPhone. Cruising around town with the screen brightness turned up while pulling map data and streaming music over 3G is awesome, but it does suck the battery dry pretty quickly. The mod to add a 12-volt outlet is cheap, easy, and doesn't change any parts that can't be easily replaced. Three cheers for internet forums!

And just this morning I downloaded a turn-by-turn GPS app that I look forward to trying out. If it works as advertised, it will probably prove more suitable than Google Maps. (Though I still contend that Google Maps alone is "good enough").

Malallee and I are super busy in the coming month or two, trying to get the house ready to sell. Our new storm door will be delivered on Friday, and the first week in March is when we are having most of the interior of the house repainted, along with some plaster and drywall repair work. Before that happens, we would like to have rented a storage unit and moved much of our stuff into it. And we also still need to hire a foundation guy.

On top of that we haven't done our taxes yet; I still haven't gotten all the relevant statements and such from the companies who should be sending them. I think it is down to just one or two outstanding, though -- I'm gonna have to start making calls. For the first time, I don't really know what to expect from my tax return, now that I'm married.

March is also when the Twin Cities Software Symposium will be taking place, and I plan to attend that. It was a very good conference last year, and looks to be good this year as well. I was going to register myself regardless, but I brought it up to my boss to see if anyone else in the group was interested, and it now looks like the company may pay for it. Sweet.

Fakon It

2009-01-21T11:29:00.004-06:00

From the Exotic Materials Department:

It's been a week or so since the high cholesterol diagnosis, and the inception of the Twigs and Paste diet. Despite my near-constant complaining about it, I think my body is finally starting to adjust its expectations. The stuff I'm eating, and the stuff I'm not eating, isn't bothering me as much as it was. (I must still complain, you understand, for psychological reasons. Yes, Malallee is a saint).

Presently I am on a culinary journey through the foreboding and infrequently traveled waters of vegetables that have been tortured, and forced into the shape of animal products. It began when Malallee came from the grocery store one day with a package of "Smart Dogs (Veggie Protein Franks)," and something else that I can only describe as the anti-cheese. This I am careful to keep on a different refrigerator shelf, away from the normal cheese that you are familiar with; I fear what may happen if the two should come into contact.

The Smart Dogs are inoffensive enough. They manage to have the texture of a hot dog, but taste like nothing at all. They are mostly soy and gluten. Considering how real hot dogs are made and from what, these may in fact qualify as an improvement. But then, I'm not a huge fan of hot dogs to start with.

I also note that despite their moniker, Smart Dogs have no embedded circuitry or electronics whatsoever, and seem capable of perfoming no calculations of any kind. They didn't even have a digital clock on them.

As for the anti-cheese, what more can be said? Shaped like cheese, colored like cheese, not like cheese. Is it better than nothing? Not really, no. I think it is just a non-toxic form of plastic. It will cause you no harm when ingested, but. . . what's the point?

Last night I cooked up something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike bacon. Upon opening the package, the strips smelled exactly like the Smart Dogs. They all stuck together, and even careful use of a knife was not able to separate them all successfully. I ended up with several half-strips, quarter-strips, flakes and chunks. I fried these up in the very lightest possible coating of canola oil. They don't sizzle or pop when they are in the pan. . . they just warm up and get a bit crispy.

The verdict on this false bacon? Not bad, actually. On a zero to ten scale (with nine being real bacon, ten being the mythical hyper-bacon that top draconic geneticists are striving to create, and zero being no bacon at all) I would rate it a three. That's not too shabby.

Let's here it for Mad Food Scientists! I've lost 9 pounds this month.

Restricted

2009-01-13T09:52:00.002-06:00

One time back in college, Stonebeetle suggested that I enjoyed restricting myself. Her evidence was that I usually ate only once a day, and didn't wear a coat most of the time.

She was wrong, of course. I usually only ate once a day because that was all I had time for (and I certainly didn't limit the portion sizes), and I didn't wear a coat because I didn't need one. I was young, and the extensive tunnels and skyways on campus meant I rarely needed to be outside for more than a minute.

In fact, I hate restricting myself. That's why I'm so bored and frustrated recently. For starters, there's the economy -- everyone is wisely tightening their belts, and I've been no exception. For the last 6 or seven months I've been trying to save every dollar I can, so that we can buy a new house this year, and in case one of us should lose our job. And it's not like I wasn't saving money before -- now I'm just saving damn close to all of it. We go out a lot less than we used to. We spend most evenings eating dinner at home, then reading or watching something on Netflix Live. It means we see much less of our friends than I would like. I am BORED.

Then there is my diet. I've cut out caffeine. I'm passing on sweets. I am trying my damnedest to watch carbs and calories, and eat small portions. And today I found out my cholesterol is pretty high -- so from here on I think my menu choices boil down to which species of fish would I like with my steamed broccoli? Damn it, I'm HUNGRY, and I want cookies.

Oh yeah, and I want some popcorn. I've been enduring that unabated craving since these frackin' braces went on in 'aught six.

So yeah -- I'm restricting myself. But I'm not enjoying it.

The darkness and cold of Winter isn't helping, either.

Things That Can Be Cut Short

2009-01-09T14:55:00.003-06:00

Today has been a day in which some things have happened. Not momentous occasions, turning points, or shocking developments, but things. Minor things. Things that alone do not bear mentioning, but which combined together may rise to the level of slightly interesting.

It's Friday, and I'm bored, so that's more than enough for me to make a post out of it.

I sliced a small chunk out of my finger this morning, while I was washing some dishes before leaving for work. I was taking the time to make an egg-white omelet for breakfast and hard-boil a few eggs for lunch (that's right -- so far today I've been an exclusive ovivore), and the kitchen was piled high with our dishes from last night, so I took a few minutes to load the dishwasher and clean a couple of things by hand. Our new knives are very sharp. We are now out of band-aids.

I've been off of caffeine for a few weeks now, with the exception of New Year's Eve, but today I caved in and had an energy drink and a Diet Coke. The shop in the lobby of my office building was out of every sugar and caffeine free drink they carry, and I didn't have any cash for the vending machines (not that they have much on offer in that department anyway) and after 5 hours of nothing but tap water, I couldn't stand it anymore.

Today was payday, and there is an irregularity with my pay. I suspect they screwed something up somehow with converting me from a temp to a salaried employee, and it seems they've shorted me by over a grand. Unfortunately, we don't get physical pay stubs anymore -- one must register with a website to view them online. In order to do this, one needs various identification and reference numbers that appear on the physical pay stubs that they used to send out. I do not have one of these. Additionally, the payroll department cannot give them to me by any means other than mail. So it will be sometime next week before I can sign up to view my pay stubs, and figure out exactly which hours they paid me for at which rates. Only then will I have the chance to correct the issue. And then I'm sure I'll have to wait for the next paycheck to get what they owe me.

It's not like I need the money right away or anything, but come on -- a person's paycheck is not something a company should frack up.

I also talked to my manager today about the possibility of switching to a 4 by 10 work week, working 10 hours a day Mon - Thurs and then spending Friday at home on the many, many side projects that I am always complaining about having no time for. I don't know if it will work out, but it didn't seem to be out of the question. I'm not even entirely sure I'd want to stick with it after trying it for a few weeks, but I'd like to give it a shot.

Tonight Malallee and I are meeting Jaisel and Katya for dinner downtown. I expect it to be both tasty and fun.

Tomorrow, the Christmas tree gets kicked to the curb.

Waiting for Spring

2009-01-05T12:31:00.004-06:00

I was perhaps a little harsh in my comments on the mechanic situation last week. He is a nice enough fellow in person, and I told him that he should have mentioned the major engine repairs needed before he sunk any time into the power locks and such. I'm not happy, or anything, but whatever. . . I'm not pissed off either.

Anyway, the main things I needed fixed right away are fixed, and I have a full report on all the other stuff that should be fixed. Not that I expect to bother with it. Come March or April, I intend to put the ol' girl down.

It was a nice weekend; I went into work on Friday morning only to realize after an hour or so of working that nobody had turned the lights on. It was a holiday. I went back home and spent the rest of the day tinkering in the office. On Sunday Malallee and I went tubing with Jahndo and Megara.

I've been playing Texas Hold 'em on Xbox Live for the last few days. The game interface isn't particularly impressive, but it has what you need. I've enjoyed getting my fix. . . I haven't played poker with my former colleagues for ages now, and I've stopped getting the invitation emails, so either they aren't doing it anymore, or they took me off the list for consistently not showing up. And when my friends get together for poker it's always a dealer calls the game crapshoot where the rules change every hand and you can't find your rythm.

I'm up about 15 grand. Too bad it isn't real money.

Not much else going on.

The Final Post of 2008

2008-12-31T10:21:00.004-06:00

From the This-Post-Should-Really-Be-Two-Different-Posts Deparment:

Happy New Year, Mankind!

It's the last day of 2008, and I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, so I thought I should take a moment to reflect on the past 366 days. And you know what? It's been a pretty good year!

When I sat down to write this post, I didn't really think 2008 had been all that eventful. This was a mental illusion brought on by the fact that the last several weeks haven't been all that eventful, due to the following factors.

One, it is winter and the weather has sucked.

Two, I have been trying to save money very aggressively, because my lovely wife and I would like to move into a bigger less ancient house in 2009, and because my income will be dropping in a week. Not to mention the threat of a deep recession. Pinching every penny translates to not having many wild adventures.

Three, the Hail Mary has been in the shop for more than two weeks now. I'm pretty gorram displeased about it, too, and I'm going to interrupt the narrative flow of post to rant about it at length. Please get comfortable, or skip ahead if you prefer.

The Tale of the Awful Mechanic

In the past, I have usually taken the Hail Mary to this mechanic just a couple blocks north of my home. He's always been timely and effective, and had a good feel for what was important to fix and what was not, given the expected lifespan of the car. He understood my priorities, and I always ended up paying less than I expected to. This time, when I tried to call him, the number was out of service, and when I dropped by the place was boarded up. Apparantly, he has closed his business and is now employed at the garage across the street. So I went there instead, the location is still right, after all.

Of course, the mechanic I actually got there is a different guy, and he's an idiot. I took the car into the shop because the power steering was failing, especially when the vehicle was cold, and because it had recently passed 200,000 miles, and I wanted a routine maintenence checkup to make sure nothing else was in danger of imminent failure. Oh, and an oil change.

Now as you know, the Hail Mary has a long list of other quirks, and I listed them and told him that I would just like him to look into them and let me know what it would take to fix them. I made it very clear that it's an old car, I only plan on keeping it until next fall, and that these things were annoyances that I didn't need to fix if it was going to prove too costly to be worth it.

Well, for four days the jackass didn't have time to even look at the car. Well, why not? I made an appointment in advance, I dropped it off on the morning they told me drop it off. If he wasn't going to get to it for four more days, then I shouldn't have dropped it off when I did. Being without a vehicle in December is fracking inconvenient, you arsehole.

More importantly, though, this guy has no understanding of priorities. He investigated all the minor annoyances first. For the next several days whenever I called him (he never called me, not even when I was told he'd call back in five minutes), he would tell me he was working on the power locks, or diagnosing the busted motor on the front passenger window. (Which by the way, I told him exactly what the previous mechanic had said, that it needed to be replaced if I wanted the window fixed -- I told him I just wanted to know what it would cost to do that. He shouldn't have had to re-diagnose it at all).

He wasted all this fracking time looking into my list of trivial afterthoughts before getting to the work I really cared about, the steering and the engine inspection. Finally, finally -- after running up nearly four hundred dollars in parts and labor on things that I told him were unimportant issues that I might want him to fix if the time and cost were low -- he at last gets around to inspecting the engine and lists about 700 bucks worth of other stuff he says need major work.

What a fracking dick. I authorized him to replace the belts and flush the brake lines, and that's it. He tried to warn me that it will cost more when I have to have it towed in there on a hook. I can guarantee that won't happen; if it breaks down on me, I will be having it towed someplace else, thank you very much.

Here's the thing. If this moron had just done the important work -- the engine and steering related issues -- first, I'd have gladly paid to have it all fixed, and told him to forget about all the other dren, like the power locks. By ignoring the things I brought the car in for, and wasting his time on the minor details, he used up both the money I was willing to invest in repairs, and my willingness to invest it with him.

Anyway, for the last two weeks Malallee and I have been making do with just her car. One of us has to drop the other off and work, and then come pick them up after. Our workplaces are in opposite directions from our home. Yesterday the weather was bad, and traffic snarled up something awful. It took Malallee an hour and a half to get from her office to mine, and then found ourselves a booth at the nearest restaurant and had dinner to pass some time until the traffic cleared.

We Now Return to the Regularly Scheduled Topic

So, as I was saying, the last several weeks have been relatively uneventful. We went to Malallee's mother's place for Christmas, and saw most of her family that lives in Wisconsin, and that was fun. But aside from the ususal holiday activities, December hasn't had much going on.

Taken as a whole though, I now realize that 2008 has been a very busy year.

I got both engaged and married to a truly awesome woman, with all the planning those things entail.

I stood on a volcano, and swam with sea turtles.

I got burglarized, tracked my stolen property down with my internet saavy, got a dude arrested for receiving stolen goods, and got my property back, most of it, anyway.

I left one job for another, then left that job for the one I started with. I regard this simultaneously as a tremendous success and a setback. A success because the experience, skills, and networking contacts I gained in the other job are invaluable, and a setback because coming back to this one meant becoming an employee and being paid much less than I was as a contractor.

I turned 10pi years old, and had a party with 10 pies. (Actually, 11 -- Ronin and Lilivet brought an extra).

Saw Bruce Campbell from within arm's length.

On the down side, I got sick enough to long for death, twice. Previously this has only happened once in a given year if at all, so I must be getting old.

Also, I have seen much less of many of my friends this year than I would like to, except for at special events. I guess I can blame all this other activity that I'm listing, but I still feel deprived of their company. We didn't make it Jackson Hole this year, and even our friends that live nearby we have hung out with much less. Many have nested and produced young, and of course we were all gettin' married and whatnot, but still.

My hope for 2009 is that it will prove calmer, with fewer major events, and more casual get togethers. Also, that will lose 50 pounds and win a PowerBall Jackpot.

2 Days Only

2008-12-15T10:16:00.002-06:00

Weekends are invariably too short. I think I need to invent a new calendar. Then become emperor of the world and force everyone to use it. Yeah.

The traffic on the freeway outside my office window is crawling today. We had rain yesterday, followed by a rapid freeze, followed by an inch or two of snow.

This weekend I finished some things. I finished the book series I have been reading. I finished Dead Rising's overtime mode. I finished repairing the broken theater PC in the bedroom. And Malallee and I finished hanging up the framed pictures from our wedding.

It was a pretty good weekend. I just wish it wasn't over already. My brain hasn't yet reset itself for another week of working.

Not Much. What's Up With You?

2008-12-10T11:48:00.003-06:00

Last week when I was cleaning the house I decided to turn on the living room and bedroom theater PCs so I could pipe music through the whole house with Airfoil. The bedroom one didn't boot up, or even give a BIOS screen; just a sequence of 3 long fault beeps.

That's no good. The last time I used it was a couple weeks earlier, and it functioned just fine, as it has since I put it together. So given that nothing changed, I am assuming serious hardware failure. I haven't had time to look at it yet -- I don't know when I will. Color me annoyed.

I've been playing Dead Rising lately. I consider it valid training for the inevitable zombie apocalypse, and recommend it to all, even though it is at this point over 2 years old. The new game Left For Dead may be better, but I am perpetually behind the curve on my XBox game purchases. . . I can play the same game until I've explored every corner of it, so I may as well wait until things are available used, and until I know which ones are considered enduring classics.

I'm working my way through the 72-hour mode for the second time, and finding myself able to complete a lot more side missions and rescues while still completing the missions. This is nice, because it means the experience is new enough, even though I'm trudging through to get the same ending that I got the first time, the A ending that unlocks overtime mode. After my first play-through, the game's less then straightforward save system tricked me, and I ended up unable to resume overtime mode with all my weapons and items. Rather than tough it out without them, I decided to go through 72-hour mode again, and this time, save correctly.

I am hoping to spend some time this weekend sequestered in my office, examining the broken theater PC and tackling the extremely long TODO list I have in my head. . . or at least, recording it. Tackling it may be a bit beyond my powers.

Workshed

2008-12-08T08:42:00.003-06:00

Last night I saw the film My Name is Bruce, followed by a Q&A session with Bruce Campbell. My life is now complete.

I have Kayrin to thank for letting me know about the event, but the bummer is that she didn't make it to the show herself -- I got her email about it on Saturday morning, so I quickly hopped online to get tickets for Malallee and myself. I kind of assumed Kayrin was going to the 7pm show, but it was already sold out, so I booked us for the 9:40pm show and sent her a note to let her know we couldn't get into the early one.

Turns out, Kayrin hadn't been able to get tickets at all, and thought both shows were sold out -- and when I checked again 5 minutes later, they were. I must have gotten in by the skin of my tail. This fact annoyed me later, because there were still plenty of empty seats in the theatre when Malallee and I were there.

Anyway, it was a great end to a good weekend. We also had brunch with Ronin and Lilivet, I played some XBox with Jahndo, and on Friday night we saw The Infamous Stringdusters at the Cedar, and then dropped by Ronin's radio station to visit him while he was doing his show.

Moving on Up

2008-11-17T13:23:00.003-06:00

Today is the first day of a new era in my career. Today is the day I inhabit a cubicle with an honest-to-god window.

It isn't much, I know, but I've never had a window at work before, and I've worked at quite a few places. Some of them had very open floor plans with lots of natural light, but this is the first time I've been able to sit at my desk working, and look out the window without getting up and walking to one. And it's a pretty nice view, too. I can see 9-mile creek, the pond surrounding our building, the empty parking lot and big grass yard across the pond, traffic on 494, a long train on the railroad tracks along Bush Lake Road, a couple of luxury condo buildings, a huge flock of geese (sometimes at eye-level), a DC-8 banking toward the airport, the moon, and a really great unobstructed angle on the ski-jump in Hyland Park.

Yup. I've arrived.

You know the best thing about having a window? My iPhone can get signal at my desk now.

Actually, the great view is something of a consolation prize, since it comes with my agreement to become a full-time perm employee here. I really liked contracting, and being a long-term "temp" was even better, but the times they are a-changin'. To get a spot on the team that will be doing the fun future projects, I had to convert. It means a lot less money, but also that I don't get stuck doing boring-ass maintenance on the old product while everyone else builds the new one.

Besides, I knew this was the plan when they rehired me after my stint at the other place. The rate I've been getting since I came back in July makes up for the impending drop in compensation.

Anyway. The process of conversion has begun. Supposedly it will become effective January 1st. Meanwhile, I am pinching every penny, trying to sock away a respectable wad to put towards a down payment on a new home next year. It will be a long time before I have the ability to accumulate savings this rapidly again.

The missus and I spent the weekend in Stillwater, visiting wineries and crap stores (Malallee doesn't call them that, but you know the kind I mean -- stores with nothing but cute knick-knacks and decorations, a.k.a. crap. I'm not trying to be derogatory, or knock the quality of said knick-knacks; just that crap is the best word I know for useless stuff that you put around your house for people to look at), and enjoying the luxury of a nice hotel room with a jacuzzi and fireplace. The weather wasn't nice enough to do very much else, but that's how it is when you need to reschedule from early October to mid-November on account of the Dracophage.

I'm finally almost better, by the way.

Other than that, there isn't much to talk about except for my usual complaints of being unable to keep up with own life -- I am long overdue for an oil-change, every non-standard light-bulb in our house seems to have burned out simultaneously, and I still haven't replaced my car radio. At least we finished sealing our windows with plastic last night. That's one thing off the list. I can't complain too much though. I'd probably be a lot less behind if I wasn't spending so much time reading the very lenghty Night's Dawn Trilogy, and struggling to advance through Dead Rising on the XBox 360 -- that game is frustrating the hell out of me. ;)

Peace, Mankind.

Germs Everywhere

2008-11-06T08:06:00.003-06:00

It has been a long damn month, Humanity.

Partly this is because we've had a lot of fun things going on. Starting with Ronin's 40th Birthday party, Malallee and I have parties and such to host or go to every weekend -- usually more than one. We had people over for a Halloween party on the day itself, then went to Byron and Meli's annual bash the next night. This coming Sunday is my 10pi Irrational Birthday, so we're having people over for that -- I hope its a decent turnout, because 10 pies will leave a lot of leftovers if it isn't. And we got an invite earlier this week for Feather and Gambit's yearly Pirate Party, which is on Saturday, the night before my 10pi.

I'm not sure we will be able to make it to that one, however, because of the bigger reason why it has been a long month -- I am still sick. The antibiotics cleared up my throat infection, but there was so much tissue damage, and my immune system was so drained, that by the time it was gone I had developed a bad cough. The kind that comes from deep down, and turns into pneumonia, which I'm sure I now have. And a few days ago I got an awful head cold to pile on the top of that.

None of this is the sort of "shoot me please" misery that the initial infection was, but I haven't been healthy in over a month. Last night my 1AM coughing drove my wife to the guest room. And she thinks she has caught my cold now too.

Suck.

The Dracophage

2008-10-12T11:27:00.002-05:00

Howdy Mankind.

Haven't posted in a while, because I've been on my deathbed. I've been out of bed for about 16 of the last 120 hours, and half of that was just for the two trips to the emergency room.

I've come down with some non-specific bacterial infection of the tonsils and larynx, probably the same thing as the nightmare infection of 2004. I've missed three days of work so far, and Malallee and I had to cancel our honeymoon. The word for that is "suck."

I'm not very happy with the health care system right now. See, this is the third time, at least, that I've gotten an infection like this. From where, Rain only knows, but the point is I've been here before, and I've had hundreds of colds. I know the fracking difference. And when the dracophage strikes, the hoops I have to jump through to get any real help from the medical community are very exhausting, given that I can barely breathe.

You know what, I'm not even going to get into it. It makes me angry. Just ask me to tell you about it later. Hopefully I'll have my voice back by then.

Thunder and Lightning, it's a good thing I just got married to an awesome woman who has to take care of me when I'm sick. It's right in the vows!

Broomhilda

2008-10-02T08:49:00.003-05:00

From the Department of Draconic Gadget Lust:

I'm not sure why I haven't mentioned it yet, but one of the exciting additions to our home since the wedding is the Roomba that my parents got us as a wedding gift. I've wanted to get one for a long time, particularly since last summer when we had the new hardwood floors installed.

At the risk of sounding like an advertisement, I'm super impressed with it. It does a fine job, and can do it unattended and more often. Plus it gets places I can't, like under the couch. My only complaint -- directed at my house, not at the iRobot company -- is that the spot I would really like to put its docking station doesn't work, as there is no electrical outlet nearby.

I am calling the Roomba "Broomhilda," or at least trying to. I'm not sure my attempt to anthropomorphise it will stick.

I am supremely tempted to start frequenting all the Roomba hacking sites on the web, pop open the case, and start reprogramming it. But I shall refrain, because I like it too much and don't want to void the warranty.

This obviously means that I need a second Roomba.

For those who are wondering about Ferret/Robot interactions, they do not occur outside of deliberate experiments. In the one case so far where I let Oberon run around downstairs and turned on the Roomba, just to see what he would do, the result was anticlimactic. He was very curious about the new toy when it was parked, and then became supremely disinterested as soon as I turned it on. He didn't get excited and do a war dance or attack it, and he didn't panic and run away. He was just like "Meh," and wandered off to do other things.

Maybe Mezoez will have a more entertaining reaction.

The 2 Terabyte Ceiling

2008-09-30T09:16:00.006-05:00

From the Why-Can't-These-Things-Ever-Go-As-Planned Department:

Well, my RAID upgrade is complete, but it required the purchase of a new RAID controller in order to get more than 2TB of space out of the new array. My old one, it turned out, could not construct an array bigger than that.

Even after I replaced it, and built the array as a 3TB RAID5, I had the unpleasant discovery that Windows XP also doesn't support volumes larger than 2TB. Fortunately, the new controller also had one other ability that the old controller lacked, which is the ability to partition the devices and create more than one RAID volume on the same set of physical disks.

So I now have two RAID5 arrays, one at a capacity of 2TB, the other at 1TB. It is less than ideal, but it's the best I'm going to get without upgrading to Vista -- and that ain't gonna happen.

One of the side-effects of having to buy a new RAID controller, is that I now have the old one sitting idle, and that means that I could stick it into one of my disused machines, and throw my four 400GB drives into that instead of just using them as external drives. But I'm not sure I want to do that. . . aside from not having the physical space for it, I'm all out of ports on my network switch.

Hitched

2008-09-29T12:21:00.004-05:00

It's a done deal. I married the greatest woman in the world on Friday. I won't try to relate all of the events of the day here, because A) it would take too long, B) most of my readers were there for a lot of it anyway, and C) I need to have something in reserve to talk about at dinner parties.

I will say that the only major glitch was that the officiant who was to perform the ceremony never showed up, and so the whole thing was running about an hour late by the time we managed to track down the owner of the wedding services company, who rushed over and did the job for us himself. Next to that little catastrophe, all other deviations from plan were quite inconsequential.

Also, I will say that Ronin did a fine job providing the evening's musical entertainment, and that several people specifically mentioned to us how great the music was. My only regret is that I missed it when he played "Kung Fu Fighting," as my new brothers-in-law had dragged me off to the hotel bar for a glass of scotch.

Finally, I will comment on how pleased I am with the way my "groom's cake" turned out:

Upgrade

2008-09-18T09:45:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I received the 4 new hard drives I ordered, along with a nifty USB dock to turn any SATA drive into an external drive. The great data migration of 2008 has begun.

The goal here is to increase the capacity of my RAID. When I first put it together, 400GB drives were about the biggest that were affordable, but now I can buy 1TB drives for less than 150 bucks, so it seems like the time to expand.

I am reasonably well pleased with the performance of the USB hard drive dock. It didn't require any special drivers, and the drive I popped into it showed up as an uninitialized drive in Windows. I was able to partition it and format it like any other drive. Formatting it took several hours, however that is to be expected. The only thing unnerving about it is that with the hard drive sitting there in the dock instead of installed in a case and tucked away under the desk, I can hear ever click and whir the thing makes. And it's loud. When I first turned it on I thought I was hearing a head crash. I guess one can't expect whisper silence from the cheapest 1TB drives one can find.

Currently, the machine is hard at work copying files off the RAID and onto one of the new drives. Once all the files are moved off of it, I can dismantle the current RAID and copy the files back to the individual drives that made it up, then turn the 4 new drives into the new RAID, and finally copy everything back to that.

Thus solving my drive space issues forever. Forever!

Reincartoonation

2008-09-17T07:41:00.003-05:00

Man, this has really been messing with my head the last few days. The newest character on Questionable Content, Lydia, looks exactly like Val. I mean, you know, if Val had been a hand drawn cartoon. The facial expression in today's final panel in particular is dead on Val branded sarcasm.

I know it's a coincidence, but talk about creepy. Malallee and I are getting married in less than 2 weeks, and every morning I see my previous fiancee, hangin' out with all her hip new friends in comics land.

Is QC where we go when we die?

Shots Followed by Shots

2008-09-15T11:42:00.002-05:00

My bachelor party on Saturday was a lot of fun. At least, I hope everyone had fun -- I did, but then I wasn't paying for my own drinks, so how could I not.

We had seven guys and lousy weather for paintball, and about a dozen for the traditional drunkening of the groom. With a few people dropping out at various times as the night went on, of course.

Paintball was fun, though it would have been much better without the downpour. We all got good and wet, and we had to take a break after almost every round to de-fog our face masks. I did well. Only two bruises, and I handed out my share of kills -- though with the rain and the breeze, there were some frustrating moments when the munitions were even less accurate than normal. I must have fired 60 rounds at Jaisel when he was completely exposed to my position and watched all of them curve off in bizzarre directions. I'm surprised none of them curved back to hit me.

The barhopping portion was good too. I was driven deeper into inebriation than I would have liked, but not far enough to be sick or end up with a hangover. Once I was good and sauced I tried to turn down drink offers, but too many of the guys didn't bother with an offer -- when shots were handed to me out of the blue. . . well I didn't want to be rude.

We started off at the Bulldog, where everyone had some food, then had a couple at Nye's. Then we went to Mayslacks but ended up across the street at another bar when we didn't want to pay the 6 dollar cover. (I think the other place was called Shaws. I'd never been there before -- they had tasty bar food, in that deep-fried-bad-for-you way).

Finally we went to Elsie's, where I couldn't help but sing along with some of the karaoke going on at the other end of the room. Ugh. That's my biggest problem when I'm drunk -- I can't help but sing along with things, and I'm a terrible singer. Anyone will tell you so. Even the very few times in high school when I had anything to drink, my anti-singing reflex was always the first thing to go.

Guys, I want to assure you -- when I'm sober, I don't even like Bon Jovi.

Bad Investments

2008-09-12T12:40:00.003-05:00

Hey, did any of all y'all ever collect baseball cards? I used to, when I was young. And I was never even especially into baseball.

To this day I find it about as exciting as watching paint dry. I like to take in a Saint's game maybe once a year, but the enjoyment I derive from that comes entirely from the food and the crazy shenanigans designed to keep people from dozing off due to the numbing boredom. I mean, I'm not that into football either, but if there's a game on TV and I have some reason to watch it, like a superbowl party, I will enjoy it -- you couldn't PAY me to watch baseball on television. Without a bratwurst, a beer, and a dozen novelty acts between every inning, it's just painful.

But I digress. I just mean that my collecting baseball cards was 100 percent about collecting, and zero percent about baseball. To give you an idea, my two favorite teams were the Yankees and the Red Sox, which if I had known anything at all about baseball would have required a genuine split personality disorder to accomplish. I just wanted to accomplish piecemeal what my second cousin (that cheater) accomplished each year by buying a single box set -- a completed collection.

Anyway what ever happened with baseball cards as a collectible? Does anyone still collect these things? Has the sports card industry tanked? Was there a sports card bubble? Or was it just that it was never common to begin with, and I quit looking? I can remember there being no fewer than three dedicated sports card shops in my town when I was growing up, at places that you would drive past regularly. I'm pretty sure none of them is there anymore, and I don't think I've ever run across a new one. I'd have to seek one out to find out if they still exist. I can also remember occasionally seeing mainstream news blurbs about rare cards selling at fancy auctions as recently as the late nineties, but it's been a long time since I've noticed that, either.

What got me thinking about this is that I still have my collection, in binders full of those plastic sleeve pages sealed in a box in a closet. It's one more thing in my house that I don't need and don't care about, and it occurred to me the last time I saw it that the bulk of those cards are now over 20 years old.

And frankly, I would like to get rid of them. But what would I do? Get a pricing guide, sort through them individually, and put the "valuable" ones on ebay? No. It is not worth that much of my time. Auction them as a mystery set?

Maybe I should build a time capsule and bury them. That at least would be novel. Suggestions?

It's the Final Countdown

2008-09-12T08:47:00.002-05:00

Howdy, Mankind. Two weeks to go until my wedding. My monkey suit is being tailored and should be ready next week, and the only thing left to do is burn a CD of the processional music and such to give to Ronin.

Malallee has been sick with a cold. I've upped my vitamin C and zinc intake hoping to bolster my defenses. She will certainly be well by the time the big day gets here, but it would suck if I came down with what she has and ended up being miserably ill myself that day.

I'm getting pretty excited about the whole thing. It should be a good party.

September Slowdown

2008-09-08T11:47:00.002-05:00

So things in my world feel like they've calmed down a little bit, which is a welcome break. It may just be that I've been letting things slide that I oughtn't, but whatever. I'm just going to enjoy the relative peace.

This weekend we took a riverboat cruise with the folks from my office, and went to the joint Jahndo / Kermit Birthday Spectacular. Jahndo brought mead. There was merriment.

On Sunday I reassembled closetsaurus, and in so doing, restored our bedroom to a livable state. After three days of having nowhere to hang up her clothes, Malallee was calling for its reinstatement as loudly as I was, and since we have decided to delay the selling and moving plan by at least six months, it was an easy call. I also finished tacking up the coaxial and CAT6 cables in that room, so that they run along the wall and over the door frame over to where they are needed, by the tv.

It's nice to have the bedroom tied into the home theater network, now. I've been enjoying episodes of News Radio before bed.

My plan for tonight is to finally get around to putting away all the junk in the office, which remains in pretty much the same chaotic state that we left it in after swapping the rooms last week.

As I said above, we've decided to postpone selling the house. The main reason for this is that we started talking to mortgage brokers and decided that we really should save up for a while longer before we buy our next house. We could manage it now, if we kept the price range a little bit lower than I was planning to, but between the down payment and the wedding expenses, it would pretty much leave my cash reserve cleaned out. If we plan carefully and cut back on some luxuries, we'll be able to do the whole thing much more comfortably in 6 months.

Plus, it takes the heat off the to-do list.

Growing into Supervillainy

2008-09-04T08:34:00.006-05:00

A quote from Yours Truly, circa October 2005 :

So I guess I need to go get some mousetraps. But I'm not sure I feel right about the killing part. Jack is just a hungry little animal looking for a warm place to stay the winter. He doesn't know it's my house. Hell, for all I know he's been there longer than I have.

Maybe I can find some live traps.

A quote from Yours Truly, circa yesterday:

On the plus side, however, Jack the Third has met his untimely end. Zeku 1, Vermin 0. It wasn't a mousetrap that did him in. It was his adventurous spirit. Well, indirectly. More directly, it was my Broom of Wrath. The living room is just too far away from the mousehole and he found himself without cover.

After the week I've been having, it was exceedingly satisfying to solve at least one problem with violence.

My my, but how we change with time. Behold the power of the Dark Side. At this rate I'll be a Republican someday.

Smackdown

2008-09-03T21:27:00.003-05:00

From the Traps-Shmaps Department:

The guy from the Vespa dealership was kind enough to come pick up the UZHMSCC and haul it into the shop, since I had no way of getting it there myself, but he was two and a half hours late, cutting into our scheduled appointment with a mortgage broker. Now, I understand they were doing me a favor by making a "house call" to pick up the patient, but if you say you can do it at 4:30, do it at 4:30, not 7.

Everything seems to be late. My suit for the wedding was supposed to arrive last week too, and it hasn't come yet either.

On the plus side, however, Jack the Third has met his untimely end. Zeku 1, Vermin 0. It wasn't a mousetrap that did him in. It was his adventurous spirit. Well, indirectly. More directly, it was my Broom of Wrath. The living room is just too far away from the mousehole and he found himself without cover.

After the week I've been having, it was exceedingly satisfying to solve at least one problem with violence.

The Galaxy, Still In Peril

2008-09-03T08:11:00.002-05:00

From the No-Dammit-No Department:

I was on my way home yesterday when the Ultra-Zeku-Hyper-Mega-Speed-Cyber-Cycle started making an unholy noise. It is not an engine noise, it sounds like something physically knocking, scraping, banging, and squealing in the rear wheel area. It sounds as though someone filled a Coke can with gravel and jammed it into the clockwork.

The wheel doesn't seem to wobble or anything, and if I turn it by hand, I can't find anything obviously wrong. . . but man, something is obviously wrong.

I pulled over when this started, accessed the onboard information and communications array, and called the service center to see if they had a towing service. But the call got dropped, apparantly on their end, and I was unable to call them back. Their number kept giving me a message that "the wireless customer I was trying to reach was unavailable."

Seriously? A wireless number? It was their main business number, are they really using a cell service for that? It continued to give me that message every time I tried it last night. I ultimately had no choice but to suck it up and ride the thing -- slowly -- home, squealing and scraping the whole way.

It is not my week, Mankind.

Moving In Again

2008-09-02T08:50:00.006-05:00

What a long, exhausting weekend it was. Malallee and I got a lot done, but had a lot of things go out of accordance with plan.

We did arrange to have a POD delivered on Saturday, but despite having chosen a spot for it that had more than the amount of required clearance they specified, the driver was unable to unload it. I'm not even saying he was wrong -- it clearly was impossible to unload there. I'm just miffed because their website and phone representatives give the required dimensions as being far less that what is actually required.

So we didn't get our POD, and the plan to put a bunch of our stuff in storage went right out the window. The rest of Saturday was actually pretty nice, because we had set it aside for this project, and without a means of proceeding, we just hung out with Jhando all day and considered our options.

On Sunday, we decided to go ahead and rearrange the furniture upstairs, to put all the bedroom stuff back in the master bedroom, and all the office stuff back in the middle bedroom. This was of course exhausting and difficult, and complicated by the fact that we had wanted to get a number of items into storage before attempting it, like the treadmill and weight bench and such. (Now that the exercise facility here at my office has opened, we both have access to convenient alternatives).

But besides the work involved, I'm not entirely happy with the result. In order to make it look cleaner and more minimal for when we (hopefully soon) put it on the market, we disassembled closetsaurus (the black industrial post shelving units that I put together to line one wall of the room and provide me with a place to hang shirts and stack clean clothes).

Now, while I like the open space and roominess of being back in the master bedroom, I am feeling the stress of having no closet space. It was already bad when it was just me -- I built closetsaurus for a reason, after all. Now that it is the two of us, losing closetsaurus is painful. My dresser drawers are full, the closet is full, and my clean stuff is sitting in a laundry basket by the foot of the bed. (Yes, that's where I usually keep it anyway, but at least before I had the potential to fold it and put it away). And I have no place to hang up the clothes that I have "lightly" worn and would like to use again before laundry day.

It feels like a step backwards. I've regained a lifestyle annoyance that I previously solved. The things we do when we are thinking of selling a house.

Swapping the rooms also afforded me the opportunity (well, kind of required me to) finish the grand CAT6 wiring project. With some timely help from Kerreck and his tools, I swapped the two ports in the master bedroom to the other side of the wall, since that was now the office. And I added two new ports on each side of the wall, so that the bedroom is still wired as well. That task took longer than I had hoped, but otherwise went smoothly.

Once I pick up a DVI to HDMI adapter and some cable tack-downs, I'll run ethernet to where the new TV is and hook up the bedroom theatre PC. Finally. Incidentally, after considering the amount of crap already stored in the basement, and the hassle of carrying the heavy thing down there, I elected to dispose of the old TV, a perfectly functional 27 inch Sony Trinitron, by putting it on the front walk with a sign reading "FREE." It was gone by the next time I glanced out the window. I do not regret it.

One other casualty of the room swap: the uptime on my linux server. It's a nerdy, pointless thing, I know. . . but I really wanted to move the linux server (which is a tiny fit-PC mounted to a pegboard that hangs on the back of my desk) without having it lose power, just so that I could keep saying I had never rebooted it since I set it up. It is hooked up to a UPS, so it is possible to keep it running on battery while moving it from room to room, but when Malallee was helping me to put it in place in the new office, the machine came unplugged from the UPS in all the jostling. I was so very sad; it had been up for over 200 days, and I've never had uptime that high on a personal machine before. I was planning to celebrate when I got to one year, but that is not to be.

On Monday, I discovered that someone had been in my garage and stolen -- get this -- the faceplate off of my car stereo, and nothing else. The garage is full of things I would have been more worried about. Two bikes, tools, motorcycle gear, a very nice kerosene heater. . . but they take the faceplate from my car stereo. If it weren't for the open garage door and the driver's side door of the car being left slightly ajar, I wouldn't even have known someone had been in there. The faceplate is completely worthless. It does nothing for whomever has it, besides make it so I can't use my car stereo. Maybe that's what they were going for -- it's a crime motivated by desire to be a jerk, rather than an opportunity to profit.

I need to get out of this neighborhood, before I go all vigilante and kill some punkass kid with a rake.

Malallee is working late tonight, so my plan for the evening is to spend some time putting the office back together, and then blow a few hours playing Geometry Wars 2, which I must currently classify as an addiction.

Rituals of Autumn

2008-08-25T10:06:00.003-05:00

It seems like it is going to be a fairly early autumn. Or just a more typical autumn, I guess; after a couple of Indian summers it feels like it's early.

I got the UZHMSCC back, and it vocalizes in the manner a juvenile feline. Doing without for 2 weeks and then riding to work in the morning really makes me aware of how much the temperatures have dropped in the last couple of weeks. It's nice and cool in the morning now, dropping down into the 50s overnight. I've been cracking the bedroom window at night, and it's awesome.

Just a couple of days ago I was remarking to Malallee that we should be extra careful about keeping crumbs off the floor, and put down some mousetraps just to be proactive. It seems like every year when the autumn temperatures start, a mouse finds its way into our house and makes an appearance. Every year, we respond by putting out a ton of traps and leaving them out for weeks and weeks, but never catch anything, and never see one again until the next autumn. Maybe they leave because there is no food, or maybe they leave because they smell the ferrets. Who knows. It's become an annual ritual -- spot a mouse, deploy countermeasures, never see one again for 12 months. I figured this year maybe we could get the jump on him.

The very day after I said that, I spotted Jack the Third. I laid out traps. History says we won't see him again. This year, we also crammed steel wool into the hole we think he came out of (the hole under the stove through which a pipe comes up from the basement).

Tomorrow the one month countdown to our wedding day begins. We're mostly ready. I need to arrange for cake delivery, and I am waiting for the suit I ordered to come in at the men's store and be tailored. I had to order a new one, because the one I have is now too small. That's what I get for buying a nice suit during one of my relatively thin times.

We met with the professional stager on Saturday, and I'm looking forward to her written report. Some of her advice was, frankly, retarded. But most of it was very sound, and in all I'd say we plan to follow about 90 percent of it.

Figuring out the timing for all this stuff we need to do in order to sell the place is difficult. We're gonna need to put a lot of stuff in storage. Move a lot of things around. Have a lot of rooms repainted. And at some point stash the animals at my mom's place in ND. (Unless someone around here wants to board pets for us? Anyone? Beuller?).

It's hard to get the painting or the rearranging done without getting a lot of stuff out of the way first, so probably we'll start putting all of our "keeping this stuff but need it gone for now" possessions into storage soon. We had been talking about moving all that stuff into the garage next weekend, then renting a U-haul and a storage space the weekend after that, and then Malallee, my brilliant bride to be, had an epiphany and realized we could just get one of those "POD" things, that they deliver to your house. Then we could just fill it up, send it away, and call for it when we move into a new place. I think we're going to go that route.

Words

2008-08-22T09:59:00.003-05:00

Hey Mankind. The main thing that I'm excited about today is that I should be getting my beloved Ultra-Zeku-Hyper-Mega-Speed-Cyber-Cycle back today. At least, when I called them on Wednesday, they had gotten the part and said they'd be done by now. So, here's hoping.

The second thing that I'm excited about today is just that it is finally Friday. I am desperately in need of a few hours extra snoozing. All week I've been sleeping like the dead, and rising like an animated corpse. I haven't even woken up during the night for the last 4 nights. Usually I am awake at least once before morning, to get a drink, or use the bathroom, or just because my brain decided to come up for air between REM cycles.

By the way, I am SO not going to be rearranging any furniture this weekend. No fracking way. We have the stager coming over Saturday morning (she rescheduled), but other than that I just plan to catch up on routine chores and chill out. And on Sunday, Malallee and I plan to go paddling.

We bought a couple of cardgames this week, but haven't had a chance to play either of them. I don't think either one would be that great with just 2 players. One is Munchkin, a humourous fantasy role-playing card game, which is basically a spoof of DnD. It's been around for ages and is quite popular, I believe, but I've never played it. I'm sure it will be fun.

The other I bought mostly for camp value, but I think it will be fun to. It's Army of Darkness, the card game. When reading the rules, it is impossible not to hear them in the voice of Bruce Campbell.

In higher-tech gaming, I'm thinking about buying Geometry Wars 2 Evolved on XBox Live. In fact the only thing that stopped me once already is that I was out of points, and my credit card info on XBox Live has expired. Anyway, I played the demo, and it was crazy fun, much like the first one, except for some reason much easier. You wouldn't think that would be a plus, but I'd like to try the newer game modes, and the reason I never bought the first one is because it was difficult enough that I had no need to! The demo of the original Geometry Wars lets you play for something like 3 minutes before it declares game over, and I only managed to survive that long once. No point in buying the full game if the limited time the demo gives me is already more than I can last. Maybe that explains why the second one is easier.

Crapwork

2008-08-19T10:12:00.002-05:00

Later this week, the professional "stager" that our realtor recommends will be coming by the house to give us advice. Though I look forward to the expert opinion, especially with regards to choosing paint colors, I do not look forward to actually staging our house. It is going to be a daunting amount of work, and I'm only exaggerating a little when I say that living in a house you are trying to sell is worse than being homeless. Especially when you have pets.

We've already been spending too much of our weekends doing yardwork, in a possibly futile attempt to increase our curb appeal. This weekend we pulled or dug up all the weeds growing on the strip of land between our garage and the neighbors driveway, in the alley. And I chopped down young malformed tree that had taken root there.

But the job that I am least looking forward to is making the master bedroom a master bedroom again. When Malallee moved in, we made that the office, gym, and guest room, and took the much smaller middle bedroom as our place to sleep. Even then, I had to give up half my desk space, and the all-things-to-all-people room still feels pretty crowded. This was in order to accomodate Malallee's sleeper sofa, which I felt we didn't have room for, but which she didn't want to get rid of or put in storage.

I didn't fight the decision very hard, because again, as I understand it, human tradition dictates that she is always right. And it has been handy having a place for visiting relations to crash.

But my point was that when potential buyers start looking at the house, we will need to move at least the sleeper-sofa and gym equipment into storage somewhere, and swap everything else with the room next door. It's all big heavy stuff, and there is no easy place to use as a holding area -- no place to put the stuff from one room while we move the stuff from the other into it. And there really isn't a good way to break this task down into more manageable chunks. It's just flat out going to have to ruin a weekend, or at least a Saturday.

Ugh. I'm trying to work up the motivation to do it this weekend.

In other news, I still don't have the UZHMSCC back. Tomorrow will mark the day that they told me they expect the needed part to arrive, so I will be calling them to check up on it if I don't hear anything. The wait is killing me.

Eternity and the Ravages of Time

2008-08-14T08:32:00.003-05:00

There are times in life when I am moved to contemplate infinities, and with the current events in my life, it is that temporal infinity called eternity that is on my mind. Forever. Does the human mind really grasp how long forever is?

The draconic mind grasps it thusly: forever is equal to one week. That is how long it will take for the service center at Scooterville to receive the replacement gasket the Ultra-Zeku-Hyper-Mega-Speed-Cyber-Cycle requires. Forever.

And so, I am doomed to at least one more eternity of rolling in the Hail Mary. I loathe driving the Hail Mary. She was a sweet ride, once, years ago -- the first car I owned that was neither older than me, nor handed down from my grandmother. But she was younger and fitter then, cosmetically challenged, but classy and powerful. . . like the girl at a party who isn't quite as pretty as everyone else but is way cooler and more fun to hang out with. These days she has two hundred thousand miles on her and accelerates lethargically. Her front passenger window is fused in place, rain leaks in at the top of her windshield, and her interior is reliably lit by the pale orange glow of the check engine light. She cruises around with her gas door hanging open, unable to latch.

In short, the Hail Mary has aged beyond her best years, and I've left her for a sexy younger vehicle with fewer wheels.

Who is now out of service for another whole damn week -- forever.

Host City

2008-08-08T08:42:00.003-05:00

So the big happenings this weekend are all about the wedding. My mother and little sis came to town yesterday, and Malallee's mother and two sisters are coming today. The six of them are getting a couple of rooms at a hotel downtown, and will be spending the weekend doing. . . you know, I'm not entirely sure. I'm going with them for dinner and drinks at the jazz club tonight, and my mom and Malallee are meeting tomorrow with the proprietor of the cafe where we will have our rehearsal dinner. For the rest of the time, I don't have any idea what sort of girly plans have been established.

I'm hoping to use the alone time to tackle some of the more, let's say "venerable" items on my to-do list. There are rather a lot of them.

And quite a few new ones too -- Malallee and I met with our realtor this week to talk about things we should do if we want to put the house up for sale after the wedding. I would like to, although we may wait until spring. . . I think that is the way Malallee is leaning, and if I am correctly interpreting the complex mechanics of human matrimony, tradition dictates that her opinion is always correct. Regardless, there is lots to do first. Meet with a stager, interior painting, fixing the various minor things that have broken, securing financing for the next house, etc.

Of course, it won't be any great tragedy if we have to stay put for a while, our house is nice enough, and we've made quite a few improvements since I bought it. I'm just starting to really feel out of room.

A Crisis of Galactic Proportions

2008-08-07T07:28:00.005-05:00

From the Please-Hold-A-Candlelight-Vigil Department:

The Ultra-Zeku-Hyper-Mega-Speed-Cyber-Cycle is unwell. Oh, terror and woe!

I don't know what is wrong with it, or how it went wrong. But suddenly, overnight, it is running much louder than it should. You know those motorcycle dudes that put modified pipes on their bikes to make them louder? It sounds like someone did that to it (which since it is a Vespa to start with, still only makes it sound almost as loud as most other motorcycles). And when I let off the throttle, it sometimes backfires a little bit.

It sounds like. . . well, it sounds like what Ronin always calls it. A "putt-putt scooter."

The dealership can't fit me in for service until next week. Booo!

Sadly, the Onboard Mobile Computing and Network Connectivity Module is useless for diagnosis.

The Future is Now

2008-08-01T09:00:00.002-05:00

From the Cyber-Punk-Awesome Department:

A few weeks ago, once the longest lines had died down, I replaced my iPhone with the iPhone 3G. I didn't mention it at the time, because if you know me at all, you will have already assumed that I upgraded as soon as feasible. I have very low gadgetry resistance powers. (If only someone made a device to augment them, I'd be set).

So I don't have much to say about the upgrade that isn't in all the reviews, but I must mention that the GPS features are a thousand time better than they were in the old iPhone -- the new one nails down my location spot-on, most of the time, instead of to within a block or two.

That fact, coupled with the higher network bandwidth of 3g, made it pretty much inevitable that I would mount a cradle for it on my Vespa.

The Ultra-Zeku-Hyper-Mega-Speed-Cycle, is now the Ultra-Zeku-Hyper-Mega-Speed-Cyber-Cycle. w00t!

Google Maps makes a perfectly serviceable GPS. It shows me my current position and pans the map as I move, and if I don't know where I'm going, I can get directions and follow the purple line. Plus I can see the traffic conditions, and route around any freeway backups.

The other iPhone apps are less motorcycle friendly, but still somewhat useful. When I am driving through town at low speeds with lots of stoplights, playing music through the iPhone speaker is better than nothing, and being able to see incoming calls so I can decide whether to pull over and call back right away will be nice. That hasn't happened yet, but its always been annoying in the past to have my phone start ringing when I'm driving and be unable to see who is calling.

This post badly needs a picture, and I'll try to add one soon -- it's just that I usually would snap these pictures with my iPhone, and I can't use it to take a picture of itself. ;)

Mixed Bag

2008-07-11T13:12:00.010-05:00

I am here at my desk, a week or so into the new job, which is to say, the old job. I've gone back from whence I came. I'm even back in the same cube, using the same workstation. (Though of course my very nice dual monitors have been commandeered by vultures, leaving me with a low-resolution POC).

I've fallen back into the swing of things pretty easily, as not much has changed since I left. It's a little bit dull, and less challenging than other things I could have pursued, but. . . they are paying handsomely to have me back, so I can deal with a little slowness. I can always occupy myself playing with new languages and frameworks.

The wedding planning has been coming along smoothly. Malallee and I sent out our invitations earlier this week. The ceremony and reception will be at the same location, in the outdoor skygarden on the 8th floor of a downtown hotel. We have limited space for the ceremony portion, so we have just invited family (and the friends that need to travel from out of town) to that, and invited everyone else to show up for the party.

On the day we put the invitations in the mail, we got one of our self-addressed RSVP envelopes delivered to us, empty and unsealed. That means one of the invitations must have come open and fallen apart in the mail somewhere. Fortunately, we are pretty sure we know which one it was, since Kayrin hasn't gotten one in the mail yet. Easily remedied.

Last week, Thursday i think, we had an amazing storm here early in the afternoon. Spiral has posted some pictures of the flooded street at her and Kermit's place here, and you should check out this video I took from inside the parking garage here at work when I went down to make sure my Ultra-Zeku-Hyper-Mega-Speed-Cycle hadn't blown over. The quality is a bit low (I took it with my iPhone), but when the storm really kicks in, you can see streams of water spraying in over the walls of the parking garage as though someone was standing out of frame with a power sprayer. It was cool.

In other news: A zombie incident right in our own back yard. Last week I got an email from Margovahl, with a link to this product, which has recently been making the rounds on the various "cool stuff" blogs:

For some reason, Margovahl thought of me. We chatted for a while about how I needed to get one, and how one might make a cheap version with concrete, cleaning gloves, and a Halloween mask, if one were so inclined. Apparently though, she was not the only person to see this and think of me. Exactly three days later, Malallee and I went out for a bike ride and encountered this by the garage:

I immediately suspected Kerrick and Omi. They confessed with little prodding. I love it. My sister and her fiance' will be flying into town late tonight and letting themselves into our place to crash. I'll have to make sure they come in through the back yard.

Cheers!

Rude

2008-06-27T14:04:00.002-05:00

You know who frustrates me? People who say on Wednesday that they will get back to me about something rather urgent "by the end of the day or early tomorrow," who fail to do that and are then unreachable on Friday.

Also, clowns.

I'm Batman

2008-06-20T17:16:00.001-05:00

Okay, Humanity. Remember all that stuff I told you about how our house was burglarized and my laptop stolen, and about how whatever idiot had it was still using my copy of firefox and thus sending me all his bookmarks, and about how I changed them to point at a redirect page on my server so I could log the IP address?

Well today the court system finally got the subscriber info from Comcast, the police went over to the dude's house, and I got my stolen laptop back.

I only had a few minutes to examine it before I had to head to that job interview, but I had enough time to see that all my pictures were still there (in the trash bin), and I now have several nice shots of my crook and his buddies mugging for the camera and throwing gang signs to go with them.

Boo ya.

A word to the wise, never use a stolen computer if its owner is even the tiniest bit tech saavy and you aren't.

Any day that my actions can get a guity person caught and charged with felony receiving and concealing of stolen property is a good day.

Of course on Monday, I'll need to call my insurance company about this development -- justice could end up being costly.

Scholarly Discourse

2008-06-19T19:19:00.003-05:00

I'm spending the evening in my office, which is nice because I am sitting in front of my admittedly unnecessary but nevertheless beautiful wall of monitors, enjoying the snappiness of the new Mac Pro, and listening to Mozart, but is not so nice because instead of reading the interwebs or working on my hobby project, I am trying to concentrate on collecting my thoughts and writing up some notes for a whiteboard presentation I need to give during this three hour job interview I am going on tomorrow.

I am supposed to deliver a presentation on a Java/J2EE product or feature that I've worked on in the past, giving enough technical detail to allow the panel to ask questions. I imagine the point of it is to demonstrate that I've actually done things, and have put enough thought into them to mount an intelligent defense of whatever design decisions I made.

I've never been uncomfortable with public speaking, and we're talking about a handful of other developers, so that part is no big whup. But in the vast history of projects that I've worked on, there is really only one that I can choose for this, and it is neither the most interesting, nor the one that I most proud of. However, it is the only one that I remember well enough to speak intelligently about in that kind of discussion, because aside from my current gig (which is dull, dull, dull) it is the only one that happened recently enough to have escaped the scythe of my wetware's garbage collector.

In many ways, it feels like a trip back to college. An oral presentation worth half my grade, at the end of a week that sees me swamped up to my wings with other stuff that needs to be done, leaving me to prepare for it the night before it is due.

There's only so much I can do, of course. Review the details of the project, try to write down everything I remember about it, and put everything in a logical order to talk about. I know what I built, and I know why I built it, so I'll basically just lay it out and spend more time talking about whatever seems to generate the most questions.

The job, by the way, is one that I want. These guys have their shit together. They've been doing agile for long enough that the process is solidly in place, and their software is very cool stuff. I'd learn a lot there.

The only potential downside to the job is that it is. . .well, a job. As in direct hire, not contracting -- which is not a problem if it turns out to be as good as I think it is, but hey. . . look at my current gig. Things aren't always the field of daisies they appear to be from outside, which is why I prefer to contract or at least to contract-to-hire before signing up to be a company man. I would probably put that preference aside in this case -- if offered, it would be too great an opportunity to pass up.

Meanwhile, I am expecting to see a "contingent" offer from another firm that I've been talking with, this one a consulting company. It would be salaried employment as a contractor being billed out to one of their many clients, with full benefits and bench time and all that. If I like the offer, and accepted it, I would basically start interviewing with their clients (The one in particular that they have in mind I was already looking at) and be hired when the client approved. I'm pretty excited about that opportunity as well, because it would still be contracting, giving me some freedom to move around when a project gets stale, and because the firm in question is quite a reputable one.

Anyway, all of this is why I've been so fracking busy this week. I hate job hunting -- it's like having a second job. . . one that's in sales. And when you are working your regular job all day, and trying to keep up with phone calls and emails from recruiters on the side, and preparing presentations, the rest of your life just gets backed up. The mail piles up, you can't find a time to take your Vespa in for its scheduled maintenance (I can bike and take the train to work, but not to interviews on the other side of town that start at 4), and your fiancee' gets stuck doing all the packing and shopping for the camping trip that you are leaving on the instant you walk out of your 3 hour interview.

Anyway. I'm going to get back to my notes. Wish me luck and all that jazz.

Slammed

2008-06-16T07:10:00.002-05:00

It's going to be a wild-ride kind of week for me, Mankind, busy as . . . well, the expression really should be "busy as a dragon" because this seems to happen to me pretty regularly.

Missteps

2008-06-09T20:22:00.002-05:00

From the Why-Couldn't-I-Leave-Well-Enough-Alone Department:

Hey Humanity. How's it going?

I'm feeling a little blue today. The job has me down, and I'm wishing I'd had the good sense to just stay put. Granted, the old gig was getting, well. . . old. But the new place hasn't worked out, and I'm starting to feel the regrets.

Mleh.

At least I'm not a fool. I wouldn't have taken this position except as a contract-to-hire, giving me an automatic "out" if it proved to be less than advertised, and I wouldn't have taken it without having at least two backup plans mostly lined up. Trouble is, those plans are starting to feel a little soft.

I just agreed to extend 30 days with the current client, rather than turning down the job outright. . . they have that long to show that they can improve the environment, and I have to give them a final decision at the end of that. If things don't get a lot better real quickly, I don't intend to stay. That means I'd better get something else lined up.

There is a strong chance I can go back to my last gig, but more than likely it would be as an employee rather than a contractor, and I'm not confident they can pay competitively. There's a consulting firm I could get into pretty easily, except for timing. . . they just ended a big contract and have several employees to reassign before they do any more hiring. Similarly, I have an application in with another former employer that I've been told I'm under consideration for. . . but they are waiting on funding.

I have an interview in a couple of days with a company that I think would be fantastic. But for the first time in years, I'm not sure I'm up to par with their standards. I understand the interview process is pretty grueling.

It all just weighs me down lately. What I really want is a month or two off. But as tempting as it is to be. . . lax. . . on the job search, I know it's a bad idea -- Malallee and I have a wedding to host, we want to move into a bigger house soon after, and I don't think my car will hold together much longer.

Bah. I am ensnared in the obligations of a Humanly lifestyle. A wiser dragon would take a deep breath and start burning things.

l33t 5ki11z

2008-06-02T10:46:00.005-05:00

From the It's-Nice-To-Not-Be-Stupid-Department:

So we got robbed while we were in Hawaii. I've mentioned that.

I promised to give you more details, so here they are. But I'm going to cover them quickly (I'll try, anyway), because time has gone by, it's old news to me at this point, and I want to get to the interesting stuff.

The morning before Malallee and I were going to come back from Hawaii, I was awakened by a phone call at 5:30 am. It was the security alarm company, saying the alarm was going off and asking if everything was okay. I briefly chewed them out -- because how the hell was I supposed to know, being asleep in my bed at a guest house on Molokai. They were supposed to call Kayrin if the alarm went off. I'd left them specific instructions, since she was going to be taking care of the ferrets and bringing in our mail and all that good stuff while we were away. The lady from the security company had these instructions right in front of her when she ignored them. She said as much.

Anyway, I put it out of my mind until about 2:30 that afternoon, when I got a voice mail from Kayrin. She was on campus when the security company called her, and was not over at the house having trouble with the alarm, so she had them send the police. The police came over and found the door open. They noted that, and left. When Kayrin was able to come by, she immediately noticed that my laptop had disappeared from the dining room table, and that my entertainment center had been pulled away from the wall and rifled through, so she called the cops back out there and filled out a report.

Kayrin was able to tell them my laptop was gone, but she couldn't tell what else might be missing, though it was obvious they'd been in the entertainment center. When I got back, I'd discover that the Xbox, along with all it's cables, controllers, and accessories was gone with it. They came in by cutting through one of my window screens, and then opening the window, which happened to be unlocked.

Now, I have to say, I am unimpressed with the quality of police work done here. The cops came over when the alarm went off, found the door open, walked through the place and decided nothing was wrong. Naturally, I don't expect them to have known my laptop was gone, but the entertainment center was pulled away from the wall, and left there, doors open, AV cables dangling, my home theatre PC half disconnected. The wall box with the network jacks in it was yanked out of the wall for Rain's sake, from when the thief or thieves decided they didn't have time to unplug the Xbox carefully. And the rest of the place, as per my habit, spotless and neat. And they decide nothing is wrong. Come on.

In fact, a few days later I got one of those nice letters from the city asking me to pay a 30 dollar "registration fee" for the "false alarm" my home security system had caused. I had to make a bunch of phone calls over that.

Anyway, that's the boring parts of the story. I then navigated the bureaucracy of my insurance company, and after the deductible, got paid replacement cost for the laptop. I replaced the Xbox too, out of my own pocket. As we speak, I'm writing this from my shiny new Mac Pro, so all is right with the world.

Now here's the interesting part. Whoever stole my laptop, or someone who is now in posession of it, is not very adept at the high-tech world of computerin'. They didn't bother to wipe the laptop and reinstall, didn't even bother to create a new login or reinstall any applications. They just started using it, as is. I saw "myself" logged into my IM accounts once or twice, and then one day a whole mess of new bookmarks appeared in my copy of Firefox, because I use the Foxmarks plug-in to keep them synchronized across all of my machines.

Recognizing this as an opportunity, I quickly changed ALL of my bookmarks to point to a page that I threw together on my own webserver, which just immediately redirects to whichever page the bookmark was originally pointing to. I pushed these changes out to my Foxmarks account, so they would get copied down to my stolen laptop the next time somebody opened firefox. And then I wrote a simple shell script on my webserver to watch the apache logs and email them to me whenever the special redirect page got a hit.

Sure enough, whoever has my laptop has been using those bookmarks regularly. It is a trap that wouldn't have fooled anybody smart enough to watch the URL in the status bar before clicking it, but. . . crooks be dumb.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I now know this person's IP address, which is one belonging to Comcast here in Minneapolis. And I know a great deal about the YouTube videos they like.

So I called the police and referenced my case number, and told them all of this. It took a couple of weeks for them to get around to me, and I had to explain the basics of TCP/IP, but when I last spoke to the investigator, he was taking down the information he'd need to fill out a subpoena and get the subscriber's name and address from Comcast. And they already have the serial number for my laptop, and the Xbox for that matter.

Eat it, bad guys.

Of course, it could be that the person is using a neighbor's wireless connection, and it could be that the police will simply drop the matter, or do poorly explaining it to a judge -- they don't seem especially internet savvy themselves. I'd say it's 50/50 at best. And if I did get my laptop back, it would probably just be a headache for me, since I'd probably have to go through a lot of paperwork with my insurance company, and give back money I've already spent to replace it. But, man, it would be worth it.

You know, because of the justice.

I'll let you know if anything comes of it.

Of Diamonds and Dirtbags

2008-04-22T20:48:00.013-05:00

From the Get-Comfortable-This-Is-Gonna-Take-A-While Department:

Hello, Mankind!

I know it's been over a month since you've heard from me, and I'm about to make up for it. This post is going to be a whopper. I've been very busy, and a lot of stuff is going on. So here we go, Humanity -- I hope you've got some coffee or something.

For starters, the new job still keeps me more than occupied. I'd like to tell you that it is going great, but I really don't have my feelings on the matter worked out. I've got about a month left on the contract period before the hard decision comes about whether or not to sign up as a bonified employee, and frankly I'm leaning against it. It's a tough call -- most of the things that I was looking for in a job are there. A fantastic development team, a more agile environment than I've worked in before, a dynamic mix of newer technologies to learn. But there's also a lot of organizational problems, a huge leadership void, a severe lack of planning-ahead, and all the morale problems that go with those things when you have a fantastic development team that can see how wrong things are. I'm deeply concerned that things are going to implode in 6 to 9 months time.

Day to day, things are fine. But I can't say I'm excited by the idea of hitching my wagon to this star. If they'd let me remain as a contractor, I'd be happy to. I doubt that will be an option.

Malallee and I went to Hawaii as planned, and it was great! I saw mongooses (probably hundreds of them), geckos, wild pigs, humpback whales, spinner dolphins, endangered ne'ne', green sea turtles, about two dozen species of reef fish, and a snowflake morray eel. Also, girls in bikinis, including one that I've been dating for some time now. ;)

The flight there wasn't so fun, of course, and the flight back was horrible. On the way out, it took us 16 hours all together, and we arrived at 8pm local time, which according to my deeply confused body clock was 1 am. It took us at least another hour to get a rental car and get checked into our hotel in Hilo. We were dead-ass tired by the time we went to sleep at 9:30. . . and yet, I still woke up at 2:30 and only snoozed lightly for the rest of the night. We were up and out sightseeing by 7am.

Jetlag is a bitch.

We stayed in Hilo for one more night after that, and just spent the day driving up and down the east side of the island to take in the sights. There are some lovely waterfalls and scenic views, and some delicious places to eat. Get this -- I joked once or twice in the past about how I wanted to open a Mexican Sushi restaurant and call it "Tako Taco." Turns out I'm not very original, because we saw a restaurant called exactly that. We didn't stop there, but based on the reviews I've looked up, they don't actually serve Tako Tacos, or any sushi at all as far as I can tell. Still, it was nice to see an idea that I thought was my own brought to life on a coloful sign.

On that second day, we drove down to the southeast part of the island, to see the lava flows. We followed a highway that terminates where it was covered over by flowing lava. As you near the end, you just start hitting spots where the road disappears into a solid mass of black, glassy rock, and turns into a trail over the lava. If you get out and walk for a half mile or so, you can see (from a respectful distance, of course) the still red lava spilling into the sea and throwing up plumes of steam.

Hiking across a bed of solidified lava was almost spiritual for Maralel and me, a experience with a deep and satisfying connection to our draconic heritage. The fire in my chest burned hotter, as though resonating with and drawing power from the vast inferno in the earth, so much closer here than elsewhere. I was quiet, satisfied, drinking it in. Maralel simply glowed, as real and as distinct from me in this moment as I have ever seen her. Malallee, was, I think, similarly awed.

I'm not a religious sort, but if I decide to belive in a goddess, I think I'll have to go with Pele.

As it turns out, this feeling would be common while we were there. On Hawaii, every rock is an igneous rock.

Our plan for the next day was to venture into the Volcano National Park itself, and backpack into one of the less accessible sights. Pele, sadly, was having none of it. The tradewinds shifted, and stopped carrying away the poisonous cloud of sulpher dioxide that Kilauea has been emitting for the last month or two, and the park was evacuated and closed. That's right -- they had to close Volcano National Park, because it's a volcano.

So instead, we checked out of our hotel in Hilo and drove up along the east coast, around the north side of the island, and then started down the west side, checking out all the beaches, scenic points, and little towns, and finally set up camp at Mahuhona Beach Park. The weather was warm and sticky, and there were feral cats there in numbers too great to count.

After a cooling dip in the sea, we had a nice dinner of rice and beans with tuna, made over our single burner camp stove, and sat up for a while watching the waves roll in and crash on the rocky shoreline. Also, I may have enjoyed "spotlighting" the feral cats with my flashlight. They get this awesome look on their face, like they've been caught burgling a museum.

When it was finally cool enough to go into our tent without suffocating, we settled in for the night and I gave Malallee the engagement ring that I had smuggled in with me. She was dumbstruck, literally. She stared at it with her mouth open for a good 5 seconds before she said anything. If I recall, it was "Yes! How. . . how did you get that in here?"

Then there was some making out, and it was awesome. When we got up the next morning and started packing up to leave, I spotted a pod of humpback whales breaching not far off shore. I remember the moment well because I was staring out over the sea waiting for Malallee to return from the restroom, and they appeared immediatly after I thought to myself "Gee, it would be cool if I saw a whale right now."

I tried thinking about how cool it would be to find buried pirate treasure, but my mind powers had apparently left me by then.

We drove to a nice diner that had excellent french toast, and checked the status of the park, learning that it was open again. So we drove there, set up camp at one of the sites down the road from park headquarters (with a day shaved off of our visit and a constant threat of evacuation, the backpacking plan went. . . ahem. . . up in smoke).

By the way, I'd just like to say that my iPhone was invaluable on this trip. Aside from using google maps to navigate, and being able to check the weather, we were able to check the USGS and national park websites. And I used it to take pictures that, despite being of poorer quality than those from Malallee's camera, could be instantly emailed to my sister in a note reading "I'm here and you're not." The two days we spent in the park after my battery died were hard for me.

After setting up camp, we went through the Thurston lava tube (cool!), and then we drove through the park to one of the most inspiring and frightening coastlines I've ever seen. Crashing waves slamming into a cliff of hardened lava, where we stood 50 feet up and still got hit with spray. There was a short, stone railing at the very edge, that ran only for 10 yards or so, and on either side nothing to keep a person from falling off but a couple of signs reading, essentially, "I wouldn't go past here if I were you."

Damn, Humanity -- If you have a soft little body with no scales or wings, nature can kill you real easy.

It was getting late by this point, so we headed back to camp, and made a really great fire in the fireplace under the site's picnic shelter. To our dehydrated mashed potatoes and such, we added roast hot dogs, bought from the general store in volcano village and cooked on sticks that I sharpened with my knife. The weather was drizzly, but under the shelter with our kick-ass fire, it was splendid.

The next day we hiked to the petroglyphs, a vast set of carvings made in the lava by native Hawaiians. Some were abstract, some were figures of people and animals. It was neat. Later, on Molokai, we would see more petroglyphs, only these would say "F*ck West Side" and "East Side Rules." We also went back to the Thurston Lava Tube with our headlamps, so we could walk all the way through the undeveloped section, to the terminus. I've been on cave tours before, but it just isn't the same once they've bolted lamps to the walls.

To round out the day, we hiked the Kiluea Iki trail, which I can only describe as "indescribable." The trail takes you down into a great caldera, then straight out accross the barren bottom of it, where all is smooth lava, and cracks in the ground are still spewing sulpher and steam.

We hiked to exhaustion, and planned to sleep well that night. When we got back to camp, though, we had new neighbors -- a group of 15 or so college kids, coming together to party. They made an irresponsibly large fire (which was cool) and we hung out with them for a while and donated our beer. I figured we might as well chill with them for a while. . . they'd have just kept us up anyway, right? They were pretty cool though -- a lot of them were CS students, and though they were still a bit loud after we turned in, we were tired enough that it didn't matter.

The next morning we drove down from the volcano and started up the west coast, stopping on Ocean View to enjoy a leisurely breakfast, wash our clothes at the laundromat, and mail some souvenirs from the post office. Afterwards we drove to Hookena Beach, on Kauhako Bay, and set up camp. This was a great swimming beach, and there were a lot of other campers. But man, what a spot. The water was perfect for swimming, and we could watch spinner dolphins frolicking out in the bay.

My memory is already starting to fade, but I think this was the day that we drove into Captain Cook, and tried to hike from town to the Captain Cook Monument, down at Kealakekua Bay. The bay is supposed to be lovely, and a popular place to snorkel and kayak, but I'm sorry to report we never made it there. The trail we took to get there is not really a hiking trail per se -- it's a horse trail. Dusty, rocky, overgrown with tall grass, steep, and lacking in bathrooms. The first four conditions I could have handled, but while we were on our way down I came down with some serious and very badly timed intestinal distress, and had to do some things behind some trees that I am not proud of. I was in rough shape for a while, so Malallee insisted we turn back, even though by then I was feeling better.

We could have driven to the monument, I guess, but we didn't get around to it. Instead we went back to our beach campsite for swimming, sandwiches, and ginger beer.

The next day we drove into Kailua-Kona, checked into a hotel, and went snorkeling -- it was flabbergastingly cool. There were fish up the yin-yang. (Not literally, thank Pele). We must have seen 50 species. Afterwards we enjoyed having a hot shower and a soft bed. We needed to be up early the following day to fly to Molokai.

Molokai, I'm sorry to say, was a bit of a dud. There wasn't really anything going on there, and the island was small enough that we saw all of it in the first afternoon we were there. There were lots of beautiful, isolated beaches, but almost all of them are unsafe for casual swimming -- and it was windy. . . real windy.

We stayed two nights in a lovely little guest cottage at a private residence, and that was quite nice. We watched Star Wars on cable. Then we called the airline and moved our flight back to the big island up a day, because we were bored as hell.

I'm extremely glad we did -- not only did it spare us another empty day on Molokai, and give almost two extra days in Kona, but it broke up the flying that we'd have had to do on our return trip otherwise -- originally, we would have been flying from Molokai to Honolulu to Hilo to Honolulu (no kidding!) to Seattle to Minneapolis all in one marathon session.

Those last two days in Kona were gorgeous -- we had the best weather of the entire trip, and when we decided to go snorkeling again, we found ourselves swimming with endangered green sea turtles. And we saw an eel!

However, just after we got out of the water on the day before we were to fly home, I found we had voicemail from Kayrin -- somebody had burglarized our house, and stolen my darling Macbook Pro, and probably, something from the entertainment center. Kayrin wasn't sure what.

I can't say that didn't put a bit of a damper on the last day of the trip. I was pretty distracted wondering what else might be missing, and I was eager to get home and evaluate the loss.

Our flight into Seattle was a nightmare. It was a redeye, the plane was hot, and there were no fewer than a dozen children under 5 aboard.

When we got home, at last, we found that the punks (which punks? If only I knew. . ) had taken my Xbox 360, it's controllers, all the cables and headset for it, and the game that happened to be in the drive, which was Mass Effect.

Also, a bottle of gluten-free vodka. So we're thinking somebody under 21. Because seriously, who the hell considers a bottle of vodka to be worth stealing?

Anyway, it appears that they cut one of the window screens with a knife, popped it off, and entered through the window, which I had apparantly not remembered to lock. The alarm went off, and I imagine that's why we didn't lose anything else.

All in all, it wasn't that terrible -- they didn't break anything, didn't get the home theater PC that was right there with the Xbox (looks like they tried but didn't have time to unhook it), didn't even take any of the games for the Xbox besides the one inside it.

The laptop, of course, is a huge loss. There were some pictures on it that I hadn't backed up yet and can't get back, and of course I spend several days worrying about my private information and passwords, but the threat has faded -- I monitor all my accounts pretty closely, and nobody can open new accounts in my name.

Believe it or not, it has actually been three full weeks since I started writing this post -- I've been swamped and only able to work on it piecemeal, so I'm gonna close this out and call it a chapter-break. I have lots of frustration to share on the topic of dealing with the aftermath of being burglarized, so. . . look forward to that.

I'm Not Dead Yet

2008-03-16T10:39:00.004-05:00

From the Long-Time-No-See Department:

I have not fallen off the edge of the earth, Humanity, just in case you were planning a funeral. I'm just fine. Behind on my writing, that's all.

See, I started the new gig about a month ago, and the minute-to-minute dynamic of my day is now quite a bit different. I don't have downtime during the workday anymore -- I am busy the whole time that I'm there. This is a good thing. It's exactly what I needed. On the other hand, I do miss blogging and chatting during the day. I am just not in the habit of doing my internetting after dark. Not since college, anyhow.

This means that in addition to not having written much, the unread posts in my Google Reader list have climbed into the thousands.

Constant activity aside, however, things are going well. I haven't formed a final judgement on the new gig yet. I like the dev team I'm on, but there's some small company politics that are going on, and I never like politics. Not at work, that is. I'm waiting to see how it shakes out over the 90 day contract-to-hire period. I would not have taken the contract if I didn't fully expect to accept the position. . . but if things start to implode before then, I don't consider myself obligated -- after all, I would also not have taken the contract if I didn't have at least 2 backup plans already lined up.

All my computer issues at home are fixed. The ailing home theatre machine in the living room turned out to be suffering from either a defective video card, or one that was somehow buggy when combined with my mainboard. I swapped it out for the competing brand, and haven't had an issue since.

The RAID array was easy to fix once someone reminded me that I was being remarkably stupid. I got myself all confused by thinking that a RAID5 array should be fully recoverable from a drive failure, but not usable while that drive was down -- I don't know where I got that idea. The redundancy is the entire point. And I know that, is the frustrating thing -- somehow I flipped a bit in my brain and for a while I "knew" the opposite of what I have always known. I must be getting old. so I replaced the bad drive, rebuilt the array (it took 4 days) and all was well with that.

I also finished installing Gentoo on my fitPC, and migrating all of my apps to it. I love this machine. It sits, silent and tiny, on the corner of my desk, sipping electricity like a bitter tea.

So all is well on that front. Now I need to move onto building the theatre PC for the bedroom. :)

Malallee and I are excited about our upcoming Hawaii trip, and as it is now only a few weeks away, I need to start pulling my crap together, organizationally. There are things to rent, numbers and addresses to record, decisions to make about what to bring. The next few weeks will be filled with the making of lists. I need to make a list of the lists I should make. I'll put that on my todo list.

That's the quick update, Mankind. See ya when things settle down!

Misery

2008-02-14T10:04:00.003-06:00

From the Somebody-Kill-Me Department:

Humanity, it has been a terrible week. I woke up this morning in a pool of my own blood, and I had to regard it as an improvement.

I got a little bit sick last week on Friday, and staying up late to play poker on Saturday night must have been a mistake, because besides playing poorly and losing my ten dollars, by Sunday morning I was truly incapacitated. I stayed home from work on Monday and Tuesday, which is not an easy thing to do on one's last week on the job.

I spent most of that time asleep, although I did manage to get a good part of the way through Marvel Ultimate Alliance on the XBox 360. On Wednesday I went to a doctor, who said that I may have, and I'm quoting here, "a little case of pneumonia," (I didn't know their was such a thing) or some acute bronchitis. She put me on antibiotics and an inhaler.

I still feel lousy, but it isn't as bad as it was earlier. I've still got a bunch of crap in my chest, and when I get to coughing you'd think I was dying of miner's lung or something. But at least my sinuses have drained. The nosebleed that woke me up this morning made a hell of a mess of my sheets and pillowcase, but it was nice to have something flowing through there.

Meanwhile, things are still falling to pieces around me -- another of my computers, arguably my main one, which hosts the raid array, started making a very bad loud noise. While I was shutting it down, it started beeping, signaling some kind of system fault. I didn't even look into it yet. I just shut it off. One more thing to fix, if I ever find the time -- I'll add it onto the list, along with the previously described problems with my other machines, and the new fit-pc that won't boot. There is also a headlight out on my car.

Being on my deathbed has made this week kind of a loss. Today is Saint Valentine's Day, and contrary to my schemes, I haven't made any arrangements with the lovely Malallee for how to spend the evening. I intended to have reservations laid, and romantic gifts at the ready, but instead find myself in the "pick something up on the way home" crowd. And my only burning desire for this most magical of evenings is for Malallee to make me a nice cup of hot coacoa and rub my back while I fall asleep.

I sure hope I feel better by the time the new job starts on Monday. Damn.

In other news, my sister got engaged last weekend. Good for her! Her fiance is a good guy, and his kids are pretty cool, too.

Hardware

2008-02-05T09:15:00.000-06:00

You know, I kind of wish I had arranged for a week off between jobs. I mean, I really can't afford that unpaid leisure time, what with the 2 weeks in Hawaii coming up in a couple of months, but it would have gone a long way to getting me caught up on some of my nerd-chores.

My fit-PC (yes, I gave in to myself and ordered one) arrived yesterday, and I'm eager to find time to set it up and play with it, and whip it into shape for its destined role as my digital butler. I can't get over how slick this little machine is -- it is actually smaller than my network switch. And it draws 3 - 5 watts of power when running full-bore! I only wish they made a version with gigabit ethernet and DVI, so I could use one as the home theater satellite machine.

Speaking of which -- still no resolution on the mysterious issues. I did run into them again, and pay enough attention this time to say that 1) my earlier statement that DVI didn't work when it was in this state was mistaken. And 2) aside from Beyond Media refusing to start, all the other several error messages that pop up are about Dolby Master Studio.

So there are a few things I plan to try. I will make sure to update the BIOS to the latest and greatest for my mainboard. I'll make sure the OS is using the latest and greatest drivers for my mainboard. I'll see whether or not I can turn off all the advanced HD sound features in the BIOS, and still get sound (I'm concerned this may turn off the on-board audio altogether and force me to add a sound card). If none of that works, I have a pile of unopened boxes which, once their contents have been assembled, will constitute an exact twin of the haunted machine, except for lack of a video card. If I have to I'll put that machine together, and see if I get the same problems. And then I'll probably wind up swapping components individually from one to the other to see if the gremlin inhabits one in particular.

All of this is going to take some time. A weekend alone in my office with no other obligations would be a great start, but I don't see that happening for a while. Which is why I almost wish I'd set up a week off between jobs.

Other stuff going on:

Kinnda was in town Saturday, and it was an awesome day. She and Malallee and I had lunch, walked around uptown, bought spices at Penzey's, and played boardgames all afternoon, then went for out for Mexican food with Kayrin, when she got back from her conference. Suh-weet.

On Sunday, Malallee and I had all the cool people over for the Super Bowl. There was a lot of junk food, and I ate enough of it to give myself a headache. I elected to cheer for whomever was behind at any given moment, which turned out to be a good strategy for keeping myself interested -- I got to see "my team" score and take the lead several times, only to turn around and root against them as they go for the extra point.

I'm now playing Half-Life 2 Episode One. My trial month of Xbox Live Gold membership expired without me ever playing an online game. I will get around to that, and look forward to it, but I've just got too much Half-Life saga left to get through.

Gremlin

2008-01-31T14:13:00.000-06:00

From the Department of Infuriating Mysteries:

I am still having intermittent problems with my living room PC, and I'm at my wit's end trying to diagnose what is wrong. I can only surmise some sort of hardware problem, but I'm not sure which component to blame.

Two times in recent memory, I've wanted to fire up the living room computer to watch a movie, only to find that the machine starts up in this broken state. The symptoms are as follows: The video card will put out a VGA signal, but no DVI signal (when working correctly, the machine is configured to mirror the same desktop on both outputs). Several pop-ups will appear with non-specific error messages indicating that various services -- I think they are mostly Intel branded things related to features included on the mainboard, but I haven't yet had a chance to really pay attention to them -- cannot be started. Each needs to be dismissed before the next one will appear. The Beyond Media application, which is set to start up automatically, will display it's splash screen, but stop 3/4ths of the way through loading, with an error message indicating that it can not locate the graphics environment.

Most of the time, when this happens, I am wanting to use the damned machine for it's intended purpose, so I try rebooting, warm and cold, several times to no avail. I swear. I seriously consider smashing the machine with a hammer, buying an apple TV, and converting all of my stored DVD images to QuickTime movies. I've even opened the case up and re-seated all of the components, just to make sure nothing is loose. Eventually, I give up, shut down the machine, and go do something else, and I tell myself that I will sit down first thing after work the next day to try and really figure out what's going on.

When I come back the next day to do so, the damned thing boots and runs perfectly, nary an error to be found. That's why I haven't got a clear picture of which services are crashing in the failure state. . . I haven't managed to reproduce it when I'm in the mood to approach the problem analytically.

It's almost enough to make me wish I'd bought some mass-produced OEM machine instead of building my own. At least then I could play the angry customer and demand that somebody else fix it.

All Good Things

2008-01-30T09:19:00.001-06:00

So, I'm changing jobs. Nothing has been signed yet, but I reached a verbal agreement with the new bosses yesterday morning, and I'm planning to notify my current employer on Monday. (I forewarned my Project Manager, though).

I'm very excited to get started on the new gig. I'll be working with Jaisel again, the development team is very agile, and I'll be adding a lot of value to my skill set by working with some of the newer technologies that I haven't until now had a chance to immerse myself in.

At the same time, I'm feeling a kind of melancholy this morning, a sadness about leaving this place behind. I like my coworkers, and although things have been dull lately, they show signs of picking up. And I'm walking away from a pet project that I've been advocating since I got here, that is finally gaining some momentum and has been made possible by my efforts over the last year.

As I described it earlier -- I wish I could take the new job and still keep this one. Like Jamie Madrox.

It occurred to me this morning that this is really only the second time I have willingly left a job that I liked. I've quit a couple of awful companies, and been laid off from a couple places that I really liked, but the last time I resigned a good position simply because something better came along was when I left Seagate. Even that one is somewhat debatable as a "liked" position -- I liked all the people there a great deal, but developing in Oracle Forms and PL/SQL was quickly proving to be Not My Thing (tm).

Anyway, that's that. I plan to start the new gig mid-February.

Negotiations

2008-01-28T12:39:00.000-06:00

So, I had tentatively set today as a decision point regarding the new job possibility. But I never did get the info about PTO days that I asked for (A confluence of people being out of town), so instead of just giving a yes or no, I spelled out my terms.

If there is a sticking point, it is likely to be the PTO -- Jaisel told me that he had to fight pretty hard to get this company to offer more than 15. I feel pretty strongly that 20 is just plain standard for the industry at my experience level. (And frankly, I would like to see more than that, since going from consultant to employee is always a pay cut).

So I am now waiting to hear whether or not they will meet my terms.

I had a sort of pseudo-interview with another company on Friday. "Pseudo" because it would be difficult for them to hire me while I am at my current job -- non-compete issues. I did the interview anyway, because they seemed to be pretty keen on the idea of being able to get me an offer quickly if I find myself on the market at some future time.

In a way, it's kind of a bummer that they aren't a possibility right now -- they offer 24 days of PTO plus 10 sick days, and would also be a pretty cool group to work for. But no use crying over non-options.

It's a good offer-in-waiting to have if I take this new job and the 90 day contract-to-hire period doesn't go well.

Anyway, I'm not feeling any stress now. The stone is on their side of the mountain.

Toy Lust

2008-01-24T10:19:00.000-06:00

I've been playing Half-Life 2 on the Xbox 360. It's fun, and I'm glad I finally got the chance to play through it -- I had played the demo of it on my PC back when it was new, but never bought the full game because a) I didn't like Steam, and b) my machine didn't really have the horsepower to run it with the frame rate and graphics quality it deserves.

Right now, I'm roughly 2/3 of the way through it. I think it will take me a while to finish it, along with episodes 1 and 2, because I just don't get very much uninterrupted playtime. I play for an hour or so every couple of nights, and probably a few hours on the weekends. I don't like to monopolize the living room in the evenings, when I could instead put on a film or some music that Malallee and I can both enjoy.

It kind of makes me wish I had a separate gaming room to set it up in, but I'm not willing to play it on a lesser television.

The other day while I was driving, a song came on the radio that I had played through in Rock Band a few times at Kermit's and Spiral's New Year's Eve party, when Ghoti brought his system with him. I could almost literally see the color-coded notes for the base guitar part scrolling toward me on the road. It reignited my geek-lust for the game, which I have so far resisted buying due to price, the quantity of peripherals that I have no good place to store, and the fact that I don't have very many parties. Now I am back to considering it.

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to resist the urge to spend my hard-earned money on unnecessary upgrades and improvement to my computers and home network. Rock band would not fall into that category, but I've reached a certain frustration point with a lot of my other devices that makes it hard to resist replacing them. And there's nothing wrong with them, really -- they are just getting a bit outmoded, and I think my whole setup could be simplified with some newer machines.

For example, I'd kind of like to replace my linux server with one of these. It would be less powerful than the machine currently holding that position, but not by much, and frankly I don't need much horsepower for what I run on it -- SSH, an HTTP proxy, and a personal IMAP server. The idea of a cheap, extremely quiet, low-power machine that could fulfill that role while taking up no more room than the cable-modem or router is appealing. Hell, I would stack it right on top of those things.

Feel free to get me one.

The other high-temptation item is a 3 terabyte RAID 5 network storage device. It's becoming a chore to free up space on my 1.2 terabyte array.

Yes, I know. I have a problem, okay?

The Value of Risk

2008-01-22T14:19:00.000-06:00

Hi, Mankind.

Our top story tonight is still the open question of whether or not I should change jobs. The potential new employer made me a solid, respectable offer, in line with what I would expect. That being said, when I sit down and really crank the numbers, it would be less money than I would earn by staying where I am, by a not insignificant amount.

There is no question that the new gig would be a more challenging and stimulating work environment, and the technical team there is top-notch. I'd love to work with these guys. I just need to ponder a while and figure out how much that opportunity is worth, weighed against the more tangible benefits of staying put. Decisions like that are always hard.

The main reason this gig would pay less is that it is a "permanent" position. Companies will typically pay less to a permanent full-time employee than to a contractor doing the same job, and this has always been interesting and little bit confusing to me.

I believe I understand the rationale. . . from the company's perspective, they take a greater risk in hiring an employee than they do in hiring a contractor. A contractor can be let go without cause and without a need to fund unemployment benefits, and they do not have to supply him or her with medical coverage, etc. When hiring an employee, they assume all those costs and risks, and so they offer less money for the same work. That is sensible.

The thing is, I can't help but think something must be off in how they compute the value of that risk. Because, in my experience, the premium they will pay to a consulting company is high enough that the contractor will still make more money than the employee, while getting nearly identical health and retirement benefits, even after the consulting company takes its cut.

That's what I don't get -- how is it that a company can pay my employer (a consulting firm) so much for my work that my employer can give me full benefits, pay me a lot better than the client would directly, and still make its own profit billing me out? It seems like the premium a company will pay for a contractor is a greater cost than the burdens they would assume to hire that person as an employee at the same.

But hey, I'm not an economist.

The other thing about this whole valuation of risk is that from my perspective, it works in the other direction. I'm supposed to believe that if I were a "permanent" employee, my future would be secure. I'm supposed to accept that the perm position pays less because I am assuming less risk.

Problem is, I don't believe that. Not for a second -- maybe it used to be true, I don't know. But in my experience, an employee is just as likely to be let go as a contractor. When times get tough and a company needs to reduce headcount, employees get laid off with just as much frequency as contracts go unrenewed. Companies go belly-up, or get bought out by a competitor, and it doesn't matter if you are an employee or a contractor -- a closed division is a closed division. I simply don't believe there is such a thing as company loyalty. What loyalty I have in a particular position is for the people I work with, not for the company itself -- a company is incapable of loyalty, and is owed none.

So when things go bad, or when a better opportunity comes along, the difference is that in his next interview, the contractor doesn't have to explain why he didn't stay in one spot forever.

Anyway. . . this is the stuff I have to mull over in the coming days. I really think I would enjoy working at this new place, but I'm not sure how much I would give up for that chance.

Peace, Humanity.

Another Sort of Cable Woe

2008-01-16T11:30:00.001-06:00

My home office is a tremendous mess. I had to move one of my desks out of the way when the Comcast tech came to address my issues with the cable modem, and I decided in my shortsighted brilliance to rearrange the furniture.

When I finish this project, it may even be a usable room again.

Whenever I move my desk and computers, I become acutely aware of how much PCs suck when it comes to cables and such. Why can't more shit be wireless, without costing a wing and a tail? I will gladly connect the cables for power, monitor, and ethernet (an exception to my demand, as it's still way faster than wireless, and I like to play DVD images over my network). But how about some affordable wireless speakers? And why in Rain hasn't anybody marketed a wireless KVM switch yet? It seems like it would be so easy. . . it would just be a wireless keyboard and mouse with multiple receivers and the ability to rapidly switch between the frequencies, coupled with a monitor switch that could detect (or be notified) which frequency the keyboard and mouse were on. Somebody get on this, please.

The Eternal Dilemma of Door Number 3

2008-01-15T13:36:00.000-06:00

I just re-read my previous post, and it seems a little. . . convoluted. I'd like to take a moment to ensure you that I have not, at least to any extent that would constitute a clinical diagnosis, gone stark raving mad.

I think my less than fluid prose can be attributed to an attempt at cramming too much background information into each sentence -- a misguided strategy that I employ when I have not posted in a while and want to cover a lot of topics without banging out ten pages of text. In the future, I shall try to stick to one thing at a time.

Today's topic is the interview I have tomorrow, and my still mixed feelings on the subject. Like any position worth seeking, it would be a minor stretch for me -- there are a lot of leading edge technologies involved that I am aware of in the most casual sense, but with which I have not acquired any direct experience. For that reason, I'm somewhat nervous. I want to come off as good enough. I want them to make me an offer, even though I'm still not sure I want to change jobs.

Meanwhile, I can't deny that for the last week or two, and today is no exception, I've been bored out of my scaly draconic skull here where I am. My pet project not withstanding, I just don't have enough to do right now. I know that will change -- being less than fully busy is not the norm here -- but it is mind numbing to sit here all day trying to find ways to be productive, when all our big projects are still in the early planning phases. I am writing this partly to remind myself that however reluctant I am to leave a position that has been better to me than most, I am absolutely bored with being here at this particular moment in time, and that needs to change one way or another.

It's really an age old problem, the one that carried the old game-show "Let's Make a Deal." How do you compare the value of a known situation against an unknown one? I mean, the boat is a boat, but the mystery box could be anything -- it could even be a boat!

Fires

2008-01-14T10:47:00.001-06:00

There's too much going on right now, and my coping skills have been stretched. One thing that has been stressful, is that my internet connection, or critical uses thereof, has been down a lot more than it has been up lately. It has been inconveniencing me, forcing me to leech the neighbors open wireless to check my email, and putting a stop on the giddy exploration of XBox Live that I had begun.

It seems that Comcast finally got around to shutting down all the "legacy" servers that they inherited when they bought out Time Warner, so I had several hoops to jump through last week to keep my machines happy. First, the smtp server I was pointing at went away. And since I have never used the comcast.net email address that I have (but never asked for) I had no idea what my password was for the new smtp server that replaced it. After I spoke to tech-support and got my settings updated for that, the DNS servers I was using disappeared the next day. I updated my machines to use the servers that are specified by Comcast's DHCP pool, but it's a short term solution. . . apparantly, for reasons that are to me unfathomable, they change their DNS servers addresses weekly. So I'm going to have to set up my own, I think.

All that would be minor, but the next day, I lost my connection completely. My cable modem simply would not receive a signal anymore. At Comcast's suggestion, I exchanged it for a newer one at their service center, but this brought no improvement, so they sent a technician out yesterday, and he replaced some of the accessible splitters in my cable wiring with special ones that split unevenly, until the cable modem was able to get a clear signal. The cable wiring in my house is quite a bit less than ideal for cable internet -- I knew this. There is only one line coming into the house, and it splits repeatedly to feed all the cable jacks in the house. So in that sense it isn't all that surprising that it needed some tweaking to get a clear signal through, but dammit, it has been working just fine for months, and now it suddenly isn't good enough? Something must have changed. The technician thinks I must have had an exceptionally good modem, and it finally just quit.

I have another theory -- RETALIATION! All of this started when I called them to cancel my digital cable and drop down to the ultra-basic local-channels-only level of television service.

I did the math, you see. I wrote down a list of every television show (still on the air, that is) that I care about seeing, that is if a new episode is on. There were 11 of them, 4 of which are available on regular over-the-air broadcast. Of those that remained, if they were all showing new episodes at the same time of the year, the total running time per week (not counting commercials) would be less than 4 hours. And they are NOT ever in new episodes at the same time of year. I think realistically, I have been paying 70 bucks a month for an hour a week of content. And every one of the shows on the list can be found on iTunes or the owning company's website. And most of them come out on DVD within a handful of months after the end of a season.

So, basic cable it is for me. I need to find time this week to update my PVR machine so that it doesn't record the static of channels I no longer get. And then start exploring the many different ways to download those shows that I want.

I took Friday of last week off to deal with the car problems I was having, and also to do a phone interview with the company that Jaisel works for. Lately I've been in the (admittedly enviable) position of being sought. I've been warding off recruiters for months with promises that I might be willing to consider a move after the new year, and now they've all come calling. It is difficult emotionally, because while the idea of a new project and a change of routine is very appealing, I am fairly happy where I am and don't want to upset the applecart. Things are a bit slow at my current gig right now, so I'm a little bit bored, and would love to dive into something new -- the possibility of working with Jaisel again is a particular draw. But though things are in a bit of a lull here, they are looking to pick up in a few months (In particular a pet project of mine made a nice splash this week and is likely going to be funded for full development), and I like the people I work with. I wish that I could take a new job without leaving this one, but my clonomat, sadly, is not yet complete.

It all stresses me out, because I know it could be a great opportunity, the sort of thing that I'd be foolish to turn down, but I just don't know if I'm up to handling that much change right now.

Anyway, I am going for an in person interview with Jaisel's group on Wednesday. Another fellow that I know at another company has asked me to come in and meet his team sometime the following week, and based on what I know today, that company interests me even more -- however, I'm pretty sure they can't hire me. The guy I know there is in charge of hiring, and used to work for the company I contract through now, and there is a non-compete in place on him. I'm not even sure why he is so interested in me coming in. It seems clear that he would like to bring me aboard, but given that he probably can't do it now I'm not sure what we're going to accomplish.

I also got sick over the weekend. I hate being sick. You know this. I won't go into a rant about it.

Northwest Airlines is full of shit. Malallee and I booked our tickets for a trip to Hawaii in April. We are flying into Hilo, on the Big Island, and are supposed to fly out of the same airport when we leave 10 days later. Of course, both the flight there and the return flight have a layover and change of planes in Honolulu. Also of course, we don't intend to spend our entire vacation on the Big Island -- we plan to fly to Molokai for a few days.

It would be nice, we thought, if we could just travel from there to Honolulu (there's a ferry), and catch the second leg of our return flight from there, rather than having to fly all the way back to the Big Island, just to catch a plane that will turn around and take us to Honolulu anyway.

Of course, Northwest wouldn't hear of it. They wanted to charge us 600 dollars more per person just to drop one leg of our return flight. Exact same route, exact same flight times, except we just don't need the first hop. How exactly do they figure we should pay that much more to use less of their service, especially when they can then book two more passengers on the first flight that we already paid for?

Fuck you, Northwest.

Suck

2008-01-10T12:18:00.000-06:00

This morning, just after leaving home, I pulled up to a stop sign at an intersection with a bus stop, where Malallee was still waiting for the bus, having left the house several minutes before. She didn't notice it was me, so I hit the button to roll down the passenger side window and yelled, in my most obnoxious and smarmy fake accent, "Heya gorgeous, nice gams. You got somewhere to be?"

She laughed. I laughed. I drove off. But my window would not roll back up. I pulled into the parking lot at the strip mall down the street, and tried to fanagle it back into its track. There was a great deal of swearing, but no success.

Ten minutes later I was waiting at a bus stop.

The Christmas Report

2007-12-27T12:59:00.000-06:00

Well Mankind, we can just about close the record books on 2007. Malallee and I got home from Christmas at my parents' house last night, and Fire and Rain is it good to be back in my own house. My parents' guest bed is itchy and uncomfortable.

Other than that, I'd say the holiday was a smashing good time. My sister and her boyfriend were there with his two kids, and all my grandparents were in town. We had two huge meals, one on Sunday and one on Tuesday, and got to visit with my aunts and uncles and cousins and whatnot. They were both big long, loud days.

I am giving myself a good report card on gifts given this year. I got my mom a pair of alpaca slippers and boots, which she raved about the rest of the weekend.

My dad, who is notoriously hard to shop for, got a replica of a 1908 Model T fire engine for his model collection. He has a whole room in our basement full of model cars, with some smaller piles for tractors and fire engines. They are all in boxes, and just stacked into piles. He says he is going to build display cases for them someday, but for the time being it is pretty difficult to know what he already has, so I was a little worried that the piece I picked out might have already been represented, but I was lucky on that front. And given the time he spent examining it and playing with all the little moving parts and accessories, I think it went over well.

I think Malallee liked the coat that I gave her, but she may need to exchange it to get the right size.

I got my sister and her boyfriend an ice cream maker, similar to ours but with an extra freezer bowl.

As for me, I was pleasantly surprised. Malallee got me an XBox 360. Now that's what I call a loving girlfriend. When the weekend comes, I will be a busy little dragon, playing with all the features and options. Woot! She also got me an awesome cashmere sweater, some flannel-lined jeans, and a matched set of gloves, scarf and hat. I got another nice sweater from her mother. And from my family I got lots of minor camping equipment, some DVDs, and some good old-fashioned Christmas cash.

My sister got me this neat oil-burning. . . rock. I don't know what else to call it, "lamp" or "candle" just doesn't seem right. It's a big flat rock, hollowed out with oil reservoir in it, with stand and a wick. My sister long ago picked up on my love for and fascination with open flames, so most every year she gets me some kind of candle-holder, oil-lamp, or wall sconce to decorate my laire with. The only trouble is, I'm running out of places to put them all. This newest addition, fortunately, will go nicely in front of my non-usable fireplace -- but I'd better get a bigger house next year.

Happy New Year, Humanity.

Theatrics

2007-12-10T11:43:00.000-06:00

I need to be sequestered in my home office for a week or two. I just keep getting further and further behind on my to-do list.

Also, things still keep breaking.

This weekend Malallee and I went to her hometown for her paternal grandmother's 90th birthday party. It was a good time, and more food was put into me than should have been. (My own mother always asks if I want something to eat, but I can just say no thank you -- Malallee's mother just sort of assumes that a full five course breakfast is always in order). We got to hang out with both of Malallee's sisters and their families, and we all took in The Golden Compass at the movie theater on Saturday.

An aside on the film: I agree with the reviews I've read. They mostly say that the movie rings hollow, rushes from place to place too quickly to build up any sense of the locations, spends no time developing characters or their relationships, and basically tears the heart out of the books. I haven't read the books yet, but I started them last night and in the first 8 pages I've counted at least that many major differences from the film, ones that seem pretty dang significant to me.

Anyway, lately I've been spending a lot more of my at home leisure time than I would like wrestling with my HTPC setup. As you may recall, I moved my main HTPC to the office, intending to put a new "satellite" HTPC in the living room -- one that would be quieter, and small enough to fit inside my TV stand.

The problem it seems, is that the video card in the new machine does not get along with my telvision as well as the previous one did. With the old PVR, I never had any problems running a VGA or a DVI cable to the TV. (Well, that's not entirely true. . . I occasionally had problems with signal degradation, as the video cable I was using then was 20 feet long, but no problems like what I am seeing now). With the new video card, however, most display resolutions just don't work over DVI to the television. And over VGA, they flicker, wobble, and end up off center.

So the state of things is that I can watch movies and TV programs just fine, but if I try to launch MAME or one of the other game emulators, I get no picture.

I probably should have done some research into the supported display modes of the card and checked them against those of my TV before I bought it, but at the time I was just desperate to find a decent video card that was low profile and came with half-height mounting brackets. And frankly, the card is so many generations newer than the one in the original HTPC that the idea it might be unable to do the same resolutions never crossed my mind.

I haven't decided where to go from here. I could try to find a different video card that might work better, or could juggle the machines around and put the older, fully functional one in the living room again -- with a different shelf arrangement and smaller UPS, I could make it fit in the TV stand. Or I could just do nothing. At this point the only things not working in the living room are the game emulators and playback of film trailers in the showtimes plugin (which I'm sure is a configuration or codec issue that I can fix). But I got to tell you. . . sometimes I'm tempted to turn in my geek card and my do-it-yourself attitude and just buy a Tivo and an AppleTV.

Push Through It

2007-11-30T12:11:00.000-06:00

You know how exercise equipment usually has a knob on it that is used to control the amount of resistance? Making the pedals a bit harder to turn, or the incline a bit steeper?

Does it ever feel as though someone has done that to your life? Or is it just me?

I don't know what it is, but everything is just hard lately. I can't get to sleep at night, I can't get up in the morning. I can't keep the dishes from piling up in the sink, or the dust bunnies from running free on the floor, or keep the litter boxes scooped, or get my laundry done. I can't fix or replace things faster than other things break. And I spend so much time trying to catch up, that I don't talk to or hang out with anybody but Malallee.

Maybe it's an hours-of-daylight thing. I hate winter.

Cussin'

2007-11-20T16:01:00.000-06:00

From the Look-Out-He's-In-One-Of-Those-Moods Department:

You know what, Humanity? I want some god damned popcorn. I haven't had any in well over a year, and with these fucking braces, I don't get to have any until at least February 2009.

This is bullshit, Mankind. Bullshit. Who knows if they'll even still have popcorn that far in the future?

Yep -- this is the big important thought that I needed to write about today.

Knoephla

2007-11-12T08:59:00.000-06:00

From the Delicious Dish Department:

It's been a long time since I made knoephla soup, which is odd because I've always been very proud of my abilities in this area. It must be something in my blood from the German part of my heritage, because it's always delicious despite being one of the few "recipe's" that I know that includes no specific measurements of ingredients. It's one of those culinary algorithms based on gaging colors and textures.

So I decided on Friday to try and prepare a Malallee-friendly, gluten-free version. I thought, at first, that this would be easy. I would just make the knoephla dough from buckwheat flour or rice flour instead of ordinary wheat flour. Malallee was going to be going to the grocery store, so I gave her a list of ingredients to pick up.

I didn't realize though, that in addition to the knoephla themselves, chicken flavor stock, and canned "cream of anything" (good to use if you need to thicken the soup) were both on the no-good-for-Malallee list. She brought home chicken broth (NOT the same thing at all). At this point we're looking at nearly half the ingredients in the recipe being eliminated of substituted, so I was a little worried.

Fortunately, it turned out great. I started with a lot less water and used a large amount of broth instead of small amount of flavor stock, used whole cream when I needed to thicken it, and the rice-flour and guar gum knoephlas turned out well -- they puffed up a bit less than the normal kind, but tasted the same. In the end I don't think I could tell the difference between the newly forged gluten-free kneophla soup and my usual product.

A rare win for the "wing it" technique of recipe alteration!

Busy Doing Nothing

2007-11-08T08:00:00.000-06:00

Greetings Mankind.

I feel like I have been extremely busy in the past few weeks, but when I try to mentally itemize all the things I've been busy with, none of them alone amounts to very much. I guess it all just adds up.

For instance, there was the Halloween Party. It went well, I think, costumes were donned, food was consumed, treats were handed out to neighborhood kids that rang my bell, and a couple of zombie movies were screened. For about a week afterwards, my face was dry, cracked, and peeling, as if I'd had a nasty sunburn. Halloween makeup sucks. And so does having skin instead of scales.

Last weekend was a 3 day one for me, sort of anyway. I took Friday off to attend a software security symposium at St. Cloud State University. Spiral brought it to my attention, and did the driving, so it was a nice, easy excuse to ditch the office on a Friday and take in a series of lectures, while still doing something that has some relevance to my work.

The presentations themselves I would give so-so ratings. The most interesting one dealt with Steganography and Steganalysis, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, even though most of the non-trivial implementations discussed were a bit over my head -- I have no experience in signal processing and have never studied how formats like JPEG actually work. Others dealt with research into detecting worms based on network patterns, and how best to recover a database that has been compromised by a malicious transaction -- meaning one that is fine from a technical standpoint, but was executed illegitimately, like via identity theft. That one in particular was interesting in the hypothetical solution presented, but the speaker failed to address any of the implications of it -- an actual deployment of his strategy would require the entirety of the system's business logic to be implemented in the DBMS.

Anyway, the free cookies were delicious.

On Satuday I did some work around the house, and wasted a lot of time playing the new Zelda game for the DS -- Phantom Hourglass. It's a great game and I recommend it, but I'm not going to let this turn into a review, because you can find dozens of those elsewhere on the web, and I mostly agree with them.

While I was sitting in my living room playing this game at midnight or so, I saw Jackson. As in, Son of Jack. As in I have spotted a mouse in my house. I think I'm seeing a pattern here. Whenever it starts to get cold, a mouse sneaks in. I put out all the traps, and leave them out for weeks and weeks, but never catch anything. The mouse either turns up dead on his own, or is just never seen again.

I'm okay with not catching anything. If the traps were catching mice all the time, it would mean I have a mouse problem. As it is, having traps out for weeks and getting nothing, it probably just means that the occasional mouse drops by to check the place out, and finds it not to his liking. I don't leave crumbs on my floor.

On Sunday, Malallee and I drove down to Redwing and did some hiking in the state park there. We had a gorgeous day for it, and the area is really pretty. Not much else to report on that. We grabbed some lunch at the pub in town before we headed back.

All of my parts have finally arrived for my two new "media terminals." These are the low-end PCs that I plan to put in my living room and bedroom to stream recorded shows and movies from my PVR machine, which I am going to move to the office. So I've got myself a big project for the weekend.

In addition to putting those together, I really need to migrate some stuff off of the Sony laptop that I am using as my linux server, because it is going to crap out pretty soon. As I mentioned before, the screen is shot, and lately it has been shutting itself off when I'm not looking -- overheating, presumably. So that's more stuff to deal with. I use my server constantly. It is the web proxy that I use to browse from work, the IMAP server that consolidates all of my email accounts, and the subversion repository that holds the source code from all my half-completed personal projects. I need to get all that stuff running on another machine.

Speaking of nerdy computer stuff, I jailbroke my iPhone and started installing third-party applications. It rules -- I can add most of the stuff that should have come standard to begin with, like a terminal, an ssh client, a ebook reader, and so on. When I find time, I plan to install an app to integrate with Flickr, so that I can push photos directly from my iPhone to my Flickr account as I take them.

When that happens, you may expect to see a lot more links to pictures.

Finally, I've been having back trouble for the last couple months, ever since Malallee moved in and we spent all that time shuffling furniture around. A couple days ago it got bad enough that I decided to see a chiropractor, who told me to pay attention to my posture, do some specific exercises, and come back today, after he has developed my x-rays. So we'll see what he says. I tried to adjust the seat in my car so that I sit up straighter, but it didn't work -- my head kept hitting the ceiling.

Ta Ta for Now, Humanity.

Spooktacular

2007-11-05T12:28:00.000-06:00

Salvete Omnes.

I've been busy and haven't had much time to write at you, but I wanted to direct your attention to Spiral's blog, where you can find a small selection of photos from the costume party we had, my own included.

Some other good ones not pictured included Lemur's Dust Bunny, Kermit's Mardi Gras Guy, and Irasauraus Rex. (A chihuahua in an iguana suit).

Talk soon, Humanity -- promise.

Couches, Costumes, and Cake

2007-10-29T10:42:00.000-05:00

It was another busy busy weekend in the Laire.

Malallee and I bought a new sofa and chaise lounge on Friday night, and also ran all over town buying costume supplies for Halloween. Saturday morning, the new furniture was delivered, and we spent part of the morning putting together the frames and legs that needed to be attached.

As we were finishing that up, Jahndo's parents came by to check out the new floors and such, as they were in the neighborhood, and just when they were leaving, Jaisel and Katya came by to borrow my large walking staff for Jaisel's costume.

Once all the visitors had moved on, I went downtown to a magic shop to buy makeup, spirit gum, and the remaining supplies for my costume that I hadn't been able to find Friday night, and then Malallee and I spent the rest of the afternoon putting together our costumes so we would be ready for Byron and Melli's big Halloween party. Halloween is like Melli's christmas, so their party is always a huge deal.

Malallee was an atom of Molybdenum. I was Dr. John Zoidberg of Futurama, in honor of the series' impending return. I have to say, it turned out beautifully, and I'm looking forward to donning the costume again for our own party on Wednesday. Hopefully I'll come away from that with some pictures to show. For now all I can do is tell you that it looked great -- I won the "Scariest Costume" prize, though scary isn't really what I was going for -- apparently there were a lot of people present that weren't that familiar with Futurama and voted for "the lobster guy."

The best part was that Kerreck and Omi showed up as Philip J. Fry, and Amy Wong of the Mars Wongs, respectively.

Sunday morning I put together a new entertainment center that Malallee and I picked up, and took down my hammock for the winter, and then we went out and bought pumpkins and a new washing machine. (Mine is about to die). We carved our Jack-O-Lanterns, and then we had a lovely sit-down dinner of roasted pork, carrots, and risotto, followed by chocolate cake!

Living with a woman completely rocks. Because sometimes, there's cake.

Pursued

2007-10-18T09:49:00.000-05:00

So I've been talking to this recruiter lately. In point of fact, I've been talking to several -- they call me all the time. But I refer to one in particular, because the position that he is encouraging me to interview for is enticing, and I'm actually getting kind of excited about the possibility.

It is stressful, because I still don't really understand what is up with my current contract right now. Last I heard, it was set to expire at the end of the year, but in the past my employer and the client have just sort of renewed it without me having to do anything. I think that if I wanted to let it run out and move on, I need to say something to someone.

But I don't know who.

Plus, I'm not exactly looking for a different job or anything -- I'm reasonably happy here. I am just being sought after by so many other companies right now that I would be foolish to not at least explore my options and leave open the possibility of taking a better position. With the market this good, and my contract ending, I don't want to just extend it at the same billing rate if I can do better elsewhere. I'm very good at what I do, and when the skillz are in demand I don't want to be anybody's bargain.

Also, I have to admit that I'm getting a little bored here -- I am comfortable, the people are nice, the job doesn't suck. But the technology I use daily is getting to be a little dated. And failure to keep up with the new is death in this industry.

So anyway. I have a meeting tomorrow with a recruiter from my current company, to sort out what the status of my contract is, and how to make it clear that I haven't decided whether I'm willing to extend. And I'll probably interview for this other opportunity next week sometime. We'll see how things develop.

Zeku out.

One Flap Forward, Two Flaps Back

2007-10-16T08:39:00.001-05:00

Why? Why can I not seem to fix anything without either breaking something else, or just having something else break coincidentally to keep me from making any progress?

I finished up the CAT 6 project last night, and everything is shiny on that front. My living room machine no longer needs to rely on 802.11g to communicate with my network. Unfortunately, my network itself is now cut off from the rest of the world, because my cable modem can't seem to get signal anymore.

To wire the new cable jack in my living room, I replaced the two-way splitter coming off the main drop with a three-way splitter, and ran the new line to the new jack. Everything was still working just fine after that, but until last night I hadn't hooked up the digital cable box yet. Now that it is connected, the set of devices connected to the cable and the number and positions of the splitters in the line should be identical to how it was before I started, except for that three-way jack replacing the two-way. (All the things that are connected to the newest feed now were connected to the one in the dining-room before, which is now not being used, so only the splitter and the fact that there is an unused line there have changed).

So I'm guessing, that I either need to change which leg of that three-way splitter each cable comes off (I may have misunderstood which leg has the least signal loss), or take it out and put the two-way splitter back, and just disconnect the feed going to the jack in the dining room, since I'm not using it now anyway. If that doesn't do the job, I may have to call Comcast (Fire and Rain, I hate them) and have somebody come out with a signal tester.

Ugh.

Additionally, the screen on my Sony Vaio, which I have been using as my mail server, proxy server, and web server, crapped out yesterday and now mostly displays white lines and pixels. Fortunately, I mostly access this machine via ssh so it isn't a huge immediate issue that the display is busted, but clearly that box is entering its golden years, and I should start making arrangements for its passing.

An Education in Independent Rock

2007-10-15T10:14:00.000-05:00

I spent most of last week reading Questionable Content from the beginning.

I'm not going to be one of the people that posts a link to a popular webcomic and acts like he's spreading the word about this fantastic new discovery that everyone should check out; I'm aware that it is already enormously popular, and that I'm the one who's late to the party.

I did want to say, however, that I am now an addict and share my thoughts on why I think that is. It is because I crave angst. (You probably know that).

I thrive on existential crises, and I'm in my element when I am in emotionally conflicted situations. I need confusing style relationship drama to feel truly at home in my scales. It's sick, Mankind, but that's how it is. A lifetime of unrequited pining occasionally interrupted by emotionally intense relationships with unstable women (I loved Val, but let's call a spade a spade) who leave in brutally traumatizing ways has left me with some grotesquely overdeveloped coping skills, and in the absence of anything to cope with, I go a little bit nuts.

This is a problem for me, because I have nothing to complain about lately. My life is going swimmingly this last year or so. My job doesn't suck, My house (though you know I have my issues with it) is comfortable, I've had more time to devote to recreation, and my amazing girlfriend just moved in with me. It's smooth sailing -- which means the well honed drama and crisis management center in my brain is sitting idle, and trying to invent issues for me to obsess over.

QC takes care of that by giving me my daily angst fix. The strip is an unabashed soap opera, and I can burn off my obsessive mental energies thinking about a bunch of attractive imaginary people who aren't sleeping with the other imaginary people that I think they should. It gives me that measure of heartache that I need to feel real -- when I don't ache a little bit for something, my soul falls asleep.

My other observation about QC is much more succinctly put. I understand maybe a third of the musical allusions and references the characters make in their conversations. It occurs to me that one could obtain a very complete education in indie rock culture in the following way. Reread the strip from the beginning, and whenever a band or artist is mentioned in the strip, pause to seek out and listen critically to that band or artist's entire discography until you get the joke. Then resume reading.

I'm thinking of trying this myself, actually -- I could become one of those "cool" kids who knows all the right bands, and has opinions on them all. But then, I'm not sure I have that much money in my iTunes budget.

Finally

2007-10-05T12:02:00.000-05:00

The home networking project is nearly complete. After hours upon hours of struggling to snake a fish tape through the final length of wall by myself, Jaisel came over and we took care of it in about 5 minutes. Now all I have to do is finish putting the data jacks on the ends and screw down the wall plates.

Woo Hoo!

I can't friggin' wait to get home tonight and bring that little adventure to a close. I can finally put my office furniture back where it belongs and have access to my workout equipment again. Which is sorely needed.

Next on my home improvement agenda is acquisitions and dispositions. It is time to go through all my crap and throw out, donate, or burn the stuff I no longer need or have a place to store. It is also time to replace some furniture. And I'm seriously considering getting a Roomba to tidy up the place while I'm at work. My new all-hardwood floor plan practically screams for a Roomba.

I told Malallee that I wanted to get one, and name it Suck-mo-tron. She didn't like that name, so if I get a Roomba it will instead be named Broomhilda.

This weekend we played paint ball, outdoors this time. Outdoor paintball is a lot more fun and more challenging than the indoor course. It was a lot of fun, but I wish we'd had more than 5 people in our group. As a small group, we got thrown in with a bunch of other groups, including 2 birthday parties full of 12 year old boys.

12 year olds are hard to hit with paintballs. They are small targets and move quickly. Also, they tend to forget which team they are on. In the last game we played, the rules were changed so that getting shot didn't eliminate you. In fact, everyone was just supposed to keep playing until they ran out of ammo, so. . . basically just a merciless game of inflicting pain on each other. In that round I got pinned down in pillbox between a bunch of the enemy on one side, and a bunch of my 12 year old teammates (forgetting once again whose side they were on) on the other.

I got shot up pretty bad in that one, but I think I gave as well as I got.

Large Object Juggling

2007-10-01T10:48:00.000-05:00

Fire and Rain.

I have too much stuff. Or not enough space. Take your pick, I guess. This weekend was spent almost entirely doing this, except with large heavy pieces of furniture. I must confess I am astonished at how much effort it turned out to be just to put the upstairs bedrooms back into a livable state. Exchanging the office with the master bedroom proved to be especially difficult.

It would have been much easier to move to another house -- even if one didn't pay someone else to do it. When you move, you can just take everything out of the house, and put it all back in the new one. When you rearrange, you have to shuffle things around over and over just to clear a path to where it all needs to go.

In the end, though, I'm reasonably pleased with the result. Although the new bedroom is a bit tighter than I anticipated, it is nothing I can't live with. There is room enough for everything we need in there, and there should be more space when I go through my wardrobe and donate all the old stuff that I don't wear anymore to a thrift store. The new office is more spacious and I was able to organize things much better than before. The amount of that space effectively consumed by Malallee's sleeper sofa is a bit more than I thought it would be -- but all that really means is that while my office is only a little bit roomier, it now doubles as a perfectly serviceable guest room.

The newly installed floor downstairs looks amazing. When the existing floor is refinished this week, I think it will look even better, and then I can at last put my living room and dining room back together and have normalcy.

I'll take some pictures when it is all done.

We did have a couple of breaks to relax this weekend. Feather and Gambit's third annual pirate party was on Saturday night, and featured some very good grog (which I sorely needed after a day of hard labor) and some delicious ham.

Friday night we went to a farewell party for Stonebeetle, who is moving to Germany for at least a couple of years to take a research position there.

The True Test to the Tenth Power

2007-09-27T08:18:00.000-05:00

From the You-Know-She's-In-Love-When Department:

I was wrong about Malallee dropping my iPhone being the true test of our relationship. The true test came this morning, when I had an accident involving her car and a guardrail in the parking ramp.

Her reaction: Was I okay, and not to worry about it, she'll call her insurance company and make an appointment at her dealership to get it fixed. She even laughed.

In conclusion, I am the luckiest Dragon on the planet. Even though this probably means I can't tease her about dropping my iPhone.

The True Test

2007-09-26T14:36:00.000-05:00

From the You-Know-You're-In-Love-When Department:

Yesterday, Malallee dropped my iPhone. From shoulder height. Onto concrete. It put a jagged scratch into the chrome at the upper left corner, leaving it rough and kinda sharp to the touch.

My reaction? Eh. . . it's only a phone. Nothing stays new forever.

Yup. It's love, alright.

Under Construction

2007-09-25T10:00:00.000-05:00

It is the week of the wood floor project, and chaos reigns in the Laire. The dining room and the office are piled high with furniture, plastic membranes divide the house in two, and ferrets huddle together in their cage, agitated and lonely.

Already, there have been surprises, changes in the plan. Foremost among those, the wood floor in the master bedroom turned out to be beyond redemption. . . whoever put it in made a poor work of it, and it has many nails, gaps, and badly fit pieces. It appears that whoever originally floored it started on both sides of the room and met in the middle -- then tried to cut triangular pieces to jam in where it didn't line up. So instead of refinishing that, I am having them install a new floor in that room.

That will almost double my cost, I suppose. When it's all done, though, I think it's gonna look great.

I wish it was done now. As it stands, I should be able to re-occupy the second story on Thursday, and also move all the furniture in the dining room into the living room, so that they can refinish that floor early next week.

In other news:

I've started a second blog, which I will use to review things. If you want to, you can find it here.

Throwing Clay

2007-09-20T08:57:00.000-05:00

Pottery on the wheel is difficult, and I was not instantly talented at it. Therefore it is stupid.

Demolition

2007-09-17T14:56:00.000-05:00

One week from today begins the flooring project, which in itself could probably be called "the easy part." The hard part will be clearing the floors in question.

I expect to spend the better part of the coming weekend moving all my furniture that is small enough to fit down the stairs into my basement, stowing computers and electronics in well-sealed closets where they will be safe from wood dust, and shuffling my larger pieces of furniture into the one bedroom that isn't being touched. Or in the case of the living room stuff, into the dining room which will be refinished itself, but later next week.

It's gonna be a mess. All the furniture on my second story tetrised into one of the smaller bedrooms, along with two ferrets who will be unhappy to be confined to their cages for a few days.

In a related endeavor, I spend part of the morning talking with an electrician about how one might go about running CAT6 cable in my ancient house. Most of the usual candidates for getting a wire from upstairs to down are pretty inaccessible in my house, but after a lot of looking around he managed to discover a particular heating duct that has already been used by previous occupants to pull co-ax cable from the basement to the upstairs bedroom. Without closer inspection I can't tell if they ran the cable alongside the duct (up to code) or through it (not up to code). Either way it seems promising. I might just have to get myself a fish tape and see if I can get it through the wall in question that way.

If so, I think I will soon be upgrading to gigabit ethernet.

Impulse

2007-09-15T09:41:00.000-05:00

It is presumably obvious to those who know me well that I am in many respects a dragon that lacks resolve in matters of impulse control. I try, on occasion, to deny myself certain things -- toys, mostly -- which I deem to be desirable but frivilous. Sometimes I resist for months. Sometimes mere weeks. But in the end, the Id will not be suppressed if a shiny gadget is at stake.

If this failing of mine is in any way in doubt, consider this evidence: I am composing this post from my new iPhone.

Muzzled

2007-09-13T07:56:00.000-05:00

From the Tales-Of-The-Apparatus Department:

The orthodontist put rubber bands in my mouth. They connect my upper canines to my lower first molars, and keep me from opening my mouth more than about an inch. I am supposed to take them out only to eat or brush, and change them periodically throughout the day.

They also somewhat alter the mechanics of kissing beautiful women named Malallee.

Anyway. I'm getting used to them. But I wish we could just get to the part where the braces come off. If the original estimate they gave me is accurate, that would be 13 to 19 months from now.

Bah!

September

2007-09-11T12:23:00.000-05:00

Well Humanity, I survived two days of camping with Malallee's nieces and nephew. I declined all requests for piggy back rides, but consented to sharpening sticks into throwing spears, and to most demands for "more fire!"

Hey, what request does a Dragon like more than that one?

They're good kids. Mostly.

I still haven't put away all the camping gear, because my basement is filthy and I want to clean it up first and organize some of the junk. This morning I shut off the gas lines to the furnace and water heater, and set off a couple of bug bombs down there. I'm tired of walking through spider webs every time I go down for something, and taking after them with the shop vac every couple of weeks is just too time consuming. It was time for the nuclear option.

My first priority when I get home will be to reignite the pilot light for the water heater. Here's hoping my shower tomorrow won't be a cold one.

Other than all the home improvement projects on the list, things are finally winding down to a more manageable pace. It's chilly in Minneapolis this week, and fall is on the way. I'm hoping to finally find some time to devote to non-work-related geekery, social engagements, and reading. Not to mention getting some proper exercise.

Malallee and I are hoping to organize an outdoor paint-ball match in October, and maybe take a nice dinner cruise down the St. Croix. And I'm planning to get back out to the Ren Fest this weekend; if the weather stays as it is it will be perfect.

I need to get started on my Halloween costume. If I wait until the last minute, I'll never be able to pull it off.

Hmm. I'm gonna go write a todo list.

Stuff What I Gots Goin' On

2007-08-28T09:26:00.000-05:00

Yes, I know. I haven't written lately. Guilty as charged.

That entropy thing is still going on in a big way. I've been swamped like you wouldn't believe, and I'm not going to bore you with the litany of crap work and chores that keep popping up. It's been an enormously frustrating month, just take me at my word. In fact, Jahndo has been back in Minneapolis (yay) for a few weeks now, and except for helping him move I've only seen him once. Kayrin has been back from her summer class in Illinois for even longer, and I haven't seen her at all. I've just been too occupied.

When I haven't been battling the forces of chaos, I've been pretty busy with weekend travels. I went with Malallee to Illinois for four days to visit her oldest sister Kari and brother-in-law Rico, and her niece, Lana. It was fun, and a nice relaxing break from everything else, but there isn't much to tell about it, because it rained like mad the whole weekend. We took in Lana's soccer match on Friday as soon as we arrived, but after that it was a weekend of watching movies and playing Wii.

The very next weekend we went to Wisconsin for Malallee's cousin's wedding, where I was run ragged by her other nieces and nephew, who all needed piggy back rides. Not regular piggy back rides, either. The kind where you have to run, and buck, because you're supposed to be a horse. And everybody has to have a turn.

Wow, am I out of shape.

On that note, this is day two of a renewed commitment to diet and exercise for Malallee and me. Naturally, there are free cookies in the break room here at the office today. Sometimes I hate this place.

Actually, the really hard part of bringing my lifestyle back under control is that I've decided to quit both caffeine and soda. Even though I only ever drink diet stuff, the amount of soda I normally consume is appalling, and all that aspartame and acid can't be good for me. So I'm quitting, which means I have a headache pretty much all the time. Hopefully that will only last a couple more days.

Withdrawal is a bitch.

This coming weekend is Labor Day weekend, so I'm looking forward to three days of not working, not being out of town, and not having any particular obligations to fulfill. It will be my first chance this year to get out to the Renaissance Festival, to which Malallee has never been. I hope the weather is nice. And I hope we don't run into whats-her-name.

The following weekend Malallee's older sister (older, not oldest) is bringing her kids to Minnesota and we're all going camping. Yes, these would be the same nieces and nephew who ran me into the ground last weekend. It will be a good time, but I've definitely got to learn how to "just say no" to piggy back rides.

My home improvement projects are proceeding. As I mentioned, I got a new furnace put in yesterday. Today I need to call an electrician to fix a switch in my bathroom, a finicky cieling fan, and maybe wire some new outlets for me. The hardwood floor guy is on the calendar for late September. After that I'll start looking for painters to repaint the interior, and thus correct the very poor color choice I made last time.

After that. . . well, to be honest I haven't decided yet. I was hoping to put the place on the market in the Spring, but after having made all these improvements, I might just feel like staying to enjoy them another year.

I have no more to say right now. Peace, Humanity.

Entropy

2007-08-06T14:17:00.000-05:00

From the Things-Fall-Apart-The-Center-Does-Not-Hold Department:

This is yet another post about how I have a gajillion things to do and just can't keep up with them all. As you have almost certainly heard it all before, I would like to assure you up front that I won't be offended if you snort in disgust and skip this post entirely.

As for me, I don't have the luxury of skipping past this feeling of futility that so often swallows me. I have to live with it, and either catch up on my task list or give up on it. For better or worse, that's who I am. I need order to make the human experience manageable.

Alas. . . entropy never rests.

I was organizing my office this weekend, and in sorting through some tax related papers and mail that I hadn't gotten around to scrutinizing yet, I discovered that my home appears to be incorrectly classified (as not being my homestead) on my property taxes. This means phone calls, bureaucracy, and headaches to correct, and possibly small claims court if I've been overpaying for the last two years. Things fall apart.

I was on my way to Kermit's bachelor party on Saturday night, when one of my rear tires blew. I had to get out the spare tire and the jack, and change it out while crouched in the drizzly weather by the side of the freeway, then drive back home, clean myself up, and hit the road again on the speed-cycle. Later I examined the tire. It was punctured by a nail, or some other sharp piece of metal, and has a nice round hole right smack in the middle of the tread. Now I need to leave work early tomorrow to take my tire in for repairs. Things fall apart.

I already had a need to take time off on Wednesday, as I need to be home when the security company comes out to replace part of my home alarm system. Through no doing of my own, it will soon stop working because the analog cellular service that provides connectivity for it will be discontinued. This will cost me 200 bucks -- just to keep the thing working as it does now, amidst changing FCC regulations. Entropy.

I need to replace my furnace. The one I have, though brand new when I moved in, is at least two sizes too small for my house, and every heating professional I've had look at it in the last 2 years has said so. This is more attributable to malice or stupidity on the part of the jackasses that I bought the place from than it is attributable to entropy, but it strikes up similar frustrations in me nevertheless.

The thing is. . . I know none of this stuff is abnormal. I'm not being targeted by the universe, I don't have more problems than anyone else, and I'm reasonably certain that no single thing on my vast and ever-growing task list is particularly challenging to accomplish.

It's just that I am, evidently, uniquely unequipped to deal with it. There's something wrong with me. I do my laundry, and a week later I have another pile of dirty clothes. I wash my dishes, and in two days my sink is full. I pull weeds in my yard, they just grow back. I pay my bills, new ones come in the mail. I dust my furniture, vacuum my stairs, take out my trash, buy groceries, and it is never done. And I just can't keep up with it all.

Adulthood can bite my scaly draconic ass.

More on the Dreaded Apparatus

2007-07-31T11:35:00.000-05:00

From The God-Am-I-Sick-Of-This Department:

My teeth hurt, and are useless. For the month of July, the average life span of the wire on my bottom braces was 3 days. It had to be replaced 6 times.

At this last appointment, they changed some ties on the top to start pulling my canines back, to close the gaps from where they removed a couple of my upper pre-molars. (This will result in opening new gaps between my incisors and canines, which will be closed later).

The end result is that I can't chew a damn thing (seriously, last night I was in pain trying to eat a marshmallow) and that is probably a good thing, since if I can't chew I might actually go a whole week without snapping a wire.

Snarl!

The Parker's Paradox

2007-07-17T15:17:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Random Musings:

One of the odd things about driving my Vespa all the time (I can count on my fingers the number of times I've started my car this summer), is that I often find myself karmically indebted to assholes.

You know the people -- the ones in monstrously oversize SUVs, who couldn't bring themselves to park between the yellow lines even if there was a deranged dragon standing across the aisle with a flamethrower and a chainsaw, giving them the eye and wearing a T-shirt that reads "Death to the Inconsiderate." The ones who leave 18 inches worth of their jerkmobile in the space adjacent to the one the rest of it is parked in.

When I'm in my car, or even on foot as an unbiased observer, my instincts for justice tell me these people should be dragged from their seats, beaten bloody, and then left in the trunk of their vehicle as it is crushed into a cube at the nearest scrap yard.

But on the Vespa, these people are like some kind of accidental angels, unintentional benefactors smiling on me even as they smite my fellow motorists, and much to the confusion of my soul, I find myself thinking, "Thank you! Thank you, giant jackass, for saving me this lovely parking space by rendering it unusable to everyone else! Huzzah!"

This kind of thing can trigger an existential crisis.