still too cool for wordpress.
choose only one:
latest;
past;
wednesday lite;
superscribe.
the weather had been pretty nice in boston the last 2 weeks before i left, and peach said it has been nice the last week too. my first morning back... rain.
it's nice when you get something in the mail and you think it's a paycheck but when you open it you find it's even better.
like, radiohead tickets.
i think i got a good amount of work done today, so i plan on taking tomorrow off for the most part.
i played sim city 4 a bunch, and had indian with phik/joe/chris/shona. we saw newly-of-brookline peter there. apparently, when they had gotten there lizzie's mom had asked if they ever run into anyone they know. he said never...
oh and we watched some family guy.
ols was my first time out of boston since i got my camera, so i tried to take some pictures. i can't even begin to imagine the sorts of things shaver would do to me if i were to post the embarassing ones of him, so i leave you with these:
also here is another non-simon cat picture:
<phik> Tonight Aug 03 Isolated T-Storms
<phik> Mon Aug 04 Showers
<phik> Tue Aug 05 Scattered T-Storms
<phik> Wed Aug 06 Scattered T-Storms
<phik> Thu Aug 07 Scattered T-Storms
<phik> Fri Aug 08 Scattered T-Storms
<phik> Sat Aug 09 Scattered T-Storms
<phik> Sun Aug 10 Scattered T-Storms
<phik> another beautiful week in Brookline
i just ordered over 1TB of disk for joe, phik, and i. i am instating a zero tolerance stance on data loss.
August 4, 2003
how i made my millions
i might have to get a g5 now.
it's actually kind of funny, because i remember last summer when my parents were visiting. we went to legal's with nat, and my dad asked him if he ever talked to novell...
<shaver> : proc; killall -9 xterm
<shaver> killall: do you mean "gdb"? (-f to force)
last night i had a dream where my sister and i were in my dad's car, which was in a parking lot while my dad went to an ATM. moe (from the simpsons) was trying to put his groceries in the car.
the interesting thing is that he was putting eggs in the car (and breaking some of them). why eggs? because my subconscious knows that he has that jar of brined eggs at the bar.
i can't get the sim city 4 music out of my head. i didn't even play it today!
August 5, 2003
simply being loved
today has truly been a gold star day (as long as this dbench runs successfully).
first, i had a couple of interesting dreams. one was me at a campus, about to leave for some reason. i can't quite remember why, unfortunately. i was walking in various buildings, thinking how this was the last time i would walk through these halls, where great thinkers and artists had once been (i think i was naming some, but i don't know that they were real people). it was pretty sad.
the other one, which may be the same dream only later on, i think was set in canada. i was in a room with some other people, including a 15 year old JFK, who was about to undergo his first womanizing experience. well, i think he would have if he had a clever pick up line, or something.
i got some laundry done, and picked up the new bt album. so far it's ho-hum for me, which is disappointing as i was blown away the first time i heard ima, and i liked MISL quite a lot too. but i'll give it some time to grow on me. i'm not saying that it's bad, that it trails the radiohead and zwan releases in my album of the year category.
lately, my phone has been acting up. the earpiece would be all static, and the charger was very flaky - i had to angle it just right to get it to charge. today i went to the at&t store to see if they'd fix it. i couldn't find the receipt, so i did not have high expectations. it turned out the guy there just gave me a new earpiece and charger, pretty much no questions asked. he did, however, put my earpiece and charger into the packages of the ones he gave me. i hope those didn't go right back on the store shelves.
work is going well... i successfully read the matrix for the first time today, and my code actually looks like it's working.
also, mc hammer was on a simpsons that TiVo caught this week. weird.
tomorrow is probably going to be one disaster after another.
August 6, 2003
oh peter, i'm holdin' iced tea
today wasn't nearly as bad as i thought. i fixed a couple of bugs, and hung out with nat+co. for his birthday for a while.
i also got distcc+ccache working. i can't build lustre/kernel with full distcc, though, because i need to build it with gcc296 for gdb to work, and that doesn't build on darwin (which is what runs on my second and third fastest boxes). oh well.
speaking of birthdays, since the last few i've had here in boston we not very fun, i kind of want to have a fun one this year. i'm hoping people will be able to visit (if you live in toronto, it's really cheap right now.
August 7, 2003
you'll get a square deal
i thought today was going to be tough, but then i talked to phik on the phone for 20 minutes and he set me on the path to success. my new job rules.
then we had some tasty pork, and some halo.
then i tried to install my maxtor SATA drives. i do not want to talk about it. as soon as i wake up, i'm getting a one-way ticket on the RMA express. next stop, hitachi junction.
in other news, i plugged in my usb serial port thingie, and it works great with the sparc classic in serial console mode. i should have it running lustre by the end of the week...
August 8, 2003
i never said i was sorry
that was the worst tooth dream ever. some of my teeth, mostly on the bottom, were loose. i could pull them out, look at them, and then put them back in. some of them were kind of shattered - lots of little pieces of teeth in my mouth. some of them were rotted at the root, it was just gross. i guess i ate too many starburst last night. i'm going to go spend an hour brushing my teeth.
August 10, 2003
some like it hot
this was a busy weekend.
much of (late) friday and saturday were spent working on simcity with phik and joe. we are scoffing at their implementation of online play, and enduring our own hack where we manually update the different cities in our region. it is going pretty well, i guess.
joey and phik didn't play today (which is a good thing, really, since if they did, i don't think they'd ever be able to tolerate playing again) while i begain construction of the assbarn expressway. you can see some of it - it starts off in financial springs, and meanders through neverwinter heights - but it will be a grand day when it connects to americatown via loolix beach next weekend. i hope the sims actually start using it by then.
this morning, instead of the usual refreshing realization that my latest nightmare is not reality, i was woken up by an angry rain. i did not know that rain could fall that hard; i thought there was some sort of terminal velocity thing keeping rain from killing people.
CHEERS to mozilla.org, for (finally) shipping gtk2/xft-enabled firebird and thunderbird snaps!
JEERS to maxtor, silicon image, asus, and nvidia for putting out products that don't work at all!
ok, that's not entirely true, since shaver says his drives work (somewhat). but i still have no success getting them to work, and i don't have and desire to really find out which of the n vendors is at fault (isn't that why i got a mac?) i will humor myself by calling maxtor tomorrow, but otherwise plan to RMA those drives tomorrow. hitachi/ibm, why did i leave your soft, loving arms?
this might actually be a good turn of events, as i've realized that i don't have any data on milano that is worth running on a raid1 setup. especially since i need winxp server or something to get windows to do it in software on the windows side.
so i figure i should just set up linux sw raid underneath lustre for stuff i actually care about, except that the lustre box is a bit... slow. which brings me to my...
LIST OF COMPUTERS THAT I PLAN ON PURCHASING WITH MY 20 MILLION XIMIAN/NOVELL DOLLARS:
hmm i meant to go to sleep an hour ago.
August 11, 2003
gimme five bees for a quarter, you'd say
today phik and i went to the supermarket and looked at cereal. there was a box of apple jacks, and they apparently have a new shape. it's "blue carrot." they have a little thing on the front though, to put kids at ease. it read, "no carrot taste! no apple taste!"
here is a skit:
ME: this is disgusting. my kids are going to eat crispix every day, and they're going to like it.
PHIK: no corn flakes?
ME: on their birthday, if they've been good. "you better finish it before it gets all soggy, or you'll really have something to cry about."
then phik made me buy a 20 pound box of cinnamon toast crunch.
August 12, 2003
twenty twenty twenty four hours to go
this morning i woke up and for a while was wondering if it was wednesday and if i missed the radiohead show. i don't know how i am going to sleep tonight.
the answer is the tasty pork satay and eggplant that phik ended up making, after delays by rain and falling asleep.
also, somehow i'm back dredging through m4.
can't sleep... clown'll eat me...
August 13, 2003
R A D I O H E A D
even though i woke up with michael jackson in my head, i am playing radiohead at full volume until i leave for the show this afternoon. i am (more than) prepared to inform my neighbors of their inevitable shoving of sorries into sacks.
it was a great show.
August 14, 2003
we got heads on sticks
i might just listen to kid a (the song) all day on repeat. i liked it ok before (it reminds me of some aphex twin) but after seeing/hearing the live version last night...
technically, tbey played something from my two favorite EPs, albeit the title tracks that are on other albums (my iron lung + airbag). hopefully we will get good radio reception from the rebroadcast on the 23rd.
i'm going to have a bowl of CTC and get to work.
August 17, 2003
a little bit of noise will destroy you
somebody broke the internet again.
the cicadas are going crazy this morning.
phik joey and i had a fun trip to the grocery store today. we got 3 gallons of lemonade, some pretzels, a ton of canada dry, and some special k.
phik said to me, "is this what happens when you go unsupervised in the cereal aisle?"
there was a logistical snafu, and i ended up paying waaaayy too much for the canada dry.
the other day there was a big incident at the subway involving a woman who thought that since the beverage dispensors were not behind the counter, and there was no sign claiming otherwise, that there were free refills. my theory that none of the people who work at subway have every actually been to a subway holds up, as they had never heard of such a concept as free refills. today when phik and i went, there was a big NO FREE REFILLS sign taped to beverage machine.
here is a skit from said subway experience:
ME: and... vinegar and salt and pepper.
WOMAN pours oil onto sandwich
...
WOMAN: would you like any dressing?
PHIK: yes, vinegrette please.
WOMAN pours vinegar onto sandwich
and that's not even the best part.
so phik and i ordered those shuttle boxes to be new OSTs for us at home. we ordered on thursday, and the shuttle cases shipped out from new jersey that afternoon, while the cpu/ram/disks shipped from california. thanks to the internet, i could see that the package from california was in boston on friday night, despite the blackout and such. the cases were in boston saturday morning.
so i was all psyched to get them all today, and whatnot. when i woke up, i checked the tracking pages, and they were all On FedEx Vehicle for Delivery. i went running and took a shower and got to work, and eventually the door buzzer rang so i went.
there were only 2 boxes.
i asked the guy if there was another box, he said no. so, i waited and waited, and checked the status of the third package (the one that was in boston friday!) and it said it was not due for delivery, and was back at the fedex location!
i was shocked. shocked. so, i called fedex to see what was up, and if maybe i could pick it up at the place, since it was only "15" minutes away (according to the pig friends at mapquest). the very nice and helpful woman said the delivery guy probably didn't have time to deliver it, and i could pick it up until 8:30 pm.
now, i don't claim to be a supergenius, but, to me, and i'm just thinking out loud here, it might make sense, if you have 3 packages all going from one building to another, that maybe, you know, put them on the same truck, or something. but that's not really the point.
since my friend nat is in germany, i had to disrupt phik's busy day to zipcar over to fedex. the box did have a cpu and ram for his system, so it wasn't a completely selfish request. through sheer will (as opposed to, say, mapquest's directions, or adequate - even that is a bit much, as i would even have settled for "poor" - road signs, we managed to find the place. i walk in, tell the woman my tracking number, and she tells me this:
"oh, these aren't due for delivery until tomorrow. they were shipped express, not two-day."
and then looks at me as if she's not going to give me the package (that had been in boston since friday).
my mind was reeling. was she really not going to give me the package that had been in boston since friday, just because i didn't get two-day? was i going to have to pay for two-day on the spot, or risk having to wait until tomorrow for the package that was behind the wall?
i was in shock, and my recollection of the next few moments is dim (at best), but either phik or i replied with stories of other packages - shipped the same day, without two-day - arrived at my door that very day, and they didn't arrive in boston until saturday - one full day after this package.
then we brought out the big guns.
we informed her that the sweet and kind woman on the phone - bless her heart - had said we could pick up the package! "don't make her a liar!" phik shouted. "this is all i have!" i cried.
well, i probably don't have to tell you, but we walked out of that building with our package.
August 19, 2003
my therapist told me there'd be days like this
musical drives certainly didn't go the way i had planned. i think the only OS i didn't have to reinstall was linux on milano.
but! i now have mirrored disks protecting my email and mp3s (and a larger disk, to boot) and a mirrored install on mini-milano (the shuttle).
this morning i was thinking to myself that it was a shame that i didn't get a western digital drive (like phik got) now that i have all this great raid stuff set up, because i'll be angry when i never get to test this raid stuff.
was i ever wrong.
i was editing /etc/samba/smb.conf on mini-milano, when it hung. i could still ping, but i couldn't edit that file. i noticed this in the logs:
hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=1370007, high=0, low=1370007, sector=84736 end_request: I/O error, dev 03:03 (hda), sector 84736 raid1: Disk failure on hda3, disabling device. Operation continuing on 1 devices raid1: mirror resync was not fully finished, restarting next time. md: updating md1 RAID superblock on device md: hdc3 [events: 0000000b]<6>(write) hdc3's sb offset: 4891712 md: recovery thread got woken up ... md1: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode md: (skipping faulty hda3 ) hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=1370007, high=0, low=1370007, sector=84744 end_request: I/O error, dev 03:03 (hda), sector 84744
a quick search on google, and a raidhotadd later, the drive was synched back up and ready for its next failure. if i actually knew how to use the raid tools, i wouldn't have rebooted 5 times.
needless to say, after this incident i nixed my plan for having a lustre mount based on raid0 volumes. i mean, when you can have bacon, why order steak?
other highlights for the day were when i couldn't do math, and tried to run my athlon 2000+ as a 2600+.
August 20, 2003
easy-bake oven (i wish i could afford it)
i want to write a song with that title.
it feels like an oven in my room, what with the 4 computers now and my possibly-allergy-induced feverish feelings.
what was it that i was trying to say?
August 21, 2003
thought control
hdparm tells a tale:
sausalito# hdparm -t /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 19.26 seconds = 3.32 MB/sec
serendipity# hdparm -t /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.77 seconds = 16.98 MB/sec
milano# hdparm -t /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.67 seconds = 38.32 MB/sec
mini-milano# hdparm -t /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.18 seconds = 54.24 MB/sec
August 23, 2003
wooooooooooooEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAoooooooooooooooooooo
(that's the sound at the end of idioteque)
the arms race continues. in response to my (and phik's) acquisition of shuttle boxes, joe has countered with a 23" apple studio display. his campaign of shock-and-awe must be stopped.
nat is trying to play along, but i don't think he knows the rules. he keeps driving by our house with his new porche's horn blaring.
August 24, 2003
back to the future
tonight we went went to algiers, then drove around in nat's car listening to moby and ok computer.
i'm going to to read some more ASWOHG and go to sleep. i have a big week ahead of me.
calls me on the phone tells me all the ways that he's gonna mess me up steal all my children if i don't pay the ransom
August 25, 2003
i can tell this is going to be a great week
wesley willis is dead.
August 26, 2003
you are not the contents of your wallet
yay 3rd season of simpsons is on dvd. i had to get it at the virgin, because i think it was the only place still open when i got off work. they were giving out little posable simpsons characters when you got the dvds. for some reason i picked the dog over marge.
this week is actually going a lot better than last. my days are pretty much split between 12 hours of trying to sleep/sleeping/trying to wake up, and 12 hours of working/eating/etc. it seems like a strange schedule, in that i feel like i'm not working enough, even though i feel like i'm working all day long.
phik, chris, and shona managed to take time out of their busy days to have bbq here and watch some of the season 3 simpsons. i think i'll go watch some more of those now.
August 28, 2003
good morning
loud knocking on door by ME's bed. he wakes up, opens the door. FAT BALDING MAN is there.
ME: uhh, rubs eyes, squints hello?
FBM: i'm here to clean the apartment.
ME: what?
FBM: are you jeff?
ME: no.
FBM: is this apartment 2?
ME: no.
i need to install a giant BEWARE OF GUN sign on my door, so that in the future, when confronted with scenarios like this one, whatever i choose to do is nice and legal.
i had a dream where phik, shaver, and i were on a plane flight from one pittsburgh airport (in the valley) to another (outside). it was a really short flight, but we didn't feel like walking up the stairs.
for dinner we had bagel burgers and watched some more season 3 simpsons at phik's.
someone needs to invent ziplock bags for colorblind people, so that my roommate does not ruin another bag of oreos.
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
hmm, football tonight.
August 31, 2003
here comes the flood
as a welcome change, last night's game could, at times, be described as boring.
i walked to harvard square, over the harvard bridge. it felt like fall today etc. nice. i saw the most disgusting car - one of the hummer stretch limos, or whatever - with like a big american flag painted on it.
i broke down and picked up itch. killer cars is good but hmm still not very interested in the other early fluffy stuff.
i want to get a keyboard, so i can learn to play everything in its right place et. al. and also so i can have 3 instruments in room that i don't play.
tick tock.
if i had actually written a song tonight it would have gone like this:
||:ecececeaDaCc:||
