wednesday night / a site for sore eyes
choose one:
a few recent posts;
links to embarassing things;
rss was for robots.
March 1, 2005
booze it or lose it
it's the first of the month, which is really exciting when you haven't been paid in 27 days, and won't be for 30 more. i think i'll go splurge and pay rent!
btw peanut butter m&ms should not be a part of any breakfast, whatsoever. i made that mistake yesterday and it about ruined my whole day.
March 1, 2005
pound one
March 2, 2005
this always happens
yesterday my laptop started making this grinding sound, which actually sounded kind of cool, and would change if i tilted my laptop in different directions. i figured it was just the fan, or something, since it was pretty warm when it was doing this. this morning, after being suspended all night, it still made the noise, and it sounds like it's coming from the hard drive.
since i'm going away for the weekend, and phil won't let me turn my laptop on on the plane if it is making all this noise, i need to order a new drive today. i'm not sure which drive to get, since this terrible review only talks about seek times and throughput, not important things like quietness and dropability. anyway here are the three i am looking at:
toshiba 100G: my powerbook came with a toshiba, and it was so quiet that i upgraded to their 80G drive. unfortunately, that is the one which sounds like it's giving up the ghost, and with only a 1 year warranty they don't have any confidence in it either.
seagate 80G: only 80G but with a 5 year warranty. this might not matter, as i will probably be getting a new powerbook this summer and they don't come with anything smaller than 80G.
fujitsu 80G: 3 year warranty, etc.
can anyone recommend either the seagate or the fujitsu, based on how long it takes them to die and how loud they are? otherwise i will probably sacrifice data integrity for the extra 20G of space, because that sounds like the smart thing to do.
March 2, 2005
i hate you, at&t wireless
i got my last at&t wireless bill. even though i canceled my contract one week into the month, they charged me for the whole month. i called, and was informed that that is their policy, even though that's not how they do the first month. i got put through to a customer service "expert" who wasn't any more helpful, until i requested to talk to someone else because it's my policy to not pay for services i don't receive. all of the sudden, she could magically take $20 off my bill even though she wasn't supposed to. then she tried to talk to me about toronto, where she was a week or two ago, but was i up for that? no.
i hope none of you mail stuff with stamps. you know you can put yourself for the to: address on the envelope, and put where you want it to go for the return address, and put it in a mailbox without a stamp? i've paid rent like that for over five years. saved myself over twenty bucks!
(if you can't tell, i worked on auto* today. here is my favourite line:)
AC_MSG_RESULT([${!lb_pathvar:-no}])
March 3, 2005
cup cranky redux
the fleetcenter is being renamed the TD Banknorth Center and some idiots from boston want to buy the nhl.
i don't have anything clever to say. i'm still in shock from dreaming that i had a dead older brother i didn't know about, there were gang related gunfights outside my apartment, i had a gun, the police were after me, and phil was telling joe that cfs was hiring two ex-HP execs starting on new year's day. while i was still dreaming i thought to myself that this was the sort of dream that could single handedly convince me that i should start seeing some sort of therapist.
March 4, 2005
we run a tight ship
i'm flying with phil to vancouver. he's already vancouthed, but i went to sleep around 11 last night since i didn't take a nap in the afternoon. here is a short skit from when we checked in:
United Agent: Are you two on the same flight?
Phil: Yes.
Me: Yes.
UA: Where are you flying today?
Phil: Chicago.
Me: San Francisco.
UA: What time is your flight?
Me: Six forty.
Phil: Six thirty.
the show last night was completely awesome.
but first, on the flight to SFO there was this dark line on the ground for miles:
i had no idea what it was. it was too straight to be natural, but too huge to be man made. later on in the flight i realized that this was the shadow of a higher plane's contrail.
on the SFO -> YVR leg, one of the stewardesses noticed that i had an iPod, and said that she was having problems with hers and did i have any idea what was going on. it reported no songs in the database, but had about 5 gigs used up, so it seemed like the music was still there.
i plugged it into my laptop, but to make a long story short we couldn't get any data off of it, even though it looked like her files were still there. all my apps ended up hanging due to the bad disk, and i had to hard reset. unfortunately, my laptop wouldn't power on! the asleep led sometimes would flash quickly for a few seconds, but it took me like 20 minutes of trying to hard-reset it before it finally booted.
during the flights, i read the new eggars collection of short stories. i have to say it is the greatest physical manifestation of a book; the built-in bookmark and elastic strap make it perfect for reading while travelling, and the pages that are on the inside covers have a fantastic texture. and the smell... it smells like paper, not glue (unlike phil's book on stalin).
we asked the hotel person for the finest seafood restaurants available, and the two we ate at did not disappoint. friday we ate at a kettle of fish, while saturday we went to the fish house in the park. i had salmon both nights, although different kinds. i highly recommend the chocolate lava cake at the latter; it is what i've been craving for weeks.
some of the traffic lights in vancouver flash when they are green. we asked a taxi driver why they did this, and he said because vancouver is the stupidest city ever. apparently the crosswalk buttons are hooked up to the lights, and they change soon after someone presses them. the problem, he claimed, was that at night people would just press all of the buttons as they walked by. he was from iran, and thought phil and i were candian due to our pure upbringing in northeastern ohio. that, and the fact that we both have a hint of a canadian accent. although i think my expos hat gives it away that i'm not canadian.
i'm not using any zoom in those last two shots. my knee was really up against the stage.
here is the set list, for phil and i:
after the show in the hotel we took the elevator up with the drummer. it turns out they were staying in the room across the hall from us.
phil and i are going to see them in halifax on april 9th. i can't wait.
March 7, 2005
sadder skate man fever
i described almost exactly this when i visited red hat three and a half years ago.
March 9, 2005
it's cold again
i should have listened to the iranian taxi driver. what was i thinking leaving tropical vancouver? the wind was so loud last night that i had to wear earplugs.
March 13, 2005
crank it
i learned a lot about upselling when i bought my new tv/stereo and ended up paying like twice as much as i had initially intended. when the mac mini first came out, i saw it as a tremendous upsell enabler for apple, into the iMac and Power Mac lines.
ever since the new iPods came out i've been trying to get a good graph of the whole iPod line. it took a few tries, but i think i've finally got it:
this graph shows how well the iPod line upsells: if you are thinking of getting the 4G mini, the 6G mini doesn't get you all that much for $50, but the next $50 you spend gives you a huge return. this also shows that you really don't pay a premium for the 60G photo, despite its $100 difference from the 30G.
i'd like to do this for the Mac mini -> iMac -> Power Mac lines, but it would be more difficult to quantify than the iPods with their single differentiating metric (capacity).
maybe i need to figure out a way to start upselling myself.
March 13, 2005
shaver only needs a few days of clothes
actually, i think this is a better graph:
this clearly shows that the 4G mini has the best upsell value, with the 20G iPod coming in second.
March 15, 2005
halfway to halifax
i can't believe march is halfway over already. and the show feels so far away... those of you lucky enough to live in halifax should go see them saturday at the attic at 11 pm (although i'd get there at 9 because i wouldn't have much else to do in halifax).
larry gets the gold star for today. now if only he could trick the kernel people into having a stable abi...
i got a haircut today. i guess i really needed one, because when i sat down the guy said, "wow." i swear that every time i go, the same old lady is getting a haricut as well, and always has something embarassing to say about me.
it would not take much of an argument to convince me that computers are more or less ruining everyone's lives.
i had some hearsay and conjecture to support this, but it wasn't particularly interesting, funny, or even correct. instead, here is a picture of my doorbell:
March 17, 2005
game over
i spent st. patrick's day 2000 in paris. here it is, 2005, and i find myself in new jersey. the terrorists really have won.
it is weird for me to ride trains between cities. amtrak seems to take a different approach than the airline industry, in that they really don't care if you are on the train or not. this wasn't really apparent until, after walking through two cars and not finding any empty rows, i stepped out to walk to another car, and they almost left without me. i spent that whole leg in fear that i was going to miss my stop.
this was after i had a terrible time trying to figure out how to get here from boston. you can't just put your origin and destination, you have to find all the routes in between and list all of those cities. sadly, i had a better time with amtrak than with viarail trying to travel between halifax, charlottetown, and sydney. i can't believe that the thing that's going to make me finally learn how to drive is a band. however, i think it's a pretty awesome reason.
we got to the hotel last night and they had no reservation for me. apparently, we were at the wrong red roof inn. and now jeff is complaining that the one i am staying at is far away, because he didn't actually look at which one i was at.
i'm beginning to really understand why i am on this trip. phil is very subtle. instead of just telling me things like, "you need a haircut," "you need to learn how to drive," or "you really are much happier working from home than you would be working in an office where everyone has HR-mandated motivational screensavers", he sends me on these trips. or maybe he does tell me, but ignore him. i mean honestly, there is not a single iTunes share on this network! and everyone who walks by gives me this strange look just because my laptop has a glowing fruit on it. i say they are the strange ones, walking around like batman with their keys and pagers and phones all strapped to their belts.
jeff got a parking citation. we couldn't find anywhere to park, so i said he should just park in that field over there, with the cows. apparently it's a handicap zone, or something.
March 18, 2005
enough with the apples already
i've finally gotten around to watching season three of the west wing on dvds, and really what can i say; it is so good.
i started watching the new ones a few weeks ago, for some reason. they aren't as bad as i remember the last couple of seasons being, but still. leo, josh, and especially toby are so good in season three that it will be hard to watch next week's new episode.
last night for dinner i had some twix, peanut butter m&m's, and some s'mores things i got by accident. the other day i wanted some shrimp, so i ordered the crispy shrimp appetizer from khao sarn. i wasn't that hungry, so i just threw out the soup and pad thai i also ordered because i was too embarassed to just order the shrimps.
some people just walked down the hall, led by some guy loudly asking, "if all life on this planet were gone, do right and wrong still exist?"
i gotta find some way out of new jersey.
March 21, 2005
meeting people is easy
the woman next to me on the train home saturday was reading some book by the author of mr. maybe. i was bored yesterday, so i figured i'd go buy the book, and then stop by her place (good thing i didn't have to burn all the phone books this year!) and tell her that she left it on the train.
she was very confused, because she had her copy right there, but thought it was nice of me and all of a sudden we are going to have dinner wednesday night.
on the T back home, i was bored again so i started reading the copy i'd bought. now i understand why she didn't want a second copy.
March 21, 2005
party time in console city
i'm still serving my linux root nfs partitions from my powermac, and not the mini running os x server. this is mostly because when i boot from the mini, it doesn't work. it turns out that i am getting -EPERM from the mini, but not the powermac on files that are mode 600. this is totally awesome, because some of these files are important:
[root@milano etc]# ls -l shadow /etc/shadow -r-------- 1 root root 1098 Nov 10 13:22 /etc/shadow -r-------- 1 root root 1098 Nov 10 13:22 shadow [root@milano etc]# head -n 1 shadow /etc/shadow ==> shadow <== head: error reading `shadow': Permission denied ==> /etc/shadow <== root:*:12557:0:99999:7:::
classic. total classic.
but it's cool, i should be using lustre for the rootfs anyway.
March 22, 2005
woof it threedux
joe got this awesome tv, but dvds at his house have always had awful, awful color. it didn't bother joe much, with his color blindness, but it drove me crazy. every time we watch a dvd there, i spent 15 minutes trying to adjust the color on the dvd player and the tv to somehow make shake's straw pink instead of blue. blue!
saturday i finally went behind the tv and replugged his cables. apparently the red cable wasn't plugged in.
March 23, 2005
the devil had sex with a dog, and your mother was that very dog
another beagle release! i still don't have any code in there, but maybe robert has time to come out tonight.
March 23, 2005
it's 2:45 am, do you know where your freedom car is?
there's nothing like staying up all night listening to elliott smith and reading get your war on to make you look forward to shovelling a foot of snow when you wake up.
March 24, 2005
the bgl has landed
we release lustre 1.4.1 today! and i am moments away from landing a year's worth of work supporting the BG/L cluster at llnl. it will be a great relief to finally get that code released in a week or two.
i've gone running for about 50+ minutes 4 of the last 5 days (3 days in a row!) so i am totally out of food.
at night i can see the prudential center out of that window.
March 27, 2005
miracles happen every day
yesterday i was at joe's and we were lamenting the fact that there was no hockey on, because we don't get ESPNU, so we watched mike modano in the mighty ducks on tv. during one particularly stirring scene, joe rolled over on the couch, onto the remote, and it changed channels to cn8, which was showing the UNH/Harvard game.
last night i had a dream where bruno was helping me with sim city. he really liked trains running over bridges.
March 28, 2005
Americans do not need a professor of nutrition at Penn State
what i need is that sandwich (just a little taste... just a little flavor in my mouth).
March 28, 2005
warm and fuzzy
i am always surprised when drugs make me feel better. i should stop suffering so much and just take more of them.
March 28, 2005
i love salmon. i love lamp.
"We are joining in a specific boycott of Canadian seafood products."
-- John Grandy, from PEI
don't worry, atlantic canada! phil and i will be there in eleven days to gorge ourselves on your seafood surplus.
March 29, 2005
the daily big dig article
"Every politician in Massachusetts has been responsible for this boondoggle, and now they are all trying to show how they are fighting to protect the taxpayers by pointing their fingers at someone else."
i like watching dinner for five because sometimes it's funny to compare where i know the person from to what they mention. last night laura dern was on. i recognized her from the west wing, but not jurassic park.
i never said it was always funny.
March 29, 2005
all techno sounds the same, anyway
in one of the live JSB tracks, they start playing this one techno-y song i know i have. i want phil to hear it, but since every techno song i have sounds exactly the same it's impossible to find.
nat, phil, and i went to legal's for phil's going away dinner. as i was walking over to the charles hotel area, i saw a couple of buses that were from the same company that we used when the band and orchestra from high school went on "tour" during spring break. i knocked on the door to one, and asked if he was with the cleveland heights band, and he said yeah. he asked if i went there, then said they would be back soon or something. one of the reasons i was so excited to move here to work for helix code in 2000 was because we came to boston my senior year, and i thought that might make a cool story for them.
but i didn't wait for them, since the band director i had retired a while ago, high school girls are totally insane, and my friends and i were pretty hungry. i'd try to find out where they were playing tomorrow, but if i remember tour correctly, they will be playing way before i intend to be awake.
March 31, 2005
pulled taut
this is one story that i am not making up. i will start off by saying that joe is alive and fine, so you don't have to worry.
last night i was on the T going into the city to meet up with nat, when i got a call from him asking if i knew where joe was because he wasn't at work and wasn't answering his phone or anything. i said no, and so immediately we realized we had to go to his house because obviously he was dead.
the T was terribly slow. listening to eliott smith didn't help.
eventually i got to central and started the walk over to phil's. i was listening to astronauts, which really was the wrong song for this too. it's all spacey and builds and builds and doesn't let your mind move on to things other than having another dead friend; your best friend. you start figuring out the first 10 people you'll call; phil to say you can't work for a couple of days - surely joe would count as a death in the family? i mean i lived with him for 3 years.
thinking... i talked to him last night he was with friends from high school what had they been doing where did they go? they were probably making a bunch of noise, having fun, and someone told them to be quiet and they wouldn't so they came in and shot joe and his friends. why did i let him live by himself? what was he thinking moving to inman? i told him that is where people get shot, and now i have another dead friend. but surely if something like that happened they would have contacted his parents... surely kara would have heard and told me. so if something had happened someone would know. he doesn't go out running without any ID like i do...
i turn the corner onto his street and expect the amusement park of flashing lights and sirens but there is nothing. i call nat; he was just there the lights are off and nobody answered the door. well, we have to break in to check just because. nat asks how and well, i have keys so it's not tough.
we knock on his door but no answer. we walk in. nothing in the bathroom (where i feared), kitchen, living room. his bedroom is upstairs, we take a deep breath before going up. we don't know where light switches are, so we stumble around a bit but then lights are on and there are no bloodied bodies lying around, their cold eyes judging.
Things are pulled taut, Toph, pulled taut! There is no give! No give! Everything is too tight, brother, everything is just right there, like that [clenching fists], see that? Tight, taut [jerking fists apart, miming the testing of a knot in a short piece of rope]! Everything is pulled taut!
-- dave eggers
this is never going away... freaking out sunday mornings when you hear a loud airplane flying low... wondering who has died every time the phone rings from ohio... waiting until every shoe finally drops...
