March 2006 Archives

According to this page, my season tickets should have shipped either 3/27 or 3/28. It's 3/30 now, and they still don't appear in the UPS system yet. So I decide to call the Yankees ticket office, to find out "what's what"...

CSR: Yankees Ticket Office.
Me: I want to check on the status of my season ticket package shipment.
CSR: What kind?
Me: Full season.
CSR: Those were shipped out two or three days ago, on the 27th and 28th.
Me: Right, that's what the web page said, except mine aren't in UPS' system yet.
CSR: Then they don't have a tracking number assigned to them yet.
Me: If they don't have a tracking number assigned to them yet, then they haven't been shipped, because the shipping label you put on a package has the tracking number on it, it's assigned then. It has a tracking number before the UPS guy even touches his hand to it.
CSR: Well, then you would have to wait for it to be in that system. They're being shipped out UPS 2-day delivery, so if you didn't get it yesterday, you should get it today.
Me: And yet, UPS has no record of the package whatsoever, so I find it unlikely I'll get it today.
CSR: It probably just hasn't been assigned a tracking number yet.
Me: **boggle** If it was shipped, then it does have a tracking number, by definition, believe me. What I'm looking at is that everything I read tells me it should have shipped already, and yet the carrier who's allegedly carrying it knows nothing about it, so maybe, just maybe you haven't actually shipped it yet, and that's what I'm sort of trying to check on. You know, to see if it slipped through the cracks or something.
CSR: They all went out on the 28th.
Me: Can you, you know, check my account to see when mine shipped, and perhaps see if there's a tracking number associated with it?
CSR: I couldn't do that.
Me: Is there anyone who can?
CSR: No.
Me: So let me get this straight -- the web page is useless because, if you're telling the truth, the UPS system is updating data so slowly that it'll have arrived before their system even publishes data about it. You don't actually keep track of the tracking number you printed on the package before it went out the door, so if I wanted to force UPS to scan their system for it, I couldn't do that, and you've got no means of actually verifying that the tickets were even sent, let alone tell me a specific date or anything. Does that about sum it up?
CSR: errrrrr, ummmmm
Me: Right, so this was twenty minutes of my life I'm not getting back.
*click*

... man I'm glad I never had to give them my account number. *grin*

A couple weeks ago, I drove by this little church (old enough to have a historical marker, FYI). Out front they had a little sandwich board for their "Friday Film". It said "MONTY PYTHON: MEANING OF LIFE".

That's kinda cool, I thought, a church that's willing to take a step back and laugh at itself to a certain extent, and isn't so "lofty" as to insist that anything which might poke fun at Christian Mythology is inherently evil.

But, I'll be honest, I didn't give it much thought past that point. Until a couple days ago, when I drove by again, and this week's "Friday Film" was a little further out there: Dogma.

Now, this takes things to a whole new level. I mean, Meaning of Life may poke fun at Christianity a bit, but Dogma takes it completely to the next level. I mean, Dogma describes Jesus as, "The nigger who owes me twelve bucks", which of course is delivered by Chris Rock, playing the ostracized thirteenth apostle (written out because he's black, of course). It implies that God likes to take time off and hide out playing Skee-Ball on a New Jersey boardwalk, to the detriment of anything else that might require his (her?) attention. It's got the Buddy Christ even. George Carlin as a Catholic Cardinal?

Dogma is not the kind of movie I'd ever expect to see playing at a Church's "Friday Film Night". Heck, I'm an atheist, and I almost want to go over on Friday night just to congratulate the minister for having the balls to be open-minded about everything.

I'm glad to see it, though. Christianity can, at times, be really really full of itself.

I'm in the midst of preparing my GenCon '06 event, and Friday night is our live playtest of it. I'm potentially going to have a few slots open. If you are local to the Poughkeepsie area, and are a regular reader of my blog, and want to spend an evening playing D&D on a fun (at least I hope it'll be as fun as the previous two years) event, drop me an e-mail (or comment on this entry) ASAP.

While I was out at VMWare training last week, I had an opportunity to check out some movies on pay-per-view (no, not those kinds of movies! Get your mind out of the gutter).

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

This wasn't a bad movie, although it seemed to sort of drag in parts. I suppose if I'd read the books as a kid, maybe this would have been as "cool" a movie as Lord of the Rings was to all of us Tolkien fanatics. In the end, though, with them going through the whole "grow old, come out of the closet young" thing at end, it just seemed too,... I dunno... trite.

Good Night and Good Luck

Wow! Holy crap was this a good flick. The parallels between the media involvement in politics during the McCarthy era and their involvement now -- "wow". Just completely over-the-top blew me away. Everyone should see this movie.

"V" For Vendetta

My future brother-in-law and I went to see it together. We saw this movie in DC, an area that was obviously "affected" by 9/11 terrorist attacks. (In fact, I saw it at a movie theater about three Metro stops from the Pentagon where the terrorists hit). I'd be really curious to see how this movie "plays" at another location like, say, LA or Seattle, somewhere completely outside the "direct effects" zone of 9/11. It's odd to spend the entire movie cheering for the terrorist. Clearly, there's an attempted parallel between right-wing USA politics and the right-wing politics of the UK as portrayed in the movie, which makes you feel even more weird for doing the "cheering for the 'bad' guy" thing. If nothing else, it makes for a very thought-provoking conversation-starter on what it means to be "bad", and whether or not that's all really relative to "whomever seems to be in charge today." (which, I should point out, is something I've said repeatedly...heck I even did a paper for my Terrorism class last Spring comparing Revolutionary War colonists to terrorists) Definitely worth seeing, but be prepared to feel like some of your internal views are challenged, or that you might even feel "dirty" after walking out, depending on your personal worldview.

I've been attending the O'Reilly Open Source Convention for nearly a decade. When I first attended in 1998, it was still "Perl Conference 2.0", as it was before the whole Open Source "revolution" had started. (The 1998 Perl Conference also was a turning point for me, as it was there that I met Jeffrey Friedl who would become a very good friend and later co-worker as he helped me get interviewed by Yahoo).

The past few years, I've been managing to weasel Press passes to OSCON to avoid paying the registration fees. As conferences go, OSCON is right in line with other conferences, price-wise, but the last few years, I've always had a hard time cost-justifying attending. Certainly, one can argue that the hallway track at OSCON is great, and I'd not argue with that a bit. Probably some of the brightest minds in the Open Source software industry all congregate there for a week. But asking an employer "pay to send me for a week of hallway track" is a dicey proposition at best.

In past years, I was able to usually say things like, "I've scored a free pass to the conference, all I need is for $EMPLOYER to cover airfare, hotel, etc.," and use that to sweeten the deal. I could usually point to a few things that would be relevant and useful to our current work environment, and that would be enough to get approval to go. (Although, in some years, I've even had to sweeten it further by saying things like, "and I'll split the cost of the hotel with a friend of mine, who is also going").

Last year, though, I found myself wandering around sort of aimlessly for a good portion of the conference. It was then that I had told myself, "That's it, it's just not worth it. I can't even really cost-justify it any more."

This winter, though, when the CFP went out, I began to have second thoughts. I thought to myself, "Well, maybe if you give a talk there on something, maybe then it would be worth it, because it would give you exposure, and it would give $EMPLOYER exposure as someone who hires smart people who give talks, etc., etc.," and all that would -- in the end -- cost-justify the important part of the conference for me: the hallway track.

But, I learned that my talk proposal was declined. I won't go into the whole argument about how the reasons why it was declined were silly, nor any of the many failings I think OSCON is suffering. As I told Nat Torkington (program chair), OSCON is going into its tenth year this year, so clearly they've got an idea of "what works", and it's putting asses in the seats for them. Mine simply won't be one of them.

Which makes me sad, because while I infinitely value more a conference like LISA, I am still a generalist. Yes, I'm a System Administrator, but I also do Perl programming, and I am also a MySQL DBA, and I also deploy a myriad of open source tools at work every day. OSCON should, near as I can tell from the marketing speak, be aimed directly at me, and it doesn't seem to be any more. Nor does it seem to be targeted at any newcomers to any of those things -- gone are "Learning Perl" type one-day tutorials, or introductions to MySQL, or any of a hundred other things which might at least leave me thinking "oh, well I outgrew OSCON" or something like that. There's very little for the "newbies" that I can see (at least in past programs), and very little for people who aren't interested in seeing niche case-studies ("Explaining Explain"? "The Semasiology of Open Source"?) Unless you're an actual hard-core Open Source developer, it has little value, where once upon a time it had a lot of value as well to Open Source users.

Hmmm, I guess I did sorta "Get into the whole argument" ... sorry 'bout that. I lied.

But, anyhow, looks like my jam-packed three-weeks-of-hell-in-a-row thing is now alleviated. OSCON won't be happening, and the NetApp training is probably going to happen at a different time, so now we're all back to something resembling normality.

I'm so sick of this debate. Why is this even talked about? It seems so patently obvious. Here's the executive summary:

Being anti-illegal-immigration is not being anti-immigrant or racist.

Lots of people all over the world "do the right thing". They go to the US Consular Office in their country. They fill out forms. They wait. They get background checks performed on them. They wait. They pray to whatever deity they prefer to help speed along the process. They wait. And, eventually, their number comes up, and they get a visa and work permit, and life is good.

Any sort of amnesty program is a slap in the face to the many many hundreds of thousands of law-abiding immigrants everywhere. It says, in no uncertain terms, that they were a dumbass for waiting, when they could have just slipped across the border and waited for an amnesty program.

As far as a guest-worker program... I'm uncertain how this is going to help in any way that the Shrub-In-Chief says it will. Sure there's a lot of jobs Americans simply won't take, but they won't take them because we're too conceited about what our salary should be. We simply don't want the "$1.00 per hour" or whatever pittance it is that illegal aliens get paid to pick fruit in Southern California.

Are guest workers going to be immune from minimum wage? My guess is no. Which means -- guess what -- guest worker programs are either going to cost America more money (because employers will have to multiply by a large factor what they pay their immigrant workers) or, much more likely, employers will just stick to the underground workers who get paid squat.

So basically, amnesty - won't work. Guest-worker program - won't work.

What will work? Making it a felony to be an illegal immigrant. (Although, I'm sure one could already find laws that already make it a crime, like the New Hampshire town who decided that trespass laws' verbiage applied to illegal immigrants)

If you're not legally here, I'm not convinced you should actually have a "full set of rights and privileges" the same as people who played by the rules.

I was reading a CNN story about a guy who's going to jail -- essentially -- because he won't let the government into his finances to verify that some money he claims he "lost in international investments" was actually lost. You see, he was in the middle of a divorce, and his ex-wife claims he was hiding the assets.

But here's the trick, see. He tells the court "I lost it," but doesn't give them the authorization to go traipsing through the data themselves. In other words, he asserts his rights not to be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.

Since international money-laundering like the wife suggests happened would be a criminal act, the guy is -- quite rightly -- refusing to give the government the evidence it needs to convict him. Go. Fucking. Figure.

But, since he won't waive his fifth amendment rights, he sits in jail on contempt charges. His contemptuous act : not helping the government make a case against him.

Is there any constitutional provision still being enforced? No? Didn't think so, just checking.

I just realized the schedule that's in store for me come the end of July...

The week of 7/24 - OSCON, in Portland, Oregon
The week of 7/31 - NetApp Training, in NYC
home for a couple days, then off to GenCon for four days.

Gosh, I almost hope my talk-proposal at OSCON doesn't get accepted, so I can avoid a "three weeks in a row gone" thing. Ugh.

While I'm in DC for VMWare training this week, I'm staying at a Homewood Suites By Hilton. Seriously, this place is hella good, and with the discount from the training center, it was cheaper than most of the other places I could have stayed in DC.

For $179 a night I've got free high speed internet, a suite with a king size bed, a complete kitchen with stove, sink, dishes, pots, pans, fridge, dishwasher, ice maker, you name it... but who needs that because four days/nights a week breakfast and dinner are complimentary (with the daily menu posted on the fridge via magnets).

I totally need to stay at this chain more often...

As I sit in my office at work right now, the temperature on the thermostat tells me that my office is 91 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yes. Ninety-one degrees. In March. With the window and door open trying to vent my room.

Vassar, like many places, has HVAC systems that are set to "heat" or "cool", but never both at the same time. In other words, the offices on the north side of the building might actually need some heat to stay at "room temperature", so the system is set to "heat".

However, no matter how much my office might need to be cooled, there is no way for me to actually get A/C running in it.

In a perfect world, the money spent on "heating" and "cooling" energy would be better spent on designing systems that used energy efficiently. For example, maybe I need "N" BTUs of cooling in my office to stay at a respectable temperature, one that doesn't have me shedding my professional attire and slumming it in a t-shirt. The guy across the hall, on the other hand, may also need "N" BTUs of heating so that his office isn't cold.

Instead of using energy to "cool" my office and "heat" his ("2 x N"), why doesn't a modern HVAC system simply say "hey, I've got hot air right here, and they'd really like to replace it with the cold air that you've got right there, and move the air around like that in an energy-efficient manner.

Sure, I imagine it would cost a lot more to build, but I have to believe that the energy cost savings would be worth it in the long run.

We're installing a massive wireless LAN on campus. As part of this, we're installing a bunch of Cisco Wireless LAN controller gear, including Cisco 4400 controllers.

One of the network contractors came into my office this morning and asked me to "Add a DNS hostname for hostname pointing to 1.1.1.1" ... I told him no goddamned way, that's a real IP address, even if it is presently reserved by ARIN, and that they would have to make do with RFC-1918 space like everyone else.

Unfortunately, the configuration documention from Cisco says to use

Step 8 Enter the Virtual Gateway IP address; one fictitious, unassigned IP address (such as 1.1.1.1) to be used by all Controller Layer 3 Security and Mobility managers.

Now, you might think you could just use some RFC-1918 "reserved for private use" space there. Except that there's no netmask applied to the network it uses. So who knows how well it will "behave" along-side existing 10-net or 192.168-net usage. Further, when the contractor contacted Cisco about the issue, Cisco gave them the whole "this is the way it's supported, you should use 1.1.1.1" argument, this despite the contractor making the case that 1.1.1.1 isn't reserved, and could some day be a real honest-to-goodness conflict.

So, despite my better judgement, there's now a DNS hostname pointing to address space we don't own, and Cisco has earned my "retard of the day" award. Bastards.

D and I decided to play Scrabble tonight. Along the way, D became extremely tired, and attempted to play the word "CRATOR".

Me: Ummm, yeah, so do you want pull that word off the board and lose your turn, or do you want to go through the trouble of looking in the dictionary and THEN losing your turn?
D: Challenge away.
Me: I challenge.
(she loses, the word comes off)

fast forward to the next turn... D spends a good five minutes studying the board, and then -- in the exact same spot -- attempts to play "CRATOR" again.

I tell her to pull that word off the board, and look at her laptop screen for proof (we were using m-w.com as the dispute dictionary). She gets all "What? Huh? Uhhh, oh," and then sheepishly pulls the word off the board for the second time.

She definitely needs to go get some sleep it sounds like. :-)

Holy frackin' crap!

I've gushed before about how good this show is. Last night's season finale turned the entire series on its ear, and left us with a completely changed world. The interesting part is that, even though the story is completely torqued, it all "works".

And, of course, leaves me waiting breathlessly for next season to start.

My employer will probably be getting me a Mac Book Pro here in the next few weeks (yay!). However, today I've got a Lind Travel Adapter which plugs into the cigarette-lighter-outlets on an airplane and my existing PowerBook G4.

However, I cannot find any functional equivalent that has the new MagSafe connector that the Mac Book Pro ships with. Has anyone seen a travel adapter designed for the newest laptop?

Had a bit of a hardware issue, but we've gotten through it, it looks like relatively unscathed. Sorry for vanishing like that.

The other day, I pointed out that D and I should have taken better notes in life, given that we thought we had a nice Bertolli meal and hadn't, etc., etc.

Yesterday, on the way home from work, I stopped in at the other grocery store we had shopped at lately, and -- lo and behold -- I came home with two frozen skillet dinners from Bertolli, of Chicken Carbonara and Rigatoni. The bag is labeled "NEW", so one can only assume it's so new that the Bertolli web site does not yet list it (although, from a marketing standpoint, that seems counterproductive).

But, regardless, now we know where to get them, and I've got enough info available to me that I can fill out those little forms that Shop-Rite and Hannaford have so you can get them to start stocking things that they don't carry (so we don't have to go across the river to go grocery shopping, just to get this one thing).