Recently in Life Stuff Category

I had a rather interesting experience this week. Sunday night (Monday morning) as I was returning from Yankee Stadium (having had the dubious privilege of attending the only ALDS game we won), I stopped at a nameless diner at 2am to grab some grub. It was not one of the normal diners I eat at, and it was clearly a run-down place, but I was starving, and it was late, and my options were extremely limited.

When I woke up Monday morning, I felt like crap. After a couple hours of fighting my own body's urges to do things it seemed incapable of doing, I recognized the tell-tale signs of food-poisoning. I'd gotten a really bad case of food poisoning a couple months ago (where I ended up in the ER... an IV drip of fluid, pain-killer, and antacid later, I was good as new). Seeing that the "pain level" on this was heading to exactly the same level as the last trip, I drove myself to the Emergency Room.

D was out of town. She was down in Pennsylvania enjoying a nice "girls' weekend" with some of her sisters. I knew that a food-poisoning issue would be "done and over" before she even got half-way home, so there was no point in calling her and ruining her weekend.

As I was going through the motions with the ER doc, she's doing the usual poking and prodding... "Does it hurt here?" "What if I do this?" etc. She asks when I ate last. I tell her the Diner story. She seems unconvinced.

"Your pain seems like it's in the wrong spot, I'd like to order a CT to rule out appendicitis."

... and then, like all docs in a busy ER, she just wanders away leaving me with lots of questions, not the least of which is, "Hey, what are the odds it's an appendicitis?"

I consult with the ER Nurse, explaining the "D situation", how she's four hours away, and I don't want to bug her for food-poisoning but if they're gonna slice me open to fish out an organ that's about to explode poison all over my abdomen, then maybe that might warrant an advance phone-call. The ER nurse convinces me to let D relax for a while, and wait for the CT and the results of it, before we do that. And then she hands me a Big-Gulp sized cup of some crazy semi-radioactive Gatorade they want me to finish before they can do the CT.

While sitting there sipping my Big-Nuke, I decide to call my parents. I figure if I'm in a hospital, freakin' someone should know I'm there... they decide to come down to the hospital. While waiting for them, they take me away, and do my CT scan.

The CT technician was kind of amusing. Lots of good advice, "You're going to feel like you're urinating... you're not... it's just your body working overtime trying to sort out what is going on between the stuff we've put in you and the MRI itself... just relax".

After my parents arrive, the doc comes back and says "You don't have appendicitis. You've got... a kidney stone."

Wait, what? A kidney stone, at my age? That's gonna hurt like fuck, man...

"Can't we make it an appendicitis?" I ask the doc, but she is unwilling or unable to magically make my ailment be something that I'll be blissfully sedated for the resolution of.

"It's very small," she says in response, but aren't they all, really? The issue is just that the hole they have to evacuate through is small as well.

I'm sent home with a referral to my primary doc and a urologist, as well as a 190µ mesh sieve that I'm supposed to strain my piss through, hoping to catch pieces of the stone as it passes, to bring to my urologist for "analysis". I read the instructions which are basically "pee into a glass or jar, and then strain the results through that mesh". Oh, and one other take-home that will be very useful, I begin to suspect: a prescription for Percocet.

Egads, this is gonna be a long week.

I call into work, and play the "I'm going to be working from home the next couple days...." and tell a couple people why. They're very supportive. Nobody wants me to commute an hour each way where one of those ways might have to be doped up on Percocet. And I seriously doubt anyone wants me straining my piss on-campus. That's just gross.

I make my follow-up appointments with the doctors. Tuesday with my PCP, and Thursday with my new urologist. My primary doc appointment, well, that was kind of a waste. "Oh, they sent you here? You're feeling fine right now? Do you need more pain meds? OK, pay at the desk on your way out."

Wednesday morning, I need to run over to the hospital to pick up a CD-ROM with all my MRI images on it for the urologist. While in the shower, the combination of running water and warmth take their toll (as they often do on members of the male species), and I find myself letting things flow and -- hey, wait, what the heck is that thing that just shot across the shower!?!

I bend over and grab it before the flow of water takes it swirling down the drain.

Holy crap, I just passed the damned stone. Without even noticing it. If I hadn't actively been watching things happen looking for this, and if I hadn't been in pain the other day enough to go to the ER, this whole thing could have happened without me even being aware of it, that's how crazily this thing went.

So I end up the next day, Thursday, at the urologist who declines to take the stone. "Oh, they told you to bring that to me? Nah, for your first stone, I don't bother.... it'd be several hundred dollars of lab work to tell you the same basic things... drink lots of water, reduce your salt intake, avoid certain types of foods."

And so now that's it... this is me with my public service announcement message for the day: Drink lots of water. I'm not that old (although the definition of "old" is now certainly becoming very elusive for me as I start to approach ages I once would have attached "old" to)... if it can happen to me, it can happen to you. Drink lots of fluids. Keep your salt intake down.

And avoid having kidney stones like the damned plague.....

Before yesterday, it'd been a while since I'd blogged, and it hasn't been anything "about me", but more just immediate commentary on something timely that needed talking about. There's been a lot that I've missed over the last few months... didn't blog about spending a week in Ireland for our belated honeymoon, or how D and I went to see The Police at Madison Square Garden on their reunion tour, or any of the myriad other things going on.

Summer was just hellishly busy at work this summer, rolling out a new e-mail system to the entire campus. D and I had plotted out "the weekends we had free to do stuff" and there were, like, three. Total. For the entire summer. That's how busy it's been.

Hopefully now that school is back in session, and the kids are back, things will slow down enough that I can at the very least keep current, and maybe even fill in some of the missing stories.

This is a scary moment for me, really. With all due deference to Wil Wheaton, who's a pretty hip cat, I really never ever wanted to consider myself to be analogous to Wesley Crusher. Unfortunately, that's the position I find myself in.

Everyone -- well, a lot of people anyway -- at work has succumbed to the charms of Second Life.

Now, frankly, I don't understand the appeal. At all. I mean not a single bit. Except for those who are chat-room addicts desperately starved for human contact, or people who want to live out their Furry Fetishes, the attraction of Second Life is completely lost upon me. I find myself regularly thinking to myself that all the jokes at this site ring true.

You want to play Star Wars Galaxies and pretend briefly to be in a sci-fi universe? I get that. You want to play World of Warcraft and pretend briefly to be in a swords and sorcery, good and evil, universe? I get that, too. You want to play Second Life and pretend to be... a normal person who has to buy clothes, and pay rent on land, and all that jazz? What the fuck dude, don't you get enough of that shit in the real world?

This virus is spreading like wildfire... first my boss' boss found out about it, then all of our helpdesk people, now it's like spreading to other schools, and a good friend of mine it seems mentions at least once a day how she was doing this, that, or the other thing "in SL".

Yeegads, people, do all those things in the REAL WORLD. You know, The Big Blue Room. The room with the Scary Yellow Orb in the ceiling. The one those Luddites called in the ancient tongue, "Outside".

And that's where Star Trek: The Next Generation comes in. I'm stuck in an episode called "The Game". I'm Wesley Crusher, they're all the rest of the crew, and I'm really hoping Data figures out how to crash the game for good before they pin me down and force me to join in.

So here's what I remember of this crazy-ass dream I had last night:

• A friend of mine (whose name, even in the dream, I could never remember and kept getting wrong) and I somehow ended up being captured.
• There was this whole matriarchal society thing going on and we were escorted to this tall building in the center of what looked like park land
• You went up an elevator, and when you got off the elevator, there was some long hallways leading to common rooms, living quarters, etc.
• There was this whole air of "combat" to it. When people greeted each other, there was this manner of exposing both hands to show that there were no weapons and that intentions were peaceful.
• There seemed to be some sort of pretext that you might have to go engage in combat against the guy you just ate dinner with, if your name came up flagged on "the list".
• There were some guys who seemed to be "in charge", but I think they were just privileged captives as well. They were the ones who had "the list" on clipboards, and would read off the names of the people who were heading to the elevator to go up a couple floors.
• "the list" included peoples' names and their e-mail addresses. I kid you not. Names were circled in red grease-pencil if they were going off to ... whatever awaited them (I never saw it, there was only an implication that there was something bad involved).
• There were big floor-to-ceiling windows where you could look out over the parkland, and see the women playing outside and living a grand old life. The view looked a lot like you might expect to see looking out over the quad of a 1930s girls school, that sort of "play".
• The guys who were "in charge" seemed to be perfectly reasonable and helpful, just that they didn't appear to be in any threat of heading into the elevator any time soon.

I don't know what particular sci-fi book or movie my brain scraped this story nugget out of, but it's definitely weird.

This year, thanks to my adoring wife and my wonderful sister-in-law, I received two gadgets that I'd been wanting for a while.

First, in a tip of the hat to a previous blog entry, I finally managed to get my hands on a calculator that supported Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). My sister-in-law, S., got me an HP 33s calculator. While it doesn't have the cool horizontal profile of the older HP calculators of my youth (but HP doesn't make any that do look like that anymore), it has all the same features, and the two-line display actually makes the RPN functionality a little easier to use (as you can see the previous element in the calculation stack that way).

A couple people who I've told about this wondered why I wanted a calculator given that I've got computers-aplenty at my beck and call. The reality is that "appliances" have their place. Just as I'm not trying to build my own DVR and am willing to trust my cable set-top box or TiVo to "just work", there's something nice about having a little device next to your computer that you can use to do the "quick math" functions you need to do throughout the day. I can't count the number of times in a given day where I fire up a terminal window and type something completely lame into bc, or worse, when for some reason I'm feeling particularly brutal, to do something like:

$ perl -e 'print ((12345/6)*7-8)'

To have that functionality off to the side? Very convenient.

Then, my lovely wife got me a Harmony 880 universal remote. This thing is frickin' sweet, that's all I have to say.

It's programmed entirely via a computer application (Mac-compatible!), accessing an online database of damned near every TV, cable box, stereo, etc., etc., ever made. There's a community of people editing and modifying and improving this data, so the codes are nearly always right. The biggest "hiccup" I had with mine has to do with the fact that my HDTV unit doesn't support discrete-input selection. This means that if I want to go from "VIDEO1" to "COMPONENT2", it's not just a single infrared code, like it is for most TVs, but instead is a sequence of "[NextInput]" codes, to cycle through all the VIDEOx inputs, past COMPONENT1, and finally on to COMPONENT2.

But I can't fault the remote for a failing in the TV. To be fair, we have the same problem with my older remote -- the one D has never liked (for those who care, it's an MX-500... it's not a bad unit, but not nearly as friendly or as cool as the Harmony).

D now has a whole bank of buttons that pushing them will automatically switch to the right input on the TV, change the channel on the set-top box, etc. It's easier for her to use, and it's cooler to look at. That and I'll save a fortune in AAA batteries, since the Harmony is rechargeable.

(PS - Kudos to Amazon.com... Christmas night I figured out that I wasn't having some incompatibility problem with the [Pause] code for my cable box, but it was in fact that the Pause button on the remote itself was dysfunctional out of the box. Amazon Fedexed a replacement on Tuesday, and it arrived on Wednesday, a mere two-day delay that they're eating all the shipping on... contrast that to a problem my boss' boss had with one where $NAMELESS_VENDOR disavowed all knowledge and he had to deal with it directly with Logitech as a warranty issue, over about a week or so.)

So overall, a really good Christmas for gadgets in the Balling household.

One thing I love about working for a college is Christmas Break.

At Vassar, we got (this year), from December 22 through January 1 off. Paid. No need to dip into vacation pay to be able to spend time with friends and family over the holiday week.

Of course, it's a little sad that I've got to head back to work tomorrow. I was just getting into the swing of "Wake up, play some Warcraft, eat some lunch, play some Warcraft," and now that's totally gonna be shattered.

Although this week should be fun. I have a new employee working for me, starting on Wednesday. Fully half of my direct reports now (not including student employees) are, by bizarre coincidence I swear!, all people who I know from my past lives.

My boss' boss joked that I'm planning a coup, but headed that off at the pass by reminding me that it's no fun if the guy you're overthrowing would happily give up the position of power. *grin*

Based on a neat blog post by Tom:

Where I've Lived, as described by Google Maps.

If you back into a car in a parking lot, and you fux0r its fender but good, at the very least you leave a note, but even better is you call campus security (who can use the parking pass to track down the owner).

You don't just drive the fuck away.

Rage.

D and I went to see Def Leppard tonight. She's a real trooper, not being a Lep fan at all, but she put up with a loud rock concert all for the love of her man. :-)

Runner-Up for "Quote of the Night":

Me: I'm starting to get kinda annoyed. This bitch is totally like taking over the space in front of my seat like she owns it.
D: Umm, babe, your seat's over here.
Me: ... ... Oh. So, um, I'm the asshole.
D: Yeah, kinda.

Quote of the night:

Joe Elliott is introducing Rick Allen, the crazy one-armed drummer, and asking the crowd to give him a round of applause. D is slapping my stomach.
Me: (puzzled look) Huh?
D: You can only do it one-handed, right?

This morning's article in the Daily Freeman concerning the Ground Round worker found stabbed to death after her night shift had concluded had a very interesting TiVo ad displayed on the same page, that included a picture of a knife and the word "back-stabber" (as it was cycling slowly through all the things Tivo would help you view this season on TV).

But, not entirely sensitive to any of Inger's family members who might be reading that article online....

Ordinarily I just ignore spam. I mean as in "I delete it before I even mentally consciously recognize it as spam". That's why I was kind of annoyed that after I got a particular spam, it took me a week to get another copy of what has to be one of the funniest images ever to be in a spam:

Classic stuff I tell you. I laughed for like ten minutes. Not often that a viagra spam invokes The Matrix, and in such an appropriate manner, even if it does get the pill colors backwards.

The A/C in the Miata is great. I mean really fucking great. It's cold enough to freeze the Middle East solid, that's how goddamned cold it makes the car.

The problem is that even on the minimum setting that's all it can do. It can't simply chill the car down a few degrees. It can't simply "make the cabin comfortable". It's simply "freeze your balls off" or turn off the A/C and within a few minutes of heat-wave level temperatures, you "cook yourself up but good."

I've been opting to freeze rather than boil, because I think it's easier to stomach "feeling chilly" than bathing in sweat. But it really is a tough decision...

There's a satisfaction you get from knowing that you've done good work, that you simply can't recreate in any other way.

I had a former employer -- and I use this term loosely, I worked there for less than three weeks in between two jobs, and I was there for such a short period of time that it's not even resumé-worthy -- call me out of the blue this past Thursday. They were down. Hard. Their server was over at a data-recovery place, their RAID array (with the backups) was there too. The hot-spare machine wasn't actually configured right and didn't have data, it was pretty much every organization's nightmare scenario:

The data that is our business is missing, and if we don't get it back soon, we might as well just shut the doors and go home.

The question was, could I come down this weekend, stay in the city, and rebuild their servers while the data-recovery people tried to recover their data. I've become fairly good friends with one of the principals of this company after I left, and frankly I couldn't say "no" to him. His very lifeblood was on the line.

The initial "Data Recovery" we got from their recovery guy sucked. Not nearly enough recovered from the corruption. As I continued building the systems, their programmer started to investigate -- what data could he reconstruct from the remnants, reports, the various system detritus that was left around after batch jobs were done. The results didn't look good. Some of the patient data would be around, but there were also going to be crucial holes, things which could be reconstituted only by paying people who weren't supposed to get paid, and having the error reported to them.

Their data recovery place calls me in my hotel room last night, asking me "how to mount the XFS RAID-5 array". My heart sinks. The guy they've got can't even get this far? What the hell?

The programmer and I confer for a few, and decide we're going to yank the rug out from under the data recovery place. We get the RAID array back, and I start trying to talk to it. To make a long blog entry short, a minor I/O card replacement, and a rebuilt partition table later, and I've done in about two hours of labor what the data recovery people couldn't do in three days.

Now, make no mistake, the Wedding Fund has definitely gotten a nice contribution from this weekend's labor, and D is to be commended for running me down a spare set of clothes as my stay got extended from one night to two on short notice. But the look of sheer joy in the owners of the company as they realized that they were not going to be closing their doors after all... that is a pretty decent reward all unto itself...

It was just under a decade ago that I packed all of my earthly possessions into a rental truck, and moved my ass up to Chicago from Fort Wayne. I remember being so exhausted from it all that if it hadn't been for a really good friend showing up and kicking our asses into unloading the truck, it all might still have been in that truck to this day.

As I sit in my hotel room this evening, digesting a couple of dogs from Portillo's, it occurs to me how much I love Chicago.

I haven't got any intention of leaving Vassar. I can see myself working here pretty much until they throw me out. But at the same time, if I had to move to a big city, Chicago would be on the top of my list.

I know that's blasphemy, and I know it means I'd get to see a lot fewer Yankee games, but seriously... all you have to do is take a walk on the Lake to realize that Chicago has got a lot of... beauty, for lack of a better word, that New York is simply lacking.

New York is an exciting city, but it's not Chicago.

I just wish D wasn't working this week, so she could've come with. Would have been nice to show her around a bit.

Another thing I noticed today was while driving the Illinois Tollway, it occurred to me that there are a lot of exit ramps that:

• Require exact change
• Have no attendant on-duty

So how are you supposed to pay the toll if, say, you're a tourist who has no idea in advance that you're going to need 80¢ here and 35¢ there? The Illinois Tollway page has this to say:

Failure to pay tolls will result in a Notice of Toll Evasion, where the toll plus a $20 fine is levied. Those who do not follow the due process outlined in the Notice could eventually face loss of license plate or driver's license through the Secretary of State's office. Video Surveillance cameras are located at all plazas to record toll violators.

Now, riddle me this:

Why haven't the tollway agencies and their "pass" programs (IPass, E-ZPass, etc.) worked together with rental car agencies so that people renting cars don't have to worry about tolls? Why couldn't I have a rental car that has an IPass box of some sort permanently attached and then, at the end of my rental, Hertz asked the IPass folks "How much has this car's tag been charged since the time he rented the car?" and simply add that amount to my rental bill?

You could even offer the option to disable the in-car IPass if you wanted, for instance for people who are renting a car, but who have their own IPass they would rather use (perhaps to take advantage of a lower-cost commuter rate-plan, or because they have a special "free access" pass like the one retired Thruway people get).

IPass would get their cut of more tolls, rental agencies' customers would be happier (and also, rental car companies would have less hassle to go through trying to track down renters of cars which were used in toll-evasion), and the tollways would likely have fewer offenders and thus also get increased revenue.

It seems to me that this would be a perfect synergy between the different organizations to get maximum value.

I haven't been blogging lately but today, I've had no less than two different things to blog about. It's hard to believe.

First... the nightmare of paperwork that happens when your rental car (rented on your personal AmEx) is hit by a cabbie, while you're not in it, while you're on business travel. Luckily, since the cabbie hit a parked car, the fault is 100% his (and, to his credit, he admitted so), so it's unlikely I'd ever be forced to pay a dime. However, if he defaults and doesn't pay, or his insurance balks, who pays?

• Me personally? Well, I don't think so.
• American Express' extended liability coverage? They say only whatever my personal auto insurance doesn't cover.
• My personal insurance company? God I hope not, I don't want to file a claim with them and have them ding my rates because some cabbie hit me.
• Vassar? The most likely option of all of those, actually, is that Hertz bills me and I get reimbursed from Vassar.

So while it may seem like that last option is the most likely, there's a maze of twisty bureaucratic procedures to go through to make that happen, I'm sure. Not looking forward to that, and so I really and truly hope that the cabbie's insurance pays up like they're supposed to.

More stuff in my next post....

I had the weirdest dream last night. I dreamed I was so desperate for cash that I had solicited (and received) a job offer from a former employer. It's weird because this simply would never ever happen, for more reasons than I can actually count.

What was funny was that, even though I've visited the campus as recently as a few months ago, in my dream, they'd turned into a decrepit shadow of themselves. It was a collection of three story buildings on a side-street. The elevator was one of those ancient ones with the metal push-buttons for floors, and where the elevator takes about 5 minutes to go up two floors. There was a lending library of comic books on the first floor of what, in my dream world, was the "A" building.

Although, amusingly, the room where they kept the videogames was pristine and full of new stand-up arcade games. I guess even in my distorted dream-world, some priorities stay the same. :-)

Jeremy put in a cameo appearance in my dream, as we chatted about the various merits of my return, whether or not it was a good idea, reminisced about the "old days" working on Y!Finance, what the health of the company was, etc., etc. In the end, he suggested I go chat with Filo before I came back. I woke up before I could discover how my dreamworld had distorted him, though.

Trippy.

While walking to and from lunch today in College Center, I finally saw some people interacting with an art exhibit I'd seen the past couple days. It's a computer hooked up to a "helmet". The helmet is modeled to look like the face of David Koresh, and the computer is running a first-person-shooter style game.

It's unclear to me, since I came in to the presentation in the middle, whether this was an art project, a CompSci gaming-class project, or some bizarre merger of the two. Whatever it is, though, it seemed kind of fun.

You run around as David Koresh, in Waco, on that fateful day. Bibles fall out of the sky and grabbing them will give you, essentially, David Koresh Prophet Superpowers that you can use later in the game. The goal is to start by using the "Awaken" power (which you activate by saying "Awaken!" into the helmet's voice-mic) to convince FBI agents to follow you around for a little while. If you lead them into the compound, and up to the altar of Koresh's makeshift temple, they become converts, pick up guns, and defend the compound.

Do this a couple times, and you've got yourself a little bit of an army.

Then you can start Healing people, or using the (and I didn't catch the name of it) superpower that lets you basically rapidly shoot everyone around you as if you were spinning around with a machine gun really fast.

Later, when the PsyOps truck shows up to blare loud music at you, the helmet will start to vibrate annoyingly, like your head in real life might be, and the game chides you to go destroy the truck.

Scary part: Taking on the role of a whacked out nutjob who thought he was Jesus Christ looked like a lot of fun.

Finally, I can blog about something that's been being kicked around in various forms for a while now. Today, it was officially announced that I got promoted to managing the entire sysadmin group at $WORK, as "Manager of Systems Administration". I now have people who report to me, which is kinda scary in and of itself, but I've done "interim" management of a team in the past, and I know I can handle it.

The only awkward part of the promotion is that a good friend of mine (who let me know about the job opening in the first place) is now one of my direct reports, but we've known each other for well over a decade now, so we should be able to sort that out.

Definitely feels weird to be "management", especially since it was something I had always really tried to stay away from (heck, even mocking Radwin and Jeremy when they made that change). Overall I'm excited though. Can't wait to see what comes next.

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

Col. Kilgore, "Apocalypse Now"

In April 2001, a certain dotcom that shall remain nameless went through its first painful round of layoffs. One employee got laid off who had (so the story was heard by me anyway) already been assured of his survival. Hurt and angry beyond imagination, he crafted a "good bye" message to everyone in the corporate headquarters that was remembered for years to come, questioning whether the co-founder had a personality or even a soul, and suggesting perhaps that he should spend his dotcom-lotto winnings on buying one or both. (They learned their lesson, though, and by the time my layoff came, I had to send an e-mail individually to about 100 people saying good-bye... although it had none of the vitriol of this guy's message)

In the end, though, something we all could predict came to pass. He had burned that bridge sky-high, its fire blazing into the night brighter than Kilgore's beloved napalm. And several years later, after that employee had moved on to a new job in a new company, the original company bought his new company, and lo and behold, he was working for the same founder who he'd so publicly slagged years prior.

Sure, he probably regrets it. Sure, his raw emotional outrage (given the circumstances) was completely understandable. But it's still a fact of life that should be a corollary to Murphy's Law, and I'm going to claim it for my own:

The only bridges you ever need to cross are the ones you burned behind you.

This comes to mind for me tonight, as I watch another friend of mine lobbing FAE over his shoulder on the way out the door. I know why he's doing it, and I completely understand it. I used to work there, I can relate to it on that level, and he's totally getting the shaft, so I can relate to it on that level as well. But, by the same token, you never quite know the ways this may come back to you in the ass months or years from now.

We want to buy a used car. We want to find the car that has the features we want. Specifically, we'd like a list of all the cars that have the options available that we want, so we can then figure out which of those cars suck, according to Consumer Reports, and then use the rest as a "potential shopping list" to go to dealers with.

Except that it's really hard to find a list of, say, "all used cars' makes and models that have all wheel drive". or "all wheel drive OR four wheel drive". Etc., you take my meaning.

I googled this for a while and found something that purports to do it for NEW cars, but was remarkably good at feeding me FWD vehicles, even though I told it I didn't want FWD at all.

Anyone ever found such a tool in the past? share. share.

Two weeks ago today, we had a contractor come out to the house to look at some repairs. He even commented on the many other things that, theoretically, we could have him do besides the things we were having him quote out. It's an old house. Go figure. As he left, he said he'd "give us a call on Monday with some numbers". When Wednesday came, I got ahold of him. He apologized for the delay, and told me "by the end of the week". The end of the week came, with no response. Over the course of the following week, I've left numerous voicemails, with no return call forthcoming. He seemed really interested in doing the work, because -- after all -- if we liked his work, he'd have had a lot of opportunities for future work. And yet, silence reigned.

I started calling another contractor. Leave messages, get no callbacks. Not a one.

How hard is it to convince a contractor to give you a call back, for Christ's sake? It's like, we want to give them fucking money, and work, and nobody can even be bothered to return phone calls. The only one who actually returned our call, couldn't be bothered to give us a quote.

What's the secret to convincing a contractor to actually (a) call you back, (b) give you a quote, and then (c) do the work? If anyone knows a contractor in the Hudson Valley who wants to do all three of those things, feel free to drop me an e-mail.

Live life like you're gonna die
Because you're gonna
I hate to be the bearer of bad news
But you're gonna die

-- "You'll Have Time", William Shatner

Driving home tonight from work, I turned left onto 9W south instead of my normal right to go north. I had to go to the strip mall just south of the bridge and deposit a check at the ATM. That's where I was, when I heard the accident.

I didn't understand the sound at first, and it wasn't until I was leaving the ATM that I realized why I hadn't recognized it. It wasn't a normal "car-on-car" accident. It was "car-on-motorcycle". No grinding of two frames as they try to occupy the same space. It was more of simply the sound of the bike crashing into the ground by the guardrail. And the sound of the driver, landing a short distance away.

I never saw him move.

I won't say that he's definitely dead, but I will say that since they put his non-moving body in the back of the ambulance, and that ambulance hung around for some time before rolling slowly away, that I'm guessing it didn't go well for him.

He's just riding down the road and then his life was, presumably, over. Snap your fingers, and it happens randomly, just like that. Wrong place, wrong time, and you don't get to come home tonight, and your family gets that phone call, or that visit from a friend, that changes their lives forever.

I say this not to be morbid, and if you, gentle reader, knew the man in question, you have my heartfelt sympathies. I didn't know your friend, but clearly he had two friends with him at least who were all out enjoying a beautiful day for a bike ride. I had the top down on my convertible as well. It was one of those days, and he was enjoying it with his friends. May we all spend our last moments in life on a sunny beautiful springtime day doing what we enjoy in the company of friends.

Life is short. And every day that you don't tell the people in your life what they mean to you is a wasted day. What did you learn today? What did you accomplish today? If the answer is "nothing", you've wasted another day. And the number of days you get is limited. Who knows what the limit is, it's random, so don't bother saying to yourself "I'll do that later". Later may never come.

I never knew the guy on the motorcycle. But I think I'll be thinking about him for a long time to come.

With floor tickets for Madonna at Madison Square Garden going for as much as $354.50, one has to ask yourself, are the prices of concerts maybe, just maybe, getting a little out of fucking hand?

What else can you do with $355? (and let's face it, the figure is even higher... you're going to get stiffed for Ticketmaster's anal-rapeage percentage markup for tithes, there's going to be tax, etc., just figure $400 a ticket, and then you're probably bringing a date, so double it). So what else can you do with $800?

• Fly to Europe
• Buy a computer
• Buy a complete collection of Madonna CDs and play them really loud on a brand new stereo
• Hire a hooker who looks a lot better than Madonna, but who will dance for several hours to your Madonna CDs and lip-sync just like Madonna will, only the "finale" of the show is a lot more intimate, and probably more satisfying

I'm sorry, I just don't get paying that much money for anyone. There's only one band out there that I've ever said "I'll pay whatever it takes to see them," and that's Pink Floyd, and ya know what? $355+taxes/tithes per ticket might actually make me rethink that vow. Because when I said it, how could I have possibly conceived that a single concert ticket could ever cost that much money?

The weather is warm.
The storm windows are open.
The breeze is blowing through the house.
The Miata has been jump-started after a long cold winter in the garage.

Life is good.

I'm as much a fan as anyone of really well-done April Fools gags. (Google Romance comes to mind). However, an April Fools prankster oversteps their bounds when they say things like, "It's a shame this happens on April Fools Day because nobody will believe it," and then of course, when you click the link, it is, in fact, an April Fools joke.

Because (in my not-so-humble-opinion) April Fools jokes are supposed to hook you in with their believability (or, in some cases, their downright outlandishness, such as the Wireless Extension Cord), but what they're not supposed to do is acknowledge April Fools day and be like "this isn't an April Fools joke", and then actually be one.

That's just silly, IMHO, and shows weak imagination. But, of course, it was a /. article, what can I expect?

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.

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. :-)

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).

D and I have really been enjoying (and making good use of) the latest trend in frozen foods, which is those "skillet meal in a bag" things. Our favorites have been some of the Bertolli varieties.

A couple weeks ago, we purchased a chicken and pasta carbonara dinner that was just superb, far better than any carbonara we've made at home from scratch. We decided we wanted to go get it again.

Except we can't find it. You see, we both thought it was just "another of those Bertolli bags", except it clearly wasn't (as you can see from the page I linked to above, they don't have a carbonara). I've been to all three of the places we ever really go grocery shopping (Hannaford, Shop-Rite, or Emmanuels) and combed their frozen foods sections to no avail. It might be something we got at the Stop'n'Shop across the river the one time we went there, but I've yet to get back over and check.

But the important part is that, right now, we really don't even have any idea what we're looking for, who makes it, etc., etc., so it's not even like I could fill out one of those cards they have at Hannaford or Shop-Rite which say "I'd like you to carry ___________" because I couldn't begin to know what to fill in that blank with.

Hopefully, Stop'n'Shop has it, so I can finally know what the hell it is I've been looking for these past three weeks and then just write it down for posterity.

I can understand when news agencies might disagree with each other about the facts of a situation, but it always amazes me when news agencies can't even keep things straight within their own organization.

Take the front page of CNN right now. It claims that Grandpa Munster, who died recently, was both 82 years old and 83 years old.

Now, seriously, how the hell does that kind of lax fact-checking happen?

The parking lot I'm normally parked in was full. Overfull actually, so much so that even the "not-a-spot" I usually park in that doesn't get used because nobody thinks of it, had two cars squeezed into it.

Had to park up the hill way behind Blodgett. Coming down the hill towards the computer center, I was kicking the occasional ball of snow left behind by the plows. Until one of them completely failed to move, as it was frozen solid to the road. Newton was an asshole, because by his laws was I thrown forward landing face first -- well, actually knee-first -- on the pavement. My knee is gonna be hurting for fucking weeks. My hands for most of the rest of the day, I suspect.

Ugh.

I got up this morning, only to find this on my desktop:

All Administrative Offices are closed today, Tuesday, January 3rd. This closing is for excused employees only.

Considering I haven't been in the office since December 20th, I was actually kind looking forward to going back and getting some of those new projects rolling. Instead it looks like it'll be delayed one more day.

Oh well, maybe I can get some World of Warcraft in. I'm halfway to level 58. With a good day of questing and crap, I might be able to hit 60 today, so I could stop the incessant "level grindage" and just concentrate on raid nights.

UPDATE: Argh, the Tuesday maintenance window. Damn it! And it's "extended by two hours" today as well, so no WoW until 2pm EST for me. Damn it!

As I look back during the closing hours of 2005, I'm nothing short of amazed at the transformation the last year has brought to my life....

• I got together with D, probably the greatest thing to have ever happened in my life, ever, and suckered her convinced her to marry me.
• I started work at Vassar. Since I'd been wanting for some time to get out of the private sector and into an educational institution, this was a huge change for me. Pay-scale plummetted but my daily "how do I enjoy my job at the end of the day" quotient has gone up considerably.
• Moved out of the apartment and into D's house, where we'll probably live for quite some time

There's stuff I need to take care of 2006, no doubt about it. Part of it is that D and I are committing to eating out less and cooking more. This week's menu is already on the side of the fridge, so we can plan accordingly. Another part is that I'd really, really like to somehow find the time and money for the fencing lessons I've talked about taking since forever ago. Then of course, there's the slew of bad habits that I need to kick, and I need to continue to adjust to the lower salary of higher-ed employment.

In 2006, I'll be switching schools, changing from Marist to Vassar... I get my tuition for free at work, I'd be an ass not to take it, especially given the street-cred that Vassar has as a school.

Oh yeah, in 2006, D and I will also be getting married. Sweet. :-)

So, I hope everyone's 2005 was a great as mine was, and I hope your 2006 goes as well as mine looks like it will be.

Cheers!

Since I've started at Vassar, I've been given two major initiatives to work on.

The first was to completely revamp our backup system into something that is scalable and doesn't require the constant care and loving attention that our homebrew backups required. As of yesterday, the purchase order for Bakbone's NetVault was approved, putting that process firmly into the "deploy it" stage. NetVault is not, at all, a well known application. In fact, we almost blew them off because they're weren't a "big name" (Veritas, EMC Legato, Tivoli Storage Manager, for example), but in the end, after we "humored them" by having them come out (that's how we viewed it), we realized that their product was a 100% match for what I had drawn on my chalkboard on Day One as our "ideal world solution".

The second was to decide upon a new anti-spam regimen for the entire campus. After a couple false starts, we settled on IronPort's appliance at the edge. The purchase order for that was approved this morning. When we come back from break, the failover unit will arrive, and we'll begin deploying it in earnest.

The practical upshot of all of this is that I feel really goddamned good about getting some of these big projects mostly-completed, and am in good position to just take tomorrow and Thursday off as vacation days and finish up some non-work stuff before the holidays. (I have off from Friday through January 3rd already as holiday-time)

This is going to feel so good to relax for this long!

I've had the Jeep listed on autotrader for a while now. I've yet to get a single lead on selling it until today.

Except, of course, that I couldn't be more suspicious of today's "lead" than I ever have been:

BUYER INFO
Name: james hart
E-Mail Address: [REDACTED]@yahoo.co.uk
Comments: My interest to offer $9,400 for your car, We're located at 288 Royal palm Street, Gillinham SE16 1HW London. if offer good and car still avaliable, get me the location and the present condition of the vehicle, ASAP
thanks
JAMES

The ears perk up at this at first... OO! someone is interested... waaaaaiit a minute, London? That doesn't seem right.

So, clearly, this is 99.9% likely to be a scam of some kind, but I think the amusing part of this, as always, is figuring out how to lead them on and waste their time, and maybe even catch a criminal when they come to "pick up" the vehicle. So I replied to him telling him where it was (in general terms, not like a street address or anything), and that the condition was great, asking him how he wants to proceed.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong... maybe there's some latent interest in 2WD SUVs in England that I wasn't privy to in the past. But I'm not exactly counting on it.

Black Friday just didn't seem so "black". I don't care what CNN says, or how the retailers portray it, it just wasn't all that busy.

We showed up at Sears at around 9:30. While the lot was crowded, it was not significantly more crowded than any other weekend. We found a parking spot - with no significant effort - within the first six or seven spots from the doors.

Inside, we were overwhelmed not by other shoppers but by blood-smelling salespeople. They were following us around, two of them. One of them got the "just looking" as he accosted us immediately upon entry, and we were still looking for our sales guy. The other got sent to go fetch our salesguy when we couldn't find him on the floor (he was on break).

Aside from a glitch in the cash-registers, I have no reason to think there'd have been any sort of line at the cashier stations at all.

In the end, after some convoluted paperwork, our new refrigerator and our new dishwasher will be here in about a week and a half. We got in around 9:30, we were out of there by around 10:30. Feeling brave, we looked around the mall for a bit, and still managed to get out by 11:30.

Black Friday wasn't nearly so "black" as it has been in other years.

So there's a non-trivial chance that I will do something this year which I have studiously, consciously avoided more than the clap. Something so hideous, that it pains me even now, nearly a week away, to even consider that I might do this to myself.

Some sort of surgery? Wisdom-tooth extraction? Self-mutilation?

No, far worse, dear friends. There's an extreme likelihood that I'll be forced to deal with Black Friday at the mall.

You see, D's kitchen has two faults, both of which I can say in public because she will agree with me...

1.) It needs a dishwasher
2.) The refrigerator that we have is great for a single person, but if you put the things two different people like into it, it gets packed in a big big hurry.

So, the plan is to head off to Sears, bright and early (well, 9 o'clock, the salesguy we are dealing with doesn't start til then), and pick ourselves up a refrigerator (although we might go with this one since a lof of the rest of the kitchen is in whites) and an as-yet-to-be-determined dishwasher. We're doing it then, because we were tipped off that there would be a kick-ass sale on Kenmore appliances on Friday morning. Like 20% off type of kick-ass. And with appliances costing what they cost, 20% is an amount of money that makes even me think, "Damn, maybe I should brave the mall."

My vote, although I appear to have been vetoed, is to drive both cars up there Thursday night, park one, drive home, and then take a cab over in the morning, so as not to have to hunt and vulture for a parking spot on Black Friday. I appear to get no say in the matter, though. *laugh*

Anyhow, eventually there'll then be "plumber day" where we hire the plumber to come out, bring water (and drain?) to the fridge, as well as to the spot we park the dishwasher. And then, life will be much much happier all around.

"God bless the Internet"

- Finch, American Pie

Rammstein has decided, for whatever reason, that their latest CD, Rosenrot, will not be made available in the United States. It's not that huge a surprise, if one was to listen to the lyrics to their song Amerika, it's pretty clear that they don't like us. :-)

But, that said, their music is still kick-ass, and I wanted it. Amazon UK is my "normal" place for buying stuff from out of the country, and since they had it as a pre-order, I happily ordered it via th