Recently in Life Stuff Category

It has just been a fuck-awful winter this year. I think we've had more sleet or freezing rain this season than we have actual snow by a factor of like two or something. It has definitely been non-conducive to commuting, which is kind of a pain in the ass. I mean, I feel lucky that my job it is at least possible to work from home, even it can sometimes annoy people when it has to happen unexpectedly. I can't imagine the level of "suck" for those people who looked outside today at their frozen cars, looked at the weather forecast of "when you're coming home it'll be far far worse than it is now and you'll be stuck out on the road so you'll have to deal with it," and have no alternative but to suck it up and risk life and limb to go get their paycheck.

Note To Mother Nature: I'm officially over "ice", please just send "snow" from now on. If you insist on ignoring me, I'm going to buy a fuckton of illicit CFCs and release them into the atmosphere so as to speed up this "global warming" thing. You have been warned! :-)

This week while I was at LISA, I had one of the craziest dreams I've ever had.

I'm in someone's small kitchen, sitting at one of those teeny-tiny bar-style tables next to Obama. We're just hanging out, drinking beer, etc. One of my friends come by and makes some sort of joke at my expense (can't remember what) but after he walks away, Obama looks at me and goes, "pffft, what a dick!", and I nod.

We get talking and he eventually tells me "You should come work for me," to which I tell him "I've got such a debt-load there's no way I could live on government pay." He nods slowly and says, "yeah, I hear that a lot...."

At the end of the dream, I tell him "D and I, and you and Michelle and the kids should get together for dinner some time soon, before it gets too hectic for you" and he agrees.

So, no idea what THAT means but it was definitely amusing to recount it a couple times this week. :-)

Last night, as a "mutual gift-giving event", my parents treated D and I (for my birthday), and I treated my parents (for their anniversary), to Tanglewood's 10th annual Film Night At Tanglewood, conducted by the master of motion picture scoring himself, John Williams.

Unexpected was that after performing "Anything Goes", whose vocals were provided in Temple of Doom by Kate Capshaw, Mr. Williams invited Kate Capshaw herself up onto the stage to take a bow. Once that reveal was done, however, Mr. Williams wasted no time in introducing someone who would be an obvious person to join her on stage, her husband and Mr. Williams' many-times-employer, Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg proceeded to stay on stage, seated to Williams' left, and introduced every piece of the remainder of the evening, which concentrated on the Indiana Jones movies, with an encore of music from E.T. thrown in at the end.

Near the end of the night, my "hunch" played out. I couldn't picture that Spielberg would be here in the Berkshires talking up Indiana Jones and Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, and that Karen Allen - who returned to the Indy saga in that film to much fanboy rejoicing - wouldn't make the really short trek down to Lenox. And I was right, as they brought her out on-stage as well to tons of cheering.

I feel like I've been neglecting something these past few years. I've always been a huge fan of Williams' work, and I had no idea that this was an annual thing that happened each year, only an hour away. I've always been thinking to myself "I'd really love to some day make it out to LA for one of Williams' Hollywood Bowl summer performances of film music," and in reality, I can go see that right in my backyard so to speak.

We all had a great time, and I can't wait for next year now. This is totally going to be an annual event for me.

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 them. Unfortunately, after the release date they sent me an e-mail that said essentially, "Oh, we don't appear to be able to get any of that German CD in the limited edition, so we've cancelled your order. Sorry, old chap."

But now it's after the release date. The limited edition version (which includes a DVD of concert footage as well) is extremely hard to come by. Lots of places have already sold out.

Come to the rescue a good friend of mine, Ralf, the author of The Book of Postfix: State-of-the-Art Message Transport. He lives in Berlin, and after some chatting over instant messenger, he called some places local to him there, and managed to obtain a copy. His Christmas present to me. In exchange, Santa will bring his small child some Richard Scarry books which are hard to come by on that side of the pond.

Twenty years ago, I'd've been screwed. In today's day and age, it's no longer uncommon to have friends available on a moment's notice an ocean and eight time-zones away.

Growing up, I had a quartet of cereals I used to enjoy in the mornings.... Honeycombs, Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, and Alpha-Bits. Alpha-Bits were, by far, my favorite of all. I'm a "keep my cereal crispy" kind of guy, so Froot Loops and Apple Jacks were the bottom pair because they get soggy and soft way too quickly.

The last two years, it's been increasingly hard to find Alpha-Bits, and it made me sad. I wouldn't eat them all that often, but it was nice to have a box in the apartment so that if I decided I wanted some "comfort food" on a weekend morning, it was nice to have handy.

Then, about two months ago, none of the stores that used to carry Alpha-Bits did anymore. They were selling some "marshmallow Alpha-Bits" nonsense still, which is nothing more than Lucky Charms, but the good old fashioned Alpha-Bits were gone.

Then they reappeared! I was ecstatic! I figured they'd just come off the shelf because of a re-sizing of the boxes or something like that. Only when I looked closer did I see that the word "sweetened" had come off of the boxes. I bought a box, hoping beyond hope that it was all marketing... that they were de-emphasizing the sweetening, and laying their emphasis on the oat-cereal underneath, which is nothing more than shaped Cheerios.

This morning I discovered, much to my chagrin, that the folks at Post had, in fact, destroyed my favorite sunday-morning breakfast cereal. Gone is the sweet taste I grew up with, replaced with dry tasteless crap.

Those bastards.

Speaking of rings, I am very happy to announce that this morning, D did me the extreme honor of accepting my request that she become my wife.

No dates have been set or anything like that. We're still adjusting to "being engaged" rather than just being "living together" Give us a break. Hehehe.

Click the pic for some images and such, if you're into that sorta thing. D's friends and family wanted "pix galore" so there they are.

Normally I don't fall into these "blog meme" things, but I found this one too interesting to pass up. The American Library Association released its list of the most "challenged" books for 1990-2000. The question seems to be "which ones have you read?" My list is as follows:

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
32. Blubber by Judy Blume
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
55. Cujo by Stephen King
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
60. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
87. Private Parts by Howard Stern
88. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
96. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell

So for those who've asked, here's a quick update on the cat situation:

• The upstairs floor has, apparently, been ceded to the newcomers, Bill and G'Kar. D's cats rarely go up there now, except when they want to use the litter box that is up there (it was their original litter box).
• The ground floor appears to be disputed territory, but only mildly so. Each cat is willing to defend the immediate vicinity around them against cats of the opposite faction, but won't go out of their way to go across a room and chase a cat out of it, except...
• G'Kar appears to have a bit of a thing for Clementine. She'll hiss at him and make it clear she wants him to go away, but he's just all nice and polite, like the mack daddy virgin that he is. He'll follow her around the house (pissing her off more and more, obviously) until eventually she takes a swat at him and he retreats to the upstairs.
• The basement is definitely the domain of D's cats, although G'Kar and Bill have each at least once ventured down there.
• Certain spots on the ground floor are undisputedly D's cats turf -- D's office, the spot by the screen door in the kitchen, and the vicinity of their food dishes.

Overall, the hissing is usually just growling at each other as they pass, with no significant conflicts to speak of (although, that's not to say the fighting is 100% over... just two days ago, G'Kar and Gracie formed a cartoon-like ball of screaming fur for all of three seconds). But, at the 10,000' level, a state of détente appears to have formed.

Tonight on the way home, I stopped at the local Hannaford grocery store to pick up some supplies. Now, the Hannaford I used to go to, on Ulster Avenue, was -- while not "gorgeous" -- it was at least passable. Clean, etc.

The Hannaford in the Kingston Plaza is, well, a fucking hole. The first thing that greets you on entry is not the smell of fresh produce (as most groceries stores are designed to do, as an enticement to entry). The first smell you catch on walking into the Kingston Plaza Hannaford is the overwhelming stench of festering empty beer-cans from the bottle return area, placed in the lobby. There's homeless people bringing in their empties so they can have crack money or whatever it is they do with the change they get from the proceeds.

So I go about my shopping, and am ready to check out. While I'm standing in line this guy walks up to me, postively stinking of alcohol, telling me a sob story. "I'll buy your food for you for half price... all I've got are these food stamps, and I need gas money to get to Woodstock, so you pay me half what I pay, and I get to go home."

Now, let's face it... the guy cannot smell this bad of alcohol without being either (a) drunk, or (b) a homeless wino. I tell him, "Uh, sorry dude, can't do that," to which he replies, "Ah, well, can't hurt to try."

At which point I sigh heavily and say, "Well, actually it can hurt to try."

"Huh?" says he.

"Well, speculate for a moment that I might be a Social Services employee, here to do my evening's shopping. Speculate further that you've now put that employee in an awkward position by revealing to him that you're trying to commit the felonious sale of food stamps, and asking that employee to be a part of that felony. Now ponder if you're now depending on whether that employee would rather go home to his wife and family, or spend time dealing with your sorry ass and a police report. Because, after all, what are the odds that you just happen to be broke and away from home on the first business day of the new month, which is when your food stamps became valid?"

At this point, the wino homeless guy gets this panicked look in his eyes, like a deer caught in the headlights. "Uhhhhh, you mean you -- ah... "

"No," I said, "But I could have. So it can hurt to ask. So why don't you just use them to buy yourself some fucking food like you're supposed to instead of trying to get beer money out of them or something?"

At which point homeless wino dude wanders away.

A couple minutes later, the cashier looks around conspiratorily, leans over and says, "That was seriously the funniest shit I've seen in a long time, guy."

Well, on Friday, D accidentally got G'Kar and Clementine into the same room. Now, G'Kar, not really used to "hiding" so much in his reign over the apartment, decided to hide under the end-table next to the bed, where he had no escape route, at which point Clementine beat the crap out of him for a few minutes, until D chased Clementine away.

Back to lock-up the cats went.

Today, after I emptied the apartment (with George and Mark's help) of the last of its stuff, we opened the door to the bedroom and let the cats out to mingle with D's cats. It's been...interesting.

The first hour was my cats hanging out in the bedroom where they've been staying, defending it from anyone who would come in (and by defending it, I mean simply growling a lot and scaring off any incoming cats).

Realizing my cats were entrenched, and this wouldn't accomplish anything, we lured them out of the bedroom and shut the door behind them, trapping them in "the rest of the house."

So far, a few hours later, there's been no major engagements, but a lot of posturing. My cats haven't "run" or "hid", and hers haven't beat the snot out of mine, so it would seem at face value that progress has been made on this front. They seem to be sorting out the pecking order amongst themselves. (Predictably, Bill comes out poorly in the new pecking order, seemingly beneath both Clementine and Gracie, but where G'Kar will wind up is anyone's guess at the moment).

I think this all might be sorted out by the end of the weekend. Sure, it seems there'll be some growling for a while, but I think we might be past the worst of it, knock on wood....

(As I almost forget to swing by Dunkin' Donuts before heading over to continue the emptying-of-the-apartment, so we can get D some much needed caffeine)

D: I need an infusion of "pep" ...
Me: uh-huh
D: Or you're going to get an infusion of "bitch".

(title shamelessly stolen from an IM conversation with Tera)

So tonight we introduced the cats to each other. Here's the players:

• Tallulah - D's papillon dog, friendly to everyone and everything she thinks could be a possible playmate.
• Clementine - D's "subservient" cat, the totally passive, skittish cat who runs away from everyone and everything.
• Gracie - D's "alpha" cat, she pushes both Tallulah and Clementine around making them get off the bed or couch if she wants to sit there, etc., etc.
• Bill - my "subservient" cat, he pretty much let's everyone push him around. He used to be really skittish around people, but has gotten a lot better.
• G'Kar - My "alpha"... has been known to stalk Bill and then pounce on him, just for fun. A bully of sorts.

So, as you read those descriptions, you'd probably make the predictions that D and I made,,... which is that Tallulah is going to get along with everyone (she's already met Bill and G'Kar by coming over to the apartment). Gracie and G'Kar would squabble for top-cat position, and Bill and Clementine would then fall into line behind whomever was now "running the show".

Sound right?

Completely not how it's playing out.

G'Kar and Bill are cowering in fear in the kitchen, where Clementine is defending the house. Gracie hasn't been seen in an hour, she's off hiding somewhere trying to pretend that my two cats haven't arrived.

And of course I'm torn between "getting in the middle to prevent them from hurting each other", and "let them squabble it, there's gonna be some scratching, there's gonna be some blood, but in the end they'll all suss out their new roles in the world order, and it'll all be good afterwards".

I think it's a lot like being a parent, where you have to step back and say "none of them have the ability to kill each other, so just let it go, because if you interfere it just will prolong it."

Sigh.

I'm now probably about 80-85% moved into D's house. There's about 5-10% that needs to be carted down to the dumpsters, and about 5-10% more that needs to be packed up and brought over. We made some on-the-fly decisions yesterday of "stuff we're not going to worry about moving today and will come back to deal with tomorrow or later in the week", since we had established a really nice loading-the-truck rhythm and didn't want to break that to have people start packing.

John, Damion, my parents, D's brother, D, and myself all spent a good four hours loading, driving, and unloading my apartment into D's house. A million mad thanks to everyone who showed up. (Including people who offered their help at other times... Pete came over Friday night when i indicated I might start loading the truck up the night before to get a head-start on it, and Dave offered to come over and help me pack).

Since last night was supposed to be my night to DM @ Geek Night, and we all knew that wasn't going to happen, John liked my idea of making it into a poker-night, instead, since it was much lower maintenance to do that. I brought D's brother over with me. He did great for his first night with a table of strangers he'd never tried to get a read on before. Damion came along as well, and likewise did really well. In fact, both of them clearly had their head in the game more than I did, and I bowed out early. I figured, if I can recognize that I'm not on my game, there's no point in throwing money into rebuys, even if they are the "friendly home game small-stakes" rebuys.

Today we have to go over and get the cats, and bring them over. This should be the most interesting part of this whole equation -- seeing how D's two-cats-and-a-dog react to the house being invaded by another two-cats. More importantly, seeing which of the alphas - my G'Kar or her Gracie - come out on top in the pecking order.

I'll tell you this, though, with four cats in the house, I almost guarantee you there won't be any sort of mouse problem. *grin*

Well, that's an ominous sounding headline, but I couldn't think of one better.

It's 2 a.m. ... I'm pretty much exhausted. I spent the better part of the evening packing the last of my stuff into boxes. And by "last" I mean "not really the last"... there's still a lot of "little shit" around that I have to deal with... the small pile here, the small pile there, all of which will end up in a box marked "Misc. Shit" or something. Oh yeah, and the kitchen? Completely not even touched yet. Luckily, Mom said she was coming over early, and would start working on that.

Only tonight, really, have I really ever questioned my sanity for not simply hiring a moving company to do it all. I think this move was my proof, though, to myself... the proof that paying pros to pack and move you is so, so worth every penny.

But, I've also taken this opportunity to pitch a lot of crap. And by "pitch" here I mean at the moment "add to a growing pile of boxes and garbage bags that will be among the things the moving posse is asked to deal with tomorrow, hauling them downstairs and into the dumpster instead of the truck."

The cats got their shots today, and (finally, I'd only been talking about it for five years) got microchipped in case they ever get out. (D's cats are outdoor cats, so there's at least a possibility that they'll see the other cats heading in and out the door and get ideas of their own).

Oh yeah, and another reason for hiring movers: I absolutely hate driving the moving truck. I could never really own a Hummer, much as I might joke about it, because I really hate driving huge vehicles.

As D and I have said a bajillion times, though, during this move... the process of moving in together sucks ass. The result of moving in together, though, is well worth it.

OK, it's time for bed, my last night in the apartment. Tomorrow is going to be a long, long day...

This was a refreshing addition to my world this evening. Here's a recipe for personal happiness in at least some small measure.

• Attend a concert in June that kicks ass
• Buy the DVD of that concert, Anthrax: Alive 2 The DVD.
• Start to watch the DVD
• Before the intro to the first song is over, have already had the camera show you staring straight into it from a distance of maybe two feet with the "screaming metal face", and realize you're now an (albeit minor) part of the disc.

Sweet.

UPDATE: For those who care. There's a really crappy pan at 00:00:41, but at 00:00:50 is the "metal shot".

This past weekend, D and I took a weekend trip up into the Adirondacks. She had bought me, as a birthday gift, a weekend getaway at Timberlock, an all-inclusive "camp" located on Indian Lake way up in the middle of nowhere in the Adirondacks.

To put it in perspective, there was no electricity... no phone ... no cell phone coverage ... no TV ... couldn't pick up a radio station at all on the Land Rover's radio... it really was "the middle of fucking nowhere."

And it was great. We had a cabin right on the lake, we spent more time simply relaxing -- reading, sleeping, eating, lounging -- in three days than I had in the past three months. We met people there for whom, like us, it was their first time there. We also met people who'd been coming there annually for the past sixty-seven years.

The camp has a long history, often passed down from one generation to the next, going back to the 1800s. There's staffers who've worked there for years, it's just one big huge happy family.

And the best part is, for a couple days, a week, whatever, you get to be part of that family. Hanging out by the fire in the evening, bullshitting about whatever comes up.

We're looking forward to planning a trip back up there next year. Maybe even convince a couple friends to come up with us or something when we do. It's a great place to relax, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Jeff's entry reminded me that today was 9/11, as he talked about how his morning went, four years ago... I posted this to his comments, but figure it should be here as well...

I remember that I had woken up and turned on what used to be the local NBC affiliate on TV, right around 5:45, like I normally would, and was confused that -- instead of seeing the local "early morning show", I was seeing the "Today Show" set. They had cut to the East Coast feed of "Today" when a plane had "accidentally crashed into 1 WTC". I sat down on the couch for a while, and watched with the sort of idle curiousity that one gawks at a roadside accident with... the "Man that sucks, but you still can't turn away" type of thing. I remember going back into the bedroom and telling my then-wife, "A plane crashed into the WTC," and her rolling back over to go to sleep. It was interesting, it was news, but it wasn't jump-out-of-bed-worthy.

A little while later, though, when I told her about 2 WTC, it all became clear. And we spent the entire day sitting on our couch staring at the TV set, not knowing what the next hours would bring. Was it over? Was there more? Was there something new and deadlier planned for 9/12?

I remember that I had felt sorta like I had been personally stabbed. I didn't have any ambition to get up and go to work the next day, either, so I just worked from home. I don't think I ended up actually driving into the office until the 13th or 14th, and then I still felt sorta like a zombie in the whole process. And again, I can't quite define "why". I was lucky in that while I'm a New Yorker, I actually didn't know anyone (at the time anyway) who was missing or dead. There had been a brief panic of "contact your cousin, who works in Manhattan and make sure she got home to Brooklyn during the mass exodus" (she did), but otherwise, I was -- in reality -- completely unaffected by it, which makes it hard to understand, to this day, why I felt so sapped of energy and will by the whole affair.

Of course, D and I were watching the Blue Man Group DVD last night, which features their song, "Exhibit 13", which is just an instrumental over images of various papers that blew into Carroll Gardens on 9/11, and D told me, "That was my neighborhood on 9/11, I lived in Carroll Gardens," and it sort of all brought it home and made it more real to me than it had been in the entire previous four years. This was debris that had landed in Brooklyn, where my girlfriend was living at the time. To a certain extent, it closed the loop for me, from then to now.

So now that New Orleans is underwater, and the devastation of property is huge, various charities have started beating the drums about raising money to "rebuild New Orleans".

I'm forced to ask myself one simple question: "Why?"

New Orleans sits below sea level, and is only able to sustain itself as "dry" artificially via the use of pumping equipment that runs 24x7, as well as huge levees to keep the water out (the levees breaking are what caused most of New Orleans' problems).

Scientists have been predicting for years that New Orleans was going to vanish eventually. The disintegration of the Mississippi River delta, the fact that it was below sea level, all these things made it clear to scientists that New Orleans' days were numbered. While it was a convenient place to build a city a couple hundred years ago, when the delta was still above sea level, in today's reality, it'd simply be stupid to build there.

But now, New Orleans is gone. It's essentially been wiped off the face of the earth, Old Testament-style. If we know (as we do) that the delta is going to continue to disintegrate and New Orleans' problems are only going to continue, why do we rebuild there?

Isn't it the much smarter investment to say -- if we're going to spend money at all -- we're eminent-domain'ing your property, putting it under-water as part of the delta, preserving it as a public wetland and/or historic property, now go buy yourself a new house/whatever somewhere else that isn't going to sink into the sea like Atlantis.

I understand New Orleans has lots of history, but the time to face the cold hard reality of the situation is when you're looking at billions upon billions of dollars in rebuilding costs. Isn't now an excellent opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past and -- if you're going to spend those billions anyway -- spend them on things which aren't going to be wiped out again some time soon?

The New York Times did a story on how AOL just got pimpsmacked for making it extremely difficult for users to cancel their service.

Apparently, though, they lifted one of the comments from my Sweet Jesus, AOL Guy! I Want To Cancel My Goddamn Service! post from a couple years ago.

Kinda a bummer that the quote they lifted was some guy claiming it wasn't all hard to cancel, when they had such a quote-rich main-post to lift from, but, ah well... I still got a link from the Times. :-)

My life is in scheduling hell for the next few months, certainly at least the next month and a half or so. What's got Derek so busy that he's bad at returning your (e-mail, calls, letters, smoke-signals) or forgetting your (birthday, anniversary, wedding, bar mitzvah)?

• Before the end of September, I need to be completely out of my apartment and into D's house... and, frankly, this single-line item for this list actually has its own two-dozen-item hit-list of stuff her and I need to do to make that all happen, from "Getting my cats shots so they'll be safe around her outdoor cats" to figuring out how to deal with phone numbers, etc., etc. Lots of stuff in this to-do item, hence why it's the highest priority item...
• I really need to get some work done on the second edition of "the book", now that we're starting to have weekly IM conferences about progress and, frankly, I haven't written a word yet since we signed the contracts two months ago.
• There's a helluva lot of stuff at work that needs to get done.
• Oh yeah, and they're sending me away to training a couple times in the next few months... It's good, and necessary, and I'm not complaining at all, but it's just one more thing that takes me away from other things on the to-do list
• I've got to at least attempt to have a "social life", and by that I mean that I've got to make time to spend with D, there's the semi-regular "geek nights" for D&D, and occasionally I need to just relax in front of the TV and watch Battlestar Galactica or something.

I've got a lot on my plate for the next few months, so if you're one of the people I forget, or ignore, or whose call I don't return, please don't take it personal, just realize that my next few months are filled to 110% capacity with stuff, and there's going to be some stuff that slips through the cracks.

Starting "real soon now", I'll be one of two UNIX System Administrators at Vassar College. I've been wanting to work there for a while now, actually --- I think Dave can attest to it being somewhere in the area of two years now that I've been asking him to find me a job there --- and I'm really looking forward to the benefits of working in an academic environment instead of the private sector.

That's not to say there aren't going to be some adjustments, especially in the area of income, but in the long-run it's the right thing to do.

This weekend I set into motion the events which need to unfold to get rid of the Jeep. It's a good vehicle, in that it runs great, is in good shape, etc., etc., but I don't need two cars, it was never a vehicle I wanted (it was the car that She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named wanted, and which I got saddled with during the divorce), and I won't be sad to see it go.

I'm just waiting for some paperwork to show up in the mail, and it will be perfectly free and unburdened for me to sell it to someone who will (hopefully) give it a good home.

Friday, D and I headed to Virginia for the weekend. Her niece, the delightful Mary V., was celebrating her first birthday. We got in really late on Friday night and crashed at a local Holiday Inn. On Saturday, I got introduced to pretty much the entire clan, including her brother, sisters, parents, and various in-laws.

It got off to a good start when D thought nobody was home at her sister's townhouse. Her sister had left her a voicemail saying she was going shopping. Since D knew the code to her sis' garage, D let us in, and then proceeded into their little backyard to give the dog a few minutes of much-needed "grass time" if ya know what I mean... which left me alone in the den when D's brother-in-law came downstairs essentially wondering "who the hell is this standing in my den?" ... the confusion was cleared up quickly enough, but not an especially great way to meet the first member of the family. (grin)

Overall, though, it was a fun weekend. We went out on the same brother-in-law's boat, cruising the waters around Alexandria. We all stuck around for a while afterwards and ordered in some California Pizza Kitchen cuisine.

Other than the incredibly long drive back home (delays totalling about three hours) it was a pretty decent weekend with a great bunch of people. Feels good to get along with everyone right off the bat.

I won't pretend to interpret this one. Seriously.

I'm apparently living on campus at Marist. But in a building that doesn't exist (the place I'm living is actually like a house, except that it's located where a parking lot is today). There's a big-ass woodchuck or mole hole in the ground near the white picket fence (Seriously, a white picket fence). I look down the hole with this flashlight (the hole is huge, like 5-6" across) and I can see that there's this huge cave down there. And I see turtles surprised by my light (awww) then I see that there's other turtles. And seriously, they begin to have a knock-down, drag-out war... like four-on-four. Oh, and the turtles have these cool designs painted onto their shells.

So I say "wow, that's cool" and then head off to class. I meet one of my roommates there, who apparently is John Cusack. I don't remember much of what followed that, except that it involved a large group of the class walking out, and as we passed through another classroom, we were saying things like "Two shows daily, folks, 8 and 10, please tip your waitresses." .... then I bailed on my buddy John Cusack so I could go head over to the radio station and do some heavy metal radio show on the campus radio station.

That's when I woke up.

That is seriously one of the most whacked out dreams I've ever had.

I haven't posted an entry in a while, so I figured I'd give a brief run-down on the various goings-on in my life.

First, the big news is that I've accepted a new position at a company in the city. I start there around about the end of the month. I'll be doing it sounds like mostly the same sorts of things I'm doing now, except that I will be doing it down in Times Square. My commute will go up by about 20 minutes or so each way, but it'll be on the train (either Amtrak or Metro-North... not sure which yet, but MNR for now), which means that I can actually do stuff while commuting, instead of just concentrating on the road. That, and the fact that (train+parking+subway) costs are still cheaper than the ludicrous cost of gas to and from Goshen.

Second, I started pondering "the next time I move", and how much assorted junk I've accumulated... I've started "the great purge," eBay'ing as much stuff as I can, so that the next time I move, it doesn't take nearly so much effort, energy, or (in my laziness factor) as many moving men to do the job. I'm selling the TiVo (it's become a boat-anchor for me, with all the HD programming I watch these days), the old G4/450, playstation games, and probably a shitload of DVDs. I've even pondered getting rid of the fucking Jeep, that albatross that's been around my neck for years. I'd have to sort out some issues to make that thing go away, but nothing I couldn't achieve I don't think.

As I wrapped my head around the idea of getting rid of some of this stuff, it felt liberating. I come from a long line of hoarders... my dad's a mild hoarder (he won't admit it, though)... my grandfather had a bunch of stuff, and my great-aunt (his sister) was practically a mental-patient-quality hoarder. It's cool to realize I'm breaking that cycle.

Anyhow, that's what's new and exciting... new job, new lifestyle... good stuff goin' on...

Peaks... went up to Vermont this past weekend for a weekend away with D. Had a great time, other than the drive back in the rain.

Valleys... my grandfather (my mom's dad) was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia-like symptoms. While there, they diagnosed a heart condition - serious, but not their primary focus because of the breathing problems. While under observation last night, he coded. The doc said that they were using CPR and paddles for about 10 minutes, and while CPR does keep some blood flowing, it's certainly no match for an actual heartbeat (especially in a guy as big as my grandfather, a man for whom the description "barrel-chested" seemed to be invented)... his eyes are open but there definitely doesn't appear to be anybody home. He hasn't had any sort of sedative, according to the doctor, so he said, "he should be able to hear you." Except it's clear he doesn't. His eyes don't move, he doesn't react to any sort of visual or audible stimuli, etc.

Gonna be a long week, I suspect, while my grandmother, my mom, and my uncle, sort out what to do next....

UPDATE: It's over. Peacefully, quietly, and with very little pain near as anyone can tell. Thanks to everyone who passed along their well-wishes.

I was telling a friend of mine that I'm going to Vermont for the weekend. The friend of mine indicated "Oh, I know that area, my favorite ice cream place is there."

When I asked how they had learned about this place. "Oh, I went to fat camp up there, right near the ice cream place."

I indicated to them that the irony of this was unescapable. It was also distinctly bloggable.

Last night was Phase Two of the Great Experiment. You see, D had never seen any of the Star Wars movies, ever. Sure she knew a couple things like pop-culture references (e.g., Vader being Luke's father) but otherwise, it was all Greek to her.

From this sprouted my idea... to have someone of our age - not a kid easily amused by CGI and pretty pictures - watch the Star Wars movies in "George's intended order". I prepared her in advance that she shouldn't get disheartened because the first two movies in that sequence were crap, and everyone who likes Star Wars will pretty much admit it except the swooning fanboys.

So, last night, she watched Clones... now at some point in the next couple weeks, she'll see Sith with me, at which point she can push on into the "original" trilogy.

More on this experiment when we get closer to drawing some conclusions. Right now, there's too much of the "ugh, this writing sucks, who's that Jamaican Idiot Savant Alien, and how did he become a politician?!" type of stuff going on...

I'm coming down the hill on 9W South, heading towards the Rondout. This motorcyclist decides he's too cool for words and decides to pass me (I'm already doing ten over) and then, for good measure, pop a wheelie while doing so.

Then there was the cop. That alone would have been funny, watching him try to explain his reckless behavior.

Even funnier though was watching him overreact to seeing the cop. And watching him flip the bike ass-end-first.

I don't wish ill on people, believe me, but I can't exactly feel pity for that guy either. :-)

Friday night... working on my POSC392 final exam, which the professor let us have as a take-home (cool!) Also started working on my POSC101 position paper that is due on Tuesday night.

Saturday... spent some quality time with D in the morning, one of the few days this week I've been able to actually spend time with her. All afternoon working on my position paper. D&D Geek Night in the evening.

Sunday... left early for the city with Mom, for Mother's Day at the Stadium. Watched a game (where, surprisingly, Kevin Brown managed to win). Drove back home. Then rode up to the parents' house to pick up the Miata and bring it back to the carport for the summer. After that, realized "there is absolutely nothing to eat or drink in the house, for you or the cats" and while I can order-in Domino's, the cats would be pretty well fucked, so off to Hannaford I went. Came home, finished up the last of the footnotes and bibliography work for the position paper.

Tomorrow night... study. Maybe get done early enough to spend some quality time with D. Hopefully.

Last night when I got home from class, there was an e-mail in my inbox indicating that the fan-club presale for Megadeth was going to happen this morning. I didn't even know they were doing a summer tour (I don't pay attention to these things except when Pollstar notifies me).

They're doing two shows, one at Jones Beach, and one at PNC Arts Center in NJ. So at 10 a.m., I've got the desktop going after one set, and the laptop going after the other, see what tickets I could get, etc., etc.

GIGANTOUR: FEATURING MEGADETH, DREAM THEATER, FEAR FACTORY
Tommy Hilfiger At Jones Beach Theater
Wantagh, NY
08/23/05 - 6:00 PM
Section    Row   Type      Ticket Price  Convenience Charge     Description
ORCH A     A     W-PRE     US $45.00     US $9.70     
ORCH A     A     W-PRE     US $45.00     US $9.70     
ORCH A     A     W-PRE     US $45.00     US $9.70     
ORCH A     A     W-PRE     US $45.00     US $9.70     
Seats:9 to 12 | Seating Chart

... which, if you look at the seating chart is pretty much "front row, dead center, have a nice day".

Sweet.

And I won't even rant about how the convenience charge for the four tickets cost almost as much as a fifth ticket would have.

Big fucking boat-anchor.

Gonna take a hit for $1100 in maintenance and repairs on it today. And yeah, I guess that's pretty good amortized over a year or two (because I'm pretty bad about bringing it into the shop on a regular basis) but it's still a painful amount.

D

They've finally done it. A complete book, 1440 pages long, containing every single Calvin And Hobbes comic ever.

Thanks to Mark for the info.

I flew out to California today for the MySQL Users Conference. My plan was simple. I stayed up all night last night, didn't go to bed, with the intent of sleeping all the way west on the plane. That way, I'd wake up in California, at 11:15, fully rested, and I'd be, more or less, on Pacific Time.

Well, the layover in Chicago didn't help. It was just long enough that it fully woke me up after the two hour Stewart-to-O'Hare leg. Which meant that my body behaved as though it had gotten a full night's sleep, even though it had only gotten two hours. I catnapped briefly on the five hour leg, but only for about 45 minutes.

I arrived in California feeling perky as hell, despite my lack of actual slumber. I drove over to Jeremy's condo. He was out of town for the afternoon so he had given me the code to get through his garage, and then had left a door unlocked for me so I could come in. Except that one of his house-keeper type people had very kindly thought "oh, he left the back door unlocked by accident, I'll lock it for him," which put me in a pretty pickle. Luckily I was able to reach the person who did it via my cel phone, and convince them to come over and let me in. :-)

I decided I was going to head over to Bay101 and play some poker. I figured that I'd play for an hour or two, get tired, and come back to Jeremy's house to nap. To say that my game was... odd .. today would be an understatement. I played for three or four hours, and in the end my sole "net" was "down 1BB". I brought my racks back to the cashier at the end of the day, with a couple singles sitting on top of the stacks, and got my $100 bills back. It was crazy.

There was one really bad piece of news today. I discovered something that I had been suspecting for a while from what I'd seen: My favorite place to eat in all of San Jose had vanished from the face of the earth. Tutuzzo's, which used to be located next to the Towne Theatre on The Alameda was the greatest little "hole in the wall, family owned, Italian restaurant" I'd even been to in the entire time I lived in California. It's been replaced with some crappy yoga place or something. I was so distressed.

I made my ritual stop to In-N-Out Burger already so I've got that out of the way. Now it's just time to start sorting out who I'm going to visit when the conference schedule permits.

Dropped George off at the bus station this morning. He's heading back to Colorado. I'm not entirely sure that I agree with the logic he's using to come up with his decision, but I do wish him the best and hope that he finds whatever it is he's lookin' for.

It'll be weird to not have a roommate again (although, admittedly, in the extremely good "I can walk around in my underwear if I feel like it" way).

I got my tax paperwork back from the accountant today. So, I decided matter of factly, I'll just drop them in the drawer here next to the past two years' worth of tax forms and ... hey ... where are the past two years worth of tax forms? They were right here last time I remember seeing them, sitting on top of all the crap in this drawer.

... and now, two hours later, still no sign of them. I've given up for the evening partly because it's getting late, but mostly because I don't need them at the moment, and I know they'll turn up in a couple of days when I am not even thinking about them.

That's not to say it isn't annoying me right now as to where they could have up and disappeared to, but still...

Waking up at 4:45 realizing you've been sleeping horribly on your neck and that if you move it a 1/4-inch it's a recipe for excruciating pain.

Please let my double-dose of Advil kick in soon. Please. Otherwise, my ability to drive to work is pretty much zero since I couldn't even really begin to look for traffic like this. :-(

Hopefully this will be the last "really and truly busy weekend" for a while. On my list of "things which must get done this weekend...

• Going out to dinner tonight
• Geek Night Turned Poker Night on Saturday night
• Read seven chapters of a book for my PoliSci 101 class, and do a journal entry on each chapter (so about a total of 3500 words)
• Get all of my paperwork together for my income taxes, so I can drop that off at the accountant
• Remember to drop off (and then pick up afterwards) the laundry

On the list of things I "really should try and get to"...

• Catch up on the five Netflix discs sitting on my coffee table.
• Start working on my GenCon2005 session that I'm running (yeah, GenCon isn't til August, but I need to get this thing tested before then)
• Heck, I should fill out all the paperwork for the sessions so that my free passes to GenCon actually happen.
• Book airfare to Portland for the O'Reilly Open Source Conference since I got approved to go to that for work.

... all this, of course, while avoiding the "crack for grown-ups" that World of Warcraft has become. Yesterday, when I took the day off to study for last night's mid-term, I was using WoW as an incentive.... "read two more chapters, and you can go play for a half hour"... I felt like I was parenting a six year old except I was the parent, and I was the six year old.

I have a vision of tomorrow night being very ... crowded. Wednesday as well.

My plan for today was to study for my Thursday night terrorism class' mid-term, and to complete an annotated bibliography that's due for my Tuesday night class. Various things came up, and it's now 9 p.m., and I haven't started any of it.

This is going to be a very hellish week.

If anyone wants to know why I plan to (finally) go do the paperwork for my concealed-carry permit, this is why.

It happens everywhere, even tiny little towns like this one.

I've been thinking of moving lately. Mind you, I abhor moving. The entire process is the most painful thing I can think of... It basically sucks on every conceivable level.

But, I'm tired of an hour commute each way in the Jeep. I get crappy gas mileage in that piece of shit (an albatross hanging around my neck from Fraulein Bitch). But it's not just the mileage. I mean, I could switch to the Miata the first sign of great weather, but do I really want to put 600 miles a week on the Miata? It's blessed with really low mileage right now (6 model years old, 32K miles, give or take), and starting to use it like that would just ruin that.

I wanted to be sure I was going to be where I'm at for a while before I started entertaining the idea. I mean, $ORKPLACE is hell and gone from civilization. If I decide to leave, I'm 99% sure I'd have to move to find decent work -- not that it's any picnic in Port Fucking Ewen, but still.

I don't know if I'll do it or not. Still sorta up in the air. Just something I'm thinking about. I just hate thinking about it.

I finally found out which hotel in Portland, Oregon the 2005 O'Reilly Open Source Conference was using, so I rushed over to the hotel web site, and booked myself a room. OSCON is notorious for filling up the hotel, so I usually book early, and then re-rate my reservation to the conference rate later on.

Only after I started trying to find out how close to the Convention Center the hotel was did I realize I'd been in such a rush to get the reservation done that I'd made a very critical mistake.

I'd reserved a room for the week in Portland, Maine.

Luckily, I always get reservations I can cancel out of at no penalty, so I quickly cancelled and got a room in the right hotel.

Oops.

Fraulein Bitch decided to try and leave a smart-ass comment on my blog. I know it was her because (a) she knew who the friends I was referring to in the previous post were, and (b) because she's retarded enough to sign in from her computer in East Bumblefuck, Indiana:

$ host 68.58.16.235
235.16.58.68.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer pcp01088545pcs.spedwy01.in.comcast.net.

Ah, the sweet bliss of sending her drivel off to the bitbucket. I've got half a mind to send her next "I'm a loser who wants money I've got no right to" payment to her in pennies.

Rest in peace, dude.

We are just getting a metric assload of snow. Yesterday there was a point where I looked outside and could barely see the apartment buildings maybe 100' from my living room window, the lake beyond them was "gone" and the forested hill on the other side ... well, that I was certain no longer existed, so thick was the snowfall.

Right now, the wind has picked up, and it's pretty much impossible to tell if the snowfall has stopped or not, given that there's a lot of horizontal movement of the snow. The ruts from the plows last night were in the one foot range, but now with all the drifting, it's pretty much impossible to tell what the "actual" snowfall is. If I look next to George's van, I could believe either 1-inch or 2-foot depending on where I look.

I'm just glad I wasn't stupid enough to volunteer for the "moving of the office from one building to another" this weekend (not that, if I had, I'd've driven an hour south in this shit anyway, but still).

Here's hoping they get this crap all cleared away before the commute tomorrow, or that'll suck majorly.

From an IM conversation:

Friend: Ever had someone who will NOT leave you alone at lunch?
Me: Heh .. yes
Friend: I'm trying to eat and she just will never leave me alone. She likes to come chat with me while I'm trying to eat. She's sitting like 10' away right now while i'm typing to you. (can't see the screen obviously)
Me: Your IM client doesn't show the "old" conversation if you get a new msg from someone does it?
Friend: Nope.
Me: Then close this window and I'll message you one minute. Get her looking at the screen.

... a minute passes ....

Me: Dude have you ever had someone who will NOT fucking leave you alone while you're trying to eat?

Apparently, it worked. Friend has admitted they now owe me a favor. It's Godfather-like, I tell ya.

So it's a little later than I expected, but I figured that you gentle readers deserved an update (and a bit more honesty) about the recent discussions.

First, there was no joy this weekend. But that's OK, "D" explained to me the whys and wherefores, and it was totally cool. We made plans to get together this evening for dinner and a movie.

After the movie, as we were driving home, "D" mentioned she'd BlogStalked me (a beautiful word I hadn't heard before, not sure if she coined it or not, though) and had read my recent entries, and had gotten a couple (easily understandable) misunderstandings about why I had asked her out.

You see, "D" and I had dated for a while once before, close to a year ago. It ended really badly (and by "really badly" I mean, like totally heinously poorly), and I can freely accept the blame for most of the things that went wrong, both during the courtship and in the closure aspect of it. But she read my blog entries as meaning that I felt desperate, lonely, and was in a "any port in a storm" mood. And I realized that while I've talked to some folks about this in great detail via instant messenger, I hadn't really been detailed enough in my blog, and it was easy to see it that way, so I should probably correct that...

When I refer to my "social ineptitude", it is usually in the context of looking back and seeing how badly I had fucked up something really and truly good. I'm not going to get into the details and specifics, but suffice it to say that my prior relationship, with She Who Shall Not Be Named, had ingrained a lot of "defense mechanisms" into me, and I had not yet really let go of those things. I didn't need to "defend myself" against "D", but I acted like I did, and things were the worse for it.

My rantings about social ineptitude basically all come back to the belief that "even when I do find someone who is great in every possible respect, who is attracted to me, and who I am attracted to, and where we both enjoy spending time with each other, etc., etc., I am bound to screw it up."

And that last part always came back, to me, as "how completely you fucked things up with 'D'".

I wrote this a week ago Sunday, at the depths of my miniature depression about the whole thing.

I knew how I'd fucked things up, and I'd long ago realized that I had to correct those things about myself. I'd been beating myself up about it for months, all the while saying to myself "jeez, Derek, you're a numbnuts, because all the while, you still screwed the chance you had with a really great woman".

That's when it occurred to me what I had to do. I did something "The Old Derek" would have been completely incapable of doing. I apologized. Profusely and repeatedly. I sent her flowers out of the blue in apology. I stopped by her house (which, in hindsight, probably freaked the shit out of her, but she realized my intentions afterwards and was accepting of it) to apologize. I laid it all out there, that I had been a complete dick, that I enjoyed the time I spent with her more than any I'd ever spent with Der Fraulein, and that if she could see her way clear to forgive me, I wanted to make a second try of it.

We both hurt each other on the way out a bit the last time. I'm sure she got hurt worse than I did, so she was (and remains) a little cautious. But she said "yes" to going out and seeing what happens, and that's what was important.

Things are moving a little slower this time around, and that's a good thing. We both know there's romantic interest from the other side, and both sides are ensuring that the heart they laid out on the line last time isn't in for the same treatment it got that last time... That's a good thing, too.

I just have to prove to her now that the "social ineptitude" which doomed us the last time around is gone for good, and that's something I'm pretty confident that I can do.

Proving that when you least expect it... at the depths of recent bitching and moaning about a lacking social life, there were signs of life today on that front.

We'll see what happens.

I keep coming back to a couple constants in my life:

• I hate my job
• I hate my complete lack of a social life
• I live in an area that isn't really amenable to solving either of those problems, because there's no decent tech companies in the area, and if you don't like going to bars, you're not going to meet women in this area.
• I'm tired of fucking moving... the past two years living in Port Ewen has been the longest I've lived in one residence since I moved out of my parents' house over a decade ago.

So I'm pretty well hosed. I need to move, but I don't want to. I want a social life, but seem geographically-challenged and socially-inept enough to guarantee it's not going to happen.

It's a pretty sad commentary on life when the only portion of the entire week that I'm at all happy is on the Friday and Saturday evenings when we all get together for D&D Night. I mean, seriously, how fucking weak is that?! The only time I'm happy with my life is when I'm partaking in the life of a fictional character? ...sigh...

I read an article a couple years ago, about some folks who, on 9/11, decided "this would be an excellent opportunity to quietly walk away from everything, be presumed dead in the attacks, and live a completely new life somewhere else." Man, does that sound appealing.

I've given serious consideration to letting my ass sink way further into debt than it has ever been, taking out massive amounts of student loans, and changing from "part-time Marist commuter student" to "full-time Marist on-campus resident student" ... Living on campus, selling 95% of my crap to fit into a dorm room and calling it a day.

The problem is, that's not terribly realistic. It doesn't solve the fact that, just to cover my monthly debt payments, I have to net about $1500 or so a month. I'd be spending so much time working off-campus that it'd defeat the whole purpose of the change in the first place.

*sigh*

There's this guy I know from work. He talked a lot about how "he can't do this without his girlfriend," or "he can't do that," etc. This was about all sorts of things, not just one or two types of stuff. I always used to be like "Dude, are you married? engaged? freaking living together? No? Then what the fuck? You need to either grow a pair and stand up for yourself," and so on.

Then I bumped into the two of them at Barnes & Noble last night. What I found disturbing after all of it was that I thought to myself, "OK, if I was him and I was getting to date her, then I'd probably be willing to be pussy-whipped, too...."

I find it ... well, a little frightening ... that my sense of my own values was so malleable. Either that or I just really need a better social life than I presently have.

Well, it turns out that whatever I've got isn't what George had. He had this stomach-flu-like thing which had, well, all the usual symptoms of such a thing. I've just got this nasty hacking cough that I can't shake despite a plethora of cough medicines and drops, and copious quantities of liquid. It's the "throat is completely dry but you're going to hack for ten seconds anyway" cough that does nothing but annoy you because there's no way to make it go away.

And, since I didn't go to work today, I've got no idea if some problems with my work-provided insurance have been resolved, so I don't even know if I can safely go see a doctor (well, I know I can because that's what lawyers are for, sorting out those sorts of snafus after the fact, but "easily" may be a better word there)

I don't foresee myself going in tomorrow, either, not unless this cough radically improves with a night's sleep under its belt. I can't picture that anyone near me would get any work done with me hacking at like 100 dB every ten to fifteen minutes....

UPDATED: from an IM conversation I had with a co-worker

Me: This fucking cough is killing me.
G: I have had it for two weeks.
Me: Not like this.
Me: I sound like fucking Gollum.

... and it's true.

Because New Years' Day was a Saturday this year, I got to take today, the 3rd, as a holiday. Which ordinarily would have been really nice. I had some plans for errands I'd been meaning to do, etc.

Instead, I appear to be coming down with the flu, so basically after I go get my HD-DVR and pick up my laundry (both of which are within like two miles of my apartment) I'll be spending the day pretty much trying not to die.

This sucks.

I posted about this over the summer in the PrivateBlog, but wanted to wait until now, until I had the proof firmly in my hand, to say something in the public forum.

About a year and a half ago, give or take, (that portion has been a long time), ExWife called me out of the blue, to brag about how "she was going to be in a film" and how "she met David Prowse" and how "wasn't she special blah blah blah blah blah".

Turns out there was an independent film, called Saving Star Wars filming in and around Indianapolis, where ExWife lives. It was filmed on a shoestring budget, and had the support of the local community, etc., etc. It's more of a drama than most "fan films", and Star Wars mania is really only a backdrop to some decent dramatic issues.

So, ExWife is all bragging about how she's going to be an extra in the movie, blah blah blah. I get her off the phone as quick as humanly possible in those days, and go off to investigate the movie myself. It's kinda neat, part of their self-financing is "selling" Associate Producer credits. Now, we all know what an associate producer really is, but I thought it'd be fun, and after all, I'd now have conquered two types of media, by earning myself an IMDb page in the process.

Fast forward to this past summer. At GenCon, they're having a screening of the film in the Con's film competition. So I get up bright and early, head down to the screening room, and check it out. I come away feeling that my A.P. money was well-spent, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see that the A.P. credits weren't like a mash of tiny-font names like the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition fan-club names were, but it's a decent font size, etc., etc.

Then I continue watching... to get to the "Extras"... and lo and behold, not a single mention of ExWife's name. Ah, says I, this is a rough-cut (this was clear from some sound issues throughout the DVD "print"), so maybe the credits are incomplete at that point.

Until today, when I got home, and found the DVD waiting for me. The real deal, the final version..... more A.P. credits now, so they go by a little faster than they did in the rough-cut, but still no sign of the Ex's name anywhere near it.

"Lying Bitch", Prince Barin, Flash Gordon (1980)

Man, I frickin love California.

I'm staying at this really nice hotel, and had something I haven't had in three long years, In-N-Out burgers. Those of you who've had them know what I'm talking about, and all the rest are just sorta dumb-founded. But that's ok.

Spent a lot of time this afternoon walking around my old stomping grounds, chatting with people I hadn't seen in years. Almost made me want to come back to work there, actually. I know my entire last year there, I was the stereotypical "disgruntled employee", but so were a lot of my co-workers (including some of the people who I was hanging out with today). Many of them seem to have come to grips with their disgruntled nature, pointing out a lot of "changes for good" that have been made, and they seem to be genuinely happy with where things are today.

I also spent some quality time with someone that I really and truly wish I'd have been single and available to spend quality time with when I lived out here. Her schedule is pretty hectic at the moment (product rollout was due yesterday, still not ready, not sure when it will be ready), but we're going to try and get together again before I head back Sunday morning. I have no idea where, if anywhere, that's going, but we enjoy each other's company, and that's enough. :-)

So, on the "Things Derek Wants To Do While Visiting The Area" list, I've crossed off "See The Yahoos", and "Hit In-N-Out"... "Spend some time at Bay 101" is still on the list, but I think that will get rectified tomorrow or Saturday evening.

I've got some more people to see tomorrow while I'm here, but otherwise, it's rest and relaxation for a few days in the land where the windows were rolled down, the sunroof open, and the winter jacket stashed in the trunk where it'll stay until I bring the car back to the rental agency....

Seriously, seatguru.com is something every air traveller must bookmark.

You know, I'm the first person to say that if you can't be bothered to watch a TV show at the time it airs, then it's your own business if you can't avoid people talking about the outcome or plot elements of the show.

I just wish a full 10% of the blogs I read hadn't mentioned in one of their entries' titles the outcome of last night's episode of Survivor.

Ever try to catch up with an old friend you don't have contact info for...

... when that person's name is the same as that of a uberhot actress / model?

Yeah, this falls into the category of "search engines being useless for this task."

This is probably the first time one of my cats has ever appeared, by name, in a dream. I suspect it was just something my mind added mid-stream because he jumped on top of me or something during REM sleep.

I was visiting NASA. I know this because all of the shuttle orbiters that were hanging from 1/2" cable from the ceiling and the astronaut telling me how the ass-end of the orbiter was 25' narrower after "the refit", which is obviously some load of shit my mind came up with.

Bill makes his appearance when Mr. Astronaut explains that we need to hang from one of those cable-harness things and take a ride, and Mr. Astronaut agrees to carry Bill with him when he goes up with us.

So I ride up this cable harness, and so do a couple other people, and there's Mr. Astronaut carrying Bill on his shoulder as he rides up with us.

Most wacky-ass dream I've had in a while.

Over the last couple months, O'Reilly has started sending me copies of the book, translated into various foreign languages. I thought it might be interesting to go over a couple of the funny things I discovered about each while reviewing my copies....

German Translation - This book's cover is printed using a slightly different color ink than all the rest so far. The American edition's cover is quite clearly "red" in color. The German edition is the first to use a different color, albeit only subtly different. The ink has a hint of blue in it (although nowhere near as blue as the original cover on Amazon.de looked like it was going to be, and nowhere near as "O'Reilly Pink" as that image to the left would have you think it is, more of a burgundy-like color). Also, where most books in the United States have their title printed on the spine "top to bottom" (that is, with the bottom of the letters running along the "back" side of the spine), the German edition has the title running "bottom to top" with the bottom of the letters running along the front side of the spine.

Also, in the German edition, they went through and replaced many of our screenshots, of things like PHPMyAdmin, and replaced them with the German versions of those application. We knew this was coming and it makes total sense, but it was still kind of cool.

Japanese Translation - The first thing I found amusing was the way the entire book is in the very attractive Japanese "kanji" script, except for proper nouns (but then even things like my name, seem to have a pictogram associated with them, possibly for a pronunciation-guide? Not sure...)

The spine on this runs "normal", except that since kanji permits it fairly easy, the Kanji portion is "vertical", e.g., each icon below the prior, until it gets to the "MySQL" portion of the title, which then flips to being aligned against the back-cover of the spine.

Perhaps the greatest shock was that our paperback book has, in Japan, a dust-jacket. It appears that the dust-jacket doesn't serve much purpose other than to pimp out some other MySQL titles from O'Reilly Japan, but it was still sort of neat. Also of interest was that it included a bookmark-like thing which seemed to be designed to stick out out of the top of the book so that it could be grabbed by the retailer and scanned for purchase (rather than having to move each book in a large stack). At least I think that's what it's for, maybe Jeffrey will see this post and explain it further, since he's gone native over there. :-)

One other thing of note was the attention to detail of the Japanese translation team. One thing I always do in the translations is go to the "Thanks From Derek" bit, because that's the part I'm the most familiar with the wording on (obviously) and I'm always curious to see how things look in a different language. In this case, I found footnotes where none previously existed. It looks like they went and founded the URL for Jeremy's "Goon Squad" and included them in footnotes for his thank-you section, and they went through and explained what the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore-64 were (I can't read the footnotes, but it looks like they may have either been marketed with different names in Japan, or never even have existed, since there's also a reference to the Commodore Amiga in the footnotes, and we don't reference that, so it might be referring to something which came "prior to the Amiga" or something).

Spanish Translation - I don't know what to say about the Spanish translation. It was the first one we received, and it was "normal" in every possible respect, other than being co-branded with "Anaya Multimedia" which is presumably a Spanish publishing company). The only interesting thing of note with the Spanish edition is that I specifically asked O'Reilly for a second copy so I could give it to my Spanish-teacher aunt. She has a long history of teaching her students Spanish by telling amusing/embarassing family stories in Spanish, and I thought it would be neat for her to have something one of us wrote that she could reference. Although I must admit that any high-school Spanish student who gets detention and has to try and translate our book back into English or something would definitely have to deserve it.

There's an Italian edition allegedly "on the way", but nobody's seen it yet outside of Italy. I really want a Chinese or Korean version (mainly because there's a decent market in those countries, and it'd be neat to see it translated into those languages).

Although I can't really be picky.

Tonight, after trading in the much-sucky Fable, I picked up, at a bargain price, Godzilla: Save The Earth (PS2) (X-Box)

Picture if you will, Mortal Kombat, played with big 150' tall lizards that breathe fire, pick up building and throw them at each other, and can do amazing tail-swipes.

Nearly the entire Gojira cast of characters makes an appearance, including two different renditions of the Big Man himself, one from the 90's, and one from Godzilla 2000 (but, thankfully, not the one from that Roland Emmerich piece of shit waste of celluloid!)

Pete came over while George and I were playing it for the first time, and much mayhem ensued. This game is hellishly kick-ass, and has easily de-throned Halo 2 (for me anyway) as the game I see myself wasting way too much time playing.

Go buy this game. Now. Seriously.

Oh my, how much time I have wasted playing Halo 2.

'Nuff said.

Yesterday was the first snow fall, sleet-fall, etc., etc., of the winter. It marks the first year that I'm actually going to catch a clue and drive the Miata up to the parents house, park it under a car-cover for the winter, and leave it be. The past two winters I've simply left it in the carport, and then grudgingly scraped and brushed off the Jeep whenever I had to go out. Now that I'm having to go out every day though, I don't really see that as being appealing at all.

So, the Jeep will enjoy the car port, the Miata will sit in an auto-cocoon on their front yard until spring time comes.

Another thing I'll do differently this winter is actually start it up a couple times... the Miata batteries, well, they suck ass, and last year it froze itself up but good and became a large gel-filled boat-anchor in the trunk of the Miata last winter during all the cold weather. And, since it's some wonky Mazda-only thing, no dealers carry replacement batteries for it, and I had to drive down to Middletown to get a replacement for it. Admittedly, I work a lot closer to Middletown now, so that's not nearly so much of an issue, but it's still pretty stupid to just let it die a cold frozen death.

Someone wake me up when Spring is here, eh?

Well, not really, but I felt it a little bit this evening. George and I headed down into the city to catch Megadeth play at Roseland tonight. We got there midway through Exodus' opening set (got to hear them do "Toxic Waltz", though, which was cool, haven't heard that live in about 15 years)

What made me feel old, though, was the time I spent down in the mosh-pit. Yes, gentle readers, the big tubby bitch that I am went straight into the pit and enjoyed it immensely. I learned two important things about myself this evening:

• I'm out of shape - (Well, duh, go figure, it's not like that's a surprise, but mostly I noticed it as it related to my ability to tolerate not getting much fresh air as I got pressed up against the stage, well, two people back from the stage, actually)
• My tolerance for pain has decreased significantly - I can still remember seeing Anthrax at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center, and getting pressed up against the barriers at the front, looking down and seeing that a screw from them was pressed into my gut, pulling back, seeing a piece of my bloody meat hanging from the screw-threads, and continuing to just keep banging my head. Not any more, a couple swift kicks to the head from crowd-surfers and my sissy ass was heading for fresh air and cold drinks

The set was absolutely great, though. Mustaine may have been told by the docs "You'll never play guitar again," but I'm glad he got a second opinion on that.

Here's hoping they come back around for another pass at some point.

I was heading to Adams to pick up some of their fresh dough. They sell these great little bundles of 14 oz. of uncooked dough, which is perfect for making homemade pizza with. Get it around noon, let it rise all day, and by dinner time, you can throw a pizza and be in good shape.

This morning, as I was preparing to head out the door, I told George he had but one chore for the day... to clean the deep-frier. I was going to pick up some extra dough and make ourselves some fried dough.

Man, I can't believe I've had this frier for a year now and haven't done this yet. Who needs to wait til July 4th and stand in line for 45 minutes at the dough-booth?! Heat up the oil, and after three minutes of gurgling, you've got just what the inner-child longed for.

Insert the image of Derek sitting on the couch savoring a belly full of goodness...

I previously pointed out how a couple years ago, Brian and I started MetallicaSucks.com, in response to Metallica's overall musical decline, and their totally off-base attacks on file-sharing networks.

The last Metallica concert I can remember going to was the summer of 1996, on the Shit To The Sheds tour, at Deer Creek Pavilion in Noblesville, Indiana. Brian and I walked out of that concert after Metallica went all country-n-western on "The Four Horsemen".

Something tells me there was one more show after that, while I was in California, but I can't recall it for the life of me, such an impression it made.

I decided a couple months ago to get myself a ticket to the Oct. 22nd Metallica show at Meadowlands. It was a test, to see if they still had it during their shows. I wanted to see if I was simply "that guy at the concert", the one who sits down for all the new songs, but stands up and rocks the fuck out when the band plays their older stuff.

A month after I bought my tickets to Meadowlands, Metallica announced a date at the Knickerbocker Arena (To this day, I refuse to use it's new "Pepsi Arena" moniker). Within 24 hours, both Dave and Blake had asked me if I wanted to go to Albany with them. Since I'd accidentally boned Blake by forgetting to ask him if he wanted to go to Meadowlands with us, I decided to say "what the fuck" and got tickets to the Albany show as well. I justified it by telling myself that it was a couple weeks in advance of the NJ show, and if it sucked ass, I could just eBay my NJ tickets and be all set.

First off, let's get a couple things up-front:

• The Knickerbocker was not designed for center-stage concert acoustics. To say that the sound was abysmal would be overly polite, but that's not something the band has any control over
• I'm not a huge Godsmack fan, so the opening act did very little for me, other than the dueling-drum-solo they did, which did sort of kick ass.

Now, that said, what did I think of the show?

The first half of the show was like dating that girl in high school who wasn't really sure what she wanted, and every time she let you cop a feel would then proceed to swat your hand away 30 seconds later, repeating that cycle over and over again. They would tease the audience with really great old-school stuff, like "Battery", and then immediately kill the rush by playing some utter shite like "Outlaw Torn". This "Great Song, Shit Song, Great Song, Shit Song" cycle repeated for the first hour or so.

But, where they played the older stuff they definitely still seemed to have what it took. (Although James' in-between-song dialogue now sounds a lot less like a headbanging metal god, and more like some sort of angry geeky psychologist). And after 10:00 or so, when the "old stuff, all the time" portion of the show kicked in, it was definitely a trip back to the times in my memories when Metallica was just Metallica, that band that kicked ass over all others.

I don't think they've quite regained that crown, but I at least recognize that for as much as the new crap they put out under the guise of "new music" sucks, their live shows are still worth the price of admission, even if an hour of it is shit. At two-and-a-half hours, it's still a good return-on-investment if only 90 minutes of it is actually decent. :-)

I'm looking forward to the Meadowlands show now....

As I was heading to the laundromat to pick up my laundry this evening, I passed by the strangest sight. There was a crowd of people all on the front lawn of one of the houses in Port Ewen. That, in and of itself, isn't that unusual in Port Ewen. It's a nice little village, but it's got its share of white trash. What was unusual was that no fewer than three of the people on the lawn were kneeling, sobbing their guts out.

Now, none of these people are attired as though there was a funeral or something like that. The level of shock and pain on their faces is consistent with like some sort of sudden/immediate death (to put it bluntly, the faces were like those faces you see when the reporter takes pictures of the families at accident scenes and such). But, there's no cops, no ambulances, and no signs of an accident.

I passed by them twice, and even after twenty minutes in between, the scenario hadn't really changed at all.

I hate not knowing what the hell that was all about.

Where would a person shop for movie prints? Not as in "8x10 glossies" but as in "eight reels of 35mm technicolor glory".

I would have thought that'd be an eBay thing, but can't find anything similar on there. And I have to believe that there's a market for such things...

So, it looks like I'm getting an impromptu roommate for a couple weeks while a friend of mine looks for a place to stay and a job to support that place to stay. It's karmic for me, since when I was in a similar spot out in Fort Wayne, a bunch of my friends from college did the same thing for me, letting me crash on their living room floor for over a month.

But, it means I really need to straighten up significantly and make room for an additional body. I was going to do it yesterday, but I had a shipment that really had to go out the door, and I'd already scheduled the pickup from the office, so that wasn't going to happen. I chose to take today off instead.

When I told one of my co-workers yesterday that I was taking today off, he instantly assumed (probably not without significant cause) that the reason for my absence today would be more related to the release of the Star Wars DVDs than it would be to making the apartment presentable.

Here's the sad commentary: I'd almost completely forgotten they were coming out today. I didn't get that excited about them because, as any Star Wars geek will tell you, they're not the original trilogy.

So I suppose that while it's true that I'll be spending a day-off like at least some percentage of the geek world will be inasmuch as "yeah, I'll probably go get them this morning and watch them while I clean", it's certainly not true that such was the impetus for my taking the day off in the first place.

What bugs me is that I don't think anyone will believe me. Ah, well, I know the truth.

A small anecdote to explain "why it is I don't hold the door for strangers".

I was walking into Blockbuster this evening. Now I'm arriving at the door about the same time a family is. Two parents, two kids. The father is ahead of me and is holding the "inner" door. I see the mother trying to drag along two kids and I decide to be nice and hold the outer door as well, and let her just go on in. She starts to walk into the doorway.

Except that -- even after seeing that "some stranger is holding the door open for her" -- she decides to start having a conversation with someone outside. While I'm holding the door.

I wait, patiently.

I wait, impatiently, to see if maybe she'll just take hold of the door on her own.

Finally I say "Not going to do this all day" and let go of the door and walk past her husband into the store.

The door swings closed, hitting her.

And she has the gall to fucking glare at me about it. As if I should have just stood around their like her doorman until she decided to finish her conversation.

I hate people.

This morning, I was driving on the Thruway heading to work. When I looked up in my rear-view mirror, all I saw was chrome. I swear this rig had to have been like five feet from my ass-end, tops. So I wait about 10 or 15 seconds, expecting that he's like pulling out or something. I look back, still there.

That's when the fun begins.

Now, it's a 65 MPH zone, I'm doing 75 and I'm in the slow lane. I don't think he's got any right to bitch about how slow I'm going.

So I pump the brakes. Hard. As in "my Jeep decelerates almost immediately to the 65 MPH speed limit".

I hear the screech of air brakes behind me, and I see his ass-end and cab swinging slightly in the same direction as he veers a bit so as not to impale me with his truck.

Now, he's all pissed, comes flying up on my side, laying on the horn, etc. etc., like I'm some kind of asshole.

I am, but not nearly as much of an asshole as he thought. Why? Because I caught sight of something as he drove by...

The phone number of his employer. No, not one of those lame "How's my driving?" stickers, but the actual painted-on-the-side-of-the-cab phone number.

So I called. The guy who answered was pleasant enough. I explained what happened. He asked me "can you catch up with him?"

"Sure," I said. And proceeded to do so.

After reading off to him the truck number, the pleasant southern-sounding gentleman explained to me, in no uncertain terms, that, are you ready, this wasn't the first time he's gotten a complaint against "Bob" (he told me his name, but I honestly forget).

"Bob," it seems, according to the pleasant gentleman, is going to eventually get back to the depot, and find himself with an appointment at the unemployment office.

Fucker. Serves him right.

As of around 11:30 a.m. yesterday morning, the official story was still "The Devil Rays are heading to New York and will be there in time for the 1 p.m. first-game which was rescheduled to 3 p.m."

When, after 90 minutes on Metro-North and 15-20 on the subway, we finally arrived at the stadium, it was approximately 2:30, and the announcement over the P.A. was something like this:

As of 12:30, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have not left the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. Thus, there will not be a game starting at 3 p.m. A final decision will be made at approximately 2 p.m.

(yes, it was already 30 minutes past that time).

After consulting with some ticket-gate staff, the end result they told us was "the best-case scenario right now for baseball today is one game starting at 7 p.m."

George and I looked at each other and headed back for the subway. A 1 p.m. game I could do. A 3 p.m. game I could do, grudgingly. But a 7 p.m. game would get me back home exceedingly late compared to when I have to get to bed in order to get to work the next morning.

Meanwhile, though, since they did play the game, I'm anticipating a long drawn-out battle with Ticketmaster towards getting a refund on the tickets. Apparently, you can exchange the tickets for any remaining game this season (except that I don't have any other available weekends this season).

I have this strange feeling I'm going to end up having to pull out the "hole card of business transactions", the credit card chargeback. I think MasterCard will go for the "I paid for a day game, not a night game, so they didn't sell me what I paid for" logic. The credit card company doesn't care, they still get to keep their merchant fees on the transaction, so keeping me happy is pretty much the only thing on their agenda.

Do you remember that person from high school, the one you would have sold your soul and your best friend's soul along with it for five minutes of completely unadulterated debauchery?

I remember mine. I saw her in Adam's today, and it was disturbing in a way how I had exactly the same thoughts. I guess it's lucky that I was distracted by someone else I knew while waiting in line at the deli, completely taking my mind off it.

It's especially lucky because she had her kids with her. Somehow I don't think she'd enjoy having to explain why the strange man wanted "debauchery" -- and what word meant -- to a pair of like six year olds.

My grandmother called me a couple weeks ago to wish me happy birthday. Well, she didn't call me at first, actually, she called my parents' house believing I lived there, and was surprised I wasn't there.

Then, when she called me, she asked "how's your wife?" ... when I said "uhhhh, we're divorced," she asked "how long that had been the case?" When I told her "over three months," she asked me if I'd seen it coming, despite the fact that the divorce from She Who Must Not Be Named had lasted over two years.

(The logic that she had both expected me to be married and living at my parents' house should not escape the reader)

My parents, and my aunts and uncles, all seem to live in denial, believing that she can continue to live on her own, and I hate to be the naysayer in the family, but they're all on serious crack. When you have to go over to her apartment every couple days to check her freezer to make sure she's freakin eating(!!!), then that's the time when you call the nursing home and make an appointment.

I don't understand how people can not see it. Maybe it's denial because it's "their parent" or something, but it just annoys the piss out of me for reasons I can't quite put my finger on.

Just as an aside, I thought I would include an image (a little grainy, it's shot from my window) of the telephone box in question (the one on the right).

As you can see, the nest inside it is big enough that the outside of the box is also covered with bees near the top of it. This isn't just a daytime thing, it was also covered with them during the cool night hours last night as well.

Actually, I'm not sure if that's the cable box or the telco box. It might be cable, since it's not labeled like the phone one is. Either way, I'd hate to be the utility guy called out to handle a problem.

Is it wrong of me to watch the two little punk neighbor kids banging with rocks on the phone box outside (where there's a big honkin yellowjacket nest built inside it), wondering to myself "I wonder if they'll puff out like one of those exotic fishes when the whole nest comes out there and stings the shit out of them?"

I mean, I'm no fan of bee-stings and all, but seriously, if you're banging on the side of a small metal stand that is full of wasps, and you know it's full of them, then you really do deserve every ounce of pain you've got coming to you.

You know, I've gone on and on about this before, but I can't help it. If you've got a song stuck in your head and it won't leave, iTunes Music Store is the greatest invention ever.

For reasons passing understanding, I have had a variety of older Van Halen and David Lee Roth songs running through my head for the last couple days. Unable to silence the demons, iTMS came to the rescue, and they are now placated.

Someone should give Jobs a Nobel prize for saving my sanity. ;-)

I've been having this weird recurring dream over the last couple months, and I can't even begin to understand the significance of it (and I'm sure there's some readers who are into that whole "your dreams tell everything about you" line of thought but I don't really buy it).

The basic premise is always the same, although the details change from occurrence to occurrence:

• It's night
• I'm in an environment like Manhattan
• Except there's like no population
• I've just decided not to take "my date" (a faceless entity in the dreams) to "the dance", but we instead decide to hang out
• Part of this includes going across the street to what is either a bazaar, or a hot dog shop, and ordering up some dogs
• While coming home I notice, "Oh, hey, the werewolf is out and about" as I see him down the city street
• I go back inside
• Some quantity of panicking and/or hiding occurs by the occupants of the house/apartment
• I wake up

Now, seriously. I have no idea what that means, but given that I've had it like a half-dozen or so times, that's a bit odd. I mean there's other dreams I've had even more frequently, but, well... er... at least I understand the motivation behind those dreams. :-P

Ah, well, not looking for answers, just looking to document for posterity, so when it drives me insane, I can point out exactly how long it's been going on for. :-)

Like many geeks, I get a crapload of magazines. The last fifteen copies of eWeek I've received have included stern warnings that This is your last issue unless you renew your free subscription!! yet they keep showing up.

The other day, I got a copy of a magazine I hadn't seen before, LinuxWorld magazine, adorned in the familiar logo from the LinuxWorld conference. At first glance, I thought it was just a flyer for an upcoming conference. Then I realized, "Oh, look! It's a magazine. Yet another periodical has added me to their subscriber list," and tossed it on a pile of other magazines which basically get brought to the bathroom one at a time for quick reading. It's a very big pile I should point out.

Today, I got an e-mail from my Red Hat sales rep, asking, essentially, "Hey, are you the same Derek Balling they interviewed in LinuxWorld magazine for the MySQL book?"

Then it all came back to me... the interview, the interviewer saying "give us your address and we'll get you a subscription so you can see the article," and all that jazz. So of course, I had to find it in the pile, and go read the interview, and refresh my memory on the whole affair.

I felt suitably stupid.

I've got work stuff to do tomorrow and Tuesday in Downers Grove (a Chicago suburb) so I decided to spend a couple days in Chicago andflew out a bit early, arriving on Saturday. Two jobs ago, I lived in the Chicago burbs, with a daily commute of 75' from my apartment to the office I worked in.

As I drove down Lake Shore Drive from the Gold Coast, and gazed upon the Chicago skyline, I realized how much I miss Chicago. If I had to choose between "living in the Loop" or "living in Manhattan", I'd almost certainly choose the Loop. The only thing that might give me pause to think otherwise is that living in Manhattan would give me easy access to eighty-one Yankee games a year, and living in the Loop would only give me access to six or nine of them.

I'm torn... I love the country. I love its lack of traffic jams, the low cost of living, the feeling that the people you meet at the local grocery store actually are your neighbors, etc. At the same time, I love the ... well, the "life" that is a bustling city, and Chicago certainly has it. And while Chicago certainly has its share of "bad neighborhoods", by and large, it feels a lot safer to me than most of New York City does (for example, I still won't take the train to a night Yankee game because walking a block through Harlem at 125th at 11:30 at night doesn't appeal to me at all).

I firmly believe life will bring me to live here again some day, and the next time, I won't live out in the 'burbs, but right in the heart of the city, so I can enjoy every ounce of it.

My TiVo announced to me this morning that my cable company had made a lineup change. Turns out it was a shuffling of the digital-audio channels that lots of cable-companies provide these days but one made me laugh out loud:

632 MCRGGAE

McReggae? :-) I know, I know, it's M.C./Reggae, with MC being Music Choice (or something like that), but still I had this vision of Scotsmen singing about peace-through-ganja and stuff. Hey, why not, as Jeff pointed out to me this morning, Scotty may be senile, but he's still pretty virile at 80.

Saturday night was my first poker tournament. I chose to enter mainly because it seemed like fun, and even if I completely busted out, the tournament was a charity fundraiser, so the entry fee was tax-deductible any way.

I busted out way early (although I at least had the pleasure of knowing that I wasn't the first person to bust-out, that honor went to an older woman at another table). I didn't play badly at all, I just got a combination of totally crappy hands, and I had a bunch of freakin' morons at my table.

When we played our home-game, George was a complete freakin' mystery. He would stay in pots with crap hands and, as those wackadoo players often do, he would get some lucky card on the turn or the river, making a hand he should have bailed out on three hundred dollars earlier.

There were a lot of Georges playing last night, and it's impossible to play against them, because they're betting like they got stuff when they don't, or betting like they don't when they do, etc., etc. For example, on like my twelth hand, I finally get something worth playing, K-9-offsuit. Flop is a 3-5-K. So now I've got a pair of kings. I start raising, trying to scare The George out of the pot. The turn is an 8, the river a 7. I keep raising the hell out of this guy, and he keeps calling. What does he turn over? 3-7, two pair. But seriously, there's two overcards on the table, and I'm raising the fuck out of him, why is he still in the pot by the time the 7 comes around? He's betting his entire stack on a pair of 3's!?

Phil Hellmuth calls these players "jackals", but I think our group will always call them "Georges" because it's so definitively "their style" of play.

Ah, well, it was all for a good cause, I guess. The charity still gets their money, and I realized that I only really want to play in home games where I don't feel bad ridiculing people like that for their style of play, or in "real" events where there's a lot fewer of those chumps screwing things up.

My investigative research over the last couple days led me to discover, quite by accident, that a teeny-tiny little credit union that is local to me offered all of the services I wanted. The toughest part was always finding something that offered Quicken Direct-Connect support (Part of my morning ritual is to download the previous day's transactions... lots of places offer Web Connect, where you download with a browser and import them into Quicken, but that's not nearly as seamless, especially for something I do every day).

Hudson Valley Federal Credit Union will be the proud new owner of all my accounts... It'll be a minor annoyance in the short term while I move everything around, but it'll be so worth it in the long run to have things local, with someone who actually cares, to a certain extent, if they keep or lose my accounts.

I won't be able to get frequent-flier miles on my debit card any more, but that's a small price to pay for my sanity....

Took the Miata in for its annual NY State Inspection (coupled with an oil change and a couple assorted odds-and-ends that needed fixed on the car).

Walked away from the Miata dealer $300.00 poorer, after they refilled the A/C, spent time tracking down a fluid leak, and various assorted items.

Then picked up a pair of tires for the back to replace the "seriously piss-poor shape" ones that were on it. I don't drive the Miata all that much, so the reality is that I'll almost never wear out the tread on my tires, they'll suffer from old-age type problems before that happens. There's $200.00...

Tomorrow I take it over to Midas to put new sets of brakes on the front and back (rear: 30% wear remaining give or take, front: 10%, just barely passing NYS inspection criteria). Estimated Cost: $200

It's all stuff that needs to get done, so there's no real arguing with it, just annoying that it all came up at once. Then again, I guess that's why NY has annual vehicle inspections, so that people like me who don't pay that much attention will have people looking over our shoulder once a year. :-)

I live right near Woodstock, one of those places that invented the term "art colony", and while really cool art-house theaters all over the country are showing this film, the ones really close to me aren't.

Why, oh why, won't anyone please book a run of the original uncut 1954 Godzilla?!!?

I'd be willing to pay $20.00 a ticket to see it. If I'd known, I'd've taken a train into the city today and gone to see it in NYC... but it ends 6/3, and I simply can't get down there by then. :-(

This sucks.

3:40pm

Me: I'm going to go to the 7-something showing of The Day After Tomorrow, wanna come?
George: Sure, be there in an hour.
Me: So, in George terms, that's like three hours.
George: No, not three, that'd be pushing it kinda close.
Me: Yeah right. I know how you are.

... 6:45 pm ...

Still waiting. I used to reserve the "NAME Standard Time" joke for Ray, but I believe George has officially stolen it, and now there is "George Standard Time" which is between two and four hours behind the rest of us...

Yesterday, I went to CeBIT to see if there was anything interesting. Last year's show was pretty decent and I saw a lot of semi-useful stuff for work. This year's show was horrible, and they had combined with the CRM show, which meant a full 50% of the booths, right off the bat, were completely ass-useless to me.

But anyhow, so I got up around 5:30 yesterday, so that I could be at the train station on time. My plan when I got home was, "Watch the season finale of Enterprise, then do my homework for class tonight." The problem, of course, is that since I got up so early, I was tired way early, and I was falling asleep on the couch before Enterprise was even over. I woke up around 9:15 p.m., and realized "I'm in no condition to read three chapters tonight." and trundled off to bed and crashed.

But if you go to bed that early, you've really got to expect you're going to wake up just as early, and so as 4:45 a.m. rolled around, lo and behold I was fully-rested ready to get up-and-at-'em, no matter how much I tried to go back to sleep.

Of course, this will probably pose a problem all its own... if getting up at 5:30 had me tired by 8:30-9:00, then getting up at 4:45 is going to have me tired even earlier, which means I should expect my "crash" to occur, well, right in the middle of my ECON class.

I think I might have to break my normal caffeine fasting today to get myself back to normal.

After all my frustration with my crappy work-provided phone, I had a number of conversations with The Powers That Be at work, trying to come to some sort of arrangement to sneak a non-T-Mobile phone into the organization. It was just "not to be".

There was absolutely no way to just "have Verizon bill my employer directly, so whatever we did, I'd be in a contract, using expense reports to get reimbursed for the billing. In the end, though, that wasn't so bad.

The deal-breaker was the hardware... If I replaced the T-Mobile phone I have (a Sidekick) with something of "equal power" it would cost about $600.00 ... I certainly don't need, for me a phone that powerful. But, if I expense the phone and then quit or got laid off, or whatever, I'm sure that my employer would want the $600 phone they paid for, regardless of whether or not my contract was up (which would put things in sort of a weird spot, since it's not "technically" their phone, even if they did pay for it, and it's certainly not a phone I'd pay to keep for my own use...)

So, in the end, the BossMan and I decided that it simply made more sense for me to have two phones... the company-provided phone with crappy coverage that is used only for "work" stuff, which they're free to call me on, day or night, and a personal phone that I pay for on my own, which (to put it bluntly), they're not entitled to call me on. ;-)

I ended up going with the not-quite-free but not-terribly-expensive LG VX6000. It's a digital-only phone, not a tri-band, but Verizon's digital-only coverage is pretty extensive, a far cry above and beyond the dismal all-digital coverage of the GSM providers like T-Mobile or AT&T Wireless.

Now I just need to remember to bring both phones when I go out. :-)

This evening Little George and I decided to head over to Jeto's batting cages and hit some baseballs around.

Man, oh man, what was I thinking?

George went first, in the "Babe Ruth, 80mph" cage. Eight pitches, one swing barely made contact.

Seeing his feeble attempts, I took a stab at the next cage down... "Babe Ruth, 60mph". Eight pitches no contact. George steps in. Eight pitches, two contact. I take another go. Eight pitches, no contact.

Boy do I suck. Ya know, once upon a time, I could hit like a mofo.

George and I are both feeling humbled now. George steps into "Little League, 40mph" and now finds himself way out in front of the pitches.

After he steps out, a family of little leaguers comes over, so I take a break to take a look at George's thumb (he had jammed it on one of the times he made contact in the 60mph cage). I watch these little snot-nosed ten year olds kicking ass.

I realize that I absolutely cannot now follow them in there, and miss eight straight pitches again. Even though I know I've got a lot better chance of hitting them, I can't take the chance of looking that freakin bad. :)

I toss my remaining token to the Baseball Dad, and George and I drive away, suitably discouraged, lamenting that we don't have a private batting-cage somewhere that we can practice in and not look stupid for all to see. :)

About a year ago, I started down my long road to kicking my caffeine addiction, and I've been pretty successful at it.

One thing I have noticed since then, though, is that even today, a year later, I still find myself with sleep/tiredness issues.

I go to bed each night around 11pm or so. I wake up in the morning "whenever I wake up" (I don't use an alarm clock) but that's usually around 6 or 7am. So I've gotten 7 or 8 hours of sleep. And yet, every afternoon like clockwork, my energy level is dead-low. 3-4pm rolls around, and I'm just dragging... on a weekend, I'll lay down to watch TV around that time of day and just pass out. Right now, for example, I'm "awake between naps"... I slept most of the afternoon away, and feel like I need to go take another hour or so. On a weekday, I obviously can't nap at 3pm, but if I'm foolish enough to lay down "after work and before dinner", then it's extremely problematic as I don't wake up until after 7 or so usually. :-)

Obviously, this doesn't feel like it should be "normal". But then I look at how many countries in the world honor the idea of the mid-to-late afternoon break, or siesta (including work-at-home types as well). As some people point out, there's a biological tendency towards crashing in the afternoon.

Maybe it's simply that because I don't use an alarm clock and artificially cram my sleeping hours into a certain "time period" (e.g., if I wake up at 5:30, I'm awake and alert, so I get up, but by the same token, I might sleep til 8). Perhaps because of that, my body is naturally tending back towards what it thinks is "natural" which includes wanting an afternoon nap.

I suppose, since I work from home and am known to work at night, I could probably do that, but it just feels... well, weird and unnatural? And besides, I don't think I could adequately convince anyone from work who called after 3 (and got my groggy "waking-up voice") that the merits of the siesta were undervalued by Americans, etc., and that they should cut me slack... ;-)

Start by defrosting steak that you had in the freezer. It might be a little freezer-burned, but probably not. It wasn't there more than a week.

Sautee some mushrooms and onions in a shitload of butter.

Throw in the steak.

Open a can of corn and toss it in a bowl.

Remove the mushrooms and onions before they get "too cooked".

Realize that this is the point in time where you should put the corn in the microwave.

Open microwave... find chicken you stashed in there "to keep it safe from the cat while you ate the rest of it" about ten days ago. Note the vile smell wafting from microwave.

Quickly shut microwave, pour corn into pot, begin heating corn on stove.

(Throw clorox-exploding-bleach-cleaning-packet into microwave to start trying to solve that problem on the side)

Remove steak, toss frying pan in sink which has the water running over everything.

Note that corn isn't ready yet. Let it keep heating on stove.

Start eating steak while waiting for corn. Notice that steak really wasn't ready yet either, despite your having cut into it elsewhere to see if that was the case.

Throw whole lot of it into garbage in disgust, find take-out menu.

I've been struggling over the last 18 months, as I believe I've mentioned, with The Pit's cellular carrier, T-Mobile. T-Mobile has some of the coolest phones (such as my present phone, the Danger Sidekick, but probably has one of the worst coverage problems on the face of the planet. It's reached the point where I almost never give my cel number to people, even people who really should be using it for work purposes, because they'll almost never be able to reach me on the phone anyway. In the entire 35 minute trip between my apartment and the data center, for example, I have coverage for the first 5 minutes after I leave my apartment. From there on, it's complete dead-air. I go to my parents? Dead. I go to the mall? Dead.

Suffice to say, I carry the phone around with me because I'm required to, but I know almost without fail that the phone itself will never ever ring because it never has a signal to do so.

Our salesfolks at the Pit have been complaining about the crappy coverage since the day our telecom folks rolled them out "for testing"... the results were fairly unanimous in the "the coverage sucks" category, but the bean-counters decided that the price was too good to ignore, and we locked ourselves into a contract with them. If you've got a non-company-provided phone, there is a $48.00 cap on what you can expense, which I can't believe would cover any salesman worth his salt.

So, I asked TheBossMan if TelecomGuy could get me a Verizon phone, because the Verizon coverage up here kicks serious ass, and because they have some decent PDA phones that would allow me to put an SSH client, etc., on them, which is useful for "on the road maintenance emergencies" and such. Nope, no can do.

So, it looks like I'll be carrying two phones from now on. The "Dead Brick of a Sidekick" that will never ring, but that I carry because my employment agreement requires it, and, (probably anyway), a Samsung SPH-i700 that I pay for out of my own pocket (and which only friends and family get the number to).

If work can't be bothered to pay for decent coverage (and according to The Pit's definition of "satisfactory", they're happy with my present coverage, so they said to me today), then I'll happily use their phone for work stuff and my phone for personal stuff. And if they can't reach me on that phone 99% of the time (which, when I'm out of my apartment, would be pretty close to accurate), that's their problem.

BossMan's attempt at a solution, and unfortunately his hands are tied by the corporate policy, was to try and have me get the phone and then just expense the $48.00/mo. maximum ... except that if I get a voice+data package that's got the amount of minutes/data I'd use for work, that costs more than $48.00 a month and I'd be on the hook personally for the contract. So if 2 years down the road, The Pit decided to toss me out on my ear, I'd be paying myself for way more usage than I needed.

It looks like there is not yet an SSH client for the SPH-i700, but it looks like the guys who make PocketPutty (the PocketPC implementation of PuTTY, the open source SSH client) are planning to support SmartPhones as well in the future, which means it'll be available at some point. Anyone have any experience with the Samsung in question?

My parents are active in the local volunteer fire department where they live. As a fund-raiser, they were sponsoring a bus day-trip over to Mohegan Sun, one of the local tribal casinos. I hadn't been over there, and since it's three hours drive, it was unlikely I'd be willing to drive all the way over just to check it out, so I decided to help out the local fire company and see if I liked the place at the same time.

I had fun (didn't really lose all that much money at all, which is good because I really didn't have all that much money to lose in the first place), but I don't think I'd ever go back. I'm a card player. I'm not a mindless slot-machine-lever-pulling chiba-monkey. Of the tens of thousands of square footage, there is a mere pittance dedicated to card games. And almost all of those gaming tables are the really odd card-game variants (which seem at face value to be better, but still don't have the same odds as straight blackjack). Heck, even with the huge rise in popularity over the last few years in poker, Mohegan Sun doesn't even have a poker room.

First, there's something to realize about gambling. There are two types of people who gamble (well, three if you count the folks like professional poker players and such)... there's the folks who go to gamble "with the belief that they are really and truly capable of getting rich". These are the same folks who plunk down their Lotto ticket-money each week, who are paying the "I Failed Statistics Class" tax. The second basic category of folks are those who realize that gambling is basically paying for an adrenalin rush. How much you pay for that rush will vary from session to session, etc. These sorts of folks don't expect that "they'll make it big".

The former group, by and large, tend to hang around slot machines, because they are going for minimal-risk gambling. Keep plunking down the quarters, hoping to hit the big-win. The latter group tend to hang around card games, craps, roulette, etc., because the adrenalin rush is more prevalent in those games, because there's decisions to be made, etc. It's "Should I bet on red or black? Do I want to hit or stay?" (or the myriad craps bets I still don't understand)... while there are certainly some folks who enjoy both types of gaming, such crossovers aren't terribly common in my experience.

It made me realize that I don't think I'd like any tribal casino for more than an extremely casual visit. Why? Because the average tribal casino is dropped in a reservation that's "local" to a bunch of communities. Their target audience is (more or less) the first category of gamer - the blue collar middle-class wage-slave who has put together a hundred bucks or so that he plans to slam into various slot machines. Las Vegas, on the other hand, certainly acknowledges that good chunks of its clientele are those wage-slaves, but also recognizes that there's money to be made on the - for lack of a better description - "more realistic" gambler.

There's a reason why there's very few "high limits slot machines". Look at it this way... look at the average casino floor in somewhere like Vegas, where they're catering to both customers. It's probably about 75% slots, 25% table-gaming. But if you look at the high-limits area, it's pretty much the exact opposite... about 25% slots, 75% table-gaming. One can conclude from this that "the people with money to spend" aren't prone to throwing it into machines.

Which comes back to the tribal casinos... they're not like Vegas or Atlantic City. They're not congregated together into a "gambling mecca" where people come from all over the world to play. They're isolated, one here, another there. Their constituency is their local populace, so they cater to the middle-class incomes around them by having a metric assload of slot machines, which in turn tends to make them unattractive to the aforementioned "more realistic gambler".

And, since I count myself in that latter category, tribal casinos just aren't my thing.

This morning, after Jeremy and I went to IHOP for breakfast, I decided to head over to EPCOT while he was at the gliderport. It seemed a lot closer when we were over in that area yesterday, but if I'd known I was going to pay $23.00 in cab-fare each way, I almost would have been cheaper off renting a car for the day and driving it over.

At Brian's behest, there were two things I wanted to do there, Mission: Space and Test Track.

Test Track was interesting, although I think maybe I'd've liked it a little bit faster in the end-half of the ride. Maybe some folks don't get up to 70 in their car, but I think I do it often enough that it wasn't that impressive.

Mission:Space, though, kicked serious ass. When we were at Rich's yesterday, he was talking about how they had to "tone it down" in the speed department from its initial deployment, how people were puking left and right, unable to maintain balance afterwards, etc. Before you get to "the ride portion" there have to be at least like eight different places where, in some form or another, you're told "if you even think you might be susceptible to motion sickness, now would be an excellent opportunity to find another ride to go on!"

I'd love to be able to peek under the hood to see what particular types of motion they're invoking in the ride to generate the different g-forces, from the 3-G liftoff to weightlessness of space... although in hindsight, I didn't actually test that it was zero-G (you're strapped in pretty tight, so your body is no use there)... it might just be that after the 3-G start, "normal gravity" seems very low-gravity.

Came home in the early afternoon, totally wiped out (I did a couple laps of the countries... as a kid that part of EPCOT always struck as more "interesting", now it strikes as "one big shopping mall of specialty stores"). Jeremy just got back to the room a little bit ago.. time to try and figure out what's for dinner.

After the close of events tonight, Jeremy, the other Jeremy, and myself, all went over to Big River Grille in Disney's Boardwalk resort. The master brewer there is a guy I went to high school with, once upon an aeon ago, Rich Michaels.

Rich was gracious enough to give us the grand tour of the facilities, and hung around with us for a couple hours bullshitting over our meals and the beer-samplers he had sent over for the Jeremys. (The irony of me, the guy who doesn't drink, being the one who suggested our visiting a brewery was not lost upon me grin).

The food was great, the brew was tasty (so I was told anyway), and it was great to get together with Rich after all these years. Hopefully it won't take 15 years before we get together again. :-)

It was after we left and were doing a walking lap of the resort's miniature lake that we saw The Dead Guy .

Helluva night.

The Conference went great... by last night, every copy of the book that O'Reilly had managed to send over to the booth had been sold... I think I may have found a software product that would prevent The Pit from having to spend $XXX,XXX on an RS/6000 report server, and I had nearly a dozen people today ask me for my autograph in their book.

In a couple hours, I'm going to head over with some friends to a local microbrewery where a former high school classmate of mine is the master-brewer, and convince him to give us a tour of the operation. Which is kind of funny, given that a number of the people who may be tagging along either don't drink at all, or don't drink beer. :)

Tomorrow is up in the air... I've thought about "doing a whole lot of nothin'", I've also considered going over to EPCOT. Jeremy intends to go flying tomorrow (to do the flying he didn't get to on Tuesday, etc.) so I'll be pretty much on my own. The old adage about "needing a vacation from your vacation" is starting to apply. :-)

I really should know better.

This may be considered TMI, so if you don't want to read, don't continue.

But, really they're only TRULY cool if they're not broken in such a manner that the "click here to register for one day access" doesn't work.

I'd love to pay them but they can't take my money. Dumbasses.

Once again the mail->blog script comes in handy....

UPDATE: It was all resolved simply by figuring out what IP address I wasn't being handed off by the WiFi system. Got the IP, substituted the IP for the hostname in the registration URL, et voila, I was on the web.

The bag is packed, the laptop and iPod batteries charged, and I'm waiting to leave. I've got a 6:30 p.m. flight out of LaGuardia, and am getting a ride down to the airport from my dad.

Ordinarily I only fly out of Albany or Stewart/Newburgh, except that there were no direct American flights from either of those to Orlando, and I couldn't see flying to Chicago - or even worse, Dallas - to get to Orlando. Getting to LGA from here is a royal pain in the ass, and I'm not at all looking forward to it.

At least, on the bright side, as soon as I'm down there, I have nothing to worry about for the next six days...

More from the conference.... cya!

FedEx just dropped off my copy of the book. I've got a small box coming to me as part of the contract, but they're only delivering one copy right now, as every copy they can make available is going to Orlando for the MySQL Users' Conference (since, obviously, that's a group of people who are a perfect market for the book).

It feels a bit surreal.

I'm going to the Yankees home opener tomorrow with Jay. So I said "Hey, I should put the battery for the pocket-size camera onto the charger so it's all fresh for tomorrow!"

Except I can't find the charger. Of course, I've seen it. I know it's around. I've been pushing it around the apartment for the last six months. Except of course now that I need it, the gnomes have stolen and hidden it away.

Crap.

UPDATE: proof positive that "Derek ranting about shit yields results", I found the charger literally three minutes after posting this, which I posted only after looking for about an hour and a half....

I so need a vacation. I can't wait til the 12th, when I hop on a plane to Orlando for the MySQL Users Conference where, so I'm told, I will be able to hold in my grubby little hands one of the first copies of The Book.

More important to me, really, is the ability to hang up the cel phone for a week. To not care if I'm reachable, and to check my work e-mail only at night, on a schedule that I determine. To have my personal instant messaging on, if I want, and to not have to have my work Jabber account online at all. The sweet bliss of a week not caring if the colo blew up or not. :-)

Plus, it looks like Jeremy and I might be skipping out part of the day on Thursday, and heading over to Titusville because ... cool timing ... there's an Atlas launch from Patrick AFB / Cape Canaveral AFS, so we'll probably be renting a car and trying to find a spot on Cocoa Beach.

The only downside to that is that I now have to bring along the "good camera", which is not going checked-baggage in the new "leave your bags unlocked so we can steal your really expensive camera, sir" world order...

I am so not a patient person when it comes to stuff like this. :-)

A couple months ago, I got a call from a telemarketer who was pimping out one of those "pseudo-charities" ... the ones who say they're calling "for the fireman's association" and promise to send you the cool little not-a-get-out-of-jail-free-sticker for your car window and such. I started going through the whole thing until he got to the point, as they always do, where he mentions it's not tax-deductible. "Stop right there," says I, "because if it's not tax-deductible, you're not getting my money. There are plenty of real charities I can give my money to and get a tax break at the same time. Cool that."

He insists on sending out the placard anyway, blah blah blah. So a couple days later, "Erik Balling" gets a sticker in the mail. Yayyy. A week later, "Erik" gets a call asking why he hasn't paid for his promised donation. "Erik" didn't promise shit, and the unnamed guy who answered my phone tells them that.

Now, probably about twice a month, "Erik" gets a call. Apparently, Erik is on all sorts of "sucker" lists now, and didn't even pay money to get there. It's nice, though, to be able to know immediately what the purpose of the call is based on who they ask for.

If they ask for...

... Woodstock Taxi, then they're a moron.
... David Ghent, then they're a bill collector.
... a reservation, they're someone who can't figure out how to dial the Super 8 properly
... "Erik", they're a charity moron-telemarketer

How much easier would life be if the person calling you HAD to identify their name and purpose first? I'd love to be able to block "Unknown Caller" calls (not just "Blocked Caller" ones)... if you're living where there's no CNID, it's the year 2004 man, talk to your phone company and make it happen... I'd pay extra for that feature actually. :)

Friday night I ate dinner. I was up til about 1 in the morning talking to people on Instant Messenger.

Saturday, as normal, I woke up at 6:30. For reasons I have yet to figure out, I've got to be really tired in order to sleep past 6:30. I don't use an alarm clock, I just wake up. Yes, I'm weird.

I wasn't all that hungry around lunch time. Then, as I started to get hungry late in the afternoon, I consoled myself with the thought that there'd be pizza at the D&D game and I could just chow down then.

D&D Night last night was an odd one. I was playtesting a scenario I intend to run at GenCon '04. By the time we started, we were moving at a brisk pace and -- you guessed it -- nobody stopped to order food. I crawled into bed last night around 2 a.m. with a splitting headache. My blood sugar level plummetting to subterranean levels.

This morning, still got a headache, but have to get out the door and get over to the data-center for a bit of weekend maintenance. Subsistance living in the form of a Pop-Tart. The headache is, at least temporarily, abated.

By the time I got home, the small amount of energy the Pop-Tarts provided has long since been depleted and my body is nearly to "shut down" mode. Walk in the door, and call Boston Market, order up a delivery and lay down waiting for it to arrive.

It's been a long, long, time since I was hungry enough to eat a whole chicken. I didn't succeed today, but I did manage to scarf down about 3/4 of a chicken.

Hopefully that will be enough to kill this infernal headache for good.

The more I watch Airline, the more I come to the conclusion that overbooking should be illegal.

The episode airing last night (that my TiVo grabbed), they had a flight that was fifty-three people overbooked. Nope. Sorry. That's bullshit. That's like 135% of capacity!

When I don't show up at an airline, will they completely refund my money? No. Because the airline had reserved my seat, and made assumptions -- or even denied other passengers the right to pay for that seat -- because I told them I wanted the seat.

By the same token, when they do sell a passenger a ticket, the passenger likewise makes seemingly perfectly valid assumptions : like they'll actually be able to fly on the flight they paid to be on. They book cruises, or vacation plans, or all sorts of other things that are non-refundable, just like the airline's airfare.

Plus, the way bumped passengers are treated sucks ass. Let's say we have two flights, both with 100 people capacity, at 8am and 10am. If the 8am flight is overbooked by 20 people say, the first 20 people on the 10am flight should be those 20 people period. The way the airlines currently handle it, 2 of those folks might get on the 10, another 2 or 3 on the 12 noon flight, etc., etc. It should be about minimizing the impact on the customer. It's better to delay "a bunch of people an hour or so each", where it's likely that they can still make use of their existing plans, than to have people being delayed sometimes days because they can't get priority seating on a later flight.

Man,... I'm so glad I don't fly that often.

Ever since I saw PCU several years ago, I'd thought to myself that -- even though I wasn't a huge fan -- I'd love to try and see George Clinton live, just once, for the experience of it.

Last night, Clinton played the local club that is one of my favorite places to see shows, The Chance. The Chance is tiny, cramped, packed, and almost certainly a firetrap. But, man do they put on some good shows at a decent price.

There were some delays in them going on stage (supposed to go on @ 9, didn't make it on til like 9:45 or so), so I ended up bailing mid-way through the show (Hey, I've got a day-job!)... It was a great show, though. There were a couple audio problems, but (since I was standing next to the soundboard guy the whole night, chatting with him during lulls) they were house problems, and not problems with the road crew.

Overall, it was great, and highly recommended to anyone even remotely interested in the idea. I was surprised how much I enjoyed myself, especially given that I didn't know a single song they played. :-)

There's lots of "so-and-so's Law"s floating around the net. Today, I make my first contribution, after a conversation with Tera made me come up with it:

"Always acquiesce to women wielding sharp implements." -- Bobbit's Law

Let no one say you weren't warned.

Spotted on inluminent...

Recently, a reporter for INC magazine was on a JetBlue flight, when he found himself face to face with the JetBlue CEO. What was the CEO doing?

Serving him peanuts. On his once or twice a month escapade where he goes on the road, and works in the trenches, and gets in touch with his company's customers, one at a time as he offers them snacks and beverages.

That's awesome. As John at Inluminent points out, lots of CEOs claim that they do that, but never seem to manage to find the time. The JetBlue crew indicated they've worked with him several times before.

It's no secret the main reason I've been a loyal American Airlines customer isn't because of their customer service (which is, like most of the other airlines, abysmal), but because I've got a metric arseload of frequent flier miles, and it makes sense to keep banking them up. Something like that might make me just decide to try JetBlue for a flight or two, and see what it's like.

Q: Can Derek whip up a tasty batch of Chicken With Garlic Sauce, thus ending his dependency on the local chinese takeout place?

A: Yes

Q: Is it way more effort than it's worth to make it yourself, and will Derek likely just buy it as takeout from now on rather than kill himself making it in the future?

A: Oh, hell yes.

Seriously, it's nice to know "that I can do it" as it were, but unless you're making this stuff up in, oh, restaurant-size batches, and have prepped three-quarters of it in advance, I just can't see where it's worth the time and energy to cook up a one or two person serving of it, unless you're solely seeking to impress someone with your ability to cook the meal.

I was digging through Webvan crates this weekend looking for something, when I found a piece of schwag that had been buried for about two years in crates. It was an absolutely gorgeous portfolio that I had gotten a couple years ago from a company trying to sell me fractional ownership of a personal jet.

Never bought the jet timeshare, but the portfolio is quite spiffy and is now in use. Plus if anyone sees the logo on the front of the thing, they'll probably suspect that I do have a personal jet. :-)

I've always been a big fan of Laura's NYC Tales. Laura grew up a stone's throw from me, and while I was living "everywhere else", it was fun to hear stories from NYC.

Laura's latest tale is how she was assigned the cel phone number that used to belong to Chris Rock, and the fun she had with the inevitable hilarity that ensued.

Definitely worth a read. I wish she had an RSS feed. :(

It's been warm the last week or two... windows open, letting the breeze blow through the apartment warm.

I woke up this morning freezing. Ran around to close the windows, and noticed snow on my car.

Ugh. It's all that groundhog's fault.

"Derek J. Balling" wrote:
>Feel free to file.

Derek,

I did, and you are divorced. The judge signed the decree today and the Court will be sending it to you straight away.

Rick Tardy

Let the celebration commence!

Are you a close personal friend of Derek?

Do you want to read the blog entries that Derek just isn't willing to allow to be google-cached, or to be read by his co-workers, etc., etc.?

Then What Happens In Vegas, Stays In Vegas is for you.

If you think you're worthy of access, let me know, and if I think I know you well enough to let you in, then you'll get access to The Good Stuff^TM.

Anyone ever done this?

- receive "your virus was rejected" message
- realize this is absurd because you have a Mac and the last "worm" for the mac was during the Reagan administration
- Compose scathing e-mail to postmaster@VIRUSREPORTINGSITE explaining to them in monosyllabic terms how stupid they are for their virus-scanning configuration, which should know better than to "notify" when 99% of the worms today use forged addresses.

And then... right before clicking "Send Message"... go google the company you're about to flame to see if you think there's a snowball's chance in hell you'll ever have to deal with them?

Just want to see if I'm the only one. If I ever need a job in the "food service supply industry" down in Arkansas, I guess I'm screwed.

My primary polling place was six paces from the chinese food place (not the one who knows my voice on the phone, the one that's actually awesome).

Who wants to guess what dinner was? :-)

Congrats to Ask, who eloped with his now-wife Vani a month ago in Colorado. The bride and groom are planing three(!!) receptions in the summer... one in the U.S, one in Denmark (where Ask is from) and one in Malaysia (presumably where Vani hails from).

May they have many festive years together. :-)

February is the shortest month of the year, but this year, it already has been home to a number of key elements that I'll look back on as being the best in 2004:

I decided recently that I wanted to go back to school and get my degree. Now, as many folks from my college years will tell you "back" to school might be a misnomer. I was a complete screw-up back in the day. "Mr. Blutarsky... zero point zero GPA..." could have had the name changed and apply to my college career.

But now I've been thinking about it a bit more seriously, because while I'm not planning on going back for CompSci (yeah, like I want to try and take lots of calc classes at 32.. not), I think that having the degree itself would probably help in the grand scheme of things.

So I checked with the two closest colleges, SUNY New Paltz, and a school I was - in my reckless, misspent youth - asked to leave, Marist College. Both of them have strict requirements, requiring a 2.5 GPA for transfers, even in their "adult ed" type programs. As you can probably imagine I don't think my current transcripts could hit a 2.5 GPA with stilts on.

So basically, if you screw up your college chances as a kid, you're completely and totally boned years later. I mean, I haven't seen the inside of a classroom in nigh on ten years. It seems kinda silly to hold against me things I did "way back then", if I've got an earnest desire to return to school now.

Sigh...

You might be ordering from the chinese food place too often if, after you say a couple words, they go "Ahhh, chicken with garlic sauce, extra chicken... quart of wonton soup, riiiiiiight?" (say that with requisite asian accent)

Yeah. I'm predictable... but it costs less to order take-out of chinese food than it does to home-cook the average meal. :-)

For the past seven hours I've had Sweet's Ballroom Blitz rattling around in the back of my head, unwilling to depart of its own volition.

$0.99 later, the demon is dispelled. Thank you, Steve Jobs. You are a gentleman and an exorcist.

You know, the Grammy Awards Show is so much more enjoyable if you just leave it muted while you wait for the artist you want to see perform.

I was reading an article in the local rag this morning, and decided it'd been a while since I'd been to Adams Fairacre Farms to go shopping. In fact, it'd been so long, I don't think I was living out on my own when it last happened.

Now, for my Bay Area readers, Adams is a lot like Oakville Grocery, except they actually have a butcher, so you don't have to go Schaub's to get your meat, there's adequate parking (unlike the clusterfuck that is the Stanford Shopping Center), and -- most importantly -- there isn't nearly the level of snobbery that you get from Oakville employees and many if not most of their patrons.

It's way bigger (even it is very crowded inside) so you can probably manage to get most of your regular shopping done inside as well (as opposed to Oakville, where you can only pick up your "specialty" items there, but for everything else, you've got to go to a supermarket).

I'm not a big "produce guy", so a good one-third of the "Adams Experience" is lost upon me, but it's still nice to be able to get breads baked in local bakeries, meats from locally raised animals, etc.

On my "top 30" songs that I would always crank up in the car was O Fortuna. The problem, of course, is that it's an opera, and the lyrics to it are actually in friggin Latin.

Tonight's definition of geekiness: Deciding to play that track over and over in iTunes with a copy of the lyrics trying to memorize them so you can sing along in the car.

Haven't achieved that goal yet, but I'm a little bit closer.

Not content to only make grievous mistakes and prognostications in a single election cycle, CNN has decided that -- with only 0% (yes, zero percent) of the precincts reporting, that they've got enough information to project a winner in tonight's primaries.

Seriously... either they've got their web site way boned, or they really need to have someone go back and watch the tapes where every news anchor looked like a complete moron for five hours straight as they tried to figure out how exactly to retract a "projected winner"...

So this is what the "progress.txt" file looks like, right now:

# $Id: progress.txt,v 1.68 2004/02/02 16:14:26 dredd Exp $
Preface   : Preface                  -- 100% NEED Boilerplate, Acknowledgements
Chapter  1: Configuration and Setup  -- 100% DONE/DB
Chapter  2: Storage Engines          -- 100% DONE/DB
Chapter  3: Benchmarking             -- 100% DONE/DB
Chapter  4: Indexes                  -- 100% DONE/DB
Chapter  5: Query Optimization       -- 100% DONE/DB
Chapter  6: Server Performance       -- 100% DONE/DB
Chapter  7: Replication              -- 100% DONE/DB
Chapter  8: Load-balancing           -- 100% DONE/DB
Chapter  9: Backup and Recovery      -- 100% DONE/DB
Chapter 10: Security                 -- 100% DONE/DB
Appendix A: SHOW STATUS              -- 100% DONE/DB
Appendix B: mytop                    -- 100% DONE/DB
Appendix C: phpMyAdmin               -- 100% DONE/DB

There are no words to describe the sense of relief I feel at this moment, and I'm sure that when Jeremy wakes up (after being up til 4:30 doing the final pass-through) he'll feel the same way.

What am I saying? It's done!! Other than finishing up the acknowledgements in the preface, and adding the standard O'Reilly boilerplate...

In a recent CNN article was a great quote:

Mary Newman of the National Center for Early Defibrillation in Pittsburgh said the center had never heard of such a case before. She said she doubted the fire or the defibrillator caused Jewett's death.

"When you defibrillate a person, they are already dead," she said.

Gosh I hope Mary isn't indicative of the actual state of intelligence at her "National Center"

Dear Mary : You incompetent moron. You defibrillate someone when their heart has stopped. Death, a very technical thing, has zero to do with the beating of the heart and everything to do with the amount of activity in the brain. Your heart is stopped during open heart surgery, but you're not dead when they use a debrillator at the end to kick-start the heart back into motion.

It amazes me what will pass as "expert commentary" these days.

... I decide not to use my Iron Maiden tickets this past Saturday because the idea of walking four blocks from Penn Station to the concert venue terrified me because of how cold it was.

Well, terrified is probably a bit strong of a verb, but certainly there was zero appeal to the thought of having to bundle up under enough layers to survive that walk, and then have to figure out what to do with all those layers once I got inside to the sweaty throng that is a general-admission heavy metal show.

Meanwhile, three more days of various flavors of "white shit" are on the menu for the first half of the week.

Must be extremely smart on technology issues, and have no compunction about working only for a percentage of what you win in court. Be ready to pimpslap large corporation around and force them to actually obey the law.

Apply within.

As I was driving home from CT this afternoon, I had the iPod going into the car-stereo, as usual, and I noticed that there were some songs I just quietly enjoyed, most songs in fact... but there were some that no matter how loud the stereo was already set to, the volume would immediately go up, and I'd be singing along like a bad karaoke singer who's had a few too many pints of Guinness.

With that in mind, I bring to you "my list"... the top 10... 15... 20... 25... 30 tunes that will cause my stereo to be cranked regardless of how loud it's already at... these are not in any particular order, and I cheated a little, trying to limit myself to only a couple songs maximum per artists... there's a couple artists who I tend to enjoy out-loud more than others.... As it turns out, I realized I demonstrated something I've always known... I have really weird (as in wide) range in music. I don't think there's a lot of people who can totally dig on a Sting track in one second and have no problem seguing into Du Hast shortly thereafter.

Well, here's the list...

Ray came out to visit for the weekend, so it was "typical male slouching about the house weekend". He had never seen Sports Night, so much of the weekend was spent sitting around, bullshitting, watching DVDs of a TV series cut down in its prime.

So now I'm catching up on TiVo, migrating our Samba server for our corporate office from one machine to another, and then later, I really need to start incorporating some of the changes that the tech-review folks suggested, so that we can get the damn book to production and start thinking about relaxing for a while on that front.

That, and I've decided that I really, really, dislike the SSA (Serial Server Architecture) hardware that IBM sells. Think "Token Ring for hard drives" and you'll find yourself asking, much as I do, why they still sell this stuff?

And finally, I've learned that "catching up with old acquaintences" may not necessarily be the best phrase to use, because quite often in the process of "catching up", you actually far surpass the original friendship you're catching up on, which can be a discovery all unto itself.

Today was a commute-day for me. As I think I've said before, I never actually set my alarm clock. I just wake up at the right time. If I commute the next morning, I usually go to bed a little earlier, wake up a little earlier, and drive the 90 miles I commute to the office.

Last night, I was feeling tired, and went to bed a little earlier than normal. Combine that with getting a much better night's sleep due to a certain someone's suggestion that I buy a set of flannel sheets, and you have a combination that led to me waking up around 3:30 in the morning, wide-awake and well-rested on 6.5 hours sleep, out the door by 4:30 and into the office by 6.

Mind you, we don't open the office til 8 or 8:30 I think, and the earliest people usually get here is 7:30.

I think I'll get a good chunk of work done this morning before the office gets crowded....

As many of you may already be aware, the northeast is getting its balls frozen off in a nice arctic chill. The temperature on Wednesday was killing me at 12 degrees Fahrenheit. Little did I know that by Friday, we'd be down into the single-digits or even the negative-single-digits.

I love my apartment to death, except it has a couple critical flaws:

Now, I love Vegas. During the boom, we tried to go there whenever we could. I've noticed lately, though, that Vegas seems to be putting in far more appearances in the media than it used to.

It started, really, with Ocean's Eleven... but it's moved to all sorts of places... CSI is set there, Lucky, from FX, was set there. ESPN broadcasts the World Series of Poker, Bravo shows Celebrity Poker Showdown, Real World had a season there, and even the most recent episode of Ed had the central characters planning an elopement to Sin City.

I think it's great, don't get me wrong. Vegas is a great city. I'm just trying to figure out why the media has so recently latched on tight to it.

I mentioned something similar once before. NBC started playing games with ER's start time, ensuring that my TiVo season pass for CSI would always get kicked to the curb by the higher priority ER, because they changed the start time from 10pm to 9:59, creating a conflict.

With the move of "Ed" to Friday nights, they're now doing the same thing with "Ed", starting it at 8:59, so that it will now conflict with "Boston Public".

Now, this isn't even a good comparison. If you make me choose between a really incredibly well-written drama, and a guy and girl spending three seasons dancing around each other trying to figure out if they should kiss, guess what, the drama's going to win.

So, NBC, I hope your marketing strategy, whatever the fuck you think it is, is working splendidly for you. I've moved all my NBC programming down to lower priority than all the other network programming, to ensure that this will never happen again. Start and end your fucking shows at the same time as the rest of the industry does, and my TiVo will happily make me a viewer again. Until that time, I guess you'll be short one more viewer.

Man, I wish I had a Neilsen box.

A mindless link post, courtesy of Josh: http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20040107/southsound/8191.shtml

In two weeks, I'll be heading down to New York to go see Iron Maiden in concert. To me, Maiden has a lot of history, and I'm so totally excited about going to the show.

Jeremy was lamenting the stupidity of some people, when I was forced to remind him of the Law Of Conservation of Cluons. Cluons, like energy, cannot be created or destroyed.

There are only so many cluons in the world. This figure is a constant (until we start interplanetary travel, anyway). The population of the world, however, keeps growing. What does this mean? There are fewer cluons per person.

What makes it worse is that cluons are mutually attractive. People who possess many cluons will not seek out "balance" in the form of finding someone with a low quantity of cluons. People with high quantities cluons generally only find attractive other people with similar quantities of cluons. They then tend to cluster, in areas such as Silicon Valley, or similar areas.

The stupid people breed like rabbits further diluting their share of cluons, and the smart people seem to only have very few children, collecting their cluons into a smaller quantity of receptacles.

The end result of this, taken to its logical end, is that we will end up as a society of morons, led by an elite few super-intelligent people who have collected the cluons from all the rest of society.

It's like Highlander, but with no swords.

I have, historically, managed to avoid watching Real World on MTV. I watched the first season (when it was, literally, the original reality-TV show). After a couple seasons, it rapidly turned into the standard "let's put seven people together who'll conflict" fiasco, and I stopped watching it. I stopped watching it not out of some conscious decision, but out of apathy. I couldn't be bothered to make time to watch it, and that apathy was so deep that I couldn't even be bothered to click four buttons on my TiVo remote and let it worry about recording it.

But then the bastards at MTV decided to run a marathon of every episode of the last season back-to-back. Argh. Now, here I sit, like a big lump on my couch, slurping down the crap they spoon-feed out in 30 minute segments, and probably will be the entire rest of the evening.

My dishwasher in my apartment kitchen is loud - really loud. It's so loud that when it is running, I have to crank up the television quite a bit in order to hear it over the noise of the dishwasher.

So, that means the only time I actually run the dishwasher is ... right as I'm going to bed.

Because I have a kitchen that is open to the living-area via a bar, there is nothing there to dampen the noise. Contrarily, there are two walls between my dishwasher and my bed (depending on the angle, it might even be three walls come to think of it), and I can barely hear it from my bed, even though my bed is actually a little closer to it.

You know, for as much spam as I get about the Paris Hilton Video, and for as much as people are talking about it, you'd think there'd be a shitload of places hosting it that aren't like professional porn/spamhauses.

Here I decided "I'll see what all the fuss is about with this damned video"... I've never been a huge porn-hound, but it's not like it disgusts me or anything...

Thing is, it's damned near impossible for me to find a copy. ;-) Maybe it's that with all the years I've spent actually paying for my software that I've completely lost whatever knack I used to have for finding illicit items on the net, and I just have a problem paying for something that was illicitly distributed to begin with, and that everyone else seems to be obtaining for free. ;-)

UPDATE: Someone e-mailed me a URL for a WMV file, except that for some reason it "requires Media Player 9", but the latest Media Player 9 for the mac completely fails to handle the file... so I guess I'm now looking for the MPEG version. Sigh. Maybe I'm just not meant to watch. ;-)

There is nothing more frustrating than having a dream, seeing someone in your dream who you recognize -- i.e., it's someone you know and have had conversations with -- and when you wake up, you can still see that person's face but still can't connect the face to a name. It isn't "the person's image has faded from your mind so you don't remember who it was", it's "I see the image clearly but can't for the life of me remember where I've met that person before, because I know I have!". You're like, "I know him/her! Who the hell is he/she?!"

It's a similar feeling to when you meet someone at a party and can't remember their name. At the party, though, the nervous panic over whether you'll get caught overrides the self-anger about why you're a dumbass who can't remember the name.

Yeah, you may remember me... I was the guy driving the Jeep Liberty on 9W north this afternoon. I was doing 65-70 in a 55 in the show-off lane, driving along at a good clip, getting ready to pull back into the normal lane. You were the guy who decided I wasn't getting back over fast enough for you, so you decided to gun it past me in the "normal" lane, doing about 80.

I wanted to thank you for getting in between the State Trooper's radar gun and my car. It was much appreciated. In exchange for you playing "Secret Service catch-the-bullet" with my speeding ticket, I'll happily buy you a beer at the local establishment of your choice.

I have always been a big fan of the folks at despair.com. Their demotivational materials are some of the funniest, most original stuff I've seen in years.

For those not familiar with Demotivators, they look strikingly similar to the motivational cards, posters, calendars, that inane middle-management think will help improve your productivity if they're plastered all over the office place. These posters, cards, and especially calendars, however, are for the "realists" among us... detailing things like "Retirement" ("Because you've given so much to the company that you don't have anything left we can use"), or "Discovery" ("A company that will go to the ends of the earth for its people will find it can hire them for about 10% of the cost of Americans").

If you're one of my cynical friends, you've gotten your annual christmas present of a Demotivators calendar before, so you know what I'm talking about.

However, there's something different this year. The folks at Despair, Inc., have been working with Mark Osborne, an award-winning film-maker who has done several short animated films. His first, More, was something I downloaded and watched over and over again. It's a story that resonates pretty well despite the lack of dialogue, and can easily be considered a cautionary tale for today's entrepreneurs.

Despair, Inc. (well, actually a subsidiary company of theirs called Copernica), helped Mark set up a distribution channel for his product, and thus www.happyproduct.com was born. (HappyProduct is a reference to something in the movie).

I cannot recommend it highly enough. There's a QuickTime version of "More" available on happyproduct.com, so you can see what it is, and I'm sure you'll go buy a copy on DVD afterwards. Mark also has another movie being released in a couple of days, called "Greener". ("Greener" was actually made first, but released second, in the way that often happens with movie projects).

I was trying to find the name of a company I'd looked into several (3+) years ago to purchase a stand-up arcade game in (to pass it along to a friend). Not finding it in any of my "archives" I cracked open a ZIP file I hadn't opened in years: the backup I made of my Eudora mailboxes on my last Windows machine, which appears to have been shut down in December of 1999.

I found some of the most amazing e-mail messages in there that brought back tons of memories....

Tonight was the annual opening of gifts at the parents' homestead. My father got what every male with a DVD player needs -- a copy of The Godfather Trilogy on DVD. My mom got a couple other DVDs she wanted, as did I, including a very cool Weird Al DVD I'd had on my wish-list for a while.

My mom, ever the avid reader of this site, also bought me a couple "cookbooks for one", based on a recent blog entry, as well as a very cool Yankees Watch.

Of course, the greatest present this holiday season was knowing that the book was -- by and large -- done, and that we didn't have to worry about it going into the holidays.

Happy Holidays to all those who have a holiday to celebrate...

The days I actually "go into" the office, versus the days I work from home, are the days that I seem to get absolutely nothing done.

If you only telecommute one or two days a week, you probably haven't noticed this. If you telecommute more often, like I do, you've probably noticed this. It seems to stem from the "Oh, I haven't seen you in days/weeks/months," type of phenomenon where there's a bit of chatting about catching up on work stuff, then another (longer) bit of chatting about catching up on non-work stuff.

Meanwhile, during none of that chatting are you actually managing to get anything done.

I've gotten to the point where I just practically write off the days I have to go into the office as being valuable only for "doing work in the computer closet that needs to get done". Otherwise, they're a complete waste of time.

Although my commute day this week will yield a department lunch/party so I guess it's not a complete waste. (Although an astute observer will point out that I'm not going to get any work done from the dining area at P.F.Chang's)

For years, every time someone claimed to come forward with "images of ghosts" or "haunting spirits", it was some crazy whack job, or the image was so poor that it could be a christmas bulb's reflection on the lens of the camera.

Except that at Hampton Court Palace in Surrey, just outside London, they got a decent shot. Someone kept leaving the fire-doors open in one section of the palace, so the security crew scanned back into the archives of the security tapes, looking to see who they should yell at.

It looks like the culprit might have died a couple hundred years ago.

What makes this story believeable are the details... it wasn't like anyone was looking for a ghost, they were just looking for something completely different. The crew -- who usually dress in period costumes -- confirm that that's a period costume, and it's one that they don't actually have so it's not one of them.

Once again, I am unable to see the trees across the lake from my apartment. Well, I can see them if you count "there's this area of grey that is darker than the rest".

The snow is back... total accumulation is expected to be between 9 and 14 inches between today and the overnight.

There's something to be said for being snowed in, though... I've got some bread baking in the bread machine, had a cup of hot cocoa (one of those things that I only drink when it's snowing out), got to watch the last bits of Buffy Season 5, and then started watching the new Horatio Hornblower box-set.

More importantly than all of that, though, is that being snowed-in has meant work is getting done on the book. I can't believe that the last of it won't be ready (for our part) for the reviewers within the next day or two. I have no idea how long after that it would take O'Reilly to typeset the copies they send to tech-review, but probably not all that long, given the way the process works.

There's a light at the end of that tunnel.

Things which suck: Coming home, not feeling all that terribly great, just wanting to order in some food and relax and do nothing

Things which rule: Coming home to find the Buffy, Season 5 Box sitting on your doorstep, giving you something to watch while doing said vegging out.

Spotted on Dean's World:

There was an article in the New York Post about some comedians' performances at a Howard Dean fundraiser.

What disturbed me was not their performances, but the Post's characterizations of the fundraiser as "an angry X-rated fund-raiser"... in fact the article goes on to use the phrase "X-Rated" no fewer than three times, in just under half the paragraphs in the eight-paragraph article.

Now, the last I knew, the way to get an "X" rating was to show copious quantities of direct sexual contact (penetration, etc.) or to show absolutely insanely ludicrous over the top quantities of gratuitous violence (a la the first cuts of RoboCop that you can now only get on DVD as the "unrated" version).

If the use of the word "shit" or "fuck" by a comedian is considered by the New York Post to be "X-Rated", methinks it's entirely possible that paper is just a teensy-tiny bit too stuffy. What's next? Men and women holding hands in public! The travesty! Maybe the editorial staff should move somewhere more in line with their moral standards....

Tonight, I start something new in my life. I've known for a while that I needed a form of exercise, but couldn't find anything that could keep my attention. Going out walking/running - to me - is just boring as hell. I'd love to play baseball, even poorly, except that almost all mens' leagues are softball only (plus it's pretty seasonal, it's hard to play baseball in a foot of snow).

So I decided to take up fencing. I know it'll be tough, but it's a year-round sport, and it's one that I think I'll find interesting enough to stay with it. Plus, once I purchase a couple hundred dollars worth of equipment, I'm going to be kicking myself every time I don't use them, so that'll keep me motivated as well.

Now I just need to really and truly decide what style of fencing I want to partake in... I've been thinking about epee, since the barrier to entry for me (as a newbie) will be lower, since I don't have to worry about learning the semantics of right-of-way and such (yes, in fencing there actually are prescribed rules for when you may attack the opponent... except they don't apply for epee). By the same token, though, if I take foil or sabre, then I'll learn right-of-way, and if I decide down the road to switch for some reason, I won't be completely in the dark on the topic.

In Brown v. Board Of Education, the practice of "separate but equal" as it applied to racial separation was found to be unconstitutional.

There are similar cases that discuss separation based on sex.

So why is it we still have mens' and womens' rest rooms?

You may chuckle under your breath upon reading that, but how is having "separate but equal" bathrooms any different fundamentally than having "separate but equal" drinking-fountains, or seats on the bus, or doorways to use to enter public buildings?

I understand that abolishing separate but equal bathrooms would probably spell the end of the urinal as we know it, but I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing (especially as any guy who's ever had to deal with the "public bathroom piss trough" can attest).

There must be some reason for the holdout nature of separate bathrooms, but I can't for the life of me figure out why... I have to believe at some point in time, some guy (or girl) was pissed off at the much-shorter line for the other folks' bathroom and decided to make a case out of it... if not, someone should...

I have these jagoff neighbors. They're several apartments down from me, but they like to park their car -- not in the parking spots off to the side of the road, but off to one side of the road. They probably justify it by telling themselves the only car they're blocking in is their own, etc., etc. (which is probably true).

Except that their car also sits now partly in the road. Now, as anyone who's been to my apartment can tell you, the road to get back into the apartment complex, as it passes between the rows of apartments, is quite narrow, certainly it's narrow when an ill-placed car is parked so that half the car is sitting in the road.

Meanwhile, there's a crew of people trying diligently to keep the road clear (cuz, you might have heard, we're having one of those blizzard things up here), but this jackass' car is making that pretty darned hard for them to do that.

Personally, I'd pay good money to see them either flatbed the bitch out into an impound lot, or just say "oh, that must be where we're supposed to deposit the snow" and bury the fucker. (Actually saw that last year... car didn't move when it was supposed to for the "plowing cleanup" after the snowstorm, so the woman came out to find her car hidden behind three snowpiles of about 4-5' each).

Admittedly, my neighbors aren't as stupid as Jay's who got told "one more noise complaint and you're fucking gone", and then proceeded to turn up their stereo full blast, but this guy has to got to be at least ranking somewhere near to that....

Sweet fucking lord, no, he's the antichrist!!!!

OK, maybe not... but it's funny, admit it.

Last night, I lamented room service gratuities.

Tonight, I'll point out that it was much more economically sound for me to work up the ambition to head out into the bitter cold, drive over to Baskin-Robbins, buy myself an overpriced quart of ice-cream, bring it back to my room, and throw 3/4 of it away, than it would be for me to pay $6.00 for two (small) scoops of ice cream, a single strawberry, a dash of whipped cream, and a fancy name like Gelato. (oh, and never mind the unsatisfied feeling after the six spoonfuls of ice-cream are gone)

If you're going to charge a ludicrous price like that, plus the mandatory gratuity (but of course!), you at least ought to offer a value somewhat commensurate with that price.

Here's a hint: If I was willing to go out on a night as cold as tonight is, that's pretty damned overpriced.

PS - If anyone wants some ice cream, there'll be the better part of a quart of Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream for the next 20 or 30 minutes, if you're in the area. ;-)

As anyone who's gone anywhere with me knows, I tip like a madman. I'm Steve Martin in My Blue Heaven tipper. "You tip everybody!"

One thing that always grated on me, though, is ordering room service and getting the bill with 20% already added to it (or whatever the hotel adds). I don't begrudge the room service guy his tip, but I just can't justify putting anything on the "TIP" line of the bill when there's already a 20% gratuity added to the bill, and I think it's positively distasteful for the hotel to print the line in the first place.

Except, of course, that they all do it.

If you want to "force" the tip that way, then don't put the line on the bill asking me for more money. I'll give you a hint -- if you don't force the tip the waiter will probably end up getting more money out of the deal, at least from me (since I'm usually a 30% kind of guy, sometimes 33% depending on the mood and the service).

Overheard this evening, with Person A telling Person B why Person B needs to get a vasectomy:

It's just like having a free-cable-box... you get to watch all the good stuff, and you don't have to pay for it when it's over

Only in my circle of friends would people tell each other, in all seriousness, to stop fucking breeding. :-)

In the course of the last few months, I've managed to lose both my copies of Fletch and X-Men. Both of which I distinctly remember loaning out to people, but nobody at all seems to admit to being the person I loaned them out to.

So, here's how it's going to work from now on... you're going to sign out the DVD. It is my responsibility to make sure you do that, but when you return the DVD it is your responsibility to make sure you get taken off the checked-out-DVDs list when you do so.

I've got a huge collection, and they come in and out from loan all the time. This seems to be the only way to keep people from "forgetting" they borrowed stuff, or saying "I returned that" when they didn't.

It's either that or stop loaning out DVDs to anyone at all, which I seriously considered. :-(

At Thanksgiving dinner today, I was getting ragged on a little for my "cooking selection" (in that I tend to be heavy on pastas and such).

The problem, as any single person knows, is that cooking for one person sucks. You either end up eating the same meal four times in three days as you consume the leftovers, or you make something small and simple that can be easily scaled down (e.g., pastas and such).

What I'd really like to see -- and in all my visits to Barnes and Noble and Borders I have yet to see it -- is a cookbook dedicated to single people. Give me recipes that include things like "1 chicken breast" or the like.

I want to eat decent food, and I want to have a nice selection, but every cookbook on the face of the planet seems to average "feeds 4-6 people" in its target audience, which is completely overkill for someone living on their own.

The latest book to come up in my reading queue is Absolutely American : Four Years at West Point, where this reporter basically hung out at West Point for four complete years with total access, and documented everything he saw.

As I read these stories, I think back to my senior year of high school, when I found out that I had been accepted to the Air Force Academy, and that I'd gotten my required Congressional Nomination. I realized, though, that there was no way I could pass the PT portion of the entrance requirements, so I bowed out and let someone else I'll never know have my slot.

Now, anyone in the Army will be quick to remind me that the USAFA is "the upstart kid" of service academies, but still, reading this book has made me wonder the myriad ways my life would be different now if I'd somehow had the drive at the time to make myself capable of passing that entrance PT test.

I'm not, at all, lamenting the choice I made. I think in the end, I did all right by my decision. I certainly don't think in the end I would have fared very well in the military anyway. Just one of those things you play in your mind as a thought-exercise... "what if....?"

I was on the road today, and on my iPod, up came All-Star, by Smashmouth.

To me, any time I hear that song, I'll be thinking of driving in Atlanta for the '99 World Series with the ex and Jay, with that song on the radio and the three of us singing along as though all of us were completely tone-deaf, heading over to the Waffle House to get some food.

It amazes me because if I sit down and consciously try to remember those events, they're not at all clear, but as soon as I hear that song, it all comes into sharp focus, and I remember it all. It's just weird to me how a song can do that.

Amazon finally has the book available for pre-order and (now) has the corrected data that also shows my name as one of the authors. Jeremy and I set up a web site for it over here.

It's a bit surreal actually. It hasn't quite hit me yet, probably because we're still neck deep in the last few chapters, and because for as much as my name is on the cover, the book really is Jeremy's baby. I've just helped bring it to term, is all.

It's actually a little weird, really. I mean, one of the things I still have to give to O'Reilly's marketing department is my author bio. The marketing department tells me it should contain "why you're the most qualified to write this book".

But, I'm not a MySQL guru. I won't deny I've picked up a lot of tips and tricks while helping Jeremy write the book, and I'm proud of what we're putting together, but I was brought on-board mostly because I'm good at organizing stuff so it makes sense and at writing. I sort of end up reading and writing the book more with the eye of the intended audience -- someone who isn't a MySQL expert, and make sure that it's accessible to those folks.

I know how important that is. I've read a lot of books by people who didn't have someone like me making sure that the text made sense to someone who wasn't already an expert on the topic.

Come to think of it... I think I just figured out my Author Bio....

I got home today from day one of the collocation move. I'm dead tired. I have no desire to cook, nor to go out and get food... as anyone who knows where I live knows, that leaves me with two options for delivery of food... pizza or chinese.

"Wait!" I said to myself, "There's that flyer for Boston Market Delivery you got the other day"... so off to the kitchen I go, find the flier, etc. I pore over the menu for 10 minutes deciding just what it is that I want to eat ...

I pick up the phone, I call for delivery...

(paraphrased) "We have selected the New York Metropolitan area as a test market for delivery. Unfortunately, we've ran into some glitches, and we're unable to offer reliable delivery like we thought we could. We will be investigating how to bring you delivery service as quickly as possible." ... blah blah blah

Grrrrrr, now that I'd just gotten myself all in the mood for some really good ham, and a couple of nice sides... Bollocks.

This is the weekend I have been both anxiously awaiting and dreading with fear for the last month or so.

Tomorrow is the last day of the "collocation relocation" project. Today and tomorrow, the last remaining stuff in our Secaucus, NJ AT&T Data Center will be disassembled by IBM, moved by shippers to Wappingers Falls, and put back together again by IBM in our new facility.

This weekend's "stuff" to be moved is the most critical parts of our infrastructure... our production server, our database, everything that you really don't want to have to try to restore on short notice if the moving truck goes off the side of a cliff.

If you think I'll be crossing my fingers throughout most of today and tomorrow, you'd be right, despite the insane amount of planning that has gone into this entire process.

Meanwhile, because of deadline constraints, I've got to finish work on one of the appendixes to the book this weekend as well as some significant progress on a different chapter.

So if I'm a bit brain-fried, don't hold it against me.

Not often, mind you, but occasionally. Especially when good friends of mine do ultimately-cool geek things for the holiday season.

A good friend of mine has made an annual tradition of renting out an entire theater and having a private screening of the 12:01am showing of that particular year's Lord Of The Rings movie. I was around for Fellowship, and couldn't fly west for the event last year because of some moving I was doing at the time, from CT to NY.

This morning, I got this year's invitation.

I want so much to go, but vacation time is at a premium (ork-place gives a whopping two weeks a year, and does so using a brain-dead vacation plan that basically doesn't allow *any* stockpiling of vacation days for a rainy day. Completely and utterly gay)... I figure it'd take at least two, probably three vacation days to make the trip happen, and that would leave me with no vacation days left...

Not to mention the trifling matter of coast-to-coast airfare. :(

... got the car fixed.
... got the tooth fixed.
... got a pair of mondo-close-to-the-stage Sting tickets for his March 5th show in NYC

It's just been a kick-ass day.

As if I didn't have enough screwing around to do tomorrow, bringing my car "there and back" to/from the dealer that's an hour's drive away, I now have to also make time to get into the dentist's tomorrow.

While eating pizza during "D&D Night" last night, a ceramic crown on my front tooth sheared off leaving what appears to be the dentin exposed. I'd always had a chip on that tooth (since I was a small child when I face-planted a pickup truck), and only when I lived in California did they finally do the repair in such a way that it actually looked good. The previous repair had lasted about 20 years, but looked .. ugly... I guess you have to choose between "well done" and "long lasting" or something, because this new ceramic repair looked great and fell apart within three years.

It's kinda a bummer... my California dentist was a great guy, a pleasure to deal with, but this is the second thing he did that I've had to have replaced since I moved back east. Kinda disconcerting.

Luckily, because it was always a very small chip, when he sanded the enamel down (to make something the new crown could bond to), he didn't have to go too deep and expose anything. So I haven't got any painful/irritating exposed nerves or anything, just the really annoyingly thin tooth now that I'm basically scared to use (I see lots of soft food in my diet today).

So instead of driving down to Middletown, spending four hours there while they do the 30K maintenance and replace my battery, and then coming back, I'll be going down, getting a ride back north with my dad, going to the dentist, and then having him drive me back down to get the Miata later in the day.

In a word: "Ugh."

The other day we had our first glimpse of winter hail... since the Miata had been outside the carport for a couple weeks (I moved it there when the carport was being painted, and had never gotten around to moving it back), I decided "now was an excellent opportunity to do so".

Except that I couldn't get the car-alarm to disarm. Cursing the batteries in my keychain I went back inside, got the "spare" keychain, and proceeded to ... err... fail utterly at disarming the alarm.

Finally, I just unlocked and opened the car door without disarming the car. Not a peep was heard. The car alarm remained silent.

Of course, as an astute reader might guess and I discovered about six seconds later, the battery was dead. Very dead. Like not even bringing up the idiot lights on the dashboard dead.

Not owning a set of jumper cables, I made arrangements that today, since I had it off as a comp day, my dad would come over with the jumper cables, jump the car, and then go buy a new battery for it. This morning came, he came down, and I proceeded to look for places that sold the battery.

Well, I actually called to see "if they had it in stock" because why wouldn't they carry the battery, right? Except that of the four or five places I called, not a single one had it in stock. They had it so "not in stock" that their computer couldn't even tell them what battery to order if they wanted to.

Turns out, the Miata battery is some wonky thing you can basically only get from the dealer or one or two mail-order companies (who specialize in selling Miata parts).

So I moved the car back under the carport, and called the dealer. For reasons I'm not quite clear on, the only day the service department is open next week is Monday. I suppose I could go to a different dealer, but the one I'm going to -- the closest -- is an hour's drive away.

The boss was quite understanding (if a bit mocking, but that's to be expected when not doing research beforehand causes you to look like a bonehead *grin*)... so it looks like I get a four-day weekend this weekend, but with two of the days devoted to screwing around with the Miata...

So I'm hanging out, catching up on the last vestiges of work stuff before I take a day off tomorrow, and I get an IM from some screen name I've never heard of before... That's odd. I say hi. A couple seconds later, I'm invited to view their webcam. Sure, what the heck. Decent-looking (although not, by any definition, "hot") female on the other end. She starts chatting with me briefly, and then starts showing off parts of her anatomy.

This goes on for a while until eventually, she uses a "pet name" for me. I won't repeat the name, not because it's offensive (it's not) but to prevent any possible embarassment for innocent folks.

I ask her, "who's petname?"

I watch her read my IM, and the smile vanishes from her face, and is replaced by this intent look with narrowing eyes as she types back, "Who is this?"

"Not who you think it is I strongly suspect."

Then she turned off the webcam.

Oops.

Thanks to an anonymous friend... this is the funniest weight-lifting I've ever seen. Even if you're not a weightlifting fan, go click the link, you'll be impressed. Trust me.

It's just one of those days 
When ya don't wanna wake up
Everything is fucked, everybody sucks .
You really don't know why
But you wanna justify rippin someone's head off

It was barely 8:00 by the time I had realized our managed-network partner was trying to screw us by installing crappy $300 SOHO hardware for the "cool new network solution" they sold us for our enterprise WAN, and they're not sure if they even offer the solution using "real" hardware (like, say, rack-mountable). Of course the contract is already signed, and we pay enough to them for 'management' that we could hire a network engineer (admittedly a cheap one, but still) to do it all in-house.

It was barely 9:30 before I'd had an argument with the ex, that no I wasn't just going to give her my password to the insurance web site, because while I'm required to keep paying her insurance throughout the course of the divorce, I'm not required to pony up my claims information, etc., to her, which is what she gets if I give her the password. She called back a little later to say that our insurance company walked her through getting set up, so now I strongly suspect I have to call them and explain that "she needs to be able to see her claims, but she has no legal right to see mine, and if you show them to her, there's gonna be a HIPAA lawsuit the size of Texas heading your way."

If I drank, today would be one of those "find the bottom of the bottle of Jack" days, I think.

I returned home from LISA this evening, and decided, "OK, time to wind down, sift over a week's worth of snail-mail, and watch some of the stuff TiVo recorded for me."

I decide "OK, let's watch last night's Lyon's Den", so I dutifully select it from my "Now Playing" menu. What appears on my screen?

Press CBL To Turn On Your Cable Box

Yup, at some point in the course of the week (appears to be last saturday!) the power flickered, the cable box lost power and -- due to its completely crappy design -- failed to return to the powered-on state after power was reapplied to it. Every program TiVo recorded dutifully told me in no uncertain terms that my cable box was smart enough to push video out the S-Video port, but not smart enough to make it useful video.

I have a vision of myself in Best Buy tomorrow, picking up a low-end UPS to put on the home theater so as to prevent that particular design flaw from rearing its ugly head again. At least I was addicted enough to watch West Wing live in real-time in my hotel room out west. If I'd missed West Wing, me and a design engineer from Scientific Atlanta were going to have a conversation.... "He mentioned the word 'bullet' and he mentioned the word 'brain'..."

(bonus points if you spot the movie-reference)

... that pre-ordering stuff from Amazon rules. My Indiana Jones Box Set arrived today and my Battlestar Galactica Box should be here tomorrow (just in time to go with me in my carry-on to LISA in San Diego ... this is a lesson that Mark is only just now coming to realize.

... that if you have to use coin-op laundry facilities, it's only like $5.00 more to pay your local laundromat to do drop-off service, and let them do all the work and folding for ya.

... that there are firewall vendors out there who need to be shot because they insist on using an IP address to connect to the other end of a VPN instead of allowing the use of a hostname. Point of order to those fucktards: DNS exists for a reason, it's so users don't have to memorize IP addresses, and so that the host which provides a service can change without anything having to change on the client side. Wake up and smell the RFC, it's only sixteen years old now.

Today I did something I haven't done in about five or six years at least, quite possibly even longer, maybe as much as seven or eight.

I renewed the lease on my apartment.

Like clockwork in the past, I've moved out of one apartment and into another never finishing my lease, or departing at the end of the lease. I've been doing it at least since I started at Yahoo in 1998, and I don't think I renewed my lease in Chicago, which means it's been even longer, not since I lived in Fort Wayne, and even then a couple years before I left, around 1996 or so, when we renewed the lease in the house that was later condemned.

It feels weird to say "I'm not moving this time"... to look upon the last few boxes still packed and think "maybe I should unpack those and completely settle in", except that I'm cursed that every time I've ever "completely unpacked", it's been time to move again.

Feels good to settle down a bit, though, and not have to think about moving. I'll be happier when I've got a house to settle down into though.

That's where I'm at right now. I could watch Free Enterprise or Office Space all day now on infinite repeat, so well do they resonate with my current state.

I'm dissatisfied with the state of the world... my country is an international bully and pariah. Travelling abroad, I'd feel ashamed to hand over a US Passport these days, and feel the need to apologize to anyone I encountered, as if to say "I'm not like the people you see on TV."

I'm dissatisfied with -- not my job, but my industry in general. Spam is on the rise, it's basically not something that cannot be stopped. The "anti-spam community" is basically toothless... Twice a week, a new worm crawls across the Microsoft Windows world wreaking havoc in its path, yet IT trade-mags devote negligible column-inches to how disastrous Microsoft's leadership of the industry is, and companies keep dumping millions of dollars into Microsoft, rewarding the company who routinely screws them...

I'm dissatisfied with the people around me... I see people who are content to believe whatever passes for news on the TV, or whatever boy-band or slut-chick is passed off as "this season's music sensation".

I have a good friend who recently went through a bit of a personal crisis where he decided he was sick of his job, his lot in life, etc. I was able to really relate to that. I've toyed with the idea of just selling everything, getting a house in the middle of nowhere in the Adirondacks or something, and just finding some way to support myself doing odd jobs or something suitably lame like that. I've thought about going back to school, getting a degree in something else, and finding something else to do that I enjoy, but that would only solve a small chunk of my issues.

I'm beginning to wonder if I can be happy, to wonder if it's actually possible.

I've never been a big fan of white cake. It's just not my thing. Chocolate cake for me, I tell ya.

So, when the Ex and I were planning our wedding (way back when), she very nicely pointed out a tradition I'd never heard of (but confirmed), called "the groom's cake".

The groom's cake I got was a sinful "Death By Chocolate" cake, provided by The Pastry Garden. It was a small cake (as the tradition goes) and there was probably about eight slices to go around. Ray got one, as did his wife. Susan got a slice I think, and I know I had two.

And, for the intervening three years, I'd been comparing every chocolate cake I ever had to that cake.

This weekend, since Ray and Jess were coming up to visit, I decided to swing by and pick up a small reminder of what true chocolate heaven tastes like.

Oh, bliss. Big-ass glasses of milk and the world's greatest chocolate cake. There is no finer pleasure in life.

Wizards Of The Coast, the owners of the Dungeons and Dragons line, announced several months ago that they'd be releasing a line of pre-painted miniatures for players to use.

This, for those of us who found using miniatures on a map-mat to be very useful but who had no artistic ability whatsoever when it came to painting the tiny things, hailed this as a god-send. Finally, we could also get the miniatures that would make the game more enjoyable and easier to play.

Except that Wizards of the Coast got its start as the company that created the collectible card-game craze with it's Magic: The Gathering product. You can already see where this is going.

You buy a box of miniatures. You get a randomized selection (some "common", some "uncommon", one "rare"... sound familiar? sounds the aforementioned game Wizards is intimately familiar with)

If you happen to want more of the miniature that is "rare", you've got to keep buying big fat boxes of miniatures, getting a shitload of "commons" that you have no use for. Unlike every other company that sells miniatures, there is no way to simply buy the miniatures you actually have a use for in your campaign.

So, I guess I'll be buying art supplies for the member of our gaming group who is good with paintining miniatures. I bought the battle-maps at GenCon this past summer in anticipation of these miniatures, and I'm definitely not going to fall into that particular trap that will have Wizards sucking down my money like some pre-pubescent Pokemon addict. I'll give my money to someone else, and Wizards will have lost.

Worse, they'll have - in my mind at least - done something TSR was famous for back in the day. That is, TSR, at the end, got well known for "raping the customer for all he was worth". Wizards seemed like it was going to be different, but if this is the way they treat the D&D franchise, they're obviously no different than the former owners.

Kinda makes me think about switching gaming systems, actually...

I was trying to figure out why my TiVo hadn't grabbed a season pass entry for tonight's CSI episode (on CBS, 9-10pm). Turns out that NBC did the same thing this week that they did last week: ER, their 10pm show, is scheduled to start at 9:59pm. Thus the TiVo says "that's a conflict" and picks the higher priority item to win. Since ER had been in my Season Passes since the beginning it was higher priority and thus got the go-ahead.

Obviously, I don't enjoy said tomfoolery. The only reason NBC does this is - essentially - to fuck with people who are using TiVo and other DVR products to make them choose between "watch our network or someone else's".

Well, I've chosen, NBC. I bumped CSI to a higher priority. So, if you care at all (and I'm sure you don't) whether or not someone who's been watching ER since the pilot episode continues to see the show, you'll stop playing games. If you continue to do the "9:59" thing, my TiVo will happily ignore ER, and I'll spend the entire evening on a competing network. If, however, you choose to accept the fact that I enjoy CSI more than I do "Will and Grace" or your very poor rip-off of the great brit-com, Coupling, you'll stop playing games, and I'll get to watch ER as well.

You choose.

So I got home from CT today and started catching up with the stories that NetNewsWire had collected for me.

Apparently, the October 1 issue of The Onion had a great story:

"Thank You, But That Was Siegfried's Idea", by Roy Horn

Great quotes, in hindsight ... "Did you enjoy the white tigers? Most people love the white lions and the white tigers. Siegfried and I often fight over which of us should get the spotlight, but in the end, the star of the show is always the cats. Everyone assumes that they work for us, but it's more the other way around! Luckily, I've always had a great rapport with those beautiful creatures."

Classic.

Update: Apparently, The Onion pulled the story. That's so not like them to find something "in poor taste"... Google Cache Is Your Friend. (mirrored for posterity)

Tonight, Ray and I went to go see Sting at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City. It was kind of a bummer that the tickets were all General Admission, standing only. It was a charity auction, so pretty much I took whatever seats I got, which was the GA seats.

It was interesting. The majority of the show were songs I'd never heard before, or only heard once or twice from the new CD that came out just this past Tuesday.

It wasn't a "regular" Sting concert, but it was still just as good as any prior show I've seen him do. I can't wait for the real tour to start (this was just a 'rehearsal gig' which had the added benefit of there being no opening act), so I can go see him again.

A while ago, I recanted a tale of when Ray, Brian, and I went to see Siegfried and Roy do their little white-tigers-and-crappy-magic show.

Apparently, the tigers got as sick of their shit as I was, and one of them decided to take a shot at Roy's neckline, putting him in critical condition.

I really really wish I could feel sorry for him. But for what I paid them, and what they take in night after night, and for as crappy as their show is, I just can't do it.

Just a unabashed recommendation: the new Sting CD, Sacred Love was released yesterday. Great disc, I'm enjoying it greatly.

Can't wait to go see him Saturday at his NYC gig @ Hammerstein. Sting is always a great concert performer.

Kasia pointed me at a great parody of Yahoo!Maps, detailing Directions from Bag End, The Shire to Cracks of Doom, Mordor.

Of course, as Brian pointed out, "Hell, if it's anything like the original site it's parodying, it probably would take you through Rivendell three times to get to Mordor".

Funny stuff made by one person, pointed to by someone else, and commented on by a third person. None of which is me. Completely stolen humor, y'all.

As anyone who has a cat will know, you can get infinitely more "cat enjoyment" mileage out of the free stuff (milk-jug cap-rings, empty boxes, etc.) than you can from the high-priced "cat toys".

G'Kar, the younger of my two cats, has been in cat heaven for the last week or so. I'm in the process of building out the new colo facility for The Pit. That means there's literally dozens of empty boxes all over my apartment — server boxes, switch boxes, cable boxes, you name it, it came in a box and I've got the empty box somewhere in my living room or dining room area, while I prep the hardware that came in it.

Which, of course, gives the cats lots of places to hide from one another and pounce on each other as they go by.

They're going to be disappointed the beginning of next week when it all starts vanishing...

When I was kid, the ultimate way of saying something was stupid was to call it "gay", or in the extreme, "gay as hell".

But then, the politically-correct 90's came, and calling something gay fell by the wayside along with calling something "retarded", because some people felt that by using a word in one context as an insult ("that's gay!") that you were also demeaning a group for whom that word was also descriptive in a perfectly normal sense ("my life partner and I are gay").

Frankly, to me, that's bunk. A word can have multiple meanings without one meaning poisoning the other, and I've never been one to be the most politically correct character around.

I have tons of gay and lesbian friends. You can't work in Silicon Valley for three years and not unless you're completely homophobic. Hopefully, they'll understand that I'm not trying to offend their sensibilities, I'm just saying that if someone is offended by it, their priorities are a bit out of order.

That's why I'm on a campaign to bring back "Gay" and "Gay as Hell" into the lexicon of modern language. It's a viral thing. At my cousin's wedding, she said something was gay without even knowing about my one-man campaign to bring it back.

So the next time you see something stupid, take a second and think to yourself, "Hey, is that gay or what?"

A week or so ago, I made my fall picks.... my buddy Jay, though, is way more into the TV and Film industry than I am (want to know who's got the 18-49 demo for Monday 9-9:30? he can tell you).

He did a great job this year with his annual fall preview. Check it out, it's a great side-by-side comparison, with predictions for what will succeed and fail, etc.

As I was getting ready to get some groceries yesterday, I put the Jeep in drive, heard a thunking sound as the engine sorta "caught" as it went into gear and the little "Engine Malfunction" idiot-light came on.

Well, says I, I guess I'm heading for the dealership before I get my groceries.

Two miles later, the Jeep's engine cuts to zero RPM and I coast to the side of the road, dead. Turn the key, silence.

That can't be good. I whip out my service contract card (which includes the tow-to-dealer portion of my warranty... had 400 miles left to go on the "bumper to bumper" warranty, so whatever it was, it was covered.

An hour later, I'm at the dealer. The service manager decides "well, let's see what you're in for" and attaches the diagnostic computer to the onboard computer.

I felt like I was Jim Lovell watching my spacecraft die. Low speed on the crank shaft, faulty behavior on some other thing, an unknown problem in the transmission. I look over at the guy with a knowing, "I'm so glad this is all under warranty, because it just sounds ... pricy!" He agrees with me.

So, I get a loaner/rental (it's a rental, but the warranty covers the rental car), and head home, expecting to see the Jeep in a couple days. I get a call a couple hours later, "It's all fixed, come get it."

boggle

SYSTEM TEST HAS CODES P1391 AND P0725. CHECK AND TEST PER DIAGNOSIS MANUAL. FOUND FAULTY CRANK SHAFT SENSOR. INSTALL NEW CRANK SENSOR. CLEARED CODES

I ask the service manager, "But it died, that was no phantom sensor-ghost that put my car dead in the water on the side of the road."

Oh, but it was ... see, apparently the computer thought it knew best and was trying to figure out what was "wrong" based on the crappy input it was getting from the sensor. Garbage In, Garbage Out, and it decided it was best just to call it quits and demand qualified attention immediately.

Remember the days when cars didn't have on-board computers? I'd gladly sacrifice a couple mpg to get back to when I didn't have to worry about some broken electronic widget deciding to have my car commit harikari on the road, or have my car testifying against its owner about my driving speed or seat belt status.

I wonder if there are sites for hacking your own car, to remove the onboard computer sensors and such. Can the modern car even work without all that computerized horseshit?

Remember that UPS order I was talking about a week or so ago, that a friend of mine was receiving.... he got an interesting e-mail this evening:

Due to an unexpected supply delay, we are unable to ship the following item(s) by the date that you were originally quoted: M8981LL/A, PBG4 15"/1.25GHZ/512/80/SD/APX/BT-USA will now ship on or before 09/16/2003

Except, of course, that such a model doesn't exist on Apple's web site. Apple scooped themselves.

To say that he is eagerly awaiting his new laptop is an understatement, and if they decide to bill him for it, he'll happily pay it. :-)

I'm on a LIRR train headed for Montauk, blogging from my Sidekick.

LIRR trains are so much nicer than Metro-North trains.. Feels like heaven, and I still can't figure out why trains aren't more popular here in the States.

John Ritter died this past evening after a heart problem that was previously unknown to him caused him to be rushed to surgery.

But, one has to wonder who exactly it is in Hollywood that sold their soul to ensure ABC can't possibly climb out of the ratings hole they've dug themselves. From the lengths to which things will happen to prevent it, it must be someone pretty damned important.

Ritter, 54, was the central character on ABC's 8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter series, scheduled for a season premiere this coming Tuesday. The show was widely regarded as one of the best shots ABC had at maybe pulling a couple Nielsen points out of the magic hat.

Obviously, it's uncertain if ABC will pull a Dick York/Dick Sargent style switcheroo on the central character, but if they don't, that show is pretty much as dead as John is.

Ever have one of those fun times with a friend/date/lover/whatever, and enjoy yourself so much that you just want to keep doing that same thing every day, but that would be like an imposition. Sorta like how you are when you get a chance to meet and hang out with someone famous, where you wish you could do things like that all the time but it's obviously not going to happen (or, if it is, you can't act all fanboyish and such, but have to be patient and let it take its course).

Or, to put it in kid terms, it's like finding a half-gallon of chocolate milk... if you really want to enjoy it, you have to drink it only occasionally, so you savor every drop of it ... if you keep pounding down glasses full of it, you'll only enjoy it for a couple minutes, and then spend the rest of your childhood pining for the chocolate milk you could have had.

There's lots of things in life like that, and I'm trying really hard to savor the chocolate milk, because it's really delicious, and I want it to last.

I have two weddings to go to this month. The first, this weekend is way out in Montauk, at the very tip of Long Island. It's a three-day bash, essentially, for my cousin Kristen.

Then, two weeks after that, Big George is getting married here locally.

The big decision for me, though, has to do with Krissy's wedding... do I take the train out to Montauk, which would be about 4.5 hours each way, or drive (3 hours). The advantage to driving is that it's faster, and the drive out will probably be beautiful. The disadvantage is that Sunday, when I drive back, it's supposed to be pouring all day according to the weather forecast, and that's totally not-fun.

A friend of mine ordered a computer system (and a bunch of associated stuff) from a computer vendor online. As part of it, he ordered it using their financing option. Except that he was turned down for the financing, so he forgot about it and went on.

Today, parts of the order show up... more expected tomorrow, and more expected next week.

Now, I know that 39 USC 3009 relates to how unsolicited merchandise that is mailed to you "becomes yours" magically by statute, and life is good.

Except how does that apply to packages received via other common carriers such as FedEx or UPS? Have courts interpreted 39USC3009 to also include those services? Are there separate statutes I can't find which protect consumers there as well?

Trying to figure out if he actually has to give the darn thing back or if the computer vendor's poorly designed order-flow just cost them a computer system. :)

I'm with Adam Curry on this one... I want one.

Well, it's September, and that means yet another chance to try and find the nuggets of good programming in the ocean of crap that network TV foists upon us each fall.

What will Derek be telling his TiVo to grab?

My copy of Spooks, Series 1 (a/k/a A&E's "MI-5" program) arrived the other day. I only got to it this morning, because I'd been watching Season 1 of ER.

Now, usually, my Apex AD-600A DVD player handles these things just great. It's got the region-free hack, so I can play Region 2 discs, and it's got a remote-controllable "output" option to select NTSC or PAL output, so it does the PAL-to-NTSC conversion automatically.

Except, occasionally, on a few discs, the downconversion from 60Hz to 50Hz (and from 30 Fps to 25 Fps) isn't does exactly right (or isn't precisely possible) and you end up with a black-and-white image.

Kind of annoying. Makes me want to think about getting one of the "high end" hacked units from CodeFreeDVD.com... almost.

Updated: As I ejected Disc One, I noticed something. The Apex "standby" screen was also in black and white, where it should normally be blue in color... after juggling many cable, I've come to the realization that this latest series of power storms has, apparently, blown something in the Apex, and it won't do color any more, at all. S-Video output yields black and white, composite output yields nothing. Sigh, not looking forward to replacing that any time soon....

I saw this a couple weeks ago, but kept forgetting to blog about it.

I was in a local eatery, which has a really tiny parking lot (about 5 spots) and sits across the street from a municipal courthouse. As you might imagine on given nights of the week, there can be a lot of people trying to find parking spaces, and they'll park any and everywhere.

The courthouse, obviously, has some spaces, and a few of those are set aside for court personnel, law enforcement, etc.

As I was pulling into a parking spot, I saw the greatest sight I'd ever seen: A law enforcement vehicle being loaded onto one of those tow-away flatbeds, a law enforcement officer, presumably the "owner" of said vehicle screaming at the owner of the eatery and the tow operator about how "you can't do that, blah blah blah", and the eatery owner just pointing at the Parking Only for Eatery Customers - All Others Towed At Owners' Expense sign.

Apparently, this became a regular thing. The municipality only set aside two or three spots for cop cars, but on court night there may be many different cars on-site (between state, county, and local organizations, even with car-pooling from a given organization, it could easily overrun the lot) and the local LEOs had, instead of parking legally, taken to parking in this guy's lot, screwing his customers in the process (since, with all the defendants parking on all the streets, it became damn near impossible for customers to find parking).

Wanna bet they won't be doing that any more in the future?

I'm amazed that I seem to be the only in Ulster County who knows how to drive. There is a T-intersection as a road enters the local mall (and T's into the circular road around the mall). The inbound traffic has no stop sign, the circular road does. I stop, the car coming the other way stops, the car coming in from the main road stops and tries to wave us on. Ordinarily, I'd just call this one dumb-ass driver, but I had it happen three times in 45 minutes.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.. print out the 250-page CAIB report and read it in a comfortable sofa, or try to read the damn thing in a PDF viewer for hours at a time.

Speaking of decision-making... watch the Yankees game, or watch The Two Towers?

I'm covered in sweat.... his, hers, mine, theirs, everyones'. Ninety minutes of moshing the hell out of The Chance.

I've always liked The Chance. The "mosh pit" area can't possibly be bigger than 10-12' distance from the stage. The farthest you can be away from the stage is around 30-40' and then only if you're really trying to hide in the back of the balcony. It's just the perfect club venue. (It's actually where The Police made their first US apperance).

I've also always been a big fan of Anthrax. While I wasn't a huge fan of Volume 8: The Threat Is Real or Stomp 442, their latest disc, We've Come For You All kicks solid ass from beginning to end.

I was a little concerned, going to tonight's show. I'd heard that The Chance had annexed some adjacent buildings and now had like three different clubs all together under one roof. I had this dreadful fear that they'd taken the club I loved and turned it into a piece of shit "entertainment mecca" like Piere's in Fort Wayne.

Wow, I couldn't have been more wrong, or more glad to be wrong.

The part that had always been there, was exactly as it was the last time I was in it, about ten years prior. About the only thing different was that there apparently had been some much-needed work done on the bathrooms as part of the renovations (they used to actually be down under the stage, and now they were somewhere else).

Of course, I still wouldn't go near them, but I'm guessing they're probably a bit nicer than they were ten years ago. *laugh*

The show was phenomenal. I showed up fairly late in the evening, since I knew there were four bands, I'd finally found out that Anthrax was going on around 11:30, so I got there around 10:30. I got to here Lacuna Coil perform their entire set, and I was actually pretty impressed with them. They have a very weird dynamic, seeing as how they have two lead vocalists, one guy and one girl, but I might have to check out their CD, if it's on iTunes Music Store.

Anthrax, themselves, though, totally kicked ass. I haven't personally been in a moshpit in years (since I saw Stormtroopers Of Death in San Fran.. or maybe it was ST... can't remember which of those two was more recent). It was fun to get back down in the sweat and enjoy myself. I was personally a little disappointed that they didn't play I Am The Law, but that's just me. They played a lot of tunes, and only a couple were off the albums I don't listen to all that much, so it was a lot of fun.

I'm completely exhausted now, though, and need to shower before I go to bed, or I'll just probably ruin a set of sheets in the process.

Last night was another helping of Def Leppard at the Knickerbocker Arena in Albany. Tonight it's a lethal dose of Anthrax playing a small club near here.

Last night's show was, for me anyway, an exercise in extremes. I was super-excited going up to Albany because I had begged a favor of an acquaintance and was going to have some pretty righteous access to the show. Turns out, with the blackout last weekend (in NYC stretching into this week in places) there was some communications issues, and I had tickets waiting for me, but nothing else. Kind of a bummer after all the expectation and build-up, but the tickets were about as good as you could get (about 10th row center, far enough back to see the whole thing, close enough to be able to easily recognize everyone *laugh*) and we still had a great time at the show. I think the acoustics were better at PNC Center a couple weeks ago, but outdoor amphitheatres always sound a helluva lot better than indoor hockey/basketball arenas do. It's just the way it is.

Tonight's show, it's impossible to have a "bad" spot... it's general admission, the club is like 2000sf tops, even in the "way back" you have a great view. Should be great.

CNN has an article where the "Parents Television Council" rates its "top five shows" in terms of family-friendliness.

Not a single one of them has a Neilsen rating worth a damn.

It's worst five shows? All have blockbuster ratings.

Now, I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but for those kinds of ratings, you've got to be having large numbers of people watching them, including families. I looked at the list of "good" shows, and realized I'd only heard of four out of the top 10, and recoiled in disgust at the four I did recognize as utter crap.

I'll take my family-unfriendly television any day, thanks, and know that I'm not getting some sugar coated "good always wins over bad" vision of the world that's completely inconsistent with reality.

In the spirit of how I seem to love just about every damned Brit show that makes it way over to PBS or A&E, I've now got a high-priority season pass for Spooks, which A&E has re-branded for US broadcast as MI-5.

I've never actually watched Alias, but I'm told it's quite similar, following the day to day lives (and exploits) of several members of Britain's MI-5. I've been really impressed with it over all, and highly recommend it to folks.

The only downside to it is that, like any other Brit show, it's seasons ("Series" they call them over there) are very short. Series One was, apparently, a mere six episodes. Series Two (which has not yet aired in the US, and I don't know when it will) is only ten episodes it seems.

I'll gladly