Ok the universe is out to amuse me. So I went for a 25.7 mile bike ride today, explored up around the airport since I happened to notice what looks like a re-opened bike trail. Low and behold I found 2, one that goes under 101 and one that clearly is mean to get you around to the point where you can circle the airport. w00t! Good find, good bike ride and my legs don't hurt too much.

So my mom poked me this evening mentioning she couldn't print, figured out it was an issue with the internal dns + dhcp, fixed the problem and all was good. Now since I was playing with the printer anyway I figured "I bought this HP Busines Jet 2250 years ago, the firmware is likely never to have been upgraded - I should fix that" (keep in mind I bought this printer while I was in college and it's a phenominal printer, it's current duty cycle claims 25,843 pages - get that out of the cheap $30 printer - HA!) Anyway, so I went and snagged the firmware update thing from HP got it pointed at the right subnet (I.E. the one on the other side of the VPN) it found the printer and off to the races it went, upgrade went fine (I'll admit how cool it is to upgrade a printer that's 2000 miles from me without issues!). So it all went well till I check the status page on the printer and one line on it caught my eye.

System Contact: IS Team 713-500-5400

Ergh - that's interesting, a quick google search seems to indicate that the phone number in question belongs to The University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. So I apparently bought the JetDirect module (after checking my inbox) and found that it was an e-bay purchase, apparently I bought it from the University of Houston and they forgot to clean it out. Haven't figured out how to change it, not that I care a lot - mom is going to bug me long before she figures out the hostname of the printer to begin with.

If anyone cares, I will be up at Linux World on Tuesday, mainly because all the Etherboot stuff going on (and I believe my code for Rom-O-Matic is going to get merged into mainline there). Should be cool, if you want to meet up e-mail me or ping me.

Off for home, both the Bof (link) and the talk (link) went really well. The talk went over it's time by about 20 minutes because people were discusing stuff so much, and discusion seems to be continuing after the fact - all in all I think that's a succes. Downside on the talk - I kinda said, rather vehemently that someone rather important was wrong. There was a fantastic write-up that I was included on over at linux.com (link).

Only other downside - heading home sucks - it means Leaving Terri, and that only seems to get harder. If I could stop having to leave I think I would be a lot happier :-) but for now, the grind of work calls.

Off to OLS, giving my paper talk on "Issues in Linux Mirroring: or BitTorrent considered harmful". Really looking forward to the conference, and definately looking forward to seeing Terri!

Ok took down the original post as I've got a new full length video - warning it's the whole thing and I've been recommended to watch it at 4x the speed I've got now, and warning the file is 100M or so. Click here to see the movie. I've got a whole slew of photos from the trip up to Crater Lake and all the side trips to Lava Bed National Park, and such. I'll try and fix the full gallery soon and get the photos up. Downside of the digital camera is that I need more storage now! Working on that.

Work has been "exciting" over the last few days, so I'm feeling a bit down. Additional bummer - Terri went home today. To quote us both - parting doesn't get easier, it only gets a lot harder - every time. So yeah - bumming - I miss her already. We hung out at the rose garden yesterday, got some really good photos, and we went to the Montery Bay Aquarium last weekend and had a lot of fun. It was exceptional just hanging out with her - and I'm really looking forward to July when I get to see her again!

Ok so Molly's wedding was awesome and I was very glad to have made the trek back home for it! Got to see a couple of people from high school that I hadn't seen in a long time. In fact the pastor who presided was a friend of mine from West High and who I hadn't seen for a couple of years - totally crazy! But it was a beautiful ceremony, and the party was good despite having to get moved inside due to some sprinkles that happened outside. Terri and I had dueling cameras going a fair amount of the time, have to take a look at the photos and see who wins [ED: Terri won for all of the inside shots, I couldn't even compete but I kept up without too much issue on the outside shots]. Even their official photgrapher (who tend to be the bane of my existance, always doing their job and stepping right into the photo I've got lined up and generally being in the way) was good, and during some of the dancing took quite a number of photos of Terri and I - have to poke Molly about those and see if they were any good.

Though bonus points to Molly - she mentioned to Terri and I that Wylde Nept was playing that night, and that if she could wrangle it she was going to go change and go listen to them on her wedding night! Go Molly! I ended up convincing Terri, my younger brother and Ben M. to all go out with me. It was highly amusing to be out listening to a traditional Irish Celtic Pub group at a table where no one drank at all. Twas awesome - I've got a really bad movie I took at The Mill in Iowa City where they got Molly and Benjamin to come up and dance. It's horrible but I will hang onto it as blackmail material against Molly (or for anyone who begs me enough for a copy!). Awesome trip so far it's going great and I think Terri is enjoying herself too!

Terri gets into town today so going to be a bit busy for a while hanging out with her! Heading to Iowa for Molly's (my little sister's* wedding. Should be fun, and Terri is going to get to meet the family too - I'll have to admit a little concern over that but I have every reason to be confident that she'll like them and they will like her too!

Other than that life is going ok, got a few things planned to do while Terri is here, know we are likely hitting the Richard Cheese show up in The City on the 30th, and maybe go for a drive and see California. Only downside to right now is that I'm looking to move so hopefully I can keep up with the search without impeeding too much on her being out here.

* She's not really my little sister but we kind of decided that I was her big brother and she was my little sister in High School and we kinda just accepted that that was that!

So for those of you who didn't catch what was going on yesterday - this was an April Fools Day joke. It was concieved by HPA and I last year, though there was some reasons we didn't do it last year. This apparently has had a number of people in a bit of a stir! I have heard rumors there's even a FreeBSD board that's still debating the validity of the original message. The main point of contention is based on when I sent the mail out. Specifically the mail was sent a little after midnight UTC as the kernel.org machines themselves are set to UTC and currently span the globe. Hopefully this will help set some of these things to rest!

I made the announcement today that Kernel.org was going to switch to FreeBSD 7.0 Found on LKML here. I'm sure I'm going to get a fare amount of hate mail for this - but we are convinced this is the right course of action.

Well kinda ;-) - More on this tomorrow

So Terri and I were talking about random stuff (not that we don't talk quite a bit in general but yeah, and we came up with a new system of dealing with the progression of relationships, as well as the operators that can be applied to them:

There are some additional things that have come to me while writing this up, operations that can be performed on the subject (ok this just proves I'm an utter geek - hopefully someone will smile at this)

Ok, I accept that my blogging skillz are t4 5ukz0rz (translation: they need lots of work). Considering that I've gone, ::looks at the date:: 6 months without letting you, my non-existent readers (if you actually still follow this at all your clearly my friend or just glutton for punishment), know what has happened in my life.

If I said "lots" and ended this entry would you all be happy? Yes?! Ohhh... no you wouldn't, I see - making my life hard ehh? Well fine! Here we go.

No further airlines have tried to kill me, though American Airlines is still serving nuts and their trail mix on their flights. Traveled quite a bit these last few months, went back for Moms birthday this year, I hadn't been back home since Novemeber, and the beginning of the "black months". It was a good trip and I'm very glad I went, it wasn't nearly long enough. Went back again in October for the annual Halloween Party, which was, as always, awesome! Looking forward to this years which is now only 8 months away and I have unconfirmed reports already of people discussing it already and saying things like "Need more crackballs" [ Editors note: crackballs are the term given to the secret Hawley family recipee for for meatballs that are traditionally served at the party. The are awesome, and we make small batches to keep demand high for them. No, really we won't give you the recipee - don't ask, well unless you ask nicely and bribe me ;-) ] After that went back up to my beloved Boston early in December for Sean's wedding, I'll get back to this but it was awesome! Other than that *my* traveling only extends around Northern Cali, but I have been busy touring, seeing and doing things.

Lets see general things to let everyone know about, well I'm not dead yet (unless I've successfully implimented myself in bash and that's what's typing up this entry - if so kudos to me!), I've actually decided to "grow up" some and I've bought a suit and some nicer clothes (yes I realize that this is one of the signs of the apocalypse, I'm sorry - but I do look good in the suit! Really! Isn't that worth maybe a *little* apocalypse?), I bought more art while I was back in Iowa again (darn you Scheels! Darn you and your wonderful clearance isles, staf who knows my name and possibly my address by heart, and your fine selection of paintings and vases that make my apartment seem so much nicer!), I've bought some furniture (w00t nightstands for cheap! My mother is a genius!), I'm dating a wonderful girl named Terri, Spent some awesome time in Boston - even getting a chance to see my old abode once more before it's leveled flatter than a pancake, went shooting with Crypto Rob (ar-10, m1 garand, m2 carbine, xd 45, cz-75, ak-47 is whats written on my dancing card), taken more photos than you can shake a stick at (digital cameras are evil! It's not uncommon for me to now have to sift through over 1000 photos after a major event! Clearly I need to take fewer photos. - if you don't have the link to the temporary gallery - email me and I'll get it to you), working my tail off on kernel.org stuff and generally well - being me ;-)

Whats that? Ohhh you want me to expound on stuff, well clearly you want to know why my Mother is a genius! Well she told me at one point to watch the clearance section at places like Crate and Barrell and Pottery Barn and see what turns up, well I did and pretty quickly found a $400 nightstand for under $100 - good buy in my part, it's awesome! Thus my Mother continues to be a genius!

What? Ohh not that, well it must be about the shooting - it was pretty awesome. Went out with Crypto Rob and a friend of his to the public shooting range out near North Liberty. We had bought about $100 in ammo and were on a bent to let loose - which we did (didn't use up all the ammo though). Shot fairly well, particularly with the ar-10, at 150yards or so. First time shooting in a while (say 3years), and it was a blast. There was another gentleman there who had brought out a collection of WWII vintage rifles with him. He was amazingly kind and allowed us to fire off a couple of rounds on a vintage M1 garand and M2 carbine, the M2 using vintage 1943 ammo. To be perfectly honest I was more at home and I believe more accurate with the pinhole sites on the M1 & M2 than I was with the scope on the ar-10. They were amazing machines - and it was nice to hold and fire them, I've got a much greater appreciation for them now - and the men who used them.

What? Not that EITHER?! Grief what do you want me to talk about? The painting? The suits?

Ok, Ok - Yes I'm dating a wonderful girl named Terri. We met up at OLS this year (though I'm fairly sure we had met the previous year as well - just didn't quite hit it off as well). However this year we ended up talking a lot after the conference, and she happened to come out here in early Novemeber at which point we realized how much we actually cared for each other (yes we were both living on the river de-nile for a while). She's wonderful, plain and simple, I can't think of any other way to put it. There is only one real downside - she lives 2900 miles away right now in Ottawa ;-). Yes, I know we are insane - trust me Terri and I probably spent 6 hours striaght talking about this trying to figure out if this was even a sane thing to undertake, but in the end love won out, and yes I do love her very much.

Terri was even able to make it out to Boston for Sean's wedding. Flights happened to get cheap right around then and she was able to come down. It was awesome, she was able to meet a lot of friends of mine - which many of them are now flung to the far corners of the earth - so it was a fairly unique opportunity to meet so many people! Was even able to spend some extra time wandering around Boston together, I believe Terri summed that entire day up best by saying "Best date ever!". Ended up seeing the Aquarium, the Harvard Natural History museum, got a light snow fall while looking out over Boston from the end of the pier near the Aquarium, saw a giant glowing blue thing, and had dinner with MDC of the etherboot project and his wife and heard the wonders that is the amplified electric clarinet!

Speaking of which I'm heading up to Ottawa to (1) see Terri :-) & (2) get away from this abysmally nice weather that lacks snow! Heading up towards the end of Winterlude which should be cool, and work has been awesome about letting me work remote for this trip. Even going to get to spend some time back home with the family for Ayyam-i-ha this year!

Getting back to Boston and Sean's wedding though, Sean's wedding was spectacular. I have to hand it to him Christina is awesome! Congratz man! The wedding was quite a hit, with Sean being as irreverant as he can be (his vows included Sean declaing "AND you're wicked hot." to Christina. Christina even came up with the idea to march out to the celebration music from the end of Star Wars IV. That was awesome! The reception was held on, of all places, Hanscom AFB - which happens to be, litterally, my old stomping grounds. The reception was held in the Minuteman Club (The officers club) which the last time I was in was for my Father's Air Force retirement ceremony many years ago. That was something else. Even ended up catching the garter, though I don't know about this tradition of the guy who catches the garter and the girl who catches the bouquet having to dance together (I swear Sean made that up on the spot!) But it was a good reception.

I have to thank Sean though from the bottom of my heart. He gave me an opportunity, albiet not one he neccisarily explicitly intended, for me to do something which I thought I'd never get another opportunity for - to see some of my old stomping grounds. It was a treat. Even found out my old houes is going to get demolished as they rebuild that section of housing, and it was odd knowing that the house was empty, in a neighbourhood of houses I remember beeing teaming with people who were packed in like sardines. Thank you Sean.

Hmmmmmm - I know I've just skimmed over 6 months in a mere smattering, and for those of you trying to follow along in general - I'm sorry. My new years resolution, as always, is to blog more - and we'll see how 2008 faires, hopefully a few more than 2007 ;-) - Terri blogs a fair amount so maybe some of that will rub off on me.

To quote a movie I own (Milipitas Monster): "I'm NOT having a good time"

So I'll give a quick update since February before I move on to how I am vehemently mad at American Airlines.

So life has been been insanely busy since Februrary. The months have flown by, and can't even tell you everything thats been going on. I know I've kept meaning to blog and tell you all how I'm angry at this, or the stupid thing I saw (like people backing up on the highways and such) but I've been busy enough that I haven't been able to do it. A lot of huge changes on kernel.org have been keeping me busy - we've deployed 4 new servers, and two of those were to Europe. My dad was able to land a job so things got a lot better on that front, though it wasn't perfectly ideal - but things are working out there so it's all good.

I just got back from Ottawa, which I was up there for the Ottawa Linux Symposium - which was a really good trip. I happened to be up there to give the BOF for kernel.org, which went really really well. a bit more than 70 people ended up showing up to the BOF, which far exceeded the 5 I was expecting - and to top it off people seemed to find it very useful. At some point there will be video footage of me making a complete idiot of myself in front of people, and now in front of the whole intarwebs ;-)

Ended up staying up there for Canada Day which was one of the most amazing street parties and national holidays I've seen. It was something else, and it isn't something you would find in Washington, DC. I mean, the national museums were free for normal exhibits (in fact I wandered over to the national gallery and saw the Renoire landscapes - which was an awesome exhibit). And had an interesting run in over at the Dominion tavern. If you've seen Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter you'll recognize the Dominion as the tavern where the giant fight with the vampires occured. Well I happened to go in and I ordered a coke, there were a couple of people at the bar and I asked the bar tender 'Have you ever heard of a movie called Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter? The people at the bar started laughing nigh uncontrolably and the bar tender calmly said 'Jesus is out back'.

This is the point where most people would double take and go *WHHHHHHAAAAA?*. Thats exactly what I did. So in true fashion I went out back, and yes I found Jesus. (I've even got photos of him)

Finished my coke and headed out and called HPA to let him know of this fantastic news, and he came straight over and we went back in. Turns out that 'Jesus' must own the Dominion as he was behind the bar serving when we went back in, so we wandered up to him and ordered two cokes and I calmly asked 'Are you Jesus?'

J: I was once

And I shook his hand and thanked him for such an awesome movie. And I can now say 'I found Jesus, he was out back and he served me a coke'.

So yeah Canada day was fun and I would love to be around up in Canada at some point again for it! But sadly this brings me to the part of the entry where I'm going to turn quite bitter, angry and I'm going to say a lot of things that will probably not endear me to American Airlines.

American Airlines or how they tried to kill me

Let me preface what I'm about to say with a few statements. I have in the past been a VERY happy American Airline customer, I'm a frequent flyer member with them and I have a reasonable amount of miles with them (enough for a couple of free flights I think), and of all my airline stories American Airlines has never made 'the cut' so to speak. I mean I was FLOORED and impressed back in Novemeber when I flew home and there was a measely delay (not anything to even worry about in my book) and I couple of weeks later I got an e-mail profusely apologizing for the delay and showering me with free frequent flyer miles (I never even complained, a delay of less than a day is peanuts when you compare it to sleeping in airports when trying to get to interviews, or being told your flight hasn't come to this airport in 6 months, etc). So when I say I'm VERY disapointed I want you to understand why I'm dissapointed.

American Airlines unwittingly caused me quite a bit of suffering, grief and anger because of a 4.5 hour flight from Chicago O'Hare to San Francisco Intl. I would go so far as to claim they unwittingly tried to kill me.

A bit more back story, to make my point very very clear. I have a nut allergy. Specifically I have a tree nut allergy, not to be confused with a peanut allergy as peanuts are legumes. Peanut allergies and tree nut allergies are actually very similar, and in a lot of cases having one means you have the other. I scaped the serpents tongue on the peanuts though but for the purposes of my rant the same arguments and concerns come up for people with peanut allergies as well as tree nut alergies. I digress with the peanut allergy explination however.

I have a nut allergy. One could even go so far as to call it a severe nut allergy. To give you an idea of how severe I've had an epipen since I was probably 5, I will likely need a constant perscription for an epipen for the rest of my life. Luckily I have had only one occasion where an epipen might have been useful, and that was before my family knew what an epipen was. All of my friends have a good idea of how serious this allergy is, and I don't hide it from them. In general this is something that's actually quite easy for me to avoid and manage (which is a bit different than people with peanut allergies - I do feel for you guys out there with those) Nuts are most commonly found in desserts, so I tend to be overly cautious about eating them, along with medeteranian food, and a few things along those lines. And MOST nuts I'm not so allergic to them that accientally eating a small amount is going to send me anaphylactic, it'll just make my mouth tingle. So while it is normally manageable there is a specific situation that is unavoidable and can cause massive havoc.

Peanuts and nuts have a tendency to leave small amounts of dust (or in the case of bagged varieties quite a bit) that is easily kicked up into the air. Now in a normal environment this isn't that big of a deal, they will float around for a bit and settle like normal dust. In a normal sized house (lets say my apartment with about 1K sqft of space) a small handful of nuts from one person means there's a very small particle count in the air, and it's unlikely to affect anyone but the by far most severely aflicted. However, lets change the environment here. Lets take that one person with a small bag and double the total sqft to 2K, but instead of something like a house you make it a presurized cabin that's recirculating air, a lot of recirculated air. In this environment your going to basically keep most of those particles in the air both as people move a lot and as the forced air is recirculated. This makes for the concentration of nut dust particles in the air to be a lot higher with very little effort.

Which brings me to my main complaint. American Airlines (along with a lot of other airlines apparently - they aren't on their own but my rancor is currently targeted at American right now) have reversed a long standing choice to not serve nuts on aircraft (along with peanuts - though peanuts seem to still be mising). In fact they have gone so far in the reverse it's mind boggling. Apparently first class passengers (on flights who's 'snack time' is after noon) are being given a mixed nut assortment which consists of cashews, almonds and walnuts I believe. And in coach the 'cheap' option for a snack (at $3) is a trail mix assortment with cashews.

Needless to say when I found this out after 3 hours of being in the air and experiencing some odd itching, a bit more caughing than I would have expected and a nose that made the niagra falls seem like a babling brook a light went off in my head and I dove for the benedryl in my backpack immediately, and called for a stewardess.

I was in the process of a good sized (though at the point non-life threatening) allergic reaction to the nut dust that was being forced to breath, and could not escape from because the other passengers were being given / sold nuts on the aircraft.

What followed is as close to a timeline as I can give, but due to me being absolutely internally livid and being very concerned with my own internal state (being very aware of what was going on and trying to make sure that if things got worse that my epipen was easily available and that my traveling companions were aware of what was going on)

~3hrs into the flight (at least 2 hours after the nuts were first served) I make the realization that the insanely runny nose (as well as the other symptoms) I've had for that last 2 hours or so is not because of the normal random traveling bits but because I'm in the middle of an allergic reaction to the nut dust in the air. There's nowhere to go to get away from it all, and to be honest the worst of the damage is done - the particles are already logged in my lungs, even putting my on oxygen at this point won't really fix the problem as the bits are there in my lungs and my body is already inflamed. I dive for my backpack under the seat in front of my and pull out the benedryl down two tablets, pull out my penguin mints (caffinated mints) start chewing them like there's no tomorrow and call for a stewardess. I inform my traveling companions of my sudden epiphany. I'm now actutely checking myself and paying attention to my breathing and such - if things get bad my epipen is in my backpack and the only thing I could do is down a non-recommended amount of benedryl, take the epipen and chew through what's left of my 'caffiene pills' in the hopes of them getting the plane down in time for them to get me an EMT. We are at cruising altitude for an S80 - 30,000 - 40,000 ft. An emergency landing might not be fast enough for me if it gets that far.

A stewardess comes over and I ask two very blunt very simple questions:

1. I need a glass of water immediately
2. What are the EXACT contents of the trail mix as I have reason to believe I'm having an allergic reaction to the nut dust from it. (that's all the nuts I know about at that time and I need to know if the REALLY bad nuts were included. If so this is going to get a lot worse, if not it won't get really bad for a while yet but I'm not in a good situation)

The head stewardess for coach (seemingly) came over a couple of minutes later and asked a few questions and tried to figure out what as going on exactly. I explained that I had reason to believe I was having an allergy attack due to the nut dust being forcibly recirculated through the cabin from the trail mix containing cashews. She quickly pointed out that 'Policy does not allow us to not sell the snacks' (fine, great the damage is already done and at that minute I didn't care but for the record that's a darned bad policy) and two 'That first class had a mixed nut assortment'.

I quickly interogate her with regards to the contents of the mixed nut assortment and make sure that the danger nut is not present. I'm now even more concerned as first class was just given the assortment, this explains a lot more about why I'm having the troubles I am. She mentions understanding allergies, as her daughter (may she rest in peace as she died of a medical condition) was at times on some of the very heavy duty anti-histimens and epipens and such were not uncommon to her because of this. She understands my concerns but ultimately (and I agree with her) there isn't anything she can do to stop the cause (it's already in the air - the only thing they could do is recirculate out all the air and pump in fresh air). She also mentions the morning / afternoon thing (even going so far as to suggest that I only fly in the morning! I've always had connecting flights when I fly and invariably I get leg 1 done in the morning and leg 2 done in the afternoon / evening) and asks me to make sure that if there's anything I need to let them know.

I am then stuck on the aircraft for another 1.5 hrs until we get to San Francisco Intl.. My brain is fried, my nose is a mess (the second stewardess had given me some tissues, and wow did those tear my nose apart), the caughing and breathing issues are now a bit more noticable. I get off the plane get to my luggage and at that time I'm rather sick and in no capacity able to fight / argue with American over the predicament. I did however make sure to ask the stewardess for the 'correct' path to complain through, as this wasn't going to end there.

I get home, still taking benedryl, take a very long hot shower (which helped a lot but obviously not enough) and tried to sleep. I didn't very well, between caughing and my nose I slept in 45 minute chunks and that was only about 6 hours at best.

I filed my first complaint, requesting a responce from American on Tuesday morning. I have kept copies of the form that was sent. I have not had a responce from American thought they claim it can 'take a week to respond to your request'.

Wednesday was the first day where I started really feeling 'human' and not fuzzy brained. I was able to sleep Tuesday night, I was still on benedryl and I was using my inhaler.

Today is July 6th, I flew on Monday. I'm still caughing (though thats getting better), and my nose is still not 'normal' (being unnaturally stuffy / runny). I don't consider being forced to breath a toxic substance in an enclosed space for 4.5hours, and then suffering for a week afterwards to be an acceptable way to fly. It absolutely shocks me that American, as well as many other airlines, would serve nuts on the aircraft. They already know how allergic people are to these and it's not like they bill their flights as 'contains nuts', and by the time someone who's allergic to them finds out it's too late to get off. I'm genuinely scared that for the airlines to take this seriously someone is going to have to jab an epipen in their leg and land an aircraft, and I pray that that someone won't be me. For now I will wait to hear what American has to say, I am trying not to harbor explicit ill will towards them and I want to continue thinking that this is a problem of the left hand not talking to the right hand about the issue. If AA responds and takes my issue seriously I'll be happy, if not I will contact a number of advocacy and complaint departments (including the FAA) about the issue and the problem the issue presents. I would just rather AA not try to ignore this but take it seriously, and I understand one of the issues the stewardess brought up: they can't stop people from bringing nuts onto the aircraft and consuming them. While I understand that, and I accept it - the airlines shouldn't encourage nuts being on an aircraft by giving them out or selling them. If someone brings nuts onto an aircraft on their own thats one thing, but if the airlines gives them out that's quite another.

Ok I've ranted enough on that, and I know right now I'm hurt (both from AA making me sick for several days and for them taking up serving nuts again after not doing so for such a long time) and I'm angry (same reasons really) and I'm giving AA a chance to make things right, I just hope they take it seriously :-/

That time of year again

So generally speaking things are going well. I'm really happy with work, progress is being made on all of my projects and I'm quite happy. I've been quite happy with everything there all told, and even getting some work in on things like PXE Knife (hoping to get a new version of that out later this month, but we'll see). So work is going well and it's definately keeping me busy ;-)

Dad is doing ok, but things could be better. He got contacted by a couple of different groups recently, and both turned out to be duds. The first one billed themselves as a government federal agency, and they were relatively near to home. So this sounded ideal, until dad got the confirmation e-mail and it turned out to 1) not be a federal entity at all and 2) it was more or less a scammer group. So double whammy. Now I'll admit that they didn't explicitly do anything to Dad, but Mom found a lot of unpleasant information on them online. So they git nixed. Next up was a billed 'head hunter', and surprise surprise - it wasn't. It ended up being a similar entity to the governments called T.A.P. or Transition Assistance Program, or a set of resources designed to help people change jobs, etc. Now in and of itself this isn't a bad thing, however when dad went to talk to them it became abundantly clear just how useless they were going to be for him. So all in all, things aren't going spectactularly on that front :-/ If you get a chance, remember them in your prayers and well wishes, because any assistance at this point would be appreciated.

Anyway before I close for the night (it's 2am) I just wanted to comment as to the time of year, mainly because well I'm single. Valentines day is in a couple of days, and I've had my fair share of awesome Valentines days, spent with S.O.'s of the time. Sadly though, I'm single and it's just kinda of a grating holiday to a degree. It reminds me of past loves (and reminds me that there are small pieces of me that do still love them), causes me to reflect and re-examine those relationships and by and large, and I'll be honest, makes me jealous of all the people who are in love right now. I don't begrudge them their happiness, in fact I'm really quite happy for all of you, but I am jealous all the same. Heck I'll even go so far as to admit I've made several decisions I've regreted in the past couple of years, and do seriously wonder if I was right, or just frightened or controlled by my own demons.

In all likelyhood I'm not alone, I'm sure there's a nice large portion of the population that is dealing with the same set of emotions, troubles and what not. To a certain extent, Valentines day is an interesting semi-exclusive holiday, with those who get to enjoy it (typically those who are in happy relationships, though thats not always the case) and than the rest of us. For some a reminder of their happiness, for others the opposite. In the end I suppose the only thing that will really affect me this year is the fact that Valentines day falls on Wednesday, the day a small group of us typically goof off and hang out in Everquest 2. Two of the four members are happily married to each other, and the other member is married as well. Probably means we will game on Thursday instead of Wednesday, maybe I'll get some work done on PXE Knife or maybe if Poseidon (new kernel.org machine) makes it out to OSUOSL I can finish setting that up and get it synced up and live. I mean heck, if nothing else I have a couple of bad movies I can watch which will amuse me all the same (Tank Girl being the most notable)

Happy Valentines Day to those of you who will be celebrating, and to those of you who aren't at least your in good company.

The life and times of a Warthog

So the last month and a half has been..... Interesting and it's been busy. First a quick update on the situation back home. Things have calmed down some, though the entire family is still on edge. No one is sure if dad's going to survive this ordeal he's being put though. There is a small reprieve so to speak and he has gotten an extension so things are now delayed until the end of February. Which currently begs the question since I'm penny pinching as much as possible, do I spend the money and go back to Iowa for a short while for Ayyam-i-ha, or do I sit and have a gothic holiday (sitting in my apartment and celebrating alone)? I don't have an answer but I'll certinaly keep my eyes peeled on plane tickets. If you find some cheap ones or know of somewhere to find them cheap, let me know.

So beyond that lets see what else is going on. Thanksgiving was a bit hectic, getting people to / from the airport and such. I ended up going home for Turkey day as I had already had tickets. It was good, and it helped the family a lot to see me, heck it helped me a lot. It was a good Thanksgiving, though everyone was on edge and stressed. It was good to be home, and just be with everyone.

December was fairly quiet, work was busy, hectic and insane. I got some decent testing done for a demo we were working on with a 3rd party, though I'm not entirely sure how that finally turned out. So the big news of December was I went into talks with 3Leaf Networks, and found out they were pretty cool and my 'Christmas Presant' to myself this year was accepting a job offer from them. C2 wasn't exactly thrilled but they took the news fairly well.

Christmas eve I ended up doing a big dinner party and made deliciously yummy food. Well, it wasn't my best dinner I've cooked but it was reasonable, and I've got some notes on what I can do to improve it if I cook it again (Pork tenderloin over potatoe beds, string green beans, salad, etc). Everyone seemed to enjoy the evening in general, did dinner and than we were going to watch a movie of some sort but got side tracked and played with my MythTV setup for a while and just chatting. People really seemed to like the setup, so I might just try and do a dinner & a movie thing maybe once a week or once every other week or something, kinda depends on how gung ho I get about it all. But it was fun and I definately want to do it again.

Christmas Day however was eventful. I awoke, and was an utter bum for most of the day. At some point I decided to start text messaging everyone a Merry Christmas. About 3/4 of the way through this process Rob M. gives me a call and calmly says 'Hey, I was about to call you anyway as I was going to ask if you could give me a ride - I think I may have broken my foot'......... Well as you can imagine, I dropped everything I was being a bum and doing and went and got him to the emergency room. So I spent several hours hanging out at the hospital. It turned out to not be broken (WELL they don't think so anyway.... but thats an odd story), and I got Rob home and went to pick people up from the airport (I did a lot of that in December, something like 5 trips to SFO and a strip to SJC in the span of a couple of weeks). The only downside to spending the time at the Hospital, which makes for a good story and was well worth it, was I caught a cold that I only got over a couple of days ago, so par for the course I suppose.

Anyway New years eve was pretty quiet this year, nothing really to report on that front. It was spent more or less about the same as last year, though instead of being subjected^H^H^H enthralled by Happy Tree Friends, we played 'House on the Hill' an Avalon Hill board game. If you haven't played it, it's a lot of fun and because of the way it's done it's new and fresh almost every time you play it. Go check it out!

Anyway this week has been my first week at 3Leaf, which you can imagine is filled with brain dumps, and just trying to figure out whats going on and getting settled in. I've already got a quote back on my desk for a new build server that I get to rig out as part of my duties (it's monsterous, trust me so you can imagine how much glee it brings me). The funny thing is not two days after I'm out of my last job, they had to call me up to have me come in and fix a few things that had broken, and in them trying to solve the problem ended up making the problem worse. Go figure, I'm gone two days and they end up having problems. Cest la vie! Things are fine now, and should go back to the smooth sailing I would have expected (the problem was a partial hardware hiccup, and not something I'd expect to happen again)

And here I am up to date, in a whirlwind update. My goal is to update this a bit more often and to vent more random frustrations and comments with the world in general. Not that I think anyone actually reads this, but hey it's like shouting through the void, maybe someone will hear you, and if not at least I feel better for having shouted ;-)

Happy New Year everyone, so far this year is looking up and I have high hopes for it!

Today has been one of those days. Heck it's been one of those days the last couple of months. It's been a pretty big mess lately, and I'll be perfectly honest I don't know how to do about most of it. Back in October my company ended up letting some people go. With any layoff you can imagine it didn't come at an opportune time, they never do. I scaped the serpants tongue so to speak again, but I'll admit it's not a pleasant thing to be a sysadmin at layoff time. I had to worry about a lot of the security concerns with people leaving under those circumstances. Not fun. We are surviving right now, but the group I'm half with took a pretty drastic hit. More or less I'm back to a two man department, and I'm still half duty on IT. So you can imagine - I'm up to my eyeballs in work.

So I've been on edge in general given that my company has been going crazy and such, but yeah my dad found out today that he's probably out of a job in two months now. So I'm now wigging out over that, there are visions of what happened 9 years ago floating through my head over the whole issue. I'll go out on a limb, that entire situation was probably one of the saddest most painful times in not on my life but I'm fairly sure of everyone in my family. We have the good col-o-nel and the Air Force to thank for for much of that, as well as it seems my dad's current boss. She seems to have it out for him, I won't get into it but she seems to have been gunning for him when she got the managers position over dad. It's odd to be in a position where I might be slightly more stable than my father. Wow does growing up suck :-/

My little sister is up a creek right now too, as she going to be bailing on grad school for the time being, seems like things didn't go nearly as well as she had hoped (mainly due to the primary costume professor leaving just weeks before she showed up on campus leaving her department in turmoil). My brother had and lost a girlfriend. And I probably can't even think of all the rest of the stuff that's been going on with the universe. Sucks don't it? When it rains it pours.

It hasn't been completely bad, but I'll admit some of it has me pretty flustered. Halloween happened and that was pretty darned cool. Flew home for the annual halloween party, it was awesome though a little bit smaller than normal. There are a few photos floating around, even one or two that prove how 1337 I am ;-). it was a good trip home and I'm glad I went. Heading back for thanksgiving as well. Also was able to make it up to San Francisco on Halloween night, and hung around out in the Castro. It was pretty cool, and there were a lot of awesome costumes. For those of you who know what was going on - yes we weren't very far from the shooting. We didn't actually hear any of the shots, but when you see the SFPD draw weapons and start marching for the scene in front of you, you know it's time to leave. We all made it out ok, about the worst thing that happened is a couple of us seem to have picked up a minor cold from it. Everyone seems to have recovered by now so it's all good. I finished getting my apartment clean, it's actually really cool and it's quite nice now. It's about time I start having people over for dinner and such, any takers?

Anyway - it's been one of those days, and I don't even know whats all going to happen. The joy, you know it's bad when your boss who's in Beijing even tells you to go home.

Central void of yuppiness or Why some companies are dumb or please lord let me never be THAT pretentious

So today I decided to add a 3rd shelf to the growing number of shelves bolted to my living room wall. A couple months back I bought some shelves from Ikea and had to stain them to get them to match the bookcases that are in my living room. This is anothe one of those, it's a bit darker than the other two but since it's further up you can't really tell. So I ended up putting a rather large book full of shakespeare and the dragon poster I bought at Gencon on it. Honestly it looks pretty good and I am now inspired to actually get things framed and up on my wall! I also decided that since I've been on something of a cleaning and organizing kick that I should go and buy the bookshelf for this one nook I have. It didn't go well.

So, what I want is some sort of modularish shelving thats about 6ft tall by roughly 36-40in wide and about 12 - 14in deep. I originally thought something like Ikea's Gorm collection would work. But sadly it's made of pine, and honestly, not the best quality pine at that. So even if I stain it, which will be a giant mess and nigh impossible as I don't really have the space, It's flimsy and well.. yeah. Not going to work. So I've been pondering what can go there, ohhh it has one more requirement: the electrical breakers for my apartment would be at the back of this, so it needs an open back. So since I've been putting up all this wire shelving at home, and since The Container Store is just up the road in Santana Row, I thought I'd give them a shot. They actually cary some of the really GOOD wire shelving, and since I'm going to be using this rather seriously I would like to make sure it's of some quality. So I give them a call and ask 'do you have the silver/chrome metro shelves in the 14x36in size in stock?' they wander off, come back and tell me that indeed they did. So I decide to trek over there. This too did not go well.

So I get over to Santan Row, and for those of you not in the San Jose area, let me explain Santan Row: It's pure yuppie central. I've sat at a cafe thats on the main drag there, doing my best to spend as little as possible, just to watch the cars drive up and down the main drag. Why? In 10 minutes I saw 3 ferrari's, 2 lamburghini's, a lotus and several other cars that are probably worth more than the total sum of all my assetts. The funny part was, they were all looking for parking spots on the main drag so they can show of their cars, instead of parking in the parking garage like 'normal' people. Anyway, so I get to Santana Row, and I get into the parking garage where people immediately turn dumb. I mean it's unfathomable how people will be fighting for parking spots on levels 1 or 2 of a parking garage where by the time I get to the top level (4th in this case) there are more parking spaces than I can shake a stick at. Lazy human beings! (DARN YOU KAISER PERMANENTE AND YOUR THRIVE CAMPAIGN CONVINCING ME TO PARK FURTHER AWAY SO I WALK MORE!) Anyway, so I park and wander into The Container Store.

The store is fairly quiet, so I head up and run into another gentleman looking at the metro shelving. So this other gentleman gets some assistance and starts pondering some of this shelving for his work (he apparently works at cisco). So yeah, this didn't turn out well. An incredibly nice associate, named Christina, came over to ask the guy who was helping the Cisco employee a question. This is where things start going wrong. He basically starts trying to put some moves on the poor girl and the associate helping him kinda plays along with the whole thing and teases her as well. They end up delaying her while she's trying to help someone else and yeah. So she ends up escaping and I make mention that what the Cisco guy is after is this certain size of the metro shelving he's after, since I'm using the stuff exactly as he wants to use it, at work. Well so now I'm designated a buddy of this guy for just trying to help out, joy. Anyway the Cisco gentleman and the associate go back to talking at some point, half including me though I'm not doing much to stay included, and their conversation quickly devolves to talking about Christina. I wouldn't normally care but when the associate starts commenting about how horny she is to a customer, and they go so far as to call her over to ask her her age - there is something WRONG! Even when she had finally escaped again and some lady who was reasonably attractive walked by at the other end of the isle he gawked and nearly cat called, turned to me and said 'hey I'm single what can I do?'. I genuinely felt sorry for Christina, she seemed lovely from the information that was dragged out of her by those two, and she didn't really seem to appreciate their advances. I did try to divert her from those two, but they didn't make it easy which probably makes me as guilty as they are :-(. And after ALL of that, and getting down there 'ohhh yeah our company doesn't even carry the size of shelf your looking for, we don't have anything for you - can't even special order it.' Joy.

So I'm annoyed and I leave The Container Store empty handed, head over to Crate and Barrel to pick up a replacement plate since I chipped one of mine and so the trip wasn't a total waste. Get my plate and leave. Parking garage is again a pain, and when I get out I get dumped onto the main drag. As I was looking out my car trying to get back to a normal street is boggled my mind at how yuppie they all were. It was just dripping with it. I ended up punch some deep base techno / grunge up on my car's stereo, turned up the volume and had to drive all the way down and all the way back to get to where I wanted to go.

Only thing I could do to try and bring reality to yuppievill.

Today, I am a quarter centuary old.

All told it's been a good day, spent most of it up in 'The City' (San Francisco). Had lunch with an old Orion co-worker, which was good to catch up. Hung around up in the city just being a bum and wandering really, I've got a couple of blisters to prove the wandering. It was good, got to think a bit see the city some more and generally just explore more of the area around where I live (well SFO is actually about 45 minutes north but still). Had dinner at the Bistro Boudin, and since Brian and Kathleen moved out here we are semi-sorta restart the tradition of the shared birthday. We'll do a better job of it next year but it was a reasonable start. I'm actually quite stuffed, and I bought some of their asiago sourdough bread to bring home.

We came back to my, now, mostly clean and semi organized apartment for a delicous cake that Kathleen made. I have a couple of ideas for Kathleen's birthday (which is in a couple of days) so she better keep her eyes peeled for a surprise ;-) (Note: I know I have to take pictures of the apartment!!! Particularly the office since few of you believe it could ever get better.)

All in all the day was a really good day, very busy day (in an odd sense) but a good day! Thank you all for making it a good birthday!

Well there was one odd point, that is sadly keeping me up. Got an e-mail that has me very confused. It's not the first e-mail thats done this to me, nor do I expect is it the last. In the end I don't know what to do about it. There's a fair amount of pain still lingering with me associated with this e-mail, pain I'm fairly sure will never go away. I'll have to sleep on the e-mail, figure out what I'm going to do about it - maybe talk to my little sister about it see what she thinks about it. I think in the end I just wish I knew why the e-mails started? Did something happen? Who knows? <joke>ONLY THE SHADOW KNOWS!</joke>

So I'm sitting here tonight, being a bit depressed. Gencon is coming up in a couple of days and I'm really looking forward to it and I know my Brother is too. He's going to be flying in on his own - hopefully the curse of flying is not hereditary.

So speaking of my infamous flying curse, it's struck again AND WITH A VENGENCE! But I get ahead of myself. So HPA and I went to OLS this year. It was pretty darned awesome, from going drunking with Alan Cox (who turns out to be one of the coolest guys on the planet) to Ralf Bächle who's the Mips Linux maintainer (another very cool guy). Went to some excellent talks, which mainly seemed to focus on (para-)virtualization and filesystems. Even got talked into doing some stuff with Busybox and Klibc by HPA and Rob Landley.

Beyond the conference, Ottawa was utterly gorgeous! When they say that Ottawa is one of the pretties G8 capitals on the planet, they really mean it. Wow. I'm not sure I can eve describe it, it was just amazing, and parliment was gorgeous, though I do still swear that Serious Sam II modeled the end after it to a degree. Saw the lighting of Parliment was pretty cool too, apparently they do it twice every night which is awesome. I'm definately looking forward to going next year.

Anyway, so yes the curse came back to haunt me in it's normal fasion, sneaking up on me and beating me with a stick. I've posted a detailed copy of the conversation I had with Brian when I got home. The short version is that when I went to get onto the plane from Toronoto to San Francisco, they kindly told me I didn't have a seat, while HPA borded the aircraft. I went and started to talk to the people up front and about 4 minutes later they closed the aircraft. It seems that their computer got confused on how long I was in Toronoto and instead of me being there 3 hours thought I was only going to be there 45 minutes and wasn't going to make the flight - along with 5 other people (which we all were standing there trying to get on) and 20 minutes before the plane boarded they gave 6 seats away to the standby passengers.

My biggest complaint about the whole thing isn't that my seat was given away, which they did the right thing... sorta, it's that they gave it away without CHECKING if we were there or not. I mean I had been sitting there for 3 hours, they claimed they bumped me because my luggage wouldn't make it - turns out my luggage made it home on the flight with HPA, and I had to spend a night without my luggage. It was a pretty bad SNAFU on their part and it disturbed both me and HPA since he sat next to a gentleman named Jack instead of John.

So yeah, my birthday is coming up later this month, and I've been taking stock a bit. I'm going to be a quarter of a centuary old. Roughly 1/3 - 1/4 of my life is over. Decided to track down a few people, see where they are at with their lives - mainly just flexing my google foo, and tracking down old blogs and what not. There were a couple that genuinely made me sad that I was pushed from their lives. Well pushed isn't the right word, torn asunder from would be a better phrasing. Old wounds have itched a bit over some of the digging and it hasn't been exactly pleasant. While I miss them I know that it's the past and the wounds of old while scabbed and grown over are there, they are real, but it's the past and will stay there. I'm truely sorry, I really am.

The world isn't all bad, though there's a dark cloud over it, the sun will shine again - and I'm looking forward to it. Ok enough with me being mopey! The world isn't that bad, and I'm walking my own path, and I'm proud that I'm still walking it, and I'm enjoying the trip!

So for all of you who actually still follow my exsistance I thought I'd give you an update so that you know I'm not dead yet. I'm alive, doing fairly well, and things are going well. I ended up going back to the farm last month and going to the last extended family High School graduation for roughly 18 years. It was a good trip, got to see some great family that we still aren't entirely sure how we are related but we know we are releated and that's just that! It was a good trip, the corn is coming in really well.

Quick side note: I'm sitting here watching the Barbeque episode of Elton Brown and it just told me happily that Bucaneer actually comes from 'he who barbeques' isn't that amusing? I love the food network!

Anyway Brian D. has been out here the last couple of days as I got him hooked up with a pretty sweet interview with Rob M., my old boss from Orion. The whole thing looks like it's going to turn out well, now I just have to finish convincing him that moving out here is a GOOD thing. But I fully realize that this is going to be anything but a simple decision, particularly complicated by the fact that he's looking at moving across the country and he needs to discuss and ponder the whole thing with his wife. I would love to see them out here but I also know that it might not work out for other reasons. To the best of those two no matter what!

So we've been doing the touristy stuff the last couple of days, went to frys, the Computer History Museum (we got a tour co-done by Steve Russell the gentleman who created the first computer game - Spacewar!), Sharffenberger Chocolates (did the tour and ate their chocolate), Did Fisherman's Warf, saw both the silverized guy and the man who hides behind the bush in San Francisco, went to and trapped all around Alcatraz, saw Lombard Street, ate at Boudin and rode on a cable car. All in all a good weekend.

Though a quick point of math concerning Lombard street that Brian D. and I are asstonished at. Given that Lombard street (at it's curviest section) is 433.33 feet long linearly (Google maps + a ruler ( 6.5 inches / 3/4 inches ) * 50 feet). Also given that Lombard street is at a 27deg angle ( Wikipedia ) and given that cos(27deg) * 433.33 SHOULD be the height of the street, that works out to be 386.102826851 feet tall. That's a HUGE drop over that distance. It's a rather amazing sight really, though I'm not sure I would ever drive it.

Anyway it's like 12:22am and Brian D. flys out of here at 6:20am or some ungodly hour like that so i need to crash so I can drive him to the airport. Hopefully I'll be picking him up from the airport again in a few weeks, but we'll see. Out.

Wow. Is it worth even apologizing for the world ganging up on me for the past few months. The world has been going crazy on me since November, and I suppose I should cactch you all up on it. Particularly since I can now speak about all of it publicly.

Well up for starters, lets go back to December. I was grousing around how California didn't have any snow, how the weather was abysmally nice and that was about it. I was working on an open source project within Orion called OpenSSI. Basically a set of extensions and patches to the Linux kernel which allow an entire cluster to more or less function and act as a single multi-processor machine. It's got some very nice features and I was tasked with bringing it up on our clusters. To be honest I loved working on it and I was able to show at SC'05 a running demo of a full 96 node OpenSSI 1.9.x cluster. To the best of my knowledge, at the time, it was the largest running running OpenSSI cluster.

So because of some interest by a large and prestigeous University in Boston, and the opportunity to sit down with some of the OpenSSI developers in person I got a trip to Boston in December! For those of you who know me, I love Boston, and Boston in the winter is a good treat! So a couple of days before Christmas I jumped on a JetBlue flight from San Jose to Boston. For those of you who have an opportunity to fly on JetBlue, take my word, it's TOTALLY worth it! I had a redeye flight into Boston, I didn't sleep much on the plane but the fact that there was a TV in the headrest in front of me made it a lot easier to deal with. I got into Boston at 4 or 5am, made it over to my Hotel and crashed for a couple of hours.

After I had gotten a smattering of sleep, I headed out for the meating and was able to show off the 12 node cluster I had flown out with (Sidenote: we had a fantastic carrying case for the 12 nodes! Basically one of the hardcases with wheels and a nice pull handle, made flying with it a breeze) The demonstration went really well and the following discussions were good as well. After the meeting I walked back to the hotel (only about 6 or 10 blocks or so) and called up Sean, buddy of mine from Iowa who had the lucky fortune to move to Boston. We went and had dinner at Cheers (the tourist Cheers not the 'real' place) and had a good time. It was good seeing him, and the bum was enjoying Boston - I will have to move up there just to mock him at some point ;-)

Anyway I was able to convince Orion to let me stay over a couple of extra days in Boston so I went and stayed with Karl. That was absolutely awesome, I hadn't seen him in a while and it was good hanging out with him for several days. Was able to go to Legal Seafood with Karl, Sean a very cute munchkin Karl and I were watching for her parents and myself. Awesome food, as always, and the jokes about it being the Legal Seafood across from the Boston Aquarium were well placed. I love Boston!

Anyway got to spend several days hanging out with Karl and his friends who were all awesome! Wandered around Boston a bit, and generally got to have a good time 'back home'. So yeah flew back to San Jose on Christmas day. It was an awesome trip, and very productive.

Well I did new years with HPA, his wife and my boss Rob. We watched Happy Tree Friends, and shot off a whole pile of bang makers. It was a good evening and Happy Tree Friends are delightful little shorts full of death and mayham, we enjoyed them throughly.

Well all told Janurary was pretty quiet... well until Janurary 31st. Janurary 31st was a day that I will not quickly forget. ::sighs:: the long and the short of it is - Orion Multisystems closed up shop that day. I found out that afternoon while I was at an offsite meeting, a phone call from my boss was answered with 'is the news good or bad', the responce was 'bad'. Needless to say I excused myself form the meeting and rushed back to the office. It was strange cleaning out my cube and the office I had been working out of, Rob, HPA and I were wandering around joking and generally singing "It's the end of the world as we know it, and we feel fine!" We were all really sad though - we really liked working at Orion. But we had our walking papers, and everyone was pretty upset. Needless to say for the first time in more years than I can remember I was 100% unemployed. That was a new experience.

Well by the end of February I had found a new job, working with a company who's making a product I am pretty darned excited about. I'll talk about them a little later but suffice it to say they are doing something very cool, and their philospohy was a key selling point in my taking the job.

Anyway, life has been busy since than. Lot of stuff going on at work, flew back home for Ayyam'i'ha and spent a week hanging out with the family. The company I'm working for exhibited at Embedded Systems Conference (ESC), Rob and Tristan were out here in February which was cool - I enjoyed having them out here and I'm hoping to get them back here again soon. March and April have been busy and crazy. Last week I bought a new Gary Fishter Advanced bike as my co-workers have been making me jealous of riding into work.

Well the world is still being crazy, things are starting to calm down - thank goodness. I've had enough excitement for a while. I'm signed up for OLS this year, and going to Gencon in August as well. I wish I had more antics in this posting, but the world has been throwing me more curveballs than normal, look at Orion for instance. Anyway it's late now, it's not even the 4th anymore ;-) I'll catch you all on the flip side and try and keep you all (probalby like 2 of you) informed of whats going on.

I realize I've been quiet for almost 2 months (there's a lot going on, trust me I'll write it up soon) However I have found the cutest monkey on the planet.

Was talking about cars with some friends today, and how some repair shops are just abysmall (sorta like this frelling abysmally nice weather in California! Someone make this nice weather stop, make it cold and give me snow darn it! I'm never going to be a "real" Californian...)

Anyway the conversation drifted a little and we started talking about The Car Clinic (Europe) in europe, and the WONDERFUL finished work they provided someone.

http://cats.meow.at/~mariab/2005-12-08/

Isn't it just the most wonderful looking thing you've ever seen! I'm honestly a bit amazed they even let it leave looking like that ::shakes his head:: the guys doing the work for the body shop must also for for UPS (I'm still having fun with them at over a month later, joy)

There will be some updates in the next few days concerning the awesome Halloween party we threw back in I.C. last weekend and the awesome concert / short plays I saw up in S.F. on Halloween.

Been busy with work, very busy. Should start calming down pretty soon, but there are definatly good things going on in that front.

Just finished the latest Harry Potter book. I'm amazed at JUST how much I've come to actually care about the characters in J.K. Rowling's books. She has a style that makes you love the characters or truely despise them. There were a couple of aspects I didn't like all told, but I am definatly looking forward to the next book. It is bound to be dark and insanely sinister.

The stuff from the 24th is resolved more or less. There is a whole wealth of just unhappiness that has been sewn and reaped. In the end I've found another knife, happily planted in my back, and noticably twisted by two different hands. And here I thought I wasn't going to find one of those this time around. ::sighs:: it's a long story to explain why it's there for those of you who aren't in the know, suffice it to say a woman I considered dear put it there.

I just don't even know what to think about the whole thing really. I'm just glad I have a 2000 mile buffer between me and it. To be honest, there's a lot in the world I don't know what to think about right now. I need to go and sit on a mountain for a while and figure it all out......

Thats it my new theory on life - the world is at a constant state of equlibirum. When things go very well things will eventually go very wrong eventually evening out to a nice medium. The pendulum will swing in either direction but will average out to the mid point (or there abouts).

I've been having two fantastic weeks at work! Major breakthroughs and progress on the stuff I'm working on and just a lot of good things going on. Life has seemed good, stable.... almost "normal" for me.

Today conspired against me to adjust itself back to the medium. Was awakened to the bass of one of my neighbours vibrating through my bed (I could vaguely make out the music and these are concrete walls / floors). The DMV took a lot longer than expected (but I have my new license plates WARTHG9) work was more or less realizing the insane deadlines I need to meet which means I'm going to be putting in a lot of hours tomorrow and Wednesday to try and meet them. And to top the whole day off I got some incredibly bad news about a good friend of mine and an ex-girlfriend. The news worries me a lot actually, and there aren't any good roads I can take with it. Joys of a rock and a hard place :-/

Tomorrow isn't going to be much better because of what I have to do now. ::sighs:: joy

eCost and why I will never buy from them again

A month ago I ordered a relativly nice Denon AVR-2105 from eCost.com on the recomendation of some guys back up in Madison as they had had good luck and decent prices from eCost. However as of today I still do not have a working unit in my house.

Needless to say I'm rather ticked off.

I recieved a unit some 3 weeks ago, about a week after ordering. After much happiness and about 2hrs of organizing cables and wiring the thing up to everything I proudly turned it on. And not a sound was heard. Ok... maybe it needs some setup. Tried playing with the setup.... nothing, in fact it gives off errors. Hmmm...... 10 minutes of nothing and than *** BOOM *** sound of some such comes blaring out of my speakers at the full capacity of the reciever. Needless to say I'm still not sure my ears are happy with me. After a weekend full of fiddling I determined that something was wrong with the reciever's audio system, as it switched video just fine, because not even the headphone jack would produce sound on a regular basis.

After trying to figure out eCosts's return mechanism out I found this lovely piece of information that was never brought to my attention at any point through the checkout process.

In addition, the following products are not returnable, and all sales of these items are final. This policy is necessitated by restrictions imposed by the respective manufacturers: ........, Denon, ......

Ok THAT sucks and I should have been informed of that prior to purchase. So I called up Denon, talked with them, they agreed it was broken somehow and that they could fix it but that I'd have to ship it to them. Fine. They also said call up eCost something isn't right with that policy.

So I did. I talked to someone who mumbled the entire time, I asked at least once for them to clarify something but they wouldn't clear up what they were saying. After getting an RMA and stating I wanted them to replace the item they kindly told me "We are out of that model".... Ok so where does that leave me? Something was mumbled about something else but they didn't expound and I disheartendly gave up and decided to call back the next day.

The next day I call and ask whats going on (this is after I've sent an e-mail asking to be contacted mind you with the same concerns I called about). I was told they suddnely had 6 in stock and they weren't sure why I was told they had none (ok most of my concerns now vanish yay) however they forward my phone call stuff off to the Denon person in the company and they will call me back.

Ok I pack the blasted thing up, and pay another $30 to ship it back to them (stupid big and heavy thing). A week goes by, they get it and I call to see where things are at. I'm informed my money has been returned. ** WHAT? ** I tell them that I explicitly wanted it replaced. They look back through their logs seeing I said "replace" several times and go ahead and do up an order to replace the unit. Fine, can I have the tracking number because UPS around here is stupid? No? Ohhh I can call on Monday and get it, thats fine.

I than watch the money returned to my bank and the next day taken back out (at least they aren't charing me shipping to get the thing here this time) Monday rolls around so I call and ask for the tracking number. "I can't give you the tracking number." ** WHAT?! ** "It will be there on Friday." Fine...

Yesterday was Friday, I couldn't make it home before the apartment office shutdown so I stopped by today... no package. eCost doesn't have weekend hours at all so I can't call and ask where the thing is or whats going on. Come Monday I'm calling eCost and I'm demanding to talk to a manager, this is getting rediculous, particularly when I could wander down the street to Best Buy and pick up the AVR-2106 (the current model slightly upgraded not a big deal) for getting close to what I've paid for the AVR-2105 plus all the extra shipping.

Please SOMEONE tell me I'm being unreasonable that when I buy a $300 piece of electronic euipment and than spend another $80 shipping it all over the country, waiting a month to get something to work that thinking eCost should have contacted me on their own (they have NEVER contacted me, I have always contacted them) and at least told me what was going on?

Peeking behind the curtains

First and foremost - CONGRADULATIONS are in order to Mary and Noah! On Saturday they become the proud parents of Michale Scott A., baby and mom are doing fine - dad is more insane than normal. But all told I'm estatic for them!!! Those two are going to make great parents and I HOPE they write that book: Parenting D20 style ;-)

Beyond that life has been mundane (almost) caught a concert series on Saturday with Scott, bands of note (that were good) The Arcade Fire and The Killers. Bands of note NEVER to see live in concert again - Modest Mouse (I like their music it just did NOT translate to stage at all). That was cool, Noah happened to call in the middle of one of the intermissions to let me know about his joyous news! It was a good concert.

Sunday I stopped by the Ren. Faire for one last time this season. It's really a lot of fun and I'm seriously considering being a player next year. Did vaguely make some romantic overtures towards a young lady, who in classic me messing up with women, happened to already be happily married. Doh! Well no harm, no foul and generally seems to be the way the world works for me. Did get some awesome pictures of the whole thing though, and I hope people enjoy them.

In the Wizard of OZ there is the man behind the curtain, the one pulling the strings of what people can actually see. As I grow older I keep getting peeks behind that curtain at how the world really is, sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry and a lot of the time I have to slightly re-adjust my view of the world. I got another glimpse behind the curtain tonight.

All I can say is the workings behind the curtain are a lot more interesting and complex than the facade would have you think.

This came to me tonight in the very small minutes of the day. Take it as you will, I'm not explaining why it came to me.

the twists of fate that women weave upon the hearts of men, to live or die we do not know for we are merely puppets in their games. Though these puppets may not know the course they take, they feel the pain just the same. To go on ever forward not knowing where to go

The strange world we live in & Why marketers don't understand the geek world.

The last few weeks have been an interesting experience in how the world works. Things have been stressful, panicy and at least for me lately a bit nervewraking to downright scary. Things finally don't look like they are getting worse, but I'm not out of the woods yet, I still have a very hard decision to make in the next couple of days... and I'll be honest, I don't know what I'm going to choose. Regardless the apartment made some progress today, and I finally got a couple of snaps of the digs. It's a mess but I'll get them posted soon so people can laugh at how messy my place is currently (and how badly I need to go and buy more shelving!)

To add to the strangeness, the peaks and vallies my life has been going through one of my little projects went live last night over on http://www.kernel.org/faq/. I'm pretty happy about it, and people seem to actually be reading it.... I've had 6 e-mails on it already ;-)

Today I ran across a very interesting website http://www.delltechforce.com/. It's premise is taht Dell has partnered with a bunch of companies to try and take the place of larger mainframe deployments. While in a lot of cases that makes sense (mainframes have really moved more towards large database servers or other very very beefy systems) dell has a UNIQUE view of this task force, or at least their marketing people do. For starters they had EMC2 while this wouldn't be too amazing except.... EMC2 is very closely linked to mainframe systems. DOH! But it gets better...

Next up is Oracle, the software company that provides the de facto standard in enterprise level commercially produced databases. Now here's another strange gotcha.... Oracle has been known to run on mainframes before (or at least my understanding is that they have been) Strike 2 for the marketing team. Now lets go in for Strike 3 (there are 4 strikes to this game) Strike 3 is that both Microsoft and Redhat are put right next to each other on the screen, the marketing people are basically saying that Redhat is just as good and powerful as Microsoft's solution, ala Linux is just as good as Windows. (putting my personal feelings aside obviously thats a MAJOR blunder in the view of Microsoft and I'm sure that Dell will hear about it at some point).

Strike 4 the killing shot - Redhat is a distributor of Linux. Linux is a very fine OS, and it runs on a whole lot of different hardware.... including mainframes! So of all the vendors that these little short videos show, most of the "tech force" are actually companies that are also in the "big iron" world!

I dunno I just chuckled when I realized how silly most of these commercials were. I'm a geek, I admit it.

Someone beat me up and drag me out of this apartment more often ;-)

The Move

Uneventful really, which I'm quite happy for. It took a total of 3 days for stuff to be in Des Moines, to the apartment complex had their keys back. The guys helping me get the stuff out of the apartment deserve way more than the dinner I got them, I have some evil thoughts now on how to make it up to them, braving 90 - 100 degree weather, and a 3rd floor walk up apartment (I vow, never again). My parents also deserve a huge thanks. The apartment was spotless when we left, and I couldn't have done it in such short time without them. They also kindly let me store all my stuff in the garage while I apartment shopped out in Cali.

The new pad is South of downtown San Jose, not very far from a couple major highways and expressways. I've got a stunning view out all my windows of the mountains in the distance, and I'm on the 3rd floor again. This time however, there is an elevator ;-) Dad drove out with me in the Budget rental truck (HIGHLY recommended, Budget has newer trucks, they are cleaner and just nicer to deal with than U-Haul. Nothing Against U-Haul, but Budget is cheaper and cleaner.) We pulled the whole trip off in driving time 28hrs or so (roughly the same as what it took me in my car) We started late on Monday, and we had apartment keys before 5pm on Wednesday. HPA & DrSuzi helped me and dad get the stuff into the apartment. Didn't take too long and it was relatively painless all told.

There have been requests for pictures of the pad, I'm going to try and borrow a digital camera and get them for you all. I'll post them up when I have them. The apartment is a total disaster area. I don't even have my beloved Smaug up and running yet, the computer rack is only half put together (as I'm using the top of it proped on some plastic draweras a desk right now since my desk won't be here for 7-10 more days). So yeah thats where that's at.

Birthday

I apparently got more ancient at some point recently. This also means that a shout out to Sean and Kat are in order as they also got more ancient. Even though we were unable to throw the giant Birthday bash I thought of you guys! We gotta work on another giant bash and get everyone together sometime.

All told it was pretty low key, after work HPA, DrSuzi, my boss, co-worker and a buddy of mine from Iowa City went toe Dave and Busters. Dave and Busters is like Chuckey Cheese, only for adults, and with switches for nice people to come scurrying over and take my drink order while I play the game. It was kinda nice, just kinda wandering around and arcading with people. I'm kinda in the mood for a lan party, need to poke people into doing this.

Not much else to tell on that.

Gencon

Was awesome, as usual. I had a lot of fun and it was a really good trip. My younger brother joined the crew for the first time, and I think he's already pestered me into agreeing to pay his part of the room bill next year so he can come again (bum, but he's in college trying to pay his way). Also my girlfriend jumped onboard last minute and came out and hung with a bunch of crazy gamers, she even got into it and bought a corset while we were out there and painfully forced me to lace her up while we were there. OHHHHH the pain ;-) (for the record she claims I'm pretty good at it)

In general though, this was obviously an off year when compared with the last two. Nothing really big happened, White Wolf didn't have anything spectacular to wow us with, it wasn't the 30th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. The shwag was way down, and I didn't see a lot of new games floating about. Highlights though: Serenity the rpg was there, I tried to snag a copy but they were sold out (they could only get 500 copies from the publishers before Gencon this year. I put in a pre-order and they promised me a bunch of extra fancy signatures in it when it arrives at my apartment. That reminds me I haven't seen it yet, I wonder where it is :-/

They were showing neat previews out of City of Villians, I'm looking forward to that. Reminds me I need to pre-order that....... (BTW P.A.N.T.S.)

Andrea (the g/f) got me to take my pants off in the middle of everyone at Gencon. Ok it's not that bad, I tried on a UtiliKilt. Honestly, I was surprised I liked it quite a bit. If it wasn't like $250 for the kilt I want I would have bought it than and there! It even fits my laptop in one of the pockets (pictures of me in a kilt and pictures of the laptop in the kilt coming soon)

Zonk, of Slashdot fame, got married a week or so before Gencon. And with the people I usually hang out with, decided that it was his quasi honeymoon and should tease and poke and prod at hime the whole way. They went so far as for a klingon and a blind Federation chaplin to come and serenade the newly weds. Zonk, we love you man and congratz on getting hitched!

I helped with LRPC this year, that was cool. Saw Pat, Sam and Mark, thought not as much as I would have liked (the trip was running on overload to begin with and trying to keep up with everyone was hard) Played SFB canisters again, and for the first year Pat and I didn't kill each other. In fact we didn't even fire shots at each other. (someone make sure neither of us was physically dead!) It was a good game. The creator even stopped by and told us about a very simplified version of SFB he's got cooking. The rule book is apparently MUCH thinner, like 30 pages or so versus the serveral hundred for the rules I currently have for SFB. Andrea even thought it was cool, and was interested in the simplified version. About it really. Looking forward to next year, just not going to stay at the Hilton near the convention center (they screwed up our billing, and just generally weren't that good. I'm still not sure where the billing thing sits. I should check on that) About it really.

Plates and why they hate me

So, in the middle of packing up the plates I had in Des Moines I decided that the scary plates that were serving as my everyday plates weren't going to be coming to California with me. For instance, they do weird things in the microwave like melt, but they aren't plastic (this scared me). So those went to goodwill, and the scary ones from the microwave went into the trash. So when I moved to California I was plateless and pots and panless (those went the same way as the plates)

Replacing the pots & pans was easy. I now have a mix of Farberware Classic, Farberware Millenium, and All-Clad pots & pans. I'm quite happy with this arrangement, but will probably slowly aquire more All-Clad, Le Cruset, and Lodge pieces over time. However the plates proved much less easy to deal with.

After finally deciding on a pattern I could buy locally, and buying it and getting it home (fairly happy and looking forward to being able to eat at home) I went to put them in the dishwasher......... Where I found that the plates were too tall, and prevented the upper washing arm from spinning freely.

::blink, blink::

(Insert explitives including: frelling, poo-flinging, and many other ones I won't mention)

I'll admit, I was seriously considering modding the dishwasher to accomidate the dishes. Several other people's more rational "DON'T DO THAT!!!!!" won, and I didn't. Dismayed, the plates went back and I began a new hunt: for plates I could live with, AND that fit in my dishwasher. (Whirlpool, the maker of this dishwasher, has apologized for the inconvience their stupid lack of forsight has caused me. The dishwasher has a "standard" 10in tub and in only 10in plates will work. The plates I bought were 11in. If your renting, measure your plates. If they exceed 10.5in, check the dishwasher before signing the lease)

So yeah, I'm drawing this story out. After checking two Bed Bath and Beyonds, two Linnen and Things, Target, Wallmart, and several online places I ended up at Crate and Barrel. I wandered around their store, checked prices, debated this and that and after a phone call to the master authority on kitchens (my mom) to check on a couple of things I went with the Crate and Barrel Madison collection. A nice elderly lady was helping me out and scurried off to the back room after a small bit of banter to fetch me my plates and such. While she was ringing me up the following happened

Nice Old Lady: So you must have taste.

My inner monologue: Sales pitch for something incoming, or she doesn't think me in a t-shirt and jeans would normally shop here

Nice Old Lady: Why just last week Steve Job's personal chef was in here buying exactly what you are buying, the 16pc set of the Madison Collection, for Steve Job's everyday place settings.

So apparently Steve Job's and I will be eating off of the same pattern of plates and bowls.

Also to note the Crate and Barrel was the Santana Row shopping center, the words "upscale" don't even beging to cover it: I saw three Lamburgini's and two Ferrari's in the maybe 20 minutes I spent getting to and from Crate and Barrel.

Thoughts on California, and why it's just weird here

California is interesting. It has a lot of cultural and local attitudes very unique to it. This is going to all be from the perspective of San Jose / Bay Area as this is all I've really experienced.

(1) WHY CAN'T I FIND A GOOD GROCERY STORE?!?!?! Seriously, I have within reasonable distance two Albertsons, two Safeways and a Trader Joes. They are all small, and more or less carry the same things (caveat I haven't been to one of the Albertons, I'll try them in the next day or so but I'm not holding my breath) The trader Joes is obviously targeting the organic market, but even than it was only like maybe 10 short isles of stuff.

Things I have not been able to find at all that I have looked for:

• rasberry cream cheese
• Dawn Complete - Blue kind (original I believe)
• Jimmy Dean ready to cook bacon
• Pillsbury Chedder Garlic oven baked buscuits
• Garden Of Eatin Black Bean Tortilla Chips - low or no salt variety
• Almond Flour (local friend is looking for it not me)

(list may not be complete it's what I can remember off the top of my head)

So I don't know what to do at this point, I'm willing to expand out in the hopes of finding what I'm looking for, but I don't think I'm going to find it :-/ I'm also truely confused about why a grocery store has an entire isle devoted to computer things, cables, ink cartridges, etc. Thats the job of an office supply store not the job of a grocery. Give me a better grocery!

(2) California is based on the idea of service industries. This one just kind of dawned on me today while I was watching my car get washed. Most car washes out here are a 3 stage process (from what I can tell) They vacume your car out, not amazingly but it's pretty decent enough to get the worst of the dirt out. The normal car wash machine washes your car. Lastly a small horde of people decend upon it and clean the inside, and dry the outside, clean the windows with like windex on the inside, tire grease your tires, etc. It's quite a sight to be seen, and something I'm going to have to get used to. I don't mind detailing the inside of my car, I'll spend a good amount of time doing this, but since I'm out here I know it would be more difficult to do that. Regardless it got me thinking about a few things. There are a lot of duplicated stores around here. Within a 30 mile radious of my apartment there are like 10 - 15 bed baths and beyonds. Within 5 Miles there are 2 Albertsons, 2 Safeways and a couple more smaller grocery stores. there are 5 targets within what I'd consider reasonable driving distance, and a new one to open soon. There are 4 home depots within easy reach of my apartment.

Businesses also seem to try and distinguish themselves by offering you more service to make things more convient or easier on you. Safeway for instance has the ability to shop online and have your groceries delivered. Every home Depot I've seen has a huge selection of rental tools, from normal household tools to huge pieces of equipment (this was never seen out in the midwest or in the north east that I can remember). I'm sure if I think more I can come up with other businesses that go out of their way to make things easier for the consumer. There are two large populations that make this possible: a large number of people with a good chunk of change, silicon valley houses are anything but cheap and a large population of immigrants willing to work for cheap just to start the process of carving out a good life for themselves.

ok it's late and I'm now tired. I'll expound on this more later. I might even keep a running log of things I can't find but I know exist and are still made somewhere else on the site in case people can point me to where I can find them......

Post Note: I got new plates for my car since I had to register out here, I have temporary ones right now but I will eventually be the driver of the "WARTHG9" car ;-)

The cats out of the bag now, for anyone who actually reads this the news that I've been hinting at and hiding under my hat for so long is finally out and in the open: I'm moving to California & Silicon Valley.

I've just accepted a new job with Orion Multisystems, I'm going to be working on the software distribution group on the linux distribution in the systems. I'm VERY excited at this point, but as you can all imagine it's a big change and I'm still reeling from the changes as they dawn upon me to a degree.

As you can all guess I've been keeping this under my hat for a while, as you can imagine, but now that the cat is out of the bag let it be known. So let it be sung from the roof tops! Sorry to keep you in the dark for a while, just a lots been going on, and there's something else new too which I'm going to include in an e-mail, if you haven't heard what that is e-mail me and ask.

A lot is going to be happening and going on, poke me please I'm probably going to need it!

Twice in one month! Heaven forbid!

Hey all I've had some pretty awesome stuff go down in the last couple of weeks, I'm going to try and sum up what I can, and there are a few things I won't toss out here as they aren't finalized but there is some cool stuff coming down the road.

First up, an incredible shout out goes to my little sister She just recently dragged me up to Cedar Falls and the University of Northern Iowa to see her 1 minute and 30 second of fame and glory for her 2 1/2 months of hard work on SWEENEY TODD. To qoute my little sister "It's a lovely story about rape, murder and canabalism..." Which by the way does sum it up, however it was really quite enjoyable and I'm glad I went. Molly ended up working on some masks that were used, and there were a lot of them, I'm going to guess around 50 or soand they all looked fantastic! I wish I had pictures, but sadly I don't (Molly toss some up!).

Molly also introduced me to a couple of people from Cedar Falls, in particular there was a lady by the name of Annie she was quite anxious for me to meet. I'm guessing Annie didn't actually believe that I exist, and that I was merely a phigment of Molly's imagination. Not much else to tell about the trip, except DANG the UNI dome is big! It is truely a giant structure, and something completely unexpected from Iowa. Side note I like UNI's stage for the performing arts better than ISUs

Kathleen, Brian's wonderful wife, apparently has been found to have WAY, WAY, WAY too much free time on her hands, and not only turned me into a South Park charater, but has also turned most of her friends into South Park characters as well! It's pretty awesome all told, however look at how many images she has spent, and it seems, a fair amount of time creating... I SOOOOOO need to harnes this free time, with it I could.... well ruling the world is out it's not quite that powerful... mmmmmmm dunno something but it would be AWESOME!

For those of you who have been thinking I have lost my mind, good news! I might have ;-) At Gencon this last year I bought an absolutely fantastically cool game called "Ogre Bash" from Cloud Kingdom Games. If you've been to Gencon, you know these people as the riddle guys. But they really do put a lot of thought into what they do, and I commend them for it. Well about 30 seconds after getting home from Gencon, I promptly LOST the copy of Ogre Bash that I had bought. Hadn't even opened the packaging on it. Fast forward to last weekend (yeah it's something like 8 or 9 months later) I'm doing some minor cleaning and just HAPPEN to open a duffle bag sitting, litterlly, 1 foot away from my computer chair. Whalah, there's my copy of Ogre Bash! I felt like an idiot, however went to the new Bostons and played the game. General thoughts on Bostons: Drink selection need serious work, particularly with Old Chicago just down the road (Note: this means I can't play my semi-infamous waitor / waitress game :-( ). The food is good though, I would probably rank the food a bit better than Old Chicago. The tables are also a fair bit bigger and thus makes invading a table and playing games easier / better.

The stuff that's missing from here, suffice it to say, is all awesome as well. I wish I could tell everyone all the stuff / good news thats running around, but I can't QUITE yet. Hopefully the next time I blog I can spill all the beans I've got stashed away.

Anyway, time to get back to doing other productive stuff.

Parting note, I've finally started posting some of my Open Source Software stuff, most notably to start with are my svn-wrapper scripts which can be found http://www.eaglescrag.net/oss/ right now!

So I've had a good weekend but for some reason I'm sitting here feeling more down than I've felt in a long time.

Had the good fortune to have my godson and his parents come visit for a couple days. He has gotten big, and very drooly ;-) He's walking and nigh talking now. He's insanely smart, after randomly hitting buttons on my stereo system he honstly started figuring it out, and understanding what he was doing, and by stereo system I mean the entire audiotron, tv, dvd, hifi system. The kid is smart, end of story.

Example: His parents bought him one of those battery powered Eeyore toys, it does stuff and is battery powered. On his own he figured out that when Eeyore runs down to go get batteries (he grabbed two for this story), Find the screw driver (he picked the right one out) and unscrew the back panel and replace the batteries. Admittedly he was a battery short of restoring Eeyore, but he was halfway through the screw before he was cought.

He was fun to have around though, and me being the evil human being I am, spoiled him :-D. He got his quattro (1-3yr old legos) blocks and his Baby Gund Girrafe and was running around playing with them like a mad man! Wandered around Jordan Creek Mall a bit with them, obviously since we ate at the cheesecake factory, and he ended up ridding up on my shoulders most of the time. Those were the times I was like "dude I really do like kids! I want some someday!"

The times when I realized kids are evil was this morning when he woke me up at an ungodly hour. The only thing saving his life was he was cute, and I realized that the only thing preventing parents from killing and possibly eating their children at an early age is they are cute, and we as adults are pre-programmed to not kill that kind of cute. (Mark obviously roled a nat 20 for his charisma roll, with an obvious baby bonus of +20 and cuteness bonus of +20)

I've been a bum the rest of the day. Work is going down the tracks at the typical breakneck pace, the end is in sight I just need to survive long enough to get to the lull and catch my breath. Stage 1 goes live this next week, and stage 2 goes live in a couple of weeks (though of note we haven't even really laid the new code neccisary for stage 2, WHEEEEE!) So to bed with me so I might sleep!

Waking from a long winters nap

*Yawns awake* ok so I bought the bed, fell asleep and I swear it's only half past noon right? On WHAT day? Man did --> I <-- oversleep!

Not a lot to report really, work is going completely insane (we have 4 new sections of the giant app going live next week and another 8 much smaller portions going live in about a month) so I have been working my tail bone off. It's been stressful, it's been long, it's been insane but I'm looking forward to getting it all done and getting a much quieter pace for a little bit. Huzzah!

I'm seriously sitting here trying to think of whats been going on that might be of any interest to everyone, and there isn't much really. Bought some more decorative art things for my apartment so it doesn't quite seem to baren (I'll get pictures up of the stuff some time, it's really very nice). Co-worker gave me an amoire, it's a pretty nice armoire though doesn't quite match the style of furniture I would go for but it's storage and I've needed storage so it's been put to good use. Read some good books (Nemisis by Issac Asimov) which was first rate. Got killed twice in one night in D&D the other night and get to make a nice ubber character.

Worried about software patents in Europe (someone prevent that insanity please!), watched some movies (saw Kill Bill I & II which I must say are VERY weird movies, not bad just very over the top), hung out in Madison with Brian & Kathleen and the whole crew up in Madison (truely you guys rock I need to come hang out up there more often!), bought my brother and myself passes to Gencon and we are both looking forward to that.

I DID hear through the grapevine that Karl that bum up in Boston might be getting married! He needs to call me back and let me know whats going on, das bum! And my godson is coming to visit with Pat & Sam this weekend so it's all good

There really isn't a lot to report, I'm decent, I'm tired and I think it's bedtime ;-)

I'm not sure whether to be giddy, or just plain insane. I've been riding one of the strangest high that I've ever ridden...

I figure I'm insane ;-)

I bought a freaking bed! No more air mattress for me! woohoo!

Sadly the experience of buying it was not as pleasant as I could have liked, but Sears will be hearing more from me on the subject

but I bought a mattress :-D yay sleep, sleep is good mmmmm sleep!

Something just doesn't seem right to me. Copyright law around the world is one of the greatest things in the world. It gives people protection for their ideas and the creative works that they make. However in recent months (possibly even the last year) I've seen the copyright system so badly abused it's driving me nuts.

Recently a German court handed down a verdict that all computers sold in Germany will now have a tax levied upon them that will go to a company by the name of VG Wort. Sadly I don't speak or read German, and the translators seem to have a hard time on their website so some of my thoughts and opinions to follow will probably be misdirected a bit but still valid in general.

This kind of taxation is taxation without proper representation. Plain and simple. I'm guessing that VG Wort is either a clearing house for people to get some royalties for lost revenues (how they decide what you get is beyond me) or that it's a company working for the German version of the RIAA. Regardless while I can see their position of wanting to protect their works and that the internet has brought a rampant and easy means of making perfect digital copies of stuff that this threatens their livelihoods there are some limits to what they have a right to. For starters companies taking this battle to the courts in the way VG Wort did is just outrageous, they went to court asking for a tax to be levied so that they could collect the funds. Canada has a similar tax on their media (specifically CD-R's and CD-RW's, not sure if DVD's have made it that far yet or not) however there are some differences, lets explore the two.

Hmmmmmmm so if I'm reading this correctly even though Canada has a tax on their media that goes into the pockets of the RIAA in Canada, they have more or less told that body that "Yes we are willing to pay you a tax on the media that is the media of choice for your product (cd's) in exchange for being able to make copies of the music"... Brilliant (when is the USA going to adopt something like this?! ok probably never but thats besides the point) Where as Germany has basically just said: "Yeah here's a tax to help sustain and uphold and old business model that is in obvious need to change because the consumers want it. You've cried wolf and here's your cash" and blanketly taxing everyone regardless of guilt and they don't seem to get anything for this taxation. Thats just not cool.

Lets switch to the USA, shall we? We are embroiled here in a fight that may affect the rest of the world, even possibly our children's children's children. We are trying to figure out what constitutes the rights of the holder of a copy of something, what they can do with it and what the big giant corporations want you to do with it. A quick summary boils down to this: The consumer just wants to be able to use what they have in any way they like for their own personal use. When I record something from cable I want to fast forward through the commercials. When I buy some music I wish to put it into a convient format for me so I can listen to it in my car while I drive, in my house while I cook, or heaven forbid use it to make derivitive works. This all sounds fairly reasonable. Now what the Companies want: money, lots of it, now. Well duh, let me expand that a little. They want to limit your use of the product you buy, they don't want you to modify it, change it, copy it stare at it, and in fact I don't think they want you to even use it without you paying them more money. Many companies even try to limit what you do own (Microsoft's XBox for example) and yeah, ok I'll grant you that the companies are looking out for themselves BUT they are going to far and it's really starting to tick me off.

There is legislation that is trying to be passed that would prevent people from fast forwarding through commercials, prevent me from recording stuff from television if the cable companies don't want me to record it, they want to prevent me from listening to my music where and how I want to listen to it, and they want to make me pay every time I want to watch a copy of a movie I have. As a consumer, this is absurd. And much of this is being percipitated by people copying stuff over the internet. Ok lets look at the root cause of the problem. CD's and DVD's haven't changed in price in 10 years. Music still costs $15 for a cd where you might get two good songs on most modern Pop cd's. DVD's still start you out at $20 or so. Now it's gotten cheaper, easier, faster, etc to produce and get the consumer these products, but the prices haven't changed. The companies making them just keep the difference. Most consumers know they are getting gouged but there isn't a whole lot they can do about it. Now along comes the internet, and it's suddenly easy to share the music, and in a situation where people don't feel like they are getting gouged. This is where the media companies call foul, and rightly so, but instead of going after the infringers they deicde to try and just take on the whole system and change it for their benefit instead of seeing the root of the problem and make it inconvient to make illegal copies of the music. Than along comes iTunes and it starts selling music like a gang buster, hmmmmmm I can buy music legally, I can copy it to cd's, and I can use it in places where I want without a whole lot in the way of restrictions AND it's CHEAPER than buying a real cd? BRILLIANT, this begins making copying a lot less disrable and file trading drops a little. Wish that bit of logic would thunk someone upside the head.

Instead we end up with legislation that makes waking up in the morning illegal, Digital Rights Management that is a complete waste of time and a hassle for everyone, and me wondering when everyone is going to wake up to what the consumers want, and the fact that the government is for the people by the people, not for the big business by the big business. Someone find a balance so everyone can be happy?

Happy New Year Everyone! May this year bring us all happiness, peace, love and understanding!

ok I'm going to bed now ;-)

So I have recently been offered a very odd trade:

My couch

For an iMac

Fooey! I can't sit in an iMac!

From me, to all of you I'm wishing you the happiest of holidays whatever it may be.

A Toast for the new year:

To those who have come before us,
To those who will come after us,
To those with us now,
May we live our lives to the fullest,
May we support and help our friends,
May we love our families,
And do the best we can.
For we have lost another year in our lives and we have precious few left may this coming year be the best year we have had yet!

Ohhhh the weather outside is frightful, and the drivers are dumb as a doornail. So let ist snow let it snow let it snow!!!

So that impromptu singing, as bad as it is coming from me, does have a point. We recently got our first "major" snowfall of the season here. Got about, I dunno, 3 inches of snow tops (man I miss getting +100in a year) so I'm pumped, it was snowingly beautifully and I was pumped completely. So it worked out that the next day was heading into work and I SWEAR the intelligence of the people driving is directly proportional to the temperature! For instance on the way to work was driving on a 6 lane high way (three lanes either direction) and I'm heading in on the far left lane and than suddenly traffic started coming to a halt.... odd... after a couple minutes I found out why. Someones car had come to an absolute halt in the far left lane, the person put on their blinkers, got out and left the vehicle. (Note: they couldn't have gotten it off onto the left shoulder as their isn't one yet, lots of construction). I was FLOORED.

However thats not the end of the tale, I wish it were. In my way home I saw three OTHER things that left me pondering. A gentleman was apparently hauling a matress and boxspring on top of the back of his pickup.... well one of the items didn't stay. It ended up across the middle and right lanes. ::blink blink:: Ok and it keeps going, another car had it's gas cover open and the cap just flaping around. Lastly when I finally got to my exit I was greeted with the flashing of a bout 4 police cars and a couple fire trucks that were on the scene of an accident, I hope no one got hurt but it just amazed me that THAT many problems on the roads existed.

PLEASE be careful on the roads over the next month or so, i'm guessing it's not going to get any better any time soon

Beyond that life is fairly quiet, not much to tell. Work, finding new oddities with state, I'm still single, and the world is still flat! Going to be finishing up one of my open source projects, a dynamic dns updater, think I'm going to call it dnsUp2Date, and if I'm lucky I'll have it done in the next week or so. I'll start a new section of the website for it when I'm a bit closer to it's finish.

I miss fresh seafood, snow and an ocean

So yeah the world has been turning and going by faster than I can even imagine lately. On the work front several of our apps, mostly ones I've worked on, have gone live and people are using them. This is great and wonderful HOWEVER there are just signifigant problems, mainly on states end of getting things. Things are slowly getting better but not without a lot of pain and anguish on our end.

Beyond that I've been running a lot lately, part of the season. Younger bro just got done with a play not too long ago. He did great (it was Anything Goes and he played the steward and had a lot of fun with it!). Saw the Nutcracker and a concert recently as well. It's pretty good. I dunno I'm just kinda mentioning that I'm not dead yet, and I'm more or less ok. Des Moines still isn't my most favorite place on the earth and life on some personal levels isn't working out the way I expected (mainly a female is involved and she's not taking the hints of no really this isn't going to work at all ::sighs:: not much I can do on that at this point.

Dunno I'm not much more than tired right now, lots of things to be tired about and I'm looking forward to some downtime in the next couple weeks. Hopefully get to chat/see/poke most of yous while I'm in "down" time.

Proper use of e-mails and the generation behind me and why we should just nuke the world

So life in general has gotten more insane, work has gone from being just normal insane to I'm taking names insane. But all is well on that front products start shipping here in the next couple of days so life should be a bit more sane. Addendum to the halloween party: we were all exposed to plague (whooping cough), so we are on drugs now to nip that in the butt. Though it's not a horrible thing, ended up with a four day weekend because of it. Other than that I'm doing ok, nothing really to report, the world is still flat (or round if you believe that dissilusion), my spelling is still horrible, and yeah.

There have been some interesting happenings as of late, well interesting to me ;-). Few days ago I got an automagic e-mail from ofoto.com. Now it was an e-mail confirming my account creation ::blink:: my WHAT? Now as most of you know I maintain my own archive of photos, it's rather large, extensive and contains a pile of stuff, so why would I even consider an ofoto.com account, let alone make one and get an e-mail about it. So I stare at the e-mail some more until my brain clicks in, the e-mail address isn't my normal e-mail address. It so happens to be bilbo AT rivendel, one of the domain names I own but haven't come up with a good use for yet. So I'm thinking, ok some automated bot has created an account and this is more or less spam for me. So I thought I'd at least check the site out, see what was actually put up there since I'm now linked to the account.

So I went and reset the password and logged in, sadly to find that there are pictures that have been stored in it :-( Some halloween pictures and what looks to be pictures of a young childs first birthday. I'm guessing someone just didn't want to put in their own e-mail address to create the account to get these pictures up, and put in an e-mail that happens to get to me. So, honestly I am not mad about the e-mail thing and at this point I would like to return the pictures, and if the person in question here needs an e-mail address we might be able to come to some understanding, so yeah. Ladies and gentleman, be careful what you use made up e-mails for they might actually get to people and if anyone knows who created the account bilbo on ofoto.com please contact me!

As for the generation behind me, friend of mine invited me into a chat room full of 15 - 18year olds this evening, from their conversations I suddenly appreciate my insanely thick skin more. They are a much more messed up generation than we were, more preasures and things that I can't even remember being worried about at those ages. Makes me wonder what my kids, if I ever have any at the rate I'm going, what the world is going to be like for them to grow up in, and I just hope they have the strength to grow up in it. Or we could just nuke the world now and save them all the trouble. But I'm being more cynical than I need to be ;-) Anyway night all, this plague ridden sleepy head needs sleep.

::looks around:: no it CAN'T be! ::looks around again:: Question: What happaned to 2004? I mean it's Novemeber already and so much has happened already! The end is nigh! It's just amazing how time has flown this year, I'm sure it won't get any slower.

So some quick updates on what happened recently: The halloween weekend was awesome, and the halloween party rocked, though some interesting happenings occured that I'm still figuring the fallout from. The elections have come and gone and we are doomed to another four years of his royal shrubness, ohhhh well he's a lame duck president so there's some hope for us yet ;-). So all is reasonably good.

So I participated in a Milleniums end game, it was absolutely awesome, and I'm looking forward to sticking with the campaign, it should be good, though I'll admit we gave weapons grade nuclear material to the badguys..... oops ;-) Though apparently I cought on the quickest as to what the item was unlike some groups that have apparently picked it up and handled it for extended periods of time. Yay for our group of characters possibly being able to have children latter in life ;-)

Not much else going on really, I get thursday off and I'm starting to try and plan out what the heck I'm going to do, which probably entails cleaning the apartment and getting some other stuff done around the apartment. Did buy a set of barley twist candlesticks which are really quite nice. But yeah the apartment is slowly coming together. Anyway I'm going to crash, it's late and I'm dead tired

So I'm sitting here this evening, looking around and seeing a lot of things, realzing a few and generally being more stoic and reflective than normal. It's a bit interesting really, if I come up with any amazing revelations I'll let you all know ;-)

So since I last write I haven't done tooooo much, built a MythTV box, which went interestingly (messed up the config pretty bad on the first try which I din't realize for a while) For those of you who don't know what MythTV is, think of a TiVo only not in the pretty box, louder and I made it from spare parts around my apartment. Anyway I saw and enjoyed the Farscape: Peacekeeper wars mini-series, and for the record I'm very, very sad about the character that dies, I liked that character a lot! Ohhhh well not much that can be done about that now. Started to play a Mage / Vampires game with Gabe, Sean, Ben S., and a new gent named Oney on friday. Not much, played till 2am, and drove to IC from DM, not a short drive ;-). Had fun though, looking forward to the next run on that game. Beyond that I had a completely useless weekend, only thing I really did was start a small project, that I'll make Open Source in the not tooo distant future.