/dev/zero

Congratulations to my good friends and “p”.
They snuck off to “Canuckistan” to get married. From the pictures it was a lovely ceremony.
I wish them all the best and look forward to the reception they have planned here in Big D some time in Oct.

It’s been an interesting week. Had a job interview last Friday that left me feeling pretty sure I got the job. By the end of the day the recruiting firm let me know I did get the job, and for a grand more than the initial listing for the position. They were supposed to have an actual offer letter to me on Monday, but the manager has been out of the office all week. The recruiters contacted the customer’s HR dept and they hadn’t gotten the paperwork from the manager yet, so I still don’t have it. They also need to do a background check, but I told them I’m OK with giving notice at my current place with a contingent offer letter. There’s nothing in my background that will cause a problem.
Meanwhile, I don’t have an actual offer yet, so I’m not giving notice.
I also have a job interview with UT Austin next week in their computer services dept. Since I haven’t signed any offers yet, I’m going to go ahead and take the interview. It’s more in line with what I really want to do (system administration, rather than tech support) and the pay is almost $10k more. Pluses: what I want to do with my career, stable firm (can’t get much more stable than the largest state university in the country), more money, closer to my folks. Drawbacks: moving away from some very good friends here in DFW.

Meanwhile, at my current $POE, a water pipe burst in another suite on Wed night, flooding out half our tech floor, including my desk. I had to work from the NOC Thurs morning. At least this time I had my laptop with me so I didn’t have to spend an hour setting up all my tools on yet another PC that isn’t my normal workstation. Friday morning I got to put my desk back together, but luckily both Thurs and Friday were quiet days, calls-wise.

Today, my parents are coming to town to go out to dinner to celebrate Dad’s retirement. We’re going to go to some place in the Fort Worth Stockyards. Apparently Dad also wants to go shopping for some casual western wear. I dont’ know why he needs to come up here to DFW for that. Surely there’s plenty of places in Austin to buy that stuff, but oh well. I know where I can take him. Not sure why he’s suddenly interested in acquiring some western wear either.
However, them coming to visit means I need to do some mad cleaning. I think it’s almost a blessing that Kestrel has to work today; it means she’ll be out of my way while I run around the house stuffing things into closets and getting them off the floor.
The lawn is edged and mowed and I’m exhausted and drenched in sweat. But I still have the kitchen, living room and front bathroom to clean. Back to work.

Not as in I WAS antisocial, but as in I discovered how much I dislike people.
Now I don’t, as a general rule, have a problem with people. I’m a pretty gregarious kind of guy. However lately I’ve discovered how much I dislike groups of people. Groups in public places.

Hanging out with friends is all right. I enjoy going out to the movies with my friends, game night at friends houses, going out to dinner, etc. Churches are fine (without getting into religion or faith. That’s unrelated to my main theme here.)
It’s crowds, crowded places, places with lots of people, where most of them have nothing to do with each other, save for their physical presence at the same time and place. This is where people really annoy me. It’s the thoughtless acts, the “no one else here but me matters, so I don’t have to be polite”, that ticks me off.

I went out to a movie with , Nymaz, Amethyst and Kestrel. 20 minutes into the movie, something starts flashing in the theater. Not a blinking light, a flash. As in a flash photography. It does it more than once. I turn around and see some Paris Hilton look-alike sitting in the row behind us with some kind of camera phone taking pictures of herself and her young friend. A picture or two during a movie, while rude and annoying, I could live with. 6 or 7 pictures was too much. Finally I told her, loud enough for most of the theater to hear, to “Put the damn camera away!” She said something snide in return, but there were no more flashes and we were able to enjoy the rest of the movie in peace. I highly recommend Kung Fu Panda, by the way.

The next day, Kestrel and I, having new dress codes handed down by both our places of employment during the same week and neither of us possessing enough appropriate clothes, went shopping. The trip reaffirmed how much I hate malls. I used to be a bit of a mall rat as a kid. Junior high and high school, I hung out with friends at the mall. Don’t look at me like that. It was the ’80s. A mall, on a Saturday, in June, in Texas, is the last place you want to be. Too many teens doing the mall rat thing, too many familys with little kids running around. Too many people who have never heard of deoderant, or in some cases even soap. Too many people who like to walk 3, 4, 5 abreast, slowly, taking the entire width of a passage so you can’t get around them to where you’re going.

It’s the “me and my friends are the only thing that matters. Everyone else in this place with us aren’t part of our group so they don’t matter. Simple manners are unimportant. Being aware of other people around us, having any consideration for anyone else’s comfort or enjoyment is irrelevant.” that drives me crazy.

The people in the mall are just annoying and I can avoid that by simply not going to malls. I did it mostly successfully for about 5 years. Flash photography in a movie theater, DURING the feature? That’s a whole new level of “the world revolves around ME”.

Coming home from work the other night, as I turned into my neighborhood I encountered a bit of police and fire activity. No lights and sirens and fire was leaving the scene, so I didn’t think much of it. Probably someone called 911 for a medical emergency and it was all over. There was one police car still in the neighborhood and he drove off when he realized he was blocking me from turning onto my street.

Kestrel said there were two police cars out front when she got ome and the officers were talking to Jeff, our neighbor across the street. I know Jeff has a past, so I was a little worried, but she said they seemed to be laughing and joking. I stopped worrying figured I’d just ask him what happened the next day.

I came home from work yesterday, saw that Jeff was home so headed over to ask what all the excitement was the day before. Jeff and Jonnetta, his wife, were sitting at their kitchen table with Chris, the neighbor that shares the other half of their duplex. I’d never met Chris before, though I had spoken with her boyfriend and roommate, Mark. I’d seen her coming home from work so I recognized her and Jeff introduced us.
Monday afternoon, Mark died, apparently of heart failure.

He’d been ill for several months, first pneumonia, then a couple of bouts of bronchitis. He was fighting off another round of bronchitis when his doctors told him if he didn’t quit smoking, it was just going to keep coming back and his lungs would never heal, so he quit. 8 days later he was dead.

Chris said she called around 3:45 to get a phone number. He said it would take him a minute to get to it, as he was rather weak and was moving slowly. When he didn’t come right back, she figured he got distracted by a book or something, as he was in the habit of doing. (I saw him many times, at all hours of the day and night, stepping out to his porch to have a cigarette, always reading a book. He made his living buying and selling books online. Their house is so packed with books they can barely move.) Later she got an uneasy feeling and came home early, to find him collapsed on the floor, unresponsive. She called 911 and they had to take him out through the bedroom window. He was probably already dead before she got home, but they transported him to the hospital, attempting to revive him.

After getting back from the hospital, she had to deal with calling his parents to let them know their son had died. While still on the phone the police showed up and made her get off the phone RIGHT NOW, so they could remove her from the house and seal it off. They wouldn’t even let her re-enter the house to feed the dog. It wasn’t until midnight that they had their search warrant, completed their search and let her back in, satisfied that there was no appearance of a crime.

Chris and Mark had just gotten engaged and were supposed planning to sign the papers on a house they are buying this Friday. Instead she’s traveling to Oklahoma City bury him.

Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra “Concerts in the Garden” series.

Glinka

Overature to Ruslan and Ludmila

Tchaikovsky

Capriccio Italien, Op. 45

Liszt

Totentanz for Piano and Orchestra, G. 126
Kyle Orth, Piano

Intermission

Tchaikovsky

Waltz from the Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66

Tchaikovsky

Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker, Op. 71

Tchaikovsky

Waltz from Swan Lake, Op. 20

Tchaikovsky

1812 Overature, Op. 49

Two of my favorite pieces, Capriccio Italien and 1812 Overature, very well done.
The guest pianist, Kyle Orth, didn’t impress me much, but he wasn’t bad either. He plays well, but I’ve certainly heard better. Still, for a 16 year old kid, he’s got his career started out on the right path.

I was at WalMart today during lunch and I swear I saw a zombie in the shoe section…

Oh god, we’ve already lost 12 servers. I logged out of all of them and am holed up in an ssh session on my home server. I’ve shut down all outside ports and have been using “kill” very carefully, but the zombie processes keep coming! I don’t know how much longer I can hold out until I have to reboot!

Now that’s just not playing fair.

I never was any good at foreign languages.

Because I don’t think I should have money. Let Saudi Arabia have it all.

This is the first I’ve heard of this, but this is the first trailer release of a new movie being produced entirely on Open Source software, under a Creative Commons license.

Big Buck Bunny - Official Trailer on Vimeo

Does Youtube simply not grasp RSS?

Viewing any RSS enabled web site in Firefox or Konquerer, I get a little button in my browser that allows me to add that RSS feed directly to my RSS agregator. In Firefox, this defaults to it’s own “Livemarks” system, in Konquerer the default is the Kontact/Akregator application, but both have a mechanism to define another reader.

Click on this little button when viewing any page on Youtube and you get… a broken RSS feed.
In Firefox it takes you to, not the RSS feed, but a page EXPLAINING HOW TO GET THE RSS FEED. If I need an explanation I would look for a link ON the page that says “about our RSS feeds” or something similar. If I click the “subscribe” button, which is generated by the “link rel=’alternate’ type=’application/rss+xml’”, I expect I’ll get an RSS feed, not human-readable page ABOUT rss feeds.

On top of this, they don’t offer a feed of something simple like, say, all of my “subscribed” channels. No, I can get a feed of MY vides (videos I’ve uploaded. Useless to me since I don’t upload videos. I’m a consumer, not a producor.), all new videos (The last thing I want is an RSS feed of every new video posted to Youtube), etc.
Even viewing the page for one of my subscriptions, there’s no link to subscribe to the RSS feed. Sure, the “about” page tells me what URL syntax to put in my RSS reader to GET that page, but why don’t they just put the simple header IN the html page so I can use the tools just about every browser provides to subscribe to the RSS?

Apparently for Youtube, Really Simple Syndication means “you do the work”.

We woke up a little late on Thursday morning and missed the continental breakfast served by the hotel, so we followed Martin’s suggestion and walked up the street to one of the bakeries in Chinatown and bought two buns each. From there we walked further up the street to Cafe Greco for coffee to go with our buns.
I had booked our tickets for Alcatraz online last night, so I knew we didn’t have to worry about it being sold out. We had plenty of time to get down to Fisherman’s Wharf. While enjoying my cappuccino at Greco, a Muni bus drove by indicating it ended at the Wharf. Perfect! We crossed the street, caught the next bus and the driver let us know where to get off for Pier 33.
When we got there I was a little disoriented. Pier 33 is NOT where I’ve always left for Alcatraz before. Apparently Blue & Gold (or Red and White) lost the concession for the Alcatraz ferry and the launch point has thus moved. It’s now operated by Hornblower, though the boats just say “Alcatraz Tours” on them and have the NPS Alcatraz logo.
On the way out to the island, there were a couple of British ladies in the seats in front of us (London east end, by their accents). One of them decided to go out on the deck on the bow to get photos. Her timing couldn’t have been worse (or better, depending how you look at it). She stepped through the doors just as the boat cleared the break water. The Bay was running about 2 - 5 swells and she caught the first wave over the bow full in the face. She came back in looking like a drowned rat. She was wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt and had no coat with her. Going out to Alcatraz without a coat is a no-no under the best of circumstances. Now she was all WET and had no coat! Her friend or sister or whoever she was got a good laugh out of it. Luckily she seemed to have a sense of humor about it to.
The tour of Alcatraz was a little different from the last few times I was there. They’ve changed it up a little, putting things in different order, adding a few things they didn’t have before, taking a few things off. Good to mix it up now and then.
They’ve restored some parts that weren’t open before and have a new bookstore down stairs. And lots more souvenirs to take home. At least the sales go to restoring more of the island.
Upon returning to mainland, we hit Pier 39, I bought Kestrel a fleece to wear so I could get my coat back, then we got some dinner.
From there we walked down the rest of Fisherman’s Wharf to the Maritime Museum and park and up to Ghirardelli Square for some ice cream and chocolate. And they NERFED Ghirardelli Square! They no longer have all the cool sundaes they used to have. Gone are “The Rock” and “The Golden Gate”. They’ve just got “hot fudge sundae” and “warm brownie sundae”. The only item with character left on the menu is an “Earthquake” milkshake.
After walking around Ghirardelli Square, we caught a cab back to the hotel and went to sleep.

Day 3 posted later.

Off to the airport around 0500 for 0645 flight. Found a decent spot in long term parking and trundled our bags through the rain to the shuttle bus depot. Found the first bus there would take us right to our terminal and we were off.
Since we had a few minutes to kill before boarding, we found a “grill” open two gates down and got some breakfast. While sitting there eating breakfast I looked at our boarding passes again and realized it wasn’t a few minutes to boarding, but a few minutes to take off. Quick closed the lids on our breakfasts and hussled back to the gate, onto the plain and got our stuff stowed.
Nice flight. Every passenger gets an LCD screen in the back of the seat in front of them and the cabin crew are very friendly.
We arrived in Denver with plenty of time to make our connection, 2 gates over. When we hit the ground at SFO and were allowed to activate mobile phones again I called Martin to let him know we were down and taxing, but that since we had to check luggage after all, just meet us at baggage claim. We got down the escalator from the concourse at the exact same moment he came up the escalator from the parking garage. Perfect timing!

Drove up to the City to get checked into our hotel, only to find that they don’t start checkins until 1500, and it was only 1100. However they graciously offered to hold onto our luggage for us. We left our luggage with them and left again with Martin. A leisurely drive down the coast to Santa Cruz to say hello to Godmoma and pick up Martin’s spare car (with a stop for lunch at The Flying Fish Grill). When we got there we found that the spare car wasn’t quite ready (it was in the paint shop and they need to fix the drivers door handle). We hung out with Godmoma. We headed back up Highway 1 to San Francisco. stopping to photograph some kite surfers. Back on the road and by now it’s 4, 5 o’clock PDT and I’ve been up for 27 hours. I start drifting off in the car. Mostly wake up as we pull into the parking garage just up the street from the hotel; We get there, get checked in, up to the room and OH. MY. GOD.
It’s the Sugarluxe room. Painted in all kinds of garish shades of pink, turquise and chocolate pudding brown. Luckily we’re only here to sleep.
I change my shirt and shoes and we head out for some diner. For the first time in 4 YEARS I eat real Chinese food and IT IS GOOD! I mean come on, Chinese food in China Town. Then we head up the street (and by up, I mean UP. And up. And up.) to North Beach to get a cappuccino and tiramisu.
Wander back to the hotel, plug in devices needing to charge up, post this blog update and crash.

Tomorrow: Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf, Fort Point.

Leaving for the airport, bound for California, in the next half hour.

Someone needs to do more research before they try to pull their next phone scam.

1. The “INS” (presumably he was referring to the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the Department of Justice) hasn’t existed in over 4 years. The enforcement portion of the former INS was transferred to the new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch of the Department of Homeland Security.
2. Government agencies do not call people at one o’clock in the morning to ask about reports of illegal aliens. The “We just received this information and we’re a 24-hour agency” response when questioned about why they are calling me at that hour doesn’t cut it.
3. Government agents identify themselves by more than just the name of their agency. This caller never offered his own name.
4. Government agents will give the full name of their agency, not the initials (”Hi, this is Agent Jones of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” not “This is the INS calling.”
5. Government agents will confirm more than just your first name when they call you. All he confirmed was that I was “Andrew”. He never asked for or offered my last name.
6. Law enforcement agencies don’t call to give you a heads up that they suspect illegal activities in your home, giving you a chance to get rid of the evidence.
7. When asked questions like “Who are you really?” and “Why are you calling at 1AM?” and so on, government agents have immediate answers, they don’t stumble for an answer as if they weren’t expecting anyone to actually question them.

Bartonomus, I couldn’t agree with you more.
Luckily for me no one has spoiled it for me yet, but I don’t read a lot of web sites where that sort of thing goes on. Of my friends on Live Journal, they wouldn’t be my friends if they were the type to do that, and are all making threats against anyone who spoils the book for them, to.
The closest I’ve run into is Shinga posting her latest edition of Headtrip

Starting at about 5:10 into this video, as the camera is panning to the right over the wreckage: sure glad teh fire didn’t reach and touch off those cannisters!

press interview with Dallas Fire-Rescue Lt. Joel Lavender

Well it looks like I won’t be transporting a server from Savvis to Databank right now.

Video On Demand | WFAA.com

Traffic.com | Dallas

I just discovered Manjulas Kitchen on Youtube. Can’t wait to try out some of her recipes!

People who leave dogs in pet carriers in the back of their pickup truck in 95deg heat should be horse whipped!

Finished church, now off to lunch w/ parents.

wandering around Scarborough Faire again.

Off to see Pirates w/ the gang

We spent the day getting all the boxes out of the living room. For the first time since we moved in we can sit on the couch.
I got the stereo wired up and we were able to sit down and watch a movie. (I was only intending to check that I had the DVD player, stereo, TV and speakers all correctly wired for sound and video, but we ended up watching it all the way through.)
By god, this place will actually be ready for visitors soon.

Until you’ve heard Beethoven’s 5th jazzed up on traditional Chinese instruments.

Because I will never go to bed once I start browsing:

Youtube.
Wikipedia.
Snopes.

Just got off the phone with my best bud. He’ll be flying out for my birthday, joining us for cider making and Scarborough Fair!

Quick weekend update, ’cause I got lazy and didn’t get started until 0100.

Friday night, stopped on the way home to get contact lens cleaning stuff and roach killing stuff.

Outdoor work done. Lawn mowed, edged, walkways swept.  I’ll let the car go another week before washing it again. Weather isn’t good for car washing.

Two toilettes fixed, both running smooth and silent and NOT running when they shouldn’t. Much better.

Shower time, then sit down to pay bills.

Wouldn’t you know it, just as I plan to head for bed, the stuffy nose comes back. This does not bode well for getting a good night’s sleep before starting my new job.

Just finished dinner with Kestrell. Going to play some WoW, then bed.

Getting some reading done.

wishing this sore throat would go away

Dad sent me an email with some funny church signs. They looked familiar, so I did a quick Google for the church sign generator and among the many links, came across the blog for “Amy”. By all appearances, Amy and her husband are a very Christian couple with 5 kids. I haven’t read much of her blog, but I came across this article. Which, oddly, has nothing to do with church signs. However it’s an interesting read.

AccuWeather.com - North Richland Hills, TX Watches and Warnings

Golf ball sized hail. My poor car got hammered. I’ve counted 4 small dents so far. I’ll check it more thoroughly when the rain stops.

My car

Hail in the front yard

Now passing through Salado.

Getting drowsy at the wheel. Time to stop for a beverage.

Passing throug Waco.

On the road to Austin.

OK, so this is another one of those “sorry I haven’t been posting lately” posts I do every few weeks, along with “sorry I haven’t been commenting lately” (which is probably the bigger issue).

Surprisingly life can get pretty busy, when there’s really nothing worth posting about.

Well, except my pending move. Hopefully I’ll get the lease signed in the next day or two, and can start moving some of the smaller stuff this weekend.

All quiet on the western front…Yeah, haven’t posted in a while. Been so busy…

Really hating my job. I am SO ready to be rid of ${POE}. I’ve been waiting for a promotion I was promised since Sept. I got the pay raise in mid Oct, but am still doing the old job, which I hate, with no change on the horizon. They can’t seem to hire people fast enough and they need to hire like 3 people in order to replace me.

Meanwhile, I’ve started doing consulting with . I flew out to San Diego this last weekend and did a job for a small company involved in mobile messaging. Was very fun. Got to play with some new (to me) technologies (ethernet interface bonding, HA failover with heartbeat, load balancing (not new to me, but the piece of Cisco kit being used, 11501, is). Was on the go the whole time. I took off at 15:30 from DFW on Sat, landed 16:30 at SAN (two hour time difference), got the car from Avis and met the client outside the data center. Got a bit of orientation with the client, then we looked at their gear. I’m not too impressed with the data center they use. Very lax about security (they never bothered to ask for my ID when I first came in) but they have some strange security rules. Many other customers in that data center make the cabling at ${POE} look good, which is really saying something. The data center didn’t even have the second ethernet drop in the client’s cabinet activated, per contract, until after the client emailed them this weekend. And THEN they never responded to the email, just fixed it silently.

I was intending to take lots of pictures of beautiful San Diego to post to the blog, but ended up not having time to take pictures, or even SEE beautiful San Diego. Landed after dark, was on the go the whole time, took off after dark.

I did get ONE picture, which I haven’t offloaded from the camera yet.

More testing - Uploading pictures to Flikr via Semagic

PC020033
Originally uploaded by strongbow_1800.

Working the iron.

PC020032
Originally uploaded by strongbow_1800.

Taken at ${POE}’s holiday party.

I like this one better.

PC020031
Originally uploaded by strongbow_1800.

Taken at ${POE}s holiday party.

The other day my girl and I were in Barnes & Noble (we stopped for coffee. Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!) and while browsing the magazine racks, I saw one of the most unusual sites I’ve seen in a long time: A goth chick, with her mother, wandered by.
Now, goths, by and large, are not too unusual. But you don’t see them very often in full regalia in Texas. And this one actually new how to wear the “white face” makeup. I’ve seen very few that could actually get that right. Usually they have it caked on, and you can see where the makeup ends and their actual skin tone begins. And because they have it so caked on, their acne is that much worse. This girl knew how to do it right. It was just enough to give her that ghostly white look (and was obviously not because she actually has pale skin). She was also quite pretty. I had to bite my tongue before I made any comment. It would have been purely complementary, however not being part of that culture, and this being a teenager with her mother, (and me looking for all the world like a stereo-typical Texan guy with my black cowboy hat, black leather coat and jeans, and shoes that could pass for boots at first glance) didn’t figure it would be well received.
Later, in the car, Kem agreed with me that this girl really had her goth look together and that she was quite pretty.

To paraphrase , if puberty ever catches up with this guy, his career is over