Author: cdwan

A busy couple of days. In no particular order:

Picked up the futon, assembled it. We now have a guest bed, in a guest room. Woot.

Transferred some plants to bigger pots. Put trellis up for the tomatoes. Tied strings to existing trellis to encourage peas to climb more broadly. Mowed lawn. Applied “summer guard” “turf builder” to the yard. Admired the eight blooming rose bushes, and the rather nice little enclave of decorative plants we’ve created this year.

Went to karate class. Started a new form: “Statue of the Crane”. It’s, well, different.

Got the tires rotated, the oil changed, etc. The shop continues to try to sell me new tires every time I go in there. That’s fine, all part of the game. I realize that I’m tempting fate by writing down my opinion that “oh no, I don’t need new tires right now.”

Took a customer call where we hadn’t done anything wrong, it was all hardware!

Hung out with my very favorite customers (MIT) and rebuilt their cluster with the new installer. It worked, most of the way. I even managed to do a disk image based install for the nodes! Felt like real cluster building for once, rather than the colossal hack that it can sometimes be. Plus, I got to sit next to a spotted array “spotter” robot all day while they were testing it out. Robots are cool.

JWZ is now a mac user.

I’m still using my other Linux machine to read mail and run XEmacs, but I’m hoping to wean myself of that eventually, one way or another. If all goes well, then in six months or so, the only Linux machines I’ll ever have to touch will have no video or sound cards in them at all.

Of course, Slashdork cares.

In Michigan, ever so briefly.

Flew in on Friday morning. redmed picked me up at DTW. Shocking thing of note: Detroit has a real airport now! It’s modern and clean, and even has a little automated tram to convey you from one end to the other of the truly monstrous “concourse A”.

We drove to Ann Arbor and chummed around for a bit, just letting the visual memories take us back. Ate a decent lunch at Arbor Brewing Company, and even chatted briefly with the brewmaster. He was making a Porter. In 2003, they started producing champaign sized bottles of Belgian style beers, which have been aging ever since. I was sorely tempted to pick up a bottle of the 2003 tripple…but managed to restrain myself.

Then we drove to Plymouth to see John and Cara and their son Eion (pronounced like “Owen”). Having spent a couple of hours with them, we traipsed up to see Zoe and Matt, and their son Trevor. This morning, drove down to see the grandparents and new we’re prepping for a wedding (the ostensible point of the trip).

Before leaving, we managed to produce the first candidate release of the new version of my company’s software. This is a Big Deal. We got through the last of the known bugs at around 2:30 on Thursday night / Friday morning. Next step – take it to friendly beta sites and find the rest of the bugs. I’m off to MIT on Monday.

Doing an annual review process with the company. It’s perhaps the most civilized such process I’ve ever been part of. I’m chatting with each of the four other guys individually, and then we’ll have a group get together. It continues to astonish me that these corporate things don’t have to suck. It’s only the way they’re implemented. At the level of a small team, getting together once a year to review progress is a remarkably positive thing.

Whole bunches of stuff to write, and neither the time nor the inclination to do it. Instead, I want to (a) work (b) sleep (c) clean the house. After that, I think it goes something like (d) find a place to plant my cucumbers (e) play Halo 2 online until my thumbs are numb.

redmed is off in Michigan, visiting grandparents. I’ll be joining her on Friday for the wedding. Between now and then, OS X and I need to have a really long set of conversations about boot time software startup, and remote configurations. Speaking of Apple, you all heard that the new apples will be built with Intel chips, right? I don’t even need to mention that. Go check out Slashdork for uninformed commentary.

On to the weekend: Here is my story about Martha’s Vinyard

Todays fun-time game is “what’s that sound?”

First round: My neighbor testing out his boat motor, with the boat up on the boat rack in his driveway. Wow that was loud.

Second round: The eerily doppler-shifted ice cream truck, as he hurtled down the street. It was off enough that it sounded like something out of “Zombie Carnival” or something. (note, there is no such movie as “Zombie Carnival”, but if there was, I would schedule a time with simianpower to watch it).

Third round: Car alarm. This “what” was easy, but the “why” is more troubling. The car in question is the biggest POS in the neighborhood. It has no hubcaps, and it’s all bondo-brown and primer-grey. Yet, loud car alarm. Why?

Fourth round: The phone. My phone has been ringing off the hook today. Partners needing favors, customers needing help, Verizon wanting to screw me (again). I long for the sweet sound of the quitting bell. Oh wait. I work at home. Oh wait, that’s my cell phone that rings like that.

Fifth round: My soul, screaming. We’re pushing out a new version of the software. It has to go out soon. It should have gone out weeks ago. The weather is perfect, my phone is ringing, and I desperately need to code. As my business partner put it: “Are we going to be able to pass this kidney stone soon?”

Planning out June, June is gonna be psycho.

the plan

Today’s probably fake news item: huge floating reef made up of millions of disposed condoms has been discovered in the mid Pacific. The condom mass is two miles long, up to sixty feet deep, and in places so tightly compressed that a small plane could be landed on it.

Prove me wrong, people.

Sitting in a coffee shop, waiting for traffic to clear (and for clear assurances that driving into Boston will be worthwhile today). The woman at the table next to me is growing steadily more and more irate as she tells the story of her ongoing family feud over grandmother’s jewelry. Finally I remembered that I have headphones. All her irate negativity vanished in a sweet cloud of cello music.

Still, her head is rocking back and forth as she gripes. Small chipping noises penetrate the sonata. Chip chip chip. Like a bird. Faster and faster.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Thank goodness for headphones.

Friends in town from MN this weekend. Todd, Laura, and their daughter Audrey (aka “the A dog”). Drove up to Salem today for a day of serious, serious kitsch. There seems to be cool stuff up there, but instead we took the “Witch Village” tour. The cemeteries and old houses were cool though. Also the history. Thank God nothing like that could ever happen in our modern age. We’re much too advanced to succumb to mindless, murderous hysteria.

Plumbers and contractors eat their young. They all do. It’s just how they are.

Finally got back in touch with the good contractor who was willing to talk to the city inspector. He’s bidding about a billion dollars just to do the plumbing, with the “pump in the basement floor to force the sewage back up to the main drain” option. We declined the “decorative fountain of sewage” option, since that would have cost more.

He’s still trying to figure out how much to charge to shore up the footings under my master bathroom. Code says that these footings should be 4 feet deep. They’re 14 inches deep. He wants to bring in a guy with a machine that pounds a pipe or a stake or something underneath the footing. I asked why he couldn’t just do what I’ve seen at other houses, and shore up each corner, dig under, and pour cement to the correct depth. He responded with a story of “destabilizing the structure” and (more compellingly) with the reality that he would have to back a cement mixer over my garden to get enough cement there.

The guy is playing me like a harpsichord.

Once it’s stabilized and the plumbing is in place, then we’ll talk about insulation so that the pipes don’t freeze this winter. Wheeeeeee. The good news is that at that point, the building will be code compliant in every dimension where we’ve looked. I have no plans to look at the electrical wiring. At all. Ever.

Inevitable overruns and complaints to the “better bid-ness bureau and indian casino” will be addressed at a later date.

Oh yeah, and the futon delivery got pushed back to next week.

Plus, the social security administration apparently doesn’t know that I’ve been employed this last year. My company has been sending them money, but … ummmm … well …

Gah.