Author: cdwan

Got my garden seedlings upstairs and on the porch. Thinned them, and experimentally tried to re-pot some of the thinned ones that came out in one piece. We’ll see if any of them live. I’m never using the “peat pellets” again. Ordinary sprouting pots for me, thanks.

Re-potted all the plants that I care about, including the sequoia. It’s grown remarkably since I bought it in Kings Canyon, CA two years ago. At that time, it came in a test tube. Once we have a house where I think we’ll stay for a while, I’m going to plant it. There’s a certain sick part of me that sort of wants a bonsai sequoia, though.

Lots of yard work. Staked out my garden. I think I’m going to do 8′ by 8′ in a raised bed. That’ll require eight landscaping timbers that already come in 8′ lengths. I’ll plan to till the grass underneath, put in the timbers, fill it with good topsoil (8 cubic yards of it), and lay flagstones down the middle for access. Aerated the center lawn with a cute little two prong aerator from Home Depot. The plan is to do the organic yard improvement thing: Rake in compost, overseed, aerate, and hope for the best.

Taxes are done, MN gave us a refund of under a hundred bucks. Go MN.

Made vegetarian pho (noodle soup) this evening. That always makes me happy.

So, I got a response from the owner of “dwan.net”:

Here’s the response

First off, watch this piece of genius.

Then read about these guys. There’s one picture with humans in it to give an idea of scale.

Today was better than yesterday, but not much. I again spent the morning with my laptop connected to a projector, with three system admins watching on the projector as I wrestled with building a cluster. It would have been better if two of them had made any pretense of having a reason to be there. At least the senior one was helpful and interactive.

Got home to a $2400 unpaid real estate tax bill. What? I thought that my mortgage was escrowing for this! Even better, had that been paid through 2004, it would have reduced my taxable income, resulting in a refund from the feds. Gah. Time to ask the H&R Block person if we can amend or something.

Edit

Called Wells Fargo this morning, and they’re taking care of the tax bill. Their position is that they were responsible for getting the taxes paid, and so they’re responsible for the late fees and interest. They’re paying the full amount due out of our escrow account to avoid further fees. When the time comes to rebalance the escrow account, they’ll adjust our monthly payment to make sure that we’re paying it off on time this year. Our monthly payments will increase (to what they should have been (had our &^$^$&%$ closing attorney done his $^$^%# job right), but I don’t need to front the money now.

The low point today was when, after wresting with the damn system all day, the final node in the cluster ate my install CD. The CD is gone. I mean, we can’t find it. We were about 11 hours into the day, and I just gave in to the giggles. We’ve had dead network ports, a satanic 10/100 switch, freaky UID issues, crapped out installers, … and then the machine goes and eats my CD. Stupid computer.

There’s free wireless in my hotel, but only in the bar.

The things I endure for my art.

Today was less fun than other days I’ve had.

Started off packing for the trip. This involved folding laundry. We all know how I feel about laundry. I’m currently in the airport, waiting for Air Canada to take me away. In between, this happened.

Wasted a whole day today trying to install SLES (That’s Suse Linux, Enterprise Server) on an IBM Blade Center. Bah. The install kept stopping at various points. First I went to safe mode, them I set all the filesystems to ext3 (instead of ReiserFS), then finally I tried a text only, minimal install. Still crapped out before installing the bootloader. Thank goodness I was only trying to get ready for a customer install rather than actually doing one. That would have been embarrassing.

In between that, I wasted my day debugging dumb XML / SOAP junk. Turns out that Taverna (a web services client) wants to “help” me by turning every instance of the word “true” into a boolean TRUE value. Thanks. Please stop helping me. Managed to at least fix a couple of bugs in my code while figuring out what was going on.

The day was saved from total uselessness by a very pleasant dinner with capital_l and technolope. Thank God someone (a) cool (b) that I know; finally moved to Boston. Now we can start to build a happy geek social circle around here. Phase two will be the integration of that geeky social circle with the existing MIT and Harvard crowds. I know those people are out there, I just don’t know how to get to know them.

I own “dwan.org.” I’ve decided that I want “dwan.com” and “dwan.net” as well. I’m not going to do anything unique with them, they’ll all just forward to dwan.org. They are currently registered to some dorks who haven’t done anything with them at all. I dropped a note to the technical contacts listed in the whois database, but I’m interested in applying a bit more pressure than all that. After all…they’re not even using the domains. One of them is a generic front page from a registration company, and the other doesn’t even answer pings.

Anyone have any experience with online pressure tactics? Ideally, I’d send a couple of big thugs to their door with pliers, blowtorches, and a friendly offer to sell out…but both groups listed post office boxes. Ideas?

EDIT

Grrrrrr, once again the livejournal client that I use to edit these entries has overwritten the previous post with this one. It kept Mark’s comment intact though. He’s referring to this picture, which was the entire content of the deleted post. Out of context, it’s a little postmodern even for me.

Listen here. Interview with the founding God of CS.