Author: cdwan

Here’s how I spent my day:

Showed up onsite. Friendly admin made a vmware image for me to use. This means that he basically created virtual machine, handed me the root password, and said “go nuts.” This makes these people the best install ever. Most of my RPMs didn’t work, but that’s okay. It’s why I bring source. We did some wild and crazy stuff with sudo to make my CGI jobs run as real users. That part actually didn’t hurt anything.

Then came the fun bit. I got to wrestle with GD.pm. I don’t know if people outside of bioinformatics have to deal with GD.pm, but it’s the bane of our existence. GD.pm is a PERL interface to libgd. Libgd has a long and storied history dealing with some patent issues surrounding the GIF format. GD.pm followed every wrinkle in the libgd lawsuits very carefully. The end result is that you have to have a very exact match between your version of libgd and your version of GD.pm, or else it just doesn’t work. If you’re installing a hunk of bioinformatics code, and something fails out with a screwy error in your compilation, it’s probably GD. GD.pm also supports the jpg, png, and x11 image formats, so it also depends on all those libraries being exactly right. It’s a joy.

Back to it tomorrow. If anyone wants to join me, I’ll be about halfway between Harvard and MIT. Come to the Central square T stop, and walk East past the gay strip club to the “Necco” building.

Good weekend.

Yesterday, we went into Boston for the day. Bought a rug at the furniture outlet Crate n’ Barrel. God damn nice stuff is expensive. $250 for a 6′ by 9′ wool rug. Sheesh. It goes with the grown up furniture in the dining room though. Slowly but surely building sets of furniture that we won’t have to throw away if we ever strike it rich.

Spent a couple of hours at the Museum of Fine Arts. Great place. Their musical instrument room is something special, and the rest of the collections are pretty darn nice too. We wound up purchasing the cat sculpture pictured here. We’ve ogled it over the years, and finally had some dedicated gift money for art. It’s happily in a niche by the fireplace now.

Then went to see the Boston Baroque do Vivaldi’s “Gloria” and J.S. Bach’s “Magnificat”, both in D major. Amazing, wonderful stuff, all on period instruments. We even attended the lecture before the concert, in which some of the players explained their instruments and how they’ve evolved over the years. Drove the hour home fueled by a double expresso. Amazing how the stuff totally kicks in now when I want it.

Today was more mundane. Moved plants into larger pots (roma tomatoes, basil, oregano, chives, and an early jalapeno). Then we spent about 2 hours trying to find a tall but thin bookshelf. We have a space that’s 25 inches wide, which really needs to be made use of. Finally found it at an Office Depot.

Tomorrow, software install at a major pharmaceutical. Should be smooth, except that they have this idea for a customization which will be tricky. Usually, all our stuff runs as the web user (being CGI driven). They want to SetUID all the CGI scripts, and thus run the jobs on the cluster as a designated user. I’ve touched most aspects of the system, and this is the one which, more than any other, if you touch it…things break in subtle and complex ways. Ungh.

When I commute, my commute is a cast-iron pain in the butt. 30 minutes in the car, an hour on the train, half an hour on the subway. That’s one way. I did it today on the hypothesis that my lethargy in the afternoons has as much to do with being cooped up alone, indoors all day as with anything else. I appear to have been about half right: I’m still functional in this post lunch period, though I feel a strong pull to just put my face on the keys and give in.

However, the red tailed hawks who nest in the building where I sit are out hunting and playing again. These beasts are awesome. They just ooze power and domination of the skies. The gulls and geese clear out when the hawks go up, and you can basically feel the negative pressure from the rodents cowering in their burrows and holes. One of them just swooped right by my window.

I like the hawks.

Bubba the lobster died in Pittsburgh recently. He was a 22 pound monster of his species, aged between 30 and 100 years. The picture shows him next to an ordinary 1.5 pound lobster.

So, I haven’t been “wracked by disease” for a couple of days now. Temperature steady, able to move around and work, that sort of thing. However I’ve been prone to long naps in the afternoon. Like “oopsie, I just spent four hours face down on my keyboard” naps. I’m assuming this is still part of the flu-like thing that knocked me out over the weekend, but dammit…this is not a useful way to spend my time! I like napping and all, but I’ve got stuff to do!

Just checked in on the seedlings, and we have good growth in most of the pots. The Better Boy tomatoes were already big enough to move to the mid size plastic pots. Looks like I’ve got 10 decent candidates for survival, which would be way more than I need. Excellent.

Forget Sleep-Eez: All praise DayQuil! Wow. Two bright orange horse pills to take care of every remaining symptom I was experiencing. I can’t wait for the “two bricks to the head” of NyQuil this evening.

And, in late breaking news: Virginia has decided to not try Lee Boyd Malvo (the younger DC sniper):

Commonwealth’s Attorney Paul Ebert said today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning juvenile executions would make a trial pointless

So, if we’re not able to kill him, we’re not even going to bother with a trial. Yup, that’s the Virginia I remember.

This morning, my neighbor started snowblowing at about 6am. I was a little irritated at first, but quickly settled down to resigned. He seemed to go at it for a really long time. When we got up this morning, he had blown not only his driveway, but most of his front yard, and my driveway as well. Nice guy, little odd though.

The cold is progressing. Unless it pulls some sort of false ending on me, I’m emerging from the tunnel. Wheeeee.

An actual ad:

Hands on Nude Bible Study group meets every other Tuesday at 8:30pm. Email me for directions. Must be over 21 All body types welcome. Come be one with us!

Ummm, “hands on”? Very no.

Still bouncing between no fever and about 100.5. Seems, oddly enough, to depend on whether or not I’m up to date on the drugs (Tylenol and Ibuprofin, alternated every couple of days) I’m using to control my fever. Odd. It’s almost enough to make me believe in science. The sinus congestion is getting better, and, qualitatively, I think that I feel less like raw butt that I did yesterday.

Sadly, I work from home, so there’s really no concept of calling in sick. I mean, if I can update LJ, I can certainly deal with customer support. 😉

47 bottles of the imperial stout, with a terminal gravity of 1.015. That’s well within the measurement error of our goal gravity of 1.014. Go yeasts!

I decided to re-rack the Barley wine, since it had a remarkable layer of sludge on the bottom of the carboy. I plan to leave it in the carboy to settle for quite a while (4 weeks? More?) and it seemed like a good idea to give it a clean environment. Now I can put on the label “Triple Fermented, double racked!” It’ll mean just as much as “fully krausened,” which I’ve actually seen on a beer bottle. Measured gravity of 1.02. Again, go yeasts!

Racked the Double IPA. Measured gravity of 1.03. It’s got a way to go, but that’s expected at this point. It’s only been fermenting a week.

All three seem to be without major defect, which is the best my disease addled senses can tell you right now.