Author: cdwan

In an effort to get my mind back on track, the world gave me a fun problem to solve! There’s a leak in the water supply line to the heater! Hooray for fun problems to solve! Thanks world!

–UPDATE–

The plumbers have come and gone. $832.

I was staring at their handiwork when I heard a “hiss” from the crawl space. Seems that de-pressurizing and then re-pressurizing the lines resulted in another leak. GDMF.

— STILL MORE UPDATE —

Plumbing total for the day: $1600.

Yeah, *that’ll* come back in the value of the house. Oh yeah.

Feeling a little sensitive this morning … like the emotions are a bit too close to the surface. Things are hitting me harder than usual. My morning started off with this Short movie about a grocery bagger who put his thought for the day in the customers bags. Oh yeah, he has Down’s Syndrome. Nice, “we can all make a difference” stuff, but it left me all squishy.

Looking for my cynicism, to make it through the day, I read the comics. One of my favorites, The Pain, slapped me around in the artist’s statement.

excerpts

We convinced Dan to do an “advanced” class last night for a small set of students (me, Dustin, and Sean). He decided to show us some ground-work. Grappling. “Today, you learn how to tap out when it hurts too much.” Damn, that’s a workout. I’m pretty sore today, but it was good stuff. Tonight: Throws.

Last night, I dreamed of being tied up and left to be devoured by a sea monster. It kinda sucked.

The weather is way too nice to be working today. I just want to sit in the garden and watch the seedlings come up.

I gave my talk yesterday at Bio-IT World and it went okay. I had half an hour, which is just a dumb length of time to speak. I can do 5 or 15 minutes pretty easily, but then there’s this window out to about an hour where it’s hard to get rolling on anything in detail, and yet make it stop in time. After an hour … I’ll happily go all day. God, I love the sound of my own voice.

Anyway, I went short – 20 minutes rather than 30. The guy after me more than made up for it … and the rest of the speakers sort of compensated back. I thought I was well received … people kept coming up to me on the show floor and wanting to corner me on one point or another … so I guess that’s good.

Back into town today for another session. Basically, today is the day that we meet with business partners and such. Yesterday was fun because I was surrounded by smart, interested people all day. Today will be less fun, I think, because it’ll be more about schmoozing.

Actually *going* to work is such a pain. Dressing, driving, talking to people. I have no idea how people get any real work done, if they have to do this every day.

My opinion has been solicited, and so I solicit you:

If you got to nominate up to 10 “up and coming” stars of science – who would you pick?

I don’t have any answers to the rules, conditions, and definitions, so don’t bother asking. If you have suggestions for rules and conditions that would make the list RULE rather than SUCK, feel free to include those, along with your suggestions as to the human beings in question. Yes, I’m looking at you, jrtom. There will be no devolving into extended arguments about what would make for a better list until *after* you have nominated a few people.

Your participation is anticipated.

Birds visible from my desk, as I write this:

* Goldfinch (male)
* Some sort of wren (investigating one of the birdhouses)
* Cardinal (one male, one female)
* Tufted titmouse
* House finch
* Mourning Doves
* Grackles

OMFG, de-thatching is sweaty, ass-busting work.

Stay in school kids, manual labor is *hard*.

Yesterday was fairly productive. Dropped redmed off at the airport at 7 in the morning, so I was able to make the 8am yoga class at Eyes of the World. A nice two hour workout, first thing in the morning, does wonders for my attitude.

Stopped off at Home Depot on the way back, to get six tomato plants, 9 cabbage plants, and a sturdy rake. I’ve basically given up on the seedlings that I started indoors. They’re spindly and weak, and they fall over any time the wind blows. So, tomatoes and cabbages in the ground, interspersed with the onions, radishes, garlic, and flowers. The hops are almost obscenely healthy, and seem to be growing at a rate of inches per day. Rhubarb is up … things are pretty good all around.

I spent a couple of hours “de-thatching” a portion of the lawn. So far as I can tell, this involves

* Mowing it pretty close
* raking the ever living hell out of it
* Mowing it really close.
* raking the ever living hell out of it

And so on. That was pretty tiring. I got a lot of dead grass and dense, matted stuff out. I think that I either did something good, or killed my lawn. Time will tell.

Then things took a turn for the unproductive. Went to the East Providence “skeptics” meeting, which was at TGI Fridays. Conversation was good, but we lingered, refilling our glasses, for much too long. A few of us wound up back at a friend’s house, watching the Matrix until past midnight. Didn’t sleep well, and I’m having trouble mustering the initiative to do much of anything at all this morning.

Ah well, back to the raking.

Long day at work today. I was halfway through some rather delicate changes to a 90TB storage array, when the power cut out to a decent portion of it. The ensuing fountain of profanity caused the ex-marine sitting in the same room to perk up his eyebrows and say “wow.”

Long story less long: There were crappy power strips with a 15A breaker, in between my 20A of load and 20A outlets. I had been “reconditioning” the drives, which involves spinning them all pretty vigorously. 20A would have been plenty … but 15A was not.

This is not the configuration in which I left the system.

I called in my minions and demanded (a) extension cords (b) a trash can. They were all like “wha?” I said: “Extension cords catch fire, rather than cutting power to my very delicate and moody SAN. This would be preferable to just powering off the hardware for no reason. If you’re going to hack my system, I want it to endanger your lives. I plan to fill the trash can with these crappy power strips and then force you to take them to the dumpster out back. Questions?”

In other news, Apple’s XRaids do not automatically map around bad blocks on the disks. You have to kick this process off by hand. If you do not do this on a regular basis, you may be totally screwed.

We may or may not be totally screwed. I will know in the morning.

On a final note: I am that guy at the bar with his laptop. I believe that I shall order another beer.

Drove from Rockville, MD to Hampton, VA today after work. On the way, I stopped off in Richmond for dinner with my fellow road-warrior. He’s the other guy from my company who’s on the road constantly. He picked up a 30 day car rental today, and is planning to stash his suitcase in the car, at the airport parking lot for his one and two day visits home this month.

We agreed that sometime when we’re not both dead tired and overworked … The Company is going to pay for a rather impressive night of gluttony on the town. I feel safe saying that we’ll exceed our Per Diem for food at that time. As it was, we had a beer at the hotel bar and returned to our respective hell-weeks.

At some point I should write about the Caz Bar in Baltimore, where my siblings and I shared a hookah and hummus extravaganza. Instead of text, I will share this:

That’s about it, prior to pass-out-time for me.

P.s: my tattoo itches. A lot. Lotion lotion lotion.