Author: cdwan

redmed gets some really nasty magazines. They have names like “American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology,” and have pictures of parts on the front cover. This morning, she left one open for me to peruse. The article is “Burnout, depression, and career satisfaction: Cross-sectional study of obstetrics and gynecology residents.”

here’s the abstract

Started my day at 5, to leave the house around 5:30, to get to the data center around 7am.

Built an apple cluster, so that the visiting people could install their software on “our demo cluster.” Ha.

Met with said people. Made friends.

Drove to someplace in Mass. Picked up 8 computers for a total of 32 cores. (SGI Altix, thanks for asking). Ripped mini-rack apart to get at needed wires.

Drove back to data center. Re-assembled cluster. Changed IP address, verified functionality.

Drove home.

Took karate class.

Won “Gears of War” on the most trivial difficulty.

Intermittently: Coughed.

Summary recap:

XBoxen were purchased

redmeds parents arrived last night, and their little dog (Daisy) too! Daisy is a “yorkie-poo” mix, which means that she’s about the size of a cat, very enthusiastic, bright eyed, and covered with short curly hair. She’s cute. The cats had very different reactions to their visitor: Merlot was pretty much okay with her. She allowed Daisy to sniff her butt, then hung out under the table, where she could flee in any direction if necessary.

Maia wandered out while Daisy was being held, and was midway through her standard slow-approach to a visitor, when she suddenly stopped and got the most amazingly bottle-brush tail that I’ve ever seen. She was staring directly at Daisy, having apparently just noticed that she was alive. We giggled all night imagining her saying something like:

Excuse me, and with respect, but are you aware that the thing you are holding has EYES? No seriously, there is an ANIMAL in the house!

Shortly thereafter, Maia was simply gone to go kitty-loaf someplace where she couldn’t be easily found.

And now: Waffles.

This story about a man and his tapeworm … well … I snorted coffee through my nose this morning. You should too.

Now that I’m safely home again, I’m once again pondering the wisdom of touching my electrical system. The circuits that I upgraded are fine, and I’m sure of it, but this article pretty much covers the rest of my problems. Knob and post wiring? Check. Two conductor? Check. Sigh.

Must … not …. touch … substandard … wiring … again …

Aw, hell, what’s the worst that could happen? Oh yeah, we have houseguests showing up tomorrow.

From the international concourse at ATL: If I ever even vaguely consider traveling on the day before thanksgiving, please stop me and talk some sense into me.

So many humans!

–UPDATE– Post midnight. Safely home. That sucked, and I have no intention of doing it again any time soon.

There’s a notional celebration and/or day of protest called “Buy Nothing Day,” celebrated on the traditional biggest shopping day of the year: The day after Thanksgiving. You participate by planning ahead enough that you don’t have to spend any money on that particular Friday.

This is easy for me, since I hate crowds and I’ll have family over.

If you’re one of the people who is sickened by being a commercial culture of consumption, then do your best to celebrate … in whatever way you see fit.

I’ve occasionally been out “urban running” or doing “parkour” or whatever it is you call it when you run kitty-wumpus across an urban landscape, cutting across areas that usually don’t get traffic, and breaking vertical barriers whenever possible.

This evening in Atlanta, I needed a reboot. Worked till about 9, ditched the laptop, went out, had a nice light dinner near the hotel, and then busted out running across town.

I was maybe 45 minutes out when it began to rain. Hard.

Note to self: Urban running is not so much fun when it’s raining.

To the nice people who yelled what I can only assume were offers of help from your cars as you sped by: Thanks for your concern – I got home fine.

Happy Feet is good clean fun. I laughed, I sniffled. Is that so hard, hollywood? It doesn’t take much, just tap dancing penguins.

In other news, I think that the electrical systems in the mansion are stable again. Circuit 20 has an additional 3 outlets, all of which are switched from the top of the basement stairs. 19 gained an outlet that got disconnected in the shuffle. One crazy-ass random always-live, un-breakered wire has been removed from its role of making that switch box at the top of the stairs “hot.” Yeah, that was a good time. I even got to go in the crawl space to find the other end of it. Wheeeee. This left circuit 6 completely unused. Hooray! A free breaker!

The fact that some of these wires came right apart in my hands does not leave me with a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Tomorrow I drive to Boston to catch a plane to Atlanta. Gonna see aledonne, and then go work for The Man for a couple of days. I fly back at 8pm, the day prior to Thanksgiving. Yeah, from ATL to BOS, on Airtran. This is gonna be good.