Permanent Vacation

Ah, vacation. It's been years since we've had an actual vacation, and this one was well deserved if I do say so myself. Sleeping in, days lounging around the pool or boating on the lake, nights relaxing watching the stars reflect off the lake, isolated in a lodge way out in the country. I could've stayed on that lake forever. That is the most calming experience I think I've ever had. Just my wife and me and the great big lake. And the occasional yacht nearly capsizing us. We could have stayed longer, and next time we will, but other obligations brought us back to reality. Only Cybr showed, but we had a blast and went to Guitar Center, where I picked up my first bass guitar. Nice Ibanez, nothing too fancy but enough to get me started. I tried everything in my range and it was the one with the best feel (I have small hands, so neck width is a big deal to me) for me. Hopefully between Yoshi and I we can teach Cybr to play guitar...

We snuck in a trip to the zoo at the end of our vacation to see the wonderful new penguin and puffin exhibit, and it is truly incredible. You are inches from the birds, so close you could touch them (but you're not supposed to). The only downside is the barriers are so low you get splashed with water quite a bit, and that is some seriously nasty water. You know what they do in there, don't you? It's a good thing it was a cool day, I can't imagine how the outdoor portion would smell on a hot day!

On a totally unrelated note, there is a fascinating piece in the Guardian on irony (and yes, it mentions Alanis disparagingly). I should note that I use rhetorical irony a great deal but people generally seem to miss the point. This is probably one of the best written essays I've read in some time. It was posted to slashdot, and while there were plenty of comments along the lines of "posting an article about grammar on slashdot, now that's ironic" I don't think they were accurate. It isn't ironic, it's merely pointless ;)

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These little conversations

in the catbox on everything2 this morning:

<Heisenberg> well, the chat was all wanky a minute ago, what happened?
<rev_matt_y> I'm uncertain.

Opportunities like that don't come up every day, you have to jump on them when they do.

The new Macs were announced today. This is truly awesome. Note they went with the IBM rather than Motorola chips. Dual 2Ghz... We don't REALLY need a second car, do we?

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Run run away

After the wildly mixed reviews (Rolling Stone loved it, reviewers who don't get kickbacks from labels hate it), I decided to listen to Metallica - St. Anger. Suffice it to say there are probably 5 or 6 really good guitar riffs. The mix is insanely bad, the drums sound like crap, and apparently Kirk decided to sit this one out as there is no lead guitar work at all. Of course, I now understand why they are opposed to file sharing. If people see the album in a store, they may or may not buy it. If they have a chance to hear it first there's no chance they will buy it.

RFT has a very good review, and I expect the Onion to have a very good one as well. Blecha had probably the best comment I've heard thus far, however. "it's as if they found an old open can of Fred Durst in the back of the fridge and poured that in"

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Highlights from the meeting yesterday:
The agency will no longer be allowing loan applications through individual departments, all applications will be done through the agency portal using a form that may exist someday. Using this form, any person anywhere in the world can submit a loan application for anything (creating work in that all of them have to be reviewed). In response, the manager of our department will be renaming our loan application module and continuing on with development.

The maintenance release of our application will be sometime during the week of the 23rd. We're hoping for a more specific date. Sparks! asked "is there a code freeze in there somewhere?" It should be noted that the general response was "What's a code freeze?" or "Why would we want a code freeze?". Sigh. And people wonder why we have craploads of hotfixes that often break the application even more than it already is.

Rich was trying to get to the reports and was complaining about having to click through five pages to get to them. As [name not heard] was explaining how to get to them, Mike1 wisely snuck out of the room.

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From the satellite dish to your joy stick

Great article on remote collaboration. During the boom, I worked for a company in Boston while I lived in Denver. There were five of us, hired as a group to do research and development, and we had a small office in the hip lodo part of downtown. We also worked from home a lot, which I find is the best way to be really productive. In order to keep in synch with the Boston office, and with each other when we were at home, we used an intranet site, VPN (for access to our systems in the office), and HotLine and it worked amazingly well. Successful remote collaboration requires people who are organized, reliable, and committed. I've done remote collab on a much smaller scale for one-off projects and the ease with which it happened varied wildly depending on the people.

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Are you receiving me?

They've left me all alone. I'm the lone geek room tenant here today. I thought "Cool, I can play music everyone else hates!" Then I realized I do that anyway. But I can play it loud! Hmmm, I tend to do that anyway, too. I'm surprised my surrounding coworkers haven't beat the crap out of me yet.

And now, for another installment of Your Tax Dollars At Work! There is an application called "Big Brother" that it very popular for monitoring lots of servers. Very very useful. Assuming your servers are reasonably stable, the big brother web pages should stay fairly static. So here's a good idea: let's put up a really nice monitor up on the wall so everyone in the webfarm can poke their head over their cubewall and see the status of all the servers. Hmmm, largely static image + plasma display = burned in image within days. The monitor is now completely trashed. I joked about taking it home when they first brought it in. If I had at least it would still be usable instead of being headed for the dumpster.

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Should we talk about the government?

Posted my first entry on watchblog.

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crawlin on her belly shakin like jelly

rev: I think the last time I took down a production server was my first day at Real Ed
griz: true
griz: did I mention having gone to a bachelor's party?
rev: Yes, and something about how it should not be legal to have them on a Wed night.
griz: I only mention it to you because while sitting in the strip club I thought "Matt would like it here - they play more Prince than I've heard in the last year."
griz: ahh yes.
griz: I did mention it then
rev: Hey, I think I'll listen to some Prince!
griz: you do that
griz: of course, I liked it there because the chairs are more comfortable than any I own, and there are naked women
rev: lol

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Read to me make your words as pictures

Man loses sex.com appeal. Someone had to say it.

[From segway.com]:

Two tilt sensors filled with an electrolyte fluid provide a gravity reference in the same way your inner ear does for your own sense of balance. The BSA is monitored by two independent microprocessors and is split into two independent halves for redundancy.

The device is designed specifically to prevent this from happening. Thank for that demonstration, President Chase. Though, as Barnacle notes, the Segway isn't intended to compensate for the long term neurological damage caused by cocaine abuse.

babygeek update
We've started reading to babygeek. Or more precisely, I've started reading to babygeek while Mae hassles me.

Me: What do you want me to read?
Mae: Whatever you want

Me: OK (begins reading from History As Mystery) "The term history refers both to past happenings and to the study of them, both the experiencing of a social process and the recording of it. However the distinction is not an absolute one." What are you laughing at?

Mae:Nothing! Go on! (continues reading) "For those who write history influence the course of events by shaping our understanding of things past and present. Conversely, those who actively participate in a historical event, especially if the occupy elite policy positions, often manipulate the materials needed for documenting that event."

Me: What?

Mae: Maybe you should read something else?

Several more books were suggested (Manufacturing Consent, Al Franken, When you ride alone you ride with bin Laden, and others. We ultimately settled on The Magician's Nephew.

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Everyone dance together now, a little further to the right, now extreme right.

Rumour has it that Dennis Miller is officially coming out of the closet. Yes, Miller will now be a regular on the Fox News channel. He has been favoring the hard right for some time now, but he's finally formally aligning himself with reactionaries and fascists. I wonder if the logic is the same as it was for David Horowitz? Early on in his career as far right commentator, Horowitz was pretty open about the fact that the right wing papers paid better so he'd be a right winger in order to make more money. I wonder if he still admits that?

One of the favorite targets of the fascists is of course the working class. Republicans are up in arms about giving a $400 tax credit to families that don't earn enough to pay income tax. Um, no, but they do pay PAYROLL tax. Which is generally about 8% of their paycheck. The refund gives them back a little over half what they pay in payroll taxes. Funny, I don't hear them complaining about giving tax credits to wealthy individuals who get all their income from interest and investments rather than working.

Two of my coworkers are discussing an error on one of the servers, and only half listening I thought Barnacle called it a "codeine problem". I'm trying to figure out it would be a lack of or an excess of codeine that would cause the problem...

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Such a beautiful disaster

It is a good idea to test your disaster recovery procedures at some point. I recommend doing so at a planned time in controlled circumstances. Alternately, you could not have a plan and connect to the production server on accident and remove the enterprise application (an action that cannot be undone). Oh, and do it on the day that the one person on the team who knows anything about the production server isn't here. And the one person in the WebFarm who knows anything about it isn't either.

It took about 4 hours to get the servers happy again, much of which was spent waiting for someone at the webfarm with access to the servers to be available to type in commands that I stood there telling him to type (for security reasons, we can't have any direct access to the production servers). So what would've taken me 15 minutes to fix ended up taking 4 hours. With the government manager constantly asking "is it fixed yet? is it fixed yet?" Yea, I can handle kids. No problem.

The status meeting for some reason focused heavily on the status of the production servers. I don't know why.

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I need to feel your heartbeat, so close it feels like mine

It's been a long and exciting day. It's very disconcerting driving in so early that Stern isn't even on yet. Wall Street Journal radio is surprisingly interesting. I was reminded once again how much work you can get done before people realize you're at your desk, interesting. Much of the day was spent trying to grab Ximian Desktop 2.0. Ultimately got everything to play nice, but download speeds were ugly.

And more to the point, we heard the heartbeat today. Dr Mac was very affable, if frazzled, and I'm very comfortable with him as OB. He whipped out the babydoppler and we heard a fairly clear and very steady beat. Amazing, really. The reality of it is dawning slowly, and each step helps bring it all into clearer focus. What an amazing process this is. We celebrated by having dinner at Pueblo and walking out into a monsoon with massive lightning storms. It is supposed to be a stormy week, but it shall all pass.

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Anytime at all, all you gotta do is call, and I'll be there

Mae: Bruce wanted to know if you're free next Saturday to help him.
Me: Sure, no problem.

*pause*

Me:What am I helping him with?

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As Harvey says "Friends help you move, real friends help you move bodies".

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thanks for making me... a coder?

Audio Alerts is the latest tool from Divinia. Very nice tool, awesome team. Also check out Powderfone.

Chris mentioned that he'd heard on CNN that Christina Aguilera had been signed to promote Java. Interesting combination. I'm not sure of the effectiveness of hiring a decidedly non-technical celebrity to promote a programming language (then again for all I know she's a mad programmer in her down time). The only thing I've found of any sort of relevance is Christina Everywhere, a Java app for fans.

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Some people will surprise you with a real depth of feeling

We made the trek out to Chesterfield to help for a post wedding reception (the wedding was in New Orleans a few months back, the reception was for people who couldn't be there). Harvey somehow managed to get Laura to think getting married to him was a good idea ;)

Mae finally got to meet a few co-workers (and former co-workers) and put a face to all the insane stories I tell her. They all verified that I told the truth, which she probably found even more disturbing. Jesus H and Queen Bitch were there, so I got to break the sad (to them) news that we in fact were not having septuplets (or fifteenuplets, as Renee was hoping). And of course, meeting the assorted spouses/kids/etc and the HR woman I've been hassling so mercilessly for so long. Excellent food (Bandana's), great company, and a wonderful time. It would've been nice if it had been longer, but it was a lot of fun regardless. And now I've gotten Keith to invite us down to his place for BBQ ;)

And what would a weekend be without a trip to Lowe's? The toilet tank level in Mae's bathroom gave out, and judging by the looks of it, about 5 years later than I would've expected. So one more thing on the honey do list for tomorrow. Good night, moon.

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You ain't nothin but a hound dog

June 8 - Stray Rescue Day at Whole Foods Market, 1601 S. Brentwood (by Borders). From 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. 5% of all store proceeds will be donated to Stray Rescue of St. Louis. So stop by and stock up on good, healthy foods! Randy Grim will be on hand to sign his book from 11:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m.

You have to get groceries anyway, so why not get good quality goods and help out a good cause as well? Rick Moen will be there, will you*

On an unrelated note, you may or may not have heard about the teen who was suing to be the only valedictorian, rather than share top honors. As it turns out, in addition to being unable to share she is also unable to attribute. In the past year her writings have plagiarized extensive sections from such obscure writers as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, and President Bill Clinton. Her academic work is now being reviewed and this may ultimately affect her ability to get into Harvard. Hopefully it will.

* obscure geek in joke, and not a very funny one, at that.

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People want to keep you in the dark

Note: our status update today combines the geeky with the sublimely ridiculous at such a close level I can't separate them, sorry.

We've come across a fairly ugly issue that challenges several critical assumptions we've made in our architecture. What we thought was a one to one relationship is really many to many. This issue was brought up in the Tuesday morning meeting. Government bigwig mentions that they knew about the problem when Unisys was fired from the project. And in fact they STILL aren't sure which it is. That was over two years ago. Mike1 asked why we weren't told about it. He said that he figured we'd run across it eventually.

There was an internal security scan that found over 800 potential vulnerabilities. Once they filtered out workstations (yes, most of the workstations here are either WinNT 4 or XP) it dropped down to perhaps 2 dozen potential problems. As it turns out, what they define as problems are not actually *security* problems per se, but ports in use that are not approved or are being used for a service that is not approved for that port. So if we happen to run the web server on port 90 instead of 80, then that shows up as a hole in the security scan. So we have several "holes" we need to address, but they won't tell us what and we're not allowed to see the list of ports and their approved uses. Apparently we are supposed to guess at what to fix.

Quote of the meeting: We have a new schedule. I'm not allowed to tell you what it is.

The upside is I've been tasked with a fairly interesting problem involving resolving three disparate security systems (one homegrown, one commercial proprietary, one legacy mainframe). Should prove complex, challenging, and quite possibly impossible, so I'm looking forward to it. I'm not being sarcastic about that, either.

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Nothing seems the same.

Many of the things that seemed so important in life Before Conception lost much of their weight rather quickly. I realize this is not an amazing insight, that it is in fact one that the vast majority of parents in the world have realized. It's just that I've now joined that subset of humanity and am having a personal realization of it.

I hope to accomplish some things today, as I really didn't yesterday, but if I don't then oh well. It's not that big a deal anymore. Of course, it all has to get done eventually, but if it's a day or so later then that's OK. Suddenly I've become Stuart. And thats... OK.

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