Christmas

Christmas is a weird time. We've got the whole religious "Our Savior is Born" message from one side and the capitalist "Spend! Spend! Spend!" message from the other. As a frugal atheist, I often find myself wishing the whole thing would go away. There are elements of it I like: some of the music, pumpkin pie, getting a day off from work. I really like wrapping presents - I guess it appeals to my inner artist. Sometimes I even like opening them.

What I don't like is the pressure I feel when it comes to giving. The religious and capitalist messages combine to say "You should give more than you receive" and there are a lot of people in my life who go overboard when it comes to giving presents. Since I don't, I end up getting more presents with bigger price tags than I give. Which leads to guilt. Which I resent. I'd rather drop the whole give presents on this one day routine, and just give what I want when I want. That way there'd be no temptation to keep score on presents.

Bad Day

You know it's a bad day when the car crash right outside my window isn't
able to distract me from the crap I'm trying to deal with.

Test

This is a test of using e-mail to blog. This is only a test. If this had
been an actual blog, you would be given further details on whatever the
hell's on my mind.

Haven't Quit Yet...

...but I did tell the Big Boss that things need to change or I'm walking. He said things will change. That was three months ago. There's been a little change here and there - Barry's handling all the interfacing with one of our clients, even for my projects, and Joe's going to take over the routine heat exchanger work. I'm not sure either of them is too happy about that, but the reality is that as long as I'm producing $30k a month, plus doing tech support, plus a lot of internal support work, I've got a lot of weight to throw around.

New computers for everybody: the Opterons were a little disappointing, with 4GB of RAM but only a little over 3GB were actually available. So the Uber Boss pulled out his checkbook and got a dual Xeon64 with 8GB for everybody in the group. That's a lot of power. Yea for him.

Read recently: Camouflage by Joe Haldeman. Not too deep, but a good page turner.
Now reading: Race to the Pole, about Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole (if you're not familiar with it, they came in second and then everyone died. Bummer.

Yea for me: I've been learning MySQL and PHP. I'll be redoing the entire coastergeek site as a database.

Catching Up

I should be able to get a couple of reports mailed out today. Since the work was finished in early January, I have to admit that the reports are a little late. Kinda shows how busy I've been with urgent projects. Seems like everything is urgent hese days.

Got a new workstation. Not an Opteron - apparently the order for these is still waiting for approval from IBM's finance department - but instead a refugee from the Plymouth office. Dual 2.4 GHz Xeons, 2GB RAM, 140 GB disk space. The disk space is the biggest improvement - I was in perpetual crisis with old '58'. Unfortunately, it has been like pulling teeth to get the SysAdmins to get all the various utilities and services that I need to have to be truly functional. Right now I can't burn a CD or write a tape. Most other machines can't see mine. It's a mess. You'd think after all these years there would be a procedure to cleanly add new machines to the network...

The Opterons are Coming!

The Big Boss sez we're going to get 4 dual-processor Opteron workstations with 4 or 6 Gigs of RAM each. No word on when, but at least they're coming. Thank God. I've only been lobbying for something to replace our aging workstations for two years now...

CFD Whore

Something disturbing in my inbox yesterday. In addition to our contact info (name, phone #, company URL, etc) our e-mail signature file is now required to include an advertisement for our latest software product. To my eyes, it looks tacky and unprofessional. I really wish they wouldn't make us do shit like this. Makes me feel cheap.

Screwed Up Again

I lost track of a the schedule for a project for the Number One Client. I thought I had two weeks left to finish it, but he called me on Wednesday and reminded me that I had promised results by this Friday. Oops. I told him I would be able to send him first results on Monday, & he said that was cool. So now I'm busting my ass to get it done. Finished building the model in three days, which is pretty impressive if I do say so myself. Had to make a few compromises, but nothing too severe. The new Opteron really helped - trimmed the whole thing in an hour by using all four processors. Gotta go into the office today to finish setting it up and get it running. These types of models usually run pretty well on the first try - hopefully this will be typical.

Color Me Surprised

Well, it took a few days. Just When I thought she'd forgotten, she surprised me one morning before I went to the gym. Great way to start the day. :-)

Got Lucky

Got some from my old lady last night. Drove her so wild she said I was "a wonderful lover" and "I want to do it again tomorrow", which is pretty damn unusual. We'll see if she remembers that tonight...

It's Hammer Time

We got a new machine to build meshes on, and it is hot. It's got four 1.6 GHz Opterons, which are faster than just about anything in the building. It actually arrived about nine months ago, but came with only 1 GB of memory and an 18 GB disk, which made it pretty much worthless. I've been pointing out for months how useful this thing could be if we just upgraded it, but what finally tipped the scales was the Number One Client saying that he wants us to double the size of the models we're building for him. So management finally plunked down a credit card and bought a 74 GB disk and 16 GB(!) of RAM. We've been pushing it hard this week, and it hasn't blinked once. We finally have a machine which can do big models quickly.

Damn near had an orgasm when the thing trimmed a ten million cell mesh in only four hours. And that was only using one CPU. It's twice as fast as our big Sun or the Itanium.

What I've Been Reading

Some comments on three books I've read recently: The Sundering, the second installment in Walter Jon William's latest series, Dread Empire's Fall. The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown's insanely popular bestseller, and Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Jesus's Childhood Friend.

The Sundering continues the saga of Blank and Caroline Sula, two young officers in the service of a galactic empire which most resembles Victorian England, if Victoria had married Mao Tse-Tung instead of Prince Albert. The civil war which began in the previous installment is now going badly, with the badly maulled fleet abandoning the capital to fight a guerilla campaign. The two lead characters again come together, with considerable passion, only to have Sula's secret past drive them apart again. Like almost all of William's books, the action is well paced, the characters are intersting and multi-dimensional, and there is a nice sprinkling of humor. Very enjoyable.

The DaVinci Code, on the other hand, was crap. Crap, crap, crap. It's supposed to be about two brilliant people figuring out the clues to lead them to a secret society which has been hiding the secrets of Jesus' life for two thousand years. Except that the secrets have all been documented by art historians, the secret society no longer seems to care if anyone remembers the secrets, and the clues are easily figured out twenty pages before our two so-called geniuses stumble onto them. The book is full of basic factual errors, and it makes no sense that a secret organization which has been hiding from an all-powerful Catholic Church for centuries would at the same time be flaunting its secrets in major pieces of art. Makes me think of a naked man prancing around shouting "You can't see me! I'm invisible!"

And now for something completely different: Lamb. This very funny story plays with the idea of "What if Jesus had grown up with a wiseassed but loyal guy named Biff?" Complete fiction, of course, but so is much of the legend of Jesus. The main difference between this and the New Testament is that Lamb is much, much funnier. Looking forward to reading more of Chris Moore's work.

Stanford is ranked #1 in the country in men's basketball. Wahoo!

Taking a well-deserved vacation from life, starting tomorrow. The not-so-short-anymore one and I are flying out to Colorado. She will be skiing, I will not. People are always telling me how much I'd enjoy skiing, and they're probably right. I imagine I would. The problem is the joints in my legs are already pretty messed up. My knees are bow-legged, my ankles severely pronated, and my fleet are completely flat. I'd like them to still function in another 40 years, but I figure the odds aren't better than 50-50 as it is. I read once that on a typical downhill run, a skiers knees absorb enough energy to shatter an acre of glass. I don't think my knees could handle too much of that without reducing their lifetime expectancy. So no skiing for the Captain.

The last time we visited my folks in Colorado, I spent one day at the ski resort. That day, one person had to be evacuated by helicopter, and two more were pulled out on sleds. I've never seen anyone get injured on a roller coaster. Yet people still ask me, "Aren't they dangerous?" Bleh.

Still no official word on when A Feast For Crows will ship.

So I haven't updated in a year. Maybe I should try to stay more current. I'll think about it.