I Hate Winter

I hate it with a passion. The Passion of the Captain. Here were are, a whole week into March, and I gotta drive home in snow and ice and I-495 stops for twenty minutes while we wait for the snowplows and I really, really hate it!

I am so ready for Spring.

New Metaphor

Just came up with & I want to remember it for possible future use:

When the troll is knocking down your door, you don't care about the
color of his sneakers.

42 Million Bucks

That's what HP is paying Carly Fiorina as a severence package. For that kind of money, they can fire my ass too.

Bump in the Night

Woke up at 4:00 this morning to a ticking sound. "What the hell is that?" I asked myself. Since I didn't answer, I got up to investigate. Turned out the (brand new) furnace had sprung a leak. Water dripped onto the electronic control, causing it to short circuit & go into overdrive. The ticking sound was steam percolating through the radiators. This was not a good thing. Neither was the small lake forming in the middle of my house.

Cut the power, called the service company, listened to the horible rumbling as the pressure relief valve let go, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda.

All better now. Thank god for lifetime warranties.

Dry Spell

Haven't had sex since December 12, which was 43 days ago. Wonder how long this will go on for.

Auto maintanence

My elders always said I should keep a log of any service done on my car, so I guess I'll try.

Two new tires on the F150 (fron wheels). Price: $185. Miles: 195,000. Drives a lot better now.

Other recent items:
Water pump on the Taurus. Price: Couple hundred. Miles: 90,000.
Wheel bearing and related items on the F150. front right wheel. Price: $700 (ouch!). Miles: 194,000 or thereabouts.

Some good things

1) My sister paid me the money she borrowed four years ago. I asked for it & she said no problem and mailed me a check. Good for her.

2) Steelers are in the playoffs, after a 15-1 season. Today they play the Jets, whom they beat earlier in the season. Good for them.

3) The Short One and I have joined a fencing club. We exercise, we have fun, we get to hit people with swords. Good for us.

Out of the Frying Pan...

They finally got the down cluster running yesterday. Once that was all okay, we
stopped all the jobs running on the other cluster for some minor
upgrades to the queueing system. At 1:30 everything was looking good &
the sysadmin said he just needed to change a few scripts and reboot and
then we could start using it again.

Ha.

It is now 5:00 and it is showing no signs of coming back to life.
You can't win.

To make my breakfast complete, a herd of clients are zooming over for meetings tomorrow. So I can pretty much kiss my productivity goodbye for the day.

Dead Dead Dead

The bigger of our two linux clusters went down last week. The problem appears to be a bad CPU on the control workstation. Turns out that for IBM both the Friday before Jan 1 and the Monday after were both holidays, so the earliest they could get a technician out here was today, five days after it went down. Meanwhile, no jobs running. Very expensive for us.

We, of course, did not get either Friday or Monday off.

Maybe I should go work for IBM.

The good news is that my new workstation stepped up to the plate. Running both CPUs, I can get nearly the same performance as I was getting with 4 CPUs on the cluster. I won't even mention how much faster it is than the old unix box...

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.