Fubar

As I read Jonathan Phillips' new book about it, it occurs to me that the Fourth Crusade was probably the greatest instance of Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition in the history of Western Civilization.

Not Interchangeable

No posts for the past 6 weeks or so because I've been busy with three very different projects: amusement parks, PHP, and sex. These are not to be confused with each other; the results would be unpredictable at best, and might result in the removal from the park with no refund.

1. Amusement parks. It is spring (finally!), which means roller coasters. Went to Great Adventure for the first time in a few years & got meself a season pass. I will say that 6 Flags has been working on its image. The park was the cleanest I've ever seen, with most of the grafitti gone and new paint jobs for Scream Machine, Batman, and the Chiller. Kingda Ka was standing with 456 feet of goodness, but not yet operating. Hence the need for a season pass - so I can get in for free when it revs up. Currently planning to go back in June.

Scheduled for May: a weekend at Walt Disney World - breakfast with Cinderella at the Magic Kingdom, Lucky the Dinosaur at Animal Kingdom, and Cirque du Soleil in between. I anticipate a very fun and intense 48 hours. Later in the month we go back to Dorney Park, which we somehow missed last year. Currently planning to spend the day with Bob & his family.

2. PHP. Stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. I've been rebuilding CoasterGeek.com as a set of PHP pages which dynamically querry a MySQL database for stats and opinions of any coaster I choose to discuss. It was a lot of work to enter everything into the database, but now that it's done it makes it much easier to add new roller coasters (don't have to manually add them to all the menus, etc). It will also make it possible to create custom lists (all over 200 feet, all ridden in 2003, etc.) but I still need to add that.

3. Sex. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but something in our sessions with Claudia led Brett to decide that it's okay to have sex just for the fun of it. Instead of me having to spend a week or two courting her and being very careful to get her in the mood without doing or saying anything that might cause offence, we've been doing it about twice a week. And the passion level has been way, way up. For both of us. In addition to the obvious benefits, I'm finding that it leaves me much less bothered by the stuff she does or doesn't do the rest of the time. Not a 100% reduction, but 50-70% is a big improvement. I have no idea if this will last, but since everyone is benefitting I sure hope it will.

Yup, it's still Winter

March 12 and we got another couple inches of Snow. Taylor's having a "Pirate Birthday" today, but it sure don't look like the Caribbean out there.

Will this madness ever end?!?!?!?!?!?

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.