Year: 2004

The kids have been participating in a reading program sponsored by the public library. At each of three “levels” of achievement, they receive a prize, and the first-level prize was a free trip to Lakeside Amusement Park in Denver. We’ve had the tickets for a few months, and were always planning to make the trip, but never seemed to get around to it. Monday evening Laralee noticed the tickets expired Thursday, so we had to either go immediately or lose the chance. Wednesday and Thursday nights were out, so that left Tuesday.

Of course, there was a severe storm warning for Denver on Tuesday.

I guess we should’ve paid more attention to the signs; apparently we just weren’t meant to go. As we climbed into the car, the rain started coming down. Laralee called the park to check their weather (a lot can change in forty miles) and they said it wasn’t raining there… yet.

As we drove, the rain started coming down in sheets.

Then the hail started, and big chunks of ice were slamming into the windshield. Motorcyclists by the dozens were huddled under overpasses, waiting for the hail to stop.

But by the time we got to Lakeside, it was dry. The sky was brooding, but no rain was falling. Woo hoo! We went in and started going on rides. The kids had a great time, and even Zack whooped and hollered on the little kiddie roller coaster. (Although his favorite ride was the merry-go-round.)

Alex, Kyra, and Laralee rode the big roller coaster– the one that’s visible from I-70– and said it was great. So I decided to go on it with Alex (since Zack couldn’t ride, I had been taking him to various other rides), and we got in line. That’s when the rain started.

They closed the coaster (“just until the rain lets up”) but the rain kept coming. Suddenly the skies opened and unleashed a torrential downpour. Everyone was scrambling to get under cover– the merry-go-round was definitely the most popular ride in the park, as it was covered– and just about everything shut down.

Then came the hail. It continued for a few minutes, and switched back to pouring rain. Since we didn’t want to huddle in the cold weather all night, we decided to make a break for the car. Running through the sheets of water proved to be a funny adventure. We came to the parking lot, which was gravel and sand, and saw vast rivers of water streaming through it. No kidding: in places the water was probably six inches deep and running cold and swift. Laralee’s car was parked smack in the middle of the largest river, and we had to carry the kids into the car because the water was coming so fast and deep.

Finally we were in the car, drenched and cold, and started maneuvering to get out of the parking lot. Of course everyone else was trying to leave at the same time, so there was a colossal traffic jam. And in the span of perhaps five minutes, the rain stopped. Completely stopped. The rivers faded away, and we realized if we’d waited those few minutes we would’ve been able to walk to the car in (relative) dryness.

Next time I’m going to pay more attention to the “signs”…

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”

— Henry David Thoreau

So of the three brand-new servers I bought a few weeks ago, two are dead. One starts up with the fans howling, but doesn’t do anything beyond that (no POST, no setup menu, no OS). The other doesn’t do anything at all.

Turns out the second one was a failed power supply, which I swapped from the first. It seems to be working. The first one probably has a bad motherboard or something.

So of course having two of three new servers fail only days after installing them makes me pretty nervous about trusting my entire web- and database hosting business to them. But that aside, a technician was supposed to arrive today (next-day express service) and he won’t be here because I found out– after serveral phone calls– that a memory module failed to ship so he won’t have the parts necessary to do a proper repair.

While that’s irritating, it’s more irritating that I wasn’t notified of the change. I spoke with my tech rep yesterday at 5pm– right on the closing bell– and he said everything looked good. I understand that logistics sometimes cause problems, but I would expect some kind of notification of it. Further, I have a spare memory module from the second server that the technician could have used.

So now it’ll be sometime next week before anyone shows up, and in the meantime I’ve got $3,000 worth of computer equipment on my office floor doing me no good. For my first experience with “real” servers, I must say I’m woefully disappointed.

When the saga ends, someone at Dell will be getting a piece of my mind. With pickles and relish.

“There is no monument dedicated to the memory of a committee.”

— Lester J. Pourciau

The current time is 1:50 in the ante meridian.

Yep, up late yet again… this time configuring a shiny new server for the ol’ co-location closet. Fortunately it went off without a hitch. It was about two hours of laptopping, but I managed to transfer everything from my existing (but aging) web server to the new one. That includes tons of e-mail, files, and of course many many gigabytes of fun.

It always seems like this sort of thing bombs for me, and I end up apologizing to clients when they whine about where their web site has gone. But hey, I must be getting better.

It’s becoming apparent that I’m getting old.

Last week while playing ultimate I suffered a bit of an injury when an opposing player landed with his full weight on the side of my (bare) foot. I heard an audible ‘crack’ and decided to sit out for the point. However, I was back in the game after the point and in fact played the second full game of our double-header. By the end of the night, however, I was limping noticeably since my foot was hurting pretty badly.

The next day I could hardly walk, and I started wondering if there was an actual broken bone somewhere in there. Since my health insurance is limited to catastrophic situations (think $4,000 deductible) it would take a lot to make me plunk down five hundred bucks for an x-ray to see if anything is really wrong. So I decided to limp for a few days.

A week later things were good– my foot still hurt, but I suspect if there was a fracture it would hurt a lot more. Thus, when Wednesday rolled around and it was time for another evening of ultimate, I decided to play. I had originally planned on sitting out most (if not all) of the game, but we were short on men so I needed to do my part. It felt okay playing, but after the game– again– I was reduced to a limp.

Now, today, I’m paying for my earnestness because the foot is definitely in worse shape than it was the same time yesterday. If I was younger, I’m sure it would be fine and I’d be ready for another game. But apparently as one gets older, these things take longer to heal. Dang it.

I just read an article by Paul Graham where he describes how great software is produced: by great hackers. As part of the essay, he talks about an ideal work environment:

“If companies want hackers to be productive, they should look at what they do at home. At home, hackers can arrange things themselves so they can get the most done. And when they work at home, hackers don’t work in noisy, open spaces; they work rooms with doors. They work in cosy, neighborhoody places with people around and somewhere to walk when they need to mull something over, instead of in glass boxes set in acres of parking lots. They have a sofa they can take a nap on when they feel tired, instead of sitting in a coma at their desk, pretending to work. There’s no crew of people with vacuum cleaners that roars through every evening during the prime hacking hours. There are no meetings or, God forbid, corporate retreats or team-building exercises. And when you look at what they’re doing on that computer, you’ll find it reinforces what I said earlier about tools. They may have to use Java and Windows at work, but at home, where they can choose for themselves, you’re more likely to find them using Perl and Linux.”

I think that’s great stuff– because it’s not only how I feel about my job, but exactly how I do it.

In today’s news, a landmark court case is being set. A man from Alaska is being charged with second-degree murder in an automobile accident where he slammed head-on into an oncoming car and killed its two occupants. It’s being pressed as murder because he was allegedly watching an in-dash DVD (“Road Trip”, of all movies) at the time of the accident, causing him to drift over the center line and hit the other vehicle.

Although he claims to have been listening to music and not watching the DVD player, in a telephone call from the hospital to his ex-wife that night he admitted that he was “distracted by the movie” he and his front-seat passenger were watching. Furthermore, his DVD player had been custom-installed in order to bypass the safety feature that will prohibit it from playing unless the vehicle is parked.

Regardless of whether he was actually watching the movie and whether it caused the accident, it raises an interesting question and point of law: when does manslaughter (accidental killing) become murder (intentional killing)?

Typically, drunk drivers are charged with manslaughter if they kill someone in an accident, because it’s assumed they didn’t have “malice aforethought” which is one of the prerequisites for a murder charge. However, the prosecutor in this particular case insists that since the defendant bypassed the safety system in an effort to make it possible to watch movies while driving, he was showing a blatant disregard for human life. In other words, because he would be in control of a ton of high-speed steel certainly capable of killing someone, and elected to place the importance of his entertainment above the importance of paying attention to his driving, he should not only be held responsible for the deaths but shouldn’t be able to claim it was an “accident” at all.

If convicted, this would create a powerful precendent for holding people responsible for their actions if they are being knowingly careless while doing things that could endanger others.

“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

— Sir Arthur Eddington

Today’s Iraqi puzzler: Who’s Dumber?

1) The Filipino government, for caving into the demands of the Iraqi extremists who threatened to behead a Filipino guy unless the Phillippines pulled out of Iraq.

2) The extremists themselves, for now kidnapping men from India, Kenya, and Egypt and demanding their respective countries pull out of Iraq as well. Note that none of the three countries have troops in Iraq.

I guess it goes to show that giving into the demands of terrorists is a universally bad policy, no matter how ugly the consequences of not giving in may be…