Into The Weeds

Alas, I have given in and started a blog. We'll have to see how this goes. I'm still getting used to the software and all that, so this will be a bit of an adventure. Hopefully this won't become one of those never-updated blogs out there in the "internet graveyard." More to follow (hopefully)!

This tuesday marked the continuation of a very nice, new, routine of attending Bluegrass Night at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge. I highly recommend it, and anyone around is welcome to join in the fun on tuesday nights. The opening band seemed like they weren't even old enough to legally be present in the bar, but were fairly decent.

The main act was "Durango Reinhardt," and they were fantastic. Matt Glaser on the fiddle, and John McGann (a regular fixture of late on the stage at the Cantab) with the guitar. And a very very nice female vocalist, who's name escapes me at the moment. Scott's contention was that -- If she were president, she'd be "Babe"raham Lincoln. After imbibing a fair amount of Miller High Life, I took some fairly cruddy pictures -- but you get the basic idea.

So, as a pre valentines-day fancy dinner, I made reservations for two at Morton's of Chicago (yes, they have a Boston location). Some of you may already know that I'm a big fan of the local steakhouse Grill 23 , and have also enjoyed the local branch of another chain: The Capital Grille . I originally intended to make reservations for the abovementioned Grill 23, or perhaps even to try the (newly opened) local branch of Ruth's Chris. But, alas, it being the Sunday before Valentine's day, and me being a procrastinator, there were no available reservations on Open Table for an early dinner. By the way, I highly recommend Open Table as a way to not only make reservations, but peruse the list of local fine dining establishments. But, I digress.

It turns out that all that business about limited reservations being available became a moot point, as a major snowstorm, or "noreaster" as we call them here, blew in and kept everyone at home. But, that's for another blog entry. I was somewhat skeptical about Morton's, mainly due to the fact that it is a chain, and that it was not as well reviewed as Ruth's Chris or Grill 23. I was very pleasantly surprised. The crabcakes were of the largest lumps that I have ever seen (which is noteable since I did live in Maryland for a few summers and have had my share of crabcakes). The Lyonnaise potatoes were cooked in some sort of bacon grease, which made them all the more yummy. And the steak, well, it was just fantastic. I won't go as far as saying it was as good as Grill 23, but I'll highly recommend this place. I can't really comment on the atmosphere, since we were one of only two couples that were able to brave the "blizzard of '06" to make it out. Oh, and for dessert, the molton chocolate cake was quite delicious as well.

So I've finally gotten around to substantially re-doing my home page. The page has been essentially untouched since sometime in 1998, when I first fired up Microsoft Frontpage and threw it on the web. Sure, there have been content updates since then (updating my address, my job, some pictures). The problem was that a lot of those updates were done by hand, so I was stuck with some strange congolmeration of Frontpage crap and hand-edited stuff.

What I'm doing is using nvu, a nice editing helper available for Linux, OSX and Windows, to actually set up a page with style sheets, no frames, and a minimum of kludgy table layouts and FrontPage bots. This is my first time at actually really editing a web page this century, so a lot of this CSS stuff is new to me. It doesn't seem so bad. Anyway, the basic work on the website is done, now I just need to fine-tune and get it looking pretty.

Hopefully, now that the site is set up in a sane fashion, I'll find it easier to keep up to date, and add more photo albums, etc.

And, no, I don't mean the planet. I'm getting regular car maintenance done this morning, and hopefully they're going to fix a binding ignition key problem (their current thinking is that the keys are worn and they are going to cut a couple new ones). But it's nice that they have free wireless internet here while I wait. I'm also informed that my serpentine belt needs to be replaced. This jives with the intermittent squeaking sound heard when turning before the car warms up.

So, pretty much ever since I've learned that ringtones can be composed and distributed, I've wanted to have the Engineer's Drinking Song as a ringtone. For those not in the know of the MIT lore, there is some background info and lyrics here, here and here.

The ringtone itself was composed as part of some MIT ringtone competition at H-Lounge. Get it here. When I got it, it was free, but they supposedly will start charging a few bucks to send it to you. The way it worked for me, was to give them my phone number, and they sent a text message with the audio file attached. I was able to save the attachment and optionally set it as my ringtone. It's actually a fairly good rendition.

My former co-worker, and all around stand-up guy, CK, somehow found quite a neat picture and posted an entry in his blog.

That's quite the crew there. Names I immediately recognize include Heisenberg, Scroedinger, Pauli, Bohn, Einstein, Lorentz, Curie and Planck. All in one picture!

Incidentally, I've been reading 1/2 grim dude's many recent recipes, and am impressed. I've just whipped up a batch of chili (which I've been known to do from time to time), and I'll post the recipe as soon as I can find it. I must say it's pretty good.

At the wonderful learning institution that is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, there are many students who like to drink. A lot. Unfortunately for them, the ultimate drinking holiday (St. Patrick's Day) often falls during spring break, thus depriving them of the pleasure of getting trashed for the holiday. But, in a remarkable show of cleverness and business-savvy, the local bar owners created a holiday of their own. It's called "Unofficial St. Patrick's Day" and it is today. link.link.
Some rube's photo album.
Some other rube's photo album.

(pictures courtesy of the Daily Illini)

Well, those pictures were both taken, most likely, sometime in the early afternoon, and that's what "unofficial" is all about. It's a day for freshmen to stumble drunkedly across campus in the middle of the day, instead of in the middle of the night as usual. It's also a day for the cops to make an annual "show of force" and ticket a few dozen people for underaged drinking. Their reasoning is probably that if they actually work on the problem for one day out of the year, they can feel better about not doing anything the other 364 days.

This year, the office of the Provost even got into the act. They sent out a massmail, warning people that today was the day, and that "student behavior ... may disrupt classes." CK has posted a full copy of the letter, which seems to actually make "unofficial" a little bit more "official." The bar owners should be sending the provost fruit baskets in return for the free advertising. For more general, and hilarious, information about the UI drinking lifestyle, check out The Booze News. It's one of the few aspects of living in Champaign-Urbana that I actually might miss.

A certain Grim Dude put up a similar list, and I have nothing else that I feel like blogging about at the moment so here goes. It's a somewhat interesting list, and I'm not sure if it has any real correlation to my actual musical tastes or not, but there are some gems in there. My current top 15 most frequently played songs on iTunes:

1. In The Garage, Weezer
2. Addicted, Simple Plan
3. Holiday, Weezer
4. Surf Wax America, Weezer
5. Call And Answer, Barenaked Ladies
6. California Uber Alles, Dead Kennedys
7. Commissioning A Symphony In C, Cake
8. Bumble Bee Tuna Song , Mephiskapheles
9. Smooth Criminal, Alien Ant Farm
10. Creep, Radiohead
11. Wicked Little Town, Hedwig And The Angry Inch Soundtrack
12. Dirty Water, The Standells
13. Needs, Collective Soul
14. Teenage Dirtbag , Wheatus
15. Army, Ben Folds Five

I'm aware that during my 4-year-long "exile" in Champaign, Illinois, I did a lot of complaining and whining about being there. Some of the negatives that come to mind include the ever-present bizarre odor from the Kraft factory, the lack of really good grub (you couldn't drop $100 on a good, extravagant dinner for two even if you tried), and the overall grimness of the surroundings and local residents. I pretty much did everything but put up a big calendar and cross off the days with a big red magic marker until we finally moved back to Boston this past May. And, don't misunderstand me here, I'm wayyyy glad to be back. But, here are some things I miss about those four long years in the midwest:

• Homeownership: Sure, it's nice to not have to worry about mowing the lawn, dealing with a leaky basement, or worrying about equity, property taxes, etc. anymore. But it was also nice to have a yard, with my own trees, and a driveway to park my cars in. And of course there's the fact that the total monthly payment on that 800sq. ft. home was about 1/6th of what I currently pay for rent + parking.
• My Job: No, I'm not going to whine about my current job here -- it's really quite good. I will say, however, that the folks at UIUC don't know how good they have it. IT there is run like one heck of a tight ship (comparatively speaking of course). Significant investments in time, manpower, and political capital were made to put in place strict, but sound, IT policies that ensure that best practices are followed, and everyone's job is actually easier. I'm not going to get too specific here, but we especially excelled in the areas of configuration management, security, documentation, and project planning. Any folks from CITES reading this will probably be laughing, but really, you don't want to see what the alternative can be like.
• My Job (personnel): One thing about Champaign-Urbana is that there really aren't too many places for a good UNIX sysadmin to work. Sure, you can slave away at Wolfram Research and work for a total headcase psycho freak. Or you can go over to Amdocs and get laid off. So, UIUC was actually, believe it or not, where all of the good sysadmins came to work. I had the pleasure of working with, and learning from, some of the best. And here's where I'll give a shout out to Warner Brigham, who after many years of service, retired last week. He definitely falls into that category. Sorry I couldn't make the party!
• My Truck: I had a c.1991 Chevrolet Blazer 4wd that was pretty badass. It had tazmanian devil floor mats. It had two sets of fog lamps (alright, neither set worked). It had a thumping bass tube in the back. It had extra-large tires with aluminum wheels. It had a big crazy brush guard / cattle catcher in the front for mowing down pedestrians. It was cool. I ended up trading it to someone for a huge discount on my new TV. Unfortunately, they didn't appreciate it. You know who you are.
• Best Wok: Our favorite local chinese restaurant. Sure, just about all of the other chinese food in the area was mediocre at best, but these folks did it right. Their General Gao's (they just call it "General's" or "General Tso's" there) was second to none. I'm getting over this loss though, especially now that we're frequenting Chinatown Seafood here in Brookline.

Honorable mention: Big badass thunderstorms, closeness to the in-laws, the scenery on the UI campus, the free and always on time CUMTD bus, being able to have satellite TV instead of paying wayyy too much for digital cable, and Barack Obama.

I was going through some old files, cleaning up, the other day, when I came across the invoice for my computer. It's been roughly two and a half years since I "switched." I'm speaking of course, of buying a Mac to replace my windows/linux primary desktop. This makes me a "switcher," in the parlance of our times.

Looking back, I'm not entirely sure what it was that made me switch. It was probably a combination of things: having some extra money around, dealing with just one too many frustrations with my computer, getting a Playstation2 so windows gaming wasn't so important anymore, and hearing and experiencing good things about OSX. So, I took the leap, ordering a PowerMac G4 from apple.com with my educational discount. This wasn't my first experience with MacOS. I've owned a few MacSE's over time, and still have one in working order even. On the first day the iMac was released way back in 1998, I went to CompUSA and bought one. I enjoyed it for a few weeks, and then returned it. This was my plan all along, since there was no way I could spend $1500 on a new computer at that point. But, this time it was for real.

I'm happy to say that two and a half years later, my life is better for having made the move. The original vision of a "personal computer" was as a tool for our betterment. It was supposed to increase our productivity, open up new possibilities, and generally lead to the "betterment of civilization." Quite immediately upon my purchase, I found that I was swearing at my computer a lot less. I was pounding my desk and banging on my keyboard a lot less also. I was able to actually get things done with my computer -- surf the web, check my email, write and read documents, listen to music, watch videos -- without feeling like I was embroiled in a constant Man vs. Machine struggle.

The trend continues to this day. Whenever I turn on my Windows PC these days, I find that I'm constantly pressing F9. Mac users will recognize this as the key sequence for Expose -- It's a one of the most amazing things ever, a visual way to navigate through all of your open windows that's pretty hard to describe with words. Invariably, I'll end up cursing at the computer for not doing what I want it to, or forcing me to jump through stupid hoops in order to get a certain game to run. Maybe I'll need to upgrade my video driver, or downgrade it. Or I'll need to disable the antivirus software, or scan the system for spyware, or (my favorite) edit the registry to prevent all sorts of stupid stubs from starting up on reboot and filling my taskbar (e.g. RealPlayer, Quicktime, Java Updater, Macromedia Flash Updater, some crappy useless tool that came with my sound card, some other crappy useless tool that came with my video card). But, that's enough of that rant. Suffice it to say, I'm much happier when I'm back in Mac-land.

Don't get me wrong. I'm definitely up to the "challenge" of getting my Windows PC (or linux, with it's own counterpart listing of frustrations) working and doing what I want to do. Actually, it's not much of a challenge at all -- I'm no moron after all. When I need/want a challenge, I can boot into Linux and play around. My mail/web/fileserver at home still runs Linux, of course. But, you see, somewhere along the line, something changed in me. After working on computers for 8 hours a day and making a career out of it, I no longer got any thrill or satisfaction out of getting my computer to do something for me. I no longer felt the need to "play around" with my computer all the time. Now, I can relax, knowing that the struggle has already been won. The computer is not there to put obstacles between me and my objectives, or to force me to conform to its way of doing things. It is a tool, at my service. It increases my productivity and opens up new possibilities -- Finally!.

Evacuation Day weekend is drawing to a close here in Boston. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it down to see the parade today, but there were already more than enough festivities.

Ryan Pierce made a surprise appearance at Quinn's place on Friday night. That whole affair reminded me of some of the old MIT parties of 'yore. Lots of "interesting" people. It seemed like all of the residents of that apartment worked at iRobot, so there were Roombas and Scoobas present as well to help clean up spilled beverages. At my place on Saturday, plenty of Guinness, boiled meat and vegetables were had by all. Some new faces were there, and a good time was had by all. Laurie gets a point for making the irish soda bread, and LeVaur gets one for making an appropriate "Naked Lady" comment at the local british-style pub afterwards. Beyond that, I don't recall too much!

I turned on the TV upon arriving at home from work yesterday, and after flipping through the stations was greeted by familiar voices. Baseball is back, and so are Don and Jerry. All is right with the world after all, and of course "hope springs eternal," as they say. I was also greeted by some cleanly-shaven schmo in a Yankee's uniform, but that hardly spoiled my evening.

So I decided to "bite the bullet" today and get a new cell phone. Actually, it wasn't that much of a decision, since my employer is paying for it. I picked up my Treo 650 smartphone from my friendly local verizon dealer and have already gotten it syncing with my mac with minimal problems.

It's not a piece of cake, and palm's sync software really is a flaming pile of shit -- especially on Mac OS. Luckily, many others out there on the internet have worked out the kinks and I was able to get my contacts and calendar working. I've also set up "versamail" on it so I can check my email (IMAP) when I'm not with a computer. On the down side, it's not a real "cell phone," so all of Verizon's "get it now" apps aren't available for it. However, it's a Palm Pilot, so many apps are out there for it. It also has a web browser, so checking sports scores, etc. can probably be done that way, although I really liked ESPN's MLB GameCast on my old phone.

The Pickin' Tuesdays photo album has been updated with some recent acts and good Cantab Lounge ambiance.

Also, there is a new Out and About photo album for random pictures taken out with friends and strangers at various times. This has been updated with some pictures from last night, when Jeff returned to Boston from Oxford. His plan was to surprise his ladyfriend for her birthday tonight. I'm sure the romantic gesture was well appreciated and all went well.

So we'll be on a caribbean cruise this next week having one heck of a vacation. Maybe if I have the time and want to expend the effort, this blog might get updated from the middle of the sea at some point next week. In the mean time, the Out and About photo album has been updated with some pictures from the birthday party last night.

Well, the vacation is over and I'm back in town. I apologize for the blog being unavailable over the past couple of days. It's one of the things I have to suffer through since switching from static business-class ISP service to cable modem. Of course the one time my IP address gets changed is while I'm out of town and don't notice it. Pictures and updates from the vacation will follow eventually. I do have some catching up to do in the mean time though, like figuring out how the Sox are 5-1 already.

Well I finally got around to putting up the Pictures from the cruse. We were on a 7-night Eastern Caribbean cruise aboard Royal Caribbean's Mariner of the Seas. Some highlights of the trip include:

• Scuba diving in St. Marteen. Pictures and details to follow. (Only one of us actually made it down 25 feet though)
• Getting lots of sun and relaxation. This was our fourth cruise, so rather than do all sorts of shore excursions and activities, we just hung out on the beach or at the pool for the most part.
• Southerners. For some reason, the whole ship was 85% people from Georgia and other southern states. I think it was the time of the year, and the timing of various spring break schedules. It was amusing.
• Wine. The Mariner of the Seas actually has a dedicated wine bar, which was a nice place to hang out and have a glass or two or three, or even an occasional martini.
• Kennedy Space Center. I hadn't been there since I was a kid, many many years ago. It was pretty cool. In case you didn't already know this, the Saturn V rocket is pretty darn big.

Well, I just realized that I had a bunch of comments to this wonderful blog marked as "junk." It appears that I set my sensitivity too high. They have been released. I suppose I've learned my lesson. Good thing I checked the junk folder. I was wondering why I wasn't getting any comments.

Apologies for the lack of blogging lately. I've been off this week at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC). So far, there have been interesting sessions on VMware ESX Server, public key cryptography and nuclear weapons control, and I'm currently in a keynote speech about systems at Pixar.

Joining us this week at the conference has been CK. This is his first time in Boston; he has gotten to see several sights in boston this week, including restaurants, bars, music, visiting MIT, some friends, and a decent taste of driving around here.

I don't feel like writing much about the activities and notable events of the week thus far, so go ahead and check out CK's multiple blog entries, and what a grim dude had to say about this.

We love TiVo. It's been about a year and a half since that day in late november 2004 when something (I don't remember what, exactly) pushed me over the edge into buying our 80-hour TiVo box from the Sam's club. It's not too much of a stretch to say that our lives have not been the same since. Our television-watching habits have certainly not been the same, and it really is interesting to consider how a profound change in the way we watch television can trickle through to the way the rest of our lives are carried out. When you're able to amass a library of wanted television to watch at your leisure, rather than scheduling around the TV season and schedule, it makes a big difference in how you can spend your evenings at home. Being able to automatically pick up reruns of shows that I may have missed, or shows featuring a specific actor, or shows automatically suggested to me based on viewing habit, has given us a virtual fountain of television at our disposal.

And, no, I'm not talking about the cable DVR. I'm talking about a real TiVo box. It pains me somewhat to see so many people settling for the generic cable-company-supplied video recorder, and thinking that they have somehow joined the "TiVo revolution." That is, sadly, not the case. I am currently forced to use the Comcast DVR for some programming, because it has the ability to record in High Definition -- a feature sadly lacking on the Tivo (at least at this time). For those of you using regular DVRs, or (heaven forbid!) not using any sort of DVR at all, let me just run down just SOME of what I generally like about the TiVo:

So we're going away for a romantic weekend to Foxwoods, the "world's largest casino and resort," this weekend. Even though it's supposedly only less than two hours away, this will be the first trip to Foxwoods for both of us, so it should be interesting. We've got a fancy dinner reservation for friday night, and some sort of brunch buffet on sunday. Other than that, I plan to hit the tables a bit, and maybe catch a lounge act or something. We might also make a trip to Mystic if we run out of things to do. I hear that there's a nice waterfront there, an aquarium, and some sort of museum. Any advice from regular visitors to Foxwoods would, of course, be welcome. We're staying in an area hotel, since the prices at the actual hotels in Foxwoods are exorbitant, but maybe that's just because we were trying to reserve with less than a week's advance.

Some good hangin' and chillin' last night at the Dockside, even though we are still mourning the Sox getting their asses swept out of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. This was only, of course, after we left the dreadful "Sam's Place" tourist trap craphole. Whose idea was that anyway?

And here are some hilarious webcomics. "Lunacy Abounds!"
http://www.marriedtothesea.com
http://www.alienlovespredator.com
I highly recommend both of them for some good chuckles.

Went to the Summer Shack (up in Alewife) for my "going-away" lunch with the folks from work yesterday. It was tasty. I had the clam chowder (very fresh, chunky, and fantastic), and the Rhode Island style calamari (crispy, not too greasy, hint of hotness with jalapeno peppers). Oh, and a well-executed blueberry pie for dessert. Should go back sometime. Thank you, that is all.

I must admit that I am often intrigued by new products, and succumb to the impulse to try out wacky new things. A few weeks ago, I was in our favorite Shaws (on Western Ave.) and saw this unusual-looking new beverage called Blak, produced by our friends at the Coca-Cola company ( press release ). At that point in time, I was intrigued, but able to resist. A few weeks later, however, as I was strolling through LaVerdes at MIT during my lunch break, I gave in to temptation.

Let me summarize the experience by saying that Blak is one of the grimmest beverages ever invented. Here's how they must make it at the factory: start with an empty can; add one half of the can's volume of coca-cola that is slightly flat from a 2-liter bottle that's been opened up for a while; fill the rest of the can up with a mug of slightly burnt and strong coffee that's been sitting in the coffee maker for about two days and is room temperature; add approximately 4 packets of sweet-n-low; mix. It boggles the mind how anyone thought this drink was a good idea. It's not that I don't like coffee or coffee drinks in general. I enjoy the Starbucks bottled coffee-flavored beverages very much. Anyway, is there anyone out there who actually has tried Blak and has not found it to be completely repulsive?

Supposedly, the roll-out started in France. One student said, probably in a typically French snooty accent: (quoted from this article) "I don't think it's a good idea. We are artisans in France, we are used to things like good coffee and fine wines, not things like this."

So I was in lovely Rochester, N.Y. this past weekend for my 10th high-school reunion and an event honoring a retiring english teacher. Rochester seems to be a little bit different every time I go there. There's a new soccer stadium, built with city/county funds in the hopes of being able to get the Rochester Raging Rhinos to become an MLS club. Kodak Park is mostly a wasteland now that they've pretty much laid everyone off and don't really make much film anymore. It's possible that I'll come up with some more things, but here are some notable things for now:

• Eating buffalo wings and pizza on a bar deck on Ridge Rd. overlooking Kodak while sipping on some delicious Genesee Beer. It was the quintessential Rochester afternoon.
• Molson gets three points. One for each establishment where I enjoyed its goodness. It's everywhere there, and at the reuinion we had two kegs of the stuff. Good times.

Back in school it was a tradition to build various flotation devices to get people out into the middle of the charles river to watch the 4th of July fireworks spectacular (e.g. the infamous cruftamaran incident). At some point last year, Scott decided that he was going to go all out and somehow turn a car into a boat for such use. Here are some pictures from last year, and here is a lengthy log with links to more pictures.

After the disappointment of last year, everyone was all the more determined to get the carboat launched and up the river for the fireworks this time around. The vessel was officially registered with the commonwealth of Massachusetts. The interior was cleaned and refinished, propulsion added in the form of a bicycle-driven-paddlewheel, steering system constructed, flotation foam added and shaped, and many other things were touched-up and/or improved upon. Unfortunately, several gears wore down early in the transit, sending the paddlewheel system into the weeds. Scott and Steve had actually spent the night on the boat earlier after a late-night launch to avoid the disappoinment of last year.

They got the boat to Josh's mooring by the Sonesta hotel in Cambridge, and after a good deal of work there on the sidewalk with hammer, file, drill, blowtorch, wrenches, etc., the paddlewheel was working again -- to the cheer of several bemused onlookers. We loaded up with refreshments and took the trip under the Longfellow bridge all the way past the MIT sailing pavillion (where we sang a rousing verse of the Engineer's Drinking Song), and to a spot near the Harvard Bridge for a good veiw of the fireworks. All in all, it made for one of the best July 4ths ever. Here is an album of pictures that I snapped this year during the work and launch of the vessel.

So this Sunday, July 10th, was a sports-packed day. The World Cup final and the Red Sox vs. White Sox marathon 19-inning game were going on at the same time through the afternoon. It was a great use for the picture-in-picture feature on the tube.

The Sox game was a good one. It was damn long though, and the outcome was not exactly to my liking. The Remdawg summed it up at one point by saying: "This game could go on until Thursday for all I care; this is great!" Papelbon blew the save, and the White Sox bullpen outlasted us. Good thing it wasn't a night game, or I would have been watching until 1:30am or something.

I tuned into the cup final somewhere around the 45th minute or so, and it was already deadlocked in a 1-1 tie. I had the feeling right away that this was at least going to be going into overtime. Of course I was rooting for the Italians, and just about fell off the couch after Zidane's no-class head-butt move. And then I just about fell off the couch again when the ref's got together and made the right call, giving him the red card. That right there pretty much sealed the fate of the French. Still, that's quite an ignominious way to go in the last game of your career as one of the game's "greats". Over at 2GD there's a great entry on the subject. With a hilarious gif animation.

And now onto the carboat. Foon as finally gotten around to putting up his account of the festivities, as well as some wonderful photos of the work. Some good ones of the thing in water, as well as a couple featuring your's truly.

Over this past weekend we stopped by our new apartment to sign the lease and fork over a truckload of money for first month's rent and the security deposit. While we were there, we got to don some hardhats and take a trip to our mostly-finished but still under construction unit (#1504). It turns out that the observations I had made from the cambridge side of the river and the harvard bridge were correct, and that the 15th floor is really the optimal level to get a view that includes MIT and Cambridge. Also, as predicted, the veiw of Fenway Park does indeed include the scoreboard, and the Citgo sign is featured front and center. Unfortunately, when snapping the pictures below, I neglected to turn slightly to the right and capture the view of the city of Boston proper (Prudential and Hancock towers and downtown).

The view from our windows (all of them face the same way, so this is the veiw out of any window):

What one sees when standing at the kitchen counter looking across the living room:

So at some point this afternoon, this server took it's well-worn uptime of 250+ days into the weeds. I was at work at the time, so could only speculate as to what may have happened. It would take a prolonged power outage to knock it completely offline, since it's protected by UPS, and that was definitely not what happened -- the router is plugged into the same UPS, and it had not gone down. My next guess was that the heat had gotten to be too much (it was about 101 degrees here today) and the AC had failed and there was some sort of fan failure and/or thermal shutdown.

I started the troubleshooting when I got home around 5pm, and immediately ruled out thermal shutdown since the fans were still all spinning and things didn't seem too warm in there. It had been warmer than usual in that room, so it's possible that the heat had taken out some other random component. Plugging in a monitor and keyboard and rebooting, I could see that the system would engage the monitor, and then beep wildly and/or fill the screen with garbage characters. Unfortunately, it's been a while since I've had to do any PC hardware troubleshooting, so I started barking up the wrong tree by replacing the processor, and then the entire motherboard and video card (I have spares of each for the server). Now, with most everything unplugged, and the new motherboard in there, I could get it to at least POST and get into the BIOS, but as soon as it started to initialize the SATA card in there, it would hang and the drives would make funny noises. Can you guess what the problem was? So as not to spoil the "surprise" and how the rest of my evening went, I'll continue this in section 2.

...Is in progress. Packers are here packing up a storm. We started painting the new place yesterday (actually she did most of the work), taking more measurements, and figuring out how all of our stuff is going to fit. We were even there for the first part of the ballgame. I verified that I could clearly see the jumbotron and follow the action of the game through that, the crowd noise, and the announcer (all audible from our living room). Stay tuned for more updates...

So I was on my treo today looking at pictures that I had stored on there, and up popped two that we took at our old apartment building on the day we moved out. Beautiful luxury condominiums at Longwood Towers my ass. It spurred me on to finish up this blog entry that I've been working on for a while:

Yes, if you want to pay $700,000 or so you too can live behind the same leaky, crumbling edifice that we were only paying $1950/month for before some clueless out-of-town real-estate mogul moved in and decided to "convert" to overpriced luxury condos. Yeah, yeah, they are "patching" the brickwork outside, and replacing the old windows with new (but still leaky from what I hear) windows, but it's all just a surface wash. "Lipstick on a pig" is a good description of what they've been trying to do. Spending millions of dollars on a fancy-pants lobby renovation -- which still includes, by the way, an unintentional, but sizable, water feature whenever it rains heavily -- and putting paint, plaster, hardwood floors and new appliances into old apartment units is probably not going to convince enough people to pay the abnormally high price, even for Brookline. My only hope is that sanity will prevail, and most people will probably see through the facade the moment they realize that most units don't even have laundry, and they would have to slum it down to the basement just like us poor apartment dwellers used to.

To Norman Radow and "The RADCO companies": I hope you go broke. You've taken a great historic building, one of the last bastions of pseudo-afforable housing in Brookline, and defecated all over it. I didn't really bear them too much ill will while we were happily residing there. Even though they used heavy-handed and questionable legal tactics in unsuccessful attempts to push current residents aside to make way for the "renovations," I still somewhat respected their right to make a buck or two. But now, when I take into account the thousands of dollars that we had to spend in order to move (into a much nicer and cheaper place, by the way), and multiply that by the hundreds of other residents who probably went through a similar process and may not have been as financially secure as us, I think they deserve every bit of what's coming to them.

They spent $110 million to buy the old dame, and then what's estimated as another $30 millon to "renovate" it. Those costs have probably skyrocketed since then. Since they couldn't just bully us residents and kick us out, a one-year facade repair project has balooned to 2.5 years and is still less than 75% complete. "Historic Longwood Towers just two years away from opening!" is the latest news. Professional designers were brought in to pick out the thousand dollar chairs for the lobby, the ugly artwork, stupid chandelier, marble floor, gay-looking sconces, and other trappings of artificial wealth. Yes, you heard me right, artificial. It's like 1999 all over again, and the bubble is about to burst. See, the awful truth is that not enough people actually want to pay $700,000+ for what is really a $2500/month apartment in a crappy old building. It doesn't matter if the valets have walkie-talkies or if there might be a driving range, or an indoor putting range put in at some point in the future (yeah, like that's ever going to happen).

The bell is tolling for all of the condo moguls. Not just Radow. "The increasingly troubled Bay State home and condo sales market is racing into a downturn that could take years, not months, to work itself out," according to the Herald. So, brace yourselves, home owners, buyers, and sellers. And most importantly of all: buyer beware!

Tenant discontent complicates Longwood conversion -- Boston Business Journal Article
Longwood Towers Tenants Association -- website
Longwood Towers Condominiums -- official website
Longwood Towers (brookline) to go condo over coming months (hehe, months? yeah...) -- blog entry

Summer technically ended over a week ago, but I think that this weekend can be considered the effective last weekend of summer here in New England. The Red Sox finish their pitifully disappointing season today, and the weather will quickly take a turn to fall and winter. This dude known as Lopez, Mike's friend from college, was in town this weekend with his lady friend, who introduced us to another friend of hers that happens to live in the area, and there was much fun to be had -- including the Scottographer and LBJ as well.

Friday night, we joined up in the north end for some good times, ending up at Hurricane O'Reilly's for the evening. For some reason, lately I've been driving to places lately instead of taking the subway. This is probably because I have no desire to necessarily worry about rushing to the station by 12:30am, when the trains stop running. There was much drinking, and certain members of our party may have over-indulged a bit, but shall remain nameless. Luckily, I had driven and laid off the booze, so was able to shuttle said partygoers back home safely.

I had no idea that Harpoon had a brewery here in Boston, and Saturday started with a long afternoon of beer and music at the Harpoon Oktoberfest ("poonfest" in first picture below). We met up with Melissa (in picture below with Mike) and had several beers of various varieties after taking a stroll through the brewery. I was a fan of the UFO Hefeweizen, but I know that certain folks bear some sort of animosity towards unfiltered wheat beer. After the poonfest we ventured back to the North Station area and were able to just get to Harp early enough to get in before the line stopped moving. This was good, because The Zoo was (were?) playing, and it was a heck of a good show. Unfortunately, a downside was that Kristy (my wife) was working this weekend, so missed all the festivities. Alas, it's back to work tomorrow, and onwards to fall.

It's extremely rare that I meet someone who hails from my hometown (Rochester, N.Y.). Last night I did, and we briefly reminisced about Nick Tahoe's garbage plates, good chicken wings, The Distillery, R.I.T. (all bricks, no chicks), The Alexander St. Pub, and other hangouts and such. Brought to mind a funny list that I had come across a while ago. What follows are some selections from "You Know You're From Rochester, NY When...":

• The only thing at the annual May Lilac Festival is snow.
• You can't swim at the beach.
• Toronto is about 70 miles away, but it takes four hours to get there.
• The name "Greater Rochester International Airport" is bigger than the airport itself.
• Your baby's first word is "Wegmans".
• You ask lifetime residents where the George Eastman House is, but they don't know either.
• You order a white hot and a pop, and the counterman knows what you're talking about.
• You can go to any mall on a Saturday and see at least 5 people you either work with, went to school with or dated.
• When 18+ inches of snow falls overnight, but you never thought of NOT going to work.
• You are perplexed when friends from other cities come to visit and want to "see the sights".
• You define summer as three months of bad sledding.
• Halloween is snowed out with great regularity.
• Half the change in your pocket is Canadian, eh.
• The thought of eating a "garbage plate" makes your mouth water.
• The worst four-letter word you could say is "Fuji".
• "Waking up with the Wease" doesn't mean that you have a respiratory infection.
• A flagpole strung with white lights seems like an acceptable alternative to a municipal Christmas tree.

That Monday Night Football game (Bears vs. Cardinals) was a head-scratcher. Don't get me wrong, it was one of the most notable games I've ever had the pleasure of watching. It was a freaky game, just not a very good game. A 20-point-late-third-quarter comeback with no offensive scoring at all (first time that's happened in the history of the NFL, by the way)? Winning a game where Rex Grossman threw four interceptions, and lost two fumbles? That missed field goal at the end? Wacky stuff. Team of destiny, or did the Cardinals just send this one into the weeds? Who knows. One could actually understand why Dennis Green was so tweaked in his postgame "interview" though. Here's the clip on youtube.

Kristy and I saw The Departed over the weekend at some point. It was a fine movie. Probably one of the better flicks I've seen in a while. Damon, Nicholson, Wahlberg, Sheen, Baldwin, etc. made up a great cast. The authentic Boston flavor made it even better (real scenery, since it was mostly filmed here, and some Dropkick Murphys rocking out as well). I highly recommend it. I didn't even mind the ending that some other people I know have took some issue with. I will not spoil it for anyone though.

Well, I'm off to Champaign-Urbana for a few days to visit niece, nephew, brother-in-law, etc. and also to visit with some former colleagues at the UIUC. Also, I can't exactly put my finger on it, but for some reason I dislike the Cardinals. I'm mostly ambivalent towards the National League in general, but maybe it's because the Cardinals fans in Champaign-Urbana (and there actually were a decent amount of them, being only two hours or so from St. Lous) when we lived there had the reputation of being the "hicks" compared to the more populous Cubs and White Sox fans. Just a thought.

If you notice a lack of entries on this fine blog lately, it's because I'm bitter. I spent a good amount of time the other day writing up quite a nice new entry, only to accidentally close my browser window and lose everything. Makes me not want to enter anything in text fields on the interweb for a little while.

So starting on Saturday, we'll be on a week's vacation. This will involve a nice drive all the way from Boston to Champaign, IL (Tolono actually), and then a drive back from there to Boston, stopping at my mom's place in western New York on the way back. Should be loads of holiday fun! Maybe I'll have some time to blog a bit while on the road?

Well, that trip's over and it seemed long. Some highlights included seeing some people in Champaign (At Joe's no less) that I hadn't seen in a while (see picture below), and visiting the Original Candy Kitchen in small-town Williamson, NY for lunch, some candy, and plenty of Americana.

Here's me at Joe's with (from L to R) Warner, Charley and Mike. Apparently Brian and Paul didn't make it into the picture, and it was taken before Kristy arrived. I got to try out a few exotic shots, including the "CCSO," which apparently consists of Cuervo, Blue Curacao, Sour mix, and Orange Juice.

100 Wonders of the World

Apparently, I've only seen five (12,25,84, 88 and 99). Although it's possible if the planned vacation next year pans out I'll be adding at least another three. Looks like there's a lot more traveling to do for anyone who wants to catch all 100.

So, this past weekend was the world famous annual MIT IAP Mystery Hunt, and for the second year in a row I participated whole-heartedly. Our team, The Chaotic-Neutral Mid-Afternoon Archers What Arch At Teatime, did fairly well. Apparently we finished in approximately 6th place ordered by how many puzzles were completed, but we were really only two or three hard puzzles and maybe a couple of "a-ha!" moments away from being right up there.

The hunt is now archived online, so you can go ahead and try your hand at some puzzles. I'd recommend taking a peek at Blather, and I Love These 80. I suppose that those are two of my favorites, but it's hard to remember or keep track with so many puzzles over the course of the 2.5-day or so event.

Quinn was kind enough to take and put up some pictures from the weekend, including several of us toiling away in our enclave in Building 56, as well as us partying afterwards at putz (EC 2nd west), where several of us spent our undergraduate days. There was some nice reminiscing to go around, as well as plenty of "back in the day" stories. Supposedly the hall is putting up a wiki so we can document some of the oral and written history of putz, but I suppose that's for another blog entry.

Picture it: voters have just elected Bill Clinton to a second term in the white house, the 100th olympic games are over and the images of Kerri Strug winning the gold medal for the US in gymnastics on a dislocated ankle, and Mohammad Ali lighting the torch are fading, and the Unabomber turned out to be some crazy dude named Ted Kaczynski.

It's the fall of 1996, I'm a freshman in college, and although my memory is fuzzy (it being over a decade ago), this is when I discovered the Border Cafe in Harvard Square. There's not quite anything like the warm feeling we get from comfort and long-term familiarity. See: comfortable old shoes, your favorite old t-shirt, the brand of cereal that you've been eating since before you could walk, your best friend from childhood, your hometown, etc. For me, you can add to that list the Border Cafe. It's a crowded, wait-outside-in-the-cold-on-weekends type place with a loud, umm..."rustic?" atmosphere. The drinks are sort of watered down, the service quality is hit-or-miss, and I've had somewhat better mexican food (even in Boston, which seems to lack mexicans for some reason as compared to Champaign IL). Irregardless, I've developed a strange attachment to the place at some point over the past decade.

My standby until very recently (thanks to the scottographer), were the "Shredded Beef Enchiladas." Actually, at one point they used to be called "Jose's Shredded Beef Enchiladas," but apparently Jose is no longer with us. These days, the chimichurri steak has caught my fancy. The portions, in general, are excellent, and the homemade chips and salsa are delightful. Also, I'd like to give two more points to Mrhe for introducing me to a concoction known as the "blue margarita." It's just what it sounds like -- a margarita that is blue (presumably because of the addition of Blue Curacao). On that note, actually I'll also give two points to the blue margarita itself, on the basis of it being so darn tasty. One predictable and consistent downside, however, is that, for example, I was there last night and over 24 hours later my coat still smells of mexican food and spices.

Anyway, writing a full review of the Border Cafe would be like trying to write a review of Nick Tahoes (another favorite institution of mine, and many other western New Yorkers). It's a place I've been going to with old and new friends for years -- no I didn't meet my wife there, but we sure went on, and continue to go on plenty of dinner dates there. So lets raise a glass (filled with a bright blue margarita, if you wish) to the Border Cafe.

With a nod to foonyor, who used to send these out occasionally back in the day.

• ^ - Pi Tau Zeta: For whatever reason (primarily trying to get my computer back), I've had the opportunity to hang out on 2ndwest way too much this week. It turns out that I'm past the point of being depressed at how old I've become and can now appreciate the nostalgia and "ambiance". I guess the kids are alright after all.
• V - Messy Apartment: I'm lazy and Kristy works 80 hours per week. This is not a good recipe for keeping the place clean. I'm ashamed to say that I still haven't managed to get the christmas tree down. We figured that there should be a new law forbidding people to still have their christmas trees up for the Super Bowl.
• ^ - My Job: A few interesting projects, relatively low stress, not too many messes to clean up. It's almost like I'm getting back to the roots of what being a sysadmin is actually all about. I'd recommend a similar change of scenery for anyone else in the profession worried about getting burnt out.
• = - BWH Cafeteria: Delicious food available just downstairs every day for a reasonable price. Unfortunately, I surmise that this is why I've gained 10-15 pounds since starting work here.
• ^ - Email Archive: I dug out my old email archive recently. There's nothing quite like reading stuff you sent out, or supposedly read 8 years ago, but have no recollection of.
• V - Hanging Out: Hanging out was at a minimum this weekend. Here's to hoping that that situation improves in the future.
• V - Scottoway: Scojo really needs an actual interactive web system (some people may even call such a thing a "blog"). He posts some good stuff on his page, but there's no way for the rest of us to add our own two cents and join the conversation.
• ^ - Da Bears: The Bears are going to put a hurtin' on Peyton and the Colts this Sunday. Bear down.
• ^ - Grill 23: Kristy and I went to Grill 23 this past Monday to celebrate our pseudo-anniversary (10 years!). It deserves it's own blog entry, but I think it may be my favorite eating establishment. We've been there a few times and it never disappoints. I had the Kobe Beef cap steak. Yum.

16 ~60GB Maxtor ATA hard drives up for grabs today. I'll bring them over to 2ndwest at some point after work with the cart and TV. There has been some interest, so as to avoid a brawl upon my arrival, please comment here if you want to reserve one or more. First come first served.

I'm not exactly sure why, but there are a whole bunch of new shows that have become season passes on the TiVo and DVR recently:

• The Sopranos-- Thanks to a twice-weekly showing on A&E starting with the first season, I'm really starting to get into it. Television at its finest? I'd seen a few episodes from later seasons previously on DVD and liked what I saw. I'm considering buying the future seasons on DVD after watching the remainder of Season 1 on A&E. (A)
• House-- House has it's good points and bad. Sometimes it gets too repetitive and the schtick just gets old fast. But, hey, it's better than most stuff out there. (B-)
• Studio 60-- It seems like there should have been more episodes by now. I had high hopes for this, and indeed the show has surpassed my expectations. It also seems to be getting better as the season wears on, or maybe that's just because we're getting more familiar with the characters, etc. (A)
• My Name is Earl-- The comedy is hit-or-miss, but it's a good counterpart to The Office. (B-)
• The Office-- Funny. Funny in strange ways sometimes. Yes, I've seen the british version, and I'm not as big of a fan of it. I'm not sure why though, since I'm a fan of british humor in other places -- heck, Red Dwarf is one of my all-time favorite shows. (B+)
• Heroes-- I missed the first couple of episodes, so was a tad lost when I first came across it. I'm all caught up now, and "wrapped up" in the action, so to speak. Well done, folks, well done. (A)

Well, here it is, entry #100. I had no idea that I'd be so prolific with this blog. In fact, I think my original prediction was that I'd start out like a house on fire, and then at some point stop writing altogether. Instead, the blog has turned into a neat place to jot down ideas and stuff as they come to mind. Lots of interesting things that pop into my head end up here that would otherwise get forgotten and I wouldn't ever get to collate them, much less share them with you fair readers.

So, here's to at least a few hundred more in 2007!

So, at some point a couple of weeks ago, I started re-playing GTA San Andreas from the beginning. Having already gone through the game once when it first came out, I can take the time to appreciate some of its finer points. The first word one has to use to describe this game is "epic." I don't have my stats handy here, but I think it took somewhere between 100-200 hours of playing time to beat it, and that may not count restoring from save spots. So, I've been playing for a couple weeks now, a few hours on sporadic nights, and I think I might be just about 25-33% through the main plot of the game.

I've also gotten to appreciate a lot more of the plot, acting and voices of the game -- featuring Samuel L. Jackson, James Woods, Ice-T, Chris Penn, Peter Fonda, David Cross, Wil Wheaton, Andy Dick, Axl Rose, and others. For the full list of who plays what, it's neat to check out the page on IMDB. Some quotes from the game are pretty darn good too.

Tommy Smith (Axl Rose): It's like I always say, you can cry about the miscarriage, or keep drinking.

CJ: (In response to an obvious question) Does the pope shit in the woods?
Cesar: Why you keep asking me that, holmes? I told you, I dunno. Where the holiness does his business, is his business.

Tommy Smith (Axl Rose): Weren't the '70s great? Back then, you could bang anything you wanted, take all the drugs you wanted, smoke, drink and hate the country. What's happening these days is a disgrace. Nobody's protesting any more, nobody can get good 'ludes and rock bands don't wear good makeup.

Random Pedestrians on Street: You're like my asshole, always holding up shit!

CJ:(while falling off of a tall building or cliff) I hate gravity!

This week just seems to be going soooooo slooooowwwwwwwly. I think I know what the problem is. We had such a good time at the Cantab Lounge on Tuesday night -- good bluegrass, good company, friendly bartender, no further damage to the car -- that this almost seems like two weeks in one. Taking a break in the middle of the week for a good time that's usually reserved for the weekend just throws everything off. Does that make any sense?

So, anything going on this weekend? Also, it was time for some housekeeping, so I updated some stuff in the right column over there. Added a couple of site links, fixed some redirected links, and welcomed a few new and not-so-new folks to the blog-roll (cheers to anne, lb, rooroo, mchesnut and paul levy).

• ^ - Uburger: This place is "da bomb." Best frappes I've had in a while, and probably the best frappe within close walking distance of my apartment (it's right there in not-so-lovely Kenmore Square). I've taken a recent liking to the "boom burger." It's the regularly-delicious ground-fresh-on-site beef patty, with fresh tomato and lettuce as well as fried jalapeno rings and a spicy chipotle sauce. I get it without the cheese of course. The fries are damn good too. Also, for those not in the area, a "frappe" is a milkshake. Well, sort of. Specifically it's one actually made with ice cream. I shall try a chicken sandwich on my next visit.
• ^ - El Pelon: This place is, thankfully, also right down the street from my apartment. I've become a bit of a burrito-eater lately. During my time in Champaign, I frequented Qdoba, as well a fine assortment of authentic mexican establishments. I've also enjoyed Chipotle, and the other usual Boston establishments. While working at MIT, I had Anna's Taqueria at least twice every week. I think I'm coming to the conclusion so far that El Pelon is the best of the bunch. Maybe I'll refine this as I broaden my horizons, but so far they are second to none. Chipotle's pretty darn good too, though -- and their whole sustainable-agriculture/environmentalist/natural hippie tack seems appealing and authentic.
• V - Harpoon St. Patrick's Festival: Whoa, crazy crowded -- even more than the Poonfest from last fall. It was quite cold too, and since I neglected to get a "Friend of Harpoon" card, we gave up after waiting in a slow-moving line for a long long time. As a consolation prize, we went to the abovementioned uburger for dinner though.
• = - Evacuation Day: Any plans for the holiday this Saturday? Corned-beef, cabbage, and Irish soda bread anyone?
• ^ - The phrase "Git 'R Done": I think I need to start working this into everyday conversation some more.
• V - Daylight Savings Time: WTF? No, the world didn't end, but losing an hour sucks. Also, patching all of our servers wasn't so much fun. Luckily there were no major incidents. I wonder how the folks over at MIT fared with their Solaris 2.6 servers and critical boxes running OpenVMS and Tru64 operating systems that are off maintenance and probably have no patches even available. I have an old server that I help folks out with in Champaign that still runs Solaris 7, so no patch available for them either. So far, it doesn't seem to be causing any problems though that the box isn't in the right time-zone anymore. Whatever, the worst-case scenario is that some stuff might be off for an hour for a couple weeks.

Firstly, I apologize to all blog readers for the outage this morning and early-afternoon. There was an IP address/DNS snafu that I need not go into.

My photo album page has finally been updated to include just about all recent (and many not-so-recent) photo collections that I have. Of course, this also now includes the photos taken with my camera (by me and other people) at our gathering at LB's place in "Tha Quinzz" for St. Patty's Day 2007. Please be patient, my upstream bandwidth is particularly slow of late, and these pictures are somewhat large (maybe I'll fix that).

I think that mrhe first introduced me to the concept of Library Thing in an entry in his blog back a while ago. I finally got around to checking it out last week and ended up staying up late and spending a few hours putting in my entire library. Now anyone can see what books are on my shelves. When I was done, I realized that I really don't have as many books as I thought. I like books. We've got several bookshelves filled with them, but really there are only about 130 total. I also realized that it's a bit of an eclectic collection. I added a little "widget" to the sidebar of this blog that displays a random handful of books out of my library. Cool stuff.

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone of the potential rig at my place tomorrow prior to LB's b-day blast at an-tua-nua. There's no need to bring anything, unless you need/want some sort of unusual beer or liquor, as my fridge and bar are both currently well-stocked. I figure we'll order pizzas or something (I currently have a free-delivery coupon from the Pizzeria Uno down the street ). Unless someone brings a few gallons of frozen beef stew or something.

Cheers,
Benoc

• ^ - Popeye's: Popeye's has opened their first branch (as far as I can tell) in Boston, and it's at Kenmore Square, just down the street from my apartment. Now, I'm sure some fair readers of this blog will have horrible, nasty things to say about Popeye's for all sorts of reasons, but nevertheless, I give them a solid up arrow. I remember as an undergrad, Kristy and I driving out to the service area on the Mass Pike that had a Popeye's, since that was, at the time, the only one anywhere near Boston.
• ^ - 38 pitches: Curt Schilling definitely hasn't been at a loss for words on his blog. Let's hope he keeps it up through the season -- there's really been some fascinating stuff on there. Supposedly the dude spends a large amount of time on the computer anyway, participating in forums and playing MMORPGs.
• V - The unsustainable american lifestyle: Man, I bet it must suck to have to use a car to get around all the time, doesn't it? I can't imagine being trapped in my car for an appreciable part of the day just to get to and from work -- and having to pay hundreds of dollars per month just for the privilege of filling the tank.
• ^ - Grand Chau Chau: This place belongs in the hall of fame of chinese restaurants. It is second to none. It's (arguably) within walking distance on a nice day, and that's what we did yesterday after catching a movie (Shooter). Damn tasty chinese food. It's the real deal.
• = - TOD: We need to do a better job of making the distinction between real, well-planned Transit Oriented Development, which I still believe can be a good thing, and doesn't have to simply be a sprawl-contributor, and Transit Proximate Development, which is a wolf in sheep's clothing. I had a nice conversation with someone about this last week, but have just now gotten around to actually organizing my thoughts.
• V - Qmail: Qmail sucks. It's complete disregard for any sort of standard as to how the rest of the world and all of the other MTAs work and are administrated is mind boggling. It's a shame too. I'm sure that DJB is a brilliant person, and the architecture of Qmail is very good and solid. But, dear lord it's a frustrating technology trap that hasn't been updated since sometime in 1998, and requires custom 3rd-party modules to even obtain some semblance of operability on today's internet. Please, Qmail fanboys (I know you're out there, and will come across this), save yourself the effort and refrain from arguing about it. Now, if you want to argue about Emacs vs. VI, that's another matter...

So, I've been re-playing GTA: San Andreas for a while now, and got all the way through the San Fiero mission strands, but decided to take a break when it came time to do the three Zero missions. I think it was probably the memory of spending many frustrating hours on those missions the first time I played the game that filled me with dread.

Nevertheless, I am pleased to announce that last night, in less than an hour's playing time I completed both remote-control plane missions (shooting them down with the minigun from the roof, and flying one to take out delivery people), only needing roughly two or three attempts each. I think the wide-screen television helped a whole lot with both of them. I seemed to get much better aim and sight of the planes when I sat up on the coffee table right up close to the screen. It was definitely a better experience than the hours that I recall spending attempting to beat those particular two missions the last time I played them (as anyone who has played through the game can attest to). Anyway, it's on to Las Venturas!

So this Wednesday (April 11th), Red Sox rookie/japanese-import phenom Daisuke Matsuzaka (Dice-K), makes his home pitching debut against the Seattle Mariners and Ichiro Suzuki at Fenway Park, approximately a few hundred yards directly out my apartment window.

Kristy and I will be watching the game and enjoying the Fenway ambiance and the hope of a new season. Please accept our cordial invitation to enjoy the game, called by Don and Jerry on NESN in all HD glory at our humble abode. The usual baseball food will be provided (Sausage of various varieties) as well as other goodies and beverages. Feel free to bring along anything (or anybody) you may want. The game starts at 7pm, so festivities should start earlier than that (6 -6:30?) if possible. Let me know what you think.

Thanks to my former co-worker and vserver guru andyburn, this blog, and my website, are both now running on a virtual server hosted somewhere other than underneath the desk in my guest bedroom. I should get around to sending him a fruit basket, or maybe some wine. Downloading those large images should be much faster, and we won't have any more of the comcast DNS snafus that caused some outages in the past. Also, I took the opportunity to upgrade the server to Movable Type v3.34.

Now, if anyone out there (*cough* johnston *cough*) needs someplace to host a blog, drop me a line. The Movable Type blog software is really quite nice, slick, powerful, etc. and I'd have no problems setting up additional blog accounts on the system (http://blogs.hejweca.org) for anyone who may require such service. Onwards and upwards!

So last night, for the 7th year in a row, my old hall at MIT put on the "CryoFAC" event. Following a tradition started in 2000, lots of ice cream of various flavors were manufactured from scratch and frozen with liquid nitrogen. Good stuff. Just for nostalgia's sake, here's the advertisement for the very first CryoFAC:

From: "Scott Johnston" 
To: 
Subject: EC CryoFAC -- TODAY -- 5:30 PM -- Talbot Lounge
Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2000 03:34:17 -0500

  TODAY TODAY TODAY TODAY TODAY TODAY TODAY TODAY TODAY TODAY TODAY TODAY

                    EAsT camPUS and Second West present

                                  T H E

               _____  ___  __  __  ____    ____  ___     _____
              / ___/ / _ \ \ \/ / / __ \  / __/ / _ |   / ___/
             / /__  / , _/  \  / / /_/ / / _/  / __ |  / /__
             \___/ /_/|_|   /_/  \____/ /_/   /_/ |_|  \___/


    ice cream * toppings * techno music * trippy lighting * prefrosh

       Friday April 7  --  5:30 PM  --  Talbot Lounge, East Campus

             liquid nitrogen  +  dry ice  +  dairy products


                            Ice Cream Menu:

                    =+=  French Chocolate Silk  =+=

          =+=  I-Can't-Believe-I'm-Not-Dead-Yet Vanilla  =+=

                    =+=  Strawberry Putzalicious  =+=

                       =+=  Potent Peppermint  =+=


                        all-natural flavorings
                          secret Putz recipes
                 batches made fresh in only 10 minutes
                    only the finest liquid nitrogen
                      served chilled at -320 deg F


                         Bring your whole hall.

              Prefrosh welcome from all corners of campus.

And an album of pictures that I took while I was over there this year:

Back in Boston after a few days in the Big Apple. I'm not going to recount the whole trip, but Here's a list:

• Sushi at Akita
• A couple of games of Stratego with Dennis
• Mets game at Shea ($9/ticket, day of game)
• Off-Broadway show (Be)
• Central Park
• Gracie Mansion
• Apple Store 5th Avenue
• New York Style Pizza (and garlic knots!)
• Awesomely amazing brunch at Norma's at Le Parker Meridien
• Sox sweep Yankees, and interestingly enough "Yankee's Suck" chants abounded at the Mets game

So, a whole mess of people came over to watch the Sox' losing effort against the Yankees this past Saturday, and it was a good time. For the record, I highly recommend the "Hot and Spicy" varietal of Johnsonville Brats. After the game was over and most of the folks left for some crazy party in Sullivan Square, us remaining individuals sat around watching the tube and drinking some of Anne's friend Craig's very fine home-brew (thanks Craig!).

The topic of Guitar Hero came up, and how I was thinking about picking up a copy for my PS2. Now, here's where living across the street from a Best Buy comes in handy, and is somewhat dangerous. About 5 minutes later, we had the goods and were off and running with the game.

Several hours of pure awesomeness ensued, and Amanda has some photos up of us rocking the joint. So, by now I've got everything beat on "medium" level (and I must say that my "Free Bird" is coming along quite nicely), but I want to get some more playing time in and really master the rig before moving up to the next skill level. Wish me luck.

An interesting footnote to this story is the Joel Zumaya story. Apparently Joel, a fire-throwing pitcher for the Tigers, missed a few games of the '06 ALCS due to "soreness" from playing the game too much. I suppose it's something to keep in mind, but then again I'm not a major league pitcher.

Well, first thing tomorrow I'm off on the 'ol iron bird to lovely Champaign, Illinois. A consulting customer out there is upgrading an old crusty Ultra10 running Sol 7 to a shiny new Dell RHEL 5 server. This should be a bit of an adventure though, since nobody's sure exactly what all is running on the old box, with various web sites, cgi scripts, content management systems, movable-type/mysql installations, etc. Loads of fun. Wish me luck.

Also, since it turns out that Steer Roast is tonight, I've got a chance to stop by and check it out, after missing it for all these years. Markus Feldmeirius is building some sort of lighted floor thing covered in sand (from what I could gather from talking to him about it), and the usual Senior House lunacy will be in full effect as well, of course. Lunacy abounds.

The trip to Champaign-Urbana was relatively uneventful. The job was a success, although there are still a couple of loose ends to tie up (migrating from listmaint to mailman, and coming up with some web-based password-changing app). On Saturday, I met up with ck for some Lil' Porgy's BBQ (which was excellent, BTW), and some crazy Guitar Hero II action. I capped off the trip by having a lunch outing with the 'ol CITES gang at El Toro II (one of Champaign's many many good mexican establishments), and then going to see Hot Fuzz with ck and chas. Good movie. I highly recommend it.

Finally, I downloaded (uploaded?) the pictures from the camera and made an album of our trip to New York City (including a visit to Shea Stadium), and some random pictures from a couple of Sox games at Fenway that Kristy and I went to over the past couple of weeks. The big goof in the mets shirt is my friend Dennis (who was kind enough to let us stay with him).

Firstly, I highly recommend the champagne Sunday brunch at Foxwoods Casino. We took the 1.5hour drive down there this morning purely for the brunch. Obviously, as you can probably tell from the name, champagne is included. Also present are the usual brunch fares (toast, waffles, omelet station, carved turkey, sausage, bacon, hash browns, etc.). But, from there the buffet traverses the boundary into the sublime. I enjoyed several slices of roast beef tenderloin, rack of lamb, fresh made sushi, lobster tails, and other yummy delights. At $55/person it aint cheap, but I definitely think it's worth it.

Also, since the Sox game today was rain-delayed, it still hadn't started by the time we arrived back in Boston. This meant we were able to wait for the first pitch and head down to get some leftover $5 tickets (somewhat long story, but it's a special deal that Kristy gets from her employer). We settled for what the ticket-window dude called "wheelchair space on the roof." It turns out that we ended up in two folding chairs up in the State Street Pavilion. Sweetness. And a pretty good game to boot.

Now for some more randomness, here are some songs/albums that have made their way up to the top of my iPod playlist lately:

• 25 or 6 to 4 - Chicago
• Some Loud Thunder/Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (albums) - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
• Mr. Blue Sky - ELO
• Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? - Chicago
• Walking On the World (album) - Jake Armerding

As you may recall from this extensive previous entry about the longwood towers condominium conversion, I don't have much love for my former apartment building, now mostly-empty overpriced luxury condominium complex. I was amused at the following news story that I picked up off the web tonight:

BROOKLINE, Mass. -- Thieves are caught on camera looking for any means possible to steal an ATM.

Omar Ali Credle, a former Longwood Towers employee, and another accomplice allegedly used a wheelchair to cart off an entire teller machine on the night of April 18 from the apartment building where Credle used to work.

To pull off the heist, police say the pair stole a swipe card for the complex as well as keys to a tenant's vehicle before using the wheelchair to make off with the machine that they estimate contained close to $1,800.

Wow. Lot of good those security cameras and 24-hour night watchpersons are doing there. I've got to say that for whatever reason this made my day. Luxury living indeed. But wait, there's more...

What's this I find while doing a Google search looking for more info? Dear Lord, if only we had shelled out the cash to buy a piece of the dream in that crumbling old hole, these people could have been our neighbors! (literally, they apparently live in B402, we lived in B404). Peachy keen!

So, take that roo roo and mrhe

Apologies to all for not blogging recently. It's not that I haven't had much to blog about, but rather there are certain exciting things going on that I probably shouldn't blog about until I know their ultimate outcome. Some of you readers probably already know what I'm alluding to. Hopefully I'll be able to spill the beans some point soon, otherwise I suppose it was just not "meant to be."

Some things that I'm currently stoked about/for:

• 27 June 07 - Live Free or Die Hard - Here's a trailer for the next (last?) sequel in the most awesomely awesome action movie franchise evarrrr.
• 11 July 07 - San Francisco - I just heard the news today that I'll most likely be taking a trip to SF for a "visit" at this time. I remain cautiously optimistic.
• 23 Sep 07 - The War - Ken Burns' epic 14-hour-long documentary on World War II has apparently been 6+ years in the making. There's a trailer/teaser up on the website.
• 16 Oct 07 - GTA IV - Check out the first trailer on their website. Awesomeness. I'm such a GTA junkie that this will also be when I buy a next-gen console (although I haven't 100% decided which one). This game is so anticipated, that they've pre-announced that the next trailer will be available on the site on 6/28.

There's a great article in Poplar Mechanics this month by Adam Savage (of Mythbusters and movie FX fame) celebrating the 25th anniversary of Blade Runner, which was released on June 25th, 1982. Now I know that some of you blog readers are not, for whatever reason, fans of this movie. I can't, to save my life, imagine why not though. Perhaps you should give it another chance. The truly amazing thing, is that at some point this year you will be able to.

The definitive director's release of the film is being re-released on DVD/Blu-ray/HD-DVD this fall, and a limited theatrical run will also happen. Yes, that's right, the word is that we'll be able to see it up on the big screen. Now, I have nothing against the c.1992 "director's cut," which contains the actual, definitive ending of the movie (not the phony "happy ending" that the original studio tacked on to the initial release), but apparently Ridley Scott wasn't terribly thrilled with it, and wanted to devote more time to this release. Anyway, I'm stoked. This might be the reason to finally upgrade to Blu-ray down the road.

I had the pleasure of traveling up to LB's fiance's near-beach house up in Salisbury, MA this past Saturday. Generally speaking, it was a good time. The weather was a tad chilly, but the sun occasionally peeked out, and there was plenty of beef to be had for all. Unfortunately, due to a massive upset in the first round of the beirut tournament, I was in no mood to take any more pictures. The few that I did end up taking sum up the rest of the day pretty well.

So, due to various issues, the car boat could not be fetched from its resting place in New Hampshire in time for a voyage on the Charles this year to watch the fireworks for the 4th and celebrate Scott's birthday.

Instead, a bunch of us just hopped into various rafts (which we hastily patched at the last minute and crossed our fingers) and paddled down the river with brute force. Unfortunately, we launched a tad late, so we were still powering down the Charles towards the Mass Ave. bridge for most of the fireworks. Still, in spite of the rain and wetness, it was quite a view -- and better than just sitting at home watching out the window.

Some pictures from my recent short trip to S.F. are up at http://www.hejweca.org/benoc/sanfran2007/sanfran2007.html

Thanks to all the folks who visited while I was there, and kept me company (you know who you are). Also, it's good to be back home.

On someone's impulsive suggestion the other night, after a delicious meal of uburger, we went to the local bowling alley. It had been a while since I've gone bowling, and yeah, it was fun. Unfortunately, I've pretty much forgotten how to bowl. See, back in the day I used to be quite the pro.

I usually stay away from the whole meme thing, but I'm bored as whoa today, so why the heck not. Courtesy of Amanda:

• What were you doing 10 years ago?
  Summer of 1997. It was right after my freshman year in college. I was working for the summer down in Ft. Meade, Maryland for "the man." Driving a shiny new SUV and fixing ancient pascal code for Y2K compliance. Remember Y2K?
• What were you doing 1 year ago?
  Just starting my new job here at BWH after quitting MIT. Other than that, pretty much the same thing I'm doing now. Oh, I was embroiled in a tenant-landlord dispute at our old apartment with broken windows and leaking walls that was being converted to condos. Going to the usenix ATC conference here in Boston.
• Five snacks you enjoy
  
  1. Jelly Bellies (preferably the large variety jug from Costco)
  2. Emerald Nuts
  3. Cape Cod Potato Chips
  4. Chocolate covered cherries
  5. Swedish fish (but only red ones)
• Five songs that you know all the lyrics to
  
  1. Dre Day - (Dr. Dre)
  2. Friends in Low Places - (Garth Brooks)
  3. Boot Scootin' Boogie - (Brooks and Dunn)
  4. Always - (Bon Jovi)
  5. Tonight - (from West Side Story)
• Five things you would do if you were a millionaire
  
  1. Pay off this huge amount of debt. Duh!
  2. Give some to various charities
  3. Set plenty aside for annual nice vacations
  4. Get a new computer
  5. Get a fancy leather couch like scojo has
• Five bad habits
  
  1. Staying up too late
  2. Sleeping in too late
  3. Not getting any exercise
  4. Eating unhealthy crap all the time
• Five things you like doing
  
  1. Daydreaming
  2. Buying things
  3. Flying by the seat of my pants
  4. Pickin' Tuesdays
  5. Being a guitar hero
• Five things you would never wear again
  
  1. That old sweatshirt mapping the battles and events of the civil war
  2. My dorky DVD/CSS circumvention code shirt
  3. Black jeans
  4. Velcro shoes
  5. 3/4-length Triple Fat Goose coat
• Five favourite toys
  
  1. Playstation 2
  2. Tivo
  3. Fancy multifunction remote control
  4. Game Boy (even though I don't have mine anymore)
  5. My Treo

Sorry for being re-miss with the blogging lately. I've been hardcore into Rocking the '80s lately.

As I mentioned a while ago, I moved the hosts www.hejweca.org and www.intotheweeds.com to a virtual server co-located somewhere at Andy's roadkill.com. And that's pretty awesome. But, I still use my server at home for webmail.hejweca.org and mail.hejweca.org, and some other things -- including a WebDAV server for sharing iCal calendar data. Unfortunately, a few months ago my self-signed SSL certificate expired, and I've been too lazy to regenerate one.

The problem is, of course, that the server only has one IP address to the outside (it's on a cable modem), and so uses name-based virtual hosting in apache. I'd have to say that one of the greatest annoyances in the world is that name-based virtual hosting does not work with SSL. That is to say, since webmail.hejweca.org, mail.hejweca.org and calendar.hejweca.org all share the same IP address and are separated into virtual hosts by name only, I can't have different SSL certificates for each vhost. This is a problem, because, as we all know, SSL certificates are tied to the name of the server you're going to. So, if you go to https://webmail.hejweca.org in your browser, you'd get a nasty warning that the certificate belongs to some other name. Anyway, it's a pisser because I'm trying to fix the SSL WebDAV server. Maybe I'll try to make it authenticated access internal-only, and not use SSL at all. Bah, that's nasty. Yes, I know why the problem exists; and that it really can't be fixed without re-jiggering the SSL protocol and the HTTP protocol in potentially dangerous and nasty ways, but maybe someone, somehow, somewhere is working on it.

And while I'm on the topic of general annoyances, why does Sun's patching system for Solaris have to suck so much? And, for that matter, why does Sun's package management system (if you can call it that) for Solaris suck so much too? And also, why are plane tickets so damn expensive these days? $350/person to go to Chicago? Give me a break!

There is a strange subset of information immutably lodged somewhere in the recesses of my memory. This stuff includes the date 8/21/96 (when our class first arrived at college 11 years ago next week). It also the following phone numbers. Now, I really have no reason to remember these, and wish I could use that space in my brain for something more useful that I have to look up all the time (like the common command line arguments to rsync, for example).

• 544-1410- This was the first phone number we ever had, I think it must have been between when I was 4 and 5 years old or so
• 323-2618- This was the next number. For some reason, the one above got randomly changed to this one
• 392-9428- When I was around 6, we moved to a new house
• 225-6243- Freshman year in college
• 225-6219- Sophomore year through the rest of school
• 945-2300- Apartment in Cambridge after graduation -- When I called MediaOne (which eventually became AT&T Broadband, and then Comcast) to set up phone service, the dude's "computer" was down for a while and as a reward for having to wait several minutes, he gave me what will probably be the coolest phone number I'll ever have.
• 356-5986- House in Champaign, IL

There are even some more in there, mostly of random friends in high school. These were just the first ones that came to mind. Also, here are some possible upcoming blog topics that I feel the need to bloviate upon. I'm not sure which one I'll get around to first -- but look for these to come up on this blog any day now:

• Julian Simon - I'm definitely not a libertarian. But he was, and some of his wacky theories and ideas are worth babbling about -- even if only for contradiction's sake. Incidentally, aside from being a libertarian, he's also the dude who gave the airline industry the idea of overbooking flights. Thanks, Julian.
• Second Life - I think it's time to talk about the phenomenon of SL and the "metaverse."
• Worse is Better - http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
• Bootstrapping an Infrastructure - paper here -- This is pretty much the core IT infrastructure theory paper that I've followed since working early on in what was then PSG at the University of Illinois. And other sysadmins and systems architects/engineers really should take some of its lessons to heart as well. This is the way to approach the problems of large infrastructures effectively.

When re-installing my MIT "personal certificate" tonight, this awesome message popped up:

After seven years, I guess it might finally be time to change my athena password.

So, for the first time in over 11 years, I sat down across a chess board from someone and played a game. Of course, I lost. I wasn't any good at chess in high school either. Even though Marti was clearly not in full possession of all of his mighty mental faculties, and I think I was up a queen at one point, I was still handily defeated.

Maybe I should practice some more. Nah.

• ^ - Rushtime: Ahh, the magical time of year when everyone comes back to MIT. Old friends returning, new friends to be made. Plenty of bizarre activities -- including a hastily-built log-flume ride in the EC courtyard and, of course, indoor slip and slide. Anyway, it's over now. Maybe if enough good pictures are collected, I'll blog about it some more. Time to get back to a regular sleep schedule and the real world for a while, perhaps.
• V - Illness: Some strange intestinal bug over the past week has destroyed my appetite and had left me feeling generally queasy at times. I seem to be over it by now though.
• V - Hanging Out: Where is everyone? Iceland? Oxford? San Francisco?
• = - Guitar Hero II: '80's: A fair expansion pack to GH II. Some good songs, varying difficulty. Not a bad way to waste several hours of time. It leaves me desperately wanting GHIII and Rock Band though...
• ^ - Beauty's Pizza: Yummy. Good suggestion by Ben Charrow at some point late at night last week while watching "Beerfest." Speaking of "Beerfest," however, there's two hours of my life that I won't ever get back.

For two or three years around the turn of the 21st century, there was a show on the Kids' WB called Histeria. Something about the wacky humor, somewhat bizarre cultural references (including to Pee Wee's Playhouse, Justice League, Monty Python, and others) mixed with a genuine approach to teaching history to kids stuck watching TV got me hooked on it.

Some of my favorite bits that I can remember off of the top of my head include:

• Episode 24: Pee Wee Herman-like character as General Sherman -- complete with full intro song "Sherman's Campsite" set to the tune of "Pee Wee's Playhouse."
• Episode 2: An entire song-and-dance number about Philo Farnsworth, the under appreciated inventor of television.
• Episode 41: The Yalta conference represented as Stalin, Churchill, and FDR fighting over a bunch of food.

The good news is that, even though the show has been off the air for several years now, we can still enjoy it through the magic of the internet. AOL Time Warner put Histeria, as well as several other shows up on the AOL Video website. Check it out at http://video.aol.com/video-category/histeria/1576.

After spending two weeks in San Francisco, visiting the headquarters of my new employer, Linden Lab, I am fully recovered from the jet lag, and back at home.

Unfortunately, the Red Sox are now down 1-2 in the ALCS vs. the Indians. The Rockies, on the other hand, are looking like a classic "Team of Destiny (TM)." When's the last time they lost a game? How good was that one-game NL wild-card playoff?

Anyway, come on down to my place, good 'ol apt. 1504 to help cheer on the Sox tonight as they battle the Indians (feather, not dot), for the privilege of meeting the Rockies in the 2007 fall classic. Refreshments and food will be provided. The fun starts at 6:30, when I get home from work. Game time is 8pm.

I guess I've been lax in my blogging duties lately, what with the new job and an extremely busy social calendar (har har har). This will be rectified soon.

So, many of you readers will know that I never saw The Matrix. Yes, one of the defining movies of geek culture, and I never saw it. It was released while I was terribly busy with school, so I missed out on the initial hype for the first few years. After that, It almost became a bit of a point of pride that I had never seen this movie, but every one of my peers had.

Well, it all came to an end this past Wednesday night. After a long day of work (I'll get to that in another entry, I suppose), I was spending the late hours of the evening on second west at MIT. I had decided not too long ago that at some point I was going to give in and watch the movie. Special thanks go out to Tammy for having the "let's watch a movie" idea at around midnight, and to Marti for going down to the dorm desk to rent it.

So how was it? I thought it was pretty awesome. Somehow, I had escaped finding out too much about the plot, or any spoilers in the past 8 years or so -- so I was able to mostly experience the movie in a pure, untainted way. But, I guess this is one less thing that I'll be able to say I've never done.

Kristy was on call the day after thanksgiving, and I had the day off, so I decided it would be a good time to take a trip to Rochester and visit my mom. We had a mini post-thanksgiving dinner, and took the opportunity to dig through a storage locker and rescue a bunch of old pictures that I should probably have had all along.

It was a bit of a treasure trove. All sorts of old pictures. Like some from our crazy first apartment in Cambridge with the nautical themed wood paneling in the front room, and the goofy huge chandelier above the bed in the bedroom, and the humongous kitchen. And also, I found the long-lost pictures of the u-haul truck towing our car behind with every bit of our earthly possessions contained therein. Of course there were even older pictures, like from high school, and trips to Australia, New Zealand, and England, and my old modeling portfolio and pictures from some plays, musicals and dance recitals. Maybe if I can get my hands on a scanner I can get some of these digitized.

Is this what happened to everyones old pre-digital photos? I mean, it's nice to actually have a physical picture -- but they can be locked away in storage lockers, misplaced, damaged, and they can also be hard to copy and distribute without additional tools. Scottoway may disagree, and will most likely offer his own two cents on the situation.

In honor and observance of the Writer's Strike currently going on, here is my version of a "clip show." This blog has over 175 entries now, some good, some bad, some awesome. I know there are several new readers here, and it's a pain to sift through the entire blog to find the good nuggets. Here, in my opinion, are the 15 most worthy entries if you're flipping through this place I like to call "Into the Weeds":

• yuck: Cold Stone Creamery Rant
• The Soul of the Commuter: Commuting sucks. In very many ways. Here I get back to my urban studies roots.
• UIUC Mail Server Disaster: A tale of sysadmin sorrow from 2002
• Trivia: See if you can identify who all of these footnotes to history are.
• The Cult of Scientology: Mini-rant and link to a freaking awesome article on scientolgy.
• Longwood Towers: Rant about why the Longwood Towers Condominiums are some place you should not be thinking about living in.
• Kozmo.com: : Classic tale of dot-bomb woe. Ever wonder what that "kozmo" box is that's sitting in the kitchen lounge on second west?
• Florence Co. ADMAX: Crazy terrorist prison in Colorado with all sorts of nasties inside.
• New Apartment: Check out the awesome view from my living room.
• Driving in Boston: A primer, with scary crazy maps of intersections.
• Captain Al Haynes: The amazing story of Capt. Haynes and United flight 232.
• Firefighting Mode: Some systems philosophy, and the condition of what things were like back when I worked at MIT IS&T.
• The Switch: Mac vs. PC
• Unofficial!!!!: The crazyness at UIUC known as "Unofficial St. Patrick's Day" and why it is awesome and awesomely stupid at the same time.
• Datacenter Transformer: A tale of woe from some crazy-ass electrical problem and superbad preparation and handling at MIT IS&T.

From the the part of the country where they refer to carbonated beverages as "pop":

(taken at a local grocery store earlier this afternoon)

So yesterday, I took a trip across the street, paid out around $180, and walked out with a single, small box capable of storing one terabyte of data.

For those of you keeping count, that's one thousand gigabytes, and that's pretty amazing. It's replacing a crusty and failing old LVM of three concatenated 250gb parallel ATA drives that have started suffering from some failed sectors of late. So, a terabyte should be enough storage for anyone for a long time, right? I remember saying the same thing in 1996 when the first one gigabyte drives were coming out. So, ten years from now, will we all have petabyte sized drives in our computers?

And now, some phrases that have crept into my vocabulary from either my own life experiences, my work, or my friends. Enjoy these shared bits of english-language awesomeness:

• Schtonky: In some circumstances, anything that is cool/awesome can be referred to as schtonky. More specifically, schtonk is a measure of some mixture of class, formality, masculinity, and old-timeyness. For example, a fine tobacco pipe carries very high schtonk value, as would any wood-paneled room with a fireplace where leather-bound books are. Snoop-doggy-dog dressed up as a pimp driving around in a '64 Impala is also quite schtonky, as is anything to do with Frank Sinatra, or the rat pack. Wal-Mart is not schtonky.




• Janky: Something that is constantly near the boundry of working and being broken is janky. But being janky is more than that. Pretty much every one of the crazy electronic / audio / mechanical projects we built in college was janky. Something that is janky but still working carries with it a certain amount of pride and charm. At MIT, on 2ndwest at east campus, the PTZ Audio Network is decidedly janky -- random bits of audio cable strewn between points on the hall tied in with various transformers and ancient audio amplifiers that sometimes work.




• To have a stew going on / to be preparing a stew: A stew is a nice warm bowl of goodness. Metaphorically, for someone to have a stew on means that they are settling into and/or enjoying a bit of awesomeness. This is somewhat hard to define. An example would be hanging out with friends and enjoying several alcoholic beverages -- you would say: "We're hanging out here, there's quite a stew going on." Other activities, such as enjoying a day at the beach, taking a nice vacation, having a gourmet dinner, watching a marathon of your favorite TV show, going clubbing, etc. may also be considered "stew-like."




• Torqued up: This one's fairly easy to understand. Anytime someone is stressed out about something, or getting worked up about anything, it's like they are twisting themselves and building negative energy. This is much like when you twist a rubber band around itself, or any item that can store torque, so let's call it being torqued up.




• Degauss: If you're torqued up about something, you need to degauss. Back in the day, we used to have CRT monitors with "de-gauss" buttons built in to allow us to somehow release magnetic energy or whatever. It made a satisfying "fwongggggggg!" noise when pressed. People can degauss in several ways. One good way to de-gauss would be to get a stew going (see above).




• Cleaning the Basement: When you're spending all sorts of time and energy doing unnecessary preparation work before starting on the thing you really need to be doing, that's known as "cleaning the basement." Back when I used to be a home-owner, I would insist on making sure the basement was clean and well-organized before dealing with clean-up projects on the main floor. Ostensibly, this was to make sure that anything that was going to be moved from the main floor down to the basement would go in a reasonable place and not just get thrown in a pile.




• Bikeshedding / Painting the bike shed: When trying to solve a complex problem or deal with a crisis, it's important to focus on what's important. If you're planning and building your dream estate, or remodeling your home, there's no reason to waste too much time and energy deciding what color the bike shed is going to be and giving it several magnificent coats of paint. Bikeshedding is a popular activity in groups. When solving a problem, or working on a project, everyone will argue about what color the bike shed should be rather than directing focus on solving the problem at hand.

I know in a previous entry I spoke about making a metaphorical "stew." But now, I will bestow upon you readers my new recipe for making a real stew -- and a very tasty one at that. If you don't have a crock pot, substitute it for a regular pot and just cook it in your oven at 200 degrees or so for 6-8 hours.

Ingredients

• 2lb stew meat (I used pre-cut chuck stew meat from the grocery store)
• 3 tbsp. olilve oil
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. pepper
• 1 1/2 cup beef broth
• 1 tsp. worcestershire sauce
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tsp. paprika
• 4 carrots chopped to 1/2" pcs.
• 3 potatoes cubed appropriately
• 2 onions also cut up as desired
• 1/2 tsp. thyme
• 1/2 tsp. oregano
• 1/2 tsp. rosemary

Mix flour, salt and pepper together in a bowl. Dredge beef in flour mixture and brown in a pan with olive oil (you'll need to do this in two batches) for approximately 2-3 minutes each side over medium heat. Throw the beef and unused flour mixture into the crock pot. Put everything else into the crock pot as well, and mix it up to combine and fairly evenly coat. Cook on low for 10-12 hours, or on high for around 6 hours. When it's done, let it cool at room temperature for an hour or so and then refrigerate. The stew is better after it's had a chance to rest for a day. Feel free to skim fat off of the top, and/or thicken the stew if desired (I found very little fat, and a perfect consistency already). Makes ~4-6 servings. Yum.

A couple of months ago, I happened to be surfing the internet and a banner ad conveniently informed me that Bon Jovi was touring and tickets were going on sale for shows here in Boston at the TD Banknorth Boston Garden. Being an impulsive buyer of such things, and a Bon Jovi fan, I picked up some tickets for the July 10th show. It turns out that All American Rejects were opening -- a pleasant surprise, since I actually like them (and not just because I bought both of their Rock Band songs).

So it was a pretty awesome show. It was an interesting crowd there. There was a pretty large portion of the people there who were around my age (late 20's), and there was another large contingent of folks about 10 years older, and then a bunch of youngsters as well. Also, it's hard to believe that that dude on stage bringing the house down is 46 years old.

Here's my (small) photo album of the AAR.

And here's the photo album of Bon Jovi.

I was skimming over the news websites today, and came across something awesome in the Boston Globe today: Cold Comfort: Abbott's custard brings back good memories for customers.

Yes, it's true. There's an Abbott's franchise open now in Needham, MA. For readers who do not hail from Rochester, NY, and/or have never tasted frozen custard (from Abbott's or anywhere), here is a good description:

"Frozen custard, made with eggs, buttermilk, and cream, and churned slowly in a custom-made machine, is denser than traditional ice cream. "I missed Abbott's," says Dauria. "Every time I went back to Rochester the first thing we did was go there." So five years ago, the former buyer for Filene's hatched a plan to open an Abbott's Frozen Custard franchise here, the first in New England"

And a little bit of history:

"Rochester residents were first introduced to frozen custard in 1902, when Arthur Abbott started flogging the confection at local fairs. He open a permanent location in 1926 in the Rochester neighborhood of Charlotte (pronounced "Shar-LOT" or, if you are from Rochester and have the signature flat twang, "Shar-LAAT"), which still exists today."

Yes, I was there. The idea was hatched among a group of my MIT friends back around the election in November, and we went ahead and bought our train tickets and set up our accommodations way back then -- actually on the eve of the election. Luckily, that did not jinx things, and I was there on the mall with about 2 million other people to see Barack Obama get sworn in as our nation's first African-American president.

The day started for all of us at 4:00am, as we awoke in Andrew's grandmother's living room. We stumbled through a quick bite to eat, and then down to the bus stop. It was nice that we were right at the end of a bus line, so there were no crowds or difficulty getting transportation to the mall. The bus got us as far as Dupont Circle, and then we walked the rest of the way. It was about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and we arrived on the already-crowded mall at around 6:30am, ready to wait another 4.5 hours for the ceremony to begin. It was cold, crowded, long and tiring, but it was worth it.

I was a part of history, along with the millions of other people standing there with us watching on the huge jumbotrons and listening over the loudspeakers. At the moment the presidential oath was read, there was an outburst of joy like none I had ever been a part of before. There was a nice, older black couple next to us who had driven up all the way from Alabama and were crowded into the masses with us and at the moment it became official there were high fives and flag waving and hugs all around for everyone. To say it was a special moment would be the understatement to end all understatements. Definitely something I'll be proud to hopefully tell my grand kids about someday.

So, I got a new MacBook Pro at work last week. It's a little bit newer and faster than the old one. I was a little bit rough with the old one, but it's still in working condition and will be used by others visiting the office (ethernet port stopped working, and part of the lid latch is broken).

The old laptop was dual-booted with Mac OSX (of course) and Windows Vista. Back when I installed vista a couple of years ago, I obtained a license key from the company, and activated vista with it with no problems.

Fast forward to now. Sure enough, when I go to in install Vista on the new system (after wiping out the old one to be eventually re-installed), I get an error when using the same key associated with this license of Vista -- "That software key is already in use." Well, duh, not really it isn't, the old laptop is wiped clean, but I can see how you may think that.

So how do I get around this? After searching around on the internet and trying some things, I find that there is NO WAY to "deactivate" a Windows Vista license. So, anyone changing computers, or re-installing to the same computer even, will presumably encounter this problem. Ironically, the quickest way to fix this would be to find any of a number of keys out there that belong to large volume licensees of Vista -- for example, a large university that has tens of thousands of available installs associated with their key. Isn't it a little bit stupid, annoying, ironic, incorrect (whatever adjective you want to use), that the mechanism developed to ensure that people were using properly licensed copies of the software is so onerous and broken that it leads people to, in essence, pirate the software it's aiming to protect?

I ultimately ended up calling Microsoft and getting this straightened out via some sort of automated phone system. Of course, this means that I could very well have kept the same key in use for Vista installed on the old laptop -- meaning that in reality, the activation key scheme does nothing to prevent piracy or illegal copying, but just is another spike through the guts of Microsoft's paying customers.

On my way into the office this morning I did something I usually don't do. I grabbed a copy of Stuff Magazine because on the cover was none other than everybody's favorite bassist with the stylin' threads and handlebar mustache, Zachariah Hickman:

Turns out there's a section inside about 11 Bostonians with signature looks, and of course he's featured prominently in it. He calls it: "cowboy suits, seersucker, and general haberdashery." General haberdashery, indeed. Figured my pickin' partners would enjoy this.

Take the following with a grain of salt. I'm just kind of bored and figured it's been a while since I've blogged. Here are some experiences of mine (in chronological order) that might be construed as product and/or brand endorsements:

• HP Color LaserJet 2550n - September 2005: Paying $500 for a color laser printer turned out to be a financially and technically sound decision after all. In the 4 years that this printer has been around, the toner cartridges have been replaced once, and the printer is still in 100% working order. Contrast that to any of the ink-jet printers out there that break after a year, and need $50 ink cartridge replacements regularly (even when they're not being used and just dry out). These days, however, it looks like consumer-grade color laser printing is starting to go down the ink-jet road with small-quantity metered toner cartridges and shoddily built hardware.
• Dell 2405FPW - August 2005: Sure, these days 24" LCDs are pretty standard, but back then it was a pretty big leap. It still holds up beautifully 4 years later and has put several CRT screens to rest.
• TiVo Series 2 DVR - December 2004: Just see this entry from 2006 for some of the reasons why TiVo is a life-changing experience. And no, I still don't mean the crappy standard HD DVR that the cable/satellite companies foist upon us. These days, however, Comcast (in Boston at least) offers a DVR with the actual TiVo software installed. I find it quite serviceable, and a definite improvement over the craptastic regular DVR, but it's still not the whole experience. The 'ol Series 2 is still going strong, and I'm considering upgrading to a TiVo HD cablecard unit at some point.
• Power Mac G4 - October 2003: It's hard to believe that it was 6 years ago that I made the switch (see this blog entry from '06 for some pontification on the subject). That G4 tower has been such a horse that it's still sitting here under my desk in use as a secondary system for bittorrent clients, file serving, and DVD/CD burning. Unfortunately, with Snow Leopard's removal of support for the PPC architecture, the end of the road may be coming soon.
• Ikea "Poang" Chair - August 2002: Who knew that a $70 wood and fabric chair could be so comfortable, durable and not too bad looking either?
• Sony 24" wega TV - December 2000: Almost 9 years later and it's just as good as the day it arrived as a christmas present. I know, not a "purchase," but it deserves to be on here anyway. It's not HD, but has a great picture and I can easily see it lasting another 9 years.

For those who are not aware, when I went to MIT I lived in the East Campus dormitory, on the hall known as Second West (a.k.a. Putz). These days, Putz has a pretty neat group of people and an informal tradition of holding "slug talks," or opportunities for someone to give a brief presentation and have a chance to share some knowledge with the group. Most of these so far have been computery in nature, and specifically computer-sciency. I hear there's going to be a good one next week on neural plasticity and long term potentiation (LTP -- it's how we learn and form memories in our brains pretty much).

Since my day-to-day life deals with computer science in a more practical and hands-on way, the topics that I have chosen are more practical in nature. Last semester, I gave a talk about MySQL in production, and specifically how we use it at Linden Lab to make Second Life work.

Just last week, however, I gave a slugtalk describing how DNS works out here in the real world. I think it went pretty well. Download my slide deck as a PDF here.

From an entry on ugliesttatoos.com(site is somewhat NSFW but this entry isn't):

That said, in a few years there will be a generation of adults for whom The Goonies is not the nostalgic icon that it is for us. And those people are going to ask you why you have a tattoo of a retarded pirate on your arm. If there are any measures you can take to prepare yourself for this outcome, you should probably do it.

...and that's sad.

You like peanut butter? You like bacon? Why not put them together! I've been making peanut butter and bacon sandwiches for a while now, so here is my technique -- a special gift for you and whomever you wish to spread the knowledge to.

Ingredients:

• ~3 strips bacon (I use precooked for convenience)
• 2 slices of bread
• Some peanut butter

Lightly toast two slices of bread. Spread peanut butter on the toasted bread. I like to put three half-slices of cold, pre-cooked bacon on each slice and then put it back in the toaster oven for a few minutes. If you're using regular bacon, or don't have a toaster oven, I suppose you could cook up the bacon in a skillet. Put the two pieces of the sandwich together, let it cool down for a bit, and then enjoy. Yum-tastic!

Richard Michael Raven

Age 62, of Shorewood, passed away peacefully Friday, March 5, 2010 at University of Chicago Medical Center.

Born August 23, 1947 in Chicago, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served during the Vietnam War. He worked as a Project Manager and Communications Instructor for Ameritech.

His family was his life.

Surviving are his wife, Kathy A. (nee Kupka) Raven; his children, Richard James (Jill) Raven, Cherie (Brian Chapin) Raven, and Kristin Ellen (Ben O'Connor) Raven; four grandchildren, Brook Elizabeth and Richard John Raven, and Audrey Katherine and Edward Michael Chapin; one brother, Daniel Joseph Raven; and several nieces and nephews.

Preceded by his parents, Stanley and Dorothy (nee Coakley) Raven; and three siblings, Raymond, Robert, and Dorothy Raven.

Funeral services for Richard M. Raven will be Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 11:00 a.m. at the funeral home chapel. Internment will be in Resurrection Cemetery, Romeoville. In lieu of flowers, memorials to University of Chicago Cancer Research Center, 5841 S. Maryland Ave MC 1440, Chicago, IL 60637 would be appreciated. Visitation Tuesday, from 3-8 p.m. at:

Fred C. Dames Funeral Home 3200 Black at Essington Rds., Joliet (815) 741-5500 www.fredcdames.com

So, I learned about this today. And was giddy like a schoolgirl after watching the trailer (below).

Made of awesome. Full of win. Nothing more needs to be said.

New A-Team Trailer Increases Nostalgia Factor by Roughly 300 percent

Yes. I want one. Right Now.

From the Chicago Tribune's review:

...a bacon and cheese sandwich where bread is replaced with fried chicken. Re-read that last sentence, and just try to grasp its cultural significance. The toothpaste is out of the proverbial tube.

...Double Down's larger implication is that KFC has broken through a barrier of culinary decency, besmirching the good name of sandwiches and all that is honorable... The absence of bread robs this “sandwich” of dignity.

All told, the ripples from this landmark product launch will be significant. Stand-up comedians will construct 10-minute riffs around this. Taco Bell will follow suit and introduce a taco called the Carne Go-Torta, where the tortilla shell is replaced with a meat sleeve. Freedom-loathing terrorists will hate us for this. I can see it now.


America, just because you can, it doesn't mean you have to.