Normally in the psycho killer way, when I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed. But I was looking through the mail that's arrived in the past couple days, and I was once again forced to ponder the Victoria's Secret catalog.

They've been sending me these things for about six years now, through four address changes. I have never bought a thing from them. Not one. Sarah, the wacky Aussie girlfriend, thought it would be funny to sign me up for their mailing list, once upon a time. It's like the gift that keeps on giving. Except it's the gift I no longer want (not that I ever really appreciated it in the first place) that keeps on giving.

Anyway, I was leafing through this week's arrival, and I noticed mention down in the corner of one page that I could log onto the web site and set up my own personalized gift list. Hoo boy, a wish list from Victoria's Secret, just for me! I considered logging in and picking out a bunch of stuff at random, just to be weird.

This idea seemed funny to me for maybe five seconds. Then I realized how not funny it was. It doesn't even approach funny, really. Nothing good could come of it.

So you'll just have to imagine it for yourself.

They used to sell boxers and cologne. Whatever happened to those? I mean, if they actually had the gift registry of silk boxers, I'd ... never mind. I wouldn't do that either. That's just weird. Anybody who'd be in a position to buy me boxers already would know what to buy. I mean, duh. (This is a lie, as I have a preference in cut -- bubble back is better than center seam -- but I wouldn't kick her out of bed for buying the wrong kind).

But then it's a lot harder to go wrong with boxers than it is with lingerie. I think if I were intent on buying something from Victoria's Secret for someone, I'd get her a robe, pajamas, or a gift certificate. The thing that would probably be most appreciated (look sweetums, two dozen cotton panties! Oh, you shouldn't have!) is about the least romantic gift out there.

Of course, Sarah and I didn't see eye to eye on the pajamas anyway. I suggested wacky and she went for striped. I should have known then it would all be downhill from there.

link (31 oct)

I shouldn't have said anything about the noises.

So I went to the opera last night. It was the Baltimore Opera production of Aida at the Lyric. Went up there as the result of a personals ad, if you must know. Unfortunately for the dating front, I don't think there was any spark there -- after seven hours (door to door) I think I'd know.

Anyway, we were sitting there as Act I got underway, and we both started to notice this low growling noise coming from a few seats to my right. Becky (my date) thought it was somebody snoring, but I suspect that the guy was attempting to clear his throat surreptitiously. The growling, you see, was interspersed with coughing. Unfortunately for everybody in the vicinity, the guy kept it up all night. (growl ... grooowwwwwlllll ... groooowwwwllll *cough* growl)

At least there were no gum poppers, like the ones two seats down, mother and daughter, when I saw Little Shop of Horrors off Broadway -- my god -- fifteen years ago.

The opera itself was mostly entertaining. It was a park 'n' bark staging, the sets were an odd mix of Olde Egypte and Opera Modern, and the body makeup was inconsistently applied, but the soloists were for the most part quite good. The only one I had a serious complaint with was the tenor (go figure¹) who sounded like he was either marking or singing from the wings. Nice voice, but it got lost whenever anybody else opened their mouths or the orchestra rose above mezzo-piano.

The other highlight of the evening was the decorations on the walls of the Lyric: composers' names such as GOVNOD and SCHVBERT. It took me a minute to resolve GOVNOD into the name of a composer with whom I was familiar, as by the time he was around the letter U was well established.

And Growling Man didn't ruin the night, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

 

 

 

 

1). Q: How many tenors does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Six. One to change the lightbulb, and five to stand around and say, "I could do that better than him."

link (29 oct)

So I have this thing about noises people make. I probably shouldn't complain, since I know I'm not the quietest breather in the world, but I tend to notice whenever people have weird habits that generate sound. Like at one job a few years ago, my manager's kid had this thing where he sniffled and snorted constantly. The kid also hovered about six inches behind you, so he was already annoying enough without the noises, but the noises put him into the criminally annoying end of the spectrum.

Anyway, I had jury duty today. The District now has a "one day / one trial" policy, the name of which pretty much explains it all. I was supposed to be there at eight am, which is before I'm usually even awake. I managed to get there about five after, which turned out to be fine as there was a line where we were supposed to check in.

I checked in, got my badge holder, and sat down in the jurors' lounge, where the teevees were playing the Today show at a rather intense volume. I did my best to block it out, but at one point I finally had to look up to find out who it was singing some awful "country" song - and it was Kathie Lee Gifford. If there's anything that will make you need to wash your brain out with Murphy's Oil Soap, it's that. Where's my Ipecac when I need it?

They showed an orientation video, and then the court official said they can't show the news, and they can't show HBO or Showtime as there had been complaints, so they show "nature videos." Luckily, I had my McSweeneys.

Anyway, around nine they called the first group for a trial, and I wasn't in it. So I continued to read, avoiding looking at my watch since I thought it might actually make the day seem longer if I were aware of how slowly the time passed. Around 11 (I looked at that point) they called a second selection group, including me that time. We were told to wait in the atrium. By the time the official got there (and I use the term loosely, as she didn't really command any respect), the judge had announced that he didn't need us after all, so we were sent back to the jurors' lounge.

At that point, I decided to try the "Quiet Room," figuring that it might be more amenable to reading. For the most part, it was. Except for Noisy Woman. She started out being Annoying Candy Sucking Noise Woman (Dear People of Earth: You do not have to suck actively on hard candy. It will melt on its own. *Heart*, Fedward), which is high on my list of annoying noises people make (chronic snifflers are another bad group). But when she finished whatever candy she had, she didn't replace it. Which was good. But then she started reading her newspaper.

Now, for Annoying Candy Sucking Noise Woman, reading the newspaper is neither a simple nor a quiet process. It involves lots of folding, refolding, and folding again. Then some unfolding so that pages can be turned, which necessitates more folding. And then she turned into Coupon Tearing Woman. Except I don't think she was just tearing coupons out, I think she may have been saving articles as well. But anyway, in addition to the folding, unfolding, excessive page turning, and more folding, there was now lots of tearing. In the Quiet Room.

I guess Noisy Woman wasn't clear on the concept that when you're in a Quiet Room, any sound that's made seems grossly out of proportion to what is around it. So her newspaper habit, while innocuous in and of itself, was not acceptable Quiet Room behavior.

So they called us all into the Jurors' Lounge again a little after noon, saying that they weren't going to let us go to lunch at 12:15 (the usual lunch time), because they were going to hold us until 12:30 instead -- and if no juries had been called by 12:30 they'd just release us for the day. This is what ended up happening. Since it was a beautiful day, I figured I'd walk over to the offices of my old employer and see who was in and if anybody wanted to grab some lunch.

Most of them were out. I talked to the one person I knew who was actually there when I got there, and then rode the elevator down to the ground floor. As I exited the building, I ran into another old cow orker, and we talked for a while. It seems that the reason most of the people I knew weren't there was because they'd either quit (most of those I knew about already) or were laid off last week. Oops. I had just found out that the company leased two more floors in the building, which added a bit of surreality to the news of the layoffs.

Apparently the real estate arm of the business (run as a separate entity) is much more profitable and straightforward than the consulting side -- not that I'm surprised by this. Real estate is generally a pretty automatic money generator, where consulting requires more of both sales and support. They're leasing space from the building mgmt (pronounced migm(schwa)t), putting in cubes and network connectivity, and subletting that space to other companies. Considering their decision (which I thought unwise at the time back when they weren't even in trouble) to put in a T-3, I guess the sublets aren't such a bad idea after all. They can lease improved space with plenty of bandwidth (funny, that sounds just like Bobo), and also defray the not insignificant costs of that circuit.

Back to the plot. In what was actually the second wave of layoffs, the company dumped two of the people hired to replace me back in February (there were actually four hired to replace me, but they'd had trouble keeping that number on staff, so I don't know how many are left now), the IT and Operations directors they'd hired about a year ago, and the database guy, who'd been there two years, but who had found out what he was worth on the open market around the time I left, and whom they'd had to start paying more money to keep. Apparently the New York office was decimated in the first round of layoffs, and while there are still nominally Toronto and Boston offices, the veep who had been in Toronto left to go work for the company he was subletting space from, and neither Toronto nor Boston have brought in any new clients.

Oh, the other veep who couldn't manage anything (this company was totally passive aggressive in management, and the two directors they just laid off were about the only actual managers I've seen there) isn't getting canned (as he should have been at least a year ago), but did find another job and just handed in his resignation.

In case anybody's wondering whether I'm happy with my decision to leave, the answer is a resounding yes.

Anyway, after finding out all that information, I got some lunch at Cosi (I never get to eat there anymore since there aren't any out in the Resto-Herndon Industrial Complex), went home, and ended up taking a three hour nap. A three hour nap. With a cat in my lap, and he didn't make odd noises once. At least not any that I noticed.

link (28 oct)

O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A
Our chant rolls on and on!
Thousands strong
Join heart and song
In Alma Mater's praise
Of campus beautiful by day and night
Of colors proudly gleaming Red and White
'Neath the western sky
OU's chant will never die.
Live on, University!

Now why couldn't they have done this ten years ago when I had season tickets?

link (28 oct)

Today's adventures in sitting in a data center were brought to you by Compaq, who don't really answer the questions asked.

So I'm trying to get Linux to install on this old-by-internet-standards (a year?) Compaq ProLiant 7000 server in the data center, as part of our migration to the new reporting package we're moving to (whenever they decide to unfreeze our budget, but that's another story, probably best told by somebody else anyway). I've been at this a few days now, since we have a kickstart server and it's supposed to be possible to set up a profile, boot the server from a floppy, connect it to the kickstart server, and have everything else automagically go onto the target server.

Didn't happen that way. First off, the guy who knew the most about the kickstart server was out of the office on jury duty last week, so I couldn't really get anything done. Then, this week, between his schedule and mine, and the Two Gentlemen of Japan who showed up three hours early for a tour of the data center yesterday, it's been an on-again, off-again process. I've been guided by the knowledge that it should by all rights be possible to get Linux onto this server, so the difficulties along the way have been all the more exasperating.

The server has dual redundant RAID controllers. Linux seems to be confused by this. After several failures of the installer, all complaining about difficulty mounting some drive, I finally thought to look at the partitions in fdisk. And there was the problem, or part of it: for every partition that showed up properly (/tmp/ida/c0d0pX), there was an identical partition showing up (/tmp/ida/c1d0pX). Aside from the fact that I was expecting them to be in /dev and not /tmp (which I could deal with pretty easily), this looked like a pretty large problem. I'd already downloaded the latest version of the Linux driver for the RAID controller(s) so I knew that wasn't it. I was tired of banging my head aginst the problem, so I hit the Compaq support site and typed up a description of the problem and what I'd done to try to fix it.

The response? They told me that one thing I'd done (use Partition Magic) wouldn't work (it does, I've done it before), to do something I'd already done, and they didn't answer the question I actually asked. Luckily for you, this was more than 24 hours ago, so you don't have to see me wave my arms and yell in frustration at the laptop display, "didn't you read my message at all!?" So I sent back an email overlooking the Partition Magic thing and reiterating my original question, then I went home.

So when I got to work today, there was another email from Compaq that also didn't really help. Dorks. I'd talked to somebody else at work, who'd suggested that I just pull the redundant controller, so I tried that. I couldn't get the kickstart to work, but this time at least the manual install was successful. Eh. Only a week and a half wasted on this problem. The guy who runs the kickstart server then created a shell script to get the machine up to standard, so today ended up actually being productive.

And for more fun, I have jury duty tomorrow. Ehh.

link (26 oct)

I counted up after the last entry, and as long as I didn't miscount (a definite possibility), this is the 100th installment of fits and starts. Not sure if this is a fit or a start, but anyway, I'm sure it'll be as content-free as 95 or so of the ones that came before it.

I'm sitting with a laptop in the data center at work, watching Partition Magic do its thing on a server onto which I'm trying to install linux. It's got this Compaq RAID controller that linux just doesn't like. It does its impression of the old commercial: RAID?! followed by a small explosion. At least the magic smoke isn't coming out. I don't necessarily have to be back here in the server racks, but I'm on a wireless card, and it's not like there's anything I can't do down here that I'd do at my desk, other than slouch a little more comfortably ... I might be talking myself into going upstairs after all. Can't watch this progress meter from there though. Feh.

The second of my two new tech toys arrived today, too late to make use of it this week. But I guess I should explain. I finally buckled down and ordered a portable DAT recorder (Sony PCM-M1 for those who care) in order to be able to tape my voice lessons, and also to record audition materials. I don't own any cassette devices except the tape deck in my car, which has been used maybe five times in the three and a half years I've owned the car. I've been longing after a DAT for a couple years now, and I decided after the string of excellent voice lessons that I should go ahead and get one now, so that maybe I can record some audition stuff and send it off, and try to act like I'm really a singer instead of just a hacker who takes lessons once a week. I also joined Opera America last week, so by all appearances I'm at least trying.

So I ordered the deck last week, as well as some Core Sound Binaural microphones, and the mikes¹ came yesterday but the deck and tapes didn't, which means I couldn't record last night's lesson, which is annoying because it was the best one yet. Actually, every lesson lately has been the best one yet, better than the one before it. That's the way this lesson thing is supposed to work, so it's nice to see it happen that way. Anyway, the deck and tapes came today, and they'd put the wrong ZIP code on the shipping label. They read it back to me right, and they even typed it in right on the sales order, but they put it in wrong on the package itself, so it took an extra day to get here. It's heavier than I expected. It's supair-cool though, so I guess the one day is not that much of a complaint. They also sent the wrong tapes (90m instead of 60m) but the prices are the same, and in one way I got more than I ordered (50% more capacity) but I ordered the others because the tape itself is thicker (better) on the shorter tapes.

Anyway, once I get all set up and figure out how to use it best, I'll probably throw an MP3 or two up here.

Yay, the Partition Magic progress bar finally moved. What is it with Windows products that the progress bars jump from 43% to done on one swell foop? What's the point of a "progress" bar if it doesn't update regularly enough to be meaningful? What is the sound of one bit twiddling?

 

 

 

1. I have one particularly pedantic friend (actually, most of my friends are pedantic, and as that goes, he's less so than most, and this is the pot calling the kettle black anyway) who works in sound production, and he insists that "mic" is the only acceptable abbreviation. I've looked it up, and "mike" is also acceptable, and it's what I learned first. So, if you're reading, Mr. Pedantic Sound Guy Friend, there.

link (24 oct)

(guest entry up at Koogle, in case you're not already checking there for updates)

Just got back from a lovely, if short, weekend at the new House of Nicole and Tino out in the woods. Looks much different with walls, flooring, and appliances than it did when I was last out there. We didn't get the network cable terminated, but we did hook up the MagicTV dish -- only to discover that their access card had been deactivated due to the length of inactivity on their account. They're getting a new one this week. I'm sure I'll be back out there soon enough, and I suspect that Tino won't terminate any network cable without me, as it just wouldn't be the same.

While out there, I finally read the copy of McSweeneys #4 that I bought so long ago. It's good. I recommend it. If you're in the DC metro, they have more -- inexplicably -- at Politics and Prose, a place I otherwise wouldn't plug out of disdain for its tweeness (which I guess isn't really a word, but it is now).

Nicole makes good vegematarian chili (which I'd had before), and Tino turns out to make a nice breakfast of eggs and home fries when he's suitably inspired (a surprise to us all). I've been plagued with heartburn all weekend, but the extent of the problem leads me to believe it's not the fault of the food up there but something else. It wouldn't be this persistent otherwise. Not that you care.

This afternoon Amanda called my cell phone to report that she'd been moved into an actual room (and out of the ICU) and that she was feeling much better. We talked for a while. She eventually asked, "did you come by Friday?" She thought she'd seen my jacket but wasn't sure. I recounted the David Gergen conversation, which she vaguely remembered as well, so now I know that she's good for the automatic jokes even when half asleep. Good to know.

I thought I had more to say, but it's gone now. Oh well.

link (22 oct)

Quickie Amanda update:

She's "recovering from her procedure, but she's not in a room yet." Quoth the kind woman who answered the hospital info number.

Will update with further info as I have it.

link (20 oct)

Courtesy update that I really don't know any more status on Amanda than I did earlier. Her mom called a while ago, and said Amanda didn't actually go into the OR until 10 this morning.

Will post when I know more. (Or when I know something, really)

link (20 oct)

"Ed! Ted Koppel! (weak attempt at a thumbs up sign) Ted Koppel is the new David Gergen!"

"No, David Gergen is the new David Gergen. Like bl..."

"Like black is the new black."

So we have our Amanda back, and she's fine. When you show up in person, you get a lot more than when you just call the hospital on the phone.

Turns out she actually came out of the OR around 1:15 and has been doing quite well, although she's sufficiently hepped up on goofballs that she doesn't really feel any pain. She was groggy, as you'd expect, but she managed not only to wake up, but to recognize me and prove that aliens hadn't stolen her brain in the process.

The doctor had come out of her surgery and gone straight into another one, which explains why Robin hadn't heard anything when I talked to her this afternoon.

Word from the ICU nurse, who was ending her shift but nice enough to let me come in for a few minutes, is that she's doing really well. She got both a kidney and a pancreas. Her blood pressure's good, she's "putting out good urine," her sugars are good, they've already taken her off a couple of the IV medications they had her on, and they're currently (as of 7pm that is) "replacing potassium." No word on when they'll move her out of the ICU and into a room where she can have visitors and flowers and stuff. The nurse thought there might actually be a chance it would be Saturday, since Amanda was doing so well so far, but Sunday is probably more likely.

And after about two minutes of apparent alertness, Amanda was asleep again. So I left. She's in good hands.

link (20 oct)