Meeting with the Boss-man. More Senate blather. Easier to ask forgivness than ask permission. Today was a busy and relatively productive day. Given the recent budget crush (complete witrh talks of pay cuts, layoffs, and furloughs, oh my) I had been feeling quite pessimistic regarding the prospects of the hardware purchase being funded for the project I am working on.

We currently have a test system up, but have no hardware for a production system, making it quite difficult to go live. I along with others came up with two plans, aptly named “Plan A” and “Plan B” which cost around $111,000 and $66,000, respectively. When we first made the plans, I knew that “Plan A” was aggressive, but I felt good about “Plan B.” But as news got worse on the budget front, I was feeling more negative about our chances for even “Plan B.”

This morning we met with the Boss-man (aka The Associate Vice Provost for Information Technology) and after starting with “Plan A,” talking for an hour, returning to “Plan A” he approved it. I was quite shocked. I don’t know what orifice he is finding the money, but hey, I don’t care.

Today I mostly listened to the Senate proceedings. I have come to the conclusion that , althought senators are more eloquent, they aren’t much better than their counterpoints in the House. With one exception. Listening to Robert C. Byrd (D from W. Va) is a hoot. He seems to be the last of a generation of truely great orators. Aside from his politics except on this issue I am not familiar with his views, so I won’t judge him in a more general way.

But listening to him counter the arguments for the resolution authorizing force in Iraq is great; he regularly quotes long passages from the Federalist Papers, the Bible, and other text that he finds relavent to the discussion. It may seem trite that he caries a copy of the Constitution in his poket at all times, but I don’t think it is.

And he obviously has a sense of humor. His off the cuff comments after reading the 69th Federalist paper regarding the powers of the Commander in Chief was to wonder if anyone in the White House has read them. He then muses out loud to send the President a copy for free. I was cracking up; it was beautiful

Back to work stuff. Kelly and I made further progress in preparation for our meeting with the SIT team. (I’m not going to go into what the SIT team is. I just wish we had a BURP team like one other College we work with.) I ran a program our DBA was telling Kelly we shouldn’t run, but it all worked out in the end. I went back to my further experiment to give Kelly (who likes things all organized) plausible deniability with respect to my “unauthorized” activities.

So hopefully the demo works tomorrow, but of course it will break at the most inoportune time as demos always have a tendancy to do. More news later.

In an attempt to write more here (self-therapy? HA!) I’m going to attempt to write a bit more than I have been. I will still continue with the links and other tidbits, but I will try to actually “talk” a little more As any who know me, about a year ago (actually it will be a year this friday), RSA (formerly 3GI) shut down my whole office and I was dropped off the end of my own personally dot-com roller coaster. This has once again been dwelling on my mind lately and having a detrimental effect on my moods.

My current workplace is a good place to work, and I don’t dislike it at all. I think that may be part of the issue. I don’t “dislike” it, but neither can I honestly say that I actually “like” what I am doing. The work that I am doing is not challenging in an intellectual manner, something that I learned to enjoy (and I admit, crave) at 3GI.

During my lunchtime walk today, Roger mentioned that he has a friend out in Oregon that just had a similar situation happen to him. The startup he was working for had their financial backer pull out. (I originally misspelled that “baker.” Amusing mental image.) Roger was concerned for his friend but was mildly confused in that his friend seemed not to be reacting very much to the situation one way or another. I explained to Roger that my feeling from experience was that his friend was a sense of “disbelief” at the situation that occurs when something that you have put your heart into gets “taken away” even if you knew it was coming.

I still have that feeling regarding 3GI. It seems at times that I am just on some weird vacation and that any day now I will head back to my old office and pick up where we left off. And scarely, I am confident that even given the year passing, I could pick up the technical issues we dropped immediately. I know for a fact I could give a rundown of what my staff was working on no problem. It makes finding satisfaction in ones later work very difficult. I remember one of my former coworkers saying that in response to the question “Are you enjoying your new job” he had to say “I would love it if I hadn’t had my dream job.” This is my feeling as well.

Focus. Something I do not seem to have lately. I am planning to take some graduate classes this next semester and I hope that will impose some intellectual rigour on my brain.

Ramble Ramble Ramble. New Topic. Or at least some random thoughts

Tonight is Alton Brown night! Woo Hoo!

Our Clematis shipped today. Should be here friday. More planting! But thankfully only two plants.

My hands still hurt from all the planting last weekend (1, 2, 3). I thought it was all better, then I went to staple some paper together and grabbed the stapler in my right hand and squeezed. Ouchie. Muscles still need some work there. Heal Faster! Go Go White Blood Cells! And the damn healing blisters itch like crazy.

Bouncy music is a good thing. I pulled out one of my Lenny Kravitz CD’s on monday when E and I went out to dinner with the Brandt clan. Unfortunately E was not in a bouncy mood and wasn’t up for loud music, but I have been playing it loud in the car for the last few days since.

Today was the first of three days that the House and the Senate will be debating the joint resolution to authorize the president to potentially use military force againts Iraq.

In an attempt to learn more about the debate, I have been listening to the debate on NPR for much of today. My opinions on the issue are very clear; I do not feel that we as a nation have the legal right to interfere in Iraq without a clear mandate from the United Nations. (Granted I do not think we have the moral right to interfere even with a UN mandate, but that is beside the point here.)

Most of the debates NPR was covering came from the House. The formal process by which debate occurs in my opinion is very rarely what I would consider a “debate” but more different representatives listening to themselves talk. And given the granting of minutes, usually they only get 4 to 6 minutes at a stretch.

Given that I was limited to the audio feeds from the debates, I was not able to ascertain the number of representatives entering and leaving the chambers, but it seemed from the subject matter that all of the speeches were made completely devoid of reference from other speeches. The representatives repeated one another to such a large extent on obvious points I was amazed; as if their fellow representatives needed to be reminded that the 9/11 terrorists used planes to commit their killings.

Another observation was in the use of titles. Aside from the normal title of “gentleman from the state of blah” many representatives felt the need when yielding time to a colleague to add a complete list of their titles in the House. Now this seemed appropriate for representatives who are the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, but I did find it odd when the chairman of the Inland Wetlands Committee was introduced as such.

Our elected officials also seem to be masters of exaggeration and leaps of logic that are quite beyond me as a mortal man. The repeated comparisons of Saddam Husein to Hitler were to me an amazing stretch of the imagination. And I was particularly fond (not) of the belief that Saddam could threaten the US with his weapons of mass destruction even though he has no missiles that can travel past Israel.

In all of the tak I heard today, I did not hear one representative speak who was unsure of his vote. I assume that the each representative is speaking to an audience of his peers who are as yet undecided. Or at least I hope so, as otherwise they are making these speeches for my benefit and I would rather they just put the matter to a vote and move on to more important matters.

So the debates will rage on for another two days and then they will vote in a manner whose outcome is effectively predetermined. This point was even made during the couse of some of the speeches. Odd. Very odd.

But such is the way of government.

From an email I received a few moments ago:

“Xxxxx Xxxxx’s mother passed away today. We have ordered a tray of deli-meats and cold cuts to ease her burden as this difficult time transpires. We will be delivering this gift to her tomorrow.”

I am so glad we are done. You have no idea Today’s events (with commentary):

9:00 am - Go out to tackle 100 plants and 200 bulbs.

later - finish laying out 100 daylilies on the ground. “Holy crap that’s alot of daylilies.”

a little later - finish laying out 200 daffodil bulbs. “Holy crap that’s alot of bulbs.”

11:18 - Finish planting all of the daylilies (they only get buried 1” deep). “Ow.”

1:30 - Finish planting all of the daffodils (they get buried 6” deep). “Ow. alot”

The final tally:

• 100 daylilies planted
• 200 daffodils planted
• 396 square feet of clay beaten into submission
• 5 blisters

I would attempt to make some witty story about today’s events, but I really am too sore and tired to even think of it, so there you have it, Fall Planting 2002.

When we last left our intrepid hero, the bed had been laid out, and the soil needed to be prepared.

Beaten into submission is more like it. Last Saturday, after we had lain out the bed, the Fedex man came by and deliverd our bulb planting tool from White Flower Farms. This is a tool that is basically a pipe with a handle that you push into the ground (with helpfull foot pedals if needed) and then make a nice round hole perfect for planting bulbs. After gleefully unwrapping the bright red instrument of destruction, I went out to try it out.

I placed the end on the ground and stepped on the foot bar. It slid into the ground about 2 inches and stopped. Hmpf. So I stood on the bar and twisted; Nothing. I then went back to the garage to get my shovel and examined the soil some more. What I found was disheartening. At the bottom of the hill, there is 2 to 3 inches of topsoil; at the top of the hill, there is approxiamtely ½ inch of topsoil. And all this topsoil is carefully spread over wonderful, hard, red, Virginia clay.

Great.

Sunday we made a trip to Mecca and I returned with my latest implement of destruction, the pick-ax. Thus began the weeks struggle of turning all the soil.

It is now Friday afternoon, and I have gone out every day after work except Monday (due to some blood in addition to the normal sweat and soil) and have completed ¾ of the soil in the bed. I should be able to finish tomorrow with two sessions.

This is good because all of the Daffodils and Daylilies (two units of the collection, 200 bulbs, and 100 plants) arrived today. I wonder what exactely Elizabeth and I have gotten ourselves into here, but I shall keep you informed.

Attached is a conversation I had this morning on IM. The names of the participants have been changed to protect the innocent. (Well maybe not innocent.) It provides an interesting insight into the mind of a techno-fiddler.

DP: have you tried RH 8.0 yet?

Jeremy Beker: ::laugh:: nope.

DP: I’m having problems with the CDs…I can’t get them to boot

DP: maybe my iso files are corrupted

Jeremy Beker: they should have MD5 checksums listed somewhere you can compare with

DP: how do I compute the MD5 checksum?

Jeremy Beker: md5sum

DP: ah…seems easy enough..haha

Jeremy Beker: I have also found that when discs are burned at high speed, they will take too long to be recognized by the cdrom drive and not be ready in enough time to allow the machine to boot from them.

DP: ah…I bet that’s it

DP: I think I only burned at 16x though

DP: so do I use: md5sum image.iso …

Jeremy Beker: 16 is very fast. I have had problems with CDs burned at 8x, I usually do 4x if I am having issues

Jeremy Beker: yes, md5sum

DP: hmmm….doesn’t seem to be doing anything

DP: oh well…I’ll try to burn at a lower speed

Jeremy Beker: it will take it a bit to go through 650MB

DP: hmmm…the software I’m using doesn’t go below 8x….so I’ll try that.

Jeremy Beker: ::laugh::

DP: I thinkI burned my 7.3 discs at 12x and didn’t have any problems

Jeremy Beker: did the md5sums match?

DP: its still cranking away

DP: yes…checksums match….must be the burn rate

Jeremy Beker: also if you can set your machine to only boot from CD, you may be able to force it to load.

DP: yeah…this POS model that I have only allows you to set the “first” drive to try

Jeremy Beker: oh

DP: it starts to load, ,but then I get an error

Jeremy Beker: make a boot floppy

DP: something about linux trying to wing it

Jeremy Beker: the images should be on the CD

DP: ….I might have to do that…I don’t think I actually own a floppy

Jeremy Beker: ::laugh::

Jeremy Beker: there is that

DP: I’ll have to go to staples and probably have to buy them in packages of like 150

DP: ah…CD is done…I’ll try this new one

DP: hmmm…same error

Jeremy Beker: kernel error, or redhat error?

DP: isolinux: Loading spec packet failed, trying to wing it…

DP: isolinux: Failed to locate CD-ROM device, boot failed.

DP: but the 7.2 and 7.3 discs I have work just fine…and I made them on the same burner

Jeremy Beker: oh. do you have a funcky cdrom drive?

DP: same drive I used to load 7.2 and 7.3

Jeremy Beker: and you haven’t dorked with the hardware since then

DP: I think that this is RH’s plot to make me replace every piece of this machine one upgrade at a time

DP: I replaced the video card…

Jeremy Beker: that shouldn’t make a difference.

DP: since the new and “improved” drivers didn’t work with my old card….

DP: even though the old drivers worked

Jeremy Beker: that is what you get for upgrading

DP: haha…yes…I suppose so

Jeremy Beker: (which is why I never “upgrade” a working system without a very good reason)

DP: I have a good reason

DP: …I need bluecurve

Jeremy Beker: um. that is the new window manager look, isn’t it?

DP: ximian is getting old

DP: yes

Jeremy Beker: ::sigh:: that is not a good reason

DP: well…when I have to look at it all day…a new desktop is like a vacation for me

Jeremy Beker: uh huh. you just can’t stand to leave something alone without fiddling with it

DP: well….why should I leave it alone when I can make it better, faster, stronger…like the bionic computer

Jeremy Beker: given your current success rate, I think older, plainer, and working might have been a better choice

the saga continues. After laying out the borders of the new bed last weekend, we started putting in the brick edging today. We have most of it in, but we will need to get a few more bricks.

Strangely, as I was starting to turn some of the soil, I found a cinderblock burried in the hill. I have no idea what it is from. Weird.

I have posted some pictures of the early work on the Our Garden page of my website. More to come

This is an image a friend of mine sent me. Look carefully.

So it is time again for our fall plantings (actually again is too strong a statement. This is our first fall planting. We had a spring planting this year.)

Read on for the beginning of the fall planting saga. The front lawn is my enemy. Grass will not grow on the low hill in the front lawn. I have tried since we bought the house to no avail. Not that I really like lawn, but I hate plain dirt. But the dirt won; this time.

I’m bringing in the big guns now. FLOWERS! ha ha ha!

Elizabeth laid out a flower bed that is pleasantly curved and encomposes a large portion of the “dead zone.” We have been planning this area for quite a while and settled on a wonderful package that White Flower Farm offers called Daffodils & Daylilies, a Collaboration of Color. It is made up of 100 Daffodil bulbs and 50 Daylilies. Given the size of the bed, we needed two of them. Wow, that will be lots of planting.

We also have a lattice wall that I built in the back yard that surrounds the two air conditioning units outside. We wanted to get a flowering vine to grow up it that would attract butterflies. After researching the subject, we settled on Sweet Autumn Clematis (Clematis paniculata).

So I placed the order today and the flowers should be shipping within the next month (they start shipping items in Spetember starting with the coldest climates and working south).

I will make status reports as things progress.