The World According To Alan

You might think people would learn how to drive...

WOODBURN, Ore. - A multi-vehicle accident on Interstate 5 Friday morning turned rush hour traffic into a mess.

KATU 2 - Portland, Oregon

...though mostly this is testing Flock, a new web browser based on Firefox that has integrated blogging, flickr photo album and rss feed support.  Could be interesting...

Dear Diary

Hard to believe New Orleans isn't any more. That probably overstates it, but it sounds pretty bad. Sent something to the Red Cross to help. This is why our National Guard people should be here, not in Iraq: looting for survival is one thing, but what's going on there is despicable. But since they don't have enough people to do rescues, much less maintain law and order... They should learn from this though, and either build the levees to withstand major storms, or give it back entirely and rebuild above sea level.

When I went to Safeway to get a late lunch (their chinese is usually pretty good, but not mid-afternoon, blech!), their premium had topped $3. The regular was $2.86, close to 30 cents over a day or so ago. I sympathize with the people calling for boycotts, but it's misguided. It seems everyone wants a free market, until the it doesn't work in their favor. On the one hand, this is great for getting alternative fuels going --- I was just reading that in Hawaii, biodiesel is now cheaper than petro-diesel. Exactly where we need to be. And be real: even a 30 cent price increase is what, $3-6 for a full tank? Not exactly breaking the bank here. Though, the $10-20 over what it was last year is getting up there...

We upgraded one of our spam filter machines at work last night. The other one got this upgrade a couple weeks ago, and it dramatically sped it up. This one, turned into molasses. Uggh. The support people at the company that makes it rebuilt the database, and got it going again, but it took all day to catch up. It looks like it's just getting caught up now...

Gay movie night tonight was "Straight-Jacket", a really funny spoof of closeted actors in the 50's (i.e. Rock Hudson). It's about the third or fourth time I've seen it in the last couple of weeks and it never gets old. I'll have to upgrade my rating, as when I can do that, it's a 10.

Phew!

Something weird happened and I thought I'd lost this blog entirely: the directory the files go in was competely empty. They disappeared the morning of May 1 from the web logs. I never really knew how MT works, but in the process of reinstalling, figured out that it was all still in the database, and all I had to do was tell MT to rebuild the site. Voila'! Back online...

Revenue Collected

Well, Monday I stopped by the Arlington Municipal Courthouse. The ticket said 11am, I got there 10:30ish. There was a court in session and they said "we'll see if she'll take you now" and she did. Very young judge I thought --- early 30's. I thought she did a great job though --- for example, someone got hit for open container after he'd gotten stopped for speeding or something and went to get his registration out of the glove box and one of those little tiny liquor bottles fell out. You couldn't get drunk on one of those if you tried. She didn't dismiss it entirely, but said she'd look at the police report and make a determination, but it was clear that if he was telling the truth, he'd get off. This is the way courts are supposed to work, though it would have been better if the cop had had more sense in the first place.

Oh, and when I came up, I explained that I'd been experimenting with running with the cruise control off, as it seems like it gets better gas mileage if you don't use it, but since this Escape drives so much better than my Explorer, 80 feels the same as 65-70 did in the Explorer. Since I get considerably worse gas mileage at 80 though, I've gone back to using the cruise control. All of which is true.

I said that to show that I was unlikely to be a repeat offender, though her comment was "at least you're honest" and gave me the minumum fine: $180. For a $240 ticket, that paid for the trip, and I was out of there by shortly after 11am, so I'm as happy as I can be.

I hear there's a move afoot to raise the speed limits again though, and I do hope they are successful...

Arlington revenue collectors

Actually, it was a Gilliam County Sheriff. Don't they go to bed? Grrr. 82 in a 65 at 12:30am. Oh well, I've been driving past Arlington for 25 years now, so I suppose it's about time. Never had an accident in those 25 years (ever really, barring a couple very minor incidents), but then speeding tickets aren't really about safety: it's revenue generation, except for the few who like to think it's about safety, but there it's really an elitist "I know better than you do" view. It's amazing how a country founded on the notion of Freedom has perverted it into "Freedom for the few to tell everyone else what they can do". Our founding fathers must be rolling in their graves.

Late night googlewhacking

On the Tonight Show tonight, they had a pretty funny guy on who googlewhacks and goes to visit the site owners he finds. Googlewhacking is putting two words into google and coming up with 1 and only 1 site found. Of *course* I had to try it ;-) and eventually succeeded with "batie supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", which took me to what appears to be a bibliography buried in The American Dialect Society. I was debating whether or not to send mail to the adminstrator telling them they'd been googlewhacked but on their contacts page, they have a number of reference links, including Word Origins. I find etymology fascinating, so zoomed off on that tangent. Unfortunately, there was a word just the other day I wanted to know the origin of, but now can't remember what it was. Oh well. Poking around at wordorigins, I ran across the most famous four-letter word, and of course had to check it out, where they debunk the most common explanation circulating the internet, but at the end had this interesting paragraph about a related gesture which is far older than I ever imagined:

There is also an elaborate explanation that has been circulating on the internet for some years regarding English archers, the Battle of Agincourt, and the phrase Pluck Yew! This explanation is a modern jest--a play on words. However, there may be a bit of truth to it. The British (it is virtually unknown in America) gesture of displaying the index and middle fingers with the back of the hand outwards (a reverse peace sign)--meaning the same as displaying the middle finger alone--may derive from the French practice of cutting the fingers off captured English archers. Archers would taunt the French on the battlefield with this gesture, showing they were intact and still dangerous. The pluck yew part is fancifully absurd. This is not the origin of the middle finger gesture, which is truly ancient, being referred to in classical Greek and Roman texts.

...followed by a link to an entire *book* on the one word. I do vaguely remember a rather humorous posting descibing the versatility of it, but an entire book?

And with that bit of highbrow insightfulness, it's way past my bedtime...

Burr's Mom

A good friend's mom lost her battle with emphysema tonight. I've known him, and her, for, wow, almost 30 years now. She was a great lady, always smiling and interested in the world. Traveling to Alaska not even that long ago. No use at all for intolerance and bigotry. The world is a lesser place now...

Superstitions, Karma and The Price You Pay

I'm not superstitious. Really, I'm not. But this week has been one to try your faith in the rational.

Saturday, I had a great time visiting the M&LK Railroad with Marc. And I've been paying for it ever since. More than paid: I think the Karma Police owe me!

It started Sunday: upgrading the mail server at sawnet (converting from qmail to postfix, because spamcop decided that qmail was "bad" and blacklisting sawnet as a result). It was a disaster. OK, I don't know postfix as well as I thought I did. I'd planned on doing this upgrade on another system where I could have gotten it working and tested first, but with spamcop blacklisting us, we had to get something in place ASAP.

Oh, and my Windoze box died miserably Sunday too, but at least I'd already move to the Mac for my main desktop...

I did get it mostly working Monday morning, though it was horribly backlogged, and then at Peak, we had a DOS attack on a customer. Simple, have our network guy put in a block on our router to stop the bad traffic. He's doing that, pasting in the new rules, when right in the middle of the paste, the system he's doing it from loses a hard disk and crashes. It's mirrored, but apparently it's crap for raid hardware (like the rest of that system). The result is our main router left in a semi-functional state. I get the management system back up, while others get the router working again.

Then we find that it took out our dialup access servers. It had done the last time it crashed, a month and a half ago, and we never did figure out why, but this time, rebooting the switch they're connected to didn't fix it as it had before. Finally figured out that a subtle ordering of config statements was causing the problem for some weird reason. So, we get that back up.

Then, on Tuesday, we get complaints of network slowness, and eventually track that down to a switch that connects us to one of our major WAN circuits had a hardware failure.

I spend all night Tuesday clearing the backlog at sawnet and tuning the system, fixing some remaining problems.

Wednesday, things are starting to resume some normalcy as we start to rearrange things to mitigate future problems when the same things happen...

And then Thursday, one of the mail servers reboots and it takes a while to find out that the software on it is old and buggy and it doesn't come back up automatically. I reconfigured it so it should now (though it still needs tested).

Oh, and I discovered today that it looks like the user shell server has been hacked.

In other words, The Week From Hell.

Happy New Year!

Had a great time out at the coast with the usual Whales In Space group, plus some extras. Some of them were sick, but so far, I seem to have managed to escape the plague. There are some pix of the fun, though nothing too earth shattering.

Escaping the ordinary

There's this really weird phenomena surrounding certain new purchases, cars in particular: once you get them, everyone else has one too. One would assume it's all psychological --- that the purchaser just happens to be more tuned in to the item and notices them. One wonders if there isn't something more to it sometimes however...

Patience!

Some people really have no sense of value, or assign a very low value to their own time: Dutch Bros. recently opened a new store on Monroe (the street that runs most conveniently along the edge of the OSU campus). For their opening, they gave away free drinks (worth, what, $2 or so?). And people were lined up all day for this. I don't know how long the wait actually was, but it had to be at least a half hour, probably more...

Oh the turkey!

Well, the Escape's got over 1800 miles on it now, after a 600 mile round trip for turkey and pinochle at my sister's. Dad's working on moving a storage shed to make room for a vinyl garage thingy to use to store yet more stuff. Seems I installed mom & dad's digital certificate last year, as well as the one on my pop server last thanksgiving, because they both expired this weekend. Oh, and one of my personal certs expired then too. It looks like Thanksgiving is going to become Security Update Weekend from now on.

I'm supposed to get DSL here tomorrow, but I haven't seen the notice from Qwest come into Peak yet, so I'm guessing they're waiting until the phone line is actually installed, though I'm not thrilled about that. Though I haven't gotten the modem yet either. I'll have to call them tomorrow and find out what's up. I'm a little worried that they're going to say "oh, we can't give you DSL after all", in which case they're going to get a surprise, because I'm having them do the install of the line here, to the tune of $100. Since the entire point of this exercise is to get DSL, if they can't provide it, they're going to eat it when I cancel the entire order. Since I actually want DSL, and I would like my Tivo to call in and count ratings for the shows I watch, I'm hoping it'll all work out though.

More Escaping

Wilson Motors called me this morning to say my new navigation cd had arrived, so I went down at lunchtime to pick it up. I found out that they way they'd made the copy that worked, was to put *my* original cd in a computer and burn a copy. I thought they'd copied another one, but the computer was able to read mine just fine. Weird, but not uncommon. They use use better error correction algorithms in computer drivers than they do in conumer electronics for some reason. Maybe CPU horsepower?

The Escape is also missing the combo door lock on the driver door that I really liked having on the Explorer. They advertise an aftermarket job that clones your keyless remote, so I looked into getting one of those. $150! Yowza! At that price, someone can get me one for Christmas ;-) And hopefully a lot more reasonably priced...but also hopefully actually secure...

Quality Software

When I ran up to Wilsonville yesterday, I stopped in at the Burger King there for dinner to eat on the way back. While sitting in the drive through line, I decided to ask the nav system to "find nearest restaurants". It thought longer than usual, then crashed and rebooted. Though I know at least one Wilsonville resident that would sympathize with it ;-)

Adventure on Mary's Peak

Yesterday, I took the Escape for a little test run into the back country. Well, as near to it as I can get within a half hour of Corvallis... Click on the route map to read the tale and see the pix...

SleepLab

After around 10 years of not sleeping the entire night through once, and after several years of friends telling me I ought to get a CPAP machine (basically an air pump that blows up your windpipe like a balloon, so it doesn't collapse and block your airway when you're asleep), I finally got into a Sleep Study a couple weeks ago. I don't know why, but CPAP machines require a prescription. And to get that, you have to do a Sleep Study (unless you find a doc who'll just do it for you). The sleep study is actually pretty interesting though --- here's the three sets of graphs they gave me (if you click on them, it will take you to a readable image with a discussion of what it all means):

Normal "light" sleep:

REM sleep:

Summary of the whole night:

And finally, me, wired up (or at least as much of me as you really want to see!):

The Trials of Corvallis

One of the reasons I looked forward to moving to Corvallis was getting away from the road congestion of Portland. Alas, Corvallis is congested as well:

As I drove up to this point, there was a lady working in the yard to the left, and as I rolled closer after taking the picture, he moved into the bushes to the left. I backed up to tell the lady, but she'd disappeared, and when I drove on past again, he was still standing there in the bushes watching me, though you'd never have noticed him if you didn't know he was there...

Pictures of the new toy...

One Side...

and The Other

New Toy

They say the difference between men and boys is the price of their toys. Well, my Ford Escape Hybrid arrived last Thursday. Early! if you can believe it. I hate to say it, but I miss the Explorer. The Escape is a little downscale, and is missing some minor amenities, though the biggest problem is the seat: it's killing my back. Why do seat/chair designers think you need extra support in the shoulders and none in lower-middle back? I'm going to have to find a pad or something, as that's another thing the Escape doesn't have that the Explorer did: lumbar adjustment.

Oh well, the hybrid is cool, though I wish you could tell it to run on electric as much as possible and minimize gas engine use, even at the expense of lower power. And the nav system is cool, though what I want to do to the Ford lawyers (and the juries that make them necessary!) is unprintable. Every time you turn it on, you have to push the Accept button that says yes I know I need to pay attention to the road and not do something stupid. And even then, they've disabled some of the useful features like "find the nearest X" if the car is moving. Hello!? Passenger/Navigator!

But I'll get used to the minor bits, and probably start liking it. Until the Highlander Hybrid comes out...

Lazy Saturday

For some silly reason I volunteered to help staff the no on 36 booth at the corvallis farmer's market this morning. Actually, it was fun, and I was finally able to hand out the bumper stickers I printed up. Only a couple, but left them for the next two weekends' use. Lots of support, though light crowds. Most amusing was the family walking by and one of the little kids says "what's 36?". The father apparently said (I didn't catch it myself, but the others on that side heard it) "it's a number, comes after 35" and hurried them on ;-) It amazes me how afraid people are to talk about people loving one another.

After, I went home --- I'd invited a couple I met here in Corvallis over for Farscape. I like them, but don't know them well, and talked to one last night about the Farscape microseries (two-part movie?) running tomorrow and Monday. He's been watching taped episodes of the series in preparation and I invited them over to watch the 4th season (or at least some of it) on DVD. I didn't really expect them to show, but wanted to be here just in case. Instead, I watched last night's Enterprise: mediocre, more the pity because the story had a lot of potential, and as all too often in Star Trek, they glossed over it. If the Powers That Be at Paramount had any cohones at all, Star Trek could be a great series like Babylon 5, Farscape and Firefly. Instead, it only has a few flashes of brilliance.

Anyway, after that, I decided to watch Angels in America --- I'd seen the play when it came to Portland, where it really didn't make a lot of sense, though what did was good. The miniseries however, was great. Al Pacino was in top form, as were many of the others. And Patrick Wilson is cuuuute! ;-) Wow, and Justin Kirk is from Salem! Interesting...

Oh blog!

Last week was "interesting" in the sense of the Chinese curse: a good friend's father-in-law and mother both went into separate hospitals with prognosis' of "days to weeks". The father-in-law passed away, but the mother has been getting better and got to the point of being able to have surgery to fix the problem, though she's not out of the woods yet. There is hope however...

Work is ok; making progress on improving things, but fighting software that's poorly documented, complex and recalcitrant. Oh well, if it were easy, anyone could do it ;-)

Just watched part of the third debate. I can only handle a bit at a time --- I'm going to have to find the transcript online so I can rebut them rather than throw the remote at the TV.

Stuff-n-things

Well, a Fine Blogger I am! "Forgive me readers, for I have sinned. It's been 2 months since my last post."

Not really much to say, been working away at peak, actually have a simple minded blog manually created on a wiki which is much more interesting, but hardly something I can make public. It's amazing how much stuff a sysadmin does and I'm also surprised how easy it is to blog in a wiki. We're using phpwiki, which is much easier to use and nicer looking than the other wikis I've used (purplewiki --- simple, but ugly) and Twiki (complex). I just have a window open and do bullet point stream of consciousness bits occasionally. Probably helps me keep my job too, since progress is slow on building new systems to migrate too, and it shows why with all the support stuff that has to be done to keep the existing show running.

Heading up to Portland this weekend to see friends, particularly Doug who's moved up to Seattle but coming down to Portland for the weekend. Marc and David too. Also, there's a gun show at the expo center --- I want to get a 22 pistol for cheap shooting.

Except I just remembered that I was told a large check I deposited today wasn't going to clear, so I've got to write a nastygram. Maybe they can get it covered over the weekend, but I'm not happy for a variety of reasons I won't bother going into in semi-public.

But I did get my Hybrid Escape ordered last week. Oct/Nov build and December delivery. So hopefully it won't slip and it'll make a nice Christmas present.

Seeking My Sound Advice

So for lunch today, I went over to the Panda Express in Memorial Union on the OSU campus (why didn't they have real restaurants in there when *I* went to school here?). Orange Chicken, yum! Anyway, I open the obligatory fortune cookie to read "Many people are seeking you for your sound advice". Well, "many people"...here I am! Come and get it. You might want to call though --- I'm not sure if the sound of me typing on the keyboard counts as "sound"...

Hello, Corvallis!

Well, it looks like I'm in Corvallis for real. No feet in two places, no hemming, no hawing. Mark and Roy (my housemates) want the whole house to themselves so that Mark's sister and 4 kids can move in. They'll need it! I got most of the key stuff moved this weekend; still have to move the theater and gun safe (the latter of which will be moved this week), then there's the library, garage and "spare room". The latter two of those will have to go into storage, and I'll have them all moved by someone else. The little I just did was bad enough...

*&%%! Spammers

F-ing blog spammers have found this site, and now I'm either going to have to go through each entry and disable comments, as well as leave them off by default, or spend time deleting the garbage when it shows up. Version 3 of movable type will require registration for comments --- a total pain, but these assholes have made it impossible to leave an open door anywhere on the Internet. They are the lowest form of graffiti vandals --- at least many graffiti artists really are artists. These creatures are nothing more than vandals trying to scam a buck from the all too many naive people around. They don't care what neighborhoods they destroy in the process and have no respect for any one else's rights.

It's really difficult to craft legislation that can distinguish between merely annoying speech and spamming, and it's as hard to even find the spammers in the first place, but it's time to stop being lazy about this and spend the resources to track them down. Free Speech stops when it becomes harassment and infringes on the rights of others, and spam has long since passed that point.

Boobs

Everybody's all in an uproar because they saw a tit. Oh my heavens! The world is going to come to an end! Give me a break. Some woman, a Terri Carlin, is in such an uproar she's starting a class action lawsuit. People like her are the real boobs, and aren't going to be happy until everyone's so afraid to do anything the slightest bit controversial that we all go hide in our closets our entire lives. Like seeing a tit that most people sucked on for the first year of their lives is really a problem. If they're really upset over it, the best thing they could do is ignore it. The only reason the stunt happened is for the publicity. If it didn't get any, it would be a bust (pun not intended until I thought about it ;-) ) and that would be the end of that. Get a life people!

Tyco Durable

In case anyone missed it on the news the last couple of nights, there's a brand new 400+' cable laying ship docked at the Portland waterfront. It's going to be based here in Portland and was christened yesterday, with tours yesterday and today. I went onboard this morning and have some pictures and writeup at the Tyco Durable Tour.

Children Learn What They Live

I don't know why, but last night I remembered a Les Crane song I heard as a teen, and it's something I wish more parents took into account. For that matter, it probably applies to how one relates to other adults as well:

Children Learn What They Live
By Dorothy Law Nolte, Ph.D.

If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.
If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.
If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive.
If children live with pity, they learn to feel sorry for themselves.
If children live with ridicule, they learn to feel shy.
If children live with jealousy, they learn to feel envy.
If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty.
If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence.
If children live with tolerance, they learn patience.
If children live with praise, they learn appreciation.
If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.
If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves.
If children live with recognition, they learn it is good to have a goal.
If children live with sharing, they learn generosity.
If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness.
If children live with fairness, they learn justice.
If children live with kindness and consideration, they learn respect.
If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and in those about them.
If children live with friendliness, they learn the world is a nice place in which to live.

Copyright © 1972 by Dorothy Law Nolte

Introduction

Well, where to start? I just put this up while I was waiting for some video editing transcoding to complete. Seemed like a more organized way to have my soapbox and also to get feedback from the few people who might read it. I'll play with it a bit and see where it goes. I have definite opinions on politics, and like to dabble with filmmaking, so I'll probably have an area for that. I'll probably create a whole separate blog for the Batie Family; I'm interested in genealogy, but not enough to take over as family historian. Since the current member in that defacto position is giving it up, I'm hoping that maybe this would facilitate a replacement or a group effort. At least the newsletter part. But, enough for now. Got to go back to editing...