The Ironbound Pages

Baltimore snow

2009-12-20T00:19:58Z

I have pics of the snow today. See them on my flickr page.

It's still snowing, still coming down. Still piling up. People are shoveling and doing what they can, but the weather is bigger than people.

I expect to trek out to ES@GC tonight, but then it's fairly easy for me.

A little snow today

2009-12-19T20:43:50Z

The snow started last night, around 22h.

It was still snowing this morning.

I went out for groceries in the snow. The store is 3.5 blocks away, and I trudged through the 5-6 inches of snow on the ground. The streets were quiet; I saw a few cars but less than the usual number for a Saturday morning. I trudged back with groceries in the big O'Reilly canvas bags.

Then I went to the gym. It was still snowing. The gym is 4.5 blocks away. I made it there, did some stratching and cardio work, and trudged back home.

Then I went out to the Book Thing. The Book Thing (they give away books... for free) is a bit further, and I take the bus. I wasn't sure that the busses were running this morning -- I had heard nothing on the news but I had not seen any busses today. It turns out that they are running... sort of. I usually take the '3' but I can also take the '11' to the Book Thing. (The '3' goes a little closer, but both are usable.) The first bus to come along was an '11', so I took it. We got as far as North Ave and the driver announced that the bus ended there and was turning around for the return trip.

We all got off the bus and I started trudging up Charles Street with rather mean thoughts about the MTA. The trip from North Ave to the Book Thing is walkable on a good day and a bit of a challenge on a snowy day. Eight blocks later, a '3' bus came along and I got on. The bus followed its normal route with a small diversion of a few blocks (to avoid a traffic problem caused by... a disabled bus).

The Book Thing was open. Their signs state that they are open every weekend, including holidays and blizzards, and there were a few people there. I checked the science fiction section, the computer section, the arts section, and the videos section. Found a few things, too! I now have a copy of "Get Shorty" on VHS and "Tom Thumb" on DVD. I also found a copy of Helen Gardner's "Art Through the Ages". I had picked up the fourth edition (1955) some time ago; today I found what appears to be the first edition from 1926! Comparing the two is interesting, but further details will have to wait.

The trip home from the Book Thing, also by bus, was not quite normal. A bus arrived just as I got to the bus stop. It took us south to North Ave... at which point the driver announced that he was turning around and heading back north. What is it with busses and North Ave?

I walked (trudged) home from North Ave. Its normally a ten minute walk; today it was twenty.

Then I went to the local cafe for breakfast/lunch. The cafe is four blocks away; walkable even in this weather. I had a yummy omelette and tea. I also took some time to read a bit more of "Disappearing Through the Skylight". An interesting book. It's a collection of short essays; today's were on Dada, Oulipo, language, poetry, and mathematics. (Not five distinct essays, but a few essays that combined the topics. For example, one essay talked about mathematical structure of sonnets and ancient texts such as the Divine Comedy.)

One bizarre idea from the essays concerned some work done with sentences and substitution of words with their definitions. The essay had little details and I don't remember the exact sequence, but it went something like this.

- Start with two sentences that have opposite meanings (but not obvious opposites such as "I am hungry" and "I am not hungry" -- use more complex opposites).
- Replace the words (or perhaps selected words) with their definitions.
- Repeat.

Eventually, the meanings of the two sentences become identical. (I'm not sure if this works for all sentence pairs or only for some. Let's assume all.)

This phenomenon is an interesting one. Language becomes circular, with no end or foundation. It has no axioms, as does geometry. (Anyone with a dictionary can do this. Start with a word. Look up its definition. Take those words, and look up their definitions. When does it stop?)

And if any sentence means its opposite, then is there really such a thing as language? Does it exist? Or does it all disappear into a quantum-like froth?

That was my lunch today.

Criteria for a winter home

2009-12-15T03:40:27Z

So these past few days I've been thinking about a winter home. Baltimore is nice, but the winters are cold and at best wet. Baltimore lacks the charm of New England winters.

I don't want to move to a warmer climate. (The summers would be too warm.) Summers in Baltimore work for me; I want to upgrade the winter to something more comfortable.

Here are my desires for a winter home:

- warm winters (duh!)
- in the US (the 48 states; Hawaii is nice but pricey)
- a city, where I can walk to groceries and the library
- good local food
- some amount of culture (museums, street fairs, theaters, etc.)
- some tech jobs

I can rule out Atlanta -- I've visited a number of times and the "feel" of the city is wrong.

Immediate candidates are Austin and Charleston SC.

New Orleans is, sadly, out. A nice city and good food, but they live in a hole surrounded by water. It's the Venice of the US, with decent but merely nice architecture.

Time to ponder.

New traffic lights

2009-12-12T19:32:40Z

On my travels about town this morning, I saw the new stoplights that the city has installed. They've been up for a while; today was the day that they became active.

The project has been a long one. More than just traffic lights, the project is a "street-scape" of Charles Street, one of the big shopping centers of the city. It started two years ago, with the replacement of sidewalks, stoplights, and street lights. The old concrete sidewalks were ripped up and replaced with brick. The old street lights (utilitarian aluminum poles with cobrahead lamps) were replaced with faux cast iron poles and brighter lamps. Many of the new poles are pedestrian-scale, so they are a mere fourteen feet high: Less convenient for cars and better for people. (They don't hang over the street, so they don't create a hazard for cars.)

The traffic lights were the last of the changes. They too get new stylish poles, and the lamps are larger and brighter than before. The new walk/dontwalk signs all have countdown indicators. The new equipment has been in place for months, waiting for the control systems (which arrived this week). This morning the city crews "flipped the switch" and activated the new signals. They also took down the old lights.

The new look is a definite improvement. The styled lampposts are a better match for the local architecture. The brick walkways are pleasant to walk upon. The city also replaced the old (granite) curbstones with new (granite) curbstones, and they look nice with the brick walkways.

The project has a few small items left to do. The poles for the old streetlights must come down. A few bits of sidewalk need completing. One stretch of the street has been stripped of asphalt and needs paving.

Nice to see improvements in the local neighborhood.

Lots done, yet not enough

2009-12-07T01:34:30Z

The longer commute means that things I ~~would normally do~~ used to do are now pushed into the week-end. This week-end saw a bunch of activities:

- Shopping for groceries
- Visiting the Book Thing
- Enjoying a relaxing if short lunch at the local bistro
- A meeting at a local Linux User Group
- Laundry
- Cooking chili
- Ripping some CDs to Ogg format
- Exercise at the gym
- The paying of the bills
- Updating Linux and Windows PCs with the latest patches
- Fiddling with the grub menu table on //delilah and removing old entries
- Reading a bit from "Better, Faster, Lighter Java"
- Cleaning the kitchen
- Cleaning the bathroom
- Getting cash from the ATM
- Dancing to loud music on Saturday night
- Watching an episode of "Buffy"
- Checking out the web sites for Kindle and Nook

With all of that, I'm feeling guilty for not getting other things done:

- Buying stamps
- Composing my annual holiday letter
- Getting a haircut
- Setting up holiday decorations

Yeah, guilt is still with me. blah!

I'm considering the an e-Reader. Not for books but for newspapers and magazines. (Specifically The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, and Fast Company.) I've checked the web sites and the book selection is not sufficient for me. (I'm interested in Tanith Lee, Glen Cook, and Michael Swanwick, for starters. Both the Nook and the Kindle have lists that are anemic.) Whichever I select, it will wait until the new year.

Thanksgiving

2009-11-29T21:52:27Z

Last-minute news at work let me have the Friday-after-Thanksgiving off, and I hastily made plans to visit my parents for the week-end. (I see them rarely, and an extra-long week-end is a bonus.)

The late travel plans made for an interesting itinerary. I took the train to my parents' on Thanksgiving Day and returned via Southwest late on Saturday. The trains were completely booked on Sunday, and the one open Southwest flight on Sunday disappeared as I was discussing plans with my father. But while odd, the plans did work.

The train ride south was pleasant. Travelling on Thanksgiving Day is a bit easier than travelling the day before. It was crowded -- the train was sold out between Baltimore and Richmond -- but not insanely crowded. Perhaps the set of people travelling on the Day are professionals, used to travel and comfortable with small changes and adjustments as one goes along. Or maybe they are resigned to arriving a day late, whereas the Wednesday travellers are high on adrenaline and impatient to arrive.

The train was delayed. It arrived in Baltimore fifteen minutes late. We had extra fun in Washington, as the conductor informed us that one of the coaches must be removed from the train. (A minor safety risk, apparently.) Removing a coach involves a number of steps: first, get all the passengers (of that coach) off the train, then attach a replacement coach to the end of train, and then remove the misbehaving coach. The 'removing' operation is the tricky part: you cannot simply remove a coach from a train like a book from a bookcase. A train is, in one sense, a one-dimensional entity, able to move forward or backward but no other way. Removing a coach from the end of a train is easy: hook up another engine, connect it to the coach, decouple the coach from the rest of the train, and pull it away. Removing a coach from the middle of a train is harder: hook up another engine, decouple the train into two with the offending coach on the new-engine side, pull all of the coaches away, push them onto a siding, decouple the one coach, pull the remaining (good) coaches back off the siding, and then push them back onto the train. Simple, right? (Computer programmers who work in FORTH or who have written the 'Towers of Hanoi' problem will understand the problem.)

Despite the late start and the extra work in Washington, we arrived in North Carolina only twenty minutes late.

The train ride itself was nice. I chatted with a few folks but spent most of the time reading. I started Glen Cook's With Mercy Towards None and Heinlein's The Menace from Earth. Lunch was a sandwich and apple from home.

My parents met me at the train station. They were returning home from a visit to my sister. (My travel plans were such that I could not visit my sister as well as my parents.)

My father and I worked on a number of things. We set up a Dell GX-150 that he will use to test Windows XP compatibility for various open-source programs. He volunteers his time at the local senior center, teaching members about computers and the internet. His computers are either Apple or Linux, and he needs a Windows box to round ot the set. Rather than set up another keyboard and monitor, we dug out a KVM switch from his junk pile and organized his desktop area. We also removed the old Dell Inspiron laptop that he was using, a relic from 1995. Removing that computer (and its attendant docking station and external CD-drive) gave us more space. I think he was impressed with the new look to his computer desk.

Our luck did not hold for the Ion USB turntable. This is a 33/45 record player with a audio and USB outputs, and also for the senior center. The idea is to rip LPs to MP3 or iTunes AACS format. The turntable is nice and seems to do the job, but the accompanying software is ... frustrating. It claims to run without any configuration (and in fact has no configuration settings) yet it has funny ideas about recording. It records the tracks at very low volume, and also turns the microphone on, so it records the track and our comments as it is recording. At this point, it is an elaborate version of playing a record on a traditional home stereo system and clicking 'record' from the computer microphone.

The software has other problems. It lets you record a bunch of tracks and mark the breaks, and then exports them to iTunes. That's not bad. But it doesn't understand that records (LPs, that is) have two sides. It has no allowance to stop the recording while you flip over the record. You either have this big gap in the middle, or you stop recording and then re-start recording. But if you re-start recording, it starts numbering tracks from 1 again. I believe that the software was written by people who did not use the software.

Mom mostly rested on this trip. She had recently fallen and fractured her tibia, and now has bits of metal holding the pieces together and a big padded cast. She's in good spirits and is recuperating, but quite less mobile than before. The doctors want her to wear the cast for another two weeks. My father is holding up well and doing a lot of the chores that mom usually does.

The trip back was just as uneventful. There were people at the airports but not crowds. (It took all of four minutes to get my boarding pass and through security.) At home, I noticed that all of the activity was at the Southwest and Airtran counters -- counters for other airlines were empty, except for one or two passengers.

Today was a day for myself. I read a bit more and went grocery shopping. I also installed Xubuntu on a computer, just to see what it is like. (Now I have Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu all on one computer.) I also installed memory into //desdemona, the old Dell GX-260 that runs Suse Linux 11.1. I went from 512MB to 2GB, which is a nice jump. I haven't seen a real difference yet; I suspect that I will when I run a few programs at the same time.

Looking ahead, this week will see a full week at work, a computer/network meeting with the ACM, and maybe dancing at the end of the week. And of course, more reading!

Yeah I post infrequently

2009-11-23T02:01:34Z

I've had a busy week and a busy week-end.

The week is busy due to the long commute. I'm up at 5:30 and out the door in under an hour. I'm back home at 7:00 or so (the evening version of 7:00, or 19:00 to those of you who run operations). I have time to cook and eat dinner, go through the mail, and prep for the next day, but not much more than that. The good part is that I can use the commute time for reading.

I'm reading Disappearing Through the Skylight, a series of essays on culture and technology of the Twentieth century. It covers a lot of topics, from evolution to architecture by way of Mandelbrot sets and chaos theory.

I'm also reading Notre Dame or Paris: A Biography of a Cathedral which covers the history of the cathedral. Not just the present-day structure, but the buildings that preceded it and a bit of history of Paris. Not exciting by modern standards (no exploding volcanoes) but enjoyable.

This week-end saw a lot too. Everything that I don't do during the week gets pushed to the week-end. Groceries, laundry, and the ever-popular paying of the bills.

This week-end I wedged a few extra activities into the schedule. There was a book reading here in Baltimore (something that occurs on a semi-regular basis) and I finally got to attend one. It was quite good: three authors read from their recent works. Each author read for about 10-12 minutes, with a few comments between.

I also visited the Book Thing. I dropped off a bunch and went looking. Little appealed to me, but I did bring home two volumes from the "humor" section. One was a collection of Foxtrot comics, and the other was an anthology of humor edited by E.B. White. (Yes, *that* E.B. White.)

This week will be a short one at the office. I work three days and then have off Thursday and Friday. I will be visiting the parents this holiday.

Visual Studio is not my friend, but John Ford is

2009-11-18T03:01:20Z

I spent a lot of time fighting Visual Studio today.

I'm building a library with C++ code. (I inherited the code.) WHen I build in "debug" mode, things work. When I build in "release" mode, it complains about unresolved external symbols. Or I can build the library as a DLL, and things work (in both release and debug modes. But when I build a static library, it complains about unresolved external symbols.

I'm beginning to get a tad annoyed with C++ and Visual Studio.

On a lighter note, I watched "The Searchers" tonight. Yes, the old John Wayne movie. Directed by John Ford. I liked the scenes and the imagery. It deserves a display bigger than my 13" CGA monitor.

Here we go again (on the credit-crisis roller-coaster)

2009-11-15T18:17:10Z

I can't decide if Discover Card's latest offering is humorous or scary.

They will give me a $150 cash-back bonus. That's an extra $150 on top of the regular cash back bonus. (Discover's cash-back plan, like many others, provides a percentage refund for all purchases. You can use the refund against your Discover bill or get double the value when purchasing goods from selected companies.)

All I have to do to earn this bonus? Spend $5000 on the Discover Card between now and January 31.

You read that right -- $5000.

I spend nothing like $5000 on the Discover card. Or any credit card. Not in a three-month period. (The promotion runs from November 1 to January 31.) In fact, to reach $5000 it would take seven or eight months of spending on all of my credit cards combined. (I purchase just about everything with credit cards, from groceries to commuter train tickets. I also pay off the entire amount every month.)

I'm convinced that The $150 bonus offer is bait. It is an invitation to spend more than I can afford (to pay off at once) and the interest on the balance would more than erase the $150 bonus. It's a sucker's bet.

The humorous part is that Discover believes I will fall for it.

The scary part is that a lot of people just might.

Movie review: Coco before Chanel

2009-11-15T01:15:27Z

Audrey Tautou portrays Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel in this elegant and well-made film. We see her (Chanel's) life prior to her fame. Predictable in parts. Definitely a chick flick. Good acting and lots of care with sets and costumes. Runs a bit long, but does not bore.

I rate this movie six cans of spam, out of a possible ten.

Pondering medical insurance

2009-11-08T15:27:25Z

So the House has passed the medical insurance reform bill. This may be a good thing. Or not.

The Washington Post had an interesting editorial about the bill, specifically the "can't deny pre-existing conditions" part. (I don't have a link since I read the dead-tree edition.)

Here's a summary of the Post's editorial: The "can't deny coverage" rule, combined with the "no coverage fee", sets up an interesting dynamic. The intent of the bill is for everyone to have insurance, either through their employer or purchased on their own. Those who don't have insurance are fined. Yet the numbers are such that the rational path is to skip the insurance, pay the fine each year (the fine is much less than the an annual premium), and wait until you need the insurance. Then, when you need it, sign up for it and start paying. Since insurance companies cannot deny coverage for existing conditions, they have to accept you. This arrangement leads to only those people who need medicine paying the premiums. With only a relative few people paying, the cost of everyone rises. Insurance works by having everyone pay, whether they need medicine or not.

At least, that's what I remember from the article. It does seem a pretty good analysis of a possible outcome. (Disclaimer: I have not read the bill passed by the House.)

It's an outcome that I think we want to avoid.

The simple solution would be to vote down the bill. But that leaves us where we are today, with the problem of denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions.

If I'm working for company A with insurance through Acme Insurance, and I leave company a to work for company B, I can lose my coverage. Let's say I have diabetes. The insurance company for B (Beta Insurance) can claim a pre-existing condition and deny me coverage.

This is not a good situation either. Some might say that I should stay with company A -- but that's not always up to me. Company A might move jobs overseas or get acquired by company UltraBig, and I might be out of a job.

Also, the free-marketer in me wants employees to move around from company to company, finding the best opportunity. Tying a worker to a company for medical insurance, when they could be more productive at another company, is a drain on the economy.

This is also an outcome that we want to avoid.

The Republicans have proposed more competition in health insurance by allowing sales across state lines. Instead of today's arrangement where companies are regulated by the customer's state, they would allow health insurance to be sold from any state to any state, and regulated by the state of the insurance company not the consumer. This copies the model for banking and credit cards. While I accept my banks accounts and credit cards, I can't say that I am happy with them, or the companies behind them. They have high fees, exorbitant interest rates (when I'm paying), anemic interest rates (when they're paying), and agreements that extend for pages and pages. Competitive pressure has failed to moderate interest rates, fees, or the size of agreements.

With the results of the credit card companies, I'm not too keen on the "cross state lines" approach for medical insurance.

I'm not keen on the idea of nationalizing health care either. (In my scenario, we ditch the insurance companies altogether and have the government run health care. This is an extreme position, and there are other possibilities. But I'm no lover of the insurance companies, and don't mind throwing them under the bus.)

Thoughts, anyone?

One week at the new gig

2009-11-02T02:44:49Z

I completed the first week of the new gig. (Well, four days, as I started on Tuesday.) I should probably share some thoughts with you folks.

Going from "not employed" to "employed" requires some adjustment. I had been sticking to my regular routine, getting up at the "usual time" and eating "the usual" meals at "the usual" times, and that worked well for me. It made the transition easier -- or so I like to think. I can wake up and get to the train without difficulty. I'm not hungry at odd times.

The evening commute gets me home later than before, so squeezing in exercise at the gym, cooking dinner, and other chores is more effort. The morning commute is mostly reliable; the evening commute has seen more delays.

The job itself is not glamorous: C++ programming and financial concepts such as interest, discount rates, loans, loan guarantees, and default rates. There are three major programs and all of them are of modest size. It will take some time to become familiar with them, but not an unreasonable amount of time. The biggest change is using the word "program" in the sense of "government program" and not "computer program".

The work environment is acceptable. Neither wonderful nor horrible. It is different from UPS -- there is more emphasis on the work and less emphasis on the trappings and ceremony. The building is an office building but not modern one with a cube farm; it has offices with traditional desks. I sit at a desk that was made possibly in the 1940s in a building that has large offices (multiple desks in each) with floor-to-ceiling partitions from the 1960s. The computers and phone system are fairly new but not over-the-top. It's not the stodgy corporate office, nor is it the hipster start-up dot-com environment. It is an interesting mix of furniture and technologies.

There is no window in my office. There is a cable for a 3720 terminal, although I believe that it is not connected to anything on the other end.

One big difference is the brain-washing. At UPS, new hires were (and probably still are) indoctrinated into "the UPS way" and told that they were "part of the UPS family". Folks who have worked in other corporations may have had similar experiences. At the new gig, which is a government agency, there was none of that. I was introduced to members of the team, given a desk, and shown the work. Direct and simple. I attended a well-organized security briefing. There were a few glitches, such as a last-minute change to a meeting location, but nothing major.

* * *

I've had some time for introspection. I've made some observations. Not all are flattering. I'm still working on them, and may have more later. Here's a few:

- I'm quite the pessimist. I am often thinking of how things can go wrong. Not small things, like getting a seat on the train, but big things, like finding a new situation. And not just thinking about them, but focussing on them almost to the point of obsession.

- I desire (and strive for) the approval of others. Perhaps more than I should.

- I have little in the way of faith. Not faith in the religious sense, nor faith in the spiritual sense, but faith in the "things will work out" sense. Some folks may consider all three senses to be one. They may be right.

- I'm uncomfortable when I don't see a solution to a problem. Really uncomfortable. Probably more uncomfortable than I should be. This ties in with the previous item.

Staring these in the face is one step in many. I want to change, but don't know how. (However, not seeing this particular solution does not bother me. I see these as something to change, not a problem. That itself may be a problem, or something that I want to change.)

In summary: the job is a mild challenge, the commute is an opportunity to read with the annoyance of variable arrival times, and my biggest challenge is inside my head.

DVD review: Bulworth

2009-10-31T18:35:09Z

Warren Beatty stars as politically-savvy Senator Bulworth. Up for re-election, he is depressed and suicidal. He orders a hit on himself, and then while on the campaign trail discards the carefully-written speeches and tells people what he feels. Mayhem ensues!

I put this movie in the "watch it once" category. The performances are great: Beatty shines here and the rest of the cast doesn't slouch either. The dialog works. There's a good balance of action, wit, and comic relief. Yet it misses something; perhaps this movie captured the spirit of the mid-1990s and we have moved on.

I rate this movie 6 cans of spam, out of a possible 10.

Weekend

2009-10-27T11:31:46Z

I visited my parents this week-end. With the new gig it may be a while before I can visit again.

My sister came in for one day, bringing her (cute, curious, and well-behaved) three-year-old son. (Which would make him my nephew.) I last saw Colin earlier this year, and he can communicate much more now. He loves cars and trucks and trains and we spent some time playing "catch" -- or rather "roll/toss the ball". He has some ways to go before he can truly catch a ball in flight.

My father had some videotapes from a friend and passed them along to my sister and me. I came home with copies of "Star Wars", "E.T.", "Spirited Away", and Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" but in French.

I also carted home a flatbed scanner, which I hope to get working with Linux.

Today starts my new gig with OMB. I also get to start on my SF-86 form, which is used for background checks. This is the form which lists residences, employers, and people who know me well. One can start working in this position before the complete background check.

Expanding my brain

2009-10-22T02:39:16Z

Today has been quite the day.

I made a practice commute in to Washington today. I've been doing that for the past week, to make sure that I can get out of bed, eat breakfast, and get to the train station on time. I've done it every day; today I was late but the train was still at the station even though it should have departed three minutes earlier. It's nice to know that they do that but I'm not going to count on it.

I collected information for the SF-86 form. One item is the SSS registration number. I had to call the SSS to get it; the web site could not find me. I was a bit nervous, thinking that they had lost my registration (and therefore thinking that I would not get the job or ever have a job with the feds) but the help desk was truly helpful and found my registration.

I spoke with a recruiter about a position she is looking for. Not that I would apply; she wanted advice about listing the position with the local Linux user group. The company is a small one and they are advertising for a Linux migration specialist. I'm pretty sure that the word "migration" is scaring off folks; migrations are considered scut work and few folks want it. (At least, that's my impression.)

In the afternoon I did some 'B' shopping. I hit Banana Republic, Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, and The Body Shop. I had a 40% coupon for Banana Republic and used it on business attire. Best Buy provided me a VHS head cleaner. Barnes and Noble had some interesting books but did not have "Coders at Work" which is what I really wanted. The 'B's had it this afternoon!

This evening I attended a talk by Jonah Lehrer, on the human brain and how we make decisions. Lots of good ideas in this talk; I wish I could relay them. He is an excellent speaker and if you have the chance to hear him by all means go! The museum (the speech was at one of the local museums) has recorded the talk. I hope that they will make the video and audio available to folks.

The end of one road is another road

2009-10-21T03:22:15Z

My summer vacation finally comes to an end. I start my new assignment on Tuesday. Phase 3 of the security process is complete, and I can work in the office. There are two more phases of security checks; they can occur while I am in the office.

It's been a long journey. I've learned a lot, and grown somewhat. (Or so I like to think.) I've built some confidence and dropped the emotional connection to the job. A job is a job; something to be done (as well as possible) but not my entire life.

I will be commuting to the job. The local commuter trains will serve me well here. The ride is about an hour, with a ten-minute metro ride on the far side. I think it will be an hour and a half door-to-door. I plan on using most of that time reading books on tech, history, and fiction.

Open source conference

2009-10-18T00:57:41Z

I attended the CPOSC (Central PA Open Source) conference today. It was a very pleasant experience! It's a small -- not, "tiny" is a better adjective -- conference, with about 150 attendees. It's only one day, with twenty-one sessions (three rooms with seven sessions each), a small set of vendors, and lunch!

I attended sessions on various topics, including Tomcat and Eclipse; fuzzy matching; Drupal, Python, and web applications; fancy tricks with KDE; and DRBD (Distributed Redundant Block Devices) for data backup and recovery. I also chatted with a bunch of people.

The con was in Harrisburg. I drove there, after debating on travelling by train. (I could, but it would mean changing trains in Philadelphia. It's a much longer trip, due to distance and waiting for connections.) So I drove, in the rain and the gray and the cold. The trip home was rainy and gray and cold, too.

For a bonus, I won a prize! (They had drawings every hour, with about fifteen winners in each drawing. Those of you doing the math realize that the odds of winning a prize were better than 0.5.) The prizes were on a table; first come, first served. I walked away with the book "Setting up E-mail Servers on Linux", just what I need for a project here in Baltimore.

Books and heroes

2009-10-12T01:10:24Z

I visited the Book Thing this morning, and donated a bunch of books that I had found in the recycle pile. (I had rescued them some time ago, and have been donating them in manageable batches.) I also found a few keepers: "Learning Perl", "Pthreads Programming" (that's not a spelling error), "Pragmatic Project Automation", "Engines of the Mind", and "Working with Congress". The first three are all geeky programming books; the last two are not. "Engines of the Mind" has the subtitle "The Evolution of the Computer from Mainframe to Microprocessor". Printed in 1986, it should be an interesting read. (The first Compaq PCs had just come out at that time, and IBM was just releasing the IBM PC AT.) The "Working With Congress" book is short and subtitled "A Practical Guide for Scientists and Engineers". It has a concise summary of congress and the various working bodies (committees, subcommittees, staffs, aides, and such).

This afternoon I attended a lecture at the local museum on heroes. Specifically, heroes in Greek mythology. The presenter focussed on four (Herakles, Helen, Achilles, and Odysseus) and tied in art and mythology with the current exhibit. The Greeks needed heroes to be people bigger than life; I suspect that we need them too.

I spent a bit of time downloading BYTE magazine PDF files. Or rather, my computer spent a bit of time; the 'wget' program is quite independent and needs no interaction. It handles retries and connection resets intelligently. I managed to download six issues today.

Huzzah!

2009-10-11T02:24:36Z

I went to the PA renaissance festival today. I met up with friends DPSwa (we had planned this) and their friends E&D. We all walked around and admired the pretty, shiny things for sale, ate some overpriced food, and watched some entertaining shows. One show was a mud-pit version of "Romeo and Juliet", another was a medieval culture show titled "Catch the Plague". The former was just what you think it would be, the latter was a take-off on "The Dating Game" but with lots of facts about the black death of 1348.

The day was a good one. My friend arranged for nice weather: some sun while cool enough to walk around with a heavy wool cloak. We saw quite a bit, including the elephant ride, singing wenches, and lots of people dressed in garb. the 'wa' part of DPSwa were the most entertaining, of course.

As we were leaving we found the *good* food places. We'll have to remember that for next year.

My geekiness

2009-10-10T00:19:38Z

I woke up to no sinus pain... something that hasn't happened for the past six days.

I had big plans for today.

I wanted to experiment with Ruby on Rails, work on my Ruby programs (Ruby is different from "Ruby on Rails"), and check out the SF-86 form.

Instead, I was distracted by a website with PDFs of the old BYTE magazine.

BYTE is an old friend. It was *the* magazine that explained computers to me, back in the late 1970s. It had articles on how to do things and how things worked, not just what is available to buy. It is long out of print, made obsolete in the late 1980s by the PC crowd and commercial uses of computers. A magazine for the hobbyist could not survive.

So the finding of a website with PDF files of the complete magazine is like finding El Dorado. I spent a bunch of time downloading issues.

And got two.

The connection is flakey. I don't know if the problem is on my side, with my ISP (Verizon), their server, or something in between.

Each issue is a sizable file. The early editions (1975) run about 60-70 MB each. The "golden age" issues (1979) run about 260 MB each. I spent most of the day and got two 1975 issues, due to slow transmission times, timeouts, and retries.

I *did* spend some time with Ruby on Rails, only to learn that the book I have does not match the version of RoR that I have. The book is for version 1 and my installation has version 2. The two versions are different, so the tutorial in the book doesn't work for me. Auugh!

DVD reviews: The Graduate and Wag the Dog

2009-10-08T01:24:18Z

The Netflix queue provided two Dustin Hoffman movies, "The Graduate" and "Wag the Dog". This may not be a coinncidence; after I picked "The Graduate" Netflix may have recommended other Dustin Hoffman movies.

Both are good; both are funny; yet the two movies are very different. "The Graduate" is clearly a product of the 1960s and is wonderful satire. "Wag the Dog" is clearly from the 1990s, is also funny, and worth watching. The former is the better movie, despite the overuse of "Sounds of Silence" and the cliche 1960s camera shots. The latter starts strong but fades in the end.

My Netflix queue now contains 198 discs; mostly movies but episodes of "Mission Impossible", "Torchwood", "Madlax", "Twin Peaks", "Dr. Who", "Star Trek Enterprise", and "Charmed" are there too. At best I can watch two per week, so I have about two year's of entertainment planned.

The Graduate: eight cans of Spam

Wag the Dog: seven cans of Spam

A productive day

2009-10-02T01:35:10Z

I did several things today.

I started with a practice run of the commute to WAS today. I was up before 6:00 and out the door at 6:35. I walked to Penn Station and made it it plenty of time for the 7:00 train.

On the train, I read the latest issue of InfoWorld and a bit of Fast Company. On the way back I read The Washington Post (I found a copy) and a bit of "Communications of the ACM".

I lunched with a former co-worker. It was a fun lunch. I miss a few parts of the old job, but I'm glad to have moved on.

The headset and power supply for the KVM switch arrived today. I plugged in the power supply and it seems to solve the problem of the KVM switch. (It would not switch when one PC was attached but not turned on.) I need more testing, though. The headset is working, too. When I opened it, I saw that it was a USB headset and did not have the audio plugs I was expecting. It also included a driver disk for Windows. My first thought was "Oops. It is USB and needs drivers in Windows. There is no way it will work with Linux." I was wrong; it works with Linux and I didn't need to add drivers or do any other tricky things. I *did* have to configure the sound hardware, which was all of selecting "Generic USB sound device" and checking the "make this the primary sound device" option. It was a lot easier than I expected.

This evening I watched an episode of Daria. The episode was amusing, and the commercials were mostly funny. This was an episode that I recorded from an over-the-air transmission in 1997, and it included the commercials. One commercial was for the "MTV 1997 Music Awards" so I know the year.

And I found forty-five cents today: one quarter, one dime, one nickel, and five pennies. That's the most change I have found in a single day.

Another commercial was for Saturn Autos. It was the "We shipped cars to Japan" commercial, celebrating the fact that Saturn, after ten years of business, had become good enough to compete with cars made in Japan. This commercial was a bit poignant, as today saw the announcement that Saturn would be shut down. The commercial mentioned that Saturn was ten years old at the time, so that would make Saturn twenty-two years old this year.

Rescuing books

2009-09-26T00:15:01Z

I went to the gym late today. On my way, I found a recycle bin full of books.

Who dumps books into the recycle bin?

I took them home and have them lined up for the Book Thing. The books are in German. The collection is interesting: German literature, a two-part encyclopedia, German readers, poetry, and a copy of "Oliver Twist" (in German). Most of the books are old, dating back to the 1950s and 1930s. One set of books has the date 1874.

I don't know that these books have any particular value. They might be valuable. They might not. The folks at the Book Thing can sort them out.

Closer to a job

2009-09-25T00:20:00Z

I went out to the wilds of Virginia, to the village called "Reston" today. I spoke with the folks at Prism and signed a bunch of papers. This moves me closer to a job, with the one thing remaining being a background investigation.

Note to media_junkie: I would have stopped by, except that it was the middle of the day and I was a bit sick-ish from the lunch at La Madaleine in Reston Town Center. Their flatbread lunch thing is rather greasy. I got to enjoy the traffic on VA-7, VA-123, I-495, and I-95. (The traffic was weak! and deserves to die!, compared to what I have lived through in New Jersey.)

The background check should take 3 to 4 weeks. I see no problems, but one must wait the allotted time and let the good folks perform their checks.

The position is in Washington, a location that is easily reached by the MARC train and Metro. I expect to commute with a lot of other folks. (Although I will miss the woman in NJ who looks like the Romulan commander! She was on the platform in Glen Rock every morning, waiting for the train to Hoboken.) The commute will give me time to read books, of which I have accumulated a pile.

It doesn't rain but it pours

2009-09-24T01:19:21Z

I received three calls from recruiters/staffing cos today. One has an offer for a position in WAS, the others have possible positions in BAL and Germantown. I prefer the first position, even though it is a bit of a commute. It has an interesting problem, decent people to work with, and lots of opportunities for contacts. The second is quite local but has fewer opportunities for connections, and the last has a difficult commute and a poor tech match.

Tomorrow I talk with the folks about the WAS position. If all goes well, I should be starting there in mid-October. (The position needs a security clearance and I must wait for the investigation.)

Nothing is final until it is final... so I remain hopeful and keep a positive attitude.