Hoooray, five days off! I don't think I've been off this long with the new job yet.

wann.net news ticker
Sara Boberg sets standard for new idealized girl ... Zagg invisibleSHIELD is a must-have for all iPhone owners ... CCNA test got considerably more difficult over the past eight years ... loopt, twitter, clouds, kites, social networking is hard ... iPhone is great device for looking up lodging while on the road ... Obama / Biden, Osama bin Laden, coincidence? ... Sandra Bullock called up for jury duty too ... waking up and watching CNBC at 5 AM is awesome ... CNBC Squawk Box "Dallas" intro is more awesome ... Burning Man is going on without me ###

Also,
State of Texas, County of Travis, City of Austin
Dear Prospective Juror: You are hereby summoned for jury service as set out below:

I've never been summoned for jury duty before. Three people have told me they wished they got it. I don't look forward to it, since it's right in the middle of my moving plans and I'd have to take unpaid leave from work for however long a trial would be. It could be a new OJ or Enron for all I know. The county says most jurors should expect their trial to last a week. Hopefully I'm lucky and I'm not needed.

I want to cock-punch whoever thought it was a great idea to use CamelCase in wikis, and wiki authors who still support it. How are you supposed to have an easy-to-read, attractive document when you have things like ThisIsAPage, TeamNotesOnPresentations scattered about?

That is all.

Incidentally I did some shopping this weekend and took advantage of it being a tax-free weekend for clothing. I upgraded from a pair of basic black roper Justin boots I've been wearing for the past month (after I had just broken them in) to Lucchese full quill ostrich boots. The comfort is an order of magnitude different. My Justins were just tolerable, some degree of uncomfort, probably had much more breaking in to do. The Lucchese felt better instantly, they remind me much of my Magnanni dress shoes; snug, but foot fully envelop in smooth soft leather. They have a rubber sole, so no more authoritative clicking on concrete, but I'll gladly take comfort over that.

I had three girls at Cavenders come up and tell me how nice they where as I was buying them, which is a good sign. One tells me they'll last me fifteen years, another tells me I could romp around in the stable all day and they'll look good as new with conditioner. I don't want to think about what I'll be wearing when I turn 44, it's too much to handle. I also lack a stable. I guess the oil patch or the rough world of IT will have to do.

Also cashed in a gift certificate at Men's Wearhouse and picked up some new shirts to replace my older ones that just didn't fit right. Went hunting around the mall for somebody that sold Brooks Brothers, no luck. Apparently my closest stores are outlet malls in San Marcos and Round Rock.

Between sleeping, watching olympics, more sleeping, waxing my truck, and more sleeping, I got bored and started taking practice Cisco certification tests. The CCNP switching test was a tricky one, endless configuration examples with some arguments switched around, pick the correct syntax. CCIE test was pretty out there, things like "how long does it take SONET to heal after a ring failure" or somesuch. That one I did happen to know, as I've seen plenty of maintenance announcements saying "you may see a hit of 50 ms blah blah". The CCNA test was even farther out there. It was very wordy and executive-summary-ish, "a network is for?" "a) providing a way for employees of a company to exchange data, information, and collaboration." I quickly tired of wrapping my head around the language and went back to watching the Jamacians dominate the 100 meter races.

Given my day job of fiddling with firewalls and VPNs, their security track might be fun. Since I allegedly can't take any professional-level tests without my CCNA, I signed up to take the ICND2 test tomorrow at lunch to renew my CCNA. I have no idea what's on it. I figure if I could pass it once eight years ago, I can pass it again. It'll be really embarrassing if I didn't pass and might have to quit my job out of shame. I'm entertaining the idea of taking the CCIE written for the hell of it, just to see where I get. That'll be a few months off, I'm impatient so I'm taking this tomorrow.

I didn't realize it until the other day, but when I first moved to Austin, I was watching the Olympics then too. My television was just a bit smaller, and I have since repurposed the milk crates.

A short visit to the Apple store tonight and now I have a new iPhone with a working speaker. An iPhone with sound! It's a whole new experience all over again!

While at The Domain, I parked next to a Ferrari. Later, Alex tells me this was a 456, of which there were 3,289 were built, so I was somewhat lucky to see this.

Alex also posted this link today: Judge: Man can't be forced to divulge encryption passphrase. This is very exciting to me to read. I am a strong supporter of information confidentiality and privacy, and greatly prefer to control what information about me is released. I've been pretty loathesome that TSA or border agents could confiscate my laptop for any reason. This makes me want to turn on disk encryption with a quickness.

The really interesting twist is that custom agents first accessed this guy's laptop without a password, saw his kiddie porn. Then, they shut the laptop down. Later, they needed his password to decrypt the files. The judge ruled he couldn't be forced to provide it, even after agents had already witnessed the material on his computer.

My apartment management called me up today to bitch that some of my garbage (some stray milkjugs) had been found on the lawn downstairs. I don't know where they came from, I don't even drink milk. Out of a fit of apathy and 'not my problem' I didn't ever pick them up. I suspect they belonged to my cute blonde neighbor (or a clever asshole who likes to frame others) who also has had a vacuum sitting out in the breezeway for several days. Cute or not, I'll throw her under the bus if I have to when they come for me!

Tangentally, apparently corporate titles have their own slang. 'C-level' refers to 'Chief *', i.e. CEO, CTO, CIO, CSO. I invented a new slang for Alex, 'D-level', for directors such as Director of R & D.

Friday began six hours ago, hooooray!

After another early venture to the Apple store, I finally got my hands on an iPhone. Today I discovered the speaker doesn't work. At first I thought it was a Feature[tm] that iTunes, games, etc didn't play sound without the ear buds. Then I called it and discovered it doesn't ring at all. A call to Apple, now I have an appointment tomorrow to exchange it or otherwise deal with it.

I need risk management friends that I can pry with overpriced martinis to teach me about the exciting fields of operational and market risk. Anyone?

I finally made up my mind to buy an iPhone this week after being convinced to flip through the app store. I decided there's probably enough useful apps that I'd actually use to make it worthwhile. Foolishly I hit up a few AT&T stores on Sunday and discovered they were all sold out. This morning I went about 15 minute before opening at the Apple Store at Barton Creek mall. Already there was a line of about 25 people. At opening time, they passed out coupons for the three different models, valid to redeem all day up until 6 PM. They quickly ran out of 16 GB black models, all that was left by the time they got to me were 8 GB black and 16 GB white. I was after a 16 GB black, so I was the only one in line without an iPhone.

apple.com says they have more in stock (what, do they ration these things?), tomorrow I'll try earlier and see what happens.

I discovered why my MacBook Pro kept shutting down. The internal fans have completely failed and it was overheating at 185 F. Now I have a fan sitting here blowing on it, which keeps it at a respectable 134 F. Now to find replacement fans and crack the sucker open again.

Thank you Olympics for bringing us women's beach volleyball. I had completely forgotten about Kerri Walsh. Somehow I didn't know she was 6'3", holy shit that's tall!

Ever turn look at the back of a new $20 note and see the scattering of "$20" in the background? Turns out there's a specific reason and arrangement for it. This week's interesting wikipedia find: EURion constellation. A pattern of five tiny rings on bank notes which imaging software picks up on to prevent counterfeiting.

Today I was a passenger in an auto collision! Rob and I were going to lunch (mmm indian curry) when he rear-ended somebody who suddenly was at a dead stop in the middle of Anderson Lane. A good 40 m.p.h. lick, popped the airbags. I knew we were going to hit, I felt the impact, but interestingly I could smell the burned airbag propellant before I realized they had deployed. Rob received some burns on his hands from the airbags as he was holding onto the steering wheel. I tweaked my neck from the seatbelt like I slept on it wrong and can't turn my head to the right.

In all we'll all go to sleep tonight and awake to a new day tomorrow. Can't say so for Rob's CRV, the front received a heavy amount of damage. Amazingly it was still drivable enough to get off the street, but was making some pretty wicked noises. It'll be in the shop for a long time. The F150 had like literally three short scrapes on the tailgate and a foot of the bumper was bent down. It clearly came out the winner and makes me glad I drive a truck.

I decided against going to Burning Man this year. With moving coming up, running the spreadsheet of what it's going to cost, and none of my friends going, my heart just isn't into it now. Instead one of my friends is flying down that weekend since she still has the week off. One last visitor before I move!

I really make a conscious effort in communications to mean what I say and say what I mean. This gets especially interesting when I "should" say something just to make somebody else feel better. A great example of this is "I'm sorry". I won't say it unless I really feel sorry. This obviously causes problems when it's something intentional I've done; I just did it so generally of course I'm not sorry for having done it. I don't want somebody to patronize me, so I'm not going to patronize others with things I don't mean.

Along the same lines, I could care less about meaningless small talk. We all do it, asking things like "how do you do?" Really, who cares how me or you are doing, so we just answer "fine." Then we'll pretend to be friendly and come back with "you?" "fine." I guess just there to ease into the actual meat of the discussion. Some might even say it's being polite. Fortunately I'm a crude person. I suspect this is how I lasted so long at my old job, either having a tough skin or developing a tough skin. I'm beginning to feel my age, I've been realizing that I'm getting less and less afraid to say what I think.

Often I see work conversations start off with "how you doing?" immediately followed by some request. What I've noticed more than anything are the requests we occasionally receive from other departments to 'reach out' to somebody. This phrase annoys me to no end, in my mind I'll always substitute it with 'reach around'. In a fit of wiki reading tonight, I ran across " Why we should remember Bill Lumbergh". It specifically addresses all that is wrong with 'reach out' and "the emptiness of linguistic conventions at work." I am glad nobody at work says things like "that'd be great".

I don't have any answers. I'm just some guy with a keyboard. I will do my part to eliminate empty linguistic convetions one day at a time. hooray!

Hoooray I signed up for a new apartment today. Right across 360 from work, about a half mile commute. My move-in date will be the week after Burning Man, so it'll be interesting.

The weekend before last, I was enjoying swimming in the pool for stupidly too long. I burned myself pretty bad on my face and chest; I hadn't been burned this bad in like 15 years. Normally I always wear Bullfrog when I'm out for a long time, but for whatever reason this time I didn't. The 2nd night was the worst. Ibuprophen helped considerably, but wasn't enough. I'm a side sleeper and it was way too painful to sleep on my side, and couldn't get to sleep laying square on my back. I eventually discovered if I concentrated on something, I could ignore the pain.

So, I spent the better part of the night thinking about manned explorations to Mars and all the problems that would need to be solved. Even though it seemed like I was talking to myself in my head for the entire time, I'd occasionally come out of it and realize 2-3 hours had passed. I never solved manned explorations, but think I'm up to speed on challenges facing the project.

By mid-week the pain went away and it was one of the happiest days of my life! The endless molting came and went, and here I am.

Much to the dismay of my non-Texas friends, I picked up a pair of black roper boots this weekend. They go with jeans much nicer than running shoes, and I get that nice authoritative click-clopping sound when I walk like my dress shoes make on concrete. Now to break-in the bastards.

The 4th was spent at Bill & Katherine's place, enjoying brisket he smoked. Somebody had brought some sort of "southwest dip", which was served in a hollowed-out french loaf. I didn't catch what all was in it, I think cheese, bits of ham, sour cream, possibly some jalapeno or chilies. I'm fond of sour cream, but this was some damn good dip! The loaf of bread kept it warm for several hours until it was gone..

Saturday was spent at Nathan's ranch out by Paige. Definately off the beaten path, the river rock aggregate road reminded me of the Winnemuca-Gerlach road of bones (just 99 miles shorter). Here again we were grilling and smoking all day. He turned me onto some hot sausage from Southside Market from Elgin, ribs and brisket from Bastrop Cattle Company; both local companies with local stock. The sausage from Southside was delicious, I will definately have to make a trip to Elgin this weekend for more. I hadn't used Salt Lick's rub personally, it was great on beef ribs. I'm getting hungry again just typing this.

Sunday was spent recovering.

Such a successful weekend.

• Toured a new apartment property today
• Grilled a phat steak tonight
• Pulled out appliances, cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom
• Watched seasons 2, 4, 5 of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (UK version)
• Went out with Bob & Julia last night at Spiderhouse; had never been there before
• Learned the backstroke
• Figured out I can float with a pull buoy tucked behind my back, then spent nearly two hours floating and swimming in the pool
• Wet Swiffer pads are greatest thing ever for cleaning a bathroom tile floor

Prospective new apartment is on top of a hill across 360 from work. Really nice place, only $20-$100/mo more depending on options. Includes a spa and dry sauna. Probably a 15 minute walk from work, riding a bike up the drive would be positively daunting. Behind the property leads into a large, somewhat quiet neighborhood, which would be nice for casual riding.

I spent a good amount of time in the pool today. Wore myself out in the afternoon. Taught myself how to do the backstroke. Tonight I went back to experiment with a pull buoy, discovered my legs will float just fine but my torso drags me down. If I tuck it under my lumbar I can float just enough to keep my face out of the water. Spent a lot of time casually paddling from one end of the pool to the other; my arms are jelly now. This is pretty exciting to me as it means I can wail on my upper body now without wearing myself out. Have started to pick up speed on my limited freestyle, haven't gotten comfortable with coming up to take more air.

I was dorking around with a snorkel and inhaled a lot of water through my nose. Water smells fucking foul, like four day old liquid garbage in my nose. Took two hours for the smell to finally go away. Hope I did not suck in some ecoli or hepititis or something nasty.

The company I started long ago would've been 12 years old two days ago if it were still around. huh. I must be doing something wrong, for I am not sitting on a beach earning 20%.

So the server I ordered long ago for tifa has two hard drives. It wasn't until later I remembered this and realized it was not setup in a RAID. I finally got around to ordering a KVM-over-IP device from The Planet so I could work in single user mode to move filesystems around to an array. In the meantime, I had been playing with racoon and configured a ipsec0 interface that started on boot. At the tail end of the ifup-ipsec script, I had ran racoon in the foreground. and forgot about this.

Tonight I reboot tifa to get the new KVM working. Of course, the ipsec0 interface happily comes up, racoon has fired up in the foreground, preventing any other services from starting, e.g. ssh or login or virtual terminals.

What I didn't expect is the KVM device (Lantronix Spider) apparently gets its power from the USB ports of the server. And the power isn't persistent through reboots. It's not just a dongle leading back to a central device like an Avocent AV2000, but a one-piece brick that's daisy-chained with ethernet in, USB/VGA out. I'd send a ctrl-alt-del, and it'd take the KVM down with it as the server rebooted. My first clue was the java applet losing connection after reboot. It took a few minutes of troubleshooting to prove my hypothesis with several reboots with a running ping.

It takes about 5-8 seconds for the web service to start on the KVM device, and by the time I re-login and fire off the java applet, the OS is well on its way to booting. One couldn't just close the applet and remain at the login page, as the reboot of the KVM caused it to lose state of http sessions, forcing me to re-auth all over again.

It took well over 30 minutes of constant reboots to finally get in fast enough to hit "I" at the prompt to go into interactive boot to stop networking from loading. The Planet sells it as "BIOS-level", but it's pretty untrue in my case. I can't even do anything like change kernels from the grub menu or rescue mode. Allegedly there's an external power source available for it. Time will tell if they will provide one to me or tell me to fuckoff.

grr.

Mom and sister visited last weekend. A good time was had, much running around, eating and shopping was done. Pappadeux was out of crawfish, we visited the UT Tower, then shopping at IKEA. I hadn't been to IKEA in several months and walked out with new huge art for my apartment.

In IKEA I found a stuffed rat doll, I was so excited! I was walking around the store when I heard some woman screech "EEEEP!". When I turned to look, she was staring at me and the rat on my shoulder, "I thought it was real!"

While at the UT Outlet, I wandered down to the bookstore. I remembered there was so much I wanted to learn and noticed college textbooks are now ridiculously expensive. Anyone know where I can find a good textbook on risk management that's not $148?

Monday I had a case of food poisoning or something wicked. I left work a bit early because my stomach was really bothering me. By the time I got home I was doubled over in pain. It wasn't just stomach discomfort, but outright burning and sharp pain in my gut. I loaded up on pepto, tylenol, but it was a solid three hours before it subsided. No comfortable position, I alternated between pacing around the apartment and writhing on the bed. I debated going to the clinic, then realized they had already closed. Took a couple of days before the cramping in my stomach went away. I've experienced this once before in Tulsa, didn't know what caused it then either. blah.

Now it's Thursday. Almost Friday.

Also Gemma Atkinson is a total babe, that is all.

What happens when a drunk driver hits a peloton of bicyclists.

Ah, summertime in Texas. I am thoroughly sunburned from being in the pool yesterday and a 24-mile ride today. The compressor in my apartment AC died last night, so today was an exercise in staying comfortable. Apparently if you close the blinds and turn on all the fans, it's fairly tolerable. Who knew?

While googling for information about the wind farms around Sweetwater, I discovered Miss Snake Charmer 2008. As part of the rattlesnake round-up they have in Sweetwater, they have a pageant for the folks who get queazy around snakes. Winners get some sort of scholarship, presumably for college. The catch is, one of the responsibilties of winning is that the girl has to either skin or milk the venom from a rattlesnake. I don't have this girl's name, but she looks relatively non-chalant about standing in a pen of rattlesnakes.

In a fit of three-day planned spontaneousness, I drove to Denver this weekend. I left work at 7 PM on Friday and hit the road. The V1 managed to save me three times on 183 before I even got to 183. It was well after dark by the time I passed through Sweetwater and I noticed something peculiar; as far south and north as I could see were a set of red warning lanterns flashing in unison. At first I thought it must've been lights along a really long runway, but as I got closer I realized it was a huge wind turbine farm. It stretched for several miles to the north as I traveled to Lubbock. I later found out from Steve that it was one of the largest installations in the world.

By 2:30 AM I was ready to call it a night and stopped at a rest stop just south of Plainview to sleep. When I left Austin it was 95 F, so I paid no mind to bring a jacket. As the night went on, the temp dropped into the upper 40s making for a chilly, sleepless sleep in my truck. Sometime after 6 AM I woke up to see the sun just starting to peek over the horizon. Started the truck to warm up for a bit, and took a solid catnap.

Back on the road, I drove up to Plainview in search of breakfast. I was hoping to find some dirty cafe with grumpy waitresses, but lacking one of those I settled on IHOP instead. I picked up a copy of the Plainview Daily Herald and remembered what part of the country I was in. The top story was about how ethanol was driving up corn prices and hurting the region's beef producers; the op-ed section carried a large syndicated column from Ann Coulter; then there were three pages devoted to religious news. In other words, very red.

It's interesting to see how seemingly sudden the terrain changes in comparison to state borders. The northern end of the Texas panhandle gets flat with virtually no trees, just fluffy white grass and irrigated fields. Within a couple of miles before crossing into New Mexico, mesas start cropping up. Then as you cross into Colorado, the mesas suddenly turn into mountains. I passed the familiar turnoff to the Great Sand Dunes at Walsenburg on my way north. Colorado Springs is a very pretty place, the mountains are much closer to the city than they are in Denver.

I made it to Steve's around 4 PM on Saturday. As we were at MicroCenter, Steve gets an obscure txt message from Sam. He later realizes Sam is on his way from Minneapolis. We head downtown for a dinner of pizza. Downtown is considerably different than from when I was there in 1998-1999. There was no train then, there was no 16th street mall. The Qwest building was still there, but it didn't seem as omnious as it did back then.

We made our way down to Adam & JoLynn's, who I haven't seen in a while, I think since I sold my company four years ago. Helped assemble his new grill, had some yummy burgers and hung out for a while. Not too long after returning to Steve's and crashing, Sam showed up.

Sunday we wandered around downtown a bit and had breakfast. Afterwards Steve and I bicycled back downtown from his place. I've forgotten how nice it is to ride on dedicated, concrete bicycle paths like KC and Tulsa had. Here in Austin we have either gravel trails for non-road bikes and highways. Lots of nice blondes and redheads on the path. Downtown we ended up at a park on the river, where people were practicing with kayaks and wading in the water. It was a nice ride, perhaps either the altitude or the pace made my lungs hurt later, but I still felt great.

Meanwhile Sam had made his way downtown while we were there riding. After we all returned, we took the train downtown for dinner. After the ride I was pretty wiped for whatever reason. A burger and several iced teas helped somewhat.

Monday morning I packed up and headed home. In the panhandle I took a slightly different route to Dalhart which lead me smack in the middle of rolling ranch land. It was such a great feeling being out with the land, miles from any other structure, in the direct sun and warm wind. Between the trip up and the trip home, I don't know how many Sonic iced teas I drank. Well into the double digits. The trip home felt amazingly fast. I made it back home in 14 hours, 5 minutes.

I had a realization about west Texas. Everyone thinks it is desert emptiness, but to the contrary, there's a lot going on out there. A few clusters of oil pumping jacks here and there, cotton fields, wheat and corn fields, grain elevators, cotton gins, cattle ranches, cattle feedlots, wind turbines; it's very much a busy area of production.

One especially interesting thing I noticed was at Lubbock airport. There is a FedEx facility there and they have what appears to be a small fleet of Cessna 208 airplanes. I had no idea they flew such small planes. I can't imagine what they're used for, unless it's quicker to fly a plane to some areas for priority overnight delivery than driving a truck.

Overall I'm glad I went. With gasoline prices topping $4.00/gallon in Colorado, it was more expensive than I was estimating. Nevertheless, tt felt great to be back out on the road seeing the land, and get out of Austin. I could've flown for less, but I would've missed out on a fun roadtrip.

Still alive. Saturday I rode the AHCC. I wanted to do the full 107 mile route, but after 30-40 miles it was pretty apparent I wouldn't last that long. I made it to the 'Dillo Door cutoff in with thirty minutes to spare so I had made good time by then. I headed down the 60 mile route and came back 'round. Coming back was easier, I wasn't fighting the wind and it felt like a large part was downhill. At the cutoff rest stop I spotted a rather nice looking blonde; wearing a Texas Iron jersey, a 2' long braided blonde ponytail, wearing ice blue Oakleys .. quite a sight for wary me. I forgot how cut, trim, and tan all the serious cyclists were.

Back at the highschool I did a few laps to round out an even 65 miles. The sun had been out for several hours by then and it was nice and toasty. A few of the Texas Iron (a tri group) kids were out running laps around the campus too after the ride. Later I realized the Cap Tex Triathlon was coming up in a couple of weeks, so they were probably training for that.

Now I've got to get my act together to put in a few centuries this summer to redeem myself.

I've decided after careful consideration NagiosGrapher is one of the worst software packages ever. There's so much terse and conflicting instructions out there, that even after three hours of hacking and tinkering I cannot get it to work. Even from an RPM install! die die die!

I must go back to Death Valley, it calls to me. I want to experience 130+ F heat.

After a week I'm better, but still coughing. It was a fantastic Texas weekend, clear and sunny, in the 80s. I failed to go do anything Saturday except be a nerd and play with nerd things. Today I couldn't take staying inside and decided to go out for the first long ride of the year. 41 miles around the Mansfield Dam loop, and my legs got completely shredded and in much discomfort right now. Normally I can cycle that in 2:30, today it took 4:22. There was a headwind on the 360 section which made it exceptionally tiring when coupled with the hills. Breating deep makes me cough a lot, but that's pretty normal for me after a hard ride..

Hellooooo Gisele

I done went and got sick again! I wasn't feeling very well after having ice cream + chocolate syrup for dessert at lunch and blamed it on indigestion. The night went downhill from there, I was getting very tired and went to bed. I woke up at 5 AM with some wicked chest congestion, felt like a cinder block was on my chest. A scalding hot shower fixed me enough to sleep a few more hours. Now I'm actually sitting in front of a space heater drinking a pot of hot tea because I'm shivering so much. Fuck you bacterial infection or Texas springtime allergies!

Swifters are awesome, that is all.

I'm amused by work sending me a 1" thick binder of doctors in my health insurance network ... in New Jersey. But that's fine, since Jersey City is my adopted city now during the day due to the number of people I work with there and how everything operates on east coast time.

Also, I did not know it was my birthday tomorrow until I got home tonight and had a few emails from friends wishing me a happy birthday. Thanks all! 29, almost 30!

So far I'm enjoying the new job. I certainly have my work cut out for me. I was looking for apartments up north so I could cut out the 30 minute commute and ran across the place that's literally across the street from the office. Looks pretty spiffy, has granite countertops, so I'll have to check it out.

My new 20" LCD arrived at home, I've been so productive this week. This week's hotness, Aberrant behavior detection in time series for network service monitoring. The other hotness is Roadhouse on DVD for $5, coz who doesn't love Roadhouse and Patrick Swayze kicking ass?

I have returned from my whistlestop visit of the east coast. On the EWR->AUS flight there were three ultra hot, size-2 girls. Listening to them chatter about timezones and daylight savings, they revealed they were coming from Saint Maarten. One of them even smiled at me as I did a double-take as they were boarding. They clearly could not keep up with my standards, they were back in row 27 while I was happily enjoying my tea from row 3. I would've loved to know their story anyways. I lost track of them after the luggage carosel, so they're about this city somewhere.

An airplane appears to be my coveted place for reading. After putting in earplugs to block out the drunk and loud Scot behind me, I was able to knock out nearly five chapters of a VPN book tonight and actually feel like I retained it.

I start the new job tomorrow; at present time I only have the address, no floor nor suite number. Interestingly, yesterday I was a few blocks away from the corporate office in Jersey City.

So at AUS, CLE, and BOS today the announcements seemed extra excited about the ORANGE security color, advising travelers to be extra cautious about suspicious items and people. What does orange mean? Is that worse than red? or is it worse than yellow? Fuck if I know. As Alex says, they need a numbering system, "today's threat level is 3" on a scale 1-10 is much more useful. But, I wouldn't know what it was yesterday... today it's 3! did it go up or down?!

From: Data Foundry Intranet
Subject: [PERSONNEL #165496] Departing Employee - Bryan Wann [bryan][e254596]
Date: March 5, 2008 4:18:07 PM CST
To: undisclosed-recipients;
Reply-To: personnel

Employee Record Inactive.
Data Foundry Intranet access disabled.

It is done.

So far the move from Fedora Core 6 to CentOS has been pretty painless. Aside from having to remember how to change selinux contexts on directories, all seems well. If you're seeing this, you're gold!

My colo is disappearing tomorrow, so you won't be reading this for a day or two until I get my new home sorted.

HARRRRRRRRRR, last stint of on-call coverage finished! No more on-call ever ever ever ever ever ever! Hello every third weekend, I've missed you!

The other day we noticed our lights at the office flicker and the facilities people at the datacenter logged a brief voltage sag. It turns out there was a guy in east Austin who broke into an Austin Energy substation to steal copper wiring. Several articles report he got into live conductors, was hit with 80,000 volts and was engulfed in flame. Amazingly, the bastard survived (for now) with 100% burns to his body and he was flown to the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.

In a fit of boredom I cleaned off my desk in my bedroom and migrated the Mac from the kitchen counter to it. While I'm still sitting here squandering life away, it feels a lot more productive. I think this is because this is how I started off spending my 20s, sitting at a desk in my bedroom until the very wee hours of the morning building my empire. I spent a LOT of time there. Shortly before I moved here, I had migrated to the diningroom table so I could watch TV. After moving, my Powerbook took over the kitchen counter. It didn't get any more convienient than that, coming and going, perched on my stool, pecking away. Eventually I'd put a leg to sleep, then move to my chair. Here, the 120+ F degree heat would eventually roast my legs and I'd migrate to the floor or back to the kitchen counter. Suffice to say, that's not a way to stay productive for long hours.

So here I am once again sitting in my old task chair and old desk, listening to old techno, all which served me well for many years. I feel ready to produce and I'm looking for something to do. I do miss having my spacious 20" monitor, so I need to craigslist one.

I finally did it, I turned in my resignation today. It's been a hard decision to make, I hope I'm doing the right thing. I'm giving up on over three years of familiarity and going to somewhere new to do different things. I vowed a couple months ago this would be my last year there, I just didn't anticipate this new job coming up so soon. I think it's going to be better for me, so I'm feeling better about it and a bit more relieved.

Thirty minutes in Mopac traffic this morning gave me more time to think than my eight hour roadtrip to Del Rio on Sunday afternoon.

I'm still alive. I was working in Amsterdam all last week. The weekend before I thought it would be a really good idea to stay up all night Saturday night (or was it Friday too?), sleep a few hours Sunday afternoon, then stay up all night Sunday night to get on Amsterdam time. For the most part it worked, I slept on a good chunk of the flight over and was ready to go when I landed.

The trip sucked. I worked long hours moving servers around all week which wore me out and built up a sleep deficit. By the end of the week I was pretty cranky, just wanted to curl up and sleep. Saturday was supposed to be my extra day off, but the schedule slipped enough to where I was working most of the day. I promptly went back to the hotel and slept until it was time to come home. Looking at my passport, I was there a year ago to the day. It was then and now cold, windy and rainy. One day I actually saw the sun!

I didn't rent a car this time, I purely rode the intercity train, trams, and busses. I figured out the #40 bus line that will take me from Middenweg to Sciencepark, which took 1.5 km each way of walking out. By 22:00, buses only ran every 30 minutes so I wound up walking to the tram station every night anyways.

Friday and Saturday night I had to go to work early for maintenance, before the trams started running. The first taxi ride was pretty uneventful. The ride on Saturday was pretty annoying; when I got in, the driver told me he accepted credit cards. fine. Then he didn't know where Sciencepark nor Kruislaan was, nor did his nav unit. Finally drew a little map and mentioned Middenweg which got the point across. When we arrived, he discovered he could only accept AmEx and Mastercard when I only had wallet full of Visa cards, no Euro, and only $100. He finally relented (what choice did he have?) and took me to an ATM in Middenweg. Good thing I knew the area.

One evening I had Indonesian food at Bojo's, it was every bit delicious as I remember. I got in so late every night I didn't want to burn two hours to eat, so the rest of my meals were New York Pizza and fries. I stayed at the Hotel Eden at Rembrandplein, really nice place; I highly recommend it. I booked some winter special and it was a good deal at like EUR 120/night. For work it was perfect since it was right on the #9 tram line. Otherwise, I didn't make it outside of the square. Note for next time, a couple stops up at Praetoriustraat in Watergrafsmeer is a number of eetcafes. I'd gladly take pizza over schwarmarolls for lunch.

Full disclosure: I broke my nine month soda-free spree. At Telecity they only have a coffee machine and a Coca-cola machine. I failed to visit AlbertHein beforehand to smuggle in bottled water. I was so parched I gave in and bought a Coke (try chugging a hot coffee or tea, doesn't work). I'm so disappointed that the counter reset. I only had one can and I'm back on the no-soda wagon.

I finally found my old DLJ brokerage statements of a small portfolio back in 2000. I've been trying to find out if they're still anything there, but DLJ was bought by Ameritrade, who was bought by TD Waterhouse and it's a pain to see who wound up with it. Most were bought right after the NASDAQ bubble popped but they still took a beating afterwards. Unless the shares double in value at some point, I'm still quite underwater. At some point DLJ started charging me a quarterly maintenance fee so my suspicion is that they've liquidated my shares to cover it and closed my account. Nevertheless, it's still my money and I'd like to reclaim it.

Akamai Technologies (AKAM), bought at $59.68, currently at 34.60
Cisco Systems (CSCO), bought at 54.94, currently at 27.07
Metromedia Fiber (MFNX), bought at 25.50, went chapter 11 and is now worthless
RMI.net (RMII), bought at 3.05, went bankrupt in a spectacular manner
Williams Communications (WCG), bought at 34.37, went bankrupt.

Somewhere I had some Foundry (FDRY) but I was nailed by a margin call and had to sell it to cover.

I'm a couple months away from topping off my short-term savings account, then I'm back in the market for some long term buying. Hopefully I'll be a little smarter about it this time around. As part of gaining clue, I've spent the past two days reading Berkshire Hathway annual reports and reading about the companies acquired. It's some interesting reading. I wish all executives wrote in Buffett's plain english style.

My truck has decided to quitely revolt against me. I've slowly been losing coolant over the past couple months. I finally took it to my mechanic last week. They ran a pressure test on it, couldn't find anything but agreed it was going down. No obvious leaks, no stains around fittings or the water pump, nothing in the oil nor transmission fluid. Everyone tells me it's probably the water pump venting tiny amounts of vapor, so before too long I'll take a shot at replacing it. Three more payments to go on my truck, the bastard must last me another four years before I replace it.

I finally got around to eBaying stuff in my closet. Anyone want to buy a stack of Portmasters? A couple of Atari 2600s and a shitload of games? Or a bunch of Cisco VIC and WICs? Next up is my stack of Sun SPARCstation and Ultras. I'm in a giving mood too, anyone want any bath towels? Champagne flutes, wine glasses? A toaster? A roman chair workout stand? A fiber optic Christmas tree? Help me free up valuable cubic footage in my apartment! Come see me at Crazy Bryan's Houseware Bazaar!