Nov 9th, 2008 by bwann
I finally got around to watching Cool Hand Luke. Great movie. Watched part of Giant, couldn’t stick with it. Didn’t go anywhere this weekend, stayed around home doing utterly nothing.
So I need to find somebody to teach me horseback riding. Somehow it got in my head this weekend. It sounds far, far more interesting than IT work.
Nov 2nd, 2008 by bwann
Discovery has a new show called Time Warp that is exceedingly interesting. I’ve spent hours watching slow motion videos on YouTube and looked forward to seeing new material. One thing they showed was a hot blonde pole vaulter doing her thing. Tangentally I went looking for pole vaulting photos on flickr and found a very lovely girl named Melanie Adams. Apparently she’s not some random girl, but an Aussie girl with modeling aspirations. Hopefully we’ll see more of her!
I’ve been kicking myself for not going anywhere on the weekends lately. Saturday afternoon I set off for Midland. My GPS was on CST, so it wound up being an hour longer drive than I had planned. It was very dark when I arrived and it was interesting seeing all the lit up rigs on the horizon. It reminded me of a bunch of Burning Man men all spread out. One of the first things I saw was a hugeass fire. At first I thought it was a rig burning off gas, but after I found it, it turned out to be some sort of tank farm burning off something. The smell of H2S was in the air, which smells like money being made!
At first glance, both Midland and Odessa around I-20 looked pretty old and run down. This morning when I went out to forage for breakfast I headed up to northern Midland. Much better area, clearly where all the new development and suburbia area. I also got a good luck at how utterly flat and open the Permian Basin is. Which makes sense, since it was an ancient sea bed.
I did quite a bit of driving around the oilpatch this morning. I drove down to Crane where some of the original fields were and it was quite dense with pumping jacks. Unfortunately all the roads were blocked so wandering on country roads was as close as I could get. The rigs were considerably harder to find compared to being lit up at night, not to mention being very spread out. I found one with a backdrop of wind turbines on a mesa I wanted a photo of, but it was deep in the middle of a lease I couldn’t get to.
I thought it was interesting that gasoline in San Angelo was $1.91, yet in the Permian Basin it was over $2.50. I thought there was a couple of refineries in M/O, but may be other things at play.
I left Midland around 2 to head home. This time I headed back to Crane and onward to I-10. Got home around 7:30, wee!
Oct 30th, 2008 by bwann
Took the truck to the shop and let my mechanic dink at it. Between an exhaust gas test and pressure test, no leak was found. When I first dropped it off, they suspected a head gasket leak but later couldn’t determine if that’s what caused it. While I was waiting, I called another recommended shop to get an estimate on a head gasket replacement. 12 hours labor, $1,100. Expensive, but surely it’d fix it.
Also had them check my O2 sensor. They cleared the code again ($80 for that privilege), by the time I got home it was back on. This sounds like a problem with cabling. In the end they recommended bringing it back so they could change the oil and carefully look for signs of coolant, and track down the wiring fault. I trust their work but need to try a friend’s outfit; I won’t have to travel across town to get there.
Each turkey sandwich I make costs $2.68 and provides about 340 calories. By the time I eat two of those and a taco in the morning, that’s about half the calories needed for my basal metabolic rate. I’ve added streching and strength training over the past few weeks to stave off muscle loss. Thus far regularlly I’m down to 168. I can’t remember the last time I was in the 160s.
Friday begins now.
Oct 19th, 2008 by bwann
My truck hates me. 2000 miles after I replaced the water pump, I learned I’m still losing coolant. After nearly a year, I finally got around to replacing the O2 sensors that were throwing a OBD-II code. One sensor was the shittiest shit to be ever shat in terms of getting a wrench to, even with a compact sensor socket I couldn’t get it. Wound up beating on it with a flare end wrench. Cleared the code, went for a short drive. The same damned code came back again!
Oct 16th, 2008 by bwann
I finally got tired of the “small” LCDs I had at work and set out to buy a pair of Dell 2001FPs like I had at Giganews. Through eBay I found a local liquidator that had a warehouse full of ’em and made a visit to them today. I hadn’t put a purchase through on eBay yet and their sales guy wasn’t there to make the sale. I told one of the guys in the warehouse “ah ha, no problem, I’ll just buy them on ebay right quick on my iPhone.” eBay site browsing was oddly slow, perhaps due to shoddy 3G reception. After several minutes of fiddling through the site, I had put in an order for my LCDs. The misstep came at checkout when sending money with PayPal. In a bit of a hurry I had selected eCheck to complete the transaction and quickly realized it wasn’t an instant transfer. “Funds will be released on October 21.” argh! No new loot, I had to leave like a yuppie fool.
I did score some Dell rails at another place today. I’m one step closer to reviving aeris in our NJ colo and say goodbye to The Planet.
Oct 11th, 2008 by bwann
After spending a couple of weeks afraid to look at my credit report, I finally bought a report today. I’m relieved that it confirms what should be true, that I have zero debt. I am however disappointed that it didn’t move my FICO score much. It would seen my past sins are still lurking in the shadows and still require a few years to evaporate. Fortunately I’m in no need of acquiring any more credit. “Stay the course” seems to be the cliche that applies here.
I’ve been working on overhauling a project this week and came to despise whoever named their project last, Net-SNMP or Net::SNMP. Maybe I should blame Google, since searching for one inevitably results in finding things for the other. While they do similar things, they are by far different animals.
The cool kids seem to use Net::SNMP widely. It’s nice to work with, but it lacks a way to translate numeric OIDs to text labels such as 1.3.6.1.4.1.9.1.670 to ciscoASA5520. The perl interface to Net-SNMP (SNMP.pm) does, as it has access to the shared MIBs directory on the system. The downside to SNMP.pm is that its gettable() method isn’t good at least, broken with esoteric errors at worst. This has lead me to use both, Net::SNMP for all the heavy lifting and SNMP.pm for translateObj. Annoying extra dependency for my scripts, but it works.
I’m beginning to wonder why on earth I wrote some things in PHP. Its annoying to shift my mind from perl to PHP and vice versa. So this weekend will be spent figuring out Mason.
Oct 7th, 2008 by bwann
Another wicked case of stomach cramps this afternoon. I left work early because hunching over was the only comfort I could get. Loaded up on pepto bismol, then tylenol .. four hours later it finally went away. gah. I don’t know what causes it. I had lunch at Delaware, which is pretty tame.
Oct 6th, 2008 by bwann
My Hong Kong colleagues get some interesting holidays. Today is the Chongyang Festival which “falls on the 9th day of the 9th month of the Chinese lunar calendar.”
The markets declined in a spectacular fashion today. Bargains to be had, but I spent my loose cash already last week. drats. A person could’ve gotten into GE and Goldman Sachs this morning at a lower rate than Berkshire Hathaway!
I hate you ancient Cisco code:
SNMPv2-MIB::sysDescr.0 = STRING: Cisco Cisco PIX Security Appliance Version 7.1(2)
Oct 1st, 2008 by bwann
New fans installed in MacBook Pro. Expensive lil buggers, $49 each from eBay. One of the more tricky MBP repairs I’ve done. Several fiddly little wires to move out of the way. After spending 45 minutes flipping through Google Earth on dual monitors, I declare success since it didn’t overheat and shutdown.
Since I’m now unsick, I started walking to the office. Takes about 20 minutes each way. The hill to my apartment is much, much longer when walking it. My lower shins already slightly burn from the climbing.
Sep 29th, 2008 by bwann
Hooray, I found a laundrymat, the laundry monster has been put down. The closest one I found was at 183 and Duval, across 183 from Rudy’s. I sort of enjoyed the experience, other than ignoring kids playing around, I got in two hours of reading Nick Leeson’s Rogue Trader.
The rest of my apartment for the most part is squared away. I spent more than I cared to on shelving, which greatly expanded how much fuh the balcony closet can hold.
Not sure if I got over my sickness. I still have the sniffles and can feel some congestion in my chest. It may or may not be allergies. I suppose the quick way to find out would be to go ride my bike up the hill and see what I cough up.
