bryan wann :: binary fury

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!

Ferrari 456, my truck

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!

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!

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!

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.

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.