Thirty minutes in Mopac traffic this morning gave me more time to think than my eight hour roadtrip to Del Rio on Sunday afternoon.
Feb 19th, 2008 by bwann
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!
Family tree
Dec 9th, 2007 by bwann
It’s again 80 F degrees today. I’m sitting here with the doors open and the humidity makes me want to take a shower. Meanwhile, Michelle tells me it’s 27 in Bartlesville, they have ice and now a thunderstorm.
Alex has been working on his and Victoria’s family trees and has been able to trace Victoria back to the 1200s. This got me curious about mine, usually I’m so horrible about it so when somebody in my family says I’m related to X person, I have no clue how or I forget. I signed up for an ancestry.com account and started playing around. I figured it would be a ton of work involving a lot of courthouse inqurires, but I was surprised at how easy it was to get started. Their website links to several other databases including repositories of scanned census records, draft cards, and immigration records.
It’s turned out to be an interesting information gathering exercise. 140 year old cursive writing takes a big of eyeballing to read. I’m amused how old census forms actually have a checkbox that says “[ ] deaf and dumb”. My sister has already done a lot of work and seemed to be excited to help me out. We also found the work other relatives did, so I merged those in as well. Friday night I was up until 5 AM reading through records to verify links and googling various names to find more data, then I wound up putting in several more hours on Saturday.
On dad’s side I’ve been able to go back to the 1700s on both maternal and paternal grandfather side. Mom’s side has been harder. From what I’ve been told, her maternal grandmother was an orphan, and the paternal grandparent side dives into Choctaw tribal records. Fortunately we found out one of my uncles has already pieced together the tribal records for a few generations as a requirement to get our Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB).
Many people make assorted intriguing arguments the surname “Wann” could be English, German, Scottish, and even Swedish. On the Wann side, I am fairly confident in the pedigree back eight generations ago to William Wann, Sr, 1755-1820. William seems to be a dead end, as I’ve found many Wanns on message boards looking for information on him and not getting much. Everyone seems to agree he came from somewhere in Germany and died in Tenneesee. In 1777, he married a woman named Ann McGowan, a 2nd generation Scotish-American (her parents came from Scotland to Tennesee). They had many children, one of which married a 2nd generation Irish-American. So, I’m of German, Scot, Irish, and Indian descent.
Ancestry.com has a feature in beta that’ll find famous relatives. Most interesting is that Queen Elizabeth II (yes, of the House of Windsor) is my “9th cousin, 3 times removed” through my 11th great grandmother and her 8th great grandmother. I haven’t verified all the links yet, but it looks like it may hold water. Other interesting (alleged) relatives:
- Samuel Morse, 5th cousin 8 times removed, inventor of Morse Code
- Frank Lloyd Wright, 7th cousin 5 times removed, architect
- Emily Dickenson, 6th cousin 7 times removed, poet
- Helen Keller, 7th cousin 6 times removed, blind/deaf author
- Robert Boyle, 3rd cousin 14 times removed, chemist
- Fran Whittle, 10th cousin 1 time removed, inventor of jet engine
- Jane Austin, 6th cousin 10 times removed, author
- Millard Fillmore, 4th cousin 7 times removed, 13th US President
- Woodrow Wilson, 8th cousin 6 times removed, 28th US President
- Ronald Reagan, 4th cousin 5 times removed, 40th US President
- George Orwell, 9th cousin 6 tmes removed, author
ancestry.com offers this footnote: “Keep in mind–The possible relationship information we show is only as accurate as the member-contributed family tree information found in OneWorldTree. We are unable to verify whether these results are in fact accurate. Of course, that’s part of the fun of family history–digging into the research.” Teases.
Christmas tree drama
Dec 2nd, 2007 by bwann
There’s something wrong with the fact that while I put up my Christmas tree today, I had all the doors and windows open, then later the air conditioner turned on.
Stupid fucking series lights.
Chef Ramsay
Nov 29th, 2007 by bwann
Greatest quote ever from Gordon Ramsay during last night’s Kitchen Nightmares: “Don’t take it personally, just take it seriously!”
I hate Firefox
Nov 25th, 2007 by bwann
Sigh. I’m getting tired of this bug where Firefox forgets how to load CSS and/or render images. It’s getting worse. A search through Bugzilla finds a few people having similar problems, but nobody has nailed down a solid reproduceable case yet. I guess I’m going to have to resort to checking page info and try to figure out what causes it.
I’m amused, the FAA airport facility directory for the Empire, NV airport (1A8) has a remark “displaced threshold marked by 8 white tires.” There’s also a one-foot berm around the runway, presumably to keep all the dust clear.
I’m headed to Amsterdam either the week before or the week of Christmas. A colleague decided against going, so it’s now on me. I can only image the amount of hell the airports will be during this time. I’m hoping my frequent flier status will get me past a lot of lines or the company decides to send me business class.
Another colleage was browsing over his Continental miles today and realized he’s 170 miles short being elgible for silver elite status next year. I always thought the stories of people flying somewhere and back in a day for mile bonuses was silly, but now I understand. Spending the $108 to fly to Houston and back is worth it in his case. He also discovered that with the amount of miles he has, he can redeem them all + $61 for a trip to Amsterdam. I’m not that vested yet, but poking around today I figured out I can go anywhere in the US for my miles + $10. It’s odd, because the last time we checked into upgrading an international flight would cost X miles and a $430 service charge; here they just want $61?
My IKEA halogen lights burned out a transformer the other night. The lights were getting dim, and then I started smelling smoke. There was a little tuft of smoke coming out of the transformer on the wall. After killing power, I had to cut the wires leading to the light strand, as the terminals on the transformer were charred and melted to the point I couldn’t get the screws out. So of course, I went out and bought the same fire hazzard light set again. I need light in my apartment in order to search for a safer replacement!
I stayed up until 3 AM Saturday morning, then spent the rest of Saturday watching Heroes season one. I couldn’t stop watching! The fact there was so much Ali Larter, and later Missy Peregrym (ok, Hayden Panettiere too, but she’s like nine years younger than me), in high-def goodness certainly helped.
I ventured into the steam room at the gym the other day for the first time instead of the sauna. It was all nice and chokingly humid, then WSHHHHHHHHHT, the steam generator kicks in and this jet of steam shoots into the room. All of a sudden it got much hotter, and I couldn’t see the door nor the far wall. Quite frankly I thought this must be what it’s like at first being in a gas chamber.
And now the result of the Safari trial. The past two weeks I temporarily switched from Firefox to Safari at home (OS X Tiger) and work (Windows XP) to try out the Apple way. So far, I’m pretty disappointed and have already abandonded it at work after it screwed me on a ticket entry today causing me to lose a lot of typing. Safari is pretty basic and a lot of the little things I took for granted in Firefox just aren’t there. Pretty much all of my gripes exist in both Windows and Mac versions.
Here’s the gripe list so I can remember a year from now why I hated it:
- Safari either doesn’t cache submitted forms or I’m abusing some bug/different functionality in Firefox. In our ticketing system I frequently use the back button after viewing details of a ticket (the previous step to get here is even a GET request); Firefox will happily take me back to the previous page, untouched, whereas Safari complains the previous page has expired and wants to post the form again. IE7 does this too, which leads me to believe it’s a functionality of Firefox I’m relying on. This killed me in doing ticketing work as I frequently flip back and forth to look at information and don’t want to wait on resubmitting an action to our slow ticketing system. To make sure I was sane, I went back and duplicated the same action in both browsers and Safari did the same thing.
- Safari doesn’t handle plain text pages very well. If I try select-all on a plain-text page, copy, then paste into pine or a textarea form, it drops almost all carriage returns and linefeeds and turns it into a huge blob. This happened on both the OS X and Windows versions.
- By default, Safari also uses a proportional-width font in textarea boxes. This makes lining up command output and other plaintext things a pain in the ass.
- I don’t have a quick sub-menu drop down on the back button in Safari. In Firefox if I wanted to go back X pages, I could click on this and just go there. Safari requires me to go to the History menu, and then it mixes all tab history together.
- Safari doesn’t work well with some of our self-signed SSL websites. On one of our internal web development sites, it flat out refuses to work with HTTPS. Other pages it may work and one mouse-click later it doesn’t (says it can’t open a connection). This is what caused me to lose a considerable amount of work today.
- Safari doesn’t have a convienient flashblock application. The only plugin I’ve seen will disable all flash content until you go to a drop-down menu and re-enable it. Flashblocker in Firefox blocks all flash and then allows me to click on individual elements to play the file.
- Safari does maximize properly on my 2nd LCD, whereas Firefox will crop off the menu and title bar at the top of the screen when maximized.
- Safari doesn’t like the Remedy forms I use on a vendor’s website. It throws some parse error and I’m unable to submit the form.
- Safari doesn’t seem to save me in memory consumption either. After several days, Safari and Firefox used similar amounts of memory.
- Rendering speed, both seem similar.
Media fail
Nov 11th, 2007 by bwann
Last weekend I bought a Mac Mini to use as a media server to replace my modded Xbox running XBMC. I love XBMC, it is nearly my idea of a perfect media manager. It plays a wonderful selection of codecs and containers, very responsive and quick interface, and it supports mounting of remote shares. The problem is, it doesn’t have enough CPU to play 720×1280 much less 1080×1920 video files. While the XBOX itself can output a 1080i signal (set through the MS Dashboard) it can’t render frames to keep up. It either flat out drops them or has nasty artifacts.
The Mini has no problem with 1080p output. In fact, it looks rather nice on my Mitsubishi. The Leopard “Aurora” wallpaper looks sweet! So, I installed Perian to give me a ton of format support for QuickTime, which then gives me that support in Front Row. Front Row handled all of my content, surprisingly even DVD and VIDEO_TS folders.
Front Row lacked many things I was accustomed to in XBMC. FR is very pokey trying to scroll through 100+ items. No streaming support either, so no Nederlandse TV for me. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get Joost working; I don’t know if it was a Leopard problem or what. I would’ve really liked to see it on the big screen. Even better would be a way to launch the application from Front Row (or vice versa).
Handling HD content on the other hand, sucked. Nothing existed that would play true HD images. VLC, Mplayer, weren’t quite there yet. I could fish a version out of their Subversion repositories and try to build myself, but that sort of sucks. Downloading HD content sucked too.
In the end, I gave up. I returned the Mini and bought a Toshiba HD DVD player. I was really torn between Blu-Ray and HD DVD. I had planned on buying a PS3 for the Blu-Ray support. I don’t have great confidence that Blu-Ray will win out in the format war. Even if Blu-Ray is technically superior, history has shown the population will buy the lowest price device to get the job done. This holiday season is seeing HD DVD players being sold at fire sale prices. Wal-Mart and Amazon are putting HD DVD players into the hands of people for under $200. This is a good indication to me that it’s the format that’ll come out ahead. Best Buy had a great deal this weekend where I got 300, Bourne Identity included with the player, in addition to three more discs of my choosing. I would’ve bought these anyways, so it helped with the price tag.
In other news, I bought Guitar Hero III for the Wii. In the past I wasn’t interested in it. Somehow I got to playing it with Rob, Bob and Brady, and got hooked on it. I finally beat the easy level, yay! It’s the next Tetris as far as I’m concerned.
Gym, raaaaawr
Oct 28th, 2007 by bwann
With the exception of Friday, I’ve spent every evening at the gym. I’m having mixed results with swimming. The thin Speedo goggles I have leak, which is absolutely annoying when constantly tilting my head to breathe. My other larger goggles are perfectly airtight but seem to block my peripherial vision. I hit the lap pool on Saturday; I was much more tired (or lazy?) than I thought and just was not comfortable at all trying to swim. One of my colleagues happens to have been a swim instructor, he gave me a few tips to try. I need to find out when swimming lessons are scheduled at the gym and get in on that action.
Today was a easy 7 mile run. I let the treadmill put me on a cardio program. It insisted on having me jog 12:00-13:00 minute miles to keep my heartrate down. Afterwards I started into a leg workout. I can now leg press 420 pounds (I maxed out the machine at our apartment complex at 300 pounds); perhaps much more on fresh legs!
I bought Armin van Buuren’s ‘Shivers’ album today, which includes “Sereneity”. This was played at Sensation White 2004 in Amsterdam, you can watch the video on Youtube. It’s gooooood stuff, great for running. Also purchased the “Ultra 10” trance compilation, good stuff as well.
I’ve also lost five pounds over the past couple of weeks. yay!
