bryan wann :: binary fury

Google Maps apparently just got updated with new satellite imagery. There’s now higher resolution of Europe, I can now find our colocation facility in Amsterdam. My old apartment complex in Tulsa is now there, no longer a clump of trees. Looking at that picture now brings back all sorts of memories living there. The whacky home for runaway girls I periodically operated on my popular futon, running around to other friend’s places nearby, driving through uppity Holland Hall SUV-land traffic in the mornings, so many trips where I got home at 4 AM. I like how from the image you have no idea it’s on top of a hill a couple hundred feet tall. I’ve spent hours cycling up and down those hills. Meaning to lay out by the pool more during the summers but never really doing it. Going out to IHOP at 2 AM when the place is blanketed in snow and having to park in Albertson’s across the street because it’s too slick to get back to the top. My pet rats who used to get into mischief and nibble on way too many things like electrical cords and water lines.

In retrospect, my first apartment seems like a totally lonely purgatory. I did only live there for 6 or 8 months before I realized I could roll with higher class with a kickass view for the same amount of money. I just didn’t have that many people come over to visit. I had pretty boring couches there too. 51st and Harvard traffic was a total ordeal when going to school every day.

My place in Austin is seeming like my first apartment. It’s a really nice place, but I don’t have anyone hanging out here to make it feel like it has a life of its own. For all intents and purposes, I could be making it all up since nobody is ever here. It’s mainly a place where I come to hide from the tortures of the day in order to face the next day. A friend told me for my first place in Austin should be a loft downtown, then I’d have more life than I could beat off with a stick. At $1,400+/mo for a loft, I didn’t need that much life.

Speaking of my place in Tulsa, I had a dream last night I asked the cute leasing girl out to lunch and she said yes (in reality she said no, something along the lines of “that’s sweet, but I don’t think my husband would approve”, which is another short story in itself). More importantly, she said she wanted to go to KFC. I love KFC. It was totally awesome that she wanted to go to KFC. Then I woke up and was horribly disappointed.

Wednesday, I leave for Virginia to do prep work for a big upcoming project. One of the things I get to do is manhandle a bunch of loaded server cabinets around. Mind you I’m a 165 pound cyclist, I don’t exactly have a lot of mass to heft these things around with. It’s going to be an experience. Incidentally, as part of this move, a lot of work and planning has been shouldered on me to care care of before it can happen. I’ve been wheeling and dealing on the phones a lot, trying to get stuff done. It’s been especially bad this week since I’m cramming to get what loose ends tied up before I leave on the trip since my deadline is looming near. Between of all my real-time multitasking I caught my mind racing ahead while my fast talking was lagging behind. I’m surprised people understood what I said (they probably didn’t). Overall I’m sort of enjoying the challenge of planning something this big with the expectation it goes off flawlessly. It certainly gives focus on what to do.

Part of my Enron fascination has lead me off to better understand the power, oil, and natural gas industries. Through some random googling I ran across this page “What’s wrong with the electric grid?” It’s a great read and filled in several fundamentals of the electrical grid I didn’t know existed or how they really worked. The bibliography lead me to this book, Understanding Electric Power Systems : An Overview of the Technology and the Marketplace which also lead me to this book, Understanding Today’s Natural Gas Business. Both seem like good reads; part of my growing up involved the gas industry so I’m already familiar with parts of oil and gas exploration, but I’d like to learn more. I bought the first book over power systems, unfortunately it’s not going to arrive in time to be used as plane reading material.

Speaking of MySpace being profitable, here’s an article talking about it turning into a profit center.

Of particular interest to me is this line, “After the Internet bubble burst, he even built a site that let people download computer cursors in the form of waving flags; the trick was that they also downloaded software that would monitor their Internet movements and show them pop-up ads.” So he’s the pigfucker that came up with that shit that made tech support a little more hellish. (read: “where are all these popups coming from! your internet sucks!”).

P.S. myspace users, prepare to be fleeced, they’ve got to make at least $650 million dollars off of you to break even. Maybe not entirely out of the question if they have 70 million “users” and expect $200 million in revenue this year. Now if only they can keep the cops from arresting the myspace users…

Yes, it’s almost 2 AM and I’m still up. I’m a bit wired from the Mt Dew; it’s quite soothing to the sore throat. And yes, I do have a particular obsession with knocking myspace here lately. Hrm, if I read the stories from The Register and News.com this morning, I won’t have them to read during the day! It’s like having a Dilbert desk calendar. If you read tomorrow’s comic today, then what are you going to have to get you through tomorrow!

Odd, I think this was the first time I ever googled for “binary fury”. Apparently it’s the name of some industrial group, complete with binaryfury.com and a myspace site. I thought I was being quick and clever when I came up with the name long ago. I forget the original reasoning or thought process behind it. I think I just slapped two words together and said “eh, good enough for a website title” Guess somebody else has beat me to establishing the name. Wonder if they’ll sue me. Oh noes, that means I’ll lose out on all the precious personal branding I’ve built up with the 5 or 6 people who read my site!

One reboot so far without touching Parallels. Time to dust off the eBay account.

If you own or will soon own a MacBook Pro, stay far, far away from Corsair ValueSelct RAM. Every day or so my MBP will spontaneously reboot. It doesn’t seem to be related to heat or load, I’ve had it reboot on me while it’s sitting on my lap generating a nice 122 degrees F, and I’ve heard the Apple chord reboot sound at 6 AM when it’s doing nothing but running a screen saver. Reading over Apple and Corsair forums now, this problem is affecting more people.

Since I’m already out of my 15 day return policy at Fry’s, I bought another 1GB stick today to swap and see if that would make a difference. Not a smart move buying the exact same RAM when I think it may be a compatibility issue, but I did it anyways in hope it points my other stick as being bad. Besides, I wanted 2GB of RAM anyways because I’ve come to use Parallels a good amount for development. Since installing a “new” stick, I’ve experienced two reboots while starting Parallels. At this point I don’t know if Parallels is doing something stupid or it’s just a inopportune coincidence. If I can get a week uptime out of this configuration, it’s probably okay. If I still have problems, it’s all going on eBay. Maybe it’ll find a better home in somebody’s HP or Dell notebook.

That was what I did Sunday, in addition to spending four hours reading over jwz’s website, because I was in no shape to do anything else because of what I did to myself on Saturday.

Saturday was a perfect day to go riding, 80 degrees, light to no wind, clear and sunny. I had planned on trying a 120 mile trip, but I didn’t get out the door until noon. The woman at the tri shop convinced me I should try a 70 mile route to San Marcos.

I left my apartment, rode down William Cannon to Escarpment (ok took a short detour to south MoPac first), down to Slaughter Lane, over to south 1st street, then caught Old San Antonio Road south until it met up with the IH-35 frontage road. I took that all the way down to San Marcos. I was feeling /really/ good, either because I was well rested, wasn’t pushing into a stiff headwind for once, or my weight training was really paying off. Maybe all three. The ride felt pretty effortless and I was sailing along at 18 mph. Riding along the frontage road was getting monotonous, not a whole lot of scenery along IH-35. From my apartment to San Marcos was exactly 37.75 miles.

Coming back, things started going wrong. Somewhere around 45-50 miles I was starting to get a stabbing pain in my gut and I was feeling nauseated. I stopped at a c-store for several minutes to rest. My stomach didn’t settle down much. When I saw how much salt was crusted on my face I realized I had been sweating a lot and not really noticed it. I was badly dehydrated by being out almost 4 hours and hadn’t drank my CamelBack dry yet. I pushed on and by the time I reached Cabella’s at Buda, I wasn’t feeling well at all. I tried calling a friend to pick me up, but couldn’t get ahold of anyone. I kept feeling like I wanted to throw up, so I went behind Cabella’s and let it rip. Not much came out, but it anything burping made me feel moderately better. I had some sport drink with me, but my stomach grumbled at the idea of sugar water. I had some water, but it certainly didn’t feel good drinking it. By the time I made it back to Austin my mouth was completely dried out and it was taking everything I had to keep going. Along the way I bought bottle of water and sipped it down. I finally arrived at home, drank a couple bottles of Pedalyte and laid down in the floor.

After a few hours I was starting to feel better and hungry. I weighed myself, I had lost FOUR pounds! Not cool at all. I went out to dinner and discovered my throat was now very irritated. It was painful to eat anything except chips and queso; the cheese was soft and gooey, at least it went down easily.

So here I am, worn out with a sore throat, battling RAM problems. Did I mention the odd sunburns on my shoulders where I apparently missed putting on the Bullfrog? Lessons from this weekend: don’t buy Corsair RAM, drink water every 15 minutes like you’ve long been trained to do, and Chloraseptic sore throat strips do provide instant relief from irritation (enough to eat a meal), they don’t last very long and they’re addictive.

Some weekends I welcome going back to work on Monday mornings.

I’m getting really annoyed by the fact that I haven’t done anything remotely interesting lately. My routine is well, very routine and it feels like the weekends are just waiting for the weekdays to arrive again.

I need to start planning my Burning Man and Rainier trips. I haven’t put much thought yet into how or when I want to arrive. Alex & Victoria have invited me to fly to Seattle, then we’d all drive down together. Hotter n’ Hell is on August 26, two days before BM starts. I’ve been toying with the notion of knocking out that first, but that leaves logistics problems of do I take my bike to the desert, or do I leave it all in Dallas and fly out.

I’d like to see west Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. Half the fun of last Burning Man was seeing a lot of new territory, but driving 16 hour days was exhausting. Google Maps plots a route from Austin to Reno (it didn’t know how to get to Gerlach) via El Paso, Tuscon, Phoenix, Palm Springs, Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Sacramento and then Reno. That’s one hell of a side trip going on.

Time is another consideration. I’m not going to have twelve days to devote to Burning Man like I did in 2004. I’ll be lucky if I can get a week off of work, maybe 10 counting weekends. If I drove, that would eat four days right off the start, leaving 3-6 days to enjoy BM. Flying to Seattle would probably reduce travel to a day in each direction.

I rented “The Aristocrats” today and watched it. That is the raunchiest material I’ve heard in a while, I loved it. My jaw is still sore from laughing so hard all afternoon. By far my favorites were Bob Saget and Billy The Mime. Most of the others seemed like they were just arbitrarily throwing together actions, but when Bob let into it, he gave enough detail over a timeline the events sounds plausible.

I gave up trying to get my wireless working on my PC and reinstalled Windows 2000. I spent about three hours installing drivers, applications, and I’m currently fighting with the Cisco VPN Client installer. At some poing during the install it locked up, so I had to reboot. After that it kept saying there was an older version installed, requiring a reboot to install the new one. Of course, this never happened. I wound up going through the registry and blowing away anything related to the VPN adapter. What a fucking pain.

I need to find a new century route to ride. The route to Shiner is bound to get me hit by a car one of these days as there’s long sections of it with no shoulder to ride on. Doing 34 laps at the Veloway for 6 hours isn’t my idea of fun.

I’m bored.