Yesterday was a pretty good day. The weather started off raintacular just like I like it but not to obstructive. Downside of course being it's impact on traffic. Speeds out on the Interstates here tend to vary between 120km/h and 140km/h, and a lot of driver's refuse to go that slow unless traffic forces them. Well with Mehring thinking the wrecks/minute ratio has hit 1:3, I think a few people may have learned the hardware to SLOW the **** down here and there!

With the weight of the ever popular SUV and pickup trucks out here, it's even more important, because heavier vehicle == slows down slower + (IME) loses traction faster under heavy breaking. Not that anyone is ever going to learn that the *easy* way 8=). One thing that I do like about being stuck in the commute for like 225km every day, is Art "Mad Man" Mehring's traffic reports. The morning show is good for chuckles and Lance always plays the most music on our way home, but heck, Mehring makes the trip worth while.


Heh, looking him up off Google, also just turned up some awesome humour for this soon to be retired commuter :-) -&#gt; Welcome to Atlanta, Park anywhere!


On the way home, I also stopped off to action off an idea that occured to me during lunch, but that's a different subject. Today, well, I'm just glad to have hammered out what's been stuck in my kick-around-list for the past two days. Also looks like I'll get to do some (more so) interesting stuff in the next couple weeks. For the most part, it's just been trying to get stuff squared away at work, so that I'm ready to roll on Monday. Courtesy of the move, I have to take Friday off (*groan*) but the move oguth to conclude on Saturday. At least, that *is* the idea! Tonight the plan is to saver a little last minute zombie slaying, since I may have to stay zombie free for a week :-/. As well as the sort my inequivalent to a "Go bag" and decide where the last minute stuff is going to be packed.

GOD willing, by Monday, I will be able to sleep until at least 0800, depending on the traffic, I might even get to sleep later lol. The flex time we have at work, more or less amounts to a wide spectrum, and while most people (smartly) would expect me to leverage that in a later direction. When you spend like 3 1/2 hours a day driving, it pays to just wake up earlier and try not to write bugs before (br|l)unch time.

Today more or less started with waking up after midnight, from weather pounding so hard that you would think houses are going to fly. Well, seems not to much went wrong but it would be a good day to own swim fins. Around Atlanta, we kind of have a problem on the road, when the asphalt gets wet, it starts giving off a moron gas causing instant stupidifcation of most Georgia drivers, it is' not tooo late for that. Anyway, the guy doing the traffic reports on 94.9 this morning, started joking that they would need to fly out some specialists to investigate a new phenomenon in the Atlanta area: rain causing trucks to become magnetized! Two trucks, eight cars, in two separate wrecks. One of them was truck+six cars.


Coming through Norcross this morning was stupitacular! The light over by Spalding Drive was out, and where it crosses the Georgia 141. So essentially, we have two lanes going each way, plus turn lanes, and a traffic light flashing red. Well, you would think it is kind of easy when the regs say, light out = treat it like a four way stop. I didn't dare count how many times people came close to a fender bender. By the time I was next in line to go, I saw the third car in what was supposed to be a group of two shooting through: he stopped like two inches from somebodies fender, and I'm thinkin' "You twit!" as this moron nearly cracks up. Don't think he was even in the right freaking lane to turn. I swear, only 30-40% of people in Georgia seem to know how to drive. This reminds me of an old Death's Head II comic, called Psychotic when wet.


I've also sandwiched in and live fire tested some tweaks to my note taking system. In addition to using the Viki plugin for VIM, I now have things automatically committed to a git repository (but not on the 'hub lol) and a script that is able to deplate them into HTML for browsing at work, excluding private stuff. Sometime when I have time outside of work, I'll screw with a script to run a web server on it, but only when connected to the companies internal network.


On the upside, the commute home was splendid as can be. And hope that if someone had to stand out at Spalding, directing traffic, that he gets hazard pay and a vacation lol.

This blog entry by Michael W. Lucas, has got to be one of the most impressive ways I've ever heard, for integrating OpenBSD in a hurry.

Hmm, seems that as soon as May 2009 is imported, my journals switch from LJ to Blogger, will at long last be complete....

It is done! -> This Journal Moved To Blogger

Right, I've just finished something that has taken me almost two years to finish by hand, since the available tools couldn't keep up with the content. Hmm, makes me think of a line from one of my favourite films! But at long last, and vastly overdue—my journal is now totally under the Blogger roof. 2009-12-05, I posted on LJ and Blogger, that I had moved things here. Well, 2011-03-27, it seems to finally be complete. Even noticed half a months extra posts after I was finished lol. Since beginning with Live Journal back on 2011-09-09, I've made 2,039 entries, assuming that I have not missed any of the 1,537 entries that I was supposed to import >_>.

In honour of completion, I think I'll post the stats of that count to date, something I originally planned to do at 2,000 entries, along with a little celebration, but hey, I didn't expect to notice my two-thousandth post anyway lol. Right, anyway here is the table!

	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006
January	12	26	61	46	16	0
February	15	26	40	33	27	0
March	28	23	69	55	26	0
April	0	48	68	62	20	0
May	0	108	47	41	20	0
June	0	69	49	28	16	0
July	0	58	43	49	25	0
August	0	37	46	50	28	0
September	0	26	45	62	24	24
October	0	26	23	45	23	4
November	0	26	40	44	31	17
December	0	16	32	52	42	18
Total	55	489	563	567	298	63

This shows that until getting into the whole job thing, the trend has been for my level of blogging to stay fairly steady. I would say an average of 1 1/2 entries per day at its height. Generally, I've been most active during the first half of the year. 2011 and 2006 being very slow, as one is when I started and one is little more than 25% into it, inverse-respectively.


One thing I really do hope for, is that after this move is sorted, I'll have more time to update my journal more frequently than I have these past few months. I really don't update things here about my present line of work (as a matter of personal policy), and anything interesting really is the subject domain of my notes anyway.



One thing I do know, it's better to have a journal than nothing but memory. And that's saying something, since 2008-2009 are still pretty much in my `recent` memory, and my trail of memories largely go back to the early 1990s!

Well, it is pretty much done: my life packed. There's just a few things here and there that are essentially, stuff it in a bag at the last minute and go. It does make you think a bit, seeing over twenty years crammed into a normal closet worth of boxes and bags. Or should I say, compared to many people, a micro-closet lol.

Excluding computers and related crapola, just about everything I'm taking is a book of some sort. I must have like three and a half pieces of luggage dominated with books; mostly Fiction. Something that isn't technically a book but not far off, is my fathers old photo albums. There's not much that I'm taking.

I wish I could say that I had a lot of happy memories, but I don't. I've known for quite a while now, that when it would come time to open a new chapter in my life, that I would close this one by singing to a Taylor Swift song.

What you can do with Open Source software

better quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO0yXC0oyIA
ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sintel

Another lovely Friday. If reports are to be believed, on a bypass that has 69 or 68 exits, traffic is screwed from I-20 to well passed spaghetti junction, along with most major roads on the same vector. After 20-30 minutes of traffic to get some where that should only take 10-12 min, I took the I-75 south into Atlanta, where it was pretty much saoring through the usual bumper to bumper from the Brookwood end to exiting the curve. To top it off, while trying to change lanes to take the I-75S, there was about double the safe length of distance between the cars, when the mother fucker in back decided to rage down on his pedal, I'm pretty sure that we both gave each other the bird as he fender dodged his way over to the I-75N in that sporty foil. One upside if anything did happen, my car is more like a tank and his was more like paper, so playing chicky is out, and raging is illegal ;).

To add insult to near injury, it took like twenty minutes of laps to get a gas pump, just to drop $40. Place was so mobbed I dunno how knife play didn't enter the picture. Topping it all off, on my way to the interstate my mother calls to tell me to pick up her prescriptions and get a few things on her list. She can't be arsed with sending it as an e-mail so I'll remember, so I've gotta scribble a note to myself while driving (which I _hate_). Then listen to her because I wrote "1 40Watt lightbulbs" instead of 60 Watt, and missed the crackers \o/. Well, ya gets what you puts in.

8=)

sshfs + svn != fast

While one of my main gripes about Subversion in the past, has always been "It's slow", I just found a real way to snailify it. Try running svn diff on a nice (~80M) chunk of source tree that's mounted over sshfs.

It probably doesn't help either, that the server has quad, quads, and  my systems a lowly dual, hehe.

Today, I really got a nice little reward. Basically, the company I work for was getting people together to go over the renewals with our medical insurance provider, and of course, eh, I'd rather be at  my work station getting something done. So this provided me with the impetus to setup my phone as  an impromptu in-building terminal.

Problemo is, I usually use VIM. While I'm stubborn enough to give that a go on a small screen with a virtual keyboard, my phones virtual keyboard doesn't provide the *PC* keys: namely escape, control, and alt. It's also not the most convenient to use the programs methods of side stepping this. So I got to thinking for a moment, what is an editor that is light and small enough to use over a text terminal, yet powerful enough to service a programmer without a lot of special keys? --> I found the solution right in my own skills repertoire, or as some say: the default text editor! Some years back, I took the trouble to learn how to use /bin/ed out of an interest in learning how to use vi/vim better.

After a couple minutes of thinking on this, it occurred to me: ed was designed in an era when terminals were SLOW, so slow in fact, that you could probably piss off someone by trying to print to much to standard output, which could be connected to a roll of paper and a true TTY >_>.


So it seems that learning /bin/ed was well worth it, because it makes one hell of a file text editor when using your phone as a terminal :-)

Epic Toast Incident

Kristen Gates' pick for this mornings You Choose The News has to be the best report since sliced bread:

TWITTER HEADQUARTERS EVACUATED OVER BURNED TOAST

Twitter's main office in San Francisco had to be evacuated when an employee's burned toast set off the fire alarm. As expected, some employees talked about the toast incident on Twitter. One employee wrote, "Quick math: 30 min fire alarm, 400 employees ~ $2500 for burnt toast. ooops," while another lamented, "Nothing like a Friday building evacuation in the rain. Damn toast."

Wow, you really can spend $2500 on one piece of toast!

Last time I heard a traffic report, it sounded like we had likely surpassed 40km worth of traffic, I was lucky enough to only see about 20-minutes of it on the front line near the cloverleaf. Once I heard my usual Interstate was FUBAR as well, I just split off for the nearest US route.

Remind me, to never take the west side loop *around* Palmetto again, flibbin' ancient roads that are so tight, you could pick your noise and hit a house, lol.

When you're watching a video stream, and you recognised the markings on the anime's computer screen as names of registers on the X86, you know you really need a life. Either that, or you've got to ask your self if the shows designer knew some assembly :-S

I had the most sickening thought on the way home tonight. Somewhere Else was playing on the radio when it popped into my head—if after the move is over, I find myself half way down the interstate before I realise that I *don't* have to do that no more, I'm gonna pull over and kick myself in the tookus.

The difference a decent nights sleep and being in the office makes: I've gotten almost 3 times as much done today as yesterday! One upside to moving, is I won't have to work from home as frequently when there's something to get done before work.... I like coming in.

Well, I'm still stuck here on account of my mother's check up, but on the upside, despite her opting to be so early that my battery will be dead before she even sees the freaking doctor.  I'm able to sit in my car and use my phone as a combo radio and 3G connection, hehe.

I wonder how much an inverter to hook up my laptop to the car battery would drain it :-/. That's the principal reason I've never plotted to obtain one.

Awfully tired lately (bloody commute) but things seem to be rolling. Things were to the point that the traffic reporter upgraded things to "Fugly" out there, rather than mealy the clouds dispensing moron gas all across Georgia. Left for work around a quarter 'til seven, got there around nine. When I saw the team lead getting out of his car as I got there, I couldn't help but wonder, is he that early today, or was traffic that bad? lololol. Been getting out late recently, so I doubt anyone is gonna mind me showing up on time instead of early :-/.

The day's been fairly normal aside from a short meeting. Gotta love this company really, meetings seem to be fairly infrequent, and I believe keeping them short is the SOP. Hurrah! Even better is when you can program your phone to beep 35 minutes early, get there 10 minutes early, and be working on your laptop before it starts lol.

So far, I've two short term desires for study. One, is I'd rather like a return to integration between Blogger and a certain major social network. I may have to jerry rig something using perl/curl to take RSS feeds and update my status. It'd be easy enough to make it a daemon running off vectra. The other desire, is to plan on going cloths shopping some time after the move is done. Can't say that I have much opinion about cloths in general but this time I rather have a goal. Last time I bought cloths, the goal was replace what I had. That basically ended in getting like 10 shirts divided between green/blue, and throwing them in the cart with some jeans. The fact that I can do clothing shopping in like 5-10 minutes of course, had to infuriate my mother >_>. There's enough equipment where I work, that the engineering department is never going to be toasty warm, and I'm rather tired of wearing sweaters all the time. Would also be nice to retire the cloths I'm using for work, which are a different set then my usual street cloths. The question is how to get the margin I want? -> Suitable for both work and routine, long sleeves, and most importantly, warm enough to be comfortable at my work station lol. I'll figure something out by the time I have a budget for it developed.

Just Communication - Mobile Suit Gundam Wing (with lyrics)

Lyrics can be found HERE.

I'm starting to worry a bit about the impacts stress has been having on me lately, more specifically the stresses my mother manages to exert.

Life is like 200% less stressful now than it was for, at least the last couple of years worth, and much of 2010 in extreme particular. Everything going on with the move has my stress levels frequently elevated, by my rather annoying parental unit. But it's no where near what it once was. These rounds of increased stress seems to be most pronounced as proximity to my mother increases for any measurable duration, and fairly consistently for a long time. I love her but she drives me batty. What else can I say? It's like being constantly needled without any prayer of reprieve, and any strategic applications to head it off, often seem to result in larger flurries later on. She doesn't get it and never will.

My mood often swings rapidly, if my mother is the active stresser, and it's usually combined with rather dark moods. The only thing that really seems to calm me is switching off the old marbles. It's like I can be in an excellent mood and she manages to have me in a terrible mood, like clock work.  Worse, the types of aggravation involved frequently forces my train of thought to digress into other matters, ones that bother me greatly on their own without any need of help; as they are issues I've been trying to find an answer for without success, for quite a number of years. Thus ramping up the stress level even further. Kind of feels like having a lit cigarette stuck on a soar spot, not nice. On the upside, when I'm working, or succeeding at *trying* to get some rest instead of frustrations, I'm much better, more content, and happier. Of course, that is frequently impacted the same way: my mother has to make like a big bird with radar. That's another reason why I enjoy Airsoft over PC games, less morons and less opportunity to gain more stress than rest.

Recently the temptation to drift into an armoured shell and rarely be reached again, rears its ugly head in my minds eye. The minds fortress of solitude. That's what you learn around my family anyway, if you're not so volatile as some. It doesn't really help that eleven to twelve hour days (counting commute) largely has me cut off from most people that I care about, and that don't drive me crackers more often than not. I'm somewhat afraid though, that if I fall into that shell again, I'll never come back out of it. Some might argue that's a good thing but hey, if you don't like me, it's not my fault :P.

Right now my one major goal is to get the move over with and survive the process.  By 2012, I should have had a month or two to take things easy, between then and now. For the time being however, the only good times seem to be had at work. It's so peaceful.


Sigh.

Oh shit, the backstop for Hulu's MSGW has like all the UC series, even the ones I've never been able to find syndicated in America


I'M GRINNING SO WIDE MY FACE HURTS!

!!! Hulu.com has Gundam Wing !!!

In passing the time until it's time to go back to work, I've been fluttering across the Internet. Right now, I've just had a huge smile brought to my face! --> Hulu has all the Gundam Wing episodes!!!!!

This show was my first introduction to the Gundam franchise, I remember sitting on my bed room floor in a huge pile of LEGO bricks when this hit Toonami; I was like 12. my geekish nature has kind of always been there, but it's really been impacted by an interest in  Mecha. In my life, there's only been a few to really catch my gaz deeply in that regard. The little known film: Robot Jox, '80s RoboTech (particularly the Macross Saga), and Mobile Suit Gundam: Wing.

What else could have gotten a kid all but wanting to camp out in front of books and calculators near 24/7, studying every ounce of information he could on technology—except trying to figure out how to design a 'mech lol.



I've always told myself, someday I'm buying the series on DVD... hehe.

Conquest, War, Famine, and Death

I watched as the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals. Then I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest.

When the Lamb opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill each other. To him was given a large sword.

When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!”

When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.

Revelation, chapter 6, verses 1 through 7, NIV.

Getting old

Somehow walking into the servers, almost makes me glad that I'm retired.

When you write a hash table look up using function call syntax in the morning, you know that it must be time for lunch!

It's actually comforting to be able to look over my commit and merge logs for the past two weeks and see how much stuff I've gotten done. When combined with the rest of my work flow, it's especially helpful in keeping track what's left to do, and finding what else needs doing lol.

I must say though, that I'm looking forward to the weekend: tomorrow I get to sleep past dawn!!!! Can't say what is worse really, staying in bed as long as possible to minimize my mothers opportunities to annoy me, or having to roll out of bed ahead of the dawn in order to get on the pinhead express ASAP. My bodies gotten used to the concept go to bed by N, wake up by M, and I make sure that N includes enough hours for me to actually fall alseep. Ohh, I can hardly wait until the move is over.

Currently:

• First alarm at 0600
• Failsafe alarm at 0615
• Reach the nearest Interstate before 0700, preferably be on the next Interstate by then.
• Come to a grinding halt as soon as Cobb County enters the picture, if it's a /good/ day!
• Wish they would blow the GA-400 of doom off the cotton pickin' map.
• Soar from just past the GA-400 exit all the way to my exit, a couple up the bypass.
• Wrestle through yet more pinheads for a half hour or more worth of traffic, regularly backed up 3-lights long.
• Reach work ~112km/70mi away, sometime between 0800 and 0830.
• Go bananas until lunch cica 1100'ish.
• Have to remember I need to get out of here around 1600 if I'm going to reach the I-75 **** **** before ************ pinheads back up traffic to several cities beyond where I work.
• hope to get home around 1800-1815.

Future:

• Drift out of bed sometime after 0800
• Get to work sometime near 0900
• Casually drift through bumper to bumper to damn bumper traffic with a smile.
• Leave roughly 8 hours later
• Enjoy being able to stay later if I'm focused on some project.
• Figure out something to do if the traffic is worse than ever.
• Go back to bumper to bumper traffic for 16~18km/10-12mi on the way home.
• Not have to give a crap when I go to bed, as long as dawns still several hours away.

People are getting on edge about the rising cost of petrol, me? Well, I calculated that subject to traffic, after everything is done, my fuel budget would become about $200/month if petrol reaches $5/gal. That's a major shit load less than what I've been spending a month, and my last budget was balanced to $3.20/gal and average actual costs around $2.90/gal-$3/gal.

So I'm gonna have a crude grin on my face if this works lol.

Need to live a little

Stressed out, running late, racing down the interstate
Spilled hot coffee, down the front of my jeans
It's work, work, pay the rent, money and my time's spent
Not a minute left for me to be me

Been going like nothing can wait
I gotta get my priorities straight

I need to live a little, have some fun
Take some time, waste it on number one
Find a girl that brings my whole world to a stop
Live a little, love a lot

Friday night, here we go, do a little do-si-do
Kick back, have a laugh, catch my breath
Tell the band slow it down, there she is, think I found
Maybe Ms. Wonderful, I haven't met yet

It just hit me like a wrecking ball
She's giving me a wake up call

I need to live a little, have some fun
Take some time, waste it on number one
Find a girl that brings my whole world to a stop
Live a little, love a lot

Step back, smell the rose
Feel the sand between your toes
Unplug, unwind
Step out in the sunshine

I need to live a little, have some fun
Take some time, waste it on number one
Find a girl that brings my whole world to a stop
Live a little

I need to live a little, have some fun
Take some time, waste it on number one
Take the girl, get a map and pick any old dot
Live a little, we need to live a little, love a lot

Live A Little—Kenny Chesney

Oh the bloody horror

When you get about 20 + jockies out of about 30 some special infected, you know that it's time to quit while you're still ahead taller than a zombie midget!

Well it has finally come to pass: my mother is setup with an instant messager. Now of I can get her to use it instead of leaving me a steam of voice mails.

I also find it awesome how my phone tried to complete "blvd voice mails" to me fails!!!

My mother seriously needs to wrap her head around instant messengering, or figure out how I can get a cellular signal through a metal building and past all the equipment here in engineering 8=).

Particularly as a in my office,
Mobile IM = usually works.
Voice = rarely works.