August 2007 Archives

at first, i thought it was the cruddy slimserver software.

then i thought it was cruddy perl modules.

then, i thought it was my own cruddy RAM.

finally, it turned out to be my cruddy OS wasn't turning on the CPU fan, so now the CPU fan is permanently on, and hte case fan may have to be switched on permanently as well. hot weather + dumb OS = bad news and random weird crashes. so long silent computer.

.oO([ osiris@eris ]:[ ~ ]: > svn copy svn://eris/repos/bm/ svn://eris/repos/bo

right.

i realized today that my beers lack something: pretentious, amateurish labels.

i realized, with sorrow, that it is not within my skillset to prepare pretentious, amateurish labels for my pretentious, amateurish beer. however, i do have other skills! I can kinda write, sorta. unfortunately, i can't exactly stick a poem or short story in each bottle, and even though really i could, i'm just too lazy, especially since that would provide temptation for custom content per bottle. the idea of the work involved is too horrible to contemplate.

so instead, i utilized my minimal web design skills to finally get something off my TODO list: a homebrew website, featuring the brewery of yours truly.

it'll be updated more frequently soon, i guess, and i'll keep it up to date as i can, and give links to those victims who receive bottles of my stuff. that way, we can share tasting notes. hooray!

but anyhow, to get back on topic, since i can't make crappy labels, but i can write crappy short stories, i've in-og-yoor-ated my idea with a cruddy short story for the stout i brewed yesterday. let's all hope the stout comes out better than the story did.

you can find it on the beer page. i ain't gonna link it again.

yarr.

so this weekend i brewed up a stout. as far as i could tell, this was the best controlled all-grain brew i've done yet, with only one hiccup: we had an unnoticed kink in the exit line from the wort chiller, which slowed down coolant throughput and decreased cooler efficiency to levels around where i'd have been without hte fancy pumping system i whipped up special for this brew. sigh.

so i pitched a little hot. wasn't the first time, hopefully the last.

but more fun than that, i grossly underestimated the efficiency of my system, or: i had an explosion of efficiency due to my own tweaking. i formulated a recipe based on teh 55% extraction efficiency of my previous brew, and took a couple measures to address what i thought were problems hte last time. as a result, i ended up with 75% efficiency and one hell of an imperial stout wort: 1.094-1.096. sadly, i had not hte hops to bring the BU:GU past .5, but then, that was my planned BU:GU for the sweet stout i was intending to brew.

so, i'll have a sweet imperial stout with, probably, low attenuation (the yeast (Wy1968) is a generally capable strain, i think, but it's not especially intended for high gravity) despite my manly starter, and quite the unusual flavor profile from the fat load of blackstrap molasses i dumped in there.

should be an interesting experience. on tap, of course!

hops on a vine

hops with a skeleton

hops in a bowl

hops in my hand

hops in my other hand. no, same hand!

hops on a drying rack

hophead in a funny hat

hey!

you stole my philosophy.

that is all.

with admission of temporary defeat on the deadlifting front, my life has welcomed the return of weekly hiking, initiated two weekends prior with a short haul up montara mt. and trending this past weekend with a trip through the quicksilver mines of wherdjacallit. didn't see any quicksilver.

i dont talk as much as i used to on the trail -- although, to be fair, i do talk as much as or more than i talked on many of my hikes of yore (the solo ones). in any case, not much talking. after all, i'm no longer out there to meet people ;)

i'm still swift and sweaty on the uphills, and grim and grumpy on everything else. and after, i have hankerings for video games, pizza, and "lost". good times.

give it a ska beat.

holy hell therion, is there nothing you cannot do?

as i packed my keys and ring into the pocket of my chalk bag, i realized: i had no idea where my spiritual vanity bracelet was.

"have you seen my bracelet?" i axed hops.

"yeah," said hops, "you left it at home."

"!!"

"!!!!!", i repeated.

"i couldn't have," i said. "i wouldn't forget to bring it."

"you hung it on the keyhook by the door," said hops.

"yeah," i said, "but i always do that and then i grab it on the way out." i dug around some more in my small, empty pocket. "i have to have it," i said.

"i can go get it," said hops.

"no..." i said, "no. that won't be... damn!"

"what?"

"this is the first time i've climbed without it." i'd climbed without my keys in the pocket, when outside, since one bad swing could crush my fancy electro-key against the rock. but i'd never climbed without the bracelet, not once, since i started climbing.

so i climbed without it. and i went up some hard ones. i went up a 10c that had defeated me on tuesday, and defeated me twice tonight. but eventually i went up it. and then i went up some others that were hard but fun. i forgot all about my missing spiritual vanity bracelet.

at the end of the night, as i unpacked the fetishes from my chalk bag, i remembered that i didn't have my bracelet; i realized that i had been climbing without it, climbing better than i had in weeks. and as i slipped my ring back on my finger, and my keys back in my pocket, i thought to myself: maybe it wasn't the bracelet after all.

maybe the magic had been in me all along.

got an extra hard drive and set myself up with mirroring on my backup drive.

i had planned to use the software RAID package included in openbsd, but while i was browsing the docs, I came across a reference to "hey, you know, you don't have to recompile GENERIC if you just use CCD, which also does mirroring", and i was sold.

now, for a change, the openbsd docs were not the greatest for CCD. neither was the google-revealed "how i set up ccd mirroring on openbsd" HOWTO page. the netbsd docs, however, were great. i didn't quite set it up exactly as described but everything seems to work.

to the extent that i am spiffy
to the extent that i am something special, after my own particular...
idiom, sire!
... idiom,

i owe it to years upon years of repression and self-cloisterification.

my formative years, meaning all of them up until last year, and probably next year as well, were spent a-playing video games, where the greatest joy was the freedom to try things without consequence, on account of if they did not work out as planned, i could always restore (you did hit f5, right?) and try it a different way.

i've never been able to decide if the real world works that way. i dont know if i'll have another chance to try things a different way.

sometimes i wonder if i lived my earlier years on the assumption that when things began to really not work out, i'd get to hit f9 and try a different strategy.

I was talking to a friend — one of the two people — recently. She asked me, “If you realize this is going on, why can’t you just not do it?” I think I laughed, though I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s the most obvious question in the world. It’s just that the answer is also obvious, if difficult to understand. The part of my brain I would ordinarily use to make judgments and draw conclusions is the very part that’s affected by this problem. I can’t just don’t-be-like-that because my brain literally doesn’t work that way.

for myself, it was at once fascinating and frightening. perhaps the frightening aspect would have been diminished had i induced the dissociative state by drugs, meditation, or some other act of will, but i had not.

i can relate to a lot of the rest, too, but fortunately, the depths of my own problems are severly limited compared to jeff's. in any case, i certainly admire his courage in posting.

i'm taking his cube.

heh.

Hey there [ name ],

While searching around on teh internets for [ thing ] I happened across a [ name ] who seemed to be involved with [ thing ].

Is this the same [ name ] that is you, or a different [ name ]?

... that i have much contact with the systems-admin side of things computer, outside of my day job. i will occasionally write some code or install a hard drive or build a webpage unrelated to work. nowadays, it all seems emergency driven: like last week, when i suffered two laptop failures in the same week: a dead hard drive in my mac and (apparently) a dead mobo in my hp. while the failures themselves were not especially enjoyable, they've spawned a somewhat pleasing foray (back) into the land of reliable backup procedures.

how fun is that?

now that i've decided to stop bulking, the give me the biggest-yet portion of salmon at the cafetorium.

now i get to deadlift multiple times per week!

at a weight of 13 pounds past a point i vowed never again to pass, at a weight of 23 pounds past where it would impress anyone, and at a weight of 33 pounds past where i'd like to be, i've managed to not lift 400lbs, and i've managed to not make any progress on my deadlift single in over 4 weeks.

after a layoff of a week and change, with either a pulled muscle, a hernia, or a tumor growing in my back (which, curiously, did not come into play during any part of the deadlift after strapping-in), i managed to leave 380 on the floor after having struggled somewhat with 2x2x345.

the stress of the training, and more specifically, the weight gain, has spilled out into all areas of my life and i've had about enough of it. certainly, 203 and rictor/veg have had enough of it. in the several months since i set out to lift 400, i packed 50lbs onto my deadlift and 30lbs onto my self. the 50 is great progress, the 30, not so much.

i still have a couple months to achieve my goal of 400 before 30, and there's a possibility that i'll make it. but if i do, i won't be 223lbs of deadlifting prowess, i'll be closer to 210. i trained harder than ever to get to 380, but it requires a degree of specialization which is anathema to this ADD-riddled attention span. it's a miracle i made it as far as i did.

so now, myself and the thing growing/torn in my back are embarking on a new journey, one we've been on before - the tummy-growling agony of weight loss.

joy.

"now, everything changes," says mr. hui to tony leung's character in "hard boiled", right before the latter shoots dead the former, his gangland mentor, representative of the "old school" of gangsterism, a gangsterism rooted in honor and some semblance of moral code.

a common theme runs through many of the john woo movies that i have seen; the changing of the guard, the replacement of the old way, which while not perfect, had its codes and its logics and its rationale, with the new way, which suffers from a total lack of any code or honor and a gross misunderstanding of the reasons that the old business succeeded. in general, a marginalized member of the old guard returns from hardship and obscurity to destroy the new guard, which, in its greed and chaos, was intent on destroying itself anyway.

i see this happening around me at work (curiously enough, the metaphor of this post is apt in more ways than one: the person whose departure sparked this post grew up watching john woo movies in hong kong, we discussed them many times). the old-timers are leaving, replaced by new people who, while not greedy and narcissistic, seem certainly to be somewhat inept, and lacking the benefits of knowing the mistakes of our company's past, seem determined to remake them.

i don't particularly think our company is in trouble, i think business will proceed as usual. but i think that as we bleed off more and more of the people that built this company (and they built this company into something rather unique for this area: a company with long retention of key employees), we transform into something new and quite different, something that should probably not be called by the same name.

if i am the last of the "old guard" (and it's getting close to that), what is it that makes "us" "us"? with so much of the old school gone, now, will everything change?

wind swells from the east
hull finds current from the west
clouds obscure the sun

the hard drive on my beloved macbook went out the other night. just plain kaput with no warnings at all. i dug out my manual and went through all the suggested debugging steps, to no avail. by the end of it, i was no closer to fixing it, and i'd found that the macbook no longer believed it had a hard drive attached.

the next day, i sauntered in to the apple store, only to find that you need an appointment to see the "genius". the b-game store was fresh booked, so i got them to get me a slot at the stanford shopping center store (i didnt know that was there! (the store, not the shopping center)) for later that afternoon.

went in to work, found out that some of my favorite coworkers were leaving, spent a hectic day running around, then headed off to the apple store.

the genius confirmed that my hard drive was dead, convinced me that it could not be the mobo, and told me my options. i could take the dead hdd with me and try to get the data back (for a fat price in novato), i could give him the hdd and he could see if they had an identical model in stock, and if not, they'd mail it in for 3-10 days. i couldnt have the old one and the replacement (bullcrap policy but i was prepared for it based on pre-visit googling). i also couldn't upgrade to a bigger drive, because, as the genius said, they simply dont have the paperwork for that.

if i were to take the replacement drive i'd have to install the OS myself, or he'd mail it away to have "them" do it. i thought for not too long and decided to go that route. fortunately they had the exact same drive in stock, he installed it, verified that the macbook saw it, and sent me on my way.

i have adequate backups, tho not super-adequate. as soon as i got home i ordered additional external drives to beef up my backup regimen. i spent the evening and next day re-installing the OS (takes a long time). now i have loads of free hard drive space and a freshly installed OS.

i guess that turned out as well as it could have. a failed hdd is not really apple's fault, and i suppose i can't expect them to give me free data recovery (odd that hte price of data recovery really hasn't gone down over the years). i guess it's also understandable that they're so busy they can't re-install my OS. actually, that's not true: they could have ghosted the machine in five minutes instead of making me do the day long install. i had the OS cds with me (to prove i own them or whatever).

this is what it's like to be a mac user, i suppose. i'm addicted to the great OS and not ecstatic about the quality of the hardware.

except the keyboard. this funky spaces-between-keys thing rocks my socks. i loves it and can't hardly type on anything else.

It's Frobuary 2, YOMHC 0x17!

10 bucks down at the Great Clips happy hour. Another buzz #2. The nice thing about getting a buzz is that finally, I can really shop on price. If I want to get a "haircut" and I try to minimize what I pay, I'm asking for disappointment. In fact, the only haircut I've been happy with since YOMHC 0x01 was -- in fact -- 0x01. 0x02 was also very good. They both cost $50. So, in the words of Saint Conan: to hell witchu!

203 got a cut too for the same price. hers wasn't a buzz. mine wuzz.

turn up the strobe.

to make me remember how much i <3 python.

please, oh please oh please, tell me how this:

std::vector::iterator i = find(v.begin(), v.end(), 2) ;
bool has_two = (i == v.end()) ;

is better than :

has_two = 2 in v

"So she reduced the input capacitance by 40%, thinking that would displace the compression wave enough to rectify the vaporator outputs!"

We all had a good laugh at that, even Victor, who often found himself bemused, but rarely amused, by the stupidity of others.

"Ridiculous," I said. "How could anyone think that would displace the compression wave?"

To my surprise, Victor came to the defense of the unnamed woman. "It's simple," he said. "It's because she didn't understand how the vaporator worked. For her it was a black box."

"Yeah," I said, "but still, the idea is preposterous!"

"Only because you know how it's put together," said Victor. "Think back to before you knew what you know. Would you have come up with a better idea?"

I thought back to before I knew what I know. I thought back to before I knew how to think back to before I knew what I know. I thought back to when I was a youngster of limited imagination.

No, I thought, as I explored the inner space of my youthful mind. Not a limited imagination, a different one. An imagination more occupied with what would be than with what has been, or could have been. An imagination of more narrow focus.

I looked out through my younger eyes, and saw a castle, far off in the distance. Between me and the castle stretched a deep valley, filled with mist and fog and the sounds of industry. The castle was miles and miles away, more distant than I could calculate or estimate, yet perched upon that hill above the misty valley, imposing on the blackness of night sky that encased it, it loomed distinct and clear. I saw a path at my feet, and it led down into the misty valley, and off in the distance I saw it again, leading out of the valley and into the courtyard of the castle.

This was the clarity of imagination of my youth, longing and planning and setting sights on distant greatness. I thought of all the obstacles I might encounter along the path through the misty valley, but always I walked upon the path. Beset upon from the four corners of the earth, I strayed not once from my imagined path, as I walked across it in the eyes of my young imaginings.

Focus. That was what I knew before I knew what I know. Later, I would learn to lose my focus, and let my imagination roam far from the narrow path, and in so doing, I would lose sight of the road. Lost in the misty valley with no notion of "out".

Looking down into the mists, hearing again the sounds of industriousness that floated above them, I recalled, like a dream of the future, that I had a task. A purpose, a reason for being here, on this path, looking out across my lonesome valley, pondering the distance and perplexing clarity of the castle amidst the blackness. I was to imagine, to ponder. I was to think and discover... something.

How to rectify vaporator outputs without reducing the input capacitance.

But I had no idea what a vaporator was, much less how to reduce its input capacitance. Why should I ever think such a thing, I wondered. How could a thought so foreign come to find a place of rest in my mind?

That's how it happens, sometimes, I guess. A thought from nowhere alights upon the mind, conscious or not, and if I'm lucky, an interesting thought will bloom and draw the attention of my senses.

Then, as if on cue, as if it had come into being directly from my thoughts, a fragrance of roses drifted past my place, and I turned my back on the castle and its valley, I turned back to face my origin, to see what flower had enticed my notice.

...

I looked up and saw... wood. And faces. The faces had shapes I did not recognize. There were faces I did not know, and faces that I did know but were different than I remembered. The mouths and eyes were not in their usual shapes.

They were speaking but they were speaking too fast, and I could not follow. So I looked at the wood, instead. It was big. It was dark. It had metal bolts and it was far away. A moment ago it had been much too close.

I closed my eyes.

...

Different. Overload. Too much. Fear. Light. Pain. Sting. I scream. I close.

...

Oblivion abides.

...

When it became apparent that I wasn't coming back, Victor picked up his take-out box, and left.

my world turns like clockwork on the words of the prophet:

I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence—a series of words—which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second.