The Mandelbear's Musings

So, after another lenghty break, we finally come around to the Thursday before Thanksgiving. We'll see whether I can get two weeks in a row. But for now, I'm thankful for..

• Having finally sold Grand Central Starport. An era has well and truly ended, and I'm still somewhat in shock. But still.
• Rainbow's End.
• My wonderful family.
• Cat therapy.
• ssh -Xf $MYBOX gnome-panel

ETA: The first sentence would probably have been more effective if I hadn't posted this on Wednesday.

This was the sixteenth Father's Day without my Dad. I miss him a lot.

It was also the sixteenth Mother's Day without Colleen's mom, whose birthday was yesterday.

And our old house in San Jose is on the market.

On the whole it's been a good weekend for nostalgia, but I'm not in the greatest of shape emotionally, even with antidepressants and alexithymia, and more cat cuddles than usual. Please bear with me.

Well, I have Nova (the file server) back online, though not fully configured. I also reconfigured the network, adding another WAP. This lets me drop the main SSID, rainbows-end, down to 802-11G. Trying to run G and N on the same network turns out to be a serious mistake. I resurrected the Netgear WNR3500L from Starport for the purpose, so it's running rainbows-end-N and functioning and providing 4 ethernet ports over in the desk area.

Meanwhile, Colleen is making progress -- she gets into her power chair on a regular basis, though she's still not too good at unassisted transfers.

Desti, our little feline escape artist, managed to let herself out onto the roof via the bathroom window, which was open because the mis-drilled holes in the tub had been repaired, and the workman hadn't bothered to close the door. I know, it's expecting a lot, and my little bear-like brain kept thinking up ways to make it my fault, including not remembering to mention the possibility to Naomi, and not having cat-proofed the door to Naomi's bedroom. Desti had, in fact, been put in there, but she was out the door before Naomi could get across the room to stop her.

Fortunately, "The Cat Came Back, the very next day" -- Curio stood on the kitchen counter meowing out the window, and I heard an answer. Opened the front door and there she was. She was very clingy for the next day or so.

Think she's learned not to leave the house? Nawwww. Not likely.

We also had our new instant hot water tap installed. But it didn't work. Spent about an hour tracing tubes and verifying the installation before finally figuring out that it was plugged into the same outlet as the garbage disposal. Both outlets are swtched. :P

We'll have to have an electrician out to re-wire it; it's not a job I feel like tackling myself. While he's here he can install a 110V outlet upstairs in the closet -- the washer-drier combo doesn't take 220. Naturally, nobody sells an adapter. :P

A good collection of links in the notes, as usual.

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The big news is that COLLEEN IS HOME!!. The bad news is that she still is nowhere near being able to walk (despite PT twice a week), and can't even transfer reliably from the bed to her power chair. Getting her into bed the evening she came home was hard enough; she made several attempts to get back in the chair the next day, but couldn't.

It's going to be a long, difficult, expensive month. We have someone coming in during the day to take care of her and cook, but I still have to change her at least twice/day, and usually more. Ouch! I'm too old for the amount of bending-over required, and even with the suggestions that Naomi made about body mechanics, there's still a fair amount of it.

At least the cats are getting along better, and Curio seems to be especially fond of Colleen. Of course: the bed smells like me, and has someone in it all the time who's happy to pet him.

Having cats around is a Very Good Thing.

In other news, the disk in my file server is dead. And I haven't pulled the backup drive to check it -- that was supposed to be particularly easy because it's in a dock. It's not easy because the dock has a key, and I can't find it. So I'll have to pull the whole damned thing, or else install a new main drive.

If the backup drive is also hosed, I won't have lost too much -- most of the really important stuff is off on the web host. It's ironic, though, that I discovered this by trying to log in in order to convert my main website from CVS to git. I'm not sure the CVS repo is uploaded. I don't think the copy of my password keychain on the laptop is up to date, either. And I'll lose most of my audio -- ripped CDs and concert recordings.

And our TV is still dead. Its problem seems to be thermal -- it runs for a couple of hours, then turns itself off. I went to Fry's and got another -- smaller (29" as opposed to 32"), but newer and lighter.

I've also written an article about git: Why and How To Keep Your Master Happy. It's work-related -- all of our new hires and many of my other coworkers seem to be unfamiliar with git and how to keep their changelog nice and tidy. Should have written it six months ago -- I wrote a rather sketchy wiki page, but it didn't go into the motivation for any of it.

Other links, as usual, in the raw notes:

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Tuesday I moved nova, the printers, and the starport (inside) router to the computer desk; moved polaris (the outside router) to the corner of the kitchen where the phone jack lives; and set up (linux desktop) algol and (mac mini) whitewood. Everything works! Much better signal from the routers, though there is still the occasional glitching from starport which I suspect is due to 802-11G/N issues.

Tip: it helps if you turn the printer on before trying to print a test page.

I did quite a lot of re-organizing, which resulted in a usable amount of space around the desk and several other items going to useful places. Decided to use Elfa "easyhang" shelving on the long livingroom wall -- it'll be fairly expensive, but a lot less than the price of even freestanding bookcases.

My copy of Cat Faber's new CD, The King's Lute, arrived in the mail. It's wonderful -- go get one. Cat is an absolutely brilliant songwriter. There are several songs on there that I need to learn.

Wednesday I got a confirmation of my COBRA health plan selections. WTF? I didn't recall making any. Thursday I got a letter dated the 5th saying that they couldn't contact me. WTF? Five phone calls later, on Friday, I determined that they had my area code wrong -- I might conceivably have messed up when I updated my profile, but they had my email address and never sent anything to it. The last person I called, Susan, was extremely helpful and pleasant to talk to. This was Friday morning, and may have been due to my already having decided what to do.

After determining that I had already received more from my FSA than I'd put in so far I dropped it, saving myself at least $860. (There was another $430 payment due, but I had already determined that I wasn't going to continue my COBRA coverage after my coverage from $K kicks in in December.) I also dropped my vision plan.

Friday I also (finally!) followed up on my house, car, and renter's insurance. And saved quite a lot. I should have done that months ago, of course. I don't know where my brain was between June and September. Well, job-hunting and moving and unpacking ate up a lot of it, I'm sure. Anxiety, apathy, and depression probably ate up the rest.

Colleen and I visited the Northshore Senior Center in Bothell -- it was only $50/year for a couple membership. If she can get transportation it'll be a great place for her to hang out, especially the quilting group.

I made several tasty meals, including a great corned beef hash using the potatoes that had been cooked in the slow cooker with the beast. Details, along with the usual links, in the notes.

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Good grief, indeed! It looks like this post is going to try to cover an eventful two-and-a-half weeks; there's no way I can do it justice.

tl;dr: Our Stuff arrived two weeks ago, I flew down and got the Honda and more Stuff, and we're gradually getting unpacked and settled in. I still don't have a job, or even any interviews scheduled, so I've decided to offer dinner at the Herb Farm to anyone who finds me one.

And now a few highlights.

The movers arrived on Wednesday, having had another stop along the way because our 17,000+ pounds of stuff only filled about 2/3 of their big-rig. Props to Billy, who managed to get the rig parked next to our entrance, which the apartment office staff had assured me was next to impossible. Billy and Pam were the husband-and-wife team of drivers; I can't praise them, United Van Lines, Chipman Relocation, and the loading and unloading teams too highly. A very smooth, painless, hassle-free operation.

... that left us with an apartment full of boxes, of course. We still have more Stuff than space, even after paring down a lot and storing almost half of it in N's garage. Well, we knew the job was impossible when we took it.

Speaking of jobs: I got my rejection from EnergySavvy, so I now have nothing on the schedule because the move totally ate my brain. I have until the end of September before my severance pay runs out.

I do not like it, Sam-I-Am.

Two weeks ago (Monday the 30th), something finally clicked in my head, and the apartment felt like home. I was in the kitchen; I knew where everything was, it was small and comfortable and convenient, and I felt like I belonged here. It's still scary, but only because of the job problem, not the move. I like it here.

I discovered something else about myself: I like giving stuff away to people who will give it a good home. More than like it -- it's *wonderful*. I'd been talking with Nathan, the guy who owns the painting service that did such a good job on the interior. I'd been referred to him because he's in a Christian group with Liz. Anyway, the conversation turned to music, and the instruments we play, and he asked about the beat-up old mandolin in the "what the heck do I do with this?" pile by the garage door. And then the balalaika, which I'd bought on a whim in high school and never learned to play.

I ended up giving them to him. I felt both relief in simplifying them out of my life, and joy -- mudita, actually -- in seeing how happy the gift made him. A very middle-sized-bear thing, I think. And I realized that this was one of the things that was making the move an enjoyable experience.

I also realized how much I enjoy traveling by myself.

One reason I haven't been posting has been the difficulty of connecting to the fileserver from outside the firewall; I think I've finally fixed most of that, but also copied my emacs-based posting client onto the netbook. We'll see how that works in a few minutes...

Loads of links in the notes, of course.

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Anyone have a recommendation about internet service? The choice is between Century Link (which seems to be the default phone company for the new apartment) and Comcast (which seems to be the default cable company unless there's a place where I can hang a dish). I'm leaning toward Century Link because Comcast has such a horrid reputation.

The other possibility would be to get all three services -- cable, internet, and phone -- from Comcast. I don't like that idea much. I checked, and can't keep my UVerse service -- they don't serve that address. Grumph.

Inquiring minds need to know.

My trusty Linux router has, apparently, been gradually dying. As of Saturday night it was basically unusable, slowing down to a crawl within minutes of a reboot. It passed memory and rootkit checks just fine, though. Sunday morning I decided to scrap it. This may have been a mistake. I tried several different approaches. The mini-ITX box I _had_ been using as my router wouldn't boot. Spent quite a while chasing my tail on that one. Finally, after much flailing, got my WAP on line as the router. Nice and fast, and of course low power. Sweet. I'd been meaning to do that for a while. Except that by then it was 4pm, and nearly time to head to the airport. (Note: I'm up in the Seattle area until Thursday afternoon; I'm available for an interview Wednesday afternoon. Hint.) A couple of things got forgotten, chief among them being testing ssh. Oops. I thought briefly about setting up port forwarding, but got distracted by things like hugging my wife and daughter goodbye. I read my email by ssh-ing in to my file server. But the ssh daemon on the router doesn't appear to be listening to the WAN port. This is an excellent security measure, but right now it sucks. The other thing I do only on the home system is keep my password database. OOPS. Fortunately, I was able to set up email forwarding this morning, so I only lose access to my archives (including a lot of job-related stuff) and anything that was sent to me yesterday. But still... It could be a painful couple of days, and it certainly made for a bad trip yesterday. Flying out of San Jose on a Delta puddle-jumper didn't help.

A pretty good day. I even took a walk, albeit a short one because the weather looked dicey. I felt a few stray drops, but stayed dry. (In fact, it did rain, hard, in the evening, and I got wet taking the garbage out.) I walked over to Savers in search of dress pants, and found a pair of dark gray ones that will work nicely with the darker of the silk jackets and the gray-and-black striped shirt that I'm wearing now.

Hey, I'm a fan. Dressing up for an interview is cosplay. Easy.

I made a yummy pot roast for dinner, using most of a bottle of cheap red wine and two bottles of non-alcoholic beer (left over from the last party, because nobody would actually drink the stuff). I had some of the broth in a mug -- it made lovely soup. And a cole slaw, with half a head of cabbage and a Granny Smith apple.

I got the Mac Mini, Whitewood, installed on the desktop to the right of the main monitor, and got x2vnc installed and working. That'll be my machine for doing taxes.

And I got through about 2/3 of the pile of papers to the left of the desk, turning up my (expired) passport, two uncashed checks, a renewal notice from AARP, some still-valid Office Max discount cards, ..., and some sore muscles in my left side from reaching back to throw stuff in the recycle bin.

In a separate search, I found a photostat of my birth certificate and the stub from my social security card. So that's good.

In other news, the move to Seattle is looking more and more feasible. Colleen spent several hours thinking about what books she wanted to keep, and searching for restaurants and museums. Naomi and I talked about housing options. Moving is going to be somewhat hellish, but we'll manage somehow.

I am encouraged by the fact that an albatross, metaphorically a dead weight hung around one's neck as a penance, is a beautiful and far-traveling seabird when it's alive.

And finally, Colleen made it through the entire day without using her scooter -- I think that's the first time in months.

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A good walk yesterday, and one of my tech reports is nearly finished. Just one more section to go, and maybe a diagram. Good walking weather; maybe a little on the warm side.

After chasing down links to recordings of Wheelin' looking for a usable one, I realized that the one on the song page was ancient and awful. It's been replaced, now, with the one from Baycon 2010. I need to go back and do that for more of my songs.

Not to mention setting up a tip jar.

There are no more world-writable directories on my web host. They were left over from various CGI hacks on other hosts (all CGIs on Dreamhost run as me, so that's no longer a problem). I discovered yesterday that someone had put oddly-named php files into them (rsync -av tells me what's being deleted on the remote end).

I also put an rsync upload, and git push in some of the relevant web-related repos, into the script that runs every day when I'm logged in. Ought to write that up sometime.

I also had to do some scanning so I could mail PDFs to chaoswolf; I was delighted to find that xsane found the networked Epson Workforce 600 MFP on my desktop without any trouble. Go Linux!

A couple of good links at the bottom of the notes.

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A pretty good day; I took a 3-mile walk (Los Gatos Creek trail), and made a tasty dinner (broccoli chicken). I also got an unexpected $6K refund from the mortgage impound, apparently because the bank once again failed to pay the earthquake insurance. I covered it with a credit card, IIRC, so that's where this particular windfall is headed.

On the way back from dropping Colleen off at FurCon, I stopped in at OSH and saw that they had iGo laptop chargers on sale for half off, so I got one. It'll stay in the living room where I keep Cygnus, so I'll be able to leave the original charger in the bag.

Since I started dinner with a whole (though cut-up) chicken, I now have two bags in the fridge for tonight: one of bones for soup, and one of skin, fat, and wings for frying to crispy goodness. *rubs hands gleefully*

I've gotten a lot of comments on my last couple of posts, not all of them favorable. In the future I will resist the temptation to comment in public about other people's posts, even when they close them to my direct comments.

I have also been contemplating stopping my daily "done yesterday" updates, as a way of giving myself a little more time in the mornings. I think I'll keep going for now, just because it's useful to be able to look back and try to see what happened. What do people think about that? Should I drop back to once or twice a week, perhaps?

A good link from +Mike Shaw on depression, shared on G+. On a much lighter note, also from G+, here's an animated version of "The Cat Came Back".

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Um... right. You can tell it was a productive day from the small number of notes? Something like that.

Because, aside from not taking a walk due to working through lunchtime, it was a very productive day. I got a couple of overdue bills paid, practiced a couple of songs, blew through my JIRA task list at work, helped the coworker who's integrating audio into the client, and did some long-delayed web stuff in the evening.

I also spent the entire evening in the living room with Colleen working on Cygnus -- it's a real pleasure to have a netbook that has a full-sized keyboard with good (i.e., IBM-like) key feel.

I finally folded up at 11:30. DO NOT LIKE this "need to get more sleep" thing. I know, self-care and all that. It still sucks.

I don't know what it was about those two bills. They're from Kaiser, because my employer switched our plan from a from the HMO plan we've had since forever, to one that sends me two totally incomprehensible bills every month. And because I tend to put off anything that smells of paperwork. Which reminds me to get my W2 out of my bag.

Anyway, that's done.

I also don't know what it is about some of my coworkers. I mean, R is an experienced contractor, and can't be all that much younger than I am. But he's a Mac expert, uncomfortable with the command line, and shows an appalling ignorance of such Unix fundamentals as processes and PTYs. I've seen this before -- S back at my previous gig had similar problems.

I really don't like to think of myself as smarter than most people -- when you're one of a handful of researchers that doesn't have a PhD it's hard to hang on to that illusion -- but I probably do have a much broader range of experience than most. Starting in the days of vacuum tubes and Hollerith cards can do that, I guess.

One link, to Whose site is it anyway? | Files That Last. Worth a read if you have someone else maintaining your website; my employer ran afoul of this last year.

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LJ Release 88 is out, complete with sucky comment pages. There are nearly 5000 comments on the release announcement; it'll probably be over by the time I post this. Why they did this is just absolutely baffling. What, were they thinking? Yet another triumph of "design" over usability. Them and Gnome 3.

I tried installing the lxde desktop on Cygnus; it looks ok and is fast, but doesn't seem to have a network manager applet, so it's useless. It would work well on a hardwired, low-resource machine like one of the old Thinkpads, though. I'd already given up on xfce because, for all its flaws, I like my Gnome2 layout better.

A lot of the morning was spent at Kaiser, getting a new glasses prescription and an EKG. The optometrist also noticed that I have blepharitis in my left eye. Which I'd already noticed. Have to work on that.

I also mailed a package of holiday gifts, having given up trying to gift-wrap them in favor of getting them actually, you know, in the mail. I don't know what it is about gift-wrapping, but I always leave it for the last minute -- or beyond.

I also took a walk, and got a reasonable amount done at work. So... good.

In the links, Mexico's Mayan region launches apocalypse countdown. Tom Smith pointed out that there were Only 367 Shopping Days Left -- it would be 366, now. Happy apocalypse. Hmm. Maybe LJ is celebrating it a year early?

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Gnomes ate my Sunday. Gnome 3, actually. Upgrading my old netbook to Ubuntu 11.04 had gone so well that I fooishly told Colleen that I'd upgrade hers "Sunday morning before [she] gets up." Yeah, right. There were three big flaws in this:

• Colleen's netbook is a Dell mini-10; Kat's is a mini-10v. Different video. It didn't correctly identify the screen size.
• So, based on the fact that Kat loved the shiny new Gnome 3 UI, I went ahead and upgraded to 11.10, and left it happily loading away while we went to brunch at El Torito (one of Kat's faves). When we got back I discovered that Colleen hated Gnome 3, and it still didn't recognize the screen size.
• After restoring gnome-panel for the old Gnome 2 UI, that's when I found out that the new mail program, Thunderbird, didn't automatically migrate her email from evolution. And that evolution, which was still around, crashed on startup.

So I dropped back to 11.04 which at least had a more familiar configuration (but still had the problem of evolution crashing), and did some frantic googling to find out how to install the proper video driver and which index files to blow away so that evolution could recreate them with the proper format. And, along the way, how to configure gnome-panel in Gnome 3 (which turns out to require alt-right-click to bring up the menus, instead of right-click). :P

Then I went to bed, because it was 11:30pm.

Much of the afternoon was taken up by a shopping trip with the Wolfling, mostly to REI (luggage and camping gear) and AT&T (getting her phone, which hasn't been charging properly, looked at). Also Fry's and Office Max, but they didn't have what I was looking for there. It was a lot of fun, though. We ended up getting Kat an REI membership of her own, to take advantage of the additional 30% discount (on one REI-logo item per member).

Despite the frustrations it was a pretty good day, and I greatly enjoyed having the whole family together. We're a weird bunch, and I like that.

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Another calm but unproductive day, I'm afraid. A fair amount of puttering around the house. I finally tracked down the WiFi dropouts on Cygnus to incompatibility between 802.11N and G -- mixed networks basically don't work. So I turned off N on the WAP, and everything's cool now.

I also re-strung one of the living room ethernet cables with Cat-5e, enabling a gigabit hardwired (almost typed hardweird) connection. SPEED! I love it.

Went for a drive with Colleen, all the way down to Gilroy. Picked up dinner from Famous Dave's BBQ, which has been recommended. For good reason -- it was excellent. Still is; we had a lot of leftovers because we couldn't wake up the YD. Her sleep schedule has been pretty weird lately.

Just realized I forgot to post a Songs for Saturday yesterday. Here's one: Cat Faber's "Axial Tilt" (the real reason for the season).

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Probably not such a good day, on the whole. My new netbook, Cygnus, arrived, which pretty much blew the afternoon. It took four or five reboots to get through all the Windows upgrades. When I got home I installed Ubuntu 11.04, which went smooth as glass up until the end. It took an additional two installs to figure out that (1) you have to be careful about how you install grub and (2) the proprietary video driver is buggy.

The fan stays on all the time, which is annoying, but it's not really noticable from a normal working distance. At least to me, but I already know my hearing is deteriorating. And Windows 7 may be the best one so far, but it's still Windows, and I still hate click-to-type. On the plus side, it's a dream to type on compared to the Dell, and all the hardware Just Works in Ubuntu.

I had a serious adrenaline spike about 25 minutes after reading pocketnaomi's post about what happened Monday night. It's often difficult for me to figure out what causes a spike like that; this seemed pretty straightforward. Although, from the timing, it could have been excitement at Cygnus's arrival.

I made an appointment to see my doctor about the neuropathy.

Some good links in the notes, and one bad one -- don't click over to Naomi's post unless you can handle a detailed description of domestic violence. Sorry about that.

I really want to shake cflute and ask "What in hell are you and what have you done with my friend?"

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Power is one of those things you don't think of much unless you're paying the bill or it suddenly isn't there. There was a power outage Friday evening, and we learned a couple of things.

The outage only lasted an hour, and the fileserver and network switch (which are on the same UPS) could easily have gone on another hour. The odd thing is that the gateway subnet (my Linux router and the UVerse "cable" router), on an identical UPS with basically the same steady-state power draw (around 25W) shut itself down after only 26 minutes.

It's pretty clear that the UVerse router is the culprit; it draws at least an extra 9W or so when there's data flowing, and sometimes as much as 20. My hunch is that it wastes a lot of power trying to reconnect to its satellite set-top boxes. Stupid.

There's not much I can do about that, except to move the DHCP server from the gateway to the fileserver, so that people with laptops can keep on working. That's basically me, since Colleen uses her netbook mostly for web browsing.

I moved DHCP this morning, with no obvious problems so far.

We also learned that it's really hard to find a bag of candles after the lights go out. Yes, we had flashlights, but those only work if what you're looking for is reasonably close to the last place anyone remembers putting it. It wasn't.

Felt like a pretty good day -- it was perfect weather for walking, and I actually made use of it. There's a nice little trail along Stevens Creek, which I walked a bit of. I got lucky; it apparently started raining sometime in the afternoon.

And I made a phone call to make an appointment. That's two this week so far. Of course, there are lots more phone calls I need to make.

I finally Read The Find Manual on shorewall, and found the incantation I needed to make inbound port forwarding work. So now I can ssh directly to the fileserver. Am now looking into locking it down more. Not hard; the simplest way is just to set up a server running as an unprivileged user on a different port.

Elevating the head of the bed still seems to be working on reflux: I woke up with my throat dry and a little scratchy, but not filled with mucus the way it often is.

Lots of links this time. I particularly recommend these Soviet technical magazine covers from the 1050s (courtesy of solarbird), and The Benjamin Franklin Effect (the power of cognitive dissonance) by way of naamah_darling. There's a longish quote in the notes that seems particularly applicable to me.

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My attempt at CARE's Live Below The Line -- eating for $1.50/person -- was something of a failure yesterday: they served pizza at work after the all-hands meeting, and dinner was the crock-pot pot roast that wasn't ready in time for dinner Sunday. (Though when I ran the numbers on the pot roast it came out to about $1/serving, and I had $.50 worth of cottage cheese in the morning, so what I actually spent was $1.50... :)

I'll do better today. I miss my coffee.

I did more work on the netbook, deleting its now-useless recovery partition (1.4GB!), and quite a bit of music work in the evening. That included the last bits of editing from last month's rehearsal, and working out the chords on one song. As of now there's only one song that needs any formatting work at all.

One of the things that happened at yesterday's all-hands meeting was getting a patent bonus, for US Patent #8,006,094. Trustworthy timestamps and certifiable clocks using logs linked by cryptographic hashes. This is number 23.

It doesn't mean I'm in favor of software patents. Far from it.

A couple of interesting links. Take a look at the charts in "It's the Inequality, Stupid". And on a lighter note, Zombies: The Safer Terrorists.

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Another weekend day with what felt like very little done, though on reflection I actually did some things. I need to prioritize better, I suppose, given that I'm never going to have time for everything I want or even need to do.

Things that did get done include setting up the gateway to boot from its USB stick, getting bagels and cream cheese for lunch (the lox was the second half of the package Colleen bought at Costco the week before last), and another 3-mile walk on the Los Gatos Creek trail.

I'm pretty happy with the USB stick (which is actually an 8GB micro-SD card) -- it saves a couple of watts over the old laptop drive, and should be more reliable. Some additional work will be needed to get around the fact that it no longer includes a mirror of my websites and audio -- those will have to be reverse-proxied from the fileserver.

Oh, and a little work on chording and scripting for Tempered Glass material.

Anyway... I guess it was ok. Links, as usual, below in the notes.

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Kind of a mixed couple of days -- a memorial service and a post that gets me all teary-eyed can do that. So can a defunct disk drive. On the other hand, I have a final determination on my current job title: Sr. Software Architect.

"Architect" makes me happy and comfortable, both because I consider programming to be one of the Useful Arts, like architecture, rather than an engineering discipline like civil engineering or a scientific ones like physics or materials science. Also, because I'm not really all that good a programmer anymore. I don't think I ever was. Sure, I can get programs written, but lots of other people are faster and more accurate at it. What I'm really good at, IMNSHO, is designing software systems in the first place, stringing existing programs together Unix-fashion with scripts and makefiles, and debugging (especially debugging other people's code).

The memorial service? Paul Metz (kshandra says it better than I could). The article that made me tear up? DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #44: How You Get Unstuck.

As an experiment, I'm putting the notes at the bottom so that if you follow a link directly to the post, you won't have them at the top of the page. Let me know what you think of that.

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A good day. About a three-mile walk, a patent issued, and the router upgraded and configured. A fair amount of other puttering. A new icon, by meeks, and a new River post to show it off with.

On the dark side, it was my first walk in over a week, a software patent, and only my third River posts this year. (Though there's been River content in quite a few "done yesterday" posts, it's not the same.)

A few links in the notes. I ought to join Diaspora at some point.

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A pretty good day. I put in an hour's worth of work on the router upgrade (and made good progress), then headed North to the Menlo Park office to triage the stuff I'd abandoned there in advance of the last move. On the way I stopped at the Cupertino building to looked at the new offices there. It turned out that they hadn't selected one for me, and I was the first to show up, so I got my pick. I picked the one with a huge U-shaped desk -- it'll be the first time in decades I've been able to have my monitor facing away from the door.

Whether there's going to be room for all my stuff is another question. I have 10 boxes worth in my cube. Fortunately I was only able to find one box worth of stuff up in Menlo, the rest can be recycled or put up for grabs. Go me!

I left a little before 3pm for a dentist appointment. No problems -- which has been pretty typical for the last few years, but it's a major and comparatively recent improvement. Part of that, no doubt, is that first item up in the notes -- writing it every morning is a powerful reminder.

On the way back I stopped at Office Max for a new box of Pilot G2 pens (I got blue this time). I hardly ever actually use them up; they just mysteriously disappear.

Just down the block in the same strip mall as Office Max is a Whole Paycheck, and the YD had an evening class, which meant that I was cooking dinner. Coho salmon and asparagus. I pan-fried the salmon with butter, pepper, and lemon juice. Yum.

I crashed around 11pm. I really hate having to go to bed before midnight, but I seem to need the sleep. Grumble.

Only one link in the notes; nothing very exciting -- that's mainly because I went up to Menlo without my netbook. Silly bear. But a good day.

( raw notes )

Not a bad day. I took a 3-mile walk (second one this week), and went to the Ford dealership to point out that their bill was about $80 more than the estimate I had authorized. I was pleasantly surprised to have my service advisor immediately set about arranging for a refund. I had almost chickened out. Nice.

A lot of puttering, including 3 bags of recycling, a trip to the bank, some music work, and some furniture setup in the office. OK, the phrase "re-arranging the deck chairs" comes to mind, but I did want to set up a monitor and keyboard next to the rack for working on the router.

I also signed up on PG&E's website so I could look at my smart meter readings. They lag by at least a day, unfortunately, so no real-time updates. *sigh*

Oh, and that monitor? In spite of being an LCD, it gobbles about 30W. At first I thought the power brick was consuming half of that, but apparently not (according to the meter I just hooked up to it); that was just an artifact of trying use the UPS as a power meter.

There are links, as usual. If you're suffering from limited mobility, check out Four Walls No Limits - For The Bedbound, Homebound, And Anybody Else Stuck In One Place by the amazing rb.

( raw notes )

A pretty good day. I took off work early to see my doctor, who identified my head/neck/shoulder pain as all coming from the right trapezius muscle. I have no idea how I did that. He said I'm doing all the right things, and scheduled me for a PT appointment Tuesday morning. While I was there I took a walk all the way around the building complex, a little under a mile, and stopped in at the other Kaiser building to make a couple of other appointments.

On the way home I stopped at Central Computing, where I got a Logitech Anywhere mouse -- it works just as I'd hoped, with the menu button under the scroll wheel serving as the middle mouse button. Yay! I have a 3-button mouse again!

They also had the TP Link gigabit switch I've had my eye on. Unfortunately, it eats more power than the TrendNet it replaces, which makes me grumpy. It's compensated by the fact that it also replaces the 5-port gigabit switch, but...

My plan is to move the WAP back into the rack and use its switch for the DSL modem, router, and fileserver, moving the 16-port switch to the fileserver's UPS. That will rebalance the load on the two UPSs.

A nice lunchtime conversation with Naomi and Ame. That exercise stretches my mind in interesting directions; Naomi's always been good at prodding me gently outside my comfort zone.

There are links in the notes, as usual; one whole block is about "the art of grieving", inspired by a comment I made on haikujaguar's latest installment of Black Blossom:

I must respectfully disagree with the Calligrapher -- there may be no art in tears, but there is art to be made of them, and grieving can be as much an art in its own right as loving can.

And the grieving have, I think, more need of art than the joyful. They have farther to go.

Nevertheless, I'm doing ok at the moment. Time and Good Drugs work wonders. Or at least second-rate tourist attractions.