Ramblings of a Martian

18 May 12

2012-05-19T03:26:08Z

A little early today..

Work was high stress. Made a bunch of changes to the production database and rolled out new code, all for this facebook crap. In testing on production, I found a bug where anybody who tried to reauth their account would get an error message for at least an hour. And because of the nature of it, they'd probably /keep/ getting it until they /stopped retrying/ for an hour. Took me half an hour to track down the fact that I was caching a request that pulled the per-page auth tokens, and when you reauth suddenly those are all invalidated as well.. At least the fix was trivial: clear one more cached value when setting auth.

loree and I went to Costco, and then tried to go to see Avengers again, this time in IMAX. But, we miscalculated horribly and tried to go to a 730 Friday show at southcenter. Ended up getting bagels and icecream instead. Came home to find the dogs had puked, which loree is cleaning up as I type. After, we're going to watch Captain America. Again, for me, since I just watched it yesterday, but she hasn't yet, and it /is/ helpful for watching Avengers. Also because Hugo Weaving was AWESOME.

17 May 12

2012-05-18T04:33:51Z

More facebook. Always facebook.

Came home. Watched Captain America. Now ready to go see Avengers a few more times.

17 May 12

2012-05-17T04:06:06Z

Stayed up until about 2am trying to land on the Mün. I managed to get into Munal orbit with an unmanned rocket, and then land it back of Kerbin, but the manned rockets kept exploding.

Woke up to find I couldn't connect to Rigel. Turned out one of my automagic attack-detection systems decided that loree's mom's iPad was failing to connect to the mail server over and over. So, that's fixed.

loree and I went and got our passport applications in finally. The dogs got their summer haircuts.

Came home and tried to figure out more facebook issues.

Then I put Kerbals on the moon. And very nearly returned them safely home.
The worst was the time they ran out of fuel as they started their re-entry braking.
Or maybe the worst was when I thought we were home free, so I separated the last stage… then discovered that the rocket I was using didn't have a parachute.. and they smashed into the ground at ~300m/s. *cough*

15 May 12

2012-05-16T06:31:59Z

Dealt with facebook issues. Mostly.

Paid for Kerbal Space Program. Now have three ships in orbit and trying to land one on the moon...

14 May 12

2012-05-15T04:31:59Z

Bad reflux last night. Aspirated some of it. Lungs are still unhappy about that.

Dealing with Facebook crap today at work.

Playing Kerbal Space Program this evening. I may actually pay for this. It's pretty fun.

13 May 12

2012-05-14T04:43:20Z

loree and I went shopping. Found some furniture that might work in the withdrawing room. Nothing really perfect tho.

Spent an hour or two rehanging the living room speakers and got the stereo working again. Need to go figure out what exactly I need to do as far as conduit to get cabling from the entertainment center, across the basement, and back up into the dining room/kitchen area. I'm thinking, if I can find an hdmi-over-ethernet receiver that has an audio out port, that might be a workable alternative to running hdmi AND audio cables across the basement. Or maybe not. Need to investigate and think about how I want things hooked up.

Oh, and loree's mom arrived yesterday.

12 May 12

2012-05-13T04:52:19Z

Sent a work email, with the CTO on the To line, containing the word 'fucknuggets'. It was about the Facebook API.

Cleared out the last of the boxes I used to move out of Amazon with. From 2006, yes. Shut up.

Chainsawed a bit. Need to dig out the chainsaw on a stick so I can trim the higher branches.

Took down a bunch of wires in the living room and library, so I can rewrite for the new layout.

Started relistening to all the Dresden books.

11 May 12

2012-05-12T05:10:55Z

Not much to say about work.
My dentist dropped by to talk about a project idea he has. I let him drive the Volt.
Went and got my hair repurpled.
More work on the ConMan data model.

10 May 12

2012-05-11T04:05:40Z

Work was largely uneventful. Priority shift for me, but it's a good one. Makes sense at this point.

Home alone this evening. Trying to think about ConMan, but find I'm waffling about multi-year old decisions in the data model. Not sure how I want to move forward.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

9 May 12

2012-05-10T04:34:35Z

Back on track at work. Got an important piece integrated, which made people happy. Helped with a design review.

Went to beer night.

Came home.

8 May 12

2012-05-09T04:36:09Z

Chaotic at work. Couldn't focus. Learned some of what I need to know. Got the writer started on my docs. Gave up early.

Got a plan worked out for the sofa platform. Only need six 8' 2X4s.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

7 May 12

2012-05-08T05:27:36Z

Finally taught myself how rails engines work today. Did some other stuff.

Then, AVENGERSZOMGSOAWESOME. *ahem* I quite enjoyed the movie.

edit: Wendy's mac&cheese is better than it has any right to be.

editedit: Target angry. TARGET ANGRY!!!

6 May 12

2012-05-07T04:44:03Z

Brunch with Professor X and his servitors. Concom meeting. Rearranging the living room. The TV isn't /that/ heavy, but it's HUGE, so it's a tad unwieldy. But, we got it moved to the other end of the room. Most of the entertainment center is offline, until someone volunteers to run some conduit thru the crawlspace for me, but at least it's on the right side of the room. I need to get the sofa platform built, so we can finish putting the couch in position. Right now, it's in theatre mode.

5 May 12

2012-05-06T04:38:32Z

We finished moving the shelves.

Then to cuddlyeconomist and walbourn's place for a small get together. Food was great. And there was Cards Against Humanity.

Now home. Was thinking I'd get more done around the house after we got home.. That's… not gonna happen.

4 May 12

2012-05-05T06:00:26Z

Wasted the morning implementing a logging system that someone else implemented five months ago. Used the results of /those/ logs to figure out a bug in my own code. Fixed and deployed it. Gave up on work.

Loaned out my (spare) car.

Went shopping. Got pasta sauce from Borracchini's. They didn't have any cakes that screamed out to me. Then went to Fry's and bought a holster for my camera and a couple HDMI cables. Got dinner, then went to Target to buy boxes to put DVDs into.

Came home, and loree and I got all the DVDs off the shelves. We have 17 boxes full of DVDs. At a guess, I'd say somewhere between 1300 and 1500 discs. Piled all the boxes in the dining room, where I plan to set up a ripping station.

We got two more shelves moved into the sun room. All of the books with no shelf to live on are now on a shelf. We still have books stacked 2 or 3 deep on some shelves, but no more books in boxes or stacked on dressers.

We are now very tired. And dusty.

Anybody want to submit ideas for how to decorate the south end of the sun room? We haven't figured out what to call it yet, but it's going to have bookshelves, some seating, probably end up painted a dark blue or purple, with gauzy black and purple fabric with little gold and silver stars (I've had it forever, bought it for this space)… but I haven't decided what exactly to /do/ with the fabric. Draping it across the ceiling seems repetitive next to the harem pit, but also seems /consistent/ next to the harem pit. So.. I dunno. Ideas welcome, either way.

3 May 12

2012-05-04T04:43:58Z

Spent very little time at work working on my projects. Got in, first thing I did was find a problem with a just-deployed change and roll it back. Then I spent most of the day trying to track down various problems coming from the Facebook API. Did some planning. Spilled beef bouillon on myself and came home.

Then had to go get the dogs, because loree was running late.

Pizza for dinner, because I wanted us to spend time clearing the southern sunroom. It's mostly storage these days.. I want to get all the boxes out, sorted through, cataloged, and sent to the basement or storage. As it is, we got a few shuffled around and sorted thru, and cleared enough space to move at least one of the dvd shelves.

See, we're going to rearrange the living room, and that means the entertainment center is going where the Wall Of DVDs currently is. The Wall Of DVDs are going to all be ripped to digital and taken to storage, and the shelves are moving into the sunroom and getting loaded with books.

At this point, one of the narrow white shelves has been moved, and one box of books has been unloaded into it. We need move boxes to store the DVDs in until I can get them ripped. And I want to build a new CPU-heavy box with a bunch of DVD drives attached to rip thru them quickly. That last part will take some time, sadly.

2 May 12

2012-05-03T05:59:51Z

Accomplished next to nothing with work, because...

Dental appointment. Two fillings, 2 and 12.

Dinner and movie w/ vix. The Pirates. Was quite good. Ran into Mac and Pol there.

Assembled new vacuum.

Tired. Sleep.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

1 May 12

2012-05-02T06:14:24Z

Company announced $18M in funding. Deployed my service to staging. Came home to avoid traffic.

Made a very large T&T&T. Watched TV. Made Loree one when she got home. Installed new Roku and played with it.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

Third and Third and Third

2012-05-01T22:56:29Z

It's a reference to Futurama. In "I Second That Emotion", Bender is baking a cake for Nibbler, and among the ingredients is Third and Third and Third.

At Norwescon this year, I was ordering a drink that I decided would be called a third and third and third.

The right way to make it: In a large cocktail shaker, combine equal parts Half&Half and Irish Cream, plus ice. Shake. Pour into a glass. Up, no ice. Basically, you want to mix it and strain it thru the ice to chill it, but you don't want the ice melting in it.

To make it quickly: Dump a handful of ice into a glass, pour in Bailey's until it's about half full, top off with half&half. Stir with a straw. Drink.

edit: And yes, I realize that it is, in fact, a half and quarter and quarter. STFU.

30 Apr 12

2012-05-01T04:35:20Z

New toilet. It goes Fwoosh.

Dentist. Brush more. Floss more. Come back wednesday for fillings.
A filling on 2 seems to've broken, and there's a hole on 12 that HURT when poked.
Also Dr T wants to come over to talk about a software project. Probably next Friday.

Matt's for lunch. Adorable little daughter of lady actually working there was working the counter. She appreciated the $5 tip. And I got free chili chips because I asked for the chili on the side and they forgot.

Talked to mom for a while. We both miss having someone to take care of upgrading the PC hardware.

Shopping for PC parts is a song of pain and hatred.

2012-04-30T06:16:06Z

I've spent the evening trying to price out another new machine.. I expect it to come out between 1 and 2k, so it's /probably/ not in the short term picture, but I want to get an idea of what I'm looking at based on what's currently available - or if I went mad and decided to buy it now..

I spent an hour comparing LGA 1155 motherboards on Gateway's website.. Narrowed things down by chipset first, decided to focus on Z68… went thru all their matching motherboards, filtering on what I think will work best for what I have in mind.. threw out anything without onboard video, because I'm not planning to game and don't feel the need to blow an extra $200 on a video card.. Kicked out anything with /no/ eSATA ports.. in the end it turned out to be mostly about USB ports.. And so I decided I wanted the GA-Z68XP-UD5. The chipset supports 10 2.0/1.1 ports, including 6 on the back panel, and it has "1 x Renesas D720200 chip and 2 x VLI VL810 hubs", which gives you 8 3.0/2.0 ports, including 4 on the back panel. All other things being more or less equal, I decided this was the best choice.

Well, it's out of stock on Amazon, Newegg.. everywhere I've checked. Looks like it may have been EOL'd, but Gigabyte's website helpfully doesn't mention that fact.

The machine's primary purpose will be video transcoding, so it doesn't need a whole lot of pretty, but does need a lot of horsepower (I'm planning on putting an i7 2700K into it) and the ability to connect one or two internal drives, one or two eSATA external drives, and several (possibly many, possibly lots) USB DVD drives. Hence my focus on the port availability.

I'm not really in the mood to repeat the winnowing process for all the other MB makers out there, so… anybody have an alternative motherboard they'd care to suggest?

29 Apr 12

2012-04-30T04:32:11Z

Fighting with computers. Cleaning the house. Vegetation. Didn't make it out to things. Ah well.

28 Apr 12

2012-04-29T05:11:28Z

Game day. Listening to The Bloggess's book in the morning. People showed up comparatively late. I made stew while some people played Agricola. We've been playing Cards Against Humanity since. We're horrible people.

27 Apr 12

2012-04-28T05:06:19Z

Work was partly docs, partly helping someone debug a deployment, and partly tracking down some social bugs.

Loree came home for lunch. Dinner was nothing in particular. Then we cleaned off the dining room table.

26 Apr 12

2012-04-27T04:47:21Z

Demo day at work. Showed off the functionality of my current service. Terribly exciting stuff. I bet the designers were /riveted/ by that Ruby code. Also there was food. I got way too much. Lots of leftovers.

Picked up the dogs, while loree bought us a new toilet. I'm told it'll be installed Monday.

Then dinner at Heartland with cuddlyeconomist. The Professor doesn't find me as amusing as I do.