Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Like brother, like sister.

    My sister Christine’s got herself a blog. Okay, technically it’s for herself and her husband, but right now she’s the captain of the ship (to borrow a phrase appropriate to those two wacky Navy kids).

    Go forth, say hi, and pester her if she doesn’t keep up on the posting and stuff. (Hey, what are siblings for?)

    John & Christine

  • Music doesn’t actually taste that good.

    Hey, it beats reading more about my crappy work situation… (For the record? I’m beyond sick and tired of “flat-screen envy.”)

    Your Taste in Music:

    Progressive Rock: Highest Influence
    80’s Alternative: Low Influence
    80’s Pop: Low Influence
    Classic Rock: Low Influence
    Dance: Low Influence

    Thank you, Lisa.

  • Unusual Commuting Day

    It’s not every day that one catches the 8:07 #9 Broadway bus downtown, twice in the same day.

    This odd little musing is brought to you by the crashing of this very webserver, due to my completely failing to learn one particular lesson from the aforementioned “last year’s debacle.”

    That’s right! Not only did I arrive at work at 9am, I also arrived there at 9pm. This time it was to set the webserver to boot with a uniprocessor kernel instead of the SMP kernel, which was the previous default, and which the hardware in question is dangerously unstable on. Ugh.

    While I was there I fixed a few other things, then came home. Again.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to finish my long-delayed dinner and go to sleep. Bah.

  • It wasn’t so bad in the middle.

    Walking in the door, almost no sleep under my belt (for various reasons), I was immediately thrust into a tricky and delicate hard-drive swap operation as part of a swap of studios for Charlie and Kisn (AM). That came off remarkably well, but it did involve three very intense hours of work.

    The middle part of my workday wasn’t so bad.

    Almost at quitting time for the day, most of everything went dark. Yep, the UPS for the main part of the building went kerblooey. Again. (Long-time readers may be familiar with the troubles that damned piece of equipment has given us. Yes, indeed, I hate it a lot.) Cue a solid hour of running around, desperately trying to get things working again in the shortest possible time.

    Luckily, I learned a lot of lessons from last year’s debacle. For one thing, I’ve upgraded a lot of the Linux servers so that services generally start on their own. I also know exactly which systems are troublesome, and how to get them back to life again. However, one new problem reared its head: Our main file-and-print server wouldn’t let most folks sign on until I thought to run a ‘DSREPAIR’ routine. Ugh.

    I’ve already accumulated enough stress to last me the entire week. Powers that be, if you’re reading this, please take note. Thank you.

  • Adobe and Macromedia Merger, Translated

    Posted to Pool by its lovely lifeguard, the following translation of the Adobe/Macromedia merger FAQ

    Translation from PR-speak

  • Gaming, sleeping, gaming, eating, and more gaming.

    A milestone was reached last night, after many months of playing City of Heroes: With Dawn’s help, my main character (a sword-slinging scrapper who goes by the improbable name of Woods Cutter) reached Level 26, which allowed him to get the Stamina power. (Yes, I know you can get it earlier than that. My build required that I get some other powers first.)

    Why is this so special? Well, Stamina helps you recover Endurance faster… and (almost) everything you do costs Endurance. Once I slot up Endurance a bit, I’ll be able to fight more effectively and keep my defensive toggle powers running more reliably. This is a very good thing.

    I celebrated this achievement by getting my butt handed to me by a very nasty boss. Ah well. Them’s the breaks.

    Today, I rolled out of bed around ten o’clock, and for some reason decided that trying out my recently-purchased (go ahead and laugh) Civilization III would be a good idea. One install and two patches later, I was in.

    Three hours after that, my phone rang. Oops, I’d totally lost track of time, and there was a get-together at Mari and Doug’s to go to. So a quick shower and bit of packing later, off we all went. And by “we all” I mean Lilith and Geoffrey and the demonspawn and the boyfriend of one of the demonspawn. (Yes, it was quite a carload trekking west today.)

    We had a lot of fun, including watching of DVDs, dining out on Chinese food, and playing Carcassonne. Yes, I’ve suckered even more people into playing my new favorite non-electronic game. Today we tried out the “Traders and Builders” expansion that Mari gifted me with a few weeks ago, and once we got the hang of it we got quite a kick out of the game. Geoffrey made a very good showing out of his first couple of games, while Mari absolutely obliterated us in our first go-around.

    Obliterated, I say. As in, there are 50 points on the score card, and the Meeple in your color indicates the score by position on that card. As you lap the score card, the general practice is to change the position of the Meeple to show how many laps he’s done. He starts out standing, then goes face down, then sort of sideways (“flying like Superman” is one phrase heard during that first game) and then… well, we decided that once Mari had done enough laps on the score card we just went ahead and stood her Meeple up again. Yes, that’s right: Mari racked up over 150 points in a single game. Nobody else even came close.

    In the future, I’m definitely seeing about finding some better way to keep score. Yes indeedy.

    Anyway, it was a fun afternoon and evening full of laughter, food, good-natured competition and all of that good stuff. Thanks to Mari and Doug for inviting everyone over!