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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • But the queens we use would not excite you.

    “So, Karel. Where the hell have you been lately? Four days without an entry?”

    Too busy to write in my journal? Guilty as charged. I don’t like to let things get so far ahead of me, but I’m not going to beat myself up about it either.

    Things have ramped way, way up at work. The in-house streaming project is about halfway done, depending on how you look at it, and suddenly it’s gone from Novelty Project to The CEO Wants It Done Yesterday. In the immortal words of Sam Beckett (the quantum leaper, not that other one), “Oh boy.”

    Add to that the fact that no less than twenty Compaq desktop computers are due to arrive early next week and you can see how busy the rest of December looks for everyone’s favorite little grey duck.

    But wait, there’s more! The computer that manages the access key-card database died Friday (or some time earlier) so we can’t add or remove key-cards from the security system. And that’s not all! The AS/400 started complaining of ethernet hiccups Thursday morning, and as of midday Friday the diagnosis is that there’s a “bad client” on our network somewhere. Guess who gets to go around the building trying to log clients onto the AS/400 until it breaks?

    And each of those four projects is supposedly my Number One Priority. Great, guys. Get me three assistants and I’ll get right on that. Or maybe that, instead. Or perhaps that. Yeah, anyway…

    Early in the week I was shooting the breeze with Gary Hilliard, Market Engineer for Entercom Portland. He’d handed me an unread PC World (or somesuch) and somehow we got on the subject of digital cameras. He offered to loan me his HP PhotoSmart C618 for a week or two. (He wants it back before Christmas. Damn.) I’m getting a kick out of the little machine, though I’m not entirely happy with some of its quirks. Nevermind that the output quality isn’t always stellar, I’m glad just to have the use of the thing for a while. (See the new Gallery for the results.)

    So far I’ve spent about three hours on the reconceptualized new anime music video. My current goal is to build a sort of visual poem out of a few very specific visual sequences from Akira. I suppose I’m trying to break out of the “stick to the original timeline” mentality of my previous three videos. Wish me luck. If this works, it’s going to be far and away the coolest thing I’ve done in AMV creation. If it doesn’t, the video will be nigh-unwatchable. No middle ground, folks, as there were in my previous projects.

    I’ll wrap up by telling you about the coolest part of my week so far. The local grade-school chess clubs met this morning at a pastel-painted school in SE Portland to engage in a mock tournament. The kids were both invited and I wanted to go along, so Wendi dropped us off on her way to go shopping. Also in attendance were the male half of the Bourgo family (Michael and James) and one of Lilith’s “demonspawn.” Michael and I shot the breeze in between my attempts to shoot various attendees.

    With my (borrowed) camera, you silly person. Sheesh. I’m not that antisocial.

    Erica may have been the star of the national shindig back in the spring, but it’s Alex who shone brightest this morning. After seven rounds of play, he stood undefeated with six wins and a draw. He couldn’t quite corner his third victim… er, opponent. Such is life.

    My daughter’s refusal to eat her breakfast may have played a part in her shaky performance. She complained of an inability to concentrate after her first two (victorious) matches. I’m hoping she learned an important lesson today about the correlation between nutrition and performance.

    And now you know where I’ve been all this time. Tomorrow? A long, long day at the office. Wheee!

  • A short story, as promised

    Because I promised a few people that I’d post the short story that carried me from 43,000 to just past 50,000 words to complete my NaNo effort for 2002, I present…
    The Unrelated Short Story

  • ROFLMSAO

    Hey, if Captain Rooba can link to an Onion article, so can I.
    Infographic – Chat Room…

  • I am a novelist!

    NaNoWriMo 2002 Winner

    50,179 words. All done. I did it.

    YEAH!

    I want to thank everyone who encouraged me along the way. I couldn’t possibly have succeeded without you. Thank you!

  • I’m waiting through the middle just to see how it will end.

    Actually, I know how my novel ends. I’ve already written it. My problem now is that when I finished the novel I was at about 40,000 words out of the required 50,000. So I wrote an interview piece, then a two-part lecture piece, and now I’m writing an almost entirely unrelated short story. I’ve always been stronger with the short subjects anyway. Remember, excerpts and (more frequent) updates are on my NaNo page.

    A few months ago Justin Emerson, a.k.a. ErMaC of ErMaC Studios, pointed me to one of his music videos as being the one he’s proudest of. While I’m not sure it’s his best work, the musical selection is really very good. Since Justin never puts artist or anime credits on his videos I had to actually visit his website (yes, I’m a lazy ass) to find out that the song is “Satellite” by BT.

    BT. That rings a bell. Oh yes, one of those CDs I got from Jaime at KNRK a couple of years ago. Do I still have it? Of course I do, I never throw out CDs. Does it have the song? Hell yes! Thank you, Jaime!

    So now I don’t have to watch the AMV to hear the song. Sorry, Justin. Don’t worry, I still love your videos.

    Speaking of videos, once December hits I’m going to apply the same “an hour per day” mentality from NaNo to my next anime music video. I’ll set the same goal: One month to completion. Do you think I can do it?

    That makes one of us. *snicker*

    How was Thanksgiving, you ask? Not too shabby. The turkey came out better than I’ve tasted in years, the mashed potatoes, gravy and corn on the cob were all excellent, and I managed not to go overboard on the Martinelli’s. No, really.

    I didn’t get in any updates the last couple of days because I’ve been writing like crazy when I’m not sleeping, eating, or putting out small fires at work. (Okay, okay, so the umpteen hours I spent losing that Heroes IV scenario are in there somewhere as well. Oops.) I apologize for my lack of output, a little, though it’s never been my intention to write here Every Day Without Fail Or Else. I do love sharing my life with you fine folks, though. Don’t worry, I’m nowhere near hitting some kind of burnout phase.

    Hopefully you and yours enjoyed the holiday as much as I did. May you be blessed with warmth and love all through the coming winter, my friends.

  • We’re the clean-up crew for parties we were too young to attend

    So here’s how it went down. The email server, that is.

    I discovered a few weeks ago that one of the mirrored drives in the email server had died, probably quite some time ago. Nothing major, it was just one of the pair of drives that stored every email message for Entercom Portland. With the volume nearly at capacity, I figured that instead of replacing the one dead drive we could double the capacity while getting back that mirroring we’re so fond of.

    The drives arrived last week. I didn’t want to try my luck with the remaining drive any longer than necessary, so yesterday became “replace hard drives in email server” day.

    But it’s never just that easy, is it? First I had to find a place to put all of that data. Ah, the old 34-gigabyte partition on the main fileserver. Next, how to transfer it. Just drag and drop on the admin workstation, piece of cake! Wrong. Windows 2000 and Netware sometimes play poorly together. The first few megabytes of data transfered quickly, then it dropped to an absolute crawl. We’re talking a few dozen kilobytes every few seconds.

    To hell with that. Plan B was to use Mihoshi, one of my handy-dandy Linux boxes. For all that she’s running a tired old copy of RedHat 6.2, she’s still got some life in her. Long story shorter, Mihoshi ran the file copy just fine.

    Of course, it was still 17 gigabytes of data over the wire, so it took a few hours. About seven of them. I wrote, I moved a salesperson from one cubicle to another (don’t ask), I chatted with supercool people.

    So it came up on 6pm and I could finally start swapping drives. It was over the next two hours that I learned something. I learned that Compaq is evil. Did you know that you cannot simply replace a hard drive in a Compaq server? Oh no, you can’t. You have to run the array configuration utility with the bad drive still in place so you can tell the array that you’re not going to use that drive anymore.

    Idiots.

    I finally got the new drives in, again, and the server was happy. Mihoshi leaped into action to put back all the files she’d taken off of the server just hours before. This of course took another few hours, though oddly not as many as on the outbound transfer.

    The restoration transfer completed at 1:37am. I didn’t bother running ‘rsync’ to double-check the transfer, I just fired up the Groupwise server modules. Luckily for me it worked perfectly.

    After that I just hung out and cranked out NaNo word-count until a bit before 5:00 when the first busses were heading out of downtown. By the way, it was colder than a penguin’s backside out there at 4:45am. Oh yeah.

    And now I’m at home. I got a few hours of sleep in, but Hannah is due to arrive any minute now and there’s just no way I’m going to have any peace while she’s here. Cute kid, but loud. Did I mention that her favorite word is “mine”? Ah well, she’ll grow out of that. I hope.

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