::::: : the wood : davidrobins.net

My name is David Robins: Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner, libertarian (voluntaryist), and student.

This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.

Grocer's apostrophe's

News ·Wednesday June 21, 2006 @ 00:16 EDT (link)

Long time, not much to tell. On the Warcraft III front I won a titanic game with an Orc about a week back, and played a few games at work, win some, lose some.

Gerian got married to Liz Turner on May 27; we were invited but had to send our regrets and best wishes.

Loss for Word: SW is leaving the Word development group in a few weeks, for greener pastures (not to mention improved girlfriend proximity) in New York City; we had a party for him last Saturday, first at AT's, then at Emily's, although we only went to part the first. We ate at Niko Teriyaki and AT baked a crumble from a Jamie Oliver recipe, I'd like to try it, long time since I've had any decent baking, much less a crumble. Although, I did finally cook up the brownie mix I'd salvaged from Upward Bound 2001 or so, and it was delicious.

The SUV backlash: People are setting their SUVs on fire for the insurance money, although as someone pointed out, Ford F-150 owners might not have to trouble themselves. And someone questions why people buy SUVs in the first place and has a new business plan:

I'd rather know why people buy those behemoths in the first place. When I see people whose SUVs barely contain enough people and/or stuff to half-fill a VW Golf, I'm stumped. Could they think of nothing better to do with the extra $10K+ they spent versus buying a normal car? Ten thousand dollars people - that's real money!

And then they go upside down on it. *sigh*

Maybe my new business plan is to take $10K from people and then walk behind them one day a week commenting aloud what a big penis they must have.

Apple's and Orange's: I nearly wept (I did hit myself in the forehead, hard) when I walked down the aisles at the Redmond Fred Meyer and saw grocer's apostrophes—like "Pot's and Pan's"—everywhere. I must state that the state of education in this state is sadly lacking, and that's an understatement.

RAS is busted: I'm on day 9 of a ticket with Microsoft IT, trying to get my broken RAS (remote login) fixed. I can connect, but then I can't reach any sites or any of my machines. They think it's an IPsec issue. It's really handy to be able to check in from home; this breakdown is a loss to the company. On the upside, I did excellent well with bugs last week, top fixer and top percentage, partly due to a lot of duplicates, which probably shouldn't count toward the resolved total. Although it could be possible to spend a lot of time on a bug only to find it's a duplicate. I have a feeling the bug resolution statistics would change a great deal if duplicates stopped counting.

Sources, please! The 05/06 Focus on the Family Bulletin mentioned a 1975 Ann Landers survey asking 10,000 women, "If you had known then what you know now, would you have still had children?"; 70% said "No." Then it mentions a "subsequent" (undated) Good Housekeeping survey that asked the same question; 95% of responders said "Yes." However, while there are many citations of the former article, I can't find any for the latter. Not one. I'm not claiming it doesn't exist, just that if you quote surveys, you need to include a source (an issue number or date would have been fine).

The paper goes on to say "It's impossible to explain the contradictory results from these two surveys", but I don't think it is. The audiences are different (and I would venture to say that the Good Housekeeping survey was also much smaller). I think it's fair to say that the Ann Landers survey probably reached a wide breadth of women, but Good Housekeeping readers are already (if you'll excuse me) not exactly hyper-ambitious career women. It's a bit like asking Electronic Gaming Monthly subscribers if they like video games: the bias is in the audience.

Large lips sink ships? Either something bit me or I had a bad reaction to Ibuprofen, but my lips and cheeks swelled up like balloons late Saturday and it lasted about 24 hours. Doctor said not to worry, though.

OS/2 lives! I surfed to the local cable listings channel, MDM's OnCable, last night, and happened to catch it rebooting OS/2 Warp. I think that's the only time I've ever seen an OS/2 machine, albeit from afar.

And in honor of Father's Day: "Parenthood is a return to infancy" and Does fatherhood make you happy (from Time magazine). I called home this weekend to say Hi, wish Dad a happy Father's Day, and discussed our plans to travel out east in September, and theirs to come out here in August.

Senate ignores American people, film at 11

News ·Thursday May 25, 2006 @ 23:43 EDT (link)

Front foliage Now that the desk's here, yesterday I arranged the computers and cables (without disconnecting the power, although we lost network and hence telephone connectivity for a few minutes), and played a game of Warcraft for the first time in about three months (playing on the floor just doesn't seem all that much fun). I played a level 7 (I'd fallen down to level 9 because of my long absence) yesterday, and won, and a level 19 today, and managed to win that one too (probably the highest level player I've ever defeated).

Still on stale bugs this week; making more of a dent than last week, partly because I tossed a few License Wizard bugs back asking for developer investigation (they like to just send the error message, which sometimes isn't even from Word). True, it should work the same as Word 11, but sometimes it doesn't, and some investigation from their end would be very nice. Fixed a nasty one with "online documents" in the wee hours of this morning; we were leaving behind the "owner" files (~$foo.doc) on a "save as" for a file on a UNC share.

Comfy chair Looks like the U.S. senate's ready to sign the "amnesty for illegals" bill. The house version is much better (close the border, make being here illegally a felony, fine employers, and actually enforce it). The senate is totally out of touch. Personally I think rounding them up and deporting them would be a great idea, even if the price of lettuce goes up a few cents (and back down after robots are developed to start picking fruit). Hopefully the house can hold them off.

And now for a small rant about driving, specifically, merging. When you merge with other traffic, you come as a supplicant, that is, you yield until there's a space to merge; if you have to, you stop. Drivers already in the flow of traffic may, even should try to make a gap to let you in, but, if all the a**hole drivers in the world lined up and went past your merge lane at once bound and beholden not to let anyone in, well, too bad. You wait. You don't drive forward as if it was some sort of high-stakes game of chicken. That is all.

I've also finally fixed the photo links on this page; if you click the thumbnails you will once again get to see a larger image (but not the full size, because people's screens usually aren't that big).

The great desk adventure

News ·Sunday May 21, 2006 @ 21:50 EDT (link)

Back garden Today at the Lord's Supper at Northgate Gospel Chapel I was remembering another assembly that I used to attend: Cowley Road Gospel Hall, in Uxbridge, England; it would be nice to go back and visit sometime. I remember the large text over the platform at the front: "Jesus Christ is Lord"; the worn chairs, the cupboard for the hymnbooks at the back, the dark brown carpet, the drafty entryway; the wall around the outside, and the sign outside advertising services. My dad has a wedding picture of him and my mother outside it.

Dr. Who was on again Friday night at midnight (Saturday morning if you want to be picky about it); another excellent episode, I'm really getting into it. It's only the second episode I've seen; I know it's a British tradition and I've heard of it all my life, so it is indeed surprising it's taken so long for me to catch a show. During commercials I tidied up most of the remaining items we had sitting in a pile in the basement; deciding where things go and putting them in their proper places can be very relaxing (but only the first time!)

We had a drawer fall apart in the move from Boston, and I took a serious look at repairing it Saturday morning, but no go. It looks like Grebel (the movers) tried to repair it themselves with a nailgun, some random pieces of wood and acetylene plastic, and a complete lack of finesse, and did rather poorly. If I had the tools it might be possible (I need to be able to cut a groove), but we'll probably just do without it and keep the telephone there.

I've been wanting a decent (large) desk for a while—the one my parents gave me when I moved to Memphis is great, but somewhat small—so now that I have an office to put it in I lined up a few promising candidate desks on the Micronews Classified Ads, and even made an offer on one, but it wasn't the highest; most required hauling or were more than I wanted to pay, so we headed to the local Ikea store to make a selection from the Galant collection.

From Ikea's side, the store is great; it forces you to walk past absolutely everything, but that's very unhelpful when you're looking for a particular set. It didn't take long to decide on a combination (one matching one of the demos: corner table, extension, and a curved end, but without the hanging computer cage which looked somewhat flimsy).

The new desk When it came to load the car—Honey's VW Golf—we found that the largest piece didn't fit in the car. No problem, they provide cardboard roofracks and twine. I heaved it up there, we passed a large quantity of twine over and around it, and off we went. The front end was up on the sunroof visor, and the back was against the antenna, so it flapped around a bit on the I-405, but the three times we pulled over it was fine, although it was probably the weight rather than the twine that kept it in place. It made for nervous driving, though—especially on Novelty Hill.

After I got it unpacked I was very impressed with the design, construction, and assembly instructions, especially considering that they don't use words, just pictures and numbers (saves translating). My drill, with a Phillips screwdriver bit, was very helpful as always. The hardest part was turning the desk back over after assembly, given its weight and the space available. But it's a magificent desk, L-shaped, medium brown, plenty of space, about 6'6" on the long sides. I assembled it while Honey was sleeping after we got back from church; it took about an hour. I'll probably put the small desk I had upstairs in the "media room" (it has my photographic equipment in there now and will probably host the piano when we get one, and since it's wired for Ethernet I'll probably put a computer in there too).

Made my bug goal this week, but not the secondary "stale" goal, due to some stubborn old bugs and not a few ambushes.

And the lawn keeps growing, and I keep cutting it....

A few of my favorite* things

News ·Saturday May 13, 2006 @ 22:11 EDT (link)

* Yes, US spelling. It's shorter, thus more efficient, and efficient is good.

With all of our picture frames together in one place now (the upstairs "media room"), I was able to pick out a suitable frame for the picture of my mother (Anne) that my mother (Esther) gave me a little while ago. It's a nice silvered frame, and now the picture sits on one of our end tables in the living room.

The US senate has voted to make English the official language. Finally! A few choice quotes from the linked article, from that bastion of journalistic integrity, the Inquirer (actually it's not so bad; it was founded by the same person that brought us the Register, which hosts that networking nemesis, the BOFH):

The US senate has formally decided that English will be the official language of the former British colony.

...

It is not clear if adopting English means that Microsoft will now have to use proper UK English rather than that bastardised US English it has been peddling on Microsoft Word for years.

Nor whether Yanks will now learn to speak proper.

A few Word developers and testers founded the Word book club a few weeks ago; our first book is Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, chosen by yours truly; we're about done it; it's high time to pick another book. On the video side of things, we're working our way through Deep Space Nine season 4, and will order season 5 shortly.

We drove out to Wallace Falls State Park on Saturday the 13th; unfortunately I left my camera at home, but perhaps next time I'll go all the way to the Upper Falls and bring my camera with me.

And the last few of my favorite things: Ribena, a delicious blackcurrent drink of English origin, also available in Canada, and my mother gave me a bottle when I was last there, which I had packed away and recently discovered. Yay! I also discovered some Turkish Delight in the same bag. What a wonderful way to end a day.

O to be in England

News ·Friday April 28, 2006 @ 18:55 EDT (link)

O, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossom'd pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge—
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

—Home-thoughts, from Abroad, Robert Browning.

A recent post to MetaFilter (MeFi) on Oxfordshire churches reminded me of spring in England.

My car's brakes are fixed. Autosys couldn't finish the work on Thursday as expected, so they paid for a rental car for me, a gray Camry LE, for that day, until I could pick up the car the next day. All seems to be well; they do good work.

Filling out the house

News ·Sunday April 23, 2006 @ 15:25 EDT (link)

View from upper deck We're not particularly happy with Ravenswood at the Park, our old apartments; they hit us with a lot of junk charges on move-out for unnecessary cleaning and so forth. Boo. But at least we're out.

The kind people at MDM finally fixed up our SORBS entry to indicate that this is a static IP, which means that mail to Microsoft (and other systems that bounce mail to users in the Dynamic IP list) will get through now. We also got a lot of piled up old mail inbound, which means some systems are using the Dynamic IP listings to stop sending mail, too. Shame, shame.

I set up my old sound system (Sony DreamSystem) upstairs; the DVD player is dead (despite attempts in Boston to revive it), but the tuner and amp. is fine; we'll get a small CD player and hook it up in a bit.

Our washer and dryer were delivered and hooked up around 1000 Saturday morning. I filled out our rebates (a delivery rebate and two for efficiency). The deliverymen ran a test cycle and Honey did several loads of laundry; the units work very well and are quite quiet.

I went to mow the lawn, after less than stellar results last time (the rechargeable mower, a Black and Decker CMM1000, cut out before I finished), and it wasn't that great this time, either, so we drove into Redmond and picked up a regular electric mower (the Black and Decker MM875), which was much better. I also edged with the Grass Hog we'd bought a few days back, and weeded the back of the garden, with Honey's help.

We picked up a new DVD rack at Circuit City; it's as wide as our other two together and a little higher; we assembled it, and moved all our DVDs over to it, with space to spare. We also picked up the Star Trek movies, I-VI, and Nemesis, First Contact, and Insurrection at a decent discount, although we had to get V from Amazon since they didn't have it.

I took some pictures today, maybe I'll get them up soon. Very sore after yesterday's work. Sausages and coffee for breakfast, and then Raphael calls and says ZorbaTwit is making inane remarks about our new #c++ bot, which I go over and quell. It's a beautiful day again today.

New washer/dryer, server downtime, proxy

News ·Thursday April 20, 2006 @ 11:46 EDT (link)

We bought a washer/dryer today, a set of white Kenmore Elite HE4s from Sears. They've gotten good reviews from Consumer Reports (Kenmore took the top three places, in fact), and the former owners of the house had a (graphite) set. We also picked up a Black and Decker Grass Hog.

Small (web-only) server downtime today due to Gentoo upgrades being slightly bonkers, but I pulled in some new Apache packages and all is well.

I've set up an IRC proxy, ctrlproxy; I've been meaning to for a while; it stays connected even when I need to disconnect (lets me stay opped and keep my nick) and multiple machines can connect to it, which means seamless switching between machines and not having multiple logged in accounts. I'm using the latest branch from bzr (yet another revision control system, and a pretty crappy one from what I've seen); there were several crashes at first; I debugged some of them and sent fixes to the author.

It's been raining most of the week; high time to finish cutting the lawn!

Happy birthday to my sister Emily.

Illegal invasion

News ·Thursday April 13, 2006 @ 00:52 EDT (link)

Wherein I rant about the current immigration issues.

I'll start with apropos quote that dear old Dad (in-law) sent me after reading the original item:

In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American.... There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag.... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.

—Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

First, it's not immigration if you sneaked across the border or hid in a truck or otherwise got here illegally. Someone that did so is not an "undocumented worker", as if they just mislaid their papers or someone forgot to issue them. They are an illegal invader, or just "illegal", a tresspasser, and a criminal. As a legal immigrant who filled out all the paperwork and paid the required fees, any talk of "amnesty" is intensely annoying; it's usually just pandering for votes, anyway (and you won't get mine when I get my citizenship, which I should be eligible to file for within the year).

Where to begin? There's so much wrong with the situation, from understaffed, underequipped, and unsupported border ("ICE") agents to the bleeding heart open borders twits to the Mexican flags at the recent protests.

I suppose the protests would be a good place to start: since the illegals were all conveniently together, it would have been a great opportunity to round them up, check their papers, and deport them. Yes, I support deporting 11+ million people. Just because you've been breaking the law and gotten away with it for a while, and even gotten comfortable, doesn't mean I owe you anything. Of course, removing them doesn't do any good if they'll just turn around and sneak back in again, so we need a fence, too.

Jobs Americans won't do: "What harm do they do?", one may ask. After all, they do "jobs Americans won't do". Do they? Rush Limbaugh, April 3 (radio):

... What is this silliness that Americans won't do these jobs? Somebody tell that to the West Virginia coal miners. Somebody tell that to the Americans, those lazy Americans in Iraq on the battlefield.

This notion that there are jobs Americans will not do is getting a little bit histrionic to me. I'm sick and tired of being told by these elites in Washington, these politicians how we all refuse to work. They seem to think we're all raised like Ted Kennedy or married into wealth like John Kerry. The American people work. They work damn hard. The economy and the numbers there prove it but yet we're told, "No, no, no! The Americans are lazy. They're uppity. There are certain jobs that they will not do."

Well, check the coal mines. Check the military. I don't see any illegals there.

I liked another quote that I can't find now, that states that America was founded and became strong because there was no job that Americans wouldn't do.

They're cheaper: So, perhaps the story is that they work for lower pay than Americans would; well, if that's below minimum wage, that's illegal, Go Directly to Jail and Do Not Pass Go. But let's assume it's above minimum wage, but citizens and legal residents ("legals") aren't lining up to work for you; perhaps working as a cashier or in food preparation is preferable to picking strawberries in the sun. Well, that's sad, but let me let you in on a little secret on how you can get workers: pay more money. "Ah, but it's not that simple! Farmers can't survive without illegal workers." Respect the Invisible Hand.

So, you pay 1.5x minimum wage, and people—legal people—start applying to work for you. You pass on the cost to the consumer. Ideally, they gripe but everyone has to pay this wage so they pay the higher cost, but then pay less income tax because they're no longer supporting the Mexican welfare state. Less ideally, growers are undercut by foreign imports and start to go out of business, but congress comes up with tarriffs and subsidies to save the day (protectionism? what's that... well, let's just say it's an encouragement to buy local).

Open borders, free movement of capital: The idea is that borders should be open and capital free to move where it wants, which seems libertarian (but isn't necessarily). Sounds like a fine idea, except that with the United States' social programs (also called "entitlement programs", usually by those opposed to them), the US ends up bearing the costs of the poor, criminal, and uneducated that move here: welfare, hospital stays, incarceration, policing, housing increases, etc. If those were dispensed with, it might make more sense to allow open borders (but with no handouts, would they still come?) but it would also be a country of small fiefdoms with a lot of anarchy in between.

Where do your loyalties lie? If you're coming to live in a country, your loyalties had better be with that country, and you'd better try to fit into it, not it to you. Previous waves of immigrants haven't demanded the US speak their language and provide government forms in their language, but the hispanics have, and they're getting it. That translates to higher costs to taxpayers, and to Spanish-speaking ghettoes springing up in cities across the country. It's Mexican flags and reconquista.

Sure, bring your culture here, but give it to the melting pot, don't try to impose it. I'm from Canada, but as a permanent resident of these United States, my loyalty is to the United States; I don't send money back to Canada, and I don't fly a Canadian flag. The freedoms I have here would allow me to do all of that, but I chose to come here, and it is my home. Billions of dollars that could be spent here flow from the US to Mexico; if legals had the jobs, I'm fairly confident that the money would remain in the US.

It's not amnesty if they have to pay a fine! A fine is a slap on the wrist and an encouragement of illegal behavior. If someone breaks into a house, you don't fine them and let them keep their loot. They forfeit anything they've taken, and their liberty besides. Illegals should be rounded up, have DNA samples taken to prevent re-entry, and be sent back across the border, possessions forfeit, to be sold by the government at auction.

What about the chylllllldrun? What about them? The parents chose to have them while illegal; personally I think their citizenship should be revoked and they should be turfed out with the parents. At the least, minor children should be sent back to Mexico with their parents. Children of illegals (or even legal immigrants), so-called "anchor babies", should not become citizens just by dint of birth within the borders of the US; that's a ridiculous interpretation of the 14th amendment: illegals are breaking the law by their very presence.

How can employers know? The US social security administration is very willing to verify the legality of SSNs; it's not a breach of privacy because the employer provides the information to the government, which only returns back whether the potential employee is legal or not—no other information.

As in many cases, the way to get rid of the problem is to reduce demand (consider illegal drugs, for example); this can be done by heavily fining those employing illegals, and jailing those responsible (a $100,000 fine per illegal and 60 days in jail, per illegal worker, should do nicely).

A net gain: So, fruits and vegetables cost a little more; the price of some goods go up, as services previously performed by illegals (janitorial work, construction) now cost more when done by legals, and must be factored into costs. But everyone's playing on a level field: farmer John can't hire illegals, but farmer Fred can't either, and if either does, the fines will probably put them out of business. With no-one hiring, the illegals go home; the government stops providing Spanish versions of anything, social service costs in the border states and areas with high illegal concentration fall, local spending increases, and everyone's taxes are reduced. With less illegals, legal immigration quotas are raised.

And America is back on the straight and narrow path, strong, self-sufficient, independent, free.

(Unfortunately, it'll probably never work. Republicans are in the pockets of big businesses that want illegals for cheap labor, and Democrats want to throw (our) money at them to pander to the hispanics to get their vote—probably the votes of those given citizenship by the 1986 amnesty; look how well that turned out.)

Tiny hoodlums breaking things

News ·Wednesday April 12, 2006 @ 23:44 EDT (link)

Finally got rid of a bug that'd been hanging around for ages: I'd fixed it on my machine, but apparently it still repro'd on other machines, because of a few other idle performance issues. It's about time; requiescat in pace.

Tuesday, March 28: MOR delivered our furniture today; a sofa set, with two tables, two lamps, and a coffee table. They gave a time range of 1100-1400, arrived around 1140, and were done around 1200, which meant I didn't have to work too late. It's very comfortable.

Wednesday, March 29: Had to stay home again today, 0900-1200 this time, for MDM (cable Internet); the guy didn't arrive until 1100. Since most of the computers were still at the apartment I verified the connection with my laptop. "Silver" was the lowest level that provided the required static IP and unblocked ports for running my servers; it's more expensive than Speakeasy was (it was about $55/month) at $80/month, however we'll save some money using VoIP rather than a Verizon landline.

Friday, March 31: Ordered Vonage VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) connection, $24.95/month, first month free, but that doesn't really mean anything as they get you for a $30 activation fee.

Monday, April 3: I took my car in to Autosys today (which required us both to get up very early) for an oil change and their "spring special" tuneup; unfortunately the engine light's come on and so I had them run a diagnostic ($150, ouch) and there's quite a lot wrong with it, with the oxygen sensor only a beginning. It seems Boston is still exacting its toll from us; the snowy roads were not kind.

Thursday, April 6: Mowed 3/4 of the lawn (the battery gave out at that point; the grass was pretty long).

Friday, April 7: Went to the doctor about an allergic reaction; first time going to the doctor here, picked one in Bellevue, nice guy, prescribed Zyrtec and said it should clear up shortly. Called Waste Management, added yard waste collection (extra $9.23/month, sigh).

Vonage's package (some papers and a reconditioned Linksys router with two phone jacks) had arrived a few days ago, but I'd gotten annoyed at them since it appeared that they wanted their device to sit outside my firewall, and act as a router for my network, which I wasn't having. Turns out (from perusing their site) that it will work just fine behind the firewall, getting an address with DHCP.

Saturday, April 8: Having the phone chained to the Vonage router didn't appeal much, but Google answers provided some information about using the house telephone wiring. I picked up a multimeter, unhooked the outside wiring at the junction box, checked the line with the multimeter—all clear—and hooked the Vonage device to the nearby jack, et voilà: distributed telephony.

This is where this entry's title comes in: we had observed some broken toys on a lane next to our house; the lane is public property, the drive goes about to our back yard and then has posts, although it's paved a little further to behind our yard. I'd thrown away a few items left out because they were eyesores. A couple of our garden lamps had been broken not too long ago, quite possibly by kids cutting through our yard to go to this lane (could also have been by the MOR movers, though).

That evening I observed a kid cutting through our yard and yelled at him (and told them to clean up their mess when they were done). A couple of the kids went to talk to parents and, shockingly enough, they came back with plastic bags and started actually picking up their trash. What they'd been doing was taking (old, possibly already-broken) toys and hitting them with a baseball bat. Not the most constructive behavior in the world, but fine, their time, their stuff, as long as they kept the noise down. A little later, though, they picked up one of the broken parts of one of our lamps and started hitting it, so I had to go out and take it away from them. Fortunately, things ended well; some parents showed up and we talked with them, they agreed to have their kids tidy up their messes (and not cut through our yard), and I apologized for yelling at them.

Sunday, April 9: Went to Northgate, then met Honey at the apartment and cleaned the remainder (vacuumed and mopped kitchen and bathroom floor, cleaned bathroom and windows, did some laundry); I'll do a walkthrough with them this week and get our security deposit back.

Monday, April 10: I called MDM technical support today (800-829-2225) (I'd emailed earlier, but I think it went to a marketing address). My new Internet address shows up in the SORBS dynamic IP list, which makes me sad as I paid for a static IP, and it's not just the principle of the thing, either, as it causes mail from Microsoft to bounce. I tried to get SORBS to remove the listing, but they said my ISP had to handle it. My jaw nearly hit the floor when the (first!) person I talked to not only knew what I was talking about, but said it would be taken care of that day. (Unfortunately, as well as that boded, it's still in the list two days later. I'll give them a day or two more and then call them back to see what's going on.)

Tuesday, April 11: Waited 40 minutes on hold to cancel our old Verizon number (yay! we hate Verizon, they've stiffed us at every opportunity). I also called the Royal Bank of Canada to see why they were taking $4 out of my Canadian account every month (which would soon put it in the red). Turns out it was for 15 (unneeded and unused) transactions monthly; I had it removed (I can still use the account for $0.50/debit or $0.75/cheque).

Wednesday, April 12: We (Word development) got our new machines today (dual core, not sure how fast, but fast), and were talking about machine names (the convention is to prefix with one's alias, usually <alias><number> e.g. JDOE3, but it's not a requirement). Best (Microsoft network) machine name ever: WHACKWHACK. As in "please review \\WHACKWHACK\public\bogus.dpk" (spoken as "whack whack whack whack whack public whack bogus dot dee pee kay"). Unfortunately somebody already has it, but AT came up with a suitable alternate: QUACKQUACK.

Moving day

News ·Sunday March 26, 2006 @ 15:30 EST (link)

Many things have happened since I last wrote; not the least of which being that we have finally moved into our house, and this is the way of it.

We rented a 16' Budget truck for Saturday the 25th, and on that day I and three co-workers converged on my office and drove over to our apartment in my car, getting there around 1100. I'd picked the truck up earlier and backed it toward the apartment; we'd been packing and removing boxes every few days for the past few weeks and made sure that the way was clear to remove the larger items. It probably took us an hour to load up, then about 30 minutes to drive over to our house in Duvall, and another hour to unload, punctuated by ordering pizza for the hungry laborers. After we dropped everyone back at Microsoft, Honey and I packed the truck again.there were still plenty of smaller items, e.g. the drawers we'd removed earlier, files, kitchen and bathroom items, laundry baskets, etc..and made another trip. We were pretty knackered after unloading, so we waited until the next day to bring the truck back (we had it from 0800 Saturday to 0900 Sunday).

I am also now involved in lawn care, which, I'm told, is both an art and a science. I ordered a broadcast spreader and a lawnmower from Amazon (better price than Home Depot; until now, I hadn't known Amazon sold tools, either). The spreader had to be assembled, which was a bit of an exercise, but it seems solid; the lawnmower just needed the handle to be folded back and some screws to be tightened (and to be charged). Yesterday (the 2nd) I spread some fertilizer on the lawn and pulled up a few dozen dandelions, most of them by the roots. I'll mow in a few days when the fertilizers had a chance to, um, fertilize. Very new at this lawn stuff but the seller has given me some helpful advice. We picked up Deep Space Nine season 2 and some GRE books with the other Amazon purchases.

Last entry I was fairly happy to have been accepted as a GNM student into the University of Washington's Professional Master's Program in Computer Science and Engineering, but unfortunately the class that I wanted, and the alternate both filled up. Maybe next quarter; perhaps I'll have written the GRE by then.

At work I'm trying to check my current outstanding fixes in. Lots of build breaks to navigate around, before I can even attempt to run the remote test suite (the local "quick" test suite passed already).

We've had to transfer various utilities: we no longer have Ista (water, sewage, electricity, trash); the City of Duvall handles water, Puget Sound Energy handles electricity, and Waste Management picks up trash, recycling and yard waste. Millennium Digital Media provide cable here, instead of Comcast; we also decided to get cable Internet through MDM, since Speakeasy's contractor wasn't able to install OneLink DSL out here. We're going to try to go with Vonage VoIP for telephone service (free long distance in the US and Canada). It's all part of the process of moving, which I hope we don't have to do again soon; we're still sore from loading and unloading the truck.