Head swapping fun over at Manbabies

Lionel want a half dozen of these to go, with a selection of dipping sauces.

I logged into a server that I haven’t done work on in a while, but gets weekly use:

bash-2.05b# uptime
 6:17AM  up 1645 days,  2:05, 2 users, load averages: 1.13, 0.50, 0.24

Over 4.5 years without a reboot. That’s some good software.

This story is sad, but very poignant. I wish I had posted a link to it on Mothers Day.

I’d write more, but work calls…

My ancient Toshiba cable modem (DOCSIS 1.0!) has been acting strangely (occasionally having 30-80% packet loss, etc.) for a few months now, and gave up the ghost about a week ago. I kind of knew this was coming – when we moved into this house 2 years ago, the only reason the Cox guys were willing to hook it up to the cable line was that it’s serial number was still in their system.

I bought a replacement (Linksys BEFCMU10 ver. 4 – DOCSIS 2.0) a short while ago. It works fine, but the neatest thing about it is when connected to fast sites downloading big files (system updates, video, etc.), I’m getting > 1.2MiB/s. I think this has something to do with Cox’s “Speed Boost” feature which ups the data rate for a short time under certain conditions. One other benefit is that the new modem has a diagnostic page up at http://192.168.100.1, which may prove useful sometime in the future.

Note to self – don’t start watching cute cat and/or rabbit videos online unless you have hours and hours to spend…

Speaking of cats, Lionel managed to con me and Amy into feeding him twice this morning, in flagrant disregard for his diet (he’s around 18-20 pounds, which is too much for a cat his size). Often, he’ll bug both of us for food indepenently when we come home in the evening, as in “oh, you’re home now, feed me!” even if he’s just been fed. We switched to diet food that you can only get from the vet, and that seems to be working – he doesn’t bug us about eating as much as usual.

It’s a step up from our previous table, which belonged to my parents for about 10 years before I inherited it. My Grandmother got that one about 6 months ago, and we’ve been using a plastic folding table for a while.

Needless to say, this is quite the improvement. Lionel think’s its a bit strange, as he’s not used to being able to look up through the table at us while we’re eating.

Some of the games I’ve been playing:

Desktop Tower Defense

A “Tower Defense” Flash game – you set up a bunch of towers that shoot at the bad guys who are trying to get from one side of the board to the other. Relies greatly on making a maze to hold up the enemies, and attack them while they’re being restrained.

Flash Element TD

A similar game to the one above, but the path is fixed. There’s also a neat interest mechanic, and your score is based on the amount of gold you have, so to get a high score, you should build as few towers as possible to get the job done.

No Gravity

This is a PSP homebrew (that is, it runs on all PSP’s that have firmware 1.5 or one of the newer Dark~Alex open edition firmwares) 3D space shooter game. You fly around in space, shooting at other ships, picking up stuff, etc. It’s quite fun, and very polished, with lots of different weapons and great graphics.

So yeah, I hope you waste a few hours playing these – just don’t blame me!

“Beef and Beaver”

“Rat cutlets with fur”

“Wild Weasel cutlet in gravy”

“Raw bits of miscellaneous entrails”

“Rhesus Monkey” (apologies to Get Fuzzy)

Raising the minimum wage put her in a different wage category, which makes her ineligible for other state (basically, you have to be below the poverty line to get anything, and spend all your money until you can get them).

So, some people like my dad are trying to change this issue for people like Sarah. There’s an article in todays Tucson Citizen about the issue, which I recommend you read.

I finally got around to posting a bunch of pictures on Flickr that I’ve been meaning to… Some highlights:

Sunset a few nights ago

Lionel eating watermelon

Amy climbing a tree (in Colorado)

The reason I didn’t post these earlier is that my Flickr account is tied to my Yahoo ID, and for some reason, my Yahoo password stopped working, and their automated system wouldn’t send a new password to the alternate email I specified. I tried their automated online system, but got caught in autoreply hell, so I finally tried calling a customer service number, got transfered, and finally got the phone number (408) 349-1572, which is Yahoo Customer Service. A nice guy named Ronald (hopefully not the burger salesman with the yellow suit and big red shoes) straightened things out, and I got a replacement password.

Other than that, things have been going pretty well. My dad is taking Amy and I along to a meeting in eastern Canada in a few days, so I’ll probably be posting a bunch of pictures and stuff about that trip soon.

I think I need to focus more on what I do well, and less on the things that I add little to no value to. I do all the accounting work for my business, which takes a bit of time, and I think I could outsource that, or write a program to do most of it for me. Crunching numbers isn’t a “fun” activity, and having someone or -thing responsible for it would really cut down on the stress.

For me, stress turns into obsessive work. If I get stressed, I start working on something. This is very different from Amy, who wants to relax when she gets stressed. When I come home from work, I usually want to start on some project, because I want to accomplish or finish something, which I find rewarding. When Amy comes home, she’s more likely to read, watch TV, or take a nap. Either way of dealing with stress is fine by me – the differences are really in how we were raised. My parents were always doing something, so that seemed normal and I fit into that mold. From my experience, Amy’s parents separate their work and personal time more strictly, so she does the same.

I’ve been thinking about my working situation as well – I work 30 hours a week for Access Tucson, and get benefits from them, but the pay isn’t that great. If I went full time for my business and stopped working there, I could probably make a lot more, but then I’d have to pay for my own benefits, wouldn’t have the 401k set up, etc. I don’t really want to quit right now (It gives me a greater sense of security to both me and Amy to have me working for someone), but I may ask to drop to 20 hours a week this summer.

Oh well, time to work.

I had a haircut in the morning, and was able to go to that without much trouble (even though I felt like crud), but when I got back, it just got worse. I think I slept for about 6 hours, and Lionel was very sweet and cuddled with me a good portion of that time.

When Amy got home (after being stuck in traffic due to a police roadblock near Miracle Mile), I felt a little bit better. She’s been bringing over movies and other stuff that’s at her parents place, and so we watched Little Women, which actually was quite good, despite being distracted by Christian Bale who I now completely associate with being Batman.

I’m feeling a bit better now, and if the headache goes away (I’m probably just dehydrated), I think today will actually be functional.

Lionel has gotten in the habit of clawing the back of my leg when I’m in the kitchen. I think this is because we feed him human food too often. Today he did it when I was holding a mug of very hot tea and I almost spilled it on him.

Amy and I bought some new dance mats as our Christmas present to each other. They look OK, but the foam insert in them comes in 6 pieces, so it isn’t as durable as the 3 piece foam mats that I had before. I think I’m going to do a swaparoo on them to see if it helps, or put packing tape on where the mats connect together to help stiffen them. More on this in a future post.

I’m going back to bed…

Available consoles: PS2, Xbox*2, Gamecube, Saturn, Dreamcast, PSX, and tons of games with specialized controllers incluing:

• Steel Batallion – Mech game with HUGE controller, foot pedals, etc.
• Dance Dance Revolution – two pads, with a ton of songs
• Beatmania – keyboard music game (very hard!)

So, the details:

• Who: All the guys (no girl cooties allowed!)
• When: Saturday, December 3rd, from 6PM – 11PM
• What: Videogames, Pizza, and just hanging out.
• Where: Zack + Amy’s house
• Bring: $4 for pizza and drinks. Bring snacks if you want.

Please post a comment here if you intend to come, so I can plan appropriately for the food (make sure to bring $4!). I’m taking pizza toppings and soda requests too.

We always get together with some family friends (the Flores’), and it alternates locations between my parents and their house. It’s always a fun time, and Carlos and Marcel are big Mac-heads, so it’s a good time to talk shop.

The food was great, as always – thanksgiving dinner is probably one of my most favorite meals of the year. Mary makes green bean casserole to die for, and we had pumpkin pie for dessert. I think my favorite thanksgiving food is stuffing, especially with lots of gravy.

So that’s about it. How was your thanksgiving?

I annotated the heck out of this in Flickr, so click on the image to see what all the parts are, and what they do.

This took me a while to do… I would punch down a few cables, my arm would get tired (the panel is in a very awkward position), then leave it for a few days. Then a cable wouldn’t verify with my tester, so I’d get frustrated and leave it be. But it’s finally done, and I even have the whole top shelf empty.

I’m happy with it now.

Then she noticed that someone had cut down all the oleander bushes.

All 8 plants have been cut down, to about 1″ off the roots, and their foliage is just lying there. The cuts are clean, like they were done with pruners.

So, we made a visit to our neighbor who lives behind us and put up the wood fence. It turns out that he had some of his palo verde trees cut through as well a few days ago (we don’t know when this was done, as we were both out of the house on saturday).

(some history – David, our neighbor, planted the oleander before we moved in, and was going to put up a wall, but there was some misunderstanding about property lines, but that goes resolved by the builders. So he put up the existing wooden fence inside where the previous fenceposts were, which put the oleanders between his fence and ours.)

So, I called the police and filed a report. I’m going to call the builders and see if they know anything about this happening.

This makes me mad… it’s just senseless destruction of plants, which are hard to grow here.

(taken in low light, but the Treo 650’s camera is still pretty good!)