misc, etc.

This was a few days ago, but I forgot to write about it at the time:

Picture two left turn lanes, turning onto three lanes. According to the lines on the road, the left turning lane must go into the leftmost lane, and the right turning lane can choose between the center or right lanes. I'm in the right turning lane, planning to use the center lane so as to avoid right turners. Guess which of the three target lanes the person in the left turning lane planned to use. Left lane as designed? nope. Fight me for the center lane? Hah! Optimist. No, the person turned from the left turning lane across to the right lane.

I went down to Orlando for New Years Eve to see Cirque du Soleil with Nicole. It was a pretty good show followed by watching fireworks at Downtown Disney. Although Nicole did the wonderful female "you should know what I'm thinking even though what I said is the exact opposite". Nicole had said she wanted to get home after the show because she had to get up early for work. So after the show she wanted to go look at one of the shops. We go to the shop, browse a bit, then leave. I ask if there is anything else she wanted to do and she said no. Mindful of her wanting to get to bed and the fact that traffic leaving will be awful if we stay until the fireworks, I make a line for the car at my normal, brisk, walking speed. As we get near the car she starts giving me grief that I obviously don't like to wander and watch people, with the implicit edge of this being a personal failing of mine, to which I respond with an off hand "No, people watching holds no interest for me". Apparently "I want to get home early" means "I want to wander aimlessly through a crowd of New Years revelers for the hour until midnight". And since she wanted to watch every single firework visible from where we were, not just the relatively short Downtown Disney display, we ended up really good and mired in the traffic leaving.

New Years day I finally did something I had been wanting to do since I got down here. I took the time to drive semi-aimlessly around town just to see where things were. While it will take time to know the city well, it's at least a start. I still need to find a good Chinese place though. I wonder if I can get Asia Express to open a franchise down here.

Something else I did New Years day was order parts for a new computer. Something I didn't know when I bought my new monitor is that this company offers 50% reimbursement of personal computing purchases. You need to be eligible (employed for three full months) on the disbursement date (end of the quarter) which meant that I needed to wait until the new year to participate as my eligibility date is mid February. Mmm... Happy, happy core 2 duo.

We had downtime tonight to make some networking changes. The SLA for our Bid Express service says no maintianance within 48 hours of a scheduled bid opening, which normally means that anything which affects bidx has to be done on a Saturday since there are bid openings almost every Tuesday through Friday. There was a break in the bid opening schedule due to Christmas and New Years, so we were able to schedule downtime for tonight. We had three items scheduled. One was an LDAP rebuild to fix some consistency errors caused a few weeks ago when one of my coworkers tried to add the samba schema to our LDAP auth DB (nothing has gone smoothly as we've tried to migrate from Samba 2 to Samba 3). My part was replacing the old firewall between the DMZ and the protected net. Another coworker was adding a new Checkpoint firewall (router) between the DMZ and the outside world.

My move and the LDAP rebuild went about as smoothly as could be expected. As anyone who has configured an embedded system can attest, it is often very easy to mess yourself up while changing IPs, and the Checkpoint box was no exception. There was also some very strange behavior where it wasn't always committing the configs from the GUI right away. After much grumbling and searching through the cryptic CLI, the system appeared to be sorted out and passing traffic. Unfortunately, the traffic didn't seem to be coming back from the outside world. Much searching through (both) firewall rules wasn't providing any leads. Eventually one of my coworkers realizes the key. The checkpoint was now acting as the gateway for the DMZ and talking to our next hop over a private network. What we had forgotten was that the next hop, which used to be the gateway for the DMZ, now needed a route to the DMZ. One Cisco "ip route" command later, everything works perfectly. <Sigh> All three of us should have known better.