Mad City Expatriate

visiting Madison

2008-08-24T16:44:00.001-04:00

I will be in Madison the weekend after labor day. I'm going to be
interviewing for a job at CAE and probably the CSL as well. I'm going
to arrive a little after 5 on Thursday 9/4 and I'll be leaving the
morning of 9/7. My intended plan is to do interviews Friday and look
for potential apartments on Sat, but I'd like to get together with people
too.

Hey! What's that? I think it's the sun!

2008-08-03T22:06:00.002-04:00

After what has seemed like two months of continuous rain, it managed to not rain today. I spent about four hours cruising on my bike, which was absolutely glorious. I have been going (more) nuts from not being able to ride from all the rain. It's not going to last though, it's still summer in Florida.

No GenCon for me

2008-07-29T21:37:00.005-04:00

So yeah, I'm not going to be able to make it. Chalk one up to poor planning on my part. I would have like to have seen you guys, but I just can't make it.

And I know I promised to continue my review of 4th ed a month ago, but once I got over being mad about the changes I didn't like I just stopped caring about it entirely. So I make no promises about continuing my review.

Also, it has now rained nearly every day for two months straight. Ugh.

Must Have!

2008-06-30T11:07:00.004-04:00

*lust*

I have signed up for GenCon, now I just need to figure out what I'm going to do...

More D&D 4th ed tonight.

Gen Con

2008-06-16T22:57:00.003-04:00

I'm thinking about going to Gen Con again this year, and I'm looking for ideas. Specifically, what might be fun that I can still get into, and what I might try to get into if there are no shows?

Review of D&D 4th ed, part 3

2008-06-16T20:37:00.007-04:00

I find my self needing to clarify my opinion again in response to Alan's comment, this time on alignment. Like I said in my first post, I agree that the old alignment system was strained in places, especially keeping NG and CG distinct and deciding exactly what CN meant. My concern is mostly that Lawful Good, Good, undecided, Evil, and Chaotic Evil will look like a continuum to someone who isn't familiar with the old system. They even encourage that point of view in the second paragraph of the CE description. A sentence or two is all it would have taken to say that LG and good can be equally good, differing only on the degree of value placed on lawfulness, and likewise for Evil and CE. I don't know if a newcomer would really view it as a continuum rather than as designed, but they might.

On to chapter 4. Probably the first thing I noticed is that while classes was a fairly modest 35 pages in 3rd ed, it's a whopping 120 in 4th ed. due to the huge number of class specific powers. Paragon paths are essentially a refinement of prestige classes, but since there are only 3-4 per class and you need to pick one, it could be restrictive on viable character concepts. Presumably there will be many more in the future splat books (only $29.25 each). Epic destinies is hurting even worse for options since, of the four available, Archmage is wizard specific and Deadly Trickster may as well be rogue specific.

Powers are by far the biggest new thing in this chapter. I think they are an extremely good thing for casters, since at will and per encounter spells can get a party away from stopping to rest because the Cleric or Wizard is out of spells. Where I think powers went wrong is in using them for all classes. In previous editions a player who was new and learning, or just wanted streamlined options, could play almost any non caster class and be happy. Now every class is as complicated as playing a caster. You're pretty much never going to use a basic attack, so every action means picking from whatever options are available and tracking power usage for every player. I may be thinking it's worse than it really is, and I do think it is a vast improvement for casters, but think it is a negative for non casters.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time pouring over each class since the returning classes are conceptually similar, plus my attention span for reading each power gave out mid Paladin. Overall, classes look more restrictive, in that it is hard to break out of the standard model for a class. I don't think Denia would be possible, and certainly not practical, in 4th ed. I'll miss that flexability.

Cleric is pretty much the same with a little more combat and a lot less healing. I suspect the new limit on adventuring between rests is going to be the Cleric's reduced ability to pour blood back into the Fighter.

Fighter is now pretty much restricted to being an armoured tank. As someone with fond memories of the flexibility of the 3rd ed fighter I see this as a big loss, probably more so in my mind than it is to most anyone else.

Paladin looks similar although the Paladin's Mount appears to be gone. (mmm... Unicorn mount)

Ranger follows the lead of 3.5th ed. with the separate Two Weapon Fighting and Bow paths. There isn't any explicit restriction to one path or the other, but I'm sure splitting feats and powers between the two paths will leave the character relatively weak at high levels.

Rogue is pretty much a rogue, although it looks like the stealth rogue, which is what I think of when I think rogue, is an afterthought. It doesn't really fit either build option. It looks like combat ability has been strongly promoted. Like I said yesterday, I'm not a fan of the striker role emphasizing combat abilities over non-combat abilities.

Warlock is an interesting concept, although pacts seem a little forced in a game where magic is always out there for the taking. Eh, not a big deal by any means. No real surprise that most Warlock spells have a target of one creature since it was placed in the striker role. They don't appear to get Rituals, which isn't a surprise since they are conceptually very different casters than the Cleric and Wizard. The Warlock's paragon path is explicitly dictated by choice of pact at level 1, with one paragon path for each pact. Hopefully they fix this in the splat books.

The Warlord concept feels really out of place to me, being better suited conceptually to leading armies than supporting a small group of heroes. I have to admit I didn't read enough of the powers to have a very good feel for how the class fits mechanically, but it does have some healing powers to fulfill that part of the Cleric's role.

The Wizard's classic abilities got split between powers and rituals, but overall it is the same class. As I said above, at will and encounter powers should make this class a lot less about total spells per day management. The downside is that compared to the massive list of available spells in 3rd ed, there are very few powers and rituals available in 4th ed.

On to Chapter 5 and skills. Compared to 3rd ed, skills in 4th edition are significantly streamlined. Similar skills are grouped into a single skill. Training is either yes or no with a +5 bonus for training, and advancement is mainly by adding in 1/2 character level. As characters level, training is going to become much less significant to the 1/2 character level. Also, any training after 1st level or outside your short class list is going to come at the expense of a feat. The skills themselves are pretty self explanatory. My only complaint is for the physics of jumping. I don't really care about the distances being calculated, but the physics of jumping itself. For a high jump, it doesn't really matter if you have a run up or not, you will jump the same height. This doesn't surprise me all that much since it is a commonly held belief that a run up will give a higher jump. A bigger problem comes in the long jump. The long jump doesn't require that the highest point in the jump be at the center point. In the example they seem to be expecting maximum height at lift off followed by a glide over the pit. Yes, I'm probably being to picky about what are intended to be simple guidelines for a game that isn't about jumping. Other than that nit, the skills themselves look good. The number and grouping is probably right, although I will miss tumble.

Time to start reading again before I can review any more.

D&D 4th Ed, part 2

2008-06-15T18:42:00.003-04:00

I'd like to go back to Character role from chapter 2 before dealing with races. My previous post was pretty much just a howl of outrage without really dealing with why. I'll give a pass on defender, I don't really think of that role in that way, and they ignore the cross role ability of the ranger, warlord and even cleric, but close enough. Controller also seems misnamed to me, but I can't think of a better name. Presumably "nuke it from orbit" was deemed insufficiently fantasy. The real problems with how role are presented starts with striker completely ignoring the non-combat importance of stealth. We are role playing after all, not roll playing. Calling the healer/support group the Leader really seems like they were trying to justify the Warlord's existence and thinking no one will want to play a character who's role is called support. They even acknowledge the potential confusion with the spokesperson non-combat role, but use the term anyway. Like I said, it just seems like much of this was taken way to seriously.

Enough on that, on to Chapter 3. I'll try to keep it shorter with less poo flinging, but no promises. I can only think dragonborn made it in one of two ways. One is to totally pander to people who liked playing half dragons, the other is as a feature of yet another new campaign setting at the expense of older settings. I haven't seen anything about Grayhawk or DragonLance for 4th ed, so presumably they are out of favor again. There's bunches of Forgotten Realms stuff in the pipeline already. Maybe they are yet another super powerful race in the Realms banished in ancient times and now coming back to restore their empire no matter what the current occupants of that land think. Str +2, Cha +2, so that means balance is out the window. That will make humans interesting. Dwarves are still dwarves. Another new race, Eladrin. They're mostly elves with a shiny new back story. I thought 3rd ed's handling of sub races in the Monster Manual was good enough, but whatever. Elves are elves, although they are fey now instead of humanoid. Half-elves are half-elves. Halflings are halflings, although not having a homeland of their own is a bit of a demotion. Humans are pretty much the same as 3rd ed. Only +2 in a single skill, but it's the character's choice. Bonus power, bonus skill, bonus feat, +1 to Fort, Reflex, and Will. Tiefling is an odd choice of new race since they go to so much trouble to stress that characters should be good. Aasimar didn't make the cut, and would make more sense. Both Dragonborn and Tiefling seem odd as new core races since both are supposed to be rare. Oh well, if it made sense it wouldn't be D&D.

oops, time for Simpsons. More ranting later.

Review of D&D 4th Ed, Part 1

2008-06-14T22:11:00.004-04:00

My copy of 4th ed. showed up Thursday, and I've been working through it since then. (By the way, why did it take until Thursday for the USPS to get a package to me when it was sent on Monday morning from Jacksonville?) I'm through chapter 4 (abridged) of the Player's Handbook along with some skipping around for context and curiosity. So far I have to say that while some ideas are good ones, overall I'm underwhelmed. I'm willing to be convinced that some of it isn't as bad as I think, and undoubtably some will look better under the light of real game play, but it looks to me like one giant leap backwards to highly restricted "one true class path" rather than an evolution of the flexibility that I loved about 3rd ed.

I skipped nearly all of Chapter 1 since it's mostly "What is a Role Playing Game" and "How do you play", along with the super exciting dice sidebar. I have to believe that anyone picking up the book who doesn't already know this stuff is going to get a less coma inducing version from the people they are playing with. Anyone using this as their introduction to RPGs is going to put the book back on the shelf and run away.

Chapter 2 is better since it actually contains useful information. Synopsis of race and class, which I'll talk about in their respective chapters. WTF is this crap about character role? You need a meat shield, a medic to heal the meat shield, a thief to scout and deal with locks and traps, and a wizard to make shit blow up. Controller, defender, leader, and striker? Someone (probably many someones) took this way too seriously. On to ability scores. Saves (now types of defenses, whatever) got a little help by being able to choose the better of two ability scores as a base. Wait a second, you don't even roll dice for two of the three methods? Guess they're planning to push Living XXXX even more. Fortunately, method 3 (aka deprecated) is ye olde 4d6 drop 1.

Huh, they did away with alignment tic-tac-toe. Five alignments now: Lawful good, good, evil, chaotic evil, and doesn't matter. The old system might have been stretched thin in places, but this seems overly simplified. Some new gods, some old ones, but fewer of them. Wait, no, they just gave second rate coverage to the evil gods. Was 3rd ed. this preachy about "characters really, really should be good?" Seems a bit early to be covering what is flavor for everyone but Clerics and Paladins. More flavor. I can only assume this was done with the goal of targeting first time gamers, but it just seems really out of place here. Languages, good to know, but still out of place. Ah, game mechanics. Still "roll high on a d20" but lots of things now advanced by 1/2 character level. How to level, rant about powers later. Retraining being officially recognized is nice since some character concepts just don't work, but it seems prone to min/maxing. They made no attempt to justify from a character's POV either. The character just forgets something they knew last night and in it's place is something completely different.

On to the One True Character Advancement Table. The first thing I notice is that ability scores advance a lot more frequently. +5 total in 20 levels (or +7 in 30) of 3rd ed, +14 (+24) in the same span now. Everyone gets powers, and a fair number of them, but we still have no idea what they do. They kind of look like spell like abilities since it's broken down as at-will/encounter/daily/ utility(?). On to a quick tour of a character sheet. The most obvious change is a drastic reduction in the number of skills, also indexed off of 1/2 character level, and trained appears to be a binary +5. Not sure what bloodied and surges have to do with hit points yet, and no clue about action points either. Whoever decided how big to make the equipment box never played in a "take everything that isn't nailed down, and if we can pry it loose it isn't nailed down" type party, which is pretty much every party in every game I've played. Ah, we've escaped chapter 2.

It's late, so I'll write more tomorrow.

Summary of what I've been up to

2008-05-26T21:11:00.000-04:00

I went and visited with Jeff and Viv at Jeff's parent's yesterday, and Viv thinks I should update my blog more often so here it goes.

I think everyone who knows about this blog already knows this, but in case anyone doesn't Nicole and I broke up about this time last year. Since that was my only reason to be in Florida, the question is "Now What?" Viv was encouraging me to move back to Madison, which does have some appeal since most of the people I know are there. The only down side is Madison is relatively lacking in the outdoor activities I like. Wisconsin quality whitewater is at least three hours away, much more for really good whitewater, and National Park quality outdoors are even further away. Wisconsin would be adequate for motorcycle riding, and probably a lot safer for a relative novice like myself, but lacks the spectacular rides which can be found out west.

So where else should I move? Boulder, CO intrigues me. I'd be close to the mountains and all the water, riding, and scenery that comes with it. Boulder creek is an intermediate to advanced whitewater run that literally runs through downtown Boulder, and there are biking/running/roller blading trails in town. Boulder is (relatively) small while being relatively liberal, a university town and close to a big city, so it should nearly be Madison west. Plus I have family in the area; my mom's sister and her children live in the Denver area.

Another option I'm considering is Seattle. Seattle's main bonus is even better access to whitewater than Boulder. I've heard of people getting more than 300 days on the water because it is easy to go on after work runs nearby. It is also a scenic location with a lot of scenic outdoors nearby. While an intriguing option, Seattle has some downside. The first and biggest is that I'm not a big city person, so I don't know if I'll be comfortable there. Also, I don't know anyone, other than Christy, in the Seattle area, so the chances of my ending up in an anti social rut like I am now are high. I'm also reluctant to move quite so far away from Wisconsin where my friends and family are; Boulder is a bit short of 1000 miles from Madison (Ocala is 1200), Seattle is double that. Plus I don't know if I want to live that close to Redmond.

I would almost certainly like California's outdoor opportunities, but pretty much anywhere I could get a job is going to be too big a city for my tastes. I also don't want to need two new vehicles just to move there.

What other places should I think about?

Oh, yeah. As hinted above, I am now two wheel enabled. I bought a Harley Sportster just before Christmas. I wish I had gotten my motorcycle license ten years ago. Probably Florida's only redeeming quality is being able to ride in January without risk of freezing to death. Unfortunately, the narrowness of the state, and the Orlando megalopolis to the south east, makes it easy to exhaust the day trip options.

While I do intend to try, I make no promises that these updates will be a regular occurrence.

Let me know what you think.

Mark

Nope, not dead yet

2008-01-13T22:35:00.000-05:00

Nothing interesting to say, but horses around Ocala.

How a $1 part can become a $700 repair

2007-10-11T20:58:00.000-04:00

I pulled into the Publix parking lot last night, and put the gearshift into reverse. The gearshift lever goes thunk, and the gearshift starts moving freely. Hmm... not good. The car is in gear, but it's in reverse, which isn't terribly useful to try going somewhere for repairs. After contemplating for a bit, I pull off the center console and take a look. What I find is that there is a pin on the gearshift lever which goes into a loop on the transmission linkage. Holding the two together is a 1 inch diameter and 1/2 inch thick plastic bushing with a socket in it for the gearshift pin. Or in my case, two half bushings. Now that I know how it works, I'm able to limp home by holding the linkage together with one hand and shifting with the other.

Once I get home, I start searching the internet and find out this is a quite common problem with that era Saturn manual transmission. I find several descriptions of home remedies, which tend to involve drilling out the pin and through bolting the whole mess. Not ideal, but it'll work if nothing else will. There are also several variations on replacing the bushing available on e-Bay which don't require removing the pin.

One of the articles I found also detailed the OEM fix. Saturn does not make the bushing available as a separate OEM part but only as part of the whole OEM transmission linkage, which makes a sort of sense since the lips on the bushing won't fit through the loop on the linkage. The article quoted the price for that part as $375. In addition, since the linkage is threaded through the very tight center console, through the firewall, and into the engine compartment, it takes about four hours to replace the linkage. No thanks, I don't want to spend $700 to replace a cheap piece of plastic.

So I've ordered one of the bushings from e-Bay. In the meantime, I've put the two bushing halves back together with the pin and loop, and electrical taped the whole mess together. It's not pretty, but it does the job.

This does make me wish I had some alternative for transportation to work though. The weekend before Gencon I took a class to get a motorcycle license, but haven't gotten a bike yet because they cause as much new as a car, and seem to depreciate more slowly than cars do. Maybe I'll go bike lusting again this weekend.

Oh, and the simple laptop fix doesn't work for mine. Grr...

From hell's heart I stab at thee, Apple; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.

2007-09-21T22:19:00.000-04:00

http://www.coreyarnold.org/ibook/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/03/danish_consumer_complaints_board_claim_ibook_defect/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/20/apple_refunds_ibook_g4_in_denmark/

I paid $300+ (twice!) to repair this problem before I found out about the simple fix. I just had to do the fix tonight because I was getting the same problem for the third time in the 3 years and 3 months I've owned my iBook. A more suspicious person would suspect there was a design flaw with the iBook G4 that lead to logic board failures. But Apple says there is no design flaw, and in Apple I trust. They wouldn't lie to me, right? Right?

And of course this happens Friday evening, when I'm leaving for Netbackup training on Sunday. Whee! A week in Ft. Lauderdale... during summer. The real question is am I registered? We signed me up on Tuesday (our backups are in desperate need of work), but niether I nor my team lead who put the course charge on his corporate card recieved the confermation e-mail. As a bonus, this is just a (literal) stone's throw from where my class is being held:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/broward/sfl-921planecrash,0,2355228,print.story?coll=sofla_tab01_layout

Boating, boating, and more boating

2007-03-25T22:35:00.000-04:00

I took my kayak out to Rainbow Springs State Park today to get in some paddling. After a long, hard winter (I think we were below freezing three times), I wanted to get comfortable in the boat before heading up to GA/TN/NC next weekend for three days of paddling. Even though I can't take vacation yet, the powers that be decided to give me a day off since work's been crazy lately. I'll be meeting up with the Spring Break trip from Madison.

Whoo boating!

Samba upgrade part 2

2007-03-06T22:07:00.000-05:00

We sleep, we wake, we go back to work.

When we get into work this morning we find out that some things had fallen out of the domain in all the fscking around last night. And we still don't have a working machine add to put them back in. Curse, experiment, discuss... The decision is made to try a home build of the newer Samba 3, instead of the downloaded binaries, and we are assured that all the paths are the same and everything should just work. Install, restart, and things go completely sideways. Stock samba is reinstalled, LDAP restored from a slave, and everything restarted.

This time, many things have fallen out of the domain, including our two main samba file servers. Eventually, a technique is discovered to restore some of the Windows domain trusts. It turns out that the LDAP slave chosen for the restore didn't have all the machine password changes. Restoring passwords from a different slave allowed some machines to rejoin. This worked for one of the file servers, but not the other. I spent most of the afternoon trying to get the other server back into the domain. I found an unadvertised tool to take apart the samba secrets.tdb file, but the failed server is running 2.2.8 and the working server is running 3.<mumble>, so comparing the two is only marginally helpful. Late in the afternoon, we are able to manually beat the other server back into the domain.

Things start to look vaguely better and all we're left with is these Windows machines which have fallen out of the domain. People start heading home, and only myself and our Team Lead are left sweeping up.

We're discussing the state of affairs, and I mention in stream of conciousness mode, "So, we need a samba account that maps to UNIX uid 0. The question is does <samba domain admin> have a UNIX..."

Team Lead: "Aaagh!"

Me: "...account?" The team lead turns to his computer and begins typing furiously. I start thinking while he types and realize my question is nonsensical. <samba domain admin> is in LDAP as a POSIX (and samba) account with uid 0, so UNIX will see it as uid 0. Team Lead trys a domain join and Success!

It turns out that while the sambaLMPassword and sambaNTPassword were set, the UNIX password in LDAP isn't. Apparently, this is why the account kept being disabled and the passwords deleted.

Gah! At least things are working now.

Samba upgrade

2007-03-06T20:50:00.000-05:00

One of the medium term projects at work is to move towards Active Directory. Why, you might ask? Supposedly AD would solve some problems that non-Gainesville employees are having, such as password changing. We have a password change after 180(?) days policy and employees on site in many states, so this needs to work.

Anyway, part one is to update our Samba servers to version 3 because AD won't form a domain trust with earlier versions. Last night was the night we updated the Primary Domain Controller. Since I don't know much about Samba, I was mostly along for the ride.

Of course, it's never that simple. Under Samba 2, we were using smbpasswd as the backend, and Samba 3 really wants to have an LDAP backend. We use LDAP for our UNIX accounts, so we just needed to add an ObjectClass for Samba. At least that was the theory. If it wasn't done correctly, the Windows desktops and servers would loose their domain association and everything would come to a stop. This is because Windows domains include a machine account for each machine, which Windows is courtious enough to change the password for periodically. If you don't stop samba on the servers while doing the update, a machine password can be changed while doing the conversion and the mismatch when restarting causes the Windows machine to not be able to communicate with the domain.

This upgrade had been attempted twice before, and despite debugging in a test environment things went poorly and had to be backed out. Due to the previous problems and the need to move forward, it was decided that there was going to be no going back.

The SysAdmin who led the previous attempts at Samba 3 is a full time student at UF and part time with us, so coordinating with him is tricky. Previously he had said everything was essentially ready except for migrating user and machine accounts, which had to be done at the time of the cutover. When he came in around 5pm after classes, he told our team lead what needed to be done before the cutover at 7, then left for some student org meeting and would return after the meeting. It turned out we also needed to write some config files before we could to the upgrade. WTF? #1.

Much much later we had config files and an LDAP update ready. The new configs and LDAP were loaded, and... Success! Mostly anyway. Users were able to log in, Windows machines kept their domain trusts, we just couldn't add new machines to the domain.

We were using Samba 3.0.10, which was the version which shipped with the version of RedHat we were using on the PDC. Prior to 3.0.11, you have to use an account which maps to UNIX UID 0 to add a Windows system to the domain. No problem, a UID 0 account is created, password set, and... No join. Not only no join, but the account had it's sambaLMPassword and sambaNTPassword deleted and the "Disabled" flag added to it's sambaAcctFlags. WTF? says we. Passwords are put back, the account unlocked, and one join later... same thing.

Much muttering, experimenting, and discussing later, the decision was made to try the newest version of Samba 3. It was downloaded and installed. We restart and... nothing works. Cursing ensues. The new Samba is backed out, LDAP restored (from a slave LDAP server) to a version which had been working with Samba 3.0.10, and everything restarted. Things seem to work, other than the machine add script. Things are declared good enough, and we head home at midnight.

Part 2 later...

games and work

2007-02-20T19:44:00.000-05:00

I was talking to Nicole on the phone the Monday before V-day, trying to figure out what we were going to do, and she was trying to get some cheats working in Baulder's Gate. I did some looking online and got the correct codes for her, but this got me thinking about Diablo II since we had been talking about it at work. I dug out my boxes, and discovered that there is a Mac version. Naturally, I had to install it and start playing. Many hours later I went to bed, and took my Mac to work the next day, intending to play during my lunch hour. Without planning it, two of my coworkers also brought Diablo II in, so we ended up playing multiplayer during lunch. I'll probably keep playing for a while. The only problem is Diablo II is pretty CPU intensive for my laptop and keeps it nice and warm.

Thursday was less fun at work. I was racking a new machine, and when I turned it on, I popped both breakers feeding that rack (redundant PSUs). Oops. Even worse, that rack has the 3 VMWare ESX servers in it, so instead of taking down 3 servers, I took down 150 testing systems plus the MSA1000 SAN. Fortunately everything came back more or less OK and there was more joking at my expense than actual trouble.

misc, etc.

2007-01-02T22:09:00.000-05:00

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.

The drive home

2006-12-27T00:39:00.000-05:00

Still getting the hang of this commuting thing. I don't think having my commute be along a major tourist influx corridor is helping matters. My drive home stream of consciousness today:

More kamikaze than usual on the road tonight... Is that Mitsu speed bump planning on going under that semi?... WTF?! Was that really a car covered in Christmas lights with a spruce tied to the roof?... Uh oh, I see brake lights... AAaaaand here comes the parking lot. Must be the break week influx.

At least I was closer to home when the traffic got really bad, so it wasn't quite as bad as the day before Thanksgiving. Although a giant SUV magically appeared in my blind spot at one point. Didn't hit him, but much closer than I like.

boom?

2006-12-22T17:31:00.000-05:00

yeah, I know I haven't put up anything in an age. Pretty much just working in between trips to Orlando. I saw a bit of the shuttle launch two weeks ago. Not up close sadly, just a bit of it rising up as Nicole and I were leaving Downtown Disney.

Which brings me to today. I had a half day of work in observance of Christmas Eve, so I spent a chunk of the afternoon cutting up lumber for a project (stands to raise up my just purchased, arriving tomorrow washer and dryer to a more workable level). I was lying on my living room floor resting my back after spending all that time leaning over when...

<BOOM><BOOM>

"boom?" sez I.

I look out the window, and the people around outside don't seem bothered, so I decide to not worry about it. Then I remembered that the shuttle was due to land at 5:30, and it was 5:26 by my clock. So, my first sonic boom and a double boom at that. Pretty impressive.

According to NASA's groundtrack, the shuttle passed nearly directly over Ocala (29.17N, 82.15W)

thanksgiving

2006-11-28T19:33:00.000-05:00

I went to my cousin's in Tampa for Thanksgiving. I haven't seen them very often, so it was nice to see them. Plus the Buccaneers were losing, so I had a good laugh at my Uncle's expense. I opted against going to the mall Friday because I'm not insane. I just don't understand why people go through the insanity of Thanksgiving Friday shopping.

Saturday I found a disc golf course nearby and went to check it out. It's pretty nice, but sandy. I was a bit rusty, and not knowing where the baskets were didn't help. I didn't keep score, it would have been to depressing.

On the work front, things are going well enough. I'm slowly learning the ropes, although I'd like to be moving a bit faster. Our DBA being released today (contract not renewed due to various issues) has served to emphasise my motivation.

miscellanea

2006-11-22T22:14:00.000-05:00

Hasn't really been much to write about. I finally got my laptop back, but they seem to have switched batteries on me. I got a new battery through the exchange program a few months ago, and it worked wonderfully, but twice since getting the laptop back on Saturday the battery has been flat after about 1:15. I'm debating the sanity of going into the store on Friday and making a stink, hoping that they'll do what it takes to make me shut up on the biggest shopping day of the year.

I finally dragged myself out the the DMV, and now have my Florida license and tags. I decided to get the Everglades tags instead of the standard tags. As expected, it took forever to get processed (before driving a half hour to work of course), even longer because my car had been titled in Florida in the past and the computer kept trying to use the old owner's information.

Working

2006-11-14T19:45:00.000-05:00

My first two days have been fairly uneventful. My desktop is unfortunately a Windows computer. That really needs to change, I'm too used to having a Linux desktop. Plus the version of Nero installed is absolutely brain dead when trying to make a bootable CD. I ended up transfering the OpenBSD 4.0 install files I was working with to a Linux testing machine I set up, makeing a bootable cd image there, then moving the image back and burning from the image. Feh.

I needed the OpenBSD disk to install what will become a replacement for a Linux firewall. So now I need to learn IPTables and translate their large ruleset into PF syntax, which has changed since the last time I used PF.

On the upside my new home monitor is in, and it is dead sexy.

Mark

Why do all DMV's suck?

2006-11-10T19:07:00.000-05:00

SHUT. UP. AND. DRIVE!

Sorry, people talking on their phones while driving was getting on my nerves today.

I went to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles last night to look at the specialty plates, since I've decided I don't like the standard Florida plates, and while I was there I discovered that Florida requires new residents to register their vehicle within ten days of establishing residency. They require proof of Florida insurance, which while more expensive than Wisconsin was simple enough to deal with, and a VIN verification form signed by God. Oh, and I had to prove I purchased the car more than six months ago to avoid the 6% use tax. Much muttering occured as I dug through my paperwork looking for the bill of sale, since the title I have only has the new issue date from when I turned in the paperwork for the paid off loan.

The VIN verification form is a odd bit of excess bureaucracy. For reasons unstated, they want the Vehicle Identification Number to be verified by a (theoretically) trustworthy source: a cop, car dealer, DMV employee, Notary Public, or military officer. Since these are all groups of people I tend to avoid knowing, this is a problem. While I was at the Insurance agent's office, I asked about notary's and learned that the person I was talking to was a notary, but she said that if I was driving the car to be registered to the DMV, the DMV employee I talked to would be able to take care of it at that time.

So, documentation in hand, I wander off the the Tax Collector's office. In an strange fit of common sense, Florida places their motor vehicle licensing and registration offices in the same location as the tax collector's ofice rather than scattering government offices around the landscape. Upon arrival, I discover three things: First, November 11th is Veteran's Day. Second, Veteran's Day is a leagal holiday for Florida government employees, being observed this year on the prior Friday. Third, Like all good bureaucracies Florida governmental offices are open 8:00AM-4:30PM, Monday through Friday. This will make getting my new plates without getting fired more interesting.

On the upside, On my way back from the Tax Collector's office I stopped at the Visitor's Information Center and (finally) got a phone book. I also stopped at Circuit City to order a new Monitor (Samsung Syncmaster 204B) to replace my 11 year old, 14" CRT (yes really). Eventually I also intend to replace the painfully slow (but only 8 year old) desktop. While I do like my laptop, I want something more reliable which I can fix myself if it does break. I also want the larger screen size for when working on projects.

Since turning in my notice, I've had a rekindling of my desire to play with computers, so I want the Linux desktop again. This further proves in my mind how soul sucking Physics was.

Oh wow, It's eight already. I need to have dinner before my stomach claws it's way out.

Hello!

2006-11-09T16:38:00.000-05:00

Ahoy!

I've landed in Florida, Cox finally turned on the interweb, and I decided to start my own blog. It will be whatever's on my mind, from political rants to what I had for lunch (Mmm... Fazoli's)

Speaking of what's on my mind, Apple better give my computer back soon. Retro is fun and all, but a K6-233 is just so '90s.