Below are the most recent 15 friends' journal entries.

Thursday, September 4th, 2008
swestrup	9:01a	Sunny Days I didn't have the best nights sleep last night. A combination of very dry air and switching off of using Dristan (because I can get benzedrex here) caused a minor sinus rebellion last night that had me unable to breath at 4:00 am and I had to sit up for a while to let my sinuses drain. Still, when I stepped outside to go to the breakfast buffet, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and there were flowers and fruit on the plants all around the path. Suddenly, it seemed a much nicer day. I may want to crash when I get home this evening, but right now, the day is looking pretty good. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
swestrup	8:36p	Replacements. I don't know if I mentioned it here, but I lost my Intel ID badge. That's right, the thing I spent a full week going through the paperwork to get, and I had it less than 4 days before I somehow lost it. It vanished sometime between Thursday evening when I left work and Friday morning when I tried to reenter work without it. In that interval I had ridden in a car, gone to a Korean BBQ, had coffee in a coffee shop, gone to my hotel room, eaten in the hotel breakfast room, and had ridden on a bus. Over the long weekend I managed to check all of those places for a lost ID badge but by this morning it was clear that it was gone for good. So, I bit the bullet and told folks today that I needed a replacement. I was driven back to the badge office and in under two minutes they had invalidated the old one and issued me a new one. Had I realized it would be that easy I might not have been so diligent in looking for the missing one! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
swestrup	3:18p	Delayed Monday. It may be Tuesday but it feels waaaay Monday to me. The nice long weekend did help in getting my stress levels down and all, but they're going back up at the thought of starting my 3rd week of work, even if its a short week. Ah well, this will pass. The stress is mainly just from trying to absorb so much so fast. My main plan for this week is to absorb 1500 or so pages of documentation and root around in the code base to see how similar problems to the ones I face were handled in the past. I figure there should be a certain amount of agreement on methods, provided the already existing methods aren't brain dead... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 30th, 2008
swestrup	7:29p	Calm. I had a pretty full day today. I moved from my hotel room to... well I guess technically its another hotel room, but it feels much more like an apartment. Hauling all my stuff down to the bus stop for the 3 block ride to the new location was a bit of strain, and then after dropping off my stuff, I went out and bought groceries for my new place. Hauling back something like 8 L of various essential liquids the block from the nearest Safeway was a bit of a strain as well. I suspect that my body may be quite complainy tomorrow. Today though, I'm feeling like I actually got some stuff accomplished, and I'm thinking of taking it easy for the rest of the evening. I also like the fact that this place has cupboards and closets to put stuff in so although I've completely unpacked, the place looks clean and tidy, unlike the last place where there was nowhere to put anything. I hadn't realized how much that was bothering me until I noticed how much calmer I felt in this far-less-cluttered space. As for the rest of the evening, maybe I'll catch up on my internet reading, since this is the first time in a week that I've had a solid connection. Or perhaps I shall read a book or even drink some wine while watching some episodes of Stargate Atlantis and Eureka that I missed due to the lack of internets. (Yes, 3 of those L of liquid was a box of wine. I feel I've earned it...) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, August 29th, 2008
pphaneuf	1:34a	Where is Mike Holmes When You Need Him? So last Saturday, we embarked on a bit of painting. You see, the paint in our apartment is some sort of "priming basic paint", which isn't totally awful to look at (unlike primer), but isn't quite awesome either, it's prime quality being that it's easy to paint over. After we recently discovered that this quality also made it a fairly hospitable surface for mold, we decided we'd paint the bathrooms with a more appropriate type of paint. While we were there, we also wanted to paint some of the doors a darker shade, a bit like the cupboards. Unfortunately, after sleeping at azrhey's parents and going to liberation_now and tygrbabe's brunchwarming (where several attempts to make us explode with delicious food were made!), we came back and saw that there was actually a number of screw-ups we hadn't noticed the day before that piled up to make it downright disastrous. So there has been episodes of peeling off misapplied paint, sanding down some defects, putting in some spackle in places, and repainting some insufficiently covered areas. The bathrooms are more or less back under control, although the doors still need work. That's combined with finally getting the delivery (albeit a bit later, and taking longer than expected) of the custom wall unit we had ordered a while back for the living room. It's very nice, although it has some of the warts of a one-off, such has just about zero cable routing and the very stylish smoked glass door apparently messing with the PVR's remote control. There was a small mistake in the design, but we actually like it better than what we wanted originally, so there (we'll be able to have a small bar in it!). Still, a fine piece of furniture. Now we just need to get more DVDs to stuff in its gigantic drawers! It seems like I'm the worst bike mechanic in the world. For a few days now, I was hearing a bit of a metallic noise when I was going over potholes and cracks in the pavement, as if a screw was loose and a washer was bouncing around on it. I tried to locate the origin of the sound, grabbing my cables, derailleurs, and various other mechanical parts, all the while going along Notre-Dame (not the safest plan, by the way). No luck. So I stopped by Belleville Cycle Co-op on the way to work, worried that this might lead eventually to something more serious, like a broken chain or whatnot, and the guy there put me to shame. One of the unused bottle cage screws was loose, and the spacing washer was bouncing around on it. Duh! I swear I checked those guys, but there's four of them, and I as I was doing that while riding, I guess I skipped the culprit... Argh. azrhey and I took a small break today to go to the Akoha, uh, thing. We've both left wondering a bit about where the money is going to be coming from (but you have to admit that you get to wonder about that for most of what you see on the Internet, and yet, it's there!), but it's a pretty cool and generally positive idea. I'll try to do well as a tester. :-) Coming back from there, I saw a pretty sweet bike locked on St-Laurent, a Specialized Langster Seattle. I guess that for a fixie, getting it all done like that is kind of cheating, and I'm not entirely sure of what I want yet in a fixie anyway, but it looks damned nice (the Chicago colour is very nice, but the Seattle handlebars are more to my liking). The Seattle one has a coffee cup holder? Uh, anyway... Current Mood: tired (21 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
gregorama	10:28p	Tequila makes everything better. Right? (11 Comments |Comment on this)
swestrup	10:07a	Flaky McLaptop Hates Me. I brought an old borrowed laptop with me down here to California. It has proved quite useful, but its also proved quite flaky. The DVD drive died on the machine just before I brought it down, so I couldn't play any of my DVDs I brought with me. Luckily, sps had a spare external DVD drive he could lend me. Then, three days ago I turned the laptop over to look at something on the underside. Ever since then, the CD drive has worked, and the wireless hasn't. So, now I can watch my DVDs, but I can't surf the internet at the hotel. :-(  Turning the laptop over a few more times has had no beneficial effects, and I don't have torq-with-a-hole-in-the-middle screwdrivers that I would need to open up the case and look for a loose connection. That's the main reason I've not been posting much the last few days. I don't like to do too much LJing from work. I also have NO access to my personal mail from work, due to the company firewalls. After I move hotels on Saturday I'll be in a room with a wired connection point, so I should be able to surf the web and answer email again. Once I start getting paid (any day now, I hope) I may seriously look to buying a personal laptop. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
gregorama	10:59p	Aw fuck. As if I wasn't preoccupied with enough misery today I have just seen a mouse in my house. Dr. Seuss be damned because the little bastard just ran from the kid's room into my room. If I wasn't afraid of my python getting some random disease I'd let him loose during the nights. I'm really looking forward to my trip to Houston now. EDIT: Little bastard has run into the kitchen. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
bokunenjin	3:57p	what I've been listening to lately I just found The Moth—a not-for-profit storytelling organization along the lines of SpeakeasyDC—and its associated podcast, and I've been gobbling up available episodes like a kid with a tub of Cool Whip. I've also been listening to audio from talks at The Last HOPE that I missed in person last month. I have many yet to hear, so this is not a complete list, but here are a few of the talks I thought were particularly interesting and useful: Packing the Friendly Skies - Why Transporting Firearms May Be the Best Way to Safeguard Your Tech When You Fly [slides] After a particularly horrible episode of airport theft, Deviant made the decision to never again travel by air with unlocked luggage. Because of this he now flies with firearms all the time. Federal law allows (in fact, it requires) passengers to lock firearm-bearing luggage with non-TSA-approved padlocks and does not permit any airport staffer to open such bags once they have left the owner's possession. In this talk, you will learn the relevant laws and policies concerning travel with weapons. It's easier than you think, often adds little to no extra time to your schedule (indeed, it can expedite the check-in process sometimes), and may actually be the best way to prevent tampering and theft of bags during air travel. A Hacker's View of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) As part of his book on the history of phone phreaking, Phil submitted hundreds of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to various three-letter government agencies. In this talk he will give an overview of how FOIA works, describe the type of documents you can get via FOIA, and discuss some of the typical FOIA stumbling blocks and workarounds to them. He will then focus on FOIA from a "hacker's perspective" and will examine the recent launch of several FOIA/hacker related websites such as GetGrandpasFBIFile.Com, GetMyFBIFile.Com., TvShowComplaints.Org, UnsecureFlight.Com, WhatDoTheyKnow.Com, and GovernmentAttic.Com. Home is Where the Heart Is? The Question of Jurisdiction A presentation on the subject of corporate legal jurisdictions and related topics. While this sounds boring on the surface, it's actually not - and is more and more relevant every year for those in the tech game. As physical human beings, we do in fact have a "home jurisdiction" in the legal sense, which is wherever we are living at present. However, corporations are also "people" in the legal sense but have a flexibility of where they call home. This ties into areas of international legal issues, corporate governance, privacy of company information, financial systems/banking, personal versus corporate liability, and so on. Basically, for anyone from a coder who wants "a company" to bill his clients through, all the way up to major tech projects that span multiple jurisdictions in a sophisticated way, few of us who play the tech game are not directly impacted by the question of where a company lives, where it calls home. Who knew law could be so interesting? (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 25th, 2008
swestrup	9:32p	Long Days I haven't been posting much lately. Mainly because the wireless here at the hotel is incredibly flaky and I often find I can't get online, or keep losing my connections. Very aggravating. Grrr. Hopefully that will change when I move on the Weekend. I've found myself a place only a little less convenient than this spot, about half again as large, and with an actual working kitchen and closets! Its also supposed to come with an ethernet connection to the Internet in the room. We'll see how well that compares to this place after I've moved in, I guess... (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
swestrup	1:42p	Ouchies Woke up this morning with a headache. I figured it was probably just caffeine withdrawal as I've been trying to cut down since I got here. But 6 or 7 cups of coffee later (yes, that's "cutting down") and it hadn't gone away. Now, I have some Advil for just such emergencies, but I can't find it. Seriously have no idea where that bottle has gotten to. I checked my toiletries bag three times and no dice. That doesn't necessarily mean anything as, during the search, I found the tea that I had brought with me and promptly misplaced. I've been looking for it all week, and I finally found it exactly where it was supposed to be -- and where I'd already looked at least 3 times. So, I had to go out and buy myself a small bottle of the stuff to take right away (which I just took -- hope it starts working soon). I'm still hoping that the big bottle makes an appearance before I get a migraine or anything that REALLY requires it because this is not a place where one wants to head outside during the daytime in search of medication when you're photo-sensitive. I had planned to get a number of things done today, including calling some folks but what with the headache and the discovery that I've misplaced some papers and that I have been having a very difficult time getting on the internets all day, I'm seriously thinking of just staying in my room all day watching TV and videos and trying to ignore the external world. If the headache is gone by supper time I might go out to one of the nearby restaurants, or I may just nuke some ready-to-eat Indian food I have here. Actually that latter option sounds kinda appealing right now, but I'll see how I feel when the headache is gone. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
vierge_en_trop	11:36a	Poll #1247428 Third sort of annual inspiration poll Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All Where do you get your inspiration? View Answers What are you inspired to do? View Answers Current Music: Rilo KIley at the Meow Meow (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
swestrup	9:11a	Dignity Restored. I just checked and the overnight raid resync that I set up worked perfectly, so now Webigail is as fully redundant as she ever was. I guess this means that the automated monitoring system really does work. However, as far as I can tell, the raid partition was taken out of sync by a software bug in the driver that wedged the syncing process. So, not so good for the redundant system to be the thing that caused the failure. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
kyotto	11:32a	I love this song! Apparently it's from the 80's, me considering myself an 80's fan... never heard of it before, laughed out loud at the lyrics, it's cute and funny :) The Extras - Circular Impression ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
swestrup	7:39a	Degradation Today I woke up to an alert from Webigail (Pooq's web and mail server) that her main raid array is now operating in degraded mode. This means that one of the array drives failed to sync, and the array is still working, but is no longer redundant (ie, a drive failure would lose us storage). Now, this is probably NOT due to any sort of major disk failure or the other raid partitions would have died as well. So, its probably a minor glitch and completely fixable, even remotely. That doesn't mean I welcome the news though. I am not currently set up to do remote maintenance on Webigail, and certainly was hoping I wouldn't have to. After all, the last time she's needed anything like this was something like two years ago. I thought I had a reasonable expectation of being able to work here for 3 to 6 months and then go home without once having had to intervene in her operations. I've been here less than a week.  :-/ (6 Comments |Comment on this)