By jp 17 Dec 2002
I’d just like to point out that I’m pretty sure yesterday was Tuck’s birthday. he yells are people whilst wearing suspenders now.
<p>happy birthday Tuck. later on this month, the two JC’s birthdays: Jesus’ and mine.</p> By anders pearson 16 Dec 2002
our new rackmount server finally came in today.
having pretty much only worked on regular desktop machines for the last few years (including regular desktop machines being setup as servers), it’s pretty neat to have a real server to play with.
the redundancy impresses me. it has redundant <strong>hot swappable</strong> power supplies. hardware RAID hot swappable SCSI drives. 2 gigabit ethernet cards setup for failover and a third ethernet card so you can hook up an administrative intranet on an entirely seperate interface. about the only things in that aren’t hot swappable are the processor and memory.
Dell bundled it with redhat 7.3 pre-installed. unfortunately, they installed <em>every</em> package that redhat comes with. so there were all kinds of vulnerabilities waiting to happen like sendmail and wu-ftpd on it (at least the default setup includes some ipchains rules that block off most of those ports). since i have some very particular ways that i like things set up, i decided it would be easier to wipe it and re-install just the stuff i want. it was probably the smoothest linux install i’ve ever experienced. dell and redhat must really be working together closely. all the hardware was properly detected and the drivers work together without any additional tweaking.
it runs cool too. after compiling apache, mod_perl, perl 5.8.0, and openssh, i could barely feel any heat coming out of the top of the case. it’s only a 1GHz PIII, but 1U rackmounts are pretty thin and the processor only had a heatsink mounted on it. the case fans are loud though. but not as loud as the fans in the Xserve we got recently (which also runs really hot).
at the rate things have been going i figure i’ll have it all configured and be able to move our applications from our current server to the new one by the end of the week. i probably won’t do that though because i plan to take a couple weeks off for the holidays and go back up to maine. so making a big move of (somewhat) mission critical services right before i’m going to be out of town seems like a bad idea. not to mention that part of the transition process would be getting the network people to re-assign some IP addresses and hostnames and they’re not exactly famous for expediency.
By anders pearson 16 Dec 2002
apparently it does. another weekend in DC, another day spent throwing up in virginia. this time out the window of a car driving down the highway. and this time it wasn’t because of a hangover.
i’ve always been somewhat prone to motion sickness. when i was little and the family would go on trips, it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for us to have to pull over because i’d been trying to read in the car and suddenly felt the need to empty the contents of my stomach.
i think being tired aggravates it. almost every morning that i wake up before noon, i get really nauseous. usually though, i’m just sitting still at my computer so it passes after a bit. the morning nausea was one of my biggest annoyances during my brief perios of living in brooklyn; i’d have to get up really early to catch the subway in. by the end of the subway ride, i’d always be exerting the full force of my will to keep from chucking (throwing up in a crowded nyc subway is a very impolite thing to do). being woken up early and then put in a car in stop and go virginia traffic was just too much for me.
the rest of the weekend, when i wasn’t spewing on the highway was ok. we got lani and kim more or less moved to their new apartment. went to lani’s office christmas party and escaped with most of our sanity. on sunday we went to Eastern Market and had crabcake sandwiches and birch beer.
By anders pearson 11 Dec 2002
this has come up several times in past conversations but i thought it would be good to write it down for posterity.
All sports (with the exception of golf) can be improved with the addition of golf clubs.think about it. how much cooler would soccer be if the players all had golf clubs that they could hit each other with? even backgammon could be made fun to watch.
golf is the real mindblower though. it’s currently the only game that actually already has golf clubs and it’s still boring. i think land mines would be the best way to make golf more interesting.
By anders pearson 10 Dec 2002
the good news is that the new server we ordered was delivered. the bad news is that it was delivered to the wrong address.
luckily, whoever it was delivered to rejected it rather than just keeping it so it got sent back. so it’s being sent out again. hopefully to the right address this time.
By anders pearson 09 Dec 2002
prasanth was hanging out at my apartment again this weekend. less video games this time and more movies (Amélie, Mulholland Dr., Goldeneye, State and Main, and bits of some others).
he mentioned that he needed to get a haircut. i responded with my usual ‘i have clippers in my bathroom’ offer which i make (with an evil grin) to anyone who mentions needing a haircut within earshot of me. prasanth actually agreed to let me cut his hair though. i didn’t really know how to react. i never expected that anyone would actually take me up on that one.
30 minutes later i had a sink full of hair and santh’s head was a little less insulated. it came out pretty good too. though really, it’s pretty hard to fuck up a haircut with clippers. just set them on 1/2” and make a few passes. then set it closer to touch up around the back of the neck and use some scissors to trim around the ears.
By lani 07 Dec 2002
a couple years ago i was reading up for my still unfinished Teen Stalker Magazine idea. (i think i abandoned it after watching too many cybercrime specials on pedaphilic cyberstalking.) in trying to finish up the quiz section, i did a little online research on cleopatra because the rolling out of a carpet bit struck me as stalker material. i found a site that proposed that cleopatra was not actually as beautiful as she is made out to be in the movies ([that movie preview voice] Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra!!!), but that she really just won people over with her charm, wit, and intelligence.
<p><i>now how to turn that frown upsidedown?</i> </p>
<p>i was thinking about this in my moon boots (for nostalgia’s sake though there really isn’t enough snow) while smoking a galoise legere on the porch. would it be possible to pass an embarassment i can’t explain as a cleopatra moment? you see, i did a betise (a stupid thing). i don’t know how it happened, but my only current theory is that i have some sort of personality threshold. beyond a certain level of nervousness and stress, i think i snap into another personality out of convenience. </p>
<p>i’ve been thinking about my bold (at best) introduction to Jim Heath, who is apparently famous for something or other in the science world, since i returned to consciousness from all the tiring conference rigamarole. i can’t explain what happened. i was just embarassingly casual and weird at the same time. i did manage to get his attention, though it was probably the bad sort. he kept looking at me like “do i know you, should i know you, what the hell is going on?!?” </p>
<p>and so now i’m torn between trying to do something cool with my research/career to excuse it (which is unlikely) and considering a change in field with an eventual change in citizenship (which is a lot of trouble). </p>
<p><i>oive.</i></p> By anders pearson 02 Dec 2002
well, we did it.
lani and i’s thanksgiving turkey was cooler than anyone else’s. ours was made out of ice cream.
a quart of chocalate (for the dark meat), a quart of vanilla (for the white meat), Drumsticks for… drumsticks, M&M’s and peanuts for stuffing, and a skin of chocolate Magic Shell and Caramel sauce.
it came out better than we ever dreamed. it was pretty much turkey sized and very much turkey shaped. lani even knew how to make the little paper hat things for the feet so it had those too.
we were awfully tempted to just make that our entire thanksgiving dinner. in the end though, we couldn’t resist taking our turkey over to Omar’s apartment and sharing the love. there we had tons of good food to go with our bird.
on friday, prasanth came over again and we all partook of beer, pizza, and video games.
saturday afternoon lani headed off to maine. prasanth and i got together with scott and watched the new Bond movie (all in all, not too bad). then we went and played a few rounds of pool and were joined by <a href=”http://www.donhopkins.com/“>Don Hopkins</a>. he’s working on a project with us at <a href=”http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/“>CCNMTL</a> and Columbia had flown him in for the week for some initial meetings. after we played some pool and had some drinks, we wandered the streets for a bit looking for somewhere to go that was still open at midnight. not much luck there. we wanted to go somewhere to just have a nice conversation but pretty much everything was closed except loud bars and clubs. eventually we all just ended up going back to my apartment and playing video games till 4am.
By jere 28 Nov 2002
Well, it’s sort of over. The court decided it just had to hold the hearing yesterday — we waited 4 years and of course it happened on a day when nobody could be there, and Krys couldn’t even get to a phone on such short notice so she could participate in the teleconferencing. The judge did sort of apologize, but that bit still rankles. We got to read our impact statements, or make independent comments; the point being that the Creep hear what we had to say. His attorney says he’s sorry. Well,…
<p>The upshot: the Creep got 25 years -4 already served under the jurisdiction of the Psychiatric Security Review Board. He weighs about 500 lbs and is diabetic. Send him some Snickers, shall we?</p> By anders pearson 25 Nov 2002
crazy weekend.
Joseph Reaglesince mimi is a mutual acquaintance, she naturally came up in the conversation. Joe mentioned a book called <a href=”http://www.gladwell.com/books2.html”>The Tipping Point</a> by Malcolm Gladwell which apparently examines cultural and political phenomenon using the techniques of epidemiology. in particular, Gladwell identifies a certain portion of the population as “<a href=”http://www.gladwell.com/tp_excerpt2.html”>Connectors</a>”. Connectors are basically people who know a disproportionately large number of people. we all agreed that mimi is the textbook example of a connector. she knows absolutely <em>everyone</em>. when she used to live in nyc, we couldn’t walk more than 20 feet down the street without her running into someone she knew. when lani and i visited her in berlin it was exactly the same and she hadn’t even been living there for a whole year. also when we were over there, lani discovered that mimi was good friends with one of lani’s close friends from high school back on the west coast.
so meeting Joe was pretty cool. the food was excellent too. lani wouldn’t stop talking about the food for the rest of the weekend.
on sunday we spent some time hunting for a winter coat for lani but with no luck. then we went to penn station to wait for <a href=”http://www.livejournal.com/users/ishovi”>Josef</a>’s train to come in (and eat krispy kreme’s while we waited ;). unfortunately, Josef had lost his cellphone earlier and didn’t actually know that we were going to be meeting him at the station. so he got in, called lani from a payphone but we didn’t hear the phone ring. we spent about half an hour walking in circles around penn station looking for him without any luck.
eventually we gave up Josef, decided that he’d be ok on his own for a while and headed out to brooklyn to visit Cheryl in her new apartment and have a couple beers in a calm, sane environment before we went to Daphne’s birthday party. that turned out to be a good idea. Daphne’s probably another likely candidate for being a ‘connector’. the party was at some tiny, no name bar down in alphabet city. loud and full of people. there were a lot of bates folk so i didn’t feel entirely out of place. Josef even managed to find his way there and meet up with us. it was fun but we really stayed way too late. so getting up for work this morning was not fun.