life

Friends,


I leave at 10am monday (11 April) morning, eastern time. The first leg is up to Cleveland on a 737, then out to Honolulu on a 767. Both are miserably cramped planes. We will be staying at the Sheraton Moana Surfrider (warning, flash) in Waikiki. Sandy and I are to be married on Thursday, the 14th of April. We will be married at the Mililani Hongwanji Temple. We will be staying until the evening of Friday April 22nd, when we catch a redeye back to Virginia, and recover Saturday (same 767-737 combination).



I start work at Microsoft on Monday the 25th.



The Moana Surfrider doesn't really have internet access to speak of, so while we will be frantically taking pictures, we will probably not be uploading them until we get back. Additionally, this means neither I nor Sandy will be reading much email (yeah, yeah, you're not supposed to read email on your honeymoon anyways, right?). I'm excited about the photography this time around, we're bringing two different Canon SLR bodies so Sandy can shoot B&W and I can shoot color (neg and slides), as well as the digital. We average 600 pictures per week in Hawaii. This should be an interesting trip.



Unfortunately, due to time and cost concerns, we won't be able to make the big island this time around. We are, however, already planning a trip for later this year to the Kona side of the big island, with a trip to Lanai for some deer hunting (by then the aforementioned Nightforce scope should be mounted on an AR-50 or maybe a Barrett 99).



If you'd like to get together for some sushi to celebrate two hackers getting married, we will be eating at Sushi Sasabune in Honolulu (yes this is an open invitation) on Thursday night. Seating is limited. Either call Sasabune and ask when the Avriette reservation is or email me and hope I read it before then.



Life changes so rapidly. I just don't know what to say. New wife, new job, vacation, learning the MSFT way... It's almost too much to digest. And to think some people yearn for a boring life.

TTFN...

The rumors are true; I have a job. Those of you familiar with the situation will know who it is with. I'm going to wait until the NDA comes down before I really say anything else, although it is probably going to be a position of relatively high visibility. At least this is what I'm told. We shall see.

I am also being given 3 weeks to fly out to Hawaii to marry Sandy. We'll be staying on Oahu and The Big Island (Kona, not Hilo). We leave Saturday, give or take, and return on the 25th. I probably won't be posting anything (and it's been pretty lax recently anyways) during that period.

I've been working with JAILBAIT, in an embedded/diskless application for one of the companies I work for (3 companies at once! a personal record!). If it starts giving me crap (the nice kernel panic in cramfs was way cool, but I won't get into that now), I may rant some. But it's so passe to rant on a weblog^Wonline diary, isn't it? Sigh.

Getting married. Going to Hawaii. New job. Damn. Life changes quickly, even when it seems to be moving pretty slowly, huh...

Aloha

Weather gloomy. Supposed to rain tomorrow. Got car smogged. Wrote new irc bot that turns [[wikinotation]] into proper wiki links. We have another bot that uses xrl.us (which I also wrote, but that's another story) to shorten the url's. It's a nice synergy. Code borrowed liberally from examples in PoCoIRC and URI::Encode (eg dennis and gaas).

wikipedia

I understand what you were trying to do, but you should be aware there are many of Wikipedians, probably the majority of us, who see no difference between "articles on a fictional universe" and "good Wikipedia-worthy article." - SimonP 17:20, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)






So I guess my push to move the Star Trek cruft out of the wikipedia will be met with failure, too. Simon, above, is referring to an article that's clearly Star Wars cruft, whcih one user is insisting should be moved to wikicities (whatever). In my case, I'd be asking them to move to memory-alpha (which isn't even a wikimedia project), which of course makes people like Simon have big bunches in their panties. Sigh. I've just been editing random pages today, fixing typos, and the like. Sort of cooling my heels before the torturous Unix-qualifications interview on Monday.

life

... goes on and on



Quote of the week:



So, doc, what the fuck do we do today? I mean, right fucking now? I'm not going to sit around and wait six months for this shit to work out or for me to understand it, what the fuck do we do right now?



Well, I guess we watch Alex in agony for a while, then.



I think maybe I'll just sit here and read my book instead.



Despite the high crapitude of the bot, it's actually useful for me, and it was fun to be coding perl again. Ruby has rotted my brain and I found it hard to remember how to "do" the loops and suchlike again. I mean, for thirty seconds or so, but still, ruby-rot has sunk in.



Ixnay on the Onoklinpay. Wasn't doing enough. Pondering another trip to LoC to do some research on β-2 antagonists. Interestingly, there seems to be one on the market which is less selective than I'd like, and is marketed as a diuretic. Maybe it's also anxiolytic, but I'm not sure whether I like peeing or yelling at people less. LoC is usually so helpful, or I guess I could go up to NLM, where I might actually get more text. It's further away by a lot, though. Sigh.

Real quiet today. Going to link to a eulogy. This man is carrying the same rifle and scope as my wife. Thoughts of wanting to go over there and put down some fire as Sgt. Plumondore did. Probably too old, probably too out of shape. The word from the corps is there are two kinds of Marines. Those in Iraq, and those coming to Iraq. These are hate breeding times.

Been tasting scotches and will be writing a scraper to make a proper page out of that. Nevermind the fucking wikipedia shitheads don't care that data all across the fancy intarpedia is not machine parseable. But I'm not really going to disrespect Adam any further by bitching about the wikipedia.

At this point, quoting Kim du Toit is not over the top:

I want to know the answer to this paradox: how can my heart be broken, and yet also filled with pride that we have such men among us?

Words fail.

Wikipedia

I'd like to quote Marshman.







I've had to give up working on Wikipedia. It was taking way too much of my time, and quite frankly I was finding much of the process stressful and unfulfilling. People here can be rude and negative feedback is a regular occurrence. On the other hand, I've never been one to require any kind of feedback and I'm quite satisfied with my knowledge and skills at this point in life. I think it is really me, not the Wikipedia community, but it started to be obvious that if one takes any degree of ownership of one's contributions here, one will eventually end up in an argument with some dullwit. And I'm not sure that is wrong for Wikipedia, but may explain why many leave disappointed from what has to be one of the more fantastic experiments on the web.






Spot-on. Note also mentioned earlier on advogato, Lowtax's Law:




As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of people trying to end it by claiming that they are tired of debating with closed-minded wuckfits approaches one.







I do find that particularly applicable to the wikipedia.

Flickr

Bought by Yahoo. Who'da thunk. I expected it to be Google, but I suppose it's all the same in the end. I'm not sure whether it sucks or it's great yet, but hopefully it means I won't be getting any more of these stupid "flickr is having a massage" messages. I would imagine this makes the ludicorp folks fairly wealthy on paper, and congrats to them for that. And to think when they were looking for sysadmins, I thought about applying, but thought, "what are they going to pay me with? beer? free image hosting?" Well, whatever.



I've been a photo postin' machine today, as we got six rolls of slides back from NGS and I had been kinda slacking putting them up. The slides were really kind of a mixed bag. Taking pictures with slides is tough. When it works out, you can get some really beautiful results.

Life &c

A friend who has proven in the past to have no self control has come back into my life to prove that he still has no self control, and was just recently using huge (160mg) quantities of oxycodone, insufflated. I am supposed to be assuaged by this because he has told me that he has quit cold turkey. Right. I just don't understand how some people seem to get trapped in this tarpit right around 17 and never grow up, and others seem to succeed. I wish I could bottle "adulthood" and sell it to people. Maybe it's called therapy. I dunno.



Oh, interestingly enough, it appears to me that we stole Hawaii. The state is near destitute. Nationhood would do them a lot of good. Fat chance of that happening. And not particularly surprising for a country that has bombed 25 other countries since 1945. Gee. Thats one country every 2.4 years. Who's up in 07?




edit: math is hard!

The Job

Everyone keeps asking. No, I don't have the job yet! The guy that I am supposed to be interviewing with, Monty O'Kelley, has the flu, and we can't interview until Friday. So things won't be wrapped up until next week at the earliest, and there's still that nagging problem of there being one other candidate.



Between you, me, and the whole intarweb, I think I got it nailed.

Innnnnennnnniiiiiiiiin........

(the rkm savvy reader will appreciate this)

El hunto del trabajo

Microsoft interview #2 went well today. Got along very well with both interviewers -- this makes seven total interviews, and I've got a concall or something to do next week. What bugs me about this is Microsoft has now grilled me on my expertise (unix, not windows) for coming up on eleven hours. Usually I bill $60 an hour for that. All I've gotten out of this is some pictures of their offices and a roast beef sandwich. Well, and lots of compliments. Like I said, I've done real well in the interviews, and I think I've got the last remaining non-me candidate (we've gone from like ten down to two) beat by virtue of my enthusiasm for the passion, (and if I do say so myself) intelligence and knowledge of the Unix culture and ethos. The DoD experience helps. They tell me I'm going to be speaking in front of groups of 500 people. Originally they sayd 2-20 people. This worries me a little, but I think I can do it. Also, lots of travel to DOD facilities and back to Redmond to work with their Services for Unix team, which is apparently all based back there. But frequent travel means lots of frequent flier miles, and since we're whores with our Amex, we can probably turn these into some more first-class tickets to Hawaii, our distraction of choice. Oh. And MSFT offers 3 weeks vacation. Schwing. AOL -- I'm not going to say anything disparaging about you, because you'll sue me -- but take note. MSFT has you beat in pay scale and benes. Can't wait to start. Also going to take two weeks prior to starting to fly out to Hawaii (on our dime) to get married to Sandy. It's been five years, it's fucking time already.

Life in general

I turned 27 yesterday. That means I'll be 30 soon. That kinda freaks me out. But, Sandy bought me a bottle of Talisker (20 y/o, limited run of 9000 bottles, cask strength, $$$$), and the marine SSgt (soon to be Gunny) said he'd teach me to shoot like the marines to, at 1,000 yards. I bought myself a Nightforce NXS 5.5x22x56 scope for my birthday (NP-R2 reticle for those who case). That should be good out to over 2,000 yards if I mount it on an AR-50 or something similar. It's all about the anti-materiel rifles.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia? What's that?

More liberal, self-serving quotes...

Moving to the town like a ghost in the rain

A dim reflection in a dark window pane

Blackness beckons from every side

Creeping all around like an incoming tide

A broken window in an empty house

I slip inside and begin to douse

The whole place with the fuel that will feed the fire

And push back the night, taking me higher

On out of the darkness in a deafening roar

The match in my hand is the key to the door

A simple turn of the wrist will suffice

To open a passage to paradise

I pause, I think about the past and the gloom

The smell of gasoline permeates the room

Everyone has a little secret he keeps

I light the fires while the city sleeps

Wikipedia

As my association with the wikipedia began, so today it ends. Silly me to think that I had found an organization without people needing their cocks rubbed, who had a problem, and wanted it fixed. I'd post the personal emails from chaper and jwales, but there's no point.



I'm just going to go back to editing my articles, and as I said, laugh at their failures, when they happen weekly. Their architecture is unscalable and they're so scared of change that all they can do is issue ad hominem attacks and frantically preserve the status quo. What was a "let's get together and solve this problem" situation is now a "why does this asshole want to change our systems and what the hell does he know anyways?" situation. The all-too-familiar Bozo Bit. Chromatic even mentioned this. The ironic thing is, I came into the "room," knowing that there were a lot of people there that didn't know their shit. I knew that I'd face an uphill battle. What I didn't know was that I'd encounter people who were so petty and pedantic as to complain about the size of my emails (518 words on one thing, 10k email that). That people seem to like their weekly outages and be real fuckin proud of their 500,000th article. They like the puddle of shit they live in, and they can continue to live in it. Fuck em. Fuck em a lot.



My contributions as a wikipedian, however, have been actually pretty cool. I'm rather proud of




• RNEP
  
• Tank plinking (mostly because other pages were linking to it)
  
• Niklaus von Dreyse
  
• subsidence crater (also because articles were linking to it and it was absent)
  
• T-12 (which was just plain incorrfuckingrect and needed a lot of help)
  
• BLU-82 (which had some confusion with a {{split}} between the "fuze" and the bomb itself)
  




RNEP and von Dreyse required I spend a lot of time and effort at the Library of Congress looking up old (but interesting) tests. I've also, through collaboration with friends, been put in touch with people at Elgin AFB, who may be able to tell me more about the RNEP, making that a pretty cool article. I've also done a lot of other maintainance shit. Going to random pages, and fixing typos and grammatical errors, changing incorrect stub tags, and so on. Doing the things that the wikipedia needs done to it that have nothing to do with the "systems" side of things. It's a worthwhile project, but I'll contribute what I like, and ignore anyone who tells me my content doesn't conform to standards, anyone who tells me the wikipedia needs volunteers or money, or anyone who requests an article.



Started taking some actual notes on scotch tasting, picked up the proper books to be citing, and everything. Will probably be making a template and filling out some of the empty pages that dot the [[Single Malt Scotch]] universe.



The wikipedia developers lost the privilege of my company today. It's their loss. Fuck em.

... and just a little more

The match makes a graceful arc to the floor

And time stands still as I turn for the door

Which explodes in a fireball and throws me to the street

I hit the ground running with the flames at my feet

Reaching for the night which coils in the fire

The raindrops hiss like a devilish choir

Dying in the flames with a terrible sound

Calling all the names of the sleepers all around

But then in the arms of the night, they lay

Their dreams sprout wings and fly away

Out of the houses in a gathering flock

Swarming overhead as I hurry down the block

I make my escape with the greatest of ease

And savor the darkness, drop to my knees

And the light less window, my hand on the latch

I reach in my pocket, and pull out a match

MC 900 Ft. Jesus, While the City Sleeps

The Job Thing

I guess we'll see what happens next week. I've obviously got to find something to do that doesn't make me so angry as to quote fiction about arson, and I think a job would greatly help distract me from the horrible trolls that plague my otherwise pretty boring life.

Updates as events warrant.

ps, good luck with multi-master mysql databases you punks...

Mostly posting because chalst offered me some encouragement recently. I can tell you up front, though, that I have no problem with an article on [[Islamophobia]] exisiting in the wikipedia. That's okay in my book, just as long as [[Homophobia]] remains, and nobody objects to my writing a [[Riflemanophobia]] article (that last one was a little bit of a joke). So, here we go.

Wikipedia

As I am so fond of saying, fuck them all. So, a few days ago, I decide, gee, I've worked enough on USMC weapons systems for a while, I'll just go to a random node (off the front page, the link is on the left), and look for typos, formatting errors, necessary wikifications, categorizations, etc. And what do I find, but [[Needlenose (Power Rangers)]]. Gack. Ok, so, contain yourself, go take another klonopin, because this is gonna get ugly. It turns out that there are HUNDREDS OF INDIVIDUAL POWER RANGERS PAGES in the wikipedia, mostly contributed by one user on 24/8 (Comcast), who has been warned six independant times about submitting copyrighted material to the wikipedia. I was in serious distress (it takes at least an hour for a klonopin to actually work) (for the unindoctrinated, klonopin is used to treat a number of things, but mostly seizure disorders [check] and anxiety [check]. It's mostly there so I don't kill myself or anyone else), and I sought the help of wikipedian admins on #wikipedia. AdamBishop, with whom I have something of an anti-[[Fancruft]] rapport, agrees with me that a [[List of Power Rangers Villains]] is a better approach, and I begin consolidating all of these articles into one large (presently, greater than 50k) article.



I'm not sure which is harder on the database. Creating lots and lots of individual pages, which clobbers the indices and tablespaces (although whateverthefuck mysql does with tables is anyone's fucking guess). That makes the wikipedia overall slower, because in order to find a page, if I wind up doing a sequential search (eg that is I am not able to use an index to find it), it is going to take -- I don't know the "Big O" notation, so pardon me here -- longer to search because there are more articles. However, with lots of smaller articles, it is easier for the apaches and squids to serve up content.



However, with one large page, we reduce the total number of pages in teh intarpedia, which is good for everything but our statistics (which seem to be published to slashdot almost yearly). It is also easier for full text search widgets, which the wikipedia may or may not have. They work better on single nodes with large contents, rather than many nodes with small contents. At least, that's been my experience with FTS.



So, aside from my [[Fancruft]] concern, we have a genuine SYSTEMS concern. And this is part of my complaint about the current state of the wikipedia. We all have our opinions about whether my hatred of the power rangers and feeling that they don't need their own individual pages is valid or not, but nobody is saying "which solution is better for the systems?"



To top it off, yesterday we had an outage that was due to a database overload. Ladies and gentlemen, the only way we're going to scale past our current databse servers (dual opterons, or maybe quad, I forget), is throwing some eight way 848's, and having dual masters. We need to have this. I don't see Postgres really doing dual masters, and I think we can get Oracle to give us RAC licenses to run Linux and n-scale on the Opteron, which would be bad ass.



Anyways, back to the motherfucking power rangers. So I manage to take the number of villains who were categorized (which is to say about half) from 44 down to 26. I got so sick of it that I had to go take a shower and a break. I took a day off. I came back to it to find that somebody had taken issue with my characterization of "bulk and skull" as villains, and reverted my edit, without telling me anything. I mean, if I revert somebody's edit, I am ferdamnsher going to tell them so on their User Talk page, "hey, I think that's wrong, and I reverted it here's a source." But no.



Went back to #wikipedia and explained that I was not going to get into an [[Edit war]] over the fucking power rangers, and as far as I was concerned, it was all copyvio anyways, and it was in such a sad state that somebody might just got and [[VfD]] the entire fucking thing, and that'd be great for the wikipedia.



So it ain't my problem anymore.



Which more or less leads me to my next segment...

More things that go BOOM!

Since the piece-of-shit Optronics scope I got for my long-distance rifle is broken, I am in negotiations to obtain a Nightforce NXS 5.5x22x56mm scope for my rifle (from gunbroker. The nice man asked me if my rifle was long- or short- action. Truth told, I think it's a short-action rifle, but Remington's page doesn't tell me. Check the Wikipedia, right? Well, [[Bolt action]] exists, but doesn't tell me, and further, links me off to [[designated marksmen]], which either incorrectly or correctly lists that designated marksmen of the Marine Corps carry the SAM-R (when I was told they carry the appropriately named [[U.S. Marine Corps Designated Marksman Rifle]]).



And so here we have me, again, editing weapons systems. Which I seem to be good at. I have an email in to a USMC weapons instructor asking him what the story is, so that I can go and correct the article, or do any required updating.



Can't wait to get out on the range with that scope. The aforementioned instructor has said to me "Me, I like shooting long range. I'd prefer somebody just go leave a quarter out there at the 1,000 yard line and let me find it." Yeeeeeeah. Projecting lead. Bang.

Jobs and occupations and other irksome things

So Microsoft said the interview went real well and stuff. No news, except that they want me to interview with their Unix hotshots (huh? Microsoft has Unix hotshots?) in Atlanta and/or Seattle. Fine. You can come and quiz me all you like about Unix, and you're going to get the same answer. I use the word 'pwn' because I've been there, done that. I get paid to red-team. I've adminned every damn flavor of Unix and Linux (with the exception of gentoo, ugh, <spit />) there is, and I'm as comfortable as can be. It's the Microsoft stuff that worries me, and they say they'll train me for that. Interesting synergies are already developing between me and friends of mine who work for OSD.



Hawaii (or more correctly, Fujitsu) has explained on various occasions that "I am the right guy for the job" and yet "we're not ready to hire anyone yet". Now I hear that "they want to change the screening process to get some new candidates out to the island." The position has now been open for 2 months. Fujitsu corporate has been thinking about closing the position. I more or less told them I was interested in the position (I want to live in Hawaii), but that the entire island would fit up their ass nicely when Microsoft puts down the bucks.

Meta &c

I can't help but think that when people read these diaries between all the military stuff and my ranting about the wikipedia and the gun pictures and stuff that I am freaking a few people out. When you say in your previous entry, you'd love to own the Barrett M99 rifle, and then you have a friend in OSD, and you hate a bunch of people, I guess somebody could get the wrong idea. I hope that's not the case. I'm a pretty boring guy, I promise.



I'd also like to note that Kate cast a bit of humility upon me by saying,



Fancruft, (n), Information about a subject which does not interest me.





She's right. Maybe I'm just an asshole and I should STFU about the power rangers. And here I go to pick a fight on wikitech-l. Sigh.



Lastly, I've given up going and getting the actual links to wikipedia nodes. Since I link to so many, unless I consider it essential, I figure wikipedians reading this can find them, and anyone else doesn't give enough of a shit to click them anyways. So I'm just going to say [[Stuff]] instead of Stuff. If this really offends you, indicate same, and I may extend the effort.

Nothing really new to report. I'll summarize quickly.

Guns and other things that go bang

Well, we joined The Quantico Shooting Club, which is pretty special (the waiting list is two years) -- it has the only 1,000 yard range in the state of Virginia. They'll also let me shoot the Barrett.50 BMG including the ever impressive M82A1. They have to actually close a road to fire on the thousand yard range. The BMG is a big goddamn projectile, and it's got some twelve thousand foot pounds of muzzle energy. Very much looking forward to that.

Wikipedia

Strong discouragement. I added an article for the CH-21 Shawnee, which is an extinct US Army helicopter to their pedia. my original edit is much more machine parseable, uses wiki tables, and is more standard with nodes like [[F/A-18 Hornet]]. The current edit, content changes aside, changes the table format, and overall layout of the page.

Anyone looking over my contributions can see I've been adding a lot (a LOT) of articles to the pedia about military armaments and units. I've got personal experience with some of them, resources to exploit to find information and pictures (field and stock), as well as a knack for finding them on google (the USDOD can't copyright their images, yada yada).

The problem is that a lot of people are contributing (albeit somewhat more slowly), and there aren't well defined "templates" and "guidelines" for how these pages will look. Additionally, people are making distinctions between things like a "weapons system" eg the [[M101A1]] (a howitzer), and the [[CH-21 Shawnee]] (an aircraft), and [[AGM-62 Walleye]] (a missile). Are they really all so different? Maybe they're all the same, and where we can, we should standardize on wikified tables so that we can do mass machine parsing if we need to or somebody else wants to. I think mine looked prettier. I'm pretty proud of the way [[M14 (rifle)]] looks. Damn, if only I wasn't too lazy to add all the proper http qualifiers to these links. But wikipedians will know how to get there.

Haven't had time to get to the systems shit, and I feel myself getting sucked down into this political/contributions stuff, and I worry I won't be able to do the job I promised Jimbo I'd do. Gotta focus. Focus. Focus!.

Worry

Sometimes people worry too much about stupid shit.