In a stunning example of miscommunication, somebody called me a liberal. A Republican liberal, at that. Shock. In a perhaps strange twist of discourse (for me), I found myself in the position of trying to neutralize the verbiage on the definition of a surface to air missile. Really, my contention was that "not all missiles are designed to kill," which is more or less true. However, a different interpretation of the word "missile" (as compared to the more general definition, "a projectile", or even the tighter-bounded "a rocket propelled projectile") leads one to declare that a military missile is by definition, murderous. Curiously, the fellow that insisted the latter case was more correct was in fact a Marine. I had originally thought it more responsible to maintain a neutral stance on the definition, and he felt it was important to "not dumb down the wikipedia" with "mediaspeak". The argument is so muddy I can't tell which side is liberal or conservative. And really, as frequently happens, the two terms are not really able to clearly define a person's point of view (this is why any two-party system is inherently flawed). But it's kind of an interesting discussion from an academic standpoint.

After the last couple months of traveling, I was quite happy to return home and actually get to spend two weeks with my wife. Naturally all the things that had been put off for the preceding two months cropped up and needed to be dealt with, from heart attacks to "default of rent" notices, burst pipes in the ceiling, and so on. When I wasn't putting out fires, I was mostly asleep. I was sleeping for fifteen or more hours at a time, whenever I could. My schedule was non-existant. This is I guess what is called "bad sleep hygiene". William Dement (iTMS: cheap and not so cheap, although Audible has an unabridged version) goes on and on about this, mostly discussing "sleep debt." The opposite is actually possible, apparently (he does discuss it in his book) accumulating too much sleep means problems attaining sleep in the future. So apparently there's some magical mystical point between excessive fatigue and excessive rest where you're supposed to wake up and be "normal." It's kind of too bad you can't just set your alarm clock to figure this out on its own. At any rate, so for the last few days I've been getting an hour or less of sleep, culminating in a whopping three hours this evening. Which puts me at advogato at 3 in the morning.

Returned to the doctor to check progress on an initiative I mentioned a couple months back. Good news is I'm on track. Slightly more than a 10% reduction in body mass. Not so much exercise (although there is certainly some of that going on), but rather the sea change said doctor suggested. It's a way of life change. Eat generally better, exercise generally more, and try not to fuck up your body if you can avoid it. It's paid off. Well, I guess if you don't count sleep problems.

Started school this week. What a giant pile of shit college is! My advisor sent me the login information for another student, but since my login ID has no resemblence whatever to my name or anything else that would identify it as mine, I didn't know. Thankfully for that other student, I was entirely flummoxed by the inability to login to the online education site. I called technical support, and got the usual $5.15/hr twit reading a script. After correcting me on my authentication information (Thanks, advisor, for sending me the WRONG information!), we got to the actual auth problem. He insisted first that it was a problem with my computer ("Uh, I work for Microsoft. It's unlikely that Windows is misconfigured."), then with my internet connection ("No, it didn't work in Arlington, VA on my home connection, nor on tmobile in Atlanta, GA, nor at work in Washington, DC, or at work in Seattle, WA, nor in my hotel in Seattle"), and finally with me. I told him as politely as I could to piss up a rope, and began digging further into the problem. The symptom was an authentication failure with the wrong credentials, and a 500 with the right credentials. Just to see if it was client-related, I switched to Firefox from IE7 (yes, it's beta, but it shouldn't crash the goddamn edu's online learning software), and got a little further. Frustrated, I switched from connecting through squid at home to a "direct" connection (which really means through the hotel's proxy), and voila, it mostly worked. So it would appear there's some client-string buggery that caused the university's software to shit the bed. Of course, after going through all that and getting to the javascript infested mess of a piece of software, I'm rewarded with people who are encountering the internet for the first time, who punctuate every sentence with ":-)", and people who really seem to want to be my friend. I can tell this is going to be a great first quarter.

I did get to take an "inventory" of my skills and attitude towards my education. How rewarding!

5. Desire to Finish College measures the strength of your commitment to completing a degree. Your score placed you in the 1st percentile. This suggests that you have some rather strong doubts about the value of a college education. It is extremely important that you try to clarify your objectives as soon as possible. Often a clear decision about one's career goals strengthens one's commitment to college. A counselor can be very helpful in guiding you through this process.



6. Attitude Toward Educators measures the degree to which you see teachers and administrators as competent, reasonable, and caring. Your score placed you in the 1st percentile. These negative perceptions probably make it very difficult for you to accept your teachers, and that may hurt your attention and effort in school. If you try getting to know your teachers, you will find that most are warm and helpful. You may also want to talk with a counselor, who might be able to help you understand your feelings toward educators.

Aww, sniffle! Our survey shows that you have seen through this hopeless charade we call an education, and our feewings are aww hurted!! I don't find it particularly probable that my thinking school is worthless (or at least undergraduate school) is going to make me any less successful at it. I mean, fuck. I'm going to have to test out of COMP 100.

I think I'm actually allergic to Seattle. All these damn plants seem to want to have babies in my eyes and sinuses. It could be that, or the cheap perfume on the chicks in the week-long event at work, or maybe it's the no-option-but-down sheets on the bed in the hotel. Either way, I'm a damn wreck. I have to scrape my eyelids open in the morning to apply contacts. Thankfully aforementioned MD wrote me an Rx for Restasis, which is kind of curious. Apparently it's an immuno-suppressant. This seems counterintuitive to me at first, but I suppose if my eyes are trying to fight off the galyfilcon and "silicon hydragel" incursions, or pollen, perfume and other irritants, it makes sense. So the stuff works.

Lately, I've been caught in ever-more complex Outlook calendaring and email issues. I'm really torn between a scathing "I hate Outlook" and a "Outlook has made me vastly more productive." I've now got enough meetings and concalls and conferences and travel and all that, I simply cannot be without proper calendaring, and collaborative calendaring at that. My wife and I were using iCal with a WebDAV server for a time, but the inability for her to modify my calendar and vice-versa was a huge limitation. It's also impractical to extend this to an enterprise. Outlook's mail filtering is deplorable. It isn't fixed in E12 either, apparently (sidenote: Office 12 is pretty). What to do? Even if I could pop or imap my email, I'd be stuck with some combination of mutt+fetchmail+procmail. Which works, sort of. The problem is that mutt is horribly bad with list mail. Fetchmail, well... all that really needs to be said is "ESR". Procmail I don't really mind too much, despite its deeply arcane syntax. And why can't somebody write a mail client that's as nice as mutt, which actually includes pop, imap, and (gasp) both plus ssl? First motherfucker that says pine gets stabbed. And why in the hell has nobody fixed the multiple-timezone problems in Outlook calendaring? It's horribly ugly. A simple pulldown in the toolbar for "timezone" (or an option to turn one on) would be enormously helpful for those who dare to travel outside of Redmond. That having been said, I generally show up for meetings, now. And I know where I'll be next week.

Oh, my. Next thing we'll see is an iBrator powered off your iPod. Airplanes will never be the same.

I'm not generally one to belch forth two entries in a given day, but I suppose it merited mentioning, and the last entry was just so goddamn long, so this ought to get it off recentlog as well.

subversion

Yes, subversion is my RCS of choice. Not sourcesafe, or anything like that. Anyways, so it had literally been broken for, well, like months. Some months ago I had a massive clusterfuck reboot after which a bunch of stuff had broken. It had been about a year since I had rebooted the machine and really taken stock. After the machine came up, the httpd I had managing svn was horked. For compartmentalization purposes, I had separated my svn httpd from my standard httpd (and also because I didn't want to mess with redhat's httpd, or be stuck with a broken one if they chose to break it, go figure).



So after looking at the output from the init script, from apachectl, httpd, and everything else, I could not figure out what in the hell was wrong with the thing. It came up, ran successfully, and then completely barfed. Turns out (after some stracing, which I hadn't had time to do before), it was bitching about mod_rewrite. This is irksome, since it isn't mentioned in the httpd.conf, and it wasn't immediately clear to me why rewrite was being used. The error it was bitching about was not being to come up with a lock related to mutexes. "function not implemented". None of the mailing list archives on the web were particularly useful in debugging. A bunch of mandrake weenies were complaining that their kernel had broken apache which is, well, absurd. Somebody did suggest that apache had to be rebuilt. Since I still had the source sitting around, I checked to see whether my installed binary was the same one I had sitting in .libs. It was. Recompiled, and they were different. Interesting. So, install it, then rebuild and reinstall with DAV enabled, and voila, it works. I am guessing that within the year of uptime I had updated my libc or something which inadvertently broke mutexes for mod_rewrite, and a recompile fixed it. At any rate, the kernel itself didn't change.

development

So, having gotten svn back up again, I took stock of all the code that I had sitting around in subversion, as well as the code that I had sitting on my laptop. I was immediately struck by how many aborted projects I had sitting around. Within the last year (really since my separation with AOL), I've gone and developed no less than three different protocols, complete with either a server or a client (or both!), and then gotten bored and walked off.



What I really find interesting is that all the naming of individual components was influenced by Charles Stross books. It is strange to me that the evidence suggests that Mr. Stross' books motivate me to sit down and write something novel, like a new protocol. It would seem that upon finishing the book, I move on, and abandon the project. Some of the stuff is pretty cool (for example, using YAML on the wire to abstract other protocols, which is a frequent goal of mine), so I'm not real clear on why I abandoned it to begin with, although I do recall being short on time.



So I've been thinking of bringing some of them back up again, and actually have the yaml project in particular working again. Unfortunately, most of my documentation is based upon the specifics of what it was doing, not what I was planning on doing with it. So I kind of have to figure out a use for software I've written.



Kind of exciting, though. Almost like I had left some presents behind for myself.