Data migration on a small, but big, scale.

We had kept most of our iTunes data on a 250GB LaCie disk that I've been worrying about. We had no backup for it, but what do you do with 200gb of data? This isn't some enterprise migration (which I've done a bunch of), it's moving 250GB to a new disk (640GB).

So, I got a little wacky. I told disk copy to make a 400GB "empty" image. I then proceeded to copy all my data over to it. The finder, as per usual, barfed on the operation. Ditto(1) to the rescue.

Now, this is adding a level of abstraction, which is almost never a good thing (as both Sergei and Doug would tell me). My justification is thus:

• I'm not going to be surprised when I hit that 400GB mark, and with the 640GB drive, it means that there's 240GB for "the rest of the stuff."
• When I move it again, all I have to do is move one file. I'll probably use cp instead of the Finder to move it.
• It's easily mountable and unmountable. With disks, this can be a pain. Sometimes they unmount and won't come back.
• Apple's disk images have internal checksumming so I can ask the disk to "verify" or "repair" it.

So, this is real wacky. Totally against what I've been taught as a programmer, sysadmin, etc. But, this is a Mac. and Mac's Not Unix so ymmv.

By the way, if you have anything bigger than a gig, use ditto. You see that output up there? I can grep through it for errors. Try doing that in Finder. Here, I'll help. Finder, cmd-u, t. That's all there is to it

Job hunt metrics

When a friend contacts me and says they're looking for a job, they generally have a sense of despair. I guess the notion is that they in particular are unemployable or under qualified for anything they actually want to do. My response is that it is a metrics game.

I have sent out eighteen resumes, via email, since I returned home on Wednesday night. This doesn't count the sort of internal-submission thing that Monster does; if I listed that, I suspect the number would more than double.

Employers, for whatever reason, have a hard time finding employees. So they use headhunters and sites like Monster and Dice. If you're not using all your available bandwidth to send out resumes on these and other sites, chances are employers are missing you.

Talk to your friends. They know people who are hiring. Sometimes it is they who are hiring.

And, don't be afraid to apply for a position that's just a hair outside your skillset. If somebody wants you to do Solaris administration for systems that control aerostats, and you know Solaris and RF and RS-422, why not give it a go? The worst they can do is ignore your resume, and that's what you're expecting them to do anyways.







All that having been said, I have no small amount of depression and resentment for about three people at Lockheed Martin MS2 in San Diego. But, they'll get theirs. They always do.

Those "Y" people

I hate generational names ("boomers", "gen x", etc). But this woman has it spot-on. Her original source has a lot to say, but what I found most interesting was the following snippet:

6 Principles of Millennial Management

So how do you translate what you’ve read so far into your day-to-day life on the job? What do today’s young employees want? If we’re designing recruiting programs and management systems based on their values and needs, how do we proceed? What kind of work environments attract, retain, and motivate Millennial coworkers?
Here are their six most frequent requests:

1. You be the leader. This generation has grown up with structure and supervision, with parents who were role models. The “You be the parent” TV commercials are right on. Millennials are looking for leaders with honesty and integrity. It’s not that they don’t want to be leaders themselves, they’d just like some great role models first.
2. Challenge me. Millennials want learning opportunities. They want to be assigned to projects they can learn from. A recent Randstad employee survey found that “trying new things” was the most popular item. They’re looking for growth, development, a career path.
3. Let me work with friends. Millennials say they want to work with people they click with. They like being friends with coworkers. Employers who provide for the social aspects of work will find those efforts well rewarded by this newest cohort. Some companies are even interviewing and hiring groups of friends.
4. Let’s have fun. A little humor, a bit of silliness, even a little irreverence will make your work environment more attractive.
5. Respect me. “Treat our ideas respectfully,” they ask, “even though we haven’t been around a long time.”
6. Be flexible. The busiest generation ever isn’t going to give up its activities just because of jobs. A rigid schedule is a sure-fire way to lose your Millennial employees.

It's uncanny how she describes these requirements. I frequently tell employers "hey, I'm not really happy unless I'm dodging a bullet. I work very well that way. So in other words, I'm looking for a challenge. Is that what we're talking about?"

That question scares off maybe 80% of recruiters/HR people. The remaining ones tend to be defense contractors. Go figure.

And once more it is appropriate to quote RKM

The personal, as everyone's so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here -- it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference -- the only difference in their eyes -- between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people, they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life, and that it's nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.

Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

The price of stupidity

I don't need to name names, but let me name some figures:

• Cost of outbound flight: $300
• Rescheduling return flight three times: $300
• Cost of return flight: $400
• Cost of Hertz rental for 3.5 weeks: $750
• Cost of four tanks of gas: $240
  
• Cost of hotel stay for 3.5 weeks: $4500
• Cost, in (not me) man hours, of my trip: 50 (~ $2500)
• Cost, in man hours, of my trip (me): 178 (~ $8000)
• Time from initial interview to badged employee: 2.5 years
• Time from offer letter to badged employee: 8 weeks

Total, dollars: $16,990


And that doesn't include, you know, the whole two years of emails and phone calls about getting shit done. I have learned to go with my gut when I meet Lance Horne types (my boss at LMT could have been Lance's twin), I should just quit and save myself the trouble. I'm going to be looking for work anyways, why not just plan for it ahead of time?

1. Oh, I see you're an asshole and you're above me on the org chart.
2. Whatever you say. (return to cube)
1. Talk to previous colleagues, explain the situation, they'll ask for resumes.
1. resumes must be sent over HTTPS folks...
3. Deal with boss for another week or two or three or whatever, but you've got something lined up so that when he sends you that email, "come see me," you can give him the finger as he's telling you he is unhappy with your performance, appearance, whatever.
4. New job lines up.
5. Profit. Or return to step 1.

We've actually developed a proper noun for this process. It's the "Lance Transition". When I came back from Maui I was way ready to quit. But instead, I hung around, doing my job, thinking maybe things would be salvageable. No such luck. Instead, Lance gets the upper hand and he decides when I get my last check and he decides when I have to start looking for work.

I'm getting better at managing the LT, but clearly I still need to work on it.

Extending my stay in the US

After about a month in a hotel, a paperwork fuckup (I don't want to go into details) has precluded my traveling to the SPAWAR sites in Taiwan, thus making me useless to Lockheed, who hastily removed me from their employ.

Most of you know what I do, but for the spiders I'll leave a recap here.

• Unix, Linux, and about every derivation of either.
• I can give a 1-hour lecture on the differences between SysV and BSD.
• Perl. It's hard to say I'm an expert perl programmer, because I know some pretty fucking good perl programmers. On the other hand, 95% of the perl I see in the wild is hideous. Mine is clean and sparkly.
• Shell. csh and sh and their cousins and aunts and uncles. Approximately the same skill level as perl.
• The Defense Department. Been working for/with/near them on and off for a decade.
• I can tell you what the differences between C2 and C4I and C4ISR and C4ISR&T are.
• I wrote a perl module that speaks TDMA/Link16/JTIDS. Sure, it's not practical, but it at least demonstrates knowledge.
• Databases. They seem to follow me wherever I go. I've worked with DB2, Oracle (8, 9, and 10), Informix, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
• Teaching. I've done a lot of this recently. I like it.

Anyways, those with ears to ground, listening for competent people to come along please feel free to mail me (avriette@gmail.com) for a formal CV.

Net::TDMA is "finished"

I think it's going to be uploaded to CPAN as Net::TDMA. I'm going to add licensing information, tests, and the standard makemaker garbage to it tomorrow.

There's a problem, though. It doesn't fit into two gigs of ram. I will ruminate on this and perhaps make it possible to make an epoch that lives in a hypothetical day or a frame that lives in a hypothetical epoch. And so on. The POD is written.

Behold:

TDMA
TDMA/Constants.pm
TDMA/Day
TDMA/Day/Epoch
TDMA/Day/Epoch/Frame
TDMA/Day/Epoch/Frame/Slot.pm
TDMA/Day/Epoch/Frame.pm
TDMA/Day/Epoch.pm
TDMA/Day.pm
TDMA/TDMA.pm

I can't think of anything missing, except perhaps examples. But somebody else is going to have to write those examples.

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
#  Created by Alex J. Avriette on 2007-06-14.
#  Copyright (c) 2007. All rights reserved.

use warnings;
use strict;

use lib qw{ . TDMA };

use TDMA;
use TDMA::Day;
use TDMA::Day::Epoch;
use TDMA::Day::Epoch::Frame;
use TDMA::Day::Epoch::Frame::Slot;

use Data::Dumper;

my $day = TDMA::Day->new();

print Dumper \$day;

So, really, not especially complicated. You can then access any piece of the day and feed it data. This makes it more interestin for listening, but because of the data structures, it's a "leg up" if you need to actually speak TDMA.

Strange output from ps(1)

alex       537   8.5 -25.0   549672 524864  ??  R     1:48PM   0:16.28 /usr/bin/perl -I/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupp
alex       509   0.4 -36.9  1042488 774576  ??  S     1:45PM   0:36.49 /usr/bin/perl -I/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupp

So this is actually kind of funny. Perl was dutifully creating objects, when all of a sudden, it runs out of memory. Oh noes, here comes the swap. So it alternated between using 100% cpu and swapping the shit out of my disk. Darwin, for those of you who do not know, allocates swap as it goes along. In this case, it was seven gigs. This is a laptop, and I have two gigs of ram, but I do not have endless quantities of disk from which to pull swap.

Anyhow, I think the fourth column is the most interesting in this example.

I remember when I worked at AOL, I had data structures that were too big to fit into memory, and I can't for the life of me remember how I got around the "2gb series" limit. If you serialize to disk, that's just as bad as swapping.

So I guess I'm just going to kind of sit on TDMA until I figure out how to get around the fact that you can't approach it a whole day at a time, and I don't know how I'd keep sync between new instantiations (the military use dedicated time boxes).

You can only fuck with a man so much.

I know what industry I work in, I know the schedules we work with, and what's at stake. I know all that. I really do. So when you tell me I need to work an eighty hour week so a Kidd destroyer is fully operational, I say, sure, I'll do that. It's work ethic, it's pride in what I do, and it's also the joy of learning new systems.

But when we reach the intersection of hurting my wife, and we cross that threshold with very clearly communicated anger about it, it's too far. She doesn't work for anything national security. She doesn't even want to, because she sees what it does to me: the nightmares, the late hours, etc.

It is unconscionable the things that are going on right now that are really hurting Sandy, and she signed up for none of this.

So, kick my ass, tell me to work harder, work longer hours, work on more and more dangerous and deadly shit, threat briefings and the whole nine yards.

But, you don't fuck with my wife. There's a man out there who will never have my respect due to the way he's treating her. He says it's all part of my job. No, actually, my job ends when I leave the office. I go home to my wife. I miss her. I miss my bed. I miss the Subaru. This whole thing disgusts me, and at the same time I'm trying to spin up on it and get comfortable. Irony. Send me home for a day, or for a week, and I will come back twice as effective.

What do you think I'll be thinking about this week?

CPUs not fast enough

If I take a time sample at the instantiation of the first object (a "day" in TDMA), and there are subsequently 11,059,200 sub-objects created, the fact it will take me more than 7 miliseconds to actually create the objects means that they will be inaccurate as created. Their own clocks will be right, but they will be "slow" compared to the battlespace whatever the users does with them. It could be very serious (I want that Su-37 to blow up that unknown target please) or very mundane ("Could you verify that's that asshole tuna boat who keeps entering our kill zone?"). But I'm starting to think that creating the objects for a TDMA day, I should start with the smallest units and work backwards. That would make "days" and possibly "epochs" out of sync, but they are much less important than frames, which contain data.

Thank you everyone who has mailed me about this project. I had no idea there was so much interest. Note that with small modifications TDMA could be multicast and it rapidly starts to look like bittorrent.

Please, if you're working on stuff like this, or you want to know more details, let me know. I am close to done. There will be a CPAN release in June. There, I've said it, and thusly it must happen. Extra points to the first guy to send me a USB radio that can talk on telco TDMA frequencies.

The future of education and credentials

I am now "taking" an MIT, graduate level course, on Aeronautics. It's twenty-two times two hour lectures. This is normally (40h) how long a class takes over a semester. I'm also starting again on math again, approximately where I left off in high school (I'm a dropout). The algebra, at least the high school stuff, I figure I'll come up on pretty quickly. From there I need to teach myself calculus, and then on to differential calculus (I may have the term wrong), and linear algebra. I'm expecting it to take a year or two (by the time I get back from Taipei). I also plan to be in school, in physical classes where I can (language will be an issue).

But what, then do I list for my having listened to forty hours of the aeronautics course? The forty more of linear algebra?

It seems to me that as more and more education moves online, the more skills are going to be important as compared to somebody's background.

Picture a mechanical engineer with a masters', quizzing me on aeronautics. If I pass muster, does it matter whether I'm an autodidact or at least can listen and learn?

Encryption versus Communication

I am finding it interesting to notice the difference between encryption and jam-proofing or making things harder to listen in on. Let us say that I have 1024 open channels (tcp ports for example), but only you and I know which order they will be used to communicate upon and how much data will be exchanged, how can you possibly know what I am saying if I add jitter and/or propagation (google's define: fails here. propagation is the tail end of a message. If I have 256 bits in a message, and the first 0-16 can be jitter, and the last 32-128 can be propagation – dead signal or misleading signal – detecting the payload between the propagation and the jitter is hard)?

So what I am writing right now (for release to CPAN actually, my 2nd module, whee) is a highly jam-resistant protocol (how do you decide which ports to block? blocking all 1024 amounts to a DOS, and I can always "notice" jamming and switch to higher ports or the signature of the communication), and can be a very high-bandwidth protocol as well. Normally, it's applied over radio waves, but if you run it across "the wire" so to speak I think my original estimate was about 40 gigabytes a day. This from a near-unblockable, near-un-listenable, crypto-pluggable protocol.

It would be a cinch to make the software so crypted that it was un-listenable even by the people who get paid to listen (their TLD's rhyme with "pill"). All you'd have to do is come up with reasonable jitter, propagation, and crypto. It would be untouchable, even with "over the counter" crypto or with tokens like RSA keys.

But, anyways, that's what I'm getting at. It's really interesting that I can write a protocol that can support jitter, frequency/port hopping, and crypto, but the crypto is its own separate component. That's all math. And if the math is broken, it's only a matter of time before your jittering propagating hopping protocol is cleartext to the red team.

The Yossarian take on HR

This photo was taken at a "beer bash" at an ISP. The man in question is in HR. What's he drinking? Bottled water. What's he looking for? People drinking too much so they can politely be told to behave. He's not your friend. Shit, he's almost a sort of HR-looking Agent Smith. You gotta love the glasses.

Anyone who's read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (incidentally, a close friend of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s) will recall the tale of Yossarian. I would like to analogize here, and inject from Yossarian the feeling of despondence and sheer hopelessness – our kitchen staff are bombing us here, and it's business as usual.

Human Resources is a good organization to have around. For example, they do a lot of the recruiting, which management doesn't want to do. They can answer questions about 401(k)'s. They can tell me which form I need to submit to my health carrier to get reimbursed for the out-of-network office visit I had. These are all very simple, pedestrian tasks (because even with recruiting, they're searching for keywords, screening out the felons, and providing management with a stack of resumes; porpoises could do this).

But, somewhere in the late 80's or maybe early 90's, HR grew into a policy organization too. It makes sense, because they need to be able to tell me that getting acupuncture with "full release" is not covered under our insurance.

Now, HR provides guidance on morals and ethics, career development, performance evaluation, and they build these enormously complex websites which are completely unnavigable. So people whose real majors were sociology or psych wind up making what they think are very good judgments based either other policies they've made, or on whatever moral or ethical sense they rely on. The problem is thus.

The whole system is broken.

The more questions you ask of HR, the more they start to think that you're not a "team player," because you obviously don't understand or don't like the rules that are in place. Or you might have the audacity to suggest that the policy be changed to allow something not presently allowed (like coverage of a domestic partner). So, more and more, you become the problem for doing exactly what HR asked you to do – use their processes to resolve requests, conflicts, or job-related issues (career development/performance review).

The telescopes on Haleakala which are run by MHPCC. These are not astronomical telescopes; their focal lengths are more in the neighborhood of 300 miles.

I'm going to provide a real example here of how this becomes a problem.

I was working for Microsoft, and had properly taken leave, applying months in advance, stating that I was going for my wedding anniversary (and also because I wanted to see the MHPCC). The hotel we were staying at, the Marriott Renaissance Wailea was undergoing renovations (so we got the waterfront room as a complimentary upgrade), but unfortunately due to the renovations had no internet access. Not wired, not wireless. I had brought on the trip my powerbook because we take so many pictures on vacation it requires "dumping" the CF card frequently (sometimes 3-4 times a day).

We had produced so many pictures of so many wondrous things that I went to an internet cafe and uploaded my photos to flickr. I'm not sure what inspired me to check my work email, but I did through Outlook Web Access. I had a reminder from my boss, Lance Horne, to turn in some document by COB the next day (A friday; Hawaii is six hours behind DC). I replied and told him I had it about 1/2 to 2/3 done, and that I'd get it to him when I got back. He insisted that it wasn't a valid excuse to miss a deadline simply because I was on vacation.

"But I didn't even bring a work laptop with me! I can't actually go and complete it!"

He told me that I must not be very serious about my career if I wasn't willing to do the work assigned to me.

So this is a manager-employee conflict. Who comes in? HR. What I did was call the woman I knew at HR, who had handled some health stuff for me previously, and said "can he make me work on vacation? I thought the rule was you didn't work on vacation because you're supposed to rest. I've been working like a dog, and accrued six weeks of vacation."

Her answer was murky. She said that no, paid vacation means I do not have to work, and he cannot "make" me work. What he can do is "ask" that I work, and if I do not thusly work that it will be counted negatively against me on my performance review.

She then immediately called Lance. Lance was livid to be receiving a call from HR telling him how to manage his employee. I then got another call from Lance that was roughly equivalent to (shaking fist) "why you little..."

What do we learn from this parable? That HR exists to create and follow its own policies, as well as provide them to others. We also learn that HR are sort of the "hall monitor" in a company (different than ops sec), and can tell your boss that you are right, they are wrong, and that they should change their behavior to more closely match company policy. But in so doing, you do nothing but irritate the supervisor, who then starts looking for a way to either get out of the HR "ruling," or simply firing you.

By the time I got back from Maui, Lance and I had so poisoned our relationship that there was absolutely no way we could work together. All this because I followed HR policy, and then asked HR for "backup" when my boss was unaware of (or didn't care about) the same policies.

iTunes U

iTunes U is a new product from Apple, offering what Harvard and MIT have already been offering. The notion is that the video lectures they get (or audio lectures) during the course of presenting the class, they can put online for free. Which is neat because there are "universities" like DeVry and University of Phoenix which are charging people for the same service. That is, to provide you with course material. Of course, they also provide you with a professor, but in my experience this professor has been just this side of the spear-wielding carnivorous chimps we've recently heard so much about. Things like "you mis-spelled 'particular'" (I had used the word 'particulate').

So I have a bunch of issues with it, of course. But it's newish software and I am guessing it will get better. Sort of like Apple's initial managing of audiobooks or recently of music videos and movies. As soon as they figure shit like that out, I think we'll be doing okay.

But first, there's this giant bug really bothering me. Look at this:


Anyone who's spent time with iTunes knows that this means it is ready to shit the bed. Which is normally okay because I can bounce the app, and all that stuff comes back, ready to be downloaded. In this case, both pause and resume are greyed out, my files have failed to download, and I'm just stuck.

Note also how small the scrolly is there. That's like a hundred and fifty items (I fly a lot). Unfortunately because they're not purchases, Apple has no real record that I've downloaded them. I have no idea how they track it. So, if I were to kill iTunes, restart it, and look for my downloads, it'd be tabula rasa, baby. I'd have to go and re-find all of those in all those different hard to find places that took me 2-3 hours to actually get into my download queue.

This is now the second time I've done this, and it's pissing me off. iTunes needs to handle network interruptions a lot more robustly, and it really needs to understand and support features like iTunes U.

The other gripe I have with iTU is the utter lack of anything below undergraduate. There's no Algebra II. I would bet that a huge fraction of Apple's iTunes Store patrons are children, on their parent's credit cards or allowances or whatever. Maybe they need help, or maybe they want to place into pre-calc in ninth grade.

It's painfully missing. A lot of the stuff there is great, there's a lot of garbage too, but what there isn't is material for anyone under about 20 years old.

The only other thing I have to say is there is a ton of Christian material. There's a seminary, and a bunch of religious business from Seattle Pacific University, and that kind of bugs me. I don't know that I want a seminary on iTU. Let's keep the ideology out, and have secular courses. I don't think we need to have "a fundamentalist view on [ noun ]" (offending noun removed, but an actual topic of a 54 minute video), any more than we need to have video courses on using cell phones and remote door locks to detonate IEDs. (meta-godwin, nyah)

Here's your chance

For all of you who continually ask me, "what are you listening to?", or want some kind of recommendation or a playlist out of me, I suggest (again) you check out last.fm. A few of these artists I picked up through last.fm, but a few of them I haven't gotten to yet. It looks like I'll be buying a lot of The Tea Party because it's right up my alley, and I need a tiny break from being panjabi. By the by, astute readers of both this weblog and my preferences on last.fm will note that I like Transglobal Underground. A lot. One of my favorite tracks (and I may go on, some time, to say one of my favorite tracks ever) is Drinking in Gomorra. Do yourself the favor, spend the $1.07 and buy that track. Then use Apple's handy "complete album" feature if you like it (I'm pretty sure you will). If not, it's hardly much of a loss.

If you manage to do this correctly, you could actually be listening to music I like before I ever listen to it and you could, you know, recommend it to me. Wouldn't that be novel?

Olfactory senses and memory

In advance, I apologize for being very sappy. Stop right here if you don't want to read drivel about feel-good stuff. The normal sarcasm and spite are missing tonight.


I spent much of my evening talking with a woman who has become one of my oldest friends. So much comes to mind when I see these people – there are a precious few women I count among the only, and very close, friends I have – as we have such a past. It's not always the twinned spending years together past, and not all of them have been lovers or even remotely romantic interests. Tonight, we spoke all night, and spoke of many things. People we knew, what we had been doing with ourselves, where we were going, the state of the world, and all that. But there was also much nostalgia – not so much wishing for the old days, but just a realization I think that we all grew up. We got here. None of us are kids anymore, some of us are parents, and some of us are just the human equivalent of a trainwreck now.

But the evening started with a hug, and it all just came flooding back, briefly. I know she isn't wearing the same fragrances (and really, "fragrance" includes shampoo and conditioner as well as deodorant and perfume), but there's a her smell that briefly flooded my sinuses and I was taken back to other times in her arms, a decade or more ago. Time we'd spent together.

When you spend time with somebody, when you sleep with them (or work with them a long time, or your parents and siblings), you learn, not actively, but rather passively, what that person's "smell" is. Because even when they've just woken up and they're not wearing anything, if you put your nose to the nape of their neck or between their breasts (including the center of a man's chest, mind) or even behind their ears, you smell them. You just get accustomed to their presence, and you recognize it when you pick up their clothes, or get into the car with them. Stuff like that.

I was just very surprised tonight when we hugged that everything, for a moment, flooded back. It was amazing in a way to have some little cluster of neurons concentrating so hard on flashing back to when we were much closer. For just a moment, I got to have what I can't ever really have – a piece of the past. We then broke the embrace and sat down to talk and reminisce.

The same is true, incidentally, when I get home from a business trip and I get to wrap my arms around Sandy. Only then do I actually feel home. And just like tonight, it brings back the affection and closeness, the ambiguous but deep memories, all at once, and all so briefly. Then it's off to get fucking luggage or whatever.

With all these people, whether it's an old lover, a friend, my mother, or my wife, as I remember the feelings that wash over me with the smell, I realize it's love, coming back. I ache to see these people, and we're all so geographically separated. To have them back in arms, to have the smell, and the reassuring feel of their arms around you, is to remember just how much I love (and indeed miss, greatly) these people.

Where I've been

I have been getting little of consequence done. It turns out that doing my own redinking is really, really slow. I guess this is what the galley process is like. And this is just my copy of the manuscript. I mean, imagine after it goes to a galley and editor! Think how much shit I'll have to move around, omit, change, etc. I won't just have one copy, I'll have a dozen.

I've been drinking bourbon and rye of late. Highly recommend Hirsch. They have an 18 year old bourbon and a 21 year old rye. Both are just phenomenal.

You'll probably notice my bent has become sort of bent in the direction of Alkaline Trio (incredible songwriting, but deeply morbid, sometimes downright suicidal. Great band, but with my history of depression I need to sort of keep an eye on my consumption) if you monitor my page on last.fm. It should also show that I have joined the "desi" and "panjabi" groups. I assure you – hopefully the picture above illustrates – I have not changed ethnicity (although sometimes I'd like to). I've just started exploring south asia. I knew a while back that there was a huge club scene in Goa (and an entire form of techno emerged from Goa, of which I am a huge devotee), and that Bhangra was making its way into the discotechques of London. I've also been listening to Mentor Kolektiv (I'd provide a link, but all of them are really annoying), who are London-based, but seem to be of Pakistani descent (or at least some of them). It's all pretty interesting stuff, even though I don't speak Hindi or Bengali or anything, so I obviously miss some of it.

The other thing to notice is that the hotel firewall is iffy, and sometimes last.fm is unable to take a tally. Also, when I'm at work listening to music, the Mac is not allowed on the network, so eight hours of music (give or take) never makes it to last.fm.

That's most of what there is to update. There's a lot of other stuff that's been going on, but nothing I can talk about publicly.

Spend the time you can with the people you love. They won't always be there. That is all.

Today is a good day to drink

This, folks, is a draft copy of Limits. Yep, now all I have to do is redink the fuck out of it, get the hook right, and publish the fucker. Tonight, we drink to us.

Sharks and Limits

People want to read Sharks more than they want to read Limits. I think this is fair, given the former is an interesting, Pahlaniuk-style parable, while the latter is a sort of sanctimonious conviction of humanity. But I suck at writing first-person (even after reading Glasshouse and trying to, uh, "pick it up"). I am worried I may need to take a writing class or something to get my skill to the point where I can write first person in a believable, tenses-match, time-passes-plausibly kind of way. Right now, it feels like crap. And I hate that.

Ode to a Linksys router

Thy name 'linksys',
thy configuration none;
why must you connect to the internet
and from writing distract one?

Product review: Sony MDR-EX81LP

My last flight from ATL to SAN was absolute hell. When I flew for MSFT, I was usually in first class because I was flying a lot more, had a lot more miles (we used a lot when we went on the trip to Hawaii back in 2006), and so on. But this trip around, I only had a paltry 60,000 miles, and only had "silver" status. So I got cattle class on the way from ATL to SAN. I presume the same thing will happen on SAN to ATL (although ATL to DCA is upgraded gratis, usually).

Sony has essentially one kind of head phone. At least, as far as the in-ear headphones go. They are actually all called "high performance ultra-secure fit." When you start looking at the specifications, you can see that they are impressive. Frequency response is actually greater than my Senns or my Etys, 5 - 23,000Hz.

What confused me initially about the cans was that there was a pair for $99, and another pair for $49 (note Amazon's pricing is a little different, and they're a lot closer in price). They have actually the same frequency response. They have the same fitment (Sony's, uh, weird in-ear-canal fitting). Sure, they look a little different, and they fit on the ears a little differently, but for all I could tell, these cans were the exact same speaker in a different package. It took me about five minutes of reading the documentation for the $99 pair to realize the power to that pair is twice that available to the cheaper pair.

Being somebody who actually has a headphone amp, this doesn't trouble me too much. Besides, it's not like the MacBook has line-out and we're talking un-dirty signal to begin with. So, the first recommendation is buy the EX81's, not the EX90's, if you're serious about sound.

The next thing to bring up is the fact that they are incredibly bass-heavy. The EX90's indicate that they have "superb bass performance" or something equally insipid. The notion is that people that are listening to contemporary music are really into bass. Folks, let me fill you in on something. Music doesn't have more or less bass. Music has a standard frequency response for each of its instruments, and artificially inflating the amplitude of a bass guitar, bass drum, or even bass vocalist distorts the music, it doesn't make it better. This is something you learn when you start paying really close attention to music.... which most of the people who read this blog don't actually do. But let me assure you, the sound that comes out of these cans is crisp, warm, mostly accurate, but horridly bass-biased. There's no reason at all that Lauryn Hill should be able to overpower Killing Me Softly with her... song. The point is, there's a happy medium between anemic lows and earth-shaking bass notes. These cans don't try for that medium. They're on the side of the earth-shakers.

As for highs, the highs are kind of muddy. If you're listening to hip-hop the only highs you're going to be getting are the hi-hats and maybe some of the female vocalists. So, maybe that doesn't bother you. But even if you listen to the Black Eyed Peas, and you listen to Don't Phunk With My Heart (which was, of course, before she became Fergalicious and was just a talented vocalist), the incredibly expanded bass response clobbers her nasal and artificially pitch-increased voice (listen to Wyclef's explanation of how they achieved that effect on the iTunes Originals for BEP) – which is crucial to the mood and tone of the track itself. It's supposed to invoke hindi chanting on Indian music. So it's no particular surprise when the track that particularly offended me was in fact Indian (by way of England, to be honest) Panjabi MC's outstanding (and remixed about a zillion times) track, Jogi – to say nothing of Beware the Boys (Mundian to Bach Ke). In one case, you're clobbering perfectly good female vocals (Jogi) and in the other, you're clobbering perfectly good male vocals (Beware).

The mids are really unremarkable in that it's hard to pick them out from the muddy highs and the absurd lows. They're there (the beginning of Mundian to Bach Ke before the sitar starts), but the clarity is missing.

Now, to be fair, I own a pair of Sennheiser 590's, Sennheiser 650's, Etymotic ER6's (not the ER6i, which is bass-distorted), and a pair of Etymotic ER4's. So it's not as if I'm comparing these fifty dollar Sony headphones to ten dollar K-Mart "cool looking" headphones. But I am really disappointed in their sound capabilities. I'm also kind of disappointed because it means that Sony made the decision for the speakers on these cans based upon what they thought the public wanted. Which means, of course, that the public is entirely stupid and wouldn't know what a DAC was (or, frankly, a headphone amp or vacuum tube) was if any of them bit them on the face (I can think of a few people I'd love to see attacked by vacuum tubes).

The last real item to include is the fit. The fit is awkward. I am accustomed to double (Ety ER-6) and triple (Ety ER4) baffled cans. The baffles that ship with these headphones (they ship with three sizes so you can get the ones that fit you best) are capable of isolating sound, but because they don't actually affix too well to the cans themselves, you can pull the cans out while leaving the baffles in your ears, which can be embarrassing at best, and disgusting at worst (ears tend to produce things you don't want to go digging for, and maybe that stuff should stay on your baffles until you clean them...)

So, my hope is that the baffling will be substantial enough that the inevitable infants who will encircle me on my flight to Atlanta (that Earth equivalent of the pit of Carcoon) will be drowned out be either some nice hindi chanting, some thumping trance, or maybe even some Alkalkine Trio or Depeche Mode. Because it sure as shit isn't enough to make audiobooks possible.

Speed and the speedball

It's long been talked about that in western culture (although specifically in American culture), that we have an obsession with speed, and that not only do we all know it's unhealthy, we all still encourage it. The speed of light is no longer fast enough, because you gotta get those electrons from Dublin to San Diego in less time than (let's spell it out) a hundred and eighty six thousand miles per second (minus inefficiency in the wire).

So is it also any wonder that thirty percent of the population is believed to be (mis)using anxiolytics? I actually tried to find comparative statistics that show that America was using more tranquilizers than Europe, but it turns out that Europe has an even worse problem with them (Scotland in particular, for whatever reason). Note also that I use the term "problem" here in the medical sense – I'm not making a value judgement on whether people should be using anxiolytics.

But, let's talk for a moment about the speedball. This is the drug combination that killed Chris Farley (in addition to being grossly overweight, etc), and John Belushi, among many other people. In fact, you can find an entire list of people who have "checked out" with a speedball on Wikipedia (although I make a point of not linking to them anymore, you're welcome to do your own research).

So in America we have this incredibly accelerated lifestyle. As an engineer, I am pretty good at estimating how long it takes me to get something done. So, let's say I give my boss an estimate of four days to finish coding up an API. Well, usually people get tired towards the end of the day (this is a circadian thing), and they also get tired after eating lunch. So they compensate (at least, I sure do), with some sort of "energy beverage." There are varying degrees of these:

• Red bull (mild)
• Rock star and the double-size drinks (moderate)
• Coffee drinks, such as a "venti caramel macchiato"
  
• Boo-Koo, the "Triple Monster" and other triple-size drinks (severe)
• Redline and related (I'm almost inclined to say hazardous here)

The Red Bull drinks may actually be the safest here, but you're still imbibing a lot of caffeine and "other stuff," off a can that says "these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" yada yada.

The Rockstar and other drinks are approximately the same only twice as strong. I remember the first time I had a Rockstar drink (back in 2004 at AOL), I came home to Sandy and said "you know how Red Bull doesn't really do it for me anymore? Well, holy shit, this stuff gave me jitters." She still can't finish a can of the stuff, although the taste is more pleasant.

The coffee drinks may be the worst. So let's talk about what this does to your body. Say for example, you get an entire Red Bull or Rockstar's worth of caffeine (my common request is for a venti mocha with five shots and no whipped cream), but what else do you get? You get a ton of fat and sugar. So your liver is going into shock dealing with all the sugar and your GI tract is handling all the lipids. So while you got the caffeine you were looking for, there's a huge crash in store for you when your body decides its time to store things rather than be stimulated.

The triple sized ones are something of a mystery to me. I suppose if you're somebody who is tolerant of a double-sized drink, a triple makes sense. But then, I remember when I had a caffeine habit that was so brutal if I didn't get it within an hour of waking up, I had an all-day-long headache that occasionally required demerol.

Redline, I have talked about before. It is by far, the most powerful, most potent, and most foul-tasting energy drink I've ever had. It uses ingredients (such as evodiamine) which are not well understood, are only now undergoing clinical trials, and do "interesting" things to our metabolic rates.

So what has this got to do with Heroin and Cocaine?

And so is it any wonder that when we are so stimulated, that we require a depressant as well? What is the exact effect? Well, anyone who has had "too much" of their desired stimulant (if you dare, go have a Redline drink if you haven't had one before. It will be about four hours of unpleasant stimulation) knows what it feels like: your body is "running too fast." Your hands shake. It's hard to type accurately. It's hard to even sit still.

So is it any wonder that we would take depressants with our stimulants? What happens when we combine them? Well, we reduce the adverse affects of the stimulant, for one. Stimulants have this great tendency to speed the body up, to keep you awake, and allow you to accomplish more work. But you pay for this with somatic discomfort. Your fingers shake, legs are restless, and so on. But if you combine this with a depressant (let's use Valium as an example, although the opiates are far more common – although less legal), you manage to suppress the somatic effects while still retaining the stimulant effect.

This means that we can still feel great – invincible even, there's no work you can't get done – but because we've also got the "downer" in our system, we don't feel like shit (because our body knows full well it's not invincible and it's going to pay for it later).

So it's no wonder that we have a huge problem with benzodiazepine abuse in the United States. It's partially because we have a problem with a very high-stress, high-speed society, and partially because we spend so much time on huge levels of stimulants (including sugars, amphetamines, and caffeine).

We'd all be a lot healthier, and people like Chris Farley might be alive today if we'd just look at the way we're running our society and admit that it's totally fubar. The fact that we have a statistically significant portion of our population (because let's just agree here that the 30% who have a benzo problem probably intersect somewhere in the Venn diagram with the people consuming OTC stims) are poly-medicating with stims and downers indicates (as I say over and over again), a deep problem with the way society works.

The first step, folks, is to recognize the problem is there. And frankly, the statistics are there. If I had access to PubMed or could spend some time at NLM, I bet you a donut I could correlate stimulant use with depressant use in a large number of patients.

And, let's be honest. That's just a really sad reflection of both our social networks and our workplaces.

Broken ribs, pain, diagnoses, and the pharmocracy.

So, let's start with a quote from an article from SFGate (and we all know how conservative the Bay Area is, so it's going to be commie ranting about health coverage, but I assure it's relevant).

He was riding his motorcycle through San Francisco's Presidio on Sept. 19. It was late afternoon. Palmer was heading toward the Golden Gate Bridge and then home to Richmond.

Suddenly his brakes locked, sending the motorcycle into a slide. Palmer slammed into a guardrail. He was pretty shaken up, but he could tell he wasn't badly hurt.

A passer-by saw the accident and called for help. An ambulance arrived within minutes.

Palmer said he told the paramedics that his ribs felt banged up, possibly broken, but that he was basically OK. He said he preferred to be treated in Contra Costa County, where he lives and would probably qualify for reduced hospital rates because of his income level.

This sounds familiar. Broken ribs. It's pain, right? The only reason to go to the doctor is because you're in a shitload of pain. Ribs hurt, a lot. The rest of the article is drivel about how he was charged a lot of money because our Republic doesn't have socialized health care, et cetera, et cetera. What the important point is (and they seem to have missed or ignored) is that the only reason the guy went to the hospital is the intense pain he was in. This is a recurring theme in my "pharmocracy" rants.

So what's really surprising is there's a lot of research (including clinical trials) on treating broken ribs with what amounts to a hormone that stimulates calcium growth at break points. The stuff is called calcitonin, well documented, and naturally nobody even mentions this. Apparently, taking calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D can aid bone repair too. Did we get this at the ER? No. Of course not. Here's 24 percocet (5/325, the weakest they can prescribe), enjoy your pain.

Let's look at some other interesting quotes from another article, though:

• Fracture of the left lower ribs is associated with splenic injuries


• Motor vehicle crashes (most common mechanism)


• Patient-controlled anesthesia allows adequate pain relief with minimal inhibition of respiratory drive.


• Morphine sulfate -- Used to achieve a desired anxiolytic and analgesic effect because easily titrated to desired level of pain control or sedation

So first off, I broke ribs 3-4 on my left hand side. Nobody gave me a CT to see if my spleen is okay (hey, I'm alive, it's probably okay, right?). There are three hundred thousand cases a year of broken ribs. The vast majority of these are from auto accidents, and the patients are given things like ibuprofen, ketoprofen, tylenol 3, and the "baby percocet" I mention above. The MD who wrote the article, Christopher Doty, however, says that for analgesia and as an anxiolytic, morphine is the preferred – and patient controlled – analgesic. Because, really, you just fell off a motorcycle, had a car accident, or whatever, and your ribs hurt like hell.

But ERs, I guess in trauma centers, you're some kind of a pussy if you're hurting. When I had meningitis, they kept me on iv dilaudid q4h for an entire week. But when I show up with broken bones from a goddamn motorcycle accident, they give me enough percocet to last four days when it's clear that the injury will take between three and eight weeks to heal.

What's really frightening in addition to the "pain chauvinism" of trauma staff is the fact that there is such high mortality in rib fractures. In fact, you're more likely to die if you're female. You're more likely to die if you break low ribs (5) or high ribs (1) because you break important things under those ribs.

What nobody told me in the trauma center is that because my breathing is so shallow (it hurts to breathe, folks) fluid can build up and I could go back into pneumonia.

I'm really, really upset at the complete ineptitude of the trauma staff at the GWU Hospital ER. For the number of cases we get per year of rib fractures (at 300,000, that means .1% (Pablo gives the correction here of oh-point-one-percent, rather than one percent) of people per year receive them), they should know that there is a tendency towards pneumonia. They should know that leaving the patient with twenty-four percocet is not going to help anything. Motrin 800 is not going to help anything. What you're going to have to give these patients is something like 20-80mg of oxycontin (or Oramorph SR, or whichever) for six weeks minimum. However, as I've said before, when doctors lose the monopoly on pain, they become irrelevant. It is in the interest of the medical profession to keep the injured in pain.

This boggles my mind, and frankly makes me sick. I might go vomit except it would hurt so fucking much.

Sometimes I just really have a deep, spiteful hate for doctors. Just how many of them out there do you think are willing to adequately treat rib fractures from a motorcycle accident? A few percent maybe? What are my chances, in picking a random trauma center, that I'll get a doctor who actually understands the degree of pain suffered, the risks of the injury, and the length of time it will take to heal?

I think what happened is the asshole at GWU Trauma gave me some sort of sanctimonious "punishment" for my having the audacity to ride a motorcycle. Well, if the world works the way I hope it does, he'll be run over by a cement truck and be given ibuprofen to treat his pain. Because, afterall, he did walk in front of a cement truck, and that was stupid.

By the way

Don't ever break your ribs. It hurts like hell. Really, it's like hell crawled under your skin and is stabbing you with infernal Klingon pain thingies. Like ouch. A lot of ouch. Don't do it.

Love and hate in California

Yeah, that California. The one in which everyone is not really an asshole, they just can't tolerate you being an asshole.

I once lived in California. In fact, I grew up in California, and moved to Potomac, Maryland after living here for twenty-one years. At the time, I was not leaving because I didn't like California. And for years, living in the DC Metro region, I would tell people that I was only there for a little while, that "my home was in California," and I would eventually be returning (although I did suggest that I might be moving to the Bay Area rather than San Diego).

I've returned many times. I average once a year or so, usually for a week, sometimes two. The things I crave in California are simple: the Pacific, and Mexican food. You can't get good Mexican back east. There aren't any damn mexicans for starters. It's El Salvadoreans and Hondurans who can put chicken in a tortilla. This is not Mexican food. And this Atlantic ocean we have back east, well, ick. It's just not worth the effort. I'll take a 48°F swim in La Jolla Cove over an 80°F swim in Miami, any day of the week.

A Mitsubishi 3000GT (ordinarily a neat car), with a body kit poorly applied, in filthy condition, and advertising his "team" – "Team Hybr8d". You can find this particular specimen over by the Spectrum office center (he's a little bit east of the Scripps offices)

But just today, I think I realized what it is I like about California but just can't put my finger on: decadence. It's like some bizarre monument to excess. From the Irvine Spectrum (this enormous monolith that changes colors slowly by the freeway) to Moffett Field to Jim Wolf Technology and the entire rice-race scene in southern California (to be fair, anti-rice is country-wide. however, the images started here in southern california and he had the decency to document the sherbet orange dodge neon that "terrorized" mira mesa back in the 90s).

I mean, everything is done to excess. I walked along Ruffin Road today and every single SUV (and this had to be 70% of cars) had twin pipes, presumably breathing through headers. I mean, it was a complete racket. Entirely amazing. What is it all of them needed the extra 15hp for? Or how about the orange Eclipse (4G63) with "spinnaz"?

It's not just cars that Californians do to excess. One need look no further than a Carls Junior's or a Jack in the Box to know that even the fast food is excessive. Go to an Alberto's, Roberto's, Adalberto's, Aiberto's, etc., and ask for a carne asada (or carnitas) burrito. What you will get will be approximately three thousand calories of genuine mexican food. You may wash this down with Horchata, which is a lovely drink.

Those of us that partake know of the fabled "Humboldt Weed." In fact, California is so extreme, so decadent, that they contravened federal law and legalized Marijuana with Proposition 215.

Where am I going with all of this? Well, you'd think that since I've lived in DC for about seven years now (a third the time I lived in California), I'd have had my fill of corrupt politicians (although Randy Cunningham is yours; Anthony Williams is ours) and fucked up laws and things like that. But you know, I kind of like California. I asked Hertz for a Subaru Outback (hey, it's like my STI, right?) and what did they do? They gave me a complimentary upgrade to a Chevy Trailblazer. So now I'm getting like 15 miles per gallon doing 95 on the freeway (because the speed limits are 65! Whoa! and traffic goes so damn fast that 95 is, well, keeping up with the Lincoln Navigator in front of me!) instead of 25, and it doesn't really bother me. Because I'm in California, and that's just how we do it here.

In fact, California elected the personification of excess.

But, this is where it ends. I have had my fill of this garbage. I had twenty-one years of it. I see it from time to time in DC and it makes me sick. So California is kind of like one big Disneyland from Tijuana to Marin (I'm not sure what's north of Marin, but I'm pretty sure it's cows and stuff). Drive as fast as you like, eat thousands of calories of guacamole and "sirloin burger," go to Cheetah's and don't feel guilty about it. That's what California is all about. It's excess from end to end.

Consider a comparison with drinking. Sure, I like to drink. From time to time, I like to drink so much I get what you could call shitfaced drunk. I tend to do it on expensive liquor, but that's right in line with this example. I don't like to get drunk every night. I don't even like to drink every night. But eeeeeeeevery once in a while, I get a wicked feeling like I gotta go down a fifth of bourbon (or whisky, or rye, or rum, or ...). That's the feeling I'm talking about. I still love California in the way I love getting shitfaced drunk. I could never live here any more than I could be perpetually shitfaced drunk. But I don't mind visiting from time to time and living like an animal.

vive les animaux!

edit: added pictures to prove I wasn't lying.