From First Principles

I finally broke down and purchased an iPhone 3G on Saturday. After two days of using it, I must say I am quite happy with it. I really appreciate it after using a Motorola Q for 6 months. Anyone know of a good IRC client for iPhone?

Current Location: 39.949036, -75.166031

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

I had some strange problems building SBCL on my Intel mac mini. At least, when it was being built in a directory served by OpenAFS, the build failed eventually. After consultation with slyrus on freenode irc, I moved the sources and the 0.9.15 binary onto my local disk to do the build. And it worked fine.

So, I moved the binary that resulted out into AFS-land - and it failed to run. Hrmppphhhh. Changing the AFS owner to someone with a UID on the local box caused the sbcl binary to run. Tried the build again. Failure mode.

Just to prove I wasn't halucinating, I moved it all back to the local disk and rebuilt from scratch - which worked fine again.

The joke here is that the errors were related to malloc()ing memory from the heap - something which should have no relationship whatsoever with the fact that the image is in AFS-land.

Just for gigles, I took some C code I had lying around that did a few malloc()s and compiled and ran it. It didn't seem to make one bit of difference whether or not it was in AFS-land - nor what UID was the owner of the binary.

I'm confused, to say the least.

In this entry, I mentioned that I had purchased a used pool table. Yesterday morning, they arrived to install it. Sadly, it didn't fit through the doorway into the basement, so we had to go with plan B - the "dining" room.

The problem with plan B (you knew there had to be one right?) is that the room isn't quite large enough for use with full size cues. The table is mostly playable, but some shots just can't be made. So, yesterday evening [after about a two hours nap and 4 racks of straight pool], I went off in search of shorter cues. I ended up purchaing a 40" Mizerak cue from The Sports Authority and a 48" two-piece Excalibur cue from Dick's Sporting Goods. I should be good to go now.

Happy birthday to us. Happy birthday to us. Happy birthday Jon & Debbie. Happy birthday to us.

12 years ago, on a Saturday, we got married in Lancaster county, PA. Hooray!

Current Mood: ecstatic

Today I purchased my first billiards table. It's a used table, originally made by Wilmington Billiard Company in Wilmington, DE. It has a 1" slate bed and will have wine-colored cloth once it is delivered and assembled. The installers will be here at 08:00 on Saturday, 2006-08-05!!!! I can hardly wait!!!!!

Current Mood: bouncy

I have a chronic problem with stress. It interacts with my medications and mental state to produce an increasing whirlwind of stress-hormone release. Regardless of how I try to release the stress, I end up feeling battered, bruised, fatigued, folded, mutilated, spindled, torn and weary.

This has caused me to focus on how I am choosing to relieve my stress. I find that it rarely involves a rational choice to relieve stress in any given way. Rationality, it seems, is malfunctioning, in so far as it is used only to dissuade me from pursuing particular paths toward less stress. This misfeature leaves me desperately trying to choose between a small number of self-destructive choices.

Post-decision review often leads me to think I could have made a better choice, but these are often not even within my frame of reference when the choice has to be made. There is no doubt, at the time, that a choice is necessary and soon.

My query is: how do you relieve your stress?

Note: comments are being screened, so let me know if you want them to appear publicly.

Current Location: Home Sweet Honey Brook
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Close To Me / The Cure / Galore The Singles 1987 - 1997

For some reason that still remains a mystery to me, I felt a strong compulsion to go on vacation this past week. Perhaps it was inevitable due to the low-grade mania I'd been under for the previous 5 weeks. Perhaps I'm just going through a mid-life crisis and am seeking stiluli I haven't experienced in a long time. In any case, I managed to get most of last week off from work and have been on a beach vacation since Tuesday, July 18, 2006.

The first night was great. Chesapeake, VA is a nice place, not very far from the Outer Banks (OBX), where we would be staying and I had reward points for a free-night in a two bed-room suite at the Residence Inn there. The room was tremendously large, even for 2 adults and 3 children. The drive down on US 13 was pleasant and uneventful. We had a great time.

The drive from Chesapeake to Corolla, OBX was not very long - approximately two hours in length. We were able to get into our rented apartment early. Unfortunately, this wasn't quite as nice as the two-bedroom suite back in Chesapeake. Don't get me wrong - it was fine for 2 adults, perhaps even 4 adults. It was not fine for 2 adults and any number of kids.

The problems were essentially two-fold: it was in the middle of a commercial development (above Nicoletta's Italian cafe), and it was barely big enough to qualify as a decent sized one bedroom apartment. For a two bed-room, it was cramped - probably nearly the size of the 1 bed-room suite I'm in right now.

It's a big hassle having to always be careful to make sure the young children don't go head-over-heels down the stairs and end up in the middle of the parking lot, sprawled face-down in the fire lane. There was a small playground, which was fenced, but it was too small to be really enjoyable by the children for more than about 20 minutes. Despite the fact that most properties in Corolla do not have grass lawns, there is still a large amount of comfort in knowing that people won't be actively driving through the sand-lot yards that are there.

I enjoyed the pool time that I was able to have and hope to use the outdoor pool at the Brandywine YMCA a few more times before it closes Labor Day weekend. I was unable to enjoy the beach, however, because it's very difficult to walk on the sand with my fused-ankle and I wasn't able to go out into the water far enough to benefit from the ocean taking the weight off of my foot. The constant shifting of the sand at the tide line made for more than a few awkward steps with my bad ankle as well.

All of this would have been enough to convince me that a beach vacation is not a grand idea next year, unless my foot is substantially better (perhaps because I've lost a lot of weight between now and then). The coup de grace, though, was the psychological distress caused by sharing the beach time with other members of the extended family. In the end, there just isn't enough positive benefit derived to justify the additional stress and the bad influence the cousins have on my own children.

For the first time in two+ years, I need a vacation to get over my vacation.

Our hamster died overnight.

In retrospect, he was not ever quite as active as we should have expected. He may well have been sick when we got him. He did use the exercise wheel the first night or two, but after that he spent most of his time hiding in his nest. Even in the middle of the night.

The day that they brought him upstairs for me to see was probably the most exciting for us and him. After they removed him from his ball, he lept from their grasp and ran under the bed in my bedroom. It took a lot of effort to get him out from under there and he went back into 24x7 hibernation mode afterward. It may have been this scare that put him over the edge health-wise.

For the few days he lived with us, it was a mixture of curiosity and fun. I miss him, but not as much as the girls do. We held a funeral and buried him in the front flower bed. Perhaps this will be a sign to the voles that I prefer them to not live near my house.

We may get another hamster after the habitat has had time to be purged of the germs that it presumably contained.

I appreciate the fact that PetSmart would have refunded our money or replaced him, but I'd prefer to not bring the dead carcass of an $8 purchase into the store for a refund/replacement. Especially since I'd have to spend an additional $20+ purchasing a new habitat for the new hamster to live in while the bleach does the trick on killing the germs in the only existing habitat we have.

Current Mood: amused

Due to popular demand here at Casa De La Mancha, a new member has been added to the family. On Monday, July 3, 2006, we added a hamster. Various names have been suggested, including:

• Hampshire
• Hamand Eggs
• Hammy
• Stripes

Current Mood: manic
Current Music: Desperate - Black 47 - Trouble In The Land

Last night, Deb and I went up to Manheim, PA to see Black47 in concert at the site of the PA Renaissance Fair. It was a fun time and they are an amazing band to see live. We had an awesome time.

If you get the chance, you should check them out.

Last night, Deb and I went to the Tweeter Center in Camden, NJ. Getting there took nearly two hours due to the lovely Philadelphia rush hour traffic. The Camden waterfront area seems to have a lot of attractions, but it's far enough away that it's closer and more convienent to go to Wilmington, DE for things like minor-league baseball.

The opening act was TV on the Radio. I only saw them perform two songs. They weren't bad, but the musicians need better stage presence. Two of them seemed to do nothing other than stand in front of their speaker stacks with their backs to the audience. The audience seemed to respond in kind, mostly ignoring the band.

Bauhaus was next, after about 10 minutes of intermission. They were great. I wish I had been able to see them years and years ago. They played for about an hour, including their two new songs.

After that, we left. Ironically, most of the audience seemed to be just showing up for the headliners, Nine Inch Nails.

Despite the traffic problems caused by people fleeing Philadlephia during a rain-delay in the Phillies game, we made decent time - from Camden to King of Prussia in about 45 minutes!

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Army Dreamers - Kate Bush

I've been recently focused on working with the Internet Protocol header field (the second octet) related to Quality of Service (QoS), specifically Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) and Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) bits.

I have not, until now, been known as a big fan of QoS. In general, I like my data access to be end-to-end (i.e. no NAT or firewalls), flat-rate (no usage fees) and best-effort (no QoS). However, I have had occasion to delve deeply into the QoS issues that one might face if one wanted to implement it successfully. Hence, DSCP bits.

( Boring Details Hidden From The Incurious )

So, to summarize, the interpretation of this particular octet has changed from IP Type of Service (RFC 1349) to DiffServ Code Points encoded in a DiffServ Field (RFC 3260). What is needed now is to update these cli interfaces to accommodate the new interpretation - without having to retrofit it backward into the previous TOS interpretation. I should be able to use a command-line option like "-ds af33" and have it do the right thing.

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Todd Rundgren - Initiation - Eastern Intrigue

I'm contemplating going to see Bauhaus in concert. I've never had the opportunity to see them before live, so this could be quite a treat. The headliner is NiN - a band I know very little about.

Current Mood: headachey
Current Music: Bauhaus - Burning From The Inside - Antonin Artaud

After one week on the NutriSystem plan, I've lost over 11 lbs!

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: SuperTones - Strike Back - Unite

I'm back - free, at long last, from the hospital. It turns out I had status asthmaticus. I'm feeling well for the first time in months, but still very weak. I spent the first day home sleeping for over 12 hours.

Thanks to everyone for the kinds thoughts and prayers. There will be a lot of follow-up required, but for now things are stable and under control.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Eminem - The Eminem Show - Without Me

Since my body has failed to respond to the treatments that have been applied on an outpatient basis, my doctor has concluded that I need high dosage steroids and IV antibiotics. So, it's off to the hospital with me.

Current Mood: sick

When I heard my parish was holding a Texas Hold 'Em tournament as part of their annual Casino night fund-raiser in February, my interest was piqued. Prior to this point, I had not played poker, as far as I can recall. I was vaguely familiar with the rules of 5-card draw, but didn't understand what Hold 'Em was about at all. Coincidentally, during a Christmas time visit, a friend from the Pittsburgh area had clued me into the recent popularity of poker on television (!?!?!).

We don't have cable or satellite TV at home (I listen to the NFL on Sirius and purchase Battlestar Galactica from the iTMS), so I was reduced to watching a few episodes of the Travel Channel's World Poker Tour or Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown while on business trips. This kept my interest high, so I decided to learn a bit more about it so that I could play in the fund-raiser tournament.

I purchased books on poker. I purchased software for the Mac so that I could play against my computer. I even got the client from Full Tilt Poker so that I could play in play-money games on-line without having to run Virtual PC or purchase a WinTel machine.

I played in the church fund-raiser and had a good time. This was my first live poker game against real opponents and I had no idea what to expect. It went a lot slower and nowhere nearly as smooth as an on-line tournament, due to issues like mis-deals, split pots, all-in bets, etc. However, I had a great time. I ultimately finished out in 3rd place.

Since that time, I have spent more time reading about poker and playing on-line play-money games. It is a very entertaining past time. However, as convenient and entertaining as on-line poker is, it's a very different experience. I have probably played hundreds of on-line tournaments at this point, yet I doubt I have faced the same opponents in a tournament more than two or three times.

Tonight I played in my second live fund-raiser tournament. Again I had an amazingly fun time. I was done after only two hours, but stayed another 3 hours to see the final hand. I met a lot of people who live relatively near me, but whom I would probably otherwise never have met. I also ran into a guy from the final table at the previous tournament.

I have to say that working from home and engaging in mostly computer-related past-times keeps me pretty isolated from interacting face to face with other people, which is something I typically prefer. However, I find playing poker in a live tournament to be such a great change of pace that I wish it were possible to do it far more often than it is.

It was also interesting to reflect on the wide diversity of people that were present. Although I didn't get to talk to nearly everyone, it did seem to represent a very large cross-section of the local community. Some people seemed like business professionals, while others seemed like farm hands. Lots of people didn't give off very much indication as to what they did, but there were a few guys who looked like they were probably in college. A small number of gentlemen appeared to be retired.

I felt very much part of a larger community tonight. And that is a far more important benefit than the sheer enjoyment I get out of watching the way the hands unfold.

Current Mood: content