dannyman.toldme.com

<recursive> mmagin@dt ~% date +’%s’
<recursive> 1111094490
<recursive> getting very close to 1111111111
<Nimbex> 1111094473
<recursive> hmm
<Nimbex> I need to run ntpd on neb.
<SmooveB> recursive: damn, that’s in like 4 hours
<dman> I’ll be around SysAdmins this evening.
<Nimbex> And I bet you forgot to register a domain for it this time, dave!
<Ark> SmooveB: I thought it was tomorrow
<recursive> jwz’s LJ says: 1111111111 = Thu Mar 17 17:58:31 2005 PST
<Ark> wacky
<dman> 0-13:23 djh@mito ~> date -r 1111111111
<dman> Thu Mar 17 17:58:31 PST 2005
* dman sets up a blog entry for 17:58
<Ark> what a great and arbitrary number we have a boner for

Yes, children, two minutes before 6PM Pacific it will be 1111111111 seconds since the start of the Unix Epoch, which commenced at 00:00:00 UTC, January 1, 1970. A couple hours later, and I’ll be at Apple HQ in Cupertino, to hear about LDAP.

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People, I will not beat around the bush. The old slogans convey a variety of disparate mission statements, which in turn only muddles up our message. I have had the mar-com team work on this for the past two months, and after a lot of process, and vetting, we have a new creative that consolidates our message in to a single slogan. I think you’ll agree that this captures the essence of punctuality, in a single, strong, coherent message:

A hand-stitched early bird in time gets to save nine worms in the bush.

You’ll find in your briefing packet a selection of tee-shirts, coffee mugs, letter openers, and tape dispensers all bearing this new slogan. We’ll be measuring over the next few months whether this new campaign has proven effective in improving on-time performance of key deliverables.

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Last week, there were serious troubles with the Sidekick data service. It was mostly down for about two days, and seriously flaky for two more. That really sucked.

At the end of the outage, T-Mobile sent everyone an e-mail noting that there would be a $20 credit due to the troubles. Basically, a refund for one month of Sidekick data service. They’ve also promised more free goodies in the downloads section for their loyal customers.

I feel better. And I think T-Mobile deserves some credit for trying to do well by their customers. Sh!t does happen, especially with bleeding-edge technology. It makes a difference when a company is pretty good with answering the phone, as T-Mobile has always done for me, and when they take proactive steps to apologise when things break fantastically, as they did last week.

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When we moved in, we noted a large collection of long-abandoned small houses and shacks and sheds and an apartment complex next door. And lots of beautiful trees. This area had been condemned, I’m told, for the past two years. Well, they finally got around to doing something with the condemned buildings, which is to tear them down to make room to build hundreds of condos. I can not blame them for building hundreds of condos so close to the BART station, but we were hoping that they would keep some of the trees around.

Wednesday when I got home, the buildings had been razed, except for a masonry structure down on the corner. About half the trees, mostly the taller ones, were still standing. On Thursday evening, I note that miniature forest that stood throughout the lot was completely gone. There are a few trees yet along the fence line, but the devastation is sad.

Those had better be some awesome condos.

On the other hand, one neat thing about Walnut Creek is that there is a lot of unspoilt land that we can walk to and hike around. This weekend we wandered around some of the foothills of Mount Diablo. We walked through a muddy area where Yayoi learned that there is nothing to fear about free-ranging cows. The views were awesome. I understand that things aren’t normally this green, but the current flora blows the mind.

All in all, I can’t complain so much. We will likely lose our view of Mount Diablo in the distance as the condos are built, but we still won’t have far to go for natural splendor.

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Two years ago I started work and eventually gave up on toldme.com. The main reason is that it was a little too ambitious for my project management and database skills, not to mention my interest level relative to free time. (Getting a paying job can really destroy your ability to work on personal development projects.) (more…)

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Back in late 2001, after I lost my job with Tellme, I looked for work at, among other places, Google. I had long been impressed with Google, which by all accounts offers a great working environment. And like me, they were also in Mountain View. I submitted my resumé and a recruiter contacted me and said they had a Junior position available, and the salary would be about 2/3 what I had been making at Tellme, where I had worked as an underpaid technical lead. I explained that I was more interested in and better qualified for some of the more senior job postings they had open on their web site. “Well, this is the position we have available,” was the ultimatum offered by the recruiter. I politely declined.

Two months later and it was very clear to me that the job market was terrible, and that if Google was willing to talk to me about a junior position, that was far better than the stresses of being broke and idle. I contacted the recruiter and she set up a phone screen, which was followed by an on-site interview. (more…)

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I am trying to install some software that isn’t working. So, I’m trading messages with the company’s technical support, who suggested I add an argument to a wrapper script, which I tried, but nada, so they clarified:

Hmmm, when you add the -nosetjmp make sure you go through custom install using ___setup and select 2 for run setup utilites then select 2 again Perform ___ configuration then select each step except number 3…this will override your changes that you made to the script. Once that is all done you can add -nosetjmp to the ___v9.cfg file and let’s see what happens.

All this while walking back and forth to the machine room to swap through a series of three CDROMs. Ah, the glorious work of being a SysAdmin!

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As posted by Dave:

<yohan> For future reference:
<yohan> the right tool for the job, when the job is drilling a hole in soft plastic, is a Forstner bit.
<yohan> Someone with a blog should put that up, because Google sure didn’t give me that answer.

Thanks Dave, thanks Andrew.

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Back during the boom I read some fluff piece on my “stealth mode” startup attribute the description of “intelligent bulldozer” to one of our senior employees.

I have long wondered just what that is supposed to mean, but from time to time when there is a series of problems to deal with, and I just start knocking them out, one after another, like one of those video games where you have to fight the bad guys one at a time, I start to get it. Some problems are rough or tedious to deal with, and feel like they are pushing you back, but if you’re on your game, you take their blows and keep gaining ground.

Not so much emotion, not so much ego, not so much pride, not so much artistry, just that sense of inevitability . . . the thing will be done, and it will probably be done on time.

I’m not a big “intelligent bulldozer” fan . . . my style is different, but sometimes there’s this complicated task that doesn’t stir your soul, your ego, your sense of artistry, and there really is no way to go about it except as some unconcerned, powerful piece of construction equipment, patiently wielded by an experienced operator, punching out one obstacle after another. And once you knock the whole thing down, you can step back and grin for a moment with pride at your ability to finish something you aren’t so eager to do.

For what it is worth, our “Intelligent Bulldozer” came from Microsoft.

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I’m flipping through the latest New Yorker, which this week has page after page of old New Yorker covers. This seems like a cheap ploy at generating the week’s content except that every New Yorker cover is, literally, a piece of art. Some are from way back, and so I have never seen them before. Others are familiar to me because I have been a subscriber for about two years. I turn from a full-page ad for Microsoft and see an old acquiantance. (more…)

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I am an NPR junkie, and my new place gets awful reception. And for a long time I have admired TiVo and wondered if my life might not be better if I had a DVR for NPR programs. Add to that KQED’s obnoxious plugin/popup window and the fact that I use an older version of RealAudio to avoid Spyware, which stutters and rebuffers all the time, and I have enough motivation to rig up something different.

I have rigged up a simple system to schedule rips of programs broadcast on the KQED audio stream in to easily manageable .mp3 files. If I had one of them iPod thingies I could even listen to the radio programs on the bus. I might even get around to warezing this to interested friends via BitTorrent and CSS, which would leave us another technical explanation. (more…)

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This past week I read an article in the New Yorker magazine about the policy of my government to secretly kidnap terrorism suspects, without any due process, and to hand them over to foreign governments to be “rendered,” which is a euphemism for “tortured.” There are many in law enforcement who have grave doubts about the efficacy of torture. If you torture a man, he will pretty much tell you anything you want to hear. And, you can not use testimony from, or evidence that leads back to torture in a legal trial. Anyway, the article, found in the Feb 14 & 21, 2005 issue, is very long, very engaging, and left me feeling very disgusted and frustrated and just plain old upset. What follows is the last section of the article, that briefly puts a human story to the situation. It is with a heavy heart that I type this out, but the story bears being re-told. (more…)

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