tbradshaw.net

Sometimes it just seems like everything lands on the same day. That day is today.

Copus is going to be playing tonight at PJ’s. I’m really stoked. They are going to be whipping out some new material, including a new as-of-yet-unannounced cover song as well as some new original Copus. This should be a damn fine concert with Copus gearing up for a big gig at America’s Pub in Kansas City on July 7. As always with Copus appearing in Manhattan, the After-Party will be at me casa, Apt7. I’m sure plenty of quality drunkeness and debauchery will ensue. (Well, drunkeness at least.)

This evening Matt and I will be delivering another weekday Freedom to Choose where we hope to look at some democracy news in Hong Kong, the fed’s recent 1/4 percent interest rate increase, and more.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the one and only Elgn ‘Melinko’ Davidson will be making an appearance in Manhappiness today, tonight, and tomorrow. I rarely get visitors from back in El Dogg, so this visit from Mel will be an especially kick ass event. He couldn’t have picked a better day, that’s for sure, with concert and After Party already scheduled.

It should be a good night. Now I just need to get out of the office and get the apartment cleaned up, I don’t think my toilet is “puke ready”.

I’ve been bouncing back between a number of different designs for the QuakeCon Volunteer System’s application process, and I think I’ve finally settled on a design that I’m happy with. The main shift as been a change from monolithic applications to modular applications, while the largest decision thus far as been made: language.

Note: By ‘applications’ I mean the forms that people fill out to apply for a job, rather than the software term ‘application’.

I’ve decided to go ahead with my plans to use Python as the development language of choice over the second choice of php. I’m very pleased with the choice, as my fondness for python typically knows no bounds. My only fear is for performance. While the majority of code I write in php would be pretty quick–almost by default–I know my python code will certainly have algorithmic shortcomings, specifically on memory usage. I don’t expect my volunteer signup to be hammered anything like the QuakeCon Registration, so hopefully it won’t be a problem.

The modularization of the application process did nicely free me from any session management of any kind, which is a nice burden removed from the process. Instead, an initial application will provide a mechanism for authentication, and then each individual form after that can be authenticated seperately, without need for careful protection. (It’s not like any information will be stored that would be subject to privacy concerns). It also more closely resembles the application process. It’s been unclear how to motivate everyone to participate in the application process, and the modularization of the applications allows me to stall those sections of the application that I expected responses back from staff and haven’t gotten them yet.

I really think that this design is going to be right on the money for what I need to do, and I’m looking forward to implementing it. (Hopefully with an implementation that has enough performance not to completely die under load.

Today I officially started my search for a new vehicle in earnest. I started by using Google Local to find as many used car dealerships in Manhattan as possible. Then I started calling each dealership and asking the same question: “I’m looking for an SUV in the five to seven thousand range, do you have anything I could come take a look at?”

The results were conclusive about one thing, searching online for cars sucks. While nearly every single search I’ve done on the internet looking for SUVs in my price range needed at least a 100 mile radius to find anything, I was able to find five SUVs in my price range right here in town by calling around.

Over lunch I swung by Manhattan Motors on Tuttle Creek to check out an Isuzu Rodeo and a Mitsubishi Montero. The Montero was out on a test drive when I swung by, but the Rodeo was there to check out. It was pretty nice, a green color, and in good shape. I’m still undecided about whether I would like to drive a green vehicle or not, but it was pretty nice. Also, the dash layout wasn’t very conducive to the modifications that I have in mind for my next vehicle, so that was definitely something on the down side.

Next I swung by Southside Auto on Yuma to check out a Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo and a Chevy Blazer LT. Again, both were nice, though the Grand Cherokee was green and the Blazer was red. While I’m not sure if I want a green car, I’m pretty damn sure I don’t want another red vehicle. While I like the exterior of the Blazer and, even more so, the Jimmy, the interior of the Grand Cherokee is very nice. Both looked pretty easily modifable to what I’m wanting on the interior.

All in all, I didn’t fall in love with anything that I saw today, but it was nice to start looking. Briggs and Dan Edwards both said taht they would be calling me back with more information, but I have yet to get any calls from them. I hope to swing back by Manhattan Motors here in a little bit to see if the Montero is back from the test drive.

I’m generally trying to keep things between five and seven thousand, the lower the better. I’m hoping to have repeat of my previous car financing, where I got an unsecured loan for the amount of the vehicle, so that I didn’t have to carry full coverage insurance. In this case, if I can get things pretty cheap, I might look at loaning more than the value of the vehicle so I can do some cool things with stereo stuff, etc.

There are lots of possibilities, and it’s just nice to get the ball rolling.

For quite some time, I have been wrestling with a recursive directory deletion from the driveClean script. Previously, Tyson and I had considered driveClean done, for all intents and purposes, becuase we had conquered the “special” files that were blocking the recursive deletes.

Unfortunately, our first limited test case proved that assumption false. It seems that all of the efforts to remove access blocks for the administrator user had still proven futile. The security model for Windows regarding securable objects is something that I normally have nothing but praise, but lately I’ve been yearning for the ability to do “su -c ‘rm -rf foo’”. It seems that nothing short of deliberately taking ownership of files, followed by explicitly adding permission to the folder for the administrator user, followed by changing file attributes, and finished with deleting the file will have the desired result.

Further research in inplementing this algorithm has been painful. It seems that at least two of the steps are not possible in Python directly. I have found a tutorial that layed out the methodology, but it required writing C/C++ extensions to Python to accomplish the goal. Not exactly weekend-fix material. I was pretty much overwhelmed by the heavy wizardry involved.

After this disheartening information, I looked back to very simple batch file that Aaron had written to handle a similar case. After seeing how “nicely” his special purpose batch file handled one of the problems within the domain of driveClean, I’ve decided to give up on pure Python and win32api calls, and start using shell commands within the script.

It’s not as elegant as I’d like, but neither it should work.

Yes, my friends, I have piloted a Segway. We were walking around the Gateway mall in Salt Lake City when we came to a kiosk providing Segway “rentals”. For about six bucks, you could cruise around on a “cones course”, for about twelve bucks you could tour the Gateway mall, and then for about twenty five bucks you could tour downtown.

So Matt Phillips and I plopped down our twelve dollars and scheduled a mall tour for later that afternoon. I was excited, to say the least.

First things first: yes, I managed to knock it over. The claims that it “couldn’t fall over” were just too much for me to resist. It was immediately clear that just throwing yourself forward or backward was handled flawlessly. It was just zoom out in either direction to “catch” you with the momentum of the travel. So instead, I decided to do both. I threw myself forward and backward quickly in a rocking motion and soon I found myself face down on the sidewalk.

The manager of the little Segway store was positively confused that it had fallen over like that. He asked if it had suddenly turned off on me or something. I was just honest, “No, I don’t think so. I was just overcorrecting back and forth several times and it tossed me off.” He swapped me Segways, just in case.

After getting acclimated to the personal transport scooters, we then set off on a guided joy ride of the Gateway mall. Man, oh, man, it was awesome. The tour started on “promenade” level of the mall, which is to say the second tier of the outdoor. We zoomed around with the pedestrians, weaving a little bit to pass now and then, but generally people either moved out of the way or we just slowed down to their pace.

After traveling the long distance of the mall (it’s kind of a rectangle) we reached the end of the sidewalk. At that point, we just hopped off the sidewalk onto the grass. We’re still on the top level at this point, but the lawn that we had just plopped ourselves onto was a nice incline that took us down to the “ground” level of the mall. The Segways all handled the grass and stuff flawlessly. It was a little bumpy, but very fun.

After the downhill grass segment, we hopped down onto a brick pathway and careened our way around the back of the mall to the lower level walk way. The sidewalk along the road on the lower level was quite a bit narrower than the upper pathway and this really gave the feeling of being “in the crowd” while driving the Segway. We had to weave around between signs and doors that definitely left openings that were just a couple inches wider than the Segway itself.

Once again we traveled all the way down the “long way” of the Gateway mall, and then around and into a building that had a wheelchair ramp. After traveling up the long indoor wheelchair ramp (with a special precaution from the tour guide to make sure not to rub up against the way), we stopped to… take the elevator.

All five of us, one by one, glided into the elevator and parked: two on each side, and then one just “stood” in the middle. Giggling like little school girls, we asked the tour guide how many people he’s fit into the elevator. Without batting an eye he responded, “I’ve gotten seven in here. Four on the outside and three standing in the middle.”. Awesome.

After reaching the top floor, that was pretty much the end of the tour; we were back where we started. Before umounting /dev/segway, we had him take a couple pictures of us with Matt’s camera, hopefully he’ll get back to me with those sometime soon.

All in all, it was an awesome experience, definitely worth the twelve dollars. Is the Segway going to be revolutionary? I’m just not convinced. This is a phenomenal toy, grade A fun, there is no doubt about that. Right now I don’t see anything but that. However, there is no denying that the Segway has very unique characteristics, and I can’t help but think that there might be some amazing niche that the Segway would just be the ultimate in short range transport. But I’ll be damned if I can think of it.

On a final note, I just want to express my huge appreciation for the technology that has went into the Segway. This technology makes the most amazing wheel chair that I’ve ever seen, and in my time as a paraprofessional at BCCC I’ve seen quite a few mobility devices. If I thought that a buying a Segway would subsidize the cheaper construction of those wheelchairs, I would be seriously considering buying one, even as a college kid.

Creating and maintaining documentation has long been a deficiency of the systems team here at CIS. Many times Sterling and I have talked about the necessity of creating internal and external documentation for the myriad of things that we do while working on the CIS systems team.

The first step in that direction was the trial of several support ticket tracking systems, with the eventual adoption of Request Tracker. This made huge strides and increasing the internal documentation by archiving all support correspondence.

The next step has been clear for a long time. We need to start writing documentation, both for reference and to set internal policies, both for users and for administrators. But there was always a hang-up… what format do we want the documentation written in? After quite a bit of research by Sterling, I think we’ve got it: reStructured Text.

Used frequently for python documentation, reStructured Text had several advantages that we were looking for: it’s plain text (can be emailed), it can be easily converted into HTML, it can be easily converted into PDF.

I’ve studied the “markup” a bit and used it to begin writing documentation for the cis-win-driveClean project. I’m elated. This is easy and very effective.

The next “problem” was to design some kind of repository for storage and eventual retrieval of the entries or articles. Sterling again was right on top of things with an idea for storage and auto-generation of the documentation portion of the website. We talked about the idea yesterday before we left for work, and I think it’s a pretty damn good idea. While we did end up generating almost a content manager, it’s incredibly simple and should serve us really well.

Speaking of work, I should head to the office.

The driveClean script has reached 1.0 and is ready for deployment. Thanks to some great work by Tyson on the network file access, I was able to concentrate this week on recursive folder deletions with special files blocking the traversal.

Some good googling found a bit of help on the ActiveState documentation that addresses just that. The example given in the help documentation was a little flawed (incorrect indentation of all things… in a python example), but some reworking and modification proved to be the aid over the last obstacle.

I think that I’m going to spend a little bit of time reading about reStructured text and then write some documentation for driveClean before moving on to focus on the cis-win-printReports project.

I was fighting some permissions for my development cycle on cis-win-driveClean, since I’m now developing on gentoo and testing on Windows XP. I was trying to get a little help from Cole, our student linux guru. Always helpful, he responded:

(14:06:32) Hoosier, Cole: there is an easy answer to this
(14:06:37) Hoosier, Cole: ……. have a windows desktop
(14:27:42) ash: I do have a windows desktop
(14:27:49) ash: that’s where I want to copy stuff over too
(14:27:50) Hoosier, Cole: use it
(14:29:45) Hoosier, Cole: you’re a windows monkey, act like it
(14:29:48) Hoosier, Cole: sit in your cage & be happy!

Thanks Cole. Your the bestest.

/me peels a banana.

Wow, oh, wow, what a busy week. I’m going to try and address just some of the events of the week in a series of blog posts, rather than just one. This is all about the National Tournament that I returned from today.

Each year, for seven years now, I have had the absolute pleasure of assisting Mr. Rob Chalender with the El Dorado High School Forensics and Debate team as they attend the annual national tournament for the National Forensics League. Each year is fundamentally different, yet similar in many ways. Last year was marked by a transitionary period for me, the first year were I really felt like a coach, and not like a student that was playing coach.

This year was a different, in that I learned more with the interactions with students than I did from the tournament itself. The beginning of this week, especially, was marked with high drama. Tensions between the coaches and students were high as personal, district, and internal pressures weighed in.

Handling those problems where an experience. A very trying, exhausting, and generally not fun experience. It took things getting to quite the critical mass before anything was truly addressed, and it ended with an uneasy truce between all of those involved. Any details of the events are really not appropriate for public discussion, but the process was definitely something that I learned from.

After the drama subsided, things settled into a much more positive routine of the more traditional Nationals Team camaraderie that I have become accustomed to for the years that I’ve attended. As always, Mr. Chalender assembles quite the “A” team of High Schoolers, and the events of a nationals trip always gives each student a chance to prove their metal. It was a pleasure to help out Mr. Chalender and the students for the week.

Student Congress left me with my typical longing, but in a different way this year. Rather than naively wishing to compete in NFL Student Congress, instead I found myself wanted to do something “like” student congress. The idea of having a political forum to discuss relevant issues, that has a clear (and Simple!) purpose of communicating, is just too awesome. It helped that there was a student senator I judged in semifinals by the name of Chris Zheng that was clearly of libertarian slant. Not only was he of libertarian thought, but he was ideologically consistent every time he got up to speak!

In my experience as a student, this was relatively unheard-of in student congress. Student congress was a game to be played and mastered. You gave speeches on whatever side of the issue was the best game theory for the base-system, or speaking precedence, or whatever other rule-element needed attention at the time. Those that spoke their beliefs or emotions were usually amateurs going to talk about abortion or something, and do it poorly.

I only wish that I was as morally consistent as Senator Zheng is when I was in high school. I think that is really a sign of intelligence. Unfortunately he didn’t really have what it takes to cut it as a national champion in student congress or anything like that. For one, he kind of went with the alarmist government thug introductions, which sometimes worked, and sometimes made him sound like a kook. Not that he was wrong with any of it, but when one is going to be delivering speeches to high school students and liberal teachers/administrators, it’s gotta be softened it a bit.

Next, and probably most crucially, he didn’t have “the look”. Human nature is human nature, and he didn’t “look” good enough to get the votes to take home the gold. He was a bit gangly and slightly off kilter. He delivered his speeches in a deliberate manner that had little variance and came off a bit staged. And, most unfortunate of all, he had quite the facial tic. During his speech he’d have the fire in his eyes and would deliver well, and then the second he was done… he’d start tic’ing and it was distracting.

But, shallow competition considerations aside, I was pleased to have judged him. While I was, at first, a little guilty about rating his speeches higher because of his libertarian content, it dawned on me. I’m a judge, human as anyone else. I should be judging on delivery, clash, and quality of subject matter. With the legislation at hand, he was saying what I believed should have been said on the topic. It would have been disingenuous to not give him the points for the content. So he walked away with several 9’s from me, I hope they guided him into the final round. (And I hope the other judges didn’t mind the tic.)

So, if you’re googling for your name, Senator Christopher Zheng, you really kicked ass this year in Student Congress.

Man, I could write volumes on my experiences sight-seeing, shopping, and the tournament, but they are all kind of tertiary to the core theme. Yet another year I have deeply appreciated the opportunity to attend the national tournament as Mr. Chalender’s assistant.

Well, after posting yet again to the flamewar that erupted in the comments section of a recent blog entry I’ve made, I can see that one has to be a little more careful about what they post to their blog.

All I wanted to do was mention that I have a two computer setup going at work, but I figured I’d do it in a funny and/or entertaining way. Oh how the hammer falls when one makes boasterous claims about the CIS department in my circle of friends. I thought it was funny to talk about computer hardware purchases in the same tense as one would talk about fashion purchases or hair-dos.

I parallelled the recent buying spree of dell 19″ flat panels that coincidently followed my aquisition of two of them as a “trend” or fad. (Which, if one believes in fads, I still feel a tad bit responsible for, I mean hell, Shea even talked to me about how nice of a setup I had before he got his. Though I’m sure that Earl gets responsiblity for realizing that the monitors were cheap enough to actually make the spree feasible.)

Fact? Pffft, who knows? Who cares? It was a casual observation that let to a humorous (in my opinion) tongue-in-cheek raising of the ante with my recent setup of a dual workstation environment for work. Then I took it to the next level with the “Fuck everything, we’re going to five blades.” link.

But oh, no, no. I had to trigger a little bit of one-ups-manship with some of my friends that worked in CIS much longer and much earlier than I did, targeted at nullifying my claims. And my refutation of “someone came first” with “I didn’t say I was first, I said started a trend”, just blew up into a multi-comment flamewar. I mean sheesh, I guess when girls started wearing bell bottoms again, it wasn’t a trend, because someone else did it first decades ago.

Anyway, It looks like half-assed humorous comments are a dangerous realm for blog posting. I guess this blogging experiment is all about trying out new things and seeing what works and doesn’t work. It looks like boasterous and sarcastic claims will have to stay in the office with Tyson and I, and the blog should only be reserved for well thought out, well developed, factually based conclusions. Pretty lame though, I always liked the idea of a blog as a digital playpen. I can’t imagine how this can even be “my” blog if I can’t joke around without starting a flame war.

Maybe that’s why some of the blogging software has a “Mood: Blah-blah-yackity-shmackity” and the end of every post, so readers have a better guess at how to take the random writings at the time. I’d try that, but to me is just screams middle-school-girl’s-pink-diary-with-a-cheap-lock-on-the-side. I think I’d rather be ambigious than pink.

Anyway, I’m going to get back over to the Sheraton to judge a house chamber at the national student congress.

In what I hope is a sign of things to come, I just stumbled onto a wireless network here at Wichita International Airport. But this time I didn’t stumble onto anything I had to snoop my way into, instead I got a quick pop up that said “There is a wireless network named “free”, would you like to join?”

That obviously didn’t take any decision time, and so here I am, on a nice broadband connect, checking my mail.

Hot. Hot, hot, hot.

For the last couple days, after the return of my workstation, I have been working on creating that new desktop environment that I was blogging about the other day. Well, just minutes before I leave the office for a week, I think I’m far enough to call it “done”.

I now have my primary workstation, liberty (we name new linux boxes after American made automobiles, and liberty was just too good to pass up), which runs Gentoo GNU/Linux with a dual head matrox g400 card. Xinerama is working great, after some driver option massaging, and it’s pretty much good to go.

I now have a workstation, n177w01 (no luxury of cool names for windows boxes… dang windows file server service won’t answer to CNAMES, only it’s “given” name), which runs Windows XP with a nice, fresh, relatively untouched installation. A few more packages to install, and it will be perfect for administering Windows’ services from an RDP connection.

I could very well be set up for the “best of both worlds”. I have a gentoo workstation as my primary computer and all the glory that is linux, and I’ve got a dedicated Windows workstation only a mouse click away for all platform specific love that might be required. I’m a happy camper.

I kind of wonder if this will start a trend throughout the department like the dual monitor setup I had did. Not that I’m the first to do dual monitors in the department (I’m certain that Aaron had something like a dual monitor setup before I came in, but I’m not sure if he did any more than laptop + single monitor + vnc), but it wasn’t long after my glorious dual DELL flat panels took root that I started to see dual flat panel setups popping up all over the department. They should give me a commission or something, I’ve probably led to the purchase of like over 3g’s of monitors. Maybe one or two for home would do it…

Anyway, I’ve upped the arms race. I now run dual monitors, and dual computers. Dunn dunn DUNN!

But enough about that, now about my interesting discovery. For quite some time I’ve been upset with the performance of some key applications on my amd64, the numero uno offender being Mozilla Firefox, the best damn browser on the planet. Well, much to my surprise, I just had the same exact problem here on this freshly installed x86 computer. Perhaps I was too hasty in blaming things on the architecture of speedy… it may be time to give that problem another go-round.

Oh hell yes! I have finally conquered my bluetooth modem problems with my new PowerBook. (Well, it’s not exactly new anymore. But it’s still pretty new to me.)

For those that haven’t been following my debacle, it began with my iBook purchase about 1.5 years ago now. It was my first Apple computer, and was soon followed by a T610 Sony Ericsson cellphone with T-Mobile. It didn’t take long before I was utilizing my free dialup account that comes with sbc DSL internet to connect to the internet via dialup from my laptop no matter where I was. Most famously, I would often be found in IRC or IM chats while crusing down any number of Kansas highways.

Well the iBook died (and I didn’t understand the value of extended warrantees on laptops when I purchased it), and a new PowerBook was in order. It is a glorious piece of work, but one fatal flaw had came with it. The latest Bluetooth subsystem (1.5) broke the cu.Bluetooth-Modem device, making internet communication with my cell phone all but impossible.

I tried AppleCare’s hotline, but as helpful as they tried to be… they just couldn’t get their head around the problem. I gave up.

I’ll soon be leaving for Salt Lake City with El Dorado High School for the NFL National Tournament, and it hit me. I don’t have internet access OR my GPS working with my laptop yet. Holy Monkies!

So the race against bugs and time began, and the first victory is mine! Thanks to the eternal vigilance of google, I found some instructions for creating a new Bluetooth serial device to mirror the functionality of the defunct cu.Bluetooth-Modem (which I, oh so creatively, named cu.Bluetooth-Modem-Replacement). Then, I found tips (thanks to the confidence building of Sterling’s recent successes) instructions to get GPRS working with the T610.

Here I am now, victories, posting this blog entry from my PowerBook (dexter), linked to my T610 (bugs), with AirPort disabled and no wires on me. Victory is so sweet.

Next up, I’ll be trying to either round up a copy of Route66 (the GPS atlas software that works on OSX), or trying to get my USB GPS device working through VirtualPC here on dexter.

This Saturday I’m departing for Salt Lake City to help Mr. Chalender with the high school national qualifiers in competitive speech and acting. Named The 2004 Beehive Nationals, the National Tournament is always an educational and entertaining experience that I’ve reveled every year.

But something just dawned on me this week as I made plans to leave for the airport. I don’t have a car. Not only do I not have a car, my good friend Tyson that I would typically ride to El Dorado with also does not have a car. While I sold my car, his car was totaled by some 90 year old woman that doesn’t even remember what happened.

As you can imagine, this is an instant monkeywrench into the plans. I’m not sure that my ninja could make the trip with a weeks worth of luggage on the back. Potentially I could pack everything I need into two backpacks, wear one of the backpacks and strap the other down… but that seems like a difficult way to make a trip to nationals. We’ll call that the last resort.

Barring the last resort, I’ve started calling the parents and asking for rides down to El Dorado. Mom has plans to pour concrete in yet another home improvement project for her very nice home. I’m sure that Dad will be working until 11:00pm or so at Boeing. It seems that a very late night ride might be the best that the parents can offer.

Maybe I should start looking for bus tickets…

Tonight Matt and I went back onto the airwaves with the libertarian message on KSDB 91.9 FM here in Manhattan. We were definitely pretty rusty when we first started, but we started rolling into it more and more as the show went on.

At the start, we were just plain choppy and difficult. Then, in the middle, we were rambling a little too much, but starting to warm up. And then at the end we were pretty comfortable, having a good time, and making some good points.

Unfortunately I’m going to be gone next week, so I might end up rusty again, but I’ll be great to get back into the swing of things.

A glance at the website for Copus shows that I will be missing my first Copus concert next week.

I noticed that I was going to be missing the concert earlier this week, but I haven’t really been able to collect my thoughts on the matter since I read the news on the Copus website.

It stinks. So far I’ve been to every concert that Copus has performed at, and they’ve rocked it hard every single time. Looking at the band site, it appears that they have been practicing a bunch of new music (no doubt to be debuted at Benders in KC) and I’m going to miss it. Son of a buck.

Anyway, if you’re going to be in the KC area on June 17, you don’t want to miss Copus playing at Benders. You can take some pictures and drink a Jack and Coke for me or something.

Whelp, I finally enrolled for the Fall 2004 semester. I decided this time that I would make sure to get enrolled before the new student orientation starts later this week, and eece241 closes up again. Here’s the schedule:

EECE 241 - Intro to Computer Engineering
GEOL 100 - Earth in Action (Rocks for Jocks)
JAPAN 191 - Japanese 1
ECON 530 - Money and Banking
MATH 510 - Discrete Mathmatics

I’ve done a pretty good job getting classes with friends; I’ll be taking eece241, geol100, and math510 with Cole this semester. The major omission this next semester is any classes from the CIS curriculum. This is pretty much by strategy. A good portion of the remaining CIS classes contain group projects, and Tyson and Cole are just barely one semester behind me when it comes to CIS classes. So I’m taking a break from CIS classes so that we can take the CIS classes together that have group work.

The next interesting bit on this schedule is the addition of japan191. I’ve been toying with the idea of learning a foreign language for a while now, mostly because of the “thought changes” that people talk about when dealing with a foreign language. The idea that people just think differently when they think “in” another language. I’m always interested in thinking of things in new ways, so I figure that a foreign language could only help my problem solving skills. So why Japanese? Well, considering my goal of learning something that would make a person think differently, Japanese is about as different from English as you can get. Then there’s the part where Japanese is just cool, and Dave can help me study.

And the final class in my schedule that wasn’t a “given” for a computer science student is econ530, Money and Banking. I’m still pretty sure that I want to get a minor in Economics, which entails four classes of 500 level or above (I’ve finished the other requirements). Since I’m already pretty damn jaded when it comes to economic theory, I try to be careful when selecting economics classes. I fear that if I pick something that is too opinionated and Keynesian, I’ll just get disallusioned and stop attending the class. So why pick Money and Banking of all things? Well, I think that this class will be much more about the mechanics of our current banking system and not so much about advocating a certain type of monetary policy (I hope). Oh yeah, and it was that or Environmental Economics: a study of market failure. Barf.

I’m pretty excited for the next semester. I’ve got a very well rounded scheduled that I think can keep me interested from every direction. Now if I can just stay “showing up” for classes, I’ll be set!

The

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about work, but there is very good reason. A couple Friday’s ago, the 28th of May, my workstation pooped out on me. Completely ka-put. Some investigation by Earl, our hardware specialist, showed that the motherboard had toasted itself, with burnt out capacitors spilling out insulation and the like.

However, the computer was under warrantee, so there wasn’t a lot to be done. They came to do an onsite last week, didn’t get it fixed, and so they took it with them. It’s still with them. Whatever they are doing, or not doing, it is taking way too long. I haven’t had a workstation of my own in over a full work week now, and it’s finally grating into me.

At first I just worked on my personal laptop, a very nice PowerBook, that I would use with one of the LCD screens on my desk. Later, I took an old computer from one of the labs downstairs and installed gentoo on it to tide me over. But I’ve beat around the bush taking care of remedial tickets as long as I can now. My primary tasks at the moment have to do with doing python scripting on Windows, and it’s very difficult to do with a Windows computer!

I have a lot that I would like to be getting done, and it’s just frustrating to not be able to get anything substantial done. And it’s not that there aren’t any alternative workstations that I might be able to work on in the mean time (for instance, Tyson isn’t in the office right now, so I can work on his workstation), but the problem is more about workflow and efficiency. I had my workstation all tweaked perfectly for just the way that I worked. And it’s frustrating to not have everything at my fingertips and to just languish in an unfamiliar environment.

However, not having my workstation has opened my eyes to a new alternative for my work environment. I’m a huge Gentoo advocate, and it kind of makes me sore that I haven’t been able to find a way to use it as my primary environment at work like I do at home. But considering I am a Windows Systems Administrator, I thought that was just going to be something that I would have to live with. But no more, I’ve got it worked out.

I’m going to reinstall this old workstation that I am on right now, and convert it into a Windows workstation. It will be relatively vanilla, with a similar installation to the lab computers that are around the building (except with the administrative tools that I need to accomplish my day to day tasks). Then, when my workstation finally returns, I’m going to reinstall it with gentoo. Then I’m going to be using both computers at the same time, the Gentoo computer as my primary workstation (I think that I’m going to name it chevelle, to match the new linux naming convention), and then an RDesktop open to n117w01, my new/old windows computer. Then I should be able to use all of the administrative tools that I need for day-to-day tasks from n117w01, and then I’ll have the glorious sloppy focus, virtual desktops, and other productivity tools that make me the speedy computer geek that I am.

I think I’m about to get a lot happier and a lot more productive… if I can JUST GET MY FREAKING WORKSTATION BACK!

My good friend Scott Johnson is going to be tying the knot in a little less than two weeks, and this last weekend he had his bachelor’s party. Not one to miss a once-in-a-lifetime event, I zipped down to El Dorado for the weekend so that I could attend. Steve–Scott’s brother–had a great bachelor’s party lined up, with paintball at The Edge starting at 10:00am, followed by some drag racing at the Wichita International Speedway. It looked to be a pretty damn good time.

Not one to leave Manhattan really early, Tyson and I geared up Friday afternoon and hit the road. It was a good ride down, relatively uneventful but with great weather.

This trip to El Dorado had the great coincidence of being the same weekend as the Relay for Life event in my old home town. My Mom is a cancer survivor, and so Relay’s for Life have always been one of my very favorite charities. My Aunt Karen had a team of walkers that raised almost $750 dollars for the cause, and they let me join in on the fun. I had the midnight to 1am shift, and I managed to crank out a good 3.5 miles before I was finished.

Participating in the Relay for Life in El Dorado had an interesting effect on me this time. This was the first Relay for Life in El Dorado that I had been to since moving away, and it was very interesting to see the “small town” dynamics in action. The event was nice, patently unprofessional, and very comfortable. El Dorado raised a record amount of funds from luminaries this year, and it was kind of discomforting to see just how many lives were taken or affected by cancer in even such a relatively small town. My family had an addition of a couple memorial luminaries this year for my Grandma Foreman that passed this last year from lung cancer.

Maybe I’m just getting old, but this weekend felt like the first time that I had experienced El Dorado from the perspective of an “adult”. I think I could see why someone would like to live in El Dorado (or some place like El Dorado), it feels very… personal.

After staying up much too late at the Relay for Life, I rode back to my Mom’s house to sleep before driving to Wichita and joining the Bachelor’s party at The Edge.

The ride to Wichita was a little unforgiving. Typically I fill up with gas before leaving Manhattan, and this time I didn’t. I have no idea when the last time I filled up with gas was, but I can tell you exactly when I ran out: on 254, about a mile away from the Hillside and N 45th street exit. This was one of the times that I mentioned in a previous entry that I wanted to moblog a bit. I had quite a bit of time to kill while I waited for Mike Harris and Steve Johnson to drive to me with some gas.

After getting to the Edge around 11am, we started getting after it. The “facility” was very nice, all outdoors, with about seven different maps. We played a variety of different gametypes on all of the field maps, with “medic” being the favorite game of the day. In this gametype, one of the players on the team was designated the “medic”. If a non-medic player was hit, they could call for the medic. And with a quick tag, you could wipe off the shot and keep going. It was good fun.

Finished with paintball, we left to clean up and get ready for the night of racing. We went to one of the Phillips 66’s that had high octane gas so that Scott could fill up, and I topped off the tank on the ninja. Before heading back to Justin’s to get showered and change clothes, we stopped by a parking lot to let Scott and Steve take a spin on my ninja. I don’t think that either one of them had driven a motorcycle before, and they both had a good time putting around the parking lot.

After some considerations regarding the possibility of rain, we headed to the drag track to give the cars a go. Three of the guys at the party ran time trials. Scott with his 3000 GT, Justin with his RX7, and Matt with his ‘68 Camaro. We had a great time talking numbers and taking video footage of the racers.

Probably the most significant event of the night at the race track was a horrible accident. Just before the Time Only’s were about to take to the strip (that’s what they called the hobbyists like us that were just there to run time trials and not actually compete), a nice camaro busted a drive shaft on the take off. It appeared that his rear differential casing blew up, and he just dumped all kinds of oil out onto the track. The track crew (mainly volunteers I believe) started sopping things up with paper towels as a preparatory step, but the real cleaning was to be done by burning off the oil. This is pretty typical for drag tracks, as even a small amount of oil on the track is completely unacceptable. As such, alcohol fuel is dumped onto the track to burn off any material that might be present. (I guess that alcohol burns hot enough to vaporize the oil and stuff, I dunno really).

When the car was pushed off the track, he left a line of oil. So a volunteer ran alcohol down the line and lighted it. Steve and I were sitting in the stands waiting to record another set of runs by Scott, Justin, and Matt, when Steve commented, “I was kind of debating taping them lighting the track on fire like that, but I figured… nah.” It’s too bad that he wasn’t, because what happened next took everyone by surprise. The volunteer leaned out to pour some more alcohol onto the track, and apparently didn’t notice that there was still burning alcohol there.

The gas can of alcohol immediately and spectacularly exploded. The first reaction was to look onto the track, where it was clear that a huge area was now burning with even blue and orange hot flames. The second reaction was to the flaming gas can and debris flying through the air and into the specator stands. The can landed on someone about 20 feet from Steve and I were sitting before we hopped up to dodge the fuel raining from above.

Some people were sitting between scattered flames, and not really moving. Then there was quite a bit of hollering as people realized that the gas can was what landed on the bleachers, and the gas can was still on fire.

The entire experience was pretty heavy, and it took a little over an hour for the ambulances to get to the track to handle the injured.

It was a somewhat sober event that kind of put a downer on the night. Overall everything was still a great time, but it certainly killed any buzz going, and it was difficult to get back into a full party mood to finish out the night.

I hope to be back in town from Salt Lake City by the time Scott gets married in a couple weeks.

It surprises me how quickly blogging integrates into ones daily lifestyle. All the time while pondering any number of topics I think “Man, I should blog that.” In any given day, I probably think of at least four or five potential blog entries.

Unfortunately, at five to fifteen minutes a piece to formulate and self-publish, I don’t have the time to blog every idea that I get. In fact, some of the better potential blogs get forgotten or deformulated by the time I get to a terminal I can blog from.

Also, I’ve definitely ran into a couple times where I wanted to “moblog“, especially this weekend. I think that I’m going to bump up my plans to set up tom (my long time webserver) as a dedicated gallery server and begin work on a script to provide mobile blogging for tbradshaw.net. The goal is to be able to email an image and some text to an address that will be procmail’d to a script. The script will submit the image to gallery on tom, and then use the text to create a blog entry here on tbradshaw.net using the thumbnail generated by gallery on tom.

Anyway, that’s my thoughts about blogging. Way to much to blog, and not enough time in the day.