Last week started off OK, but by the time we got to Wednesday things were on the way downhill. I had a flat tire just as I was pulling into the office driveway. I waited until my afternoon meetings to go out and change it. Surprise! There was one funny lug bolt that needed a special key piece that I dont have.

Public service announcement: If you have a special anti-theft lug bolt on each wheel, take some time to check and make sure you have the key adapter in your car. Do this ahead of time, before you end up needing it. If someone else put the tires on for you, check that they put the key back in the trunk with the wrench.

As it turns out the AAA guy was not able to get it off either, and the tire would not inflate at all (due to riding on the rims for the last quarter-mile or so). The dealership has the part but there are like 10 different patterns so you can’t just get a ride and go pick it up, they have to actually see the car to match it. (The manual has helpful advice for this circumstance — be sure to write down the code number (visible on the key itself) sometime before losing the key.)

After getting towed to the dealer, I got the $20 part and paid the $70 to the tow guy for the mileage beyond 5 miles. The towing guy was really nice. Also my friend JT from work drove along with me in case I needed a ride home, that was extra cool.

This week was index deployment week, which involves a lot of meetings. There were also a couple of meetings having to do with last week’s network maintenance. I don’t like having a lot of meetings… I prefer to be available to people as a resource, and take some of the extra overflow type of work and in general keep people happy and focused. Lots of meetings with people outside my group make me feel sort of cut off. Perhaps I should take a laptop to the meetings and stay connected with irc.

Most of the time that was not meetings on Thursday and Friday was taken up by helping to deploy a new product — it was delivered to us a week and a half ago but we didn’t have a chance to work on it until now, and Friday night was the deadline. So Trip and I stayed quite late on Thursday night to try and figure out why it wasn’t working (Trip was doing most of the heavy lifting and I was mainly moral support and research assistant). After getting the data rate up from being stuck at 4 megabits we were able to get it up to like 8 or 9 (the theoretical max is 50 because we are running two copies at once to the same machine). This was not enough to meet our deadline but it would probably finish Saturday, and our other deployment was likely to run over a bit too.) So we called it “ok for now” but decided we should regroup with the R&D folks Friday morning when they got back in the office.
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I really did write up a post about my weekend. Did anyone else see it? Ah well, either my computer ate it or LJ did.

Highlights:
– Move a few more users and three mushes. Charon is pretty much ready to take down.
– Saw jakeaidan for dinner (Restaurant Formerly Known as Cuisineer Six) and dessert (BJ’s)
– Saw L and J for dinner Sunday and had shabu-shabu at Kingswood
– Spent most of the weekend organizing and reorganizing my MP3s.

The other post was longer and more eloquent, so just pretend I’m like, well-spoken or something, kay?

I posted the following in and I wanted to save it in my own journal for my reference. (It’s a response to someone who deleted a handful of comments to her post because they were “being mean”.)
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Still cannot kill Texans with my mind. Tried. Failed.

Bryant might be interested in this, if he hasn’t seen it already. When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History

This is a very interesting essay about a world leader who:
– had not been elected by a majority vote
– had his political roots in a southernmost state
– whose coarse use of language… and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media
– used the occasion [of a terrorist attack] – “a sign from God,” he called it – to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion
– pushed through legislation – in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it – that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus
– proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader
– and surprisingly, is NOT named Bush

Let me just say that I support the the wish for peace meme by linking to my original essay from September 12 2001 A Wish For Peace.

The following quotes written over a year ago still ring true for me.

Despite the sheer magnitude of yesterday’s events, I will still continue to trust people as often as not; it took a long time to learn and will take much more than this to un-learn…

I have no specific suggestions or guidance as to what to do in a situation like this. Only time will tell if we will be admired or sharply criticized for our actions during this dark time.

This article in The Onion was printed January 2001. This was pre-9/11, and yet strangely prophetic. And funny in that “doesn’t it suck to be right” kind of way.

My opinion? Terrorism sucks, but it’s not clear this has anything to do with Saddam or Iraq. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the misdirection and sleight-of-hand that Bush has used to associate Iraq with terrorism is impressive. Not because it shows how clever he (or his aides) actually are, but more because it shows that a large number of Americans are cattle.

Still, it didn’t completely work, there is a large chunk of population that doesn’t agree with his policy, and still more who believe that we (the US) do ourselves a disservice by going against the will of much of Europe.

My questions: How do we know inspections are not working? The inspectors say they are working. Do we think Saddam will be more of a danger to us (or our interests, whatever those are :) 30 days from now, while inspectors continue to work with a highly-motivated Bhagdad, or less of a danger? 150+ weapons inspectors could get a lot done in 30 days, but we’ve gone and forced the issue so now they are leaving.

Why did Bush say “We will force the issue to a vote” and then decide not to do so, when it was clear that France and several others were against him? Is it at all notable that more UN security council members said they would be against such a resolution than those who favored it? So when it is clear that another vote would not go quite our way, at least not at this point in time, how sporting is it to suddenly decide “Well we don’t really need that second resolution, because international consensus is overrated anyway?”

And where is the North Korea issue in all of this? Bush’s double standard is showing. We should not be afraid of a country that is 1. closer to the us, 2. has an actual nuclear program (and not just aluminum tubes that turned out to be unsuitable for enriching uranium) and 3. might actually have an inter-continental missile or two? OK, I can think of two BIG reasons why we are going to war with Iraq and pretty much ignoring North Korea. 1. Americans empathize with Asian people more than with Arabs, and 2. North Korea has no oil.

OK enough rambling. Let me just say that the next time we have elections here in the US we should take Chile up on the offer of sending election monitors.

Powell Offers Proof of Saddam-Osama Link

OK, I went and bought a book on this subject which contains dozens of possible transcriptions for common names. I feel it’s already earned its value. Here is one possible way to write Guu-Rei-Gu in Japanese:
遇礼仇 – one who treats his enemies with courtesy
Would anyone else like me to look up their names? :)

Hello again loyal readers, sorry this is a little late.

Not sure what I did Friday. I seem to remember leaving work more or less on time, like 5:30. I probably had dinner at some point. Oh, that’s right, L came over again and we worked on the first of the user migrations (me!)

Saturday, we went up to Healdsburg to see M’s grandma and parents. A good time was had by all! It was M’s birthday and her mom gave her a huge blanket that she knitted, must have taken a long time. We got back kinda late but not too bad.

Sunday, I did laundry, which was a challenge in itself, since three of the six or so laundry rooms are closed for either painting or new flooring. These happen to be the three nearest me; I am in building 4 and the laundry rooms are in 1, 3, and the cabana pool area. I found three other laundry areas in buildings 6, 8, and 12. The dryers in building 12 don’t dry very well, but all worked out okay.

We went to the store to get some hair color for M, and got back in time to meet L. L and I worked on a couple more user migrations. We are getting pretty fast at this, so we should be done in a week, two at the most. (Any nekodojo users not yet migrated, please email me and we will set an appointment.)

Just about to go to bed, 11:45 pm, I carefully made the bed and then found out that Harley had *pissed* on my bed, probably to protest me not scraping the litter boxes right on schedule. So, I unmade the bed, sprayed some cleaner on it, dabbed it up, flipped over the mattress, and made the bed again. Got to bed about 12:45. I kicked Harley off the bed several times, but he didn’t understand why, so he went into the front room looking hurt and confused at Mommy about why Daddy doesn’t love him any more… He is all better today though.

That is all.