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OK before I forget, the weekend report. Did some cool work stuff that needed doing. On Saturday I solved a potentially sticky problem that was just found on Friday. Also I brushed the dust off a device that is designed to funnel all syslog messages EVAR to one machine where we can watch them all scroll by. Sunday was spent mostly looking for laundry rooms, since #1, #2 and #3 were closed, that meant hauling clothes to the other end of the complex. It would have been easier to haul them to my car; had I known all three closest rooms were closed I would have done so. ...

Regarding HR 1146, proposed by a gentleman from Texas, concerning ending United States participation in the UN, I have called my representative to express my views. Here is the recipe in case someone else wants to serve a batch as well :) 1. Find representative here: http://www.house.gov/. 2. Call the number. 3. Say “I’m a constituent from ____(city). I would like to ask the congressman to oppose ______(whatever bill). I feel strongly that we should _____(verb).” 4. Say “Can you tell me if the congressman has a position on this issue?” 5. Listen. Say “Thank you.” 6. Hang up.

Playing Bookworm just now. I very carefully lined up the word “LIENHOLDER” but it didn’t recognize it as a word. Sigh. I don’t think I have ever had a 10-letter word. I played LIEN and HOLDER for 2880 points between the two, but playing one long word would have been “fantastic!” OK time for bed now.

Call allergist make appt Call car repair make appt Call tax guy make appt Call plumber re: toilet Move charon to new ip Move poly to new ip Cancel meer.net

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.

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. ...

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”.)

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… ...