CrazyEngineer.net

So, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t see this movie earlier in my life, because I most definitely would have built it (and probably try to install it in my cave at CMU).These days, it would definitely need to have the lock on the button because it just wouldn’t do to have Isabel throwing raves whenever she felt like it. In fact, I should just build an emergency “In Case of Izzy Meltdown” button. It would start playing “Banana Phone”, play the Best of Dora the Explorer on a wall projector, drop life size talking Elmo and Zoe robots, and raise a platform of cookies from the middle of the counter.

One thing I’ve never really been able to get into is reading blog RSS feeds from a Reader. I used to think it was just because I wasn’t using the right Reader, but I think I’m just allergic to that format of incoming data. Which is why I subscribe to all my RSS feeds as daily emails so my pointless information comes in little bite-sized nuggets instead of as a never-ending stream from a fire hose.

This dubious article on Detecting and Solving Internet Addiction made it to my inbox the other day in one of these digests. What annoys me about these types of articles is that they are usually so broad that 90% of the population is included. For example: drinking to get drunk means you’re an alcoholic. Well, why the hell else would you drink?

For the attention-deficit enabled, the article lists 5 detection steps. (It also has 6 solution steps, but since I’m not addicted, I skipped those).

1. You spend more time with the computer than with people.

Isn’t there an implied belief in this statement that people are inherently better to spend time with than computers? Anyone been to a 7-11 at 3 in the morning? Are you honestly suggesting I should be hanging out with those people than reading about particle physics on Wikipedia? For that matter, I could be chatting with a particle physicist online at 3 in the morning.

Maybe my problem is I place the burden of proof on the person and not the computer. Prove to me that you’re worth my time, or it’s a digging I will go.

2. You can’t abide by your own boundaries.

Hey, life happens. How often have you been at lunch longer than you planned? Are you a lunch addict? Or what about staying late after work to make sure that report gets done? You have a problem, you’re a work addict. Boundaries for everything always get broken at times. So I stay on later because the guild is putting together a raid and needs people, that’s the price of being a member of a team.

3. Lying to others about your computer usage.

Well, if they’d stop pestering me about it, I’d stop lying to them.

4. Feeling unable to live without the computer/internet.

Have you tried being offline for a few hours? I mean really offline, not even a cellphone. It sucks! It’s boring. And I would argue it is actually anti-social. I can’t Twitter to let people know what I’m doing. I can’t blog to share my deep feelings and thoughts. Heck, I can’t even post a picture of that beautiful sunset to Flickr for everyone to marvel in. That sir, is not living.

5. Misguided spending on your computer.

This is really short-sighted thinking. If my computer dies, spending whatever it takes to get it back online, no matter what, is not misguided. I’d make back that money in no time. Don’t need cable tv, I can watch whatever I want online. Don’t need a phone line, I have skype, email, IM, etc. Business attire? Have you seen how much a decent suit costs these days?

You want to talk about misguided spending, lets talk about filling up that SUV for a five mile commute everyday. Telecommuting is the ultimate green transit policy.

A working computer and a fast internet connection is the cornerstone of any sound personal monetary policy.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a podcast to listen to.

When Mrs. CrazyEngineer first asked me last week what I wanted to do for Father’s Day, I had one answer: Sleep.

Perhaps some background is in order. Sometime during college, the CrazyEngineer switched to being a morning person.

A “Holy Crap why would anyone ever be up this early!” morning person.

I personally blame my two years as a Buggy Mechanic as the trigger mechanism for this switch. Being functional at 3:30AM every Saturday and Sunday for two years is going to mess you up. So, these days I wake up at 4 AM and am usually at work by 4:30 AM while the family sleeps. I start winding down around 9 PM and aim to be asleep by 10 PM. For those math majors reading this, that would six hours of sleep a night.

So, assuming a young bipedal hominid does not wake me up early, I can get four complete REM cycles and somewhat refreshed in the morning. I’ve been tempted to try switching to a biphasic sleeping schedule, but I just don’t function well on cognitive tasks after 10 PM, so an afternoon nap would just let me stay up longer and be unproductive.

I do actually love a long afternoon nap, which is why I try to work out of the home at a coffee shop since they usually get annoyed when people are lying around snoring. This means that naps on the weekend are great treasure and usually claimed as an excuse to help the CrazyBaby sleep. I still keep the same 10 PM to 4 AM cycle on the weekends so I don’t get out of whack the following week. But a whole day of no responsibilities and sleeping and reading all day would be most excellent.

However, for the same reason I can’t go on vacation without a bag of books and a notepad, I couldn’t just lie around doing nothing all day. I’d go crazy after a few hours. Plus, since it is Father’s Day, I figure I should probably get up and spend time being a father with the family.

Which led to me changing my agenda 180 degrees and instead of taking it easy, I want to get a pile of crap done that has been sitting in my active drawer and cluttering up Remember the Milk. It’s a weird mishmash of crap, from expense reports for Marked Man to some class action lawsuit involving Sears anti-tip brackets for ranges. Sending that pile to the “Done” bin would be an excellent karmic cleansing.

Speaking of karma, I’ve also been meaning to make myself a meditation bench, because as much as I enjoy sitting seiza, I enjoy the use of my legs even more. What’s a more fatherly activity than building something?

I also have that three inch tall stack of magazines I could catch up on, that would be nice. Or I could finish one of the few other books I have started. Or I could just start that third book of the Baroque Cycle that has been mocking me since Christmas. And I really should get to fixing the Media UnVault.

And like that, my one day of relaxation a year has become just as jam packed as any other day.

Sigh, damn you brain. Just chill for a little bit. We can watch some reality tv.

I’ve mentioned that I switched to using an HP Media Vault six months ago for my massive storage needs. It was working great, with 500 GB of RAID mirrored goodness. It was also allowing me to continue to amass music without any space limitations to encourage me to consolidate my music archives. But that’s not the point.

The point is that yesterday the product in question become less vault-like and more blackhole-like. All the shares on the device disappeared, and the handy web admin interface cheerfully reported that both drives had 500GB of free space and were ready to go.

Losing this data really isn’t an option. Forget the mp3s. While their loss would be painful, it would provide a clean slate to rebuild my media empire in an organized fashion. But the Media UnVault also had financial files and Mrs. CrazyEngineer’s digital storybooks and other large files she had to move off her laptop.

I do have multiple options for recovering the data, however none of them are particularly appealing.

I opted to start with the most comical option: Call Hewlett Packard Tech Support.

This is not going to be an “Anti-Outsourcing-To-India” tech support rant. I’ve called tech support before and received most satisfactory results from staff on the subcontinent. No, this is a “Did you even bother to train this guy” rant. Bad technical support is universal, it doesn’t know political boundaries.

While on hold, I did some research on the problem and tried to connect to the Media Vault from the several computers at home. Since I could ping the device and use the web admin to check the status (I even enabled telnet and actually shelled into the No-Media Vault), this was obviously not a network problem.

My guess is that there is a corrupt volume or other data storage structure error that is confusing the UnVault. Apparently the No-Media Vaults use ReiserFS for their file system. While amazing in many ways, ReiserFS is perceived as a little more voodoo than computer science (what do you expect when the code’s namesake murdered his wife).

Anyhow, the HP tech support representative just made me cringe. He’d ask a question, I’d give an answer, then he’d put me on hold for three minutes while he checked something, come back, and ask the logical followup to the previous question, then put me on hold again, etc. I think their troubleshooting system was running slow.

He seemed sure that it was a connection problem, even though I could ping the machine, get to the web interface, and telnet to the UnVault. When I tried to tell him these facts, he said he was just going through the process. Eventually, he admitted he was stumped, and said he would email me back with a followup. I gave him my email, and expected to begin working on option 2 tonight since I would never receive an email.

Guess what I found in my mailbox this morning.

Hello CrazyEngineer:

I am sending this email as per our conversation yesterday regarding your computer not being able to see the MediaVault.

After doing some research and from few similar cases I had, I realized that this is a connection issue. Please call us back and provide the case#, we will be able to walk you thru the steps on how to solve this issue.

If you require further information please let me or a member of my team know by calling 1-800-474-6836 (1-800 HP Invent) and at the voice prompt to reach our team please state “storage” and “A HP Media Smart Server”

Thank you,

Emmannuel
HP Media Server Customer Care

So, +5 points for actually emailing me back, -1000 points for not understanding that if I can ping it, my computer can see it. I’m debating whether I should even call them. Might waste even more of my time getting nowhere. The best I can hope for from HP at this point is that they send me a new internal hard drive with the OS already installed on it to replace in the UnVault and then recover from the mirrored drive. This would save me the trouble of having to do some linux-fu to put the OS back on the primary drive myself. I think I’m going to go to option 2 and try to mount the mirror drive on my desktop in Linux and hope I can see the files. At least then I can recover all the files before I put the mirror back in the UnVault and call tech support back.

Time to check in with our favorite wacky popsicle makers: Alcor Life Extension.

They’ve been busy these last few weeks with three cryo-preservations. I’ll let the curious read the after action reports, but here’s a great paragraph about patient A-1026 who suffered cardiac arrest in southern California:

Due to delays in obtaining the doctor’s signature on the death certificate, transporting the patient to Arizona was nearly delayed an extra day. Because he was a neuro patient,

Alcor’s storage facility is in Arizona. And neuro patient means he was a member of the Frozen Heads Only Club.

we chose instead to perform a cephalic isolation in California.

Cephalic Isolation = Chop his head off. But their term sounds so much more serious.

Doing this eliminated the immediate need for a transit permit, because the brain is considered a tissue sample and is not subject to the same regulations as human remains.

Anybody else really disturbed by the logic of the law here? I would think logically that the opposite would be true. The brain is the really important part, the rest is really just life support and an exo-skeleton for the brain.

It was a choice of last resort, and was only done because an additional 24 hours delay would prevent us from being able to cryoprotect the patient. The patient arrived at the lab at 00:25 on 1 May, almost exactly 18 hours after pronouncement.

I’m not exactly sure why an additional 24 hour delay would have prevented cryo-protection outright. By this point a team was present, they had already washed the patient out (no blood) so clotting shouldn’t have been a factor. The head temperature had been lowered significantly to slow decay. Sure an extra 24 hours would have impacted the preservation achieved, but not nearly as much as a typical delay (the body sitting in an un-cooperative morgue).

These three most recent patients bring the total patients in long-term storage up to 82. Wonder if #100 gets something special (maybe a storage dewar with a window)?

Fun side note, there’s a link on the top of the Alcor blog to a small blurb that the CrazyEngineers’ college newspaper just did a story on cryo-preservation and used some photos from Alcor. It also says:

Please note: They declined our offer to do fact-checking before publishing the article.

I find this immensely amusing since I know from my days at CMU that The Tartan never let facts get in the way of a good story. This also brought back fond memories of when I lit The Tartan up in the alternative student paper with an article on just how incompetent they were at actually running a newspaper ($30K plus in debt, which was getting paid off with student activity fees that should have been going to student organizations).

Notice, these are not JUST Buffy and Angel action figures. They are action figures of Buffy and Angel from the episode “The Prom” (3rd Season). I mean, words really fail me here. I can’t understand why anybody would buy these except as a gag gift.

To be fair, I found this site by clicking through an ad for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Tarot Card Deck. In my defense, it does look like the deck is fairly clever in linking the Buffy Verse Elements to the traditional Tarot Deck. For example, it looks like The Tower card actually has Buffy diving off it, in reference to the Season 5 finale.

But, that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy it. I have been meaning to buy the Season 8 comic books, but I really don’t have the time to read what books I already have. Also, I fear a Buffy comic book could be a gateway drug to comic/graphic novel reading in general, something I really don’t want to pass.

Productivity and focus-wise I’ve been all over the map in the last month or so. With work changes and preparation for the new baby, I’ve had to make some sleep and priority adjustments, and a resolution or two may not be possible this year just because of competing constraints. But here we go…

Reach 175 Pounds

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the gym: I skipped size 36 pants. This last week I actually wore pants with a 34 waist. Folks, I haven’t worn pants smaller than 40 since High School.

The big change has been my adoption of the Body For Life program. I had always planned that once I hit 190 I would start doing more weight training. That occurred at the End of April. While looking for info on designing a weight program, I read about the Body for Life book over on Get Fit Slowly. I actually liked it’s approach and was an easy read (paid $4 out of pocket for it over at the used book store).

I just finished my second week and am down to 187 and I actually see movement in my arms when I try to flex my muscles. For anyone wanting to lose weight or tone up, I really recommend this book. It’s structured as a 12 week program, which I think is nice because you know when it will “end”. So, instead of saying “I need to get in shape”, you can say “I need to focus on getting in shape for 3 months and then evaluate”. And if the book can motivate me to start eating low-fat cottage cheese for protein (which I haven’t eaten in 20+ years), it can motivate anyone to get in shape.

I’ve also been using Fitday to track my food and exercise. The calculations are a little rough, but I’ve always found the value from tracking calories isn’t the numbers themselves but just being more aware of what you are eating and how healthy some of your choices have been.

Get 3 Characters to Level 70 in World of Warcraft

I did manage to start grinding Izzabel again, up to level 53. One problem has been instead of playing WoW, I’ve been playing Rome Total War (which, while it is four years old, is far more interesting than grinding the same content again). But last night I bit the bullet, uninstalled the damn thing and deleted all the saved games. Doing 30 minutes of grinding a night while listening to the Marketplace podcast should get this process going consistently again. However, looks like Wrath of the Lich King will be hitting in July, so I need to pick up the pace.

Meditate or Get Off the Buddhist Pot
I went to the Meditation Class at Dharma Rain and really enjoyed it. All the people were really nice and some of the other people in the class were also Catholic refugees. The only thing was that their approach seemed more relaxed than I thought Zen Buddhism would be. But its still a good starting point.

I did start zazen (Zen Meditation) for a few weeks, but decided that I needed to focus on one major change for a few weeks to get into a routine before adding more. I opted for the Body For Life program first, and since that is going so well I feel I can start meditating again in June and look to go to another class at the Dharma center.

Reach 8th Kyu in Kendo
As much as I hate it, this is a resolution that may slide until next year. Kendo requires serious dedication and my plate is just very full right now. My one comfort is that Body For Life will get me into awesome physical shape and Zen meditation will get me into awesome mental shape so that when I return to Kendo, I can focus on Kendo and not be as hamstrung by my previous physical and mental shortcomings.

Learn Lockpicking
Sigh, I suck. I know. Maybe I should ask for a set of lockpicks from my loving family for Father’s Day to kick this back into gear.

Organize MP3s
The music situation is coming to a crisis point. Because of my full-time gig with a stealth start-up, I’m logging large chunks of time in the coffee shop office slinging code. The only problem is that my music consumption is far outpacing the easily found supply and all the free music services (Last.fm, Grooveshark, Pandora) just aren’t doing it for me. That only leaves me with loading my iPod from the server at home and putting it on shuffle when off working. But to do that right and get good clusters of music to go with what I’m doing at the moment (my day can only be a movie montage if it has good music), I need to know what I have.

This Resolution Classified by Marked Man Inc.

Sigh. What the hell do I do with my life? I can either keep trying to work on my life’s Great Work (as this resolution refers to) at night and on the weekends while doing a normal full-time job (and drive myself to burnout). Or I can back off and focus on the work for the stealth start-up which will go one of two ways by the end of the year (Crash & Burn or More Funding and continued employment).

Mrs. CrazyEngineer and I have pretty similar political views. The only difference seems to be the reasoning behind those views. For example, we are both Pro-Choice, but Mrs. CrazyEngineer is because she believes in a woman’s right to choose and reproductive freedom. I’m Pro-Choice because we have too many fricking people on this planet and I’m willing to allow just about anything to keep that number from growing. Hell, I’d implement forced sterilization after two kids if I could. (And yes, that would be forced sterilization of the woman. I’m not against forced sterilization of men, but until you can easily take an egg from a woman and implant it in a man who can carry the child to full term, it’s just pointless to go after the men and not the women).

So, as could be expected, we have taken different sides in the Obama/Hillary Deathmarch. Eryca has been a big fan of Hillary for some time (read her book, family connection to Wellesly College, both are strong women in leadership roles in environments that have traditionally been dominated by men). I’m leaning towards Obama only because it would actually bring a little hope to my blackened cynical heart that a country that was ready to lynch every muslim they could find after 9/11 would actually make a man named Barack Obama its ultimate leader seven years later. And the first African American President being elected by a non-Republican Party (Lincoln’s part) should illustrate just how far the Republicans have drifted from their ideals.

Here’s the thing. I’ve heard/read this in several places, and only after I really thought about it did I realize how true it was. Barring a massive Obama scandal (on the order of magnitude video tape surfacing of him naked with a bunch of cub scouts in a motel room burning the American flag), if the superdelegates actually override the pledged delegates, popular count, and state count and nominate Hillary, the Democratic Party will shatter for this election, and maybe forever.

Doubt it? Think about it like this: A group of predominantly white elites (less than 1000 people from all over the country) is going to have to deny the nomination to the first African American to win the presidential nomination from a major party and give it instead to a white woman from the deep south. Think about that, really think about that (especially from the perspective of an African American, which I am not but after reading “Gang Leader For a Day” I feel like I at least some understanding of their perceptions).

Bluntly, once again it’s “The White Man screwing over The Black Man”. African Americans who thought they were equal members in the Democratic Party would suddenly feel like they were second class citizens (or that maybe their votes counted for less, like say, three fifths of a white person’s vote). I’ve heard people say that there’s now way Obama supporters would vote for McCain in the general, and that’s true. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to vote for Hillary if they see the Democratic and Republican parties as the same racist organizations that will never let them be on top.

I’m going to predict that if Obama gets denied the nomination, some black leader will step in (Jesse Jackson, or Goddess help us, Al Sharpton) to rally a third party protest vote for African Americans and spoil the election for the Democrats.

Here’s a nice un-advertised feature on Hotpads. Normally, Hotpads shows dwellings for Rent and for Sale on a spiffy zoomable map. You can zoom in on a geographic area and see what’s available in it. So, when the home page loads, just click anywhere on the US Map. Now, look at the four tabs at the top left of the browser. Why, there seems to be a fourth options: Foreclosures!

Instead of looking at available dwellings, you get a per-household heat map by county of every home ownership dream that has been crushed. For fun, take a look at the greater Detroit area. Most of those counties are in the highest foreclosure tier: 1 foreclosure for every 150 households in the county. Now, I think somebody is lying, because there aren’t at 150 households left in Detroit. However, it is an interesting solution to the large amount of Detroit homeless that existed before the credit crunch: they can just squat in foreclosed homes.

If I seem a little bit flippant about thousands of families losing their homes, you’re right. The honest answer is that most of the people losing their home should never have been able to purchase the home in the first place. If they had actually lived within their means, had an emergency fund, and didn’t buy big screen tv’s on credit; they would be just fine. Yes, there are some cases of trickery by mortgage companies, and those involved deserve to be tarred and feathered. But many more just didn’t bother to do the math, ask questions, or basically be a responsible adult.

All of these schemes to help out families losing their homes is just stretching the agony out. Adjustable Rate Mortgages are like that for a reason. Delaying the adjustment hurts the lenders and only delays the inevitable. If a family can’t afford it now, they’re not going to be able to afford it a year from now. Most people bought too much on credit in the last binge, and now it’s time to pay the piper. And while I agree with the Bear Sterns bailout made sense (otherwise a worldwide economic collapse may very well have occurred), I also think that maybe this market correction needs to be extremely painful. Maybe it will force the current generation to pay attention to the dangers of credit and not let this crap happen again for a few decades.

Sometimes setbacks are for the best. When Mrs. CrazyEngineer and I moved to Salem, I applied to a few State of Oregon jobs at the Oregon Lottery. Needless to say I didn’t get any of them, just a GFY letter.

But now, thank Buddha that I didn’t get a position, because this is bullshit. As I have said before, the quickest way to turn good workers into disgruntled employees is to treat them like children and not trust them. In my experienced, decent employees rise to the level of responsibility expected of them (if you don’t have decent employees, then you have other problems bigger than personal email on company time). Nobody wants to do crappy at their job, everyone would like to do a good job and be compensated for their effort (either with money, public praise, perks, promotion, etc).

But barring users from even playing CDs in their computers sends the message that management just doesn’t trust them to make good decisions. Once employees feel they are no longer trusted, they will start acting in ways that really would result in a loss of trust (in much more harmful ways). I’ve seen it happen.

As for the security argument, it’s probably more the case that the state is too cheap to properly staff the IT department so that specialists can be focused on security instead of any random doofus plugging holes ad-hoc. Properly configured firewalls, spam filters, virus scanners, and web browsers are not a security risk. Explain to me why any email with an attachment couldn’t be bounced back to the sender, thereby completely eliminating the risk of email viruses? Are they actually trying to stop an employee from transmitting sensitive information by email or IM? Newsflash: if they want to do it, they’ll find another way.

And guess what, this morning I was checking the Dice Job Boards to see if there was anything in the area, and a bunch of Senior Analyst positions with the Oregon Lottery popped up. I’m not saying people quit because of the lockdown, but I do think they’re not going to get many qualified applicants because of the stringent work conditions. This will only add to recruiting and HR costs (employee turnover is insanely costly when calculated, which it never is). Which will probably more than offset any perceived losses to productivity because of personal web use during business hours.

Good Job!