I’m Alive
Posted on March 18, 2008 Posted by John Scalzi 17 Comments
Made it to Chicago — I’m actually a little past Chicago, actually, since the hotel I’m at is one of those a mile out from the airport. It’s technically Chicago but it feels more like Irvine, with much worse weather. The trip was fine except the last hour, which was the Kennedy Expressway crawl, which apparently never goes away in either direction. My plan for now: Maybe a nap. After that, we’ll see.
How’s your day?
Mine? Boring in a good way since the allergy symptoms from yesterday have abated (ah, modern pharaceuticals). One of the down sides of living in the Bay Area are the conditions which arise when a warm spring follows after a long wet winter. Every flowering plant known to man (and a few we’re not so sure about) is partaking in a literal orgy of pollen exchange.
I am jealous at the notion of a nap, but that is because I had a wonderful time last night at a house party celebrating the 10th anniversary of local band North. My favorite part was actually during the jam session post the North-only performances, when Jim Novak (a local poet and musician who runs a monthly open mic and is a terrific performer), whipped out some of his William Butler Yeats. It was wonderful.
John! You’re in my hood, brotha! I feel downright privileged to be in proximity to you.
Hey, let’s go check out a movie tonight or something. Or, if you’d rather stay in, I could bring over a 12-pack of Goose Island and we can watch reruns of Cops. Either way, let me know.
PS – I know secret passageways to circumvent the Kennedy.
The same as every yesterday.
“It’s technically Chicago but it feels more like Irvine, with much worse weather.”
Good ghu. Welcome to hell. The only thing Irvine has to recommend it is the weather. Well, that and the Peruvian restaurants.
What Ulrika said. And, ouch.
My day was so-so. Trying to teach the great minds of tomorrow how to reason.
I suggest building a deep, deep bunker and start stocking it. Investing in that doomsday seed vault in Norway might be a good idea as well.
As for more bad news, it seems that Arthur C. Clarke died.
see the alert on CNN.
You know, not too bad. Had an awesome leg workout just now. Lifted the same amount of weight that i was lifting 5 months ago but for twice the amount of reps, so that was cool. Work as so-so. I hate it when the code outputs way too many lines supposedly from the results of an SQL query but when I try the SQL by itself, it returns the correct number of lines. I’ll figure it out tomorrow.
Wait, was that TMI?
Plug time:
Go to http://lthforum.com to find out the best places to eat nearby (or quite far, actually).
If you’re in the Rosemont area, you’re in a vast wasteland, but there’s some quite good stuff in a 15 minute drive radius.
Well, I was driving south on I95 on my way to the airport only to find out that I95 is closed in Philly…
only a minor inconvenience of routing rush hour traffic off THE major highway…
Had to listen to the GPS yell RECALCULATING for about 15 minutes while I drove randomly until she chose a course that wasn’t steering me back toward I95.
Slow. I didn’t get enough sleep last night. I feel like I’m running on spent batteries.
I’m glad you’re okay. :)
Had a great day at work, even though I thought it wouldn’t be. Am technically still having it.
I got a blog entry finished inbetween a commute this morning and a lunch hour (skipped lunch). And it got Stumbled. I’m thankful to someone, possibly multiple people. It’s about synopsis writing.
Glad I finished it up, even if it did cost me breakfast and lunch. Means I can go back to making up my sleep debt tonight. Then I’ll only have like 10 nights left to pay it off in full.
Going all right overall. Got a nice massage. Now I’m reformatting the documentation to someone else’s massive SQL database. At the moment it consists of a bunch of wiki articles in roughly chronological order of him putting the database together, in a single big list on one page, all of them in <pre> format. I’m hoping to organize it into subsections so that it’s easier to find stuff. This would be so much easier if he hadn’t suddenly quit on no notice a few months back…
Two days left on morning shift, then I get to go home, so that’s good. Offer for a hockey game still stands. As long as you try your hardest to impersonate James Earl Jones, I’ll do my best Kevin Costner.
Wet. It has been raining non stop for a few days here in south west Ohio. My yard and kitchen are swimming pools. Must get the kitchen roof fixed! I wore my snow boots to work, otherwise my feet and pants would be soaked. I suspect you experienced the same weather at home.
Lost.
SQL seems to be the order of the day. If direct SQL gives the correct answer then, well, I think you know how to debug it. One of my biggest ARGHS came as the result of I/O caching that I had no idea was happening. Another terrible problem happened between a computer on the west coast talking to one on the east coast. Comm traces showed everything fine and yet a deadlock occurred now and then. I had to use a datascope on both ends at the same time and look at that trace. It turns out the friggin’ firewall on one end was interceding and responding FOR the computer with invalid protocol which resulted in a deadlock condition where both computers were waiting for the other with NO timeout.
They set the firewall to do that to try to prevent denial of service attacks. Big big arg on that one. It was intermittent and took months to figure out, and intermittently clobbered the nightly credit card processing, delaying payment and delaying shipments as well. Big Big ARG!
Today I am pissed at my Linux box which let me shut it down without telling me it had too little free hard drive space to come back up. Now I can’t get the BIOS to boot from the CD drive so I can delete some extra files and make room. I can’t make a bootable diskette because my Windows box has no diskette drive.
God I really and truly HATE Linux even more than Windows which is saying a LOT.
So yeah, thanks for asking about my day.