Older blog entries for eknuth (starting at number 12)

bwh: Weird. My last fortune cookie was "Your success in life must be earned with earnest efforts."

I seem to fit into the "not posting much lately" category of advogatorist rather than the computer programmer, computer scientist, or angry young man (notice the Oxford comma).

This has been a good week for me. Been a pretty hard hittin' kinda guy at work. Lots of weird problems. Lots of trouble. Lots of people calling me at 7am, which is the best way to make it in to work at 8am. This week definitely went by quickly. That is usually good. Finally broke down and bought an Andrew Vachss novel. I'm not sure what I think. It is his latest book. It is ok. Very dark. Pretty well written. I haven't read any of his earlier books. This is the tenth in a series about the same guy. An anti-hero named Burke. I think I am going to have to go to the beginning and do some reading. We'll see.

I've been working on a cgi frontend to mon. There are a few out there but they aren't really what I want. I'm going with more of a devpatrol kind of look. I've been familiarizing myself with the Mon::Client module and I've put together a mock up. Once I get some functionality I will pull things into subroutines or maybe write a module. I'd like it to be just a one file drop in kind of thing. It seems like everything I write is incredibly localized. Makes distribution difficult.

I'm pumped to see Almost Famous tonight. I think it will totally rule. I'm psyched. I also want to see Original Kings of Comedy. I dig Spike Lee Joints. I don't have a car which makes it difficult to go see movies which are located on the outskirts of town. I'm a downtown kind of guy and all the downtown kind of movie huts have closed. It is a shame. squiggy and I are hopefully going to see Almost Famous tonight.

I've also been feeling kind of loopy. I don't know why. Doing lots of ed-patter. Which I find entertaining, but tends to annoy people. Conversation just gets kind of boring after a while. I think I probably have ADD. Looking at the lit Skud posted makes me wonder. Of course I always answer yes to all those questions. When I think I am depressed I answer yes to all the depression questions. I don't know. I think I am dyslexic as well. I'm just a depressed, dyslexic, ADD dude. And I think I've got testicular cancer. The good news is that I noticed that my body is shrugging off what appears to be poison ivy on my arm. Last summer I got poison ivy thrice in a two month period. It was rough. I took the prednisone cure which was surprising effective. Worked better than my old rub clorox bleach on it to kill the skin cells method. The good thing about bleach, though is that it is cheap. I think I am much healthier than last fall. I spent most of my last august drinking, smoking and doing bad things. Clean living. Will make. You healthy.

I'm amazed by the amount of people that think stallman is a crackpot. They think that he is some hyper anal license freak and that everything he says is just dogmatic crap. He may be an annoying long haired hacker, but he is usually right. The reason that the GPL has to be so precise is because it has to be bulletproof in a legal sense. Details matter. It shouldn't be that hard for some of you to imagine. And yes, we can go back to hacking and just writing code BECAUSE Richard Stallman and the GPL exist.

Today seems to be psychological show and tell day. squiggy is my bro and even if we live in different countries we will always be buds. I don't think you should look back on recent years as a waste. You WERE living. Sometimes you had fun. You may not have a college degree, but you have made up for that by kicking ass professionally. You may be too fat to race bikes, but you have a great ass. I think taking some time off for Stantime is a brilliant idea. You're young, you have disposable income, and you have great vacation benefits. And you know that I am down for whatever. You just say the word.

So, back to me. I'm really fucking edgy right now. I'm not riding very smoothly. I'm a teepee and a wigwam. Walking reduces my stress. I've up'ed my walking routine to about 2.5+ hours a day.

I haven't been keeping up with my diary too much. It seems like so much of the day is spent going to meetings, doing immediate need work, and supposedly thinking about bigger projects. Not enough actual work and not enough things done. I feel blah. When I feel blah, I read a lot. I've started a recently read books list. Pretty soon it will get depressingly long. Then I will remember that I bought most of the books and shelled out an average of $25 each. Anyway.

Books
not an endorsement

My office is a mess. I just sucessfully created a console cable hood that will basically let me console into nothing. And I can no longer use my stack of 6 retired Kentrox dsu/csus as a monitor stand. So, time to reconfigure the desk. I'm think a xyplex might work well.

Lunch with the boys. Stan and I talked about Alaska. It is looking more and more likely that sometime in the next two years or so I could likely move up there. My girlfriend goes to school in Juneau. I could move there or perhaps back to Boulder, CO where I am from. I haven' t lived there for more than 10 years though. I'm almost done with Indiana, I think. I want to put at least another year into my job, though. And moving would mean getting a new job. Unfortunately there don't seem to be any ISPs in Juneau. You would think that it being the state capitol and all... I don't know. Regardless I am planning a big trip there this summer. Do some major camping in Denali. Doesn't sound too bad.

My best buddy from high school leaves for Seattle Saturday morning. We've been hanging out quite a bit lately, which is good. I'm going to miss him.

Had kind of a frustrating day. I was inconvenienced by the ba/verizon strike. No big deal. Apparently they shipped in around 30,000 managers to act as scabs. The people I talked to were almost worthless. Tomorrow I am going to get cflowd/netflow working. Should be exciting.

It kind of pisses me off when people whine about the content of the diaries here. If you don't want to read it, then skip it, which is what I do when people whine about content. I also skip messages from people wanting someone to suggest a project for them to do. If you need to be told what to do you are a consumer not a producer.

I think that most of us college drop outs are having trouble understanding the certification system. I don't really have a strong grasp of it, but I think I may have an idea. It isn't the amount of certs you have, it is who you are cert'ed by. The closer you are to the top of the tree the more likely you will actually be certified. I just lost my Apprentice status which makes sense because I am part of a constantly changing status network. If someone pulls the certification of someone that certified me, I lose status. One thing I wonder about is if the more people you certify the more diluted your seed becomes. The less weight you have. Maybe I am misunderstanding the whole "seed" thing. If I'm right shouldn't the originally seeded people have their weight increased to cope with an ever expanding universe?

Some of my comrades have weighed in on the whole work not being a perfect system. I have some very thoughtful friends and co-workers. I'm interested in seeing what happens in the near future at my workplace. I think most of us have gotten pretty jaded. Hopefully this will increase consciousness. Either that or our concerns will get swept under the carpet yet again. I think that recent events will hopefully drive home the point that we all have to work together to get what we want. It is easy for them to throw a bone to the trouble makers and cause division. Leadership comes from the trouble makes. Without leadership most people are content just to muddle through and wait for better things to happen. Or jump ship. I think management has proven to be deaf to us. We'll see.

Mad props to Zach (free as in Bir) for the John Irving reference. The coop sounds like a great idea. I think we need to come up with a location. I've been pushing for Alaska, but I have ulterior motives. And Alaska isn't exactly tropical.

I think that advogato helps me organize myself when it comes to work. I am kind of in a vacuum physically, but here I can actually think in a group environment.

Today I need to get two terminal servers configured and ready to go. Or finish them up, anyway. DSL meeting. Lunch to "walk the dog". Maybe I will get to mess with cflowd and the monitoring package. I've convinced my boss that we can put something together with mon/rrdmon, cricket/rrdtool. This is good.

Went shopping and bought a bunch of new clothes. Including some jeans from old navy. I tend not to wear jeans very much and then I get some and I remember that I like to wear them.

My weekend was very mellow. I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre. I enjoyed it. There is definately a spectrum to spy novels. Tom Clancy is probably on one side. Recent Tom Clancy anyway. And Le Carre is on the other side. Len Deighton is close to Le Carre, but not quite sharing his rarified air space. Le Carre is very artful and more is implied than explicit. He doesn't need huge terrible villains. He knows that bad guys are people that just happen to have been born in a different country. His "villains" are fully developed characters. Clancy on the other hand needs some terrible, evil and mentally twisted bad guy that he can kill off in some horrible way. Last week I read Rainbow Six and in recent books it seems like Clancy is just expressing his anger against various groups, environmentalists, women, Japanese, etc. The cold war boogeyman is gone and I think Clancy is feeling angry and powerless. Compare Rainbow Six and Hunt for Red October. It is interesting to see how these writers are dealing with the "end" of the cold war. Le Carre is doing pretty well. Our Game was brilliant. Tailor of Panama was decent. The champ in my opinion is of course Len Deighton. As always.