Spring/Summer 2007

I’d been living with Matt Sweeney (usually just Sweeney) on the first floor of a duplex on the edge of Downtown Minneapolis since fall 2006, but around May 2007, we both had interests in him moving out. He felt the rental market was favorable around that time of year, and was kind of interested in getting a place to himself. I extended an offer to Adrianne to move in with me, after having dated for about two years at that point, and she excitedly accepted. We had already basically been living together for many months by that point, in that she stayed at my apartment most days, and was kind of using her old house as a closet/office, but it was still a big step to formally cohabitate. We rented a U-Haul van for the roughly three-block move, which then went pretty quickly. The only particular trouble we had was with the large open-faced wardrobe she owned, which was originally too tall to fit through the front door into the apartment, and didn’t have enough clearance in the entryway to flip/rotate it on its side and come in that way. But, after much wasted effort, I discovered that it had screw-on feet for leveling purposes, which we were able to screw in enough to just barely shove it across the threshold. It stayed in the living room for the rest of its life there on S 10th St.

I think Adrianne was barely in a month, though, before she packed up and left for a summer internship at Nike headquarters in Portland, OR (well, Beaverton, technically). Her departure was incredibly difficult for me, at the time, and I think I cried more the day she left than I had cumulatively in the two years preceding it. We weren’t breaking up, or taking a break, or anything like that, but I just was sad that we’d be apart for that long; we saw each other nearly every day for many months prior to that, so it was going to be a big change to not see each other for about six weeks at a time (we figured I’d go visit in the middle of the summer). But, as it tends to do, life went on, and we both figured out how to make it through the day, while still conversing daily by IM and phone. At no point between getting my current cell phone plan with 1500 minutes per month and that summer had I exceeded 400 minutes of talk time, but I reached the point where I had to be very conscious of my usage, to avoid exorbitant per-minute overage fees.

I don’t honestly remember too much else about that summer. I know that a long-time family friend Erin C. (now Erin G.) got married, which kind of forced the issue of Adrianne coming back to Minneapolis for a long weekend, instead of me visiting Portland for a long weekend. Other than that, I probably just worked a lot, and saw friends occasionally. I feel like I must have done more than that, to avoid going stir crazy, but if I did, its memory escapes me. I suppose that’s basically the explanation for how time flies. My memory of a three-month span of my life consists of one event and concern for my cell phone usage.

Fall/Winter 2007

Eventually, though, Adrianne’s internship got done, so she moved back to our apartment in Minneapolis, and went back to school for her last semester. I … um … continued to work? It was at this point that Adrianne started not-so-subtly suggesting that we move to Portland after she graduated that winter, which I wasn’t thrilled about, but I started looking for jobs out there anyway. There actually ended up being one pretty interesting prospect–a company that made enterprise-level digital media servers and the like (I believe the company was Grass Valley)–but the original position the recruiter had wasn’t the most exciting to me, and while she assured me the company was also interested in me for another engineering position on a different team, there were delays inside the company with getting the official approval/budget allocation for a new hire. I wasn’t searching or pushing too hard, and Adrianne’s plan to receive an offer from Nike didn’t come through, so I explained my position, that it made more sense to stay in Minneapolis, where at least one of us had a solid job, than to move across the country and both be unemployed and job-hunting. She eventually relented, and applied for some jobs in Minneapolis, as well as other places around the country/world, and I mostly stopped looking.

Spring 2008

Adrianne kept hunting for jobs, and I kept working. Around what I believe was the end of February, I took a trip out to Las Vegas, which marked two firsts: my first time in Las Vegas, and my first real business trip. (I put real in quotes because it was for my side-business, Techware Labs, which, although a real, profitable, company, can’t pay my salary, and I had to take time off my real job to go on that trip.) It was while I was in Vegas that I received news of Adrianne’s job offer from The North Face in a split capacity doing normal retail sales and having some responsibilities for arranging merchandise on the floor, setting displays, etc. I think she fluctuated between being excited and unsure about a dozen times, but eventually ended up accepting the position.

Later that spring, Adrianne and I took a vacation out to Seattle, WA. Although I didn’t take an approach quite as lavish in Seattle as I did in Los Angeles the previous spring, we still stayed in a nice place (rented a condo in the Belltown neighborhood, a few blocks from the famous fish/etc market), rented a very fancy car (which I later learned I was the first to drive, even), and ate some very nice meals (fresh seafood!). Despite not liking beer, I agreed to go on [another] brewery tour (Red Hook), which was a little funny, because it was more of a beer tour than an actual brewery tour, so Adrianne had to drink for me, too–she got pretty sloshed :p. I also got to see a little bit of the Microsoft campus while visiting my friend Josh J., who had briefly attended college and been in ACM with me, and who passed on some good recommendations for restaurants and sights to visit. The Jimi Hendrix Experience Music Project was pretty cool historically, and interactively, though there were longer waits at some of the interactive stations (like playing instruments) than I cared to endure. Adrianne ran in a trail race about an hour north of Seattle, a bit into the mountains, and placed quite well in her category, especially for her first trail race ever.

Summer 2008

My memory of the summer of 2008 is almost completely centered around one thing: Adrianne and I broke up. Had I written this at the time, I certainly would’ve filled pages (and did, privately) about that, but it’s pretty far behind me now, so I’m confident I can exercise a bit of brevity recapping it at this point. The crux of the issue–as I see it–boiled down to the fact that, after getting her job at North Face, Adrianne really changed. She got new friends (co-workers), new hobbies, and neither of us made a significant effort to make sure that we were along for that ride, and by the time either of us did, it was apparently already too late. (Perhaps it was always too late … who knows.) So, she grew closer to one of her new friends/co-workers, and we grew apart. Issues flared up a bit a couple times, and I, surprisingly, actually brought them up and tried talking about them, to no particular effect. I guess she eventually processed everything herself, and we talked through everything, with varying degrees of honesty as the night wore on, and lots of crying. I don’t think I slept at all that night, but the next morning marked the start of my positive habit that summer of running on weekends. At my urging, we tried to work things out, but eventually it became clear that Adrianne just wasn’t there, so I said she should move out, and she didn’t disagree.

Despite being pretty torn up about the situation at the time, I like to think that, for the most part, I handled it pretty rationally. I mentioned earlier that I did write a ton privately, which I tend to do when I’m emotionally disquieted, or otherwise have something on my mind I need to work out. I think that writing forces me into an analytical mindset, and it’s necessary to organize and thoroughly process my thoughts–or at least the years and years of English classes have just made me do that by reflex when I write. Either way, I find something cathartic and very helpful about it, so I use that outlet when necessary. On a somewhat related note, after writing easily more than 10,000 words in less than the first week of all of that happening, I came to the realization that I had documented the most painful parts of my life in meticulous, prolix detail, and had virtually none corresponding to average, or happy times in my life. I made a casual resolution to fix that, and am pleased to report that I have followed through with that (to varying degrees at different times, but still!). But I digress…

Getting back to the topic at hand: I started to really lean on my friends after the breakup, which caused me to realize that I’d severely neglected them while I was in a relationship. Despite that, they were still unconditionally good to me, and I can’t emphasize enough how much that meant to me, and helped me. I was forced / forced myself to be very social, and went from having roughly one or two social engagements per month with friends to one or more per day, almost without fail. I distinctly remember a span of three weeks during which I literally did not have a weeknight evening or weekend day that I wasn’t doing something with people. It was awesome, but it’s also rather difficult to get anything done for myself with a schedule like that. At this point I also started to become closer friends with Naomi K., among others, who turned into one of my best friends over the following months. So, after the initial slump, there were a lot of hugely positive changes in my life that summer. I wouldn’t say I’d jump at the opportunity to go through that again, but I recognize a lot of good came about as a direct or indirect result of it, so that’s really the best I think anyone could ask for :).

Well, I’m on one of my weekly conference calls with some of our engineers in India, and don’t need to completely pay attention all the time, so I decided to start writing a little. But, rather than writing something substantial (like the very necessary continuance of my life update since I left off in spring 2007, I think), this entry is going to basically be a hodgepodge of a few things that are, or have recently been, on my mind.

Motorcycles

I bought a motorcycle on Tuesday. It’s a blue 2002 Suzuki SV650S with 5,900 miles (looks like this, and frankly, it’s pretty sweet). I took my motorcycle permit test back in mid-June, about three days after the thought popped into my head without any discernible origin, and signed up for the BRC about two days later. Somehow I managed to get into a class about a week later (even though everything after that was full for a month or so), which I easily passed, thus earning my motorcycle license. This was cool, but I didn’t have any specific plans to buy a motorcycle. I occasionally perused craigslist, but knew nothing about motorcycles, so I was basically just looking at pictures and price tags. Again, for no particular reason, one day I decided to actually research the subject, so I read a few guides, reviews, and asked a few people some questions, and then started hunting with a specific target. Not very long later, I spotted this listing, sent some emails, convinced a friend to come look at it with me, and bought it!

I’ve only ridden it about four times so far, and I still stalled it a couple times today, but I think I’m getting better. I do know that it’s brilliant fun, and I’m excited that my jacket and gloves should arrive tomorrow. (Hopefully they fit.)

Thunderstorms

We’ve had two of them in the past three days, one of which I had the displeasure of needing to go outside during, and didn’t have an umbrella, etc. I was at the Twins game on Friday, and since it was still a beautiful day when I left for the game, I didn’t think at all to check the weather, much less bring an umbrella. (I have a condo a few blocks from the Metrodome, so a couple friends came over before the game, had some beer, and then we just walked over.) I was supposed to be going to the Wolfgang Gartner (sample) show at Envy at 10 PM, so I left the game after the top of the 10th inning, which happened to be right around the worst part of the storm, and if you recall, it was quite the torrential downpour. Although I only had to sprint from the dome to the rail station across the street, I was still pretty well soaked by the time I got there. Clothes and hair dried reasonably quickly, but I think my shoes were still wet by the time I left at 2 AM.

The second thunderstorm just rolled through about an hour ago, and I had the pleasure of watching this one from my window, on the 15th floor. For quite a while, I just got to watch the lightning display a few miles in the distance, which is quite humbling; the scale of these storms is truly awe-inspiring. I occasionally try to imagine what the landscape might have looked like hundreds of years ago, prior to the arrival of Europeans (though, obviously I wouldn’t have the benefit of a 15th-story view at that point), and a huge force of nature like a massive thunderstorm seems appropriately connected to such a landscape. I’m not really trying to say anything particularly profound with this … just one of many disjointed thoughts I have. I guess I’ll just wrap this up by noting that I find some strange pleasure in getting completely soaked by a warm summer downpour … as long as I don’t have anywhere I need to be. I think it’s related to the aspect of surrender and acceptance, and then watching others make futile attempts to stay dry.

Eukaryotes

This is clearly the nerdiest of the three random topics I decided to address tonight, and perhaps the topic on which I’m least qualified to speak. Luckily for you, that means that I’m not actually going to speak in very much detail about its specifics, but rather the tangent through which I happened to be thinking about this.

I was at a punk concert on Saturday at Triple Rock (punk isn’t really my scene, but a good friend was really looking for someone with whom to go, so I agreed), which led to some prime people-watching. During the course of my observation and reflection (while the show was going on, yes), I started pondering how it was that we’d managed to get from the point of a single prokaryotic cell to multi-gigabase eukaryotic societal creatures capable of joy and depression, love and hate, fascination and boredom, and astounding focus/productivity and crippling listlessness–all in the same person. Complexity of this level amazes me. That’s not to say that I’m going to quit my day job and go get a PhD in genetics, or biology, or psychology, or anything like that, but I like thinking about it. And I hate thinking about it. I end up in loops about thinking about thinking, wondering about wondering, etc. I think my eventual resolution whenever I get into this is that humanity is absurd, and I’m absurd. (Don’t worry; you’re ok, though. :p)

I do sometimes think that we’re just marginally too smart for our own good. We figure out how to burn coal and oil for great momentary benefit, but, on the whole, seem to ignore the possibility that we’re running out of this finite resource, and potentially thrusting our climate into an irreparably altered state or worsening feedback cycle. We develop fantastic advances in technology, and use much of it to oppress, harm, or even kill others in various manners. We’re capable of love, but it can be so elusive, and the path to it so painful.

If we were marginally smarter, would we solve all these problems and avoid all this societal, environmental, and personal pain? If we were marginally less smart, would we have never run into these problems in the first place? I don’t have answers to these questions, nor a solution even if I did have those answers. We are here now, and we have to work with what we’ve got; I just have to do what I can, where I can, to help our big picture. And I have to aspire to improve myself, find happiness, and bring happiness to those around me. Does that seem reasonable?

And at the very end of the month [Feb '07], I apparently bit the bullet and bought the airplane tickets and hotel reservation for the vacation to Los Angeles, CA we planned for March.

March ‘07

After talking about a vacation for a while, and sucking at decision-making for a while longer, we’d just sat down one night and talked about various options. I don’t really remember the other things we discussed, other than skiing in Colorado, but Adrianne had never seen the ocean, and she disliked the cold, so Los Angeles seemed like a good option. If memory serves, we left mid-to-late evening on a Thursday or Friday, so that I wouldn’t have to take extra time off work just for the flight. We did take a rather charming photo (direct) during the otherwise uneventful wait in the airport, after which I think I probably slept during the flight (yay!). I don’t really remember the L.A. airport, but I do remember driving. It was probably after 11 PM by the time we left the L.A. airport and got on a five- or six-lane highway (each direction), which was still fairly heavily trafficked, mostly by people driving about 85 mph–I loved it.

We eventually made it to the hotel, but it wasn’t entirely clear to use where to park, so Adrianne ran in, and they directed her (us) to the underground valet parking–how very L.A.. We were on vacation, and living it up, so I embraced the situation, and started my healthy use of of the big wad of $1-bills I’d stocked up on for tipping. Once we got into the lobby, it became apparent that I had successfully picked a fairly swanky hotel (by my standards, anyway), with a ~6-floor tall open lobby (with fountains, of course), four glass elevators … this was no Residence Inn. (I later learned, from a plaque in an elevator, that parts of True Lies were shot in this hotel, and specifically that elevator.) We checked in, and the room was nice, though nothing particularly extraordinary. I’d picked a nice hotel, but just an average room therein. (<aside>I wonder if the best room in a crappier hotel would be nicer and comparably priced? An experiment for another time, I guess…</aside>)

I don’t remember the exact order of events (I could probably reconstruct it better if I had the photos in front of me, but alas, I’m writing this on my laptop on the train), so I’ll just give you an unordered list of things that happened:

• I was able to successfully bypass the hotel’s lame attempt to gouge me for internet access. Take THAT (and the several hundred dollars I already paid to stay there)!
• We received a phone call or voicemail or both from the front desk informing us that we would need to move to another room. They were sorry for the inconvenience, so they were going to set us up with a really nice room. It seemed pretty much the same to me, but I didn’t particularly care.
• We took an expensive shuttle bus to the Getty Museum, due to somewhat deceptive advertising and impulse clicking. Morals of the story: Oritz sucks, and don’t ever buy the add-on packages/offers on travel sites. At least they did give us a nice tour of some parts of the city on the way back from the Museum. Other than the unnecessary/expensive shuttle, though, the Getty Museum was a pretty cool place (assuming you acknowledge that art is cool).
• We drove over to Rodeo Dr., which is apparently the premier area for designer clothing stores (think Prada, etc.). I most like poking fun at the store that’s so pretentious that they don’t even have a sign up. The closest analogous example I can think of in Mineapolis is Chino Latino, a trendy uptown restaurant/bar. It’s also apparently considered luxurious for these stores to crank their AC as cold as it can go, and leave their front doors open. And people wonder why California suffers from brownouts? I think the only thing I probably could have afforded on Rodeo Dr was a $100 white t-shirt, and that prospect just didn’t jump out at me, so I walked away empty-handed. Tear.
• I believe it may have been the morning/day that we were leaving that we drove up a little ways into the mountains and hiked around a state park. The weather was gorgeous (if not a touch too warm for my taste), and while we really had no idea where we were going, and didn’t really find one or two of the destinations we had casually decided to look for, it was still a great time. I was tempted to hop in the river briefly, but abstained. Driving on the winding mountain roads was also rather enjoyable (though, whenever it was that I happened to have to drive back into downtown L.A. during rush-hour was less pleasant).
• Adrianne was assuredly more excited about this than I was, but one morning we had tea and crumpets (and other little breakfasty items, I believe) in the Tea Room at the Huntington Botanical Gardens. After the brunch-like thing, we walked around the gardens for probably a couple hours, which got to be a little hot, too, but they were beautiful (as you might expect). I especially liked the Japanese section, including bamboo (direct) :). There were also some really massive cacti, which I’m not sure I’d seen on that scale before, so I suppose that was kind of cool, too.
• What would bringing someone to the ocean for the first time be without going to a beach? I guess I wasn’t prepared to answer that question, so I took the easy way out, and went to a beach :p. Rather than going to a potentially crowded beach right around L.A., Adrianne wanted to drive north about half an hour to some other beach she’d found (though, they have quite a few out there). Driving along the ocean is pretty fun, too, so I didn’t mind terribly, and while I do believe we missed our turn the first time, or possibly missed our beach entirely, we ended up at some sandy public oceanfront property, so I’d consider the endeavor a success. It was still only spring, which the locals consider too cold to visit a beach, so we had the beach pretty much to ourselves. I admit that the water was a tad brisk for actual swimming, but laying on the sand was still pretty fantastic. (After the beach we drove another 20 minutes, maybe, to some outlet mall, which was of little interest to me, but whatever.)
• Although we didn’t make it up to the big HOLLYWOOD sign (I don’t think you can actually really get up there, anyhow), we did make it over to the famous Chinese Theater (wikipedia entry). We saw parts of the walk of stars, shopped at an American Apparel store (apparently novel–before one came to Minneapolis), and I bought some dress shoes (at Aldo, maybe?) while we were waiting around before our movie started. I believe we saw 300, which, I imagine, was pretty much the same as if we’d seen it for $10 per person less at a theater in Minneapolis. This strikes me as an attraction whose sole draw is that it’s an attraction. Skip it.
• The last major activity I recall from the trip was a piano concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The concert hall was apparently designed by Frank Ghery, and looks rather striking both externally and internally (direct). We didn’t have the best seats in the house, but the acoustics really left nothing to be desired, and the music was spectacular, so I appreciated Adrianne planning that for us (which I think may have mainly been for me). Alas, I couldn’t tell you what pieces were played or by whom, but of the approximately half-dozen classical piano concerts or recitals I’ve attended in my life, I don’t think there’s been one that’s let me down yet. Maybe I’m just too easy to please, heh.

I’m sure there’s other crap I’ve forgotten, but I’ve now written far more about one long weekend in March than I can probably write about most of the remaining months of 2007 combined. I guess that probably qualifies it as a good vacation!

April, May

I’ve looked through email and facebook (haven’t had a chance to try to check out my own photos yet), but as best I can determine, virtually nothing took place during these two months. I know that it was during this span of time that my former roommate, Sweeney, (at this place) volunteered to move out and I invited Adrianne to move in (and she accepted). I somehow got out of helping Sweeney move (perhaps related to the fact that he, unlike myself, was a smart renter, and didn’t accumulate a myriad of [large] belongings), but definitely did not get off as easy when it came time for Adrianne to move in.

Adrianne was moving approximately three blocks from her old place to my place, but she still decided to rent a U-Haul van to speed the process (though, for some reason I still carried her desk by myself over to the new place). The weather was fine, and I think most of the move was pretty easy, but when we had to move her big wood wardrobe dresser contraption, things got a little dicey. The monstrosity must have been about seven feet tall and nearly 100 pounds, and while we had enough space to maneuver it out of Adrianne’s old place without tremendous issue, the same could not be said for getting it into my place. There was a delightfully tiny common entryway at my apartment, with the interior door to my unit immediately to the right of the exterior door. This meant that we needed to lift the wardrobe in upright, by its side profile to fit through the door, rotate 90 degrees to the right, and bring it through the inside door. And while this admittedly sounds straightforward at first glance, it was compounded by the fact that there was hardly room for the dresser and a person inside the entryway, and the discovery that it was apparently too tall to fit through the interior door. Due to the confined space, there wasn’t enough room to tip the unit to bring it through on its side (we tried a couple times), but eventually discovered that if we screwed down the feet the ~3/4" they were holding the base up off the ground, that we were able to force the dress through the doorway (a little worse for wear). Once inside, we were satisfied to leave it in the living room … for the rest of its time in the apartment :).

June

Despite having just moved in, Adrianne promptly had to leave for about 2.5 months for an internship at Nike corporate headquarters in Portland, OR (Beaverton, technically). I bought a used laptop off craigslist for her, since her old laptop was absolutely abysmal (a situation that I’d already mostly remedied with the desktop computer I bought her around February), and and she was going to need a laptop to use while she was in Oregon for the summer. I was adventurous enough to load up a fresh install of Windows (XP Media Center 2005) and Ubuntu Linux, and encouraged her to give Linux a try. To her credit, it’s my belief that she did almost exclusively use Linux for those 2.5 months, with the exception of needing to boot into Windows to use the Nike+ integration with iTunes. I have to admit, this was sort of a selfish experiment for me, to see how Ubuntu was perceived by a non-techie, but I think the only real issue she ran into was a result of my own poorly executed attempt to optimize the partitioning scheme on her system (and /home filling up). It had been quite a while since I’d even installed Windows, and was unpleasantly reminded of how much nicer the Ubuntu installation process is than Windows (at least, on all the hardware I’ve ever tried it on). But I digress…

It’s probably mostly a testament to how relatively sheltered/easy my life has been, but Adrianne leaving for Portland was incredibly hard for me. I don’t cry very often (perhaps not often enough?), but I certainly made up for lost time that day in June. But, we talked on the phone a lot (never before have I actually come close, much less had to actually worry about going over my 1500 minutes per month on my cell phone), talked on IM, and things were pretty alright.

…But how does the summer end?! What did I do with my time?! What did I buy to fill the void in my life?! The answers to these and other questions you didn’t ask and wish you never had to hear about are yet to come!

Lost Time

No, I’m not talking about 8 PM CST on Thursdays starting in January (though, that would make for a better post). I’m talking about the fact that historically, when I’ve gone to write these major life recaps, I look through the calendar on my phone to figure out what I actually did way back at the beginning of the time period I’m attempting to cover, and I’m unable to do that now. To stray into the technical side for a second:

I set up my Palm Treo 700p to ActiveSync to my work’s Exchange server after learning that I could do that through the Outlook Web Access address. It was probably my own misconfiguration, but for a while, this seemed to be deleting anything from my calendar that happened more than about two weeks in the past. I did back up my calendar right before setting up ActiveSync, anticipating that things could go horribly wrong, but when things looked like they were working, I made no subsequent backups. So, my past was slowly being erased, day by day. I could admittedly probably restore my calendar up to whatever time I started the ActiveSync, but it’s only been an issue once prior to now, so the cost/benefit ratio isn’t favorable enough to bite the bullet and do so.

When I put it like that, it sounds a lot like like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and to some degree, that’s how it feels to me. Sadly, I don’t take nearly as many pictures as I should, or as I retrospectively wish I did, so I don’t have much of a record in that form, either. Re-reading through IM logs would probably be my next best bet, but my IM conversations are massive. From December 2, 2007 through today (October 15, 2008), my IM conversations consist of over 41,000 lines, or 500,000 words. If you think reading a few pages of this blog is bad, imagine reading over 600 Letter-size pages of IM conversations (or over 800 if you didn’t let the lines flow together)! (Based on some quick research and an un-scientific experiment, I’m going to say the average number of words on an 8.5×11" page is 800, and 49 lines.)

My last source, before resorting to something ridiculous like my own foggy memory, is email. This provides a pretty ridiculous pinhole view of my life, since I have such little correspondence by email that relates to my personal life. I’ll give it a shot, though.

October-ish, 2006

I bought a computer! (Haha, off to a roaring start. See, this is the type of interesting things documented by my email records.) My old desktop computer died somehow around the spring of 2006, and, being unemployed, couldn’t really justify the expense of replacing it until I’d been working for a bit. I did hold off for a little while longer than the first chance I had that I could afford one, because I wanted to wait for the Windows Vista Express Upgrade program to become available. <aside>(Vista wasn’t scheduled to ship to retail customers until early 2007, but OEMs complained to Microsoft that everyone was going to hold off on buying a PC during the holiday season if they were anticipating the release of Vista. Microsoft then partnered with several OEMs (like Dell) to agree to give a free Vista license to customers purchasing qualified PCs and Windows XP licenses once Vista was actually released.)</aside> I really spoiled myself with the computer I got, but–knock on wood–it’s held up beautifully for two years now. I also bought a wallet, which I promptly lost while I played designated driver on Halloween. How unfair is that? The SOBER guy loses his wallet. <myspace>Life is sooo unfair.</myspace> I don’t typically get particularly into holidays, so my 80’s racquetball player costume (direct) was put together entirely at the last minute out of clothes and accessories Adrianne had around. Weird.

November ‘06

I apparently had to start paying off my student loans in November. I’d been secretly hoping that the government wouldn’t figure out that I graduated a year early, so I wouldn’t have to start paying them back until fall ‘07, but I guess the government knows everything, so those dreams were crushed. Oh, and I bought a vacuum cleaner, and went to Gregory’s birthday party (direct) … disappointingly unrelated events, though :P.

December ‘06

Christmas happens in December! I don’t even need my calendar or email to remember that detail (though, there are about a dozen emails from my mother about Christmas, etc, just in case. Bleh.). Before folks left the cities to visit families, etc, the crew at the Elliot house threw a Christmas party I attended, which I don’t really remember, but there are photos, so it must have happened. (And no, I can say with complete confidence that it’s not because I was blackout drunk … apparently just didn’t make a big impression on me.) Adrianne went back to Milwaukee to be with her family that year, so I did our traditional Christmas Eve with my mother’s side of the family [by myself], where I think my highlight was giving Nerf guns to my little cousin Jack, and then getting to play with them / him afterward.

I’m pretty sure that I worked during three days that the office was basically closed around Christmas this year, because we were under a tight schedule, and I had nothing better to do, since Adrianne was out of the state. EFI (my employer) has this concept of CTO (Company Time Off?), where it’s not a paid company holiday, but unless you’re under a tight deadline and required to work, they basically don’t let you work. You’re either required to use personal time off or take unpaid time off (which then also screws with your monthly insurance premiums or some crap). Since I’m a newbie at the company, I accrue time off at the lowest rate possible, so I feel like I really need to hoard it, so I can use it for something big (on my own terms). Being told that I have to use three of my personal days when I don’t have a vacation planned irks me, so I was actually pretty happy to work those days.

January ‘07

Happy New Year! I went to Kalin’s Birthday party, got snowed on (just slightly) (direct), and partied at the Elliot house once everyone was back in town (all those slackers who didn’t graduate in three years still got winter break :-P). It appears that I also replaced my then-3.25-year-old Treo 300 (cell phone) with the Treo 700p mentioned above (which I’m still using, at the time of this writing). I guess I get my money’s worth out of phones!

It also looks like I was doing a lot of work on my second big module I’d been tasked to write on my own at work around this time (as opposed to minor changes, bug fixes, etc. in existing code). I remember how genuinely exciting it was to be solving some real problems, and planning and implementing new features. I was even excited about documentation! I’m going to get technical for a second again, sorry.

The project I was working on at the time was Balance 4.0 aka Fiery Central 1.0. It basically lets you take a number of printers and add them to one (or more) group(s) on our server, and we create a virtual printer to represent the union of these devices, which we can then use to divide up the work of printing lots and lots of pages or copies. To create the virtual printer for each group, we have to process the PPD for every printer in the group, do some translation/normalization, and then do some intelligent work to generate a new PPD that’s the union of the useful PPD keys/options. Once a user tries printing to our printer, we have to figure out which printer(s) we should send the job to, and then occasionally resolve constraints placed on any options the user has selected for the job. For instance, if a user has selected an option to staple their job, some printers require that we explicitly specify that we want to send the job to the stapler output tray, too (but others might not, or they might call it something else). So, I wrote code to connect to each printer, and ask it about the restrictions it has for the specified options, and then I try to find a solution that will work, without actually altering the user’s intentions/output (e.g. they might be pissed if I told the printer to fold their job and they didn’t ask for it … but they probably don’t care if I flip the job over to be face-down before it comes out, or something).

Basically … I got to make something new from the ground up, and solve the problem from start to finish on my own. It was enjoyable. It works. It’s still in the code and in use by customers as of this writing :).

February ‘07

This appears to have been a very boring month. No photos were taken, a total of about eight emails were sent, and less than 20 were received on my personal account. I filed my taxes. I ordered two pizzas. Oh, I guess that was the month I bought Adrianne a computer (direct) for no particular reason, other than being a good excuse to get a new monitor for myself as part of a good combo deal.

And at the very end of the month, I apparently bit the bullet and bought the airplane tickets and hotel reservation for the vacation to Los Angeles, CA we planned for March.

To be continued…

It’s 3:07 AM on a Wednesday night. I’m supposed to be waking up in 3.5 hours to get ready for work, so I have to cut this short. Tune in next time for March ‘07 through … LATER!

Problem

Running VMware server on linux, I edit virtual machine settings, open the CD-ROM device, select Use ISO image, and Browse. I navigate to my smbmount (actually a cifs mount line in my /etc/fstab), and VMware hangs for about three or four minutes before displaying the contents of the directory. The following lines are written to /var/log/syslog:

Mar 24 16:54:30 nine kernel:  CIFS VFS: server not responding
Mar 24 16:54:30 nine kernel:  CIFS VFS: No response to cmd 47 mid 16
Mar 24 16:54:30 nine kernel:  CIFS VFS: Write2 ret -11, written = 0
Mar 24 16:55:30 nine kernel:  CIFS VFS: server not responding
Mar 24 16:55:30 nine kernel:  CIFS VFS: No response to cmd 47 mid 28
Mar 24 16:55:30 nine kernel:  CIFS VFS: Write2 ret -11, written = 0

Tracking down the problem

I started by just googling these errors for a while, with no particular luck. The closest solution I found was someone getting errors like this, and eventually resolving them with a new NIC and/or switch … some network problem. I was hopeful this might be my problem, since I was connecting at 100/Half through an old hub (not switch) on all machines exhibiting the problem (though, they did have various types of NICs, so I didn’t think it was a driver bug). Unfortunately, even after I was able to get a switch instead of a hub, the problem persisted. The #samba IRC channel was no help, and I wasn’t ready to bother the developers.

I put the problem aside for a few days, and gave it another shot on a clean state of mind. This time, I used lsof to figure out which pid had an open handle on my smbmount. I then attached strace to the process and tried to open a directory, and was greeted with this little gem (comments added by me):

/* create .vmBigFileTest0 for LARGEFILE access */
open("/blah/blah/.vmBigFileTest0", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = 36
 
/* override the regular signal handler for 'exceeds file size' with an
 * 'ignore signal' handler
 */
rt_sigaction(SIGXFSZ, {SIG_IGN}, {0x80c9f00, ~[KILL STOP RTMIN RT_1], SA_RESTART}, 8) = 0
 
/* set the read/write offset to 2 GiB */
_llseek(36, 2147483648, [2147483648], SEEK_SET) = 0
 
/* write a byte */
write(36, "\\245", 1)                    = 1
 
/* close ... which also means flush buffers to 'disk.'
 * this call hangs for a long time
 */
close(36 <unfinished ...></unfinished>

Download this code: vmware-strace.c

To summarize: VMware apparently thinks it’s necessary to check if the underlying filesystem of its ISO mount location has a 2 GiB (or smaller, I suppose) filesize limitation. While this is a very legitimate concern when browsing for the path to create virtual disk files, it strikes me as pretty irrelevant for mounting an ISO, which should be a read-only operation. To make matters worse, it doesn’t do this by checking the filesystem type in /proc/mounts or something quick and easy like that … it does this by effectively writing 2 GiB of data. (In fairness, their way is more reliable and future-proof, but come on…)

Solution

Once I saw what was going on, the solution to this problem was pretty trivial. I remounted my smbmount to be read-only, rather than read-write, which prevents VMware from getting the chance to try to write 2 GiB of data. In case you really don’t want to do any more research yourself, this means either passing the -o ro option to the mount command, or adding ro to the comma-separated options list of the fstab entry (right after the fs type entry … i.e. cifs).

Today when I tried to go pay my bill, I logged in as I always do. However, instead of being greeted by my regular account overview page, today I was faced with a page instructing me that I was being required to create NEW account credentials. I tried to create my regular username, and was informed that I could not use any special characters (i.e. an underscore). Although this is a pretty dumb restriction already, I have run into this on various sites, so I was willing to accept this and go on with my life (and without any special characters in my username).

Here’s where the real stupidity began. A few keystrokes later, I had modified my username to eliminate any malicious characters like underscores, and was naturally proceeding to enter my password. Sprint had other plans. Apparently it’s not good enough to have a secure password any more–usernames must also meet complexity requirements. (If you’re not familiar with the term, this is the general name for all the crazy rules like Your password must be at least eight characters, but no more than nine, must contain three letters, two numbers, at least two special characters, and cannot contain a word or portion of a word.) What? Complexity requirements FOR MY USERNAME? I guess we should just have two password fields now. Or maybe three (more on that later). I briefly tried hacking their javascript, but was unsuccessful, so now my username can be described by the following formula:

[regular username] - [special characters] + 1

:sigh: (I guess I should just be thankful that my username at least [barely] met the length requirements.)

I started to enter my password, and was shocked to see the letters appearing as readable text on the screen! I guess the people designing this application have never used a computer with another person in the room, or they might have considered that was a bad idea. Don’t worry too much, though … once you click on the field, the password turns into asterisks. I guess it must have been fun with JavaScript day at the Sprint development office. :roll-eyes:

Lastly, there’s the PIN. As if the password-like requirements for the username, and the password itself weren’t enough, I’m now apparently required to create another PIN … even though I already had one. But this one must be more secure because it has to be stupidly long, unlike every other four-digit PIN since the beginning of time. I feel so safe knowing that I now have three SUPER SECURE identifiers for accessing my account … two of which were emailed to me (in cleartext, obviously) immediately following their creation.

THANKS SPRINT!!

Saturday

I left for Vegas on a completely full flight on Saturday. The flight was supposed to depart at 1930, but by 1935, they hadn’t even closed the door yet, since they were apparently waiting for a few stragglers. Eventually we took off; I passed on the option to buy a $5 snack box or miniature bottle of wine, and contented myself with a little cranberry juice before trying to sleep (with little success). The landing was slightly bumpy, but pretty tame compared to what it sounded like a few flights/landings were on Sunday. Due to the magic of flying west two time zones, the flight only took a bit more than an hour (that is, comparing local time to local time), so a stint in the crowded baggage claim and a $15 cab ride to the hotel later, and I was checked into The Flamingo. I proceeded to spend a couple hours trying to hack the hotel’s internet, rather than paying $12/day for it (after succeeding so effortlessly last spring on my trip to Los Angeles), only to eventually give up and use Sprint EVDO (’cellular’ internet) through my phone.

Sunday

I was able to sleep in a little on Sunday, much to my delight, and after showering and spending a kind of ridiculous amount of time deliberating about what to wear (I packed roughly 2x as many clothes as I needed), I indulged myself in a classy breakfast [wrap] at Subway in an adjacent hotel/casino. I was able to find my way to Subway and back without much issue, but the journey to follow was something of a different story. After running back up to my room to grab my briefcase (that is, a Swiss Army nylon shoulder laptop bag), I proceeded to walk around the Flamingo ground floor for about 10 minutes, attempting without success to locate the shuttle to the Rio about which I had read here. Eventually I was able to talk to the concierge, who informed me that the shuttle did not in fact pick up from the Flamingo, but was just one hotel down (Bally’s). While this may not sound like anything of consequence (it didn’t to me at the time), neighboring hotels in Vegas are not actually very close to one another. Furthermore, once I got to Bally’s (probably a six minute walk?), I was greeted by three hotel employees that didn’t know where the shuttle pick-up was. Great. I wandered around for a bit, and eventually found a sign directing me to one of the entrances. I made my way to this entrance, only to find a new sign indicating that I’d missed the shuttle pickup at this location by about a week; starting February 18, the shuttle to the Rio would pick up from the Paris hotel/casino. Arrgh! I followed some signs toward Paris (again, just one hotel away), and halfway there met a fork in the road. Two more hotel employees at an information desk at this juncture again lacked information about this shuttle, but made a guess as to where I should try to catch it, and pointed me on my way. I wove my way through yet another sea of slot machines and poker tables to yet another hotel entrance, and at long last, was immensely pleased to find signs for the shuttle I wanted! I still had to wait about ten minutes for the shuttle to actually arrive, but I was on my way!

A comparatively short (and relaxing) while later, I arrived at the entrance to the Rio hotel/casino, probably a little bit after 1100, but unfortunately, my sense of hope that I had arrived at my destination would soon prove to be premature. Although there were signs nice enough to direct me to the convention center almost starting from the entrance, these signs would continue to guide me for about a ten minute walk through a wide, winding corridor to they very opposite end of this apparently massive complex. Once there–finally–registration was painless, and I was handed a trendy neck lanyard/name badge and canvas bag with goodies like an XL t-shirt and squishable foam stress-ball-type sponsor-branded toy. I wasn’t thrilled to have to carry around a second bag all day, but I dealt with it. Although I had actually arrived later than I had in mind the day before, it turns out that was just fine, since the expo hall was still being set up, and no event had really started. As such, I took the opportunity to camp out on the floor by an outlet and break out my new Lenovo Thinkpad T61 (specs). Needless to say, after my failed attempts to hack the hotel internet the night before, I was immensely pleased to find a plethora of open WiFi access points set up for the conference (hey, I guess that $1500+ registration fee needs to pay for something, right?). Although it wasn’t the most comfortable seat, it served its purpose for almost an hour until the meet market officially opened and the expo hall started to fill up.

Meet Market

Now, depending on how well you know me (if at all), it may or may not surprise you to learn that I don’t consider myself the most naturally outgoing guy on the block. As such, a room full of several hundred people with whom I’m supposed to network, and kind of ’sell’ myself to, is somewhat daunting, but considering this was half of why I was here, I forged ahead. One of my first stops was a myvu/RealNetworks stand with a demo of the personal media viewer glasses featured on their web site. While a demo of a technology product at an expo is something that TechwareLabs (TWL) is very familiar with, it was really the only such booth at the Affiliate Summit … and was mainly being shown as it related to some RealNetwork/myvu affiliate program. Regardless of that last fact, I explained what TWL did, discussed the possibility of performing a review of the product on our site, performed the exchange of business cards that would become very familiar over the next couple days, and continued on my way.

Although I performed the business card shuffle a number of times that afternoon, I unfortunately only have a specific memory of three other booths. The first of these was RingCentral, a company whose primary product (as far as I recall) is a virtual PBX (service?). This may have stuck out in my mind because it was again technology-related, but also likely because it reminded me of the service Numbra (second to last paragraph) that was produced by my former employer. I know it’s not supposed to be amazingly difficult to set up something like Asterisk for little to no cost, but I definitely still feel there’s a place for [what my understanding of] products like RingCentral. Even personally, I’m getting to a point in my life where I’m less likely to tinker and spend a weekend playing with free solutions that require only a commitment of time, and instead pay for a product or service to do it for me, assuming such a thing exists for a reasonable fee and high degree of convenience (sad, I know).

The second of the remaining booths I remember was dgm-au. Although this wasn’t a terribly remarkable company of its own merits in my opinion (sorry, no offense), Australians have notable accents. I gave my increasingly rehearsed speech about what TWL does, and Dominic talked a little bit about what dgm-au does. He discussed the possibility of geo-targeted content for .au readers, which admittedly strikes me as an interesting idea, but probably a little too much work for what we’ve got on our plate right now. And last but not least, there was affSpy. I hate to admit it, but I was initially reeled in by one of the booth babes (p.s. the chick on the far right was wearing a ridiculously short skirt), who was able to repeat an obviously rehearsed introductory sentence or two about affSpy, but referred me to any of the guys once I asked a question about the service. Essentially, affSpy is like froogle (google product search) for affiliate marketing offers. It’s a neat idea, but from the results I saw, it’s probably not terribly well suited for use on TWL in its current state (at least, as long as we can avoid turning into a click portal for a freeipods.com / freecomputer.com type sites :P).

After weaving my way through most of the tables, I decided to take a seat at the back of the conference hall at one of the tables that were set up for general use and log a little bit more time on the open WiFi. Since I didn’t want to be totally antisocial, I propped up my big nametag and a business card against the back of my laptop, which apparently worked (a little). One lady, probably in her mid 40’s, approached me timidly, and after the customary exchange of cards and information, explained that she was currently a one-woman business, and was looking for a good way to find a developer to help her with some of the technical aspects of her plans. Since my company name contains the word Tech and ends in .com, I suppose I was as good of a candidate as anyone to ask such a question; unfortunately for her, we’ve done all of our development in-house, by Paul Uranium-235 Linebarger and myself, so I didn’t have much advice to give. Later, Eduardo Fenili of Revenue Magazine dropped by to kinda just chat in general. He does ad sales for the magazine, and seemed like a likable guy all around, so it was nice to chat, though I don’t think our businesses can do too much for each other.

There was a cocktail party at 18:00, but I skipped that in order to go back to my hotel and drop off my bags before heading to a private party at the Palms hotel starting at 19:00. Unfortunately, I apparently missed a shuttle back to my hotel (er, sorta) by a few minutes, and they were only running every ~30 minutes at that point. In hindsight, I really should have taken the shuttle to Caesar’s that was waiting right when I got outside, but instead I waited … and waited … and waited. When the shuttle finally did arrive, the driver said his shift had just ended, so we had to wait just a couple minutes for the next driver to arrive. As you might imagine, that actually took nearly ten minutes. I jogged from the shuttle to the hotel and back, to try to catch the next shuttle, but reached the pick-up right as it was pulling away. I was facing a potential ~30-minute wait, when a woman (Vidhu Sharma, as I later learned) came up to the stop and asked if I was waiting for the shuttle. She explained that she was supposed to be meeting people over at the Rio (i.e. the shuttle’s destination) in about ten minutes, so I proposed that we split cab fare over there. As we spoke on the ride over, I learned that she was here for the Affiliate Summit as well, and she worked for TrialPay, which is apparently and emphatically not like freeipods.com … except in the sense that you complete an offer to get something for free for which you would normally have to pay. But seriously, aside from getting really defensive about my freeipods comment to her, Vidhu was really nice, and I genuinely do like the idea of what her company does. The example she gave was that users can legally purchase WinZip by completing a single offer (not several offers, and no referrals, like freeipods requires); also unlike freeipods, the TrialPay customers are theoretically a bit more legitimate, genuine, and specifically targetable, so there’s probably a better chance of the users finding an offer in which they’re legitimately interested than users of freeipods, who are probably likely to cancel every single offer they complete (not like I did that, or anything).

The ShareASale Party

After reaching the Rio, I walked my way over to the Palms about a block and a half away, and gave John Chow (yeah, like he needs any more traffic :-p) a call, since I was meeting him at the party. He let me know what the deal was, and I checked in, got my wristband, and made my way up to the 32nd floor in a crowded elevator. I declined a complimentary photograph in front of a ShareASale sign, and made my way through the crowd to find John on the second floor of this penthouse suite. (As an aside, I always thought a penthouse suite had to be on the absolute top floor of the building, but Dictionary.com says it can be any specially designed apartment on an upper floor, esp. the top floor, of a building, and the suite was labeled as such, so I’ll concede.) Yes, I did say second floor, and yes, the suite had its own private glass elevator to reach the second floor, in case you were too lazy to take the stairs.

Before I continue to talk about the party, I need to stop for a minute to talk about this suite some more. And damn, was it sweet. As noted above, I went up to the second floor of the suite, where the two bedrooms resided, along with a dedicated massage room and exercise room. The first bedroom featured a fireplace, a pop-up plasma TV, a rotating bed, and was separated from its bathroom by a fancy-looking stainless steel bead curtain adjacent to the whirlpool bathtub. Admittedly this wasn’t really an entrance to the bathroom, but looked pretty snazzy, and I have to imagine could be pretty romantic with a bubble bath, or rose petals, candles, etc … if you’re into that kind of thing (and have a net worth well into the millions). (And don’t worry, there was still a separate door to grant some privacy for using the toilet.) This was only half of the bathroom, though. The second bathroom-room featured a glass-encircled shower stall with a massive shower head in the dead center of the ceiling, and then six more shower or steam heads protruding from about chest to knee height on opposite walls of the shower. Oh, and did I mention that even the bathrooms had amazing views? Moving over to the other side of the suite, the second bedroom was a little more conservative; it featured a traditional bed, fireplace, foot-board pop-up plasma TV, another truly amazing view, walk-in closets, and obviously its own private bathroom. This bathroom had a whirlpool tub, but when you turned on the faucet, a hole located in the ceiling above the tub dispenses the requisite stream of water to fill the tub–pretty neat.

Heading back downstairs, you can go to one wing containing a floor-to-ceiling rack of A/V equipment, three plasma TVs, massive wrap-around leather couches, and the chef preparing custom cheesecake concoctions for guests. Heading back out, the center of the room featured water pouring down the slate walls and underfoot, protected by a clear plastic/poly-something-or-other raised floor. A grand piano sat in the middle of the room, near the entrance to the balcony–which featured a hot tub jutting ~15′ out from the building and one of the two open bars in the suite. On the other side of the ‘main floor’ sat a couple more couches, another plasma TV on the wall, a massive [open] wet bar, and a sushi chef. John said that he had looked up the price of the suite, and found it cost around $20k per night, not counting the open bars, and various chefs … so I’ll just conclude by saying it was a pretty nice place.

Edit! I apologize for not having taken any pictures, but John Chow edited together a little video of some footage he took on his digital camera at the party, so you can check it out here on his site. If you look really closely, you can even see me at about 5:24 wearing a maroon shirt, holding a cup, and making some gestures with most of my upper body in what was an ongoing fight to communicate in the rather loud environment.

As for the party itself, it was good, albeit loud. I met a number of people, such as Chris Bloczynski (I think I may have taken that photo of him with John Chow), Christopher Rauschnot of All In Energy Drink, Ian Fernando, and probably the highlight of the evening, John Hasson. John was kind enough to approach me out of the blue as I was wandering around by myself and strike up a conversation; we both have software engineering backgrounds, and he’s super friendly, so we talked for a while before parting ways. By that point, my voice was starting to die from carrying on conversations at nearly a yelling volume, and I’m not used to being on my feet for 12+ hours a day, not to mention the two-hour time difference I was still feeling, so I decided to call it a night, and headed back to my hotel. A shuttle pulled up right as I was getting back to the Rio, so a short ride and walk later, I was at long last able to lay down and collapse for the night.

Check back for more news of Monday and Tuesday!

As some of you may know, I bought a refurbished IBM ThinkPad T41 (2373-5U2, iirc) during fall 2005, and have been dual booting it with Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu Linux. The hard drive is only 40 GB, which I partitioned as:

• 26.5 GB Windows (NTFS)
• 5 GB Ubuntu / (ext3)
• 1 GB swap
• 4 GB /home (ext3)
• 3.5 GB unusable/recovery partition

Windows and Visual Studio 2005 Professional managed to eat up about 8 GB, plus another 1.2 GB for the installers I left on the hard drive, and miscellaneous other crap put the Windows partition near its capacity, and I had nearly 1 GB free on the Ubuntu / partition, but when it came time to upgrade to Feisty, I was informed that I needed over 1.1 GiB free. Even after some housecleaning, I still came up short, so I decided to wipe / and perform a fresh Feisty (Ubuntu 7.04) install. I figured I was probably about due anyway, since I’d been dist-upgrading since at least Breezy. The installation went fine (I did it during a meeting here at work), but when I went to enable “Desktop Effects” (compiz), I got some odd results. Actually, immediately after enabling it, the right section of the screen was displaying odd banded/corrupt artifacts (leftovers, I presume, from switching video modes, etc). I disabled the effects for the time being, and went about my life.

Fixing Compiz Display

As I noted above, I had problems getting Compiz working from Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty on my ThinkPad T41 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 (01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]). One or two Ubuntu version ago, I had some OpenGL performance issues with xmoto (a game), which I kind of resolved by changing my xorg.conf file to explicitly use the ‘radeon’ driver instead of ‘ati’ and forcing AGPMode 2 (and maybe something else, I don’t remember for sure). I hoped that would solve my current problem, but alas, it did not. Perhaps resulting from my inability to accurately describe the results I was seeing, I was unable to immediately find any quick fixes to my problem. I guess that’s why it’s still beta, huh?

Update! I reinstalled Feisty (fresh) on my new laptop hard drive, and spent some time isolating the line that fixed the display rendering. It wasn’t the original line I thought, but rather:

Option "AGPSize" "32"

Fixing Compiz Performance

After getting compiz working, I was still getting weird performance hits, where I could hear my hard drive click, whirr, and see CPU spikes during really any display updates (even scrolling a man page in a gnome terminal window would spike the CPU). I thought this was somehow related to the new IDE device handling by the SCSI subsystem, and possibly not having the drive using DMA. I followed that hunch for a while, since it seemed that other people were indeed reporting issues of that nature in Feisty. The information I could glean from dmesg suggested that the drive was in fact in DMA mode, but during the course of the investigation, I noticed some questionable SMART values, so I decided that maybe my hard drive was just dying, and bought a replacement. However, I wasn’t entirely convinced that was the problem, so I kept poking around. I tried many combinations of options, but eventually found a winner. Again, I’m not 100% sure which line was the actual solution, but I think it may have been the following line in my Device section of xorg.conf:

Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Along the way I also modified my dric (/etc/dric or ~/.dric) to enable hyperz as follows (alternatively accomplished with the package driconf):

dric file »

<driconf>
    <device screen="0" driver="radeon">
        <application name="Default">
            <option name="force_s3tc_enable" value="false" />
            <option name="no_rast" value="false" />
            <option name="fthrottle_mode" value="2" />
            <option name="tcl_mode" value="1" />
            <option name="texture_depth" value="0" />
            <option name="def_max_anisotropy" value="1.0" />
            <option name="no_neg_lod_bias" value="false" />
            <option name="texture_units" value="3" />
            <option name="dither_mode" value="0" />
            <option name="hyperz" value="true" />
            <option name="round_mode" value="0" />
            <option name="color_reduction" value="1" />
            <option name="vblank_mode" value="1" />
            <option name="allow_large_textures" value="2" />
        </application>
    </device>
</driconf>

Full xorg.conf Devicesection:

Full xorg.conf Device section »

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]"
        Driver          "radeon"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
#       Option          "DisableGLXRootClipping"        "True"
        Option          "DRI"                           "true"
#       Option          "ColorTiling"                   "on" #already the default
        Option          "EnablePageFlip"                "true"
#       Option          "AccelMethod"                   "EXA" #prevents mine from loading
        Option          "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"
        Option          "AGPMode"                       "4"
        Option          "AGPFastWrite"                  "on"
        Option          "RenderAccel"                   "true"
#       Option          "UseInternalAGPGART"            "no"
#       Option          "EnableDepthMoves"              "true"
#       Option          "GARTSize"                      "64"
        Option          "AGPSize"                       "32"
#or "64"
#       Option          "backingstore"                  "on"
#driconf -> Enable HyperZ for big improvement
#power saving:
        Option          "DynamicClocks"                 "on"
EndSection

Yes, I realize that’s pretty much the most creative title ever to grace the internet. I’ll give you a minute to let it sink in.

…

Anyway … a fair amount of substantial, major life change sort of things have happened since my last post, so it’s probably kind of important for me to update this (well, as important as writing on this blog can be). As you probably know, I completed my BS in Computer Science in June, which made it fairly clear what I had to do for the rest of the summer: waste time by playing through Quake 2 again, eat frozen pizza, sleep until 3 PM every day, and then at the last minute get a job and find an apartment. If you’d like the executive summary: mission accomplished. Feel free to stop reading now.

Still here? Fiiiiine. I guess I can keep writing.

July

My first week of July is covered in fairly excruciating detail in the previous post, so I’ll summarize by saying that I went out to Wisconsin to visit Keefe and see Summerfest. I actually had one or two phone interviews while I was out there, too, so it wasn’t entirely unproductive (despite my best efforts). Unfortunately I wasn’t clever enough to try to schedule an in-person interview with the company from Madison that was courting me at the time; oh well. I had another phone interview with that Wisconsin company the week after returning from Wisconsin, which went well. I was speaking with one of the other software engineers there (similar position to that for which I was applying), who asked me A. what my favorite language was, and B. what my favorite type/aspect of programming was (C/networking/sockets/etc), and he randomly happened to have the same favorites/interests, which I felt was a lucky coincidence and connection. For better of for worse, that became kind of a moot point late the following week.

On Tuesday, July 18, at 15:18 CDT, I received a call from the Minnesota director of software engineering at Electronics for Imaging (EFI) informing me that he had been authorized to extend a job offer to me. We discussed some of the terms/benefits of the offer over the phone, but had the formal offer package FedEx’d to me overnight. The biggest caveat was that if I wanted to accept the job, my response (signed acceptance letter) needed to be faxed to their HR department by COB Monday. It doesn’t seem like about six full days should be a huge deal to make this decision, but I was still in the interview phase with at least three other companies at that point … AND I was leaving around 0600 that Friday for the BWCA, not to return until late Monday. That meant that I actually had to complete everything before I went to bed Thursday night … one day after actually receiving the offer package, employment contract, etc.

Within about 20 minutes of hanging up the phone about my job offer, though, I was already apartment hunting. I knew there was about a 90% chance I would be accepting the offer, which meant I would be able to afford an apartment after all. I probably looked at dozens of apartments online (HousingMaps.com is a very cool site) that evening, and scheduled three apartment showings over the next two days. Only shortly before this, I had learned that my friend Matt, whom I had met in Physics 1302 in the fall of 2004, was interested in rooming with me for the upcoming year. While this obviously meant my search should be restricted to two-bedroom apartments, it had the added side-effect of requiring me to extensively photograph any place I toured, in order to be able to get some degree of approval from Matt, who was gallivanting around Asia and the middle-east for the summer. Other considerations included: proximity to light rail (my transportation method to my potential job), proximity to campus (Matt is still attending), cost, and perhaps most importantly, ability to move in ASAP. The job would start on Monday, July 31, and I needed to be out of my current apartment by Monday, July 31 at 8 PM, and I took my first tour on July 18, so … you get the idea. Expeditiousness ftw.

I picked up a few housing applications on the tours I took, and then had to head to my parents’ house Thursday evening, since we would be leaving for the Boundary Waters very early Friday morning. I packed my small bag of gear for my four days in the wilderness in approximately 8 minutes, which probably wasn’t the best idea considering the degree of isolation, but whatever. (It turned out that the only thing I was really lacking was a long-sleeve shirt to wear around dusk (mosquitoes suck), but I survived.) I spent much of the rest of that evening pouring over pages and pages of the employment contract I was given, and then finally around 3 AM (I think?) signed and faxed my job offer acceptance and my housing application to the apartment I had decided was the best option. I understandably slept a fair amount on the ride up, but we arrived, got canoes, and hit the water. Friday was the only day I recall being able to even faintly smell smoke from the sizable forest fire going on at the time, but it really wasn’t bad at all. We were supposed to have a ~10-rod portage followed by a little canoing and then a ~40-rod portage, but it turned out that someone had decided that canoing was stupid, so the poor excuse for a trail on the 10-rod portage just bypassed the small lake and connected directly to the 40-rod portage … probably making something like a 100-rod portage (and very hilly). The campsites on the next lake weren’t spectacular, but we finally put in on the second or third one we passed, and set up our three tents in very close proximity to one another (due to space constraints). Dinner was brats and beans (over the stove of course … they’re not too keen on campfires when there’s a forest fire already going), though unfortunately we didn’t get everything finished before sunset, and the bugs got pretty bad.

Saturday was good. Canoed, portaged, had lunch (summer sausage, cheese, pitas), canoed, portaged. Our final portage of the day was quite long, and I was sweating considerably by the end, so I went for a quick swim, which was very refreshing. We made camp (and even had a sandy beach … a rarity up there), had chili, and slept. Sadly, Sunday was not nearly as sunny as self-described. It rained nearly all day, and we had a lot of portaging, including some very poor conditions. We went through a chain of lakes and portages that didn’t really connect to anything and had only one path through, so it would seem they were infrequently utilized (which leads to poor trail/entry/exit conditions). The added bonus was the low water level, making a few entries/exits particularly troublesome. At one point I was up to my thighs in swamp/mud (with a huge pack on, obviously), and I guess my uncle had the same pleasure at another location that same day. We didn’t take a lunch break that day either, so the jambalaya we had for dinner tasted pretty fantastic.

Monday was sunny and calm when we woke up, and had clouded over for a while during breakfast and such, but got sunny (and windy, unfortunately) by the time we hit the water. We didn’t have any portaging that day, but were on a pretty large lake (Homer), so were on the water for a while. I got slightly sun burned that day, but it wasn’t too bad. On the drive back, we passed through some severe weather, but the canoe stayed strapped onto the car :). I took a shower moments after getting home, and probably made a point of eating something delicious, and not prepared over a small camp stove (though I don’t recall specifically what it was).

I toured another couple apartments the next day. One of them looked great on paper, but wasn’t going to work out, and the other had a very friendly building manager, good value, good space, and good convenience for me, but not great convenience for Matt, and the biggest problem was that I couldn’t move in until September (if I wanted a 2-bedroom unit). I signed a lease on Wednesday, July 26 at the place for which I had faxed in the application before leaving for the BWCA, and started to move things in that evening. I had another couple phone interviews with other places that week (despite having signed a job offer acceptance letter), and continued to make about one car trip a day with friends to my new apartment to move things in. I was out of my old apartment by Sunday night, and started work Monday morning, July 31.

August

August was my first full month in my new apartment, and I spent most of it sleeping on a pad on the floor, as I did not own a bed. While my back may have been a little stiff in the mornings after waking up, it really wasn’t as awful as it sounds. Waking up at 0630 M-F for work, on the other hand, was a bigger issue for me. Remember, I was waking up around 3 PM most of the summer, so this is nearly half a day earlier. Anyway, my first week of work was … interesting. I spent a lot of time reading documentation, and generally just trying to figure out wtf was going on, and what I would be working on. Occasionally I could contribute in the capacity of general technical knowledge, such as re-ghosting machines, or reinstalling Windows, etc. to make a few new base ghost images, but I didn’t get much opportunity to touch any code. At the end of that week, I went up north to Upper Gull Lake near Nisswa, MN, USA to the cabin of my friend Nick Jacobs['s parents], with whom I attended Kindergarten through High School. Nick, his girlfriend Courtney, his parents (including Jeff Jacobs, the mayor of Saint Louis Park), his two younger siblings, and Adrianne. It was nice to relax, swim a little, hang out, get some sun, etc. I don’t really remember anything else that happened in August, other than getting paid, and probably buying some furnishings from Ikea. After getting my first paycheck (er, direct deposit), I immediately went to Banana Republic to start my ridiculous spending habits.

September

I bought a bike from the Minneapolis police bike auction. It was more expensive than my bike that was stolen, but as Patrice (a former Trek Bike store employee) immediately pointed out [something along the lines of] well duh, it is a Trek. I did my best to get my money’s worth out of it yet that summer by riding to and from work (here is the route I take), which is over 11 miles each way. Fortunately, there’s a shower and [small] locker room at work, so I was able to just wake up, pack a bag, bike in, and shower and change clothes there, so I wasn’t sweaty and smelly all day. I loved the exercise, and also just generally like biking, so I think it was money well spent. I continued to get paid, and spend lots of money on my credit card at Ikea, H&M, and Banana Republic (and probably other places).

I’d say that pretty much wraps up my Fall 2006 update, considering I started writing this when it still was fall. Ooops. I have another couple updates in line (in my head), so there might be a little more activity in the upcoming month, too. I’m sure you’re all just dying with anticipation. Please … do hold your breath. (Let me know how that works out.)

Depending on how long you’ve known me (or whether or not you know me at all, I suppose), you may recall that I have a tradition of heading out to Wisconsin every summer, around the 4th of July, to visit a friend and business partner (Keefe) and see some concerts at Summerfest. I believe this was my fifth summer to head out there, and I hope to go back again next year. I left Minneapolis with a friend from school (Matt) around 4 PM on Friday, June 30 after having to get up at 0630 to make it out to Eagan for an 0830, 2.5-hour series of interviews with four different people, and we were lucky enough to hit absolutely awful traffic between Minneapolis and Saint Paul. When all was said and done, I think we made it past Saint Paul about 90 minutes after leaving Minneapolis … a trip that should take only about 15-20. Despite that somewhat sub-optimal start, we made pretty good time the rest of the way, and I think we made it to Milwaukee around 2230 (10:30 PM, for those of you unfamiliar with 24-hour time formats).

Although a few good bands were playing Summerfest that evening, the headliners usually start at 2200, so Keefe and I decided that less than an hour of a concert probably wasn’t worth $15 each, and walked around an office building in downtown Milwaukee for a while instead. The Wells Building, as I believe it was called, used to house the Techware Labs server, so Keefe had a key for after-hours entry. Among other things, we were able to get out onto the roof, which presented a good opportunity to take a few pictures, only a couple of which turned out well. (Sadly, I didn’t make any other good use of my camera during the trip, though maybe I’ll grab a few other pictures that Keefe took and put ‘em up later.) I generally enjoy going onto roofs of tall buildings, so that was a pretty decent way to pass the time for free, in lieu of half of a $15 concert. Later, Keefe’s girlfriend (Jenny) ended up calling from Summerfest for us to pick her up, which is no small feat, to navigate dozens of half-blocked one-way roads with thousands of people roaming around to find their cars. Among other things, we passed the same intersection no fewer than four times, and unnecessarily (unintentionally) drove ourselves to the back of a huge line of cars trying to exit a major parking lot. We never did end up finding Jenny near Summerfest, and instead ended up picking her up from a bar about 15 minutes away from downtown Milwaukee. It was somewhat unclear how she got there.

I don’t really remember everything I did for the rest of the week (until leaving the evening of Sunday, July 09), nor do I believe it would necessarily interest anyone to read it (much less me to write it), so I’ll just try to cover a few highlights.

• The Sunday before the 4th, Keefe and I headed over to John Chaillet’s house for a huge barbecue/grill/cookout extravaganza. I guess that many hours were spent preparing food before the hours of cooking could even commence, including making a few dozen hamburger patties with onions and peppers mixed into the meat. Needless to say, it was quite delicious. It was also cool to meet havoc (John) and chillywilly of irc.havoc.org #havoc in person, with whom I’ve been conversing on the internet for nearly half a decade. I played volleyball there, too, probably for the first time since 10th grade gym class. I dominated everyone :P.
• Monday, Keefe and I went to a client’s business to install a wireless internet subscriber module and wire it up to their network. This was a somewhat daunting task, as the antenna needed to be on top of the 2-story office building (with only ladder access to the roof), then have the cabling run to two wiring closets on the two floors, and then to nearly the opposite end of the building to reach the client’s router. It took several hours, involved a lot of time on ladders and awkward places in ceilings, etc, but we got the job done, and now Keefe gets to make some more money. I’m still unemployed :P.
• On Tuesday, I spent the day with Adrianne (my girlfriend) at Summerfest, and saw Punchline, Lucky Boys Confusion, and Bowling for Soup. Despite the fact that the bands weren’t necessarily a perfect match for my main musical tastes, the shows were very fun, the bands had good stage presence and high energy, and that was reflected by the atmosphere in the audience. It was also really nice to get to see Adrianne for the first time in a week, though it’s been almost another week again, which may not sound bad, but it feels like a long time (I guess that’s a good thing, hey?). We later met up with Matt at a coffee shop, and again the next day for lunch at the SafeHouse, which was a decently cool experience in and of itself.
• I had a job interview with Google (over the phone) on Thursday afternoon. It was somewhat brief, but they had already emailed me and I completed ~4 pages of problems/programs/etc. they had sent me the preceding week. The position is located in Mountain View, CA at their headquarters, so if they offered that to me and I took it, that would mean moving out to California.
• Keefe, Jenny and I went down to Summerfest on Friday and saw about half a dozen songs from Yellowcard, a little Cheap Trick, Train and Big Wu, and maybe another half dozen songs from Styx.
• We went to Jenny’s birthday party on Saturday, and then Keefe and I departed for Summerfest, only for his alternator (presumably) to fail along the way. We barely made it off the freeway, and with a little help of my pushing, we got Keefe’s truck onto a side street. After about a $150 tow back to Hartford, and much disappointment about not getting to see Panic! At the Disco (and my added disappointment for missing my friend Brian (of Savin Hill fame) and 30 Seconds to Mars), we headed to a local bar. Having turned 21 only the month before, this was my first time in a bar, and the Mike’s Ice Hard Lemonade I consumed was only the third alcoholic beverage of my life. I’m not an individual of particularly large build, and have no prior tolerance built, so the single bottle containing ~5.2% alcohol did affect me somewhat, but having no desire to actually get drunk, insistently refused Keefe’s attempts to buy me more drinks. Sorry Keefe, you don’t get any embarrassing stories to tell about me doing stupid drunk stuff. (No one shall have such an opportunity so far as I’m concerned.)
• I headed back home with Matt on Sunday evening. Aside from the massive storms around Milwaukee around the time of departure (of which I saw only a few minutes of a torrential downpour and a few pieces of hail slightly larger than peas), the trip went quite smoothly, and I think we got back to Minneapolis in about five hours (not counting the one stop we made).

Music

Among other things, one aspect of this yearly trip I make that sticks in my mind is the music I hear while out there. I don’t necessarily even mean the concerts I hear at Summerfest (although yes, those are typically very good), but rather just the music I hear on the radio while riding around rural Wisconsin. While this experience probably doesn’t translate well for others, I almost never listen to the radio throughout the rest of the year, so when I’m out in Wisconsin with Keefe for a week, and we do a fair amount of driving, I’m exposed to exponentially more radio than I am otherwise. Over the course of the week, there are, of course, various songs that receive a considerable amount of air-time, consequently impressing themselves in my memory in association with that week. While some years/songs leave a stronger impression than others, I figured that since I went to the effort of making a Music category for my posts, I might as well include some mention of some of these songs. If you’re not a radio-hermit like myself, have some other decent exposure to new music, or have convinced yourself that you’re too cool to like popular music, then the following brief list will be of no interest to you. It will basically just be a snapshot of some songs off the top-40 list for July 2006, but it might be fun [for myself?] to look back at this in a few years to remember what was happenin’ back then … er … now.

So, without further adieu, the list of songs (in no particular order) that I will henceforth associate with my trip to Wisconsin, 2006:

• Red Hot Chili Peppers - Dani California. I actually started listening to this a few weeks before heading out there, having already picked up the album at Keefe’s recommendation, but I enjoy the song, and it got its share of radio play. There are some sections of the song reminiscent of Tom Petty - Mary Jane’s Last Dance, which I also like.
• Angels And Airwaves - The Adventure. Apparently this band features the vocalist from Blink 182 (easily identifiable, to me, anyhow). It’s not the highest on my list of songs, but it’s worth remembering anyway.
• Raconteurs - Steady, As She Goes. I’ll admit this song is fairly repetitive, but that probably makes it all the more catchy (kind of like another song we know). I may have heard it once prior to the trip, but I probably heard it at least half a dozen times over the course of the week, and it stuck.
• Fall Out Boy - Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down. This song will mainly stick in my head as a result of Keefe’s repeated attempts to sing the song as performed by someone with a severe speech impediment. Apparently there’s some parody on the internet to that effect, which I haven’t seen, but shall forever remember regardless. Thanks.
• Gnarls Barkley - Crazy. No, this isn’t like Britney Spears - Crazy (though I haven’t seen the video for this one yet, so you never know…). It has a little bit of an oldies feel to the vocal style, which I think maybe gives this song a unique appeal to a wider age range than most of these other songs. Also, with the name Gnarls, how can you go wrong?
• Panic! At The Disco - I Write Sins Not Tragedies. I’d never even heard of this band, much less this song, prior to heading out to WI, but I liked it enough to want to see them in concert by Friday. I’m particularly conflicted about liking this, though, as they’re listed under the emo genre, which I tend to despise on principle. Also, the radio edit of the song censors god out of the refrain’s phrase shutting the god damn door, which is where I originally heard the song. I actually kind of like the sense of syncopation / off-beat emphasis the gap in the lyrics provides, but will manage somehow with the studio/uncensored version. This will probably stick in my memory more than the rest.
• She Wants Revenge - These Things. The vocals in this song remind me somewhat of Depeche Mode, but to be honest, this song will just stick in my head because I heard the line from the song She’s in the bathroom; she pleasures herself. What more can I say?
• All American Rejects - Move Along

Top 32 Songs @ 102.1 FM Milwaukee - July 2006 »

1	Dani California	Red Hot Chili Peppers	lyrics
2	The Adventure	Angels And Airwaves	lyrics
3	Steady, As She Goes	Raconteurs	lyrics
4	Miss Murder	AFI	lyrics
5	Move Along	All American Rejects	lyrics
6	Animal I’ve Become	3 Days Grace	lyrics
7	Life Wasted	Pearl Jam	lyrics
8	Paralyzed	Rock Kills Kid	lyrics
9	Wings Of A Butterfly	Him	lyrics
10	These Things	She Wants Revenge	lyrics
11	Make Damn Sure	Taking Back Sunday	lyrics
12	Crazy	Gnarls Barkley	lyrics
13	I Dare You	Shinedown	lyrics
14	Vicarious	Tool	lyrics
15	I Write Sins Not Tragedies	Panic! At The Disco	lyrics
16	Don’t Wait	Dashboard Confessional	lyrics
17	Ready To Fall	Rise Against	lyrics
18	Rough Landing Holly	Yellowcard	lyrics
19	Woman	Wolfmother	lyrics
20	What If We Could	Blue October	lyrics
21	The Press Corpse	Anti-Flag	lyrics
22	Hands Open	Snow Patrol	lyrics
23	If You Talk Too Much	People In Planes	lyrics
24	Cubicle	Rinocerose
25	Out Here All Night	Damone	lyrics
26	Is It Any Wonder?	Keane	lyrics
27	Welcome Home	Coheed And Cambria	lyrics
28	The Gift	Seether	lyrics
29	How To Save A Life	Fray	lyrics
30	Oh Yeah	Subways	lyrics
31	Hard To Beat	Hard-Fi	lyrics
32	Youth	Matisyahu	lyrics
NEW	I Will Follow You Into The Dark	Death Cab For Cutie	lyrics
NEW	Rooftops	Lost Prophets	lyrics