Rants and Revelations

In anticipation of an Obama victory, I’m filling out a N-400 (Application for Naturalization). One of the questions asks me to list every club or organization I’ve ever belonged to, anywhere. Ok, I think I’ve got most of the ones I belong to now, and I remember belonging to the Wolf Cubs (sort of a junior Boy Scouts) back when I lived in Schomberg, but I’m a little hazy on what I belonged to in between.

Does the stamp collecting club at my public school count? How about the Strategy Gamers club at my high school. (Yes, the nerd die was cast early.) Oh, speaking of die… Oh wait, our D&D group never called itself a club. Never mind then.

I used to have a ski racer’s “card”, which I needed to race in local cross country ski races, but I don’t remember who issued it.

Oh, I think I have a card in my wallet that says I belong to the Subway Sub Club, does that count? Probably not since I didn’t actually give them my name, just money and little stamps.

I thought about adding PFLAG, even though I’m not technically a member, just to see if it would raise any alarm bells.

Sigh. I can see this is going to be a long process.

Don’t forget, that because of massive overcrowding last time, Democrats vote next Tuesday, and Republicans vote on Wednesday.

Just doing my part.

• Damn Interesting
• Down For Everyone Or Just Me

I renewed my aviation medical today, and while it was relatively painless, I failed the vision test without my reading glasses, and so now I have a restriction. Which is stupid, because I have no problem reading things at the distance of my charts or GPS, it’s only really close up and in dim light that I need my glasses. Also I still appear to have some twitchiness in my right eye, the one that was having problems, due to lack of sleep and I have no doubt that I’d pass the test on a normal day.

Oh well. It sucks getting old.

I’m at the Ontario Linux Fest in Toronto right now. I thought people would look at me funny for Mac OS X on my laptop instead of some version of Linux. There are about 5 people here with Mac laptops, but several of them are running Linux on them, but the talk I just went to was done by a guy with a MacBook Air running Mac OS X.

You know, it struck me that it’s a good thing I’ve still got my Treo phone, because as a Prius driving, MacBook Pro using Obama supporter, having an iPhone would probably drive me through my personal Schwartzchild radius and compress me into a black hole of pretentiousness.

Yesterday I went out with Coach Dan on the canal at his home. It was a beautiful crisp fall day, brilliantly sunny and about 50 degrees F. I was thankful for my farmer john wetsuit and thermal shirt, even if Dan mocked them when I first showed up.

To give you an idea of how far I’ve progressed this year, we paddled a mile just for the warm up. We did a number of technique drills, adding one more element to my technique each time. Meanwhile, since all my paddling in this boat before has been in races, group work-outs, and leisurely paddles with my family, I was getting more confident in allowing the boat to move around me. I’ve read, and Dan has mentioned, that one major difference between a sea kayaker and a racer is that a sea kayaker locks into his foot pegs and thigh braces and uses his hips to rock the boat, while a racer tries to stay disconnected from the boat and lets it rock on its own. So one thing Dan encourages is to put a plastic bag on your seat so that when you push on the foot pegs on the power side of the stroke, your whole body rotates freely. It actually made a big difference - afterwards my legs were more tired than they’ve ever been in a work out.

So anyway, we were paddling along, adding new items to my technique at each drill, going slow to emphasize the item, then doing a “pick up” - paddling about 200 metres increasing the speed every 10 paddle strokes until I got up to past race pace. Dan watches and every time I mess up and forget the new item, we stop and recover and try again. It was very effective, and by the end of it I felt like my stoke was really starting to look and feel like some of the really best racers I’ve seen. I’m sure that just means that the things I need to fix are increasingly small and subtle, but I can really feel the difference, even over the course of one workout.

At the end, we practiced a bouy turn around a large piling. I was going to approach it about 2 boat lengths away, which would put the center of the turn right on the piling itself. But Dan pointed out that the water on the other side of the piling was shallow and the shore was near, so he showed me how to take it further out, so instead of turning around the piling, you come out of the turn just a metre or two away from it in the deepest possible water. So I was doing my turn, and as I started to straighten out Dan yelled “now accelerate out of the turn”. I put on a bit of speed, and suddenly I felt the most amazing thing ever, as my technique was good, I was getting a good recovery, and the boat was absolutely flying. It was like a “Rode Super Blue” day in cross country skiing. I love that feeling.

Last time we saw Great Big Sea, it was at the Molson Amphitheatre at Ontario Place in Toronto, and it kind of sucked because the venue was so huge and impersonal and there wasn’t much room to get up and bop around. The previous times, we’d seen them in the Water Street Music Hall here in Rochester, a small venue ideally suited for such a high energy band. But I’d emailed Water Street to see if they were planning to have GBS back again, and they said they doubted that GBS would ever play such a small venue again. So we were surprised and pleased to find that they were going to play the German House here in Rochester as the first gig of their fall tour. We’d never been to the German House before, but just like Water Street it had about a standing room only floor below holding about 750 people, and seats in the balcony above for cripples like me.

They came out and told a great story about how they almost didn’t make it to the gig on time, but we’re really glad they did. As always, they did a high energy show and did a great mix of traditional and new stuff. I’m a tiny bit disappointed they didn’t do “Captain Kid”, but they did to Mari Mac and Patty Murphy, of course, and Charley Horse. And “Walk On the Moon” is really starting to grow on me.

Funny thing - because Vicki and I sat up in the balcony in Water Street and again at German House, we were able to do a bit of people watching. Back at Water Street, we were amused by this one woman who spent the entire show trying to come on to the band, especially Allan. She even bought the whole band a shot of scotch, which is probably the worse thing to drink when you’re trying to sing, but they acted appreciative. And this show, there she was again, front and center. She didn’t buy them scotch this time.

One thing I’ve noticed in the last couple of times I’ve gone to see them - they don’t take a real break in the middle of the show any more, except for this one bit where they get the audience singing random rock songs. But they’re all on stage and playing their instruments and stuff during it, so it doesn’t seem like much of a break.

Anyway, I’ll stop babbling now. It was a great concert, and it’s great to see them back at a perfect sized venue again.

My impending job change has me stressed out so much that I’m having trouble sleeping. But maybe I’m letting it get to me more than I should. Today I used the word “asshat” in a problem report resolution. Mind you, I was referring to whoever at Sun is responsible for changing the name of the Java Runtime Engine from jre to j2re and then back to jre (and a whole bunch of other gratuitous naming convention and numbering scheme changes), so it’s a very appropriate adjective, but in retrospect I don’t think my cow orkers would quite understand my sentiment.

I start work at Paychex in a couple of weeks, and one of the things that came up in the interview was that they do J2EE/EJB/JSP on JBoss, something which I’ve never done before. Since I don’t want to appear like a doofus when I get there, I started reading up on them, and discovered that J2EE has changed significantly between J2EE 1.4 and JEE 5 (yes, another one of Sun’s stupid-ass switcheroos in the naming convention - JEE 5 actually is the version right after J2EE 1.4), and I didn’t want to study the wrong one. So I asked Sally at Adecco, my recruiter, for the email address of somebody technical at Paychex I could ask. And being a recruiter, of course instead of giving me an email address, she gave me a phone number, without telling me whose number it was.

So I called it, and got a very irate Head of IT. Irate because I called him, irate because I couldn’t remember who had interviewed me, irate because I didn’t know who I’d be working for, and just generally irate. I apologized and said I’d get my recruiter to give me a more appropriate phone number, but he said he’d get somebody to call me, and he sounded even more irate as he said so. So I’m really winning friends and influencing people there before I start. So thanks a lot, Sally, once again Adecco has managed to fuck up my life.

Gallery 2.3 just came out, and I made the mistake of upgrading instead of waiting for it to shake out a bit. And of course, things are slightly broken. Everything works, but at the end of every page is this:

Database Error
An error has occurred while interacting with the database.

The exact nature of database errors is not captured unless Gallery debug mode is enabled in config.php. Before seeking support for this error please enable buffered debug output and retry the operation. Look near the bottom of the lengthy debug output to find error details.
Back to the Gallery

Error Detail -
Error (ERROR_STORAGE_FAILURE)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryStorage/GalleryStorageExtras.class at line 1007 (gallerycoreapi::error)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryStorage.class at line 521 (gallerystorageextras::addmapentry)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryCoreApi.class at line 2955 (postgresqlstorage::addmapentry)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryDataCache.class at line 692 (gallerycoreapi::addmapentry)
in main.php at line 594 (gallerydatacache::putpagedata)
in main.php at line 104
in main.php at line 88
System Information
Gallery version 2.3
PHP version 4.4.4-8+etch6 apache2handler
Webserver Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) mod_python/3.2.10 Python/2.4.4 PHP/4.4.4-8+etch6 mod_perl/2.0.2 Perl/v5.8.8
Database postgres7
Operating system Linux xen1.xcski.com 2.6.18-3-xen-686 #1 SMP Mon Dec 4 20:48:20 UTC 2006 i686
Browser Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.20.1

The weird thing is that it was happening almost everywhere, and now it’s only some pages.

I just noticed that the upstairs TiVo hasn’t recorded anything since Tuesday, not even the manual recordings of the Daily Show. I tried rebooting it, and the “ToDo List” still shows “No shows pending” for every entry in the Season Pass list, even the manual recordings. So now I’ve got a call into tech support, which at 6pm on a Friday, I’m not expecting a quick callback.

Update: an hour after rebooting, the ToDo List has finally been populated.

A few short weeks after buying my Prius, and I already broke the tail light cover backing into the driveway. And to make matters worse, you can’t just buy the cover, you have to replace the whole tail light assembly. The local dealer has it in stock for $225. The cheapest I found it on-line was $170 including shipping.

BTW: To all the companies that make auto parts web sites? You all suck. Go back to web design school. I should not have to put in the VIN and the type of engine and transmission (on a Prius, which only has one type of each no less) just to find out if you have any tail light assemblies. I should not have to guess if tail light assemblies are listed under “Safety”, “Body” or “Electrical”. I should not be on a page that says “Toyota Prius tail lights” at the top of the page, and still have to put in the make, model and year before I can find out if you have any.

I haven’t flown since I got back from Oshkosh. I haven’t even replaced my log book, which was stolen a few days before I left for Oshkosh. My medical expired on August, and I haven’t bothered to renew it. I’m beginning to wonder if flying, the activity that I longed to do since I was 12, and which I used to revolve my life around, just isn’t important to me any more. If that’s the case, I kind of wish I’d discovered that before I spent $2000+ on replacing stuff that was stolen before Oshkosh.

Since I’m moving from my high paying job to a lower paying one, maybe it’s time to go “inactive” in the flying club.

A few weeks ago, I had a sleep study. They wire you up with a bazillion wires and tubes, put you in a sterile room on an uncomfortable bed, and then say “sleep normally”. The reason for the study is that sometimes lack of sleep, especially because of apnea, is sometimes related to sensitivity to pain.

Today, I got the results. Highlights include

• It took me only 14 minutes to fall asleep, but over 180 minutes to first get to REM sleep, and I didn’t get very much REM sleep over the course of the night
• I experienced “arousal” (not sexual arousal, they just mean I wasn’t properly asleep any more an average of 38 times per hour
• The “arousals” were closely correlated to snoring and some apnea, and are the probable reason for the lack of REM sleep

Upshot is that I’m going to get a “CPAP” machine for a few weeks to see if it helps.

For reasons I probably can’t go into in public, I’ve decided to take the Paychex offer after all. Oh well, at least I’ll get to learn about Hibernate and JBoss.