May 2001 Archives

Cartoonist Steve Kelley got fired over this cartoon! What in the world is offensive about that?!?

I've finally figured out what was causing my Mac at home to crash. It was the memory I added when I installed MacOS X. It seems to work fine when running OS X, but in OS 9.1 it crashes fairly constantly. Argh, I wish that the computer would detect this and warn me about it (hmh, I think it actually might have, but then I reseated the DIMM and it seemed to work). Lesson learned is to suspect new hardware when software crashes.

Anyway, having a stable system once again, allows me to upload and post pictures from my camera, including those of Homer.

I got an email from alivewww.com about my domain:

Hi,

This was just a quick email. I noticed that you were not doing alot with the domain nonplus.net and wondered if you still needed it or whether I can possibly have it? I know it's quite a blunt question but I am not very good at subtly!

Kind Regards,

Andrew.

I suspect it's for nonplus.com since that's being hosted by them. I guess I should do something about my home page. But I am NOT planning to give up my domain (it really is difficult to come up with something short that's not already taken).

However, alivewww.com does have some pretty amazing deals, though. Their Budget Plan comes with 250mb, PHP4, mySQL, cgi-bin and tons of POP accounts for £12 per - that's around $17! It seems like all the cheep hosts are in the UK.

I got home after work, planning to spend 15 minutes playing with the dog and then to head to the Oasis to pickup Jennifer after her swim. I go into the back yard, all ready to bond, and there is no Homer! I walk the fence and discover where the bugger got out. There is a loose plank that we overlooked in the darkness while fixing the fence last night. My first thought was about how I failed my responsibility (visions of me losing a child, when I actually have one). Then came the thought of the consequences. If I let Meredith know that he's lost, I'm in trouble and her husband Michael is in serious trouble (she'll blame him for the fence, since he's the handyman). She must not know!

So I hit the neighborhood parks on my bike (wondering if I'll even recognized the dog which I've been exposed to for less than a day, and that mostly in darkness) and, by sheer luck, find him hanging out with some kids. They say they'd been playing with him all day long (I don't mention that they've possibly picked up some parasites from him) and they ask me whether he's mine. I say sure, without explaining too much, and try to get Homer to come to me. Of course, he has no idea what his name is and stays about three feet away from me no matter how sweetly I talk to him and eventually crawls under a bridge. After my failed efforts, the kids easily coax him out and I try to get him to walk home. No luck with that, he's either too tired or, more likely, doesn't trust me. So I pick him up and cary him home - I have to go back to the park to pick up my bike later.

I block the lose plank with a plastic garten chair and stool and arrive at the Oasis 45 minutes late.

When we get back to the house at night, the frigging dog is gone again! He managed to get around the furniture and out through the same hole in the fence. I find a lantern and get ready for another search patrol. Luckily he's hanging around the front of the house, so I manage to cajole him in about 15 minutes. I brave my way through the weeds in the darkness and nail the loose plank back in its place.

Let's see how long this will hold him. I'm thinking of renaming Homer to Houdini.

All ended well, though. When Jennifer came over, we sat in the back yard and Homer would eventually come by for a sniff and let us scratch his itchy hide. I had to hold him on my lap while Jennifer forced some medicin down his throat, and without much complaint he felt asleep on my lap. Unfortunately so did my feet, so we had to wake him up to get him off of me. He seems more relaxed, though, so maybe he no longer views me as an enemy.

So Homer, the puppy that I'm foster parenting, has moved into my back yard. Michael helped me fix up potential escape routes through or under the fence and Meredith then brought over the dog.

So far we seem to be getting along. He's still a bit shy, although he can get playful. Last night was a storm, but he didn't seem to mind. We didn't hear him bark or cry and he now definitely knows that his dog house is his shelter.

I think we'll be able to keep him entertained (Jason says his dogs sleep pretty much all day long). We'll just have to make sure that Jennifer doesn't spoil him.

My friend Meredith called today that they'd found a puppy they need some help with. It looks like it's got mange so they need to keep it quarantined from their dogs. Apparently there aren't many people out there with yards that don't already own pets, so I'll become the (tepmorary) guardian of a Golden Retriever mix puppy.

I have this nagging suspicion that this is going to lead to dog ownership, if Jennifer has anything to say about this...

So Jim Jefford made the move and the ballance in the Senate has shifted to the other side. It will be still close (49-50) which is good, but now at least all of the executive and legislative branches won't be controlled by one party. I wonder how the "President" will deal with that...

I went to a highschool graduation party on Saturday. It was in honor of J.T. Seargeant with whose family I was staying during my exchange year in 1986-87. I probably wouldn't have recognized J.T. if I had ran into him on the street. He was 2 or three when I first came and now he'll be starting college in the fall. His sister Marla is going to be a senior at A&M - this young woman is a far cry from the little girl who used to watch My Little Pony and The Monkeys reruns.

It's strange visiting places and people from "the past". It takes you down the memory lane and you reminds you of things you haven't thought about in years. It's kinda nice, but it also makes you wonder about how you spent the time since then. What have I accomplished? Am I where I thought I'd be a decade or so later (hah!). Am I the person I wished I'd become? It's cool listening to the highschool kids discuss their interests and plans and to remember how young and, well, naive I was at their age, too. I wonder if I'll be feeling the same when I listen to thirty-somethings in another 15 years?

I managed to resurect a lot of my work from my hard drive, but now I'm in the slow and tedious process of installing the OS. It's weird to watch the Win2k installer run in VGA on a 21" monitor.

It's been one hectic day for me. After riding an obstacle course around the downed branches from last night's storm, I get to work, fire up Outlook (on my laptop which happens to be alive) and realised that I'm supposed to see Carmen after work tonight. So I had to ride back home over lunch to pick up my car. That was about the time the new front came into town so I was battling head wind through half my trip home. It would have been a perfect lunch to fly kites, too...

My hard drive at work got hosed to day. I hate when that happens - it's such a painful reminder that backing up might not be such a bad idea, after all.

It also makes me mad what a royal pain it is to resurect a crashed Win32 system (and Windows 2000 isn't any better about it, either). Granted, my Mac at home occasionally gets corrupted, too, but at least I can always easily boot up from the System CD and do the required repairs.

Jennifer and I saw the Journey Into Amazing Caves at the Texas State Historical Museum IMAX last night. I like IMAX movies and the visuals were great - especially the ice caves - but I was a little underwhelmed with the content of the movie. Really not all that informational - you get more info in most TLC shows.

Then again, TLC cavers may not be as cute...

I did lunch at Chuy's with some guys from NI, since Gregg Fowler was in town from Boston. It was kinda neat hanging out with them. It sounds like they're working on some neat new stuff - but still dealing with the same old crap, too. When @hand went through the layoffs a week ago, it got me thinking about my decision to join. I'm still glad that I did it - although I might have felt differently if it had been me out on the street.

I'm a bit sunburned because yesterday over lunch we flew our kites at JCAA. We must have been out there for less than an hour, but I guess staring into the sky will do that to you.

I got to fly my Wind Demon as well as Adie's new kite (very sweet). Right now I'm lusting after a Revolution 1.5 SLE. Is $200 for a kite really too much?!? I'd be the first kid on the block to have a quad line kite...

It's the first full day of work after the layoffs at work. I guess we are a real startup now :-| I'm going to miss a bunch of these folks. Beside being work colegues, they also added a lot with their personalities.

The engineering meeting this morning reminded me of what it used to be like about a year ago when the group was the same size. I still feel bad for the guys that were laid off. I wish I had more contacts in the industry to point them to.

On the other hand, I like working in a small group - the communication is much better and you know what's going one without wading through reports or enduring long meetings. Several people are moving their offices so we should all be closer together, which is nice.

Still, it is rather quiet around here - like the calm the storm.

I just discovered that a bunch of my past (way past) entries posted via BlogThis! made it, due to "user error", to my other blogs.

Note to self: Always check the destination blog before posting.

On Saturday, Jennifer and I helped finishing a house for Austin Habitat for Humanity. We didn't actually do all that much work (touching up paint and such) but it was a great experience. The house itself was well build but simple.

What impressed me most was the dedication of the volunteers and how well organized and thought out the whole HFH concept is. The mission of HFH is to eliminate poverty housing. They do this by helping build housing for people that could not otherwise afford it. Houses are build by volunteers and HFH provides the house owner with an interest-free mortgage (which in turn helps pay for future HFH houses).

The cool thing is that the house owner has to provide a lot of volunteer work (>200 hours) before even being considered for a house. Overall, they must provide more than 400 hours of "sweat equity". Doing this work seriously vests their interest in their home and teaches them the skills to maintain and repair it. All the existing and future HFH home owners I saw at the site had a very positive and appreciative outlook. It's neat that while this work is charitable, it's not a hand-out but rather, as HFH puts it, a "hand up". Truely a worthwile cause.

I went to my very first Eeyore's Birthday Party on Saturday - more or less by accident. Jennifer and I went to a Tango lesson at UT and some friends of ours called from Pease Park. It was, not as wild as I suspected it might be, but actually I kinda liked that. Both the families with their kids and the drum circles with their weed seemed to have a great time.

I haven't written for a whole month! Shame on me!

On the way home from work last night, I saw a bunch of lightning bugs in all the yards that I passed. It's really distracting trying to ride your bike in the dark while watching lightning bugs. You always catch them out of the corner of your eye and then stare at the spot you last saw them and, of course, they flash somehwere else. Try that at 15mph in the dark. So, if you live in the Austin area, go and take a walk in your neighborhood after dark. It's very soothing (and nicely cool, right now).

Oh, and yesterday was the fifth day in a row (spanning the weekend) that I went to work on my bike. It takes less time now and it gets more difficult to keep my heart rate up while I ride, but I guess that's a good thing. I figure I save around $5 a day by taking my bike (assuming about $0.33 mileage rate). Not bad at all!