Andy's Blog

Chris and Tanya wedding wrap-up

So, I am finally back in California, after having a pretty long (but fun) day yesterday at the wedding and surrounding festivities. We got a late start yesterday, going for breakfast at around 9:30 AM. We ate at "The Baglery", which is a local place that makes their own Bagels. It came highly recommended by Tanya when we first got into Bellingham, and she was right -- it was pretty good. After that we checked out Fairhaven, which is the older, artier, cafe-ier, and yuppier part of Bellingham. We were joined there by Mike and Sheila, who made a precision strike on Washington for the wedding. The weather wasn't great -- cool, cloudy, with some drizzle, but we didn't let that stop us from our mission -- celebrating Rushabh's birthday!

We left Fairhaven in order to deposit Jim, Chee Wai, and Bill back at their respective hotels, so that they could change into their tuxedos and begin the pre-wedding picture-taking process. The slimmed-down group checked out one of the art museums in downtown Bellingham. It was pretty decent, for a small-town museum. It seems like the Bellingham area has a productive community of local artists. Some of their work goes to shops in Fairhaven (I was tempted by some pottery, but didn't want to bring it home), and other pieces are shown in the museum. There was one artist, RR Clark (word doc, sorry), who had a big display on the 2nd floor. His stuff was pretty neat -- some of the first "painting-in-museum-art" that wasn't afraid to have a narrative (comic book style) or make use of written text.

After this, the group slimmed down again, as the wedding neared. Rushabh, Kristen, Hong Eng, and I spent about 2 hours together, before making our way to the church. I can now say that I have been to the "Big K" in Bellingham, WA. Sweet.

The wedding itself was pretty good -- the church was beautiful (I probably should have taken some pictures of it -- oh well), the ceremony was the right length, the priest cracked some jokes (I told Justin and Sarah that if he had made a Simpsons reference he would have had me), and everything went off without a hitch. The bride and groom rode off to the reception on an old Ford Model A, in lieu of being pelted with rice or bubbles.

As this was an evening ceremony, the reception followed immediately afterwards. There was food (which was pretty good), drink (I snagged a picture of Chris and Tanya's first diet Cokes as a married couple), and dance. It went until about 12:30 or so, and then I stayed to help with the clean-up of the reception hall. After cleaning up, depositing various peoples to where they needed to go, and getting myself and Jim back to the hotel -- it was after 2:00 AM. And of course, we had to get an early start in the morning, so that I could get Jim and Bill to SeaTac airport in time for their respective flights. So, I rocked today on 4 hours of sleep -- 28 years old and I've still got it!

All-in-all, it was a pretty fun trip. There was a lot of deja-vu to the Norway trip for me, because I spent the bulk of the week with that same group of criminal masterminds. I also got caught up with some UIUC people that I haven't seen in awhile while at the reception, which was cool. I met some of Chris and Tanya's friends from their undergrad, but I didn't really hang out with them too much. I was also happy to visit with Justin and Sarah again -- they are a lot of fun.

So, all-in-all, a successful trip, from which I return home tired. So, I will have to recover by going to work and doing a half-assed job...

-Andy.

Bellingham, WA

So far, my Pacific Northwest trip is going pretty well. I hung out with Chee Wai, Hong Eng, Fredrik and Monica Tuesday and Wednesday (with some support from Rushabh, Kristen, Justin, and Sarah). Today I picked up Bill and Jim from SeaTac airport, and we drove up to Bellingham. After getting some lunch at a really good bagel place, Chris took us on a tour of Bellingham. The only problem was, Chris isn't from Bellingham, and I don't think that he has been out here for all of that long, so he had some obvious handicaps when it came to tourguidery. But, we persevered, and we got to see some good views of the bay, and the city in general.

For dinner, Tanya and her mother made us all an extremely good meal over at their house. Fresh samon, chicken, and steak, all cooked just right. My dad would have been quite jealous.

-Andy.

GO CUBS

While driving on Interstate 5 through downtown Seattle this morning, I saw a car with Montana personalized license plates that said "GO CUBS". This reminded me that when Suzie and I were in Berkeley last Sunday, I struck up a conversation with a father and Cubs-hat-wearing-son pair. They were apparently from L.A., but the father said that he grew up in Chicago, and passed the "support the cubs" impulse on to his son.

Last year, when the Cubs nearly made it to the world series, a co-worker of mine asked why there were still any Cubs fans left, seeing as how the (almost) always lose. Well, now I have a definitive answer. Being a Cubs fan is generational, and once you are a Cubs fan, it appears to stick for life, no matter what state your license plates have on them.

-Andy.

Airport Security (one good thing)

I am on my way to Seattle this morning, in order to do a mini UIUC reunion, capped by Chris and Tanya's wedding. The security line at SFO was pretty crazy this morning, there was a throng of people, and it seems like security was heightened (I had to take my shoes off -- a strong indicator). These days, if you have a laptop, you have to take it out of your bag and send it through the X-Ray separately. After getting past the metal detector, you have to wait for your stuff. They can usually people through the metal detector faster then they can X-Ray all of the bags, shoes, belts, and laptops.

Anyway, so I'm waiting for my stuff to come down the line, and a woman has gone through the metal detector, and is waiting behind me. When my PowerBook comes out, she says "nice laptop!".

So, I guess there is one advantage to the new airport security regime.

-Andy.

Andy goes to College

Last Sunday was a little bit of a surreal experience for me. I had Laura's little sister, Suzie Schornack, staying with me for the week. She is going to be a freshman at UC Berkeley in the fall (i.e., next week), and managed to arrive in town a wee-bit early -- like over a week before the dorms opened. So, she spent a week of that time at my place, just chillin' (and occasionally illiin'). And then on Sunday, I drove her up to Berkeley, helped her get her stuff out of storage (which thankfully, was far less stuff than what I took when I first moved to college), and then got her all moved into her dorm room in Ida Sproull.

The last time that I had lived in a dorm was about 5 years ago exactly (I spent the summer of '99 in Storrs, so that is why it is just about exact), and after seeing Suzie's living situation -- man -- I don't think you could pay me to go back to that life. She has a triple room, no not triple size, 3 person (her plus two roommates). Not only that, the size of the room is about the size of a CWRU double. Amazing. There are three beds (two bunks, one loft), 3 desks (2 shoved under the loft, one free-standing), small bookshelves, drawers, and closets. There is really no way to re-arrange the furniture -- there is exactly one way that it can all fit in there, and UCB Housing has figured out that way. One of Suzie's roommates was planning on bringing a mini-fridge, but nixed that idea upon seeing the room -- there really is no space for it. The only way to live there is to be young, I think, which I am no longer.

Suzie seemed to be remarkably unstressed out by the whole process. Admitedly, she had been to the campus a number of times since coming out for her orientation in July, and I will give UCB props for making the move-in process as painless as they could, given the circumstances of their environment. The UC had plenty of helpful people wearing "move-in day '04" shirts, so there were many targets for my questions. They also bequeathed a free parking permit, and cleared out some lots for move-in only parking. The only annoying part was the loading/unloading zone -- but the real problem is that Berkeley is located in a city type environment, so they really don't have that much space to facilitate the parents trundling up with their mini-vans and SUVs full of stuff.

Which gets the another thing that was surreal for me -- I was basically Suzies's designated "father for the day" (or at least, that is what it felt like to me). I think that parents have a certain role to play on move-in day, and I kindof got to play that role well ahead of the game (for me). Suzie was probably one of the easiest kids that you could wish for, move-in wise. But still, it was stressful, and after it was over, I had a goodly sweat going on. I don't know how really old people do it.

Which leads me to the last way in which things were surreal -- I was exposed to college students again. And not just any sort of student, but freshmen. And not just any sort of freshmen -- 18-year-old freshmen! I mean, I'm 10 years older than these people! I marveled out the random girl talking about an Incubus concert, the slackers already busting out with the pirated DVDs on the HP Media Center laptop, the jock-types going around to meet all of the new, naive, freshmen women (shudder), etc. And I was just left with the since of how this whole phase of my life is over, and it is so not a bad thing. I have done my time in the college gulags, and now I am out of there, a much better man for the experience, to be sure, but out of there just the same.

Suzie and I capped off this wonderful memory-lane-type experience (for me) by having dinner at none-other than... (wait for it...) -- the dorm cafeteria! Yes kids, I had dorm food on Sunday night! As Suzie's designated parental unit, I was treated to a free meal at the caf for my hard work, and as a thank-you for all of the bucks that I am (not) going to send down into the UCB sinkhole. The food was pretty decent (for college cafeteria food), but I'm sure they were putting on "the show" for the visiting parents. I'll have to ask Suzie in about a month what she thinks of the food.

So, in conclusion, college is great, and Suzie is going to have a wonderful time at UC Berkeley. But for me, college was great, and while it's interesting to see how much I have changed in 10 years, I'm glad that I have grown as an individual, and moved on with myself.

At least, until my midlife crisis, anyway. :)

-Andy.

What does it look like from the top of Mission Peak?

I hiked to the top of Mission Peak again on Saturday, this time with Stan and Suzie, both of whom have never done this hike before. I don't think that either of them were prepared for this one -- it is a little bit rigorous (4 boots out of 5, according to Stan's hiking book). Anyways, we all made it to the top, and the view is impressive:

If you click on that picture, you'll be treated to a 6.5Mb, 19 second panorama from atop the peak. I took this movie with my new camera, a Sony DSC-P100 (which I plan to blog more about in the future). If you get past the wind on the audio track, you'll hear something funny at the end.

-Andy.

As seen in Portland

While Mike and I were in Portland attending OSCON, I snapped a couple of pictures with my phone, as we were walking around. I have been pretty forgetful about actually downloading them off of my phone, however, which is why I'm not blogging about it until now.

From top to bottom, some sort of Utility van that had a spiffy Ghostbusters logo on it. A random chinese restaurant that we walked by -- see if you can make out what it says underneath "chop suey". And the last one is of some weird sculpture that exists in downtown Portland. It is possible to move the center piece if given enough force -- it will swing around. I caught this guy trying to get his kid to do it. I think that the kid was actually able to move it a little. Cute.

-Andy.

DSPAM

The EECS department at Case (where my e-mail is hosted) has recently added DSPAM to their mail servers, instead of SpamAssassin. The switch has been a little annoying -- it has forced me to figure out how to move messages between different IMAP folders in pine, which while I have figured out, is still too many keystrokes. The reason why messages have to be shifted around is because DSPAM is a learning system, similar to Mail.app's Junk system.

And of course, because DSPAM needs to be trained, it has really sucked at finding SPAM for the last couple of days. I think that it might be getting a bit better, but it is hard to say. I think what might be hurting it is that when I do use Apple's Mail.app, it plucks the SPAM out into its own folder, and thus as a result, DSPAM doesn't get trained. I'm going to have to research how to make these two kids play better together.

-Andy.

No postin' 'round here

The subject reminds me of a Homerism -- "Hey, how come I can't get no Tang 'round here no more?". Anyways, my family was out in the bay area last week for a visit, and that was fun, but kindof busy. And it didn't exactly leave a lot of time for the computer. I got some new toys that I need to post about, and of course there have been doins-a-transpirin'.

The primary of which, right after my parents left, I went and picked up Suzie Schornack, Laura's (of Mark and Laura fame) little sister, from Kevin's place, and she has been my house-guest here in Sunnyvale ever since. Suzie is going to be a freshman at UC Berkeley in the fall, but the dorms aren't quite open yet. She caught a ride out to the Bay Area with her dad, but he had to go back to work a couple of states away, and so she needs to bridge the gap. And that's where "old reliable" Andy comes in...

Anyways, it's been fun having her here -- I kindof get to be tour guide of the bay area. I don't really know what I'm talking about, which makes sense, since I've only lived here a little more than a year... But what's to know, really? Drive, work, drive, eat, sleep, repeat.

Duh!

-Andy.

The visit so far

Well, so far, things are going pretty good (at least from my perspective). My dad has had some disappointments -- he wanted to take the ferry to Alcatraz, but my mom doesn't like boats, so that got nixed. He also had a supreme bug up his butt to ride the "go car", but he couldn't get the whole family behind him. We could have bifurcated, and he and I gone and done it, but I guess that need for family separation hasn't crept in yet. If we go back to the city later in the week, then this will probably have to happen.

Anyways, we had lunch at the Buena Vista, where the Irish Coffee was invented (apparently -- my dad couldn't quit talking about it). And of course we saw the Palace of Fine Arts, the Golden Gate bridge, the Presidio, and Noe Valley. We picked the latter neighborhood, so that we could have dinner at a nice Italian restaurant with Stan.

Anyways, so far, things are going pretty good.

-Andy.

277

When I was out at OSCON two weeks ago, I performed a little experiment. Since I knew that I was going to be using only one computer, my PowerBook, for the entire week, I decided that I would not delete any SPAM. Instead, I would let it all pile up in the "Junk" folder in Mail.app. I have been curious for awhile as to how much SPAM I'm actually getting, but it has been hard for me to track, because I am pretty fanatical about deleting it.

So, from Sunday the 23rd of July through Sunday August 1st, I didn't delete a single SPAM. And the total that I reached? A mere two hundred and seventy-seven messages. On the one hand, that is a lot of e-mail. It occurs to me as I write this that I should also have tracked the total number of e-mails that I received in that week, so as to determine the ratio of signal to noise in my inbox. But, one conclusion that I can reach is that I'm probably getting less SPAM then many other people out there on the 'net.

Oh, and the other conclusion is that SPAM sucks. But everybody knew that already, right?

-Andy.

The Reitz's have landed

So, my parents and Sara arrived in the Bay area today, marking the beginning of their week-long visit here. My folks haven't taken a vacation in quite a long time, so this is truly a special event. I'm going to take the week off of work, but other than that, I'm not exactly sure what we all are going to do. In the immediate future, my mom is going to cook one of her signature "big meals" tomorrow, so that is going to be great. And I guess we're going to go out to dinner or something on Tuesday in order to celebrate my birthday. And one of my co-workers was really talking up Monterey and the 17 mile drive, so I may pull for a day trip down there...

-Andy.

Airport Express

Finally! After having a fairly lousy time at work, I managed to complete "the trifecta" after I left. First I swung by the comic shop, and picked up "Astonishing X-Men #3" (I'll try and review it once I've had time to read it). Then I swung by Fry's, where I was astonished (no pun intended) to see that they actually had Apple's Airport Express in stock!

So, since I have been wanting one of these, for like ever, I immediately snapped one up. Being able to hold one of these little marvels in my hand really made my day. The level of design and engineering that Apple put into this thing is incredible. And what's even more incredible, I can't think of another company that can even compete with Apple in this space. I just saw a competing product on Gizmodo, from SMC. Not only is the thing ugly, but I'll bet that it's nowhere near as simple to setup. The hardest part of setting up my Airport Express was hooking up the audio cable (because I had to get in behind my receiver -- ug). But once that was accomplished, I literally plugged the thing in, and it appeared in iTunes. I then told iTunes to output to the Airport Express, and hit "play" -- iTunes continued playing the song that I had been listening to with my headphones the night before, only this time, it was coming out of my stereo.

Granted, I do have some more configuration left to do (I want the Airport Express to be client to my pre-existing wireless network, which from what I have read, should be possible).

I was also happy to find that the hybrid audio output jack is standard -- I was able to use a Toslink cable that I bought years ago for my MiniDisc player in order to get digital optical output from my Airport Express to my Yamaha receiver. Too cool.

But I didn't stop there. When I was in Portland last week, Chris and I were talking about Airport Express. He said that he'd be sold on it, if you could do a "double stream". Chris has all of his music on his PowerMac G5, which is upstairs in his office. His stereo, however, is downstairs in the living room. So, he wants to be able to run iTunes on his laptop, and have it stream music from his G5, and then route that out to Airport Express. Since I don't (yet) have a G5, I endeavored to get the Open Source "daapd" server working on my FreeBSD machine. After some hackery (I needed some newer versions of stuff in order to work with iTunes 4.6, and I had to deal with the usual compile/configuration/etc. problems), I managed to get a setup where my PowerBook could play mp3's that physically resided on my FreeBSD machine, via Apple's streaming DAAP protocol.

But then came time for the acid test -- could those same mp3's be heard on my stereo, via Airport Express?

Of course it works! This is Apple, after all! In fact, I didn't even try not playing the audio via Airport Express -- once I gained the ability to see all of the mp3s one redefine in my iTunes, I just hit play, and it worked.

So, there you go Chris, say good bye to another $130 of your hard-earned cash... :)

Thus far, I have only described two great things that I got today. What is the third thing? Well, some CDs that I ordered when I was in Portland showed up in the e-mail. Primary among them, the new EP entitled "H", from NJ-based "Philip's Head". This is the band that Mike and I hang out with whenever we go out east, because his cousin Ben is the drummer. The new disc is pretty good -- to quote Maynard, "I suggest you buy it".

-Andy.

trips

Since I was last able to blog, I done been on several trips. For the 4th of July weekend, I was out in Chicago. I had yet another good visit out there -- I didn't accomplish everything that I wanted to do (Sara and I had 3 movies that we wanted to see, but we only made it to one), but still, it was good.

I went directly to Detroit, MI from Chicago, for my first business trip with EDS. The company has signed a big outsourcing deal with DaimlerChrysler, and I was tasked (along with a number of other EDS folks) with being on-site for the build-out of our monitoring and management infrastructure. As business trips go, I suppose that this one was okay -- I worked some killer hours (like 12/day), but I got to do it using my Mac, which made things better. Also, I blundered into some first-class seats on the way back from Detroit to S.F. (I had to go via Dallas -- ug), which is the first time that I've ever flown first class anywhere. It was pretty nice to fly first class, especially after my grueling trip to detroit.

After that, I had a little less than two weeks of non-travel (because a semi-planned L.A. trip didn't pan out), before it was off to O'Reilly's Open Source Conference in Portland, OR, with Mike. In general, the conference was a lot of fun. Perl rocks, python didn't impress me, and Linux continues to make strides (especially wine -- I actually saw Jeremy White demo iTunes running on Linux. Stunning). I was really hoping to blog more about this conference while I was there, but it didn't work out that way. I may try and post some more later.

But, I'm back from OSCON now. My parents & Sara come out to S.F. for a visit for a week starting on Saturday. Then I have a week of 'normalcy', and I am off to the Seattle/Bellingham, WA area for Chris and Tanya's wedding.

-Andy.

my schedule

A lot of things have been messed up ever since I moved, not the least of which being my schedule. I have been traveling, working, going into S.F. -- you name it. For example, right now I'm oncall, and dealing with a page that I got at like 12:30 AM Pacific. It is now 3:30, and I'm still waiting for this Sun box to be back up so that I can verify it.

So, my sleep schedule is messed up. My work schedule is messed up (I probably won't be getting to work before 11:00 AM tomorrow, that is for sure). My workout schedule is messed up.

On the plus side, it looks like I only have to hold out until September for things to get back to normal... (or whatever passes for normal around here, anyway).

-Andy.