I've got nothing to say ...

Madness ...

2011-01-06T16:23:00.002-06:00

I'm in idle (python 2.7) and see the following:

>>> p = re.compile(r"^(\d{2}/\d{2}/\d{2})")
>>> p = re.compile(r"^(\d[2}/\d{2}/\d{4})")

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
p = re.compile(r"^(\d[2}/\d{2}/\d{4})")
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/re.py", line 190, in compile
return _compile(pattern, flags)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/re.py", line 245, in _compile
raise error, v # invalid expression
error: unexpected end of regular expression

The first regular expression compiles, the second one does not. The only difference I can see is the "4". What is going on here?

Ooops. Just before I was about to post this, I found the problem. Do you see it? It's not easy to see.

Fixing the Windows 7 Read-Only Folder Blues | IT Expert Voice

2010-04-19T22:44:00.001-05:00

Saw the same problem on Windows 2003 trying to run bash scripts over a remote desktop connection: Fixing the Windows 7 Read-Only Folder Blues | IT Expert Voice. Always wondered what was going on ...

2010-04-01T07:02:00.001-05:00

The N.E. Patriots drafting Colt McCoy would make me happy.

2010-03-28T21:05:00.001-05:00

If Duke was knocking down their threes, this game would be over. But I'm still pulling for Baylor ...

2010-03-28T21:04:00.001-05:00

Still not done watching Duke-Baylor, but Duke is playing their zone perfectly ...

2010-03-28T16:16:00.001-05:00

By the way, I hope I'm wrong about Duke-Baylor.

2010-03-28T16:14:00.001-05:00

Quck prediction: Duke will win this game not because they are THAT good, but because they are the only team with the discipline to play Baylor's zone.

Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest

2010-03-24T21:35:00.000-05:00

This is really bad:

Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest: "Top Vatican officials, including the future Pope Benedict XVI, did not defrock an American priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even after warnings from several bishops, church files show.

"

2010-03-14T22:47:00.001-05:00

Testiing some text

Crawling along ....

2010-01-31T19:42:00.003-06:00

Bella ...

crawled for the first time yesterday!

I was going to buy a nook ....

2010-01-23T20:23:00.002-06:00

Not any longer.

Update: This was almost certainly an overreaction on my part (although the story is pretty horrific). But what I do take as a pretty safe conclusion from all this: B&N's customer service is putrid. When compared to Amazon.com's service (with whom I've always had such a fantastic experience): why take any chances? Chances are I'm probably going to buy a Kindle (although a Sony reader remains a possibility).

Round Rock Library

2009-12-28T16:10:00.002-06:00

I just got my library card for Round Rock Public Library; I'm amazed at how many resources are available through this library. I had really thought to join to get access to inter-library loan programs with UT, but there's a lot of really cool stuff I can get access to from the RRPL itself. They have lot of ebooks I can access for some of the Platonic studies I want to read. This is one of the best things I've done in some time ....

First Christmas ...

2009-12-24T19:11:00.002-06:00

Isabella's first Christmas is tomorrow!!! I'm beyond excited. She didn't like her first visit with Santa this week, but hard to not adore the emotional honesty. :-)

Closed academic communities ...

2009-12-24T19:05:00.002-06:00

I've been reading a lot of Kierkegaard again lately. Right now, I'm particularly interested in the relationship between Hegel, Kierkegaard and how Kierkegaard understands Hegel. I went searching Google to see what was online, and it quickly became clear that very few communities are as closed as academic communities. I kind of knew this already from my grad school days, but was surprised things haven't changed. If any knowledge and/or scholarly contribution desires to be free, it's philosophical contributions. But I could quickly become poor if I started buying all the articles I wanted to read on Kierkegaard. Typically, these articles go for $30 or $40 a pop. I could join a good library and get free access to many of these articles, but that would generally require being physically present in the library itself (ie Perry Castenada Library). In the academic communities themselves, most of the "free" philosophy online is quackery (and it's certainly true, most of the "free" stuff online is abysmally bad) and so to offer something free online probably smells of desparation.

tracker needs some serious love ...

2009-12-22T21:07:00.002-06:00

I remember reading a lot of posts/emails etc from the author of tracker awhile back that was badmouthing beagle and extolling the virtues of tracker. I've been using tracker on one of my fedora 12 boxes for a week now, and all it does is chew cpu and ignore my preference settings (and crash all day long). Just now, I had the setting which says to pause indexing when the computer is busy, and trackerd was using 99% of one of my cores. I decided to strace this to see what it was doing:

strace -p -o /tmp/trackerd_strace.out

I let it run for about 30 seconds, and then go to /tmp to try and tail -f the file a bit. However, when I get there, there are 81,000 files from this afternoon matching the pattern tracker-evolution-module-* all from this afternoon. Yikes. I kill trackerd and vim the trackerd_strace.out file, and what does it contain? It contains 2,500,000 lines of this:

poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=6, events=POLLIN}, {fd=9, events=POLLIN}, {fd=7, events=POLLIN}], 5, 0) = 0 (Timeout)

I used to be a big beagle fan, but it looks like it's basically unmaintained right now, so I switched over to tracker. Since I've done that I get about 20 - 30 trackerd crashes a day (per abrt) and this constant cpu usage. I think I'm going to have disable tracker and go back to beagle, or start using google desktop again.

Don't go to Italy ....

2009-12-05T08:34:00.002-06:00

OK, I'd read several accounts of the Knox case, and while I obviously don't know what really happened, I'd also read a book on a very famous crime in Italy (don't have the link now), written by an American who lived there for several years that said there's a 0% chance that Amanda Knox was guilty, but, because of the absurd way the Italian legal system works, a huge chance she'd be convicted anyway. And she was. I'm never going to Italy.

Need to dig up the aforementioned book (it was about the famous serial killer in Italy); it describes in great detail how many innocent people were stalked by Italian prosecutors not with the goal of reaching the truth, but to further their own careers. Certainly that goes on here, but usually those prosecutions have to at least wear the guise of attempting to reach the truth, so that it's hard to tell the difference. From the description in the book I read, it's not clear that "truth" is even a value that many in the Italian criminal system even recognize.

Huh?

2009-04-27T13:09:00.002-05:00

My auto/home insurance company (who I am very happy with, btw) gave me a discount for moving to a new neighborhood recently. They do not have discounts for giving birth. I'm sure there's a specific reason for this, but it's surprising to me: if there was anything that would really change my behavior on the roads, this is it.

Isabella!

2009-04-21T12:48:00.003-05:00

Our new daughter Isabella was born last night! She's amazing!

Little things ...

2009-03-30T14:56:00.002-05:00

I was immensely pleased today by something very minor. I was working pretty hard at work today, and I think I managed to wrap up a couple of really hard pmrs. I wanted "something" but wasn't sure what it was, and went to the beverage fridge, even though I was pretty tired of Diet Coke. Then, suddenly, realized we'd just bought Diet Barq's that that was what I wanted! Glorious!

Absurdly funny tweet ...

2009-03-24T01:18:00.001-05:00

(Or whatever they're called these days.)

Find it here.

I'm always the last person to hear about anything

2009-02-12T21:30:00.003-06:00

I'm sure I'm the last person to see this, but I laughed pretty hard. This is my kind of "bit" and I can't believe I didn't think of it first:

Linus does 25 things about me.

Holy Cow!

2009-02-08T21:56:00.000-06:00

Old Barney Miller episodes on Hulu! This is like the greatest sitcom of all time!

Amazing to hear myself say it ....

2008-12-09T12:33:00.000-06:00

It's a girl! That is all.

Life is funnier than ...

2008-11-24T12:50:00.002-06:00

Two funny incidents in the last two days, both involving my wife:

1) Last night we were at a Thanksgiving Potluck; several of our friends are Taiwanese (my wife was born in Taiwan, although spent her whole life in Brasil). We told people there that we were pregnant, and one of our friends said it was old Taiwanese saying that after you conceived, if the woman got prettier during the pregnancy, you were carrying a girl; if you got uglier (ie, if your complexion got worse etc), you were carrying a boy. A funny saying, that. Anyway, I quickly turned, and looked at my wife, paused a second and said:

"Hmmmmm, looks like it must be a boy."

Got a pretty good chuckle out of that, and a few slaps upside the head. (Of course, could never get away with something like that if she wasn't pretty.)

2) My wife and I work at the same company, and a couple days a week, we work from home in the same office. Today, we were working like this, and I heard her say while on a phone call with a customer:

"No, I can't tell you where you put your install media."

I couldn't help myself: I laughed alound, and pretty loud. I don't know if the customer heard this, but they couldn't help but notice when my wife started laughing too. She had to make up some story that I was looking at my camera, and there was something funny on it, and I showed her, and it made her laugh. (Camera??? I asked her about this, and she meant to say "TV".)

This is the kind of stuff you read online and never believe. Working in Support is the perfect machine for generating comedic content. I'd write a novel based on this, if I wasn't so busy helping customers find their install media.

The Magic Typo

2008-11-21T08:50:00.003-06:00

Imaginary situation: I've just searched for something in Google toolbar; what it is isn't important. I'm reading my feeds in Google Reader (maybe I should be in a commercial for Google) and I'm using the shortcut keys. But as often happens, Google Reader doesn't have focus, and my focus is still in Google Toolbar. The combination of the search and the unintentional extra characters produces the greatest search ever, the one search on Google that returns the magical hit that changes life forever. Imagine that.

So much for my turn at President ....

2008-11-17T17:51:00.003-06:00

I had planned to become President of the United States in 4 or 8 years until I saw this story. Can you imagine being without email for 4 to 8 years? I can't. I guess that's it then: I guess I can stop working on my acceptance speech.

Meme poseur ...

2008-11-14T18:31:00.002-06:00

There's a meme going on over on planet gnome. I usually don't care for them, but I liked this one:

Grab the nearest book.
Open it to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

People who know me won't be surprised by mine:

"This in turn will stretch and tighten the body to a degree at which the downswing becomes an instinctive and uninhibited reaction."

Treeman

2008-11-12T18:23:00.003-06:00

Search on "treeman" at Google for one of the saddest and most unusual stories of an individual struggling (courageously) against HPV.

Spirit of 76!

2008-11-12T18:07:00.002-06:00

One of the two people who read this blog already know about this (golfed with me), but have to blog it anyway. I shot a 76 today! This is 5 strokes better than any round I've had in the last 10 years, and 3 strokes better than my best round (at Lions with a couple of beers in me when I was much, much younger).

I birdied 1, 9, and 17 with lengthy birdie putts (for me anyway). I could have potentially shot lower if I'd not three-putted two par 5's on the back nine (bogied both of them). Saved several pars with one-putts. Was unusually accurate with my short irons. Almost holed a sand wedge on the first hole.

I had no idea I was going that low until I checked the golf cart score card on the 18th after my third shot was on the green. I two-putted for the 76. In our golf foursome, the best previous score was a 78 and Ren and Toben had both scored several rounds under 80. It looked like I was never going to shoot a round like that ever. I was pretty much in a state of a shock when I realized I'd shot a 76. A very happy, pleasant state of shock.

Long live '76! Life is good!!

How sound can hang ...

2008-11-07T22:25:00.002-06:00

I finally found it! I've been plagued with random gnome app hangs (usually gnome-panel, but plenty of other apps as well). I started stracing some of the hanging apps and it wouldn't give me much, but if I killed them, and restarted them under strace, I'd always see something like this at the end:

access("/tmp/.esd-501/socket", R_OK|W_OK) = 0
socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 18
fcntl64(18, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0
setsockopt(18, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR, [1], 4) = 0
connect(18, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/tmp/.esd-501/socket"}, 22) = 0
rt_sigaction(SIGPIPE, {0x3d07c0, [PIPE], SA_RESTART}, {SIG_IGN}, 8) = 0
open("/home/foo/.esd_auth", O_RDONLY) = 19
read(19, "\371\27PG\6\f2utX=!\f\2):", 16) = 16
write(18, "\371\27PG\6\f2utX=!\f\2):", 16) = 16
write(18, "NDNE", 4) = 4
read(18,

It was always hanging trying to read this esd socket. After seeing several of these, I searched online, and it took me almost no time to find this once I searched on 'gnome-panel hangs esd socket'. This has been bugging me for weeks, and I had blamed it all on Notes 8. Nice to know I was wrong.

Looks like killing esd, pulseaudio or both resolves this problem. Previously I was actually having to reboot to resolve this!

Cool beans ...

2008-11-04T22:18:00.002-06:00

I'm very excited about the results tonight. No one will (I think) claim that he's perfect, or will be free from mistakes, but I wonder if this is how many Americans felt when JFK won the election back in the day. While I'm writing this, McCain is giving his concession speech, and so far it's quite good ...

Voted!

2008-11-04T12:41:00.002-06:00

I voted today. I went to the wrong precinct at first, and there was no line at all in the wrong place. They redirected me to the right precinct, and at the new voting location .... there was no line at all!

Rescued ....

2008-10-18T17:16:00.000-05:00

We had two power outages today at home. The second one was about 45 minutes long. The worst part was it zapped my master boot record on my mythtv Fedora 9 machine. When I tried to boot it just printed:

"GRUB"

and stopped. This normally would have caused a great deal of panic in the old days, since I used to believe this wasn't recoverable. However, this is actually pretty easy to fix. I had already recently created a Fedora 9 respin using jigdo. I burned that and booted the computer in rescue mode.

Then did:

chroot /mnt/sysimage

and then tried to do:

grub-install

but it gave me:

"does not have any corresponding BIOS drive"

grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

Took a long time but eventually worked.

Next, started up grub and did:

root( hd0,1 )

setup( hd0 )

Everything worked, and I was able to boot ok!

Cleaning up rpm duplicates

2008-10-16T16:36:00.003-05:00

Every once in awhile I'd have one of my linux boxes crashing during a yum update. If yum doesn't have a chance to do cleanup, it will leave a bunch of duplicate rpms that will totally mess up yum and it's dependency resolution. I used to have this rpm one-liner a colleague had come up with to list duplicates, then would manually remove them. This was a pretty not-fun process.

Well, apparently there's a tool that does this for you:

package-cleanup --cleandupes

package-cleanup --dupes

will list any duplicates. This is in the rpm yum-utils. I wonder when this was added?

When good food goes wrong ...

2008-10-06T20:00:00.005-05:00

Had the worst case of food poisoning on Saturday night. It was either the Dim Sum we had Saturday afternoon, or the steak and salmon a friend cooked for me Saturday night. In either case, the symptoms were the most violent I've ever experienced, and for several days. My wife actually insisted I go to the ER (which, of course, was a total waste). I'm only now starting to feel anywhere close to normal. I don't think you'll see me at Dim Sum for quite a while ....

A summer of grueling, hard-fought competition ....

2008-09-30T18:52:00.006-05:00

Well, the long summer season finally ended this weekend. We worked pretty hard, competed without respite all summer long. I didn't think I could handle the long haul, but somehow I managed to last until the end. And, I'd made a pretty big comeback towards the end, but got beaten pretty badly one of the last few weeks, and it was too much to overcome. In the end, Ren proved to be the better man, and convincingly so.

I think we all deserve congratulations for how we persevered. I'm really going to miss Fantasy Golf.

I'm "Desire is the golf game killer" (and a truer word was never said).

Bad day, good night ...

2008-09-28T22:30:00.003-05:00

Tough start to the day.

While not much could make up for how the day started, we went to a friend's house for picanha (cooked generously with ice cream salt) and hung around chatting and (some of us) drinking beer. Very nice night. We agreed we'd do a batida (sp?) party sometime soon, which is apparently a Brasilian drink made with cachaca, condensed milk and something else that sounded really good. This drink was invented with me in mind.

Remote downlevel document

2008-09-27T22:28:00.003-05:00

I'd never been able to get printing working when my HP OfficeJet 4215 was samba shared to my Linux boxes. The print jobs would always show up as "Remote Downlevel Document" then the spooler would basically hang, and I could no longer print unless I deleted the job and rebooted the Windows box. The printer would work fine if it was connected directly to the Linux box (although we'd lose some of the functionality).

Was looking on the internet again today to see if anyone figured this out yet. I'd seen a lot of other people had this same problem, and never found a satisfactory solution. Finally, I hit paydirt: someone finally figured it out! Worked for me too. Nice.

Also, watched the Longhorns game recorded, and it was a pretty dominating victory. It would have been a great day if I'd hit better at the range.

Helping out ....

2008-09-22T22:30:00.002-05:00

So my wife often complains that I don't help out around the house enough. One of the reasons this has happened is that my wife is very intense about everything being done a very specific way (her way), so that you pretty much stay out of her way, if possible. I've often warned her that if I started to do more around the house, I was fairly confident that she was not going to be happy with the fact that I was helping, but would likely be upset with me for not doing it exactly as she would have done it.

But, anyway, I can't not help based on this suspicion, can I? That's a total cop out. I've got got to keep the faith and assume everything will be fine. So, lately I've started to try and do more to help out. Tonight, I did the laundry while she watched TV (was a bachelor for a long time and have done my share of laundry). I won't go into details, however, let's just say it did not go well. Laundry got done, but there was no happiness.

What happened to my chomp?

2008-09-22T21:01:00.004-05:00

Was working on a perl script for work today (a pretty ugly behemoth of a script at this point) and I kept getting weird behavior when printing some debug output. chomp() seemed like it had gone completely useless. Now if I was Toben, I would have started stomping around my office complaining about how broken perl was (I wish I could do that). However, I'm all too familiar with my propensity for shooting myself in the foot when writing perl code. And, as it turned out, setting $/ to a string naturally results in a useless chomp(). Although the perl programming book was kind enough to point out the error of my ways and that I could set $/ locally in a loop to get it back to it's normal behavior. Cool.

But the real question is: where were you Ren when I needed you?

Ryder Cup and seed-spitting ...

2008-09-21T22:30:00.004-05:00

Had planned to record the Ryder Cup and watch later (although I didn't really have a good chunk of time available to actually watch the recording). But I blew off mowing the yard this afternoon (was still semi-wet) and watched the Ryder Cup (partly catching up the recording and partly live). So many putts were made it was quite remarkable! The ending was a little anti-climactic considering how well everyone played. I think the Euros wore down a little bit; the crowd was great for the US and it takes a lot of energy to fight that again and again.

After the Ryder Cup ended we went over to the house of a friend from church and had a potluck dinner. Food was very good, company was great, and we finished the night outside on their stone deck having a watermelon seed-spitting contest. The temperature was perfect, the sky was purple and dark blue and it was so quiet out. All in all, an awesome day.

Ubiquitous shells ...

2008-09-17T22:40:00.003-05:00

Starting playing with Ubiquity and I like it. It's basically a small shell that you can install into firefox and allows you to do actions relative to specific contexts (highlighted text in the webpage or relative to the URL). It will need a lot more commands before it's really going to be useful, but I'm already using the email feature to send myself bookmarks.

Infinite Jest ...

2008-09-14T21:29:00.002-05:00

Bought the book tonight at Barnes & Noble. We went down to San Marcos with A. and G., bought some golf shoes (only $40), came back, went to the golf range at Avery Rancy (we all mostly sucked today) then to dinner at Momji (sp?) where there was almost nothing on the menu I really liked. However, the mango ice cream kicked ass.

Football and other ...

2008-09-14T09:40:00.002-05:00

Was disappointed in the USC-OSU game. Had been recording it on my mythtv box and one of our DVRs, but the game was so bad, I deleted both recordings around halftime (even though I have plenty of space on both).

Hadn't heard of David Foster Wallace (which kind of surprises me since he's the kind of author I would have normally known about) and the news of his death is a bit odd. When stuff like this happens don't the family usually try and hide the fact that it was suicide? I have no problem with the fact that they didn't, since I think in death, I wouldn't want the final statement of my life, that's this big, hidden. But it's almost as if they're broadcasting the fact that it was suicide (and if they are, they probably have a good reason to do so).

I think I'll have to read Infinite Jest, even though I've seen many reviews that suggest it's a book that's being clever for the sake of being clever (and I generally don't have any patience for that). I guess I need to read and decide for myself; the theme certainly sounds fascinating.

Rumours about McCain true?

2008-09-14T09:34:00.002-05:00

Been reading lots of blogs lately that claim that McCain has completely changed his personality in the last several weeks/months of this campaign. I have no way of knowing whether this is really true except via second-hand reports, and most of the folks who are in a position to report on this generally have their own agendas. If it is true, however, it's unfortunate. Even if I was unlikely that I was going to vote for him, I was glad he was the Republican candidate, since he seemed to be "different" than your normal glad-handing, ass-kissing, talking-points speaking politician.

iotop (2)

2008-09-13T16:02:00.002-05:00

Have I mentioned iotop before and how much it rocks?

Mythtv ...

2008-09-13T15:53:00.003-05:00

Forgot to post this awhile ago: I've had Mythtv working for awhile with the free regular cable jack that I got from Time Warner (for spending so much money with them, I guess). However, I kept having problems getting my frontends on remote boxes to work. Turns out I misunderstood the sql for enabling remote boxes to connect to mysql that they had in the mythtv docs:

grant all on mythconverg.* to "mythtv"@"" identified by "mythtv";

The docs don't mention (where I could see), that the "identified" clause is setting the password. I thought it meant something else, and so I kept setting the wrong password. :-) Now it's all good. Pretty soon I'll have a hard drive full of old Star Trek episodes, which still remain, in my mind, some of the finest over the top science fiction drama of all time (unlike the new Star Treks which are generally devoid of drama and replete with agendas).

factcheck.org

2008-09-13T15:51:00.002-05:00

After reading some of the entries on their site and subscribing to their feed, I'm almost inspired to become non-partisan myself.

Displaying cpu usage separately for each processor ....

2008-07-16T16:22:00.001-05:00

Didn't know this until someone asked me how to display the cpu usage for each CPU. Found 'mpstat':

mpstat -P ALL
Linux 2.6.18-92.1.6.el5xen (foo.domain.com) 07/16/2008

04:28:28 PM CPU %user %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %idle intr/s
04:28:28 PM all 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 99.95 135.16
04:28:28 PM 0 0.03 0.00 0.02 0.04 0.00 0.00 0.00 99.91 44.19
04:28:28 PM 1 0.01 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 99.97 29.24
04:28:28 PM 2 0.01 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 99.97 29.23
04:28:28 PM 3 0.01 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 99.97 32.50

Nice.

ICQ blocking unofficial clients (what is ICQ?) ...

2008-07-02T20:25:00.003-05:00

Thought it was humorous to hear that ICQ was blocking unofficial clients. It's been awhile since I used ICQ and didn't think anyone used it anymore. But even funnier: there are official ICQ clients??

Figuring out which column nulls are being inserted into ....

2008-07-02T20:18:00.003-05:00

Actually see this kind of error a lot at work:

DB2 SQL error: SQLCODE: -407, SQLSTATE: 23502, SQLERRMC: TBSPACEID=2, TABLEID=1301, COLNO=0

If you see this error, you can just run the following sql to find out which table and column the null was being inserted into:

SELECT C.TABSCHEMA, C.TABNAME,
C.COLNAME
FROM SYSCAT.TABLES AS T,
SYSCAT.COLUMNS AS C
WHERE T.TBSPACEID = n1
AND T.TABLEID = n2
AND C.COLNO = n3
AND C.TABSCHEMA = T.TABSCHEMA
AND C.TABNAME = T.TABNAME

where the values from the error are replaced for n1, n2 and n3. This is actually from the DB2 V9.5 docs.

Nice comeback

2008-05-30T22:40:00.001-05:00

Nice fourth quarter comeback by the Celtics!

Glad they don't work on my transmission

2008-05-28T20:26:00.002-05:00

One thing that will never change (even if everything else does): NBA refs are horrible. I'm watching the Celtics-Pistons game and there have been bad calls already, but the one that really blew me away was the blocking call against Lindsey Hunter where Rajon Rondo just drove right into him with about 7 and a half minutes in the second quarter. Wow. I'm a Celtics fan and that call was a joke. To make a call like that the refs must keep a mental tally of which team they "owe" a call.

Day off

2008-05-28T18:52:00.002-05:00

Went to Fogo de Chão today for lunch. Was good as usual. Food was good and the service was good. No need to eat dinner now. Went to see the Indiana Jones movie after; it was enjoyable, but as every review I've seen has pointed out, pretty silly. Anyway, we enjoyed it.

Also looked at the new house. I think it's almost done. They put the turf down and painted the garage door. The door was locked so we couldn't get in, but could see they'd taped up the walls to indicate everything that needed to be fixed. So it looks like we won't need to do that much of that ourselves. While everyone keeps telling me that every builder will screw you over as much as they can, that has not been my experience.

Back to work tomorrow after a week and a half in classes or vacation. From what I could see, my team was getting hammered while I was out (although not because I was out). Looking forward to getting back to work. We paid $51 for a tank of gas today; first time either one of us has ever payed > $50 for gas. It's a cliche by now, but here's to working from home.

Not good ...

2008-05-27T22:24:00.000-05:00

Went to Iron Cactus tonight by 360 and it was not very good. Used to be a nice restaurant, but it seems to have fallen a long way. It was almost empty around 8 pm on a weeknight.

A friend and his wife went to a different restaurant that is supposed to be pretty good (heard pretty good reviews of it from work colleagues); they went for their anniversary and were expecting more (it wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as they had hoped). Someone from the restaurant saw the post (I'm guessing they have a publicity firm or the like who scours the web for blog postings like that) and actually posted on his blog asking them if they'd to try again and saying they'd like another chance to show them how good they can be. It was impressive customer service. Although I think it was also a bit offputting; there's only a few of us who read his blog, and it didn't really matter what he said in it. Suddenly, I think he felt like he had to explain/justify himself to the person who contacted him. I might be putting words in his mouth, but hopefully not.

By the way, this wasn't an attempt to get a free meal out of Iron Cactus; I don't think I want to go back.

iotop ....

2008-05-22T22:35:00.000-05:00

I was suffering from the problem described here (before I knew this bug was open and that it was a known issue) so I was looking for ways to monitor disk usage per program. I'd searched like crazy on google, searching for every keyword I could think of. I never found a prebuilt program that would monitor I/O usage per process. Then almost by accident I bumped into 'iotop' (perhaps I should have just guessed that there might be something with this name that would do what I wanted) and it was exactly what I wanted. It does 'top' like display of per-process I/O usage. Awesome!

Google rocks; just searched on "fsync mozilla bug" and the first link Google returned was a link to the aforementioned bug in the mozilla bugzilla. Nice.

I'm having another mozilla problem in FF 3.0: when I highlight text in Firefox, something similar to right-click menu opens up automatically, so I can't control-c to copy (have to hit escape first). Wonder if this is an extension I installed and forgot about?

Celtics lost at home tonight. Total downer. At least Ray Allen played well.

UPDATE: as soon as I was thinking it might be an extension, realized instantly what it might be (Auto Context); it really does the wrong thing for power users who like to use the keyboard. Once you select text, it kicks open a pop-dialog box with choices, and you can't do anything else until you dismiss that dialog. Royal pain. Anyway, it's disabled now.

Tried to send an email to the NBA ....

2008-05-02T22:14:00.001-05:00

I tried to send an email to the NBA about officiating (they have a form in which you can send them an email on nba.com). I spent a long time thinking and writing it, and then when I sent it, it said the page couldn't be found. Imagine that.

NBA refs are amazingly bad ...

2008-05-02T21:37:00.000-05:00

Watching the Celtics-Hawks game. Not only are NBA refs the worst homers, they make foul calls on big plays when it's clear to everyone in the building that there's no contact. I've never seen any ref in any league more susceptible to big plays, stars and momentum. And it's not just this game, this has the case for years. The calls that stars have gotten this league are just a joke.

Please note: I'm not accusing NBA refs of being corrupt; I'm accusing them of sheer incompetence. I've been watching games for a long time, and NCAA college refs are clearly better.

Moved out!

2008-04-28T21:24:00.000-05:00

After a month long packing/moving and a frenzied last weekend of moving and cleaning, we're finally out of my first house! We're now staying in a hotel until the new house we're building is finished (sometime in June). I still can't believe that we sold it and got everything done! We've been so busy the last month; constantly packing and thinking of things we'd need to do to be ready to move out. We actually closed on the "old" house today.

On the contrary ...

2008-04-20T19:23:00.000-05:00

We went to Waterloo Ice House by Parmer, and the service was very good. The difference between good and bad service is just amazing ....

Theme week: Subway sucks ....

2008-04-19T13:58:00.000-05:00

Subway is a mess ...

My wife went to Subway while I was waiting in Half Price Books to sell some of my books. She called me when she was there because she heard that they were out of tuna while waiting in line (I wanted tuna). Next? Meatball. They were almost out of meatball. White bread? Out of white bread. Regular Lays chips? Out of regular Lays. There were like 20 people waiting in line, and they had only two people working at the counter. They gave me a three meatball six inch sub and put almost no toppings. The people working there were so rude, it made my wife really upset.

We're not going there anymore. The food is mediocre anyway, the prices have gone up recently, the service is incomprehensibly bad (how many times do I have tell someone the toppings I want?), and they're always running out of stuff.

Which Wish isn't that much more expensive, (although a lot slower), but at least you don't feel like a herd animal when you're getting your food.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that they were running out of everything on Saturday at noon. How screwed up does your store have to be to run out of everything at the beginning of your busiest sales period?

Sprint is a mess ...

2008-04-18T11:26:00.001-05:00

Sprint is a mess.

No wonder Sprint is losing customers at a record pace. They are a complete mess. Where to begin?

I needed to change my address because we're moving. I went online to sign in (I've done this many times before, although it's been awhile). I try to find my username by entering my phone number, and it says "Phone number not found." I call customer support to change my address, and someone picks up without actually saying anything. I can hear conversations going on and they're dropping their headset etc. so there's all this banging. I say "Hello ....?" and a person answers, surprised that I'm there (they picked up the call, so how can they be surprised?). After changing my address (which didn't go smoothly because the call handler couldn't remember more than one number at a time: if I say 345, she gets 3 and that's it), it turns out I don't have an online account anymore. They've gone to a new billing system, and they couldn't migrate the old users to their new system (huh?). I work in this area of the tech industry for a living, and this is a joke. This is why Sprint is a joke now.

Whatever.

So I go to re-register my account and they actually require a number in your account name! I've always had an account that I've used that no one else in the world would possibly want, and it doesn't have any numbers. Who in the world besides Sprint requires this?? Now I've got to have yet another different account, because Sprint has their head planted so far up their ass, it's ridiculous.

Although to be fair, now that I'm signed up, their website is definitely better. You can get a lot more info more easily about your plan, including expiration date for your contract. And I suppose since they're losing customers at a record pace, they might not treat us like shit anymore if we stick around. I was always amazed at the hubris with which they treated us when we needed help.

Rain on meeee-eeeee-eeee ....

2008-04-17T23:42:00.001-05:00

Is there anything better than a really good thunderstorm?

Packing and Oasis ...

2008-04-12T23:13:00.000-05:00

Packing and Oasis ...

Spent the whole morning packing, going through old books. Managed to find five boxes of books I was willing to sell/donate/throw out. Major accomplishment for me. Also found a lot of my old paper and some old Plato articles I'd been looking for for awhile; especially a short work on the Charmides I thought I'd lost.

Packing went better than expected, and my knee held up better this time than last weekend. Managed to get through the whole garage today, and I'd thought it would take a couple of weekends. After the hard work we went with some people from work to the Oasis, and had a very good time. The weather was perfect, and the food was even that bad.

I'm very tired now, but it's the good kind ...

Ouch, my knee hurts ...

2008-04-08T20:15:00.000-05:00

I aggravated my knee awhile ago packing for a move, and it's starting to get a little better, but it still aches and it is still swollen.

I'm missing golf outings while I'm hurt, which sucks, although I've got so much to do for the move, that in some ways it's a good thing.

We've got a few more weeks left to pack, and we really want to avoid waiting until the last minute.

Red Sox won 5 - 0 today in the home opener. Sweet. Watched the Kansas-Memphis game last night; was pulling for Kansas as a Big 12 fan, and was blown away by that ending. Wow.

Got to call a customer recently who's had a ticket (or six or seven) open or the better part of the last six years for a corruption of a timestamp that occurs in our product in a timestamp that sits in our cache. I'd reproduced this about a year ago, and my next line of support had been trying to debug this forever. They finally figured it out and fixed it (actually was only a few lines of code) and got to call and tell the customer, who had actually given up already (the problem wasn't happening to them anymore and generally only happens in situations of extreme multi-threaded load). They were very happy. Probably one of my favorite calls I'll ever get to make.

Second worst day ...

2007-12-06T20:39:00.000-06:00

Don't feel much better after yesterday. It hit M. hardest, of course, and it was so hard for me to see how sad she was.

While we were sitting around being depressed I got mediatomb installed on my upstairs FC8 box had it scan my music directories and photo directories, and had my new PS3 showing our photos and music over our TV. That was pretty cool. We went through a lot of our photos from our trips to the Northeast Brasil and Chile. Also streaming music downstairs to the PS3/TV was really cool.

It cheered both of us to see the photos from our trips. We had a lot of great trips that I'll never forget. I still can't get over how beautiful Puerto Varas and Puerto Montt were. The hotel/posada we stayed in in Puerto Varas (Puerto Duecher) remains the best place we've ever stayed overall for beauty, cost and comfort. Every morning we would wake up amazed by the view, sitting right across from Volcano Osorno.

Worst day of my life ....

2007-12-05T21:07:00.000-06:00

Subject says it all.

Testing posting from Google Docs

2007-12-02T21:40:00.000-06:00

That last entry was written awhile ago, but I was testing posting to my blog from Google docs.

Contemplating the Good

2007-12-02T21:38:00.000-06:00

Contemplating The Good

Imagine a person who was wholly inspired by the genius of Plato that he devoted his whole life to pursing the intellectual contemplation of The Good. But because of this passion and whole-hearted devotion to the contemplation of The Good that he neglected all else: his family, his friends, his work. Such devotion was his that the rest of his life was not good. Because of his contemplation of the The Good, his life wasn't good? Could he really have understood The Good if he subsequently lived a life like that? Wouldn't the quality of his life demonstrate that he really didn't understand The Good?

Shot an 82 today, Longhorns beat #1 UCLA and I didn't get paged whlie golfing ....

2007-12-02T21:25:00.000-06:00

Quite a day. I'm oncall this weekend, and it's been a bit busy (been called out three times, Friday, Saturday and Sunday). I had a tee time at 1:39 PM at Avery Ranch and it was in the 80's in December, so really wanted to play. But I got paged out at 12:15 PM while we were still in church. It was someone from a different team who needed help (althought it was never really an issue for my team; the guy from the other team wasn't too bright). I'd brought my laptop with me, and ran out to the car, fired up the laptop and tried to connect with the Sprint broadband card. Every time I use this, it seems to need to update the firmware of the card. It did again, and took about 15 minutes to do it. Meanwhile, my crappy battery in my laptop lasts only about 45 minutes anyway, so I'd barely started, and the battery was already low. I finally got connected and talked with the customer directly. He was getting errors in DB2 (so not sure why they tried to send it to my team anyway). I talked to the customer (internal customer) briefly on sametime, and then drove to Avery Ranch while logged in.

Took me about 20 minutes to get to Avery Ranch while I was still connected via my laptop (which was about to run out of battery power). I ran into the restaurant and plugged in my laptop, ordered lunch and continued to work with the customer. I had at that point about an hour before I had to tee off. Eventually, the customer resolved it themselves (and it was certainly a DB2 issue, so not sure why it was ever sent to my team). I finished eating, paid and even got to hit a few balls at the range.

So it's nearly a miracle that I'm playing golf at all. But the whole time I'm playing doom is hanging over me. If that damn oncall phone goes off, it's all over. But it never goes off. And I shoot an 82. At a tough course. And I only have 27 putts. And I hit the ball as well as I have in a long, long time. One par 4 on the back side I hit a provisional tee shot that traveled beyond the flag on the fly (it was a par 4, albeit a short one). The yardage for this hole seemed all wrong on the card (said 371 for the tees we were playing from, but there's no way that was right). The closer tees said 297, and we think that was probably closer. But it's also possible that it was 320 or 330. The ball actually landed in the sand, else I probably would have rolled another 20 or 30 yards. It felt like the biggest drive I've ever hit (abstracting away weather, steep downhill grades and or crazy bounces etc), and I've other ones that have gone easily 330.

I had a birdie on the first hole which usually doesn't bode well for my round.

When I got home, I helped M. cook, and we had a really nice dinner. And she let me watch the Longhorns play number-one ranked (in the Coaches poll) UCLA at Pauley Pavilion and the Longhorns pulled off a miracle win with Damion James dunking for the final score when DJ just threw up a prayer. We're much better this year that we were last year, even though we lost Kevin Durant. Quite a day. My handicap had started to balloon this year, and I was at 20.60. I'm hoping this will get me back under 20. Although when I checked out the handicap spreadsheet, I noticed I'm losing a decent round off the end, so probably won't get much benefit.

Pregnant!

2007-12-01T13:37:00.001-06:00

Should have blogged about this awhile ago, but wasn't thinking about blogging much when we found out: M. is pregnant! She's now 10 weeks pregnant and she's due next Summer.

Pan's Labyrinth, Palm TX and David Roochnik's Book

2007-12-01T13:33:00.000-06:00

Watched Pan's Labyrinth, which was quite good (shocker, I think everyone liked this movie). It was more interesting to read the director's commentary. I'd rented this off of Netflix, but might buy a copy for myself just for the director's commentary. It was one of the better director movie commentaries, I've heard (although I didn't listen to it all because M. was getting bored).

Almost done with David Roochnik's "The Tragedy of Reason". There were a lot of things I liked about this book; it takes up the confrontation between truth-driven conceptions of reality and the more anarchic conceptions in a good way. There's several people that I've known who probably would have liked to have written this book, or a book with this theme. However, stylistically, it felt too glib. It feels like a book written on this theme should be written differently, at least stylistically. I like his tendencies toward a narrative approach, but some part of me believes the narrative should be more serious. Also, it never seems like it really gives the positive views of Plato's logocentric view, and is itself too protreptic. I wanted more focus on the journey that would take one along Plato's route (and it seems like the book sees a journey like this is possible).

Just got my Palm TX syncing with Evolution on my Thinkpad T41P running Fedora 7. I had network sync working fine for awhile with this box, but I really wanted to get it syncing with desktop machine at work and I don't have work wireless setup on that Palm. So I really needed usb syncing working. This is what I did to get this working:

1) created the pilot.rules file in /etc/udev/rules that contained:

BUS=="usb", SYSFS{product}=="Palm Handheld*|Handspring *", KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", NAME="ttyUSB%n", SYMLINK="pilot", GROUP="usb", MODE="0666"

2) copied the 60-libpisock.rules file that's included with the pilot-link rpm on Feodora to /etc/udev/rules.d.

3) I already had my user added to the uucp group

4) Was able to get 'pilot-xfer -p usb: -l' to work as a test.

5) Changed the config in gpilotd-control-applet to point at 'usb:' instead of /dev/pilot or /dev/ttyUSB*.

I think the main thing that got this working was changing to 'usb:' in gpilotd-control-applet. Not sure which of the other things helped, and which didn't matter.

Food nightmares ...

2007-11-26T23:45:00.000-06:00

Today M. told me she was going to have to stop watching a certain TV show because it was making it hard for her to sleep; want to hazard a guess on what show it was? Iron Chef America. Yup. Not kidding. She also told me after she fell asleep (and ostensibly woke up awhile later): "I need to put water in the pans." I asked her several times because I didn't understand, and she finally explained: "I need to put water in the pans so it doesn't burn."

M. also got her permanent green card today in the mail! Woohoo! We went P.F. Changs to celebrate, and it was really good.

Testing blog entries with my N800

2007-11-16T23:02:00.000-06:00

Just wanted tose see how quickly l could post an entry to my blog. lt''s not that slow, although it would be a lot quicker if l was more used to it.

Watched National Treasure tonight. Not very good but not as bad as l thought it would be. (l thought it would ble pretty bad.

What I thought about at Church this Sunday ....

2007-07-23T20:34:00.000-05:00

I had a lot of time to think, which is a nice benefit for me. I think I understand Euthyphro (the Platonic dialogue) a little better now. Every Platonic interlocutor seems to have a particular passion that identifies them as who they are and which makes them worthy of being in a dialogue in the first place. Euthyphro's passion, in a dialogue about piety, is to always be in possession of righteousness. He's so enamored with being "righteous" (as he understands it), that he's willing to prosecute his own father in a situation that is extremly murky and not clear morally. Part of the problem is that Euthyphro is unable to see that any moral dilemma can be murky in the first place. In his desire to be "right", Euthyphro probably just sees all difficult moral situations as easily decided.

But it's worse: he's so possessed with this need, that he's separated himself unecessarily from his family and his community. He's ostracized himself, and done so for all the wrong reasons.

The irony of this is that many uninformed readers of the Platonic dialogues would think this is exactly what Socrates is often guilty of. But not being possessed by this desire would appear to be a fundamental requirement of being a philosopher (since these early dialogues reason for being generally seem to be to educate those regular citizens not well initiated into Socrates' ways what it takes to be more philosophic).

Back to Brasil!

2007-06-15T08:56:00.001-05:00

M. and I are going back to Brasil today. M. hasn't been there since we got married. Lots of friends there M. hasn't seen in awhile, so it will be great to go back. I love going there; the restaurants in Sao Paulo are awesome, and I love Brasilian food. The people there are great.

We're also going to the Northeast for a resort vacation. I love the Northeast of Brasil.

I'm going to take my PS3 so a friend there can try it out and see if he wants to get it himself.

I'll get a lot of chances to keep practicing my Portuguese, and I need all I can get.

The only negative in all this is the ten hour flight; I can never sleep on these flights for lack of leg room, and M. always plans stuff for us to do as soon we get off the plane. So I'm going to be wreck when I first get to Sao Paulo. But it's all worth it!

AP ...

2007-06-02T19:31:00.000-05:00

Talking with AP. Setting up our trip to Brasil; she's going to take us to Santa Efigenia, so I can geek out. Really looking forward to going there and seeing her and everyone.

AP quit Eve Online, partly because of the accusations that they were favoring specific players.

We'd both heard of the new MMORPG for Lord of the Rings, but don't know if we'll try that. I usually don't have the required patience of MMORPG's. I told AP I'd write about her, so here it is. :-)

Hi AP!

Update on Chicago and Party for Leaving Friend ...

2007-06-02T19:07:00.000-05:00

I'd forgotten to mention that on Sunday, we'd gone to Millenium Park in Chicago and saw the Cloud Gate Sculpture, which is really cool. You can get some really awesome photos off that stainless steel (or whatever it is made of) "bean".

Had the gang over today, basically to wish C. well, who took the job offer in Chicago. He got a great offer, and we're all really happy for him. Seems like a good change for him. We ordered pizza from Papa John's, who delivered it an hour and fifteen minutes late, and drank beer from growls, and talked about old times (21st Street Coop, for example, where we did stupid things countless number of times).

Back to work ...

2007-05-29T14:56:00.000-05:00

It's busier again at work. Already picked up two new calls today in a couple of hours. Hoping to spend some time learning some more java/jndi programming, but we'll see.

I have mixed feelings about writing a blog. It's a bit weird how most blogs are written (and I've always noticed this, but it's a bit more acute when I started writing more in mine): who is the target audience for a blog? Most of them are written like a reporter would write about someone else's life (including mine). You are like a news reporter, reporting on your own life, but in the third person. Whenever I meet people who talk or write about themselves in the third person, I instinctively feel that they are unwell.

The most obvious benefit, at least on the surface, is to provide details about your life to family and friends. However, you need to careful about the kinds of details provided in a blog, since they are publicly visible (so it's not clear it really provide the benefit mentioned above).

Despite these misgivings, I think there is value in writing about and reviewing the activities in one's life, even at the somewhat surface level that occurs in a blog. So I think I'll keep doing this (even though no one will read it).

Sampaio's and Poker ...

2007-05-28T21:20:00.000-05:00

Went to Sampaio's with the gang; food was good. We came back home and I got smoked at Poker. Everyone played well except for me. :-)

Sunday in Chicago

2007-05-28T21:14:00.000-05:00

We ended up going back to the Navy Pier on Sunday, after having a really poor breakfast at our hotel (which was too bad, since it was otherwise a good hotel). We decided to take the subway back to the Midway airport, which was a little stressful and a little too much walking (to get to the Orange Line), but we got to the airport without any problems. We did get a nice surprise at the airport. We were sitting at the gate waiting for boarding to start, and a friend showed up unexpectedly. Our friend (you know who you are) was returning to Austin after an interview, and we were all pretty surprised to see each other. We got to ride back together on the plane, which was great.

Saturday in Chicago

2007-05-26T19:07:00.000-05:00

Today we went to the Bongo Room for breakfast. Holy crap! Don't get the Chocolate Tower French Toast if you don't like messy dishes. This was pretty amazing, and like no French Toast I've ever had (although, admittedly, I'm not usually that adventurous with my breakfast food). They served a lot of food (there's a breakfast theme I'm starting to see here), and the place was pretty cool. We were happy there wasn't a long wait.

Next, we went down to the Museum Of Science and Industry. We paid extra for the CSI Experience and the U-Boat onboard tour. Both were a good idea. We also liked the Old Fashioned Town and the Space exhibits. This museum is a lot more fun than the Fields Museum, with which I was disappointed. The exhibit attached to the U-505 (they have the real uboat captured from the Germans in '42!) was simply spectacular.

When we were walking back after taking the 10 (bus) from the museum (heading to the Millenium Park), it started raining and lightning by the time we got to the Buckingham Fountain. We (and many others) sat under the extended roof of the restroom building. Fun, fun. Eventually, we stumbled our way to a local Dunkin' Donuts, got some coffee and donuts and waited out the storm. Mei didn't like this part of the trip; she got in a bad mood. The rain bugged her, and she started getting fussy about how dirty the subway was. Mei wasn't made for Subways. Overall, we were glad we picked the Bongo Room and the MSI. They were good choices. We're glad to be out of the rain, now, though.

Chicago

2007-05-25T19:31:00.000-05:00

We got in Chicago on Thursday morning for a short vacation. Chicago is really a fantastic city. I could easily see myself living here. It's got all the great restaurants and culture of a great city, but more parks than most big cities. The shoreline is pretty amazing for a city.

We were at the Navy Pier walking around on Thursday when I could swear I saw Walter Cronkite. I think it was the most wind I've ever seen outside of a hurricane. The flags at the Navy Pier were whipping so hard, you could hear them snapping and cracking, and it was hard to believe they weren't torn to shreds.

We also went to the John Hancock building and it's observatory; amazing view. A lot like the Sears Tower that we visited today. We went to Fogo de Chão for lunch yesterday.

Today we went to Lou Mitchell's for breakfast (two eggs has never been so much food!) and then to the Sear's Tower Skyview. The sky wasn't too clear, but it was still a great view. Then we went over to the Field's Museum. It was a little more oriented to something like a historical zoo then a standard museum. We also went to Soldier Field, which was much more scenic then I would have expected.

I think we finally figured out the Subway system. The three-day passed we bought were definitely the way to do.

2005-10-19T18:59:00.000-05:00

Was reading Plato's Protagoras lately. Definitely one of my favorite dialogues. There's a whole discussion in there that fascinates me where Socrates tentatively identifies The Good with what brings pleasure (leaving aside his intentions for this move). It's almost as if it makes it formally simpler to discuss the nature of courage and excellence in general when something has been specified as the referent for the The Good. This allows a formal analysis of what courage might be like, even if the referent for the The Good will be subsequently changed. (And the reader is expected to make this substitution, since identifying the The Good with The Pleasant is able to provide any reasonable explanation of the phenomenon of being overcome by pleasure. This phenomenon requires are more complex understanding of The Good, whatever it might be.

One of the things that seems to be going on here is that different kinds of "goods" can be resolved:

1) Protagoras is primarily interested in seeming good before the public for egoistic and financial reasons (and his evasiveness during his discussions with Socrates, and his inability to really compete with Socrates in dialogue is partly due to this)

2) Socrates is primarily interested in something we might call "actually being good".

Both these forms of excellence, or striving after excellence are a different kind of excellence then the natural excellence displayed by Alcibiades or Charmides -- a natural or potential excellence. (Like "daring" is the kind of potential courage or natural courage that must become real courage via learning.)

Protagoras overwhelming desire to appear good before others prevents him from being able to try to become genuinely good. And it also prevents him from even appearing good to others when he's compared to someone who's actually trying to become really good (like Socrates). And by the all the dialogically evasive maneuvers Protagoras makes during the dialogue, it would appear that he's trapped by this desire of his.

Odds and ends ...

2005-03-04T19:35:00.000-06:00

Ah, I am now cruising into the new century with my first blog! I'm on the phone with my girlfriend, she's too tired to say goodnight, so I'm letting her sleep while I'm on the phone with her.

Got upset at work today; you'd think I'd learn to intercept the frustration, since I have so many oppurtunities to do so, but I still have trouble.

Have been reading Charmides again lately; I had started to work on this for my dissertation (which I never really started). I'm fascinated by the discussion of the possibility of knowledge that knows itself, and can't stop thinking about it, but can't really make any inroads on understanding what it's suggesting.