Moved out!

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 ...

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 ....

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 ...

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 ....

Is there anything better than a really good thunderstorm?

Packing and Oasis ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ....

Subject says it all.

Testing posting from Google Docs

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

Contemplating the Good

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 ....

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!

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

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 ...

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

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 ....

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!

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 ...

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 ...

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).