Late night

Was out with Vikki until 2:30am. Indian for dinner. Talked in Union Square Park.

Dan: "You know what that was?"
Casey: "No. What?"
Dan: "Another missed opportunity."

Running late for work....

Tuesday

Worked from 10am to 7:30pm. Making good progress and wrote a bunch of code today. Afterwards Dan and I went back to Queens and got dinner at Broadway Station.

Just as the food showed up, Vikki called and wanted to know if I wanted to have coffee. Figures, the first night I leave the office at a normal time and that's the night Vikki calls to see if I am still at the office. If the food had not just shown up, I would have hopped a cab and went back into Manhattan. Will hopefully meet up with her later in the week (depending on her work schedule). Her birthday is Sunday and I suggested we should go out to celebrate.

Watched House and Boston Legal.

New week

So it's Monday. Worked from 9:30 to 8:30. Met up with Patrick for dinner in Queens. Was good to catch up.

More progress made on the manager API work. Most of Benny's problems today were because his code was out of date for his dagent. Naoum spun new RPMs this evening, so hopefully those problems will go away. It's good in that he is finding all sorts of edge cases that normally would not have been run into under normal circumstances, however it is time consuming and we really need to get back on track.

Received an odd email tonight. It was a Google Talk invitation from Naomi. I find this strange for a number of reasons:

1. She knows I already have a Google Talk account because I have use gmail.com as my primary email.
2. She knows I use a Mac which doesn't support Google Talk.
3. She could have talked to me all she wanted to in person over coffee last week when she was in New York, if she had not blown me off.
4. I have Cingular cell phone service, which means I can talk to her on a real phone for free whenever I want, bringing into question why I would go through the trouble to deal with the hassle of Voice over the Internet.

Very strange.

Watched 24 and the Sopranos tonight.

Progress continues

Worked from 11:30 to 7:30. Made some pretty good progress and cleaned up some bugs. Naoum was there too. Also got our Bugzilla to authenticate against our Active Directory server via LDAP (with Ben's help). Should make account management a bit easier (and one less password to remember and change).

Met up with Carter afterwards. Went to a cafe on 2nd Avenue for desert and coffee.

So after leaving work, I grabbed a cab to take me up to Carter's on 99th street. As we were driving up Park avenue, I noticed that the driver kept slowing down at green lights. I thought this was strange. Then we were stopped at a red light, and when it turned green the cab didn't move. The cabbie had fallen asleep! I shouted, "HEY! WAKE UP!". I'm just glad he didn't fall asleep at the wheel when the cab was moving. Dumbass.

Home now. Watched The West Wing.

Sunday - Quick break

Taking a quick break from work.

Ever setup a Linux box? Then you know how all Linux servers that come with the Apache web server start with a very basic "You have installed Apache successfully" home page like the following.

Well, some ISP for the City of Oklahoma screwed up its web hosting configuration, and the manager of IT for the city contacted CentOS (the Linux distribution vendor) and threatened to call the FBI on them since the OS vendor "hacked" their website.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/

The irony comes in the fact that when the Apache group (which makes the Apache webserver) first started the practice of providing a default page, they got all sorts of email. So they made it VERY clear in the content of the page that if you see this page then you should contact your own IT department or webmaster (and not the Apache group).

Quite funny. Well if you're not into computers then you might not find it funny.

Ok, back to work...

Saturday - One day weekend!

First day off in nineteen days. Go me.

Went down to New Brunswick and met up with Kyle. Lunch at Olive Garden, went back to her place and helped with some gardening. She fixed my coat. Good to see her.

She gave me a Sodoku puzzle to take home with me. It was labeled as "hard". This being my first Sodoku puzzle, I have learned a couple of lessons:

1. Start with a simple puzzle
2. Read a strategy guide.
3. Use a pencil (or have extra paper)

I was up until midnight working on it (4 hours), got about 1/2 way through and then got stuck. So I guessed at one of the fields that I narrowed down to two possible values, and I guessed wrong.

Back to work tomorrow.

So tired

Got to work at 10:00. Got home from work at 11:30. Had an extended talk with Shamoun and Tom.

Made more progress on the automation. Reworked activate/deactivate routines to properly forward multi-step commands to the agent. Pretty much ready for the create cluster test tomorrow.

Debating the merits of putting Novell Desktop linux on my main VMWare workstation. The fact is that aside from xterm, the two key application I use they system for are Evolution and OpenOffice. Well, Novell (Ximian) is the author of Evolution, and Novell is the largest contibutor to OpenOffice outside of Sun, so my hope is that their implementations of these applications are a bit more recent in terms of bug fixes than what I might find in Fedora or the other distros that are using upstream sources. Will have to try out and see.

Got an email from egb today (first in a while). Apparently the Bell Labs site in Holmdel is closing. Guess it's an end of an era.

For those not familiar, Here is a link with a bit of background.

HASH(0x7f842a011858)

Didn't get to work until 10:00. Worked until 10:00. Since I have been sick, I feel like I start my day at 50% and only go down from there.

Made a good bit of progress today. Dan dealt with all the issues that came up so I actually got some code written. Got all the infrastructure working so I can do creation of clusters from the GUI. Cleanup work, input validation, etc.

Watched Monday's 24 and the Sopranos from Sunday.

Talked to Shamoun, and it looks like I'm going to get Saturday off. By that point, the bulk of the remaining code should be in place, and Peter should be able to help out with the business logic. He was already really helpful today in that he has stubbed out all the manager calls that Benny needs to make the GUI work.

Harry left today.

I'm all disoriented about the days. For some reason I thought it was Thursday when I got home tonight. Alas, it is only Wednesday (well, technically it is Thursday now because it is 2am).

So tired. I should have just gone to bed two hours ago.

Shake Shack Now Open!

The Shake Shack in Madison Square Park across from the office is finally open for the season. Wohoo!

Oh how I love the "Concrete Jungle" . Yummy.



If you look at the picture, the Shake Shack is the small building on the left with the green roof. The line of people goes all the way to the lamp post on the right side of the picture. Probably a forty-five minute wait to order a hamburger, if that gives some perspective as to how popular the place is.

Went to the client site today to get a handle on the environment we will be installing in.

After work Dan, Matt, and I went to Broadway Station to get dinner/drinks. Home by 10:30. Talked to Lauren, Kyle. Realized that I have not been to South Jersey since President's Day weekend.

Cold and lonely

Worked from 10:00am to 11:15pm. Had trouble getting going this morning (think I'm getting sick). Felt like a zombie most of the morning and afternoon. At around 8:00, Cathryn had food delivered to the office from the Thai place I like, so at least I got some dinner.

Came home and watched the Colbert Report for the first time. Not a bad show. The new Sopranos episode from this week wasn't available via On Demand yet, or else I would have watched it. Need to reprogram Tivo to know about the new channels.

Naomi IM'd this afternoon to tell me she wasn't going to meet up with me this week. She said she didn't have any other reason to go into the City, and it wasn't worth the effort if I was the only person she was going to see. On one hand I can see the logic in her argument but I can't help but think about the countless trips I made to see her in Bryn Mawr, or Maryland, or New York, or Paris. And now I'm at a point where I haven't seen her in six months and I'm not worth the forty-five minute train ride. I can't really be mad at her -- this is just the way things are.

Eric is going on-site tomorrow. I made good progress on the software tonight. Have more bugs to iron out.

On the bright side, Spring is here and the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park opens tomorrow. Will be good to get a descent burger, and if the weather is good, to eat it in the park.

Speaking of getting sick, Benny left the office today at 1:30 because he felt sick.

I need a day off. I only have a few days left before I don't have any choice but to take one. Aunt Cindy would call it a "mental health day".

Drinking coffee, making plans to change the world... while the world is changing us...

Funny thing:

It's Sunday.
We're going to the customer site tomorrow.
The success of the company rides on this deal.
I'm the only one here in the office.

Did I miss a memo?

Work work work

Worked today from 10:30 to 9:30. Implemented most of the manager calls necessary for the GUI. Still have to make the appropriate calls from the Manager to the agent. Naoum made a great deal of progress with the Suse manager cleanup, and Benny continues to stabilize the gui.

Last night met up with Dan at Flight on 8th avenue. Had a pretty good buffalo chicken sandwich, and stayed until about 11:00. Thinking of such, Dan mentioned last night that Uncle George's is open 24 hours a day. It's tempting to walk over there for some souvlaki.

Will watch a little TV, then off to bed. Should try to get to the office tomorrow by 10am. Need to drop off laundry too in the morning.

Strange dreams..

So I woke up from this dream....

I walk into my 4th period gifted Algebra class. I sit down and a three page test is handed out. I look at the test, and realize that it is on a topic I have never seen before. I think to myself, "did I miss a day of class or something? Did I forget to do last night's homework?" So I start taking the test with my only guide being the use deductive logic. I get about half way through the test, and the teacher comes around and asks how I am doing. For once I confess that I have never even seen the material before and I have been slacking off in class therefore I'm going to fail the test. She replies, "Yes, you would think it's a test I would give to my statistics class or something?"

At this point, the teacher makes the observation to me that nobody in the class knows the material. It's a test she plans to give to another class, and she wanted us to review the test for errors in conjunction with the statistics textbook she conveniently provided on everybody's desk. I now look around and notice that everybody else is looking up the answers using the textbook.

So what is the moral of the story? Hmmm... Perhaps it's that I'm all about doing things the hard way until somebody points out that I'm allowed to just do it the easy way. The application of brute force to a problem is not always the proper solution.

Short and sweet

My wireless is not behaving very nicely tonight, so I'll keep this short and sweet. You get what you pay for.

Work continues on the big project. Worked from 10:15 to 8:30. Feel like this was another day where I didn't get much done. Or as Eric put it I "spent most of the day walking around the office dealing with other people".

Did I mention VLANs are a bitch to get working properly under Win32? Or perhaps it is just me trying to do Red Hat Linux Anaconda builds inside VMWare sessions over DHCP running on Windows on a VLAN on crappy switches... Wow, reading the number of layers in the previous sentence makes me wonder how it works at all. But I got three developers working over the last two days -- that's three developers with the owner Manager servers...

I really need some time to myself so I can get my own development under way. By the time everybody else leaves (around 7:30), I'm too tired to really focus on my own development. Plus I think I'm staring to come down with a cold, which just makes it harder...

I sent Naomi some email this afternoon to suggest we grab some coffee when she is in New York next week, even if it turns up her laptop works. How is this for a response:

Devin,

Laptop works fine here at home on the wireless internet. I don't know why it didn't work at the hotel in MA. Umm as for meeting up, I will be in NY all of next week. Just curious though,....why do you want to meet up with me? Sure I could. I don't really have any plans made yet but I do want to meet up with a BM alumna friend and see her in the city if I can and Nate arrives next Friday night. I am thinking about doing dinner with the family I nannied for on Thursday. In the days, I plan on doing my schoolwork and on cleaning/cooking. Let me know more of what you had in mind and a tiny explanation. :)

~Naomi

I have to offer an explanation as to why we should get coffee? Very strange. It almost makes me feel like she is suggesting I have some ulterior motive.

No code written today

Had another one of those days where I didn't get more than five minutes to concentrate so I could write some code. Thinking perhaps I should work a shifted schedule so I get more hours to work alone.

After work met up with Vikki and her friend to grab some dinner down by Union Square. It's interesting because I never really went to vegetarian restaurants before I started hanging out with Vikki, and the food is pretty good (despite the lack of meat). Don't think I'm planning on becoming a vegetarian any time soon, but at least now I can appreciate that it wouldn't be that bad.

After we parted (10:15pm) I went back to the office and got some more work done. When I told Vikki of my intent to go back to work, she labeled me as a workaholic.

Looking forward to a day off from work (perhaps Saturday?)

Home now. Tired, but thinking about watching a bit of TV before I go to sleep.

All out of good subject lines...

Was Dan's first day back from Israel. I'm glad he's back because there's so much work to do and it's so much easier when there is someone else for people to go to with their problems.

Worked from 9:30 to 9:30. Grabbed Cosi on the way home.

So I was riding home in a cab tonight, and was thinking back to when I was in Paris. I remember wondering how Naomi could stand to not have a car and use public transit all the time. Now I myself don't own a car, and it's not that bad. I haven't not had a car since my first year in Rutgers (over a decade ago). I guess it's much easier when you live in a city with a subway.

Talked briefly to Vikki tonight. She suggested perhaps getting dinner tomorrow if I get out of work at a reasonable time.

Naomi is IM'ing.

Monday

Made some more progress on the project. Spent the day trying to create a cluster and add a node to that cluster. Certainly not going as quickly as I would have liked. On the upside, Naoum is picking up the slack very effectively with the cluster container stuff. I just have to keep it up for a few more days...

Was giving a bit more thought to the whole thing with Naomi last week. In retrospect, I think I really flew off the handle, and now regret what I said. I suppose I could blame it on the pressure from work, but that isn't really much of an excuse. She IM'd me this morning at work but I didn't really have time to talk, and I got home too late to give her a call.

Watched the Sopranos. Really should not have stayed up until 1am to do such. Need to reprogram Tivo to understand the new cable setup.

Sunday

Got to work at 10:00am. Peter showed up shortly afterwards. I left at 11:00 am to meet up with Paul in New Brunswick for lunch. It was good to catch up with him and get all the latest gossip.

Back at work by 5:00pm. Worked until 12:15am. Made a good bit of progress, but as usual not going as quickly as I would like. I keep thinking that the stuff delivered to me for integration will work, when in reality I need to go through it and take the time to clean it up in most cases. Let's just say some people could be making my life easier if they tested more on a clean environment before handing code off. Eric was helpful in answering questions throughout the day over the phone.

I'm trying to figure out how I can deliver on time. Once again I find myself being in the critical path, and there isn't really anyone this stuff can be parsed out to except Dan, who doesn't get back until Tuesday.

I really wish I could find more stuff that others could do.

Saturday at the office

So it's Saturday morning at 10:00am, and where am I?

Where else....



It is a beautiful day outside though...

Company diner

Work on the project continues. Since the rock-climbing got cancelled, the company went out to a bar/restaurant tonight for a couple of hours. There was plenty of food, so I filled up and went back to the office and worked until 10:30.

Carter called tonight. Her family trip to Italy was cancelled because her aunt died unexpectedly. Will probably try to meet up with her this weekend after work. I have a whole bag of oreos with her name all over it.

On the subway to work this morning, I was giving a bit more thought to my conversation with Naomi last night. I was thinking about how I had offered to have her bring the laptop over if she still couldn't get the wireless to work and I would take a look. I was wondering to myself, why the hell would I have offered to help her out further after she called and was treating me like dirt? There's really no reason for me to go out of my way and be helpful to someone who isn't nice to me in return.

Anyway, I've talked about it enough and am going to drop it now.

Devin Heitmueller - Tech Support

The whole episode in the previous entry made me think of this fine piece of apparel from ThinkGeek.

Still Going.....

Continuing to make progress on the project. Everybody in tech seems to have recognized the importance of what is going on and working later than usual. Arrived 9am. Left 10:45pm.

It was made official today that the company rock climbing excursion has been postponed until after this thing is done.

Naomi called me tonight when I was at the office. She was having problems getting her laptop to work on the wireless LAN setup by the hotel she was staying at (she's in Mass for a job interview). I did my best to help her out, (ipconfig, ping, traceroute, checked DNS, proxy settings), but I simply couldn't get it to work. I simply ran out of stuff to try. It's not like she has a protocol analyzer installed.

So then she started complaining about how she never would have dragged the laptop along if she had known the wireless wouldn't work, and I really felt like she was inferring it was my fault that it didn't work because I bought her the laptop. So at this point I had been at work for about thirteen hours, and it was the end of the day, and I was cranky because I was hungry and tired. So I sarcastically told her that the laptop came with a money-back guarantee (bearing in mind that I gave it to her as a gift and it didn't cost her anything). Yes, I realize that it was a juvenile thing to say. So I don't know if she understood what I was getting at because she said, "I don't want your money, I just want my laptop to work". By this point I'm seething, thinking "WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU THINK I GIVE WOULD YOU MONEY FOR A LAPTOP THAT I PAID FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE?" And then she says, "and I'm not paying for it in sexual favors either." To which I replied, "I didn't ask"

After reading the last two paragraphs, I think perhaps I should have put it under a separate journal entry labeled, "No good deed goes unpunished."

I don't know why I got so bent out of shape about the whole thing. I just feel like she didn't call to see how I was doing -- she called because her computer was broken, and when I couldn't fix it she made me feel like it was my fault. Or she called because her boyfriend didn't call her tonight, and "she doesn't want to call him every night because she doesn't want to appear needy".

I should just go to bed.

Dreams

I woke up this morning from another dream about Emily. It has happened a few times this week. The whole thing is quite odd -- why would I have several dreams in one week about a high school crush I haven't spoken to in over twelve years? Why now?

Got to work at 9:30am. Left at 11:00pm. Shamoun and I put together a project schedule, and he took the group into the conference room and explained how important the project was and to be prepared to work our asses off for the next couple of weeks (paraphrasing, of course). I think this is the first time many of them have conceived of the notion of working on a weekend. Should be interesting. Peter came out and suggested we postpone the rock climbing outing the company has planned for Thursday night. Shamoun said he would talk to HR about it.

Watched House when I got home. Ready for bed now.

Long day

One grande Starbucks hot chocolate? $3.25.
Seven meetings in 11 hours? Free dinner from the Thai.
Zero lines of code written? Priceless.

Back to work tomorrow

Had a nice lazy Sunday. Took a walk down Steinway Street. Finished the bathroom floor (entirely). Watched some TV. Went to the supermarket.

Carter was supposed to come over for movie night, but she called fifteen minutes before she was supposed to be here to invite me to an Oscar party. So I got dressed and went into Manhattan where I met up with Carter and her alum friend Teri and Teri's boyfriend Hiro. They live in a beautiful apartment in a building on the lower East side (33rd and 1st), which is unfortunately a good ten minute's walk from the Subway. It was fun to meet some new people. We also looked at Carter's new headshots, which look suprisingly stunning.

Back to work tomorrow. I really hope I wake up at a normal time, given I have been sleeping in for the last three days. I had sent Dan email over the weekend telling him his code is now working and he got back to me, suggesting he has arrived safely in Israel.

Saturday

Today was an ok day. Woke up late. Hot chocolate from Starbucks. Worked at the office in the afternoon. Tried to find a tool that converts content from Trac to MediaWiki. Also found out that Trac's export feature is broken.

Met up with Vikki for Japanese on 6th Ave. Went back to her place and talked a while. She broke up with her boyfriend again, and was distressed over having met with him this afternoon so he could pick up his stuff. Tomorrow she leaves for Florida for a week. She also got her hair cut short (which looks really good). I feel like there is more to say here about this whole situation but I have to compose my thoughts.

Supposed to get together with Carter tomorrow for a movie night. Must remember to buy Oreos.

57 Channels and Nothing's On

First vacation day in six months today. How did I spend it?

Breakfast at the diner
Hot chocolate from Starbucks
Laundry
Bank
New tile for bathroom floor
Cable installed
Web surfing

The Cable Guy:


Almost done with the bathroom floor. Tonight I went into the bathroom without turning on the light to wash my hands and there was no sink, since I had taken out the entire vanity earlier in the day. There was an odd moment of confusion when I reached for the faucet and it wasn't there.

There is a bit of irony that I went to watch some TV tonight, and the only thing worth watching in prime time was a television on one of the broadcast channels that I have had for the last five months.

Finally Friday

Another long day at work. Arrived 9:45am. left 11:15pm. Dan delivered dmanager code that "compiled and linked". Of course, as I expected, it segfaulted as soon as you ran it. But I was able to iron out the kinks and it looks like it's pretty much working now.

Eric is back in the office. The latest reconcile failed, but I went down to Wall Street and analyzed it to find it was not our bug. Unfortunately, it still killed a couple of hours since I left the office to go down there at 5:30pm.

This new project is pretty critical, so I suspect the next couple of weeks will be really hard.

Finally got my Tivo to download program guide data. I was all ready to either buy an ethernet to wireless bridge, or hack up my OS X networking to run NAT and DHCP to bridge the wireless card. I mentioned this to Matt and, being a Mac guy, he pointed out that Apple already built the feature right into OS X, and I just had to enable the "Internet Sharing" feature. Felt kinda stupid for not thinking to see if they already provided such a feature. So I effectively eliminated the one thing that still had me considering getting a cable modem.

Taking my first day off on Friday since I started working there. Wohoo. Cable guy comes between noon and six, so effectively there goes my afternoon. Such is life.

Insert stupid subject line...

Another day on the job. Still prepping for Dan's departure. Had an extended discussion with Peter about what is in the pipe for the next few weeks. Trying to get Benny and Naoum moved over to other tasks. Worked with Shamoun some more on his DBA use cases. Dealt some more with Chan on Win32 porting issues.

I ran into Cathryn outside the elevator this afternoon, and it was odd because she started to apologize for "kicking me out of her office yesterday" when I went in to her office while she was on the phone to discuss something with Shannon. Quite strange. If you're in my office talking to my office mate and I'm trying to have a phone call, I'll kick your ass out and not even give a thought about apologizing. She then went into saying that she knows how hard I have been working and she heard I was taking some time off and she wanted me to know how much she appreciates everything I have been doing. I'm not sure if she thinks she offended me or something? Did I give her a dirty look or something and not realize it?

Dan and I hit Broadway Station after work for dinner/drinks. As I was walking home I ran into Matt and Jeff outside another bar and hung out with them for a while. Got into a pretty heated debate with Matt on the notion of taking vacation days at a 'critical time' for a startup. The whole thing left me feeling pretty crappy. Part of it is because I feel compelled to stick up for Dan, a guy who already deferred his vacation once because of his last project. I guess I'm also a bit defensive because I'm taking Friday off, and I know damn well how important this thing we are working on is and don't really need the guilt trip.

Got home at 11:15. Watched Grey's Anatomy from Sunday. Turns out Dan watches it too.

Naomi's away message right now says she is "on the phone with her piper". It's not stalking when the person broadcasts it on the internet.

I feel like I have had better days.