Author Archives: David

Where is my Super Suit?

Ok, talk about a panic.

A few weeks ago I attend the System i Innovation Award banquet at the COMMON conference.

This was a formal affair, suit and tie, but all my suits were pretty old … since I don’t wear them to work (only once or twice a year), there hasn’t been a driving need to get a new one.

So off to Nordstroms Ginny and I go … we find a really nice charcoal wool suit that requires minimal tailoring.

Fast forward to the COMMON conference … because I’m only going for the awards banquet … I wasn’t able to get MKS to pay for me to attend. I did a bit of wheeling & dealing, arranged to room with my friend Aaron (who is a vendor) , and paid my own airfare (Ginny was able to find me a pretty reasonable rate).

When I arrived at the hotel, I found Aarons room and dropped my stuff off … including hanging my suit up in the closet. A little while later, a friend of mine told me that he was in a suite at the hotel … and had an entire room available that he wasn’t using. He asked if I wanted to stay in that room instead. Obviously I said yes. He gave me the key and I went back to Aarons room to get my stuff (including my suit).

Fast forward again to Monday evening … about an hour before the awards banquet. I’m getting ready, pull out my suit … only to find my suit pants missing.

The first thing that flashed in my head was that I had forgotten my pants at home. I called Ginny to see if she could check the closet (not that she could do anything about it at that point). She wasn’t home. I tried calling Aaron, who would be on the expo floor, to see if he knew if they were still in the closet of his room. I got his voice-mail.

As a last ditch effort, I called Marty (who is a co-worker at MKS, and also on the expo floor) to see if he could go and ask Aaron to call me. I got a text message from Aaron saying that he couldn’t leave the expo, but I could come over and get a spare key.

I sprinted over to the expo (luckily it wasn’t far) and got the key … then ran back to Aaron’s room and checked his closet … THANKFULLY the pants were still in the closet. I had taken the pants off the hanger the jacket was on so they could hang separately.

I then ran back to my room and finished getting ready … took me a bit of time to cool down, but I was once again presentable … and the rest of the evening was a success (although I didn’t win the award 🙁 ).

Obama & Copyright

As a believer in free content, I salute Senator Obama for his request to license the democratic debates under the Creative Commons (Attribution) license.

I am a strong believer in the importance of copyright, especially in a digital age. But there is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection. We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates. Rather than restricting the product of those debates, we should instead make sure that our democracy and citizens have the chance to benefit from them in all the ways that technology makes possible.

– Obama’s Letter to Howard Dean

Bravo.

Almost Heart Attack

Ok, my friend Aaron almost gave me a heart attack today.

We’re both going to the COMMON conference in a few days … and need to connect up.   So we traded cell phone numbers.

Just to make sure I had the right number … I sent him a text message “Did you get this message”.

This morning I saw a message on my phone from Aaron that said “Who are you and why are you texting my daughters phone”.

Obviously I thought I had the number wrong … but even worse, I thought maybe I had pissed off some girls father … making him think I was a freek.

Well, turns out that Aaron was just having a joke at my expense … but it was a bit alarming.

I’m going to chalk it up to cultural conditioning.

Upgrade Complete

Well, I finally got my Linux systems upgraded … both Rivendell & Gondor got upgraded to Fedora Core 6 this weekend.

There were a few minor glitches … but nothing that couldn’t be handled.

One thing that was kind of annoying is the fact that the Apache config (httpd.conf) was replaced on both servers (the original was backed up to a ‘rpmsave’ file). This, in itself, wasn’t that big a deal … but I wasn’t expecting it.

I have an idea for a good open source project … that could be incorporated into new distribution releases … an “Upgrade Impact Analysis” tool. It would evaluate your existing configuration, compare to what is known about a new distribution, and tell you what config files could be used without modification and which files would have to be reworked.

Another problem I had, which had me worried, was the fact that I couldn’t get ClamAV to rebuild. After a bit of research, I found that my linker configuration file ‘ld.so.conf’ had a ‘/usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib’ listed. This has to be left over from one of my older Redhat installs. The files in that directory are timestamped April 15th 1999. To be honest, I’m shocked I was able to build anything with that old code in the linkers configuration. Luckily, simply commenting that line out fixed the problem.

So far everything seems to be working OK, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

Vacation Final Analysis

Obviously getting sick put a pretty big damper on the whole trip.   I couldn’t enjoy just about anything.

That said I’m pretty sure that we’ll do a Windjammer cruise again.   It had serious potential and, what things we did do, were quite fun.   I think if I had been feeling better than I was, I would have had a fantastic time.   It’s probably a trip better taken with a group of friends.

Tortola was a significant let down I think it’s probably fine for the sailing & cruising crowd, but as a destination in itself, no thanks.

Fort Recovery, on Tortola, was total disappointment over priced and lacking facilities & services.     I would not recommend them at all.   My gut feeling is that the owner runs the place to cater to her family & friends.

Next time I think we’re going to stay with a more traditional resort property or major name hotel.   We are NOT going rely on web site advertisements again.

Clean Optics Redux

Back in October, I wrote about having forgot to clean the filter on my camera … well, it turns out that the stain on my filter wasn’t actually causing the spot on my pictures.

There was actually a stain on the filter… but the spot on the pictures was actually being caused something on my cameras CCD sensor.

I didn’t realize what the problem was until I took pictures with different lenses.

I took the camera to Wolf Camera (where I purchased it) to get it fixed. Hopefully all I have to do is pay the $65 cleaning fee.

Update 4/25: Sadly, Wolf hasn’t finished the cleaning … I’m getting kind of antsy, as there have been a number of nice days I would have liked to go out and taken pictures. I called today to check on the status, but they couldn’t tell me much. The guy who normally deals with repairs & such is out.

Going home

Time to leave to be honest, I’m looking forward to it. I’m usually ready to go home at the end of a vacation, but this time it’s quite different I’m not really looking to return anytime soon.

We got our stuff loaded into the car and go to the office to check out. We get billed for the dinner and few breakfasts we had and phone usage. There was no notice of a phone charge for local calls, so both Ginny and I assumed that local calls were free. I indicated this and the owner cut the phone charge in half. If we had more time to argue, I would have worked it down to zero, but we didn’t.

Got on the road to the airport stopped to put gas in the car and headed out. Traffic going the other way was terrible, but not too bad going in our direction. Roads were as bad as always.

We arrived at the airport, parked the car, took pictures of the car (just in case there was a problem), and checked in. We then found out that, because we did not reconfirm our reservations 2 days ago, our reservations had been canceled. Um, what? Pardon me, but if I paid for a reservation, there is no way in hell they should be canceling my reservation until I don’t show up for the flight. That’s absolutely ridiculous. Luckily, the gate agent was able to rebook us on both flights.

The flight from Tortola to San Juan was uneventful got through customs & immigration without any problems, although they did inspect my camera bag.

After a few tries, was able to call a cab. Their stupid VRU system wasn’t working quite right.

There were a few messages on my cell phone voicemail … including one from Dad, telling me that my mail server was down. Two messages from local numbers that turned out to be voicemail systems … but no name on the announce message. Wrong numbers maybe?

We got home and I found the IDE Mirroring adapter on my main server had glitched … for some reason it thought one of the drives in the mirrored pair failed. I swapped the drive and resynchronized the drive, which got me up; again … but the drive that was indicated as failed tested out to be fine.

I really have to investigate this … maybe the mirroring adapter is more trouble than it’s worth?

Lazy Day / Rainy Day

Neither Ginny nor I was really up to doing anything adventurous today we were considering going out to “Marina Cay , but decided that it was probably way too commercialized to be fun.

We ended up relaxing in the room.   Good thing too, as it started to rain REALLY hard around 2pm.   It rained so hard, the water was dripping down inside the doors and from the roof.

Ginny called Avis and asked how we should return the car to the airport she was told that we should just leave the car in the long term parking, unlocked, with the keys in the glove box.   Ok, if they say so.

Gotta get packed up today we need to get a fairly early start although not TOO early.   If we leave at 8:30, I figure we should be able to get gas and get to the airport in plenty of time.

We still have some pasta left, so we’re going to cook that for dinner shame to waste it, and it saves some money.

Health wise, I’m feeling much better than I did before but I still have a bit of a cough.   Ginny still has a cough, but it’s not as bad as it was.

Rainy day

Weather is looking pretty sketchy, so we’re just going to drive around town to see what’s to see today. Ginny wants to go out by the airport to see “Aragorn Studios and I would like to scope out the airport to see where we will return the car.

Had lunch at a local cyber café I had a chicken roti pretty tasty. Kind of like a West Indian burrito.

Aragorn Studios is a art collective place lots of different artists, some working on stuff, and some just selling.

My only big gripe is that all the vendors had a 5% surcharge for credit cards. I ended up paying cash.

Leaving, we tried to find the airport Avis location with no luck. Kind of odd, I know that Hertz, National, and Thrifty had booths in the lobby of the airport building.

On the way home we decided to make our own dinner, so we stopped at the Rite Way again and picked up stuff for pasta & garlic bread.

Before dinner I took my laptop out to check mail & stuff. I managed to catch Riley on the webcam as he sitting on the table. I tried to get his attention by changing the way the lights blinked on the cam. Changing a setting might have caused a slight click, as he turned his head quickly when I did. Not entirely sure though. He looks normal though, so that’s a good thing.

Patouche Sailing cruise

This is probably the best day of the whole trip.

We signed up to do a snorkel trip with Patouche charters. They were one of the few places that returned our calls AND would take credit cards.

Fay and Shane were a good crew, took us to nice places, and pointed out the best places to go. Fay was from Maryland, out here to get her captains papers. Shane was from the Dominican Republic (I think).

The boat wasn’t big, but neither were the number of guests. There were four other people besides Ginny and I: A married couple from Florida and a couple of guys from New York.

They had plenty of things to drink, and some tasty snacks. They didn’t push the alcohol, which was nice.

We did 2 snorkel stops, had lunch, and did another snorkel stop. Lunch was quiche, unfortunately, so I had to pass. The pasta salad was pretty good though. We have GOT to remember to tell people about my lactose intolerance.

The two guys from New York were also staying at Fort Recovery, so we gave them a lift back. We stopped at the Rite Way grocery store to pick up stuff for dinner just sandwich stuff.