A Nitrous Crouton

I was attempting to absorb new technical knowledge this afternoon. Sadly, my brain desired to wander. My solution was to self medicate with heavy doses of Mountain Dew and DragonForce (a guilty pleasure ever since I saw this tongue in-cheek video).

This worked for a while, but eventually my brain wandered further still and I found myself wanting to start learning IronPython instead and as a play project write a Merlin 8/16 syntax compatible 65816 assembler. Then I had to slap myself.

It was just the other week that I was reflecting on the need to refresh some of my aging CD-R archives. This weekend Fry’s advertised a 300 gig external Seagate for $139, no rebate required. I snapped.

Treeviews are my favorite method for visualizing where my disk space is going and finding rogue multi-gigabyte files that I’ve forgotten about. If you haven’t used SequoiaView (Windows) or Disk Inventory X (OS X), you should. Freeware, no excuses, download them and discover you have a 700 meg .mpeg of the Star Wars Holiday Special in your temporary internet files directory. Do it now!

While this wasn’t a three-day weekend, it was a four-day workweek. Sometimes that’s just as important. It’s rather depressing to see a round of lay-offs go by with some of those affected lacking any immediate prospects while you’re getting three unneeded calls from recruiters within a matter of hours.

Also this past week, I (hopefully) finished the rigmarole of putting the now-canceled project to bed. Like weeds on a tarmac, all the brain cells devoted to the minutiae, processes, and holistic knowledge of the ecosystem that is a large project will now succumb to entropy. All the arcane lore will be forgotten, and considering how much of my mind it occupied for the past eighteen months, this process too is a bit depressing.

As an aside, one of the biggest lessons learned working with the custom development tools for that project was that you can’t really live without Filemon. Robust error handling is rarely a feature of internal development software. Sometimes, when you run into say, a silent failure, you really need to be able to know that a file open for write failed on a temporary file that some artist inadvertently checked into source control.

I was searching technical blogs for motivational inspiration when I stumbled across Randsinrepose. I’m really not sure how I missed it. At any rate, I did get a good chuckle out of N.A.D.D. Surrounded by no fewer than five screens at this precise moment in time, I am most certainly afflicted.

As a space geek afflicted with N.A.D.D., I found a sweet sweet firehose of aerospace information crack recently: NASASpaceFlight.com and most specifically, it’s paid L2 section. How long does it take me to decide to download an 892 page PDF on the Shuttle EGIL (Electrical Generation and Integrated Lighing) systems? About 0.01 seconds, ka-leech! This actually came in handy when the news about the issues with fuel cell 1 broke.

Now if I can just get myself out of this indeterminate hold at T-minus 9 minutes.

Coming home to DSL instability after a long day makes me a very very sad panda. The pathetic thing is DSL woes, coupled with the painful post-Labor Day surge in commuter traffic, results in my hanging around the office later into the evening. This is not necessarily better for my mental health. Experiment time, I’d been brooding that one of my neighbors (in the evenings, only a problem in the evenings) was utilizing something that cranks out enough RFI to make sync problematic. However, given the temperature, I’m wondering if the modem might be getting too hot. Cheap-ass equipment. We’ll see if a fan pointed at the thing helps at all, or merely makes the interference problem worse. I am very loathe to downgrade speed, it’s not that 3 versus 1.5 down is painful, but going from 384 to 128 up would hurt.

On the weekend preceeding Labor Day weekend I ended up making something I hadn’t made in many many years: cookie dough. While I occasionally indulge in cookie dough ice cream, going right for the pure fix hadn’t been done since Bush I was in office. Yes, there are premade tubs of chip-laden goo available in the refrigerated foods section, but they always suffer from a displeasing tangy preservative aftertaste. Salmonella be damned, after a week of difficult project news, sore muscles from renewed exercise, Brazil-esque paperwork agony, I wanted chocolate chip cookie dough the way God and Nestle intended: from scratch from the recipe off the back of the Toll House Morsels package. Of course, over the next week, I only managed to eat a portion of the plentiful bounty, but a scrumptious bounty it was.

In other indulgence news, I tried out RiffTrax Monday night, after a rare trip to Hollywood Video to rent the infamous Star Trek V. I always enjoyed MST3K, so it was sweet to hear Mike again, even if I was a bit more of a Joel guy. However, I think I am a bit spoiled from picking that particular episode since Kevin Murphy guest hosted along with Mike. Reading impressions, it sounds a bit lonesome with Mike solo (DisembAudio doesn’t count, although I was amused the Kevin pointed out that he sounded like Bob the Tomato.

As to DSL, the experiment while I composed this blog entry has shown that no, the fan doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t help either. The real kicker is that losing sync for several seconds at a time is painful, but what really is a kick in the groin is every once in a while it doesn’t lose sync, but the connection must be getting confused and dies. When this happens, I not only have to power cycle the modem, but my router/firewall before PPPoE will reconnect. When that happens, the firewall does some QoS checks, which means that the downtime is upwards of three minutes. When that happens once an hour, keeping a download going, much less trying to play WoW with a connection blink every five minutes will result in homicidal tendencies faster than photoshops of Suri Cruise hitting web forums.

Speaking of WoW, my main character, an undead mage, now has a complete set of Tier 1 armor and exalted reputation with the Defilers. I think I’m ready to do more productive things now.