Year: 2003

The insomnia continues, and it’s been combined with long working hours due to the fact that a new co-worker literally disappeared for two weeks before sending word that he was resigning. Excluding the extra work inherited from him, most of my projects right now have a high potential for evoking euphoria among the users, which is a very cool thing — it’s not often a programmer gets to produce something that could inspire the composition of epic ballads or interpretive dance. Although now that I’m picturing it, the image of John and Mike doing an interpretive dance to celebrate the new code isn’t all that rewarding of a thought.

Anyways, with only 143 days left until the next retirement it isn’t really worth it to dwell on work. Had a fun night eating raw fish last night with a friend, and will be jamming along with the Blue Man Group tomorrow night, so there’s life outside of Warner Brothers. And lest I forget, those of you hating me right now for not responding to e-mail, give me a few more days, I’m going to clear the inbox soon, I promise.

I’ve been suffering from insomnia over the last few weeks, and as a result I’ve got lots of time at night to work on various projects. The latest one has been converting all of the journals to be generated from XML. It’s a bit disturbing that I’ll spend six hours writing code to save a half hour each month, but when the alternative is watching some guy on television at 2:00 AM selling spray-on hair I suppose it’s all worthwhile. Code is here if anyone is interested.

This journal entry is of no interest to anyone and is going here solely for the benefit of anyone searching for a solution to the problem I have been experiencing. Norton Antivirus basically takes over your computer when you install it, and after uninstalling it leaves networking in an unusable state. To fix the problem you must do the following:

1. Go to Start –> Run –> Type in “regedit”.
2. When the regedit program opens browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE –> SYSTEM –> CurrentControlSet –> Services –> Dhcp.
3. Double click on “DependOnService”. There will be an entry in the list that reads “SYMTDI”. Delete it and click on OK.
4. Reboot

This bug plagued me last October while I was trying to upload journal entries from the Alaska trip, and apparently Symmantec still hasn’t fixed it. As a software developer I find that highly annoying. Solution is courtesy of this site.

A few quick items:

• Plane tickets have been booked — after the Antarctica trip I’ve got two weeks in Patagonia. Normally I would want to stay longer, but following-up Antarctica just seems like too daunting of a task for any part of the world.
• From David Letterman’s Top Ten Reasons Why Arnold Schwarzenegger Isn’t Running for Governor — “After you’re ‘Mr. Universe,’ ‘Governor of California’ seems kinda lame.”
• Last of all, my old cross-country teammate Oyster (link isn’t him, but it’s close) was on the gameshow Weakest Link the other day, and actually won the damn thing. Of course, he missed the question “What is the first planet, alphabetically”, but came through in fine form when asked for the name of Vermont’s capital city.

“Master Shake, the self-appointed leader directs the group in watching tv, sitting in their neighbor’s pool, and solving mysteries (when he remembers). Frylock is the box of french fried potatoes that possess magical powers not totally understood by anyone… The group is rounded out by Meatwad…”

I’m never quite sure how to explain my job to non-computer folks, but now I can point them at this site and tell them that I help make the marketing of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force possible, specifically by enabling the distribution of information on Master Shake, Frylock, and the indomitable Meatwad (Meatwad ?!?!?). Mom will be proud.

One of my roommates during the Antarctica trip is going to be a guy who was a “camera department senior technical director” for each of the Lord of the Rings movies. I have absolutely no clue what that title means, but even if his title was “head cheese slicer, catering department” I would still be excited to hear stories from someone who was there for the making of those movies.

After an inordinate amount of searching on Google the FTP server is back up and running. My note in the Linux section of the site about adding information for FTP configuration “some time in the future” came back and took a big bite out of my ass on this one since it took me about four hours to figure out what needed to be configured.

In other news, JB again proved that there is such a thing as “JBness” by disappearing for two days to tag along with the Stanford solar car team for the final legs of their race across the country. Apparently when the sun goes down the car stops (it is solar after all), making for some interesting sleeping arrangements. JB’s story of a bewildered farmer who suddenly found a solar car, three support vehicles, and twenty college engineers sleeping in his field was a good one. My introduction to this whole thing came when the team decided to crash at our place after the race — when I got home twenty people were sleeping on the floor, fighting over showers, or worshipping some device JB had designed to display power levels for battery arrays (apparently one of their batteries caught fire during the race). Living here has its memorable moments.

In random news, the system is down, yo.

Just a note that updates may be sporadic until I figure out how I broke my FTP server. Using the UNIX vi editor on an SSH connection to update a web page is not something I want to do often.

Before heading off to vacation, Dave Barry left a challenge to all of his readers: Poetry.com runs a monthly poetry contest. Dave’s challenge was to create poems that incorporate the phrase “the dog ate my mother’s toes”. The entries are both surprisingly good and rather disturbing — go to Poetry.com and search for poets with a first name of “Freemont” to read them.

Yesterday was a good day — woke up at 4:30 and picked up a friend to go to Volcanoes National Park. Two and a half hours later we were at the Kilauea crater, an awesome sight. Did a bit of hiking there (including a trek through a lava tube), took some photos, then headed down to the coast to see the area where the volcano is still active. The web site for the park had mentioned that if we were lucky we might see some steam where the underground lava was reaching the sea, but instead of steam we got to see a river of lava running down the hillside — apparently starting Thursday the eruptions had picked up in intensity. Not only did we get to see this, but we were able to walk about a mile out over the cooled lava to within fifteen feet of the lava flow — there was rock melting and burning all around us while molten lava poured down the hill in front of us. Hawaii isn’t somewhere that’s high on my list of travel spots, but this experience definitely pushed it up several notches.

The big island of Hawaii is a lot nicer than I expected — most of it is ranches, national park, and two giant (13,000+ foot) volcanoes. The coast is fairly rugged and undeveloped, and the scenery varies from rain forest to desert lava flows. The coolest thing about this island is that one side is dry, the other rainy, and the transition zone between the two is only a few miles wide — when driving you literally turn a corner and go from low shrubs to green pastures. It messes with you — Scott, Anna and I were hiking today and it started to rain, so we decided to drive the short distance to the “dry side” and it was completely sunny there for the remainder of the day. Weather changes dramatically in places, but I’ve never seen anything quite like it is here.

I’m having one of those moments where the “real world” suddenly seems utterly surreal — a friend of mine is getting married in Hawaii on Monday, so I’m sitting in LAX waiting for the plane. There’s a muzak version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” playing, and I can’t help but wonder what committee, focus group, or other ambiguous mass of individuals concluded that this was what should be playing in airports. I’d bet large sums of money that not a single person in that focus group preferred the muzak version to the original, but groups have a way of doing things that individuals never would.

Meanwhile at least half of the passengers are wearing these god-awful Hawaiin shirts, and while I’ll laugh along with the people who wear them as a statement of leaving everything behind (“I’m wearing it because I can“), I’m disturbed at the thought that some of them are wearing something like that because “this is what you wear in Hawaii”. Maybe having just finished re-reading Atlas Shrugged and watching “Fight Club” has made me cynical, but sitting here I just can’t make this environment feel like it’s in any way grounded in reality… Luckily tomorrow I’ll be on a volcano with the jungle and the Pacific spread out around me, and there’s no doubt as to the reality of that environment.

Courtesy of Dave Barry, I laughed out loud when I watched this video.

171 days to Antarctica…

Just when you start to think that LA isn’t really that bizarre of a place to live, someone hits a horse (yes, a horse) on the freeway in the middle of Burbank and turns a fifteen minute commute into an hour and a half commute.

…or I could fill one of the last available berths on this year’s Cheeseman trip and visit Antarctica this winter. Between his ability to respond to e-mail faster than any human being I’ve ever met, and his talent for saying just the right thing at the wrong time (“Actually we do have a room that opened up due to cancellation, but it’s the smallest and cheapest one on the ship”) Doug Cheeseman may have just succeeded in luring me away from a from a very comfortable life and a cushy job.