"My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?" — David Mitchell
In an effort to thwart my attempts not to get too excited about the trip this October Ted pointed out that NASA has lots of satellite photos of South Georgia island available online. In the photo below, South Georgia is the bright white feature on the left, while the large white object on the right is iceberg A-38B. Scale: the island is one hundred miles long by twenty miles wide.
A team of researchers will be searching Mt. Ararat for Noah’s Ark. They aren’t going to find a boat. There is no doubt that it is impossible that a boat could be thousands of feet up on a mountain; still, a little voice is saying “but what if…”
Working this weekend, but seeing as I’ll probably only be working six months out of the entire year I’m not gonna complain. In addition to time at work and making this site less of an eyesore I’ve been busy attempting to compile Mozilla from source code (yes, I will soon be the uber-geek, and no, I’m not proud of that). The Mozilla organization produces a great browser, a really good mail client, and responded to my bug report in less than five minutes, but when it comes to documentation for developers, it’s been an ordeal. I’ll post my notes from the experience in the near future in the hopes that it might make the process less painful for someone else.
It’s amazing how much the new look of the site is nothing like gemal.dk. If any of the pages on the site look odd for you please e-mail me and let me know what browser you’re using and I’ll try to fix it, or you can just upgrade to Mozilla, which is probably the best web browser available right now anyways.
In 1996 I hopped on a bus with almost no money and went to the Atlanta Olympics, eating once a day, sleeping in bus stations and abandoned lots, and sneaking into events when I couldn’t afford a ticket. In the midst of that I met a woman who had been a national-class cyclist but who had been in a wreck and given up cycling (sorry, my memory failed me, she wasn’t in a wreck). She insisted I stay with her and her family, and was in general so positive that I couldn’t refuse. During the past eight years we’ve kept in touch via email, but tonight while driving back to LA I talked to her on the phone for the first time since the Olympics — the energy Alyson has is incredible, and I was practically glowing when I got off of the phone.
That conversation was followed several hours later by a night out with an old college friend who I hadn’t seen since graduation. It’s amazing how great it is to see an old friend again after many years, kind of like finding a security blanket that you didn’t know was there. A good weekend indeed.
Matt’s mother got some terrific whale photos during the Antarctica trip. This was of course prior to her becoming a legend among polar travelers by puking into a humpback’s blow hole.
Nadia and Zac are moving off to Asia, so the whole gang went out last night to see them off. Zac’s story about an Australian guy wrestling an anaconda was epic, and all in all it was a great way to say goodbye to those two — San Francisco won’t be the same without Nadia and Zac in it. Friday night was spent at Universal CityWalk having drinks with the roommate and watching Kill Bill Volume 2. Word to the wise — when going to a screening at the CityWalk IMAX theatre on opening night, arrive early. From the second row Uma was looking mighty nice, but my neck is still killing me from the experience.
I can’t think of a good reason to post a link to Jason’s blog, nor can I come up with a reason to post a photo from last year’s meat massacre.
Following up from the last entry, Dell finally agreed that the computer needed to be repaired, and in fairness to them once that was settled they sent a courrier to pick it up (he even brought a box to ship it in) and then had it fixed and back to me in less than seventy-two hours.
In other news I spent the long weekend in the Bay Area, at one point somehow ending up at a party filled with tattoo-covered middle-aged bikers. There was Sam Wo’s late on Saturday night, vicious defense on the basketball court against Kev and Aaron (including a dive to the pavement that drew blood), and seven strikes in a row bowled by the Goob. In addition to his bowling feats the little bugger cold-called some girl he hadn’t seen in years, went to see her for an entire day, and has already wrangled two more dates out of the deal.
When all of the fun in the Bay Area was finished I slogged through the drive back to LA only to discover that my roommate had dead-bolted the door on the inside and then gone to sleep. Hopping over the patio walls and beating on her window wouldn’t wake her up, so I had a nice nap out on an air mattress until I finally was able to get in.
The network interface card on my laptop has been acting up lately, and today it conveniently died an hour before my new work PC was set up, stranding all of my data so that I couldn’t email them to people who needed them. I called Dell technical support; in the past this has been a relatively quick and painless process during which I get put on hold for thirty to sixty minutes, and then quickly explain to the tech support person exactly what the problem is and what I’ve done to remove all doubt that anything else could be wrong. They then arrange to have my PC sent to a Dell service center, and in a few days all is well.
When I called tonight I went through the normal forty-five minute hold time before someone picked up:
“Hello, what seems to be your problem.”
Shit, they outsourced their tech support to India. I explained the problem — I couldn’t connect to the network, when the card was connected the computer would crash, and I had already tried different network cables and re-installing the network drivers. And no, I hadn’t installed any new hardware or software lately.
“Could you please speak more clearly, it seems that the phone connection is not so good.”
This definitely won’t be quick. I explained again, more slowly and using very small words.
“OK, let’s first check the network cable. Is it plugged in to the wall?”
One more time I explained that I’d tried several network cables, and further repeated the other steps that I’d tried.
“And how did you reinstall the card?”
I bit through the side of my laptop and ripped it out with my teeth… I explained that I used the Windows troubleshooter, which is available from the device manager.
“That is not supported by Dell! That may be the cause of your problem!”
Microsoft’s primary tool for fixing computer problems isn’t supported. She is making things up now… Seeing as the problem had been occurring for a week, and that I’d only tried the troubleshooter today, I suggested that this might not be the smoking gun that my tech support friend seemed to think it was.
“Well, it is better if you do not do this. What I would like you to do now is to right click on My Computer, choose properties, and then choose device manager. From there right click on the network card and choose properties. You will see a button labeled troubleshooter…”
I’m going to fly to India and bludgeon her with my laptop. After another half hour of pain she came to the dramatic conclusion that since she had “eliminated the possibility that it is the network cable” that the network interface card was likely at fault; however, she indicated that until I had tried using the Dell Diagnostics CD (which was back at home) she couldn’t authorize having the laptop sent in to be fixed. I still love Dell, and will probably buy Dell machines until the end of time, but when I call back (having now run the diagnostic CD — the network interface test failed) God help any tech support person who even mentions network cable.
Life, during the past two weeks:
As you can probably tell, the excitement around here is electric. If I owe you e-mail right now please understand that I’ll write back as soon as I’ve got a story to tell that won’t induce brain atrophy.