Ryan's Journal

One year ago today I was roaming around Wonder Lake with Denali looking down on me. I spent the days lounging in the fall colors on the tundra, eating wild blueberries, and chasing the trails of caribou, moose, grizzly bears and wolves while the northern lights flashed overhead. Last night I came in to the office until 2:00 AM to try and track down a site problem that’s been elluding me for a week, and today I’ve sent nearly twenty e-mails. Getting back to nature is going to be most welcome.

I’m in one of those moods where I want to write something, but I’ve really got nothing to write about (hence the lack of entries in the past week). I attempted e-mail, but after knocking the inbox down by a whopping three e-mails I gave up on the effort to appear witty for people I haven’t seen in ages. I’m now reduced to surfing to pages like Wil Wheaton’s web site. I’m not sure how much lower I can sink.

It’s nights like this where, despite all the great things I have going for me, I sort of wish it was just a bit better. What if instead of sitting in the living room alone I was with my future wife, playing pictionary, trying to figure out how to draw “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”? And even if I was with someone else I’m sure I’d be wondering how I could get some time to myself. Why is that? Maybe we’re all born with a “stupid” gene that has the sole purpose of forcing us to do illogical things when life gets comfortable. Considering that life is much less challenging now than it was a hundred years ago, such a gene would be a logical explanation for things like bungee jumping, high divorce rates, tofu, and “freedom” fries. All I’ve got to support the existence of the stupid gene is anecdotal evidence, but anyone who has ever asked for the wheat grass “boost” at Jamba Juice or read any headline involving Aston Kutcher must know what I’m talking about.

This is also amusing. Vote for Optimus Prime.

This is awesome.

At about 5:00 EST today, someone in a power plant somewhere spilled some coffee and went DOH!.

After two weeks of insomnia, I slept for ten hours the other night, and there was much rejoicing. Additionally, the e-mail inbox is half of its previous size. Give me a few more days and I’ll have it knocked out. Lastly, after the morning I had today I was in need of some advice passed down in James Clavell’s Shogun:

“‘Always remember, child,’ her first teacher had impressed on her, ‘that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort.'”

And really lastly, go here and listen to “Soul Sloshing”. Too happy for someone like Jason, but I dig it.

The Blue Men kicked much booty tonight. I need to get me some blue paint, PVC pipe, and lighted drum sticks so that I too can tap my as yet undiscovered musical talents.

I just realized that the first full day of the Alaska trip was exactly one year ago today. At this very moment last year I was spending the first night of the trip in the Subaru just south of Redwood National Park (sleeping peacefully, unlike tonight). I woke up that day and went for a run through a Redwood Grove that was palpably peaceful, if such a phrase can be used to describe a place where you can’t help but feel anything other than content and relaxed. It’s a bit odd how the trip doesn’t feel like it was that long ago, but at the same time it feels like a lifetime ago that I was working for Accenture.

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.