Archive for July, 2001
July 1, 2001 at 04:00
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- Happy Canada Day!
- Feeling better, although certain gastrointestinal problems will go undiscussed.
- It’s rained–a lot–over the last 24 hours, so I’m beginning to think that Canada Day in Ottawa would have been pretty wet, just like the last time I was there.
- Did a lot of simulator hacking, and have the calculator plus some sample demo code working well. Next up are proper LCD contexts, which are a real mess.
- I hate threads. My stance on threads basically hasn’t changed since hftpd in 1999, and that is simple: Threads are stupid. The simulator may well be, however, one of the genuinely good uses of threads. There is an altnerative, but it is a lot harder, a lot more complicated, and involves a lot more i386 asm.
- Someone remind me to call my mother; she’s going to be upset, I wager, that I haven’t talked to her in nearly a month.
- Speaking of which, Joe and Zach haven’t updated their activity logs in three weeks. What gives?
July 2, 2001 at 04:00
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- LCD contexts work, but there are a few edge cases that I’ll have to test on RimOS before I believe that I’m finished.
- I’m sure other stuff happened, but I don’t remember it clearly.
July 3, 2001 at 04:00
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- George, Mike, and I had lunch, and then I stopped into the office to file some lingering expenses. The receipt that I need hasn’t arrived yet, so of course I didn’t end up actually filing them.
- The disk in one of my desktops at work died again. That’s four in one year. The ‘k’ is for ‘kwality’!
- Rewrote the simulator’s scheduler so that it doesn’t take 100% of my CPU when idle. Now it takes about 1% while running the bouncer.
- Our DSL is really flaky, and has been ever since we upgraded to 3mbit. After talking to our ISP (can you even imagine any other ISP having this conversation with us? they’re perfect!), it was discovered that Bell was supposed to install a POTS splitter, a box that splits the incoming line into a single, filtered DSL line and a handful of lines for phones. It needs to be filtered at the entry point because 3mbit DSL needs an incredibly clean signal. We went down and looked at the wiring where it comes into the house, and it’s a joke. There’s a jack on the outside wall, then a piece of regular phone cable that the tech had to borrow from Mike connecting it to another jack, where it’s split off to the rest of the house. The installer had to borrow cable from Mike and it’s not high quality, it’s whatever he could rip off of whatever cheap phone he had lying around. Are you kidding me?
- Took a nap, made dinner, did some hacking, went to bed.
July 4, 2001 at 04:00
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- Went into the office to have lunch with someone, talk to some people. I should start bringing stuff home each time I visit so that I don’t give myself a hernia carrying it all home at once.
- American Airlines sent me my cheque! In the wrong currency. Next time they’ll send me Turkish Lira, just to keep my money for an extra month.
- The Bell technician came while I was at work, but Mike talked to him and he was apparently a pretty good guy; he talked to Mike about our problem, seemed competent. He said that he was done with the splitter and left.
- When I got home and looked in the closet with the wiring, I saw that all he’d actually done is write “demarc” and our phone number on the phone jack in magic marker. No POTS splitter. The DSL still goes down like Nortel’s stock price. Motherfucker. What the fuck are we paying for?
- George came over for dinner and milkshakes, yay. Yummy.
July 5, 2001 at 04:00
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- Oops. Mike locked Simon on the balcony last night accidentally when he went out to cover the grill. At least it didn’t rain. It explains why Chester was so friendly and mouthy last night, though.
- Lots of simulator hacking; implemented a first cut of most of the database API. I’ll have to eventually write my own allocator so that I can keep the “filesystem” in a contiguous few-megabyte chunk. The filedemo OS sample works now, though, another good milestone.
- We called Bell at noon to demand that they send another technician to fix our flapping DSL. The dispatcher, aghast that the last technician didn’t install the splitter, assured us that he would return today to actually fix the problem.
- We called back at 16h30, not having seen a tech yet. The guy we talked to said something about at 14h00 trouble ticket from Velocet, but nothing about a phone call. He transferred us to the dispatcher, who said that someone would be here tomorrow, and would charge us $100. Mike argued with him for a while and hung up. He called back an hour later to apologize and assure us that there would be no charge. Pig fuckers.
- Apparently we’re the first 3mbit residential customer in Montreal ever. Aren’t we lucky.
- Zach forwarded another interesting job offer today, this one from a game company needing Linux expertise. We exchanged some email and someone will call me tomorrow to talk numbers. We’ll see.
- The DSL has dropped 11 times in the last 40 minutes. When you consider that it takes a minute to resync, plus 40 seconds for TCP to get squared up, that’s an average of 45 seconds of uptime separated by 100 seconds of downtime. Fuck it, I’m going to bed.
July 6, 2001 at 04:00
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- Bell guy’s here. He’s deriving our trouble from first principles again, of course, instead of just installing the POTS splitter and getting the fuck out of our home.
- Yesterday’s technician declared that our wiring was perfect, and now today this other guy claims that our upstairs wiring is crossed and open–ie, there’s a phantom fourth phone jack. His (plausible) explanation is that during renovations, somebody put a nail through the wire.
- Since the upstairs wiring is unacceptable, and we know that Bell must, if we ask, run new cabling up to the third floor for a new DSL installation, we do just that. He calls for some contractors to come do the work, and says they’ll be here 2 hours later.
- Lo and behold, they show up before the first tech even leaves. They chat briefly, we show them where the cable needs to go, make some suggestions about technique, and let them go to work. First mistake.
- Contractor #1 comes upstairs with a huge drill and starts going at the walls. One hole. Two holes. Three. Four. Five. Six? What the?
- I’m growing a little concerned, so I go to inspect the handiwork. I notice that with his insane commercial drill he’s carved at least a half inch into a nice piece of the recently renovated, heritage building woodwork in the bathroom, and has drilled through moulding that’s a full 3 inches away from the other end of the wall. I wish I still had my digital camera, because it’s amazing. I’ve done less damage with chainsaws on some particularly hardy trees.
- Mike also pointed out that there’s a beautiful false-start hole where he tried to drill and ran into some obstacle, so he just started over somewhere else. He didn’t do a test drill with a small bit first, of course, so now there are two enormous holes to the left of the bathroom door.
- I don’t think he knew he was drilling into drywall in the closet until it punched out a big piece on the other side, either.
- The cable that they ran 50 feet across our recently renovated, bright white, naturally lit heritage building is, of course, slate gray. Not stapled into the corners, but it is stapled into the huge gash in the woodwork, so we can’t even easily putty it over and repaint. We’re lucky they didn’t drill through the bathtub.
- When Mike brings up the issue of the damage with Frick and Frack, the guy (who may be on his first installation ever–we think there may be some apprenticeship going on here) apologizes and says that he only had a commercial drill, so he used it. He didn’t go back to get the right tools, he didn’t ask to borrow our residential drill, he didn’t even proceed slowly and carefully (there are two contractors after all, there’s no excuse to drill through something 3 inches past the other side of the wall), he just blasted through our house with rampant abandon.
- The contractors leave, the original tech returns to finish the wiring and test. We talk about the damage. He insists that it’s part of the “necessary risk” of wire installation. Apparently, as far as he’s concerned, it’s A-OK for installers to do whatever damage they want, as long as it’s not intentional. Did I mention the dents in the drywall where they couldn’t control the drill body? Total amateurs. Bell will be paying for repairs.
- The best part, the very best part, the part that makes all other parts green with envy, is that it didn’t even fix our DSL. It still drops off every random(60) minutes. They destroyed our house for nothing.
July 7, 2001 at 04:00
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- Bell technician #4 showed up at 18h00. He spent 80 minutes or so, couldn’t find anything wrong, replaced some cabling out at the pole, said that he didn’t have any diagnostic equipment that he could plug into the line to watch when it loses sync. Bell is totally just guessing now. Escalate!
- Alice came over and made a yummy mushroom risotto that we ate with some beef and potatoes. Mmmm. Beef.
- She also brought Red Planet, on the so-bad-it’s-a-comedy principle. So bad.
July 8, 2001 at 04:00
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- Wrote a bunch of simulator code, watched a half dozen episodes of Newsradio.
- Ate dinner with George at Thai Grille, which was as good as we’ve come to expect. Went back to his house afterwards to help him setup his local network and masquerading. About twenty minutes later his speaker started going crazy, his machine stopped responding, and one of his ethernet cards won’t respond to the driver anymore. There’s bad hoodoo in that machine.
July 9, 2001 at 04:00
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- It’s official; my last day at Zero-Knowledge is August 1st. Hooray!
- Come home from work, finished my book, ate dinner, went to bed. Booorrrrrrring.
July 10, 2001 at 04:00
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- Another day, another dollar…another irreplaceable chunk of a finite and rapidly passing lifetime.
- Steph returned from Japan today, hooray! We had caesars, milkshakes, and pizza for dinner; staples of healthy Canadian cuisine.
- Mike and I took off to see Matthew Good Band at Metropolis after dinner, prefaced by Treble Charger (suprisingly good) and Copyright (skip it). MGB puts on a great show; if they weren’t sharing the stage, I’d be tempted to take the bus to Ottawa tomorrow to see the last stop on the tour.
- On our way to the show, the man walking in front of us was propositioned, rather directly, on a crowded street, at 20h00. Ahh, Montreal, it’s a hell of a town.
July 11, 2001 at 04:00
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- Started reading Killing Pablo last night, by the author of Black Hawk Down. It’s great so far, even if it’s not as tactical as Black Hawk.
- Had a hard time concentrating today, so I didn’t write much code. It didn’t help that some of the items near the top of my to-do list aren’t very interesting.
- Spent some time thinking about what I want to do next. Read some background information on a potential contract, followed up on another lead. Rumour has it that Zero-Knowledge is more interested in keeping me now that I’ve announced my resignation. What, they didn’t think I was serious?
- I was amused to notice that Air Canada has a discount fare this weekend for travel from Toronto to Kingston, Jamaica. Not all that surprising, given that there’s gun battles in Kingston and the government is deploying the army.
July 12, 2001 at 04:00
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- Finished Killing Pablo, moved on to more Robert J. Sawyer.
- We went more or less nuts at the IGA, restocking the house in anticipation of the hordes of frantic ultimate frisbee revelers that will descend on our house this weekend.
- Redid some of the simulator’s display code to allow scaling, but it’s incredibly CPU inefficient because there’s no good way to use any of the gdk functions on a raw buffer without involving X in the whole mess. I’ll probably have to end up reimplementing the simple X primitives to operate on a flat buffer. Annoying.
July 13, 2001 at 04:00
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- Rebel.com is dead, hooray. I don’t have anything specifically against them or their product, but I had a really hard time cheering for anyone dumb enough to spend 5 million dollars on a domain name. Doomed to failure; terminal idiocy.
July 15, 2001 at 04:00
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- Lots of people came into town for the weekend; there was an ultimate tournament in Montreal, some fairly stiff competition I’m told. By the end of the tournament on Sunday pretty much everyone had to be helped up the stairs.
- To sate the crowd yesterday, Mike picked up sushi on the way home from the fields. 17 people, a few hundred pieces of sushi–and a litre of pickled ginger to go along with the 500g of wasabi that they gave us.
- Right before I went to bed, Mike’s cat Chester went totally insane; I have five big scratches, all of them bleeding on my shirt, from when I picked him up to put him out of my room. He’s been acting up for weeks, but usually in a “get away from me, I don’t need humans until I’m hungry” way.
July 16, 2001 at 04:00
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- Did some work, which mostly consists of email and file cleanup by this point, and some reading. I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that one of Zero-Knowledge’s most incompetent people is finally leaving the company; she was probably number one or two on my “MUST FIRE, TODAY” list. As if the company would ever let me do anything with that beautiful, beautiful list. Oh well–look at me not caring.
- Both of the interesting contract leads will likely move into the numbers phase this week; no real hurry, but it would be nice to wrap things up before the wedding.
July 17, 2001 at 04:00
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- Speaking of the wedding, I was roused by FedEx this morning as they delivered my itinerary for the festivities. Patrice is so well organized!
- Went into the office, had lunch with George and Deb, visited with some ex-co-workers-to-be.
- Someone told me that I seem “giddy in that bitter Phil sort of way” about leaving Zero-Knowledge, and he’s mostly right. I’m really happy about not continuing the almost daily uphill battle against bullshit, but I’m also pretty sad that I wasn’t allowed to make the difference I wanted to. I joined the company and took a big pay cut because I believed in the vision and the goals, and I’m disappointed in the company for making mistakes that everyone warned them about. Oh well. Life goes on.
July 19, 2001 at 04:00
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- The phones are down at the office–again–this time for 18 hours or more because the six hours of scheduled downtime was insufficient bullshit. All incoming calls are routed to reception, and there’s no voicemail. This is a fairly minor problem in the big scheme of things, but it’s indicative of a more general trend. Will the last rat off the ship please turn off the lights?
- I am now in possession of an actual phone number that will connect me to a live human being at Citizenship and Immigration Canada whose job is to answer my questions. I didn’t think this job existed, and if it did, I didn’t think the person filling it would be allowed anywhere near a phone. I will call them tomorrow and find out that the number has been disconnected, no doubt, or that this person is on sabbatical.
- Adam came over for dinner, and then he, Mike, Steph, George, and I went to see Jurassic Park III at Paramount–which I wasn’t terribly keen on, but I was buoyed by the fact that Salon didn’t totally shred it. It all worked out for the best in the end, since the projector ate the next-to-last reel and we didn’t end up paying for it. We also learned that the $12.50 that one pays for a movie these days doesn’t actually rent you a live projectionist, as was demonstrated when one patron stood up and hammered on the plastic window, trying to get someone’s attention.
July 20, 2001 at 04:00
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- Finished another Robert Sawyer book, which means I think I’ve read all of the remaining books this week, apart from his trilogy. Moved on to A Civil Action.
- I think I’m going to buy a camera, the Canon Powershot S110. Zach has one, and they’re terrific. It’s about time that I replaced the one that was stolen from the office, anyways.
- I need to borrow $400,000. I will repay it, without interest, in 5 years. Funds will be used by the Government of Canada to create jobs and develop provincial economies.
- George came over for dinner and the three of us mused over tsnw; they hacked a bit, I read my book, we played GT3 on the PS2.
- Mike has to catch an early flight, so I figured I’d shoulder the burden of getting the tsnw build environment setup on his borrowed laptop–boy was that ever a mistake. ClanLib is one of the most annoying packages ever; its spec file overrides everything on the ‘configure’ command line (what’s the point of having it check for things, then?), it depends on lots of badly packaged things, and the authors in some cases provide broken packages. It references structures that aren’t found in any known version of LUA. Add to that the fact that g++ is incredibly slow on Adam’s P2-233 Stinkpad and you’ll quickly understand why I was going to bed as he was getting up. He owes me one.
July 21, 2001 at 04:00
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- Of course, the build didn’t work. Spent another hour with that god forsaken package before Mike left for the airport. Didn’t get nearly enough sleep.
- Read for a few hours. Played a lot of Gran Turismo 3. Watched Almost Famous. Read some more.
- I’m going to bed early; 4 hours was not enough last night.
July 23, 2001 at 04:00
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- Around lunchtime Justin, Mark, Manish, and Josh called from their car; they were on their way over from Ottawa for a visit before the conference starts on Wednesday.
- We had lunch at Dunn’s, they went CD shopping, and we sat around the house for a bit. I went to play frisbee with George for a while and we all met up with Alice and Deb at Restaurant Nil Bleu.
- After way too much delicious Ethiopian food, they hopped back in the car for the drive to Ottawa. Bell hired a contractor to come fix all of the damage tomorrow morning, so I need to sleep now.
- It’s so unbelievably hot. 40degC with the humidex. I just want it to rain, please, please rain. I can hardly fathom playing ultimate tomorrow in this weather.
July 24, 2001 at 04:00
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- Went to the office for a while; tidied up some paperwork, wrote some documentation that may never see daylight for the software they’ll never use.
- Played ultimate against a much better team, but that’s fine; I’d much rather lose to this team 15-0 (or 15-5, as was the case tonight) than score lots of points against the team we played last week. This team had a strong offense, a good man-to-man (and somewhat weak zone) defence, and was very good-spirited. We did not, as usual, start playing decent ultimate until the second half…
- The other team showed us a terrific ice cream place not far from the field, so we all headed that way after the game. Reminisced about Ottawa for a little while with Josie-Anne, since she just moved from there a couple of months ago. What a great little city…
- Ate at Tandoori Village again with George and George. Good food, fairly inexpensive.
- I have so many things to do before the wedding, and only one more day in which to do them. I can probably ignore everything except a haircut and a few loads of laundry, but it would be nice to tie up some loose ends at the office and work on hammering out a contract.
- This is insane; it’s 23h10 and I’m literally covered in sweat just sitting in the office at home. I need to go to bed, where I’ll at least have direct fan action.
- There’s a real shortage of “white midwestern American male with no undergrad degree” scholarships. I’m starting to feel pretty oppressed.
July 25, 2001 at 04:00
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- Did a lot of laundry, got a haircut, went to the office.
- Filed almost $2k worth of expenses that I’ve been loaning to the company interest-free for over a year. Sigh.
- I know a lot of people who should read this.
- Did a lot of last-minute packing, and stayed up too late.
July 26, 2001 at 04:00
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- Woke up early to fly to SFO, which was relatively uneventful except for the mother with 4 totally uncontrollable children. I feel sorry for her. If I were her, I’d be on my 7th or 8th drink before the plan even leaves the gate.
- Chris met me at the airport and we stopped at Fry’s briefly since we both needed CD players.
- Went to the tux place in San Jose to get our final fittings and pick them up, then ate some decent if somewhat inauthentic Mexican on our way to Monterey. Stopped at the DJ on the way for some last minute changes and questions.
- Checked into the hotel then met Chris, Patrice, and the Beard clan at their hotel for dinner.
July 27, 2001 at 04:00
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- Small breakfast at the hotel and then to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for the bulk of the day. Our group was something like 65 people, so it took a little while to sort out at the entrance.
- The wedding party drove up to the church for the rehearsal, then we all drove back into Monterey for the rehearsal dinner at the terrific Lighthouse Bistro. We had most of the restaurant, and they prepared these enormous paellas on huge half-metre platters. Each had rice, pork, beef, shrimp, mussels, clams, chicken, and probably other stuff that we never managed to unearth. There were 5 or 6 of these platters for the 40 or so in attendance and we didn’t even come close to finishing them. I hope the staff ate well that night.
- Afterwards everyone gathered in a reserved room at the Blue Fin for some drinks and pool. Mike and Ryan got into town a few hours later and met us there sans Zach, who is unfortunately really sick. Poo.
July 28, 2001 at 04:00
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- The big day! Ryan and I met in the lobby of the Plaza and chatted until Chris was kicked out of his room. Mike and Tyla showed up soon thereafter and got checked in and fed.
- Ryan and I drove the couple of miles to the nearest shopping centre where he bought a more or less complete wardrobe, and I grabbed a pair of shorts and a surprisingly inexpensive tie.
- I ate a quick sandwich and returned to the hotel to get showered and tuxedoed. The limo arrived right on time and the male half of the wedding party departed more or less on time. Chris appeared pretty calm so we didn’t liquor him up on the way.
- The wedding went off perfectly, of course, in a beautiful old church in a forest near Pebble Beach; the entire front of the church is made of glass, so the background for the ceremony was the unspoiled forest. It has a number of 1/2 metre thick solid wood pillars that had split and aged really impressively.
- Reception on the terrace at the hotel, dinner and dancing inside. The Monterey Plaza apparently does something like six weddings every weekend during the summer, so everything went pretty much as planned. They’re such a cute couple.
July 29, 2001 at 04:00
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- Showered, checked out of the hotel, and ate brunch with Ryan nearby.
- We drove 30 miles or so to Sunset Beach just north of Santa Cruz. Our directions were not entirely (cough) precise, so we sat around on the beach for an hour until we figured out that the rest of our group was a mile further down.
- Ate a small lunch and chatted with the majority of the families that made it out to the beach. Flew a kite for the first time in probably 13 years. Managed to lose my Blackberry at some point, which is disappointing. I don’t know how it happened; I hope someone finds it and calls or emails to claim the reward.
- Bryce and I drove Chris’s Miata back to Carol’s house in San Jose for some gift opening and a hopefully more subdued party. I’m not up for another wild night.
- There were, of course, five metric tonnes of gifts for Chris and Patrice to open; I’m starting to believe him when he says they need a new house now. Stuff brought from all over the world made an appearance; kitchenware from Japan, a hammock from Brazil, tableclothes from France, various Canadian items.
- It’s been at least 5 years since I’ve had Kraft Dinner, but it made an appearance on the menu; people had made such a big deal out of it for the last few days that someone bought a dozen or so boxes for John.
- After the 45 minutes that it took for everyone to say goodbye, Bryce and Kendra dropped me off at my hotel; I booked a shuttle to the airport and fell asleep shortly thereafter.
July 30, 2001 at 04:00
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- Today was totally lost to travel; woke up at 08h30, ate a small breakfast at the hotel, walked to a convenience store to find a cash machine, read the paper until the shuttle arrived.
- Took the shuttle to SFO, read my book in the terminal until Mike and Tyla arrived. Spent 5 hours on the plane, slept a bit, finished my book, ordered some thai food, read my email, and went to bed.
July 31, 2001 at 04:00
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- Woke up surprisingly jet lagged, probably because I didn’t get great sleep the night before last, either. Waded through email and slowly woke up.
- Went into the office to clean up loose ends and bring more stuff home. One more day!
- Played a decent game of Ultimate at Parc Olympique; the field was incredibly dry and dusty, really unpleasant to play on. We could definitely have won, but we committed a lot of unforced errors. Strategy seemed better, people just need to throw and catch better under pressure.
- Ate dinner at home with George, Mike, and Steph, then dabbled with the new Dune before bed.
