phik

It’s a new month, the very nice month of September. The coming of the new month signals that it’s time for me to move in three days, despite the fact that I haven’t really packed anything that’s still here at the house. I’m counting on it all fitting into 3 or 4 boxes that I can pack on Monday night, and I haven’t even acquired boxes yet.

Subversion is self-hosting! Words cannot express the happiness that overwhelms me when I think of a modern version control system that Brian Berliner and Jim Kingdon had absolutely nothing to do with. What is that, you say? A chance to ditch the code that looks like it was written on a dare? An end to the CVSROOT/* special files that don’t even try to solve general-purpose problems? It is truly the dawn of a new day.

Pretty much everybody except Zach and me fell off the activity log wagon in August. I don’t really know what to say about that. I still want a new camera. And also a pony.

I went to the Bay and bought a bunch of stuff, though they only had one of the knives that I wanted. I stopped in at Ernest, in the middle of their ten-year-long sale, and bought some shirts. I don’t wear nearly enough purple or orange. Ernest had zero orange shirts. I am now fully equipped to dress like a funeral home director, however.

Dinner at La Prunelle, a new (for us) French restaurant in the insanely trendy downtown restaurant strip. My foie gras and confit de canard were excellent, although the entrees were small and the service was pretty lacking. The menu promised soup, and when one person indicated that she didn’t want soup, the waiter assumed that nobody did (!?). Getting an extra glass to compare two wines? Rocket science. That sort of thing.

Picked up the truck and we loaded my bed into it. Adam had the (in theory) brilliant idea of taking the truck to the yearly SAQ warehouse sale, which ended up being a total disaster. At least 2,000 people where there, and although it was remarkably well organized, the rewards were slim. The selection was fairly limited, it was well picked over by that point, and what was available was largely unrecognized. Next time we’ll go early on Saturday, and take a wine expert.

Mike and I got all of my stuff out of storage and into the truck. He played Shogun while I half-watched and packed all of the crap still in the house. Up way too late.

I woke up later than intended, but that’s fine, because it was raining anyways. Once the rain let up I made a quick trip to the hardware store and we packed the things from the house into the truck. I left Montreal around 12h30 and drive more or less straight until 22h15. I miss Montreal already.

The drive was uneventful, if somewhat longer than intended. In retrospect, I’m told that the directions that the U-Haul guy gave me were total crap. Oh well.

Took the cat to the kennel for a few days, or at least until I figure out where I’m going to be staying, and when. I don’t want to saddle someone with him, and I can’t really carry him around all day, even if I don’t like putting him in kitty prison.

Looked at a very nice place, but it’s not available until 15 Oct, and I’m not sure that I’m willing to live out of a suitcase for that long. It’s a bit small, too, but very beautiful. I’ll see what’s available right away before I make up my mind…

I haven’t had much sleep the last few days; my brain is almost totally useless today, especially now that I’ve had lunch.

I’m glad to see that banks in the United States haven’t advanced past the 1970s while I was gone. They actually want to charge me money to use the online bill payment services which cost them less to process than a paper cheque. Good thing I need to switch banks anyways.

I’ve been driving a borrowed Audi TT convertible for the last few days, and I have to ask: why is it even possible to buy a $40,000 car with no CD player? The car is exceptionally fun to drive though, CD player or no.

Peter is in town, so we’ve been catching up on the last two years of our lives in between our InterMezzo design sessions. It’s fun working on this again, and InterMezzo is very rapidly reaching a point where many people can use it. Once I’ve reimplemented data-on-demand and cache purging, it’ll be totally suitable for disconnected laptop operation.

Did some very good hacking, made some cleanups in the kernel code, and cut a branch for the 2.4-only hacking going forward.

We had a very nice dinner with Chip and his family, and as usual there was an unbelievable amount of very yummy food. I waddled out to my car, drove home, and slept well.

Worked most of the day on cleaning up the kernel patches that Peter and I started yesterday. There turned out to be an incredible number of very subtle interactions going on, much more complicated than we thought this would be.

I rented some storage space, moved all of my stuff out of the truck, and returned the truck. They were remarkably reasonable at the rental place, accepting CAD 40/day instead of USD 40/day after just a little prodding.

Ate dinner and came back to work; by the time I went home it was quite late but I think I’m very close to being finished.

On my way into work this morning, the breaking news was the second plane hitting the second World Trade Center tower. Nobody really got much done as the story unfolded, though I did manage to finally clean some patches up after lunch. Totally devastating. I can hardly fathom the New York skyline without the twin towers.

In less depressing news, I looked at a Jetta this morning, but I was very unimpressed. The brakes were very soft and unresponsive, and the gearbox was very loose. He wanted me to commit to the car today, which didn’t give me nearly enough time to check it out properly or drive other vehicles. Oh well.

I’m going home; I can’t focus, and I’m just staring off into space.

I didn’t know anyone in the towers or the Pentagon, but lots of people in the office seem to. I wonder if people will start to realize how big a joke the airline security checkpoints are, and how easy it will probably always be to hijack a plane with a dinner knife. That’s life.

Sometimes people don’t totally suck.

I’d forgotten about the awful aftertaste that US corn-syrup-flavoured beverages leave in your throat. Ick. Ick ick ick.

I had this weird dream that Joe’s mom dropped Joe off at my house for a visit, but before she arrived I was out walking and she almost hit me with her car, so I made a rude gesture before I recognized who it was. She got all pissed off and wouldn’t talk to me anymore. Really strange. I miss Joe and his parents, they’re great people.

I remember one of the reasons that I hate about living in most parts of the US, and it’s the fucking cars. Life without one is almost impossible, but I don’t want to own one of those smelly, expensive things. And if you don’t have one already, getting one is hard, because you can forget about reasonable bus or taxi services. Sigh.

Made a breakthrough at work today; data-on-demand is very close, probably one more day’s hacking.

I give up, I’ll just buy a new car. The used car market sucks wet farts from dead goats right now.

I finally finished Body of Secrets which was largely interesting, if sometimes a little outlandish and sensationalist. If you liked The Puzzle Palace, it’s worth reading; it overlaps chronologically, but it’s mostly new material.

My sisters turned 15 on the 13th, and I even remembered to call them. Throughout my childhood years, I firmly believed that when I was a parent I would totally understand what it’s like to be a kid, and be in touch with what was “cool”. It’s really disappointing to me that by age 20 I have no idea what to get my 15 year old sisters for their birthday. I need to watch more television.

Speaking of which, it’s almost hockey season, which means that I need to get my TV acquisition in gear as soon as I move into my new place. October 3rd starts the season off with Ottawa v. Toronto in the Air Canada Centre. I am giddy, like a schoolgirl.

Data-on-demand in InterMezzo is very close now, after I spun in circles for an hour or so on a really stupid non-bug. Take a memo:

Programs such as ‘cp’ open files with O_TRUNC.

I’m such a moron.

Still haven’t bought a car. Trying to tackle insurance in parallel, having little success. It turns out that New Jersey is one of the most expensive and most regulated states for insurance; so much so that lots of otherwise-nationwide companies don’t even bother to get licensed here. Sigh.

They Might Be Giants managed to release a new album while I wasn’t looking; “Mink Car” made its release last week. I’m not finished listening to it yet. I’m still eagerly awaiting the Canadian release of Matthew Good Band’s “The Audio of Being” on October 30. Almost, but not quite, counting the days.

I’m going to take a look at tsnw’s Makefile woes, then hack on cebolla tonight. I miss Zach. Oh, and Alice. And Mike and Tyla. And Steph. And Deb. And Adam. And George. Sigh.

Had lunch with the extended family in Chinatown, then went for a haircut. Did some light reading, then some somewhat heavier work-related reading.

Went with Bobby to hit a couple hundred tennis balls, so I’ll be nicely sore tomorrow morning, given that I’ve basically not exercised since I left Montreal. A nice, mostly-lazy Sunday.

[root@erasmus]# grep “cmd\.exe” */logs/*.access | wc -l
  74456

This is getting really old.

It’s cheaper to rent a car full time than to pay the insane insurance rates people are quoting. Ready to move back to Canada, or perhaps to the one or two places in the US with decent enough public transportation.

Ok, the fourth and final place that I called had a much more reasonable quote for some reason. I’m so past caring at this point.

Spent a long time tracking an obscure kernel bug with Peter, which yielded a pesky 5-line workaround. I think the bug is in ext3, but we’ll see what Stephen has to say about it.

24 hours and 110,000 hits later, this virus thing is still really old.

We ate really yummy Italian food the lunch. I’ve been here for three weeks, and I don’t think I’ve eaten at the same place twice. So far so good. I wish I had leftovers from lunch, because I’m really hungry.

Merged my data-on-demand changes, so hopefully someone will test them and stuff. I know there’s bound to be at least one recovery-related bug that will eat hours of my weekend, but such is life. Shirish has a big bad 2.2 testing setup to hammer the patches, which I think he’ll start tonight or tomorrow.

Did some cebolla hacking, which mostly amounted to putting my usual build system in place and adding some plugin infrastructure. Soon I’m going to do something with real utility, so the world better watch out.

I bet Alice’s internship report is a real hoot. If I know Alice, then it’s so acidic that it actually drips.

Did a bunch of stuff; started work on KML truncation, which is full of annoying subtle issues. It’s mildly annoying at times… pretty much all that’s left is hard stuff, we did the easy stuff years ago. The hard stuff is a lot of fun, but some days my brain doesn’t really feel up to it.

Started The Hobbit, since I feel obliged to read these books before the movie comes out. I feel like something of a loser for not having read them already. Zach highly recommends Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, so I shall have to pick those up soon. I’ve finally managed to pick up all but one of Donaldson’s 6-book Thomas Covenant series. I’ll reread them at some point, but they’re hard enough to find that I’ve been looking for them whenever I’m in a bookstore.

I’ve nearly bought the car that I tried to buy a week ago, and the myriad unexplained delays continue to pile up. On the one hand that’s just fine, because I don’t really want a car, but on the other hand it makes life in these parts really hard.

Did some cebolla hacking over the weekend, and it’s now finally to a point where it can be configured without the aid of lamb’s blood and a dead chicken. Slowly, slowly, progress is made.

Did some stuff. Went home. Read for a couple of hours. Went to sleep.

Buy some assbarn shit.

Did I mention that I got an expense cheque turnaround of under 24 hours last week? Sometimes small companies have benefits you never expect.

I totally need to buy a rabbit and some bread, so that I can take pictures of it with its bread hat.

I saw a rabbit the other morning while I was reading my book on the front steps. It came up to within about a meter before I turned my head and scared it away. I wish I’d had a camera and some bread.

More KML truncation work, although I got kinda distracted tracking down what I believe to be an unrelated bug. I’m unable to reproduce it, so I moved on for now.

I found out why the car dealer hasn’t been returning my calls: because they sold the car to someone else, despite my having put a deposit down. After a couple rounds of “well what is the deposit for then?” I felt like I was transported through time into an episode of Seinfeld.

I was all set to go buy somewhere else, but Ric negotiated a much better deal on account of all of the trouble, so I’ll go pick one out tomorrow. Pig fuckers.

Met the dealer in the morning, picked out another car, got all of the paperwork. I think that I can just about see the light at the end of this fetid, putrid, repellent tunnel.

It’s also almost October. How?

“Writing interpreted programs is a bit like dashing off rhyming couplets. By comparison, writing compiled programs is more like composing a sonnet.”

– The Economist Technology Quarterly, September 2001

What… The… Hell?

I helped Trevor move (well, ok, I moved Trevor; he’s still on crutches), and his former apartment building was covered in misspelled signs. These are actual examples that I am not making up:

• “PUT ALL GARBAGE IN THE TRASH SHUTE” (a nice, machine-tooled sign)
• “SO IF YOU NEED HELP DON’T KNOCK ON ROGERS DOOR JUST CALL THE PAGER NUMBER ON WEEKEND (ROGER NEEDS TIME OF TO)”
• “IF YOU LEAVE TRASH ON THE FLOOR AND WE CAN ASSOCIATE IT WITH YOUR APARTMENT, A FINE WILL BE ASSED” (my favourite)

I wish I had a camera. I need to replace it soon, maybe after I’m finished paying for all of these extremely annoying one-time charges associated with moving and car buying.

Stopped by the storage place to get my duvet out–it gets cold at night now, it’s officially autumn. Dug out my CDs and a couple of mugs while I was there. Only a week or so until I move into my less temporary home, I hope.

Didn’t do much today, mostly listened to music and read. I decided that I should really read the Tolkien books before the movie comes out. So far so good; The Hobbit was enjoyable.