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Jacob, Joe, and I went shopping tonight. I’m leaving tomorrow, so I’m only shopping for essentials, brussels and nantuckets.

Jacob and I were in the cookie aisle, bags of cookies all over the floor, with my entire arm buried in the shelf, trying to find something worthy of the Pepperidge Farm name and my cookie hole. Every time that I came back with some disgusting shit with a February expiration date or, god forbid, January, I would throw it on the floor and say something that is only appropriate when earshot consists exclusively of the polite company provided by Jacob. I didn’t expect, at nearly midnight, some assistant manager to go strolling by, do a double take, and ask us to purchase the items in our cart and leave the store immediately.

So I guess I won’t be going to Stop ‘n’ Shop anymore, if this is how their management is going to treat my palate’s sensitivity to freshness.

ACTUAL LIST OF ITEMS IN OUR SHOPPING CART ON THE NIGHT OF NOVEMBER THE ELEVENTH

• Two bags of Pepperidge Farm milano cookies, french vanilla
• Four bags of Pepperidge Farm milano cookies, mint
• Two bags of Pepperidge Farm brussels cookies, mint
• Two bags of Pepperidge Farm nantucket cookies, soft baked
• Eight Marie Callender’s pot pies, frozen (assorted varieties)
• Two one-gallon containers of orange juice, calcium-fortified

The robot checkout lines are, in typical fashion, closed. Joe almost left the store rather than be seen by a human in even the vicinity of this shopping cart of nutritional disaster.

I wish Jacob would learn to draw our web comic, because these kinds of grocery trips inevitably provide excellent material.

Update: do not purchase french vanilla milanos, unless your idea of a delicious snack includes tasting it twice.

Also: wouldn’t “Marie Curie’s pot pies” be a much better product?

Jacob, Joe, and I went shopping tonight. I’m leaving tomorrow, so I’m only shopping for essentials, brussels and nantuckets.

Jacob and I were in the cookie aisle, bags of cookies all over the floor, with my entire arm buried in the shelf, trying to find something worthy of the Pepperidge Farm name and my cookie hole. Every time that I came back with some disgusting shit with a February expiration date or, god forbid, January, I would throw it on the floor and say something that is only appropriate when earshot consists exclusively of the polite company provided by Jacob. I didn’t expect, at nearly midnight, some assistant manager to go strolling by, do a double take, and ask us to purchase the items in our cart and leave the store immediately.

So I guess I won’t be going to Stop ‘n’ Shop anymore, if this is how their management is going to treat my palate’s sensitivity to freshness.

ACTUAL LIST OF ITEMS IN OUR SHOPPING CART ON THE NIGHT OF NOVEMBER THE ELEVENTH

• Two bags of Pepperidge Farm milano cookies, french vanilla
• Four bags of Pepperidge Farm milano cookies, mint
• Two bags of Pepperidge Farm brussels cookies, mint
• Two bags of Pepperidge Farm nantucket cookies, soft baked
• Eight Marie Callender’s pot pies, frozen (assorted varieties)
• Two one-gallon containers of orange juice, calcium-fortified

The robot checkout lines are, in typical fashion, closed. Joe almost left the store rather than be seen by a human in even the vicinity of this shopping cart of nutritional disaster.

I wish Jacob would learn to draw our web comic, because these kinds of grocery trips inevitably provide excellent material.

Update: do not purchase french vanilla milanos, unless your idea of a delicious snack includes tasting it twice.

Also: wouldn’t “Marie Curie’s pot pies” be a much better product?

After last night, I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with sub-standard cookies for a while.

Some January milanos arrived with my meal on the way to Denver, so I pushed the call button and, as way of explanation, crushed the small packet of cookies very thoroughly and poured the crumbs on the aisle carpet. I told her to clean up the mess and get me some fresh cookies.

She gave me some March 27th milanos and a $25 travel voucher.

After last night, I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with sub-standard cookies for a while.

Some January milanos arrived with my meal on the way to Denver, so I pushed the call button and, as way of explanation, crushed the small packet of cookies very thoroughly and poured the crumbs on the aisle carpet. I told her to clean up the mess and get me some fresh cookies.

She gave me some March 27th milanos and a $25 travel voucher.

As Jacob mentioned, we got talked into doing the SC2003 bandwidth challenge a few weeks ago. But we didn’t actually get to access the cluster until we got to the show floor, and we didn’t know that we would be running over a 2,000-mile, 60ms link to NCSA. We were supposed to have some ia64 machines, too, but we got the Joan Collins Special on that one.

We averaged about 1 GB/s (gigabyte, note) on that 10 gigabit link, although the graph shows that we have some smoothing to do. It’s unclear whether it’s more the fault of Lustre or the TCP stack just at this moment. Anyways, not too shabby, if we’re measuring against other performances done on two days notice.

As Jacob mentioned, we got talked into doing the SC2003 bandwidth challenge a few weeks ago. But we didn’t actually get to access the cluster until we got to the show floor, and we didn’t know that we would be running over a 2,000-mile, 60ms link to NCSA. We were supposed to have some ia64 machines, too, but we got the Joan Collins Special on that one.

We averaged about 1 GB/s (gigabyte, note) on that 10 gigabit link, although the graph shows that we have some smoothing to do. It’s unclear whether it’s more the fault of Lustre or the TCP stack just at this moment. Anyways, not too shabby, if we’re measuring against other performances done on two days notice.

My dad joined a very small start-up last year, and every time we talk, it sounds like his company is proceeding parallel to mine, only one year behind. His business partner invented some revolutionary restaurant grease machine, with some features for cleanly and safely containing and transferring it (to trucks, I think).

They talk about how they don’t actually manage the grease themselves, and how they don’t want to lock you into a grease contract like everyone else. Likewise, we are hardware-neutral, and run on any Linux system, and any block device.

They have some competition which is somewhat competitive, but really they have the better solution. They, like us, need to translate their design superiority into business success.

Like we did a year ago, they are just now starting to get some good contracts with important reference customers (major fast-food chains vs. Department of Energy national laboratories).

When I mentioned this to Peter, all he said was “It’s a good business, dealing in fat pipes.”

My dad joined a very small start-up last year, and every time we talk, it sounds like his company is proceeding parallel to mine, only one year behind. His business partner invented some revolutionary restaurant grease machine, with some features for cleanly and safely containing and transferring it (to trucks, I think).

They talk about how they don’t actually manage the grease themselves, and how they don’t want to lock you into a grease contract like everyone else. Likewise, we are hardware-neutral, and run on any Linux system, and any block device.

They have some competition which is somewhat competitive, but really they have the better solution. They, like us, need to translate their design superiority into business success.

Like we did a year ago, they are just now starting to get some good contracts with important reference customers (major fast-food chains vs. Department of Energy national laboratories).

When I mentioned this to Peter, all he said was “It’s a good business, dealing in fat pipes.”

Phoenix is, I think, the worst city in which I’ve ever been. From the moment I entered the Barry M. Goldwater Terminal 4, I knew that this was a very bad place. The airport is an enormous concrete behemoth, with very bad signs, when they exist at all. And they have those extremely annoying people in the baggage claim area who check your bags against your claim ticket. Assholes. [yes, I know why they're there. That is not the point. --ed.]

Phoenix is the Florida of the West. I don’t think I need to say a whole lot more.

Seafood does not thrive in the desert, so we went straight from the airport to Legal’s with Abby, Dave, and Taylor. It was delicious.

Well, the weather was nice. It’s a dry freezing desert cold.

Phoenix is, I think, the worst city in which I’ve ever been. From the moment I entered the Barry M. Goldwater Terminal 4, I knew that this was a very bad place. The airport is an enormous concrete behemoth, with very bad signs, when they exist at all. And they have those extremely annoying people in the baggage claim area who check your bags against your claim ticket. Assholes. [yes, I know why they're there. That is not the point. --ed.]

Phoenix is the Florida of the West. I don’t think I need to say a whole lot more.

Seafood does not thrive in the desert, so we went straight from the airport to Legal’s with Abby, Dave, and Taylor. It was delicious.

Well, the weather was nice. It’s a dry freezing desert cold.

I spent a thousand dollars at the iTunes Music Store in just under two hours. Do not install this software.

bash-2.04# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/lustre/big bs=1k seek=2147483645 count=1
dd: advancing past 2199023252480 bytes in output file `/mnt/lustre/big': File too large
bash-2.04# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/lustre/big bs=1k seek=2147483644 count=1
File size limit exceeded (core dumped)
bash-2.04# _

Interesting.

I realized what’s going on. If the truncate fails (top), dd just gets an error. If the write fails (bottom), dd gets an error and the SIGXFSZ signal, for which it has no handler. Duh.

bash-2.04# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/lustre/big bs=1k seek=2147483645 count=1
dd: advancing past 2199023252480 bytes in output file `/mnt/lustre/big': File too large
bash-2.04# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/lustre/big bs=1k seek=2147483644 count=1
File size limit exceeded (core dumped)
bash-2.04# _

Interesting.

I realized what’s going on. If the truncate fails (top), dd just gets an error. If the write fails (bottom), dd gets an error and the SIGXFSZ signal, for which it has no handler. Duh.

I spent months, maybe years of my youth playing StarFlight. As recently as the year 2000 I had something rigged (maybe in dosemu?) to lose another small handful of weeks to this game which, for me, never really gets old.

So imagine my delight when I stumble upon this. My first reaction is that Forth looks to be the most tortuous language ever conceived by humans. No wonder it took them 3.5 years to ship StarFlight.

I’m still shaking from the wonder of my discovery.

I went back to my old apartment tonight, one last time, to get the little dingus which connects my dishwasher to my faucet. My landlord re-finished the floors, it looks really nice.

I can’t imagine why he felt compelled to re-finish the floors.

I spent months, maybe years of my youth playing StarFlight. As recently as the year 2000 I had something rigged (maybe in dosemu?) to lose another small handful of weeks to this game which, for me, never really gets old.

So imagine my delight when I stumble upon this. My first reaction is that Forth looks to be the most tortuous language ever conceived by humans. No wonder it took them 3.5 years to ship StarFlight.

I’m still shaking from the wonder of my discovery.

I went back to my old apartment tonight, one last time, to get the little dingus which connects my dishwasher to my faucet. My landlord re-finished the floors, it looks really nice.

I can’t imagine why he felt compelled to re-finish the floors.