phik

Happy New Year. 2003 was a blur. Another irreplaceable chunk of a finite and rapidly passing lifetime.

I have made some resolutions, in no particular order.

• I will try to average fewer than 80 hours of work per week.
• I will try to find a wife, or some reasonable approximation thereof.
• I will try to stay in better shape; two years ago I was in great shape, and it’s gone steadily downhill since then.
• I will take a vacation.
• I will see more of my grandparents, who will not be around forever.

There are a few more.

My monkey-strong bowels are girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo … dung.

It’s like the words I use don’t have any meaning at all. Typically, jwz has already been over this.

There’s a huge snow storm in Chicago today, so I will in fact be spending more waking hours here than either of my origin or destination cities. Four flights to Boston are cancelled.

Jacob has been in this situation a few times in the last year, and by this point in the process I think he has basically no chance of getting where he wants to be.

Normally I forget about priority standby as one of those unused perks that they just use to pad the list. Boy. United is truly rewarding my loyalty today by getting me home.

(Aside: I think the “guaranteed reservation, even on sold-out flights” thing is pretty cool, but then again, I’m not the one getting bumped.)

Zach reminded me of a funny story about me being angry.

There’s one extremely common operation, ls, which performs very badly in Lustre 1.0.x. Many people might not notice on their little systems if they don’t do it at the wrong time, but it has led some of our customers with enormous file systems to say things like “I’m not sure how much data I wrote, but I scheduled an ls -l batch job to run overnight.”

Anyways, we were giving some terribly impressive demo at SuperComputing in which we not only wrote 1.5 terabytes of data over a 2,000-mile link, but we also had all of our remote CFS employees mount the file system and exchange some data in a shared file. Neat, right?

Of course, not wanting to spoil the demo. I asked for some restraint. The conversation went about like:

18:31:40 <phik> ok, please don’t do anything stupid, like ls
18:31:51 <eeb> ls is taking a long time
18:32:00 <phik> eeb: honestly, what the hell?

I am not making this up:

<phik> I’m going shopping; name something delicious
<blizzard> chocolate
<phik> no, like a healthy, nutritious meal
<blizzard> french bread and brie

I learned today that approximately two tonnes of furniture, 25 cubic metres, will soon be loaded on a boat headed for Boston. When expressed in those terms, it seems like a lot.

There may be some reason to believe that the first stop on the Long Island Express is in fact Sousington, and not Souston as previously reported. We regret any inconvenience.

I miss my friend Jacob, and our zany antics. I wish he would visit me from time to time.

I totally, completely lost my voice over night. It was pretty bad last night, after being the centre of talking attention for almost eight hours, but now it’s pretty much totally gone. I think Chris is paranoid that I’m going to make his baby sick.

I had an amazing steak tartare as one component of my nutritious lunch, and then we slipped into an electronics store before I had to leave for the airport. I purchased the Tycho-approved Warioware, and let me tell you, kids, it does not disappoint.

When you think about making a game in which you have three seconds to figure out what you’re supposed to do, and then in many cases do it, you start to appreciate what Nintendo has wrought. It may just seem like a sort of nirvana for the attention deficit crowd, but in fact it is pure genius. Among my favourites are Deploy the Airbag, Catch the Toast, and Hammer the Nail.

And let’s not forget Dr. Mario. Did I ever tell you the story about how I competed in the Nintendo world championships of Dr. Mario in Seattle? Some would say that I am quite good.

I left my bathroom kit in California, so I made a stop at the Fred Meyer today to replenish the essentials.

Try to imagine the look on my face when I get to the deodorant aisle and see the newest grotesque creation which the Gillette/Mennen mega-empire has foisted upon us. I see deodorant in the distance; it looks a lot like the deodorant I normally use! But these have some sort of power dots floating in the gel, in three vomitous fragrances.

The practical upshot is that when I paste the already-questionable gel under my arms, these blue fucking flavour crystals come along for the ride. What happens to these? Do they fall off into my shirt, and collect along my waistline? Are they supposed to kick in for that extra burst when I really need it, such as during a really agitating meeting? Which marketing committee decided that it was OK to have opaque blue anything floating in my deodorant?

I spent my three days at home, and now it’s time to visit my family. No, nobody died, but I did skip out on both Thanksgiving and Christmas this year — which was a valuable precedent to set, in terms of the self-determination of my schedule — so my family is getting antsy.

On my way into Chicago, we arrive a little bit early, and the gate isn’t available yet. For those not familiar with O’Hare, if you do anything out of the ordinary during rush hour that could affect the schedule — arrive before your gate is ready, arrive late, push back late, not be ready when you’re cleared to take off, etc. — then air traffic control will send you to the penalty box until you sort out the holdup.

As for leaving the penalty box, well, that depends on when they can fit you in; after all, you’re the troublemaker. During rush hour, especially with weather involved, it’s hard to work your way back into the flow.

Long story short, we sat in the box for 45 minutes, and because I’m taking a pesky regional jet for my next leg, I have to hoof it a mile to the F terminal.

When I get there the door is already closed, and all of the seats have been given away to standby passengers — except one (phew). The woman at the desk is radioing downstairs to see if they’ve already pushed back when a second passenger arrives. I don’t encounter very many other 100K fliers, so that’s twice in one month that the priority waitlisting has made itself useful.

I didn’t wait around to see what happened to the other guy, but I bet it involved the O’Hare Doubletree, because I’m sure that was the last flight of the day to Akron. Maybe he got on a flight to Cleveland.

I don’t really want to be President, but I do really want to do all sorts of things that aren’t “Presidential”, like speak my mind regardless of whose feelings get hurt, and have reasonable opinions.

Who knows what the political landscape will be in 2016, when I’m old enough to be elected, but I bet it won’t be so different that there’s open debate or any real hope of a multi-party system.

With that in mind, I’m wondering if I could make some sort of deal with Fox: if I’m elected, I’ll let them produce a four-year reality series called “Mr. President” or whatever. Viewers can see my zany antics and sober decisions in a highly-rated weekly program. Maybe they can mix in some American Idol by letting people make some relatively trivial decisions, like choosing which tie I’ll wear to dinner with the Canadian Prime Minister.

In exchange, Fox has to get me elected, probably by primarily catering to the uneducated majority and the people who would normally never vote, but really want to see a show like that.

Everybody wins! Especially our children, because holy fuck, do I want my government to spend a lot less money. That is my one and only campaign pledge that does not involve zany antics.

Go go priority waitlisting. Another day of fun travel weather, and another dodged opportunity to spend the night at O’Hare.

We got into Logan so late that ATC told us that we could land on runway 33 left “if you can find it; I’ll turn on the lights.”

BBQ with Joe, Chris, and Shona tonight. I can’t remember the last time I had BBQ.

Joe is totally hooked on Warioware. I think his favourite game is the one where you make Wario dodge the dolphin which comes at you on a skateboard.

We watched an episode of Bill Maher’s new show on HBO, which is hilarious. Maybe I’ll start getting HBO again.

I also just learned that Alton writes from time to time, and should not be missed.