Of course, it is not the May Two Four Weekend, but we did our best to overcome that slight Gregorian obstacle. Video games were played in the morning, and then Madhava met up with George and me during our sushi lunch — n.b. that he did not get the message we left on his cell-phone, which would have been a flat-out miracle, but instead saw us walking by his restaurant on our way to Japan Sushi. Sushi was good, but what came afterwards was even better.

First, we stopped at a local deli to purchase reckless quantities of sausage and sauerkraut, which we then deposited back at the house. We sometimes have trouble getting friends to join us for dinner, but with George as bait it was simply effortless.

And then we three did trek to the Distillery Historic District, for much touring of the new gallery spaces, brewery and shops. It was quite fantastic, and I hope to get back there at some point when it's less crowded. The brewery actually already has its wares available at the LCBO — there was some tension with Brewers' Retail that I don't fully understand — in the form of half-sized bottles of Original Organic; perfect for breakfast.

I only burned the sausages a little — it is well past time that I retire the ceramic blocks, and perhaps the whole grill, because the uneven heat and the flare-ups are really getting out of hand — and they tasted just fine. The $10 worth of gourmet mustard that I couldn't resist buying at St. Lawrence Market didn't hurt either, I have to say.

George and some other people who I thought were my friends have planned a hiking trip in the Pyrenees for the end of June, and I managed to strong-guilt-arm-trip George into a half-hearted invitation. Tyla thinks that my knees aren't up to it, but that has historically not been a major factor in my decision-making.

Many thanks to Beltzner and Asa and Deanna and others who sent their support and helpful scar-prevention suggestions. I'm bewildered, pleasantly, by the number of people who care, even without having to wake up next to my scabby mess every morning. On their collective advice, and based on clear recollections of what I did as a child every time I had inside parts that tried to get outside, I'd been keeping out of the sun and slathering on the Polysporin. (Some of this advice comes from painful experience: massive surgery incisions and the like. I'm touched, and feel perhaps a little bit wasteful, as though I were having Richard Holbrooke explain the I-cut-you-choose rule to me.) This afternoon, though, there was a wee little problem with one of the servers we host at Velocet — to be specific, rsync developed an utterly insatiable appetite for memory, and munched its way through everything else on our poor little box — so I headed in to supervise a reboot. All went well, and Emily — a frequent and always-welcome visitor who was up to her usual dropping-by tricks — had fetched a fresh George Showman from the nearby bus terminal, so I threw caution to the wind and we walked back to the house.

I had thought about doing some grocery shopping and cooking dinner, because we were expecting a fair number of guests for Game 7, but instead I wimped out and we ordered merely-OK Indian from Restaurants on the Go. And then we watched Ottawa lose a heartbreaker of a game, alas. I think it was worse than if they'd lost in overtime; I could barely stand to watch them play out the last 3 minutes of the game, knowing that they really weren't going to make it — when New Jersey feels it's time to field 5 defensemen, there isn't a whole lot that could be done. I think they performed admirably through the playoffs, and that they came back from a 3-1 series deficit shows that they are really not the choke-prone team of olde.

Yesterday, I jogged into a tree and scraped the crap out of my face. That's the short of it, and nothing I tell you about sidestepping a teetering toddler and what not will take away from the essential tree-walking nature. There are not pictures, but I look pretty beat-up. Tyla gets this sad look on her face whenever she looks at me, and I hardly got any sleep last night because I woke up in a start every time the left side of my face touched the pillow.

I also broke my glasses a little bit, but Lenscrafters fixed me right up. I think they were especially helpful because there was still blood trickling out of my cheek. I don't know if they have a policy about that or anything, but I'm left with a strong sense that my jump-the-line, just-need-a-new-screw, thanks-a-ton cause was helped by my very visible injury.

I've been avoiding going outside, because I'm a little bit self-conscious about the whole face thing. If you've seen the clothes I wear, or the way my hair often gets, you'll realize that I'm not an especially vain person. Or, at least, not an especially successfully vain person. This feels different though, and I'm really hoping that it doesn't scar up too badly. In pursuit of that hope, I've rendered myself approximately 30% Polysporin by volume.

George — friend, not landlord — arrives tomorrow, and I expect a weekend of merriment and waste. I hope he's up for some hockey watching, because Ottawa surprised me by winning in New Jersey, so I think I owe them my viewership for game seven — sorry: Game Seven — tomorrow night.

Oh, and I'm just going to give up on the old entries, because they're all stale and uninteresting. Onwards!

Yeah, this is way overdue. I've been keeping jot notes as I go through the day, even if I don't have time to write full entries, and the idea was that I could then easily go and fill them out when I had more time. The good is the enemy of the perfect, or something, because when I finally take the time to flesh them out — and really, a week is way too long — I can't decipher all of my notes. I'm the king of the world.

I do remember some things, though, so I'll do my best.

Today (yes, today) was Matrix night, as well as Mark's birthday. We dined at Tiger Lily, and then took advantage of one of the Paramount's early showings. I thought it was a pretty good movie, really, and I think it'll generally be well-received. I'll probably see it again in the theatre, and I'm quite looking forward to the 3rd in the series. Hard to ask more of a middle movie, really.

Kev asked why our apartment listing indicated condo fees, and I have a good answer: it's a condo. We're just renting it because the landlord got tired of trying to sell it, around this time last year. Mom asked an even better question: where the hell is the "den" they talk about? It's sure not in this unit; maybe they have it mixed up with the unit upstairs, which is somewhat roomier?

I'm really starting to get into this whole "fire-fighting" thing. Robert is all over the recovery stuff now, and I'm sure he'll do a much better job with it than I did. My energies are now focused on Total Customer Satisfaction: helping our clients put Lustre through all sorts of sick, physicist-and-biologist-derived paces, and then helping wipe up when Lustre just can't quite contain its excitement. Things are going pretty well, but there's the occasional, well, occasion in which things don't go according to anyone's plan. Even the sort of plan one might plausibly construct retroactively in order to rationalize the results one found lodged in the side of one's head after a particularily energetic software explosion.

Those occasions are sort of fun, though, because I get to get on the phone with Phil and Zach and read through megs and megs of lock-manager skid marks, until they figure out what the problem is and I run off to do my part: add bug graffiti. I feel like one of the nameless coroner's-office folk on CSI, just taking the bodies away when I'm told it's over. Fun stuff.

Season finale of Angel tonight, and game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals, and the all-over-but-the-forum-screaming penultimate episode of Buffy. And the new Matrix movie opens this week, and I'm actually interested in the West Wing again, and Tyla's enjoying her job, and the cat is being all friendly. And I got my hair cut, and George is coming to visit, and I've been cooking up a storm.

I guess it has to all come tumbling down now.

The Titan game was over pretty early last night, all things considered, but I still slept in a little bit. After I got up, I poked a little at some bugs at work, and read a fair bit of code, but nothing really special.

I spent no small part of the evening preparing dinner for Tyla — tequila-lime-jalapeño salmon, steamed artichokes, walnut-rice pilaf — who was mildly exhausted when she returned home, but appropriately appreciative. I also managed to get some Planetside in, and watch a spot of CSI. Not bad, for a Monday.

Not very exciting, but I'm perfectly OK with that.

Hey, look, Mother's Day. I called and chatted with Mom this morning, which was nice — it always is, which makes me wonder why I don't do it more often. I bet she wonders, too. =(

There comes a time in every man's life when he must make a stand, when he must do what is right instead of what is convenient, when commitment and maturity must trump the shallow temptations of youth. Tonight is not that time: a simple call from The Hoye — whose blarg? is really very entertaining; you should make a point of reading through it from time to time, such that my own meagre writings may improve in your eye through simple association — led to some late-night Titan with Geoff and Mehmet. I lost, but it was fun to get the old box out again and breed some puges. When George is here the weekend after next, I think we may have to revisit our glory days.

I bet Mom thought she raised me better than that. (By which I mean "raised to win Titan", not "raised to go to bed a respectable hour", obviously.)

Tyla's working again today — what sort of barbarian goes to a library on a Saturday? — so I'm rushing around fetching food-components and tidying for tomorrow's open house — don't look into that URL string with your good eye, pal — and fending off the depredations of the New Conglomerate dogs.

I am fully prepared to grill and drink and watch hockey until I can no longer stand, so you've all been warned.

Tyla's doing her very best Sheena Easton impression today, so I made it into work at quite a respectable hour. We were running a large test shot on my new cluster-of-record, so Phil and I were going to supervise a little and make sure that any Lustre problems were filed in the correct bin and tagged appropriately. I was working solo for a bit, because our newest contractor decided to take our CEO out and get him drunk. And keep him drunk for quite a few hours. Everything went pretty much fine, in that we largely hit problems about which we were already quite aware, and for which we are hard at work on solutions.

Because I got to work early, I felt it quite reasonable to head home around seven, and Tyla returned shortly afterwards — it's all about timing, this DINK lifestyle. She was in a pretty good mood, until she discovered that Chester had left us a Special Digestive Present on our bed. Some people came by to see the place today in our absence, but the promised four hour notice turned into, on the average, a mere ninety minutes of forewarning, so I figure they rolled those dice themselves. It's quite possible that Chester had his little accident after they'd come and gone, but I'm pretending not, because it amuses me in a childish way.

Emily nearly revealed our secret tryst to my wife, by showing up to ask me on a date around 8pm, and then compounding her error by announcing that she was doing so. I think Tyla was still off in cranky-land, though, as she didn't seem to notice. Em wanted to see X2, and I'd had so much fun the first time that I agreed without hestitation — well, without any more hestitation than was required to wolf down the pizza that we'd ordered for dinner. It was fun again, for the record.

I made a little bit of progress today on my top-priority bug, and a larger bit of progress on the debuggability of the test cluster in question; the latter is much more interesting to me, I must admit. Phil doesn't think I should really be trying to become an IA64 assembly expert, and I'm sure he's right, but it still feels a bit frustrating to not be able to analyze these problems to the depth I enjoy on IA32. Maybe I'll read the IA64 kernel book that Chris Beard gave me years ago, and see if I can become a little less helpless.

While I was on the way back to the office after my haircut, I got Tyla a book to commemorate the start of her new career. She seems pretty pleased with it, though she was too tired by the time I got home to do much more than read the back. It's got a fair amount of programmer-oriented content, but Tyla should be able to hold her own there; back in the mists of high-school, she wrote one of the best few-page overviews of OO Programming I've yet encountered. She's also really digging various Gibson books, which I also find sort of cool. She wasn't a huge fan of Sawyer, but Gibson is, IMO, a better author by a fair margin.

...

Huh. How about those wacky Wild, eh? I suspect that viewership of the western conference finals will be down, because neither Anaheim nor Minnesota are big hockey names, which is sort of a shame: I think both teams are going to play great hockey, and I'm quite looking forward to it. I think an OTT/MIN final would be pretty exciting, given the speed of both teams, but OTT/ANA wouldn't bother me too much either. Just as long as New Jersey doesn't do anything silly like with their conference final.

Buffy last night was pretty good. I find myself again interested in the remaining (two!) episodes, and not just for compleatist or historical reasons — they might well be interesting to watch. Who knew!

I think Matthew is missing the point that I was trying to make the other day. There is nothing materially "plain" about structured XML, for example, except that it can be usefully viewed and manipulated with simple, widely-available tools, such as the human eye. I never suggested plain text, precisely because there are important structural and semantic characteristics that we want to preserve during however many conversions from presentation-format-du-jour to primary-source-storage and back. (We can still convert from EBCDIC to ASCII today, and there's no good reason that you wouldn't be able to convert your XML-in-ASCII storage to XML-in-XASCII2 at any point. I submit that this is a much less invasive change than from mySQL to Postgres or OpenOracle, and will break fewer tools that operate upon the content. But to equate modern-day ASCII — even modern-day XML — to EBCDIC, when the latter was never designed for any sort of interoperation and was supported only out of direst necessity by anyone outside of IBM, is to be either deeply misguided or rather disingenous.)

And why is it easier to do all those maintenance tasks with an opaque storage format and its one set of manipulation tools than with a format like XML? It seems to me that whatever approach you use with a SQL-guarded backing store will work pretty isomorphically with another storage format, with the possible exception of searching. But then I think that to rely on the full-text search capabilities of a database is to abandon much of the structure-value that people so painstakingly add to their entries. How would you search for all the times that you cited Mark Pilgrim, with a database that sees your every entry as just a sequence of bytes? How would you extract an index of such things? Maybe that's not a case you care about, but I can imagine many such indices and reports that would be of value or interest, and having to regex my way through byte-blobs seems like a sign that my storage and generation system has failed me. (And would you want someone searching your web log for "archives" to pick up all the times you linked into an URL with that string in it?)

(I don't really care about trackbacks or pingbacks or comments, though I'm interested to see why Matthew thinks — as his final comment implies to me — that they are an evil to be actively avoided.)

...

And just now I got back from a relatively awful driving lesson. I was doing pretty well at the start, and through the various emergency maneuvers, and even during the highway driving, but then a pressure-change headache started to set in, and then it all went to hell. Clumsy clutchwork, some oversteer, a few "slightly hot" corners. Bah. I want a mulligan. Ever since the instructor switch, I really haven't been very much on my game. Not sure what it is, really; could be the car, which is — and I'd not thought this possible at the time — even less suited to my size than was the Mustang; could be the instructor, with whom I don't really get along very well, and who seems to have only two pedagogical modes: Lecturing In His Outside Voice, and Silent — unless something unpleasant happens, at which point he will say something typically unhelpful, like "careful". Could be that I've just seriously regressed as a human, though I was doing fine on Martha's car the other weekend. Bah. I guess I should trick Alasdair — I can't drug him, because then he wouldn't be a legal passenger-seat driver-type, note — and get some more practice in.

The headache isn't improving my mood any, at all.

Made it to the office today, after signing the lease on the new place. I need to get George-the-friend in touch with George-the-architect-landlord for some internship idea exchange; I'll try to remember to get that rolling tonight at some point.

I used to bitch a lot about how hard it was to test recovery, but I was wrong. Testing recovery is a walk in the park with a martini and a fine cigar compared to testing anything under IA-64. I would kill for a sharp stick and a good, strong piece of twine. If this is payback for complaining about recovery testing, I can't wait to see which dripping maw of hell I will end up in next. (Actually, it's not all that bad. It's just that I also ran afoul of productivity killing bugs in gnome-terminal, had to wait out a cluster upgrade, got torqued in a proctological manner by sourceforge — save us, Jacob-wan! — and have a headache. Tomorrow has to be better, right? Right.)

I think I've been having blackouts lately, during which I run marathons, or climb mountains, or maybe just move large stones from one pile to another. I'm having trouble coming up with any other satisfying explanation for the fact that I slept thirteen hours last night, and was still tired when I woke up this morning. Perhaps it's just the crushing burden of keeping Tyla's computer hardware habit sated, though.

mpt writes about data preservation in his ultimate weblogging system, but I think he's wrong. On the off chance that such a bald assertion is not sufficently compelling, prima facie, I shall elaborate.

Using a database system like MySQL simply to get "presentation-independent storage" is sort of like swatting a fly with a Buick, only without the satisfaction that comes from actually killing the fly. If you want some future-proof structured form for storing metadata-heavy but interrelation-light content, I think you're probably going to end up using some XML Schema and then converting to display-format-of-your-choice. He rails against "static files" as a form of latter-day 8-track, but MySQL's data storage is just a bunch of static files on a disk somewhere. And it's in a format which is not designed for interoperability — or even simple backup — and which has as baggage many storage design decisions that are very useful for the General Purpose Database Problem — flexible and ad-hoc query support; fine-grained authentication and authorization; high-performance parallel query capabilities, with indices and stored procedures and whatnot; sophisticated locking for parallel update/update and update/query operations — but not necessary for the Stable Web Log Content Storage Problem. And when your format has the vast majority of its design effort focused on problems that aren't problems for you, I think you've chosen the wrong storage format. (Additionally, very few browsers can usefully display MySQL database files as of this writing.) A future proof format is one which places the fewest burdens — think not only of the "obvious" software and hardware burdens here: what if the MySQL format is found to violate an Oracle patent, heaven forfend? — on future readers, which is one reason that archivists will only humour you for so long when you talk about "long-term digital storage" before they clap you upside the head and tell you to print the content on acid-free paper and move on.

Any second-year computer science student can write something that will produce Format Of Choice from valid XML, and a good 20% of them could probably do it without weeping hot tears if you told them they couldn't use the language of their choice with its built-in XML parser goodies. Could they do that with the MySQL data format? Maybe if they had some good documentation on the format. So now you might want to ask yourself: "what format would I use to store the documentation?"

I tried to find some web-people who'd run into the same problem that my motherboard-and-such switch had caused me, but no dice. I found some that were close, but their descriptions of solutions made it clear that they were still able to boot into Safe Mode, and I was patently not. A fresh install of Windows XP didn't have this problem; I tested on a spare partition that, apparently, I was keeping around for just this occasion, and then starting backing up all of Tyla's RIAA/MPAA-bait.

In the midst of this, Tyla and Madhava and Hilary went climbing — my back is still a little sore; no, really — and by the time I met them for yet more sushi, I'd mostly got everything working again.

It's pretty sweet. Now I'm thinking about that LCD we saw, or maybe a liquid cooling kit. Not thinking too hard, though. Don't worry, honey.

The landlord was showing the place this afternoon, so Tyla and I went out for a nice brunch. We were sitting on the patio — where it was a tiny bit chilly, I now admit — when Tyla informed me that computer was being a little slow when she was making movies. I swallowed my disgust at the very prospect and let her drag me bodily down to College, where I was forced at gunpoint to purchase, oh, a new motherboard, CPU, and video card. Oh, and some new memory, just for completeness' sake. It was like chewing my own eyes out, but I managed, for Tyla's sake.

Now, while the filthy hordes gather in the living room for 8 hours of Buffy and Angel — some people were in Amsterdam for 4 months, and now have some catching up to do — I'm going to perform the requisite hardware transplants and then scoot over to Alasdair's for a spot of hockey-watching.

...

That didn't go as well as it could have. Going to need some software surgery tomorrow, I think. And another beer.

I took a nap yesterday, after ingesting some Vitamin I, and when I woke up, my headache was gone. Gone with it was the entire day, though. Ah well. It's not like I was going to be productive with that throbbing cranial thing going on anyway.

Today, I walked to work and was doing pretty well — ignore, for the moment, the brief network outage caused by a fat-foot error in the server room — until I developed a serious back-pain issue. Neither horrific music nor obese, megalomaniacal rodents could cure me, so I stole some Advil from Fixy and lay down on the floor. Doing much better now.

I did finally get Movable Type installed, and it wasn't that hard. I guess I should set up web logs for various kin and folk soon. I'll wait until they ask again, I think.

Tonight: X2 and a tour of Tyla's library. Alasdair's in a cranky mood — he says it's not my fault, but really, who else can make someone that cranky? — and doesn't want to take the back roads up to the East Nowhere branch of the Toronto Public Library. In spite of that, I think we're going to have a good time, even if we keep our pants on.

Jacob, my dearest love, I didn't mean to abandon you. Just had some laptop issues, got a little behind the curve; you know how it is.

About once a year, I'm treated to a great conversation with Miriam (and other people who happen to be standing nearby) about the Nature Of Science. I think she'd probably enjoy this discussion, but to be honest I never remember very much of the conclusions Miriam causes to lodge in my midbrain each time. That's part of what makes it fun, I guess.

It was inevitable, I suppose. After a few days of fantastically-beautiful weather, we got a low-pressure invasion that has left my head feeling like a Bunol tomato. The agony.