Vacation – San Francisco, CA

Leave a reply

Quick summary by cleaning out bags, more details to come after we unwind more:

  • ATM receipt for travel cash
  • printed ticket-less round-trip flight itinerary for St. Louis, MO to Oakland, CA
  • receipt for the St. Louis airport’s CPK for a chicken Caesar sandwich shared during the plane flight, not expecting much food on the plane – California connection was a coincidence
  • plane flight Snack Pack box containing empty wrappers for honey roasted peanuts, Oreos, Ritz crackers with cheese, JELL-O fruit snacks – more food than anticipated
  • paper containing phone numbers for Lori (Kelly’s co-worker) and Jeff (Lori’s husband), our gracious hosts for the extended weekend
  • receipt for 1 hot fudge Sunday shared at the Ghirardelli Square
  • receipt and packaging for an additional rechargeable battery for our digital camera, didn’t have enough juice for the random pictures I wanted to take
  • ticket for Coit Tower, great views, great pictures (coming later)
  • receipt for Blazing Saddles bike rental from Friday afternoon in San Francisco – got tired of walking, had to grab a bike, had to take advantage of the beautiful weather and plentiful bike friendly areas
  • map for Blazing Saddles locations and formal bike paths around the Bay Area
  • ticket stub from the Alcatraz audio tour – enhances the experience of wandering around the prison
  • napkins from Ben & Jerry’s, where I had an Strawberry Cheesecake/Vanilla Ice Cream sundae crammed with a core of strawberries – fuel for the walk from Pier 39 to BART
  • 25 cents left on a BART pass, used between the Embarcadero Station to the Lafayette stop, near Walnut Creek where Lori and Jeff live
  • BART Destinations guide
  • boarding pass stubs from St. Louis, Phoenix, Oakland, Kansas City
Update:

Here are some photos from our weekend. I’ve not done any optimize/crop/color adjustment yet, limiting the upload to this raw subset due to the storage limit, but here ya go for now.

There are so many foggy Golden Gate bridge shots because riding that by bike was was so much fun.

After we go through more of the pictures we’ll get more up to share.

Random Redesign

Leave a reply

I updated the CSS yesterday to get the current incarnation of the design in place. I had attempted something similar a while ago but the layout was too inconsistent across browsers; this one seems to play nicer.

No real reason for the change other the the desire for something different.

And it’s fun.

My Invisible Car

Leave a reply

Often when I leave for work within a certain half-hour of the morning, the sun shines at a perfect angle so my drive up the hill out of our neighborhood renders me blind from the bright sun diffracting through dew and frost on the windshield. So it was easy to rationalize waiting an extra half-hour at home. In the interest of safety. Not for the extra web browsing minutes.

I left my house with the sun safely higher in the sky and the added benefit of avoiding rush hour, and I began my drive through Suburbia to my office.

Three times this morning during the 10 minute drive I had to take evasive maneuvers to avoid getting plowed into by cars larger than mine. The last was the most fun:

I was driving through an intersection were I don’t have to stop, and a pickup on the cross street approaching on my right got in his right (yield) lane to join my one lane. At this point, I had no trust in any driver and based on both our speeds was expecting him to simply ignore and sideswipe me. I checked the lane to my left for oncoming traffic and began sliding left to avoid getting hit. He then must have changed his mind, because instead of making his right into my lane (with me in the way), he turned on his left signal, looked to his right (not at me approaching now more cautiously from his left), and entered my lane as I was about 3 feet from him. He likely would’ve t-boned my passenger side straight on if laying on my horn didn’t get him to wake up and look directly at me. He was still slow to react as even direct eye contact didn’t get him to stop as soon as I would’ve hoped, and had I not done some major swerving and acceleration (zoom zoom) I’d be dealing with the insurance company and a body shop now.

My car is silver. Maybe I need to get it painted traffic cone orange.

Lazy Home Ownership

Leave a reply

We have several plans to update our home, and are unfortunately slow to move on all of them. This is exacerbated by our ability to add new things to do to The List without actually working on things already there.

A few weekends ago while I was procrastinating a project for work, we found ourselves at Home Depot, checking out exterior doors since replacing the front door is on The List. Also among the things we’d talked about in the past (but not on The List) was our deteriorating side entrance, so when we passed the storm doors we decided it would be an easy fix to update the side of the house. Then bought a new storm door.

As soon as we got home I unpacked it and started gathering tools for the replacement, determined to actually move forward on a project. All the pieces were accounted for and I had the necessary tools. Removing the old broken door was a simple job thanks to a power screwdriver. Based on the way everything else often goes, it shouldn’t have been too surprising, but the simple task had complications: the wood I had just exposed was is in dire need of replacement. I pried off one length of the brick trim to get a better measurement, and headed back to Home Depot to find replacements. Turns out the previous installers cut their own brick trim to size, and since I lack a table saw (it wasn’t on the list of recommended tools), and the employees there didn’t have a helpful solution, I left to find a better one.

But then I got distracted with other things, so no home project got attention. For weeks. But yesterday Kelly and I went downtown and joined the housing tour of the loft spaces available. While it made me want to change residency to enjoy the downtown living, it also reminded me that even if that was an option, finishing existing home plans, especially ones left incomplete, would first have to be addressed.

Today I bought some new wood, borrowed a circular saw from Dad, and carved my own damn brick trim. Worked our rather nicely, actually, although I can clearly see my own work flaws. Regardless, it was cut to fit, installed, and Kelly painted. The door installation is still not complete, but we’ve gone as far as possible today since paint must dry first. After another coat tomorrow, I can install the door Tuesday.

I’ve measured countless times in OCD fashion, to make sure I’m not going to have to tear my work down and start over, but I still get the feeling that something else is left that won’t work, requiring additional work. Then I get to feeling that I don’t want to have to bother with any of this, and just want someone else to take care of it for me; I want them to have to deal with the surprises.

Sometimes I don’t want a house anymore.

2004 MS-150 Day 1

Leave a reply

Hans, our fast and fearless team leader, led Kurt and me to complete today’s century ride. This morning we left the start line around 8:30am, and returned around 5:30pm. I’ll have to check the map to find all the rest stops and factor in how long we spent at each one to find our actual ride time and average speed. My bike computer is apparently not set correctly, and isn’t reporting accurate numbers. The 100 miles left us pretty beat, but we’re not stopping from finding sushi for dinner, though we’ll likely be crashing early this evening for a full nights sleep to prepare for tomorrow ride.

Tomorrow the plan is still to ride another century; today’s seemed easier than I expected, but I’m still tired and sore. I’ll likely take the century route no matter what, and just ride until I collapse. Picking up my lifeless corpse is what the support vans are for.

In the meantime, you can check out how my fundraising went, and you can still contribute if you’ve not.

National MS Society’s 2004 MS-150 Bike Tour

Leave a reply

I’ll once again be participating in the National MS Society’s annual MS Bike Tour to help raise funds for research and local programs. The two day event is held September 11th and 12th in Columbia, Missouri.

Last year, with admittedly some difficulty, I completed 150 miles as 100 miles the first day and 50 the second. This year, I’m challenging myself to pedal the 100 mile loop each day to accomplish a double century. It’ll be hard, but it’s a small thing for me to do for people who face the devastating and relentless effects of MS every day.

Please consider sponsoring me and supporting the MS Society, or you can just view my progress.

Thank you!

SBC’s automated apologies.

Leave a reply

Our DSL is out right now (11am, Saturday morning), so I’m the only one that can currently see this while the server is unavailable to the world. SBC’s automated support informed me the problem is apparently affecting parts of St. Louis and Texas, so I don’t feel like I’m being singled out. As long as it’s back up by 2pm as they expect.

I did feel a little awkward on the phone though. SBC has implemented a voice recognition menu system, so I was asked to speak my way through the menu system instead of being prompted for button responses. It’s very conversation-like, and the friendly woman’s voice sounds generally concerned with helping me. First time through, even with my typically mumbled speech, I was understood and got the answers I needed. I was amused and content with the support.

Having accomplished that, I dialed again.

If you garble a word, the she apologizes, “Hmm, I didn’t get that,” or “Sorry, I didn’t understand that.” Her varied responses help keep it less mechanical. If you don’t say anything, the she also apologizes, since it’s of course her fault, and asks the options again. If you continue to not speak, she presents the choices by number for you to press. So, if you are incapable of communicating by voice, you can still use the system.

Unfortunately, if instead she continues to misunderstand your voice responses, she finally offers “I’m sorry, I’m still having trouble understanding you, please call again later.” Click, dial tone. Now that’s the customer support I’m used to.

I like the automated customer support better than the people kind.

I called around 2:30 when I still had no DSL connectivity, and the status update indicated that aside from some users in Texas, “all other network services are functioning normally.” My response of “Bullshit” went unanswered. So I stuck around to talk to a person.

The person I was forwarded two immediately shared that network services had been restored in my area, and I shouldn’t have anymore problems. I wish. Yes, I power cycled my DSL modem. In sharing my personal information with the service rep, I also offered how I get time outs when pinging the SBC gateway, and some details of our static IP package setup, in hopes of either skipping some of his basic consumer troubleshooting scripts or getting passed to someone who knew better. No such luck. In response to my sharing of the network details, I got a brief lecture on how SBC doesn’t support routers or wireless configurations. Then he tried to sell me their home networking wireless package. I held my tongue.

Then I spent an hour humoring him while he guided me through plugging my machine directly into the DSL modem and configuring it to access the network. First we set up the machine for a login-based PPPOE connection with a user and password combo he provided. On hold while he “researched” the error. Then (after he realized we’re not using a user account authenticated connection) we set up the computer’s NIC with the IP, Gateway, and DNS addresses to connect with one of our package’s static IPs. All identical to the router (surprise). That of course also didn’t work. On hold for more “research.” I’m glad I’ve got books to read. I was informed that he was able to ping my DSL modem from where he is. I thought that was nice. I still couldn’t ping them. He was so convinced it was my problem, he started into his NIC hardware device failure script. I stopped him short, clarified how it was still functioning on the local network, and read my book some more.

Finally, he shares that the network status has just been updated, and includes problems in my area. I’m not surprised. He apologized for a while and I hung up after getting a case number in the hopes that I could skip this nonsense when I have to call later this evening.

I had just really wanted to let them know that all other network services were NOT functioning normally. I need a way to do that faster.

Service was finally restored around 1am Monday morning.

Downtime is my Favorite Time

4 Replies

That’s a lie.

This site and a few others run off an abused server that sits in a closet at home, and the machine typically behaves so I don’t have to interfere with it’s service. Unfortunately, it occasionally chooses to defy me. Tonight was one of those nights. For no reason that I can discern, the service running SnipSnap was killed, leaving the sites inaccessible.

If it was my site alone, I’d spend a few minutes on it, and if I solved it, fine. If not, bedtime. I have little patience for server configuration, and frustration quickly kicks in. As a developer, it’s slowed me down more than I’d prefer, and is one of those things I have to fight through. Because I’m not hosting my site alone, going to bed wasn’t really an option. At least, it wasn’t a considerate one.

08:31:08.226 DEBUG –
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.snipsnap.snip.storage.FileSnipStorage.parseSnip(FileSnipStorage.java:296)
at org.snipsnap.snip.storage.FileSnipStorage.traverseFileStore(FileSnipStorage.java:330)
at org.snipsnap.snip.storage.FileSnipStorage.traverseFileStore(FileSnipStorage.java:339)
at org.snipsnap.snip.storage.FileSnipStorage.storageAll(FileSnipStorage.java:323)
at org.snipsnap.snip.storage.MemorySnipStorage.<init>(MemorySnipStorage.java:87)
at org.snipsnap.snip.SnipSpaceImpl.<init>(SnipSpaceImpl.java:92)

Thankfully Hans was online and after I shared the logged exception I didn’t recognize, he pointed me to a solution.

For those that care, for some reason the SnipSnap process was killed, and it didn’t clean it self up properly. A single snip from each of our sites (possibly the last content accessed, maybe it’s just random) was saved with no content. 0KB. When it tried to auto-start itself, it found empty content, and not knowing how to handle it, shut back down.

The content stored has it’s own backup, and it was fortunately intact. Restoring the snip or properties content from the backup solves the problem.

So thanks to Hans for pointing me in the right direction, allowing me to get some sleep tonight, instead of spending all night jacking with the server. I’m going to bed.