Fri, 21 Oct 2005
What I Did on My Vacation
The report of my activities in Florida
The family and I have returned from our trip to Florida. Apparently, we timed it about right; Hurricane Wilma blew through a week later.
Fortunately for us, we were able to experience the wonders of Silver Springs; Kennedy Space Center; and Walt Disney’s Epcot, Magic Kingdom, and Disney-MGM Studios parks while the weather, hot and muggy though it was, cooperated.
On a slightly less commercial side trip, we also visited Belleair Beach in Clearwater, on the Gulf Coast. The kids enjoyed playing on the white sand beach, building sand castles and generally getting dirty and sunburned.
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entryTue, 13 Sep 2005
Flashback
Something I wrote in an email on February 2, 2005, while I was working in San Francisco:
I don’t think I mentioned it… On Monday night as I was walking down Hyde Street on my way to pay for my February parking, I noticed a woman on her hands and knees peering into the gutter alongside a parked car. She appeared to be looking for something she had dropped.
Like the good Boy Scout I am, I not only had my multi-tool with flashlight on my belt, but I asked her if she needed some light to help her find what she’d lost.
She mumbled something affirmative-sounding; so as I fumbled to pull the light out of its pouch, she continued looking.
About then, a second woman walked up - seemingly acquainted with the first woman. She immediately marveled that I had a flashlight (and was willing to help).
Then she asked me if I was “just hanging out or what?” Innocuous enough words… But her look and inflection said something completely different.
This is why I avoid interacting with my neighbors 
“No,” I said, “I’m running an errand.”
“Oh. Okay” she said, as though I’d just told her her pet Gerbil had been hit by a car.
In the end, we never did find whatever item had dropped. I dread to think of what it may have really been…
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entryMon, 12 Sep 2005
Flashback
Something I wrote in an email on December 20, 2004, while I was working in San Francisco:
Up here on the 14th floor, it can be hard to make out details at street level.
But sometimes I look out the window on one side of my cube and watch the traffic and pedestrians below on Fremont. Lunch hour is the most fun, because the sun is closest to being overhead and fully illuminates the street.
I just lean forward over my desk a little, and I can see the plaza between First and Fremont, where Subway, Baja Fresh, and McDonald’s patrons sit and eat. Shadows stretch from the southwest, leaving the plaza about one third shaded. The pigeons are thick on the concrete, eating the sandwich crumbs from beneath the tables; depending on the weather, anywhere from three to a dozen tables are occupied. Today, people are crowded on the planter box edges in the sun, six-inch subs, Big Macs, and burritos at the ready.
The pigeons meander over the plaza, circling, anticipating the departure of the next diner; they are fat from long dependence on scavenging in the plaza.
The same homeless man, wearing dirty jeans with a rip in the right knee, is in the plaza every day. His face is wrinkled like a chain smoker’s. And it’s dirty, like a four year old after a hard afternoon playing in the sandbox. His uncombed hair, once black, now sprinkled with gray, hangs in his eyes. Today he sits with his back against the pillared entrance to MacDonald’s. He is not thin; rather, he has become fat like the pigeons, relying on the detritus of the city for his sustenance. Remarkably, no one ever seems to stop to leave him any money. Is this because he seems so well fed? Or does his unkempt appearance drive people away?
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entrySun, 11 Sep 2005
Flashback
Something I wrote in an email on February 1, 2005, while I was working in San Francisco:
beep
What a cruddy evening it was… I was dinking around on my other PC, still working on getting functional sound, and broke all kinds of other stuff. So I fixed that,
beep
mostly, and went to bed. I’d barely fallen to sleep, when
beep
the power went out.
If I was asleep, then how did I know the power went out? you
beep
ask…
Let’s just say that living in a studio apartment with an
beep
uninterruptible power supply (UPS) can
beep
be a frustrating experience. When the UPS detects
beep
that the power is out, it sounds an
beep
alarm. If the power is on and
beep
beep
off, or off for a long time, the alarm can
beep
become quite bothersome. In my particular case, since the UPS sits across the
beep
room from my bed, it was impossible to get
beep
away from the noise!
Needless to say, I slept
beep
poorly… right up until my other alarm went off…
doot which doot I doot didn’t doot quite doot sleep doot right doot through doot.
Nevertheless, my cellphone rang blip just as I was once again blip falling into blip a deeper slumber blip. I had to answer blip it, of course blip, as I’m anally retentive blip that way… It was my dad, blip complaining about the blip PC I sent back to him yesterday blip with Jan blip. Apparently, it’s blip still not working blip properly.
So if I seem a little groggy today, that’s why 
It’s just as well, though, as the phone ringing awakened me enough for me to realize that it was time to go to work…
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entryFri, 02 Sep 2005
Back to School
Now that the kids are in school for the 2005-2006 school year, we’ve had a much more complicated schedule.
Last night, DuBray Middle School - Bryan’s school - had its back-to-school night. Jan and I went and met most of Bryan’s teachers, and had an extended chat with his pre-algebra teacher.
Check, Please!
Wells Fargo Mortgage seems to be more honest than even Abraham Lincoln. Yesterday, we received a check for $0.02 - that’s right, two cents - from them, to reconcile our escrow fund. I suppose after the major fiasco that was our closing day, I should be pleased that they have decided to pay so much attention to little details…
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entryWed, 31 Aug 2005
MasterCard to Go Public
In a super-secret, employee-only meeting this morning…
MasterCard International announced that it plans to restructure the corporate organization, currently owned by several major banks, and sell shares to the general public. The official press release is here. What does this mean for me? I don’t know — I wasn’t invited.
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entryMon, 29 Aug 2005
Wife’s PC Finally Fixed
After much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, I have succeeded in returning my wife’s Athlon 3200 PC to service.
The culprit, it appears, was incorrect drivers for its MSI motherboard, which is controlled by an NForce 2 chipset. Now, Windows 2000 is fully installed, along with Microsoft Office Professional and Adobe Premiere, so Jan can return to the video editing projects she’s been wanting to work on.
Those Wiley Rascals!
Tonight, the family and I went to see the River City Rascals play baseball against the Kalamazoo Kings.
The Rascals lost, in a rout, to the Kings. It was a most surreal experience. Fortunately, the tickets, at $5 a pop for lawn seating in the nearly-empty T.R. Hughes Stadium, were cheap.
Thomas, at least, had a good time hounding the the Kings players for a baseball.
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entryWed, 24 Aug 2005
NFS-Mounting a VFAT Partition
And other technical gibberish
I’ve got one Linux machine, “tiny”, that has data I want to share with a second machine, “oracle”. This seems to be a fairly straightforward NFS operation, except the partition on “tiny” that has the data is VFAT (AKA Microsoft’s filesystem), and I want the exported partition to be available to the Apache web server on “oracle”. However, although the data appears to be properly available on “oracle” when I mount the filesystem, the ownership of the directories and files remains slightly off (group should be “webusers” based on my understanding of the mount options).
$ ls -la /var/www/
drwxrwx--- 3 nobody users 32768 Aug 16 18:30 tiny/
I’m not using NIS to sync the users and groups across these systems… which may be part of the problem, although /etc/passwd and /etc/group on the two systems both have unique, matching entries for user “nobody” and group “webuser”.
In short, although I can browse the /var/www/tiny path from the command line on “oracle”, when I attempt to browse via http, i.e., using Konqueror, I get 403 Forbidden errors.
I submitted a request to the nearly omniscient folks on the Vox-Tech mailing list, and they were quite helpful; however, in the end, I wound up backing up my data, reformatting the partition and making an EXT3 filesystem on it, reloading the data, and then mounting that, instead.
posted at: 23:30 | permanent link to this entryThu, 21 Jul 2005
Server Migration Complete
I have finally disconnected my server in California and am now hosting this website as well as my email and other services out of some boxes in my basement here in Missouri.
This took longer than I anticipated because Postfix runs in a chroot jail on my new server… which required some configuration tweaks I was unfamiliar with. Additionally, I learned a few unrelated things about the postfix configuration file syntax…
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entryThu, 12 May 2005
Birthdays
Yesterday was my oldest child’s twelfth birthday.
This is a milestone for several reasons, not least that he’s now one-third of my age. Since I’m here in the St. Louis area, and he’s still in California, I was not present for the festivities.
This makes me somewhat depressed.
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entryFri, 06 May 2005
Home Inspection
Yesterday was the official inspection day for our new home in St. Peters.
It went well. So well, that the inspector characterized it as “boring”. Aside from a few minor issues related to age (old appliances, old plumbing), the house is looking good. Estimated closing date: June 3, 2005.
Broadcast Flag
On the political front, some good news for Free Software afficianados, TV watchers, and Librarians everywhere
What does this mean to you? It means that as of July 1, 2005, you’ll still be able to buy hardware to receive digital TV signals — hardware unencumbered by a mandatory device intended to control whether you are allowed to record programming, watch it at your convenience, or copy it to other devices. Like you can now with your VCR or TiVo.
This is generally considered a good thing, unless you are an executive in the entertainment industry.
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entryThu, 21 Apr 2005
National Do-Not-Call List
Like most Americans, I despise uninvited telephone solicitations.
When the National Do Not Call Registry was established, I was overjoyed. And one of the first things I do whenever I establish phone service — landline, cellular, VOIP, whatever — is add the number to the registry.
However, I neglected to do so when I got the phone number for my apartment in St. Peters.
That was a mistake.
I should have known what was going to happen after the third time the phone rang and nobody was there when I picked it up. But, I don’t have an Internet connection at the apartment yet, so I couldn’t go online to register. And when I was at work, I forgot about it.
Last night, however, right after I got back from the office, the phone rang. I was expecting an important call (from the CTO of Shopzilla). And this is basic phone service — no Call Waiting, no Caller ID, nothing but Plain Ol’ Telephone Service. I only use it for incoming calls when I need to be sure of a clear connection. So who was on the line? A telemarketer.
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entryWed, 20 Apr 2005
Apartment
It only took three weeks; but I am now residing in a two bedroom, two bath apartment in St. Peters, Missouri.
St. Peters is a suburb of St. Louis, and lies between St. Louis and O’Fallon. I am, however, still looking for a house in the area. St. Charles County is one of the fastest-growing places in the United States, so there are many new homes to choose from. Compared to California, they’re cheap, too. The locals don’t seem to think so, though.
Shingle Springs
Meanwhile, my home in Shingle Springs is on the market
We’ve already received one offer, but our exposure until now has been somewhat limited. When the place sells, we should be able to pay cash for a home in the O’Fallon area.
The kids are wrapping up their school year in about a month; when school’s out, the rest of the family will join me here. Although having quiet time to myself is pleasant, I miss them immensely.
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entryFri, 01 Apr 2005
St. Louis
So much for carefully keeping record of my adventures.
Today, I am in St. Louis, Missouri, where I am under contract with MasterCard International as a software engineer. I’m still looking for longer-term housing, as the NCAA basketball playoffs are keeping the local hotels completely full, and therefore keeping rates somewhat higher than usual. And my family will be joining me here in the St. Louis area when the school year is over.
I moved here in mid-March, after investing four months in a contract-to-hire position at MarkMonitor® in San Francisco. However, the CEO made some structural changes to that organization, resulting in a re-definition of the project I was working on and the removal of some authority from my boss, the vice-president of operations.
At MarkMonitor, when my first four months were nearly up, I had inquired of my boss whether I was to be offered direct employment or if my contract was to be renewed. His answer was somewhat non-committal, which induced me to update my résumé. Within the week, I’d had several interviews and a contract offer from MasterCard. I went back to my boss with this new information, and emphasized that although I’d prefer to stay at MarkMonitor, I also needed to have some certainty. He was, once again, non-committal.
His reasons became clear the following Monday, when the CEO revealed a new layer between the top and VP of operations - a senior vice president. Of course, by this time, I had already resigned and accepted the contract at MasterCard.
That’s the background. I will attempt to keep this blog slightly more updated in the coming weeks.
posted at: 22:30 | permanent link to this entry
Marc Elliot Hall St. Peters, Missouri
Page created: 21 January 2002
Page modified: 31 December 2009
