Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Konnichiwa. It's really too bad that I'm so lousy with languages, because I do like to study them. I can generally learn the grammers pretty well, but despite having a decent vocabulary in English, I don't seem to be skilled at picking up basic vocabulary in other languages.

Guten Tag. It may be due to a quirk in my personality. I don't like to appear unconfident, particularly if I have been studying hard and feel as if I ought to be further along.

Bonan tagon. So I end up being reluctant to do exactly the sort of drilling that I need — actually talking with someone else in the language I'm supposed to be learning.

Bonjour. That's what leads me to be able to recognize many more languages than the few that I can stumblingly ask for the time of day.

But I'm fluent in American war movie German. And my sister took high school French. And I've seen one movie in Esperanto. And I've read through lesson 3 Japanese.

Monday, September 20, 2004

I've started running a MythTV box for my television viewing pleasure. Specifically, I'm running KnoppMyth.

MythTV is a very nice product despite its perpetual alpha state. But it has one really big flaw — virtually all the documentation is installation instructions. There is little to no documentation on the user interface.

I admit that most of the idea is fairly straight forward and the UI mostly does sensible things. But the gap between the sensible things and the other things is severe.

In my case, I really want to understand how the scheduler makes its decisions. Not because I'm not trusting its behavior, but because I'm spending too much time overriding the decisions. I know that you can tune the scheduler with a large variety of priority settings. But to do that effectively, I need to understand the program. Otherwise I'll have to learn it by trial and error, which is a slow process at best.

Not being one to just piss and moan (though I'm perfectly willing to do at least that), I've started creating the documentation for the UI. One weekend of work and I have the Web interface roughed out. But only for the TV functions, which is my primary interest. I started with the web interface because I could edit the docs at the same time as I played with the interface.

Monday, July 26, 2004

I haven't been doing the updates on here very frequently. Too bad. I have a couple of thoughts from the last few weeks.

One of the great unanswered questions: What does the inside of your nose smell like?

I appear to have plumbing gnomes. My kitchen sink trap recently began to leak. Multiple trips to the hardware store later, I have all PVC parts under there and a complete replacement of the brass spaghetti mess that the original plumbers left me. Not that I did much better, since they parts don't line up without a bit of a diversion from a direct run.

Anyway, after conceeding that I'd have to do the funky run, I got things bought and connected together. But having a 45 bend in there makes it hard to tighten the joints, as turning one end tends to loosen the other. I gave up for the day and left a bucket under there for the drips, planning on waiting for the weekend to take it apart again and tighten one side out where I could get more hands on it.

This weekend, the bucket was dry. So I washed my dishes. Still dry. So I dumped a gallon container down the sink. Still dry. My leak healed.

My dad suggested that if I've got plumbing gnomes, I'd better put out an offering of steak and beer.

Monday, January 12, 2004

Once in the past (about 5 years ago) I had a roof leak which led to some dripping in my kitchen. It was basically a problem with drainage under snow cover and some minor flashing errors. But it wasn't fun while it lasted.

So, in the middle of last week I was pretty distressed to find a large puddle of water on the floor in my kitchen. Particularly since it was not in the same place as the prior leak.

In fact, this new puddle was strangely out in the middle of the floor. It was about 8 inches wide and 2 to 3 feet long. One end of it did run up next to the stove. That's a lot of water on a night when there wasn't any rain nor much snow cover on my roof anyway.

Here are some more peculiarities. It was a well defined puddle with no splashes. Though one end of it reached the stove, there was no water on the stove and none under the stove. There was no water on the ceiling.

The water was very clean, like ice melt. But the quantity was at least a whole tray of ice cubes. Since I don't use ice much, there was plenty available in the fridge, but almost no chance that any got out on the floor. I'd made pasta, but the pasta water naturally was pretty starchy.

Tony suggested that maybe it was Casper pee. Ok, he said ectoplasm, but I hear what I want to hear, OK? Anyway, I cleaned it up and started waiting to see if more would show up.

By the way, at the beginning of the week last week is was dang cold out here. Daytime temperatures in the singles and as soon as the sun went down sub-zeros. (Fahrenheit-- I'm in the U.S..) On my way home from work I had to stop twice to bundle up some more — and it's only a 5 minute walk to my car from the office. Then while I was waiting for the car to warm up, I found out that the BiteMe valve on my water pack had frozen in those 5 minutes. I naturally had to quote from ‘Doctor Evil’ — “It's frickin' freezin' out here, Mr. Biggleworth.”

I know that I sometimes ramble in these little stories, but in this case I'm actually still on point. Get it?

Wednesday, January 7, 2004

It's one of life's little ironies that our decisions are always based on multiple, competing restrictions. For example, I have a shload of projects that I'd like to work on. Back when I was unemployed and had plenty of time to work on projects (because there is just so much you can do each day toward looking for work) I found that many of the projects that I wanted to work on required a non-trivial initial outlay of moolah.

Now that I'm working again and have the moolah coming, I'm finding that many of the projects also have a large initial investment of personal time, of which there is a significant drought.

Yes, there is no doubt about it. I'll just have to win the lottery and retire if I ever want to get anything done around the house.

Ok, honest self-examination time here. I am beginning to catch my breath. 34 months unemployed does things to your work ethics — something that 4 months employed doesn't quite cancel out.

It didn't prevent me from performing my work duties; in fact, I slipped back into the University mode pretty easily. I.e. I don't complain about the long hours after 5 p.m. during a week when everyone is trying to get their poster presentations ready at the last minute before flying off to their conference. I know that I can get that back in short days while everyone is away or in time spent mostly taking it easy or reading back issues of Linux Today.

Where it afflicts you is when you discover just how hard it is to get things done after hours or on the weekends. It's strange how easy it is to get in a mode where you think, “It's dark outside so I ought to be at home winding down for the evening.” And you realize an hour later that it's only 7 p.m. and you could have been getting things done.

It's pretty pitiful that my New Year's resolution has to be something along the lines of “I will start working on projects around the house even if the first one has to be building a remote-controlled ‘my own butt’ kicking machine.