vanderwal.net

Snow with a house

It seems snow has a whole new meaning when one is a home owner (actually the whole world sort of changes). Snow now means shovelling, which is preceded by picking a suitable snow shovel, and deicing (also requiring careful thought so to choose a product that works, but does not damage the environment -- meaning it damages the pocket book, but I would rather pay there than poisoned land and water). I shovelled a couple times today and diced once and I am rather sore. Time for a long Winter's nap.

We had just a little over 6 inches of snow today at the house. Joy is down, iced in, Raleigh, NC and not here to enjoy the white fluff. I really enjoy the snow and it one of the things that keeps me from moving back to the SF Bay Area (I love the seasons and eternal Spring does not cut it for me).

I am looking forward to a nighttime snowfall here. We have a good yard to sit in and take in the quiet of snow falling. When I lived in Arlington, VA I was right across the street from the Iwo Jima Memorial. When it snowed at night in Arlington I would wander across to the Memorial to look down the light-up Mall and listen to the snowflakes land and the only other sound, the flag waving. It was perfectly calming. I did not really venture out today around here as I knew there were chores and things to look after. Sigh.

Snow photos from Bethesda, MD

Photos of today's show at home are now posted (an updated set will be posted as soon as the software registration arrives). You can also follow the local road conditions through a traffic cam at Bradley and Wilson (we can see the traffic light through our backyard when the trees are bare).

Snowday and lessons on not caching and using static pages

It is a personal snowday as the U.S. Federal Government is open (so far), but on unscheduled leave. Oddly enough the OPM (Office of Personnel Management) status site does not have a no-cache setting in the header. This means you browsers, even your modern browser, will cache the page and require you the user to manually refresh the page. These pages may even be cached locally by ISPs and connectivity providers, meaning the information is not up to date. The page is rather light, with few graphics, but it is not a static page, meaning each page is generated dynamically, which requires more horsepower to serve the page. One days like today every Washington, DC area federal employee and contractor is hitting this page, as well as many DC area private sector employees (most DC companies are open if the Federal Government is open).

I thought most IT folks learned their lesson with the need for "dynamic" pages a year or two ago, but I guess not. Many previously dynamic pages are not dynamic on the back end with content management systems doing the same work they always have done, but building static pages. If the content on the pages is not changing often (this is a subjective term and can roughly defined as content changing ever few hours with heavy site loads are usually candidates for static pages) or are not serving parsable datapoints (tables of data that can have subsets of data selected for viewing). Much of the "dynamic page" hype was generated by marketing folks to non-technical types who made decisions on cool or manly mindsets. Many folks started actually thinking about the need for dynamic pages a couple years ago. Those that decided they did not need dynamic pages for all or even most of their site began to realize they could save on the heavier hardware needed to churn out everypage. These static output folks also found they could withstand much higher hit rates with ease. I have been in meetings with folks that were asking about stress testing site that were static running on boxes that were formerly running dynamic sites. Those of us that understood the processor savings knew this was a foreign concept and they did not understand the server would be able to handle twice to eight times the load previously handled.

Home sick

I am home sick today. I have only been awake 7 to 9 hours the past two days (not consecutive hours either). It started with what I thought was warding off a chest cold and turned into a minor chest cold with body and head aches. The coninually being tired has really been tough as family was in and I was cranky and really crashing hard when my batteries ran out. Last year broke my 2 and a half year stretch of not being out sick, which was a wonderful streak. Having a wife who is a nurse (not by trade at this point) makes the stay home or go to work decisions easier.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

Desk built

We finally got all the pieces and have our new desk assembled and our stuff on them. I am so happy to have a window to look out while working on the TiBook (primary tool) and PC. It is about time.

DSL on its way

Flippin' finally!!! The DSL gateway is shipping!!! I can be a person again in only a few more days.

All in a view

I woke up rather early this morning and walked out to get the paper as the grey foggy sky was beginning to lighten. This really reminded by of last Spring in Monterey where I woke early and opened the blinds in the morning to look out at the grasses and trees wake to their new day and shake off the morning fog. I was able to write a lot and knocked out some diagrams that helped me think through some issues and possibly others too.

I walked back in this morning and went to our office and opened the blinds and found a similar flow. Having a window to look out that offers a rather quiet scene helps me think and work for some reason. When we bought our house and we talked about where the office would be set, I really did not care as long as there were windows and it would really help to have those windows look out at trees. I have much of my wish and this morning really reminded me of this.

During and after grad school I had a studio apartment and I set my desk (also served as a dining room table with the ever present table cloth on it) to look straight out a large picture window. When I lived there I was able to get a lot of writing done and it was during this time I started writing poetry (well over 100 in two years) and some short stories. After I moved I was staring at a wall. When Joy and I were married our apartment looked out at parking lot. Now I look forward to what may come.

Rob gets it right

I missed an important call last night, Rob was calling my cell phone from the SF Giant game just after they won the fourth game of the World Series. It was nearly 13 years ago when Rob and I had tickets to the sixth game of the Earthquake series, which is a game they never played. Rob learned his lesson and picked up tickets earlier in the series. Nicely done. I found my cell phone buzzing in my jacket pocket at midnight letting me know I had missed a call. How I would have loved to get that call. I need a phone that knows when to ring loudly even when I have it set to vibrate.

I am not a somebody I am a persona

... I am Terrance Austin. I am a persona.

arg

Today sucked at work. One of the worse parts of the job, but it is the job I have. Other than a great group discussion with a very talented team, it was a flat out very tough day.

Drug use or Miss use

Yes, I broke down a couple months ago and finally saw an allergist again and started shots. I had spent a whole six months on perscription antihistamines and was not able to drop them like most summers when it get humid. I am now down to once a week, but I also have a plethora of other perscriptions. I had a huge headache today, in part due to sinus or allergies. I have been using a nasal spray only for bad days where I really need a clean out. I never remember what it is called, but I was out of the sample and went to my bag of official drugs for me and dug in. I pulled out what I thought could be it be it had a name, patanol, which sounds like a feminine monthly pain releaver. Maybe the allergies were not from plants, molds, or other usual suspects but gender? I read closer and remembered this is for allergy medicine for my eyes. Nothing like I was expecting. I dug in the bag again and found the horrible tasting nasal spray, apply it and wait for relief.

Update on lack of broadband progress

I am still with out most of my outbound e-mail capabilities for my usual accounts. I can see all the inbound e-mail, but I am mostly devoid of responding, which is driving me crazy. This will get resolved once DSL arrives, I am still waiting on Verizon to get their act together and tie the phone number to the address. The last residents of the house has DSL running at a really good clip, but nobody can see that until Verizon understands their role in the world.

We finally got satellite TV today, which is a huge improvement over cable. Why? Much better picture, much better sound, cheaper, and channels like Tech TV and BBC America. The downside is the current placement of the dish, on the right hand corner of the roof on the front of the house. It could be a good reason to remove the tree that is creating this issue or to get the dish moved when we paint the eaves.

I spent today trying to figure out why we had no phone signal, well it turns out the PC modem fries the phone lines. I was waiting for contractors to come and fix a furnace, closets, and the dish guys. All the contractors were stuck in the traffic related to trying to find the DC shooter and we calling the often to let me know of their delays. The shootings really have not un-nerved me as the odds are long that I or anybody I know would get shot. I am much more aware of my surroundings, much like living in the UK in the late 80s with the IRA bombings and such.

I was put off from doing some work for a while today as the CD I burned on a nearly up-to-date security patched Win 2k box would not be acknowledged in the Mac. This is odd as it is how I move files out of XP Home (miserable version of XP). I finally got the CD to run in the PC (I finally had a reason to assmble it after nearly 2 weeks in the house) and reburned them on a CD, which did run on OS X. This little task and figuring out that the PC modem has phone voodoo here caused the loss of a couple hours. I knew I should have pulled the box of blank CDs out of the packing box they are in.

I am trying to focus on getting a couple reviews done, user/usability test a new site, get back to writing some articles, and putting our office together.

Gabriel Live

We now have tickets for the November 11th November 24th Peter Gabriel show at MCI Center. I have only seen Gabriel as a part of festival shows like WOMAD and the Amnesty Internationl Tour. I am so ready to see a full show.

Battle Boxes

On the house front, we found out late last week that our furnace has a tendancy to shoot flames out the front when the gas is turned up to normal capacity. This is entertaining, but it is not safe. It seems the fire shooting has been melting some wires in the furnace. At least the walls are in good shape, knock wood.

We are still sitting in a sea of boxes and will be for some time. We had some space savers put in our closets, but there was one number not accounted for, our height. We are not tall people, well by Dutch standards, but our clothes drag from the top rack to the lower rack and the lower rack drags on the floor. The whole contraption needs to be raised two inches or so, which will limit the overhead storage.

I still can only find the left shoe for any of the shoes I wear to work. I am not sure where the right shoes are, nor can Joy remember where they may have been placed. I also can not find my electric razor, which should have been in the box marked "desk items and RAZOR". I have been using a blade razor, which in one or two more days will give me insane ingrown hairs.

One positive observation, well for me at least, I have fewer books than Joy. The last few years I have listened to teasing for all the books I have (mostly tech/Web/UXD related with a healthy helping of econ, history, architecture, design, and fiction) on the shelves. It seems Joy has nearly equal, if not more, knitting books and boxes of periodicals, just slated for our office. The knitting book count does not include the attic nor second bedroom. This to me is a nice thing to find out, I am not sure you are interested, nor Joy with my telling you, but it is just you and me here right?