Playlist: Crown on the Ground
Posted: August 26, 2015 Filed under: General 2 CommentsI have a Spotify playlist named stoof. It was the first playlist I started, back when I didn’t have a clue how I would go about Spotifying – hence the super-descriptive title. Actually…I just chuck songs into it so maybe it is fairly descriptive. To date it holds 210 songs. I added the first song on 2012-10-12 and the latest maybe an hour ago. I add songs infrequently and generally in spurts of a handful at a time. I listen to stoof in a similar way – not infrequently, but in spurts of a handful of songs at a time (before the damned commercials kick in and I go back to Pandora).
It occurred to me that a significant portion of this list – any playlist – has a personal story. Some of the artists are obvious (I’m looking at you, Violent Femmes). Some of the songs are obvious (Africa, anyone?) …but some of them have a much more specific meaning to me; they might evoke an emotion or make me recall a particular memory. This post is about one such song: Crown on the Ground.
I’m calling out Crown on the Ground because I remember the first time I heard it. I can’t say that about very many of the songs in stoof, percentage-wise.
I first heard this song on a family road trip to Myrtle Beach. Kate and I were in our car, my mom and sisters were in another. It was about a 12-hour drive, we were in the home stretch – maybe 3/4 of the way through – and we were a bit “lost”. Not lost in the sense of “Where are we?” so much as “What, specifically, do we have to do to get where we’re going with as little backtracking as possible?”
…and then Crown on the Ground came on the radio. It was loud. It was intentionally distorted to make it sound “bigger”, a difficult-to-achieve excellent sort of “Are my speakers blown?” effect that’s hard to describe without hearing it. It was this “crunchy” Wall of Sound coming out of my speakers and I was transfixed.
“Holy shit, we’re gonna listen to this!” I turned that shit up.
Kate turned it down. (She wanted to “talk” about “where we were going”.)
I turned it back up (I like my shit loud.)
Kate turned it back down, all “Did we miss our exit?” or whatever.
I don’t know how long this back-and-forth went, who “won out”, etc. What I can tell you:
- we got to Myrtle Beach
- as it turns out Kate liked the song as much as I did (IIRC she bought the album as soon as we got back home)
Anyhow…I think about that trip – that moment – every time Crown on the Ground comes up in the rotation…
Garganelli Board
Posted: August 12, 2015 Filed under: General 1 CommentPurchased. It doesn’t appear to scale well, but for making a pound of not-quite-penne I think it should do and for ten bucks I’m in.
I wouldn’t consider myself an “authority” but I have some experience in this arena and I feel fairly strongly about this: extrusion is for chumps. If you’re going to take the time to make your pasta by hand then roll it or cut it. Do not extrude it. I’ll buy penne from time to time (not fucking Bari**a. Never Bari**a.) for the same reasons that I’ll buy a frozen pizza – it’s not great, but it’s cheap and expedient. I’m not spending my time to make the dough and then waste it by extruding it. It’s slow, it’s more difficult than it should be, it makes crappy fragile pasta that doesn’t dry well, there is zero control over thickness or texture…shit, man, just don’t do it.
On a related note: JoJo is either a hero or a prick, I can’t decide which. Or maybe it’s his grandmother’s fault. Or maybe none of these are mutually exclusive. My point is this: I care a lot – perhaps too much – about the pasta that I eat and serve to my family, and I directly blame JoJo and/or his grandmother.
Example: I went to an offsite lunch for a couple of engineers moving on to other parts of the company last week. It was at an “Italian” place. (Side note: “Italian” requires quotes in the Bay Area as it pertains to food.) I should have gotten the lamb chops – because omg lamb chops – but I’m a little sensitive to ordering a $30 lunch in a party of 25 when I’m not paying, even if it is Silicon Valley. Someone else got the chops and I’m still a little jealous.
…I ordered a pizza.
I ordered a pizza because I don’t know anything about how they make – or, more likely, source – their pasta. Could be fucking Bari**a for all I know. Maybe that’s just paranoid but I wasn’t willing to take the chance, particularly not at an “Italian” restaurant whose menu featured two paella dishes. (wat?)
In short: I ordered a pizza because I would not risk the possibility of being served substandard pasta. Perhaps it’s limiting – even crippling – to my “restaurant” experience, but I just won’t do it.
At any rate I should have the board this week (huzzah for Amazon Prime!) We’ll see how it works out. 🙂
These Motherfucking Laundry Baskets
Posted: February 25, 2015 Filed under: General, personal Leave a commentI am the (proud?) owner of four laundry baskets.
One of these laundry baskets is at least 10 years old. It’s made of a plastic that…well…let’s just say it’s the Titanium of Plastics. It has under its belt 10 years of regular use (minimum: 3 loads of laundry a week). It has not bent. It has not cracked. It has not failed.
One of the baskets I purchased upon a relatively recent move – about a year and a half ago. One of the handles cracked and eventually came completely off. I use it no longer.
The other two are of identical make and model to the latter, purchased shortly after the failure of the original…perhaps in the hopes that it was some one-off manufacturing defect, or more likely because “it was at Target, it was cheap, and I needed a basket”. Their handles are cracked, they bend, and they are falling apart.
I could paint you a picture about the needs of apartment living, a scene in which in-home/in-unit washer-dryer is a thing of the past. A Saturday morning landscape with a hallway and a flight of stairs so narrow I trade knuckle-skin for clean clothes. I could talk about how sometimes my 2-year-old wants to come with me and happy to oblige I haul both her and a perilously-balanced and cheaply-made disintegrating piece of shit down that path.
But I needn’t.
My needs are modest, my requirements few. I just want a coupla laundry baskets that do not suck the peen.
So I turned to the Interwebitubes. Typically my savior in similar cases, Amazon has failed me in this. I started off with searching for “laundry basket” and eventually went so far as to look for the specific make and model of The One True Basket which I still possess. (Yes, the label is still legible after all this time – I guess In My Day they made things to last.) The brand still exists, the specific model does not.
Here’s the funny thing: pretty much everything I looked at had a rating of 3-or-4 stars – the expected meh distribution for something like a laundry basket. The hidden treasure is in the one-star ratings; almost to a man: “OMG the handles are cracking and falling off and/or it’s a bendy piece of shit.”
I enlisted my wife into The Hunt. She came up with some Ikea stuff that wasn’t bad…but too small. If you’re not bringing at least close to 2 bushels (~18 gallons, ~2.4 cubic feet) then you’re not even on my radar. She also found some new-fangled folding cloth jobby that seemed kinda sweet. By all appearances it was being marketed online by some Kickstarter-y Bay Area startup. “Item Currently Unavailable”. Imagine that.
At any rate, the motto would seem to be “Build a cheaper mousetrap and you’ll probably make a fuckload of money.” Well…I’m not looking for cheaper. I’ll beat a path to your door if you make me a better laundry basket.
2012: The Year In Which I Get Organized
Posted: January 3, 2012 Filed under: gtd, personal | Tags: 2012, gtd, personal, scription Leave a commentI came across the (free!) Scription Chronodex the other day (thanks, Lifehacker!) and thought to myself “Hey! There’s a cool idea!” So today I printed it out and spent some time putting it together. I thought folks might be interested in how I went about it, so without further ado:
Step 1: Nail it to a board
[Actually, I guess Step 1 should have been “Download and print”…] This might not seem like the most standard approach, but I assure you it ended up working out okay in the end. I spaced the nails out about 2″. Note that had I planned this out a little better, I would have taken into account how I was going to bind the thing. This actually ended up working out okay, but next time I’ll plan ahead.
Step 2: Trim the edges
Just getting rid of the extra junk on the sides…
Step 3: Binding
As I mentioned before, this is where things kind of got hairy. At first I was going to use some beading cord, but as I was wanking around trying to find a needle big enough and figure out how I was going to thread it inspiration struck. My mother-in-law gave me a packet of bobby pins for Christmas (kind of an in-joke), so why not use those? I had to widen the holes a bit to get them to fit, but a little patience and a lot of working the pins back-and-forth got them where I wanted them.
Once this step is complete, it should look something like this:
Notice that by sheer dumb luck the bobby pins happen to be about 2″ long, which makes them line up nicely. Not much to do now but…
Step 4: Make a bookmark
I really liked this idea, so I decided to go ahead and replicate it. I just cut out a bit of a manila envelope, notched it so that I could slide it between the sheets and up to the topmost bobby pin, and voila!
Step 5: Use it!
That’s really it – just start writing shit down, folks. 🙂
Cast of Characters
Posted: November 8, 2011 Filed under: games, wow Leave a comment- Kbar (aka “Kbardamus the Old”) – Guild Master, Main Tank*. Old as balls. Gets grumpy sometimes, especially when he hasn’t has his Elixir of Mastery (read: whiskey).
- Jpedius – Off Tank, Melee DPS. My college room mate. Might actually be good at WoW, but it’s hard to tell since he plays a class that requires zero skill to play. (heh…sorry JP)
- Aloranay – Healer. Mother of a couple of guildies. (Sorry, Nay – I know your kids’ names I just don’t know their names in-game.) Is likely to break your eardrums if you spend any amount of time on vent** with her.
- Jarhead – Healer. Father of Marioo, Jasmama, and Quickkillz. Mexican from Chicago who lives in California***. One of the handful of guildies I’ve met IRL. He was a marine – can you tell? 😉
- Fhina – Healer. Is actually playing on a different toon with some weird-ass German-sounding name now, but everyone still calls him “Fhin”. Used to work with this guy.
- Macdowell – Healer. Altaholic****. Folks who have been around a while know him as “Jak”, since one the toons he used to play is named JakBauer.
- Tomolak – Ranged DPS, Healer (sometimes). Russian Jew who lives in New York*****. Would have me believe that NFL football is better than NCAA football (it’s not), that soccer doesn’t kinda suck (it kinda does), and that fantasy hockey is a viable fantasy sport (it isn’t). But he’s a good guy, all the same. 🙂
- Khully – Melee DPS. QQs (complains) about “garbage” loot despite being #1 on the damage meters. Wins every roll, every time when a mount is involved.
- Werzul – Melee DPS. Knows Khully from outside WoW.
- Amyeez – Melee DPS. Target of a significant amount of ball-busting from Yours Truly, but since she’s one of the 3 people who read this (and I count twice) I’ll keep quiet this time. 😉
- Setekh – Ranged DPS. Significant Other of Amyeez.
Stupid Phrase
Posted: November 2, 2011 Filed under: general Leave a commentI don’t know why, but a phrase popped into my head in the shower this morning and I can’t seem to get it out of my head. I’m sure you’ve heard it before as it’s fairly common, as phrases go. You may not have heard it in a movie or on TV; it’s a fairly dramatic sort of thing to say, so it seems unlikely that you’ve heard it come out of the mouth of anyone you actually know…or at least I can’t think of anyone I know who’s said it.
“What is it?” you ask.
Well, it generally goes as follows: “I’m only gonna say this once, <insert super-important thing here>.” That’s it.
I’m only gonna say this once.
Now, I understand what the phrase means. It typically preceeds something of particular importance, presumably in order to add a certain gravitas. “This thing I’m about to say is so important that I’m going to notify you as to the specific number of times I’m going to say it to make sure you’re listening before you lose your opportunity” is the general flavor.
…but if you really think about it, it just doesn’t make sense.
Here’s the thing: If what you have to say is so goddam important, why on earth only say it once? It’s completely counter-intuitive.What if the person who needs to hear it doesn’t hear you the first time? What if they sneeze or something? Once you’ve made a statement like “I’m only gonna say this once” you can’t very well go back on it; you’ll just look foolish, repeating yourself when you explicitly stated that you weren’t going to do so. And I’ve got a hunch that the type of person who would say “I’m only gonna say this once” isn’t the type of person who takes looking foolish lightly.
Why take that chance? Why not say it a couple of times – ya know, to reinforce it a bit? Perhaps write it down? Shit, maybe write it down a couple of times.
What I’d love to see is a movie scene in which one of these pompous one-time-only asshats, every word dropping from his lips never to be heard again for fear that it might seem less important, walks up to someone and utters this phrase. Dude proceeds to give his spiel – doesn’t really matter what it is – to a complete stranger. Suppose it’s something about missiles or action or something – fate-hanging-in-the-balance type shit. The stranger listens in perfect silence, waiting patiently until Dude’s lips stop moving. At that point, Stranger signs to him “Terribly sorry, I can’t understand you. I’m deaf and I never picked up the knack of lip-reading. Have a nice day.”
Hmmm…perhaps Stranger could preface it with “I’m only gonna sign this once…”
Hindsight is 20/20
Posted: November 1, 2011 Filed under: currentevents, economy, politics, protest | Tags: ows Leave a commentA friend of mine was recently “inspired” (his word, not mine) to blog because of me. (Check it out – tell him “B sent you”.) In his first post – Lessons of History – he writes about Occupy Wall Street. I thought about commenting, then thought better of it, then thought about it some more and came to the conclusion that while I have something to say I’m not sure I can sum it up in a short comment. (Besides, I’ve got my own blog to write here and words ain’t cheap, buddy! :-))
So I guess my main reaction – one which I typically have about any sort of protest of this size – is “What on earth is it that they’re actually protesting?” My friend seems to have boiled it down to “wealth redistribution”, but it seems like a larger and perhaps slightly more nuanced movement (if it can be called such) than that. As with anything, any time you get this many people together for a “common cause” it seems like the cause becomes not so common at all. This time is no exception. I hear everything from “I don’t want to pay any taxes” (no less ridiculous for being trite) to “We need to separate politics from money” (seems reasonable…but how?) to…well…to fuckers running around in Guy Fawkes masks. Not even sure how to categorize the latter.
What I do know is this: The protest would seem to be in response to some pretty fucked up things that have happened over the past few years and that people probably should be pissed off enough to protest. If the message – and as I said above, I have no idea if this is correct – happens to be “The system failed, but we propped it up and nobody seems to give a shit. Well, we give a shit!” then I reckon I can get behind it. If, on the other hand, the message is “I don’t want other people to have more money than I do”… well, I’m afraid I’m not on board for that. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, and the fixes probably lie somewhere in a relatively boring solution space that includes things like more-progressive taxation and better algorhithmic trading regulation.
I wasn’t around for a lot of the world’s historic protests, but I wonder if they had the same sort of confusion surrounding them; i.e., a solid core of ideas that got more and more fuzzy at the fringes. Was the civil rights movement viewed as “A bunch of crazy colored folk that wanna take over the world”? Women’s rights seen through the lens of “Just a buncha broads that don’t wanna wear bras any more”? The American Revolution as “Some upstart colonies that need to get their heads right”? Note that I’m not comparing these to OWS in any sense other than the one of “fuzziness of core message”. They say “Hindsight is 20/20”, so will I look back on this 20 years from now and say, “Oh, of course! That’s what they were talking about!”?
Tell ya what – I’ll let ya know in 20 years. 🙂
Snyder’s First Law of Capacity Planning
Posted: October 27, 2011 Filed under: capacityplanning, sysadmin, systems Leave a commentThere’s a phrase I hear all the time that’s been bothering me for a while now. I hear something like it about once a week on average when I ask about requirements for a system that needs to be provisioned. It usually goes something like the following:
“Well, I think we’ll need 20GB, so let’s go ahead and ’round up’ [sic] to 50GB…y’know, just to be safe. Storage is cheap, right? I mean, just yesterday I saw a 1TB drive for like $60!”
…and it drives me nuts.
I’d like to apologize ahead of time for using “you” below if you, personally, have never said this to me. It’s conversational in voice, not accusatory…
First of all, what you’ve done here isn’t “rounding up” in any way, shape, or form. What you’ve done is increase your requirement by 150%. Second: Yes, perhaps storage is cheap relative to other system components – like, say, RAM. However, throw in high-speed SCSI disk, multiple spindles for performance and redundancy, a support contract, support subsystems like SAN switches and cabling (also redundant), support staff costs, etc. and it’s significantly more expensive per-GB than that Hitachi SATA HDD you saw in the bargain bin at the Office Depot. Third, if you put two-and-a-half times more disk into every request than you really need, that means we have to buy two-and-a-half times more disk. Generally speaking, you know what that means as a function of cost? You guessed it! We’re now spending (approx.) two-and-a-half times more on storage than we need to! Taking all this into account, it gives the original statement the flavor of “Let’s spend more money than we need to because it’s cheap!”
Now, if this storage were just a one-time, fixed-cost item then it really wouldn’t be that bad…but it’s not. At this point, I’d like to coin a new Law – we’ll call it Snyder’s First Law of Capacity Planning. It goes something like this:
“A resource – once allocated – has a probability of being de-allocated of near zero.”
Applied to this problem, it becomes “Once storage has been allocated, you will very likely never get it back.” Not only will this storage be continuing to use power, cooling, etc. ad infinitum, but we will now need to take it into account in every storage subsystem outage, maintenance, and migration from now until the end of time.
On the other hand, the above is precisely the kind of thing I get paid to be mindful of so that the people who are coming to me asking for resources don’t have to. So, in the interests of continuing to make a living while remaining sane, how can I make this better?
Well, for one thing, it’s seemed a little bit silly to me for quite a while now that any incoming requester should be asking for resources this specifically. What I mean is: I’m the Systems Guy, shouldn’t I be taking incoming requirements and translating them into specific resources? So maybe a better approach to the problem would be asking questions of the form “How much data do you have and what are you going to do with it?” rather than “How much disk do you think you’ll need?” (Of course, this won’t work in all cases, but it seems like it could be a fairly effective approach most of the time.)
Another way to handle this when asked for more storage than is necessary might be to have numbers on-hand going into these meetings. This way, when presented with consumer storage costs of something like 6 cents/GB I could “counter” with, say, $14/GB (or whatever it actually costs – I’m just making up a number here). A little end user education might go a long way.
I’m sure there are other approaches that I haven’t thought of yet; I’ll be sure to update the post if I think of any. I’d be glad to hear any ideas you’ve got in the comments…
Five Years Ago
Posted: October 25, 2011 Filed under: general, personal 1 CommentThere are a few things I’ve learned since I graduated college. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that I’ve learned more since I graduated than I did in my entire four years. It might even be possible to say that I’ve learned more in the last 10 years than I did in the entirety of my time at school (16 or so years at this point), but that’s a little hard to quantify. I mean, how do you compare “I learned how to wipe my own ass” with “I learned that mortgages are expensive as balls”?
Okay, so I probably knew how to wipe my own ass long before I was in the first grade. My point is that it seems like every 5-10 years or so I look back at my 5- or 10-years-younger self and say something like, “Man, what an idiot I was!” I’d like to try and recreate that here:
5 (looking back on 0):
Good Lord, what a no-walking, no-talking, shitting-all-over-myself baby I was back then!
10 (looking back on 5):
Man, I’ve come a long way. I mean, I could hardly even read!
15 (looking back on 10):
Are you kidding me, with the playing tag and watching cartoons? If only I would’ve found out about girls sooner…
20 (looking back on 15):
If only I would’ve found out about girls sooner…
25 (looking back on 20):
If only I would’ve found out about girls later…
30 (looking back on 25):
If only I would’ve found out about compound interest sooner…
Alright, I probably didn’t do this justice – a one-liner per five years is pretty thin – but this is really meant to be food for thought. What would you tell yourself if you could go back in time 5 years?
Surprises
Posted: October 24, 2011 Filed under: general, personal 1 Comment[Disclaimer: I’m a little scattered – typical “I need a vacation to recover from my vacation” state – so this post may be a little disjointed.]
I was thinking today about things I’ve been surprised by recently:
It Rains Inside in Mexico
Okay, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration – maybe not everywhere in Mexico. The resort where we stayed in Cancun had a really impressive open entryway and skylights running the length of the hotel. (Note to self: Put more picture in posts. People like pictures.) This seemed pretty reasonable, given that someone told us they only got something like 30 days of rain a year in Cancun. Well…we happened to get 3-4 of those days. As it turns out nothing in that hotel was particularly water-tight, resulting in towels lying about on the tile for the majority of our stay. But hey, it was still 80 degrees, so no complaints.
AI Class
Turns out, there are some bits of Artificial Intelligence that are fairly tricky. Particularly if one hasn’t taken a statistics course in 10 or so years. And particularly if one is out of the country sans PC while the online courses are taking place, giving one a single day to watch all the video lectures, take all the quizzes, and complete the homework. It begs the question: Why on earth couldn’t they have done the easy unit on depth-first search while one was on vacation?
Blizzcon
Not that Blizzcon took place – that happens every year – but what was announced at this year’s con. Specifically: The next expansion, Mists of Pandaria. Again, it’s no surprise that they’re releasing another expansion; I’ve come to expect that about once a year out of Bliz. I figured they’d probably tweak around with the talent trees and all of that stuff. Pretty much par for the course for an expansion that adds new levels. …but panda monks? Seriously? This one might be where I call it quits with WoW. I mean, I loved the movie…but…seriously?
Yes, that’s actually Donald Knuth
A buddy of mine sent me a link to a video of Randall Munroe speaking at Google in 2007. I hadn’t seen the video before and I love xkcd, so I figured I’d go ahead and check it out. Well, it just so happens that one of the Googlers had arranged for Donald Knuth – yes, the Donald Knuth – to be present at the talk. In fact, she went so far as to get hime to ask Munroe a question about a comic he had drawn about Knuth. It took me a minute to realize what was actually going on. I actually thought they were just kidding around – “ha ha, the guy who asked the question must be Donald Knuth.” Not kidding around…that is, in fact, him. In the flesh. Awesome.
Simplicitas 