half a cat

A much belated post. I’m a lazy bugger, I know.

So Easter. The long and the short:

• All of us (the kids, silly) piled up to Mom’s house for ‘brunch’. The girls both had the boyfriends there, so it was not the usual single male event. Both Jeff and John (Jon?) are great guys — they’d have to be to date my sisters. Since they are such nice guys, I suppose I will have to feel bad if I need to kill them at somepoint. =D
  • Mom’s brunch is not the light-on-the-stomach meal you might think it should be. Noooo sir! We had french toast, egg bake, carmel rolls, some sort of friend meat, lets call it bacon. Oh yes, and mimosas
  • I also brought Bogart up to Mom’s. I think we’ve finally found someone to equal Rebekkah’s energy. They were both quite pooped after playing all day.
• We wrapped up the day with dinner here at my place. I made the usual (and Melanie’s favorite!) ham and scalloped potatoes. yummy!

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So, I’m starting to learn a few things by having a real pet now.

• I have no patience. I used to, I swear. Sloowly it is coming back.
• I am a sucker for whining. Wuss.
• A dog will make you do the following things that you never thought you would
  • Wake up before 8am.
  • Wake up before 7am to go outside.
  • Wake up at 6am and encourage something to “go potty” or “go poo”
  • Eat meals at regular intervals. I no longer have the luxury of working so hard I forget to eat. The natives get mightly restless.
  • Pick up. Anything. I have had to make the round picking up yard trash, rubber bands, etc. Man, dogs will eat anything!
  • Use newspaper as the greatest floor covering since, I dunno, floors?
  • Walk quietly around the house (that you live in alone I might add) because someone is sleeping.
• It is not all bad, far from it. The great things I’ve noticed:
  • Puppies are soft and fuzzy. Amazing everyone wants to pet them.
  • They are very smart. After a week of positive praise, Bogart is whining and barking to have me take him outside.
  • I am getting fresh air multiple times a day. Whod-a-thunk-it? It is great — I even take extra time at lunch to play with him so that he is good and exercised, not to mention sleeps most of the afternoon.
  • Instant Love, just add Puppy.
  • I enjoy having something/someone around the house. Again.
  • My dog will surely be smarter and kick the snot out of your dog soon.
  • I’ve heard it said that dogs take after their owners =D
  • There is SO much time before noon if you get up before 9am. You can, like, get stuff done.
  • Girls love dogs. Can I take Bogart to the bar ?
  • You can trick puppies into sleeping all afternoon with a rousing game of lunchtime fetch. Too bad I am the one fetching most of the time, but at least he chases it down.

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I’d like to introduce Bogart

.

I have blatantly taken the name from a friends dog in Philadelphia, but damnit, it is a great dog name. So a bit about Bogart:

• Mom was a full blooded Border Collie, dad was 50/50 BC and Australian Shepherd.
• He is 8 weeks old, and dearly misses his 2 brothers and 2 sisters.
• Enjoys long walks in the yard, chew toys, and a romantic bowl of puppy chow.
• His former residence is Help for Homeless Pets, the owners of his parents just could not deal with that many puppies.

I’m really quite jazzed to have a dog again!

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So… in my post the other day I think I left out a lot of thoughts that need to be detailed. I’m gonna chalk that up to extreme exahustion – it is a good as excuse as any.

So, I came to realize a few things at the end of the team launch process that really made me happy:

• We have REAL manager, who is dedicated (time wise, which is the most important) to just the people in our team. He was with us for 3 days and gave the presentation on our team plan better than anyone I could think of. It is very exciting to have some one that talented working to make our lives better. I think having a qualified person at the helm with allow the rest of us to really do our jobs well.
• Ability to learn. This team has a very unique experience for me — I can choose what I want to learn. I would very much like to dive deeper into debugging Lustre problems, as I have always found myself a very good debugger, as well as learning how to properly manage a software team. Already I am starting to see that our esteemed Team Lead is a different sort from what we are used to here at CFS. Perhaps I will even learn what I am not good at for real, rather than tie that into just not being able to do a certain job at a certain time.
• Structure. Yes I used the “s-word”. The individual details are too many to list out, but I continually see things in the job of a ‘Director of Engingeering’ that have a fixed input and output. I literally would have killed for this a year ago — perhaps I would be in a different place becuase of it. I think there are two very large things that TSP gives a software company. The first is a real managment, reporting, work assignment and tracking, and progress tracking system. The spreadsheet that we use to combine each team members data and view team progress is worth its weight in electrons. Second, just the formal process of reviews and inspections is going to vastly increase the quality of Lustre.
• The face to face meetings were great. It is amazing how smart these people are. Perhaps the most interesting part is how different each person is. I don’t think there are two people on the team I would describe being like another.
• I got some good JSB downloads from the boc. He found that archive.org had a ton of live concerts recorded from (mostly) the sound board at the concert. These live recordings hold a TON of new tracks that have been tickling my ears ever since.
• New people! Weeeeeeee! We have more people to handle work. I am thrilled to welcome these guys to the team, and I look forward to their contributions.

I think that about concludes my thoughts on the team launch. All in all, I am very much looking forward to executing, what I think, is a sane plan. This is not to say that it is not agressive in its goals, but I think the whole team agrees that it is a workable plan. I shall report in soon (being the ever faithful Planning Mananger) on the progress and acuracy of our plan.

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Thank god! It looks like Tivo is trying to squirm out of the coffin that everyone seems so ready to place them in. Tivo and Comcast have signed a deal to get the Tivo software on Comcast’s existing DVR hardware.

I, for one, am estatic about this. If you have Tivo, you know the sweet sweet bliss that it is. Those who don’t, shame on you!

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So, I’ve fired up the shuttle again, as it has quite a bit of horsepower. The basics are Radeon 9800 Pro, 2.8Ghz P4, 1GB Dual Channel DDR, 60G SATA, DVD+RW burrner, gigE, firewire, USB2, etc. etc. To complicate the matters of switching primary workstations, I’ve a ton of music squirrled away in iTunes on my powerbook G4, and we use crossover office for work, I figured I’d give the whole linux-faking-as-in-orgasm-iTunes-server a whirl.

Details that might help:

• iTunes under cxoffice works well
  • don’t forget to turn on hardware emulation
  • it will do the whole rendevous thing and allow you to play music from any iTunes machine, OS X or Windows
• linux iTunes Server — fakes being an iTunes export
  • several links gentoo wiki & macosxhints & linux gazette
  • you might need lame or faac
  • Rendezvous compile instructions
  • you want to use Rendezvous-58.8 not the latest, as it works better on linux
  • line for firewall changes
  • Remember: it will take some time for daapd to plow through your library, so be patient and wait before trying to use the export that shows up in iTunes.
• mt-daapd looks to work much better than regular daapd
  • mt-daapd homepage
  • great link on setting up mt-dappd on linux

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My butt is oscillating between numb and really painfull. You needed that info, no? This week has been quite busy, as the whole of TSP5, now named the ‘Koala Team’, met in Boston for our project launch. I could bore you with the gruesome details, but suffice to say that it was a lot of fun working in the same room with those guys. We also have a new manager – like a real trained for managment of a team of engineers. Woot!

The best part was probably getting to hang out with Liza for a couple of nights. We had drinks & food and tried to do a ton of catching up. We both were a little punch drunk from work, but it was great nonetheless. I am looking forward to trying to stay in better touch with her…if only I did not say that everytime.

Ok — off to doze for a bit before my flight boards…

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So… I’ve made my first annoying ‘who the heck is this Nic guy’ post on a blog. Granted we are both members of the infamous drunken posse, so hopefully that will lessen the confusion.

At any rate, for those of you playing the at-home game: this is february � logo game

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The weekend was not that exciting, blog wise. Here are the shorts:

Saturday: It was 63F, so I got the Harley out of the garage and leathered up. As the grandparents had come in from North Dakota with Walt & Sarah, I rode up to Red Lodge. The ride was fantatic, right up there with heading to the beach last Sept. I could have set the throttle lock at 80 and never slowed down. It was pretty fun pulling out to pass people starting at 70 and by the time I got back in the right lane doing 100+. Wee! It did get a bit chilly the closer I got. Gee, who would have thought a 2500 foot elevation change would make such a difference. It was the first time I got to ride into the mountains, and I am so looking forward to doing more of that this summer. I had a nice chat with the fam and headed back after a bit, before it got too cold.

Sunday: Ahhh, bliss. I slept in, lounged around until noon until I got a surprise visit from Mom. We cleaned the kitchen, cooked up steaks and salad, and watched NACAR-slash-took naps. I ended up working that night, to get a few things cleaned up before Monday rolled around.

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I’ve gotten lazy or boring lately — I’m afraid to admit the latter, so the former sounds better. It has been a classic case of work,work,work,work, sleep,work. Nothing terribly exciting, just lots of the same. Life should spice up again soon, as I’m heading to Boston Wednesday

• worked on the truck down at The Shop
• rebuilt the distributor — it was in sooo much need of this. All the weights had their round holes ovaled out and it looked like someone took a big electrical shat right in there too

• timing, the hard way. Since there were no existing timing marks on the front cover, we got to “”engineer”" a positive stop from an old spark plug and a bolt. For those of you who don’t know, what needed to be done was place a degree wheel on the balancer and rotate the engine around with a wrench until the #1 piston hits the stop. You then reverse the engine until it hits the stop on the other side of the stroke. Take the two numbers and TDC (top dead center) is right between the two marks. Thank god Koelzter knows what he is doing.

• Farts really do rise. Yes, I have proof. Here is how you can recreate this bit of “man-fun”:

  • one person eat something really narsty (evil-doer)
  • other person comes over later, completely unawares. (victim)
  • evil-doer is underneath truck placing timing marks on balancer
  • victim is working in the engine compartment, blissfully unaware they are about to experience chemical weapons of a variety never before seen in the public sector
  • evil-doer (apparently) sharts, keeping the news to themselves
  • victim does the usual sniff…sniiiiff sniiiifffffff. “Oh jesus dude, did you shit your self (again)?”
  • evil-doer wipes the tears from their eyes as they are laughing so hard. Laugh it up funny boy.
  • Wash-rinse-repeat as necessary

• The retiming and distributor rebuild did help matters out quite significantly, but did not clear up the vacuum advance issue. The next idea is to rebuild the carbeurator on the beast, seeing where that leaves us. I am pretty sure that if it does not solve the problems, I am going to give up and just drive it — it runs great without it, just sucks a bit o’ gas

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