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Getting my web site in order

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On August 11, 2001

In Blog

As I’ve said before, I’m good at procrastinating. First of all, it seemed a bit silly to me that I, a person who’s been on the Internet since before there was a World Wide Web, should not have an actual homepage of my own. I kinda started to build one back in 1996, but I never got interested in it enough to finish it. But recently, I realized I had a bunch of pictures I could put up, and links to my writing and my songs and so forth, so I determined to get myself my very own domain and set up my very own ego tripping web page. Having determined this, I registered the domain “autographedcat.com”, set up a temporary holding area, moved the photos that were on my personal page there, and…..got distracted and didn’t touch it again for weeks.

Getting all my songs into HTML format and actually up on the web kept looking like a daunting task. It was easy to say ‘”I’d do that today, but I really don’t have time.” and put it off. I knew it was the next big thing I wanted to do, so it was merely a matter of finding the motivation to do it.

Then, one of my songs got nominated for an Pegasus Award. Nominated for Best Song. (The Pegasus Awards are essentially the Grammy awards of the filk community — it’s a tremendous honor to be nominated for one). And I realized that while it had appeared in print in a couple of places, there was no where for someone who hadn’t seen it already to find out what I was about. So I thought “Well, I’ll put it up on the web. But if I’m going to do that, I should go ahead and get them all up.”

So they’re up now. There’s still a few floating around, and a couple that are frankly embarrassing and I don’t want to be seen in public . But for the most part, I’m done. If anyone’s interested you can find them at https://www.autographedcat.com/songs/

People really need to get over themselves

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On August 9, 2001

In Blog

Nothing amuses me more than people who get themselves worked into a tizzy over gay people. I’d probably find it less amusing if I were gay myself…

The Associated Press story

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also reported on the story.

Good heavens! How terrible! The next thing you know those gay people might start demanding, I don’t know, to be treated like human beings and given the basic dignity and respect that should be afforded decent people! When WILL the madness end?

I despair to live in a world where an entire group of people can be hated and despised because of who they choose to love! Cause that’s really what’s going on here, isn’t it? “We don’t like the way THOSE people love one another. It isn’t right.” Yeah, hate is a much better way to deal with people.

The really sad thing is almost every one of the people complaining would probably identify themselves as a Christian, and could easily express to you their belief in a infinitely loving God and their belief that the same God thinks gay people are an abomination in a single breath.

*sigh* I weep for the world, and all the darkness we bring to obscure the light.

I work with idiots.

By

On August 4, 2001

In Blog

So, no shit, there I was, nuking e-mail accounts right and left, when….

It recently came to the attention of our DBA crew that there were accounts on our systems that were not properly reflected in the customer database — in essence, potential service users we weren’t billing. Last week, they asked me to give them a list of all the logins on all the customer servers so they could reconcile the two. This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable and sensible thing to want to do, and I approve of the notion wholeheartedly.

Today, I get a list from them of accounts to delete. Over 800 of them. “Are you sure all of these need to be deleted?” I ask cautiously. “Oh yes. We’ve checked them over.” “So everyone one of these is a customer login that isn’t in the database and can be discarded safely?” “Absolutely.”

No problem. Deleting things is fun.

So tonight, I’m merrily wiping out this deadwood, when I get an ICQ message from the support group. They say that for some reason, they suddenly can’t access the database with their command line tools. These tools are perl programs we’ve developed over the years that allow them to, for instance, dump all the db and account information on a customer quickly. I run one of these commands on myself, and get back an Oracle DBI error from Perl. That’s curious. It’s not a “Database is down” error. It’s a missing library error. What on earth could have happened to the…..

You didn’t. You stupid, brainless moron f***s couldn’t have possibly…..

I flip over to the list of accounts to delete. I grep it for a specific login. I know what I’m looking for.

oracle.

They put the freaking ORACLE user on the “unnecessary” list. The user whose homedir contains all the libs necessary for all the provisioning scripts and support tools to work.

Oh, my head.

By now, I have the tech support supervisor on duty in one window and the backup admin in the other. It’s 1am. “We’re going to have to run a restore,” I say. “What’s the directory?” she asks. I tell her. She says what I already know: “Those tapes aren’t in the jukebox. I’ll have to drive in and change them.” It’s 1:15 am.

“Wait a minute!” I say. “I have an idea”

Remember last month when I was moving a bunch of files onto the hardware RAID device I had gotten them to buy because the software disk arrays were old and beginning to get cranky? I never actually deleted any of those files, I just unmounted them and left them sitting there. I quickly mount the old filesystems and check — sure enough, the files are all there. This is pretty static information, so I copy everything back over quickly to it’s original location. A quick test shows all the support programs now work perfectly again.

Backup Admin is now suitably gratified because I saved her a two-hour office visit at 1am on a Friday night. That’s lunch she owes me. Now, on Monday I get to raise holy hell to my boss about how they almost caused us an awful lot of work.

And you thought a sysadmin’s job was dull…..

Neil Gaiman interview

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On August 2, 2001

In Blog

I could listen to Neil Gaiman read the telephone directory for an hour. Listening to him talk about writing and history is even better.

http://news.mpr.org/programs/midmorning/rafiles/thu_midmorn2.ram

(BTW, if you haven’t yet read Gaiman’s new novel, American Gods, run, do not walk, to the nearest bookstore and get a copy. Probably the best new book I’ve read in a couple or three years.

Pay attention: There *are* still good, descent people in the world

By

On August 1, 2001

In Blog

The average person would have kept it. Or sold it.

But when Julie Geisler discovered that she had inherited an 80-year overdue book that belonged to the Boston Public Library, she returned it. The book, a first printing edition of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species, was valued at between $15,000 and $75,000.

http://www.boston.com/dailynews/213/region/First_edition_Darwin_book_retu:.shtml

At a time when everyone seems to be out for themselves, it’s nice to see someone do the right thing for no reason other than because it’s the right thing to do. (In an interview on NPR, Geisler said the Boston Public Library agreed to waive the $1.50 maximum overdue fine for the book *grin*)

So where the heck have *I* been?

By

On July 31, 2001

In Blog

I rule at avoiding things. It’s a talent.

One of my last entries sort of wandered around and then ultimately admitted that I wasn’t feeling up to talking about what was really consuming my mental energies at that time. I may still not be, but I don’t want to just vanish, so here’s the readers digest version.

Things really haven’t been going well with and me for quite some time. Over the last five months, things have been deteriorating at a rapid pace, and last Monday it finally boiled over. We had The Relationship Talk.

Some background: Kim and I have been together now for twelve and a half years. We are not married. For large parts of that time, we only had half a relationship — all the commitment, but not of the fulfillment, as it were. So in 1997, I broke off our relationship, in large part because I had met someone else who DID seem to care about me. At the time, I thought that this would be a considerable relief to her, to finally be rid of me. This wasn’t necessarily an unreasonable assumption — we had been sleeping in separate rooms for a long time at that point, and were really more roommates than lovers by then. She surprised me by not only reacting very badly to my desire to move out, but insisted that she wanted to save our relationship. After about 2 weeks of discussion, I broke off with the other girl in an effort to salvage the 8 year investment I had with .

For a while, things were much better. But slowly things reverted back to the same rut. The last year has been especially wearing on me, as I had begun to feel like I was really being used — one of the remarks I made on Monday was that it was like having a job without a paycheck — I had all the responsibilities and obligations, but none of the benefits. On the recent trip to Knoxville, I was able to discuss some of this with Kender, but I still had no clear idea what I wanted to do about it. One complication is that I’m the only income earner in our house, and we only have one car (which is hers). If I just walk out, I essentially leave behind a person I do still care about and four cats with no way to pay any bills. If I had it in me not to care about that, it’d be easier, but I don’t. So after the initial fight, she went upstairs to talk to a friend on the phone for a couple of hours, and I sat downstairs and felt miserable. When she came downstairs we talked some more, and I outlined why I was unhappy and what sort of things I’d need to see happening to think it was worth trying again — we’ve “tried to work it out” before, and it always seemed like I put in all of the effort. Never again.

I’m still not convinced it can be worked out. I’m willing to give it some time to see how she wants to play it, but the balls definitely in her court now. Part of me wishes that it was all over and I could just work on being miserable and piecing my life back together. Part of me really wishes I could find in the person I’m with the person I fell in love with over a decade ago. And part of me just wishes I knew how it was going to work out.

By

On July 11, 2001

In Blog

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/state/la-000056553jul10.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Ds

Now here’s a fun can of worms. You own a satellite, which is in orbit. It’s out somewhere over the equator somewhere, and nowhere near where you actually have your business offices located. But the country decided that hey, you’re here, and it’s worth X million dollars, so let’s charge property taxes on it as if it were here where your office is.

I’m not sure what to think of this. What happens when a company has multiple headquarters? Who’s liable for the tax then? If I have an office in Gwinnett Co and another in Fulton, I don’t owe Gwinnett Co. property taxes on my office in Fulton. So it seems to me that the taxes on the satellite are owned to whoever has jurisdiction over County Space.

But hey, anything for an extra buck.

Wherein the Autographed Cat is at work way too early in the morning.

By

On July 11, 2001

In Blog

I’ve been up since a little after midnight, since I had to be at work at 3am for a maintenance window. We were doing some fairly routine upgrades to the database server — adding a hardware RAID enclosure and also swapping the 1GB of ram it had for 4GB of memory.

Everything went well except for the RAM. I think that one of the DIMMs is bad, or else the slot is bad, because we put 12 DIMMS in and it only saw 11 of them. Worse, this machine (Sun E450) expects its DIMMs in groups of 4, so it only sees 3GB of the 4GB we put in. Yuck. We took it down and tried to reseat everything — I think it’s the slot that’s bad, it seemed loose and now I wonder if it had a hairline crack that was made worse by the removing and inserting of new sticks. Oh well, the window’s closed now and I can’t take the server down again. We’ll have to reschedule another time to take it down and get in and look at it.

My friend vila_resthal from over in Athens was wanting to come and see deidrecorwyn and me tonight. I’d really like him too, even though the house is a wreck. *sigh* He suggested the visit on Monday, and I said to deidrecorwyn, “If he’s coming over, we need to at least pick up the living room”, but nothing’s been done. She’ll say it’s my fault for not helping, but I work all day and she’s at home, and it’s not like I asked for the place to be turned upside down.

Oh well, Editor’s seen our house as a wreck before, so it won’t surprise him any. I’ll probably leave here at noon, so maybe instead of catching a nap before my doctor’s appointment this afternoon I’ll clean the living room. That way at least there’ll be somewhere to sit down.

By

On July 10, 2001

In Blog

I admit, I’m easily amused. This was in my friend Rommie’s private journal today:

http://www.jamaicaplace.com/item_JP-00546-g.htm

Just when you thought you’d seen everything…

Wherein the Autographed Cat reflects upon his Immortal Soul

By

On July 10, 2001

In Blog

I’m going to hell.

Those of you who know me well may consider this an unsurprising revelation, but it’s official. Tonight I committed what has to be a serious and unforgivable sin. You see, in order to stretch our money as far as possible, I try to drink iced tea instead of other various beverages which tend to be more expensive. So I went to brew a fresh pot of tea, and discover….

We’re out of Tetley.

I thought for sure we had some. I looked through all the cabinets, even the ones down near the floor where the extra stuff is kept. No luck. But I did find something. So, out of desperation, a pot of tea was born.

I made iced tea with good Darjeeling.

And it’s good.

I’m going to hell.

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