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Saturday, November 7th, 2009
ewhac
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4:33p
*mutter*
Wednesday
I left work, started my car, and the engine-shaped icon appeared. The manual said that something was amiss with the emissions system. After arriving home, I made a service appointment for the following Tuesday. I could have had Friday, but I was leaving for a conference in Santa Cruz on Friday. Or, rather, I was hoping I was leaving for a conference on Friday provided my car was safe to drive.
Thursday
I phoned the dealership and spoke to a service advisor. He said, "Nah, it's safe to drive, it's usually nothing major, sometimes as minor as not tightening the gas cap."
Friday
I left in the morning for the conference. As I drove there, I took a right-hand turn fairly sharply, and the oil indicator icon flashed on for about three seconds. This is the second time I've observed this. After I parked, I happened to notice oil coating the inside of the exhaust pipe.
Something tells me the auto service will not be cheap. Oh, did I mention I'm 2000 miles outside the comprehensive warranty?
Saturday
After plugging in the laptop to recharge before I went to bed, I woke up to find the battery LED flashing yellow. The power meter read 100%, but removing AC power killed the system instantly. I've been noticing a steady reduction in available battery capacity for some time, but I never expected such an abrupt and complete failure.
Lenovo wants $160 for a replacement.
I'm really not looking forward to Sunday, nor most especially Monday, when I will attempt to drive back home over Hwy 17. (So much for that new graphics card I wanted to buy...)
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(comment on this) Friday, November 6th, 2009
(6 comments | comment on this) Thursday, November 5th, 2009
shevek
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12:02a
Under the yellow sodium-lit night sky, a million stars of broken glass twinkle along the edges of the freeway. I feel that once, I knew that "Bascom" was a type of fish, or a flower; but now, the lettering in Highway Gothic just means "home". In two days, I will leave Los Gatos, and I will probably never visit it again. My roots are shifting. What will "Bascom" mean then, in ten years time, on the road to Santa Cruz? It will mean a row of clairvoyants, all outdoing one another with gaudy advertising, and two years later, a closed down Chrysler garage. It means the daily pilgrimage to Wholefoods, because there's nowhere else to go, and the interminable wait for the pedestrian light to change.
I'm struggling to explain why I felt an unaccountable familiarity as I drove up I280 today. It felt more like a run to Glastonbury at night - a regular commute - a necessary slice out of my life in part-payment for moving from one place to another - more than an expedition. I think I speak the language of the San Francisco highways now.
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(2 comments | comment on this) Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
(comment on this) Monday, November 2nd, 2009
ladykalessia
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11:41p
Yes, yes, I suck at posting.
I really am reading, I swear. And there's plenty I could be posting about, really. But I just don't feel like I have the time.
The new boy is awesome. The new bed is great. The new job is eating my life, but I don't actually mind all that much right now. This must be what normal people feel like, right? I'm actually thinking that I like all of this well enough that I've considered not doing Dickens this year. Crazy, huh? Not-Fezziwigging it takes a lot of the draw of the event out of it for me. We'll see how this goes.
And soon I'll have healthcare on someone else's dime. And in the next few months I should start the housing hunt fo' reals yo. I really want to *buy* something - it just seems so ridiculous to contemplate throwing $1500 in the ground every month. But I'll have to save up big to be able to afford even the most pitiful of dwellings, even at this point in the economy. Depressing. My house fund, while halfway to the first goal in June, was what sustained me through the unemployment claim fuckuppery, and is now an anemic and sad little slip of its former self resting in my new credit union account. I has a sad. Awwww.
And really, I think it's time I did sit down with a financial planner and figure this out. Could I buy a condo sometime in the next N years? What should my savings and retirement fund goals be?
Ooof, yay adulthood. :)
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(2 comments | comment on this)
(1 comment | comment on this) Sunday, November 1st, 2009
shevek
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10:14p
Having spent some time using antlr, I have come to the regrettable conclusion that whatever the task, antlr is the wrong way to address it. As is common with LL parser generators, it has no clear distinction between the syntax and the semantics of the target language; the grammar specification is overcomplex and underpowered, and involves an unholy mixture of code and data; and the API is generally a botch job which leaves one to invent a great many uninteresting wheels.
The right answer is almost always SableCC.
Protip: When using sablecc, feel free to add arbitrary semantic constructs to your AST, even if they aren't the target of any transformation the CST. You can transform to these constructs later in your semantic analyzer visitor, and it's an elegant way of generating the extra classes and visitor hooks. This trick also allows one to resolve parser ambiguities in an early-stage visitor.
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(3 comments | comment on this) Saturday, October 31st, 2009
(2 comments | comment on this)
shevek
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10:29p
I just came fourth out of 600 runners in Journey to the End of the Night, a 10km hunter killer street race across San Francisco. I am exhausted but just glad to be here. I ran for about three hours and was about 30 minutes behind the winner. More when I recover and stop shaking. The vast majority of runners don't finish so I really am glad to be here.
Edit: I think 75 people completed the course. The last ones were still coming in after 1am.
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(13 comments | comment on this) Friday, October 30th, 2009
lj_maintenance
[ dwell ]
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5:17p
Network Maintenance - Saturday, October 31, 2009 at 04:00-05:00 GMT/UTC
EDIT: If you're reading this, our maintenance is OVER! The problem was not found on our equipment, which means we'll have to work with our ISP to fix this small problem -- which also means another maintenance window in the future -- but at least we have eliminated our side.
Thank you everyone, and a special shout out to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rekoil for giving me a great suggestion AND also the opportunity to feel like I've just called in to a local radio station.
Have a great day, night or afternoon wherever you may be.
---
Hi everyone, sorry for the late notice but I'm going to have to do some testing on 1 of our 4 internet circuits TONIGHT; Friday night or Saturday morning depending on which time zone you're in.
Most of us shouldn't notice any impact, though there may be some slowness or lag when I switch traffic on to our other ISP circuits and then another hit when I stop the tests. If a page won't load or times out, try hitting refresh 1 or 2 times and it should load then. If it doesn't work at all... trust me, I'll be typing really really really fast to try to undo whatever I just did. Hopefully you'll have some Halloween candy (if you're in the USA and celebrate that kind of thing) nearby to take away the bitterness of a small site outage. :(
Here's the handy-dandy Website That I Always Use to get a feel for when the maintenance will start in your area. Our site traffic historically dips on Friday afternoons until Saturday morning which is why we tend to pick this time for maintenance work.
( tech details )
status.livejournal.org will, of course be updated before and after the maintenance window. Or else marta will get mad at me. :D
bt
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(50 comments | comment on this)
dazeoflaur
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11:40a
Red & Gold Trained gown: making the bodice
I promised to eventually come back & create more diary entries for this project. So here I go:
I machine basted the shoulders on this entirely hand sewn bodice, *facepalm*. Those machine basting stitches were pulled out later but I find it ironic that I have the patience to hand sew a garment but not to hand-baste two wee, little shoulder straps to check the fit. Life is full of contradictions.
Evidence:
Here I have on all the undergarments, getting ready for the first try-on of the final bodice. I had just removed the original pleating on the camicia so it was hanging off my shoulder. After fitting the bodice straps (with the help of my housemate), I then made a new band to pleat the camicia neckline to fit.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Article crossposted from  . Comments there are appreciated.
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(comment on this) Thursday, October 29th, 2009
shevek
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6:11a
Someone: "polyexclusion... involves bosons and it's why atoms don't pass through each other and it's why you can sit your ass on a table".
Me: "I've always wondered that."
-- at dojo
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(4 comments | comment on this) Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
(1 comment | comment on this)
ewhac
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1:00a
"Throw The Switch, Igor..."
So, last week I was charged by trinsf with the duty of finding a cheap Web and domain hosting provider to replace her existing one whom she'd grown to loathe after the original provider had long since been lost in a cascade of acquisitions. And-oh-by-the-way this has to be done in the next few days, as the domain registration is about to expire.
In my customary fashion, I left it until the last minute.
After some poking around and consulting with The Twit(ter), she settled on Dreamhost.com and opened an account. Then I am further charged with The Cut-Over. The Cut-Over has the following requirements:
- The DNS record for the domain needs to be pointed at the new hosting provider;
- The domain registration itself needs to be moved to the new provider;
- All Web content must be copied off the old hosting servers;
- Email loss must be absolutely minimal;
- The Cut-Over should be invisible to all email clients -- i.e. no account settings in any email client may be changed (and no, the email account passwords aren't written down anywhere).
As you might imagine, that last one was the tricky bit.
Dreamhost.com has a very nice Wiki page detailing step-by-step what to do. Sadly, however, it said that domain transfers can take up to two weeks to complete, and trinsf's domain was set to expire in a matter of hours. So I sent email to their support people, asking if it would be a problem if the domain expired while the transfer was in progress. Given that it was 23:30, we despaired that the answer may arrive late the next morning, well after it was too late.
10 minutes later, a response arrived saying no, as long as the transfer is initiated before expiration, there'll be no problem.
So: Go to the old registrar, unlock the domains, get the transfer auth codes. Go to Dreamhost, initiate a transfer, enter the auth codes. Three minutes later, emails arrive from the old registrar saying, "Click here if you really meant to transfer." She clicks, once for each of her domains. Five minutes after that, her Dreamhost control panel is showing all her domains, all renewed for another year. The WHOIS entries are also updated.
Total elapsed time to transfer domains: 25 minutes.
Next came setting up the email. I copied the email account names off her old hosting provider's config page and entered them into Dreamhost. Then I downloaded a free tool that shows you all the POP and IMAP passwords Outlook is currently using. I copied those over, too.
Next morning, after all the DNS servers had updated (and after quitting and restarting Outlook), she started collecting mail from the new servers. (Well, not quite. There were a couple of warts I neglected to handle, but she fixed those on her own.) Given how many things could have gone achingly wrong, this went rather well.
current mood: accomplished
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(4 comments | comment on this) Monday, October 26th, 2009
(comment on this)
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But aren’t all those stars really pretty?
