Dale Miller

Happy birthday, stupidgibberish!!!

Today ended far better than it started. By lunch time I didn’t feel like going to the pool for water aerobics, nor did I even feel like walking across the street to get food. Fortunately, Jay brought me back a steak sandwich from Sonic, and I felt somewhat better after eating. I managed to finish up a program to verify consistency of email addresses in LDAP, and fixed the program that does the survey of our network hardware (it hadn’t been working since the recent webserver upgrade — missing Perl modules). I came home tonight to find “The Lion King” waiting in my mailbox. I haven’t seen it in years, and thoroughly enjoyed watching it. I think the cats are beginning to wonder about me. I tend to listen to movies at fairly high volume. It’s normally so quiet in the house, and then suddenly this wall of noise. They don’t seem to mind too much, though. They have discovered that I stay still while watching, so they can come snuggle. I have hopes that I will feel better tomorrow than I did today. If I don’t start out better, I think I’ll just stay in bed.

I finished The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin a few days ago. A couple of the conversations between Jack (teen boy) and Eddie (teddy bear) were memorable (at least to me).

Jack climbed painfully to his feet. He gazed down at the toy bear. ‘You really are real, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘As real as,’ said Eddie.
‘As real as what?’ said Jack.
‘Wish I knew,’ said Eddie. ‘But I can’t do corroborative nouns. None of us are perfect, are we? I can get started. As big as, as foul as, as obscene as. But I can’t get any further. But that’s life for you again. As unfair as … Listen, wouldn’t you rather go to a bar and have a drink? My bum’s beginning to sober up. I seep at the seams. I’ve got leaks as big as … But we all have our problems, don’t we?’

‘We’ll have to wind it up first,’ said Jack.
‘This much I know.’
‘Then we get in and I drive.’
‘It all sounds so simple when you put it that way.’
‘There’s one thing,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t have a driving licence. I’m too young to drive.’
‘I don’t think we should let a small detail like that stand in the way of the disaster that immediately awaits us as soon as you get behind the wheel, should we?’
‘You’re a most articulate little bear,’ said Jack.

There are times that having a long drive in to the office is a nice thing. It gives me time to think over problems and work out what I need to do, lets me plan out my work day and prioritize things, and just generally get myself settled in for another day

Today was not one of those days. I spent most of my drive in thinking about the things I have done wrong in my life, things that I wish I had done, and just in general berating myself for being a failure as a person. Needless to say, by the time I got to the office I was thoroughly depressed. I think I’m going to see how much of the day I can spend hiding in my office so I don’t have to face the world.

This weekend has been interesting. I was in a good mood most of Saturday and went to Sufficient Grounds Saturday night. Sometime between arriving and leaving I started feeling rather depressed, for no apparent reason, I felt that way the rest of the night, but was mostly okay this morning. I really don’t know what happened, but I would rather not have it happen again. Today I went out to lunch and made the mistake of haunting antique malls and flea markets. The first stop was Blue Suede Shoes Antique Mall, where I picked up an original Mickey Mouse phone, with a broken dial, but I believe I can manage to fix it. Unfortunately, those phones weren’t made by Western Electric, although they were sold by Bell. The dial is slightly non-standard, but of the appropriate dimensions. I should be able to pull a dial out of a Princess phone and cobble something together for a bracket. Next was the Purple Cadillac Flea Market in the back half of the building. There I found a Hamilton Beach model E mixer. It was not in particularly good shape, but it had a good set of beaters, both large and small mixing bowls, and the juicer attachment. I thought the $40.00 price a bit high, but was pleased to discover that the seller was running a 50% off sale. Okay, $20 I could handle. I also picked up a Trivial Pursuit Genus Edition master game and a Genus II Edition card set (more on that later). As if I hadn’t already spent enough money, I stopped in at Antiques and Uniques, where I found another Hamilton Beach mixer (a model G, this time) with no accessories, but in excellent condition for $17.00. I was on a roll, so I bought it too. I know I shouldn’t have, but now I don’t need to refinish the model E unless I just want to. I also found something which disturbed me a bit. Check the pictures if you are interested.


The model E is on the left, and the model G on the right.

A close-up of the juicer sitting on top of the model G

A sign that mirell would like, but I didn’t think it was worth $225.00

Finding this rather bothered me. I’m going to have to go look tomorrow to see if there is one on the building, or if it has somehow managed to make its way to Bryant. I’m also wondering who would want to buy such a plaque, and for $125.00, even.

When I told Mark about my purchases, we started talking about Trivial Pursuit editions. I went searching on the web, but was unable to discover a comprehensive list of them (or even the ones published in the U.S.). I have decided, though, that I want to pick up a few more, just to round out my collection. I now have Genus I, II, III, and 5, so I need only IV and 6 (and yes, they changed from Roman to Arabic numerals with 5). I also have the Know-It_All card set. I want to pick up some of the “decade” sets (60s, 80’s, 90’s, etc.) And some of the more esoteric card sets (War & Victory, Welcome to America, etc.), just because. Now I just need someone to play against.

Alright, I’m up far too late, and I must go to work in the morning.

Yee-haa! I have just signed up for DSL service. I can finally have a connection with reasonable latency. Now I just have to wait for the modem and to have it turned on. I suppose I should spend some time this weekend running a new phone wire so I can split the analog service off at the demarc. Now… where did I leave that box of cat5?

Choir last night was quite nice. I’m getting my voice back a little, and I’m beginning to feel like I’m making music instead of just trying to sing notes. The rehearsal was tiring, but it was a good kind of tired.

I spent most of today working with Jay on a database design for identity management. Although we ended up with only about 4 tables in DB Designer, we hashed out a number of concepts and generally decided the overall plan. Hopefully we will be able to sit down next week and actually build tables and start populating them.

I watched “Patton” tonight. I enjoyed that movie when I saw it in the theater as a kid (in Dimension 150, no less), and I enjoyed it again tonight. Unfortunately my television just doesn’t have the same impact as a large-screen theater. The cinematography is good, the story is compelling, and the music is memorable. What more can you ask of a war film? I have Bridget Jones’ Diary to watch tomorrow. I don’t expect it to have quite the same effect. :)

Oh, I when I checked the mail this evening, I found a letter from Alltel saying that DSL is now available in this area!! Unfortunately the business office was closed by the time I called, but I intend to call them early tomorrow and see how soon they can install. It would be good to get rid of the satellite connection.

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I’m presently reading The Nameless Day by Sara Douglass. The principle character is Thomas, a noble-turned-priest in the late 14th century. His perception of the world seems to be appropriate for a man of his station. One paragraph struck me as interesting:

Thomas sat for a few minutes, staring into the fire, then he, too, rose and walked to the: door. He knew now that Marcel was undoubtedly demon-corrupted, if not demon himself, and he, had confirmed the method of the demonic assault of Christendom: through their evil, both subtle and direct, the demons meant to launch an attack on the traditional and God-given hierarchy of society. They would attack the Church, and they would attack the right of the nobles to govern society, and they would persuade the common man that he had a right to his own destiny. Sweet Jesu! It was a nightmare! The commonality were simple folk, who needed the love and direction of the higher order of priests and nobles. God’s order on earth would collapse if common men were allowed freedom of choice! Ah, it was best he leave now, before Paris disintegrated into flames around him.

Just as the powerful of that day felt that a monarchy was the proper way of things, so today the powerful seem to feel that a representative democracy is the only appropriate form of government. In both cases, the powerful find it necessary to impose their desired form on others. All of this caused me to begin thinking about the good and bad points of various governments, from my point of view.

In general, any established government seems to fall prey to bureaucracy. The longer a government is stable, the more laws are passed, the more employees the government has to employ to deal with laws and regulations, and the more paper is generated. This would seem to argue for a complete change out of the government every 50 years or so.

Okay, I’ve rambled sufficiently for this post.

This is my obligatory “Valentine’s Day is no fun if you’re alone” post.

Actually, I’ve managed to handle that part fairly well this year. I even had a pretty good day at the office. I have my Perl script to copy/rename LDAP entries working properly now. It helps to actually pay attention to the documentation. The array of attributes returned from a query is not the same as the array of attributes passed to the create call. I don’t know where my brain was when I was fighting that on Friday.

I have also learned how to call a subroutine in a C library from inside PL/SQL. Unfortunately, Jay and I stumbled across that late this afternoon, so I didn’t stick around and build a test case. That will be for tomorrow. That has the potential to greatly simplify some of our identity management issues. Oh, and the DBMS_OBFUSCATION_TOOLKIT is interesting, but I’m not sure how useful.

Version 0.1 of the laundry room status page works now. I don’t have anything more than a proof of concept, but the data are all accessible, so I just need to decide how it should look (and finishing populating the capabilities and timing table), and it will be ready for public testing.

I also just finished playing with the PL/SQL LDAP module. I think I know what I’m going to be doing for the next few days.

So, in conclusion, while I really would like to have a girlfriend, I wouldn’t get as much programming done.