Dale Miller

This weekend has had its good and its bad moments.

On Friday night I was planning to spend my usual evening at Sufficient Grounds. On my way there, Ann called and wanted to hang out with me. We ended up sitting at S.G playing Chez Geek for a few hours. On my way home, I received a call from some one who had seen my bumper sticker. She claimed to be interested in meeting me, and, since I told her I was headed home from S.G, suggested meeting me there at that same time (9:23) on Saturday. This is a bit late for me, but of course I agreed.

Saturday started out with a trip to North Little Rock where KOLL was having a drawing for a free pool. I was one of their finalists. It seems that there were ~90 such folk. Of course, I didn’t win the pool, but received an “Atlanta vacation”. I put that in quotes because it doesn’t include transportation. There were a couple of Branson trips there as well. That would have been more to my liking. I can afford to drive to Branson and spend a couple of days going to shows and hanging out by the pool if my lodging is paid for. Atlanta isn’t as appealing. The package includes admission to Stone Mountain and Six Flags, but those wouldn’t’ be much fun by myself. I’m going to see if anyone at work wants it.

Once the drawing was over and the parking lot cleared enough that I could leave, I headed to Hooters for lunch. The sandwich was acceptable, and the scenery was nice. Then it was home for a nap.

I headed out again around 8:00 pm. I sat at Sufficient from 9:00 to 10:00, hoping that the previous night’s call was serious. Of course, no one showed up. I hope whoever was playing with me enjoyed themselves.

I woke up this morning and kind of wanted to take a drive and take courthouse pictures. I talked myself out of it and into mowing the yard instead. That was probably a good move on my part. The yard certainly needed to be chopped back. I didn’t destroy a lawnmower, or even a blade. I’m getting better. :) The only untoward thing that happened was that I got stung by a wasp. They have built a nest in the door of my storage building and I apparently disturbed them when I went to fill up with gas at one point. While a sting anywhere is annoying, this one is particularly so since it’s in the middle of my back.

I’m bored. I could read or watch anime, but neither appeals terribly to me at the moment. Oh well, I’ll see if I can get to bed early tonight and hopefully be distracted with work for the next few days.

The tao that can be tar(1)ed
is not the entire Tao.
The path that can be specified
is not the Full Path.

We declare the names
of all variables and functions.
Yet the Tao has no type specifier.

Dynamically binding, you realize the magic.
Statically binding, you see only the hierarchy.

Yet magic and hierarchy
arise from the same source,
and this source has a null pointer.

Reference the NULL within NULL,
it is the gateway to all wizardry.

Happy Summer Solstice!

Lessons (re) learned today:

• When configuring a terminal server to connect to an Opscan 5 scanner using software flow control, disable the check for DTR so the line doesn’t drop mid conversation.
• Similarly, when configuring a terminal server to communicate with a printer port of a Verifone 530, disable software flow control as the checksum can sometimes be an x-off character (and the packets are small anyway, so flow-control isn’t important).
• If you change the IP address on a Bluesocket controller, don’t expect the upstream Cisco router (with static routes) to magically know that the address has changed.

Basically, it has just been one of those days.

I did not want to get out of bed this morning. I punched the snooze button several times, and between each punch dozed enough to have another odd dream. The ones I still remember include planning a wedding (my own, I think, but I’m not sure), training to be able to teach step aerobics, and putting rfids on cat collars that would open the back door of the house when they approached (not the cat door, that would have been too simple).

It’s Sunday evening, and another weekend draws to its close. I’ve spent this weekend mostly at home. I started to go out to lunch today, even got in the car and started down the road, but turned around after seven miles or so. I just wasn’t in the mood to interact with people nor spend money. The “not spending money” part is a good thing, but I’m a bit worried about the other. I’ve been accused of being anti-social as it is. I don’t need to become any worse.

The cats have been working in shifts to keep me company today as I have been reading. Cinderella is presently in my chair with me, trying to convince me that I should be petting her rather than typing.

I need a plan for the coming work-week — something both interesting and useful. At this point I don’t know what that might be. I can come up with several things that are useful, but not necessarily interesting. I should probably do a few of them anyway. I think I will dig a bit more into the card system and identity management, since those seem to be hot-buttons with the administration at the moment.

I have eaten too much this evening. It’s amazing what I find to snack on when I don’t have any traditional snack foods in the house. I suppose a can of pineapple isn’t as bad for me as a serving of ice cream, but I still shouldn’t eat so much.

It has been a supremely lazy Saturday. I have spent much of the day either napping or reading. Although there are a number of things I should or could do, there don’t seem to be many things I want to do. The kitties are all inside, staying out of the rain. They seem to be almost as lethargic as I am.

There is abundant rainfall in this area, thus giving me an excellent excuse to not mow my yard.

I stayed home this morning to meet the air conditioner repairman. Some $140 later I am able to pump cold air into my house. This is a very good thing.

I showed up for work a little before noon, and jumped right into the projects at hand. I did a bit of tweaking of an LDAP server and continued my explorations of the Bluesocket box. The only downside we have yet found is that it’s noisy. In production this is no big deal since it will be in the computer room, but for testing purposes it’s slightly annoying. If that’s the worst we find then I think we’ll be okay. The later part of the afternoon was spent figuring out a good way to change a Unix password on one system from an Oracle web application running on a second system. I got it working, but the path is somewhat convoluted. Hopefully this is a temporary method, but temporary implementations have an alarming tendency to be around for years.

I have been eating too much lately, and not exercising enough. Bad Dale!

Today started out badly. For some reason I was really down when I woke up this morning. That lasted all through my drive in to work.

However, as soon as I was at the office I made myself busy. I headed over to Administration South to retrieve a screw-type RJ45 jack (I couldn’t use a 110-type punch down since I was using non-standard wire), and then out to parking lot 8 to connect up the new campus card reader. That went flawlessly, and I had lot fully operational by about 8:30. The I headed back to the office, processed administrivia for a bit, and was alerted to the fact that our Bluesocket boxes had arrived. If you’ve never heard of Bluesocket, they are a company that make appliances to sit between a wireless network and the rest of the world and require authentication for wireless users. There are a number of vendors of similar devices, but we picked Bluesocket. Tim and I messed about with one of ours most of the afternoon. I am fairly impressed. It has pretty much every feature I want to see in such a box, and the interface is both usable and reasonably intuitive.

In any case, by keeping myself busy all day I didn’t have time to be depressed. That’s a good thing.