Blogrilla

me.

I’m the spaz.

I went out for lunch today to “the carts” over by MIT. Its a series of “roach coaches” that each serve a different cuisine. One served mexican. Another middle eastern and a third served far south-eastern asian food (thai/vietnamese).

I got lamb shawarma sauce all down the front of my shirt.

I have to conduct an interview here in about thirty minutes — its a good thing its only a phone interview because I look like the kind of guy who just can’t keep his food off his shirt!

What a dork.

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So my wife has an apple iBook. One of the little white ones. The screen is 12″. It has a little hard drive — I think 20GB. But I got it for her so she could surf the web in maximum comfort. Two years ago, when I purchased it I wasn’t crazy about buying the $250 warranty extension that would push the coverage from 1year to 3 years. But my brother warned me that laptops differ from desktops in two strategic ways:
1. They are (get this) “portable” and as such they get banged around more than a very stationary desktop.
2. If a component goes (like the monitor) I can’t replace it. If the hard drive on my desktop crashed I could open the case and slide in the new drive I purchased at CompUSA. Not so with laptops.

So I deviated from my usual practice and spent nearly 25% of the purchase price of the machine on the extended warranty.

Over the last two years I have placed nine calls to AppleCare. Believe me, I have used the warranty to within an inch of its life!

And then some. Last week Liz’s machine crapped out again and I made the call to Apple to have them send me a box that I would use to ship the computer to them for repair. But this time they didn’t do that. They marked the unit as a loss and shipped me a new one.

A brand new one.

Off the shelf. Its identical to the old one except that there’s not two years of wear and tear on it.

And it has 50% more disk space.

With a faster CPU.

And twice as much RAM.

And a rockin’ OS.

I’m totally tickled!! They even gave me the educational rate on the new extended warranty! Haha! I figured the first one worked out so well I would be an idiot not to get it a second time!

So this is a beautiful machine and its brand new and everything is coming up roses!

Thank you very much.

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Blogrilla: It sounds fantastic!!

The Desktop Theater 5.1 works with my iPod, too!

Its a beautiful day — the sun has been up for a little over an hour and the sky is bright blue, my tunes are humming along here. Its an excellent start to the day.

Today is going to go really well. I can feel it in my bones.

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A few years ago, I thought I would get a playstation II and start playing video games on a playstation instead of the computer. It was kind of a strategic change in direction because it was starting to cost too much money to continue staying current enough to play the hot games that were coming out. So, although the PC had seen me through many great late night (virtual) slaughterfests I felt I needed to hang up my keyboard and focus on the playstation for the hot new video games.

But this didn’t work out for a number of reasons. The TV we had it set up on was dinky — it was only 13″ and its hard to get sucked in by such a small image. I tried to buy a new TV but my wife was afraid the furniture it was on wouldn’t hold it. Its a set of shelves that aren’t quite 18″ deep. And at the time all the TV’s used cathode ray tubes instead of LCD and they had this very heavy glass screen at the front. Anyway out of a fear of it toppling over we never got one.

Also the sound stunk. Its really little more than a portable TV with some of the worst speakers on the market. The sound was tinny and small and weak. When you’re blowing things up you really need to “feel” it. To combat that I bought a Desktop Theater 5.1 from Cambridge Soundworks. In the end the connections never fit quite right so I didn’t use it and it sat in a box for years because there was nowhere for me to put it.

Finally the whole strategic change in direction fizzled out because I just didn’t like playing video games on the Playstation.

At work I am now sharing an office with two other people. They both come in several hours after me so I brought in the old set of speakers and amp and have been enjoying the crap out of it yesterday and today!! The sound is really great! I don’t care if the technology is practically 10 years old; the sound quality is really great! I have a subwoofer under the desk and some of those adorable CSW-cubes sprinkled around my desk and the deliver really great sound.

Out-bloody-standing.

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Our big commitment over the weekend was to Ben and Gabe’s soccer game. As you know I’m pretending to be the assistant coach. The actual coach is a very nice guy named Glen. Glen’s team hasn’t won a game in 2 years. ipso facto Ben’s team hasn’t won a game in two years, which is one of the things that made me decide to offer my meager services.

Well, in our second game we put that losing streak to bed! Benjamin Solomon, my son, scored the first goal of the game/season! In the first quarter he dribbled right up to the goal and scored easily! We were thrilled and the parents on the sidelines went nuts! I hooted and hollered from my regular vantage next to the other goal. I normally hang out near the goal and help our goalie make good decisions. Oh, and I holler a combination of encouragement and instructions to our players when the game is at our end of the field.

It was a really great moment and I felt very proud of Ben for managing to score that point.

A little while later he was playing goal-keeper and I gave him some appropriate “atta-boys” and whatnot. An opposing player, a friend of Ben’s from school, broke away from the pack and dribbled towards our goal. It got very tense because this other kid was quite good. He dribbled closer and closer and ben came out of the goal to close the distance. His friend kicked the ball hard at the goal. Ben put his face strategically between the ball and the goal (what a trooper!) and took one for the team, as they say. It knocked him clean off his feet! Everyone stopped to see if Ben was ok. All the players were motionless and the parents and coaches watched to see how he would react.

The ball sat nearby and nobody moved.

Ben hopped up to his feet, shook the cob webs out of his head and picked up the ball! He ran it up as far as he could and then hurled it to one of his teammates!

The crowd cheered and shoted Ben’s name!! He did JUST what he was supposed to! I think most everyone expected him to roll over and cry and ask to be taken out of the game. Nope. My little mensch did just what one would hope he would do if he could. I can’t imagine a better reaction from a professional player. His glasses were dangling off to one side of his face and his cheek was all red from the impact. In fact he had a cut on the bridge of his nose and he was starting to sniffle a little.

All the other kids (on our team and the opposing team) just stood there and watched him do his thing. They were all too stunned to react as he ran up to throw the ball to the other end of the field. It was amazing to see him pop back up like some kind of soccer weeble.

The coach and I agreed that it was Ben’s best save ever.

Ben kept any points from being scored for the rest of the quarter.

Gabriel had a really good day playing forward. He ran his little heart out trying to keep up with the ball and get it where he wanted it to go. I was very impressed with the amount of effort he put in to it. If he keeps trying that hard he’s going to be a real star someday. For now he is still working on the basics. But I liked the effort he put out!

Gabriel played goalie for a while, too and didn’t let a single ball get by him. When the ball got nearby he would run up to it and leap on top of it, protecting it with his body. JUST LIKE HE’S SUPPOSED TO!

In the end it was a win they could be proud of. Its been a long time since they’ve done something competitive and won. Well, I mean something organized and healthy. I’m hoping they got a taste for what its like to win at something and want to keep doing it. I hope it motivates them to keep trying hard to be better than last time.

It was very exciting for all of us. I was very suprised at how much I enjoyed being “assistant coach”. It was loads of fun.

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I’ve been having a lot of these kinds of days… its a little cool out but bright and sunny around 55 degrees.  We went out for some really good indian food at a punjabi restaurant at Inman square.  It was a very good time and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

I’ve been putting the finishing touches on the first, and for me, the most difficult part of my backup strategy.  That is, getting SAP and Oracle to cooperate in automatically producing backup files on a regular basis.  I think that works just fine now and I’m happy with it.  The trick now is to get it on to tape.  That’s an area I am wholly unfamiliar with.  I’ve always relied on someone else to manage the process of getting these files off to tape.  My employer has someone who is in charge of the enterprise backups, but apparently usually only gets 90% of his job right, which isn’t enough for me.  If I loose half my database, the whole thing is useless.  So now someone is urging me to put together (and take responsibility for) my own SAP tape backup solution.  I am hesitant to do that for a couple of reasons:

1. It will produce bad blood with the incompetent who currently has the responsibility
2. It really is in my employer’s best interest to have a cohesive enterprise backup solution and not have a different tape/server for each application.

So I am inclined to help the guy who is currently responsible for it to improve how he does things for the whole company.  Its a bigger and less pleasant task, but I think its the better more comprehensive way to go.

On another note, Liz and I are going out to eat this evening and will probably scope out a new picnic table and maybe some other shopping.  We have a baby sitter all lined up for 5pm and I’m sure we’ll be out until 9-ish or so.

I promised Liz I would devote Saturday to soccer and gardening/landscaping.  So we’re going to be cleaning the backyard and making everything look good.  I have to go to Lowe’s and return some tiles and purchas some mulch.  And I think we might try to get a new magnolia tree for the backyard.

Ben and Gabe have a soccer game on Saturday.  Sunday is open, but the weather is scheduled to be cold and rainy.  So I don’t know what we’ll do then.

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Idenix Announces Data Presentations at the 2006 Digestive Disease Week Meeting: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Digestive Disease Week, eh?

Sounds disgusting.

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Generals underline Rumsfeld’s folly | csmonitor.com

There must be SOMETHING we were told leading up to the Iraq war that was correct. I was just reading this opinion piece where Daniel Schorr points out that Cheney said we would be greeted as liberator and that the duration of the war would be measured in weeks, not months. All of the reasons to go to war were lies, except that Hussein was a very bad man and a threat to his people. They weren’t trying to get their hands on nuclear weapons and had no chemical weapons. They were no threat to us or to their neighbors.

It seems to me that EVERYTHING we were told about why we should go to war and how the war would go were a series of made up excuses to make us feel better about going to war.

And Bush says that knowing everything he knows today he would STILL have gone to war. He wouldn’t have changed anything.

Is that unbelievable or what?! He thinks that everything has gone perfectly? That nothing could have been done better?

What an ass.

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At lunch I went out and got my car inspected. The only big surprise was that there were so many places that would inspect my car! There was one on every block! I got it inspected without a hitch. Afterwards, I figured that since I was out and about I should get some lunch and although there were shops and restaurants everywhere there was NOWHERE to put my car. I drove in circles for a while - wound up in Harvard Square and then Inman Square. But I finally put the car away in the garage and walked about six blocks to the Kiraz Cafe where they served me a smoked salmon and goat cheese sandwich with kapers! I had a Nantucket Nectars lemonade/iced tea with some cape code kettle chips (salt and cracked peppercorn). Its 65 degrees and clear as a bell out!

What a marvelous day!

Work is a little trickier. Everything is going well — don’t get me wrong. But there’s a lot to do. Yes, I get to set up everything the way I want. However, this means I have to set up EVERYTHING. Its going to take a long time before I get on to any of the more complicated esoteric work of performance improvement and whatnot.

For now, though all is well!

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I got pulled over on Tuesday afternoon. I haven’t been pulled over in years. Was I speeding? Driving wrecklessly? No.

Expired inspection sticker.

I wish I could say it was only a little bit out of date, but I can’t. The cop nailed me because my inspection was six months over due. He was good about it, though. He explained that he was only going to issue a written warning because he doesn’t approve of how the insurance companies try to take advantage of a simple thing like that.

So the warning lets me off the hook for two days. In the past I always used to get my inspections done in Danvers/Peabody but that isn’t nearly as convenient now that I’m 30 minutes away from there. I think I found a place on McGrath Highway here in Cambridge that had a sign out saying they do inspections.

Last night I took the kids to the carnival that was in town. It was a pretty rinky-dink operation. Ben didn’t look very well from the outset — he was so green around the gills that he didn’t want to play any of the midway games. He seemed focused on the bumper cars. After a couple of kiddie rides that’s where we ended up. Afterwards he looked even worse and all he wanted to do was sit down close to a garbage can in case he heaved. After about 30 minutes he consented to let me call his mother to come get him. I stayed with the other three kids until about 7:30pm. They rode every ride available over and over. Chloe, especially was a mad-woman about the rides. Since it was a small travelling amusement park they had to focus mostly on spinny rides that go in circles.

This didn’t slow Chloe down, but after about 20 minutes Gabriel also began to feel ill. I kept taking Grace on kiddie-rides but even she was starting to loose interest — she would sit there in a car with her thumb in her mouth looking around blandly. I’ve got some photos I’ll post.

Overall they had a really good time.

While I was there I saw a local cop and decided to ask him for a recommendation of a garage who would do an inspection for me. He jovially suggested a couple and casually asked with a wide grin on his face how soon my sticker would expire.

I just smirked and laughed as I walked off and said that I couldn’t tell him that! He smiled back and encouraged me to get it taken care right away.

I think I better do that!

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