A carnival of technology

Maybe I should just skip forward to that one who dug up his predecessor and put the corpse on trial. Oh my goodness that dude was messed up. Hopefully this weekend will give me the time and motivation to actually do some reading.

Meanwhile, here’s what’s been going on, told in crappy pictures:

My wallet has been perhaps my greatest act of procrastination. The mauve nylon thing that I used up until today was purchased by my mother (thanks, mom, I think I got your money’s worth out of it) for ten or fifteen bucks when I was in the seventh grade or so. I think it came from J.C. Penny. It could have been first considered worn-out around the eleventh grade, when the velcro stopped working. It came with one of those useless plastic picture holders, which I used for a while to hold credit cards and identification, and after that broke I stuffed every card I had, which turned out to be quite a few, into the one pocket on the side that was sized for that. The seams are coming apart, and that one pocket has stretched to the point that everything falls out if I turn it upside-down. It’s been in this horrible condition for about as long as I can remember.

Pictured above is the old wallet, emptied, next to my new wallet, stuffed full of cards and about eight dollars. Chris was the one who gave me the idea, since he bought one first. The New York Times wrote an article about these things about three years ago, so hopefully I’m not too far behind fasion. I got an All-Ett, which basically claims that the problem with wallets these days isn’t so much all the crap you stuff into them as the wallet itself, so they make thin wallets out of spinnaker nylon. I bought the “European,” perhaps better called its original name, “Junior,” since it would be useless for holding European money, which is a simple billfold having one pocket for cash and two for cards. It’s the smallest that All-Ett has, and I went with that in part to force me to get rid of some of the junk I carry around; I’m never going to visit Taco Mac enough times to get a free mug, I don’t even like Performance Bikes and I think two or three of these insurance cards are expired. I’ve cut myself down to a driver’s license, two credit cards, two kinds of insurance, organ donor information, a Breeze card and three customer loyalty cards, and this both fits pretty well into the two pockets and seems like enough to get by. The wallet doesn’t completely disappear from sensation like the promotional material would have you believe, probably because I’m still sitting on a big wad of plastic cards, but it’s much less noticeable, and it’s not super uncomfortable like the old wallet.

The lack of discomfort and the water resistant material led to another delightful conclusion: I can wear this thing on the bike. In the past I’ve found non-pants places for my wallet while biking, either the panniers if I’m carrying them or that bag under the seat, and I’ve done this for two reasons: 1) (most important) my old wallet was way uncomfortable; 2) (less important) carrying the wallet in my pants meant that paper money was going to be soaked in ass-sweat. The first condition is certainly no longer true, and I decided to try out the second today with a clear sky and a pleasant 86 degrees fahrengrade. The paper money seemed to hold up pretty ok. This will certainly make my lighter trips less annoying.

This leads me into my second topic…

I’m fat. I was probably in pretty alright shape around last August or so, but after I gained about twenty pounds while being extra-sedentrary with my broken foot, most of which I held on to, and now that I’m not biking to work anymore I’m continuing that spiral into flabbiness.

Pictured above is the Wii Fit balance board, which also thinks I’m fat. It even makes my Mii look chubby when I do the daily weigh-in and balance test. So I managed to get a Wii Fit despite the dire predictions of shortages and riots and whatnot, I’m not sure what to think of it yet. The idea of getting me off the couch and in shape while playing a game seems great, but I’m not sure that the Wii Fit will help me with my biggest problem: sticking to it. It’s kind of like Wii Sports in that it gives you a whole bunch of games, or exercises or whatever, that you can play, but it doesn’t give you any kind of plan. So the Wii Fit tells you what to do with each activity but doesn’t plan a workout for you. I’ve only had it a couple of days, so I don’t know how well that’ll go.

Above is the computer I’ve been running as some sort of server since college, and an AMD Athlon with more hard drives than the case was meant to take, a computer that has failed time after time only to be stitched back together and forced into service anew, a computer so flaky that if I drove the load average above 1 for more than a couple three minutes, like if I tried to compile something, the kernel would start to throw errors and random programs would begin to segfault. I’ve turned it off. Taking its place are two new machines: a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router taking over the tasks of routing and local DNS and DHCP services, and a Buffalo Terastation Live taking over the task of storage. What’s neat about these is that they both run Linux under the hood and provide the mean to poke around and change things to fit my crazy whims. What’s less neat about the Terastation is that there isn’t as much the unified community as for OpenWRT, and I keep running into obstacles. The folks over at nas-central gave me enough information to figure out how compile a kernel with NFS support, but the next problem I’ve hit is ACLs. As you might know, I’m pretty big on access control lists, and not having them presents as nasty obstacle as far as how I’m going to bring the CVS and SVN repositories back up. Compiling a new kernel isn’t enough in this case; the glibc in the stock root image doesn’t have the right syscalls.

It’s not hopeless, though as I continue to attack this problem I’m moving further from my goal of replacing computers with appliances that don’t require any maintenance. Maybe I just can’t live without a problem to solve. It’d be nice to be able to install an entirely new, easily updatable system like for the Linksys router, but since, other than being old, the Terastation system is fairly unrestrictive and exists on a hard drive instead of flash memory, the cool thing to do seems to be to use one of the NSLU2 package feeds. After messing around with cross-compiled libcs and finding new and exciting ways to lock myself out of the Terastation, I’ve realized that the chroot environment I use along with ACLs can possibly help; I don’t need a new library on the main system as long as I can get one running in the chroot environment. So maybe that’ll help.

The guy sitting next to me on the flight to Boston crossed himself as the plane was taking off, and that kind of creeped me out. It’s not that I have a problem with Catholics or anything, it was knowing that through that action he was saying a little prayer asking that this metal tube hurtling through thin air at about 500mi/h does not fall out of the sky as would seem right for such a flimsy thing to do. It was unsettling. He crossed himself again when we landed, and that was a lot less unnerving.

I had a fun new experience while going through ATL security. As I was walking into the entrance of the security line, the usually empty turnstile maze that precedes the guy who checks your ticket and ID, a TSA agent walked out of the mass of poles and wires, handed me a yellow postcard and said in full authority voice, “SIR WOULD YOU PLEASE HAND THIS CARD TO THE SECURITY AGENT,” before walking away and disappearing. I assumed, as I think many would, that I had just been signed up for the random anal probe. There was an Indian guy next to me, and he kind of backed up a few steps and gave me a look as if to say, “The hell?” I shrugged and continued the march, resigned to my fate. While waiting in line I had a chance to take a better look at the card. The numbers scrawled on it weren’t codes; they were times. There was an explanation on the reverse side telling me that this card is used as a marker to time the length of the security wait. I was not probed. The wait was ten minutes.

I supposed I should have planned what to do with the three or four hours of free time I had on this trip instead of just driving around looking for stuff, since all of the kitschy museums in Massachusetts are closed on Monday. That GPS thing was useless.

The interview was exactly as horrible as Chris and David made it out to be. I hope I did ok.

In a little bit I’m going to hop in a car and drive to the MARTA station (because the bus schedule is different and confusing since the last time I took it) and hop on a plane up to Boston, land of clam chowdah and a tea-soaked harbor and some other stuff. It’s been a while since I’ve flown, so today I’ve been looking over the TSA website and playing a game of What’s Legal to Take on a Plane Today? (answer: nothing). I generally try to travel pretty light so I don’t have to deal with dragging a bunch of luggage around or checking bags or any of that, but this time I bought a bag to check. I figure I ought to shave for the interview, and even if I could find where I put those cartrdige blades I don’t think I could take shaving cream carry on, so into the cargo hold with it. One effect of this is that all of things I usually stuff into one bag are now spread across two bags, so it feels like I’m forgetting something. I hope my new bag doesn’t end up lost.

Happy mother’s day, mom!