navigate pictures more code unbound pedantic going elsewhere beth stef melinda floh jobo contact jose@monkey.org

march 31, 2002 currently in cleveland visiting beth and her family. its always fun, they're wonderful people. sohpie, the dog, slept with me last night. she's a sweet dog, and it felt good to have her there. :) i was listening to npr (big surprise) on the drive home on thursday night. a really cool story on the structure of life and xenobiology was pretty interesting to me. i was reminded of a question i answered online one day about the use of H2S in place of H2O. i answered what i thought was a pretty sensible answer (basically that you need an electron acceptor, an energy gradient, etc ... and you dont have to have water around), and it was even fun to think about. too bad grad school squished that kind of thinking out of me, and gave me a fatalist attitude about the whole process of science. "we can thank jesus for the right to carry firearms." essentially what charlton heston would be saying this christian holiday. march 27, 2002 luckily its warming up. not warm mind you but warmer than this crappy snow ridden crap. i have become quite possessive of my drive to work. i love opening it up on a country road, even if my car needs some work. still, when some yuppies bastard gets in my way and drives too slowly, or even just slows down to turn, i get upset. get off my road. i feel the same way about my bandwidth. crimeny. i'm paying for this stuff, get off my wire! 30 second lags is unacceptable, when i work on a remote command line. "he sprinkles in the fairy dust and it makes more bandwidth." i wish it were that simple. or even as simple as calling ameritech. march 26, 2002 i'm fucking sick of snow. and cold. and clouds. and wind. why the fuck didn't i take a job in the south? found a nice remote overflow in OpenBSD last night. but then i think i screwed up the patch. that'll teach me to drink and code. this weather keeps me annoyed. my fingers get cold and stuff, i can't use gloves on my hands to when i have keys in my hands, my steering wheel is cold, etc ... later finally got some code working. rakesh++ for some suggestions that made a huge difference, and me-- for forgetting some simple hacks around stupid limitations in expect. march 25, 2002 twilight. its almost the end of march. it snowed today, which is annoying. however, it also is still light out, well, twilight out, at 10 until 7 pm. ahh .. finally. some light. busy scheduling how i will be checking in the final version of my thesis. i have no idea how this all will work, or how i will print the whole shebang. i may drive in on thursday night and crash on someone's couch. looking at gadgets. TiVo and similar products, a Rio bookshelf +MP3 system, etc ... in due time. too much else to worry about right now. march 24, 2002 soreness. helped a coworker move yesterday, and now i'm sore. arms, legs, everything. so i slept a lot today. i hope i dont ruin my schedule tomorrow. the TV's been on almost constantly when i'm home now that i have cable. this obviously isn't good. wheat's worse is that i have 80 channels, and less than 1% of the stuff on any given DAY is worth looking at. the things i go through to watch a few shows. the cable modem performance is abysmal, too. lots of dropped packets, so at times it feels as slow as my old 36k modem. i need to call them to see if this can be remedied. march 22, 2002 online time is coming my way? i hope ... i hope its not one of those sucky "oh, here's you equipment. if we can ever figure this there thing out we'll turn on your port" kind of deals. i wanna be online NOW. i come in to HORDES of email each morning (automated alerts) and i can't do my development work from work ... suck! i need online access now! it hit me this morning. i defended :) i looked in my closet, where i had a suit hanging which i was PLANNING on wearing for my defense, and remembered, "oh yeah. that was this week. i'm DONE." couldn't feel better about it. my SGI has an IndyCam. i am pondering a webcam. but i doubt i will. after all what you'll see mostly is a guy not there. or a guy hacking code. or watching hordes of TV. but not a fun, exciting life to watch. not like Jenny cam or something. march 21, 2002 victory is mine! the thesis is defended. minor corrections and a final printing, binding, and herr doktor i will be. the world awaits ... in other news, i am really lucky. beth, she rules. she got together my friends, who also rule, and we had a nice dinner at arirang gardens. my bad, i showed up 30 minutes late after chatting with some people. still, my friends, who RULE, waited. thanks guys :) it was so good to see all of you and share a nice meal. thanks, it meant a lot. right now my laptop is sitting atop a small sun netra x1. "if its on my desk its mine." that may not float around here, i'll see what i can push through. maybe if i keep my laptop on it they wont notice it. muah ... sparc 64, small rackmount form factor, dual ethernet jacks. this would be sweet. march 19, 2002 woke up with some funky dreams. i don't even know what. its probably thesis stress in the making. i worked on my presentation last night. it doesn't look great, but frankly i guess i just dont care anymore about it. after all, my boss didn't put much effort into it, why should i? i misscheduled the cable guy to come on wednesday. beth laughed at me for this, and deservedly so. i'm gone all day wednesday. all i was thinking was, "yes! have it installed in time for the west wing!" plus i'm looking forward to having a cable modem so i can get back to some coding and book writing without the control of a company. march 17, 2002 finished reading hunter thompson's fear and loathing in america. not as good as the first volume of letters. started reading philip agee's inside the company: CIA diary. so far its interesting, even if dated (he started in the late 50's). still no cable, no internet connection either. watched star wars and empire strikes back, rented season 1, episodes 1-4 of the sopranos. gotta get me the rest, this is a fun show. i may have to look at getting HBO in the cable package, too. march 16, 2002 ahh the weekend. fin de la semana. its saturday night, and i've been milling about the place for a while. i fell asleep AGAIN while watching "the empire strikes back". damn me. i keep missing out on all of luke's adventures. (warning: spoiler) and i keep missing the defining moment of the movie, "luke, i am your father." what a week. aside from milan's sudden and unexpected death, it was pretty good. i can sum it up like this: i just walked outside to get my new brita pitcher (the water around here is horriffic) and i saw something i hadn't seen for a while when i looked out my front door, the stars. yeah, i think this is going to work out nicely. gotta reschedule the cable guy's visit to *not* coincide with my absence from my house (plus the cable modem is gonna be sweet). gotta finish "bsgen", a data falsifier for work (and i gotta think of a better name). plus i may have to rewrite some methods for our test suite to move to deterministic testing. such is life, eh? highlights of my week: "aaron. can you get your x21 to APM suspend reliably?" "yeah." "i can't. sometimes it can and sometimes it doesn't." "i found that it does that when its still plugged in. APM's funny like that." problem fixed. "this would be a whole lot easier if we moved to Linux." "no, tom, it would be far worse." heated discussion ensues, spirals out of control, amuses great hordes of people on internal IRC, and i quietly slip back to work. catching funny small bugs. i actually enjoy this stuff. :) so i was all set to drop a lot of money at best buy today. TiVo, probably a new bookshelf stereo system, and maybe even a bigger TV. no one paid a single drop of attention to me. nor a bunch of other guys also looking at TiVos. "did you find everything allright today, sir?" "no, i didn't. i was all set to spend a lot of money, but no one helped me." i don't think the words registered with him at all, but i'm not surprised. instead of $500, you get $3 as i buy a piece of coax for my place. back to online shopping. march 14, 2002 it's been just over a day since milan died. i miss my friend. in this picture, taken this winter, she was happily keeping warm by the vent in the bathroom. that was one of her favorite places in my old apartment. she didn't even get to settle in the new place before everything happened. what's up with jose? well, here's the short list: new job i am a QA engineer at arbor networks, and now live in ann arbor, michigan. got a nice townhouse, two stories and everything. the stairs were for the cat, as were the windowsills. i figured i owed her so much after how well she treated me during my phd studies. i did my first CVS commits today (with one add, even), and my first bug reports yesterday. i wrote a test module for a new product, and its being fleshed out. lots more work to do, but i'm one happy guy. plus i learned that 0/8 *is* a valid network, just IANA reserved. plus i wrote a LOT of test cases. phd thesis defense i defend my thesis next wednesday. look for details here. beth's still in pittsburgh, where she's finishing up a year or her graduate studies in classics. i miss her, but i know i'll see her soon. i started this so that people could see whats up. hopefully a few minutes a day of telling you guys whats up will be worth it for you and for me. more later, this will certainly get fleshed out. be patient.