Current entry Archive March 2002

Behind These Eyes - March 2002

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Monday, 18 March

My, how time flies when the cable modem is down.

Come Wednesday, the stupid thing will have been down for two solid weeks, bar half an hour or so once every couple of days. It's so frustrating. There's absolutely nothing we can do about it, and nobody else we can switch to. We are seriously considering just packing it in without a replacement--going back to modem-based service. At least that way, we wouldn't be expecting the service.

Anyway. Since last entry, I've been back to Wiesbaden for the migration, which went smoothly enough except for one really late night that was completely my fault. Copying the data from the old server to the new server took forever; I thought it was because the old server had compression enabled and was having to decompress files on the fly as I copied them, which was slowing things down, especially when it then ran out of space. In fact all this was true, but the real problem was that the new server had a duplex mismatch with the switch. Strangely, when the nic driver loaded, it reported 100 MB, full duplex; yet in Monitor, it showed the driver at 100 MB half. Adding some parameters on the nic driver load line and restarting solved that problem, but not before we'd sat there till 1:00 in the morning troubleshooting the speed problem, given up on it and let it copy sloooowly all night.

I went slightly mad in Wiesbaden. During our first trip, we happened upon a shop that sold just the kind of off-beat stuff that makes us stand and stare in fascination, which we proceeded to do. It was actually an interior design studio, but for reasons we may never know, their windows were full of hyper-modern candlesticks and what I can only describe as stone-and-metal chickens. We were utterly charmed. Unfortunately, thanks to the combination of restrictive shop opening hours and our sightseeing schedule, the shop was never open while we were anywhere near it. But this time, I was there for a few more days. On the last day I managed to select and buy a candlestick and a chicken, but along the way I'd found another shop with fun framed prints in the window, which if I tell you the prints all involved fish and flying saucers, you'll probably give up on me completely so I won't. Anyway, I ended up buying two fish/UFO prints as well. I will leave to you the mental exercise of imagining my passage through airport security, with a candlestick that looks like a lethal weapon and a stone chicken in my suitcase, while my unfortunate co-worker Paul looked on in some disgust, having himself been shanghaied into lugging the fish prints (I had run out of hands).

	Candlestick (63 KB). This is the candlestick. The combination of three vicious-looking arrowheads and quarter-inch-thick metal rods looks fairly incriminating on a luggage scanner.
	Chickens (188 KB). Added to which was the chicken. ("What have you got in your luggage, lady, rocks?") This is a photo of one of the shop windows, showing some of the chickens (photo courtesy of Paul, as I forgot to bring a digital camera). We ended up with the one on the far right, which currently is sitting with its back to the camera. He now graces one of the windowsills in the hall.

While I was in Wiesbaden, Mike found a match for the green paint and began painting the rest of the hallway, so when I got back, things were half green. It was just as well we didn't know at the beginning how much effort it was going to take--we had to do three complete coats before we got that yellow covered up. In retrospect, we maybe should have primed it first, to get the yellow covered immediately, but who knew then?

Anyway, the paint had just enough time to dry before Mike's birthday party, which has also come and gone. Now that his birthday is safely behind us, we've gone mad at Amazon, using up our christmas gift certificates and then some. We finally placed an order just yesterday, for (ahem) 13 books and 14 CDs. Whoops.

This most recent weekend, we went to Heath's for his 30th birthday party. There will be a rash of these this year, as Mike's university friends all take the inevitable plunge. Better to be on the early end rather than later, as everyone stores up their torment to give back to those who follow after...

Created at 23:04

Wednesday, 20 March

This will be an entry containing nothing but things I meant to mention in the last entry, but forgot.

Although I had a long gap before the last entry, I wasn't entirely idle; I made a major overhaul to the work sub-site (or rather, finished and posted the results of a long-term effort to overhaul it), and also finished and posted a version of MixPix. I blame James for this; at Mike's birthday, he asked for a copy. Well, I couldn't very well give him the version I was using; there were a few known bugs (but I knew about them, so could use it without trouble), and the on-line help wasn't finished. This forced me to tidy it up, at which point I might as well release an official version. Kind of strange really. Anyway, see the Changes page for more about any of this.

And now, boys and girls, a question for you: How do you know you're having a tough day? Answer: When you have to be rescued from your own jacket.

There we are, ready to head off to Heath's birthday party last Saturday. We've got half the house piled in the hall, packed and ready to come with us. Mike calls Cath (who is riding there with us) to tell her we're ready to go. Time to trundle the stuff out to the car. We put on our jackets. I start to zip mine--have a bit of trouble getting it started, it's been giving trouble for months now, but eventually I get it going. It gets stuck just a couple of inches up, though, and while I'm trying to peer down at it to see what the problem is, the bit that has already zipped, unzips itself.

Hmm. I've now got the zipper partway up, with unzipped zipper on either side of it. The zipper doesn't want to go down, because of course it's designed to zip in the up direction, and unzip in the down direction, so it doesn't handle going down over unzipped zipper very smoothly. Aha, thinks clever Lisa, I'll just bring it all the way up, let it unzip as it goes if it wants to, and run it straight off the top end. Then I can just start over.

And indeed, it slides easily upward, until it gets to the top, where the flaw in this plan finally occurs to me: zippers don't just run straight off the top end. They mostly stop there.

Hmm.

So there's me, with the zipper thoroughly stuck and refusing to go down, having cleverly pulled it up to the narrowest point, right solidly around my neck, in the one place where I can't possibly just slide my head out of it. In the end, Mike managed to get it to go down far enough that I could squirm out of the jacket, whereupon I threw it on the dining room floor in disgust. There it lies still.

One more thing, not something old that I forgot to mention, though. Do I even want to mention this? Or will it just annoy me? Ah what the heck. Two answering machine messages from blueyonder this afternoon. You may recall that they have seen fit to gift us with a 13-day outage. It's been (mostly) up yesterday and today, though. By my informal count, we called the special line (we have a direct line, not the main tech support number, for the duration of this problem) seven times during this outage, because we're supposed to call while the problem is happening so they can trace it and see what is happening. Four times we were told that ah yes, they could see a problem, a technician will go fix it tomorrow. Tomorrow always came without any improvement to the situation. We'd call back and get the same story again. They wouldn't call us back when they thought they'd fixed it, which was really annoying, because we couldn't tell whether they still hadn't fixed it, or whether they thought they'd fixed it and were therefore not trying any more. Not one call-back in all that time, until yesterday. Now that the thing has gone back to working anyway, through no action of theirs, we've had four calls in the last two days. The one that took the cake was the second answering machine message, in which the nice lady explained that our line appeared to be working fine, so there was nothing they could do because they can't see a problem, so would we please call them sometime while the problem is actually happening?

Created at 22:00

Friday, 22 March

Pursuant to Title 31, Section 103.24 of the Code of Federal Regulations, every U.S. person is generally required to disclose any interest in or signature authority over a foreign bank account, securities account or other financial account on Form TD F 90-22.1. ...In certain situations, the failure to file Form TD F 90-22.1 could result in penalties of up to $500,000 and prison sentences of up to ten years. If the odd form number alone doesn't intimidate a taxpayer, the name of the agency responsible for enforcement of such form surely will: Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
 
--MFA Reporter, The New IRS: It's Not the Money, It's the Form that Counts

This is one of those days when I'm really glad I have a tax accountant.

OK, so you've moved to the UK, but otherwise you're just an ordinary, normal person trying to have an ordinary, normal life. Then, tax time comes. Your accountant does up your return, no problem, takes him about five seconds, oh and by the way, do your UK bank accounts exceed $10,000?

Now how the hell, I'd like to know, is an ordinary, average, would-like-to-be-law-abiding citizen supposed to know something like this? You can so easily get yourself in so much trouble, just by simple omission of something there is absolutely no way you could know about. It's uncomfortably lodged in the back of your head somewhere that things like this are out there, lurking, but you really can't do anything about it; you have no choice but to get on with it and just hope for the best.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you move to another country, get an accountant.

Created at 23:16

Saturday, 23 March

Possible tactical error this afternoon...

I bought a Dyson earlier this week. This is something we've been intending to do for some time, because they have a pretty good reputation for actually being able to clean, a definite rarity among currently available vacuum cleaners. (Some years ago, before I bought my last one, Consumer Reports [similar to Which?] did a comparison of various hoovers, and concluded that if you want one that will actually pick up dirt, borrow your mother's. I'm not making this up.)

The Dyson has another thing going for it: gadget-itis. It's like a Transformer. Everything snaps into place with a satisfying snick; there are lots of secret doors and compartments which, if you press the right bit of plastic, spring open and reveal some cool feature or other. The whole thing disassembles and reassembles into different configurations. So, when I brought it home, we opened it up and played with assembly and disassembly for a while, but we weren't so foolish as to actually switch it on.

This afternoon Mike's mum popped in, noticed the purple and green monster lurking there and said Oh, I've been wanting one of those, so of course we had to show it off in all its gadgetesque glory. This brought its existence back to our forebrains, so after they left, Mike, in a fit of foolhardiness, actually switched it on and experimentally hoovered a few feet of carpet.

This was the tactical error.

The crud it picked up! And this was a very recently (for us) hoovered patch of carpet! And this was in the dining room, which is probably the least-used room in the house!

Inevitably, we found ourselves wondering: what would it get from a heavily-trafficked area? We had to know. So, into the living room it went, and eeewwwww! It picked up pounds of fluff and silt and dirt and dust. Without us really deciding to do it, this demonstration resulted in us (or really Mike) having to hoover the rest of the house, just to see. It was exactly like watching one of those super-optimistic hoover demonstrations in an advert, where they run it gently over a stretch of rug and the colour actually changes as it picks up loose dust sprinkled there for purposes of filming. I have to say, the carpet looks absolutely great now, all fluffed up and brand new.

So, if you've been lamenting the current state of hoover technology (as who doesn't), and wishing someone made one that actually worked, I'm pleased to report that someone does. Get yourself a Dyson. This thing is great!

In other news, this morning my Palm Pilot gave me a bit of a scare. I powered it on, the screen came on, and then straightaway flicked off again. Dead batteries, I thought, and put in some new ones and powered it on. Nothing. Uh oh.

This is the point where you really, really wish you'd listened to yourself any of the dozen or so times in the last six months that you entertained the passing thought that it might be a good idea to back up the Palm sometime soon. This is also the time when your brain relentlessly begins building an inventory of the information you'll have lost as a result of having put off the aforementioned backing up each time the thought occurred. You also get to think of just how stupid you, an IT professional, are going to feel if you really have just lost six months' worth of stuff as a result of being lazy about backups. You promise the nonexistent, uncaring Deity of Technology that if it will just give you one more chance, you swear you'll be good from now on and furthermore you will listen to Stormtroopers of Death's Anti-Procrastination Song one hundred times as your penance, please please pretty please!

Tried a HotSync in case it was just the screen that was gone. Nope.

Went to the Palm web site and did some basic troubleshooting they suggested. No good.

Long shot: Found some old batteries, previously expired, and put them back in. Powered it on. Hey! It came on!

Quick like a bunny dashed over to the PC, popped it in the cradle and did world's fastest-ever HotSync in case I was only going to get a few seconds of useful battery.

Breathed a huge sigh of relief. Those new batteries must have been dead already. Thanks, and I'll start that penance real soon now, just a few minutes, I'll just do these other things first...

Created at 22:47

Sunday, 24 March

Blast and damn.

I've spent a good chunk of the day working on a little sub-site for Stripe. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, then just never mind; it would only confirm your worst fears about my mental state.) It turns out we've taken rather a lot of Stripe photos. Building the page(s) is, except for writing the descriptions and touching up some of the yet-unprocessed photos, a tedious and repetitive exercise.

So here I am, filling in yet again my little cut-and-paste skeleton for the name of the graphic, the name again, the name of the thumbnail, the caption, the size, the description...and suddenly I realise...wait...would it work? A quick exercise for the old brain...could it handle this? and this? Why yes, it could. I could rewrite the entire web site so that the pages that contain photos build themselves on the fly.

This would, needless to say, be a lot of work and involve quite a bit of hair-tearing. But the end result would be a nifty little database with photo filenames, thumbnail sizes, and descriptions; plus a bunch of self-building pages. Then, when I want to add photos in the future, it would be really easy--just add some stuff to the database and a bit of PHP code to the page in question. It's neat and elegant, and inarguably time-saving. Well, except for the initial time investment of working out how to do it, and rewriting the existing pages...

Sadly, having an idea is something of a Pandora's box; I can't un-have the idea. Now that I've thought of it, it will nag at me until I do it.

Well, anyway. I'd hoped to finish the Stripe page(s) today, but it's a much bigger project than expected, and it's getting late, so I almost certainly won't. That means it will be quite some time before it gets finished; next weekend is a bank holiday and we are going away to be awed by English scenery and have cream teas about four times a day if I have anything to say about it. Plus, now that I've thought of a way to automate all this Stripe-page-generation, doing it the manual way will grate at me.

You just know I'll be right back here in front of this computer at 2 AM, tinkering with PHP code.

Created at 22:39