Garbage Lore

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Sun, 17 May 2009 01:27:02 GMT

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Thu, 14 May 2009 21:54:16 GMT

Johnny Pneumonic

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:29:05 GMT

So, guess what I managed to catch! If you were to say "pneumonia", I would be like, "WTF?" And yet you would still be right.

I went in to get checked for what seemed to be a rather nasty case of bronchitis. After hearing my description of the symptoms and doing some of the other checks his notion was "it's been getting steadily worse for long enough that it would appear to be a bacterial infection and it's time for antibiotics". Then he got to the stethoscope part and his notion changed slightly to "I'm hearing wheezing in only certain parts of your lungs, so you're getting a chest X-ray to see if you have walking pneumonia. Also, it would appear to be a bacterial infection and it's time for antibiotics."

Between the time I left radiology and the time I got to work, I got a call confirming more or less the same: It is in fact pneumonia but the Z-Pak I'd just been prescribed should knock it out handily.

Last night's winner of the relief game, however, was the Guaifenesin + Codeine cough syrup. The past couple of days had been a torturous ordeal of repeated attempts to nap met only with paranoid half-dreams of my least favorite sort—trying to solve logic problems concocted outside the context of logic, like trying to figure out which of the itches on my body corresponds to the desired volume on my radio. This morning I woke up readily at a time that would be appropriate for preparing for work were I actually going today.

A little while after I got up I decided that it would be funny to hear "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing" with a cheesy text-to-speech voice replacing the final word with something else. For example, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that unemployment."

That is all. Yet.

Nitpixx

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 03:44:06 GMT

There's a Marsh commercial that airs on the radio which closes on a line that resembles "So when comparing Marsh's produce department to other produce departments, it's like comparing apples and oranges." The wordplay entirely falls apart for me because the analogy is broken. It would be like comparing apples and oranges to compare Marsh's produce department with, say, some other store's pharmacy. The thought they're actually trying to express would be more like comparing a very tasty, juicy apple to a mediocre apple (or perhaps a rusting apple with five bites taken out of it and a worm in the decaying remainder).

There's a Taylor Swift song on the radio, "Love Story", which I think abuses its Romeo and Juliet metaphor. Taylor: You say you're Juliet and he's Romeo. Good start. The only reason you're apart is that your father disapproves? I'll buy that. But is there an extended conflict between your families that has mounting casualties? Do you get married without the consent of your parents? Is there suicide, either real or feigned? Is your story a net tragedy? No? Then you've ganked the wrong love story. Try another. There are many to choose from! In fact, it seems as though you've compared your romance having a fairytale denouement for perhaps the only historically famous love story that lacks a happy ending. Whoops.

In other news, the Comptroller of Maryland has once again given me the shaft (to the tune of roughly $250), but it shall have been the last time.

I'd like to be someone else for a week. Preferably someone with a less tense existence.

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Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:43:16 GMT

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Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:53:55 GMT

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Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:49:10 GMT

TotM: Much like subjectivity, it's subjective

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 21:40:48 GMT

Blip

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:53:50 GMT

I've been snowed in from work for two days now, but still working thanks to the magic of the internets. Being told to do stuff I don't quite feel like doing over the phone might be worse than in person.

Last night I found out there was no snow shovel in this place, so I ended up using a rake to clear a path to my car through the foot or so of snow on the ground. I took the ice scraper/brush out of my car and found that it did a better job of digging snow than the rake. However, when clearing the path from my car to the road, which was blocked not only by the normal snow but also the iced-over plowed roadside snow, I gave up on all tools. Instead, I found myself trudging through the snow with my feet. One would think this would be an incredibly dangerous (if not just time-consuming) idea, but somehow my feet and shins didn't get any colder than they would have exposed to air. The trudge was a workout; much despite the low temperature my glasses were fogged and I was working up a decent sweat. I think I may have done about 60 or 70 laps before I tried to pull my car out. After only four or five tries I made it onto the road.

Where did I go? Wal-Mart. To buy a snow shovel.

I just opened up the front door to get the mail out of the box. An icicle fell and hit me on the back of the head. That didn't feel nice, so I took the handle of the rake, still in the doorway, to clear away any other icicles that wanted a piece. The threshold of my door looked like someone had emptied an ice tray on it. The mailbox was iced shut, so I bludgeoned it with a wrench to crack the ice. That was kinda fun. The mail inside was slightly moist and entirely worthless in content. Oddly enough, the word "icicle" got Queen's "Bicycle Race" stuck in my head. "Iiiiicicle, iiiiicicle..."

I shaved the beard yesterday. I think it may have been growing since November. Much to my surprise, I think I look better without it.

I found myself working on an old issue: the backing up of my important stuff. For me, data backup has been about, in this order:

conglomerating a bunch of files into a single archive file (the tar step)
compressing that archive file to make it take up less space (the bzip2 step)
encrypting the compressed archive file so that nobody but me can make any sense of it (the gpg step)
getting that encrypted, compressed archive out somewhere that isn't here so that I can get it back if my hard drive ruptures (a.k.a. offsiting; the rsync step)

Long ago I wrote scripts to do all of this for me on a periodic basis. In the late spring of 2007 (I think) I decided there were two things lacking in this scheme. First, it used bzip2 when the right tool for the job had become lzma. Secondly, it didn't have an incremental backup capability.

Incremental backup is the idea that you make a full backup of everything once in a while, and then between full backups you make incremental backups where you only record what has changed since the full backup. tar has some support for this, but I think that if one byte of a file has changed then the whole file shows up in the incremental backup. I was thinking that a narrower block granularity would work better for a lot of my stuff.

rdiff is a program that, using algorithms swiped from rsync, records a delta file containing, with a reasonably fine granularity, only the differences between two files. What makes rdiff interesting in this regard is that it doesn't actually use a live original when recording the changes; it uses a small "signature" file (not to be confused with a crypto signature) containing checksum information about the original. (More about that in a moment.)

It doesn't make sense to record the differences between two .tar.lzma.gpg files; two archives containing similar but not quite identical data aren't necessarily going to have a lot of similarity after compression and are guaranteed to be as dissimilar as possible after encryption.

So, the archives must be rdiffed as .tar files before doing anything to them. But the product of the full backup must be a .tar.lzma.gpg, and we don't want to have to decrypt and decompress the full backup to create a delta. Fortunately, rdiff doesn't need the original; it just needs the checksum file. Yeah—full circle.

As one might have guessed, I implemented these year-and-a-half-old pending changes today. I used an old and extremely hacky script I wrote called utilitee to allow the .tar archive of a full backup to be used to generate both an rdiff signature and a lzma-compressed, gpg-encrypted archive without needing an intermediate file. On an incremental backup, the same specifications are used to make the .tar archive, but it is rdiffed from the signature file and then discarded while the resulting delta is compressed and encrypted (in my system, this results in a file named something like oldarchivename.tar--to--newarchivename.tar.rdiff-delta.lzma.gpg). To recover a particular incremental backup, both the original and the delta need to be decrypted and decompressed before combining using rdiff patch.

The method of offsiting hasn't changed: rsync over ssh to my hosting provider. (The fact that the destination is a computer where someone else has access is the reason these things are encrypted in the first place.)

Ciao.

TotM: Seriously, they can

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:40:52 GMT

Thought of the Moment: MENSA can suck my dick.

Voice Post

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 02:56:56 GMT

Gerk

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:53:03 GMT

On my lunch break, I noted two peculiarities about my brain.

On the way to Jimmy John's, I noticed my ever-present echolalia. The wind was blowing like a motherfucker. A guy who was walking in a group of guys that I think might have included the director of my agency almost lost his cap to the wind when I thought fast and snatched it up before it was swept to the street. I was thanked, I smiled and nodded in acknowledgement, and we were on our respective ways. For the next two minutes or so, the situation continued to play over in my head in repeat mode. This often happens in a situation where I've interacted with someone with whom I'm not familiar but I do respect, and where the interaction was brief enough that I tend to wonder (a) whether it actually happened or I just made it up, and (b) whether I handled it correctly. I think that these things repeat in my head to try to convince me of both.

Near the end of the block, I realized that, for the whole time since this encounter, I had been subconsciously but physically nodding my head every few seconds in reenactment of the moment. I had to consciously stop.

On the way back, I noticed my occasional tendency to have a runaway thought that I have to really pull on the reins to get to stop. As I was walking on the sidewalk, I had to steer clear of someone coming in the opposite direction. A notion that I frequently consider in such situations presented itself:

"If you are about to run into someone, pretend you're driving and go the direction you would in a car."

(If everyone heeded this advice, then the only trouble you'd ever have is visiting one of those places that still does the left thing. But I digress.)

My mind couldn't help suffixing this with:

"Unless you're a douchebag behind the wheel."

And apparently that wasn't enough.

"In which case you should pretend you don't drive like a dick, and then go the direction your hypothetical self would go in a car."

Brakes finally on.

I wonder if I have Tourette's.

TotM: Only in Amurrika

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:26:33 GMT

Young, Sexy, and Extremely Well Read

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 03:16:32 GMT

Voice Post

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:23:29 GMT

We'll do it live.

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:38:16 GMT

When Facebook suggests "People You May Know" to add as friends, it's a little like the stereotypical comedy situation where the mother-in-law is trying to get her new son-in-law to talk to his father-in-law after Thanksgiving dinner, ineffectually coaxing him with a saccharine "You both like baseball..." He hesitates only to be shoved into the living room for an extremely awkward, forced conversation, much like the one you'll have if you friend somebody on Facebook on the thin premise that "You and (So-and-So) both went to (The Same Miserable) High School."

I wasn't extraordinarily great at making friends in school because the things important to me were unimportant to them, and vice versa. That situation never really changed much. Near the end, late fall of senior year, myself and the G/T kids who had shared a mutual guts-hating with me for eons undertook the burial of one or more hatchets, and the short remainder of the year was a senioritic blast.

This happened while I still had time to share with them. But on occasion I get a friend request from somebody with whom I never really did manage to get any closer by the end of school. I don't know how to feel about that. Even with the alpha kids who didn't like me up until the end there was at least a bond of...something, even if it's ill will, that we might manage to commiserate over and celebrate post mortem. But in the cases of others, sometimes it's just somebody whose name I vaguely recall hearing on the PA between classes, whose face I vaguely recognize. Do I have a reason to add these people on the notion that they occupied a cell block on the opposite end of my prison?

Friends happen. You don't craft them, you don't dig them up, and you don't contrive a circumstance. You find them. They find you. It might lead somewhere or it might not. Nothing I've ever forced in this regard has ended well, and I'm of the impression that I can't rightly expect anything I force to do so, and increasingly that nobody else should expect the same.

A group of people with only one thing in common doesn't form a group of friends...it forms a club. Or group therapy.

So I won't entirely shut out the people who almost knew me at one point, but I will pose this thought: If the only thing we share from the past is our school, and the only thing we share in the present is patronage of Facebook (population zillions and counting), and in particular we don't share a geographic location, any friends that we would consider close, or any interests of real importance, doesn't that swing the amusing/awkward balance a bit out of our favor?

Mental Train Wreck

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:31:14 GMT

Hungry? Grab a sandwich.

*Removes a Snickers bar wrapper from a candy-bar-sized, candy-bar-shaped BLT*

No Stairway! Denied!

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:36:27 GMT

I've been writing a crapload of JavaScript lately. Most of it has been for work, which is upsetting for a few reasons I won't go into. Using some of the same ideas, I wrote a simple thing recently: a counter for my fianceé (June 1 is not our date but our estimated moving day).

I kinda feel like writing something more complex, though, that is still not for work. I don't know what. Have any ideas?

BINGOOOcrackOOOOO!

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:43:55 GMT

This whole commercial is silly, but pay particular attention to Mr. Self-Assured around 0:55. It makes me want to laugh louder than I really can at work.

This Just In

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 14:19:54 GMT

*** NEWS FLASH! ***

ENTIRE WORLD IN FUCKING POLITICS MODE

LOCAL MAN THINKS IT'S 'STUPID AS HELL'

TotM: Regarding Relapse

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:12:07 GMT

TotM: I'm sure I was thinking of car accidents.

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:24:13 GMT

A Very Special Blossom

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:47:06 GMT

So, guess what I have yet to tell my LiveJournal audience...

~~I'M PREGNANT.~~

No, wait, that'd be weird. What I meant to say is

I'M ENGAGED.

Yes, that's the one that's accurate. May the "dead man walking"-style jokes at my expense commence.

Ecks dee.

TotM: Quoth the dreamer about to wake up

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:59:53 GMT

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Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:12:29 GMT

Garbage Lore

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Johnny Pneumonic

Nitpixx

Voice Post

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TotM: Much like subjectivity, it's subjective

Blip

TotM: Seriously, they can

Voice Post

Gerk

TotM: Only in Amurrika

Young, Sexy, and Extremely Well Read

Voice Post

We'll do it live.

Mental Train Wreck

No Stairway! Denied!

BINGOOO*crack*OOOOO!

This Just In

TotM: Regarding Relapse

TotM: I'm sure I was thinking of car accidents.

A Very Special Blossom

TotM: Quoth the dreamer about to wake up

Voice Post

BINGOOOcrackOOOOO!