Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in kraigus shmeggus' LiveJournal:

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Thursday, August 28th, 2008
6:18 pm	office supplies I was setting up some PCs for n00b grad students (who'd damn well better show up, now that I've sunk time into them), and one of the offices was newly set up. On top of each desk, I found no less than one bottle of cleaning fluid, apparently made for and supplied especially by the furniture company. I am at a loss. But not so much that I didn't scoop some bottles (that came with used cloths), as my furniture is not-new and actually could use some cleaning, whereas these desks are so new they still have that new-desk smell. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 18th, 2008
4:34 pm	It is true melted_snowball and da_lj are not really the same person. Hard to believe, but true. In other news, computators hate me today. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 7th, 2008
1:17 pm	Quote of the day "Well, there's always the meat." Made my day. It's even funny out of context. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
11:37 pm	Holy Conversations While walking into work this morning, I saw a sign on a building: "Welcome to Holy Conversations" What is a Holy Conversation, and what does it sound like? I rather imagine the end of Dogma. I'm not sure a holy conversation is one I'd like to have, even if I was religious. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
11:38 pm	Academic collaborators I don't know how anybody gets a damn thing done in collaboration. Maybe when you're both equal partners it's different, but trying to help Linda finish off a 5 page paper was hell. We did a couple of hours last week, and then tonight about 2.5 hours, but it felt like 12. At the end of it we had roughly 6 pages of reasonably well-written paragraphs that had a decent flow. She's going over a printout figuring out ways to work around the couple of XXX CHANGEME and XXX PARAPHRASE BETTER statements I inserted, and I'm about to get a (well-deserved, I think) beer. But there have been at least a couple of times I wanted to snap, and I'm sure the same goes for her. At least she didn't cry this time, and I didn't stomp off for an hour-long break. I can't even imagine trying to do something more complex, especially if both people have something actually invested in it. All I wanted from this was to give her drug-addled mind a break. (She's on strong painkillers for her back problems.) Linda's paper is about the speech John Kerry gave to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971, by the way, and it was a very good one, although one of her secondary sources was all but fellatious in its tone. Published in 2004, how convenient. ... I forgot to transfer the beer from the freezer to the fridge, and now it's half-frozen. Crap. No sweet sweet alcoholic bliss for me. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 14th, 2008
7:02 pm	Treadmill for bucks Today at the grocery store, Linda and I saw a treadmill. For toddlers. Really. Anybody who feels the need to get their kid some exercise without having to oh noes send them outside is welcome to trade domiciles with us. We live on the third floor of an apartment building, no elevator. Just have them run up and down the stairs a few times. If you're worried about their safety, you can eliminate the need for your own treadmill by accompanying them. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 4th, 2008
6:27 pm	we have a third story animal Linda reports that there are bits of cheese and chicken bones on our porch. Fine, some animal is depositing them there. We know we have squirrels on our porch on occasion - which pleases our cats greatly. But squirrels don't eat chicken, do they? I shouldn't think bones are ideal nesting material either. What other animals live in a city and are capable of scaling brick up to a third story porch? I've seen raccoons, but I would think they're too heavy to climb that far. Bunny rabbits can't hop that high and certainly don't eat chicken. I've never seen birds on our porch, or at least nothing bigger than a sparrow - so it isn't crows or magpies. I really doubt skunks can climb that far. So what is it? (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
4:46 pm	This past year, I billed out about 853 hours of work. At a rate of $50 an hour (which I think is what our "rates" work out to, even though it's all funny money in the end) that's $42,650. No, that's not what I actually get paid, it's just supposed to defray some of the cost of my salary and, er, living expenses I guess you could say - office, phone, yadda yadda. It's kind of depressing to think that it takes me a year to cost the Canadian taxpayer what I cost in one night of a live fire exercise. PS: plz 2 be payin ur taxes, I needz the moolah. kthx. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
9:48 am	Early to bed and early to rise Well, I've got half of that, anyway. The last couple of mornings I've set my alarm for 7 (which gave my cat great distress this morning, as he is unused to this shriek and is nervous by nature anyway). I kind of like getting in for 815-830, I can get a fair bit done before everybody else comes in and make things noisy. I just need to work on the earlier to bed thing a bit. And leaving work before 5:30. Maybe it'll help SB get her butt in gear in the mornings too. (Perhaps living bacon will suddenly grow wings too, but you never know.) And no, the new year has nothing to do with it. I hate new year's resolutions, the date is coincidental. (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 13th, 2007
10:17 am	So guess who just rebooted a Solaris 8 machine after reinstalling then replacing its shadow file, forgetting that it had been decreed our machines shall not have root passwords set? Idiot. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 6th, 2007
8:02 pm	My life the last couple of months The last couple of months have been school, family issues, and work. Linda's back issues are chronic and congenital, which means I get to do a lot of the picking up and cleaning up at home. Anybody who knows me well knows that means it mostly doesn't get done. It also means she's been loopy on painkillers until fairly recently - who knew that an anti-depressant was a great nerve blocker? (I do now, and so do you.) Hopefully that will help. School, well, my classes are done and they were great fun, but now I have a 4500 word paper due Monday. I've got maybe 750 words done on it so far, another 1500-2000 easily on tap, but then it's crunch time. If I hold true to form, I'll start Sunday evening with 2500 words, inch my way up to 4000, then suddenly find myself close to 5000 and wondering what on earth I can cut out. At least the topic's interesting, and judging by some conversations I've stirred up, I'm far from the only one who finds it so. Legal and ethical implications of recent neurological discoveries, specifically from fMRI scans, if anybody's interested. With a side order of justice and free will theory. I love learning stuff, I considered minors in either psych or philosophy at UNB so this sort of combined course is like crack, and I love editing papers, but that initial writing... pulling teeth. Work? Let's just say right now I'm trying to figure out a way to cut down an estimated 130 hours straight of firmware patches on 56 machines to something a bit more manageable. (464 patches, give or take a few hundred, each taking 20 minutes, about half of which brick your system if you do them incorrectly so I want to do them one at a time.) When I'm not working on that, I'm trying to figure out why our Blade Centre won't talk to its NAS. If I don't want to do that, there's always documentation to write or systems to upgrade. Next week I've got OS reinstalls or upgrades scheduled for two major multi-user systems and three days in which to do them. I'd hoped to upgrade three clusters as well, but the firmware patches are going to get in the way. When I'm not avoiding doing one of the above three things, I'm either decompressing with a novel, trying to watch a hockey game, agonizing over finances, or sleeping. So, that's my life since October or whenever it was I last posted. It could be much worse, but I'm not going to say it couldn't be better either. All I can do is play the hand I'm dealt though. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
8:27 pm	t00bz This is what the t00bz were invented for. Seriously. My life is now complete. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
3:52 pm	reason why my boss is > * In the last 48 hours or so, I've written and passed in a 10 page paper, participated in a 90 minute seminar and a psych survey (I'm a lab rat), done a shuffle of a couple of machines (and in so doing got to inconvenience, idle, or otherwise fuck up about $750,000 worth of salary and $150,000 worth of hardware). This morning I've was head down trying to sort out the fallout from that last particular item, including dealing with a faculty member who was displeased with some of the results. (Not my fault he didn't read his email, and he did apologize, but I was still pretty pissed off at the time.) I've also had a steady stream of visits from others who also did not read or understand the warnings that were sent out and are put out that their files have `disappeared', and of course there's the usual machine-swap madness. I forgot to eat this morning, so my boss went and got me some cake, an apple, and my favourite from the C&D, beef vindaloo. Yay! If only my headache (literal, not metaphorical) would go away, life wouldn't be terrible. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
2:05 am	Nope, I'm still not dead, still too busy living life to really write about it. Succinctly, Linda's back has been as bad as it's ever been, which means I get to play hands and feet for usually half an hour in the morning and about the same again in the evening (if not longer). Between that and work being somewhat insane and class, it's been a chore. I do have a new co-worker finally, hopefully that will help. Speaking of class, it wouldn't be a "last day before the paper is due" night without some angsting and staying up ridiculously late working on said paper. I'm not actually sure how well I'm going to do - I'm sure I won't bomb it, but I'm not sure I'll pass with flying colours either. Oh well, it's "only" 30%. In the "should have had an outline to show the prof last week" department, he'd asked for ~10 pages (including bibliography), 3000 words. That's cutting it close, especially with the doublespacing. I'm at 8.25 pages or so and still have about 700 words to go, going to be a tight squeeze. I guess I can reduce the font size, he wants a word count included so I guess that's more important than just pagecount. I took a couple of days off two weeks ago to try to get a head start on the paper, and it wasn't a total waste - I did make it to three university libraries and a public library in those two days plus the Saturday, but between a minor case of work burnout and the other stuff, I mostly just slept. Maybe I'll try three days for the final paper, and earlier - it's worth 60%. (Which means I'll have to do it in the next couple of weeks... nice way to spend my 6th anniversary.) A la prochaine, if you really miss my witty wit and writing, you can always check out my other home. Back to the grind, at least my cat gave up trying to help me and has gone to sleep. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 12th, 2007
11:36 am	Getting crochety I must be getting exposed to CS types too much, layout matters to me now. Combined with pre-existing ill humour at seeing words like "impact" used in place of "effect" and other signs of poor editing, it made reading this paper, entitled "Visually Assessing Possible Courses of Action for a Computer Network Incursion", rather painful. In fact, I stopped about 10 pages in. I was cringing as soon as I saw the table of contents - it wasn't the content of the contents that triggered me, but the poor layout. (Written in Word, is my guess, although I'm no expert.) It looks like an interesting paper, but on a Sunday, I don't know if I can force myself past the visual gunk and desire to pull out a red pen into reading it. No offense intended to the author, who worked very hard on it I'm sure, but... damn. No abstract should say "This report presents a tool that allows the security analyst to visually evaluate various containment options to minimize operational impacts." (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 15th, 2007
10:48 am	Nope, not dead I'm still not dead, just pretty busy. Sending Linda back to school in the fall, another $8000 in debt (or we will be once the line of credit is spent). Going back to school again myself, taking PHIL/PSYCH 446, which used to be titled Cognitive Modelling but now is something else. I'm also taking a pass through my personal inbox this morning, which means some of you might be getting replies to comments as old as last October. See my thoughts on necroposting, if you're wondering why. I recently (late last week) started using a system for keeping my work inbox at < 10 messages, and no, it's not by simply filtering everything into other mailboxes as some do. I do filter mailing list emails, but that's it. I would describe this system more fully, but the margins are too small NO CARRIER (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 19th, 2007
1:11 am	Hobbies(ish) No progress on the Scheme front, but I started teaching myself LaTeX in order to produce some nicely-formatted documentation for our still-fairly-new clusters. That's like crack too. Three or four hours to write up maybe 15 pages worth of text, then a couple of hours to roughly TeX-ify it... then another 5 or 6 hours to clean up the last 10% of the formatting. I got it all down except the best way to handle URLs - do you wrap them in the middle if they come at the end of a line, or force a newline? Either way looks like crap. It's easy to lose several hours mucking around with that. I didn't let myself use TeXShop at first, just so I'd have a better handle on how things worked, but when I started using it last night, man. Finestkind. Now I should sleep. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007
11:54 am	As some of you (who receive work email from me) might be aware, I have a rotating set of signatures at the bottom. They're meant sometimes to be funny, other times to be thoughtful. Sometimes my sigmonster is apparently prescient: The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity. - Paul Tillich I got my cognitive science paper back today, after writing my last exam. My first exam was slightly above class average, my second slightly below, but my paper was well below class average. In fact, I've never received a mark this low on a paper before, save one from a prof who thought I lied to him about why it was late. (Hung up the phone on me, as a matter of fact, after he called me at home to wake me up.) And even that was a C. I passed the paper - 56% - but my pride is hurt. It's a righteous mark, although a bit tough, it's deserved. On the other hand, that was enough to officially pass the class, so the exam I just wrote is gravy on top, and I figure I'll get about the same on this exam as the last, so my final grade should be about 70-75%. Not the honours average I'm used to, but still respectable, especially considering I'm working a fulltime job simultaneously. (I'd say 40+ hours a week like I usually do, but I've slipped this term, I'm only at my mandated 35 or so.) As far as failures go then, this hardly qualifies as deepest - and my deepest failures are ambiguous at best, and currently irrelevant beyond their contributions to my character and my qualia, to steal a word from this course. The course was good, I learned a lot and thought a lot, and that's the point. For somebody who advocates getting rid of marks altogether, I seem to put a great deal of stock into the ones that I earn - I shouldn't. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
1:17 am	Academentia Normally it's a pejorative term, used to denote scorn for academia. In this case, I'm feeling demented for continuing to subject myself to it. Not in the job sense, it's about as enjoyable as any job can really be, but in the personal sense. It's 1am, and I have a paper due tomorrow. The paper is actually finished - I read it over, printed it out, found a stapler that could take its massive 12 pages, and am now drinking the last beer in the fridge - which is a big switch from my usual undergrad career so far. I was late with one paper and received exactly two extensions ever, but I have passed in papers literally at the very last minute - just as the prof was getting ready to leave, say - more times than I can count. I think this may be the second time ever that I was done more than 9 hours in advance of the paper due time. I've knocked myself out for the two exams so far, and likely will again for the last one, more studying than I usually subject myself to. This is honest to @PANTHEON much, much harder than my real job. My real job is supposed to be hard, and philosophy is supposed to be easy: just write bullshit, right? Sysadmins get paid decent salaries to do jobs not many others can, and philosophers - well, if they're really lucky, they're faculty members, but those positions are few and far between. If they're just lucky, well, they're sysadmins. If they're not lucky, they're Windows admins. *rimshot* So I'm left wondering why I do this to myself. It's fun, it really is, I've really enjoyed this course so far, and my others have been good too. But... it seems to get harder every time. I don't know if it's because I'm older, or work takes more of my brain cells (even if it is usually relatively easy) or if I'm just getting more impatient, but it seems like the returns are diminishing. I spent part of my procrastination time thinking man, if I put this effort into studying, say, network stuff, I could do so much more at work. (Notwithstanding my performance reviews from the last 3 years, which have all been excellent, I'm always feeling vaguely guilty at the amount of stuff I don't know.) On the other hand, I don't want to become a sysadmin who knows very little outside his sphere of expertise, except "things I read in books." Any idiot can pull a book off the shelf and read it - I want to know that I'm getting the "right" ideas from it. But the stress! Argh. I know by Friday I'll have largely forgotten this, and come the beginning of April (last exam's on the 6th) I'll be stressing again, but by mid-April I'll again be wondering what the big deal was, and by mid-summer I'll be wishing I'd signed up for a spring term course (Waterloo sucks, why isn't it a summer course?) and by August I'll be looking to see what course I can take in September. Do I really want to keep doing this? Who nose, but my beer is almost done and my cat gave up some time ago on trying to entice me to bed so he can lie across my legs. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
1:00 pm	Work amusement From a manpage distributed by us: -i option for investigations. There will be changed noth- ing, but will be produced all messages, if them not drowned. ... Words fail me. "man setogm" for people who know what I'm talking about. (4 Comments |Comment on this)