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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "thegameiam" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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09:05 am
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Rush!
Sarah and I went to see Rush last night - thanks to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) georgetowner's hardcore-dedicated approach to getting tickets, we were in the 6th row just off-center.
dude. DUDE. I got to have a three-hour guitar lesson just from watching Alex's left hand. Also, I've never been underneath a laser show before, and the pyrotechnics were close enough that we felt the heat waves. Best tickets ever for me - the last time I was that close to the front of a stage was when I was in the mosh pit at a Primus show. Hell, I was closer to the stage than most of the folks who come to The Franchise shows...
A few anecdotes about the show:
davvening minha while "Hells Bells" is playing is amusing.
Neal Peart sent his sticks out to the crowd to a little kid in the fifth row. Even better, the guy who delivered them is (according to Michael), his security guy who was wearing a shirt which said "Praetorian" on the back in big letters, and "SPQR" on the sleeves. I wonder what percentage of the crowd actually gets that? The kid was there with his family - that strikes me as a really, really cool family activity.
Sarah remarked that a Rush concert is one of the very small numbers of places in the world where there's a line at the men's room but not at the women's.
The couple sitting to our right (and a few other folks) were smoking vast quantities of weed throughout the show. Funny moment: one of us didn't recognize the smell. Funnier moment: that person was offered (and turned down) the joint.
Now on to the music -
I find the progression from Free Will to The Way the Wind Blows very interesting - it seems to be a growth in acknowledgment that we're not quite as in control of our destinies as we may like to believe. There IS a tide which governs the affairs of men... (see, sticking with the Praetorian theme...)
I think that Red Barchetta has gone from weirdo-mediocre science fiction to eerily prescient - any bets on whether the internal combustion engine will be banned from passenger cars in my lifetime? I wouldn't bet against that, myself...
One of the nice things about being so close was that I got to see / hear the (very small number of) mistakes - a drum fill that ended a 16th note too early here, or a missed guitar note there - that is tremendously pleasing to me, because it makes them a little bit more human to me. I think to catch them, you'd have to both know the songs very well, and also be a musician who's paying close attention - these weren't the kind of mistakes most bands make: when I play, I'll get the occasional barfed chord where I forget the bridge until I'm a measure into it or something.
One of their instrumentals basically boiled down to "jam like crazy in E," which again, warms my heart - that's proof that they're not so high above where I am that they don't still do the straightforward thing.
I never noticed before, but on Neal's electric kit, the bass drum is tiny. It's about the size of a floor tom.
Alex and Geddy are fascinatingly different in technique - I basically understand what Alex is doing with his right hand: it's his left hand which is doing the really hard stuff. With Geddy, however, his left hand stuff looks totally straightforward, but his right-hand technique is like nothing I've ever seen anywhere else - it looks like the caricature of a flamenco guitarist - all of the fingers are flicking out and contracting simultaneously. Neat!
I think that Mission is my favorite Rush song, with Witch Hunt as a second favorite. And happily, they played both of those.
They played for about three hours. They're all pushing 60 hard enough that it's starting to push back. I'd have a hard time playing that hard that long as a 35 year old. Impressive.
Current Location: Harrisburg, PA
Current Mood:  happy
Current Music: Jonathan Coulton, "Re: Your Brains"
Tags: music
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10:06 pm
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Getting away
Sarah and I re-watched Chicago the other night, and a few things really struck me. First, I love 20's style swingy-jazz. That is some fantastic music, and the erotic component of it cannot be overstated-They say that life is tit for tat
And that's the way I live
So, I deserve a lot of tat
For what I've got to give
If you want my gravy
Pepper my ragout
Spice it up for Mama
She'll get hot for you
Damn - that makes all of the 80's cock-rock look pretty tame by comparison, no? (also, "pepper my ragout" has to be one of the cooler turns of phrase I've encountered in a long time). Then add the crazy syncopation of "We Both Reached for the Gun," and what was merely good becomes excellent.
Second, the story is really disturbing when you stop to think about it - it really is about getting away with murder, and justifying it in the process. Yuck! Pretty much the only sympathetic character in the whole thing is Amos, and perhaps the briefly-seen detective. Special condemnation should be reserved for Billy Flynn, the lawyer. I was surprised to note how similar his tactics were to the defense attorney in the trial I was on - the attempt to flim-flam the jury and razzle-dazzle us was pretty stunning.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: good
Current Music: Clyde, "Pavucina"
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10:39 pm
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nice to be loved
I got an email from an old client today - he's now at a new company, and he had looked me up and wanted to know if I could give him some of the things I had done for his old firm... Of course, I couldn't, and I told him so, but who knows, maybe a really easy gig could come out of that. But more importantly for me, it's nice to have my work appreciated. (egostroke)
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  gratified
Current Music: none
Tags: work
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06:55 pm
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n00bz g3t l33t
I had a newbie civilization game yesterday - there were seven players, and I was the only one who had played before. My intention was to broaden the pool of prospective players for future games, and perhaps shake up the crowd a bit. I think it was a smashing success - I suspect that many if not all of the players would like to do so again.
I played Africa (I was going to do either Asia or Crete) because we had two last-minute cancellations - I filled Illyria's spot but wasn't able to get a second new player quickly. Unsurprisingly, I won, but I was pleasantly surprised at how close the game was - if the last turn had gone differently (and I hadn't gotten rid of Iconoclasm & Heresy) I could easily have come in third. Awesome!
We didn't get as far in turns as in other games, and I attribute that to the rule explanations - we were just getting into the Iron age, and only three players ended in it.
Scores:
Africa 2304
Italy 1884
Illyria 1334
Thrace 2153
Assyria 1870
Babylon 1535
Egypt 2048
We put Civil War and Civil Disorder back to their original positions, and I think that worked VERY well - in fact, I think I'm going to recommend going back to that approach for all of the games. Interestingly, it came up three times, and the first time, the victim had the most units in stock, so no calamity happened. The other two times, the victim only had about 39 total points on the board, meaning that he only lost 4 - so not so bad, all told. I got nailed with superstition four times (!), and at the end of the game the barbarians/pirates were substantially stronger than the rest of us: eight cities which could have been fully supported (!).
There was a strongly amusing moment where one person who was extremely calamity-averse (Babylon) had said that the whole trading thing wasn't going to be worth it at all - this ended up being an object lesson in the virtue and value of free-trade, and that player had to be reminded that the isolationism in the 2008 presidential race was coming from the Democrats (the player is a staunch Republican)...
Illyria basically got himself into a bind right at the beginning, because Italy and Thrace divided up Europe much the way that Spain and Portugal divided up South America, and he wasn't in on the negotiations. He ended up effectively locked into Southern Greece.
One substantial note: I've got to start making seudah shlishit plans - I keep getting to mid afternoon, and realizing that I hadn't planned for anything else to eat.
And there was a casualty: the lid to the magic crock pot cracked and broke. :( That crock pot has been to a huge number of places, and I think I can get a replacement lid, but it's surprisingly close in price to just getting a new pot entirely.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: States of Melba, "Lost Innocence"
Tags: civilization
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01:14 am
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Brainsplode
this, this is funny - not quite as funny as they think they are, but really the concept speaks for itself, no?
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  amused
Tags: networking, porn
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11:20 am
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so true
sparrowrose tipped me off to excellent tshirt. Awesome!
Current Location: Herndon, VA
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: none
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11:13 pm
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miles to go
I finally was able to make bonus points actually work for me: we'll stay at a Marriott after the Rush show next week (booyah!) and Sarah will get to fly Delta to Memphis to visit her mother in August. After all the travel I've done over the past several years, it feels nice to actually think that the bonus points are worth something after all. Hooray for modern corporate America!
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It was a little jarring to go back to work today after the trial - I've really got to get myself back into the swing of things, because I've got a todo list which is starting to approach multiple pages. Eeek! Not the least of which is discovering which of the mysterious buggy conditions have been caused by the assorted security scans, tests, and requirements. sigh. There seems to be a windows security tool which (among other things) flushes the arp entry for the default gateway, and then won't let the host re-learn... I figure that someone forgot to check the "keep it working" box in the GUI.
I've always maintained that network guys and security guys are oil and water to each other: my mission is to get packets from A --> B, while the security guy's mission is to keep that from happening. Eventually the pendulum will come to rest in a sensible place, but that'll take a while.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: none
Tags: travel, work
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10:22 pm
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A lot more colors in my world
hat tip to TDP for the title. Good acoustic music, and nice folks with whom to play a show.
We finally picked a color for the second bedroom: there are about 15 different splotchy squares on the wall - I told Sarah we should go with a multicolor thing, and call it modern ("Mondrian-esque") but she didn't go for it... So Nob Hill Sage it is, and while we're at it, our bedroom will be Tropical Dusk.
And our bathroom is oh-so-close: once the contractor can get the grout stains off the floor tile (grr) and seal it, we're done. I can't wait.
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Mike presents some really depressing Peanuts panels - I think Lucy is particularly Sartre-esqe there: hell IS other people, and she's just the person to inflict it upon our hapless Charlie.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Jethro Tull, "Locomotive Breath"
Tags: comics, house
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08:55 pm
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Tribulations
The trial concluded today, and to spare any suspense, we found the defendant guilty of second degree murder, along with a couple of firearm offenses (carrying a handgun in public is generally not legal for most folks in DC, and given that the murder weapon was a semi-automatic, once we found that he was guilty of the first charge, the others flowed from that).
I don't like sitting in judgement - who am I exactly that I would be in such a place? I've been called four times in the ~9 years I've been a DC resident, and I've served three times. I have a theory that I'm memorable but not immediately objectionable - I've had just enough run-ins with legal matters that I end up in a bench conference during voir dire (it amuses me that dire is pronounced "dear"...), but when they ask me whether I have any prejudice toward the prosecution or defense, I honestly answer no.
I've had 8 or 9 people ask me why I don't try harder to get out of serving - like maybe wear an NRA "Charleton Heston is my President" T-shirt or something similar (how about this one, for instance which is a takeoff on the old bit from Beavis & Butthead Do America...), or one of the myriad of other (legitimate!) excuses (project-based workload, caring for Sarah, etc). Except the excuses really don't seem legitimate - I do believe in our system, and I am not willing to serve, then who should?
So I do it. I bitch about it, but it's worth it, and I think that the presumption of innocence is a profoundly important thing.
The case in question is this one: DCist and WaPo have the background. I was surprised at the weakness of the defense- the attourney didn't actually contest any of the facts which the prosecution introduced into evidence, but instead seemed to create a gigantic FUD cloud through handwaving. I was totally waiting for the Chewbacca Defense to come out, because that was pretty much the only way his arguments could have gotten less relevant to the case. He told a story about a cat and a mouse in the outskirts of Denver which dragged on for about five minutes in his closing - it was sort of like The Secret of NIMH, guest starring Lennie. Yikes. Combine that with being unable or unwilling to pronounce the names of the witnesses correctly, insulting the education at Howard University, having the defendant attempt to change his appearance (glasses do make one look more studious, no?), and trying to create an impression of forensic evidence which didn't exist (hint: absence of evidence != evidence of absence...), and you get a sufficiently confused mess that there may as well not have been a defense case. I can't tell whether the defense attourney was lousy, or just didn't have anything to work with.
So the prosecution made their case, and given the facts at hand, there was no way to interpret them which didn't make the defendant guilty. There were a couple of jurors who were not fully comfortable with the implications of this: one said "I think he's guilty, but I don't want him to go to jail - he's just a kid." Well, yeah. That's true, but of course, there's another kid who's dead thanks to this one, so the idea of punishing the guilty doesn't really bother me so much. One juror mentioned that she would find it hard to go face the defendant and give the verdict. It's supposed to be hard, but everyone deserves the right to see the faces of those who are pronouncing guilt.
There were a bunch of people in the gallery for the whole trial, and based on their reactions at the verdict, I think they were family of the victim. I judged as fairly as I could, and I believe that justice has been served.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  drained
Current Music: Rush, "2112"
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02:50 pm
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History only matters after the fact
New York has to be good for something. This week, there are two interesting articles in NY publications.
First, this article on the demographics of fertility in the NYT magazine is interesting, although I think that the author does make one category error. He talks about the Scandinavian birthrate (the highest in Europe, at 1.8) and the US birthrate (2.3) and treats them as polar opposites of successful policy / culture. However, 2.1 is replacement, so Scandinavia has to be viewed as only "less bad" than the rest of Europe (which is hovering around 1.3).
Or, if you're a misanthrope, then the US would be the bad one, because Scandinavia is still on track to have fewer people over the long term... I'm glad to see that Paul Erlich, the doomsayer par excellence got quoted, so that still more people can get exposed to the lunacy of his ideas. Seriously, how many times does someone have to be spectacularly wrong before folks stop listening to them?
Second, this opinion piece in the WSJ is refreshing: perhaps Heinlein is right: "history doesn't repeat itself; historians do." I like his point that pessimism is really a luxury of affluence - if things were nearly as dire as the pessimists believe, we wouldn't have time for all that.
Current Location: Herndon, VA
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: none
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02:55 pm
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a trying experience
The prosecution rested its case yesterday at 3:30, and we were told to return today for a small amount of defense testimony, but were going to get let out early because a few folks had pre-existing flight plans.
We sat down at 10:30 this morning, to learn that the judge got a pile of documents at 9AM, and wasn't done reviewing them to see whether they would be useful to the defense or not, so we were sent home, to return on Monday.
Now, my question is this: why the hell were we brought in today at all? Why not just delay the whole everything until monday, and let us get on with our lives? One of the jurors is a physician, and he's had to cancel all kinds of patient appointments. I've had to juggle a zillion things because of being remote, and I'm not the only one. All that would have been needed would have been to call us and leave a message saying "sorry, see you monday."
Will the DC court system advance into the 20th century? sheesh.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  annoyed
Current Music: Newman, van der Spuy, & Buttery, "Beautiful Feet"
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09:09 pm
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in the weeds
I spent about an hour tonight pulling weeds and trimming plants - if only the plants I was trying to grow would grow this well... And who knew we had a hosta in the corner? English Ivy was throttling it, and it was barely peeking through, but now it should hopefully get some sunlight.
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This morning, I had the cool experience of walking one of my teammates through BGP prefix-list changes to resolve a thorny routing issue while I was on the bus. And it worked! This, to my mind is cool, but not quite as cool as the guy who walked me through troubleshooting MWI problems while he was driving from Atlanta to Raleigh - now THAT is amazing recall...
Current Location: home
Current Music: Pinback, "Fortress"
Tags: house, networking
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10:16 am
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happy happy
I just got a very pleasant yashar Koah from upper management about my performance on the project before my current one: my work was "instrumental" in securing a new half-billion dollar project. w00t! Aah, if only pay was percentage-based...
Now I should get back to the jury room - Sarah asked whether the paintball bruises would get me out of service today... somehow I doubt it.
Annoyance: apparently this judge does not permit jurors to drink any beverage other than water, because lawyers have accused jurors of drinking alcohol. So no diet coke for me. Now THAT is an example of our overly litigious society at work, right there...
Current Location: Moultrie Courthouse, Washington DC
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: none
Tags: work
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09:05 pm
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high-energy projectiles
Because Alon is awesome, he organized a paintball outing to Pev's in Leesburg.
I've got welts'a'plenty - the one on my forehead is probably the funniest: apparently that was caused by the direct hit I took in one game or another. However, the annoying one is on my left bicep, pretty much right where tefillin go, so that's going to be noticed for a few days.
We had a bunch of elimination games, which were fun and straightforward, and a few center-flag ones, which were also pretty cool. However, the center-flag field was pretty heavily weighted toward one side: the fort was significantly closer to one pole than the other, and the far pole was downhill. My favorite of the games was a defense one, where a bunch of us had to defend a flag in forts from the attackers who could respawn once.
I had a couple of really cool moments - one was actually being the guy who brought the captured flag, and another was successfully infiltrating the village and picking off several folks. Cool.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  tired
Current Music: Rush, "Far Cry"
Tags: paintball
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07:12 pm
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speeding up!
"ip domain-lookup" is a double-edged sword: with it, you get helpful DNS resolution. However, your typos also then hang on a response. One surprising area where it's notable is in certain command output - for instance, "show ip mroute" does not do any resolution, but "show ip mroute active" does. "show ip bgp sum" does not, but "show ip msdp peers" does.
Moral of the story? If you're going to have domain resolution, be thorough about it, because if you don't your exec sessions take a long time to respond.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  busy
Current Music: none
Tags: networking
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07:53 pm
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config bits
There's a certain kind of joy (not!) in doing configuration annotations - explaining why each and every line of configuration is in place to auditors. One of my favorites has to be:
no service pad
Because that disables X.25 connections - it's amazing to me that every modern cisco router still really wants to actually function as an X.25 packet assembler/disassembler, expecting to turn characters into packets... yikes.
Then again, that's no worse than the reserved VLANs 1002-1005, which are for translational bridging between Ethernet and other media types (like Token Ring and FDDI): those can't be removed, but worse, they don't even work anymore. A couple of years ago, I had built a FDDI ring (don't laugh, it worked, and for that matter, it's actually still up) in a lab, and attempted to connect some ethernet hosts to it via the trans-bridges. Hah! That code worked back when a cisco 1200 was new (because, yes, I did actually have one of those POSes), but doesn't work in any of the IOS based switches, and didn't work on the couple of catOS switches on which I tried it (other than that 1200).
Another fun bit is of course that TACACS+ server keys have to be stored either in plaintext or the crummy cisco 7 hash. heh. You might think that the key to your authentication server might be something worth a little more cryptographic horsepower, but that isn't what you'd find in modern IOS...
Current Location: home
Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Idlewild - Once in Your Life | Scrobbled by Last.fm
Tags: networking
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01:48 pm
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Jury's in!
I got picked for a criminal trial down at the DC Courthouse - argh. Two weeks of being around attourneys and judges, and a bunch of days where I'll get to do my regular work in off-hours. phbt.
Personally, I think law is like nuclear power: useful, but I'd rather not get any on me...
(paraphrasing Scott Adams)
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Sarah and I watched Clerks II last night. That movie is hilarious - I had really low expectations, and it was a very pleasant surprise. Silent Bob as Jay's 12-step sponsor was priceless, and Randall attempting to "reclaim" a racial slur was also comedy gold. Good, good stuff.
Also, excellent battles between Star Wars nerds and LotR nerds. You really can't go wrong with those.
Current Location: Moultrie Courthouse, Washington DC
Current Mood:  blank
Current Music: none
Tags: reviews, work
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01:44 pm
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Cowardice
It's a certain kind of bitterness which causes someone to post from their work IP address anonymous comments on someone else's LJ which disparage third parties known to both. I wouldn't encourage this behavior - especially when the substance of the comments proves that the person leaving the comments knows far less about the subject than s/he thinks s/he does.
In a directed message: get a clue.
Current Location: Moultrie Courthouse, Washington DC
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: none
Tags: work
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01:36 pm
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Judgement
voir dire should not be confused with Muad'Dib, even though they sound a lot alike.
Jury selection in DC is kind of amusing: between fully 30% of the pool actually being attourneys, to the personal law enforcement connections ("the head of the ATF is my best friend"), I'm amazed that they can ever pick anyone. This particular voir dire has gone on so long that we had to take a break in the middle (sheesh!)
At least I can use this as an opportunity to get some work done...
Current Location: Moultrie Courthouse, Washington DC
Current Mood:  bored
Current Music: Eminem & Dido, "Stan"
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05:14 pm
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sqweee!
Lingua Franchise is on iTunes!
I'm amazed at how fast Apple got that up there...
Current Location: Herndon, VA
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: none
Tags: music
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