Quack

Dad was up this weekend, both for a visit and to bring back Hawkeye.  It had been awhile since he had been up to Boston, and he had the honor of being the first overnight guest in our new house.  The house is still a complete mess, with boxes all over the place, but at least now all of our stuff is in the house now (and out of storage or my parents’ house).  Now it’s just a matter of unpacking it all and putting things in their place.  I’m trying to get rid of as much crap as I can as I unpack things, especially a lot of the geek cruft I’ve accumulated over the years…  I have several boxes which are just full of cables, and that’s just ridiculous!

Anyway, I got home from work a little early to meet with the RCN technician who was there to install the two CableCARDs into my new Tivo Series3 HD.  It took about 45 minutes, some of which was the technician waiting for someone at dispatch to pick up the phone and activate the cards…  You would think they would just do that before sending out the tech, but that would make sense.  Anyway, after the dispatch guy putzed around for like 20 minutes they were eventually up and running with almost all of the channels, but Discovery HD, HDNet, and HDNet Movies had no picture or sound.  I made an executive decision to neglect to mention this to the tech and deal with someone over the phone instead.  This morning I read on the Tivo Community Forums that those three channels were the only members of the HD Tier, so I assumed that the HD Tier was not activated on my account.  Sure enough, a quick call to RCN resolved that (in theory, I’m at work so I can’t test it.. :P).  Now I just have to get an HD television… :P

After the tech left my dad called and said he was mired in traffic on 90..  Pretty unusual, since most people are leaving Boston around that time, but who can predict traffic around here…  Anyway, Dad arrived around 5:30pm, and Corinna got home for work soon afterwards..  After a quick tour of the new place, we hit up the Summer Shack in Cambridge for dinner..  I normally might have preferred the downtown location, but I was pretty hungry and it was a home game for the Red Sox, so it tends to get a little hairy down there…  Dinner was awesome, and afterwards we headed back to the house and took a walk along the Charles before settling in for the night.

Saturday was pretty busy, we left the house pretty early to head over to the Museum of Science.  We weren’t actually going to the museum, though, instead we were picking up a Duck Tour there.  We got there around 11am, but they were already sold out until 3pm, so we ended up heading over to Harpoon Brewery for one of their tastings.  It was a pretty good time, even if I’m not the world’s biggest beer fan.  I did manage to get a case of their draft root beer, which is delicious.  The Duck Tour was OK, but I think it was pretty redundant for someone who’s lived in Boston for 6+ years..  I did learn a bit about Charlestown, which I had never really explored much…   I made some BBQ chicken and grilled veggies for dinner and we watched a movie which was terrible.  Never watch this movie, and reprimand

and

for making me write about it.  I now realize they hate me with every fiber of their being.  Little did they know that not only did they attack me, but their car bomb also took out

and my father.

My dad left Sunday morning, but before he did I made some french toast and bacon for breakfast…  It came out pretty good, I used half a baguette I had lying around for a few days, so it was good and stale and really sucked up the custard.  After dad left there was much napping and eventually we saw Crazy Love with the film club.  It was a small turn-out, but it was a good time.  The movie was almost unbelievable, just a crazy story..  We had a good time afterwards discussing the film and other randomness.. 

turned up towards the end, he was passing by on his way to play pool with

at Flattop’s.  After we finished chilling with the film club peeps we popped over to Flattop’s to say hi to the two of them, which was cool…

Fucking Hippies!

Today a hippie inconvenienced me. I walked from my desk to the vending machine to grab a Coke, and when I got there I found that the machine was rejecting my perfectly good dollar bill. I examined the bill, and found what I presume is the culprit. A stamp near George Washington’s mouth with a cartoon speech bubble reading “I Grew Hemp”. I tried the bill in all possible orientations, but all were rejected even though it was in tip-top shape. And since I had just brought enough for a drink, I had to hike back to my desk to obtain a non-patchoulli bill.

Everything’s just a little broken

You can re-release it, you can remix it, but when it comes down to it, bad music is still bad.

It seems that the Sprite slot on the Drink machine sticks and dumps its entire contents out from time to time. Bill and I (the software guys) believe this is a hardware (either mechanical or electronic) problem, and of course, the hardware guys think otherwise. :) The one thing we have going for us is that it is the same slot every time, and all the other slots work fine…

I am fairly certain that the changes I made to the LJ client last night work, but one person replied in the support area saying they still had problems…. I guess I will have to wait and see.

Smelly, Hairy, and Pissed Off

Ok, Today is a bothersome chore day. I planned on doing laundry this morning, so I did soon after I arose from my coma-like slumber. Upon returning to the newly-reopened “Sol He-Man Laundry Room”, I noticed that one of the brand new (in operation for 3 days) dryers completely failed to dry my clothes. Which means I have to sit around for another hour. :P Fortunately, the other dryer accomplished its mission, so I will finally execute my plans to take a shower now that I have some underwear to throw on.

I have a 3pm appointment to get a haircut at the place on campus. I have only gone there a few times, and they have never done a poor job (but not great either). The main chick that works there is Monica Lewinsky’s Doppelganger, which is always lends a bit of humor to the overall haircut chore.

I spent a little while last night setting up the Drink Perforce Repository now that we finally received our license from them. The source is now publically readable and browsable; More information is available here.

It’s friday, i’m in Rochester

Went to my morning class today, in the snow, and let me tell you, it was well worth it. That class is like novocaine for your mind. Jon is still in bed; I have been trying to be quiet as to let him rest as best as he can, but I am sure that I have unsettled him.. Not much I can do about that…

I have been working on a python module for interacting with drink. Part of reason is that Jon hasn’t been able to get PHP to do sockets right under Solaris (I don’t think it is a high priority for him), and I want a web client for Drink. The other reason is because I wanted to learn the language beyond my fundamental understanding that I had gleaned from seminars at CSH. It is a neat language, and far better than perl, but I don’t see myself using it for some of the more wack uses (like GUI programming).

Open the pod bay doors, HAL

Wow…. Another year gone by… And more importantly, the last day on my “Pop-up Video” Day-by-Day Calendar that My Roommate, Jon Parise gave me last Christmas.

I think I remotely finished up my work on Drink for this break… I made quite a few improvements to it overall, allowing multiple client connections at a time, wrote a dirt-simple logging server so we can keep track of what’s going on, tested the latest beta TINI OS (which is way more stable). I am looking forward to getting back and hooking it up to the machine (but that’s the ONLY thing I am looking forward to back there).

Finished up the First season of the Sopranos last night, and I watched an Interview of the series creator that was on the last disc… It was 1:15h long! It was a pretty good interview though…

Chuck called me this morning, we are going to go get him another DVD or so after he runs some errands… He finally has the ability to play DVDs, and he only has one… He is thinking about Willy Wonka, which I think is a great idea… :P

Not gonna phone it in tonight…

Today was very productive for me…. I acquired a hub and some 10Base-T so I could start hacking on my TINI, and I did so. I upgraded the TINI OS to 1.02b3 (we are only using 1.01 in drink right now) for testing, and I had to hack the drink source to work on it, since there were some API changes. This version of the OS allegedely addressed the “Telnet Server dying randomly” bug, which will be a major benefit to drink. I fixed another bug in drink earlier tonight regarding refunds if the drop fails, and I am thinking of hacking on multiple client threads for the SundayServer if I really have lots of energy in a few minutes.. :)

After dinner, I headed over to Chris’ place to see her one last time before she returns to CA tomorrow morning…. It really bums me out that we are so seperated these days.. It really depresses me. You never really know how much someone means to you until they are gone. Chris isn’t exactly gone from my life, but I only get to see her every few months, it is really upsetting… She is probably my best friend, and I wish I could spend time with her without feeling that the clock is ticking…. Maybe after graduation..

Ok, now off to possibly work on drink, but maybe to just call it a night and crash… We will see how I feel when I reach my bedroom. :P