Following Edge

I was happy this morning to see that Scooter Libby's indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice made front page news. After Tuesday's revelation that Libby's own notes contradicted his testimony, I was dismayed that the story only appeared on page 4 of the Wednesday newspaper. When the top aide to the Vice-President is lying under oath, I would expect that to be very important news, even before criminal charges are brought against him. The more sincere coverage today seemed appropriate, but I do notice that the article has slipped way down on The Register-Guard's web site to allow more prominent coverage of river otters. Almost unbelievable.

Much, much closer to home, I completed both of the outstanding personal chores that David had suggested I might need to outsource. I repaired the TV, which turned out to be crippled by bad spots on the hard drive (which took out such unimportant-sounding, yet critical, files as /dev/mem and /var/spool/). I also have sent the "kicking you out" letter to our renters. I gave them until December 4 to vacate. It's sad to do, but it's not as if I haven't given them lots of chances over the last 3 or 4 months. I've heard a lot about people having trouble kicking renters out in less than 3 months, but I haven't found any indication of that in the law. If you know something about that, let me know.

And, so far as David's suggestion of outsourcing goes, I suggest he keep his mind on which of his own projects he can outsource. I don't think it's possible to build any part of your chimney inside your house, then move it to your roof. Even if it was possible, it still wouldn't be wise. Go review the situation and let him know if you think he needs some help.

Hey! Feeling much better today. I can't be sure what changed yesterday to improve my mood. Here's how it went: Spent half the day sitting in a room on jury duty. I was assigned to a group of jurors called "the mutts", which I guess is better than being in "the poodles" or "the labradoodles". I got a haircut from Tia. Gave her a big tip for doing such a nice job. Got my cell phone bill, so I can send off for my cell phone rebate. Love that paperwork! Got some good love from Anne Marie and slept well. Or maybe it had nothing to do with love or rebates or jury duty and was just a fluctuation in hormone levels. In any case, I'm feeling much better.

Now I can get on with things I'd put aside:

Eugene Weblogger Get-together planning. Hmmmm... cancelled for this month. Hey, that was easy planning. I'll set up a date for November as soon as I coordinate with Kinsey, who may be able to join us while visiting Eugene.

Catching up with work. I reduced my pending emails from 12 to 4. Mostly by deleting. Hey, that was easy too.

Essential household chores. I did the laundry. Easy.

Fixing the broken TV and terminating our renters' lease. Oh, drat! Not done yet. Maybe tomorrow.

It's nice when I'm feeling better. Thanks for staying tuned during my technical difficulties.

Must have been a nice day yesterday, with a visit to Corvallis, lots of little chores checked off, and watching Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which was pretty good (having lots of puns). Even so, I am in a profound depression off and on for the last couple of weeks, and especially today.

Don't take me too seriously. I'm sure I'll have to feel better tomorrow.

But, for today I don't feel like fixing our broken TV, or taking on other than the essential household chores. I really don't feel like returning to work tomorrow. I don't feel like planning the next Eugene Weblogger Get-together, even though it should have been last week, or at least this week. I don't feel like blogging.

It's been a difficult week, at least from the perspective of work.

On one hand, I have made the progress I had hoped to, including rolling out the new instant messaging (chat) service to our whole company. Keith has also made some really great progress on the "big project" and, on a personal level, I'm feeling less isolated from Anne Marie and both getting time with Lauren and away from her.

On the other hand, through some cosmic prank, whenever I start to check things off my list, twice as many things as usual start to jump onto my to-do list. As much work as I've been able to do this week, it feels like there's now more work to do.

Even worse, there was a major meltdown. After Wednesday's announcement from Apple about new super-powerful G5 PowerMacs, we posted a page of nice, high-quality images of the guts of the machine on one of our web sites. The page got linked from dozens of Mac news and rumor sites and we had over 25,000 hits to this page in less than a day. Between the traffic and the size of the images, our computer room network was brought to a crawl and the servers were running out of memory. Even though I was able to keep everything running for the most part and arrange a mid-day hardware upgrade, the adrenaline has sapped me for the rest of the week.

Finally, I discovered that the chat server I had just set up had a critical problem communicating with .Mac chat accounts. Given that our company is like the largest Apple reseller and Apple heavily uses .Mac chat accounts, this was a major blow. The open source software we were using for this connection is a perfect example of open-source software... poor documentation, incomplete features, and unusable newest versions. Gak!

In the middle of the night, I was able to find and get working a slightly better-behaved open source software to solve the problem, but I couldn't find anyone to chat with to test it. After a quick web search, I found out about "Zola on AOL", a "chat robot" at AOL that some people have had strange luck with. Sure enough, I connected up to "ZolaOnAOL" on the AIM service and chatted with Zola for a while, finishing my testing. Anyone familiar with the artificial intelligence programs Eliza or Alice will not be surprised by Zola's responses.

However, I was amused by the response she gave me (graphic above) to a testosterone-induced middle-of-the-night question. Maybe she was just telling me what I wanted to hear.

Even after this week, there may be little rest this weekend as Lauren will be with us, instead of with her grandmother and David may want help getting a ton or two of wood pellets to his house. Oh well, I'll rest when I'm old.

I've been having trouble writing here due to a profound depression over the last week or so. It may be just something that comes up every now and then for me, but, on the other hand, there's plenty of causes as well: having a 11-day sore throat; feeling hopeless about promoting the Eugene Weblogger Meetup; having continuing conflicts with our renters to the point of needing to write an eviction notice; and feeling disconnected from Anne Marie as she works very hard to catch up on her school work.

Work hasn't been so satisfying lately, either, but I feel like I do have a chance to get some satisfaction there. In the last month, I've been "growing projects", with things starting, but never finishing, leading to a bit of overload. Lots of things: getting my check-authorization-system software certified has taken over a month due to delays beyond my control; important changes to our online sales system had derailed my project to set up a company chat server (resulting in neither project being finished); the big project with Keith making painfully slow progress due to illness and (thankfully) better input from the users.

The good news in that bad news is that there's plenty of opportunity to complete work. Crossing something off your to-do list is always mood-lifting. So, this weekend, I completed the half of the online sales system upgrade that I have control over. Today, we put the check approval system into use company-wide. And, today I wrote over half of the documentation for the chat server system.

Despite slaving over making the chat server documentation as useful and readable as possible, it's dubious that anyone will read more than a few paragraphs of it. No one reads documentation, especially Mac users. But, that is of no consequence. The real reason for the hard work on it is that it's the last step before finishing the project. Oh, and it will give me great pleasure to smugly point people to the documentation for the next 3 years as they ask questions before reading it. Hah!

Here's hoping that you get something off of your to-do list today!

We returned today from our more-or-less annual camping trip. Because we're not that into camping, we stay in a yurt, which is a bit more full-featured than a tent, but not quite so much as a 28 foot travel trailer, as most of the other campers seem to have. Not that there were that many other campers. Mid-October or early March are our favorite times to go camping, mostly because we don't have to endure many fellow campers.

We always stay in Yurt 53 at the Umpqua Lighthouse State Park. The lighthouse itself, pictured here, is pretty great. Instead of the usual single rotating bright white light, it's a rotating set of hundreds of hand-carved French prism lenses that swirl lines of white and red all around the lighthouse. The park also has a placid little lake, Lake Marie, that has a well-manicured hiking trail all the way around it. This trip is the first time we've hiked all the way around, thanks to Lauren's increased endurance at this age. Overall, Lauren really loved the camping trip. She said that it was sad to return home, because she likes to stay in the yurt better. Sleeping in the top of a bunk-bed in the yurt has to be part of that sentiment.

It wasn't all hiking, wilderness, and smores, either. We visited Sea Lion Caves, the year-round home of sea lions, which, unexplainably, had no sea lions during our visit. We visited

Amazingly, my new cell phone was able to hook my computer up to high speed Internet from the yurt. It let me take care of an "emergency" for work without having to drive into the nearest town, but I'm not sure that having that kind of access in the forest is a good idea for recreation.

Anyhow, the world of camping is now safe from us for another year. As wonderful as it is to have days of constant recreation and nights of fitful sleep, it's wonderful to be back home.

Almost exactly three weeks ago, Anne Marie noticed our silkie hen and another silkie chick were missing and, believing the raccoons had gotten her, started The Raccoon War.

The war has been a success with 2 raccoons and 3 opossum captured after 3 weeks. We've had the trap so long now, we'll just keep it instead of returning it for the tiny bit of deposit remaining.

However, Anne Marie started seeing the silkie hen around again a week ago. She wasn't staying in the chicken coop, but would appear suddenly in the pasture near the barn when Anne Marie fed the goats. It was curious, since there are no nearby chicken hotels that we're aware of, and chickens just don't live in the forest (at least not for long, I suppose).

Yesterday, Anne Marie solved the mystery. The silkie hen had made a nest under the saddles in the barn and was sneaking out when she could grab some food from the goats. She has collected at least a half dozen eggs and has been sitting on them, even though this is not baby-chick season. It's a good thing we did catch those raccoons, since they used to live under the barn and would have found her while looking for fruit-flavored baby chicks.

We don't expect that any of the eggs will hatch or survive, given how cold it is this time of year, but it's a curious ending to the missing chicken mystery.

Last week, I wrote a WordPress plug-in (PHP software) to help out Ampersand (aka Barry) at Alas (a blog). Yes, this is the same Barry that's drawing the banner for this site.

"Alas" frequently focuses on feminism, same-sex marriage and liberal (even ultra-liberal) topics. The blog's accurate focus on these issues, and its open and thoughtful nature, have led to it being a platform for lengthy discussions amongst readers. In order to support this discussion, Ampersand had provided a "Recently Commented Posts" list on the side-bar so that readers could easily follow where new discussion was happening. Unfortunately, the plug-in he was using wasn't written with the mindfulness to efficiency that is required when your site has more than 42,000 comments, as "Alas" does. As a result, his web hosting service had to take the site off-line a few times, ultimately resulting in the total removal of the list.

The problem was really right up my alley since I have some experience with WordPress on this blog and an almost ridiculous focus on efficiency when I write software. After waiting a while to see if other volunteers would be able to write the plug-in, I wrote the "Efficient Recently Commented posts" plug-in last week and helped Ampersand get it set up on "Alas". You can see it on the right side of every page at "Alas" or under "Posts with Recent Comments" in the side-bar here.

I felt very good about my work on the plug-in and wanted to share it with others. Normally, I release my non-work projects like this under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which has gotten a lot of press in the last few years and which gives anyone the right to use the software, and gives anyone the right to modify or enhance it so long as they only distribute the modified (derived) work under the GPL license. It's a very generous license that ensures access to the software and ensures access to improvements to the software.

But, I haven't released the plug-in under the GPL, because the WordPress folks say that I must release it under a GPL-compatible license. I know that they're wrong. The GPL FAQ says that plug-ins must be licensed under the same license as the program, unless the plug-in links dynamically. Without even getting into whether a PHP script links dynamically, the issue of the program's GPL license is only at issue if I modify or distribute the original program under its GPL license, combining the new code and the old as part of a "combined work".

For something like my plug-in, where I am the only copyright holder (since it is a 100% original work with no part of it written by anyone else), there is no connection to the GPL that can require me to license the plug-in under the GPL, or any other license. It upsets me that they want to use their misunderstanding of the license to require people to be generous, instead of just asking people to be generous with their plug-ins. It's as if you made something for someone and planned to give it to them, but when they saw it they say "You have to give me that, because you owe me". It changes one's perception of the situation, perhaps.

I suspect that I'll eventually get over being pedantic and childishly irked at their demand, and license the plug-in under the GPL. For now, I'm festering and licensing it for free on a very restrictive basis, just because I can.

Andrea (another great feminist, liberal (oops) progressive blogger) added the plug-in to Shrub.com as well. It's really rewarding to see software I wrote helping people use these sites.

This week, both Lauren and Anne Marie have had some sort of horrible sickness. I mean a barfing-type sickness, so with some real misery involved. Things are pretty well organized in our lives so that we have just enough time to do our work and school, take care of the house, spend time together, do a tiny amount of socializing with others, and spend time on our own projects (maybe you could call them hobbies). When one of us is sick, it takes an effort to keep things going. One of the ways I helped was to feed the horses, goats, cats, and birds. This "new hobby" was not a lot of work, but just enough to keep me away from one of my hobbies... writing here.

Now, almost inevitably, I've gotten sick as well and had to take much of the day off today. I was skilled enough, however, to be sure to get only the scratchy-throat-and-tired-type sickness and not the barfing-and-sore-type sickness everyone else had. Now that I'm sick, perhaps Anne Marie will help me pick up the slack and write my blog for me.

It's illegal, in the city of Eugene, to display a dyed (or otherwise artificially colored) chick in a public place. I love the law, especially these strange parts. How did that law make it onto the books? I can't imagine that dying chicks could ever be that much of a civic problem. In fact, it must have been some problem since this law [City of Eugene Code 4.485(1)], extends to ducklings, goslings, and rabbits and sale or display in stores.

I may have to try to break that law, as difficult (and unnoticed) as that may be.

How did I come across that? We noticed a local "will work for food" sign holder, who normally has his dog with him, was without his dog. I wondered if we should get an alpaca for him. As much money as his dog was probably bringing in for him, I have to believe that an alpaca would bring in much more, if just due to the novelty. Of course, we were wondering if this would be legal. Anne Marie decided that, if that was an important question, it would be even more important to know if she could take one of our goats for a walk in Eugene.

Getting the answer required a pretty thorough analysis of the Eugene and Oregon laws. This brought me to the "dyed chick" law. The answer to the alpaca/goat question? A goat or alpaca are specifically restricted from most private property and from city parks and open spaces. On roadways (pretty much the only remaining space), they are allowed under the same rules as motor vehicles (meaning they can't be on the sidewalk). So, as long as she sticks to the streets, Anne Marie should be able to take Portia or Malvolio for a walk in Eugene.

The last few days have seemed full of crisis. Happily, the picture here of Lauren climbing a rock wall on her own shows something worrisome that, thankfully, did not involve any crisis.

One major concern is that I started getting failure reports from one of the hard disk drives in the server that principally runs all of our retail stores. Happily, I plan ahead and the server has an identical mirrored drive that took over automatically. I ordered a replacement drive and got help from my friend Chris to replace it (him with the system in Portland and me in Elmira running the software).

Just as we got the drive replaced, the power supply for the system had a failure, bringing the system down unexpectedly and preventing it from starting back up. And this was at 11:30pm, which you might think would be a safe time. But, this happened to be the last day of the month, when the controller (that is, the company's supreme master of accounting) works part of the night to prepare the system for the coming month. Crisis!

Now, when I said I plan ahead, I meant it. With adrenaline pumping, I loaded my complete set of replacement parts for the system (drives, boards, power supply, cables) into my car and began the two-hour drive to Portland in order to get the system back up by 2:30am. The good news is that the system recovered only a half hour into my drive and I was able to check the system and prepare the new drive using my cell phone and get back to bed by 1:30am.

Then today, Anne Marie and I were returning a opossum to the wild when I discovered that Lauren had at some point switched the gas tank switch and we were now out of gas without any warning. Happily, I had my bicycle in the back of the truck and I was able to ride back home to get my car and some gas. Not a huge crisis, but enough, since my adrenaline had already been used up the previous night.

But, that's not the biggie. The renters in our little house have 2 dogs that have been barking constantly. We talked to them about it previously, but it's just been getting worse and worse. So, I discover that they now have 4 dogs and have to go tell them that they have to get back down to 2 dogs and keep those dogs reasonably quiet. I don't like having to "babysit" them over this stuff.

So, I knock on their door and they say "Oh, I thought you were here about the electricity being out. Didn't you get the note with our rent?"... To which I reply "No, because I haven't gotten your rent". Evidently, they left a money order for the rent in our mailbox out on our rural road. I don't mail checks in our mailbox, much less cash or money orders. As Keith put it, "STOOOOPID!"

The good news (for me) is that the electrical problem was just that their own refrigerator was blowing the circuit, and nothing about the house or with the refrigerator that we provide. The bad news is that I have to worry about kicking them out if they can't come up with a second rent payment or if they can't control their dogs. Ayee!

The result of all this? I can't relax and my back and head hurt like crazy about half the time. I think it must be time to take up serious drinking or recreational drugs!