Gelaed » The Blog

I’ve uploaded a bunch of new galleries in
the photos.

Among them are:

• A trip with the family to Shadowbrook (where Kristen and I are getting married)
• The Computer History Museum
• A trip to the shooting range

There are a ot of pictures from our trip to San Francisco that I haven’t taken the time to post. I’ll put those up son a well.

I’ve put up a few more pictures. I added pictures from California and pictures of Kristen’s graduation (2 sets) and Seleena’s graduation.

Also, for anyone who’s missed the memo, Kristen and I are now engaged. No, we don’t know when the wedding will be. Also, I’ve taken a job with Yahoo in Santa Clara. I start early June.

I put up some new photos. The photos site now has the pictures Kristen and I took in Boston and pictures of my mangled car.

I have not put up pictures from Kristen’s graduation yet.

I’m stuck in Tampa. I was supposed to leave at 12:47, now I’m rescheduled for 5:30, and who knows if I’ll actually get out then. I hate this crap. I’m stuck in the damned airport all afternoon, and maybe longer. Ugh.

Our Internet connection died at work this morning. I checked, and it turned out that our router was just fine, but it couldn’t get a DSL connection. Andy and I headed over to the comm room and poked around. Turns out that the phone line to our DSL modem had been pulled halfway out of the phone board.* We managed to reseat the wire and restart the DSL modem, and our connection was back.

Late this afternoon, Courtney noticed that he’d lost connectivity to google chat. We all confirmed that we had, too. Then we checked and found that several other sites were inaccessible. We initially thought the connection was down again, but it turns out that we still had live SSH connections to remote machines, and sites we’d been connected to for a while were still up. It looked like a DNS issue. So we grabbed the DNS addresses from our router and tried to ping them. I saw 25-33% packet loss. Ben got 75% loss. We managed to ping to other IP addresses without a hitch. We knew it was the DNS servers. Not much we could do about it, since the DNS is handled by Bellsouth. We could have set our own, but by then it was pretty late, and not really worth it.

When I got home, I checked my connectivity, and found that I couln’t get anywhere. I checked my DNS servers and sure enough, I have the same Bellsouth servers that we have at work.

What to do? SSH to a remote machine via its IP address (remembering the remote machine’s IP is the hardest part). Do a dig on the webserver at work and get its IP. After that, connect to the server via its IP address and go to the private wiki. Now log in and grab the university DNS addresses (which were thoughtfully added to the wiki long ago). Then set up a static DNS on your local machine, using the university DNS servers. Isn’t it obvious?

Seriously, after I did that, I thought about it for a second and realized that most people would have no idea how to do most of this (nor would they probably have access to the necessary resources). It’s really wierd that this stuff is almost second nature now. Who knew that such random geek knowledge would have tangible benefits?

I only hope that my exhaustive Futurama knowledge will one day prove as useful.

* A Bellsouth technician was in the building today for another company. I actually think he probably pulled the wire out on accident while he was poking around, but that’s not really relevant to the story.

Update: Turns out that the university DNS servers are having a bunch of problems, too. I assume they probably get their information from the Bellsouth servers, too. In any event, I managed to find a list of public DNS servers cached by Google, so I’m riding Cisco’s public DNS servers now. Woooooo!

My parents gave me a new camera a few days ago. Thanksgiving presents, who knew? It’s a Canon PowerShot SD1000. I quite like it. I know certain people will complain that it doesn’t have image stabilization. To those people, I say pft! It’s teeny, it’s intuitive, and it does everything I need. Getting the image stabilization would have been 38% more expensive, and the camera wouldn’t be as small.

I took a few quick pictures of the Christmas tree. These were taken in pretty bad conditions, but they turned out fairly well, I think. A little image processing to clean them up wouldn’t hurt, but I didn’t bother. Maybe later.

I was surprised how well some of the non-flash images turned out, especially this picture of Leon. It’s quite crisp, considering the low-light condition. The shutter was open an eigth of a second, which is longer than I’d have thought I’d be able to hold my hand steady. I used the timer so I wouldn’t be pressing the shutter button when the image actually snapped (but I was still holding the camera). I’m not sure if it really helped to reduce the shakiness, or if the camera just did a good job.

I ordered three Christmas gifts yesterday.  All three were and are marked in stock.  All three say I can get them tomorrow if I order now and select one-day shipping.

So what’s the expected shipping date for my order?  November 26.  What the hell?  Come on, Amazon.  You always do this to me.  It’s like we have this abusive relationship.  You treat me like crap, but I always come back because you’re such a charmer.  Why do you treat me so?

I just got this cool, new thing installed at my apartment. They call it running water. It’s really amazing. I turn a handle, and water just jumps out of a pipe in the wall. It’s pretty awesome. I’ve got like six of these pipes installed, and they all spit out clean water whenever I want.

I just took what I like to call a standing bath, but I think it’s technically called a “shower”, or something like that. I also used this thing called a “water closet” and “flushed” it when I was finished. I even flushed it again just for kicks! And then I washed my hands under one of those running water pipes. Cleanliness is next to godliness, you know.

All in all, it really is awe-inspiring. It’s only the year 2007 A.D., and I’ve already got running water in my house. The future has never looked brighter!

So I talked to my landlord around 8:00 last night. Turns out that the water problem is on their side of things. Supposedly he told the plumber to come check it out early yesterday afternoon, but he apparently didn’t. The plumber didn’t get here until about an hour after I talked to my landlord. And then didn’t really do anything except cut off the water to stop it from flooding the back yard

It’s been almost 24 hours since my water went out, and it’s still not working. I can look out back and see that they’ve dug a pretty big hole, presumably around the broken connection. I can also see that ther’s no one actually out there now, though, so I assume that the pipe is supposed to fix itself.

I think I’m going to either call up a coworker or head to the turner center to take a shower soon. I’ve got no idea how long it will be before my water comes back on, and I’ve got no desire to spend the day gross again.