You would think, being the geek that I am, that I would be on the ball with the routine maintenance of my Jeep. Far from it, sadly.

The rear brakes started making an awful, tortured squeal a week or two ago. At first I thought that it was just moisture that got into the pads, after a week-long monsoon over the midwest. I finally accepted that I couldn’t blame the water and took the Jeep into get looked at.

Besides being horribly overdue for an oil change (nearly 1 year and 10,000 miles, hello McFly) and the death cry of the brakes, one of my rear tail lights was out. I dropped it off and walked down the road to Panera Bread to partake of the free wireless and eat some food.

After an hour or so the mechanic called with the damage; rotors and pads on the rear brakes are shot beyond repair, the front brakes are in better condition but need to be replaced soon. The two left-side tires are worn down and need to be replaced. Finally, the engine coolant was dirtier than the Chicago River (and trust me when I say, that’s pretty darn dirty).

I can get away with not replacing the front brakes and tires. They’re good for at least another month or so (and another payday away). Now I can sit here, keep drinking my infinitely-refillable iced tea, work, and hope the dogs don’t tear up the house. I’ve got a good two hour wait, minimum, until the work is done.

Being the son of a mechanic and technically-inclined myself, I really should be more cognizant of car-related issues. At the very least, I have no excuse for not getting routine maintenance done. At least my tags aren’t expired.

The Google Calendar is now a reality

While discussing the sad state of email clients in Linux, such as Thunderbird and Evolution, Jorge mentioned that he had switched entirely to gmail. Only one thing he was missing:

20:15 once they do a calendar it will rule.

I’ve played with it briefly, and it is pretty slick. Easy to use calendar functionality, and notifications via e-mail and SMS.

It’s a sad state of affairs when a our two primary graphical e-mail clients, who’ve been around for years, get throttled by Google once again. I’m not sure how I like only having access to my mail/calendar via the browser (negating any offline caching like offlineimap), but the quality of these Google productions makes me stop and think about it.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this calendaring functionality get integrated to the desktop soon. How cool would it be to view my calendar in gnome and see the events in my Google calendar?

I’ve been running KDE for the past several weeks, much to the dismay Jorge. It’s mostly because kwin has features that metacity does not, such as window memory. I went to fire up GNOME a few nights ago and discovered that the alt-F2 shortcut to launch the file launcher dialog didn’t work. After much help from goatboy (who doesn’t blog nearly enough), I was able to track it down to a bug somewhere in gnome-panel. Metacity sees alt-F2 and sends the message to gnome-panel, but it never gets activated. I’m still working out enough of gdb to trace down exactly where it is. A project for another day, though. It’s fairly isolated. It works for a new user on the same machine, but not my existing user (even after killing ~/.gconf*, ~/.metacity, and ~/.gnome*

I recently put my Fujitsu P5000 laptop into semi-retirement, replacing it with an N-Series Fujitsu with Dual Core. The only problem has been the ATI x1400 video card that doesn’t have any linux support yet. I’ve been stuck running Linux via VMWare. It works well enough, but not the ideal solution. Unfortunately now there seems to be some hard drive issues. It’s been running chkdsk for an hour now, after several VMWare crashes, a BSOD, and timeout errors reading from the drive in the event log. It’s replaced some bad clusters that appear to be in my VMWare file. If my VMWare disk is dead I’m going to be one very unhappy camper. Enough to consider returning it and pick up something a little more Linux-friendly, like a Mac Book Pro. Laugh all you want, Jorge, but it’s roughly the same price as any other Dual Core, and it will run OSX, Windows, and Linux natively. You can’t get that anywhere else yet without a bit of hackery.

Work is going extremely well. I’m still putting in an insane amount of hours. I’m getting ready to make at least one full-time hire soon. I’m still looking for a good Perl programmer, capable of handing my mess of mod_perl2 code.

A failed experiment, sadly.

“We’ve equipped a Russian Orlan spacesuit with three batteries, a radio transmitter, and internal sensors to measure temperature and battery power,” says Bauer. “As SuitSat circles Earth, it will transmit its condition to the ground.”

I woke up this morning around 5:30AM to try to a tune in the SuitSat but all I heard was static. I tried the antenna on my handheld, the mounted 2M in the back, and an inverted “v” on the roof but no luck. Then I heard the bad news: the suit was silent. Speculation is that the batteries were too cold to operate and failed shortly after deployment.

Even though this experiment failed, it’s this kind of spirit that drives us forward. Onward, SuitSat II.

Again work has kept me from doing anything other than work-related things but such is life. I’m doing something I enjoy and have enough of a stake in it to make it worth my while.

For the longest time I’ve been using the text editor vim for writing code. It doesn’t have all of the fancy features of a full-fledged Integrated Development Environment (IDE) but it suites my needs of being flexible and fairly easy to use. Scott has been talking about Kate lately so I decided to give it a try. Despite my misgivings about changing the status quo, I’ve discovered that Kate is very functional without the traditional bloat and overhead of your normal IDE.

Along with Kate I’m also giving KDE another spin. KDE 3.5 hit Ubuntu Dapper recently. I will probably end up back in GNOME, but I like to experiment with various window managers to see what others are doing. I really dig the window memory features that kwin has to offer. That, in my opinion, is my biggest gripe with GNOME/Metacity. It seems that while GNOME is making nice strides, Metacity is sort of just sitting there gathering dust. Enlightment 17 is also looking really good. Kyle may not believe it, but I think there could be a release in the not too distant future. I mean, even Duke Nukem Forever is going in full force. The end times must be close at hand.
I’m going to be doing a bit of travelling this year. So far we have trips planned to Nashville in March, upstate New York in June, Detroit, for Penguicon, in April, and potential work trips to Las Vegas in March and California spread through the year. I suppose I should sign up for frequent flyer miles now. Hopefully I’ll have enough free time during my trips to meet up with some people. I know Linux World is in Boston this year and I’m secretly scheming to arrange the time to go. It’d be good to actually meet some of the people doing the good deeds out there.

I’ve never been very good from blogging consistently due to travel, work, etc. I have no excuse now, though. We’re driving 70MPH on I57 south, near Matoon in Central Illinois, and I’m on the Internet.

Work picked up a wireless data PCMCIA card for me from Verizon. It needed to be activated in Windows but worked very easily in Linux (Ubuntu Dapper). It looks like I need to rebuild the kernel to apply a patch to usbserial, but it’s at least a solid connection so far. I can IRC. I can IM. I even managed to install drivel and post this.

Once I have a few minutes to put together the notes I followed, I’ll post some configs and instructions.

My brother is in the hospital recovering from bowel surgery so Dena and I packed up the dogs this morning and drove up to Wausau, WI to pay him a visit.  He’s got a long history of medical problems, including a build up of scar tissue in his intestine which has been a source of many problems over the years.  This was the seventh or eighth time there was a blockage bad enough to land him in the hospital.  The doctor finally decided it was time to open him up to find out what was really going on and they ended up finding a kink – sort of like the kink in the garden hose that kills the flow of water.

He’s got a bit of recovery ahead of him.  They opened up an eight inch incision down his belly and he’s on a 10-minute morphine pump while that heals, but I’m hopeful that this surgery will help him live a little bit more of a normal life.  He looks downright anorexic right now.  I don’t think I’ve seen him eat more than a few bites of food over the last few years before he started to have discomfort.

This was also the first long ride in the car for Perl.  She had a small bout of carsickness but otherwise did well.  She even discovered the joy of sticking her head out the window (but only when the jeep was stopped).  This also marks the first time she’s slept out of her room and with us.  She’s passed out on the bed right now, using Dena’s leg as a pillow.  Gotta love puppies.

The only hotel we’ve found so far that allows pets is Super 8.  For an extra $10, they stick you in a smoking room and let you keep two dogs with you.  That alone makes Super 8 my new favorite cheap hotel.  With the holiday weekend, I couldn’t get ahold of anyone at our vet aka kennel until this morning, and all their space was filled from the holiday.  We weren’t about to leave the dogs alone in the room all day and night so we did the natural thing and brought them along.  No other hotel we called would even talk to us when we mentioned pets.  Plus free high-speed Internet and a Buffalo Wild Wings across the street.  This I can handle.

A mostly relaxing day on the road, a full belly and wifi and I start tearing through code to find a bug that was killing Apache.  Turns out I made a few serious snafu’s working with LWP::Parallel::UserAgent.  First, I was require’ing it every time the code was hit instead of when the module was loaded.  My earlier testing never took that into account, so I thought its timeout handling was broken.  Turns out my ugly SIGALARM hack was causing mod_perl to dump randomly.  Then, in perhaps the biggest mistake of all, I forgot to convert my database-stored timeouts from milliseconds to seconds, so instead of a timeout of three seconds, it was waiting for three thousand seconds.  Whoops.  That might explain my performance problems over the past few days when one of my upstream sources of data was having hardware issues.  Sometimes, taking a step back and getting a fresh perspective on things really does wonders.  It would also help to work less than 18-hour days.  Sometimes the code just blurs and I the next day I sit and wonder why the hell I wrote what I did.

One more day on the road and then we’ll be home.  Nothing beats the homestead.