Rochelle - Aldoblog

BeBox Extension Top 10

Rochelle suggested that I should write up a Top 10 list of reasons why I should get an extension on my BeBox project, instead of her throwing them on the street.

Rochelle suggested that I should write up a Top 10 list of reasons why I should get an extension on my BeBox project, instead of her throwing them on the street. So here goes:

Technology’s complicated.
Fun with Gas #1
It’s the NFL playoffs, goddammit!
What BeBoxes? That’s a permanent art installation.
The cats distracted me with shiny things.
I’ve been drunk or hung over every weekend since I got them.
Hey! You tricked me!
Oh, yeah, right, I guess I need to work on those.
Because I wear the pants around here!
What about your projects?

BeBox Project Update

Back in October, Rochelle got me to publicly commit to finishing my BeBox refurb project, or terminate it. She cleverly suggested a deadline far in the future. The date was last weekend.

Back in October, Rochelle got me to publicly commit to finishing my BeBox refurb project, or terminate it. She cleverly suggested a deadline far in the future. The 17th of January, the anniversary of my buying the collection. I later modified that to be the weekend after the 17th, to give myself an extra two days.

Those last two days were this past weekend.

So, I’m not finished, and haven’t actually made a whole lot of progress. My Daily Home Improvements are primarily going to tasks to clear space for the BeBoxes in my office, so Rochelle can have her parlor back.

DHI 13-19

BeBoxes, software updates, configuration fixes, more clearing of shelves, meta tags, meetings with designers, more fun with gas, clearing a flat surface, and over a dozen t-shirts bite the dust.

DHI 13: I worked on the BeBoxes, installing permanent RAM in the dual 133 that I plan to keep. Installed a network card too, but the Kingston card I tried isn’t working, not sure why. Might be tomorrow’s DHI — with my BeBox deadline fast approaching, that’s all I really have time for.

DHI 14: I updated my Mac to OS X 10.2.3, and ran the Repair Privileges tool on it, which corrected a few errors.

(Mac OS X tip: It’s always a good idea to do this after installing an OS update, or really, any installer that asked for the administrator password. You can run this without rebooting, or booting from a CD. Just run /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility, and do a Repair Permissions on your boot disk. Works fine, and catches errors.)

I also found and fixed an error in our MIMEDefang configuration file, which may have been causing us to lose mail since the 5th (yikes!). So if you wrote to us and didn’t get a reply, try again!

DHI 15: I worked on the bookshelves again, selecting more books to be pass on to another household. I pulled out enough books, both paperback and hardback, to get all the other books that I didn’t have room for onto the shelves proper, instead of sitting casually on the edges.

I also installed MovableType, a different weblogging package, for Rochelle to try out on her weblog…if I can get her to start one!

DHI 16: This one’s kind of geeky (even more so than usual). I added my ICBM Address (latitude and longitude) to my blog page and registered with GeoURL. Now you can see what other web sites are near me physically.

DHI 17: Rochelle and I met with an interior designer for about two hours, to start the process of getting help to finish the water closet project we began almost two years ago.

Rochelle also got someone to come over and hook up the gas heater we’d worked on so hard previously. But that’s a whole other story.

DHI 18: I got rid of almost 20 old t-shirts from my dresser. I kept most of the Be t-shirts, though; I still can’t bear to part with them…

DHI 19: I cleared off my nightstand, throwing some stuff out, and getting rid of a pile of crap I was pretending I would eventually read. With a clear nightstand, I can now hook up my alarm clock and actually use it, a big improvement from Rochelle and I passing back and forth a little travel alarm (the person getting up earliest got the alarm).

I should add that Rochelle blew me out of the water this week, with less than two hours of work on the back deck. It looks fabulous, and it’s now worthy of having people over and hanging out on the deck. Woo hoo!

Fun With Gas #2

On Friday Rochelle had an appliance repair guy come and hook up the gas heater we had such fun with two weekends ago. We felt the need to have an expert come in and handle it, since we’d gone to another 5 hardware stores (yes, that’s 9 total), and not found the part we thought we needed.

And the funny thing was, Mr. Pearson didn’t want to turn off the gas either, he used Rochelle’s approach of “open the windows and work fast.” I guess when you know what you’re doing, it’s not a big deal.

But when he took the cap off the gas pipe, no gas smell! Hmmm, what’s up with that? A trip to the basement to trace the gas line revealed that, much to our dismay, the pipe has been removed over a 5 foot section. So there’s no gas running to the line, and it’s an ordeal to repair it.

Ah, well, we tried. And the vintage heater looks really cool where it’s installed in the dining room, even if there’s no gas to make it glow.

Someday!

DHI 9-12

Thursday I moved some cut boards from the hallway to the back of the house, where they will go to the basement. Friday I culled out a shelf’s worth of books, for selling/donating. Saturday I put a bunch of books that were stacked up around the house into boxes for storage. Sunday Rochelle and I de- and re-constructed our bedframe to be more stable, added a new power strip for my side of the bed, and rotated our mattress and box spring.

I’m going to stop posting these daily, and instead just post a weekly report on Sundays.

DHI 9: Thursday I moved some cut boards from the hallway to the back of the house, where they will go to the basement. (They moved to the basement Sunday.)

DHI 10: Friday I culled out a shelf’s worth of books, for selling/donating.

DHI 11: Saturday I put a bunch of books that were stacked up around the house into boxes for storage.

DHI 12: Sunday Rochelle and I de- and re-constructed our bedframe to be more stable, added a new power strip for my side of the bed, and rotated our mattress and box spring.

DHI #6: Fun With Gas

On Sunday Rochelle woke up with a new brainstorm, a project she thought would be simple, quick, and provide a big payoff: hook up the vintage gas heater we found at an antique store to the gas feed in our dining room. Four hardware stores and 6 pilot lights later, we’re back where we started — but at least we didn’t blow up the house!

On Sunday Rochelle woke up with a new brainstorm, a project she thought would be simple, quick, and provide a big payoff: hook up the vintage gas heater we found at an antique store to the gas feed in our dining room. I was dubious, and insisted that Rochelle have adult supervision while doing the work. Since I was going to spend the day working on my BeBox deadline, it couldn’t be me, so she called Hilda, and when Hilda wasn’t in, she called David.

David agreed to join and supervise, and soon arrived. Meanwhile I had hauled the heater to the dining room. After some discussion on what they needed, they left for the hardware store.

Upon returning, Rochelle was hot to go. During discussions about process it became apparent that Rochelle did not want to turn off the gas, because that meant we would have to re-light all the pilot lights (stove, water heater, house heater), and she was scared of that. She was of the opinion that we could just “open the windows wide and work fast.”

In the opposite corner were David and I, who were a lot more afraid of a wide open natural gas pipe — i.e., blowing up the house, or having fire engines arrive screaming and have to evacuate the block, or both — than lighting a few pilots. Apparently I fear gas more than I fear electricity. We killed the gas.

With effort, David and I were able to get the cap off the now non-active gas feed, whereupon we discovered that we didn’t have the right size adapter to hook the pipe to the heater.

So Rochelle and David went shopping.

Returning about four hours later, with much new clothing and a wee bit tipsy, they had procured more adapters in different sizes. Let’s try again!

Nope. But closer! One adapter fit the pipe, and a different one fit the heater, so we now knew the sizes we needed for the adapter. Send Michael to the hardware store, we’re too drunk to get it right ourselves!

So I go to the hardware store, 20 minutes before all hardware stores in SF will be closing, and paw through the meager collection of gas fittings and adapters. Nada.

So Rochelle and David, and now Dan and Hilda, keep drinking and having fun, while I try to work in the other room. It dawns on me that I skipped my bath for the day. With the gas out, I will have to take an ice cold bath the next morning before I go to work. Which will surely stop my poor heart (I would be wide awake, though).

So after the party breaks up, Rochelle and I take David home, and head for Home Depot in Daly City, open 24 hours. Are you keeping track? This is our fourth hardware store.

Well, Home Depot is great if you have a modern house, but if you live in a 100+ year old Victorian, it sucks. Our gas pipe is a non-standard size, and they don’t have it. We head home, with Rochelle wondering how big a beatin’ she’s going to get after I take my cold bath.

We decide to back off the project, re-cap the gas pipe, and re-light all the pilots. Re-capping is easy, re-lighting all the pilots turns out to be tricky. In 12 years in the house, Rochelle has always had PG&E do it. I’ve not re-lit a pilot myself in my five years here.

So we turn on the gas and wander from heater to heater to stove, not succeeding anywhere on the first try. Turn off the gas, look closer at all of them. Turn off the cutoff valve on the heater and water heater. Turn on the gas, try the stove, which has four separate pilots. Light all four. Still can’t get oven or broiler to light. Call Hilda. Figure it out (a little thing called a reset button).

Go downstairs, light the water heater. Rochelle’s ass is safe! Decide to call it a night.

So, anyway, my DHI for Monday was figuring out the pilot for the house heater, and getting it re-lit.

DHI #5: Razor and More Anti-Spam

DHI #5 consisted of poking a hole in the firewall for Razor to access its central servers, and disabling most of the RBL blocking in sendmail, while enabling RBL checking in SpamAssassin. I also kept Rochelle from blowing up the house.

DHI #5 consisted of poking a hole in the firewall for Razor to access its central servers, and disabling most of the RBL blocking in sendmail, while enabling RBL checking in SpamAssassin.

I also kept Rochelle from blowing up the house. But that’s a longer story, for tonight.

Quotation of the Year Candidate

She leans over to a man in the hotel suite, whose identity everyone has been wondering, and says “Hi, we haven’t been introduced, I’m <rock star’s name>.“

“I know. I’m your manager.”

We weren’t there for this NYE party, but our close friend was, and this story is too good not to record.

Among the guests was a certain reasonably famous musician, just a leeettle bit drunk. She leans over to a man in the hotel suite, about whose identity my friend has been wondering, and says “Hi, we haven’t been introduced, I’m (rock star’s name).”

“I know. I’m your manager.”

DHI #4: Old Machine Stripped

I removed the CD-ROM drive, hard disk, and network card from the old server, which used to be Rochelle’s old PC. What remains still starts up and runs; it’s next to the front door, ready for putting out on the street.

I removed the CD-ROM drive, hard disk, and network card from the old server, which used to be Rochelle’s old PC. It’s probably seven years old at this point. What remains still starts up and runs, but needs something to boot an operating system from.

I’ve got it next to the front door, ready for putting out on the street, but I’ve decided to let Rochelle have that pleasure. When she reads this posting, she can toss it on the sidewalk. (Hopefully gently, it’s still a usable machine for someone.)

DHI #3: New Server in Permanent Home

Today’s Daily Home Improvement (DHI from now on) was to sew up the new server, and move it from the operating table to the computer rack, its “permanent” place. This was actually more work than it sounds like.

Today’s Daily Home Improvement (DHI from now on) was to sew up the new server, and move it from the operating table to the computer rack, its “permanent” place.

The computer rack is a bunch of shelves where the server, the DSL box, a printer, the phone and some other electronic odds and ends share space with a couple hundred floppies and CDs, and about 40 pounds of unfiled papers. It is a mess. The rack will surely be the subject of many, many DHIs this year.

While I was at it, I removed the old server (a 150MHz Pentium with 80 megs of RAM), replaced the old power cable with a heavy duty cable, moved the CD-ROM drive to a different ATA bus than the hard disk, so the hard disk could run in UDMA100 mode, and tweaked the MIMEDefang startup script to not spew messages in a different format than the rest of the system startup scripts.

The part Rochelle will like the best is that I got a machine out of the living room. Except all I really did was move the new machine out, and the old machine in. But tomorrow the old machine is going to get cannibalized, and I’ll probably put the remains out on the street. Things like that usually disappear in about 35 seconds…

New Year’s Resolution #1

One of my many New Year’s resolutions for 2003 is to do something for the house, every day. It can be a small thing, like changing a light bulb, but it can’t be an ordinary thing, like washing the dishes. And every day, I’m going to list it here in my blog, where you can hold me to it. Gulp!

One of my many New Year’s resolutions for 2003 is to do something for the house, every day. It can be a small thing, like changing a light bulb, but it can’t be an ordinary thing, like washing the dishes. (Washing the dishes when it’s Rochelle’s turn might count, though. ;-)

And every day, I’m going to list it here in my blog, where you can hold me to it. Gulp!

Many days my little thing will have to do with the systems infrastructure for our web sites, mail servers, etc. Indeed, my first two days are exactly that:

1-Jan: Add MIMEDefang and SpamAssassin to our mail server.
2-Jan: Tweak MIMEDefang configuration to only check incoming messages, and not add SpamAssassin reports as attachments.

Still, I hope that no more than 200 of my 365 improvements will be electronic. God knows there’s enough things to put away or throw out, just in my office, that will qualify as a home improvement!

How to Get Ready for the Holidays

I have five brothers and sisters, which can make holiday gift giving very stressful, so many gifts for so many people. Years ago we simplified, with a gift exchange where we drew names out of a hat. Well, that’s how my siblings did it, but I have “more sophisticated tools for assigning gift-receivers to gift-givers.”

I have five brothers and sisters, which can make holiday gift giving very stressful, so many gifts for so many people. Years ago we simplified, with a gift exchange where we drew names out of a hat.

Well, that’s how my siblings did it, when it was their turns to run the exchange. In preparation for this year, my brother mentioned to my sister that I had “more sophisticated tools for assigning gift-receivers to gift-givers,” to which I replied:

This is the difference from me and a normal person: I looked at the gift exchange as an opportunity to spend some time writing software. I wrote some scripts that would select people out of a pool, randomly match them with people, ensure you didn’t get matched with yourself, ensure you didn’t get the same person multiple times, ensure each person got selected X number of times, where X was the number of people you had to buy for, etc. I wrote test scripts to make sure that the random assignments were at least approximately random. I thought about adding notification routines, which would send out e-mails with gift assignments without my intervention, so I wouldn’t know who got who. But then I decided that was a little extreme, and it didn’t really matter if I knew. Plus I ran out of time, and had other things to do. Uh, like my actual shopping.
Now, if you think of this as a learning exercise, rather than a personal obsession/problem, it would almost be reasonable. And then you’d ask for the software, so you could use it yourself. Except I wrote it in an relatively obscure product called UserLand Frontier, of which only Tim L. might have heard of it, and none of you would actually pay for (it’s $899 these days, but it was free when I was using it). Plus it has a really steep learning curve, so even if you got the software free, you wouldn’t know how to use it.
I suppose that, with about 3x more work, I could turn it into a web site, and that might actually be fun (uh, remember, think of this as learning, not being weird), but I don’t have it on my list of things to do in the near future (i.e., before NEXT year’s holiday season).
So, long story short, if you do a gift exchange, I recommend a hat.

Now, before y’all start e-mailing me about my personality quirks, Rochelle already beat you to the punch:

Freak! Freak! Freak! It’s clear to me that I SHOULD be taking up more of your free time so you don’t continue to “waste” it ;->

Finally, before any Frontier fans get upset about the “obscure” or “steep learning curve” comments, remember that Frontier is a developer’s tool, and I was writing to my family, not a bunch of programmers. I happen to like Frontier a lot, but I wouldn’t give it to my mother!