“Babel” is the best movie I’ve seen since… I can’t remember. I watched both “Children of Men” and “Babel” at the theater tonight. I cut it close with Children, but I slid in right on time. I went to eat at Popeyes beforehand, and simply cut the 7.40 a little close for comfort. I went to see “Children of Men” first because it is currently getting an 8.2 at IMDB, I like Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, and Michael Caine, it had the dude from Serenity in it, and I like films with an indie feel. This one let me down a bunch. For an 8.2, I was disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, it was good, just not #159 on the list of IMDB’s Top 250 good. Afterwards, I greatly debated if I should have seen another movie. I felt pretty odd and e-something (from the tip of my brain — affluent and bourgeoisie of me) about going to an expensive movie twice in one night. I guess I paid 2 * $9.25. A little stiff, if you ask me. But seriously, Babel was totally worth it. There was almost no one in the theater. I wasn’t 100% sure that “Babel” was the movie I was thinking of, as I had looked at a bunch before I left home. I was pretty sure, though, so took a chance. IMDB has it right now at a 7.8. It is easily 10 times better than “Children of Men”. Like I said, I can’t think of anything to compare it to. The only things I can think of are “Crash”, “Man on Fire”, and “V for Vendetta” (which apparently I didn’t blog about — I would have sworn I did… the mind is going). I’m not talking about comparing this to the old films, just new ones. I was so emotionally connected to these characters and what happened to them. They had me emotionally suspended and unresolved until the very end. Even then, I still have questions. Awesome, just awesome. I hope this one takes best picture.

I’ve felt of late that over the weekend I tend to post several short, disjointed posts, so I figured I’d save up and just post once this time.

Hilary and Barack and who knows who else have formed presidential exploratory committees.

“You pick the smartest, most capable, most honorable individual you can think of…”
— Leo McGarry

I think that sentiment will be driving my decision. A person who is honorable, trustworthy, dare I say patriotic, who would adhere to a more strict interpretation of the Constitution. Actually, I don’t think I can use patriot as a criteria. It has been twisted. I don’t mean it in its current connotation, but that connotation from the Colonial era. A statesman, a patriot, a federalist, a contitutionalist.

I finally just put 2 and 2 together. For the past day or so, I’ve noticed a severe slowness in the responsiveness of one of my shells in a screen session. I had also noticed in a “ps axf” that there was an ssh session open to wesley. Neither of these things were adding up. I just realized that most likely I had ssh’ed to wesley, then back again to argento. The reason for the slowness wasn’t due to high load or low memory, but simply network lag and overhead of going to Texas and back again. Oops…

I have spent a good deal of this weekend again working on the home network. I installed a new Xen image for my database machine, figured out that Samba can’t do straight Kerberos authentication (only with real AD :(), packaged Resin for Debian for real this time (yay! finally!), watched a bunch of Scrubs, watched a bunch of movies over again, got Azureus working headless on my new shell server (compute0), did some laundry, stayed up too late, got up too late, found out my internet connection can push 15Mbps+, setup cricket for snmp monitoring of all of my new machines, hmmm, that’s all I can think of right now…

I haven’t fixed the car door and it’s been too cold to ride or finish the table.

I’m out of photos now. Must take more.

I don’t remember if I’ve blogged about this before, and I’m too lazy to do a search, so I’m just going to post (possibly) again. It sucks that I’m caught up with all of my shows. No more West Wing or Sports Night and I’m caught up on Lost, Studio 60, and Scrubs. Having to wait a week is a chore, and then if you watch them on real TV, there are commercials. What’s up with that? Commercials and waiting for next week’s show is for the birds…

There were three major things I should have gotten done this weekend. 1) Get my car door handle fixed. 2) Ride. 3) Finish my coffee table. I did none of them. Well, I did ride on Sunday, but I should have ridden on Saturday and Monday too…

Man, it doesn’t get much more looney or screwball than “Bringing Up Baby”. :) This one definitely gets added to the favorites. It’s even funnier the second time around.

I reallly love those late night/early morning hacking sessions when things are finally clicking. It’s a good feeling when you look at the clock and can’t believe that it’s 2:30 in the am and you don’t know where the last two hours have gone. And I love it when you get done what you set out to accomplish before sun comes up. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my fair share of all-nighters. Getting the Crunchtime video out the door comes distinctly to mind.

This weekend, I cut over my network from the mundane, basic WRT54G doing everything, to having a shiny new dual wan, internal dns, dhcp, qos, Debian based router. It’s my old dual Celeron with two of the dual port e100 cards. The primary reason for this was internal dns, so that I can get Kerberos running. But that’s somewhat on hold, as I’m not 100% sure that moving everything to kerberized nfs would be the simplest thing, maintenance wise for my clients. I guess that CIFS has authentication built in, so maybe it’s not too big of a deal. I just don’t know right now how hard it will be to get kerberized nfs clients. The main goal last night was to get WPA2 Enterprise working on the WRT54G, authenticating to a FreeRadius server, authenticating to my LDAP server. And it all works now (802.1x is so cool)! I should have documented it better, but I was more concerned with getting the concepts down and getting it working. I still have the wiki up and running with nothing in it. I really should be posting my notes up there… Also during this process, I figured out how to get wpa2 working on Debian, as I’d never figured it out before, or really ever had any need to… I will say this, though, that NetworkManager really is quite slick.

The other thing I forgot to mention was that a dear friend, Dr. Dudley Moore, died January 13, 2007. Most of my readers wouldn’t know him, but I know there should be at least one or two that did. His health had been declining for some time, having pneumonia and confusion/dimentia. He had been in the hospital for a while and wasn’t getting any better. On January 11, they transfered him to hospice and died two days later. I distanced myself from his worsening health and told myself that he had led a full life. It didn’t really hit me until he was gone that I would miss him. We stopped by to see him the Thanksgiving before last at the Clarks’ house, a couple of streets over from my parents. That will be my last memory of him, in decent health, and I am sort of glad I never saw him in poor health. I am sorry I won’t be able to attend the funeral; my father is one of the honorary pallbearers. I know Dr. Moore impacted many people in his life, and it really will be a shame to miss the funeral, as I know it’ll be big and I know it’ll be a party, just like he’d want it to be.

There were several things that I wanted to mention… what were they…

There was something about venting, about how it’s just a bandaid for your feelings and the problem. When you’ve blown everything out of proportion, I suppose it can help you get a reality check. And if you’re having some issues figuring out how to solve some set of problems, then maybe it’s good for getting a second opinion. But for me, most of my problems don’t involve not knowing the course of action, but rather a lack of motivation to put that course of action into motion. But, I think I’m over it for the moment…

I spent a lot of time remote diagnosing/troubleshooting the Wesley network with Ben tonight. During that time, I could hear people in the background carrying on. Wow, I miss those times a lot… :( Thinking about it now, I realize how much I miss just sitting around for hours on end spending time with your closest friends, day after glorious day. Something that I did for I don’t know how many years straight, I almost never do nowadays. I guess I took it for granted then, and only today did I realize that I missed it. Oh to sit on a germ infested Wesley couch for 8 hours straight, with very little to care about except whether to eat Jin’s or Freebirds.

I am very tired, so I don’t know why I’m posting this.

My living room is an obstacle course/minefield from my new coffee table, old coffee table (aka my microwave box), and a plethora of boxes of stuff I’ve gotten in the mail in the recent past.

This kernel package I made’s name is entirely too long: linux-image-2.6.18.011207-l7_2.6.18.011207-l7-10.00.Custom_i386.deb

I don’t think that sentence makes sense.

I am now the new, proud owner of my very own, real coffee table. It was finally dropped off today and I put it together when I got home. I think I’ve already got a little grease/vegetable oil on it, so I can’t eat on it again until it’s finished. :(

Steve Jobs had his keynote today at MacWorld. I’m have two questions about AppleTV. One, why doesn’t it have a firewire port so it can stream TV from a cable box, and two, does it support UPNP? They also announced the iPhone. It looks cool, but I’m not one much for that kind of stuff. I still have really old, plain cell phones, and I still don’t have much need for an iPod…

I wore my Greece shirt to work today. Only one guy noticed and mentioned something to me about it. That tells you something about the guys I work with. Or maybe they’re all afraid of me. Or maybe they noticed and didn’t say anything.

I’ve finally gone through my photos from the past several months and the photoblog will be on autopilot for the next (almost) 2 weeks, just as Marc’s is at the moment. Hopefully I’ll get around to posting the raw pics into original soon.

I heard a song on Scrubs during my binge that caught my attention from Kutless. I downloaded some songs and they seem like a cool band.

I bought 4 2-port 10/100 e100s on ebay (a buy it now) for $30. I probably would have spent $20 on one single port from best buy or fry’s. I need them for a router, so I can finish building the home network (I need real dns before I can setup kerberos…). Also on the tech front, I realized that even though my webhost symlinks uptime to /bin/true, I can still read /proc/loadavg (and top will show it as well). But the bad part about this is that I’ve seen the load be 30. Now I understand why it’s unbearably sluggish sometimes. :( This is almost unacceptable and I’m half inclined to setup a cron job to monitor it to see what it’s like over time…

I’ve also solved a problem with my Nexenta system that’s been driving me up the wall. I had gotten Nexenta to work with OpenLDAP, but it wasn’t seeing the groups. I finally posted to sparks-discuss and they solved it for me pretty quickly. It was a known bug, but they had a decent work around, so I was pretty happy with the result.

Maybe it’s been the up-teen hours of Scrubs that I’ve watched over the past several weeks, but tonight I am feeling mysteriously better about my life. I just finished catching up, having watched all of the Scrubs episodes through the current season and episode. Like most television shows, at the end of their 30 minutes, whatever mystery or problem plaguing the characters seems to find resolution. And you might not think that life is really like that…

There are many days that I feel completely overwhelmed in my life. And there aren’t too many people in this world that I talk to about stuff like that, and it seems like that pool grows smaller and smaller every day. I get tired of talking about the mundane details of my life, and I’ve never been one much for small talk, so that does not lend itself very well to me keeping up with some of my best friends.

But somehow at the end of every episode, things are all right. And, you know what kind of show it is, so there isn’t truly much doubt that things will turn out okay, even when things look their most bleak. And somehow it’s the same way with my life. There hasn’t been a day gone by in years when I honestly didn’t know in my heart of hearts that my future is secure. But there are too many days when I can’t for the life of me see my next step, and too many days where I can’t imagine a wife and a family, and too many days when I feel like I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing. And knowing that my life is going according to plan does not always grant me solace.

But there are times, when I briefly glimpse clarity, and know that we really are going to be alright.

I just wish someone could tell me what I’m supposed to be doing here. And I wish I had someone to go through life with me and help me get through all of those little things that I need nudges to do. And I wish I had someone to vent to and someone I can listen to. Someone whose life I have a vested interest in.

It’s just so hard for me to know that in the end everything will be alright when I can’t see my next step.

Note: I should have posted this yesteday (Saturday), but I didn’t. :(

Today has been monumental. I rode again today. Here are the stats from the ride near my apartment: 6.1 miles, 27 minutes, 13.6 mph average, and a top speed of 34.87 mph. Yah! And I didn’t really feel that bad afterwards. I think I’ve finally realized that I need to pace my riding. I didn’t try to sustain 20 mph, and just tried to keep it between 10 and 15 mph, which seems to work out much better for me and should be a better work out for me. Longer time at an elevated heart-rate and all that. I also vacuumed the living room. Go me!

Venting is extremely foreign to me. You feel upset and overwhelmed. You angrily spout out a bunch of stuff that may or may not be relevant, meaningful. or pertinent to anything. And generally at the end you feel better or maybe after a little while, you feel better. Even though nothing has fundamentally changed with anything that’s going on in your life or whatever’s been bothering you. And it’s even worse when you feel bad for no good reason, then vent for no good reason, then feel better for no good reason. The problems still exist, remain unresolved, and no solutions created, yet you just feel differently about them now. That just doesn’t compute. Which is why it seems such a foreign concept to me. Perhaps because I view it more as a problem solving strategy, when in fact it is not. And the reason I view it as a problem solving strategy is because everyone and their dog wants you to talk stuff out whenever you feel like this, like it will solve all of those problems that have led to this. It solves the problem of how you feel, but little else. But is that really a solution at all? Can feelings really be solved? Of course not! They are “just feelings”. But it’s not like they can be ignored (well, I bet I do a more than fair job at that…). They must be dealt with somehow. But why? I guess it’s a little too much like cleaning to me. Yeah, I could clean this stuff, but in a day or a week, it will be dirty again. And, in all honesty, I’d rather just leave it dirty for a long time than have to clean it up once a week. There is no satisfaction cleaning it up once a week. (Well, there is little satisfaction in cleaning at all for me.) But, it gets the monkey off my back. So, it’s like, if you feel bad for no good reason, then why deal with it, because eventually you’ll feel better for no good reason. Shouldn’t it just balance itself out? Seriously, what’s up with feeling bad for no good reason? Why does that happen? Anyway, doesn’t that make sense? If you feel bad for no good reason, and you wait long enough, shouldn’t you feel better for no good reason? Why am I trying to justify this to myself? I dunno, but I need to go to bed.

So, instead of trying to “solve” your “feelings”, wouldn’t it be more advantageous to actually fix the problem instead of fixing the feelings associated with the problem? Where by fixing the problem, ergo, vis à vie, ipso facto, e pluribus unum, you fix the feeling.

I awoke this morning to knocking at my door. In my i’m-still-asleep stupor, I was excited, as I thought that it might be my new coffee table (oh yeah, I finally got the coffee table). I put on my robe (j/k I don’t own a robe) and answered the door. It was the police. Luckily I had [insert something here that would have been fortuitous in light of a cop showing up on my doorstep] the night before. He asked if I owned the Yukon (which I do of course). Someone had tried to break into it. They managed to crack the handle, but didn’t get into the car. They might have gotten spooked or something (who knows). Anyway, the car’s ok. I’ll need to get some estimates of getting it fixed, and most likely I won’t claim it on the insurance, so it’ll probably be out of pocket (yay!). I took some pictures of the damage this morning, so I’ll probably eventually post them.

In other news, I caught up on Lost on Friday night. I had finished season two some months ago and hadn’t been keeping up with season three. They were in a lull, so I picked up the first 6 episodes (that’s how many they’ve made thus far), and I’ll poke my head back under the sand for a few more months. I really do like watching them in groups (like I’ve done with West Wing and Scrubs), as it’s just so nice. I think that I’ve made some peace with Lost’s slow timeline. I’ve also decided if I were any of them, I would have snapped, and not trusted anybody, and just started killing anyone who messed with me. I really don’t understand what the others are afraid of from these people who crash landed. If they’re so sure of their purpose and their success, then they shouldn’t care about them. If their purpose is so pure, they should have no problems letting new people in and have those new people help them. It just seems like a cult or something. They have to hide and ethically justify what they’re doing for the greater good. It just doesn’t make much sense. But, if the story is supposed to last for 5 seasons, then it should be getting close to half way, which is somewhat of a comfort… like it’s only downhill from here or something.

I also’ve watched “You, Me, and Dupree” which was better than expected. Also, I finally watched “Funny Face”. I didn’t realize it was so much of a musical. Oh well, it was still decent. Having Fred Astaire in it should have tipped me off.

Do you know the best part of my first ride on the first day of the new year was, beside the 55 degree cold, the wind, driving 10 miles for a 5.6 mile ride, and accidentally riding past where I parked, adding an additional mile to the ride? The mid-ride dry heaves. Thanks, 2007. It’s going to be a good year.

When people ask me how long I’ve been here or how long I’ve been in Atlanta, I’ve started telling them that it will be two years in April. I guess that it’s been roughly 20 months now, but I like the other turn of phrase more so and 20 months doesn’t really mean much to me in terms of time. But every time I say that now and think about really how long it’s been, I cannot help but feel like it’s been two years of my life where I’ve accomplished nothing. I will be two years older. I was a young 24 when I started, and I am about to turn 26. That makes me feel old. I’m almost 26. No wife, no kids, no real sense of where I’m going, nor any sense of self accomplishment. Life’s not supposed to feel like this.

Clawing your way up the corporate ladder 101.
How to tell when your boss is an ass 102.
Ass kissing 201.
Selling yourself (and taking credit for other’s work) 202.
How to create a project for the sake of creating a project and sustain it for 6 months 301.
How to tell when to leave your job 401.
Looking for another job while still employed 402.

Unfortunately all of those sound like every self-help book ever written. I doubt they would actually teach you anything worthwhile, sustainable, or applicable to people’s real lives.