Sysadmin Field Notes - September 2004 Archives

September 28, 2004

It's weird reading through your RSS feeds and seeing yourself mentioned by name. Kinda cool. I think I was originally subscribed after the How to read Smalltalk if you are a Java or C++ programmer. I still haven't grokked smalltalk yet, but that could be because between the upcoming baby, school, a seemingly double-load at work, the backyard, and greedy anticipation over reading the final Dark Tower book, I've only spent about 15 minutes on Smalltalk. I'll get there, I promise. :-)

September 24, 2004

I thought it would be fun to list everything we've done to our house, inside and out, since we moved in. We've been here about 2 years, 9 months now. In no particular order we've:

• removed 600 sq. ft. of carpet and put down tile,
  
• replaced the kitchen countertop with stone tile,
  
• repainted/resurfaced the kitchen cabinets (contractor),
  
• had three 40-50 ft. trees in the backyard chopped down (contractor),
  
• Taken out 4-5 shrubs from the front and about 19 from the backyard,
  
• replanted the front side area,
  
• replanted the front area of the house,
  
• ground 4 stumps,
  
• replaced 130 ft. fencing,
  
• new kitchen sink & faucent,
  
• new door to garage in Kitchen,
  
• new baseboards for 75% of the house,
  
• painted the exterior (contractor),
  
• got a new composition roof (contractor),
  
• painted the entire interior,
  
• repainted hudson's room and added new baseboards and chair rail,
  
• new dual pane windows all around (contractor),
  
• new range hood,
  
• all new exterior lighting fixtures,
  
• removed dry rotted patio cover,
  
• removed cracked (from root) 20x15 concrete patio,
  
• cleared and planted grass in the dog run,
  
• diagnosed interior wiring problem and replaced interior outlets,
  
• ran network cable through the attic and walls,
  
• ran coax (for sat and antenna) through the attic and walls,
  
• installed recessed lighting in the kitchen,
  
• cleared and put gravel in the dog run, and
  
• installed new interior light fixtures.
  

I think that's everything. I had no idea how to do almost any of that stuff when we started. I now have lots of nifty tools and just enough knowledge to be dangerous.

September 20, 2004

I realized I never posted pictures of the stump grinding results. So here are pictures of the stump grinder. Quite the effort. But the stumps were gone, and just these last two weekends I tore down the old decrepit fence you see in the background of these pictures. 130 feet worth or so. Blech. But the cool part is that this is the first thing we've done that's made the backyard look better, rather than worse. We finally reached rock bottom and are clawing our way back up. A timeline for those not familiar with the saga is in order (not sure about some of the dates).

• We move in (Jan 2002); backyard is nondescript, but servicable. Back fence needs replacing though.
  
• We buy a dog (miles)
  
• Miles eats the sprinkler valves and some sprinkler heads, causing 2-3 months of an arms race consisting of frequent sprinkler repair and ever more elaborate schemes to protect the valves from damage.
  
• Cyndie's mom keeps the garden alive by manual watering, add some ghetto chicken wire to keep miles out.
  
• Add ghetto chicken wire all around the falling down fence to keep miles in.
  
• End of summer 2002, we give up on the sprinklers. Grass starts to die, but returns with the rains. We don't mow it, it gets way out of control, then dies from getting trampled by the dog.
  
• Decide miles needs the sideyard/dog run to be where he hangs out, start by clearing gravel (move it to the other side yard). Add 2 yards of dirt and grass seed.
  
• Garden shows its first crop, corn is disappointing but tomatoes show promise.
  
• During our tile project, we discover that the big crack in the concrete patio is from a root under there.
  
• Learn we are not responsible enough to maintain grass w/o automatic sprinklers. Miles' side-yard grass dies and is replaced by 5 foot high weeds.
  
• Spring comes, grass dies without water.
  
• Dig out all the dirt in Miles' side yard, move it to the other side yard, and replace it with gravel, and a canopy to keep him cool.
  
• Cyndie's mom leaves, we stop watering, killing the garden (except for the tomatoes), and miles is given free reign of the garden area.
  
• Miles' canopy dies in the rain and is thrown away.
  
• Summer 2003, rip out the 18 or so ugly bushes inhabiting the back fence perimiter.
  
• Summer 2003, we rip out the dryrotted patio cover and tear up the 12x18 concrete slab. We go more than double over the weight limit on the dumpster (almost 20 tons instead of 10).
  
• End of summer 2003 status: Dead grass, 3 big, ugly diseased Cypress trees that drop lots of crap, nothing else alive really. No patio, just a sort of flat disrt area in front of the backdoor, flower bed is just dirt now that miles digs in.
  
• Spend the winter thinking, man, that clay that was under the concrete sure turns to some nasty mud when the water hits it.
  
• Spring/Summer 2004, decide enough is enough. Hire people to take down trees. They stack them on the side yard.
  
• 1 month later, rent stump grinder, grind down the back stumps.
  
• Rent dumpster, put trees in dumpster (along with ghetto chicken wire). Rock bottom; nothing alive in the backyard, rotten falling down fence, and a bunch of trash. Big pile of gravel and dirt in the side yard.
  
• Sep 2004; install new fence and clean up. Hurrah! positive movement. What we have now actually looks dilberately blank instead of accidentally overrun.
  

That's everything I think in the backyard. I'll see if I can find some good before/after pictures. Hopefully the after pictures will start to look a lot better soon.

September 15, 2004

I find the interaction between my mail filter and blog spam interesting. See, I get mailed about all the comments here so I can see the spam and click on the mt-blacklist link and blow away the jerkoffs.

Now, the interaction comes in that usually the post is talking about o n l i n e p o k e r or herbal v1agra. So depending on the post, my email filter might flag it as spam. bogofilter does an awesome job though, so usually I see emails about posts. Every once in a while though one slips through, so usually after a big round of spam I check the most recent comments here as well and remove anything lame.

Spammers. What a bunch of turds. (Can I get that on a bumper sticker?)

September 9, 2004

I was just thinking to myself, "you know what the world really needs? Another Shaq rap album.

September 9, 2004

Hey, check it out, someone agrees with me on the issue of scheduling a formal, nightly build and also having CI builds. Granted, he puts it a lot better than idea, but after much consideration this is the exact system I ended up using.

September 8, 2004

I had a migrane today and it totally wiped me out. So what on earth am I still doing up? I couldn't really tell you. I'm definitely tired and would fall asleep if I laid down, so it's not insomnia. I'm in one of my "I should be doing/learning something but I can't really concentrate so I'm just browsing around aimlessly on the web" kinda moods. Really a bad behavior that I'd like to eliminate because it leaves me tired, cranky, and doesn't accomplish a thing really.

I could do some homework; school started last week. I dropped my "internet" class because I'm going to try and challenge it. In it's place I put "Intelligent Systems". It's an area of computer science I know almost nothing about. I think the quest for "Artificial Intelligence" is never going to amount to anything on our von neumann, binary logic machines no matter how fast they get, so I've always just kind of viewed the field with skepticism and never dug very deeply. Maybe I'll find some interesting techniques that can be applied in actual work.

And of course there's a million things to be done around the house. We're getting the dumpster so we have to load it up, take down the back fence and load it up, put up a new back fence this weekend, prepare Carson's room, clean the house, wash the cars, wash the dog, mow and edge the front lawn, trim the hedges, fix the back sprinklers, install a back patio, learn a ton of stuff for my new position (I'm now going to be lead on -another- project), all while keeping Hudson in check and taking care of a very pregnant Cyndie. And I've got only about 5-6 weeks to do it all in (and some of those jobs are ongoing).

Calgon, take me away. I think I'll try sleeping now, since I'll have to wake up at 6 am tomorrow and take Hudson and Miles on their morning walk, or they will be very cranky.