that’s whacked

marsh-ed?

Tuesday, Apr 17. 2007  –  Category: Musings, Pets, Sun, Travel

i’ve always wondered where the origin of the word swamped came from (as in “i’m so swamped with work”). why not marshed? i notice swamped does share some commonality with bogged, as in “i’m bogged down”.

but anyway, i digress.

i’m swamped, bogged, marshed, whatever…

the SCM Migration Project is predictably going slower than we planned. on the plus side, i’m seeing lots of interest from other engineers – but we haven’t been getting the internal resources we’d hoped for, so for now it’s primarily me, richlowe, and kupfer plowing ahead. we’ve picked up a couple guys from ERI that should help.

of course, the other major thing on my plate at the moment is my very-very-upcoming wedding (18 days!!!), so my days are oft filled with wedding errands and such.

so of course, with all this stuff going on in our lives… wendy and i thought it would be best to …. remodel our kitchen. a combination of a decent tax refund, and the realisation that the one-month estimate to remodel our kitchen (during which our house would be a disaster) coincided nicely with the one month of time we would be taking for our honeymoon and vacation. so now we’re rushing about trying to secure contractors, and get permits in the two weeks before we leave.

i feel like our lives our pure chaos right now. on the one hand, it’s hectic, crazy, and i’m getting crappy anxiety-ridden nights of sleep. but on the other hand, i’m really starting to appreciate the small quiet moments… like the 8 minutes i took after the electrician left today during which i just laid out on the sofa/futon with one beagle slumped across my feet and the other splayed out next to me resting her head on my chest. within 45 seconds, both were snoring. those 7 minutes and 15 seconds of blissful peace (i won’t say quiet, since they were filled with the snores of two hound dogs) and doing nothing but vegging felt great.

more destructive dogs…

Tuesday, Jan 2. 2007  –  Category: Pets

sigh. we called in professional help.

char-siu is an eff-ing evil genius. not only that, he’s an alcoholic too.

bet you’ve never heard a dog described as a brilliant alcoholic before, but he is………………. last week he managed to break into the fridge twice. getting into a double-door fridge is no mean feat… but char-siu did it AFTER we started putting a child-lock on.

yes. you read that right. my beagle broke into a double-door refridgerator with a child-lock on it.

amazing. if only he could use his evil genius for better things…. like washing the dishes, or doing the laundry. heck, make me some dinner even.

… anyway, i think i figured out how to set the lock such that he couldn’t leverage it and open it. it foiled him the past 4 days anyway…. so today he moved onto other things.

i came home today to find a chair pulled out next to the liquor bar, my bottle of 12 year Glenlivet lying on the floor… half drunk.

my dog drinks single-malt scotch.

amazing. not only that, he drank half the friggin’ bottle…. which explains his erratic behaviour (and pained yelping when i came home).

anyway, we’ve had two training sessions with Matt, and it’s looking good so far. char-siu is starting to respect us a little more, and i think his confidence is slowly increasing. once we get him focused and more self-confident, i’m hopeful his separation anxiety will ease up.

but in the meantime, i put all the good liquor away.

of all the……

Thursday, Dec 21. 2006  –  Category: Pets

sigh.

char-siu’s separation anxiety is definitely getting worse. i think we’re going to call in some professional help.

of all the things the beagles had to find…. why did it have to be the peanut butter? and of all the places they had to eat it…. why did it have to be our bed??

i suppose i should back up. sometime in between wendy and i leaving for work (~7am) and me coming home (~6pm), char-siu managed to get into the fridge.

between the two dogs, they managed to get the following out of the fridge:

• dried mushrooms (easy to cleanup)
• ramen & soup base (fairly easy to cleanup)
• garlic (easy to cleanup, but smelly)
• a pitcher of tea (messy, but easy)
• peanut butter (@#)%(@#)(%@#)(%)
• garlic butter spread (just as fun to cleanup)
• 3 raw eggs (how?!?!? the egg shelf is like 4 feet high!!)

having got all this bounty… eating in the kitchen the tile laminate floor wasn’t enough… oh no… they’re very territorial with their food, they always take their treats to separate rooms to eat. which is how we got peanut butter in the bed, along with garlic butter spread, and 1 egg. the living room was blessed with 2 eggs, and a bunch of ramen. and the kitchen had the rest scattered around.

anyway, what do you usually do after a huge buffet bounty? that’s right. it’s bathroom time.

again, the kitchen tile floor wasn’t good enough. let’s find the bathmat instead.

on top of that, one of the beagles managed to push over a chair and jump from the chair to the piano… and scratch the surface of the piano…… the very expensive $30-$35k piano. so that’s probably gonna be like $500-$700 to repair the finish.

sigh.

the two of them are cowering in fear under the piano in the corner of the living room right now because they can tell how seething furious i am with them.

[update: at alan’s suggestion, here’s the IRC log where i relayed all this to (a very off-topic) #opensolaris:

(18:49:37) stevel: sigh
(18:49:45) stevel: of all the things my beagles had to find, why did it have to be the peanut butter
(18:49:54) stevel: and of all the places they had to eat it.... why did it have to be my bed
(18:50:40) Tpenta: ROFL
(18:51:33) Tpenta: could have been worse
(18:51:40) Tpenta: it could have happened while you were away
(18:51:47) gisburn: no
(18:52:12) stevel: tpenta: it did... happened today while i was out
(18:52:17) gisburn: s/beagle/komodo dragons/ would be worse since they would've picked a deer
instead of the peanut butter.
(18:52:19) stevel: they got into the fridge
(18:53:02) Tpenta: oh dear
(18:53:06) stevel: got the dried mushrooms, leftover stinky tofu (that one is fun to cleanup),
a pitcher of tea, garlic, peanut butter, garlic butter spread (that one's fun too), 3 eggs, and
a bunch of packets of ramen
(18:53:12) Tpenta: and it's not really wash the sheets and hang them out to dry weather
(18:53:22) stevel: thankfully we have a drier
(18:53:34) stevel: s/drier/dryer/
(18:53:57) stevel: ... and then to top it off, they decided that eating all this newfound 
bounty in the kitchen wasn't enough
(18:54:02) stevel: they had to take it into various rooms of the house
(18:54:03) gisburn: stevel: seriouly: the beagles ate the garlic ?
(18:54:15) stevel: how the @#)$(@#$ does a beagle carry a *raw egg to another room
and then decide to bite into it
(18:54:36) richlowe: stevel: carefully.
(18:54:54) stevel: and one of them somehow managed to tip a chair over, jump from there
to the fireplace mantle, and then from there onto the top of our piano
(18:55:06) stevel: so he's left scratches all over the piano
(18:55:08) gisburn: stevel: instinct. Our cats do the same. Even the dragon puppies I raised
did the same - grab foodm drag it into an edge and swallow it there.
(18:55:27) stevel: which, btw, is a $35,000 piano.  so that's gonna be probably about
$500-$700 to repair the finish on that
(18:55:38) richlowe: ouch.
(18:55:39) gisburn: ugh
(18:55:52) stevel: and of course... what do dogs do after they eat and drink too much?
(18:56:01) stevel: poop and pee.... 
(18:56:08) stevel: again, the kitchen wasn't good enough for that
(18:56:14) stevel: no no... they had to go on the bathmat instead
(18:56:20) Tpenta: yea, I have two dogs. this is the reason we have vinyl downstairs now
instead of carpet
(18:56:28) Tpenta: the cat goes in the bath
(18:56:49) Tpenta: steve this is blog material man
(18:56:57) richlowe: oh yeah.
(18:57:17) gisburn: stevel: please blog it.
(18:57:21) gisburn: steleman_: with photos
(18:57:26) gisburn: LOTS of photos
(18:57:57) stevel: i've already cleaned up most of it, but i can take photos of the scratches
(18:58:12) stevel: and i can take photos of the two of them hiding in the corner of the living
room underneath the piano cause they can tell i'm f-ing pissed at them

new camera!

Monday, Dec 18. 2006  –  Category: Musings, Pets, Photos

we got a new camera over the weekend… the Nikon D80.

it’s been fun playing with my first DSLR… of course, the first photos i took were of the beagles. i’m particularly happy with this shot of the two dogs sharing a bed.

on saturday night we headed into the city with wendy’s cousin and nephew to have dinner and walk around Union Square and check out the Christmas madness (we BARTed in, not wanting to participate in the Christmas madness occurring on the Bay Bridge), and then on sunday we had a winter bbq (on a gloriously sunny day) with wendy’s family.

both opportunities gave me chances to play with the camera

so far i’m loving it… it’s a wicked camera.

sometimes i hate oakland

Saturday, Sep 9. 2006  –  Category: Pets

someone tried to break into our house yesterday. our alarm company very promptly called me on my cell phone to notify me that they had dispatched a police officer to our house.

i gave wendy a call and she went home to check up on the house with a neighbour. it looks like some of the stuff on our back patio has been moved (presumably so whoever was trying to get in could get to the back kitchen door since the garbage can i put to block it was moved).

fortunately, some combination of our ferocious beagles and our loud-honkin’-alarm scared the person off.

either way. sometimes i just f-ing hate oakland.

a cross-disciplinary productive day

Saturday, Sep 9. 2006  –  Category: Code, Music, OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Pets

i’ve had a fun day catching up on all sorts of little odds and ends i’d had on my to do list.

• finished the final step in my migration of all my users’ home directories and web-space to ZFS.
• setup drupal and started building the portal for my neighbourhood. our neighbourhood improvement association was blowing away $45/month on crappy webhosting for a phpBB installation that kept getting hacked, and a mailman list. it’d frustrated me long enough that i finally volunteered to be the webmaster. i’m in the process of building a new website from scratch that will be a full portal to our neighbourhood and provide blogs, message boards, mailing lists, and web space to any resident, organisation/club, or store in our neighbourhood
• did lots of research on various brake pads for my A4. i’m planning on replacing my front brake pads tomorrow. it’s been tough finding a good recommended brake pad that has a firm bite, not-as-much brake dust, and a proper connection for a wear sensor. i’m finding that it’s hard to find a good firm sport brake that will endure my, shall we say, vigorous, driving that also has a wear sensor.
• installed bugzilla on grommit. i finally got tired of hearing about our bug database sucking, and the points about project bug-tracking for externally driven projects (like ksh93) are perfectly valid. yes i realise there is much to be done on b.o.o., but due to the process, policy, and implementation of Sun’s bug tracking system, there are lot more constraints of b.o.o. i do intend to help internally anyway i can to make it better; but in the meantime, hopefully the bugzilla install will let external projects start tracking bugs and just make progress

my random thoughts for the day:

• the new vienna teng cd is incredible. her voice has definitely matured since her first two CDs. the music is less raw now, a little more polished/produced. this is neither good, nor bad… just different. the CD is brilliant. highly recommended.
• there’s nothing quite like a freshly bathed beagle as your soft/plush pillow when you’re taking a nap. lovely.
• it’s getting colder and gloomier out now. i took the dogs to Pt. Isabel, and actually had to wear a beanie. this was also my first official soft-shell-jacket wear of the season. it’s definitely fall.
• i’d always known Pt. Isabel was big… i didn’t realise it was the largest off-leash dog park in the nation. wow. go east bay parks
• the chili/sourdough baguette at the cafe at Pt. Isabel rocks. highly recommended.

char siu

Monday, Aug 7. 2006  –  Category: Pets

one week into the “sleepover” and for the most part Char Siu is doing pretty well. he and Isis seem to have become friends. he’s not as affectionate as Isis, but he definitely seems to have bonded to Wendy and I.

two problems though: 1) the separation anxiety is bad. he HOWLS whenever we leave him at home. the rescue group and i both thought he would be okay with Isis at home with him, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. he definitely wants human contact. i’ve been trying to train him off it, but it’s been hard so far.

2) he pees. inside the house. often. supposedly he is housetrained, and for the most part he seems to do okay. but for some reason, he pees every now and then. and it wouldn’t be so bad if it were just on the carpet… but he always seems to go for our white (okay, now yellow) rice paper lamp. sigh.

anyway, we’ve just passed the halfway point in the two-week sleepover and Wendy and I will have to make the decision as to whether or not to keep him. it’s a pretty tough one. we love him already, he’s a great furball of fun and energy, and we can tell he’s enjoying his stay with us. and we’re definitely enjoying having two beagles around. giving him back to the rescue group would only compound his separation anxiety issues even more…

i’m 75% sure we’re going to keep him….

…if only because last night he decided his bed was too far away from me and he came over to my side of the bed, dragged my shorts over, and curled up on my shorts and promptly fell asleep.

weekend photos

Friday, Aug 4. 2006  –  Category: Food, Pets

i just uploaded some photos from this past weekend… namely wendy’s 30th birthday party, and photos of char siu

he’s a great beagle

busy busy busy

Saturday, Jul 15. 2006  –  Category: Food, Football, Pets

i so rarely blog about anything personal these days.. to the point that my default new blog post category is now ‘OpenSolaris’. a little bit sad, neh?

i guess that’s what happens when you love your work. oh well. losing some blog audience is a small price to pay i guess

anyway, after today’s cleanup and reorganising work, my basement is starting to look… well… almost there. two years after we started, with countless distractions along the way (including putting up two windows last weekend), we’re finally done with the drywall. (seriously, we started drywalling two years ago… sad, i know). our next steps are to texturise, and paint the walls/ceiling, and then lay down a floor. once we have those done, the basement will be… well, liveable!

our inner storage room in the basement is finally done, with all the storage in place, and my new workbench area and tool wall all organised.

after a long afternoon of inhaling plaster, we headed down to Milpitas to “Cafe Orphelia” at McCarthy Ranch for some great filet mignon on the “hot rock” grill. they bring out a big rock/stone that’s been super-heated, and you grill your own steak on it. great steak. mmmm…afterwards, we had some red bean shaved ice. we ate all the red bean and then asked the waitress to box up the remaining unfinished ice. she gave us a blank stare and asked why we wanted to save ice? of course, isis was in the car… and she looooooves ice cream, so we thought she might want some shaved ice.

of course, isis lapped it all up – and we have some great photos (which i’ll post tomorrow).

after that, we headed down to Los Altos and tried out the new Satura bakery which was awesome. we got 4 desserts and loved all 4 of them.

and on a very last quickie note: we’re planning on adopting a second beagle. his name is Dusty and he’s 3 years old. i can’t wait!

isis, hard at work

Thursday, Jul 21. 2005  –  Category: Pets, Photos

eric took a couple photos of Isis yesterday at our NUMA/Autobahn meeting. Given that we have so much work to do, and not enough engineers, Isis kindly volunteered to take on some work. After all… 1 dog-month = 7 people/programmer months!