Fear No Man

got another 1gb of ram, let's just bring up two grimpenmires just because we can

copying /etc/xen/grimpenmire,

for the new mac address, changing 00 to 01 in the first byte makes it a locally assigned address
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address

#vif = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:00:8e:0c' ]
vif = [ 'mac=01:16:3e:00:8e:0c' ]

and use uuidgen to make a new uuid http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenIntro

uuid = "66ad99a7-307e-4494-84e8-50493aa201d7"

brought up machine ok, network no workee
did xm network-attach 9 ip=10.0.0.198 and brought it up on eth1 instead, dunno what's up with that

wierd, ram reported by "free" seems to drop in half after a while. Last week it said something low, I rebooted to get it up to 1gb, just now it said 1gb, I rebooted to get it to say 2gb.

[root@baskervillehall scripts]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1007616     994232      13384          0      14876     860488
-/+ buffers/cache:     118868     888748
Swap:       524280        124     524156
[root@baskervillehall scripts]# 
Broadcast message from root (console) (Sat Aug 25 14:33:16 2007):

The system is going down for reboot NOW!

Broadcast message from root (console) (Sat Aug 25 14:33:17 2007):

The system is going down for reboot NOW!
Read from remote host bvh: Connection reset by peer
Connection to bvh closed.
[kevin@irene:~]$ ssh bvh
Last login: Sat Aug 25 13:19:30 2007 from irene.goess.org
[kevin@baskervillehall ~]$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1928192     251492    1676700          0      14464     132552
-/+ buffers/cache:     104476    1823716
Swap:       524280          0     524280

I have now been to the San Mateo County Fairgrounds twice, and my overwhelming impression is that IT IS LOUD.  Once for the San Mateo County Fair (go figure), where somebody's idea of a good time was to line up a bunch of rental-rides next to each other on the scorching blacktop, turn the music for each ride all the way up to ten, and tune them all to different stations.  If the Russians ever capture me and submit me to that, I'll break in five minutes. 

The Maker Faire's approach to the same sensation was a little more creative: "Let's hook a robot up to a full Keith Moon Memorial drum kit and power it alternatively by a random number generator and a series of overstimulated six-year-olds, and put it between an arena where 500 lb. titanium robots are ramming each other and two giant Tesla coils winding up to arc across a fifty-foot gap.

I actually got to leave a message on our home voicemail that wasn't "Hi, hon, I'm leaving work now, be home in an hour."  I got to say "Hi, hon, we're staying for the second rocket launch at 4:30, so we'll be home later than I thought."  But poor Frank got so overwhelmed that he was nauseous and had to lay on the grass outside for half an hour before just climbing into the car and going home. And even there our ears were assaulted by an air compressor and a giant mechanical talking giraffe with a three word vocabulary. 

So we missed the second rocket launch, but we definitely made the first one.  I've wanted to do that since 1978, when Patrick Steiner would bring his Estes rocket catalogs to eighth grade and we'd drool over them together.

Originally posted on keving.vox.com

this is a test

Originally posted on keving.vox.com

Here, this should make amends for that disgusting last post, a little lamb in the garden:

The most disgusting food name I've heard in the last year:

bloaters

Cured herring, eaten by the Victorians for breakfast. A marketing tragedy, a name like that. Pretty hard to sell. Unless you're setting up a restaurant for zombies:

Our special today is bloaters with tepid nausea and a side of gangrene.

...would you like fries with that?

Lotta's fountain, given by the singer Lotta Crabtree to the City of San Francisco in 1875, used as a gathering place and cultural locus after the Great Earthquake of 1906, seen in the early morning light on the hundredth anniversay, April 18th, 2006.



Note the time is 6:16--at 5:12, The Moment, I was considerably further away. There were about six blocks of Market Street worth of people there.

Years ago a guy who we'll call Chuck (although that is his real name), got me into playing folk music, bluegrass at the time. He left California to run a restaurant/music hotspot in Maine. He left an ancient Ford Escort in California with a friend of mine, which was renamed "The Chuckmobile." I borrowed the Chuckmobile to drive to a folk music camp where I first met my wife. Chuck eventually got out of the restaurant and got a programming job at a place that sells white mice to genetic labs, changed genres to Irish music, and started playing seriously around Maine with an Irish fiddler. They're having a mini-West Coast tour, and tonight I'm going to hear them at the Kensington Circus pub. How's that for a complicated story?

Edmund couldn't quite see what they were eating, but it smelled lovely and he wasn't at all sure that he didn't see something like a plum pudding."

--C.S. Lewis

He was not sure that he did not see...eh, what?

Some GPS navigation system is directing drivers to an impassable road through a small town in North Yorkshire, and the locals are rather concerned for the drivers:

The drivers are going up and through the gate on to the gravel track.

"You can see it goes from Tarmac to the stones - and it's only just passable with 4x4s.

"But we get a lot of sales reps in posh cars coming and they get so cross."

Apparently this is the rainiest March ever in the Bay Area. On the last day of the month, I finally got the payoff for it. Standing on the BART platform with the rising sun coming up over the East Bay hills behind me and looking at the next incoming squall climbing over the Marin headlands, I got to see a beautiful perfect rainbow, with one end behind Treasure Island and the other end sitting in El Cerrito. A complete arc, very nice.

Sigh. Most of the people on the platform missed it because I didn't have the balls to start jumping up and down and screaming "LOOK AT THE RAINBOW!" I'm sure I'll pay for my selfishness in the next life.

After owning an iMac for three months now, it's becoming more and more clear that Apple's reputation for flawless UI design is undeserved. Two big problems in their Mail application:

To tell it to save drafts in your Drafts folder on your IMAP server you click on the folder, then select Mailbox / Use This Mailbox For in the menu, and then select Drafts. That's supposed to be obvious? It's not even a Mailbox, it's a folder.

Then, try to change the "From" address so you can interact from a mailing list that knows you as one of your disposable addresses. My wife, genius that she is, somehow figured it out. In your account setup, you add your second email address to your main one separated by a comma. Once you do that, you get a drop-down on the sending window that allows you to select one. Geez.

In other news, I had an independently verifiable reason for being late to work this morning. Seeing KCBS say "the morning commute was ruined for thousands" almost made up for the inconvenience.
Bomb Scare Disrupts Morning BART Commute</a>
BART service to and from San Francisco was halted for almost an hour this morning as the transit agency investigated a bomb threat.
No one was injured and authorities found no explosives, but the morning commute was ruined for thousands who rely on BART to get into or out of San Francisco.
Just before 8:00 a.m., Two passengers exited a BART train at 12th St. Station in downtown Oakland screaming that there was a bomb on board, according to BART spokesman Lynton Johnson.
When the train reached West Oakland Station, its next stop, it and the station were evacuated as police investigated the alleged threat. No explosives were found.
BART briefly detained two people at 12th St. Station whom they believed may have caused the bomb scare. Authorities could not positively identify them, and they were released.
"It's not funny," Johnson told KCBS reporter Bob Melrose. "For the passengers who are delayed, they're furious at this point."

http://www.kcbs.com/pages/17701.php

In the last two years we've seen six trees chopped within a block of our house. The other day my wife went outside to see yellow police tape around a really nice camphor tree and she freaked. She put this sign on the tree and started making phone calls. Turned out to be a false alarm, they were just working on the sidewalk or something. Still, I was impressed, almost like being married to Emma Goldman or something.

Last day at Ensenda yesterday. It was especially hard because the night before, when I was hauling my books out to the car, it was pouring rain, and there's nothing more romantic than downtown San Francisco in the evening in the rain--the well-dressed people in their coats hurrying, the lights reflecting off the wet streets, the swoosh of the cars. The next day, my last day there, it was a beautiful clear blue March day, and there's nothing like San Francisco on a day like that after it's rained. Charles and I went up to the top Carnelian room on the 41st floor to look around, God it was gorgeous.

I'm only moving six blocks away, so I shouldn't get too upset, but SOMA is so much different from the Financial District.

Man, and after four years I finally had my desk set up to suit me. It was hard leaving.

So was blogging invented by the conservatives to keep the intellectuals so obsessed with introspecting and analyzing each other that they would become ineffectual in the public sphere?

A giant distraction? An opiate?

acronym of the day

Bad usability in the design of aircraft controls can result in what is cheerfully referred to as CFIT: Controlled Flight Into Terrain.

Trying to eat out in all my favorite restaurants before I change jobs in two weeks (moving from the Financial District to SOMA). Café Claude today. One of my dad's favorite places when he comes to vist.

Had a tomato soup, a glass of Gloria Ferrer chardonnay, and a club saumon sandwich. The sandwich was nicely balanced. It came with french fries (not pommes frites), but of course in a place like that they're not going to give you ketchup. It was all just ok until I got to the demitasse de café, real espresso in a real cup with a saucer, somehow essentially different from the Starbucks experience, and that made it all come together pretty well.

I still don't feel at ease in there, though, I never feel like I quite belong in there. And I noticed that you have to have grey hair to get seated at the window.

...but lately I've been feeling less and less Jerusalem and more and more Gomorrah...

--Shalom Auslander on This American Life

woot!