Life is a State of Mind : ideas, thoughts, rants

Bigger Aquarium

Well, after talking it over and examining our options, Erci and I stopped by Marine Scene and bought a 120 gallon All-Glass (brand) aquarium, cherry stand, Tek T-5 lights, versa-top, sump, pumps, and plumbing to make it all work. The new big system will go into the dining room and it will house the fish and coral and shrimp from four smaller aquariums we’ve had on the kitchen counter and in the family room since they came home from work.

I am using a 30 gallon breeder with CPR backback overflow skimming to filter sand and water before it goes into the new system. For a while it will be a lot of work, but once set up it should be easier to maintain than all the little tanks. Now I am impatient to start plumbing tests and thrilled the old backpack works so well at skimming the surface water (I should have use it much earlier, great device).

Busy Holiday Season

With all the holiday party action, new jobs, and planning/prepping for Yuletide Ball Championships; I am afraid I have been lax in updating. Here is a batch mode update…

This morning I had an unexpected adventure, just as I was finishing breakfast and feeding the fish, I discovered that my 30 gallon marine aquarium was leaking on the kitchen counter and from there down onto the floor! I wiped the water with a towel, waited a moment and it was definitely an ongoing leak and not just a spill.

So I grabbed an old 29 gallon tank from the basement, transferred the water, fish, shrimp, corals and heaters/pumps/lights to the temporary replacement, and made sure the leaky tank stopped leaking (about an inch of live sand and water are still in the tank waiting for more time)… then I headed into work. At work I think we can shrink from 5 active marine tanks to 3 if we need to, but we must keep the big fish separate from the little fish and the little predator away from our shrimp… so 3 tanks is the minimum. Must work this out with Sutragirl.

I have been hitting a learning spurt in my dancing, picking up several new groupings and refining technique at both studios. I hope to dance with Cassandra, Ann, Anne-Marie, and Sutragirl at the Yuletide Ball Championships. It should be great fun.

I am replacing my dual 500MHz G4 Mac desktop and 500MHz G4 Mac cube server at home (both running 10.3.9) with a 20″ iMac and a Mac Mini (both running 10.5.1). That is taking a while to get everything set up properly (jump from 10.3 to 10.5 is non-trivial, but fun), and I am discovering that I do not have enough firewire cables, extra drives for backups, and time…

New job has been a huge learning experience (exactly what I asked for… though perhaps a bit much of it) and I have been learning all about openSuSE 10.3, HP Blade c7000s, i-LO server management, PXEboot/tftp/dhcp install servers, YaST, and relearning Solaris, BEA WebLogic, and NFS… Plate is full… and after the holiday break it will be time for MySQL replication servers, MediaWiki, Oracle, and Progress. Folks at the new job are awesome, and everyone tries to do everything… Damned Astaro VPN is not letting me in, but that’s because we cannot save a new configuration with my userid in the PPTP allow file… sigh. It’s fun working on a team of five with three Prius owners on the team!

Children of Hurin is helping me stay in touch with Fantasy/SciFi at night… and the writer’s strike has given me a chance to catch up to almost current on the few remaining decent TV shows…

Shiny new 20″ iMac

Apple delivered my shiny new 20″ iMac 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of Ram today. It has been fun to get it set up and running. Since I just helped a friend set up her MacBook a couple days ago, I thought I’d share some of the stuff I routinely add to a Mac.

Both the MacBook and the iMac come with iLife ’08 and Leopard (10.5) now. That solves my need for iPhoto (to import pictures from the camera) and iTunes (to play music, download podcasts, and put content on my iPod and my AppleTV).

Other things built into the machine are: Safari (excellent web browser), Mail (best mail reader since ZMail), AddressBook (excellent contacts database), Terminal (pretty good shell/terminal emulator), and TextEdit (for reading those pesky, proprietary, and annoying MS Word doc files people insist on sending me).

Nearly everything else I use is available for free download, and comes as Disk Image (.dmg file) which makes it trivial to install. Sadly the Palm Desktop Software I use to control my Tungsten C (PDA) from my Mac is only available as a Stuffit Archive (.sit file), so I had to find Suffit Expander (free, but a pain to find now) and install that as well.

Stuffit Expander (for extracting the last few Stuffit Archives in the world)
Adium (best AIM/Jabber/MSN Messenger/Yahoo Messenger)
VideoLan (Video playback for many formats not supported in QuickTime)
Flip4Mac (Quicktime and Web extension allowing Windows Media files to play)

Camino (Excellent Web Browser, very fast text display)
Firefox (Excellent all-around web browser)
OmniWeb (Excellent web browser, very fast, excellent bookmark management)

Carbon Copy Cloner (Backups to external drive)
Chicken of the VNC (useful for remote control of other machines)
QuickSilver (Application launcher and search program)

OmniDictionary (Dictionary spelling and thesaurus)
OmniFocus (Getting Things Done tool, organizer)

Palm Desktop (Desktop organizer for Palm PDA devices)
Plucker Desktop (ebook/cached web page reader for Palm PDA devices)

OmniGrafflePro (Visual Diagram Software, the Visio-killer!)
Graphic Converter (Very good and affordable photo image editor)

Also, I typically set up the first account on a Mac as “Administrator” with the short name admin, then I set myself up as a second account without administrative priviledges so it is harder for hostile software to grab my machine.

The new iMac comes with the “Mighty Mouse” and the new aluminum keyboard… I was skeptical, but initial impression is very good on the keyboard, and my previous dislike of the Mighty Mouse may be fixed by turning off horizontal scrolling (I found it made vertical scrolling harder to control). Most of all, I love being able to simply turn off the annoying Caps-Lock key (hurrah for Preferences/Keyboard&Mouse Control in 10.4 and 10.5).

Oh, I am trying out a .Mac account to sync things between machines (might help with migrating off the dual 500MHz G4 running 10.3 I’ve been using) and I will be trying out iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) on the new machine.

2007 12 12 snolan Computers Comments (0) Permalink

‘The Peel Affinity’ is coming soon

For those of you who know about us through La Belle Compagnie, the book we worked on for a long time is finally getting published and is expected sometime in 2008 (February is tentative). The Peel Affinity has it’s own website, thanks to our amazing publisher, Shumacher Publishing, LLC.

2007 12 07 snolan Fun
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Home again, home again

Dance-O-Rama with the Tysons/Vienna Arthur Murray school was terrific fun. Erci and I went with a group of 22 from our studio and danced until our feet were sore and danced a whole lot more. Blue Martini in Bally’s continues to serve excellent martinis, and it was probably a good thing (if mildly disappointing) that they closed at 2:30 Sunday morning (we might have stayed and drank even more, ouch).

I am mostly very happy with my dances, though I need to work on my groupings and presentation a whole lot more, and focus intensely on mambo as a dance (I totally blew that dance). Bolero and Viennese went particularly well for me (due to recent focusing and lots of practice), and I wish I had entered more heats. I have bruises from a slip and fall in the bath tub in our room, and Erci is bruised and sore from a bad tumble down some steps at the hotel. We both have sore feet from lots of dancing, but we are wimps compared to Mr Bond, who did over 100 heats, well over. Our studio was remarkable in that we had over 2/3 of our group were male dance students. Rumba/Cha formation, a slight variation on the one we did earlier in the year at Freestyles went very well though with seven couples instead of the original fourteen. The bus ride up and back with the Silver Spring and Gaithersburg studios was nearly as much fun as the dance event itself!

Big thank you to aenloo for taking care of Bailey while we were away, he was well fed and affectionate when we got home.

2007 12 02 snolan Dance
Fun
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New job is worth dancing about

So I’ve spent two days at my new job and I am happy. There is a lot to do, and some of it is very strange, but it is all interesting and there is a lot of freedom to tackle each problem as we techies see fit. The team is excellent, and the environment very informal.

I will be learning, learning, learning.

I am already re-learning how to make do with less expensive gear (smaller company, smaller budget, more sensible about money). Now if I can figure out how to set up a team AIM-bot that will share messages with the whole team at once…

I am waiting for Erci to get home to tell me how her second day was. Her first day was entirely eaten with the usual corporate propaganda from both the contracting firm and GAO itself… sigh. Hopefully today was better for her.

We are gearing up for Atlantic City Dance-O-Rama competitions and recovering from a brilliant dance-party at our house this past weekend.

2007 11 27 snolan Personal Comments (1) Permalink

Melancholy on my last day at AOL

It has been a fantastically interesting job, one where they pay me to play in some of the world’s largest toy-rooms (for computers are toys to me). Mostly I am going to miss the wonderful people I have worked with here at AOL.

I know the new job will be filled with new opportunities and good people too… but it does not stop me from being a little wistful and melancholy today. Sigh…

2007 11 21 snolan Personal Comments (0) Permalink

Fun at Fall Showcase, Arthur Murray

Sorry it has been a while since my last update. There has not been much to write about. I have been busy at work wrapping up projects so they can be handed over cleanly. Been busy at home cleaning house and at the dance studios getting ready for Fall Showcase (last weekend) and Atlantic City Dance-O-Rama (end of November) then Yuletide (New Year’s Eve).

Arthur Murray Fall Showcase was fun. It was at the Sheraton this time, which meant an overly warm, cramped room for the latin/rhythm routines (I like Westfields better). Our friends Cindy and Anne-Marie came to watch and it was fun sharing observations with them. Erci did a fantastic Viennese Waltz with Dan Calle, and a very lively Mambo with Bryant Phillips. My Bolero with Marisa Jo Frank went very well, though I did at least one error right at the final pose/dip and probably need to work on emphasis and arm styling more. There were a lot of very memorable routines.

We cut out early to attend Dan and Jeff’s 10th anniversary party, where we had fantastic Malbec with lamb. Erci and I crashed there rather than drive back sleepy, and we had a nice breakfast with them as well (though I had a hangover).

2007 11 20 snolan Dance
Fun
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Erci has accepted an offer

Erci has accepted a job offer from NCI Information Systems and she’ll be working at the Government Accounting Office starting November 26th. She’ll be in the same building with both my brother (Steve) and my niece. In a strange twist of ironic fate, she is filling the same opening that her first boss at AOL recently filled. The commute into Washington, DC will be long, and we’ll be making life adjustments, but she is excited to start because it looks like an interesting job.

I will be starting on that same day at Ruckus working with some old friends in Herndon near Worldgate.

2007 11 10 snolan Personal Comments (0) Permalink

Lessons Learned from Election 2007

It was a bad year for a re-match. My favorite local candidates: Roemmelt, Rishell, and Pandak all lost to incumbents in effectively re-matched elections from one and two years ago. I am still trying to figure out why, because in all three cases the losing candidate is clearly and demonstrably more able, more likeable, and better for Virginia or Prince William County. What they all have in common is Prince William County, and it is clear we are having problems educating voters here.

It was a really dumb time to allow certain incumbents to go unopposed. Both Delegate Albo and Loudon County Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Plowman lost substantial votes to write-in candidates… though both won re-election, it is clear that an effective candidate on the ballot in those races would have put the races in contention quite easily.

Write-in campaigns dramatically slow down the counting process. It was after midnight before reliable returns began getting reported from Loudon county, which had many of us on pins and needles well into the night.

Money can buy many races, but clearly there are limits. While money probably bought several races around the state, it is also clear that despite vast money differences, some races are still won by people. Chap Peterson, Stevens Miller, Susan Buckley all won despite enormously unequal spending.

We must have a precinct by precinct ground game with better logistics at each polling place.

I am hugely happy we won the state senate, but we should have picked up more seats. We should have picked up more in the house too. Prince William is a sad, sad disappointment.

2007 11 07 snolan Local
Personal
Politics
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