This painting, which was too large to fit within one JPEG, was interesting. Other bits of the painting will be reproduced in subsequent entries. The artist was Oscar Oiwa, the title was “Do you like Iraq? (Barbecue)”. Various cartoon characters are having a barbecue, and all the pieces of meat they’re cooking look like countries. I’m sure there are profound political statements being made in this piece, but I can’t say for sure what they are.

The plan for tonight is to get together with some of the old friends from my previous job and go have dinner at one of the nicer restaurants in Tempe. That should be fun.

Finished Strangers Among Us. The book is fairly interesting and reasonably optimistic, even though its conclusions are somewhat suspect because it’s ten years old. I found it interesting that the author, a Latino, a US citizen, and a child of legal Latino immigrants, says that illegal immigrants to the USA can STFU and GTFO. Then again, I’m an educated white male who owns property. As such, some people would say that my opinions on matters of {sex, race, class, economic status} are irrelevant because I belong to a “privileged class”. I do not know what I would say to those people. Since the early 1990s, I have known various people who are not white (inclusive or) not male, and that many of those people have been more skilled in various areas (and been more highly paid) than I will ever be.

This was part of a larger painting that was mostly unremarkable. I don’t know what would possess someone to name bottled pop “Boing”, but here it is.

Yikes. Work may prevent me from writing as many blog entries as before. I may have to skip a weekday occasionally. If you see a missing day, work is the reason. Also, taking I-10 east from downtown Phoenix to Tempe at 5 PM is a great way to waste time. Even with the traffic lights and lower speed limits, it’s faster to take the surface streets by about 7 minutes. Of course, next week, I’ll be taking the bus, and that will be totally different.

Went to Steve’s yesterday, had barbecued chicken legs and got a dual-monitor setup going with the evil binary-only nvidia modules. This was actually the first time I’d done anything with a dual-head setup. Of course, I had to restart X a couple of times to get the orientation of both monitors correct, but it all worked.

Yesterday I did something stupid with svn. It all got fixed, and none of the end users were affected at all, but it was a bit nerve-wracking while it was happening. I now have another entry in my long list of What Not To Do, though. Grr. I think something analogous happens when longtime Linux users log in to a Solaris box and then try to use killall without Reading The Fine Manual.

A painting of a sink full of psychedelic neon things. Good artists can take ordinary objects and make them really neat-looking.

Fuzzball was really annoyed that I left her in the condo all by herself for most of the day. I’ve never seen a cat who wants so much attention. Maybe she’d be happier if she had another cat to play with, but she doesn’t seem to get along well with other cats. I also don’t know that I could afford another cat right now.

The site is now running on port 80 (though 8080 will still work) since I found the proper setting in my DSL modem’s config. The content here is still the same old stuff, though.

Trivia: We won again (yay!) thanks to Kelli’s knowledge of celebrities, Trevor’s knowledge of opera singers from New Zealand, and my knowing a few things about the Beatles.

Anyone with at least one dog knows what it’s like at feeding time. The artist deliberately used a naive approach to perspective here, probably to convey something or other. I’m not sure what, but the sheer joy that dogs take in being fed could be seen as naive.

I think I’m going to like the new job. Of course, I didn’t actually get much done yesterday, just went through orientation, filled out a stack of forms, got my work area set up, met everyone who was there, read a huge pile of documentation, and other typical first-day things. I have A Plan(tm) for fixing several minor problems and dealing with a more annoying problem. Also going to test some stuff tomorrow, which is always useful and educational.

And it looks like some of us are getting together Friday for dinner, and trivia is tonight.  Lots of stuff to get done . . . .

When I first saw this painting, I looked at the extreme right of it, where the man’s body is partially transparent and you can see a woman through him. Then I looked at the extreme left, where the family is. I think it took a good 20 seconds before I noticed the actual subject of the painting. I thought this painting was partially famous, but I can’t find any references to its title. Maybe I should’ve written the title or the artist’s name down, since I probably got a word or two in the title wrong and that’s messing up my Googling.

I start the job today. It will be interesting. There’s a 2-hour orientation meeting for all the new employees. I wonder what that consists of. Maybe we’ll all be team-building synergistic matrix empowered valued ethnically diverse tiger team Myers-Briggs member associates at the end of it. Alex gave me some advice about what to do and what not to do—basically common sense there.

A larger version of the photo for those who want a better look at it.

The Phoenix Art Museum has one of Picasso’s smaller and lesser-known works. I took this (blurry) picture of it sort of out of a sense of duty, not because I thought the picture was insanely great. Whatever.

Been reading Strangers Among Us, a book about how Latino immigration is changing the USA. The author believes there is no way at all to stop immigration from Mexico and South America, as the economic incentives are too great and the policies of the USA on immigration are such a total vortex of suckage. A short excerpt:

“But illegal aliens are the wrong target for public rage. The real culprits are the officials of both political parties who have refused to make hard choices.” (p. 100)

The author then goes on to describe a number of different Latino communities in the USA, and the different approaches they have taken to being immigrants in America.  The chapter about Cubans in Miami was the most interesting.  The Cubans had a great deal of help from the US Government, built a reasonably prosperous community, and had a fair amount of political power.  However, the community they built was insular, deeply distrustful of the outside world, and at heart, racist.  Since the book was published in 1998, there’s no data in there that’s newer than the mid-1990s.  I don’t know what the current Miami situation is, or how it might play out in the future, just that the author painted a pretty bleak picture of it as it was.

Also, the author repeatedly makes the point that “Latino” covers a huge amount of territory.  Maya from north Guatemala != Cubans != Dominicans != Mexicans. However, the distinctions and differences among all those groups blend together and get eaten by stereotypes in the eyes of most of us honkies, much the same way as a Guatemalan highlander might mistake a Brit for an American, or a Texan for a Michigander.  Classifying people into “ethnic groups” can save time and effort, but it can also backfire spectacularly.  The best policy is probably to take each person and judge them individually—but that’s not always possible if you have to deal with hundreds of different people every day, many of whom you’ll only see once or twice.

This particular painting in the Phoenix Art Museum was done sometime in the late 1800s. The whole thing is gigantic (at least 7 feet tall, 6 feet wide) and executed in an almost photorealistic style. It’s an impressive technical achievement, even though the subject is boring. I don’t think anyone would do something like this today, mostly because color photography is now everywhere.

Yesterday, I got up early and drove to the parking garage at the new job at approximately the right time. I started at 7:40am, slightly later than I would start normally. Traffic wasn’t that bad, and I got there in about 30 minutes. This may be a good sign. Of course, yesterday might have been an unusually light traffic day or something. At least it shows that I can drive to work and not have to deal with anything insanely horrible, though I think I’d rather take the bus. I don’t know how bad driving back will be, though. Guess I’ll find out. Apparently they want me to drive in on the first day, probably so that they can get a license plate number and issue me a parking pass or whatever.

Went shopping yesterday as well.  Bought some shirts.  Boring.  Also bought about $11 worth of appropriate connectors, so now I can replicate the display of my computer to my TV set.  The display isn’t insanely high quality, but hey, “Pulp Fiction” is more immersive at 33″ than it is at 19″.

It’s official, I have the job of herding penguins at WePublishNews. I start Monday the 16th. Whee! This may mean that blog updates may become less frequent. I will post something when I know for sure.

This painting was one of the ones I saw in the art museum several days ago. I don’t remember the text in the placard by the painting, but I believe this was painted near the start of World War I. The influence of world events is obvious in the painting, which I thought was pretty well done. I have about 13 or 14 reasonably good pictures from the art museum trip, so I’ll be posting those until I’m out of them.

Since apparently the iproute2 utilities are terrible at bandwidth limiting, I tried the next best thing and got out an old 10bT Ethernet card. I’m in the middle of running some tests on timing a bunch of I/O heavy operations using this old card and drbd. Then when that’s done, I’ll add an old 802.11b access point to the chain, and have the second machine communicate via 802.11, and see what (if any) effect the additional latency imposed by the wireless conversion has on drbd‘s I/O speed. Bandwidth stays the same, since the 10Mb/sec maximum of 10bT is similar to the 11Mb/sec maximum of 802.11b. It just takes longer for each individual packet to get through, and I think this will have a deleterious effect on drbd‘s performance. I Could Be Wrong, but if I’m right, it could point to a potential solution to a technical problem that they’re having at the new job.

The thing about old, slow hardware is that it maximizes the suckage rate of bad programming and bad configuration. For that reason, I think that good testers and sysadmins should keep some old, slow hardware around, just to be able to diagnose certain types of problems with minimal hassle.

This is a crop from one of the pieces of art Meghan and I looked at in yesterday’s entry. That painting depicted part of the Gila River in the mid-1800s before it got dammed up and regulated. What drew me to this painting wasn’t the well-done technique or the depiction of how things used to be, but that the tree to the upper right of the deer looked sort of like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I guess this shows I spend entirely too much time on the Net, or something.

Steve wasn’t feeling well yesterday, so the usual Linux get-together didn’t happen. I spent some time trying to set up a test for a problem involving drbd, and ended up stuck on a totally different problem. My attempts to use the traffic-shaping features of iproute2 ended up with horrible results. Whatever I did, I always got an abysmal 15 K/sec sustained transfer rate when I tried to limit traffic on one network interface to 1 MB/sec. Other people have managed to do this. I must be doing something stupid incorrectly.

Lots of stuff happened yesterday. Went to the art museum with Meghan, saw a bunch of art, some of which was really good. We talked about the art and various other things all through this. I took a bunch of pictures of this art which will be put here and analyzed in later installments. We saw almost all the museum and spent more time there than I’d thought. Then we briefly poked around downtown Tempe, going into some place called “The Hippie Store” or something like that, then getting some coffee, then it was time to go to trivia.

I think everybody who knew about trivia brought their friends or parents last night. We ended up with about 14 people and had to push multiple tables together to have enough room for everyone. Zach had shaved his head, which he had been threatening to do for some time. Since the basketball playoffs were going on, the TVs were loud in the room where we were sitting. This was enough of a problem that we had to send someone out into the other room every time the quizmaster asked a question. They heard it, then reported what it was to everyone.

We won, possibly because we had so many people on our side. Yay! After everything was over, we broke up into smaller groups. I think Meghan finally got some info from Kelli about working at a large media corporation. I don’t know for sure as I was talking to Zach and Nathan and Sarah about future plans, books, and firearms.

Then of course when I got home, I was too tired to write up an entry and schedule it for 6:30am. So it’s about an hour late today. . . .