Wednesday had a reasonable number of ordinary work things. It also had a retirement lunch for 3 people who’d taken the early buyout. This was nice, but I’m sure we’ll miss these folks when they’re gone.

Then when I got the usual Golden Eggroll food, they said, “Um, it’ll take longer than usual. OK?” I really didn’t have much choice, so I said OK. Moira meowed so much and so often that I gave her some canned food to quiet her down for a couple of hours. Stephanie said she’d be late because of traffic. Steve got here on time, so we talked about video cards and TVs. Stephanie got here late, but before the food showed up.

So we ate, then played some Rock Band 3, and that was fun. What wasn’t fun was not being able to go to sleep that night. Every time I was on the verge of snoozing, somebody started yelling loudly in the parking lot and/or Moira started meowing. I finally sacked out around midnight.

So, on Thursday, I was drinking coffee like the above kitten in order to stay awake. There were some minor kerfluffles and some odd-sounding database stupidity. Aaron said he was going to have a party on Friday for the hockey game (Coyotes in round 2 of the playoffs for the first time ever! AHWOOOOO!!!!) but I’m not going to be able to go to that. His house is a long way away, and I’m still on call this week. Guess I’ll watch at least part of the game from my couch, since there’s no way I’ll be able to afford tickets.

Sunday, Stephanie and I went to see the Braves play the Diamondbacks. This worked out pretty well. We rode the light rail to the game. Of course, everybody else also was riding the light rail, so it was really crowded and we couldn’t sit down. Ah well. It took longer than I’d thought to get to the game, so we barely had time to buy lunch before finding our seats.

The game was pretty good. Stephanie got up to go walk around and shop at the bottom of the 2nd inning, which was sort of a mistake, as the Braves loaded the bases, then walked Kennedy, the Diamondbacks pitcher, in for a run. And then Parra hit a grand slam. It was exciting baseball, and it was good to see the Diamondbacks win one.

We took the light rail home, and it was even more crowded than going there had been. Ah well. I made shrimp scampi for dinner, which was pretty tasty, and we watched “Project Nim”, a documentary about the first chimp they tried to teach sign language to. I’d read a bit about Nim in Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden a long time ago, but the film provided a bit more info. Basically, chimps are mean bastards, and their language skills aren’t great, but Nim probably wasn’t as dumb as Sagan made him out to be. The people running the project probably weren’t running it as well as they could’ve, since they were sort of flying blind.

Monday seemed to last forever—people kept asking me to do “just one small thing”, so I didn’t make that much progress on the larger things that the bosses wanted. Sigh.

Also, I heard from the people who contacted me about advertising on this blog. I thought they wanted to put in a text ad (or several text ads) the way Google and other advertisers do on their right rail. Nope. The people at moredigital.com wanted me to write a blog entry and/or HTML page that praised their clients. They offered me $130 to do this.

I said no.

Marketing and advertising, in general, are morally and ethically questionable, and I really don’t feel comfortable taking money to be a shill. I want to have the freedom to be completely honest on this blog, and if I accept money from others to talk about things I don’t care about, I’ve compromised that honesty. I can see why many people and organizations have compromised themselves for money, but I’ve got enough money right now to tell the marketers to take a hike.

I hope I won’t have to write advertising drivel to keep food on the table. I think Bill Hicks said it well: If you’re in marketing or advertising, kill yourself.

It’s been a very long and busy week.

Last Tuesday, we learned that Patrick’s quitting. He said he wasn’t happy with the long-term prospects at the company, tired of the immense pigheadedness of corporate, and really wanted to go somewhere else and do iPhone development. Wonderful. What does this mean for ordinary peons like me?

Wednesday, there was no rock. Instead, there was an HOA meeting. I went, but it was really mostly useless. Not many people were there. Officers were elected. One cantankerous old coot complained and complained and complained about everything he could think of. This is pretty normal; some retirees with too much time on their hands do this and expect everyone to cater to them. Don’t know what you can do about that. I was just glad when the meeting was over.

Friday, the big excitement was the farewell lunch for Dan. Dan’s moving back to Pennsylvania, because he wants to do some sort of self-sufficient small farm hippy thing while working from home doing iPhone development. Larry was there too—he said that he’d just handed in his 2-week notice at WebPT, because, “It was boring as hell working there, the management were idiots, and I wanted to go somewhere else and do iPhone development.” OK then.

Everyone seems to want to do iPhone development, which seems odd to me. Real computers can do everything an iPhone can do, and more, for less money, and more easily. The only real draw is that you can fit an iPhone in your pocket, and you can’t do that with a real computer yet. Well, Apple’s spent a lot of money on marketing, which convinces a lot of people of a lot of things that aren’t necessarily true.

Saturday, Stephanie and I went to see “Legend of Zelda: The Symphony of the Goddesses”, which was a concert where an orchestra played a bunch of music from the Zelda series of video games. The guy who arranged the music talked briefly before each part of the program, and scenes from the various games played on a big video screen behind the orchestra. The theatre was fairly crowded, and there were a lot of people wearing video game T-shirts among the more formally-dressed folks. The orchestra played well, and the music was interesting. I’ve only played the first 3 Zelda games, though, so I couldn’t really appreciate the music from the later games as much as others might’ve.

Anyway. The big excitement this weekend was getting everything, including accelerated 3D, working right with nouveau on my superannuated nVidia card. It took some fooling around, and manually downloading and compiling libdrm and Mesa. It did work, though it was a bit more involved than the Gallium documentation for accelerated 3D on nVidia cards made it sound. Had to do some export LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose and read and understand its output, then create symlinks and stuff manually. Ah well.

Got plenty of stuff to do in the next week. Bunch of work junk. Going to the Free Software Stammtische tomorrow, which should be interesting as I haven’t been to one of those in a while. Stephanie and I are going to a classical concert (playing music from “The Legend of Zelda” video game series; yeah, whatever) Saturday night, and seeing the Braves play the Diamondbacks Sunday afternoon. I don’t know how much time I’ll have to fool around with graphics card drivers in between doing all of that stuff. But anyway, things are not boring, which is sometimes a good thing. . . .

Wednesday had a bunch of stuff at work, including a very long meeting that wasn’t really all that productive. Ah well. I mentioned that Steve, Stephanie, and I were planning on getting Popeye’s chicken for dinner, and Patrick waxed eloquent about how good food from there was.

So Stephanie picked up the chicken, and when Steve got here, we all attacked it like starving Chihuahuas on a side of beef. Well, maybe a little less messily. It was pretty good. Then I showed Steve my attempts to get TV-out working with the nouveau driver, and was partially successful. I made the mouse cursor disappear again, though. Oops. No matter. Then we spent some time on Rock Band 3, and Stephanie wrote down a bunch of people’s individual scores so we could keep track of how we were doing from week to week.

Thursday: More work stuff. I got a few useful things done. I didn’t get any response on the stuff that I thought everyone wanted to hear from me about. I microwaved some hearty peasant fare leftovers for lunch, and people said, “Wow! That smells really good!”

Started reading The City and the City on the bus ride home. So far, it’s a police procedural set in a fictional Balkan city with some decidedly weird things going on. Interesting, but I’ve barely scratched the surface of it.

And when I got home, I started playing around with the nouveau module. Apparently, if you put the line Option "HWCursor" "off" into your xorg.conf , any attempt to change anything with xrandr will cause X to die. I thought this’d be a quick and easy way to work around the disappearing cursor problem. Nope. Further fiddling made me think there’s something unexpected/wonky going on in the interaction between SDL’s mode switching, xrandr, the nouveau driver, and possibly the NV44 videocard I’ve got. This is annoying, but workaroundable.

Well, the stock market sort of barfed on Tuesday, but what can you do? Not much.

Work wasn’t all that fun. Garrett’s peeved at the company and the whole development process, and said as much during today’s meeting. It doesn’t really matter to him; he’s quitting and moving to California.

I got TV-out working (mostly) on my Linux box, using the nouveau module, by dint of experience and reading stuff from the European Monks. The TV was sort of working, but there was no color and its vertical hold was off. I saw “mode: PAL” in the output from xrandr -q, which made me think, “Hey! My TV’s an American TV, so it doesn’t do PAL. It only does NTSC-M. So. . . .” And then I found that there was no way to change the TV-encoder parameter from userspace, and no way to modify the nouveau module’s parameters since I’d built the silly thing into the kernel. So: Edit the right part of the kernel code so the default TV encoder’s NTSC-M, rebuild kernel, reboot with new kernel, and the TV-out immediately starts working fine. Grrr.

Not everything’s perfect though. I somehow made my mouse cursor disappear while trying things out. This isn’t insanely terrible, but I had to restart X to get the dang cursor back.

Also did my state taxes. Don’t know why it took this long for me to get around to it.

Also also, I got a message late last night from somebody in Britain saying, “We’re looking for blogs without advertising on them, because we want to put text ads on them, and we would give you a yearly fee for this.” Not sure whether to do that or not. Money’s nice, but advertising in general really annoys me, and I’m not sure I want to subject people who read this to ads.

Monday. <SARCASM> Always a good day. </SARCASM> Well, at least it wasn’t too bad. I did a bunch of ordinary work stuff. Things are probably not going to be quiet and normal for a while, though. Jeff’s taking early retirement in May, Garrett’s quitting and moving to California in June. These things will mean more work for me, of course.

When I got home, I spent some more time trying to deal with my nVidia card’s TV-out. This is what I found after trying the 3 Xorg drivers available: (nvidia’s binary-only, nv is Free and has a long history, nouveau is Free and a lot newer.)

nvidia: TV-out works great, so does accelerated 3D. However, there’s inescapable graphics corruption that occurs at random and is really annoying.

nv: TV-out doesn’t work at all, and there’s no 3D. However, there’s no graphics corruption ever.

nouveau: TV-out sort of works, and with more time, I might figure out how to make it actually work right. 3D is slow, and there’s some graphics corruption, but it’s much less prevalent and less annoying than with the nvidia module.

Not sure what to do with all this. I may end up asking the nouveau devs for help. However, if corruption is happening in 3D with both nouveau and nvidia, it may be that my graphics card has had some sort of hardware failure, and no fooling with software will fix it. (Been There, Done That.) The card’s 5.5 years old—which is positively ancient in graphics card terms.

Apparently, Stephanie’s installed Ubuntu on an older laptop she had. I think Steve and I have had some sort of influence on her. Of course, she might try to use Unity and say, “AAAAGH! This user interface is terrible! I hate it, and I’m never listening to you about operating systems or desktop environments ever again!”

Anyway. Friday, there wasn’t a heck of a lot going on, because I had the day off since I was on call all last week. I spent a lot of that time petting Moira, reading Anansi Boys, and after eating dinner, went over to Stephanie’s to watch the last episode of Firefly, disc 2. (I’ve commented on that particular Firefly episode before.) Jayne’s kind of an amoral psycho, but because he was in the right place at the right time, the people of Canton think of him as a hero. The subtext of all this, of course, is that all of the heroes we venerate probably had just as many flaws as Jayne does. I’m sure that Joss Whedon et al would’ve explored that theme in more detail if the show had been allowed to continue its run. (The people responsible for cancelling the series need to go to the special level of Hell, as many of the Browncoats would agree. . . .)

Saturday, not that much. Stephanie made seafood ramen for dinner. Then we watched “In a Better World”, which was a bit depressing, but interesting nontheless. No American movie studio would’ve ever approved that script. This sort of points out the real problem with the oligopoly that controls the movie business; they want things that make money right now, and so they ignore things that are important and/or could make money in the future. This will bite them in the ass in the long term, because they will ignore whatever the next big trend is in favor of doing something conservative and remaking a random 1980s TV show for the Nth time.

Sunday had regular, normal things. I fooled around with getting TV-out and OpenGL working on my machine, since it’d been about 18 months since I’ve tried that. It mostly worked—I’ve still got some weird artifacts. (This is partially my own fault for using a superannuated nVidia card instead of the recent ATi cards all the cool people are using.) Then, I made dinner, ate it, and dealt with Moira meowing a lot. Anyway. Back to work tomorrow. . . .

Here’s another picture from the Sedona trip. This was taken somewhere on the Lizard Head Trail.

Work actually hasn’t had that much happen this week. We’ve got a new employee on the team—this will be really useful later on, and will take some of the pressure off the rest of us. Of course, it took several days for them to actually get his network login and password to work properly.

In non-work stuff, Tuesday, we went to trivia and saw everyone. Apparently, Zach’s younger brother Malachi isn’t just visiting, he’s moved to Casa Grande and is staying for an extended period of time. I’d thought he was just visiting for a week or so. Ah well. Kelli said that Moira had been good while Kelli was taking care of her. (Moira’s never good while I’m taking care of her.) So that was nice.

Wednesday had some more pretty ordinary work things. Steve and Stephanie came over for Rock Band 3, though they were delayed a bit because of terrible traffic on I-10. We all dined on boneless buffalo chicken strips and red beans and rice. Steve’s job is asking him to work more overtime than I’d want to deal with, but Steve seems to be dealing well.

Thursday saw some more stuff. Stephanie wants to go to a concert on Apr. 21. The Braves are playing the Diamondbacks here from Apr. 19..22, so I’d like to see the baseball game on Apr. 22. At work, a few problems get resolved. Our new guy is still unable to log in to the corporate-approved IM system, though they finally got his mail fixed. <SARCASM>I’m glad the Gannett-approved IM system is so much easier to use and so much more reliable than the free 3rd-party IM system that all of us have accounts on for the many, many times when the Gannett-approved IM system shits itself for no reason.</SARCASM>

This is one view of the ancient ruins we saw while on the Jeep tour west of Sedona.

Anyway, Friday was notable mostly for going out on a long walk to Five Guys for lunch. Mmm, dead cows and potatoes. Stephanie and I bought some more tickets for the gigantic lottery, but neither of us won anything. This is only to be expected.

Saturday, I didn’t really do all that much. Moira meowed a lot. I found that a couple of books I was interested in (the 4th and 5th of David Zindell’s The Lightstone series) had never been published in the USA and had to be special-ordered from Britain. What? Well, the publishing industry isn’t supposed to be sensible. Oh well.

Sunday had more stuff going on. I got a panicked work ticket right before lunch that was actually valid, though I wondered why they hadn’t called me hours before. I did a bunch of laundry and got groceries, made sure my TuxOnIce patch worked with kernel 3.2.13, talked on the phone with my parents, and made pork enchiladas for myself and Stephanie. We then watched some more of “Firefly” and fired up Skype so we could talk to Stephanie’s parents and aunt. This was interesting, even though we had some trouble with the lighting—we were pretty terribly backlit, and I tried to fix it but couldn’t. Anyway. It all worked out. . . .