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. . . .

More rock art! This was a little more interesting in person, because rock art doesn’t seem to photograph well in afternoon sunlight.

Wednesday was reasonably normal. I saw that I hadn’t won anything in the lottery that morning—which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Work had some annoying bits, but we managed to get some useful things done. The plan was to have Rock Band 3 with Steve, but Steve couldn’t make it thanks to his work wanting him to work overtime. Argh. So Stephanie and I had takeout Chinese food without Steve, and we sang/played a bunch of songs. Stephanie made a profile and made her own character, since she hadn’t done that yet.

Thursday had some semi-interesting stuff at work. I’d submitted a request on Monday. It had been held up, as it was waiting on approval from a guy. We went to talk to that guy. He said, “Oh, yeah. I can’t approve that because I don’t have access to the Lotus Notes database.” What? Argh. Anyway, I think that’s been fixed. It’s just. . . typical that some sort of bizarre weirdness would prevent somebody from being able to approve stuff that needed to be approved.

And then I got a panicked urgent request to modify some stuff on a website that my team doesn’t have access to, has never had access to, and is hosted in a completely different datacenter. Apparently, they called me because A) it’s a website B) my team does website things C) if they called the third party who could actually fix the problem, they’d have to pay money to that third party. Good grief. I’m thinking the whole stupid situation happened because some “decision maker” somewhere didn’t understand anything about what they were actually doing. This is far more common than it should be. I don’t know how to fix it though.

Snoopy Rock! This required some post-processing, but I think it turned out OK.

Monday was back to work. Five tons of things had happened. I didn’t get much of a chance to work on anything new, because I was busy fixing all the stuff that had broken and I didn’t get a chance to fix while on furlough.

And I found a package in the mail on Monday. It was a couple of books, from Teh Nacho. YAY! Books are always nice to get. The City and The City should be neat, whenever I can get around to reading it. (China Miéville is a Marxist, but he can write good fiction. . . .)

Tuesday, I had to suffer through a really pointless 2.5 hour conference call while trying to field plaintive requests from people who didn’t really know what they needed but wanted it all right now. Then there was another 2 hour meeting, followed by a protracted session of trying to fix an inexperienced coder’s badly specified problems.

After I got home and had dinner, I tried an experiment: I installed the latest and greatest new VPN from work. This is the 3rd VPN that they’ve used in the 3.8 years I’ve been with the company—which is a bad sign in itself. It also has the worst functionality of all of the VPNs they’ve used. Several things that my team absolutely requires are completely impossible with the way the new VPN’s set up. I don’t know who’s in charge of deciding what to use, but whoever it is is apparently a complete dumbass. I’ve heard that they switched to this new VPN because it was cheaper than the old one, but that really doesn’t make any sense, because Free as in beer and speech VPN software for all major platforms exists. If the VPN problems can’t be solved—and soon—then this’ll cost the company a significant amount of money. I have a feeling the people who make decisions either don’t know about this, don’t care about this, or are incapable of understanding this.

So. Friday, we ate breakfast at the hotel (cereal and vegetarian breakfast burritos), then went into town. We decided to go on the “Ancient Ruins” Pink Jeep Tour, scheduling it for 1pm, and then spent some time walking up and down and looking at all the tourist stores. This was kind of interesting. I didn’t see much that I actually wanted to buy, though.

We ate lunch, then got on the jeep for the tour. This was different from the tour I’d taken years ago. It wasn’t raining, and the tour took longer since the ancient ruins were quite a ways west of town. The ruins are only accessible via miles of primitive road. We still saw a few ordinary sedans using the road. But once we got to the ruins, we spent about an hour walking around and looking at the remains of the settlement that had been there in pre-Columbian times. There was a bunch of rock art. Because it was mid-afternoon when we got there, most of it was in full sunlight, so getting pictures of it was a bit difficult. I tried anyway.

On the way back, several of the passengers talked about the DARPA Grand Challenge and the possibility for advanced navigation software to take the place of human jeep drivers. I said that no matter how advanced the software got, it’d have a really hard time performing the important function of telling bad jokes to the passengers.

Stephanie wanted to go on a hike after the tour was over. So we drove out to the trailhead, but I got us lost in the process. We eventually found it. We spent some time walking around on the Lizard Head Trail and another trail close to that one. And then we went to a Thai restaurant for dinner.

There’s not that much exciting nightlife in Sedona, so we watched “In Time”, which the local movie critic totally hated. I didn’t think the movie was as terrible as that. It was still better as a DVD than paying full price in a theatre.

Saturday, we forgot to set the alarm and woke up late. Oops. This meant we didn’t have a lot of time to go get breakfast at the Coffee Pot restaurant. (Trevor said, “You have to go to the Coffee Pot! Everyone goes there!” at John’s party.) But anyway, the food there was good. Then we checked out and went back downtown for another run through the tourist stores. Stephanie needed to get some stuff for her cow-orkers.

Then we went home. This worked out reasonably well. I saw that the jackpot for one of Arizona’s lotteries was over $350 million, so Stephanie and I both put in about $7 and we bought some tickets. This is probably throwing money away, considering the odds, but what the heck.

Sunday, not that much happened. I got a call from work early in the morning, since my furlough was over and they could call me. Argh. It was reasonably easy to fix, it just took a while. Got groceries, made dinner. Stephanie and I watched a couple of episodes of Firefly, since I’d mentioned that to her earlier.

Anyway. I haven’t been updating this, since I’ve been on furlough and relaxing and doing stuff. Current events: Facebook is being evil and stupid, which should really surprise no one.

But: Last Sunday, Stephanie and I went to Peter Piper Pizza with John, a bunch of his friends, and the trivia group. We all dressed up in suits and formal dresses for this. OK, this was kind of weird, but what the heck—we all had fun. Stephanie and I spent some time playing skee-ball, then playing a “Terminator: Salvation” video game where the main objective was to shoot evil robots. (I didn’t think Stephanie was much on shooting evil robots, but she wasn’t too bad at it. . . .)

Wednesday, we had the usual Rock Band 3 with Steve, though we had pork chops and black beans and rice instead of Chinese food. This worked out well.

Thursday, Stephanie and I drove up to Sedona. It’s been at least 13 years since I’ve been there, so I figured it was time to go back. We got a pretty good hotel room, but it was kind of far away from the rest of town. No matter. We went to a mall and browsed around for a while. I saw some interesting-looking art, but it was priced too high for me to buy it. Most art is. Maybe someday, I’ll have enough spare time to actually work in pencil or acrylics again, and can make my own interesting-looking art for less money.

We ate at Barking Frog, which was actually a lot better than the one horrible review on Google made it sound. (The waitress did forget to bring me the drink I’d ordered, but that drink didn’t show up on the bill, so no worries.) That was about it—we’d gotten there too late to do much more than poke around a bit and eat dinner.

More later.

Another loooong week. The bus strike here in Phoenix/Tempe made it worse, since instead of riding the bus, I had to drive 2.5 miles to the light rail park-n-ride. This took about 20 minutes longer than taking the bus did. So I had less time than usual all week.

Had Rock Band 3 on Wednesday with Steve and Stephanie, and played more songs on Hard. Stephanie was highly caffeinated, so she sang a lot. Steve didn’t think he could make it that night, but was able to. Thursday, Stephanie and I went out to eat at a nearby Mexican restaurant. This was pretty good, and not all that expensive.

At least I wasn’t on call, and I managed to get a few things done, like updating a bunch of stuff on a bunch of machines and fixing a script that writes out a bunch of stuff. I updated the Tux On Ice patch for kernels 3.2.1 through 3.2.11 page with additional info and such.

I also found that you can’t have a /usr separate from / any more without doing silly things with initramfs, which made me just a bit annoyed on Friday night. I’ve had a separate /usr on my desktop for 12 years, without using initramfs. I don’t like using initrd/initramfs, because it’s yet another thing that has to be messed with and can go wrong. I don’t think the arguments in the previous link make a whole lot of sense, actually. Who cares about how Solaris does things? Also, having /usr shared across multiple machines via NFS only makes sense if you have an NFS server that never goes down. I’ve found that directly-connected IDE/SCSI/SATA disks are actually more reliable than your average NFS setup.

But anyway, thanks to work furloughs, I’m not supposed to do anything at all for work from 2012-03-18 to 2012-03-25. It’s sort of like an enforced vacation without pay. Maybe I’ll have some time to relax, do some reading, play some video games, and just do nothing over the next week. That’d be nice. . . .

There was a reasonable amount of stuff going on. But anyway.

Friday, I had the day off work, since I was on call the previous week. This was fun. I slept in, made good coffee, catered to Moira, and did some reading.

Saturday, I’d planned to go to the Renaissance Faire with Stephanie, Zach, and Sarah. This worked out well, but it sort of took all day. There was a whole lot of traffic. Stephanie and I got there about 10:30am, and we spent some time looking around before watching our first show, Lord Zarko’s Hypnotist Show. Lord Zarko explained a bit about hypnotism, then asked for volunteers. I volunteered to be hypnotized. (I’ve been hypnotized before, at a U of M show in 1996, and that worked well and entertained the audience, so I figured it’d work again.) As in 1996, I was a pretty good hypnotic subject. Zarko did several routines, but the best one was probably one where he had the woman to my left believe that I had pinched her butt, and had me act as though that was the funniest thing ever, while she became quite upset. (I never touched her, of course.) Zarko made it up to the woman a bit later, when he had her believe that she hadn’t seen her husband in six months, and then had her run to him, jump on him, and kiss him like she hadn’t seen him in six months.

Stephanie was in the audience through all of this, and she took a bunch of pictures. Zach and Sarah actually saw the last few minutes of the show. So we met them after the show was over, and then went to get some lunch. After that, we wandered around, looking at all the stores and crafts places. Zach wanted some tea, so we found some. Stephanie wanted to see Neidfyre the violinist (since we’d seen her a couple of years ago.) We did that. And after that, we just walked around some more. We left the faire at about 4:30, leaving Zach and Sarah there, since they’d gotten there later and wanted to look around some more.

Sunday, I did some fooling around with Tux On Ice, since the maintainer is busy, and doesn’t have time to do some stuff. I put together a Tux On Ice kernel patch for the 3.2.x kernel series that should work properly, though I’ve only tested it for 3.2.1, and only on the x86-32 architecture. Anyway. It is through small enhancements like this that progress is made in the open source world. . . .