Yep, one year. Time flies, doesn’t it?

This was one of the pieces we saw at the First Friday art walk yesterday. It’s a work in progress, where the artist, Jen Urso, does some pencil sketches throughout the day, then takes stuff she’s drawn previously and either erases it or draws over it in ink. The exhibit had a series of pictures she’s taken depicting the progress of the art. One thing that it’s difficult to see in this picture is that there are words written in places on the picture. This piece was a lot more interesting than the pretty mediocre cellphone picture here shows, actually.

Another picture we saw, which reminded Stephanie of Fallingwater.  She wrote me this:  “Trees are the essence of life.  The eyes are tearing water as if in Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterful creation of Fallingwater.  Water is flowing through a wooden, organic structure into the river of dreams.  The sun is in one eye and the stars are in another.  It’s as if elvish nature surrounds you.”

Anyway, Stephanie and I, we get along really well as far as I can tell, and so we’re dating.

I also got some good news on Thursday:  I’m getting a small raise.  This is a really good thing—much better than being laid off, that’s for sure.  I rarely got raises at the old company.

Still reading The Many-Colored Land.  I think the main criticism I’ll have of this book is that it’s probably too short.  It’s an engaging yarn, full of larger-than-life characters, evil plots, double crossing, epic fights, and so forth.  This is only to be expected, since the author says, “Some of the characters were lifted directly from Celtic mythology” in the afterword.  At least there’s a sequel.

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.

I got a call last afternoon from WePublishNews. They want to hire me, provided that I can pass a drug test and a background check. Both should be no problem, though I don’t think that I’ll eat any poppy seed muffins or bagels between now and the drug test. (Eating poppy seeds can lead to a false positive for opium or heroin, which would be very bad.) They’re on the bus route, and the bus stop where the express bus stops is either one block from my place or 3 blocks. So I can use mass transit (probably), and thumb my nose at the oil companies.

Also decided to add another couple of categories. “Books” for anything dealing with books, “Good news” for those times when something goes right. Going through 106 posts and adding the “books” category to posts with books in them took longer than I thought it was going to. I don’t know how people recategorize things like this that have thousands of entries.

Last weekend, while we were playing Rock Band, The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” came up on the playlist.  I had never heard the song.  Several of my friends were shocked/incredulous, since apparently that song is a classic.  There are holes in everyone’s educations, I guess . . . .