Yesterday was a pretty good day. The weather started off raintacular just like I like it but not to obstructive. Downside of course being it’s impact on traffic. Speeds out on the Interstates here tend to vary between 120km/h and 140km/h, and a lot of driver’s refuse to go that slow unless traffic forces them. Well with Mehring thinking the wrecks/minute ratio has hit 1:3, I think a few people may have learned the hardware to SLOW the **** down here and there!

With the weight of the ever popular SUV and pickup trucks out here, it’s even more important, because heavier vehicle == slows down slower + (IME) loses traction faster under heavy breaking. Not that anyone is ever going to learn that the *easy* way 8=). One thing that I do like about being stuck in the commute for like 225km every day, is Art “Mad Man” Mehring’s traffic reports. The morning show is good for chuckles and Lance always plays the most music on our way home, but heck, Mehring makes the trip worth while.

Heh, looking him up off Google, also just turned up some awesome humour for this soon to be retired commuter 🙂 -&#gt; Welcome to Atlanta, Park anywhere!

On the way home, I also stopped off to action off an idea that occured to me during lunch, but that’s a different subject. Today, well, I’m just glad to have hammered out what’s been stuck in my kick-around-list for the past two days. Also looks like I’ll get to do some (more so) interesting stuff in the next couple weeks. For the most part, it’s just been trying to get stuff squared away at work, so that I’m ready to roll on Monday. Courtesy of the move, I have to take Friday off (*groan*) but the move oguth to conclude on Saturday. At least, that *is* the idea! Tonight the plan is to saver a little last minute zombie slaying, since I may have to stay zombie free for a week :-/. As well as the sort my inequivalent to a “Go bag” and decide where the last minute stuff is going to be packed.

GOD willing, by Monday, I will be able to sleep until at least 0800, depending on the traffic, I might even get to sleep later lol. The flex time we have at work, more or less amounts to a wide spectrum, and while most people (smartly) would expect me to leverage that in a later direction. When you spend like 3 1/2 hours a day driving, it pays to just wake up earlier and try not to write bugs before (br|l)unch time.

Today more or less started with waking up after midnight, from weather pounding so hard that you would think houses are going to fly. Well, seems not to much went wrong but it would be a good day to own swim fins. Around Atlanta, we kind of have a problem on the road, when the asphalt gets wet, it starts giving off a moron gas causing instant stupidifcation of most Georgia drivers, it is’ not tooo late for that. Anyway, the guy doing the traffic reports on 94.9 this morning, started joking that they would need to fly out some specialists to investigate a new phenomenon in the Atlanta area: rain causing trucks to become magnetized! Two trucks, eight cars, in two separate wrecks. One of them was truck+six cars.

Coming through Norcross this morning was stupitacular! The light over by Spalding Drive was out, and where it crosses the Georgia 141. So essentially, we have two lanes going each way, plus turn lanes, and a traffic light flashing red. Well, you would think it is kind of easy when the regs say, light out = treat it like a four way stop. I didn’t dare count how many times people came close to a fender bender. By the time I was next in line to go, I saw the third car in what was supposed to be a group of two shooting through: he stopped like two inches from somebodies fender, and I’m thinkin’ “You twit!” as this moron nearly cracks up. Don’t think he was even in the right freaking lane to turn. I swear, only 30-40% of people in Georgia seem to know how to drive. This reminds me of an old Death’s Head II comic, called Psychotic when wet.

I’ve also sandwiched in and live fire tested some tweaks to my note taking system. In addition to using the Viki plugin for VIM, I now have things automatically committed to a git repository (but not on the ‘hub lol) and a script that is able to deplate them into HTML for browsing at work, excluding private stuff. Sometime when I have time outside of work, I’ll screw with a script to run a web server on it, but only when connected to the companies internal network.

On the upside, the commute home was splendid as can be. And hope that if someone had to stand out at Spalding, directing traffic, that he gets hazard pay and a vacation lol.

This blog entry by Michael W. Lucas, has got to be one of the most impressive ways I’ve ever heard, for integrating OpenBSD in a hurry.

Hmm, seems that as soon as May 2009 is imported, my journals switch from LJ to Blogger, will at long last be complete….

It is done! -> This Journal Moved To Blogger

Right, I’ve just finished something that has taken me almost two years to finish by hand, since the available tools couldn’t keep up with the content. Hmm, makes me think of a line from one of my favourite films! But at long last, and vastly overdue—my journal is now totally under the Blogger roof. 2009-12-05, I posted on LJ and Blogger, that I had moved things here. Well, 2011-03-27, it seems to finally be complete. Even noticed half a months extra posts after I was finished lol. Since beginning with Live Journal back on 2011-09-09, I’ve made 2,039 entries, assuming that I have not missed any of the 1,537 entries that I was supposed to import >_>.

In honour of completion, I think I’ll post the stats of that count to date, something I originally planned to do at 2,000 entries, along with a little celebration, but hey, I didn’t expect to notice my two-thousandth post anyway lol. Right, anyway here is the table!

2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006
January

12

26

61

46

16

0

February

15

26

40

33

27

0

March

28

23

69

55

26

0

April

0

48

68

62

20

0

May

0

108

47

41

20

0

June

0

69

49

28

16

0

July

0

58

43

49

25

0

August

0

37

46

50

28

0

September

0

26

45

62

24

24

October

0

26

23

45

23

4

November

0

26

40

44

31

17

December

0

16

32

52

42

18

Total

55

489

563

567

298

63

This shows that until getting into the whole job thing, the trend has been for my level of blogging to stay fairly steady. I would say an average of 1 1/2 entries per day at its height. Generally, I’ve been most active during the first half of the year. 2011 and 2006 being very slow, as one is when I started and one is little more than 25% into it, inverse-respectively.

One thing I really do hope for, is that after this move is sorted, I’ll have more time to update my journal more frequently than I have these past few months. I really don’t update things here about my present line of work (as a matter of personal policy), and anything interesting really is the subject domain of my notes anyway.

One thing I do know, it’s better to have a journal than nothing but memory. And that’s saying something, since 2008-2009 are still pretty much in my `recent` memory, and my trail of memories largely go back to the early 1990s!

Well, it is pretty much done: my life packed. There’s just a few things here and there that are essentially, stuff it in a bag at the last minute and go. It does make you think a bit, seeing over twenty years crammed into a normal closet worth of boxes and bags. Or should I say, compared to many people, a micro-closet lol.

Excluding computers and related crapola, just about everything I’m taking is a book of some sort. I must have like three and a half pieces of luggage dominated with books; mostly Fiction. Something that isn’t technically a book but not far off, is my fathers old photo albums. There’s not much that I’m taking.

I wish I could say that I had a lot of happy memories, but I don’t. I’ve known for quite a while now, that when it would come time to open a new chapter in my life, that I would close this one by singing to a Taylor Swift song.

Another lovely Friday. If reports are to be believed, on a bypass that has 69 or 68 exits, traffic is screwed from I-20 to well passed spaghetti junction, along with most major roads on the same vector. After 20-30 minutes of traffic to get some where that should only take 10-12 min, I took the I-75 south into Atlanta, where it was pretty much saoring through the usual bumper to bumper from the Brookwood end to exiting the curve. To top it off, while trying to change lanes to take the I-75S, there was about double the safe length of distance between the cars, when the mother fucker in back decided to rage down on his pedal, I’m pretty sure that we both gave each other the bird as he fender dodged his way over to the I-75N in that sporty foil. One upside if anything did happen, my car is more like a tank and his was more like paper, so playing chicky is out, and raging is illegal ;).

To add insult to near injury, it took like twenty minutes of laps to get a gas pump, just to drop $40. Place was so mobbed I dunno how knife play didn’t enter the picture. Topping it all off, on my way to the interstate my mother calls to tell me to pick up her prescriptions and get a few things on her list. She can’t be arsed with sending it as an e-mail so I’ll remember, so I’ve gotta scribble a note to myself while driving (which I _hate_). Then listen to her because I wrote “1 40Watt lightbulbs” instead of 60 Watt, and missed the crackers o/. Well, ya gets what you puts in.

8=)

sshfs + svn != fast

While one of my main gripes about Subversion in the past, has always been “It’s slow”, I just found a real way to snailify it. Try running svn diff on a nice (~80M) chunk of source tree that’s mounted over sshfs.

It probably doesn’t help either, that the server has quad, quads, and  my systems a lowly dual, hehe.

Today, I really got a nice little reward. Basically, the company I work for was getting people together to go over the renewals with our medical insurance provider, and of course, eh, I’d rather be at  my work station getting something done. So this provided me with the impetus to setup my phone as  an impromptu in-building terminal.

Problemo is, I usually use VIM. While I’m stubborn enough to give that a go on a small screen with a virtual keyboard, my phones virtual keyboard doesn’t provide the *PC* keys: namely escape, control, and alt. It’s also not the most convenient to use the programs methods of side stepping this. So I got to thinking for a moment, what is an editor that is light and small enough to use over a text terminal, yet powerful enough to service a programmer without a lot of special keys? –> I found the solution right in my own skills repertoire, or as some say: the default text editor! Some years back, I took the trouble to learn how to use /bin/ed out of an interest in learning how to use vi/vim better.

After a couple minutes of thinking on this, it occurred to me: ed was designed in an era when terminals were SLOW, so slow in fact, that you could probably piss off someone by trying to print to much to standard output, which could be connected to a roll of paper and a true TTY >_>.

So it seems that learning /bin/ed was well worth it, because it makes one hell of a file text editor when using your phone as a terminal 🙂