I’m sitting around at a conference, and just to share with you some of the pain I feel I figured I would post this:

PING google.com (72.14.207.99) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=241 time=2190 ms
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=2 ttl=241 time=1470 ms
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=3 ttl=241 time=1467 ms
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=4 ttl=241 time=1195 ms
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=5 ttl=241 time=985 ms

— google.com ping statistics —
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 3999ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 985.984/1462.167/2190.931/407.187 ms, pipe 3

Seeing as how today is PI day I found this particulary good, but requires you to drop the last ‘e.’

I prefer pie

I’m stuck in an all day conference call of a sick person telling us what we already know, so I might as well get around to posting about the trip I just got back from. All around it was a great trip. I enjoyed Tempe but the workshop itself was more management than technical so that was a bummer but I made some good contacts and had plenty of side conversations. Some points though:

• Flights: I don’t mind flying, but being stuck three people in when you want to go to the bathroom and you have incredible heartburn for 5+ hours is not fun. However while flying out we were chasing the sun as it was setting which was amazing. I had the window on the south facing side so I got to see some incredible gradients and such. And if anyone ever has to pick up baggage in the Phoenix airport, I feel for you.
• Mr. Pibb: There’s a Coca-Cola bottling facility in Tempe so most of the place offer Coke products, including Mr. Pibb!! Something I’m not used to seeing since I’m in the northeast, but it’s amazing.
• Weather: The first day out, the weather was phenomenal, it was like a perfect Spring day. Thursday and Friday however there was some rain or just the feeling of pending rain but not too bad. However, we were sitting outside at a Happy Hour talking about CAS Thursday night, and got hailed on thrice.
• The Big Bang: Thursday night I went out looking for a bar. Being only three blocks away from ASU this was not a difficult task, but which bar to go to first. We walked into a basement bar called “The Big Bang” which advertises itself as a dueling piano bar. Holy Cow! If you are a fan of live music and find yourself in Tempe go to The Big Bang. We had an amazing time. The “I’m only going out for 1 drink” night turned into a night in which we had t o leave at 2:00 because Tempe closes down at 2:00.

So it was a good trip. I was completely exhausted Saturday night when I got back to Albany, but with my love of live music I went straight to Mahoney’s to see Replica. Just a couple more days of not working on projects then I fly down to Orlando for another conference.

That’s right A/C. I walked into my hotel room tonight, and the priorities were 1.) turn on A/C 2.) Scan for wireless networks. I guess more to follow but I’ve been traveling for 12-13 hours so I’m going to go relax.

I had this weird problem at work back in December that I thought I’d share. I had noticed that when I started new gnome-terminals, my prompts read:

I have no name!@urbs-19979

Now that’s weird, but I ignored it since the machine was working and I was in a series of meetings. However, when I started trying to ssh into other systems I was getting told

You don’t exist, go away!

At this point I verbally told my laptop “You don’t tell me no” which caused some weird looks but people moved on just fine. Since the problem was now getting in my way I had to look into it. After a while I had realized that by adding a username to my ssh commands (through -l user or user@host) I could use ssh again. This caused me to think something was wrong with /etc/passwd, and I was right. My user couldn’t read /etc/passwd, fixed the permissions and all was well. I forget what I did to muck up /etc/passwd, but I’m sure if I had been using vipw like you’re supposed to I wouldn’t have had this problem…..but then again I would have missed out on the great gems that programmers leave in their programs.

I’ve got a list of tools I think are cool or useful, so I’m going to start sharing my thoughts of them here….isn’t that the point? So today’s tool is iftop. It can be used to display bandwidth usage on an interface. If you can’t figure out what it does based on the name, their description of the tool lays it out well:

iftop does for network usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It listens to network traffic on a named interface and displays a table of current bandwidth usage by pairs of hosts. Handy for answering the question “why is our ADSL link so slow?”.

Small and simple tool, what’s not to like. Real good for those times that you know something is eating traffic but don’t know what. Check out screenshots of iftop at http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/iftop/.

Have you ever have one of those weeks where at the beginning you thought everything was going to be reasonable and time would just pass quickly, but then you run into a wall and everything falls apart? Why can’t this week just end? To make it worse, I was on the way home I was thinking about how it is supposed to snow late this afternoon and how that might mean not going to Poughkeepsie Friday, but now I don’t see how that helps at all.

On a brighter note, here’s a great reference for any How I Met Your Mother fan.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother

Doing these quizzes isn’t my normal thing, but this had some odd questions and pegged me pretty well. It helps that I did not feel like even attempting to catch up on anything tonight.

Find your own pose!

What’s this? Another post? That’s right, 5 this year. There are reasons for tonight’s post. Here is what’s going on:

• Moved to WordPress. I finally did it. I had planned on doing a lot of testing and making the whole thing smooth…didn’t happen. I can say that the Serendipity (s9y) to WordPress Importer I got here worked well. I found out while testing the RSS feed however that the import task set the guid in the database to the test domain I was using which led to problems. Over all I’m liking WordPress, I just need to find a theme I like.
• Post #100! Evidently this is post number 100, nothing too special. However with #100 marking my fifth post of the year and noticing that Bruce only has four, I’m declaring war. I kind of wanted to participate National Blog Posting Month (NoBloPoMo) just to get me to post more often, but challenging Bruce is a more obtainable goal.

I had more to post, but between problems upgrading and watching BSG: Razor I have forgotten what I had to share. Oh well, I need to stop with the mega posts anyway.

..I guess. I figured now that we are almost done with September, I’d make my fourth post of the year. Nothing really to report. I wake up, go to work, get annoyed, go home to watch TV, sleep. Occasionally there are drinking sessions which leads to fun, but life is fairly routine. But just to recap:

- Free conferences are great.
- The Space is being shutdown. Parazoid.net is now hosted virtually in Atlanta.
- I want to get back into PHP and doing development work. I have to thank having to do perl work at Marist for getting the programming bug back into me. I have a couple of small ideas of things to do once I get some updates/upgrades done.
- I’m starting to get back into the Internet again. For some reason, every time Summer comes around I stop paying attention to the Internet and stop reading email and news and completely ignore my feed reader until it is so large that it crashes my machine (+45k unread messages isn’t enough). But I am cleaning up and getting back into things, so hopefully I’ll start posting random stuff again, especially fun tips and tricks that I see. So many things to share. I am playing with WordPress and plan on switching soon. Does anyone have any suggestions on good plugins and/or themes?
- I live in Red Hook. Moved up in June with Dave and Sara.
- Have I said free conferences are great? Free food and an excuse to not be at work and not use up vacation day, wow!

Alright, I’m out of random points, and this session is almost over. I do feel bad not pointing to a cool tool or something, so go to xkcd and read through the entire archive. I’ve probably plugged it before, but my god is it good.