guod.net

Wow, so I'm moved over to my ISP and you should be getting this at a little bit faster speed now. It was a struggle, but that's what I've come to expect with any public communications service these days. At least when I had problems this time around, I could walk in to my ISP's office instead of waiting to talk to an MSN or Qwest person on the phone. In fact, I was even offered a beer the first time I stopped by. That's good service. Much better than "please unplug your modem for 20 seconds and tell me if the red light comes on blah blah blah."

The major obstacles for me were these:

• Apparently running with the wrong version of CBOS will prevent the modem from training on the DSL line. I'm not sure if this is by coincidence or by intention, but it really confused me. I was under the impression that no matter what, the green WAN light should at least blink. But running CBOS 2.3.x, the light never even came on. Once I flashed the modem to 2.4.6, everything was great--almost...
• CBOS is still a confusing piece of crap (at least to a guy who's desperately impatient to see his new 1.5Mbit DSL speeds). Getting the NAT situation up and running was really a pain in the arse! Mainly this was due to my inexperience, but I would have killed for a tcpdump or some access to a traffic log on the modem's two interfaces. Is there a way to do that? I couldn't find one. Thank goodness I only switch ISPs once every few years.

So now Elly and I are going to finish watching Meet the Fockers after we put Tova to bed, and then I'm going to read some rails stuff I guess. Oh yeah, I bought iWork last night, so I wanted to play around with that and maybe update my resume (just cause I haven't in a couple of years). Also, I'm hoping that it's going to allow elly to update her dad's site with a cool new look (and more photos!).

I watched this creepy documentary last night called The Corporation. Despite the fact that it made me want to move to a socialist country and start growing hemp, I think it was pretty well done. It was definitely educational. I realized that I have only worked for corporations since returning to the U.S. from Sweden. It was one of those realizations where I was like, "Wow, corporations, they are terrible and those people that work for them--how can they be so greedy?" but then I caught myself, "Hey, wait a minute! I'm one of those people and I'm not that greedy (i hope). I even liked that documentary!"

That mental hiccup reminded me of one of Chomsky's comments in this film, which was that the corporation itself is the monstrosity, not necessarily the individuals that run it or work for it. In fact, he said, the people who run the corporation may be really nice guys who are sincere about doing the right thing. His point was that the corporation itself was monstrous, so the offices those people occupy are necessarily part of the monster. Thinking of it that way was a new insight for me. Even when I don't agree with Chomsky, I like listening to him. Very articulate ... and clever.

Finally, I'm most of the way done with my new "server closet". And the downstairs coat closet is no longer full of wires and loud computer fans.

BEFORE

AFTER

We had a great time at Petsmart today, buying Tova her first pets. We have named them Kip and Napoleon.

So, when I signed up for the Greenland Trail 50K, I didn't realize that it was technically an ultramarathon. Anyway, the longest race I had ever run was a half-marathon, so I thought this would be good enough, even though it was a little bit longer than a normal marathon. The course was about 7.5 miles, so the 50K was a four-lap race. Four laps of hell. Okay, it wasn't that terrible, but, being April, there was still quite a bit of snow and mud on the course. The fact that there were ATV tracks through the snow was supposed to help, but I found instead it had the same effect on me as trying to run on a balance beam. Keeping my strides within that small 8-10 inch tire track made me look more like a drunk failing the white line test than a marathon runner. Especially by mile 27 or 28. That was probably the most challenging thing about the course for me.

Here are some pics from that day:

Me before the punishment began.
Tova cheering me on!
Me coming into the finish at the end of lap 4...
Finally, it's over!
It felt so good to get off my feet when it was all over.

Looking back, I feel like this was a good experience, and I'm glad I did it ... but I don't think I'm going to make a habit out of ultramarathons. At least not until I'm old and I have to run slowly. I saw some things that will probably scar me for the rest of my life, including some very time-efficient people who could not bother to take more than 2 steps off the trail to relieve themselves. In fact, they didn't even bother to take their shorts down (and I'm talking numero deuce here--yeah, no joke). It goes without saying that I'm now convinced that ultramarathoners are a really tough bunch of crazy people, and I'm not really at a point where I can consider myself one of them. When I finally get over my post-race laziness and fast food spree, my next race is going to be at most a half-marathon.

If you're reading this, then there's a good chance it's coming to you via my Soekris NET4511. I'm getting ready to fully switch over to it some time today. I need to make a few more configuration changes and then do some tests, like simulating power outages and verifying my wireless connectivity. Hopefully by tonight I'll have some before and after pics for you. Oh and I'm supposed to write something on last week's race since there are some new pics up in the gallery.

Well, after several phone calls and equally as many confused support people, I finally got Qwest to switch my ISP to Netrack. What does this mean? Well, hopefully it means I'll stop tithing to Bill Gates (I was using MSN as my ISP), you'll get much faster speeds when reading my blog and browsing the gallery, and there's a small chance that this site will be out of comission for a while next Thursday when they pull the plug and give it to Netrack.

I'm also getting a little Cisco 678! So goodbye to that crappy MSN modem!

I've made a discovery that I think is appropriate to share here. It's especially fitting that I'm writing about it on my blog, as I made this discovery while working on the code that runs my blog. So here's what I've found: by tracking my own progress on personal projects, I am more efficient and less likely to drift away from them before they're finished. This might not sound like a lot to those of you who live in your mom's basement and don't see the sun for 13 days at a time while you're debugging the kernel of your favorite opensource operating system. But for guys like me, who get about an hour or two of personal computing time max per day, anything we can do to make ourselves more efficient is worth trying.

The way I've been tracking my progress lately is using subversion. It's the first time I've actually held myself accountable with a version control system, despite numerous attempts through college and my first couple of jobs. Back then, rcs was too simple and cvs was too complex (and Doug was too lazy). A little while ago, I finally mustered the ambition and set aside enough free time to read most of the important chapters of the subversion book. I then set about importing the code from this blog into my first repository. Since that day, any changes I've made to the code base have been committed to the repository with a relevant change description. And that has made all the difference.

A lot of nights I would normally walk away from my computer feeling like I just didn't get enough done, or there was just too much left that I hadn't even begun to accomplish anything. But now, thanks to svn, I don't feel like that anymore. Every night that I make a commit, I have proof that I did something and that my project moved forward. As an added bonus, this mode of working keeps me focused on small, achievable goals. I don't get lost in the usual daydreams of massively impressive features that would take many man-months to implement.

Well, if you're a regular-checker of this blog, you know that I have not been a regular-poster. It's probably been almost a month since I've written anything new on this page, so I don't blame you if you had almost given up hope. What you didn't know was that somewhere out on that nebulous cloud of fiber and light yours truly was steadily working and chipping away at a pile of home network maintenance and bug fixes. Well, I've finally reached a point where I can stop messing with the mundane adminning I've been doing and upload the latest code from my repository to my webserver. Voila! I don't know what I call my blog, but if it had a name, this would be [doug's blog's name] 2.0. Or maybe 0.2. I'm not sure.

Most of the improvements (categories, some bug fixes, UI reorganization) were done in anticipation of a Linux Journal article that I was writing at the time. As it turns out, I never did get around to releasing a tarball with my article. When Ara and I finished the article I had just gotten my Mac Mini, so all heck broke lose on my home network and I guess I just sort of lost track of my blog source and posting a link for readers. Oh well. I'll get around to it some day.

I've got lots more to fill you in on, including The Saga of the Soekris 4511, The Mini-Ultra Marathon From Hell, and My Love Affair with Subversion Over WebDAV and HTTPS. All very interesting and very important stories which I know you'll stay tuned for. But for right now I need to finish getting this new code deployed on my webserver and then go watch a movie with my wife. Later!