Below are the 6 most recent journal entries recorded in Allan's LiveJournal:

Friday, July 13th, 2001
11:14 am	Looks like Brust's Issola is out. As I was passing the WTC a couple of days ago I saw it prominently featured, and came in to look at it. In order to avoid WTC lines (and NYC prices!) I decided to pick it up at home, but was too tired to go out. I picked it up yesterday, though, but am still in the middle of Gerrold. Also picked up Delany's Dhalgren, Peter David's Sir Apropos of Nothing, GRRM's Clash of Kings, and 3 and 6 of Lost Universe. Rggh. Did it again. On the way out this morning, saw that Atlantic was in the mailbox. Oo, Mark Twain, Graham Greene and the Vatican, mad poets, and an attack on literary styles. Plus Mark Doty. Poetry has Agha Shahid Ali. Still plugging away at VUELTA, regexps and emulation environments, ble-ach. Yesterday I was so bored and frustrated I was punching my books out of the makeshift shelf upon which I keep them. Not a good sign. Gary is really pissing me off; I've been extremely generous and he keeps riding me. That in addition to the fact that he won't admit fault on that stupid diagram. Current Mood: moody Current Music: Fugazi, Waiting Room (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 10th, 2001
10:38 pm	Today This morning I picked Middle of Nowhere over Bulgakov. Picked over it on the morning train, but read the other T Capers Jones book, Estimating Software Costs that I had borrowed from Bill, the section on Sizing. I'm still trying to get a grasp of function point analysis without paying IFPUG $80 for the counting practices manual. At work, dug more into it, but spent most of the day with the VUELTA training program. PerformanceStudio choked processing Morpheus transactions. Hm. Looked over the session file, but no certificates seemed to pass, and yet I can't find out where requests and returns are made. I see how it requests files from other servers, but not how searches are made. Probably done in binary? Billy Idol video, "Cradle of Love." Looked through resources on Card Modeling. Gary just pisses me off, with his smarmy digs. "When you get on site, you'll get another shirt." VUELTA VUELTA VUELTA. Annette and I left at the same time as Scott, last ones there again. Protest against some Provost of NAHB right outside our building. Scott of course leaving for CT in his car, Annette and I homeward by way of PATH and NJ Transit. She mentioned that Jennifer wanted to talk to me. Sounds ominous. She's reading some Graham historical romancing featuring Vikings; I left Estimating at the office, so I start Middle. Same characters as in Star Hunt, though I remember something in Hunt about it being a different timeline or something? Hm. Arrogant Commander Korie wants captaincy. Tenchi Muyo first tape ("No Need for Discussion!") at home. Pore through MacAddict, Entertainment Weekly, Dr. Dobbs Journal that came in recently. I'll call Jen tomorrow. Current Mood: pissed off Current Music: The Beatles, Run for your life (Comment on this)
10:23 pm	Yesterday... Wow. The Catelyn ending of Game of Thrones was totally unexpected, and yet completely inevitable. (Robert Francis as the Satirical Rogue? Look it up.) It was shockingly good. I almost didn't want to read the Daenerys lead-in to the next book, but that went well. Eight hundred or so pages, phew. It has slack, but so does Odyssey. Squeak: thinking of abandoning the Compass class approach for a simple Pen. Hm. Waiting for the Squeak book to come out. Ordered a video capture card, but they were out; but they had a Kritter/CapSure package deal that they offered at the same price; a free camera? How could I refuse? At the office, talked with Karlene about Sunday; it did not go well, but she acquitted herself well, and none of the problems were her fault. I should have seen the semaphore problem coming sooner. I explained to her about the ordering problem that PerformanceStudio has with TCP connections and how to deal with it. Took the new guys and everyone else to lunch, but was called away to a meeting, so Kathryn took care of the bill, but she split it up! All I could do was giver her my share. So instead of treating the new guys, I stuck them with terrible service at a higher-than-usual price. Oh well. Meeting: Merrill doesn't seem to have much use for a test plan, but every time we've short-changed our process, we've been burned--never again. After, I read Capers Jones's Benchmarks, Assessments, Best Practices book and found some papers on function point counting practices. After, I assured Steve Johnson that we would not be using Strategizer in the engagement. Came home, finished GRRM, wow. Watched Galaxy Quest. Apparently KaZaA has a 59-function library to implement the KaZaA/Morpheus client, that they license to people who want to slap their own interface on it, like MusicCity did with Morpheus. Maybe I could get in touch with them to opt for a Macintosh version? Or should I try to reverse engineer the stuff on my own? Hm. Next, I guess David Gerrold's Middle of Nowhere, or perhaps Bulgakov's Master and the Margarita, whatever I grab first on my way. Current Mood: jubilant Current Music: Winter Hours, Roadside Flowers (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 8th, 2001
10:47 pm	Whoops Hm, skipped a week or so. So it goes. What happened in the last week? Finished Reichert. Started working on Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog again. Finished that; I wonder why I keep re-reading them? Granted I like them, but still, I ought to be reading new stuff. Still avoiding Game of Kings, I took up George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, now am 419 pages into it, and I'm still just halfway through. Whew! Friday at work, my boss reamed me out for not keeping up with the dailies. Stu has informed me and everyone else that I have the lowest count for last month, three. Before that, on Monday I went to the Dow Jones complex in Princeton to meet with Chris English in the Factiva building. Factiva is a joint Reuters/Dow Jones online news service. Joe and I did a pitch for OPNET ITGuru ACE, and Chris seems interested. Spent the week doing a proof of concept on some Sniffer logs they had given us. Did absolutely no work on my Smalltalk image. I picked up Darby Conley's Get Fuzzy: The Dog is Not a Toy (House Rule #4). Lord but that I love that freaky little cat. Also, Fry and Lewis's Over the Hedge, another favorite. Anime, just watching the same things over and over. I think I may return some DVDs that I can get elsewhere. I still haven't opened my old movies, Harvey and Groundhog's Day; I could probably get them for five to ten dollars cheaper elsewhere. I wish Citizen Kane and Bringing up Baby were out. Fourth of July was restful, if it weren't for the dodging and avoiding. Um. Saturday I went to Yen-yen's party. Oh, yes, and the Saturday before, Yen-yen had come over; that's when she invited me. Unfortunately, she invited Edward as well, through Mom, so he had to go, even though he was planning a party for someone else on the same night. He's pissed with her, but he never shows it to her through the night, but when I drive him back, he's palpably pissed. Playing Invader Zim episodes over and over. Anyway, the party went well but of course I had to leave early because of Edward. Danced a little. It was a seventies theme, and all the Seven Seven staffers were in seventies get-ups. Most of them are young enough I think that they saw less than two or three years of the seventies, hm. Met some people, Jo-Jo and Allan (no relation, ah ha ha ha, he chortled drolly) are friends of Jay's. Bam Bam put me at a table with some young people who ignored me; I talked with Bert, a mainframe guy. CICS and DB2 on an IBM/390, no less. Dancing, and though it was a seventies party, the DJ had nothing against dancehall reggae, thank Heavens. Though it was mostly four- or five-year old stuff, stuff they were playing when I was in college. I suppose that's considered classic nowadays. When was the last time I heard good dancehall reggae? "Wasn't Me" is fun, but not what I call swinging stuff. The DJ needed to cut the transitions between songs short, or make them more danceable. Saw a woman I sort of knew from the horrible Chase project under Hannick's wing; I don't remember what she was working on when I was there, and in fact never cared. It did give me a turn when I saw her, though; I figured I knew her from someplace. Edward didn't go to Church with me today, feeling sick. Ramona West invited me to some Thursday thing, but she gave me the wrong number, and I don't have her number! Rrgh. She said that some people from Rutgers hung out there, as if that were an inducement. Trying to put a Lettermen CD together from some CDs Mom has but never plays, to get me out of the doghouse. Trying to find a video capture PCMCIA card for a PowerBook. Trying to keep my head above water at work, and do my taxes before the fifteenth, so I don't feel so overwhelmed next month. Gotta get papers from my various banks, and E*Trade, dammit. Ordered a Handspring Visor Edge, because of the rebate offer--I'm sending my US Robotics Pilot 5000, broken as it is, it's only good for bragging rights to being an early sucke--er, adopter. Still thinking about getting a PBK thing, but not sure which. It's not like I wear jewelry at all. And is it for the snob appeal, as Susan said, or am I not fooling myself when I say that it means I'm dedicated and committed to the liberal arts? What have I done for the liberal arts lately? Started committing my Imperial Immanate thing to electronic bits, transferring it from the scribbles I did in Roy's apartment in St. Louis when I was working at AG Edwards. Long time coming. Current Mood: tired Current Music: Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 28th, 2001
1:53 am	Secundus Mood icon is the closest I can find to wired. Close enough I guess. The inaugural entry was written yesterday and I forgot to post, which is why this post comes hard on its heels. Forewent Dunnett to re-read Reichert's Nightfall book on the train. We did a Welcome-in for the new guys. Well, nothing actually so formal as Cherryh's Finity's End ceremony. But they're out of the training room and into the bullpen. Dragged an air conditioner from the other room. Jon and I talked about the VUELTA presentation. Most of the day I was picking at the various projects on my desk, and searching through the web and Usenet for materials and methodologies of analysis, modeling, and simulation. Arsham's site has a lot of nice material, if scattered. Monthly meeting today. Nice to see everyone, chat with Roy in St. Louis over the intercom. Jennifer didn't come, nor Ron Delgado. Afterwards went to Gators at the seaport. Boy it's hot, but the scenery is nice. There's a pretty waitress with, je n'sais quois, an attitude, sort of flirty and insolent, who never looks back, never comes closer than twenty feet away. Sigh. Matt and Meredith (not Melanie--this is the third time I made that same mistake) have split, as of a month ago. They were going to get engaged next month. I'm stunned. What does one say about that? Ronnie confirmed what I gathered from something Annette said last week: she and Scott the network guy are an item. And now that I know that they're an item some things from when she was still training coordinator are starting to click in my head. Such nice people; what a great couple. I left at ten, hopped onto the next PATH, and arrived about thirty minutes before the next train. Jon left about a half hour earlier than me and was waiting for about forty minutes at the station. He's going on vacation over the next week, and I made a certain bet about a certain party and a certain "digital fetter." Various projects. After I've done the salesman presentation, I want to retarget it to the rest of our engineers, so they can recommend it when an OPNET situation pops up. It's like a recognition manual for when to bring up the subject. Also, a complete process checklist for PTAP/RAMP for analyzing, characterizing, and modeling workload. Current Mood: hyper Current Music: Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes (Comment on this)
12:39 am	Inaugurate First post. What's happening now? I finished Pullman's Subtle Knife seven days ago, and Neil Gaiman's American Gods three days ago. I caught Neil at the World Trade Center signing last Tuesday, but am kind of pissed that I didn't try to go to the Magnetic Fields show/Gaiman reading at the Bottom Line; now I think Stephin &co are in Norway or something. Where was I? Oh, AG: I suspected the murderer a few pages after the sheriff came over to Shadow's. Low Key was easy, and the big con at the center was guessable. The ending tied things up nicely, but the post-climactic wrap-up was rather long. It reminded me of Dobyns's Wrestler's Cruel Study, with a less digressive plot. Right afterwards, I started and finished Dan Hood's Strife's Gold piece. Good stuff. I hope the Fanuilh series finds a new publisher. The books remind me of Asprin and Abbey's Thieves World shared world, with the same sense of the awesome breaking into the ordinary, but with none of the abrupt changes of style that goes along with a shared world. Now I'm trying to start Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles with Game of Kings, but the writing is rather mannered. Also working on Capers Jones's Software Assessments, Benchmarks and Best Practices. Jon hasn't brought The Deadline back yet. Actually I don't need it so much as I want to put some of those tips into my copybook. Replay weekend and I went hog wild. Ugh. The Lost Universe series; a Gasaraki; Harvey; Monty Python and the Holy Grail; other anime, Groundhog's Day. I embarrassed myself twice asking for Bringing Up Baby and Citizen Kane when they are not yet on DVD. Who'ld ha' thought? Third Man in special edition (don't have it yet...er, don't have it) but not Kane? Jerry Archibald died a few days ago. A great loss. Also Carroll O'Connor. Big SqueakCentral update. Oops, better update my work image. Smalltalk project: Is there a Morph that can give me a single view into a Form, sort of like an Observer or an MVC view? There are just too many subclasses in the image to read, and none of them are commented very well. I cleared PRAM and rebuilt the desktops of my three partitions, and I haven't had a freeze since. Er, yet. Yesterday, saw George Chan on the subway; we talked about Schering Plough. He's now at Standard and Poors. Staff meeting yesterday, er, day before yesterday. The OPNET capture agent seems to have been either hardware or BIOS related, but, silly me, I changed more than one thing at a time, and now I don't know why I have one good installation and two bad on the same blasted hardware. It looks as if I'm stuck in the office until an OPNET assignment comes along or we become desperate for performance/scalability testers, but there are two people besides me on the beach that could do it, so I'm not holding my breath. Looks like an opportunity at Merrill Lynch. I wonder if James Merrill is held in any regard anywhere there? I am trying to reverse engineer the protocol for Morpheus. Does that violate the terms under which I installed it? Hm. Better check. Current Mood: blank Current Music: Magnetic Fields, 100000 Fireflies (1 Comment |Comment on this)