Thursday, June 28th, 2001

Time	Event
12:39a	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)
1:53a	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)

2001/06/28 [Calendar]

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