Shame

I used to write VRML, one character at a time, but that was many years ago. Now, it seems state of the art for 3d product display has turned to pre-rendering 100's of images and displaying them via flash. Unfortunately, not all webapps act kindly when simultaneously serving 100's of small images.

I wish i could render our scenes in VRML - i really do - especially considering the lack of complexity of the scenes in question. But i'm also willing to attempt the "new style", and towards that end i've created this moveable view of a recognizer (only tested in Firefox 2/Mac and IE7/win). It's a Proof-of-Concept consisting of 3 files: the html, the css, the image. Here's a scaled-down view of the entire image i'm using:


That image is composed of 612 rendered views of a povray file that i made a couple years back, in anticipation of a compsec shirt i never printed. The PoC concept is rather simple - reposition the one large image based on what button the user clicks. With a little bit of work, it can translate to clicking and dragging the image, working better around the poles, and maintaining consistent speed.

I'd like to deliver my PoC in Flash, as that's what the original target was set for, but i'm not really sure how to begin creating a flash file - that magick is beyond my current capabilities. For now, i'm happliy disgraced by my PoC. Oh, whatever happened to the wonderful world that VRML promised?

Where do the children play?

Monday, 4am. 6 more hours of work and i've done my 40 hours for the week. But as before, i'll put in at least 40 more over the next 5 days. What is this? I can do 70 hours of work in 3 days, but ask me to read a textbook chapter for a class and i'll have it done in a month, maybe.

When we were much younger, my brother and i used to play a game with small soldiers and a marble. Each set up a series of soldiers, then rolled the marble to knock down the other's army; killing was so easy. Why can't i remember any other games we played together?

I've been thinking through my vacation plans for next month. The problems i had in June keep coming back: i'll lose so much money, going on vacation, is it worth it? Time enough to relax in the grave, to paraphrase the Great One.

But for now it's put-up-or-shut-up time: 4:30am, and still that one script to write. You know the one: once written, it'll either cost them a few million bucks, or go unnoticed by all but 2 or 3 people. Irregardless, it needs to be written, and instead i'm busy blogging.


In final, completely unrelated news, i've nominated a friend for sysadmin of the year in what is sure to be their most rambling, incoherent entry.

The Past

And now for a step back in time.

Heat

It's hotter here that it was in Africa, but that's not the kind of heat i'm referring to.

I returned to a number of issues at work. Some problems new, spontaneous - who knows why they appeared, perhaps just to welcome me back. Other problems there while i was away, asked to give them to others, instead left to greet me, and only mentioned at 4pm Friday, please note you need to have it done by the weekend. Nice to come back to overtime, work through the weekend, get about 1 hour of sleep and crawl to my mom's for some food.

Work hours

If i had taken Monday as a vacation day, i wouldn't have had to work this week yet i would have put in my 80 hours work per two weeks (in other words, by Monday i had put in 72 hours of work and i still had a work week to go on the two week pay cycle). Of course on Monday i still had well over 40 hours of work that needed to be done, so i'm still doing lots of work. The overtime is nice, and after this post i'm buying some computer gear for myself, as well as pricing plane tickets for my next vacation (planned for most of June). Unless i pass out from exhau

One More

I was also mentioned in my work's newsletter, which was the real reason i wanted to be on CNN.

While biking home last night, some people drove by me and yelled out "We support you!" This marks the first time anyone has yelled a supportive comment to me (usually i hear "get off the road!" or "get a car!" and it sure beats the "stubborn shit" comment i received earlier today). I'd like to believe that either they recognized me from CNN or the CNN bit made them more aware of all city cyclists, but whatever the reason, their words of support will surely help keep me warm through the rest of winter

Flying High

I'm startled awake, not knowing where i'm flying to, unsure if i've packed accordingly. It's a strange airplane, very spacious, and only 3 other passengers. I wonder if i'm the pilot? Wherever we end up, i'll need my wits about me to handle the problems that are sure to arise, especially since a couple of my fellow passengers look suspicious...

6 hours sleep in two days, and being awake 23 hours past that finds me sitting in the server room, waiting for a third level tech in the UK to call us back. If i lean back and start to doze, the air being pushed around by the computer fans and AC units becomes the hum of an airplane, the physical discomfort of the chairs rivals AeroFlot, and with the nervous anticipation of what will happen in the next few hours, i could be heading to the DRoC.

In the end, the problem was resolved around noon, i caught an hour sleep on my office floor, worked until a little past 4, then went home for another hour of sleep before staying up til 4am. Wasn't quite the 70 hours sans sleep of bygone times; i must be getting old.

First Day in

4:40am
Walk through the Bird Flu Quarrantine folks, waiting for the immigration oficer to grunt at me in disgust, like the Japanese fellow did for not having an address i was staying at. She doesn't.

4:55am
I see my bag, i'll grab it and walk through customs and they'll say nothing to me, barely even look at me as i walk by.

5:00am
I'm really in China now. Too early for the Hotel Reservation place at the airport, but up ahead is a 24 hour cafe with what appears to be a fairly well-stocked bar.

5:15am
It's hot - 21°C or so - and the chinese noodles (with beef, oops) are steaming hot too. Hopefully they know how to make a Bloody Mary here - that should cool me down a bit (hey, i's 5:15pm MI time!) I eat while wondering where i'll stay tonight, what i'll do in the upcoming days.

5:30am
A couple Spaniards walk in, and a Chinese man, all speaking Spanish. At LAX, China Airways flights depart from the same concourse as TACA, and on the flight here were a substantial number of Spanish speakers. I wonder if the language will follow me around the world (probably will - we notice what we want).

5:45am
Finished soup, waiting for waitress.

5:50am
Mumbling my way through explaining a Bloody Mary - she doesn't get it. How can a waitress not know "vodka" or "Smirnoff" or "Absolut" when there's a bottle of it behind her? Tsing Tao it is, and i'm back to pondering the more important, pressing issues at hand, like where i'll watch the game that's scheduled to start in just over 2 hours, if my time-math is right.

6:05am
Trying to remember the 2 Chinese characters i tried to memomorized on the plane: "exit" and "open". Still remember a couple of phrases in Serbian, which impresses a couple friends, and a few in Khmer, which impresses no one (yet!). I also wonder how long til my accent kicks in. During the Belgrade trip, it took under 2 days for me to start speaking with a latino accent.

6:06am
A large group of airport employees has gathered outside, a woman speaking to them. The Spaniards are speaking about garlic manufacturing and processing. I'm wondering what work e-mails await me - if i had my way, i'd still handle all the mail i normally do, but i don't know that they could take the delay (ok, as is there will be a delay anyways). I like my job, and love being able to do so much from around the world. If i had my way, this is all i'd do - travel the world and put in hours wherever i am.

6:20am
The employees are going their separate ways and i notice there is now someone at the hotel reservation counter. Must go ask for a hotel with the Pistons - at this point i still don't know they'll disappoint all of us.

6:22am
Just finished my first Chinese beer in China. Now to find a place to stay.

workstudy

It's been over 50 hours since i last slept, not counting Friday morning's hour nap i took on my office floor. 30 hours ago i got home feeling dead tired, having slept but 4 hours the night before, and 4 before that, and checked e-mail - main database server was down (why can't we do RAC?). Couldn't let that sit lest i lose my superhero status.

The 30 minute nighttime bike ride to work woke me enough to resolve the situation by morning, just before anyone noticed that the major service was down, just before anyone was around to start yelling about their inability to register students, and just before anyone was around to say "good job" (but there are countless other diatribes on the haplesness of a sysadmin's job, i won't bore you with a rehash of those, i'm working on my own particular hapless diatribe here).


In 8 days i'll be heading to a graduation ceremony. The student speaker will speak of sleepness nights spent with classmates in the studio, of the comraderie, of the endless work, of the shared bleary eyed mornings with friends. I'll remember no one said "thank you" when i singlehandedly brought up that database server before registration started (but i did get some nice overtime). There will be more words on how tough the regimented studies were, on the uncertainties of projects, on the deadlines, on the friends they asked for help. I'll remember all those tasks on my work todo list, some of which have been there for years. I'll wish i had help through the tougher tasks - these days it's an increasingly solitary job.

18 hours after that grad speech, i'll start a 80 hour stretch during which i'll sleep under 10 hours, and during which i'll begin to wonder why i couldn't hack school. I can work for 36 hours straight. I can sit and work in front of a computer for 12 hours before i need to get up. I can get home drunk at the wee hours of the morning and still be alert enough to solve any work problem that presents itself. But school work? It's an unsurmountable labour for me.


Still, challenges are good for the soul. The reason i learned to put my pants on right leg first, decided to eat vegan, am growing my hair out, or bike to work, even through the dead of winter: gotta constantly challenge yourself, in both big ways and small ways (lot of that i learned from my brother). Perhaps one day i will find a way to complete the school-task without resorting to a Herculean solution.


In other news, i'm tired.

Family Bonds

A few weeks ago i started using Instant Messaging in order to ease communication with some co-workers. I've since expanded to include some friends, and i have accounts via AIM, Google Talk, MSN, and Yahoo in order to accomodate everyone else's pre-existing company of choice. I had avoided IM for years due to its more synchronous, wide-scale nature, but figured a change was in order.

A few days ago a co-worker sends me this message: good morning :). No one at work talks to me about non-work related things, so i waited for this co-worker to send me the problem that needed solved. Three minutes later, Rex asks me if i'm logged in, because the other co-worker had messaged him that i hadn't responded. I told him i hadn't responded because i hadn't been asked anything, which Rex forwards on to the co-worker, and i get the following message from that co-worker: i hear i dont know frisco aim protocol... rex is fixing it for me :).

Language is a tricky subject for me and daily i feel uncomfortable with English, despite it's being my first language. Phrases like don't look a gift horse in the mouth are strange to me and make me pause to ponder their ramifications (the Trojan Horse was a gifted horse, had the Trojans looked in its mouth perhaps Troy would not have been lost, so is the phrase deceitful in nature?). I generally try to focus on a person's questions and actions, at least at work.

Ok, it's not really language, but the way a particular culture uses its language - i haven't been immersed in any culture long enough to fully learn its language nuances. While this has a (sometimes delightful, sometimes annoying) side-effect of giving me a distinct voice of my own, its main effect seems to be distancing me from the rest of society.

I realise this situation is made more unique by my own history, that my history is shared by only a few people, and as such i can depend on one and only one person to truly understand the ramifications of someone saying good morning :) to me, from what the hell do they want? to crap, i should respond, what is appropriate? and all the hrm, 3 o's in that one in between.
That one person is my brother.

work

Was told today that i either take 3.4 weeks vacation by the end of June or i lose it. June is a long way off; i'll wait 'til May to think about it again.

In other news, the best part of my job is the free pen i get every couple months. Today's is a laser pointer/flashlight/stylus pen - it makes everything worthwhile (where everything = .1%).

graphing paper

I made graphs today. Not very pretty ones, just generic MS Excel graphs.

I like making graphs: uncreative work to present uncreative, repetitive tasks - 5 runs of 3 tests on 3 variables, summarized in 6 pages (with my name on each one) that only 4 people will ever see and will influence nothing at all, but serves to answer the question "how was your weekend?" in the most mundane, straightforwardly obfuscated manner possible - thus being precisely the embodiment of how my weekend was.

I like run-on sentences too- long-winded explorations of misuses of punctuation, adjectives, and clauses, used to say what should be said in a Hemingway phrase but ultimately saying little to nothing at all.

Fame, Fortune and Everything that Goes With It

Online movie by Rex, where i play a supporting role. Note how well i play the part of the Uninterested Employee.

While you're at YouTube, be sure to check out the Man dancing. Yes, it is just a man, dancing, around the world, and yes, you should be jealous of him.

Work.

I am supposed to be at work in 4.5 hours for some hardware repair on a major server. The rest of the day i get to interview people for a web programming position. Of the applicants we will be interviewing, 66% have at least one Masters degree; i am a collidge dropout.

Today at work i was talking with a coworker and an instructor when the instructor - in reference to the semester's beginning - asked us, "are you guys all fired up?" I responded, "FIRED?!?!?" as if i had only heard certain words. My coworker was kind enough to laugh and say to me, "you walk on water up there, you would be the last to get fired - the rest of us would be gone and you'd still be working there." I hope he knows how deep the "Thank you" i said was meant to be.

Still, a degree or three would be in order. Maybe i can lease one of my brother's.

Just Another 9 to 5 day

Yes, Wednesday was just another 9 to 5 day, except that in this case it was 9pm Tuesday until 5pm Wednesday, and that after working 8am-6pm on Tuesday. I get home Wednesday, sleep for a couple hours, eat, then find new problems and work again from 10pm until a little after midnight. In a 40 hour period, i put in 32 hours of work, a new record for me (though i think i also did a straight 30 hours of work once).

It's so good to be back from vacation, where i stayed up for 40 hours straight just sitting in airports and train stations. Which reminds me, i meant to write a couple follow up trip posts but haven't had the time, due to work. Maybe tomorrow.

Cute Coffee

I was going to leave, but as i was heading out, the cute girl in the coffee shop gave me a free cup of coffee, so i took it as a sign from god that i was supposed to stay and work longer.

There are (at least) two points wrong with that statement.

Saw episode III tonight; glad that's over.

Decided to come into work afterwards - here's me in the server room at 4am.

vacations

Skipped going overseas and spent the week and a half at home. Spent the time relaxing, and then working on a little project for April 1st. Back at work, lots of stuff to do, still wanting a vacation.

Cultural phrases

I've been working quite a bit over the last couple weeks, enough that the world has started to turn to static, but it wasn't until today that i started making really silly mistakes. At least i've been able to turn things around - i caught myself turning a server silly so i stopped what i was doing, thought for a second, set my jaw, looked at that serial console, and said, "Now i show you trick or two", and everything is working better now.

Bike Helmet

I have a couple stickers on my bike helmet other than the shiny ones that keep me alive. One of these is security related and the other is the sticker off the Battle Royale dvd i received today.

Our supervisor gave us gift certificates to Barnes & Noble for the holidays, and as with most actions that my supervisor takes, this cert is overly time consuming - i'm not sure what to buy because B&N doesn't offer what i want, like Battle Royale. Since i couldn't find it in B&N i decided to buy it at ebay, and i got Battle Royale I & II for $28 including shipping.

My brother told me about Battle Royale a while ago, and since then i've seen a variety of Takeshi Kitano flicks - Sonatine, Brother, Zatoishi, Taboo - but Battle Royale was a little more difficult to come by (ok, Liberty St Video probably has it but i haven't been in there for years, it's way too close to where i live). I've especially wanted to see it after reading some reviews about it, such as this one.

It's a good movie, not Unforgiven good but Dawn of the Dead good, which in its own way is a goodness i respect a whole lot more than a Shine goodness. I enjoy movies that can be readily dismissed as "horror" or "action" without realising the social commentary underlying the premise (that's not to say that one dimensional films like Napolean Dynamite or Saved can't also be good, but they won't have the depth of Night of the Living Dead, and that's a bad thing because then they work iff the viewer has an indepth understanding of the culture surrounding the story; in a similar manner i doubt the Simpsons or Andres Serrano will be widely understandable past our own cultures).

Spielberg can keep his in-your face messages as depicted through Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan, sometimes an audience needs the juxtaposition created by the distance between the story and the message - it is as important as chiaroscuro in painting or contrapposto in sculpture.

And if i continue down that line of thought, maybe, just maybe i'll learn to appreciate musicals as well.

Vacation Time

Supposedly i've been on vacation since Wednesday, yet i've logged almost as many work hours as i have vacation hours. I don't mind - i enjoy my work and it keeps my mind someplace where i feel i'm doing something halfway worthwhile.

In the hours that i don't work, i get to read. Tonight i also visited and ate with my abuelita at her house, along with my father and uncle. We then went over to see one of my aunt's - she recently opened an internet shop in her garage, a nice little place with 10 computers set up for use. In 6 hours my mother arrives in town and in around 12 we head for Arequipa, and, eventually, the world's second deepest canyon and then the deepest canyon, if i can convince them of it. The air at 4000m; i'm looking forward to it.

Arrived in Lima

Flew to Lima earlier today.

I checked my mail from the Dallas airport and saw that one of my more important servers had crashed (it also came back up ok, total downtime of maybe 20 minutes, if even). Is it a coincidence that i also happened to be reading about the H.F. Harlow "the Nature of Love" study - the one which determined that creatures need the physical proximity of a comfortable figure in order to work properly?

I was the last person through immigration, and arrived at my father's place around 3:15am. I logged into my machine at WCC and have been working ever since. This is my vacation!

I've reached the point in my sleep deprivation pattern where i am feeling wavy as my mind starts to black out every now and then. Time to pull over to the side of the road and run around a bit, that should buy me another hour of driving time (or another good near-death story).

Will to Work

Every night when 2am rolls around i get a desire to head to work. It's late, i should be sleeping, i'm going to wake up in 5 hours no matter what, but i'd like to head to work right now, even if it's just so i can sleep on my office floor for a couple hours, wake up and type. To a degree it's escapist (deal with work instead of the rest of my life) but also it's invigorating to try to do good work when really tired, drunk, or otherwise less than fully abled.

To know that i can still ramble off solutions to problems even when asleep is rather refreshing. The first time i realised this i was a few beers into a conversation with Michael Anne - Nil called be up with some work problem. I rambled off "type in [long strings of commands], does it say [error codes]? Ok, do this: [longer strings of commands]. Is it working again? Good, e-mail [relevant person] and let them know what happened, thanks." Michael Anne was staring at me, amazed that i could recall such random (and most likely strange-sounding) strings at the bar, i too realised that i must know my job pretty well to have been that sure with Nil, and ever since have enjoyed such challenges. I'm sure it helps that i keep remembering the look on her face; she's a great woman and truly a best friend.

shirt update, work, alternate reality

3 hours pathing out the original screen capture plus 2 hours fine tuning the image, and i have a final image of the shirt ready for printing. That link leads to a smaller version, but if you compare that smaller version to the link in the previous post, you'll see a difference in the sharpness (hair isn't filled in, i'm debating leaving it white in the final print, there are already so many colours that need to get done, and the image i'm working off of is about 5 times as big). I don't have enough materials to make the screens just yet, though, and i might have to order them, so it might be another week before i begin the laborious process of transfering ink onto shirt, but it'll be so worth it...

Last night i gave a tour of the server room for one of the compsec classes, kept me here a bit late. This morning got to do it again for the unix admin class. Kind of hoarse now, having to talk for hours over the roar of the HVAC and servers is something i'm not so used to.

Spent too much work time looking through the CIA World Factbook , one of my favourite pasttimes. If i could write, i'd write a book in which UofM (approx 50k students, $3.8 billion total revenue) invades Belize (68k available military manpower, $18 million military expenditure) and forms the Republic of the University of Michigan, or in which Bill Gates (net worth: $48 billion) hires 6 million Chinese men for one year (GDP per capita: $5k, total cost of $30 billion), spends $10 billion to equip them, invades North Korea (~6 million available manpower, $5 billion military expenditure), uses his remaining $8 billion to rebuild the country afterwards, and is hailed as the greatest US patriot ever for taking out one of the Axis of Evil countries- i'm sure either would be a best seller.
Thinking about war in terms of raw numbers reminds me of The Fog of War : in one part Robert McNamara describes more efficiently bombing Japan during WWII while numbers fall from planes in vintage footage - quite a disturbing scene.

New T-Shirt (wip)

I'm bored at work and so have started up again on a side-project of mine: making this t-shirt a reality. It's from the Blame it on Lisa Simpsons Episode, and there are CafePress alternatives for this shirt, but i don't care for industrial iron-on quality in a shirt that i consider important - screenprinting is the only way to go.

Cameras

Spent part of today setting up an Axis Camera. These are pretty nice - we have one set up at work in the radio room and simple to set up. Lots of options, run linux on a cf card (don't remember the processor), along with ftp and web (via Boa). Solid state is nice. First photo taken with camera - the rest should eventually be located at http://www.wccnet.org/aboutwcc/webcamera/ and there is but one saved photo at http://www.wccnet.org/aboutwcc/webcamera/saved/wccplaza-20041130.jpg. I wonder how long it will be before one of the web folks removes that photo of Rex.

Work

My mother picked me up from the airport and one of the first stops i had to make was the office. Had to have her drive me there as i let my license expire and i didn't have the clothing for biking in the cold.

Yes i go to work immediately after i get back, my grandfather would be proud. Didn't have to - it was Friday after Thanksgiving and no one else was at work. Still it was good to go back.

My main reason for going was to reset a couple secondary servers, which took but a couple minutes. Checked my (physical) mail while i was there - had two smallish packages in my mailbox and a box on my desk. The smallish packages held a shirt each and the box was a Canon A75 digital camera (the A75 is the newer version of the A70 which is the lower end version of the A80 i own and love), all won via promos from APC.

The last time i won anything was also around my birthday, back in 1992. I wasn't going to buy a raffle ticket, but a friend of mine was quite insistent. The girl i was dating at the time was involved in the drawing and by complete chance, i'm sure, i happened to win the grand prize: a large basket full of american chocolates and other candies. That prize was just as useless to me as the camera and shirts - it was the beginning of the wrestling season and i had to lose a couple pounds. I gave the candies away to all my friends, as if i was so overwhelmed with joy at winning that i had to share. I only wrestled for two matches that year thanks to Tony Kikka (sp?) - during a training exercise with him something in my foot went POP and i was on crutches the rest of the season.

I'm giving the A75 to my father. He's the wealthiest person in our family but has no camera.