Category: Life. Don’t talk to me about life.

There’s some cosmic balance that makes it necessary that, on a day when I really should get up early and get working, our cat decides that this it’s a good day to wake me up by dumping a glass of water on my head.
Twice.

How’s THAT for an unusual topic?
I bought my VW Golf TDI from Bernardi VW about 2 years ago, and I’ve been pretty pleased with the service and support they’ve been giving me. I had a broken FM antenna they fixed under warranty with a minimum of hassle, and have basically been pleasant to deal with.
I needed to get my rear center brake light fixed, as well as get the car inspected, so I gave them a buzz. They happily said I could come right over and they could do it on the spot. Excellent!
I drove over, and pulled into their receiving bay, handed over the keys, checked in, and with some trepedation, headed toward the traditional dull waiting area.
This time, however, I had my trusty IBM T40 Laptop with me, so I figured I’d get a little work done while waiting. Fortunately, there was a comfy table and chair set there, so I set up shop on the table, planning on doing some coding while I waited.
But, whats this? My little wireless indicator was on full green. “Huh!” – and lo, I was on the net! Bernardi has free wireless access in their showroom / waiting area. How cool is that?
I was online with no hassle, able to do mail, irc, and other goodies while waiting for the car to be done.
Of course, they did need to order a part, alas, so I’ll need to go back tomorrow to finish things up, but at least I know I’ll be able to geek while waiting.

Yes, I’m actually participating in this. Honestly, it’s sort of hard to argue with a structure where you have food, a big play area for the kids (mmm, human habitrails), -and- wireless internet access. It’s just a bonus that McDonalds is actually doing this for a reasonable price ($2.95 for 2 hours of wifi access). As I sit, Tim and I are chatting, I’m able to blog, and the kids are functioning as 40lb hamsters. (Tim points out there needs to be a wheel in the playroom to complete the image)

So I’ve done a couple radio spots, been involved in several episodes for an online radio comedy called The Fantastic Fate of Frederick Farnsworth the Fifth, and enjoyed it immensely. I’ve always thought that voice acting is something I can do well, and would have fun doing more of.
So, why not put together a demo tape and a website? So I did. Want to hear the sultry sounds of my voice and some silly tracks I’ve done? Well, feel free to wander over to www.davesvoice.com and check it out.
Comments on the content, site design, suggested links, how I sound, etc are all welcome. I’m going to be adding more links and content as things progress, but I think things look pretty good for a launch.
Whadya think?

There are few tracks that can get someone going in the morning better than Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” (aka the Peanuts Theme Song). Few others bring on a serious case of office-chair-bopping.
Thanks Radio Paradise.

11:43pm
End of the con. We’ve been calling this sort of ‘Arisia ’05 – The Extended Edition’. Many folks decided to just stay in the hotel this evening, and try to make our way home tomorrow. We hauled out the Registration terminals and set up a LAN game of FreeCiv – since I was done with services for Arisia, it was nice just to relax and game for a while.
Now the laptop is the last thing that needs to be put away, and the rest of the work is done. All the terminals and printers are packed up in the shipping cases, and we’ll load them out into the van tomorrow.
I’m tired, but it’s a mostly good tired. A lot of things learned, we’re already making plans for next years event.
11:58am
The word of the day is ‘snow!’ – 18-20″ of snow fell overnight, and it’s windy as all git out. There’s nasty storm surge along the cape. Boston is basically shut down, state of emergency all over the place.
The hotel internet link is up and down, so I haven’t been able to post that much (not to mention being horrifically busy). Most folks are extending their hotel stays through Monday, opting out of even attempting travel.
The con has gone well – I’ve got a fantastic team working with me, things have gone really well. I’ve almost gotten enough sleep too, how weird! 🙂

6:12pm
STORM! Aieeee! There’s a major snowstorm (they’re using the word ‘blizzard’ freely:

Tonight
Snow…heavy at times. Snow accumulation of 10 to 14 inches by morning. Blustery. Not as cold with lows around 10 above. East winds 10 to 15 mph…becoming northeast 15 to 25 mph with gusts up to 40 mph.
snow Sunday
Snow…heavy at times in the morning…then tapering to flurries in the afternoon. Total snow accumulation of 14 to 22 inches. Windy with highs around 10 above. North winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts up to 45 mph. Bitterly cold wind chills.

It’s spooking a lot of hte attendees, it’s the quietest Saturday night I’ve ever had at an Arisia. At least the reg system worked great!
3:00pm
Wow, missed an entire day. The hotel network link was out of service for most of yesterday, so we had on network connectivity at all. Woe!
At any rate, things are workign! We’ve been making on the fly tuning to the Kiosk app and CONGO all weekend – CONGO itself hasn’t needed much tweaking (except for badge layout issues we resolved yesterday morning), but the Kiosk, being a ‘brand new app’, has definately needed some nudging.
No disasters, no major catastrophes, in fact, no real bumps for the whole weekend. We’re at about 2/3rds of the people checked in, more news later.

10:41pm
As expected, things went chaotic once I arrived here at the hotel. I’m pretty beat now, but the terminals are all running, we’ve run badges for a large chunk of the staff and guests, the kiosks are running fine, and folks seem to be happy. The reg team has been doing great, we did a ton of work today that didn’t -need- to get done, but I’m glad it did. For instance, we had a backlog of probably 200 address changes from bounced mailings. A couple of the reg team folks buckled up and entered all of them into the database. Yay!
OF course, now I’m exhausted. I’ve dumped out the database into a backup file, and copied the backup to my pen drive. We’ve shut down the terminals for tonight, and now I’m heading off to relax until we open at 2pm tomorrow.
I’m a little nervous about the state of hte hardware – some of the Gateways are being a little flaky, and the iopeners are being their normal odd selves. The Kiosk app needs some tuning, though JB and Joel H and some other folks gave some -very- good feedback on making the kiosk easier to use.
The proof will be tomorrow when we have hordes of folks moving through the kiosk lines and registering. Stay tuned!
11:30am
Packing is complete! We have a lot of boxes and crates, but thanks to Steph and Dwight, we have a lovely minivan to haul it all. Lisa is helping me pack up and load, and things are going swimmingly. Only a little tired. 🙂
Off to load up and drive in.
8am
Ung. A slow morning – not quite enough sleep (it’s a con, right? :). I have to take Z to school first, so I’ll make a stop at dunkin donuts en route to pick up some high test. The equipment is all laid out in the great room mocking me. I think I know how i’ll pack it all, just have to get crackin. Still have to take the seats out of the van too.
On the other hand, only 2″ of snow fell last night, and the sun is out now. It’s really quite beautiful outside.
Off to Framingham and back.

I’m going to try this out, and see how well i can keep up with things. Today is really the first day of prepping for and going to Arisia (a big SF convention in Boston). I’m the Registrar, so I’m responsible for handling all the registrations and making sure everyone gets checked into the convention.
This is really a huge test of CONGO in an end-to-end model. CONGO was used for all pre-registration, membership tracking, and database reference for many of the Arisia staffmembers leading up to the event, and so far has performed very well.
The big test starts tomorrow when we move the entire system, terminals, printers and all, to the hotel for isntallation and testing. Registration doesn’t officially open until Friday, but we’ll be printing staff badges and some of the comped group passes tomorrow.
I’m going to try something I’m going to term ‘dayblogging’. One blog post per day, I’ll just keep adding content to the posting, marking it with the time. Folks with RSS feeds will see the post updated, folks on LJ may see this article stay ‘high’ on the friends list as I add content.
Wednesday, 11:24pm
The first stage of departure is pretty much set. I’ve disassembled most of the testing equipment and laid it out in the great room for packing and loading into the van tomorrow morning. It’s a lot of stuff. 6 Gateway terminals, 8 iOpener terminals, all the supporting hardware for them – power systems for everything, the 3 badge printers, the receipt printer, and the registration supplies (paper, badge clips, etc). I’m pretty beat, but the shower helped a lot 🙂 Off to read in bed (at a reasonable hour!) mostly because I need to get up early tomorrow to take Zach to school before loading up and heading in.
This evening I nailed a bunch of small bugs in the process – things like the receipt printer kicking out an extra page on every print, some wording problems on the terminal, and one PANIC moment where I realized the receipt printer would not work off the Kiosk terminals. I had to run to Officemax to pick up 32′ of USB cable to run ‘around’ the end of the area to put the printer near the kiosks, but plug it into the server. Annoying.
The last problem really is that the badges, when punched with a slot for the badge clip, punch a hole in the ’05’ of ‘Arisia 05’. I may re-layout the badge, we’ll see if I have time tomorrow.
Onward and forward!

Gosh, it’s been a while since I posted, thought folks would like to at least get a dave-life-snapshot to get an idea where I’ve been.

• Mosaic Commons, our Cohousing group, is moving into a very intense state of land and busines negotiations. More details on this shortly… it’s taking a lot of energy and time, but it’s very exciting.
• Arisia is happening this coming week, and I’m the registrar for the event. This means not only am I supplying the systems and software, I’m actually running the registration. I have two great helpers keeping me sane, but it’s a lot of work registering almost 2500 people in under 36 hours. If you’re in Boston, come see CONGO at work!
• Our house is still on the market. Hopefully things are going to pick up after the holiday and election season. We have an open house today, and know of another prospect that will hopefully be viewing the house this week. Cross yer fingers!
• Virtually all the people in my social circles have gotten sick in the last 2-3 weeks, including myself. I think we can be done with the vicious flu or whatever this thing is. Zach was out sick from school for almost 4 days, finally diagnosed with pneumonia. He’s on antibiotics now, and the fever and most of the cough is gone, but it was a rough week.
• Coding-wise, CONGO is coming along swimmingly. The amount of code I’ve written in the last 2-3 weeks has been astronomical, and I’m really proud of the end result. I’ve posted some current screenshots as well as descriptions of how CONGO works on the business site. Check ’em out.

Now, we’re pretty much done with housecleaning, and have to head off to a Mosaic meeting. Life marches on!

My fave online music site, Radio Paradise, is doing a contest this month to redesign their logo. If you do graphic design, and would love the publicity, the fame, the schwag, and the $100 prize money, check it out on their home page.

This morning I finally did my first donation to the International Red Cross’s Disaster Relief Fund for operations in not only South Asia, but also in Sudan and Indonesia. I thought for a bit where I could best place my donation where it wouldn’t be used for political counting or lining someone elses pockets (even Amazon gets a slice of money sent through them, and any other forum that is collecting money can say “Such and such a political organization raised $xxx for relief…”.
I wanted to avoid all that, and go directly to the people doing the work. I strongly recommend everyone to do the same. We live in the worlds richest country; we have the luxury of choosing to give some of our wealth away. Why not do some good with it, and donate to those who can put that money to work, helping those hurting the most.
Donate to the American Red Cross.

YAY! Snow snow snow! Lovely storm, beautiful weather.
BOO! Still not quite feeling strong enough to go skiing after being sick off and on all week.
YAY! Assembled and tested the snowblower a week before the snowfall.
BOO! A blown tire on the snowblower halfway through todays cleaning.
YAY! Getting a wireless keyboard for the cell phone and PDA.
BOO! Wireless driver under Palm OS (W-link. AVOID!) makes PalmOS based phone unstable.
YAY! Going out Sunday and getting a bunch of needed items / upgrades for some projects at home.
BOO! Realizing the wireless driver has made my phone unuseable, and I can’t receive or send calls. Not good when out in a major snowfall and the Missus is worried.
YAY! Total battery death on the phone overnight has done a hard reset on it, and it is now handling calls correctly.
BOO! It was a full reset, all data / installs apps are lost.
YAY! I have a backup!
BOO! An upgrade of my desktop client has removed my old settings, I’ll need to reconfigure.
YAY! I have a backup! (that’s worth saying it twice)
All in all, a cyclical couple days.

The worst of the worst happened. The Sci-Fi channels’ production of Earthsea was a screaming disaster, and Ms LeGuin could do nothing about it.
From the interview:

My principal feeling about it is one of sadness, loss. An opportunity thrown away, at great expense. I’m sorry for the actors. They all tried hard. I’m sorry for the people who think they’ve seen Earthsea, but saw a stale, senseless rehash of bits of other fantasy films instead. I’m very sorry for my readers who tuned in thinking they were going to see a film version of my books. To you readers, I apologise. I love movies, and I did want to see an Earthsea movie, so I fell for it. I’m sorry! We’ll do better next time.

This is just fun. The Monty Python musical website has a great flash introduction on it. Vintage Python animation.
Check it out…