May 17, 2007
Cat Proximity
Cats - Much like Dilbert appeals to office workers, there's a web comic introduced to me by co-workers that appeals to engineering types. Like Dilbert, the artistry is weak. The appeal is the humor within. The comic is called xkcd.
The strip I found funny (and geeky) is this one, from about a month ago. If you've hung around my wife and daughters when they see our two cats, Jingle and Belle, you understand why. These perfectly smart, lucid women shift their voices and start talking like they've just seen a newborn. It happens nearly every time and makes me laugh.
Thursday - Today just felt like molasses. While on back roads of my commute to work I got stuck behind a convoy of dump trucks going about 20mph below the speed limit — and a few school busses. On my commute back home, the highway had numerous delays. While at work, even the computers were slow because one of the network file servers (a NetApp) was acting up. Tasks which normally take only a few minutes took many times longer. Y'know... There's only so much email you can catch up on while waiting for your computer to do "real work". If there's anything that bothers me, it's feeling like you're spinning your wheels wasting time. Even contacting BoostMobile to update the expiration date on my credit card took about 20 minutes. It was just one of those days.
Friday - Hopefully tomorrow will go smoother. It's possible that my "good" cell phone should come back from the Motorola repair center. If I time my commutes better, I should be able to avoid the slowdowns. I should be able to get a workout in, which almost always improves my outlook. Perhaps if the IT department gets to the root cause of the server slowdown, I can catch up on what I couldn't finish today.
Ben - Congrats to Ben Bilik who just had his last day of high school ever(!!) and now only has to attend his graduation ceremony. I can't believe Ben is graduating! I still remember seeing his mom in the hospital just after she delivered him. He can't be college age! Besides my upcoming birthday, it's yet another sign that I must be getting old. *grin*
Howdy Scott -
It's strange, but the most psychologically debilitating thing I've ever seen happen at work is a network going down. It's happened only a couple of times I know of in my 11 years at Wolfram, but it was a regular thing at a former employer. Ordinary nice folks - even kindly old ladies - would get surly and foul-tempered when they couldn't get files to work on.
bw
Posted by: Bill White at May 18, 2007 12:14 AMI've been enjoying xkcd for quite some time. The humor and geekiness really fit me. I also like how occasionally the author shows that he can do some real artistry, like in: http://xkcd.com/c77.html
Also, if you're familiar with the quirks of both Russell and the Narf, this comic is fitting ;) http://xkcd.com/c247.html
Anyway, I hope the roads for your commute start clearing up again; there's nothing worse than being stuck behind slow-moving trucks. Also, you and Claire enjoy seeing Shrek 3 tomorrow. I'm home with my family for my belated birthday and mothers' day celebrations, so I'll see it with my sister and niece Ashley.
-- Will
Posted by: will at May 18, 2007 10:09 AMHi Bill,
When I first did engineering work with networked file servers, they were SunOS (pre-Solaris) machines with NFS. Once in a while a file server would go down and it seemed the whole network of machines just froze. We referred to the scenario as "prairie dogging" because the engineers would all pop their heads up out of their cubes. It would be a good excuse to get some coffee or a snack.
Now that we've evolved to fault tolerant, redundant arrays of disks, it often seems that they just come to a crawl with their CPUs maxed out while they try their best to work around the bottleneck issue. They rarely crash. They just become very, very sluggish. So you *can* work, but ordinary tasks seem to take much longer.
Otherwise kind folks suddenly are mumbling under their breaths, "come ON already!"
Posted by: Scott at May 18, 2007 10:45 AMHi Will,
Yeah, I saw that one and thought of Russell as well. My absolute favorite one (thus far) is this one:
http://xkcd.com/c224.html
since I enjoy Lisp but have to get my day to day "real" work done in Perl. (not to mention hacks to this weblog software...)
Posted by: Scott at May 18, 2007 10:51 AMI suspect that this was the reason traffic was slow during my commute home yesterday. It's a bit of a sad story:
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/x1037455640
Posted by: Scott at May 18, 2007 01:37 PM