I just gave an overview of the twisted, convoluted payments infrastructure at Amazon to my new manager.

He almost ran away screaming. :-)

Andy Roddick interview

Andy Roddick got his ass handed to him by Roger Federer in the Australian Open, 6-4, 6-0, 6-2. His performance at the press conference afterwards, though, was awesome.

Selected quotes:

Q. What was it like for you just being there at the end of that?
ANDY RODDICK: It was frustrating. You know, it was miserable. It sucked. It was terrible. Besides that, it was fine.

Q. How much would you have paid in order not to come too this press conference tonight?
RODDICK: That's about the best question that's been asked.
     Well, I mean, I can't really say an amount because I would have gotten fined, what, 20 grand. Obviously, it would have to be less than that, right, if we're thinking logically? It really wouldn't be about the money; it would be about running away and not facing it.
     I would pay a lot of money if everyone would just make up stuff that I said and pretend like I was actually here. That would be fine. My dad didn't raise me to run away from it, so here I am.

Q. What did Jimmy say? US Open final experience, you played him tough, got on a roll. Did you talk about that before the match, if Roger gets on a roll, try to do X, Y or Z, slow it down?
RODDICK: Yeah, there's a lot of strategy talk. It's not so much like, If you're down 6‑4, 6‑0, 2‑0. We didn't really talk about that. Oops.

Q. After a night like this, do you sleep well?
RODDICK: Do I sleep well?
Q. Yes.
RODDICK: It depends on how much I drink tonight.

Happy Australia Day!

In stranger news...

In stranger news, one of the tempered glass doors on our shower randomly exploded.

This happened while nobody was in the shower, thankfully. I had left the light on in there -- it's right above the door -- and there was probably a 10°F difference from top to bottom. That alone wouldn't explain why a door would shatter; I'm guessing there was a latent issue (manufacturing defect, improper installation, damage in transport or during installation, etc.) which, combined with the temperature gradient, shattered it.

Weird, though. Took us a few minutes to identify where the sound came from.

Caltech -- the site of my undergrad edumacashion -- snapped its 207 game NCAA basketball losing streak.

To be honest, I wasn't aware we ever had a basketball team.

Ill conceived item #5734: Kellogg's Fudge Ripple Mini Swirlz.

I might end up as background scenery in Grey's Anatomy. They were filming some stock footage around town, and caught the ferry I was on as it was docking. If I do end up in the shot, I'm one of the folks on the starboard side passenger deck with an expression on my face which says, "Why the heck are all those people standing around on the dock with cameras pointed at us?"

We are empowered again, not to mention eminternetted. It was a long, strange week, though.

Starting on Christmas cards tonight. Err... yeah. Anyways... :-)

Still no power. Haven't sent Christmas cards as a result because I can't get at my address book. Nor have I been able to read personal e-mail in that time.

Worse, there's another storm coming up today. From what I understand we will be pushed back to the bottom of the priority list for power restoration. This is contrary to the claims being made by PSE that they'll restore power to those without it longest; the reality is they have no way of tracking how long you've been without power since their systems automatically reset you to "power restored" after 48 hours.

I'm close to just giving up and heading back to Pittsburgh. At least I have heat there, and basic utility outages are treated seriously.

I'm also getting in trouble at work because I haven't been checking up on things from home. Folks assume that, since they have power, you should, too.

ELECTRIC SERVICE DOWN STOP PLEASE SEND REPAIR CREW STOP CURRENT ETA TO RESTORATION ONE WEEK STOP HOUSES COLD AND REFRIGERATORS WARM STOP TYPING THIS FROM WORK STOP FIRST TIME I HAVE USED CAPSLOCK IN A LONG TIME STOP

Today was the busiest day of the year at work. We also came frighteningly close to a large (though not total) meltdown. My role in this was mostly canary ("Uh, guys, these systems don't look good..."), a bit of Chicken Little ("No, really, the sky is falling, and we need this team in the war room now."), a dash of resolver ("Well, the problem isn't here, and it's not there, so let's look thataways."), with a topping of reassurance ("Yes, the graphs look good now, we really can stop panicking now, thanks, now let me step out of the way while you manager types affix blame.").

Alas, I ended up spending the entire day in the war room and got no work done. Bleh. I also like to talk in italics. So sue me.


Speaking of suing, the SeaTac Christmas holiday tree fiasco amazes me. Basic gist: Rabbi wants a menorah included in holiday decorations at the airport, is met with typical bureaucratic "I'm going to answer in the way that involves the least amount of work for me" responses ("Your request is important to us, please stand by"). He gets fed up, threatens a federal lawsuit if they don't comply within 48 hours. Bureaucrats panic, consult lawyer, lawyer says you'd better take them down or prepare to include symbols of every possible faith including demonic worship, etc. So the trees come down.

Is anyone surprised by this? Apparently, Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky, who had threatened the lawsuit, was.

Either the parties involved are truly nefarious and disingenuous, or they're idiots. I find both plausible. Taking DAC's law into account ("Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity"), I'll say they're idiots all around.

I have a cold. Nothing terribly bad, but it's kinda gross to be around me right now and I'm likely contagious.

Alas, I cannot stay home from work tomorrow. I'm on-call from noon Monday until noon Wednesday. Normally, an on-call shift is the ideal time to stay home (you're not going to get much work done anywhere you are). During December, however, my team is required to have our on-call present in the "war room" during peak traffic hours -- a crowded place with a bunch of graphs projected on the walls. I don't expect this to be pleasant for myself or anyone around me.

Fortunately, I've found a mask which will filter out most of the germs. It looks a bit silly, though -- more like I'm about to do some carpentry rather than the surgical-style mask I was looking for.

Law & Order: Minor Debt Claims, by a bunch of UQ law students.

March of the Engineers, by the same guilty clan.

And the ATMs? They can be a bit vicious down under.

Apparently the commute yesterday around Seattle was so bad that rush hour lasted until well after midnight. The trip from Seattle to Tacoma -- usually about 30 minutes or so -- required five hours.

For those of us who take the ferry, though, it was a normal, though chilly, commute. (Well, aside from having to get around the crowds swarming Qwest Field for the Monday night football game.)

Argh! I just encountered another instance of the following code from one of our developers:

    try {
        // some stuff
    }
    catch (NumberFormatException e) {
        throw e;
    }

Do some folks just enjoy typing for the sheer fun of it?

Random silliness related to a new project I'm working on at home: visualizing the keep-out regions for an ATX motherboard for a case I'm working on.

(A higher quality video is available here, but $)@(*#$ LiveJournal won't let you link to videos if they're not on YouTube or Google).

Proptronics

You've seen them. The cardboard boxes simulating computers, TVs, and other electronic equipment used in furniture stores. The most familiar names are Proptronics and Box Props, though I'm sure there are others.

What I never realized was just how expensive these things are.

That 42" corrugated plasma TV? Box Props wants $76.95. A 60" box-o-vision from Proptronics will set you back $123 ($133 if you want a static color image on it). Complete computer systems with the latest Cellulose processor will run you $46-$95, depending on configuration.

At least the laptop is somewhat affordable -- $13.95. I don't think I've seen one that clunky since the late 80s/early 90s, though.

Technology sucks

Apparently, the good folks at Apple have coded up a way to simulate CD scratches into iTunes 7. Songs which were intact before -- as well as those purchased on iTunes -- are now skipping. <sigh> Or maybe it's a ploy to push me over to Zune.

I'm guessing the Victrola emulator had to be deferred to version 8.

Also, I'm on-call again this weekend. We've reduced the number of folks available for on-call by half, which means the rest of us are now on-call twice as often. Oh, and now we can't do anything -- including rebooting a dead host -- without filling out a bunch of paperwork and getting it approved by a manager. Only 304 days, 2 hours, 23 minutes, 51.25 seconds until I can go to another job...

More as a reminder to myself; this place apparently has all sorts of oddball fasteners, screws, etc.:
http://www.tacomascrew.com/

Ah, some of you make me feel like Electron Mike from today's Diesel Sweeties. For some of us, e-mail practically was the internet for a long time. (Ok, there was the occasional use of Usenet and Gopher, and we had our own version of Google and Bittorrent in Veronica and Archie.)

My younger coworkers who ask me how I could forget to update my here/away status on IM and who laugh at the plain-vanilla stock ringtone I use on my cell phone (it just beeps a few times) are also guilty.

For those who are into retro-internet, Firefox still supports Gopher. I even discovered a few active sites, like this one.