ceteris non paribus

I can’t believe that nobody else uses the word “kinderwrangle” to describe the act of trying to keep the lid on one more more rambunctious children. Google, however, thinks that that’s so. Sad.

A hat tip to Buzz Aldrin, the first sysadmin on the moon.

“I was kind of the systems guy in the LM…”

“Though named ‘Lunar Module Pilots,’ they performed as system managers…”

From “Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight”, a highly recommended book if you’re at all interested in the Apollo program.

From work just now:

Developer: “I need root access!!”
Me: … talktalktalk
Developer: “Ok, so I need read access on that system logfile!”
Me: … talktalktalk
Developer: “Oh. I need to know how to redirect the output of a command to a file.”
Me: “Sure! I’ll send you mail with a cut and paste it from a place where you’ve already done the same thing. Have a great day!”

Quoting from the Monkeybagel Document:

SYSADMIN: I used to provide system support for a team of database administrators. One time, out of the blue, for no apparent reason, they called up a senior vice-president and told him that they needed root access to all of our servers so they could run the ‘ls’ command and if they didn’t get that permission then nobody in the company would get paid that month. In the end I had to tell them that if they ever had the need, they could call me at any time, day or night, and I would at that time tell them the root password. They agreed and were happy. They called the first night and used the password to set up a porn site on our firewall. I shut the site down and notified our security guys. I got fired when our security guys found out I’d given out the password over the phone and reasoned that the database people wouldn’t have been that obvious so it must have been a Russian hacker. So let us now return to the matter at hand, about which I have only one question: What kind of pickles?

Things that have landed me in dependency hell during the last 30 days when I tried to install them:

• calibre on Ubuntu 8.10 and CentOS 5.3
• DBD::mysql on RHEL5
• graphite on RHEL5
• php-mysql with wildly disparate versions of mysql and php

I was ok about it all, really, until I read this:

Decoupling Server Development from the OS

…and now that I’ve become convinced that this doesn’t really need to be the state of things, I end up in a table-pounding rage each time I see something like:

/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/libssl.so when searching for -lssl

or

symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgio-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_thread_gettime

Sabrina: “I’m an expert today!” Me: “Oh? How so?” Sabrina: “I’ve got a clipboard!”

I think she’s got a pretty good handle on social engineering. And at such a young age, too.

Speaking of “social”, here she is with a Nice Young Man who thinks Very Highly of her.

I hate the fact that my cheese crackers feel that telling me that they’re “made with REAL CHEESE!” is a selling point.

I like going to our local Hannafords because, besides being cheaper, the workers all tend to be high-school/college age with cheerful personalities.

Checkout Girl (with cute pigtail braids): So this morning I figured I’d do something different with my hair.
Bagger Boy: Did you?
CG: Yea… (strike one!)
BB: Oh! Don’t you usually only have one braid?
CG: No… This is the first time I’ve braided it. (strike two!)
BB: Er, ah, well, I haven’t seen you in a while.
CG: We worked together two days ago! (strike three!)

Given that I saw him deliberately edged out another bagger to work on her line, it’s not as if he wasn’t aware of her…

Glad to see that they’re training men in Advanced Oblivion in younger and younger these days.

It’s annoying that the date 090205 can be read either forwards or backward. (ignoring for a moment the slightly less annoying but longer running day/month:month/day issue.)

A clergyman doing a survey of NYC in 1885 found that in one ward there was

“One saloon to every 200 population.”

– from the makingmaps blog

My favorite is 2nd St. between Avenue B and C: 18 saloons, one church. Doesn’t look like the church is still there, unfortunately, but there’s a firehouse at the other end of the block. I bet they wish the pubs were still there.

I could have sworn I blogged about this before, but I guess not.

The bobble during Obama’s swearing-in caused me to remember my wedding day. No, I wasn’t being married to a supreme court justice, but it was more important to me than the recent inauguration, believe it or not.

During a Quaker wedding ceremony:

Following a period of silence, as long or as short as the couple is led to observe, the two rise and, each in turn taking the other by the hand, make their promises to each other, in the words from their marriage certificate, in tones clear enough to be heard throughout the meeting.

In the run-up to the wedding, Lindy and I had agreed to “use the vows in Faith and Practice“, and checked off the “write vows” item on the checklist. Easy, peasy, right?

Come the day of the wedding, I stood and, in tones clear enough to be heard throughout the meeting, said my vows. Lindy took her turn and, I thought, got it a bit wrong. “Ah, well,” I thought, “it’s the thought that counts.”

It wasn’t until we escaped into the getaway car that we compared notes and discovered that we were both right. Turns out that I had used the 1972 edition of F&P and she’d used the 1997 version. Whups!

I’m pretty sure that Justice Roberts doesn’t have that same excuse, though.

From the registration page of an outsourced travel company:

Password invalid. Non-alphanumeric characters required: 1.
Use any of the following: !,@,-, or .

Oooh, I get to pick from ALL THOSE? How ever will I chose?

(A co-worker reports that, contrary to the options provided, ‘#’ works. Idiots.)

A man with a racial background strikingly similar to my own was just, to the fading strains of a Quaker hymn, sworn in as the POTUS. ‘Tis a gift to be free, indeed.

> so, dude, I get to hear Nathaniel’s up and crawling around from a sales weasel??? :)

Oops.

Nathaniel’s been on “solid” food for a few months now and is ready for some more substantial chewing action. “Great,” I figured, “time to start stocking up on zwieback.”

Except I’m too late.

The Nabisco (division of Kraft) product of this name has been discontinued (July 2008)

Bummer.

Scene: evening bath, where a napless Sabrina is getting a little chill time before going to bed. Dad is likewise stealing a few minutes to read a book while she splashes around and colors on the tub with bathtub crayons.

S: “Daddy, I just stuck a crayon in my nose.”
D: (absentmindedly) “Great, dear!”
S: “Daddy, I’ve got a crayon in my nose.”
D: (absentmindedly) “Great, dear!”
S: “Daddy, I can’t get it out.”
D: !!!

Turns out the tip of the crayon got lodged in her nose and she’d pushed it further in trying to get it out. We couldn’t get it out with a snotsucker or tweezers or having her blow it out, so it was off to the local emergency room. A few hours of reading books and watching the game (Go Phillies!) in various waiting rooms and then they did some poking and prodding; the crayon bit was gone. I’m guessing it came out during the drive over, since she got pretty hysterical at the prospect of the hospital, though she calmed down by the time we got to go. (She got so comfortable that she didn’t want to leave. After an evening of not wanting to be anywhere but in my arms, she climbs up on the bed and declares, “Daddy, I’m going to stay here and you go find me a snack, ok?”)

Being a parent means doing what you must, even though every fiber of you is screaming out for sleep.

My brother points out an article over at Bloomberg that gets to the bottom of the arrow thing.

Oct. 1 (Bloomberg) — Rose City Archery Inc., an Oregon company that makes arrows used by children, hit a bull’s-eye with Senate legislation that would rescue Wall Street banks.

From page 300 of the senate draft of the “EMERGENCY ECONOMIC STABILIZATION ACT OF 2008“:

SEC. 503. EXEMPTION FROM EXCISE TAX FOR CERTAIN
WOODEN ARROWS DESIGNED FOR USE BY CHILDREN.
(a) IN GENERAL.—Paragraph (2) of section 4161(b)
is amended by redesignating subparagraph (B) as sub-
paragraph (C) and by inserting after subparagraph (A)
the following new subparagraph:
‘‘(B) EXEMPTION FOR CERTAIN WOODEN
ARROW SHAFTS.—Subparagraph (A) shall not
apply to any shaft consisting of all natural
wood with no laminations or artificial means of
enhancing the spine of such shaft (whether sold
separately or incorporated as part of a finished
or unfinished product) of a type used in the
manufacture of any arrow which after its as-
sembly—
(i) measures 5/16 of an inch or less in
diameter, and
(ii) is not suitable for use with a bow
described in paragraph (1)(A).’’.

Yep. Rome is burning and someone thought it a good time to help out the toy arrow manufacturer in his district. It’s selfish stunts like that that got us into this mess in the first place. I really, really wish there were a requirement for every line in an act to have a sponsor. It’d be nice to see who’s being such a bastard…

And people think I’m a cynic for no reason.

Among other changes is our lives this September:
- Nathaniel is on “solid” food and seems to be a big fan.
- Sabriana is now officially a preschooler, and has been declared potty trained by the staff at school. (Yes, there’s still the occasional accident, but we drove all the way down to PA and back with nary an issue.)
- I’m starting a new job on Monday. Ack! (This means that eero.ethersmith.com and things hosted on it will be moving in the next few days, and my phone number will change back to my old -1927 one. Ding me if you’ve got questions about either.)

It’s been a good week for sky-related sightings. On Saturday, we had some balloons from Hudson Balloon Fest come right over our house.

The next day, a few ultralights we puttering in the area and did a 360-degree turn around us, I think because we were out on the porch waving like madpeople.

When I got home on Tuesday, after a cruddy day, I got to show Sabrina her first rainbow. Even better, I got a movie of her watching it.

And later that night I was taking the trash out and, while stargazing a bit, saw two satellites and two huge shooting stars.

Lots of neat stuff in the sky these days.

It’s System Administrator Appreciation Day!

It’s time for the yrealy reading of the Monkeybagel Document. Every word is true.

On a lighter note, it’s not uncommon to see comments like this about Obama:

also Barry you need to start dressing less like a 35-year-old midlevel IT supervisor

My first thought? “Hey, what are you talking about, he dresses just like me…. oh.” (I do not, however, have as cute a butt as he does. Vote for Obama! He’s got a cute butt! And can sink 3-pointers on the first try.)