A journal and sounding board for a geek girl in Silicon Valley.

It's a sign. I should definitely not live in Sacramento.

I just woke up from one of the worst nightmares I've had in recent memory. Jon and I were living in Sacramento (amazing, really, since I hate the weather up there and the commute would be a bitch) and I had left our oh-so-cool geek apartment to get some chocolate covered rice krispie bars. I was driving and walking around, and there was a fresh, crunchy snow (it doesn't snow in Sacramento, must be a missing-Minnesota thing) and yet it was still eighty degrees outside. (I likely dreamt this part because it was so hot in the bedroom.) I was marveling at this and informing myself I had to write about it in my blogger. (Even in dreams, I blog.)
I run across some sleeping homeless people, and I stop my car near a bus stop to look out at the fog over the palm trees and contemplate how I can make Sacramento better. I'm so civic-minded. While I'm doing this, and listening to some particularly horrible music on the radio, a middle-aged pudgy homeless woman comes up to my car and informs me that she has a seatbelt with which to strangle me, along with a gun, so I'd better give her my car.
I, being feisty, tell her what she can do with this idea and start making to leave. I wasn't fast enough, so I ended up strangled and left for dead on the side of the road so the other homeless vultures could pick me over and take what they wanted.

Ask not what Sacramento can do for you, rather, ask how you can avoid living in Sacramento at all costs. That's my life's motto.

So here I am, sitting at my computer with my down comforter (it's cold downstairs, and hot upstairs), blogging at 4am.

Jon's just called the Apple Store to find out where our MacOS X beta cd's are. While he was doing that, I got yet another "Your order has shipped" email from Apple, which also explained why the tracking number didn't work - they screwed up. Should get here in three days, at which point we'll be in Minnesota. Doh!!

I'm getting some Barenaked Ladies tickets from a coworker. The concert's at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, which is right near SGI's campus. I saw a link on CNN today about BNL sabotaging mp3's on Napster by placing their own out there that has a snippet of a song and then Steve and Tyler saying, "You probably thought you were getting our latest single, but this is just an ad for our new cd." It's a good 19 minutes long, which makes me wonder what people thought they were getting when they downloaded it. CNN made it available for download from their site, but perhaps fearing Time/Warner's "MP3 BAD" knee-jerk reaction, they didn't make it available as an mp3 as a smart site would. No, they made it available as a .wav file! It's a ~48 meg .wav file, and I bet they were wondering why their site was so slow. I'm enough of a fan that the idea of Steven and Tyler bantering about mp3's is more interesting to me than the single, which I can get just by buying the cd. (Which is now on my list of things to do.)

Now, to kill more time, possibly by sleeping, before going in to work this morning to get yelled at for the site not being perfect.
posted by Ciannait at 4:30 AM

The DNS round-robin worked. The site worked. Tomorrow the ACL change should go through, at which point I ask nicely for another DNS change.

My boss seemed pleased with this - it's less trouble than we've gone through for Netbusiness, and for that he's thankful.

I stumbled home at 11am, after saying incoherent things to my coworkers (I even sound different when I'm exhausted) and crawled into bed and didn't emerge till 8pm, when Jon woke me up. He woke me up before that too, and said, "Do you want to sleep some more?" and I grunted and rolled over. He took that as a yes. :)

So off I go to play some Unreal Tournament before crawling back into bed yet again.
posted by Ciannait at 10:12 PM

Damn. Witness this. When people compare the modern day to the landrush goldmining days of yore, they're really not kidding.

So, I messed up. The entire reason I came in at 5am was to make sure a DNS change worked. Well, the DNS change worked all right, but I forgot to submit the ACL request to poke the hole in the firewall for the required SSL port. I'm amazed that in my current, sleep-deprived state, I noticed it, and could figure out a work-around until the weekly scheduled ACL changes.

So now I'm doing constant nslookups to see if my interim round-robin DNS propagated or not. Oh, please god, let it be soon.... This is supposed to go live today....

So, you could say that I'm feeling mighty stupid at the moment.
posted by Ciannait at 5:52 AM

Trying out a new blogger template. Jon's blogger looks exactly the same.

So it's been a while. A lot's happened. It's almost 1am now, and I have to be at work at 5am. I'm currently wondering whether or not I should attempt sleeping. Damn timezone changes... The only reason I have to be in at 5am is to make sure a DNS change went through from the East Coast, where it'll be a much more bearable 8am.

This weekend was interesting. Went up to SF again on Friday, finally caught up with Enkhyl. It was truly wonderful to see him again - we can talk and talk for hours and not run out of topics. It was also good to finally give him his things back, and to get a tour of his house. I want one. He's got a three-story Victorian house in SF, and it's beautiful. I've had a soft spot in my heart for Victorian houses ever since I lived in one in Iowa. (Jon thinks that hardwood floors are too hard to maintain. That's what area rugs are for.) We ended up missing the last Caltrain back to Mountain View, though, so we tagged along with Enkhyl to a party - where Cameron and I were horribly... improperly dressed. It was a drag party, so we stuck out like a sore thumb. Everyone was very nice and friendly and inviting, however, especially considering they didn't know me and Cameron from Adam. The only bad part of the party were the token goth chick and her SlaveMaster Du Jour. I could have really lived without them - they were the singular most idiotic people I'd dealt with all night, and considering I'd been at a seedy little bar previous, that's saying a lot.

I think most goths these days are just plain poseurs. They think they look hot and sexy in their black leather pants, listening to nin, but really, being a goth pretty much meant pain and suffering, not being a spoiled daddy's girl. Used to be you were a goth because you were an outcast, no one understood you, your parents hated you, and your life was like a Smiths song. Now it's trendy. Witness Hot Topic, which, incidentally, has the worst business, "we wanna sell you something", website I've ever seen. Granted, I was never a goth. I was too well-liked to be a goth. ;) But I listened to the Smiths, I understood the trials of the world, I Got It. I got it enough that I didn't want to try to be a goth just because it'd look good. So I was never a goth, and I understood the whole goth movement more than this chicks do.

So we ended up not getting back from the city until 10am Saturday morning. I lived, but Jon got all cute and worried about me. I had to assure him that I didn't end up drunk, in a toga, with a lampshade on my head. This made him laugh, which I hope helped at least a bit to alleviate his worst fears.

Saturday night was Gilbert's housewarming. That was actually pretty uneventful, but fun nonetheless. It's a little weird partying with coworkers, but Gilbert, Gilbert's girlfriend, and Gilbert's girlfriend's other boyfriend (make sense?) are all very cool, and just as nice as when they let me crash with them when I broke my leg.

Other happenings this week are somewhat of a tamer mood. I finished Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age this week and am left with mixed feelings. I dislike how certain characters and themes just disappear. What happened to Judge Fang, or the orphaned Chinese girls? What happened to Harv? What happened to Hackworth's family? (There was a bit more closure with him, but not much.) Then there's the really poor transitions into life situations when it comes to Nell. The book spans fifteen to seventeen years or so, so at the end of the book she's a young woman, but I can't help thinking of her as an overly precocious small child. Parts were glossed over, presumably because it's a long book to begin with, weighing in at 464 pages (paperback). However, the ending wasn't quite as bad as the ending in Snow Crash, in which Neal sort of went "*plop!* Here's the ending!"

I also finally booked my tickets back to Minnesota, for my friend Kristyn's wedding. I haven't been back in six months, so I'm really looking forward to it. I had no idea, though, how many people I'd want to see when visiting, until it came time to schedule the trip. I'm going for longer than is necessary for the wedding, and I have a feeling the entire time I'm going to be busy trying to cram in all the friend-visiting I want to do.

Jon did an evil thing. He bought me The Sims - Livin Large. The new items are just enough to re-whet my Sims appetite. There's a servant robot - no more maids or repairmen! It'll even serve dinner! There's a cool chemistry set (though this garnered me a $500 ticket from the SimCops - you'd think I was running a meth lab or something), a genie lamp (which has ruined two friendships) and all kinds of other new stuff. I didn't mean to spend eight hours playing The Sims today, but I did. It's evil.

It's the Olympics! Which means it's time for a spasm of marketing and hype. Apparently people are being barred from bringing Pepsi into Olympic-Land in Sydney, because it might piss off Coke, a major advertiser. This also means we get things like Olympic cereals, junk food, sodas, postage stamps, cat brushes, etc. I remember being something like five or six years old and watching the Olympics all day without moving, which I'm sure pleased my mother to no end. The magic of the Olympics, which is supposed to be about world-class athletes in perhaps under-rated sports ("if it's not (American) football, it's CRAP!") performing at their peak, is now all about which sponsor can create the world's biggest logo.

We ordered MacOS X (the beta) from the Apple Store this week, right after Jobs' keynote in Paris. I'm likely going to toss files onto my Zip disk and stick it on my G4. I'm just asking for punishment, I know, but I've never been as excited about anything as I am about Aqua. I even used to have a WindowBlinds theme for Aqua, even though it was a little unstable and buggy. I'm looking forward to using the real thing.

Finally, I did some more futzing with my Shoutcast, and added a few songs again, that weren't in there to begin with. Things like Depeche Mode, and also a Static X song. Jon was listening when the Static X song came on, and turned to me and said off-handedly, "You realize that this is neither Celtic nor chick rock." Yeah, well, I like it anyway. My tastes are nothing if not eclectic. Also, I now have a relay for my Shoutcast stream! This should hopefully take some load off of my little 1.1M SDSL line, and give users who were complaining about choppiness an outlet. It's accessible at Live365. However, the relay does *not* list the current song, for which you can use....

.... the cute little page for my Shoutcast stream, which lists the current song and number of listeners, plus other information about the stream. It's on my page on blatz.

That's the news from Lake Wobegone.
posted by Ciannait at 1:44 AM