Nem W. Schlecht

I bought a package of small steaks yesterday, marinated them, and grilled them up for supper. Yum! A little pink on the inside – perfectly cooked. My colon hates me, but I’m a happy camper.

Dayna had some flooding in the house-o-problems. Much of the carpet in the basement had to be torn out. Mazz is trying to cool off while Dayna cooks up dinner.

We had a grilled pork roast, beans, and couscous with cranberries. Afterwards we walked over to an ice cream shop where Dayna and I split a scoop of coconut ice cream. All of it was yummy.

The ever-adorable Ann and me in the Beer Garden at RRVF 2007.

On the I29 overpass at 124th Ave S, Fargo. Half point (mile 15 of 30) of my Saturday ride. Beautiful day, calm easterly wind at about 87 degrees.

We (Mazz, John, and I) found a wheelchair by a dumpster yesterday in the alley behind Duffy’s. Luckily, the cop (John, “That car has an apparatus.”) who stopped us just laughed at us and let us go on our way (At the time we were defending taking the wheelchair from the dumpster, but later we realized he stopped to help us.). Dan Reetz will swing by my place soon to pick it up.

Carly (from “The Bison Turf”) was out at Duffy’s and stopped by our booth for a chat. She’s going to be all done with her Master’s in English soon.

As I left the 2007 Pig Pick-nic (great food and company as always, terrible weather – only 42 degrees or so at one point), the crowd of die-hards waves goodbye to me.

Thanks again Phil & Renee for having us all over!

From left to right: the Keg of Summit, Brian, Cliff, Mazz, Phil, Dayna, Renee, John, Christina & Gerry

This has been a really, really, weird week. I’ll try to sum it up:

• I’m usually very careful when making changes to code or to databases, but I messed up both (although I still don’t understand why my ‘rsync’ of my Slips system didn’t work and the screw-up to the ‘db’ MySQL table didn’t really matter). What was odd about this was that obelisk, the campus backup server, was down that day and took hours to come back up. Usually that machine (and the group of guys who admin it) is rock solid. Sucks when you mess up and can’t get to your backup – especially when you’re spanky new help-desk software is one of the victims.
• For some reason, port forwarding Oracle on port 1521 (yes, that is its normal port) wouldn’t work on any host other than localhost. After much testing and experimentation, I figured I’d just try 5121. It shouldn’t make any difference, but for some reason, it does. 5121 works fine for localhost and remote connections, 1521 doesn’t work. At least I got this to work – life is much nicer now without being forced to use SQL*Plus. Although, Oracle is still a smelly pile of crap. It’s a huge and highly functional, but still a pile of crap.
• Speaking of Oracle, they distribute different libraries in their “instantclient” versus their full install. On some Solaris 10 boxes (like my home workstation), the instantclient version causes memory errors. The full version doesn’t, though. Nasty messages no longer appear when using the Oracle client library.
• Yet another Oracle thing. Usually before you install Oracle on a Solaris box, you need to modify /etc/system and set a bunch of parameters. The most important being the amount of shared memory a user can use. I didn’t want to reboot my server (current uptime: 235 days). Luckily, Solaris rocks the house, and you can just set up a ‘project’ space for a user:
  

  projadd -c “Oracle” ‘user.oracle’
  projmod -s -K “project.max-shm-memory=(privileged,4GB,deny)” ‘user.oracle’

  If you’re already logged in as user ‘oracle’ you need to log out then back in again, but after that, you’re golden for an install.

• My iBook laptop hard drive died. Then the boot CDROM I put it in won’t come out (in fact, it’s still in the drive). I took out the drive, tried various methods of getting data off of it with no dice. I took off the logic board, cleaned the contacts I could, then re-seated it. No dice. Then I froze it (-13F) and tried again. Still no dice. Then I banged the crap out of it, plugged it in, let it sound like a grinder for 10 seconds, then magically, it mounted. I should have made it worse, but now, I’m happily backing it up.
• Found out my workstation at home had an old CGI script that allowed access to the e-mail headers, which some spammer also found out about as well. I caught it after a couple of days, but the damage was done. Bug fixed, sendmail queue cleaned, and now I just have to wait a couple days to get out of whatever tarpit my IP was put in.
• Got a Geek Muse plug on another podcast, which isn’t all that odd, just kind of rare (and appreciated!)
• After procrastinating for a week, I finally edited and published episode 50 of Geek Muse. Our longest one yet, just under one hour and twenty minutes.
• My boss’s boss shaved his beard, leaving just a mustache. He kinda looks like a cop now. (Not that’s bad or anything, just different).
• I started eating at the student cafeteria (and food court) this week, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
• My eye checkup came back great – I still have 20/15 vision after my LASEK.

While not all bad or good, it’s just been a really odd week.

I grilled up some of my favorite sausages (Turkey & Chicken with Habenero Peppers and Monteray Jack Cheese) and headed over to Mark’s place to watch the Superbowl. Lala showed up later and probably wanted us to get the hell out of her living room. Later we all enjoyed some peanut butter cookies Mark had whipped up (recipe from Dayna).

Dinner tonight was a Salmon & Tuna loaf with black bean cakes & lima beans. Again, not being a huge fish fan, I didn’t eat a huge amount, but it still was very tasty. Desert was fresh-baked peanut butter cookies, using natural peanut butter (and not Jif or Skippy). Very tasty cookies.

From Brian (although I echo his last statement):

In what was announced as the last Bison Turf trivia contest, BNP again made a good early showing but faded down the stretch.

In the first round the team answered all but one question correctly, the team only stumbled on a 3 pt. question, the last Chinese dynasty (Manchu, not Ming). This resulted in a three-way tie for first place, with a pitcher of beer and two beer glasses at stake.

The first play-off question was the year Mad Magazine started. BNP and another team both guessed 1954 (correct answer, 1952), which eliminated one team. The SECOND play-off question was “How long to build the Great Pyramid at Giza”. BNP guessed 40 years. The other team (our nemesis, Pizza), guessed 75 years. Correct answer: 23 years. Victory!

The second round, BNP also missed only one question (the fort being shelled while the Star Spangled Banner was written). We got both the song lyric question (a Beatles song) and the really easy movie dialog question (“Houston, we have a problem”), but could not dredge up Fort McHenry. Unfortunately this was 6 pt. question, and despite doing well, for us, in the second round, two other teams tied for first place in that round.

Things went downhill from there, as is the BNP pattern. First, BNP was continually jobbed on the quick answer questions. John knew the answer almost every time, but we were sitting too far back, and other people ran up first. Then, in the third round, we missed questions about the tides (6 hours! not 12), the Super Bowl MVP last year (Hines Ward! not The Bus), the country containing Elba and Capri (Italy! not France), and the loser to Truman in 1948 (Dewey! not Stevenson).

When the final question came around we were in 6th place (out of 9), 15 points back of the leader. We bet the full 20 points, got the question wrong, and went down in flames. The question: in what order did these appear, Wonder Bread, Ragu Sauce, Kraft Cheese Singles, Sweet and Low. That is the correct order. We had the last two reversed. The winner was 15 points ahead of us, got it right, and beat us by 55 points on the 40 point swing.

And thus we conclude the brief and sometimes glorious run of BNP at the Turf. Total swag: 6 beer glasses, some 2-for-1 movie rentals, some pitchers of beer, and quite a few Bison Bucks. One first place finish, one third place,
some near misses. Not bad.

I salute you, comrades.

Dinner at Dayna’s tonight was a tuber medley (potatoes & squash cut into chunks and baked in butter in the oven) along with sugared carrots and pan-fried fish. It was a very orange, yet obviously delicious, meal.

Also, I attempted to upgrade the RAM in Quinn’s computer, but the RAM I thought for sure would work, didn’t. ;-( The main reason for my visit was Dayna’s car, which wouldn’t open no matter what you tried (the key just wouldn’t turn). For some reason, I got it open immediately, but I couldn’t get the lock to work again to save my life. Neither could I get the power locks to not work, which we think might be part of the problem. Actually, the problem is most likely the auto-start she has installed, but I didn’t want to try to remove it. Maybe next time I visit, I’ll be more adventuresome, but it was really cold working in that car, and I gave up a bit quickly.

The BNP team won another take 2 video coupon, rent one, get one free, plus a $5 bison buck coupon.

We scored 16 points in the first round (the winner scored 25, a perfect score). We were in good shape in the second round until we tanked the song lyric question, and the colors of the Cuban flag (5 out of 15 points).
We got 4 out of 6 in the third round, gyped because we offered David Reiner, when the correct answer was Carl Reiner, and they marked us wrong (although others, who simply answered ‘Reiner’ got the points).

There was chaos over the last question about top grossing movies before 1970, so a second ‘final’ question was offered concerning ‘best actor’ Oscars between 2000 and 2004. We were in 5th place, and bet 5 points, and missed Russel Crowe, and Jamie Fox, so went down in flames (but we were pretty darn close). We came away with a coupon for Paul, and $5 Bison Bucks. The next competition is in two weeks (I think) Jan. 23. We are hopeful that John’s apartment is clean by then.

Tonight Quinn had a minor problem with a new game – it was eating up all of his memory (actual and virtual). We just had to increase the Windows page space and all worked well (albeit very slowly).

Dayna prepared mini pizza crusts and we (Mark, Mazz, D & Me) all made our own mini-pizzas. Mark and I had seconds, of course.

Tonight was a great night! First off, I finally got a PCI video card with Pixel Shaders that works on Quinn’s computer. Seeing the Bioncle game starting up was a great site. Of course, it was more satisfying to see Quinn’s excitement at finally being able to play some of his games. Unfortunately, getting him to finish his homework the rest of the night was difficult.

Dinner tonight was a Spinach & Cheese quiche as well as a bacon and potato quiche-like dish and a wonderful salad with Craisins (cranberry raisins). Wine and chatting followed, as well as a lot of looks at Dayna’s new puppy, Lily, while she slept or chewed on anything in sight.