I hope that this book sells really, really well, and that the target audience follows its instructions before the 2008 election. Because if they really think this way, they don’t deserve the freedoms they think they’ve already lost:

Now that habeas corpus and other basic rights, including the right not to be tortured while interrogated, have now been deemed unnecessary, more Americans than ever have been thinking of getting out the door while they still can.

Just for the record: I believe that my friend Hans Reiser did not commit murder, a crime he’s currently suspected of. I hope that his wife is found alive and well, and that their children are not forced to grow up without parents.

[Update: formally charged. I agree with the defense attorney that the police seem to be aggressively feeding the press. They’d constructed a compellingly sinister narrative and handed it out to reporters before charges were even filed. Sorry, guys; it’s supposed to be “trail by jury”, not “trial by a pack of j-school hacks”.]

So, work took me to Kirkland, WA for a week. Not so bad, even if the fact that my work was critical to the company failed to motivate IT to prioritize my tasks above whatever else it was they were doing.

[but I, having promised my manager that I wouldn’t Speak Truth To The Peter Principled At High Volume With Expletives Not Deleted, was a shimmering fountain of sweet reasonableness]

The flight up was packed, but on time, and I got through security in less than five minutes. My map to the hotel proved useless, since they’d changed their name a few months back, and it wasn’t until I called the front desk that I found out that the Doubletree Bellevue was now the Hilton Bellevue … with really horrible wireless Internet access provided by a company called Waypoint. They’ve promised to refund my $10 eventually.

I put in about 65 hours resurrecting our build service, eventually giving up on the last two brand-new servers that were supposed to have been configured and ready before I arrived. Perhaps someone will get to them this week. Or next. Hey, it’s not like they’re needed to, oh I don’t know, PRODUCE OUR ONLY MONEY-MAKING PRODUCT.

[but I, having mostly mastered the art of Not Caring Because They’re Laying Me Off At The End Of The Year, made no fuss, worked around their limitations, and got the hell out of Dodge]

The flight home was uneventful. $50 got me upgraded to first class, and I had a nice limo ride home from the airport, expecting to relax, have a nice meal, go pick up my car from the body shop, and relax some more.

Naturally, I was greeted by the stench of a broken refrigerator filled with spoiled food. Yummy. And very relaxing.

Tuesday night was spent attempting to clean the damn thing, and then surfing the Sears web site when it became clear that the smell couldn’t be removed without more labor than it was worth, assuming it could be fixed in the first place.

Wednesday morning found me waiting patiently for Sears to open, and then dropping $1600 on a new fridge (Kenmore Elite Trio, by the way), to be delivered Friday. Then I spent half a day at work starting the break-in process of one of our replacements, with much more to come on Thursday.

[Nice lady, who’s coming to realize she’s in over her head. I wish her well, but expect she’s doomed. We’re busy keeping things running, so whenever she gets time with us, the knowledge transfer process is a lot like drinking from a fire hose. And she also needs to pick the brain of someone who’s already left, and is available for only a few expensive hours a week. Worse, she needs to rely on the folks in Kirkland once we’re gone…]

Friday, I will rest. Saturday, I will fill up my new fridge. And rest some more.

Sometime soon, I get to figure out why everything I’ve got that can read certain ClarisWorks 4JP documents can edit and print the Japanese text in some of my teacher’s old documents just fine, but nothing can export them to Word as anything but garbage. I’m pretty sure I got it to work once before, but now her ClarisWorks install is refusing to export to Word (with error messages in Japanese), and everything else spits garbage.

It’s particularly annoying that the OS X-native AppleWorks 6 reads them fine, but exports garbage, even via cut-and-paste.

[update: if I export from AppleWorks 6 as RTF, and then run textutil -inputencoding X-MAC-JAPANESE -encoding UTF-8 -convert rtf foo.rtf on the output, everything works fine. I still shouldn’t need to do this, but unless I can coax another copy of ClarisWorks 4JP to export directly to Word, I think it’s the best I can get.]

Just got a status update from my insurance agent on my car accident. They reached the owner of the vehicle responsible for the hit-and-run, and got the following information:

1. He's insured.
2. That night, the car had been borrowed by a friend who was visiting from out of the country.
3. The friend claimed the car was damaged in a hit-and-run.

#1 is the most important, of course. #2 is amusing, because the person driving the vehicle made a quick escape from 101 to 85 to Central, not something you’d expect from someone who didn’t live in, say, Sunnyvale, where the car is registered.

#3 is true, from a certain point of view… :-)

I got a ticket yesterday. More precisely, I got a fake ticket yesterday, because it was the only way for the cops to get the crazy angry person to shut up and go away.

I had a little work project that was kind of important. Namely, I needed to get over half a million dollars worth of servers packed up and loaded onto a truck (the same ones that were supposed to be shipped out on Friday). To do that, we needed to park the truck. Unfortunately, just as we were pulling into the commercial loading zone that we’d been patiently waiting for for twenty minutes, some clown in an SUV whips around the truck and starts backing into it.

I stepped out into the street and waved him off. He kept coming, until his bumper was about three inches from my body. Then he jumped out and furiously accused me of trying to steal his parking space, shouted at everyone within reach (including a completely unrelated moving company that was working across the street), and then ran off claiming he was going to find a cop to take care of me, leaving his car blocking both the parking spot and the street.

We found a cop first. When he returned with his dry-cleaning (he later claimed he really was making a commercial delivery, but that box never left the back of his SUV, and the cop saw him picking up the suit…), she was already writing up his ticket, and informing him that he was two minutes away from being towed.

He shouted at her. He shouted at us. He shouted at her sergeant, when he showed up. He harangued the bums on the sidewalk, telling them what horrible people and criminals we were. He tried to get the cop to give my truck driver a ticket for blocking the road. He tried to get the cop to give me a ticket for illegally attempting to reserve a parking space.

He got several tickets, which he’ll have to pay for. To shut him up, they wrote out a phony ticket for me, which will be dismissed when the cop deliberately fails to appear in court (her exact words: “this is bullshit, don’t pay it”). He tried to get my name so he could go after me personally, and the cop patiently explained that he had no right to that information.

And to think that this was actually better than my day Friday, which involved the world’s most carelessly ambitious contract Unix sysadmin trying to get me to let him work unsupervised as root on a production server that I’m responsible for (“Hi, Mark!”).

17 Egyptian exchange students, all headed to Bozeman, Montana. Six show up as scheduled, the rest are eventually located in: Richmond, Virginia; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Manville, New Jersey; Dundalk, Maryland; O’Hare International Airport; and Des Moines, Iowa.

Money quote:

"None of the students is considered a terrorism risk."

I’d feel a little more confident about this statement if they’d been found in, say, a Las Vegas casino hotel in a room filled with booze and strippers.

So where’s Dundalk, anyway? Why, it’s the home of the Dundalk Marine Terminal, whose major clients include the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia. Lots of bulk cargo coming in through there, from all over the world.

Manville just seems to be a wide spot in the road that’s half an hour away from the Newark Liberty International Airport and McGuire Air Force Base, the sort of neighborhood where one death every two-three years changes the murder rate from 0.0 to 9.7.

I’d like to think that there’s an innocent explanation for all this. I just can’t think of one.

Driving home from class tonight, someone hit my car. His lane was closed ahead due to construction, and I guess he decided that he’d rather merge in front of me than behind me. Sadly, he ended up trying to merge through me at about 75-80 MPH, and then decided to run for it. I caught up to him long enough to get his license plate number, and then he was gone (making a fast exit from 101 South to 85 South, then running a red light to turn onto Central Expressway South).

Worse news for him: a witness pulled over and stayed to make a statement to the police, and his memory of the incident was a good match for mine.

The damage? Several deep, long scratches along the driver’s side, from about the side mirror forward to the front of the wheel well, with the finish scraped off of the tire rim in several places. The witness said my car was pushed to the right about a foot and a half by the impact, and he was surprised that I wasn’t hurt. No apparent mechanical damage, and it drove home fine.

I’m fine, and I have excellent insurance, so even if the sorry bastard is uninsured, all will be well. It could have been a lot worse. In the cop’s experience, an impact like that at that speed could have easily caused my front tires to lose traction with the road, sending my car rolling sideways down the highway. He figured that the relative size and mass (my “small” SUV versus his smallish hatchback/whatever) are what saved me.

The (surprisingly small) damage. Aside from the scratches, the door rubs a bit when you open and close it:

[update 10/11/2006: My insurance company ran the license plate number and came up with a 2000 four-door Volkswagen in Sunnyvale, color unknown. Given the location of the accident, that suggests that I got the number right.]

The Internet has failed me. Or, at least, my search-engine skills have failed to turn up the nugget of information I’m currently interested in.

Wednesday afternoon, in preparation for my upcoming vacation in Japan, I applied for a passport. The man at the downtown post office who took my picture and processed my application was really cool, and when he found out where I was going, said “man, I haven’t been to Japan since 1964, as part of the Olympic volleyball team”.

I didn’t hear his name clearly at the time, and I was in a rush to get to a doctor’s appointment, so I didn’t hang around and talk more with this former Olympian.

But I’m curious. And my web search has failed to answer the question “who was on the US Men’s Olympic Volleyball Team in 1964?”. I might have to go to a library and look it up in a book made out of dead trees.

Or call the passport office and just ask him. That’d work, too.