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… :-)

[update: well, this one’s straightforward: 「女の子の足を開かせる」]

I figured I was getting more Japanese spam recently because there’s Japanese text on this blog, but no, that’s not it. Almost all of it goes to addresses harvested elsewhere, including one I that I can never remember the origin of (“j.nwo@…”). Only one in this batch was even sent to an address in the dotclue.org domain.

The subject lines make for fun reading. One thing to note is that the structure of the language seems to be keeping them comprehensible. Either Japanese spam-filtering is a lot more primitive, mangling it to evade spam filters and still be readable is a lot harder, or both. That might explain why my teacher has trouble sending email from a US Yahoo account to some ISPs in Japan; it’s easier to just refuse messages from specific domains and IP blocks tainted by spam.

• おっぱいを素敵な男性にも吸われたい・
• 迷惑メール届いてませんか？
• 美咲よりjgreelyさんへ
• 突然申し訳ございません
• 火遊び？プリーズ！
• 孤独に死んで行くおつもりですか?
• 写真みてくれましたか？
• 今日待ち合わせできますか？
• ネット版ハプニングバーへようこそ！
• サクラゼロの優良サイトから無料パート
• サクッと軽く性欲解消
• ご指名されました
• Ｈ友１００人できるかな♪
• ☆逆援助相手、真剣交際相手☆
• ☆☆確実な出逢いで今日から楽しい
• ■目的別で交際相手を探してみませんか
• ■即アポ確実■
• 【淫らな人妻、派遣いたします】

I have a large stack of unencrypted (well, they are now…) DVDs. Each one contains several short video clips, correctly separated with chapter marks. I want a new DVD containing a subset of those clips, arranged in the order of my choosing, with a simple menu structure, and without re-encoding any of the videos. A mix disc, as it were, with no quality loss. So far, every Open Source or free tool I’ve tried has choked.

I’ve tried three different VOB-splitting tools. All of the available author-from-VOB tools choke on them, because they’re missing the embedded tags that make it a real DVD-compatible VOB (e.g. muxed with “mplex -f8”). Demuxing (either directly from the DVD or from split VOBs) produces an audio track that none of the tools can read, not even the same tool that just demuxed it; they all claim it’s unsupported. mplayer, ffmpeg, ffmpegX, mjpegtools, dvdauthor, transcode, etc, etc, all the same. mplayer cheerfully plays the DVDs (and the single-chapter VOBs), but it only successfully demuxes if the audio is AC3 or MP2; mine are all PCM.

[side note: ffmpegX and HandBrake both have a tendency to produce garbage in either audio or video when used to transcode and compress DVD video; there are options that work correctly with both, but many things that should work don’t.]

It seems the only realistic solution is to rip to DV and drop them into iDVD, accepting the quality loss from re-encoding. Everything else involves spending more money than the task is worth.

Despite my lifelong admiration of the female breast, I can honestly say that this never occurred to me:

Other Japanese men engage in the all-too-common handshake scam, where a friendly man pretends to want to shake your hand Western-style, then fondles your breast at the same time.

This comes from the “Women Travellers” section of the Lonely Planet Japan guidebook. Their stuff is generally reliable, as long as you ignore their fondness for treating alternatives to Western medicine and logic as simple fact, and it’s no secret that groping is a significant problem in Japan, so this is probably an accurate and necessary warning.

By the way, their World Food Japan book is excellent. I have a slight preference for What’s What in Japanese Restaurants, but more for the presentation than for the content; more kanji, and they don’t keep using the phrase “traditional restaurant-cum-bar” to describe izakaya (their other Japan books just call them pubs, like everyone else does).

WWiJR is also slightly harder to lose than WFJ; I know I’ve got a copy of it around here somewhere, but it must be hidden under a CD or DVD. I had to use Amazon’s search-inside feature to look up its euphemism for pub. Which, by the way, appears to be censored on some pages, or else their scanning/viewing software has an odd glitch that accidentally deletes the “-cum-bar” part about half the time without affecting anything else on the page.

[and now I dread the search-engine referrals I’m going to get for having those two words in close proximity…]

Well, at least in the area of configuration, maintenance, and release management, the current version shows its dark roots. Before anyone speaks up, I’ll say that I’m generally happy with using FC5 and RedHat Enterprise on our servers at work, but someone had recommended Ubuntu server as a possible base OS for virtualizing my personal machine with VMWare Server.

It installed correctly, but wouldn’t boot. The solution I located required the following steps:

1. boot from the install CD
2. discover the command-line option for booting in rescue mode
3. guess the partition name to mount as / for rescue
4. open a root shell
5. manually add a nameserver to /etc/resolv.conf
6. type apt-get install linux-686
7. say yes to all the dependencies this requires
8. watch and wait
9. reboot

“Fixed in next release,” supposedly, but between that early-warning sign and some of the obvious eccentricities I tripped over, I don’t think I’ll bother with it.

YouTube stopped working a while back on my Quad G5. Videos played, but with no sound. All other forms of video worked fine, and the exact same video would work if I downloaded it manually and ran it from a different FLV player.

I reinstalled Flash, I wiped caches to make sure I didn’t have an old version of the YouTube flash player, grabbed the latest version of Firefox and tried it there, etc, etc. No change. It wasn’t a big problem, since I usually don’t surf from that machine, but I finally spent a few minutes chanting Google incantations and found the answer:

Run the Audio MIDI Setup utility and change the Audio Output Format back to 44100 Hz

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!”).