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Doctor, doctor 2006 November 30 12:29

Posted by diamond in : Work, Health , 2 comments

On 11/29/06, Stephen Shirley wrote:
> I managed to strain something in my wrist yesterday.
> It seems to be getting better, taking today off to try
> and rest it up.

Failed to get better, doctor has ordered me to rest it till monday, girlfriend complains that i never take her orders, all allegations that this is a foosball-related injury are strenuously denied. Girlfriend now also complains that she was only joking when she suggested the above mention and that i wasn’t meant to type it. Sheesh.

I’m available by mobile if anyone needs more girlfriend-related whining.

Steve

I was worried about jet-lag 2006 November 22 18:40

Posted by diamond in : Health , 1 comment so far

No longer. For the last 3 days in california, i started getting up at about 05:40, to try and lessen the jet lag when i flew home on monday/Tuesday. As i was flying out at 16:30 california time, and landing in london at 02:00 california time, i needed to be sleepy in the early evening if i was going to be able to sleep on the flight.

That kinda didn’t work out.

I didn’t get to sleep on the flight at all, nor on the flight to dublin afterwards. I finally did fall asleep at about midnight last night after being awake for 34 hours. As such, the 8-hour time difference between here and california is entirely outweighed by the amount of sleep deprivation, so once that’s sorted, i’ll be on irish time anyway ,-) It’s like a good plan, only much much worse.

Fry, wash 2006 November 20 2:10

Posted by diamond in : Random, Health , add a comment

Exhaustion, unfamiliar traffic patterns, confusing and/or misleading road signs managed to turn this into this. I’ve normally got an excellent sense of direction, and i’ve driven most of this route before, which is why the end result is quite so remarkable. This whole getting-up-at-05:43-to-try-and-lessen-the-jet-lag-on-Tuesday lark is pretty tough going.

What’s also scary is that the washing machine in this apartment did a full wash cycle in the time i took me to plot out my meanderings; 20 minutes. I’m afraid to look too closely in case it’s nuclear powered.

Many things, frequently involving ears 2006 November 13 6:55

Posted by diamond in : Work, Random, Health , add a comment

On my way back from seb & sol’s wedding (which was lovely), i was driving through stillorgan. As i drove along, i saw a dog sitting in a driveway up ahead scratching itself. That seemed a bit odd, as it was quite late at night, and you don’t tend to see that many dogs outside after dark. As i got nearer, i realised that the proportions of it’s head and ears were somewhat off. It was only as i passed it that i realised it was a fox, calmly sitting there in the middle of dublin. It then ambled off down the footpath, quite clearly at home.

I recently bought a pair of in-ear sound isolating earphones. They weren’t cheap, but they nicely fulfil the requirement for something very portable that allows me to block out the crowds while commuting. The only problem is that you have to be pretty careful with the volume levels. If, like me, you’re not used to in-ear sound sources, you’re likely to turn the volume up past safe levels. On a few occasions now i’ve had ringing in my ears after using them for a couple of hours. You’d think i’d learn. The other thing to watch out for is that the noise floor of your sound source becomes much more important, as the music will be at a much lower level in comparison to normal headphones.

I flew over to california on the 30th of october, via london heathrow. I was quite relieved that al from my office was also travelling with me, he’s a seasoned business traveller, and knew all the various shortcuts for getting through security etc with minimum fuss. That didn’t stop him from bringing 3 laptops in his hand-luggage however, which produced an amusing scene when he was asked to place one laptop per tray at the security scanner.

For the flights, i’d been given a choice between flying 8 hours to chicago, and then 4 hours to san francisco, or 1 hour to london, and then 11 hours to san francisco. After asking around the office a bit, i opted for the route via london on the basis that the carrier was virgin atlantic, and they were strongly recommended to me by other people who’d done the trip many times. The major aspect in virgin’s favour was the on-board linux-based entertainment system built into every seat. You had an choice of about 50 movies, various seasons of tv shows, music, games, and other misc features. I watched 3 movies on the way over, plus some tv episodes, and was thoroughly impressed. It’s all on-demand, you can play/pause/resume whenever you want. With the addition of a loan of some sound-cancelling headphones from noirin, it made the entire 11-hour flight quite bearable.

The headphones themselves are quite deceptive. After a while, you think they’re not making any difference. Then you turn off the sound-cancellation, and the difference in noise is stunning. The product blurb claims it’s a perceived halving in volume, and for once that’s an understatement. I can highly recommend these for anyone who’s doing any long-haul air travel.

The rental vechicle i opted for is quite a mixed bag. The steering is quite light and well balanced, the transmission is very smooth, and there’s quite a large amount of power available. That said, the suspension is awful, it bounces up and down for ages after the most minor of bumps; the cornering is bad enough that you get tire-squeal even at very sedate turning rates; the braking, while firm, is badly hampered by the suspension preventing the tires from having decent contact with the road. It’s also so long that it tends to stick out of parking spaces into the lanes by a good 2 foot. The lights usually don’t turn off when you turn the switch, you have to flip the switch back on and off again before they change state. The locking system insists on beeping the horn every time you lock the vehicle. Unlocking the back doors of the cab require either 2 or 3 presses of the button, i haven’t figured out any pattern to this yet. The mirrors, for a vehicle of this size, are tiny and far too focused, meaning you have to move your head around a lot to try and figure out what’s around you. The few americans i’ve shown it to have burst out laughing at the size of it, so apparently it’s not just europeans who think it’s ridiculous -) Next time i’ll be opting for something smaller, thought the options aren’t exactly better looking.

Driving around mountain view some evening last week, i noticed a rather odd looking creature crossing the street. At first i thought it was some kind of disfigured dog, or possibly a racoon. Again, the oddly shaped ears (plus some googling to confirm) led me to the conclusion that it was in fact an opossum. In an ugly competition between an opossum and a pt cruiser, i’m not sure which would win (or whether winning is better than losing).

Recently i’ve been playing with rockbox, an open-source replacement firmware for a number of mp3 players (archos, iriver, ipod, iaudio). I have vague plans to work on the interface a bit to include some of the better parts of the rio karma’s ui, which is the best i’ve ever seen in a mobile device. To that end, i’ve bought an iriver h320 player off ebay. Unfortunately, it looks like it has a faulty battery, so i’ve contacted the seller to see about a replacement. The handy thing is that the seller is also here in mountain view, so i was able to drive the 1.2 miles to pick up the iriver in the first place, saving myself on shipping etc. I’m hoping this means i’ll be able to get a replacement easily before i leave on the 20th. The one issue i’ve noticed with the iriver so far is that with earphones like the e2g’s mentioned above, there is a noticeable hiss on the headphone output, regardless of volume level or whether there’s something playing. It’s only detectable with the e2g’s though, so i can probably live with it.

Speaking of the rio karma, i found a project that adds usb-mass-storage-like capabilities to the rio under linux. It rocks -)

My sleeping patterns over here have been a bit weird. The office isn’t conducive to napping, so i’ve had to try and adjust to that. What’s been happening though is that i fall asleep at night with the lights on. Many nights i’ve not actually gotten around to turning off the lights at all, despite waking up a number of times to go to the bathroom. I realised the extent of this when during a night near the end of my second week i came back into the bedroom and was lost, couldn’t figure out why. Eventually i realised it was because i hadn’t walked into this room when it was dark before. Oops. I’ve been sleeping a lot, but not very well, waking up a lot. No real idea why.

People keep asking me how google is, and how the states is, etc. The general answer is that google rocks, and america is fine. This is my second time over here, the last time being this spring to boston with skynet. During that trip, i was unimpressed by the ritual fingerprinting and taking of mugshots. Being treated like a criminal is not my idea of fun. So, i decided that if i had to return to the states on buisness at some point, ok, but such an experience was not my idea of fun, and would not be part of any future holidays. On this trip, i’ve seen nothing that would make me want to change that decision. I even went to McDonalds today, on the tenuous hope that it might be better over here. Ha. They did at least have detailed nutritional information about the food. As it turns out, the meal i ordered had well over 1300 calories. And it would have been another 300+ calories more if i hadn’t opted for a diet drink. Scary stuff. Needless to say that’s the only thing i ate today out of concern for my arteries.

Life at the Googleplex is really really good. They have many on-site masseuses. I have thus far had 2 chair massages, which last 15 minutes, and one hour-long table massage. It took a while to get used to, my mind kept drifting off to things i wanted to go do, but wow the feeling of relaxation afterwards. The campus is fairly sprawling, it takes maybe 15-20 minutes to walk from one end to the other, so each building has a stock of electric scooters to allow people to get around efficiently. The standard issue scooters have a top speed of about 15mph, but the sysops group have scooters with a turbo mode which are good for 20mph. They rock -) It’s also been really good getting to know some of the sysops group over here. The amount of knowledge and expertise they have is mind-blowing. That’s one of the reasons i love working with this company, the sheer amount i can learn here is phenomenal. Sometimes it makes me feel like a child in a shop of shiny things holding a large gift voucher -) And the food… oh the food… vast quantites and variety free, delicious. I’m really going to miss it.

I’m staying in one of the corporate apartments in mountain view itself. It’s got a net connection, and a wireless access point to share it out to the rooms. Unfortunately, this is one of those occasions where wireless sucks. I couldn’t figure out why the wireless reception was so bad. Even with my laptop sitting a foot or two away from the access point, i’d get maybe 50% signal at best. It wasn’t until i ran a wireless scanner for a few minutes that i realised why. The scanner indicated that there were 49 wireless access points within range. 802.11b and g divide the 2.4Ghz spectrum into 14 overlapping channels. In practise, there are only 3 channels that should not interfere with each other, 1, 6 and 11. Here, there are 10+ networks on both channel 6 and 11, and sufficient noise in the spectrum that there is very high levels of interference across all channels, making wireless very unreliable. Gah.

A while ago, i got published in the linux gazette with a piece on some hackery in subversion (a version control system). Last week, i received an email sent out by the editor of the linux gazette to all previous authors (at least i presume so) asking for new article submission. As it happens, i’d been working on another article on kerberos migration which started out as an email that never did get sent. So, i replied with that url saying that it wasn’t finished yet, needed some polish etc, and asked for general remarks on the content. I got a reply that contained the following:

Looks really good. Heck, the only thing that’s actually “missing” (not really missing, but that’s what’s needed to convert it from an email to an article) is a short intro header giving some background.
<….>
Incidentally, I really appreciate the good quality of the content that I’ve seen from you, Steve.

That kinda made my day.

*Update*

I forgot to mention that the 4.7l petrol engine in my rented pickup delivers about the same power you’d expect from a 3.0l turbo diesel engine, which is just pathetic.

Just arrived 2006 October 31 1:20

Posted by diamond in : Work, Health , 2 comments

I have just arrived in the google apartments in mountain view. I have travelled dub->lhr (1 hour) and lhr->sfo (11 hours) today, and gotten one hour’s sleep in the last 39 hours. I’ve also driven on american highways for the first time ever. The sheer terror of it boggles my fried brain. The absymal surfacing of the roads, the stunningly bad handling and suspension, the aggressive unhelpful road users, aaaaaaagh. And now at last i sleep.

*Update*
I was too tired to remember clearly. It was in fact 30 mins sleep in 39 hours.