I’m in the homestretch now. I have Casa de Morrill successfully moved now, and I think I have GeekKing finished. [I'm at least seeing it.] I’ll have to see if all the database stuff came across correctly for the King’s; I’m still a little skeptical that it did, but I still have the data on the old machine.

Tonight I’ve got a couple more doozies to get moved. Phew.

Yes, I know that CDM is offline. I always forget that the massive amount of wedding photos never got properly run through NetPBM and the large images tossed out with the bathwater, so it’s over 1.5GB when tar’d and gzip’d. That horks when I try to move it.

I’ll be taking advantage of higher capacity bandwidth at work and doing the FTP sesh there … should be up by COB today.

I left work today when I hit 40 hours for the week. I didn’t have anything that I could legitimately accomplish for the rest of the day, so I left. I’m going to sleep gooooood tonight, because I still have work left to do.

At this rate, I’ll have next Thursday and Friday off.

Forever Geek pointed me to Cable Wholesale. Fantabulous.

I have a few frustrations.

• Technical advice being followed after eight months of hemming and hawing about it—not to mention another testing failure. I-told-you-so is my phrase of the moment.
• Customers who, on a whim, force contract closures to keep clean paperwork. Hell, nothing about this contract is clean—the design isn’t clean, so the build paper isn’t clean. Why should the contracting be clean?
• Said contract issue will have me working on Friday, which I’d really like to have off since I’ve already put 29 hours into this pay period as of this writing.
• People who screw up and flap their arms aimlessly while wanting me to fix the problem. Gah.

Oh well, it all pays the same …

I am happy to report that I am the #1 result for “tag up offsides” in Google.

I rule!

Update: Google surfers looking to figure out what the heck the tag-up offsides rule is: if you’re in the offensive zone and the puck goes out, you’re not offsides if you skate out to the neutral zone before re-entering the attack—you’ve “tagged up” the blue line. College hockey fans have long enjoyed tag-up offsides because it allows the offensive team to keep up the heat on the defense during the attack—and we’re sure that it’ll be good for the pro game, too.

If you want a visual, check out ESPN.com’s page on the new NHL rules for 2005-06, and check out the graphic under the “TAG UP” header.

It looks here as if, independent of our ROM, [$customer] is directing [$customer subcontract manager] to send [our contract manager] an RFQ. I don’t know whether it’ll be CPIF or FFP. I’m assuming the former based on our ROM status, which I just sent [our engineering manager].

– geoffrey.morris AT tbe.com, 2004-Sept-27 14:10

I told you that I’m getting sucked into this. :sigh: It’s not enough that I have to deal with technical acronyms, is it?

I have a fever … and the only prescription is …

That’s Josh Reilly on rhythm guitar, Steven Jones on drums, Adriene Holland on lead guitar, yours truly on bass, and Jeff Holland on the cowbell.

Oh, and Mark Smiley on the Photochop.

I’m curious to see what benefit it would have, but if I get after it, I’ll be referring to the definitive post on GZIPping CSS. [Hat tip to Nick Bradury.]

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year.

I’m just blessed to have been a part of y’all’s lives. I just wish that I were there to give you two a big hug.

As we stood, arms folded, waiting for the final proof load of the weekend to come off—predictably, it didn’t, due to a test hardware failure—my customer informed me, “I’m taking next Friday and Monday off.” I thought to what I’d do with the 13 hours I banked this weekend—I’m being nice and cutting that to the minimum—and, thinking about my impending birthday on Friday, though, “Hmmmm, wonder if I can wangle to have Friday off.”

Then I remembered that Friday is the first day of our new contract with Boeing, and that all our charge lines will change to new WAs on that day. Since my role on our contract includes being the de facto “Keeper of the WAs”—heck, my boss has to come and ask me what the charge lines are—I realized that, unfortunately, I was going to be stuck at work for some [and most likely all] of Friday.

The thing is, I know that all of 4Q2004 is going to be just this crazy. We’ve got three deliveries that we’re going to be pushing: one in mid-October, one right before Thanksgiving, and one right before the end of the year.

It’s just the nature of this business. Unfortunately, it’s just fun enough that I like doing it, even when it frustrates the crap out of me.

Denis Leary’s Rescue Me, one of my favorite shows of the summer, has been renewed for a second season.

FX has renewed the show about New York City firemen, asking for at least 13 additional episodes. The series is filmed on location around New York City and draws about 9.5 million viewers over the course of its five airings each week.

It averages about 2 million viewers ages 18-49 � the key audience prized by advertisers � in its Wednesday 10 p.m. slot. That’s turned out to be the highest total in that demographic for a new basic cable show this year.

I had a minor panic when this past week’s ep mentioned “three more episodes” without noting whether it had been renewed. I’m thankful that it has—it’s rapidly become a show I very much look forward to watching each week.

Nothing like a nap to make a server move go faster.

Or something.

We’ll be back at work in the morning at 0700. My boss was a little surprised that I’d cleared the decks to be there, but if we’re going to do a critical lift, someone ought to be. I’m hopeful that we’ll get out of there around noon. Yes, that hope is in large part due to the fact that I want to see the Bengals game.

Maybe I can trade off visitor escort duties with the boss once he gets there. All I know is that the nap I just took was great, but that I’m going to need another good night’s sleep to make good, sound decisions. Randy keeps asking me if I’m okay, and the answer is that we’re all just pretty run down at this point. You get through this point by making smart decisions about what you do outside of work, which is why I’m home right now and not at Big Spring Jam. [I hadn't planned on going anyway, but hey.]

I’m very much taking a chance here, but I can’t help but think that Noah’s photolog entry for today is dedicated to John Wilson and his bride, Peggy.

John and Peggy, my love and hope to you both. I wish that I were there on your special day [and not stuck at work ;)].

Hey, I figure that, since I have to work this weekend—Saturday and Sunday—that I might as well do the move of the rest of the gfmorris.net network [GFMorris.com, GFMorris.org, IJSM.org] while I’m working. Not like I’ll be around but at night anyway.

I love it when customers decide, on Thursday morning, to screw up your weekend. Of course, I’ve seen this coming for at least two weeks, but still …

Now I must sleep, since I have to be at work in less than seven hours.

… really must be the hobgoblin of little minds.

Jason Whitlock, who once said that anyone rooting against the 2004 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball teams was a racist—which, you’ll remember, really pissed me off—is now drawing parallels between that team and the 2004 U.S. Ryder Cup team. He quotes himself talking to a couple of friends, saying:

“Our Ryder Cup team was composed of a bunch of lazy, unpatriotic, stupid thugs who don’t know the first thing about playing team golf,” I said. “I was rooting for the Euros because I hope it sends a message to our golfers that we need to change the system, change the way we play and pick the team.”

It couldn’t be that Whitlock is racist … could it?

Now, before you rip the network cable out of the back of your computer in disgust, realize that I’m only turning Whitlock’s words and gross assumptions back upon him. I haven’t a clue whether the man’s racist or not. Thing is, though, that he doesn’t know that about me, either. That’s my real point.

I’m presently miffed.

Unfortunately, you can’t write something like DELETE from 'refer' WHERE 'refer' LIKE '%porn.blogspot.com'; in MySQL. It’s really aggravating to not be able to do that, because I have referral spammers who like to use lots of URLs, and while I can block by IP, I know that blocking by IP is ineffective. I am all about moderating the URL, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to do it.

What’s really frustrating is that you can write: SELECT `refer` FROM `refer` WHERE 1 AND `refer` LIKE '%.blogspot.com' LIMIT 0 , 30; and get results returned. You just can’t use the LIKE as a condition of a WHERE clause in a DELETE and get anything. Trust me, I tried: DELETE FROM `refer` WHERE 1 AND `refer` LIKE '%.blogspot.com'; more than once. I tried variants, removing 1 AND, removing the single quotes, everything.

:banghead: Any help from any MySQL gurus would be appreciated. The MySQL Manual hasn’t been real helpful.

I have always been amused by this: EM 666: Engineering Project Management.

So, so appropriate.

[Yes, I'm looking into graduate school.]

Dearest Michaela reviewed Sandra McWebbCracken’s Best Laid Plans for Relevant Magazine’s online arm. It’s a good, honest review, and one I’m glad to read—not just because I like Michaela, but because of the circumstances of the release of the disc.

Sandra, to US ears, is still an independent artist; over in the UK, she is signed with a label. McForbie the Wonder Hamster is herself an American gone to the UK—Scotland, specifically—and it’s interesting to have her perspective on the record as someone who knows Sandra’s music and shares the same Midwestern roots.

It’s a very good album, and I can’t wait to see Sandra play with a full band on Tuesday night and get my hands on a copy.

Happy 25th Birthday, Richard Paul King. Once again, we’re the same age … for nine days.

My brother is going to freak out when he reads this: Petals Around the Rose.

Say it with me, Doug: “Polar Bears Around the Ice Hole: Like petals around a rose, how many polar bears do you see?”

Doug tormented me off-and-on for a good week with this when I was 14 or 15. I’m pretty sure it sparked at least one fight. [No, I've never taken frustration well.]

Geof: “They’re having me do something new at work …”

Leonard [no pause]: “I hope to God that it’s not pole-dancing.”

Geof [long pause]: “Leonard 1, Geof ZERO.”

It’s almost like living with Todd. Well, except for the fact that I give more than I receive with these two lunkheads.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea talks at length about paying for Web services.

It’s a question that can be addressed from two directions, both interesting. You can frame the question as, “What is the business model?”, or you can ask “How does a community support a resource it finds useful?”.

I find that this is a question that your average user doesn’t really consider. I think that’s just common human nature—if there is no cost of entry, we don’t think about the costs of upkeep.

An example: Your average churchgoer might never think of what it takes, financially speaking, to run a church if we didn’t pass an offering plate every Sunday—but the costs are there regardless.

While you can “pass the hat” in meatspace, it’s much harder online. I’ve got a fair amount of experience with this, as I largely finance a community-run Web service. There are many generous folks who donate to help us stay up and running, and I greatly appreciate those people—and they know who they are, so I don’t need to name them. But I’m always bemused when people think that a service package like what we provide with the RMFO network doesn’t cost that much. I wish that it didn’t!

If you read Kellan’s piece, you’ll run across the same words I did:

A few years ago this would have been an unprecedentedly large amount. The idea that we were all going to get rich selling online services was so firmly rejected that it became a commonly accepted truism that “people won’t pay for things online”, and yet, quietly, almost under the radar this seems to be changing.

It really is. I think this is the maturation of the Internet population understanding, fully, TNSTAAFL.

The scary thing is, despite maybe four hours’ sleep, I’m absolutely kicking ass here at work today. Things are just going swimmingly, and I’m wide awake, alert, thinking cogently, and not getting weird looks from co-workers or the boss.

Part of my brain says, “There’s a catch,” but I’m not going to listen to that for now …

That something is college hockey. NHL fans, embrace the wonder that is the US college game. It’ll make you love the NHL, and you’re seeing kids in our conferences that will play in the Big Show once they’re back up and running.