Some of you know that I have a lot of family in South Mississippi. Most of them are okay. The only person I’m really worried about at this point is my dad’s first cousin’s husband, Ashton Carver, who apparently decided to ride Katrina out in Bay St. Louis. I didn’t watch TV when I got home last night [I went straight to bed], so I haven’t seen the devastation there, but in reading about what all Katrina has done to Mississippi … well, I hope he still had a boat at the house. Their house was a few blocks from the road that runs along the shoreline.

The worst thing, economically, for our little state is that all the Gulf casinos are just destroyed. As has been regularly reported by the AP and rebroadcast by every media outlet, those casinos bring in $500,000/day to the state. They’re a vital cog in Mississippi’s economic engine, and … they’re just gone.

These are sad times.

I’ve spent the last half-hour or so looking at things, and I now understand what my sister-in-law’s mother meant earlier when she called me, wondering if I’d heard from her daughter and my brother: “… and then I went on the Internet, spent a couple of hours reading about it all, and … my assurances that most everything would be okay went away.”

I’m just happy that, three months ago, I had the foresight to give Cindy’s folks my business card, complete with my cell number. I’m the only family of Doug’s they knew how to get hold of that they could get through to talk to. [Doug and Cindy are okay, although Doug's probably working really crazy hours right now covering all the news.]

Most of the blognoscenti may well say that TrackBack is dead, but … just now, I realized that I hadn’t done proper linking between two entries, and so I sent a TB from an old entry to a new one. I thought about going in and editing the comment timestamp, and … I found that WordPress has implemented my old suggestion that TBs should be sent with the timestamp of when the source entry was posted, not when the target entry received the TB. Totally cool to me here at 0515. [Of course, just like most anything's funny in the middle of the night, most anything is cool to me first thing in the morning.]

Tonight, as I sleep, I will be surrounded by the voices on WWL-AM out of New Orleans. Tonight, for once, it is coming through here as clear as a bell.

God bless the folks on the northern Gulf Coast, and may we all be so lucky that Katrina fizzles out overnight and drops to a Cat4 or a Cat3.

Somewhere around 0230, I could no longer get a signal from WWL—which might or might not mean anything—but, blessedly, Katrina has weakened ever-so-slightly.

The only amusing thing that happens with hurricanes going down on the bayou is that Cajuns get put on TV—with probably half the country trying to figure out what language they’re speaking. Of course, then the TV foofs figure out that oh, maybe the hurricane will hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast. That gets them to talking about the burg of Biloxi … and brings me to my point of distraction.

The “lox” is not pronounced like the lox you might put on your bagles. It’s not “Bye-LOCKS-ee” or “Bih-LOCKS-ee”. It’s “Buh-LUCK-see”.

Of course, I’m sure that Rick is happy that he doesn’t have to hear TV newsfoofs try to pronounce Gautier. [There's lots of non-Coasties that stumble on Gautier, folks. I did until I knew Rick.]

All in all, the one thing that I wish that could happen, but won’t, is that Yoknapatawpha County could be once-and-for-all flooded out and riven from the Mississippi landscape. [Why yes, I do detest the oeuvre of William Faulkner. Thanks for asking.]

As I’ve discussed a couple times, I’ve been reading Charles Petzold’s Code I finished just now, and so I’d like to share some scattered thoughts:

• Petzold builds slowly but swiftly, if that makes any sense. He divides the early chapters into small, manageable chunks, talking about things like bits and bytes and Boolean logic in ways that the average layman shouldn’t have any issues with. The first 40% of the books or so fairly flies by [if you're interested in the material and willing to set aside the time to read it, that is].
• The next 20% of the book or so, though, slogs way down, as Petzold jumps from small chunks to large chunks fed to the reader at once. [If you want to compare it to the terminology of the text, he goes from feeding you 1-bit chunks to 8-bit chunks to 16-bit chunks of information at quite some speed.] It’s disconcerting, and this is the point where I lost steam in reading the book and went from reading it to skimming it. That’s unfortunate; Petzold’s voice is extremely strong and engaging early on, and it’s as if he’s like so many engineering professors I had as an undergraduate—suddenly realizing that he’s way behind the syllabus and deciding to just charge forward, Mas alla! over the next hill. My feeling on this book went from “I love it!” to “It’s teaching me a lot, and I should shut up and keep reading.” There’s a difference there, folks.
• The next 25% or so of the book actually slows up a bit, but it covers dreadfully boring material [assembly code, addressing memory, etc.]. Important stuff, and it’s covered in much the same manner as before: a balanced historical perspective told anecdotally. However, I was left wondering when there would be a quiz on the material being covered.
• The next 10% discusses high-level subjects like high-level programming languages, APIs, and things of that ilk. It’s done fairly well, with a sense of history, but the anecdotal nature is lost. At this point, the book has certainly resumed its desperate-to-finish nature.
• The final chapter of the text is an amalgam of stuff under a banner of The Graphical Revolution, but it quickly devolves into a thumbnail sketch of technologies like CD-ROM media, GIF v. JPEG, vector graphics v. raster graphics, DACs, etc. Honestly, you could get more information from these links than you would have gotten reading the final chapter. However, Petzold’s work suffers from covering an exponentially-growing sphere from the perspective of the late 1990s, so while I’m tempted to skewer the ending, any book discussing modern computing is going to be highly prone to grinding to a halt like this.

Please don’t get me wrong: the text is still quite solid, and it comes as recommended reading to people who are interested in how computers work. [Before anyone says otherwise, please understand that I'm a hobbyist administrator, trained in following manual pages, install scripts, and asking for the advice of others. I AM NOT A PROGRAMMER. The only language I've ever written working programs in is FORTRAN 77, and that almost eight years ago. I'm a high-functioning user; this is part of my self-education, serving as a foundation point.]

I would absolutely recommend handing this book to a book-savvy pre-teen who is interested in computers. Had this book been available in 1990, I might be a programmer now instead of an aerospace engineer. [I think I prefer the aero bit. I like blowing stuff up.]

Subscribers to my del.icio.us bookmarks [and I'd be shocked if anyone is subscribed to it but me] know that I’ve been looking at a Linksys NSLU2 for over three months. Last night, I finally broke down and got one, with an 80GB Maxtor USB 2.0 HD to go with it. Why now? Well, I want to re-format this machine in the near future, drop it back to Win98 [more in keeping with its RAM capabilities than is XP], and swap the HDs around in it [pulling a 6GB drive for use in my parents' old machine when I get that up and running, replacing it with a 40GB drive]. I want to use the NSLU2 as a ghetto NAS, and … it’ll do.

And again I say: “Suck it up!”

Gas Prices Graph, with adjustments for inflation.

Feel better now?

[HT to John. I :heart: jowilson.]

Due to time constraints, a little FL downtime, and the insane rate at which I get new items, I’m just now getting under 500 unread items from my high of 2800.

I might get to all read by the end of the day, if I do nothing else …

On Scott’s suggestion, I think I’ll have to give Nagios a try. We had a small exploit last week—it was the pre-WP 1.5.2 SQL injection bug, actually, giving some clown an opportunity to try to root me; he did dump a bunch of spam out while I was gone :sigh:—and so I’m back to having two terminal windows open to miller at all times. [One runs top c; the other is su'd and cd /tmp, just to make sure no one's dumping stuff there. It also lets me do stuff to the box so I can watch the top output in the other window in real time.]

This hobbyist sysadmin shit is for the birds, but I’m not in a position to pay someone to do it for me.

I remember something Dad told me early in life: “Son, beware slow-moving hurricanes down in the Gulf.” Why yes, Dad’s family is from South Mississippi and lived through Camille.

Now we’ve got Katrina, what was thought to be a weak little tropical storm that would fizzle out over Florida while we were watching the local weather in Orlando on Wednesday, which became a Category 3 hurricane overnight, wobbling its way westward through the southeastern Gulf.

Here we go again.

So yesterday, I left the office around 1430, headed over to campus, got a copy of my schedule—which I need for the two campus-based errands I have today—and then came home. I read for a little while, then decided that I needed a little nap. That was 1630 or so.

I woke up about 15 minutes ago.

I’ve been a TBE employee for six years today. It sure doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but it has been.

Gee, I think I’ve been out of town for a while. Great googly moogly … that’s a lot of marking as read. Thankfully, FeedLounge makes it really easy to do this … and I’ll definitely mark “Rainy Day” as read first thing.

I gotta say … I’ve been up for over 18 hours now, and while I’m tired, I’m not sleepy. One shouldn’t be jet-lagged from a one-hour’s difference in time zone, but I was also getting up 90-120 minutes earlier than I had been getting up the two weeks prior to the trip while I was down in Florida.

Thankfully we aren’t terribly busy around the office…

[This entry starts my Booklogging category. If you're interested, see why I'm booklogging.]

So, I finally got around to reading Freakonomics, which makes me a lame Weblogger or something. I found it to be interesting, a nice thumbnail sketch of using statistical analyses to look at the world in interesting ways. A lot of the stuff that Leavitt argues for in the book is the same kind of thing I’ve been reading over the years with the folks who do sabermetrics—taking the data, looking for trends, seeking correlations, and possibly finding causalities.

Doing it from an economist’s point of view, however, widens the scope of the investigation. The things that Leavitt, his colleagues, and others he finds interesting study are really … out there. But they’re pretty doggone cool.

One thing that I found interesting, however, is how Leavitt’s regression analysis that found a correlation between abortion becoming legal with Roe v. Wade and a nationwide drop in crime pretty much kicks the leg out from under the anecdotal argument that Malcom Gladwell made in The Tipping Point about what worked in drawing down crime in New York City. Considering how much the blogosphere talks about both Freakonomics and The Tipping Point, you’d think I’d've run across someone remarking this before. [However, I've probably missed every reference to this contradiction. Oh well. In this case, I'm writing for my limited audience. :)]

Anyhow, if you like unconventional thinking and having your preconceptions challenged a bit—or in watching others’ preconceptions shaken—it’s a good little read. It was great for a Saturday afternoon in Florida.

If you love Wikipedia as I do, you’ll do as I’ve done and donate to support them.

Well, I’m admitted into graduate school. Since ETS still hasn’t filed my GRE scores yet with UAH, I’ve enrolled as a non-degree student; I’ll re-enroll as a degree-seeking student sometime later in the fall. [It was the fastest way to get me in.] Doing the non-degree route required someone from the department to sign off on my classes, and when I went to go to Dr. Utley’s office, there was a fun exchange:

Dr. Utley [not recognizing me]: “Can I help you?”

“Yes, I’m Geof Morris. The Dean’s office called …”

“Oh, yes.” [pause] “Wait, don’t I know you? You were in Bob [Frederick]’s class, weren’t you?”

[sly smile] “Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay. Let me look at this.” [quick scan] “You don’t want to take those two classes together. I think you should just take one class this term.”

[Stifles urge to invoke the name of Dr. Benfield, who said, "Oh, please. You can kill those two classes together in your sleep."] “Oh, okay. Which should I take?”

“Either one will be fine. 660 is what we start most students with.”

“Fine by me.”

“Honestly, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone take 690 with anything else.”

I started to interject, but the words out of my mouth would have been, “Oh, c’mon, Dr. Utley. It’s Dr. Gholston. I had him for 390″—the undergraduate counterpart to this course—”and even though I only attended half of the lectures, I aced the class.” I decided that, since she was doing me the favor, I should just shut up. Instead, I said, “I’ll definitely take your advice on that score.”

So yes, Ant-Dawg … Geofro and Opie will be re-united. Hehheheeheheheheh. [Hey, wait ... we never did take the same class as undergraduates, did we? How the hell did we manage to do that? We were both undergraduates for half of forever. It's amazing ... we went to the same school and worked at the same company [for a little while, anyway], and … we never saw each other in either place in an official capacity.]

While I was gone:

1. TiVo was only set for me to be gone through Saturday, so … I lost some of the Law & Order episodes I had, but far worse, I don’t have last night’s episode of Big Brother 6. I’m a full week behind, too, as I chose not to keep up with the show while I was on the road.
2. I got my GRE scores. They’re good.
3. Some assclown hijacked the server. Again. The day I left, in fact. The NOC kept updating the ticket, wondering where the hell I was. Oi.

Nothing else seems terribly amiss, though. I have to shower soon, figure out what all I have left in my graduate school application, get all that turned in, then quickly get registered for classes and decide whether or not I want to fight the book lines today. [Read: not on your life.] Oh, and yeah … I have class tonight.

Still at KSC. Probably here through Wednesday.

Confirmed: flying home in the morning.

Amazingly, we didn’t slip the schedule after all. Sanity prevailed!

Manic packing and preparations to commence at 1800 hours.

Update: Since I have a lot of friends and family that worry about these things:

1. DL 4348: HSV-ATL, 1330-1527 Wed 17 Aug 2005.
2. DL 386: ATL-MCO, 1650-1820 Wed 17 Aug 2005.
3. DL 219: MCO-ATL, 1154-1321 Sat 20 Aug 2005.
4. DL 4805: ATL-HSV, 1415-1408 Sat 20 Aug 2005.

Damn, I love that flight from Atlanta where you gain time.

I love it when unofficial schedule slips take the pressure off of everyone.

I wonder if my trip to KSC and my first day of classes are going to coincide…

But hey. Dr. Gholston is used to me missing his class…

My realization of the morning: if I’m leaving midday on Wednesday for the Cape, coming back on the weekend … and classes start next week … I gotta get all my paper square before I leave town!

WordPress 1.5.2 is out. I just did the upgrade here in … 30 seconds. I’m hoping to have a spare hour tomorrow to do the rest of my upgrades.

Owen Winkler has a writeup, in English, of the changes. The biggest feature update, to my eyes, is the improved comment feeds, which now have entry metadata in them to let you know, as you peruse aggregated comments, on what entries the comments were posted.

Did I somehow miss where Anchorman was supposed to be screamingly funny? I mean, there were some funny bits in there, and I laughed out a loud a couple of times, but … I felt like it was trying too hard most of the time, going for the goofball quotes that people would be using later on with their friends.

And before you jump all over me, this isn’t some “I hate Will Ferrell” thing. I thought Old School was insanely funny.

Y’know, I think I’m about tired of folks complaining about gas prices. Increased prices are simply an aftereffect of increased wages. We all like increased wages, but few of us like increased prices [unless we're selling something].

Do I like paying more for gas? No, not really. I’d like to spend my money on other things. But my demand for gasoline is pretty inelastic—I drive to get to work, and I drive to stay sane. It’s pretty inelastic for other folks, too, I’m sure. But, at the end of the day, the market generally finds a solution.

Now, do really poor folks have a beef here? Sure. Folks trying to hack it on minimum wage—don’t derail into a discussion of whether a minimum wage is a good idea; it’s the law of the land, so for now, let’s limit the scope of this discussion to the magnitude and not the existence—do get screwed out of this, because the artificial floor of the market hasn’t been indexed to inflation. [Mind you, there aren't a plethora of jobs around here right at that minimum wage, but they exist.] But Jesus was right … you’ll always have the poor with you.

But the next SUV driver I see in Madison complaining about gas prices on the local news … well, pardon me if I feel like punching ‘em in the face.