Heather and I sent out our save-the-dates last week, which meant I needed to finish up our wedding websites, mr-and-mrs.jasonparrott.com . It turned out pretty good. It has a lot of interactive pieces, and Heather can pretty easily update most pieces on her own. It was a nice project to learn Rails 2 and ActiveRecord since I’ve mostly been using Merb and DataMapper at work.

I’ve also been working on a pet project for the wedding. I think it’d be neat to have color-changing leds in the centerpieces at the reception. At first I thought I would have just a simple purple light at the base of all the vases. Then I thought, why not have it be whatever color we want and use RGB leds. Then I decided I wanted some way to control the color, so why not make them wireless. And while I’m at it, why not make a remote control with various knobs and switches to control the lights individually or together in various patterns and neat tricks. Well, at that point I had to go all out and make the leds work in unison to the music as sort of a whole-room audio visualization project. Oh, and Heather said I had to keep it under $10 a table. Here goes nothing!

Started off small. I have one led blinking and connected to an Arudunio. Then I got a potentiometer attached so I have an input knob for intensity. Now I’m working on getting the rotary encoder working so I can have hue control. My last goal for the evening is to get the RF receiver and transmitter working. Unfortunately, they’ll be connected to the same arduino for now. If you think I’m giving out the frequency of the RF signal – you’ve got another thing coming! That’s a closely guarded secret until after the wedding.

Has it been a while since I used my blog to rant about something? Sure it has – let me get this one off my chest.

For the last four days, I’ve had every intention of going to the passport office in Ferguson Library’s basement – to get my photo taken, write them a check, and get the paperwork filed for my first passport. Unfortunately, work stuff has come up Tuesday through Thursday, so I had to go today. Incidentally, I still have work stuff, but I took a break!

Anyway, I get there, there’s a mob of 20 to 30 people waiting in the hallway. I notice a library book slip holder with a bunch of cards with numbers. I get number 23 which is on the top of the pile. About an hour into my wait, the crowd is beginning to die down, the restless kids are leaving slowly, and its just 10 of us sitting in the hallway. That’s when it gets complicated.

About five other couples have picked up cards at this point. A man walks up to the stack of cards, rumages through them noticing that they’re out of order, then takes the lowest numbered card (happens to be 20) and puts his “31″ back in the pile. Then a woman, seeing the man do this, goes up and picks up card knowing full well that she has “25″, goes and picks up card 22. This has happened because people have left after taking a card, and they put their card back in the stack. It was very frustrating. Nobody said anything, so I stood up, asked the man and woman what they were doing. They told me to find a number in the stack too. I explained that the numbers don’t matter anymore, that there are only 10 of us, and we know what order we got in. The man said, “I didn’t see you sitting there”. The woman’s excuse was, “I was here, then left, and I came back so I got the number I had originally.” Both are bullshit. I told them that, then sat down. The man eventually got up and got a seat closer to the door. The woman and I started talking, I explained kindly that I didn’t believe her, but I’m in no rush, so she should go. Eventually 20 was called and the man walked in. Then they called for 22 and the woman said “are you sure?”, I said I didn’t care, so she went.

When my turn was called, the passport lady said “you’ve been sitting there for a while”, I explained what happened, and the passport lady said “yeah, this has been happening”. I explained that a black woman had number 24, and if the person holding 24 wasn’t her, then they deserve to go last. She said “thank you”, and I left.

So, my first gripe is with the passport office, not using some sort of numbering system that you can’t return numbers to. If everyone got one number, and it stayed in order, then there would be no problem.

However, it *should* have worked, except people are generally rude, impatient, and inconsiderate towards their fellow human beings. It should have been obvious, if someone notices the cards are out of order, they put the lower numbered cards in the back of the pile or throw them out and sit back down. Why when one person does the wrong thing do other people have to follow? I was actually angrier at the woman because she knew damn well that the man was an asshole and did it anyway. The man might have had an excuse that he thought he had picked up a high number by mistake and went to get the next number in the pile.

Oh well, I got my passport, so I was productive for the day! Now, back to work!

I’m having a problem with Anaconda installer in the rhel6 beta. If use anaconda with a serial console or Xen console, AND I’m running GNU screen, I get funky output and that screen window which is viewing the console freezes up with some unprintable characters.

I want to see if its my .screenrc that’s causing the problem, or if it happens with a default .screenrc. If I can reproduce it, I’ll open a Bugzilla bug and contact redhat.

For now, the workaround is to run xm console or view the serial console outside of GNU screen.

Looking for a new place to live is pretty stressful. I’m down to staying where I am in my 10th floor Stamford, CT apartment, or moving to the less-urban 1st floor Norwalk, CT apartment. The Norwalk apartment has more space, is more convenient to work, and is cheaper by a few thousand dollars. However, I won’t have moving expenses if I stay here, and I really do like it here. I think I’ll let the credit reporting agency decide if I’m worthy of a new apartment.

Started the hunt for Delaware-area DJ’s, photographers, florists, and officiants. This will take a while to find someone at the right price who provide what we want and are available Jan 7th.

Apparently with my lease up in June, it is still too early to be looking for a new apartment. I’ve decided that all the amenities (pool, fitness center, movie lounge, walking distance to stores and restaurants in downtown Stamford, and amazing view) aren’t worth the price I’m paying anymore. Instead, I’m looking to spend about $600 less a month to live closer to work and have about double the space I have now.

However, most places won’t talk to me because they want someone to move in immediately. Luckily, since I’m looking to save a ton of money, I could have some overlap and be just as well off financially.

I’m looking forward to having new surroundings and a different commute to work.

I’ve been playing with RHEL6 beta at work. So far, it works nicely as a paravirtualized host inside RHEL5 xen. However, the hpsa module for HP Smart Array controllers is throwing a lot of errors when I try my install, and won’t let the RHEL6 install complete. I tried loading the cciss driver again, but failed (human error probably). This was on an HP bl460c G6 proliant blade. I want to try on a G1 blade before I open a redhat bug with my error messages. Tonight I’ll try the install on a Dell M610 blade!

It’s not just for the house anymore. I have about 700GB worth of data on my 1TB external drive. After keeping this data (some going back to 1993) for so long, I’ve decided to delete the files that I don’t need anymore (viruses, old warez, old downloads) and tar/gzip the important documents which should reduce their size quite a bit. I’ll then duplicate it all across two drives.

I’ve been going through my music as well, tagging with Musicbrainz Picard. I corrected some corrupt filenames with convmv, and deleted DRM’d music with a simple bash script that used mplayer to see which files were unopenable. I have hundreds of songs labeled “Track #”, and it’ll take me years to get it all labeled. It should be fun.

I finally took and passed the Redhat Certified Engineer exam. 100% on the RHCT portion of the exam and 93.8 was my final score on the RHCE portion. I’m satisfied. Now, back to work. =)

Get ready for a stream of consciousness post.  If I try to write up structured posts, I never finish and they sit as drafts.

Why work is more fun than video games

My weekday life is largely made up of work.  I leave my apartment by 7am, and I’m home around 5pm.  Sometimes when I get home, there are some tasks that need to get done after 5pm, and usually don’t tkae that long.  By the time I’ve had a snack for dinner, its 7 or 8 and I’m ready for bed.  That’s my day.

The weekend, however, is when everything gets accomplished.  Lately, I’ve been writing a to-do list Friday night so I know what options are on the table for that weekend.  This weekend, it lists:

Games: torchlight demo, Shadow Complex, start Fallout 3.  Shows: Diggnation, TRS, HDNation, Co-op, Twit, The Guild, This Old House.  Food: Sweet potatoes, finish milk, finish heavy cream.  Life: taxes, get stock+401k accounts updated, new netflix account?, bills.

I look at that list now and think, “really, Jason?  You’re listing what shows and games and food you’re going to eat?  Really?”  I can’t help it.  A few months ago, I was playing video games so I could finish them and move on to the next one.  I wasn’t having fun.  Shadow Complex was fun.  I really enjoyed the single player campaign.  Now that I’ve finished the single player campaign, I want to go back and complete all the minimalist run through and collect the other achievements.  I realized in the shower this morning that that’s dumb.  I don’t want to play through it again – that’s tedious. Why do I put myself through that?  I think it’s because I’m a completionist.  I won’t put a game away until I’ve played it all the way through and done all the side quests and experienced every possible thing in the game.

Anyway, back to the subject of this section..  all Friday and Saturday, I was working on getting one of our servers at work, unixdeva05, squeezed into a Xen HVM virtual machine – a P2V.  I realized that I’d rather be working with computers and playing with virtualization than playing an awesome video game.  I’d rather be banging my head against a wall troubleshooting a networking issue than banging my head trying to double jumping up a canyon wall on my big screen tv.

I’m happy I can enjoy work so much.  I wonder if there are only a few jobs out there that are truly fun.  Any job where you work with the ‘public’ I’d consider not fun (if only for the occasional asshole).  That rules out about three-quarters of the jobs out there.  Jobs that place an undue amount of stress on you aren’t fun.  I think I picked a good profession.  I only have to work with a small group of like-minded nerds.  I spend most of my time with inanimate machines.  My bosses handle the stress so I don’t have to.  And I’m good at what I do, so I’m never really frustrated.  Hopefully in 30 years, I’m still doing something similar.

Maybe Starcraft 2 will be more fun than work..

Pending life goals as of Feb 2010:

• Own a home
• Get married

Completed life goals as of Feb 2010:

• Get a job I enjoy immensely
• Get engaged to a smart, beautiful, funny girl
• Own a big screen tv
• Make enough money to have the opportunity to build up savings

I opened this blog on Feb 17th, 2003 when I was 17.   Happy 7 year anniversary, blog.  At 24, I’m doing pretty well.  Let’s see if this blog lasts until I’m 80.

Off to find something for lunch that uses milk and heavy cream.