Two Ideas

This morning, I saw someone selling Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler on vinyl, at a weekly scavenge market. Three things occurred to me:

1. Kenny Rogers seems to exist in a sort of irony-gap or retro-gap, where it’s not quite possible to enjoy it ironically based on its perceived badness, nor good enough to listen to sincerely. If anyone is left who does listen to Kenny Rogers with great sincerity, they’re undoubtedly not the kind of snob who still digs listening to records.
2. When I listened to the song “The Gambler” as a kid, it wasn’t lost on me that it was supposed to be a metaphor for how to live. But thinking about the song recently, I realized that they’re not even playing cards at the beginning, just sitting on a train in the dark — but the narrator is still, in the eyes of the gambler, “out of aces.” So he’s only out of aces metaphorically, not literally.
3. On my copy of Kenny Roger’s Greatest Hits, I always misheard the words to “Lucille.” Even as a kid, I was pretty sure that “four hundred children” was too many.

Well, my plans for today more or less fell through, so I’m chilling alone at home. Somehow, the grill on the roof-deck broke just in time for the hottest week of the year, and is still busted. So I’m heating up the broiler, which means for dinner I’m having a salad, quick-pickled zucchini, and a broiled steak. I’ll drink a beer, too. Not bad, all told.

I’m definitely enjoying the time and space to myself, which has let me accomplish a bunch of stuff: record-keeping, bill-paying, some housecleaning, some organization. I managed to sort the stuff in my freezer, which is good, and type up what I’ve written so far of a short story, which is better. All the money stuff is up-to-date, all the dishes are washed and the trash out. It sounds simple, but it’s stuff I don’t normally have time to do the way I’d like to.

I’d hoped to have a lot more time to do this kind of stuff with Laura out of town, but work calls: nine days, five cities. Tuesday I fly to Boston, where I’ll work Wednesday and Thursday. Thursday night I’ll take the train down to Connecticut, and possibly work in Greenwich on Friday. It’s not unlikely that the customer won’t be available, which would give me a three-day weekend just a bit north of New York.

I’ll see some family over that weekend, perform remote maintenance for a customer late Saturday night, and that Sunday I’ll fly to Atlanta. Monday I’ll have meetings in Atlanta, then fly to Baltimore. Tuesday I’ll have a meeting near Baltimore, return the car to the airport, and take a train to New York. Wednesday I’ve got a meeting in New York. Possibly I’ll take the train up to Greenwich that afternoon, or the next day, if I’m unable to do that work the previous Friday. Right now, however, I’m scheduled to fly home that Thursday.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it!

Tonight, after dinner and dish washing, I’ll probably watch 300, which I’m only moderately interested in, but which Laura is completely disinterested in.  I’ve also rented Vantage Point, which I might see tonight, or tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll hit the Farmer’s Market in the U District, pick up a couple of things for dinner, and basically knock around all weekend relaxing. I’m thinking spicy garlic-chili-basil pork noodles tomorrow night, pizza Sunday night, and leftovers Monday night, so there’s not too much hanging around when I fly away on Tuesday.

If you’ve got anything fun planned in Seattle this weekend, let me know. I’ve got enough to keep myself busy, but I’m sure that I’d find time for exciting stuff.

Per Josh Aas:

On creepy, my Mac:
2 ~$ uname -a
Darwin 10-8-13-196.isilon.com 9.2.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.0: Tue Feb 5 16:13:22 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.3.13~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 i386
3 ~$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
122 ls
89 cd
43 sudo
19 ssh
18 df
16 man
14 rm
11 mv
11 less
10 ifconfig
4 ~$
And on spooky, my Ubuntu box:
jlasser@spooky:~$ uname -a
Linux spooky 2.6.24-16-generic #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 12:47:45 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux
jlasser@spooky:~$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
139 ls
121 cd
37 less
32 cat
23 ssh
23 grep
20 sudo
19 find
10 telnet
9 rm
jlasser@spooky:~$

Much of what I do on these boxes is reviewing logs from various Isilon clusters, which doesn’t result in a lot of interesting stuff. The rest of what I do is largely launched via GUI (e-mail, Web browsing, instant messaging, and work tracking with VoodooPad) or local workstation administration.

Last night, Laura and I split our plates into four equal volumes. We had some delicious, spicy and bitter microgreens from Full Circle Farm sprinkled with Cabernet vinegar, Mark Bittman’s raw beet salad made with fresh dill, pan-seared New York strip steak from Skagit River Ranch, and roast potatoes spritzed with olive oil and spices. (I don’t remember where we got the potatoes, as we got them last week and had them sitting around in the fridge.)

The thing that took the longest were the potatoes, which spent maybe twenty minutes in the oven, and which needed to be sliced into wedges. The beet salad took maybe fifteen minutes to prepare the previous evening; I’ve discovered that it’s far better the second day.

While the oven heated, I seasoned the steak, and I started cooking the steak a little after the potatoes, so that it had time to rest once it was done. While the potatoes finished, I prepped the plates with their quarters of beet salad and microgreens. Finally, the potatoes were done, and we plated them and the steak.

It was delicious, it was beautiful, and it was easily fast enough to cook on a weeknight.

At work, I wanted to build a single Ubuntu image for VMWare, which I could then clone for virtual appliances.

I settled on 64-bit Gutsy Gibbon Server, as it was the latest and greatest. I built my generic image, which worked great. But then I built my clone.

The clone’s ethernet card never showed up. I used every tool; I could see it on the PCI bus, and I could examine it to my hearts’ content, but ifconfig just wouldn’t see eth0.

Finally, today, I found the culprit. I’d rebuilt the image again, cloned it, told the clone to create a new ID, and immediately the Ethernet interface disappeared.

The culprit? /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules, which relies on the MAC address of the network card to assign ethernet devices. Changing the ID changes the MAC address, which breaks the existing rule.

Solution? Delete the rule for the old card, on eth0, and change the eth1 in the rule for the new MAC to eth0.

That’s it. Wish it hadn’t taken me days of messing around to figure that out. Makes me feel old and not very bright.