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Posts tagged “geekdad”

• August 01, 2018 A Visit to Kennedy Space Center

  Today I had the chance to visit Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. I was there with my family, plus Andy Seely (who guided us there with his awesome wayfinding superpowers) and his two sons. It was an amazing time, and I want to write this down while it's fresh in my mind.

  Side note: I don't have much in the way of pictures. There are lots of pictures that are much better than anything I'll be able to take, and I didn't want to be distracted from being there and really seeing what was in front of me.

  First up was looking at the Mercury, Gemini and Agena rockets. It was incredible to see how small they were -- not just the capsules, but the rockets themselves. The only rocket we'd seen previously was the first successfully landed first stage of a Falcon 9, and these things were (I think) well under its height. And the size of the Mercury and Gemini capsules -- wow. I knew they were small, but this was just incredible. (Unfortunately, I didn't think to pay much attention to the Agena rocket -- it would have been interesting to look at it and think about the various EVAs the Gemini astronauts did when around it.)

  Next up was the Atlantis Space Shuttle. It wasn't direct -- instead, like a theme park ride, there was a lineup (though, since we were there on a Wednesday, it was incredibly short), then a film, and then the great unveiling. And man...I did not anticipate being awed by a Shuttle, but I was. No offense to the shuttle; it's the Apollo missions that really awe me, and going to see Atlantis was more in the "Eh, we're here, why not?" category. But seeing it...WOW. It was amazingly big, and the way they've got it displayed -- horizontal, wings angled like it's banking in flight, cargo bay open -- really shows that off. I was awestruck.

  One cool thing: Andy and I talked to the docent, who was a retired NASA employee. It turned out he had not only worked on certain Shuttle subsystems (hydrogen tanks, IIRC) but had also been involved in the canceled Resource Prospector mission, a rover that would have gone to the moon to pave the way for ISRU. Once he figured out we were space nerds that he could geek out in front of, he talked in depth about the work he was doing, the pain of seeing the mission cancelled, and some frank talk about SLS and commercial options. It was fascinating. KSC has a "Lunch with an Astronaut" program...which should thrill me to death, but for some reason does not. I'd totally go for a "Take a Docent to Lunch" program though. (Still don't understand this part of my brain; I think both could talk in equally technical depth about their work, and I think both would be fascinating.)

  After that we went through the Shuttle Launch Experience; it was fun for me, but my youngest son found it pretty scary, so that wasn't good. (I think he's pretty much put off on the idea of ever going to space now.) After that, lunch...and then...

  ...the Kennedy Space Center Bus Tour, which took us by the Vehicle Assembly Building, Historic Launch Pad 39A, and some other launch pads as well (39B, maybe? my memory is already gone.) This was interesting, but seeing everything from such a distance made it hard to get a sense of scale. I was disappointed that the SpaceX Falcon 9 for Merah Putih was not out...but now that I check the launch calendar, I see that it has been delayed again 'til August 7th. Boo.

  The KSC bus tour drops you off at the Apollo/Saturn V center; again, you have to go through a film (interesting), then sit in the Firing Room (launch control for the Apollo missions) to watch another film (mildly interesting) before you get to the meat of the center: the Saturn V mounted on its side, where you can walk underneath it and see just how freaking HUGE this thing is. It was jaw-dropping. This was the awe I expected, and it in no way disappointed. Walking out under the F1 engines was incredible...and only beat by walking the length of the rocket to see the incredibly tiny (by comparison) command module up at the very top.

  And the only thing that beat that was a lunar module hanging from the ceiling. It had been built for Apollo 15, but was replaced by a newer module. It was amazing to see it, to see how simultaneously big and tiny it was.

  After that, we caught the bus back to the main visitor center. We bought souvenirs, and drove off to return to Tampa. (Another side note: Orlando traffic is truly shitty.)

  So. What to say about all this?

  • Seeing these things is like going to church. I'm staunchly atheist, but I'm pretty sure that the sense of awe and wonder and grandeur and tearing up and wanting to cry is a decent approximation of what a devout person feels approaching the holy.

  • At the same time, it's hard for me to not notice all the Wondrous! Space! Music! that's playing everywhere. It is stirring! and uplifting! and like eating an inspiration sundae every 15 minutes! By which I mean it's cloying after a while!

  • I dropped a stupid amount of money at the souvenir shop, knowing full well what I was doing and doing it anyway.

  • I tried hard not to be a full nerd, but it was hard not to cringe every time something mentioned SLS launching in 2018, JWST launching in 2019, the Asteroid Redirect Mission or the Journey to Mars. (If you're not a space nerd: those are either optimistic schedules that have been overtaken by events, or NASA goals that were given to them by one administration and removed by another. And for the record, I would LOVE it if all those things were to happen on time.)

  • There was a woman wearing a ULA hat and a Parker Space Probe hat. I complimented her on both, and it turns out she's on the integration team for the PSP, and was there with her family on a tourist outing in the middle of her work. I shook her hand and wished her the best of luck with the launch.

  • There is a lot of "Thank you for your service" aimed at military service people in the US. This can extend to things like "...and here's 10% off your next mattress purchase." This strikes me as a bit over the top...but I still wanted to thank the NASA docent for their service to, I guess, humanity.

  • I could totally see myself coming back and spending a few days visiting this place alone. I felt the same way when I visited the Grand Canyon.

  • I am extremely grateful to family and friends for coming along with me. These things are neat, but like anything else they are not everyone's cup of tea.

  • The bus tour is fun...but the videos they play on the bus are a way of passing the time during what is a very long drive between interesting things.

  • I'd love to see the VAB from the inside to get a better sense of scale.

  • The souvenir shop had prints of Apollo 11 pictures signed by Buzz Aldrin for $1800 each. I was tempted.

  • A few weeks back, it looked like there was a good chance that 2 rockets would be lifting off around this time. That has not happened. In a way, I'm grateful...this was already a long day, and I think adding a launch to it would only have made it longer (or pushed other stuff to a future visit.)

• December 28, 2016 Pretzels

  Today I was out with the kids, and we came across a place selling fresh-baked pretzels. "Mmm, those smell GOOD," said Eli. "Want to try making some when we get home?" I asked. "Sure!" he said, sounding surprised that such a thing was even possible. One quick check of "More Food that Really Schmecks" later, and we were off to the races.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

• October 05, 2016 CAN I ROCK BUSINESS WITH YOU?

  Today's title from the subject line of some spam I just got. ("a spam"? "a spammy email"? just "spam"?)

  • Mystery flu-like illness continues, or at least its fallout; I've had lower back pain for the last ~ 4 weeks. Doctor says removing spine is "not an option" but I've done some Googling and

  • $WORK continues apace. After taking a week of Python training, we're using Go for a new tool we're building. Haven't got a good sense for what it's like just yet, but so far I don't seem to be making a mess of things.

  • Tried out drone.io at $WORK yesterday and holy god, is it good. Auth with our internal Github, then activate repos, and boom! it runs tests on every new commit on any branch, watches for PRs, the whole nine yards. When I think of the amount of work we had to do to get Jenkins to do this, it's insane. Plus the whole run-as-a-Docker-container, fire-up-sibling-docker-containers-for-tests thing is very, very impressive.

  • Sportsball has started up again with a vengeance: practices on Monday and Wednesday, games on Fridays and Saturdays. Somebody stop this merry-go-round!

  • I've registered for LISA 16, woot! This will be my fifth -- wait, sixth? -- LISA, ten years after my first time attending. Not sure who's gonna be the theme band this year -- I've done New Pornographers, Josh Rouse, Soul Coughing and Sloan. And since he's co-chair this year, it seems like a good time to pull out that picture of Matt Simmons (@standaloneSA) as a PHP dev:

  

• September 15, 2016 Updates, Sep 2016

  • This week I've been taking Python3 training at work: 4 days of staying at home and concentrating on Python. The result? 4 days to work on Python, sharpening my skills, and that's a good thing. The lecture was not that hot, but what was useful was having the exercises in front of me, waiting to be done and no distractions to keep me from them. And after all that, the biggest difference I notice between Python 2.7 and Python 3 is print "foo" vs print("foo"). (Which shows you how much Python I know. But still.) I finished the exercises a few hours early, so I spent the time trying to solve the coding challenge we give new people at OpenDNS. (I didn't get that one; instead, I got the "this machine is borked in 12 different ways, please solve it" challenge.) This has been a wonderful way to stretch my brain, and work on something very very different from what I do every day. I wish work had the same sort of course for Ruby and Go.

  • Have I mentioned that I've come to love Bandcamp? Lots of excellent music, and I keep finding lots of excellent music. I mean, really really excellent music.

  • Like Hairy Hands.

  • Or Mars, Etc.

  • Or Snail Mail.

  • Also on the music front, one really excellent station I've found is Popadelica.

  • But back to Python: despite the click bait title, O'Reilly's "20 Python Libraries You Aren't Using But Should" is wonderfully informative for this Python n00b.

  • I loved showing this video to my kids, demonstrating how bacteria evolve.

  • Set up a Tor node last week for the cause.

• February 29, 2016 Awkward times

  Tonight was Eli's last soccer practice of the season, and the coach declared that it was going to be Kids vs. Parents. Clara has writing class this week, so I went along; I took Arlo with me, who had homework to do. We sat on the front steps of the school by the soccer field, staring at math problems and waiting for the game to start, then joined in when it became apparent that all the other parents were eager to go.

  The kids had fun, but I was out of my element. Not just because it was sports but because many of the parents were really good at soccer and really cared. (That's not a dig; I care about Emacs and rocket ships, so what the hell do I know?) I found myself looking around, staring at the sky (cloudy but maybe there would be some stars? nope) and checking out in a way I've recognized in myself since I was 18, and see a little bit of in Arlo.

  Eventually it was over; I let in the winning goal, and the kids won. The parents talked about strategies for next time, and promised to see each other at the pizza party on Sunday. I'll be there; and doubtless I'll be looking around, seeing what there is to look at.

• December 26, 2015 Xmas 2015

  The leadup to Xmas 2015 has been, um, slack...at least for me. Clara has done so very much of the work, both because of my general laziness/busyness and because I've been sick for a couple weeks with flu. It has been hard to find a rhythm in all of this, a chance to get into the spirit of things. (I may be an atheist, but between my childhood and the excitement of everything/everyone around me I don't even try to resist the appeal.)

  Today, though, the day was finally here, and late though I was I got into it. The kids, bless their hearts, were fine not receiving iPhone 6s in Rose Gold, or Samsung tablets, or XWii4 console stations; instead, they were genuinely thrilled to bits with what they did get: notebooks; games; pyjamas:

  

  books; and best of all, digital cameras from their grandparents that, it turned out, did creepy special effects on pictures that delighted them because it disturbed us. ("Daddy, look at this picture! --Hey Arlo, he made that face again!")

  I got the gift of beer from Clara and my parents:

  

  Clara was happy with the donation I made in her name to Options for Sexual Health (nee Planned Parenthood). I got to make Apple Pancake, a staple of Christmas from my childhood, for my own kids:

  

  It wasn't exactly a Christmas present, but my father-in-law made me wheels for the new Dob out of stuff he just happened to have lying around the house:

  

  Overall, it was a damn good time. And on top of that, I got to set up the scope on the front porch -- first time I've observed in 2.5 months. I saw NGC 457 (ET Cluster, but I saw it as a spaceship), and the full moon (wonderful view of Aristarchus plateau). A great day all round.

• November 01, 2015 We need to do something, and this is something, so therefore we need to do this

  Right now I'm watching my 9 year old son type out an email on a laptop. He and his younger brother have emails set up at one of our domains, and they've got a hand-me-down laptop running Debian, and Thunderbird is set up to check their mails. They email their friends, and sometimes their grandparents, and sometimes -- like now -- me. But I've set things up a little different with them: I've set up Enigmail, and set up GnuPG keys for them, and taught them how to use it to encrypt and decrypt email to me. The passes on their keys are silly, same as on the laptop, but it illustrates the point and it is fun for them to have s3kr3t wr1t1ng.

  This is all part of a big, sprawling ball of worry in my head that stretches from now 'til their adult lives: how do I teach them the contours of the world they live in? And in particular, how do I begin to explain to them the surveillance they'll be under, what they can do about it and why they should care?

  Being a Free Software hippie, I'm in pretty much complete agreement with Snowden, Greenwald et al: pervasive surveillance is corrosive and morally wrong, and fighting back is important. But as much as I hate to admit it, I think Benjamin Wittes has a point when he says that the average American (let's lump us in with them for the moment) has more to fear from Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies than the NSA. (I don't think he's entirely correct on that, and he's leaving out organized crime entirely, but there is a point...buried under a crapton of stuff I vigourously (read: shrilly) disagree with.) And while we're dealing with informed POVs, let's not forget Moxie Marlinspike's impatience/disappointment with GPG.

  In the meantime: I make the most of the tools I have. I make it a fun game, talk about secret writing and the fun kind of spies. And I try to figure out what in heaven's name we're going to do next.

• April 09, 2015 OKAY (Part 2)

  (I don't often reply to other posts, but this one deserves a reply.)

  I spent a good chunk of my day working on computers, of course, because that's what I've picked as my career. (It's odd to have a career, but that's another post.) So I spun up Docker container after Docker container, built in Jenkins, tweaking LDAP and SSL settings until everything was right, then adding favicons and splash images that would make me and others around me happy. Laughing -- laughing well and happily, not meanly -- is important. And as a reward I got to share those laughs with coworkers, and I got to move tickets to the "Resolved" pile, and both were satisfying.

  So work is done, but now it has to be documented -- another thing I like, since it means writing (which I like) and writing down what I've done so I don't have to explain it (which I like), and even if it takes longer than I think it will (which it does) the time goes faster when you slip in some jokes that make your coworkers smile. Laughing is important.

  Next up is lunch, which gives me a chance to talk to my onboarding brother from another mother and ask what he's up to, and what keeps his team from doing things another way -- which turns out to be a lot I didn't know, which is exactly what I had hoped would come out of this: me learning something I didn't know. Later in the afternoon I'll ask another coworker questions that are challenging-sounding, and explain that I don't doubt his assertion, I just want to know what it is he's thinking about that I'm missing. I still struggle with how to phrase these questions.

  And then there was a problem with Nagios and PagerDuty -- which turned out to be a problem with our understanding of how they interact. I've got a shaky understanding, and my attempt to explain it to someone else does not sound convincing -- which is fair, and in any case is less important to them than the fact that they have to do extra work to figure out WTF is going on. It calls for a better understanding of how we use the two, so I make a note for our Friday documentation spike, which I'm proud to say I started.

  All this has left me no time to talk to my coworker in San Francisco, who spent yesterday busy in meetings and spent today working on stuff I should have helped out with. We commiserate about it. Supper is leftover pizza eaten cold (it is the ONLY way to have leftover pizza) at my desk.

  At 6:30 is OpenLateYVR, the Northern Edition of the meetups in San Francisco. People show up, I talk to them; I introduce our speaker, then call for other speakers after it's done; I talk some more. I am not extroverted, but I have learned, late in life, that one of the gifts my father has given me is the ability to LARP it when needed, and I meet many people during the night: the guy who worked in the docks until he busted his elbow, and is now figuring out web development; someone else who works at a competitor and may be up for a career change; the one who is reorganizing his life, one bit at a time, and is feeling his way around Vancouver's tech scene. It is a strange thing to be so outgoing, so confident (maybe not deservedly so, but confident nonetheless), when most days I want to just hide in my hole and type at computers, not people.

  I get home at 10:45, after a crowded SkyTrain and bus ride home. And I come across my wife's blog post about her day. I've known for a hella long time that I'm incredibly lucky, but it is a particularly wonderful example of this to read her describing her day; there are pictures of the kids (our beautiful, beautiful children), there are the details I would have asked for, there are thought-provoking bits that I'm doing such a poor job of trying to echo here.

• March 29, 2015 Fisherman's Blues

  I was turned on to "Fisherman's Blues", by The Waterboys, in 1992 by a girl I met while working at a provincial park in Ontario. She was kind of a hippy (by which I mean she gave and received hugs freely), and I kind of had a crush on her (though she was quite honest about not reciprocating). "There's this album," she said, "that you should really listen to." So I did, and wah -- I was hooked. The opening chords of "Fisherman's Blues"; the men's choir shouting along to "World Party"; the whimsy and fun of "And A Bang on the Ear"; and the gorgeous, moving, tearful beauty of both "Sweet Thing/Blackbird" and "The Stolen Child" held me like few other albums have. I listened to it over and over and over again. I have fond memories of her for lots of different reasons -- she was an excellent friend -- but high among them is telling me about this album.

  I've listened to other songs by The Waterboys, but never really got into them. Lots of people I know love "Whole of the Moon" but it never left me anything but frowning, unsure how something like that could come from the same band.

  Years later I came across "Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille" by Stephen Brust. It's a story about a band that plays Irish music in a bar that travels through space and time, and how they accidentally save humanity. It charmed me with quoted lyrics at the beginning of every chapter, with making a joke on the song "Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O" (covered by The Waterboys on their next album), with being funny and clever. Shortly after I met my future wife, we exchanged books; I gave her "Cowboy Feng", and she gave me "In The Skin of a Lion" by Michael Ondaatje. I felt seriously outclassed. I read her book, but it took me 'til the third and final part to really get into it -- but that just confirmed what a schnook I was, and how my choice of book was a poor one. She's dismissed that -- but that's how I felt.

  I was harsh on myself, of course, and harsh on "Cowboy Feng." It may not be the best sci-fi novel ever written, but it holds a very special place in my heart. I love the way it focuses on small things, small details; yes, humanity has expanded to other star systems, settled on other worlds...but they have brought music with them, and it's something like what we have now, and it has evolved to nothing like we have now. People muddle on.

  When my children were infants, I would sing, lullaby-fashion, "Fisherman's Blues" when I was trying to rock them to sleep. I don't know that it actually, you know, got them to sleep, , but it made me feel good. I think about that now -- about how much of what I do for my children, I do for reasons that move me rather than them. I think of articles I've read describing how artists deal with people who want to tell them What That Thing Means To Them, and how I still want to find Mike Scott and tell him about this.

  Today I found out that there is a six-cd box set for The Waterboys' "Fisherman's Blues", with a metric crapton of outtakes, never-released and alternate versions. As a result, I spent an hour tonight trawling YouTube for live recordings of songs from that album, which apparently Mike Scott and Anthony Thistlewaite are touring/have toured. There are lots, of course -- the Internet is a big place -- and no lie, no exaggeration, I wept near constantly at the beauty of their performances and their songwriting.

  I imagine them younger, at concerts I never saw; I imagine cover versions, some that might move me and some that will just piss me off, on planets I will never visit; I imagine showing my children these videos and them listening more or less politely, then wandering off to find their own songs; I imagine being old, possibly senile, and my eyes still lighting up when I hear that fiddle line from the title song.

• March 08, 2015 Observing Report -- March 7, 2015

  Last week I went out to Boundary Bay to observe. It had been a beautiful afternoon and evening, but by the time I got out it was hazy as anything. Not fog, but high-up haze. I got there at 8, and stuck it out 'til 9.30. I observed Jupiter some, but it was fuzzy and without detail; I put it down to the haze, or maybe internal reflections in the diagonal. I went home at 9.30.

  This week I went out again, but I was accompanied by my oldest son (8 3/4). He'd wanted to come out last week, but I only found out at the last minute. This time we got prepared beforehand: books, blanket and a pillow. (I knew he wanted to stay up late and look through the scope, but I also knew he'd want to go to sleep at some point. We got there at 8pm again, with much better weather (you know, clear).

  There was a fair amount of outreach tonight. First was a family of five out to see the stars, and second was a couple out for a walk. They were all pretty stoked to see through the scope. One of the kids really took a shine to my son and declared him his new best friend; I think Arlo was a little relieved when they left.

  Between those visits, I figured out what the problem was with my scope: collimation, of course. I haven't collimated it since purchasing it, and the last few times I've had it out I"'e been pretty frustrated with the views. I finally got it done, and WOW what a difference -- Jupiter was actually sharp and detailed and beautiful again. It made me want to call the first family back to show them what they'd missed.

  There were ambitions for the night, but fog kept rolling in for a while, dewing the corrector lens (despite the home-made dew heater); the battery on the Magellan ran out and had to be replaced; and the moon was up and nearly full. I tried for M78 (reflection nebula in Orion) and failed, even with an O3 filter; I tried for M79 (glob in Lepus) and failed; I tried for NGC 2207 (galaxy in CMaj) but failed; but I finally got somewhere with M93, OC in CMaj. Got a sketch through the dew; it has a real W-shape. One more Messier...

  As for my son: I think he enjoyed it, though I think he would have been happier coming home earlier. I know that a big part of it for him is being out with me and staying up late, rather than the astronomy itself -- but he was happy to see the constellations, and to did seem to have fun.

  There's more to write, but that's all I've got strength for now. Another time...

• January 03, 2015 Cursive

  (aka "random words for titles, please")

  $WORK: I've been working on OpenStack lately. It's been fun, despite its frustrations (which I won't list here because I tend to rant a lot, and I'm becoming less convinced its helpful or as funny as I think it is) (which drolly deserves its own bit of expansion...). Why fun? Because a) I've had the luxury of focusing on this for, like, a month now, pretty much to the exclusion of all else, and b) because I'm not on my own. One of my coworkers is doing this with me and he is really, really good. He's careful, his shell scripts make me cry with their beauty, and he's just a lot of fun. And it's amazing what a difference a great bunch of coworkers make (he's just one of a great gang of people).

  This has been a real revelation, particularly after visiting my workplace to catch up with people. It was good to see everyone again, but it really reminded me how much all of us needed a change -- me to get the hell out of there, and them to get someone in who is enthusiastic about things again.

  It has been quiet over the holidays, which is good; I was on call for NYE and hardly had anything happen at all. And the office was quiet with people being out for so much of it. But I'm looking forward to people being back in, conversations going on, HipChat having more traffic than just me asking Hubot to animate me a Christmas tree.

  Holidays: not nearly as long as when I was at UBC, but it was still good. The kids had lots of school vacation, of course, and then there was COUNTDOWN TO XMAS OMGOMGOMG. They nearly lost their little minds with anticipation, but finally Xmas was here and...they loved what they got. Which was a relief; they had been pining for Xboxes and tablets and iPhone 99s and I don't know what all. None of that was going to be happening for so many reasons (money, they're 6 and 8, I have moral qualms about non-free computing) (which is ironic because I have an Apple laptop now for work); they knew that, but I wasn't sure how they'd actually handle it on the day. And it was a non-event: they got sketchbooks and books and toys and were happy as clams.

  My wife and I continued our Xmas tradition of Watching Bad Movies on Xmas Eve with "The Christmas Cottage: The Thomas Kinkade" story ($5 in the grocery store bargain bin!). It's no Asylum joint (and what a concept that would be...), but it was still wonderful (by which I mean really odd: Peter O'Toole as Kinkade's mentor, and Chris Elliott as chair of the town's Chamber of Commerce). We didn't get a chance to go out on our own, but we'll fix that one night.

  I've been spending time on the Stack Exchange Emacs beta; it's really shaping up. It's been fun to answer some of the questions, and really dig into Emacs; the digging (because it's rarely as straightforward as I think it's going to be) turns up a lot of stuff I never knew.

  I sent off my first letters for Amnesty International last month; it's been something I've wanted to do for a while now, and I finally got off my ass and joined their Urgent Appeal network. It's easier to sign up than I thought it would be; I urge you to consider joining yourself.

  Reading:

  • BeerOps/Katherine contines to knock it out of the park.
  • A sad post on one person's experiences in the Emacs developer community.
  • "The Iliad", translated by Stephen Mitchell. Picked this up in the library, started reading and couldn't put it down.
  • Larger project: the entire Master and Commander series, in order. A while back I won an Amazon gift certificate, and I used it to buy the whole damn set. I'd read a bunch of them previously, but not all and not in order. I'm up to the fourth one ("The Mauritius Command") and they're just as excellent as the first time around.

• December 15, 2014 Observing Report -- December 14, 2014

  Tonight was a clear night -- but first, it was tree-decorating time. (I admit to being tempted to duck out of decorating the tree, but I relented after, I dunno, no more than 20 minutes of thinking about it. I am a bad person.) I decided to head out to Boundary Bay -- it's clear, it's Sunday, it's winter (astro twilight ends at 18:10, y'all) and I'd just flocked the Meade (both the main tube and the drawtube to the first knife-edge baffle -- man, that makes a difference).

  I'd planned to hit M31 then the Cassiopeia clusters, but as Douglas Adams said, the best part of making a plan is ignoring it. Got out at about 7.30, was set up by 7.45 and panning around with the binos by 7.50. Saw a Geminid (hurrah!). Took a quick look at easy Messiers, and they were: M35, M36, M37 and M38 all just popped right out. So for shits and giggles I looked up where M33 should be, and holy hell if I didn't find goddamn M33 with binos right away. Wow! I tried to find it in the scope but was unable -- and rather than get bogged down in that, I gave myself a high-five and carried on.

  I moved over to M31, and used a printout to find M110 -- only to realize at home (like, ten minutes before I typed this) that I'd already found it last August, apparently. (I'm giving myself the side-eye as I write that.)

  So okay, no new Messier there -- but as long as we're really honest-to-god finding faint Messiers, I found M1 without any real difficulty. Still nothing like Jeremy Perez' sketch, but no question about seeing it this time.

  New Messier, though: M77! Spiral galaxy I had not seen before, in Cetus. Relatively simple to find; not much to look at, but great to see.

  Took a look at M42 -- first good look of the season, and despite being unable to focus (dew heaters were not working at this point; not sure what went wrong), it actually made me gasp. Amazing, just amazing. Even saw M43 w/averted vision this time.

  So after all that -- I'm up to 65 Messiers. Hurrah!

• October 24, 2014 Reading, Writing and Running

  Man, it's been busy since I started at OpenDNS. I've been down to San Francisco twice (once when I was hired, and again for a planning meeting w/the rest of my team), I've been writing a post for the company blog (coming RSN), and I've been leading a team of bloggers for the USENIX blog (along with the excellent @beerops, @noahm (who had to bow out after one article, sadly, but hey, guy's probably a father already!) and @markllama). The kids now know to say to me, "Daddy, you've got blogging to do!" :-) It's been a lot, and I'll be glad when the conference is over and I can get back to slacking.

  The last week or so I've been reading to the kids at night. That's not a new thing -- we did this since they were infants -- but I sort of changed it up a little. Most of the time they pick the books, but I was getting tired of Garfield and one night I announced I was going to read part of "The Wizard of Oz" before we got to their choices. They've displayed occasional interest in longer books (like the time I had to read a bit from "The Lord of the Rings" for a few days), but this seems different: I was asked to keep going. We're up to chapter 7 now, and Eli in particular seems to like it. We'll sit downstairs; I'll sit on the couch, and he'll stretch out in the recliner. "Ah," he says, "it's so relaxing to sit here and have you read to me."

  Arlo, meanwhile, is taking to drawing. He's practicing his faces, which are noticeably different from his usual style: wide eyes and big open mouths, usually with "AAAAAAAAHH!" coming out of them. It's all fine, really. :-) He's also written a couple of comic books, including one about Godzilla terrorizing people in their apartments that, sadly, he hasn't finished.

  And Clara is, on Saturday, going to run her first half-marathon. She's been training for this through the summer, and can now run more than two hours straight. This is awesome. We'll be out there cheering for her, but she isn't promising to share the beer she gets for completing the race. That's fair.

  Finally, a miracle occurred yesterday: in spite of rain and winds and I don't know what-all, the clouds cleared for 15 minutes in the afternoon, and we were all able to see the partial eclipse of the sun. AR 2192 was clearly visible, and it was incredibly cool to see the moon (partly) covering the sun.

  Concluding paragraphs are for the weak.

• September 07, 2014 Observing report -- September 6, 2014

  A couple of weeks ago, I gathered up (nearly) all my eyepieces, Barlows and diagnonals, and took them to the local scope shop to trade in. I came out an hour later with a 2" diagonal, a 2" adapter for the Meade, a 2" adapter for the Skywatcher Dob, and two new eyepieces: a 17mm Speers-Waler (1.25", 82 deg FOV) and a 30mm Erfle (2", 74 deg FOV). (I kept the 12mm Vixen and a 7.5mm Plossl.) Tonight I went out with the Dob (the Meade had a little accident when I tried to upgrade the focuser...sigh) to the local park, and had a grand old time.

  

  First off, I showed my Dad some stuff: the Moon, the Double-Double (couldn't split with the 12mm), the Double Cluster and M31. We took pictures of the moon with our phones, and I think they turned out pretty well. The Double Cluster was framed nicely in the 30mm, but looked even better in the 17mm -- that 82 deg FOV is incredible. After that, he headed home and I stayed out to geek out.

  M11: Beautiful as always. Nice in the 12mm, almost lost in the 17mm.

  Moon: Saw a few craterlets in Plato with the 7.5mm Plossl. Neat to think that I was seeing features only two kilometres across!

  M29: Sparse but a Messier.

  NGC 6910: OC in Cygnus. Small but pretty -- I imagined it as a prancing horse with silver horseshoes, which has to be the single most Baroque and precious description I've ever come up with but what's a brother gonna do?

  NGC 6886: Another OC in Cygnus. Fainter, more scattered cloud of 25 stars or so. Nearby 30 (or 31?) Cygni was a lovely double: yellow and blue, like the sun and earth.

  NGC 6884: PN in Cygnu. Okay through O3 filter. No detail about 7.5mm.

  NGC 6997: loose cluster, faint, couple of dozen stars. Vaguely pentagonal shape.

  Pelican Nebula: Long shot, but why not? No sign, even through O3 filter.

  M57: Beautiful and bright tonight!

  M73: New Messier! Responded well to O3 but no sign of shape.

  Home at 1am or so. Happy with new eyepieces.

• August 11, 2014 Meteor Shower Part IV

  This year, for the third (youngest son) and fourth time (oldest son), I took my kids to Aldergrove Regional Park for the RASC-organized Perseid Meteor Shower Star Party Extravaganzaria. We went last year, though I neglected to blog about it; we went two years ago, and there were cute pictures.

  Last year clouds showed up about eight minutes after sunset (really), but this year it was clear as a bell. There was also a full moon; for meteor-watching it was sub-optimal (as was the weekend falling three days or so before max), but the kids were even more excited. "There's gonna be a FULL MOON!" they kept saying. How can you argue with that? You can't.

  We showed up about 6.30, only slightly delayed by missing the Tim Horton's ("Dad, you forgot the HOT CHOCOLATE!") and got set up: tent, sleeping bags, lounge chairs and all. After that, the kids ran up the big hill, then down, then back up again. "I was a little tired the second time," said Arlo, "but then I found a trick: just fun faster!" His athleticism continues to amaze and impress me.

  After that it was time for the activities. Eli decided he didn't want his face painted this year; we looked at the telescopes a bit but skipped the presentations; but the Lantern Walk was a huge hit. It's this path that loops through the park, maybe a kilometer in length, with little coloured lanterns outlining the path. There was story-telling, which they both liked, and quotes on signs along the way, which Arlo kept reading. I got him to read this one from Carl Sagan aloud:

  All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff.

  Perhaps misquoted -- I don't think the sign said exactly that, and I'm too lazy to go look up a reliable citation -- but I dearly love the idea behind it. Eli looked up at me and said, "I didn't know that!" He was quite taken with it.

  It's neat to see how much they've changed over the last couple of years. Before it was face painting, hot chocolate and staying up late. Now, it's the story-telling, hot chocolate and staying up late. :-) Treats are treats, no matter what; but their understanding is broadening and their tastes are changing.

  We set up the little Galileoscope to see the full moon, and showed a couple other people too. And then...sleep. They were bagged. They stayed on the lounge chairs for a while, then went inside the tent. Eli was keeping Arlo awake, so I brought him out to sit beside me; then back inside the tent once Arlo was asleep, with a story to get Eli to sleep as well.

  I stayed out on the lounge chair 'til 12.30 or so. I saw exactly one Perseid -- it's amazing how bright the full moon really is! I would have stayed out longer, but I was getting very, very cold even in the sleeping bag and under a big wool blanket. FIXME: Next year bring more blankets.

  Next morning we packed up and went to Cora's in Langley for breakfast, then home again to unpack, dry out, shower and get ready for a Vancouver Canadians baseball game. Because why do one thing in a weekend when you can do two? (This is living large where I come from.) Our seats were right in the solar furnace, so we skipped out after the fourth inning. Next time, though, we'll get better seats that have actual shade. FIXME: Avoid section 7; go for section four, row 20 or higher.

• July 27, 2014 Yeah but then

  I was gonna write up the first two weeks at OpenDNS, but then my youngest son couldn't get to sleep. That doesn't happen often, and he's always upset when it does, so it was my job to tell him a long, rambling story about his day and try to get him to relax. So there went my writing time.

  Quickly, then: the people are great; there's a lot to take in; we move to a new office tomorrow (temp space for two months, then our final digs); overall, it's a big, big challenge and it's pretty wonderful. My head is still swimming. Pix still needed.

• April 14, 2014 TIRED

  Yesterday was a full day:

  • Out to one of the 1.2 x 10e7 nearby parks with the kids at 8.30am for a first-real-nice-day-of-spring bout of playing on everything. (One thing we love about this neighbourhood? Not only do we get to walk through the nearby rich neighbourhood without worrying about a tax bill, there are a ton of parks nearby -- including one that's 128 years old.) (Not that we went to that one -- that'd be too relevant.) Swings, monkey bars and that roundabout thing on an angle that Facebook invented four years ago.

  • And then out to Abbotsford for the BC Gem show. Arlo came away with gold foil in a bottle and obsidian; Eli left with a ring and something else I can't remember. I got lost sixteen times on my way to and from, which ended up expanding the kids' vocabularies wonderfully.

  • And then then to Eli's birthday party, a week in advance of his actual birthday. (He's thrilled it's on Easter Monday, but we decided not to push our luck with the scheduling.) Eleven kids, including our own, at a local gym/activity centre where they are run RAGGED. Clara pulled off an amazing birthday cake: cupcake cake from the supermarket, okay yes but also zombie Minecraft figurine + gummy bears == IRRESISTIBLY DELICIOUS SCENE OF MINECRAFT TERROR THAT KIDS MUST EAT.

  "Whoah, you did all that in one day?" This from the incredibly organized mom who gave us a coupon for a local attraction we'll be visiting in a week because she never goes anywhere without a coupon book. I admit to being flattered.

  It really was a fun day. Schedules have been busy lately, in a oh-god-the-errands-never-end kind of way. It has been a long time since I spent that much time with them, and I enjoyed it a lot.

• April 13, 2014 Proud, Happy and Thrilled

  Jason Stanford is contemplating saying goodbye to his wife, Sonia Van Meter, forever. She's a semi-finalist for Mars One, and if she goes he'll stay behind. The odds are long -- but he writes about contemplating saying goodbye to his wife forever, and supporting her regardless. "We forget that our [wedding] vows are not lyrics to be recited for public enjoyment but promises to be kept," he writes, and I have enormous respect for that.

  The attention Van Meter has got from the rest of the world has mostly been shallow and harsh:

  Rarely does anyone engage her as a space geek to talk about what she hopes to find up there, but if someone did, he or she would open the discussion to Sonia's innate curiosity and her enthusiasm about humanity's drive to explore and expand our understanding of what is possible. She honestly does not understand why everyone does not want to go to Mars, though she knows I would last about half an hour before getting bored up there.

  But that's not what people talk about when they comment about her on the Internet. No sooner had a story about my wife's astronautical ambition aired in Austin than strangers took it upon themselves to diagnose our obviously flawed marriage.

  ...which makes me think twice about writing about it here and joining the chorus (of people talking about this, I mean; her decision, their decisions, belong to them, and neither I nor anyone else have any business condemning it). But despite my reservations about Mars One, and for what little it's worth, I admire them both. Read the damn link.

  In other news: this article makes me want to get my scope out and look at Mars. But the dark is coming on late these days thanks to DST, and I've been getting over a cold and need my beauty rest. Which is a damn shame, because it's been clear here for the first time in weeks. Oh well...soon, along with a trip to Boundary Bay to finally get the Virgo Messiers.

  Today it's birthday party day for my youngest son; he's up already (it's 6.20am!) stalking the halls, waiting impatiently for things to get going. To keep him entertained until the party starts, we're going to the BC Gem Show in Abbotsford. The kids have a waxing-and-waning interest in rocks and minerals, and I suspect this'll wake it up again. Does it measure up to a party with your friends? No, it does not. But it'll keep the wolf from the door for a couple of hours, at least.

• April 10, 2014 Fighting the good fight

  Years ago, when I got into Linux, I somehow managed to persuade my father that he should run Linux too. I was surprised, but I shouldn't have been; he had a better Internet connection than I did for many years, we'd talk about which 286 system we'd buy (WordPerfect 4eva!), and he had a Blackberry long before I had anything remotely comparable.

  Yesterday, I helped him get Tor going. He downloaded the browser bundle (64-bit Linux, natch), and I talked him through unpacking it, starting it up, and setting up a menu launcher for it. It was all done over the phone, which took me back to my days on the help desk: anticipating what the other person will see, telling them what to do and remembering to be explicit at all times. Three's so much you can skip over when you're familiar with the process; there's so much you realize is entrusted to muscle memory, never actually rising to consciousness anymore.

  But it worked -- he got connected, he got a feel for how slow things can be, he logged into Facebook (and knew not to click on the "Enable Flash plugin" button), he logged into his bank (!) and even GMail. We discussed what Tor would bring (increased privacy) and wouldn't bring (security). (Complicated; my feeling is that, although NoScript and not having Flash does a lot, it's not their primary concern. If security was my main focus, I'd probably start looking at SELinux or Qubes.) And we talked about what using Tor would do for others: provide cover, camouflage, for some who really need it.

  Of course, he's probably the only Tor user within a 50km radius. (No, really -- he lives outside a small town.) So he sticks out like a sore thumb now. We joked about a pixel lighting up on a map in Maryland, analysts scratching their heads and wondering "Is that in the US?" But still: little, tiny, worthwhile things.

• March 22, 2014 I wouldn't call it observing exactly

  The forecast looked good; the forecast lied. But that didn't stop me and Arlo from having a good time. We were both bagged: him from a day with his brother at a day camp, me from insomnia. But when I got home from work at 7pm, we both ran around the house gathering things to go out astronomizing (as my wife calls it).

  We got out the door at 8pm, only having to come back for one thing (dew shield, dammit!), and got out to Boundary Bay at 8.40. Arlo was asleep by that point. There were a couple of other observers out there; I talked to them briefly about the weather, then they packed up and left. But I stayed, set up the scope, and woke up Arlo to show him a few things in the maybe-quarter of the sky left uncovered.

  It wasn't about the astronomizing for Arlo, and that's fine; it's exciting to be up late, to be out without your brother ("I spent a lot of time with him today, and it's good to take a break"), and (maybe) to spend a bit of time with your dad. But I flatter myself that he was interested: M42, of course; M35 for a star cluster; Jupiter, with Io read to transit across its face; and Sirius, the star whose light had travelled for 8 years to reach him -- just a little older than he is.

  After that he settled in the back of the car with a lantern and a Geronimo Stilton book. I looked for a while, but the battery on the hand controller had died (next time: spare batteries, dammit!) and the slop was moving in further. I gave up, packed up, and we came home. He slept, I drove...the natural order of things; though I broke that a bit when I could only carry him partway up from the car when we got home. Li'l dude's heavy, yo.

  In any event: a good dry run; a test of my checklists, and of the emergency father-son system. We both did well.

• February 01, 2014 Random Reading part $RANDOM

  • Canada's CSEC tracked travellers at Canadian airports who used the free WiFi. Not only that, tracked 'em afterward and backward as they showed up at other public hotspots across Canada. Oh, lovely.

  • A TSA screener explains: Yes, we saw you naked and we laughed.

  • ESR writes about dragging Emacs forward -- switching to git, and away from Texinfo, all to keep Emacs relevant. There are about eleven thousand comments. Quote:

  And if the idea of RMS and ESR cooperating to subvert Emacs's decades-old culture from within strikes you as both entertaining and bizarrely funny...yeah, it is. Ours has always been a more complex relationship than most people understand.

  • My wife takes out our younger son's stuffed dogs for the day, and gets all the space she needs at Costco. WIN.

  • Looks like the supernova in Ursa Major has peaked at magnitude 10.5 or so.

  • Have I mentioned Adlibre backup before? 'Cos it's really quite awesome. Written in shell, uses rsync and ZFS to back up hosts. Simple and good.

  • Maclean's sent a sketch artist to cover Justin Bieber getting booked. I'd like to sketch that well.

• January 25, 2014 Observing report -- January 24, 2014...or, SUPERNOVAAAAAAAAAA!

  Today I stayed home from work; my oldest son had come down with a cold, and it was a mitzvah to keep him from breathing on his friends. We had fun: we set up spy bases, extracted DNA from strawberries, and after supper I set up Ranger, the 8" Dob. I showed the kids Jupiter; even got brave and used the 10mm Plossl, which is a tiny hole to look through -- but they got it. Not like the old days...Then I asked them if they wanted to go back inside or see a star cluster. "STAR CLUSTER!" they fairly shouted, and maybe not just because it put off bedtime another 15 minutes. So I showed them M35, and they were happy (though it was fainter than they expected)

  After they went to sleep I packed up Ranger (didn't want to be bothered by dew; good choice) and went to the local park. Another quick look at Jupiter to see how it was doing (damn good) and then off to Ursa Major for...SUUUUUPERNOOOOOVAAAA!

  SN 2013J is -- was -- lighting up M82. It's been clear for a few days in Vancouver, but life has been busy. Not tonight, though. And thanks to new starhopping instructions from Astro Bob (seriously, he makes it SO EASY) I was able to get to M81 and M82 with no effort at all (not like last time). Couldn't see the SN at 30X, but damn if it wasn't there in averted vision at 46X, and obvious at 100X. First supernova!

  Tried at 200X, and amazingly it held up. I checked with with the AAVSO chart; I got to 12th mag at 200X, but not 13th mag. Rough estimate for the SN itself was about 11 - 11.5...hard to be sure. (The light curve would seem to indicate I'm not completely wrong, so yay!) Maybe hint of mottling at 200X, but nothing definite.

  It was really neat to look at it and think "The gold in my wedding band came from one of you...one of you shocked my sun into being, and my planet into coalescing..." And here I sit collecting your photons beside a busy road. Man, I love this hobby.

  After that I tracked down M46 and M47. The last time I looked at M46, I really loved it; this time, not so much. Still, nice to be able to find it.

  Then it was time to for the gusto...M1! Which I finally found, though in the barest barely-there way. O3 filter did nothing (not that I can remember if an O3 filter's meant to do anything.) Checking with Jeremy Perez' sketch I definitely had the right location, but I assure you it looked nothing like his sketch at all...mostly just like a large faint fuzzy cloud. Enough to say you saw it, but that's it. Still, brings me to 58 Messiers!

  At this point I went back to Jupiter, which seemed shockingly clear to me. Held 200X; Callisto and Ganymede both seemed disks, not dots. And hte belts were very, very nice.

  Home again to warm up -- which I've only just now acomplished.

• January 21, 2014 Observing report -- January 20, 2014

  Another clear night -- and less than a week after the last one too! Nothing for it but to set up on the front porch again and show the kids some stuff. I picked Ranger, the Dob, again; I wasn't sure how long the clear skies would last, and it's quicker to set up than Neptune.

  So after soccer practice and supper, it was time to show the kids the Orion Nebula for the first time. Eli wasn't really able to pick it out, though he did see the Trapezium; Arlo picked it up, but said it was faint. And fair enough; the 40mm made it small, and the 12mm spread it out a lot. But it was fun to see, and they seemed to enjoy the thought of what they were seeing.

  After they were in bed, I went back out to see what I could see. Started with M42 again, of course. The O3 filter really brought out the clouds, but the only hint of M43 I could see came without it -- and I'm still not sure I actually saw it.

  Searched for M78 -- not sure I found it. Took a quick sketch to compare w/the hive mind, but I'm still not sure.

  M35 -- the last few times I've looked for this have been full of frustration. Not tonight, though -- the stars aligned (ha!) and I was able to track it down w/o problems. I love that sad-face arc of stars inside it. Tried looking for NGC 2158, but pretty sure I was skunked.

  M36, M37 and M38 -- If M35 has been frustrating the last few times, these clusters have been frustrating since day one. Not tonight, though -- got the hat trick! Not only that, I was able to find NGC 1907 by M38. The seeing was really good tonight, and I was able to take a quick sketch of it through a Barlowed 12mm -- unusual for me. (Compared it to the barlowed 10mm Meade that came w/Neptune, and I love the 12mm. That 10mm is going up for sale.) Favourite was

  M37, though...what a gorgeous sight.

  Finally over to Jupiter, which stood up well to the barlowed 12mm. Not perfect, but damn good. Got my first good look at the GRS, and yeah, it really is redder this year -- very obvious even a couple hours past the meridian. Swear I saw Ganymede as a small disk, not just a dot...bigger than our moon, so I guess it's a possibility.

  All in all, a very fun and enjoyable night.

• January 15, 2014 John Dobson: 1915-2013

  Today I found out that John Dobson, inventor of sidewalk astronomy, of the mount that bears his name, had died at the age of 98. Miracle or tribute, the skies were clear (ish; it is the West Coast in January), so I dragged out Ranger, my 8" Dob. I haven't had it out since getting Neptune, the Meade LX10, and frankly it was a treat; simple to set up, easy to point, and quick to cool.

  I took out the kids to look at Jupiter and the moon. We saw equatorial belts and Sinus Iridium, where Chang-E has landed. I told them the story of John Dobson: how he wanted to show people their universe and made his own telescope to do so; how he ground his own mirror from porthole windows and sand, and made the mount that bears his name. Up, down, spin around -- the simplest thing that could possibly work. How he took his scope to the sidewalks to show people stars, planets, galaxies -- the universe where they lived.

  There are times when what I want and what the kids want are mismatched, and we bump heads. This was not one of those times, and they seemed genuinely interested. (I have to say, though, what they really liked was looking through the eyepieces and seeing everything upside down.) And when it was bedtime, we read "This Is Me And Where I Am", one of my favourite books. (They like it too.)

  After they went to bed I sat outside on the porch, watching Europa's shadow transit and pass Jupiter. I saw the moon, Tycho and Copernicus, the bright craters spotting it everywhere. I saw the Orion Nebula; not well, because the clouds were rolling in, but well enough. Rest in peace, John Dobson.

• January 05, 2014 He went to a lot of trouble.

  The other day, my wife mentioned an Internets I had to read. "Ooh, that sounds good," I said, and since I had my laptop on I visited the site. Sequence went like this:

  • Pop-up window asking permission to set a cookie; denied.

  • Site looks like crap, so fiddle with RequestPolicy and allow the site to request from the CDN.

  • Site still looks like crap, so fiddle with NoScript to temporarily allow the site and its CDN to run JavaScript (grr).

  • Each of these steps prompted a refresh, which took a while because I mostly surf with TOR on these days. (Good thing the site didn't just block me because I'm coming from a TOR node, the way some sites do...)

  All this was reflex. My wife watched what I was doing and smiled. "Your epitaph is going to be, 'He went to a lot of trouble. No adversary was too small.'"

  And I smiled because that's true. Each of these things slows me down, is a pain in the ass, is one more thing that leaves other people shaking their head and wondering "Why bother?" But each one has its reason:

  • Cookies: do I really have to explain? If you're reading this, probably not.

  • NoScript and RequestPolicy really cut down on ads, plus there's the whole privacy benefit of not requesting every single web beacon out there.

  • TOR: a few reasons. First, to piss off the NSA. (Yes, that's a bit juvenile.) Second, to make bulk surveillance harder for them and others. Third, to provide cover for people who really need it (human rights activists, say).

  All this reminds me of the "just one more thing..." breadcrumb trail that'd leave me, say, gradually funnelling all my money to a 419 scam. (I think it's unlikely I'll go too far, though. How private can you be when you're on Twitter?)

  I'm starting to run into this sort of question with the kids. They want iPhones and Android phones and iPads and laptops and PS3s and I don't know what-all. My response so far has been to say "No," then "Not 'til you're 16 and you can give me an essay on 'Privacy before and after the Snowden revelations.'" And then my son asks, "What do you mean by that?" Trying to answer that, while simultaneously trying to figure out how to explain opsec and why it's necessary to a seven year-old, while simultaneously second- and third-guessing myself (I really do realize how crazy this all is), leads to about a 20 bit-per-minute communication rate during these conversations. And then the kids just wander next door to use the neighbour kid's iPad and dream of the day when they can buy their own.

  It's enough to make me want to look up an NSA analyst and ask how they deal with it. (I bet I'd have to disqualify the answer on the grounds of "'If you have nothing to hide...' isn't acceptable." But maybe that's unfair.)

  And since I can't think of a good way to end this, I'm just going to post it.

• July 09, 2013 Ritter (verb, intransitive)

  Today was a battle of wills. My younger son did not want to do something, and his mother and I did. We've been hemming and hawing over what to do about this for a while now. "He's holding on to his independence," she said, "in the only way he knows how." "He's being bloody-minded," I said, "and he needs to learn that we're serious." After a lot of argument, we agreed to try things my way.

  So we spent the day, she and I and he, inside, butting heads, in as kind a way as we could manage. Our older son would wander through the room occasionally, curious about what we were doing but bored, bored out of his skull. We were all inside on a beautiful day, inside at two when we're usually out and about by nine.

  We made it, but it was not victory; far from it. Our son was stubborn and tearful, just as Clara had predicted. I had an uneasy, growing sense that I'd been overconfident, but didn't know how to say so. So I declared victory early to save face, to keep the progress we'd made, and my wife did her best to explain it to our son: that we wanted him to improve; that we'd made a mistake, and would not do it this way again; that we did not know what we were doing, and that all we had on our side was good intentions.

  We went out for ice cream, a reward for staying home all day. The kids loved it, and I think the adults enjoyed it as well. We went to a park and wondered at how they could run around enjoying it so much after being bored or dunned all day. We came home, had supper, watched TV. I took my older son to karate class; he went in barefoot but walking there and back he wore flip-flops. He doesn't often wear them, and he was constantly stumbling and then recovering with a shocking grace, like John Ritter being caught by paramedics. We put them to bed then sat on the patio, drinking a beer, shaking our heads at our luck: our children's patience and forbearing, and our privilege to screw up and still make out.

• June 29, 2013 Summer Ale

  There are days when I can't see the end of the TODO list. Patch the laptops; add SSL to Postfix, to try and keep the NSA away for one more year; take down the recycling, and the composting, and the garbage; take the empties back to Safeway; pick up the caulking for the bathtup, and a switchplate to replace the one the kids broke. Oh, and we're going to the in-laws too (they live just across town and they're wonderful, generous, loving people, so that is in no way a complaint). I wanted to brew, so I have to pick out a recipe and then some ingredients. I want to go out with the scope, so I need to pick some targets. And it's Saturday, so I'm taking the kids out for the morning (again, not a complaint).

  In the middle of that, having to play with Eli, my younger son, can seem like a chore, like something that's taking away from The Things that Have to be Done. He senses that, too; he's five but he's no idiot. I'm mad, but I've got a secret weapon: while we were out this morning buying donuts (one each; their money, their afternoon treat) I bought myself a 10X magnifying glass (a loupe, basically). Now's the time to take it out. Sitting down on the front step, I see a sowbug exoskeleton. I pick it up, put it under the loupe and look. "Oh, wow."

  "What is it?" He's cautious, but interested; he's pretty much over a phase where he was Not Interested in the things I wanted to show him. That was probably my fault as much as his. I wanted to show him things, all the wonders of the universe, and at some point he had enough, and he didn't hesitate to tell me so. We're both stubborn, a fact my parents grinned at knowingly when they were visiting a few weeks ago. At the time, Eli and I spent a certain amount of time glaring at each other. But now, he's watching me squat ungracefully on the sidewalk, trying to see what I see.

  "It's a dead sowbug. Have a look."

  He does, and it's cool, it's interesting. We look for other things: snails, ants, crystal rocks (defined as anything shiny). Eventually his brother comes home and they run upstairs to play together.

  Later on I bribe him into helping me take back the empties to Safeway by promising him the deposit. On our way back we find a caterpillar on the sidewalk. He's yellow and black and fuzzy and looks like a toothbrush. We take him home, picking leaves from random trees along the way so he'll have something to east. One of the leaves we pick has the ladybug equivalent of a cocoon on it, and we decide that we should watch for it to hatch.

  An hour later, I look at the leaves and realize the ladybug has hatched -- and there it is, bright yellow and looking like a tiny lemon. I call Eli over and we stare at it. There are no spots on it; they come in later, I explain, and Eli says "Huh!" in that way he has when he's actually interested in something. An hour after that we check again. The ladybug has spread its wings to dry, and its shell is showing a couple of green spots.

  Despite the desperation, shit got done. The recycling went down. The cat did not vomit on the floor. I got an SSL certificate for the mail server. I watched a movie with my wife and kids. I picked up the ingredients for my next homebrew, a summer ale, and it's mashing now; it'll sit overnight, waiting for me to finish it tomorrow.

• March 04, 2013 Observing Report -- March 3, 2013

  This was a busy-ass day, yo. Got up at 5.30am to make beer, only to find out that a server at work had gone down and its ILOM no longer works. A few hours later, I've convinced everyone that a trip to UBC would be lovely; I go in, reboot the server and we drive back. It's no 6000 km from Calgary to California and back like my brother does, but for us that's a long drive.

  And then it's time to make beer, because I've left it mashing overnight. Boil, chill, sanitize, pitch, lug, clean, and we're one batch closer to 50 (50!). A call to my parents (oh yeah: Dad, you guys can totally stay here in May) and then its supper. And then it's time for astronomizing. Computers, beer and astronomy: this day had it all.

  So tonight's run was mostly about trying out the manual setting circles. I don't have a tablet or smart phone to run something like Stellarium on, so for now I'm printing out a spreadsheet with a three-hour timeline, 15 minute intervals, of whatever Messiers are above the horizon.

  How did it work? Well, first I zeroed the azimuth on Kochab (Beta UM) rather than Polaris, and kept wondering why the hell the azimuth was off on everything. I realized my mistake, set things right, and tried again. And...it worked well, when I could recognize things.

  M42, for example, was easy. (It was the first thing I found by dialing everything in, and when I took a look there was a satellite crossing the FOV. Neat!) But then, it's big, easy to recognize, and i've seen it before. Ditto M45. M1? Not so much; I haven't seen it before, and I didn't have a map ready to look at. M35, surprisingly, was hard to find; M34 was relatively easy, and M36 was found mainly because I knew what to look for in the finder.

  This should not be surprising. I've been tracking down objects by starhopping for a while now, so why I thought it would be easier now that I could dial stuff in is beyond me. It's my first time, and the positions were calculated for Vancouver, not New West (though I'm curious how much diff that actually makes).

  There were some other things I looked for, though.

  M51: found the right location via starhopping, and confirmed on my chart. But could I see it? Could I bollocks.

  M50: Pretty sure I did see this; looking at sketches, they seem pretty similar to what I saw. (And that's another thing: it really does feel too easy, like I haven't earned it, and I can't be sure I've really found it.) Oh, and saw Pakan 3, an asterism shaped like a 3/E/M/W, nearby.

  M65/M66: Maybe M65; found the location via starhopping and confirmed the position in my chart. Seems like I had the barest hint of M65 visible.

  At the request of my kids:

  Jupiter: Three bands; not as steady as I thought it would be.

  Pleidies: Very nice, but I do wis I had a wider field lens.

  M36: Eli suggested a star cluster, aso I went with this. Lovely X shape.

  Betelgeuse: Nice colour. Almost forgot about this, and had to look at it through trees before I went home.

• February 13, 2013 Observing Report -- February 13, 2013

  (Yep, that's more than a month since the last time...)

  Tonight was a rare clear night. Just before putting the kids to bed, I stepped outside to see if it was clear -- and saw the ISS heading over! Talk about good timing...I ran back inside and got my youngest son to come out so we could wave at @Cmdr_Hadfield. Sadly, doesn't seem like he saw us.

  I was expecting the clouds to roll in, but they didn't. I was dithering about whether to go out, and my wife said "Why don't you just go? It'll make you happy." Now that's a) good advice and b) a wonderful partner. I'm lucky.

  So out, scope not even cooled, and did I care? Did I bollocks. It was wonderful to be out, and the clouds really did hold off a long time.

  M81 and M82 -- Holy crap, I found them again. It's been a while since I saw them, and it was wonderfully encouraging to know I could track them down.

  Moon -- quick look, as it was setting and being covered by clouds. Fun fact: while walking home from work, I was surprised at how small the moon was. Then I remembered that's just its regular size, and it's been a while since I saw it.

  Polaris -- the engagement ring. Pretty. Fits into a 40mm eyepiece view ('bout a degree FOV).

  M34 -- First time, which means I've got one more Messier bagged. What a pretty cluster! Took the time to sketch it. Looks like a triskelion to me. (UPDATE: Whoops, actually found it last September. Dangit.)

  M42 -- Beautiful, beautiful. I've been looking at sketches of it recently, and that helped me notice more detail, like the fish-mouth shape and the bat wings. But I think I was not looking in the right place for M43. Next time. (BTW, this is just a lovely sketch.) I think I saw the E star, which is nice.

  Brief attempt to find M1, but by that time the clouds were rolling in. What a lovely, satisfying night.

• January 13, 2013 Viewing Saturn

  I took the kids out this morning to look at Saturn through the telescope. It was a rare clear day; the clouds of the last three months seem to have taken a break. And it was cold -- probably -5C out there.

  First, though, we had a visit from Mustard Boy! He uses a frisbee for a weapon.

  

  Arlo took this picture through the viewfinder, and it turned out surprisingly well. Saturn is just visible above (well, below) the rooftops. It wasn't the best location for viewing, but it was nice and close.

  

  This, by constrast, is the crappiest afocal picture ever.

  

  But on to the kids! The tempation to look down the tube of the telescope is nigh-inescapable.

  

  Notice the stickers on the telescope. Some of those I added, but approximately 6 x 10^8 were added yesterday when the kids were bored.

  

  Eli is small enough that I have to lift him up to see through the eyepiece.

  

  Saturn was small -- 100x doesn't show a very big image -- but we had fun, didn't get cold and no one got their toungue stuck to the telescope. I declare that success.

• January 01, 2013 New Year's Day 2012

  Continuing our long tradition of being old, my wife and I barely made it to 9.48pm last night before falling asleep. But we made up for it this morning, when we took the kids on a walk to find a graveyard. Okay, so there's one nearby, but it sounds exciting (especially when the kids don't realize that "graveyard" is the same as "cemetery", and thus the same boring thing you drive by all the time). But it got even better: the fog was thick as pea soup, and we found THE RAVINE. I mean, look at these pictures:

  

  Clara kept telling the boys that the popotch would get them if they wandered off the trail. (Popotch == semi-made-up Italian for witch)

  

  I was quite scared of the popotch.

  

  So it turned out we were in the Glenbrook Ravine Park:

  

  We've been in New West six years now and never once knew it was there. Not only that, but there's a 118 year-old bell:

  

  And it's from an old prison...

  

  which is just up the street:

  

  After this we had to walk up an enormous hill, whipping the children the whole way. And it was then that we finally got to the graveyard, but they were too tired to do more than groan at how much further they had to walk to get home. I mean, not even the Lacrosse Hall of Fame could get them excited.

  And finally, we done had a battery splosion:

  

  This came from a toy the boys got for Xmas. The battery ran out (quite normally, I should add), and I had taken it out of the toy so we could replace it. I wrapped it in an old copy of my resume I'd been working on, tucked it into my pocket in preparation for a trip to the dollar store, then promptly forgot about it. 24 hours later I was sitting around minding my own business when POP! I had no idea what the hell'd just happened, but when I dug around in my pocket I found the paper and unwrapped it. The cap popped right off; the bit on the left was something like sponge or wool, and was quite hot.

  I think the ink is conductive; my wife thinks maybe the battery got too hot just sitting around. At some point I'll conduct an experiment.

• December 30, 2012 Observing Report -- Sunday, December 30

  Once again it has been a goddamned long time since I got out with the scope. The skies here have been cloudy for months, it seems, with very, very few breaks. Tonight was one of them, and I was itching to try out the new O3 filter I'd bought from the good folks at Vancouver Telescopes...went in looking for finderscope caps and came out with the caps and a new filter. (These folks are awesome, btw. They always have time to chat, and I've never been to a friendlier store. When I finally get the cash together to buy that 8" Celestron, I'm damn sure going there.)

  We were over at my in-laws today, and as it happened I'd taken over the Galileoscope, attached to a photo tripod. It's not the most stable mount, but it does the trick. We set it up in their back yard and looked at Jupiter. I've got an old Kellner eyepiece that gives 28X, so we could see the two equatorial belts and, with careful squinting, all four moons. It was the first time my in-laws had seen Jupiter through a scope, and I think they enjoyed it.

  The clouds held off while we drove home and put the kids to bed, and I headed out to the local park. The clouds were starting to move in, so I started looking in a hurry.

  Jupiter: The seeing seemed quite steady tonight, and I was able to see a fair bit of detail. The GRS was transiting while I was there, which was neat. It was fairly easy to see (now that I know what I'm looking for). There was a long, trailing streamer (not sure that's the right term) coming off the GRS, and I swear I could see it was blue at times. (You can see a really great picture of it here; that guy's photos are simply amazing.)

  M42: Viewed in a hurry, as I was afraid the clouds were rolling in. I used this as a chance to try out the O3 filter, and I'm definitely intrigued. I'd write more, but I really was in a hurry and didn't savour this at all.

  M37 and M36: I have always had a hard time finding these; in fact, it was my second winter observing before I could find them. Now, I'm happy to know I can repeat the feat. The clouds rolled in bbefore I could find M38.

  IC 405 (The Flaming Star Nebula): While looking at the star atlas I noticed this was in the neighbourhood. I found the star, and tried looking at it with the O3 filter, but could not see anything. Sue French says in "Deep Sky Wonders" that it responds well to hydrogen-beta filters, "but a narrowband filter can also be of help." Not for me, but again I was in a hurry.

  Luna: Ah, Luna. The mountains of Mare Crisium, and Picard just going into shadow; Macrobius; Hercules and Atlas. The O3 filter made a fine moon filter. :-)

  A short and hurried session, but fun nonetheless.

• December 28, 2012 Post-Xmas Brewday

  It's Xmas vacation, and that means it's time to brew. Mash was at 70 C, which was a nice even 5 C drop in the strike water temp. 7.5 gallons went in, and 6 gallons of wort came out. It was not raining out, despite the title, so I brewed outside:

  

  My kids came out to watch; the youngest stayed to help.

  

  The keggle was converted by my father-in-law, a retired millwright; he wrote the year (2009) and his initial using an angle grinder.

  

  The gravity was 1.050, so I got decent efficiency for a change -- not like last time.

  

  On a whim, Eli decided to make the 60 minute hop addition a FWH instead:

  

  Ah, the aluminum dipstick. No homebrewer should be without one.

  

  Eli demonstrated his command of Le Parkour...

  

  and The Slide:

  

  "Hey, it's Old Man Brown, sittin' on his porch eatin' soup an' making moonshine again!"

  

  Eventually it was time to pitch the yeast. We took turns. I took this one of Eli...

  

  ...and he took this one of me:

  

  Isn't it beautiful? Oh, and the OG was 1.062.

  

• December 05, 2012 Tampa Bay Breakfasts

  My friend Andy, who blogs at Tampa Bay Breakfasts, got an article written about him here. Like his blog, it's good reading. You should read both.

  He's also a sysadmin who's on the LISA organizing committee this year, and I'm going to be seeing him in a few days when I head down to San Diego. The weather is looking shockingly good for this Rain City inhabitant. I'm looking forward to it. Now I just have to pick out my theme band for this year's conference....I'm thinking maybe Josh Rouse.

• November 11, 2012 Observing Report -- Saturday, November 10

  We've had a three-day stretch of clear skies; that's not the first since the last time I went out, but damn near, and definitely the first that wasn't in the middle of the week (middle-aged sysadmin needs his goram sleep) or covered by sickness.

  We spent Martinmas at my in-laws eating new wine and chestnuts, and by the time we got back it was late and Jupiter was already up. I set up the scope on the steps near our townhouse and showed the kids. Jr/Fresco and I'd been talking about what eyepiece to use: the 40mm or the 12mm? He grabbed the 40mm since it was bigger, and was really surprised to see how much smaller Jupiter looked (30x) compared to the 12mm (100x). Both saw the NEB and SEB, and noticed Europa, Callisto and Io.

  It was clear skies then...but in the hour it took me to read them stories, put them to bed and get out the door to the local park, clouds moved in and all but obscured everything...except Jupiter, that is. (Cue macho joke about KING OF THE GODS, that's who.) So I made lemonade and spent my time looking at Jupiter.

  It was wonderful. The seeing was quite steady, and that made up for things not being quite as bright as they might have been. I was able to get up to 320x, which is a feat for me -- not to mention being able to simply keep it in view when it sails across the screen like that. The North Polar Region, the NEB and the SEB were easily visible, and I could just make out the Great Red Spot rotating out of view. From time to time I could distinguish the north and south components of the SEB, the north and south Temperate Bands, and what looked like a thin dark band right across the equator (which I just barely see hints of in these photos; not sure if I was imagining that or not).

  ANother thing I saw was the reapparance of Ganymede from occulatation (that is, from behind Jupiter's disk). I knew when to expect it; when the time came, I saw it and thought "Oh yeah, neat...not as cool as a transit, though." I ignored it for a few more minutes, then realized something: I was seeing a disk, not just a point o' light...and that was only at 200x. I had my copy of the RASC Observer's Handbook (okay, maybe it is handy to have around), so I looked up Ganymede and saw that it was half again as big as the moon. Wow. I had a closer look at the other moons, and while I couldn't really see any disks, I did seem to see a sort of brownish colour to Callisto (which may actually be accurate).

  I came in after only an hour; the clouds were erratic, and I wanted to get inside. Not the widest-ranging observing session, but lots of fun.

• November 07, 2012 Pickup

  Tonight I picked up a grain order I placed with my local homebrew club. Pickup was at Parallel 49, where the president of the club is the brewer. My oldest son came along, and said brewer was kind enough to give him (and his dad!) a quick tour of the place. My son was impressed, and so was I; I'd never seen a 10k litre fermentation tank before. It occurred to me later how overwhelming that would be for me: to be faced with this enormous volume waiting to be filled. I'm in awe of someone who can look at that and say, "Yeah, I know exactly what I want to put in there."

  I also came away with a free bottle of their Salty Scot Scottish Ale; haven't tried that yet, but I did like the growler of the India Pale Lager (which I was happy to pay for). It's a nice twist on the usual IPA fare. I do regret having to leave behind the milk stout, though...next time.

• November 04, 2012 Illness

  Last week my 4.5 year old came down with his usual asthma-inflamed cold; this week it's my wife's standard sinus infection and tonsillitis for my 6 year old. It's been busy: two weekends spent at the doctor's in a row is more than we usually aim for.

  It's not all bad, though. In a way it's been nice to sit around and just be with them at home, rather than think constantly about how to entertain them out of the house. We've read books (of course), played games, done crafts and pointed TV at our heads. I've even started installing games on my laptop for them to play. (Complicated succession rules mean I got my wife's old laptop recently.) 4.5 is particularly enjoying TuxRacer (which I've just found out was renamed to Extreme TuxRacer).

  Next weekend it's Martinmas, plus a long weekend. I hope to have a 25kg bag of pale malt by then, and it'd be nice to get some beer in...something a bit more relaxing than illness.

• September 21, 2012 Geekdad

  My wife's out tonight. I was going to use this time to due some surgery on the home network, but instead I spent my time playing Monopoloy with the kids and putting 'em to bed way past their bedtime. So now? It's nachos, beer and Netflix. I think that's fair.

• August 26, 2012 RIP Neil

  I've been reading up on the Apollo missions lately. It followed after reading about Sputnik, then the Mercury missions ("The Right Stuff" is incredible; I now know why Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thomson get mentioned in the same breath). Skipped over Gemini -- not much selection at my local library, but I want to fix this oversight -- then lots of Andrew Chaikin, Life magazine and, just finishing right now, First on the Moon (also written with/by Life magazine journalists). I was at the return flight, and kind of skimming over things, when I heard that Neil Armstrong had died.

  Clara was going out that night, and I'd been promising the kids for a long time that we'd go out and look at the stars with the telescope, so I figured this was a good time to follow through.

  "Hey guys, want to stay up late tonight and look through the telescope?"

  "Can we watch movies?"

  "Yeah."

  "Okay, then."

  Note: I do feel bad about not doing this earlier. In my own defense, I have taken them out to a star party this month; I sat out with them at my parents' place this summer (skies dark like you would not BELIEVE) and shown them the Milky Way, told them that we live in a galaxy with billions, BILLIONS of stars. These things are important to me. But I want to do things that are fun for them, not just/only things that are important to me. I try hard to find the balance between making sure they feel welcome, and pestering them about things that bore them to death.

  Anyway.

  We stayed up and watched Power Rangers S.P.D (two episodes), a little bit of Ghostbusters, and some Pink Panther. And then we put on warm clothes and went out.

  It was cloudy, a little bit, but not too much. It was around 8.30pm, and really dark was just in sight. The moon was up -- 67% full, according to my nerdy daily emails -- and low, too low to be seen from our 3rd floor window.

  We looked at Saturn first. The highest magnification I had was 48X, so the rings were there, but not amazing -- but the kids saw them. The younger (4 years old) wanted to move the telescope around; the older (6 years old) tried hard not to bump the scope. They both saw through the telescope, which is a big improvement over previous years. (I'm not complaining, though I would've at the time; they weren't ready for that, and I didn't realize that.) It was neat, but probaby not a wonder for them.

  We looked at Mars, and that was just a red dot. But I told them that this was where Curiosity was, and I hope that made it interesting.

  I pointed it at the moon. The 30x eyepiece framed it nicely, gave them lots of time to look before it drifted out of site. They saw craters, maria, the terminator.

  I told them about Neil Armstrong: how he was the first to walk on the moon; how he'd died today; how his family had asked that we wink at the moon. "Why should we?" asked my younger; I think he was confused about the whole thing. "Because his family thought it was something he'd like." "I can only wink two eyes." "That's okay."

  "Have you ever seen someone die?" asked my older. "No," I said.

  I had a map of the moon. One at a time, I showed them Mare Crisium; hopped from there to Mare Fecundidatis and Mare Nectaris, like two claws on a lobster; and Mare Tranquilitatis, joining the two like the base of the claw. "See up there, right where it goes up to the right? That's where they landed. No, there's not much to see, but that's where it happened." And then we looked up at the moon, counted to three, and winked (or blinked). Goodnight, Mister Armstrong.

• August 13, 2012 Meteor shower

  This weekend I took the kids out to Aldergrove Regional Park to the Perseid meteor shower party, organized by Vancouver Parks and the local chapter of the RASC. I went last year with my older son, and the younger was quite eager to go this time around. (Clara was happy we were all going this time, too; last year, the younger stayed up 'til 10pm waiting for his brother, and woke up at 5am upset he wasn't back yet.)

  We packed up the tent, flashlights, sleeping bags, PB&J, water bottles, stuffies, binoculars, pillows, lounge chairs, blankets, star atlases, and drove out. We got there at 8.30pm or so and it was already packed. The kids help me set up the tent, and then we were off to the activities.

  First we got glow sticks:

  

  And then we went off to get faces painted. That didn't last long, though; we'd already had a very long day with my inlaws and relations by that point, and the kids were bagged. We ducked out of the line after a few minutes, got hot chocolate, then went back to the tent to look at the sky for a while.

  Sr. headed off to bed, announcing he "might put his head down for a while". Jr. went with him, but came out in time to watch the ISS fly over. Sr. poked his head out as well, then went back to sleep. Jr. stayed up a little longer, then went to bed about 10.45pm, and I was left with 800 or so of my closest friends.

  It was really neat watching the shower with so many people around. There was a park-wide game of Marco Polo, which was funny. And as for the meteors, even before midnight there were a few really bright trails, and everyone would ooh, ahh, and even applaud.

  I fell asleep in my lounge chair around 11.30pm, then woke up again about an hour later. There were some really cool trails, but I wouldn't say there was a huge number...I saw one maybe every 2-4 minutes. I finally called it a night at 2am and crawled into the tent.

  We got up about 6.30am, ate our PB&J, and started packing up.

  

  We picked up some godawful sweet snacks at a gas station (we did it last year, had to do it this year, next year I'm putting my foot down) and drove home. The kids fell asleep in the back, and then again for two hours in the afternoon...and that never happens.

  All in all, a fun time. Recommended if you're in the Vancouver area.

• March 09, 2012 Impromptu training from the sysadmin

  Today I gave some impromptu training at $WORK; the approximate topic was "Saving State in Linux". I've been meaning to do something like this for a while, but it was prompted by a conversation yesterday with one of the researchers who kept losing work state when shit happened -- Emacs window arrangements, SSH sessions to other machines, and so on. I found myself mentioning things like tmux, workgroups, and Emacs daemon mode...and after a while, I said "Let me talk to you about this tomorrow."

  So today I found half an hour, decided to mention this to everyone in the lab, crowded into a meeting room, set up my laptop and the projector, and away I went. For a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants first attempt, I think it went relatively well. Best idea: asking people for questions. It hadn't occurred to me that people would want to know more basic stuff like "How do I split windows in Emacs?". I'm never sure what people already know, so I don't want to bore them...

  Next time:

  • Be more organized
  • More notice for people so they can prepare questions
  • Let the vi people know if it's going to be Emacs-heavy

  In other news: finally converted my SVN repos to Git yesterday in a fit of pique. The big three -- my org-mode stuff, and the two Cfengine repos (Cf2 and -3) -- are already in use, as in that's where I'm checking stuff into. The rest (Nagios configs, for example) are being done as I get to them. It's really, really wonderful.

  Family: holy house o' plague, Batman!

  • Last Friday my older son pukes, stays home from school
  • Last weekend my younger son comes down with bronchitis, demands compensation for being forced to take antibiotics
  • My wife comes down with some kinda virus that makes her nauseous for a week
  • I'm still fighting off a sinus infection
  • Wednesday, my older son pukes again apropos of what we don't know

  Gah. We're getting the house boiled next week. (Update, March 13: too late; I puked on Friday night and spent Saturday moaning in bed; my wife did the same thing Saturday night/Sunday. FUCK.)

  Also? There's a Planet Lisp. Who knew?

• February 29, 2012 Weird bright satellite on Monday

  Last night was a rare semi-clear night (this month has been awful, grumble), so I was excited to see the Moon, Jupiter and Venus on my walk home from the bus stop after $WORK; it was kinda cloudy, but not completely, and anyhow the crecent moon was awful pretty through the haze. When I got home I asked my oldest son if he wanted to go out w/the telescope after supper. He was enthusiastic, so I put the 4.5" reflector outside to cool while we ate.

  Forty minutes was enough to bring in more threatening clouds, but we could still see the three of them. I set up the scope and had a look at Theopilus. A couple years ago my son noticed its distinct appearance, and asked what its name was. I looked it up, and have been fond of it ever since. This time, though, he couldn't pick it out...but he was still interested, so that was good.

  I'd looked on Heavens-Above to see if the ISS was due to fly overhead tonight, and it was -- just before 7pm, right when we were outside. Sweet! Sure enough, we watched closely and there it was, bright as anything and moving just past the moon. But wait, wasn't it supposed to go across the moon? What the...

  ...and then one minute later, there was the real ISS, and it was going across the Moon (very cool!). And there was the other satellite, almost as bright, moving on a different track. As far as I could tell, both stayed the same steady brightness -- so no tumbling for our mystery satellite. We watched both 'til they passed into the Earth's shadow, then headed inside for the night.

  First thing I did, of course, was pull up Heavens-Above again to see what this other satellite was. And I couldn't find anything! There was simply nothing listed anywhere near the time the ISS flew over, let alone something that was supposed to be that bright. No Iridium flares either. Stumped, I reported to my son that I had no idea what it was.

  But then I realized that I'd been looking at the listings that were supposed to be brighter than 3rd magnitude, rather than the fuller list that went down to 4.5. It was possible this thing was in the fuller list, but was brighter than predicted (because the predicted angle of reflection was wrong, say). So I pulled up the full list and started looking at tracks.

  Sure enough, there were a bunch that were overhead at that time. The ISS was the most obvious one, but looking at the map tracks this Delta II rocket was the one we saw, which had launched the Globalstar 26. Here's the ISS pass:

  

  And here's the Delta pass:

  

  The times don't match up perfectly. The Delta was predicted to reach max altitude at 18:44 and enter shadow at 18:50; the ISS was predicted to reach 10 degrees altitude at 18:51, max at 18:54 and shadow at 18:57. I didn't note the time we saw the first one, since it was right around 18:50 and I thought it was the ISS.

  I told my son about all this and -- being the son of a geek -- he thought it was pretty cool. :-)

  Also -- and this is completely unrelated -- how did I not know about M-a in Emacs? Ordinarily it's "backward-sentence", but in programming modes, it moves to the beginning of non-whitespace on a line. ZOMG.

• February 20, 2012 I'm gonna build me a cloud chamber

  Sunday we all(1) went to the AAAS Family Science Day and ho boy, it was fun. The kids had fun, of course; the demos were aimed pretty much right at them, and there were stickers and lasers and more stickers and popcorn. Friends of ours showed up with their two kids in tow, and all the boys got to run around and shine lasers at each other's heads. My wife had fun cos hey! SkyTrain! that's fun. But also? I had fun. And by fun I mean ZOMG. Because among other things, the Physics Department(2) from UBC had a real, working cloud chamber. A CLOUD CHAMBER.

  When I was a kid, I bought this book at a library book sale: a collection of Scientific American "Amateur Scientist" columns. There was all kinds of stuff in there, from how to build your own solid rocket motors to measuring the metabolism of rats (I think part of it was TAKING SAMPLES OF THEIR BLOOOOOOOD) to grinding your own telescope mirror. For a budding geek, this was simply endless entertainment.

  But -- BUT -- there was also a column explaining how to build your own cloud chamber and watch cosmic rays decay before your eyes. There was also an offer to mail you a radioactive speck so that you'd see more exciting stuff, which I thought was possibly the coolest thing ever.

  This may have been the beginning of my interest in particle physics, expressed in later years when I:

  a) got a local welder to weld some copper pipe in a loop, in preparation for a sadly-never-completed circular particle accelerator (linear accelerators are for suckers and chumps);

  b) sent a fan letter to Carlo Rubbia and was thrilled to get a personally-signed letter back;

  c) went to university to take physics in preparation for a career at CERN (only to get distracted by the Internet and libraries that were open 'til midnight, and fail out two years later); and

  d) was amazed that a coworker at my first sysadmin job was the son of the director of IT for CERN; I tried to get him to get me a job, and he said no, but he gave me a cool CERN swatch instead.

  And in all that time, do you think I'd ever seen a real, live cloud chamber? Had I bollocks. I'd printed out pictures of bubble chamber tracks, read up on spark chambers, learned about emulsion tracks, but never actually seen a working cloud chamber.

  This thing was cool. I had not realized how dynamic they were. They'd put in a radioactive source, of course -- maybe they had sent off for a radioactive speck back in the day -- but there were also cosmic rays and other natural sources of radiation leaving their marks. There were tracks appearing constantly, and then fading away; it was hypnotic to watch. This video shows exactly what I mean:

  The woman giving the demo said that some of the tracks were muons. Dude! MUONS! I was seeing MUON TRACKS! And then I got embarassed 'cos I couldn't remember whether beta radiation was photons or helium nuclei (neither: they're electrons or positrons; gamma radiation is made of high-energy photons) and felt insecure about the whole prospect of being in the same room as all these scientists since I obviously needed a remedial course in shoelace tying if I couldn't remember what beta radiation was.

  (My brain, it does not always make sense.)

  And so but it turns out you can find a lot of instructions on how to build a cloud chamber (the Starbucks chamber gets big props for being a cool hack), forums, and even a company that will build one for you (starting price for museum-grade model: $48,000). Now I just gotta track down some dry ice.

  ---

  (1) "my family"? "my wife and I and kids"? I think (by which I mean "worry", by which I mean "obsess") about these things.

  (2) You damn betcha it's capitalized.

• February 17, 2012 That was the week that was

  This week has been a writeoff. I took 2.5 days off sick (shoulda been 3), I slept for maybe four hours last night, and I've stared blearily at my work monitor more than I care to admit.

  I did get some stuff done: updated one of my wireless routers to the latest version of OpenWRT (and promptly found problems), got njam working on the new incarnation of the MythTV box (the kids are thrilled), and listened, rapt, to my youngest son proudly show his friend around the house while I hid upstairs in bed, snuffling quietly. So there's that.

  I've been reading "A History of Christianity". I long for footnotes, but more for comfort than anything else; other than that, it's pretty damn good. I've also got "Why Evolution Is True", and that's good too. I picked up Sue French's "Deep Sky Wonders", thanks to my ever-generous in-laws, and if the verdammt clouds ever clear up I hope to put it to good use. (Though I was proud, the last time the sky was clear, to have found NGC 1662 by Orion, which is mentioned in this book...I was surprised at how easy it was to find.)

  Optional reading for the week: "Sun's Unified Storage 7210 -- designed to disappoint?". Bryan Cantrill is a class act.

  Mandatory reading for the week: Terry Milewski's article on Section 34 of Bill C-30, which outlines the duties of inspectors, appointed by the minister under the act. Quote:

  The inspectors may "enter any place owned by, or under the control of, any telecommunications service provider in which the inspector has reasonable grounds to believe there is any document, information, transmission apparatus, telecommunications facility or any other thing to which this Act applies."

  ...The inspector, says the bill, may "examine any document, information or thing found in the place and open or cause to be opened any container or other thing." He or she may also "use, or cause to be used, any computer system in the place to search and examine any information contained in or available to the system."

  ...The inspector -- remember, this is anyone the minister chooses -- is also empowered to copy anything that strikes his or her fancy. The inspector may "reproduce, or cause to be reproduced, any information in the form of a printout, or other intelligible output, and remove the printout, or other output, for examination or copying."

  ...Finally, note that such all-encompassing searches require no warrant, and don't even have to be in the context of a criminal investigation. Ostensibly, the purpose is to ensure that the ISP is complying with the requirements of act the but nothing in the section restricts the inspector to examining or seizing only information bearing upon that issue. It's still "any" information whatsoever.

  Horrible. Email your MP today.

• August 23, 2010 Trip to Science World

  My in-laws got us a family membership at Science World for Xmas last year. Yesterday I got to take my 4 year-old (how should that be hyphenated?) son for the morning. It was his third trip and my second.

  We headed right for the Eureka room, which is aimed at the young 'uns, and he ran around showing me everything. "Daddy, here's a big tube where you can shoot out parachutes! And this air gun shoots balls up into the water!" We found out that you could stuff three plastic balls into the air gun at once (poom poom poom!).

  Oh, and when we got home he wanted to do an experiment. He got some pennies and put them in a jar with water, to leave them for a few days and see if they would dissolve. I had a maple syrup candy in my pocket (no idea where I got it), so I threw that in too. The candy has dissolved and made the water brown, so I'm curious to see what he makes of that.

  Science World is just incredible. I long to go see the grownup stuff, but even the kid stuff is enormously fun and moderately educational (though that's not my son's priority right now) (dang kids). I grew up in small towns as a kid, so trips to museums like this were rare, enormous fun. (And I never did get to go to Science North...) It's amazing to me that this stuff is right here, only a half hour away by transit. I'm still a little shocked we don't go, like, every weekend.

  In other news, I've got a starter going for a batch of beer next weekend. It's a Belgian yeast, harvested from my January batch. The yeast was washed following these instructions, and the starter took off in about 18 hours. It seems to be doing quite nicely; I'll probably stick it in the fridge on Wednesday or so and cold-crash it.

  The ingredients are pretty much whatever I have around the house: the last of my Gambrinus ESB, some biscuit and wheat malt, a bit of roasted barley, and the hops are Centennial, Goldings and Mt Hood. My father-in-law would call this a "ministrone" -- Italian not just for that kind of soup, but for "dog's breakfast" or "big ol' mixup". (I kind of like the idea of an Italian sounding like he's from Missouri.)

  Still looking for a name; suggestions on a postcard, please. Sponsorship options are available. :-)

  After that's in the bag, it's time to head back to Dan's for a shopping trip. This time, I think it'll be a 50-lb bag of plain ol' pale malt, and I'll see what difference that makes.

• August 15, 2010 Home again, home again, Jiggity-jog

  I'm back from 3 weeks' vacation. My family and I drove (!) from New Westminster, BC to Brandon, MB to visit my brother and sister-in-law and my parents. We took our time driving out and back: 6 days out, 6 days back, and, um, 9? days there.

  Originally our plan was to camp most of the way there and back, but after two days we realized that the kids were a tad young for that...between mosquitoes, not going to sleep on time, and long-ass days in the car, it made a lot more sense to stay in hotels. (Kids dug it a lot...every new Super-8/HoJo/Travellodge prompted a "Wow, TWO TABLES! This is the best room EVER!" from the oldest.)

  Family was fun. The prairies were hot (who knew?). Hotels with swimming pools are to be celebrated. The Rockies were, as ever, amazing. Canmore has a good brewpub and is a very, very pretty town. Aylesbury, SK had a horse to look at, which made it a good place for a picnic with the kids. Regina is made entirely of ass. Saskatoon, home of The Dymunds, is as pretty as ever.

  TThe Royal Tyrrell Museum was incredible, even in a visit abbreviated by two toddlers...first time I'd ever seen real dinosaur skeletons before ("and I saw a T Rex anna stegasaurus anna triceratops anna archaeopteryx anna...). I could have easily spent a week there. If you ever get the chance, visit by any means necessary.

  Despite some last-minute panics before leaving, I only received one phone call while away, and that from a salesman. I managed to forget about work entirely, and I expect to have to be guided to my desk tomorrow. And that is the capstone of a good vacation.

• April 12, 2010 The weekend of PLAGUE

  Wednesday, 5am: 2yr-old son wakes up and starts to shout. I go into his room to pick him up and step into a pool of cold vomit. He seems fine.

  Thursday, 5:15am: 2yr-old son wakes up and starts to shout. I go into his room to pick him up and step into a pool of cold vomit. I stay home a few hours to clean up the carpet. He seems fine.

  Friday, 6:10am: 2yr-old son wakes up and starts to shout. I go into his room to pick him up and turn on the light. I avoid stepping into a pool of cold vomit. 4yr-old son wakes up and starts to throw up; he throws up every half hour 'til noon. I stay home to take care of the kids. We put a towel on the carpet by the head of 2yr-old son's crib. 4yr-old son grey-green most of the day but picks up after nap time. 2yr-old son seems fine. We watch fourteen hours of television.

  Saturday, 2am: 2yr-old son wakes up and starts to shout. Clara goes down and finds him in a pool of vomit within the crib. She sleeps in the rocking chair with him 'til 7am. 4yr-old son much better ("I feel MUCH better today!" he says). 2yr-old son whiny and miserable. Clara and I feel like shit and are whiny and miserable. Clara's parents take 4yr-old son for the day. I drive us all to the doctor, worried about how many things are going on right now (night vomits + bug + teething + what the hell else?); dr tells us almost certainly the same bug, but manifesting itself differently in all of us. Clara drives us home while I slump against the car window, cursing the sunlight. 2yr-old son refuses to nap so I hold him in a rocking chair for two hours while reading James Herriot. We watch sixteen hours of television and eat plain crackers dipped in filtered water.

  Sunday: 2yr-old son feeling better. He has not thrown up in the night. 4yr-old son feeling even better than yesterday. Clara and I still feel like shit. We take the kids to the park in the morning. 2yr-old son naps on his own. Clara and I gradually improve through the day. We eat plain crackers with salt in the morning, plain crackers with peanut butter in the afternoon, then four pounds of leftover mac and cheese at 8pm. We watch "Office Space" and laugh weakly.

  Monday, 4:45am: 2yr-old son wakes up and starts to shout but agrees to go back to sleep. 4yr-old son does the same at 5:45am.

• February 23, 2010 Randomized Updates

  Backups: Bacula has been giving me problems the last week or so. I've got this file server I'm trying to back up; it's got a 2TB partition, and I've been naively trying to just grab it all in one go. Partly that's because it hasn't been backed up before, and I figured this'd be the quickest, simplest way to get going.

  What's happened is that after slurping 2 TB over a 100 Mbit connection (no, there's no way to make that quicker), which takes 53 hours, the writing to tape fails for reasons I've yet to figure out. Bacula doesn't say "Oh, the first bit worked so I can just grab that next time...." (To be fair, that's probably a much harder problem than I imagine.) And in the meantime, despite having two drives and two pools of tapes, backups for other stuff pile up behind this big backup and then don't work: they get put on spool space, but then despooling to tape fails.

  Contact manglement: I've been looking for a contact management program for $WORK. Requirements:

  • database (not LDAP), so I can do funky joins and such
  • web-based
  • FIAF
  • members can belong to more than one group
  • extensible (ideally w/o my intervention) without making me feel like I've returned to maintaining the database frontend at my last job

  This turns out to be surprisingly hard to find, and not just because Freshmeat's interface is terrible. Applications appear to fall into n categories:

  • Incomplete and not updated since 2004
  • Complete but full of bletcherous hacks like direct SQL manipulation of the table (making future modification hard), or assuming that a person belongs to one-and-only-one group; often intended for personal use, not business, as evidenced by space for a birthday and contact fields for 30 different IM platforms
  • SugarCRM
  • Replacements for Access/Filemaker

  So now I'm trying to decide between using Dadabik, which'll let me make a frontend w/o much work as long as I can come up with a schema, or modifying one of the complete-but-bletcherous apps and getting a prettier page. (I'm always paranoid about people refusing to use a web-based tool because it isn't pretty enough; I don't know how to make it prettier and it's not something I personally care about enough to do something about, so I'm caught between don't care and don't know how to fix it if I do care. As a result I panic.)

  Family: Son #2 went to the hospital Sunday night with his mom; he's fine, but I was up 'til they got back at midnight. Still got up at 5:30am as usual, thinking I'd catch up last night. Then Son #1 had a bad nightmare last night and it took a while to get him calmed down. Spent a couple hours after that staring at the ceiling, trying to get myself calmed down. Still up at 5:30am as usual.

  Dentist: Root canal didn't work. My former dentist, who is the second most graceless dentist I've ever seen, couldn't get through and referred me to an endodontist (someone who does root canals; thank you, Wikipedia). My appointment for them is on April 1st.

  And that is that.

• January 12, 2010 Must change title

  Happy 2010 everyone! Now that it seems to be well and truly under way, I feel I can say that safely.

  It's been busy so far. All the stuff I didn't do in 2009 is still on my plate...which is obvious, right? but it still caught me by surprise after the 3 days doing Xmas maintenance on my own. It was easy to forget that there are, you know, people waiting to show up and do work.

  Like the new students we've got for one of the faculty members. I'd upgraded OpenSuSE on their new workstations over the holidays, then when they came in yesterday the carefully-tweaked dual monitor displays weren't working. Arghh.

  Or the guy who's let me know that he wants to get moving on the MySQL/PHP website he's building...which reminds me that I've still got to move the website to a virtualized machine. I'm tempted to do that RIGHT NOW and put his site in there, but I don't think that'll be the best way to do it.

  Or the new project my boss is part of, which involves researchers from across Canada. For me, it's a new website, hardware recommendation and purchases, maybe a new LDAP server. I could add a new root suffix to the existing LDAP server, but

  a. we don't need it yet a. that seems like it'll make it more difficult to move later a. while I can create one in the existing LDAP server (Fedora/389/CentOS DS), the cn=config tree seems suspiciously empty of any entries related to the new root...so I'm leery of trusting it.

  I still haven't sat down yet and tried to plan my year. Partly I've been busy, partly my planning tools are a bit of a mess (daytimer + orgmode + RT). But at some point I need to get my priorities straight and oh, how I long to have them straight. I feel a bit like I'm spinning my wheels right now.

  Ah well. In other news, Xmas was good; my kids got two guitars (one acoustic with an Elmo sticker, one fake double-neck electric) which makes four guitars they have now. Since they no longer have that to fight over, they've taken to fighting over a microphone (cardboard tube stuck in a toy that acts like a stand). But damnit, they're still cute.

  

  Finally: Just for fun right now I did a word count of all my blog entries. I've been blogging since 2004, and I've got something like 158,000 words. Amazing. And there are still some entries I've got to grab from my old Slashdot journal.

• December 07, 2009 Zounds

  Busy day:

  • Wake up at 5am because the youngest son's teething and he's going to be up at 5.20am

  • Clean up ZFS snapshots yet again; repeat "I must schedule this in cron" for the nth time

  • Put in request to maintenance to look at server room humidifier; current block o' cold weather == 10% RH in there

  • Find out why Mailman stopped working (probably permission problems on the logs), and how to monitor this (settle for web interface for now, since that wasn't working either; will probably need to make my peace with user accounts for Nagios on machines I'm monitoring)

  • Figure out why Drupal is shitting cron.php files all over the place (still no idea)

  • Fill out performance review for self

  • Back up Windows 2003 server before tossing it over the fence to software installer

  • Start writing article for SysAdvent at last on OCSNG/GLPI

  • Struggle with cfengine tidy stanza that doesn't work; repeat "I must upgrade to cfengine 3 or puppet" for the nth time

  Tonight, bed at 8.30pm. And there's no shame in that.

• November 24, 2009 SELinux at last

  Welp, after my training at LISA I finally got to start using SELinux. I was setting up a CentOS server with Mascot, search engine software for mass spectrometer software, and I thought I'd give it a try.

  Mostly it turned out to be simple -- semanage fcontext to add some new httpd -friendly locations where the software had been installed, restorecon to set the labels. One thing that did take some tracking down was digging up exactly what this meant:

  type=AVC msg=audit(1259021236.914:280): avc:  denied  { execstack}
  for  pid=6845 comm="ld-linux-x86-64"
  scontext=user_u:system_r:httpd_sys_script_t:s0
  tcontext=user_u:system_r:httpd_sys_script_t:s0 tclass=process
  
  

  This happened when the install script tested Perl to make sure everything was okay.

  As described by Dan Walsh and Ulrich Drepper, this means that the Perl executable was marked as needing an executable stack. Not only is this a Bad Thing(tm), it's not usually necessary these days (what with the Internet and all). execstack -c cleared the flag, and things appeared to work after that; it was right at the end of the day, though, so it's possible problems will show up today.

  And then when I got home...it was wonderful. The kids'd had two-hour naps each, there was a wild rice casserole in the oven (The Cheese Fairy is always amazing), and my parents had sent the kids a calendar full of pictures of Canadian wildlife. I got to tell Trombone how the beaks of different birds (great blue heron, snowy owl, cardinal) were adapted for eating different things; I think he was interested, and that was just flat out fascinating. Ah, domestic bliss.

• February 04, 2009 Sleep!

  I can't believe it...my youngest son, after nearly three weeks of being up four or five times each night, slept nearly all the way through without a break: he only woke up at 1am and 5:15am, which is close enough to my usual wakeup time as makes no difference. It was wonderful to have a bit of sleep.

  This comes after staying up late (11pm!) on Sunday bottling the latest batch of beer, a Grapefruit Bitter recipe from the local homebrew shop. You know, it really does taste like grapefruit, and even this early I'm really looking forward to this beer.

  My laptop has a broken hinge, dammit. I carry it around in my backpack without any padding, so I guess I'm lucky it's lasted this long. Fortunately the monitor still works and mostly stays upright. I've had a look at some directions on how to replace it; it looks fiddly, but spending $20 on a new set of hinges from eBay is a lot more attractive than spending $100. Of course, the other consideration is whether I can get three hours to work on it….But in the meantime, I've got it on the SkyTrain for the first time in a week; it's been hard to want to do anything but sleep lately.

  Work is still busy:

  • I'm trying to get tinyMCE and img_assist to work with Drupal

    1. tinyMCE is no problem, but the img_assist part wasn't working with it. Turns out you need to get dev versions of the img_assist and WYSIWIG modules, because the latest version of tinyMCE (which is required for Drupal 6) broke some parts of img_assist (which, in turn, was in the middle of a rewrite anyhow). Eventually, the admin ass't will be able to work on the website w/o having to know HTML which == major win.

  • Contacting vendors to look at backup hardware. So far we're looking at the Dell ML6010 and the Sun SL500. They're both modular, which is nice; we've got (low) tens of TB now but that'll ramp up quickly. The SL500 seems to have some weird things; according to this post, it takes up to 30 minutes to boot (!) and you can't change its IP address without a visit from the service engineer (!!). Those posts are two years old, so perhaps things have changed.

  • Trying to figure out what we want for backup software, too. I'm used to Bacula (which works well with the ML6010) and Amanda, but I've been working a little bit with Tivoli lately. One of the advantages of Tivoli is the ease of restoring it gives to the users…very nice. I'm reading Backup and Recovery again, trying to get a sense of what we want, and reviewing Preston's presentation at LISA06 called "Seriously, tape-only backup systems are dead". So what do we put in front of this thing? Not sure yet…

  • Speaking of Tivoli, it's suddenly stopped working for us: it backed up filesystems on our Thumper just fine (though we had to point it at individual ZFS filesystems, rather than telling it to just go), then stopped; it hangs on files over a certain size (somewhere around 500kb or so) and just sits there, trying to renew the connection over and over again. I've been suspecting firewall problems, but I haven't changed anything and I can't see any logged blocked packets. Weird.

  Update: turned out to be an MTU problem:

  • The Thumper supports Jumbo frames
  • Our switch supports Jumbo frames
  • Our firewall's inside interface, a GigE from Broadcom, does not support Jumbo frames
  • Our switch will silently drop jumbo frames when directed to an interface that does not support it

  I had no idea there were GigE NICs that did not support Jumbo frames. Though maybe that's just the OpenBSD driver for it. Hm.

• January 24, 2009 Only a couple days late

  Okay, so the other thing I was going to do was blog regularly. And now it's three days later.

  But I've been meaning to mention another aspect of the new job as well. When, previous to working here, I'd thought about what I'd like my next job to be like, it was pretty consistent:

  • Less desktop support (ideally, asymptotically approaching zero)
  • More Unix server work
  • Bigger place

  The last point needs a bit of expansion. See, my first job in IT was on the helpdesk of a small ISP. There were three of us on helpdesk, one webmaster, one sysadmin, one database guy, one secretary and one manager; I got some mentoring from the sysadmin (who split his time betwen us and a sister company), but not lots. My second was at a startup company; the guy who hired me was a good mentor, and then after a while after he left I got to hire a junior and be a mentor to him. The job I just left was pretty much just me, though I'm lucky enough to have other people I could talk to; UBC's a big place, but I was in a small department.

  So my next job was going to be bigger (as in a bigger installation — maybe a whole data centre, even) and have more people — because I really, really wanted to hang out with my peers and learn from them. I envied the people I'd met at LISA in 2006 who were part of a team, who had people to teach and people to learn from.

  Well, at this job it's...just me. Sort of; the folks I've been working with for the last six months (one lab out of the five that make up the centre) are pretty technical. They know way more about Java and MySQL and web development and how the latest CPUs from Intel compare with AMD than I do. But I'm the sysadmin. There might be another in the future, but there isn't now.

  But! But, there are two sysadmins on the floor above me who work in another department. For various reasons, we're going to be working closely for the forseeable future. On Friday, I went up to talk with them about how that was going to work out.

  They knew stuff I didn't know -- no surprise there -- but it turned out I could show them a trick or two as well. We swapped war stories, discussed our very different backgrounds (saved for another entry), and just shot the shit. It was wonderful.

  It's weird, because I'm an introvert, and not very socially apt. (Or ept. As in "opposite of inept".) But it's really, really nice to get together with people who like being a sysadmin the way I do.

  (This entry brought to you by the number i, the letter Ve, and my youngest son's 90-minute nap.)

• December 12, 2008 So tired

  Tuesday: youngest son (8 months old) up at 5:30am teething.

  Wednesday: youngest son up at 5:15am teething.

  Thursday: youngest son up at 5:30am teething. I'm so tired I go to bed at 8:30pm and fall asleep immediately.

  Friday: youngest son up at 4:45am teething. At 5:45am he goes back to sleep. At 6am my phone tells me the DNS server at work is down; I can't raise it. I restore backed up zone files to a spare Xen instance (hurrah!), give it the DNS server's IP address and head into work. I restart the machine and shut down the Xen instance; can't figure out why the machine shut down in the first place. Then I discover a replication problem between two of our LDAP servers which is resulting in random bounced email for a newly created account.

  I want to go home now. But there's a Very Important Meeting(tm) at 1pm, and I can't leave before then.

  <headdesk>

• September 02, 2008 Double-take

  That's not quite my dad at c2k8, but damn if it wasn't enough to make me look twice.

• June 19, 2008 Sick, sick, sick

  Flu sucks. I've been down with it for the last two days. Today I'm feeling a bit better — a little bit, mostly with lots of drugs. We'll see if I make it in to $WORK today or not.

  What else have I been doing? Let's see…

  • Our Roku SoundBridge M1001 has died after just over a year, which turns out to be a semi-common thing. Fortunately I've found a local electronic repair store that I'm hoping will fix things up. Other than that I've been fairly happy with it; it's definitely a lot handier with the SoundBridge Commander, though.
  • Started playing with Xen on my web server. I'm going to try setting things up more complicated than they are now, but hopefully more secure: one instance to serve files, with /home (where all the sites are) mounted read-only; one with a database server; one for mail; one for SSH access; and one with the bag of passwords (LDAP, probably). Yeah, it's hopelessly baroque for a home server with, what, 8 websites, but it's a work in progress and it's fun to play. :-)
  • Installed the Awesome window manager after reading about it for the nth time. Happy so far, but I'm still exploring.
  • Tried making bread that rises overnight. I got into the habit of making my own bread at the beginning of the year, and I really got used to it. But two kids means much less time, and half an hour to mix and knead the dough is getting hard to find. So the latest trick has been using the KitchenAid and its dough hook (I did it all by hand previously), and fiddling with the amount of yeast so that, in theory, it'll rise overnight and be ready to bake when I get up at 5:30am to go to work. This used to work, but now I'm having problems with it collapsing. That may be because I'm using instant yeast rather than the regular, active stuff. Updates will follow as events unfold.

  And that's that. Time to put together some lunch and see about going to work.

• May 26, 2008 Back at work...

  ...after a month off, and almost no emergencies in my absence. Sweet!

  Now if only I could catch up on sleep. I remember this from the first kid: you never know just how much you can accomplish on so little sleep.

• April 20, 2008 Now we are four

  

• April 19, 2008 Possibly my last free Saturday afternoon for a while...

  As Project U-14 draws to a close, I've been spending a wonderful couple of hours on the couch playing with my laptop while Arlo naps.

  Here's what I've been doing:

  • Tracked down a bug that in gpsbabel that would make it crash if you gave it no filename to process. Turned out it was fixed late last year, and the new version will be in Lenny, but that was okay; the practice was good, it didn't take too long, and it turns out both the developers and I came to the same conclusion. I hope they know what they're doing, at least. :-) I'm unsure if I should file a bug in Debian or not; Lenny's coming soon, and I'm not sure of the usual practice in this case.
  • Actually began work on Project U-13; I'm trying out fai-cd, rather than GRML. GRML's nice, but it's a way non-stock Debian install by the time it's done, and I'd like to stick as much as possible to stock Debian (OS of the OElder Goeds). We'll see how it goes.
  • Read about how Dan Fucking Kaminsky managed to Rickrolled Facebook thanks to nasty DNS hijacking (similar to Verisign's Site Finder) by Earthlink and Comcast. No copy of the presentation up on his site, from what I can see, but I'm looking forward to it.
  • Eating chocolate chip cookies my wife made. Yum.

• March 17, 2008 The LugRadio presenters are little girls

  Hah! Just listened to Season 5, Episode 13 of LugRadio, and they read my letter! It was about how, if you're working tech support, you usually have no idea whether or not the other person is actually clueful or not; thus, the inevitable "Is it plugged in?" questions which frustrate techies. Or, as Jono Bacon put it, you have no idea whether the customer is "chuffing up the bong pole". (And the giant round of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? goes to…Jono Bacon! :-) So this is what fame feels like.

  Incidentally, LugRadio Live USA looks like it's going to be freakin' sweet. I wish I could go, but Project U-14 is going to be in pre-release testing at that point...

• February 27, 2008 Wah ---

  Airport Toy X-Ray Machine, c/o Saint Schneier. Maybe I'll get one for Arlo.

• February 03, 2008 Heh ---

  Matthew Garret's presentation on Suspend-to-Disk make fun reading.

  Arlo's sick with flu or something; I was up 'til 1am last night rocking him to sleep. Haven't done that in a while…

  Telling detail: I'm about to blow away Debian testing on my desktop machine and install Ubuntu's Gutsy Gibbon. Partly it's because I'm tired of installing 80MB worth of updates every two weeks, and partly it's because it'll make setting up the printer a breeze.

  I'll probably leave half the drive aside for good ol' Debian stable, but Ubuntu'll stay there for experimenting and so my parents, on their next visit, will not have to bring out their 4-tonne laptop.

  I'll be reinstalling Ubuntu on my laptop as well; due to a stupid error, I installed Dapper, not Gutsy. I tried updating in one fell swoop, and after three days of apt-get -f install I finally got things working…except for the boot artwork, and GDM doesn't start one time out of three. Interesting experiment, but I think I'll take a do-over.

  I may even install it twice, so that I can try out The Depenguinator, which appears to be a lot easier than trying to figure out PXE booting for FreeBSD. Unlike OpenBSD, there's no readily apparent "official way" of doing it, and the handful of HOWTOs I've found have contradicted each other. At this point I'm just too lazy to keep trying and seeing what I'm doing wrong.

• December 25, 2007 Merry Xmas!

  

• October 16, 2007 Milestone

  Tonight, my 15.5-month-old son pointed at a hat and said "Hat!"

  I said, "Yes, you're right. And what's that on the hat?"

  "Guk?"

  "It's a penguin. And what does a penguin say?"

  "Inix."

  It's a proud day.

• September 29, 2007 Presentation(s), conference, nagios exchange, Project U-13, Project U-14

  I've had a bunch of ideas lately. I'm inflicting them on you.

  The presentation went well...I didn't get too nervous, or run too long, or start screaming at people (damn Induced Tourette's Syndrome) or anything. There were maybe 30 or so people there, and a bunch of them had questions at the end too. Nice! I was embiggened enough by the whole experience that, when the local LUG announced that they were having a newbie's night and asked for presenters to explain stuff, I volunteered. It's coming up in a few weeks; we'll see what happens.

  And then I thought some more. A few days before I'd been listening to the almost-latest episode of LugRadio (nice new design!), where they were talking about GUADEC and PyCon UK. PyCon was especially interesting to hear about; the organizers had thought "Wouldn't it be cool to have a Python conference here in the UK?", so they made one.

  So I thought, "It's a shame I'm not going to be able to go to LISA this year. Why don't we have our own conference here in Vancouver?" The more I thought about it, the better the idea seemed. We could have it at UBC in the summer, where I'm pretty sure there are cheap venues to be had. Start out modest — say, a day long the first time around. We could have, say, a training track and a papers track. I'm going to talk about this to some folks and see what they think.

  Memo to myself: still on my list of stuff to do is to join pool.ntp.org. Do it, monkey boy!

  Another idea I had: a while back I exchanged secondary DNS service, c/o ns2exchange.com. It's working pretty well so far, but I'm not monitoring it so it's hard for me to be sure that I can get rid of the other DNS servers I've got. (Everydns.net is fine, but they don't do TXT or IPv6 records.) I'm in the process of setting up Nagios to watch my own server, but of course that doesn't tell me what things look like from the outside.

  So it hit me: what about Nagios exchange? I'll watch your services if you watch mine. You wouldn't want your business depending on me, of course, but this'd be fine for the slightly anal sysadmin looking to monitor his home machines. :-) The comment link's at the end of the article; let me know if you're interested, or if you think it's a good/bad/weird idea.

  The presentation also made me think about how this job has been, in many ways, a lot like the last job: implementing a lot of Things That Really Should Be Done (I hate to say "Best Practices) in a small shop. Time is tight and there's a lot to do, so I've been slowly making my way through the list:

  • Improving backups (Bacula, Amanda)
  • Automated install (FAI, Jumpstart)
  • Monitoring services (Nagios)
  • Monitoring performance (MRTG, Cacti)
  • Ticket system (RT)
  • Automating management (Cfengine)

  Some of these things have been held up by my trying to remember what I did the last time. And then there's just getting up to speed on bootstrapping a Cfengine installation (say).

  So what if all these things were available in one easy package? Not an appliance, since we're sysadmins — but integrated nicely into one machine, easily broken up if needed, and ready to go? Furthermore, what if that tool was a Linux distro, with all its attendant tools and security? What if that tool was easily regenerated, and itself served as a nicely annotated set of files to get the newbie up and running?

  Between FAI (because if it's not Debian, you're working too hard) and cfengine, it should be easy to make a machine look like this. Have it work on a live ISO, with installation afterward with saved customizations from when you were playing around with it.

  Have it be a godsend for the newbie, a timesaver for the experienced, and a lifeline for those struggling in rapidly expanding shops. Make this the distro I'd want to take to the next job like this.

  I'm tentatively calling this Project U-13. We'll see how it goes.

  Oh, and over here we've got Project U-14. So, you know, I've got lots of spare time.

• September 24, 2007 On Being a Parent, and Obnoxious EULAs

  For my own future reference, Otter Escaping North recently posted two excellent comments about being a geek parent in a recent Slashdot discussion about PC parental controls. The whole article is worth reading (though I always read at +3), but Otter's really resonated with me.

  And from the world of obnoxious EULAs comes this gem from Live365's software player for Windows:

  "You may not alter, merge, modify, adapt or translate the SOFTWARE
  PRODUCT, or decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise
  reduce the SOFTWARE PRODUCT to a human-perceivable form."

  So hexdump -C is out, then? Or looking at it with less? Sigh…

• July 08, 2007 Working from home

  Now that Clara's heading back to work, my schedule has changed a bit: I'm staying at home on Wednesdays to take care of Arlo, and then working from home on Saturdays to make up the time. I'm grateful to my boss for letting me do this, and I'm hopeful it will work out.

  My first Wednesday (July 4th) went pretty darned well, really. Arlo ate, he played, he got vaccinated (Chicken pox; I had no idea they vaccinated for it), he napped and then he played some more. I didn't drop him, he didn't freak out and it was a great deal of fun.

  As it happens I got to take care of him on Friday, too; my mother-in-law, who's going to be taking care of him two days a week, had a sudden trip to the emergency room. She's okay, but wasn't able to take care of him that day. (She was mad about it, too...) I called into work and let them know I wouldn't be in, then went in anyway just to make sure a few things were okay. I've got some karma built up and a fistful of sick days I rarely take, so all was well.

  And then yesterday I worked from home. And man o man, did I get stuff done. Not quite as much as I wanted; I was hoping to use flar to duplicate a Solaris machine so I could test it, and ran into a bug that took a while to figure out. (If the patch I applied fixes the problem, I'll write it up here since there was only one other reference I could find.) But it was lovely to work for, like, four hours in a row on something and not be interrupted. Plus, there's the skipping of the 90-minute commute to enjoy.

  My fondness for trivial patches continues. You may envy me.

• June 14, 2007 My new wallpaper

  ...is this picture of Arlo and me:

  

  My god, the kid's cute:

  

  

• May 24, 2007 Back ----

  I'm back from vacation, and a relaxing time it was. We got to enjoy the hospitality of a lot of family in Ontario, and sysadmin duties were pretty minimal. Hell, I didn't even check Slashdot the whole time.

  I upgraded my dad's laptop to the newest version of Ubuntu, and got him a new wireless card that'll work in Linux (though with a restricted driver) as an early Father's Day gift. (If I had been able to buy him an old Orinoco somewhere, I'd've done that instead...as it is, I'll have to cringe under the wrath of my inner RMS. :-)

  I also showed him how to FTP a new Wordpress theme to the server, and I have to say I'm impressed with how easy Gnome/Nautilus makes it for him. I'm starting to understand the appeal of a nice GUI, though I'm still sticking to my xterms for now.

  As a bit of reciprocation, my dad gave me a 2GB SD card for the new camera we've got -- which was nice, because the old 256MB card was filling up very quickly.

  I was happy to get back to work and find that, really, there wasn't that much to clean up. Coworkers had filled in nicely for me, and the worst that had cropped up was an SQL bug in a new credit card payment form; it was failing to update the second of two places that indicate someone has paid. (Yes, redundant, but to be fixed next year.) I'm a bit irritated by this, as the bug was an SQL statement, passed to PEAR's Db module, that said:

  ...set updated_by="foo form" form" ...

  Yes, this is my typo, but why did PHP not report this error? What happened, and why wasn't it being caught?

  Anyhow. Now that I'm back, relaxed, forced by funding to put off Big Website Rewrites 'til next year and mostly done with this year's web work, I'm finally able to contemplate upgrading our Big Server(tm) to Solaris 10. That will be a bear of a job, but it'll be nice to get it done.

  On the home front, I'll be switching to Uniserve's ADSL shortly. They do allow servers, and offer static IPs for a small charge; that'll be nice. We used them at my last job, and the service was fine as logn as you didn't have to contact tech support.

  Surprisingly, they also have this clause in the TOS:

  65. UNISERVE shall have the right, without notice, to insert advertising
  data into the Internet browser used by a UNSERVE customer, and
  transferred to a UNISERVE customer over UNISERVE's network, so long as
  this does not involve UNISERVE establishing the identity of the
  customer to whom such data is sent.

  In a previous life at an ISP, we started putting in machines run by a company called Adzilla. They were, as far as I could tell, proxy servers that replaced the ads on, say, CNN's website with ones for local businesses. I thought it was scummy, but couldn't persuade the bosses of this. I'm fairly certain this is the same thing, and probably the same company too. I still don't like it, but Uniserve is the best option I've got right now. And at least they admit they're doing this.

• March 14, 2007 Cute pics

  You have been warned.

  

  

  

  

• February 11, 2007 Didn't even drown or anything!

  date: Sun Feb 11 20:12:09 PST 2007

  

  This was Arlo's first time going all the way under water. He was definitely surprised by the whole operation, but he didn't panic or cry or anything. Such a trooper.

• October 16, 2006 Two Recent Examples of My Handiwork

  When my wife went to pick up the co-op car we'd booked for Sunday, she found that the mirror hanging off the door by the control cables. Fortunately, a little camo duct tape -- a Christmas gift from my parents -- took care of it (at least until the co-op can get it fixed):

  

  And then there's this:

  

  Thanks to John and Arwen for Arlo's shirt, and to Theo et al. for mine.

• August 13, 2006 Never thought...

  ...that I'd be wearing a Baby Bjorn and singing my kid to sleep with Joy Division's "Dead Souls". Clara and I dragged out a bunch of tapes yesterday, and man, I haven't listed to that one in years.

• August 12, 2006 Theo Kills Your Pony

  A few things.

  First, Arlo is doing well:

  

  Second, there's this.

  Third, work has started on the world's most useless project: Theo Kills Your Pony, the aggressively destructive Unix-like system. (Thanks to Zen Render for the name!). I'm attempting to do things semi-right, and that means I've had to learn a bit more about how OpenBSD (and BSD in general) is put together.

  Like what? Well, like the name for example. The OS is called TKYP, so that's what I want to show up everywhere. I figured I would start with the output of uname(1), since that's the most Thing is, this took a surprisingly long time to track down.

  uname(1) is, as you might expect, a simple wrapper around the uname(3) libc function, which is in turn a pretty simple wrapper around a sysctl call. Through paths that, frankly, I'm still tracking down, you finally get to sys/conf/newvers.sh -- a simple shell script that creates a file called vers.c and sets the variables ostype, osrelease and osversion within it. (Paths are relative to /usr/src, BTW.) After that, the different sys/arch/*/conf/Makefiles compile it -- sys/arch/i386/conf/Makefile.i386, for example -- and then include it in SYSTEM_LD. After that, <handwave>I think these values are simply returned by sysctl(3)</handwave>.

  Okay, so now I've tracked that down; I rebuild and install the kernel, then reboot. (QEMU rocks for this sort of thing.) And yay, it works:

  -bash-3.1#  uname -a
  TKYP tkyp-qemu 0.1 GENERIC#0 i386
  
  

  Now to rebuild world, right? Wrong: first, Apache kept refusing to compile with an error about not being able to find -ldbm. Trolling through the mailing lists only found one message mentioning a similar problem, and no reply. The CVS tree showed that, since 3.9, a couple minor changes had been committed to the httpd Makefiles mentioning that OpenBSD has used its own dbm library for a while. I tried making a few changes, but couldn't get it to work. So I cheated: I removed httpd from usr.sbin/Makefile and moved on with my life.

  Next problem: the GNU configure tools haven't heard of TKYP. (I'm sure I emailed RMS about this...). gnu/usr.bin/binutils is the first thing compiled in world that uses these tools, so that's where I'm looking first. A little judicious editing of config.guess (which guesses the OS and architecture), configure (which figures out what needs to be done for the OS/arch) and config.sub (which says it's a "configuration validation subroutine script"; I'm guessing a basic sanity check) takes care of thing. They're fairly simple changes, as it's pretty much just a matter of copying the OpenBSD entries.

  And all this before I can even throw in anything nasty! I got big plans, of course -- SIGKILL replaced with SIGHUP, rot13 encryption for passwords, and the RTM worm pre-installed -- but I haven't even had a buildworld finish yet. Plus, there's the cautionary tale of MicroBSD to keep in mind...whatever else I do, I wanna make sure I piss off Theo for the right reasons. :-)

  (Incidentally, the email to root is in etc/root/root.mail; etc/Makefile installs it in the right place. I thought for sure it'd be in share for some reason. newvers.sh mentions this file, plus a few others, that need to be changed to reflect new version numbers.)

• July 09, 2006 One more thing

  before I go back to changing diapers: from the ever-excellent Secrecy News comes a link to this report from retired US Army General Barry McCaffrey on his visit to the Guantanamo Bay prisons.

  The report is well worth reading. As summarized in the newsletter:

  "The JTF Guantanamo Detention Center is the most professional, firm, humane and carefully supervised confinement operation that I have ever personally observed," he stated.At the same time, "Much of the international community views the Guantanamo Detention Center as a place of shame and routine violation of human rights. This view is not correct. However, there will be no possibility of correcting that view.""There is now no possible political support for Guantanamo going forward," Gen. McCaffrey wrote.

  McCafferey acknowledges in the report that "During the first 18 months of the war on terror there were widespread, systematic abuses of detainees under US control in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Some were murdered and hundreds were tortured or abused. This caused enormous damage to U.S. military operations and created significant and enduring damage to US international standing."

  Yet nowhere in this report does he seem to realize that the U.S. also was condemned for its lawlessness:

  The great value of the platform of Guantanamo was that it was a military space in which no Federal District Court had primary jurisdiction. For that reason alone, Gitmo has over the past 45 years been the location of choice for US migrant refugee operations (no appeal to the INS process) as well as other secret operations. No applicable foreign law, no foreign diplomatic intervention, no Federal Court civil orders, no nosy intervention by a US Ambassador -- only the exercise of unilateral military power and the tool of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It was the perfect deal. No more.

  The mourning of the loss of a place over which no court had jurisdiction, into which no "nosy " US ambassador could look, is entirely unbecoming of any democracy -- let alone one that views itself as the Great Vending Machine of Liberty. Yet this point flies right past the nose of a man who gives an otherwise straightforward and unblinking account of Gitmo's failures.

• July 03, 2006 Arlo Maxwell Reginald Cristofaro

  So:

  Arlo Maxwell Reginald Cristofaro, ne Trombone, was born on Saturday July 1st, 2006 at 2.26pm. Clara had a pretty damn good labour once things got going, and horsed him out after only 13 minutes of pushing. As labour stories are, by ancient right, public property, I'll let her post the details.

  Both she and Trombone^WArlo are doing quite well. They've both learned how to nurse, and I've learned that the index finger does a lot to calm him down. We've managed to pick up a couple hours of sleep here and there, so we're not too punchy.

  For those who haven't seen, here are a couple pix:

  

  

  Oh, and you know what also calms him down? A slightly modified version of Fat Joe's Lean Back:

  My Arlo, he don't know how to dance
  He just leans back and he fills up his pants
  He does the Rockaway! He does the Rockaway!
  

  It also sends Clara into hysterics, so that's good too.

• June 30, 2006 Update

  When last Clara visited the doctor (Wed), Dr said that a routine checkup on the babby would be in order at some point this weekend -- Monday, maybe? Turned out to be today, around 2pm. During the ultrasound it further turned out that Babby/Clara had low levels of amniotic fluid. This means that they wanted to induce Real Soon Nowtm. This was begun about 6pm, about ten minutes before I made it to BC Women's. (Stupid bus drivers that don't stop at King Edward when they're asked -- but I digress.)

  She's being kept for observation, which means taping big things to her belly and watching the strip of paper slowly come out of the machine that goes ping! when it runs out of paper. I've come back to the house to get things like the hospital bag and cheese, and to feed the catt. (Let this be a lesson to someone: when going to the hospital after your due date, always bring the bag. If they say you don't need it, hit them.)

  Clara is doing well. The baby is doing well. No telling how long it could take before active labour starts; the nurses said they've seen it as quick as three hours, or as long as 24. We're hoping for a Canada Day babby, especially after hearing the story about the friend of the nurse who got free stuff for LIFE because the kid was born on July 1st. (Seriously. Government owes the kid a damned helicopter now.)

  The next post will probably be made once we're back from the hospital; you should expect something like "Holy CRAP this thing's small!"

  That is all.

• June 30, 2006 Soon!

  Birth is being induced. Baby's well, wife is well. Wish us luck.

• December 18, 2005 fork()

  ...big news over here.