I just finsihed 6 laps on The Loop at Wrightsville Beach. I'm not on my computer right now (long story, forthcoming), so I haven't synced the GPS, but it was 15.32 miles in 1:25:39, lap speed of 10.7mph, and peak speed of 15.9mph.

And the most amazing part: it was non-stop. I braked once but didn't come to a complete stop. Other than that, I was in continuous motion at nearly my peak physical output for almost ninety minutes.

And now, if you'll excuse me, that kick-ass new corkscrew my woman got me for my birthday is gonna collaborate with some cheap Australian Shiraz to reward me a bit.

I’m the registrar and one-man IT department of a small school. When I took this job we were saddled with a hacked up implementation of a really poor commercial product serving as our database/front desk software. I settled into the job and learned to hack at it further. The shortcomings of this pile of, umm, stuff, were legion. But, at the end of the day, it did, technically, get the job done. Eventually however, namely when we opened a second location hundreds of miles away, its underlying architecture could no longer be worked around. There was simply no way, sane or otherwise, to sync two instances of the system. In seeking a replacement, the market failed us. The only products that even came close to meeting a majority of our key needs cost many times what we, as a non-profit, could ever hope to pay. So I convinced the powers that be that I, never having actually undertaken such a thing, could build it from scratch.

The amazing thing is, I did. While performing my regular full time (and often more) duties, I managed to build this thing and put it in place within six months at both locations. I then spent the next six months getting it running with less and less fiddlin’ of the bits by yours truly, and developing a synchronization system so that multiple instances of it could compare notes every night. Lately I’ve been fine tuning that and getting it up and running on its own two feet.

All of this coincides with the launch of a system that we had a local web shop put together so that other schools can pull student records from our web site. The official go-live date on that is tomorrow. On Monday I tried to log into the system to replace test data with the real thing. I was unable to, but I figured the FTP client I was using wasn’t using the same SSL protocol or something silly like that and went back to my bug fixing.

Yesterday morning I got a call from our other school saying that one of their key admin machines no longer accepts any valid password and they have no net connection. Had the machine dealt with pretty quickly, but we are still without a net connection there and have now resorted to IP over FedEx.

This morning I still couldn’t log in to the FTP server, so I fired off an inquisitive email. The response, alas, did not thrill me:

We had to turn the secure FTP off as it caused a lot of problems with all of the other regular FTP sites on the box. You're probably going to have get a dedicated server, be it physical or virtual, to get that going. If you email our IT director, he will set up a test site for you on a different box so you can make sure that you'll be able to work with secure FTP from your end. If that works out, he can help you with setting up the dedicated server. I'm not sure the contractual ramifications of that, so I'm ccing the Account Executive for your project on this email ...

No peasants were heard to rejoice.

I was about halfway through my reply when I received an email from the account executive in question:

They are setting up the secure FTP on a different machine, so we can test it out. It will be ready later on this afternoon- I'll let you know when you can try testing.

Total elapsed time between the two emails? Seven minutes. Gotta love the 21st century.

But man, days like this make me wish I’d listened to my high school guidance counselor.

WTF? Am I the only one seriously creeped out by this? How come the first word that went through my mind when I heard that bit was “Blackwater?”

And yet a cursory search of Thine Intartubes shows that World+Dog did not have the same visceral reaction I did (or has the sense to keep their damn mouths shut). So would someone please get on here and reassure me that a non-military military force is a good idea? Seems all I can think about are other examples of countries creating such, uhh, semi-military forces (for lack of a better, less chilling prefix) and pondering how that turned out for them...

I’m surprised that I haven’t seen this mentioned much: what the hell was Bush on for his NWF speech? I think the psych types would call that a “flat affect” or some such. Looked and sounded to me like he was brought out of a stupor with heavy stimulants or maybe brought down from a psychotic break with either downers or anti-psychotics. Seriously, what the fuck is up with that? And why are so few mentioning it? It’s not exactly a subtle thing.

He did perk up a bit later in the speech when discussing Iran and Syria, which scared me in a totally different way, but for the most part he seemed like a sullen child made to apologize to the old lady next door with his dad’s hand on his shoulder to keep him from scurrying away.

Wouldn’t it be the public’s business to know whether the president is on heavy-duty psychotropics? Shouldn’t the White House Press Corpse be inquiring about that? Considering how much ink was spilled over his odd symptoms during his debates with Kerry, isn’t this much more significant display worthy of at least as much inquiry?

iWant.

Oh my god do I want one.

Pretty please?

With one of my kidneys on top?

Currently, of the 7 cents tax on every dollar, 4.5 cents goes to the state
and 2.5 cents goes to the county (note that Mecklenburg County requires an
additional .5 cents). Beginning tomorrow, North Carolina will reduce the
state tax rate to 4.25%, lowering the total tax per dollar to 6.75 cents. On
July 1, 2007, North Carolina will further reduce the state tax rate to 4%,
lowering the total tax per dollar to 6.5 cents. For more information, read
the following Department of Revenue notice:
www.dor.state.nc.us/taxes/sales/ImpNoticeTaxDecrease1106.pdf

Well, color me impressed. Once in a while North Carolina makes me proud to live here.

I grew up in Hawai‘i, where every year the previous year’s budget surplus is divided by the number of taxpayers and checks are mailed out. That always seemed to me a sign of solid fiscal management, as does this current tax decrease.

That was the note scribbled in pencil at the top of the drawing.

It struck me as sort of the ultimate fortune cookie: Was it imploring me to improve the machine part depicted that I was about to revise a drawing of? Or merely to improve on the illustration itself? My personal favorite way to interpret is as a request for the illustrator to improve himself.

I ended up improving on the illustration, reworking it so the steam and condensate pathways are more readily visible. But I have this nagging feeling that I should have left the illustration untouched and improved myself instead.

Don’t ya just hate vague instructions?

I noticed something weird today. I often read slashdot threads once they’ve matured a bit, as I can often pick up a lot of useful information once the moderation system (such as it is) has done its work and some thoughtful discussions have taken place over a few days. But that’s not the weird part.

The weird part is that the front page summary for a particular article, which has been cached locally by Opera for some time now, shows 300 comments. Yet when I hit the thread itself, there are 299 comments at the -1 threshold. What gives?

Granted, I have only a passing familiarity with the internals of Slash, but what I do know fails utterly to explain such a thing. I know some of the people that may see this have a better understanding of the guts of this thing; do any of you know how to explain a mismatch like this?

Now here’s my favorite part, the (slight) irony: the article in question is one on fake news stories.

According to Weather Underground we’re getting nailed. According to the chick on the radio we’re getting nailed. But outside? Nah, not so much. The rain has been relatively light for the past six+ hours, wind is blowing “a little bit” according to my lovely lady hanging her head out the window behind me.

Inside? We’re getting hammered. Bottle of Jack, few bottles of wine should that fail us.

On the radio? Another buzzy thing. Oh wait, National Weather Service Dopper RADAR indicated something or other someplace or other. “Potentially life threatening situation,” generic warnings about trying to drive through flooded roads.

It’s supposedly making landfall right now about sixty(?) miles south of us. Flash flood warning in our county until 2:00am. It’s actually fairly tame relative to what the official numbers would indicate. But we’ll see how “tame” it feels when I survey our flood-prone driveway at 6:30 tomorrow morning.

Good warmup hurricane, but ultimately forgettable. C’mon global warming, that all ya got?

<singing>
    I can see clearly now!
</singing>

I got contact lenses Tuesday morning. Today’s the third day and they’re still driving me nuts. It’s really cool to be able to see details off in the distance, but I’ve spent entirely too much time lately blinking at my monitor. Sometimes I can actually see the edges of them. I know that shouldn’t be possible, but they are triggering some sort of perception in my peripheral vision; sometimes I turn my head to see what I sense beside me, and others I’m just certain there’s a hair hanging down between my eyes.

Any of y’all have any insight (har har) into dealing with contacts as a heavy computer user? Or tips for putting them in without being late for work? (Today I had to give up and go to work, then fight with them for twenty minutes once I got here.)

Almost forgot... in other news this week, it seems that my town recently started printing the names of the streets on those green things on the poles. Good to see that they’re finally using my tax dollars wisely.