February 2004 Archives

Maya said something really cute last night. I was telling her I got Tux Racer working on the kitchen computer. I had installed a new video card, but I hadn’t gotten the 3D acceleration working until then.

At this point, Maya said, “Dad, do you remember the first time I booted into Linux?” and she paused for a moment and looked off into space dreamily. “Those were the days weren’t it?”

Heh heh. Maya has just been full of cute sayings. We’ll never forget when she was about 2 or 3 and she wasn’t feeling well. She was sitting down on the floor, kind of slumped, and she told Christine, “Mom, I think I’m sick with the big one.”

Tonight, we were looking through pictures of LDS temples and we were looking at a picture of the Salt Lake temple and Maya said, “That looks like a scary temple! Like a haunted temple or something!”

Christine looked like she was going to explode from trying not to laugh outloud.

If there is ever a Japanese anime-like cartoon made abou me, this is probably how I’d look:

Thanks to Krista for pointing me to the site that lets you create an online anime-style avatar.

Having had a day or so to ponder the UTOPIA situation after attending that meeting in Roy City with Qwest president for Utah Jerry Fenn, I’ve come to a few conclusions.

Fix-it man

First of all, Mr. Fenn indicated that since he’s taken the helm of Qwest’s Utah operations in September customer service has improved. He mentioned 150 some odd new technical customer service representatives were recently hired at $40-50,000/year salaries to handle DSL issues.

When Brad Peterson and I mentioned that we were aware of ridiculous recent problems with DSL orders, Mr. Fenn demanded that we call him personally and he would see that those problems would be solved immediately.

One particular issue we’ve had to deal with is with a client in Ogden. They ordered DSL about three weeks ago. The DSL service came online the day they had said it would, but it was on the wrong phone line coming into the business. They wanted it on their fax line and it was installed on their voice line.

DSL being DSL, this introduced a lot of noise to their voice line. They installed the Qwest-supplied DSL filters in the RJ11 jacks around their business only to discover the fax line didn’t work anymore. The filters only support one line while the RJ11 telephone jacks support 2 lines.

The client went to Radio Shack and purchased a set of filters which worked with multiple lines. Meanwhile, we contacted Qwest and explained the situation and said that we wanted the DSL service connected with a different ISP than it was currently set up with. Qwest said they would remedy the problem and assigned a new delivery date for the job.

When that date came, the DSL service that was working on the voice line shut off. The ISP we asked Qwest to move the service to said they had not received any turn-up notice from Qwest. A call to Qwest revealed that Qwest hadn’t acted on the order. A new install date was assigned.

Qwest missed the next scheduled install date too.

Finally, Qwest came through on a third install date, but the DSL service was set up with the original ISP and not the ISP we requested. In addition, Qwest reconfigured the DSL modem/router and overwrote all the configuration changes we had made which were necessary for the applications the client was using.

Another call to Qwest resulted in another date.

That date was Wednesday - the day of the meeting I went to in Roy. I told Mr. Fenn the particular Qwest problem I had been dealing with was supposed to be taken care of that day, but I would let him know if it wasn’t. I suspect he thought I was blowing smoke.

Well, this time the DSL service was gone.

Another call to Qwest and we were promised the service would be turned back on within 24 hours.

The client called Qwest to confirm that change order. They were told the change order didn’t exist in Qwest’s system and there was no way anything could be done within 24 hours — the soonest anything could be done would be closer to a week.

We’ve called Mr. Fenn and left him messages and e-mail. It remains to be seen whether or not he’ll come through. One thing is clear, though, from this experience it does not look like things have improved at Qwest. They should change their name back to US West so we can sarcastically call them “US Worst” again.

Demand for UTOPIA

In the Wednesday meeting, Mr. Fenn said UTOPIA’s take rate estimates were ridiculously unrealistic and he said Qwest’s DSL take rates were proof of it. He said, overall, people just don’t care about broadband Internet access.

I’ve thought about that a lot and I think he’s right... if UTOPIA was just about Internet access, but it’s not.

Most Utahns are paying $30-60/mo for basic telephone service depending on how much long distance calling they do and what features (e.g. call waiting, voice mail, etc.) they add to their line, etc. Most Utahns also subscribe to Comcast cable. It’s been a long time since I had cable, but I’m guessing the rates for an average basic cable subscription are around $30-40/mo.

And this is for residents. Businesses, of course, pay more for telephone service.

With UTOPIA in place, a different scenario unfolds. A resident or business in a UTOPIA member city would be able to order phone service from their choice of telephone service providers. They could order a television service package from their choice of television service providers. It’s not unreasonable to guess a switch from Comcast/Qwest to UTOPIA service providers might save a person $40 a month or more.

Qwest may not be seeing the kind of take rates on their DSL products that UTOPIA is forecasting for their service, but Qwest isn’t bundling telephone, television, and broadband Internet into one package.

I think Qwest is making a big mistake to refuse to be a part of UTOPIA.

Another thing Mr. Fenn and his boys brought up in Wednesday’s meeting was a chart which attempted to debunk the argument that Qwest’s telephone rates keep going up. This chart showed the cost for basic telephone service twenty years ago and showed what it would be today if it had tracked the rate of inflation over that time.

This proved, said the Qwest-boys, phone service was cheaper now than it ever was. They used that as a jumping-off point to say, “If it looks more expensive, it’s because of all the taxes and fees the government makes us collect that we didn’t have to collect before.”

It looked good on paper, but there was one big problem with it: technology. Telephone service is driven by technology. You probably couldn’t get call waiting twenty years ago. There was no voice mail service — everyone had those cassette-tape driven answering machines. In addition, the equipment Qwest used to manage their circuit-switching network was a lot more expensive then than it is now.

Fast-forward to today. Almost every facet of telecommunications is automated. The cost to provide services on a phone line like voice mail, call-forwarding, etc. are nearly negligible. They’re standard features on most company PBX systems, for example. Consider also the fact that more people have more phone lines than they did 20 years ago.

A good example of how advances in technology have made telecommunications significantly less expensive is long distance service. Consider how expensive a long-distance call was twenty years ago and compare that to MCI’s neighborhood calling plan now that offers unlimited long-distance calling to other people who have MCI service.

The bottom line is this: Qwest can’t take credit for charging less for telephone service. Technology took care of that and probably warrants an argument that Qwest should charge less.

If and when UTOPIA does get off the ground, I think we’ll see just how much less Qwest can charge to keep customers. Competition is always good for the consumer.

Tonight I attended a followup meeting with the Roy City council and Jerry Fenn, president of Qwest Communications for Utah. Mr. Fenn was supposed to have attended a regular city council meeting yesterday, but had an unfortunate incident where he went into anaphalactic shock from accidentally eating a peanut, which he’s allergic to, at a local chinese restaurant.

I was unable to make it to the Tuesday meeting, but upon learning of the followup meeting tonight, I made arrangements to be present.

From what I was able to gather, Mr. Fenn had a couple Qwest employees fill in for him and give a presentation to the city council. After the presentation, there were a lot of unanswered questions, concerns, and even raised-voice arguments, which is why Mr. Fenn wanted to personally attend a followup meeting.

Some inappropriate blanket statements were made by Qwest representatives in Tuesday’s meeting such as government should not be running any kind of public utilities (What about all the cities that generate their own power, manage their own sewer, not to mention several that operate their own telephone services?)

One of the issues that came up in Tuesday’s meeting was availability of DSL to areas within Roy City, specifically city council members homes. Mr. Fenn’s assistants provided line qualification information for each of the homes in question at the meeting. Only one home did not currently qualify and that city council member was given the date of 14 May when his line would qualify.

The Qwest representatives wanted to make it very clear they are using remote terminals (neighborhood DSLAMS) to do more to fill in the gaps in coverage areas. They have already installed some remote terminals in Roy and said there would be five more within the next few months.

For the state of Utah, Qwest plans deployment of over 200 remote terminal installations during the first half of 2004.

The Qwest representatives had a couple of issues to address in response to a UTOPIA survey they had in their hands. On issue was lack of control of content. Because UTOPIA would not govern or restrict any data flowing across its network, Qwest seemed to be trying to incite animosity by pointing out that content going across the UTOPIA network (which would, of course, be funded in part by Roy City tax dollars) might contain offensive or illegal elements. This didn’t seem to faze anybody in the room. Chris Davis, Roy City city manager, indicated that to do something about that would amount to censorship and that wouldn’t be appropriate.

Mr. Fenn made the point that during the three and a half years it is said will take UTOPIA to build their network, Qwest will have filled in all the gaps in their DSL coverage areas.

Mr. Fenn used several points to try to persuade city officials that UTOPIA is a bad idea. I’ll try to summarize each one below.

Unrealistic take rates - Mr. Fenn used the relatively slow adoption of DSL in Utah as his proof that UTOPIA wouldn’t be able to attain the customer base it says it can.

Underestimated cost to build - Mr. Fenn said his engineers claim it will cost a lot more than the $543 million. He indicated this figure is only appropriate if the entire project was being done in a “greenfield environment” and not a retrofit of existing utilities.

Overestimated bandwidth demand - Mr. Fenn said Utahns are happy with 256kbps, 1.5Mbps, or even dialup speeds. He said nobody wants 10Mbps to their home and if they did, WiMax technology would provide adequate bandwidth for those customers.

One council member asked Mr. Fenn if the reason Qwest was recently suddenly deploying remote terminals to eliminate coverage area gaps was because of UTOPIA. Mr. Fenn vehemently denied this was the reason. He said the deployment of the remote terminals had been planned and budgeted for months and if there was a driving force behind the deployment it was Qwest’s internal migration to VOIP.

Mr. Fenn repeatedly indicated that UTOPIA has provided no prices for their services and indicated that it was unwise to make any determinations as to the value of UTOPIA until those prices are published. He also indicated that Qwest’s DSL technology was nowhere near any “wall” bandwidth-wise- that they could and will provide 7Mbps service in the future as the demand for higher bandwidth connections begins to grow.

Another issue that came up was about DSL for businesses in Roy. Apparently many businesses can not get DSL service. Mr. Fenn didn’t really address this directly. He tried to explain that this was because there’s a lot more competition in the business services market. He also pushed Qwest’s SONET backbone as proof that (a) Qwest is dedicated to the needs of businesses and (b) Qwest is already providing fiber to the premise for businesses.

Mr. Fenn continued on, saying that Qwest was already available to help cities with economic development by providing broadband to business via their fiber technology.

Several times in the meeting Mr. Fenn complained that Qwest was getting knocked in discussions about UTOPIA because they’re a “monopoly.” ”We haven’t been a monopoly since 1995,” he said. He specifically mentioned Pete Ashdown of XMission making cutting remarks at a Salt Lake City council meeting and then shortly thereafter posting a “kudos to Qwest” message on the XMission website when the 1.5Mbps DSL service was announced.

I asked Mr. Fenn if UTOPIA were to become a reality, would Qwest consider being a service provider on the UTOPIA network. Mr. Fenn took a deep breath and said no, they would not because it would mean turning their back on the millions of dollars invested in the infrastructure they’ve built.

Mr. Fenn brought up WiMax again and went into more details about how it would be deployed and reminded those in attendance that only a distinct minority would ever need the incredibly high speeds (10-20Mbps) provided by WiMax. Another advantage of WiMax, he said, was that it didn’t entail tearing up any streets.

Perhaps the comment I found most interesting that Mr. Fenn made was when he said Qwest could and would do a fiber to the home deployment if the conditions were right. The right conditions, Fenn said, would have to be a new development — a “greenfield situation” and not a retrofit.

Mr. Fenn also spoke about Senate Bill 66 and admitted that it was a “Qwest bill” and that they had helped craft the legislation from the very beginning. He said this bill illustrates Qwest’s core arguments against UTOPIA:

• Government use of tax dollars (including Qwest’s own $2 million/yr paid) to build a telecommunications system to compete against Qwest.
• Exclusivity clause granting AT&T an 18-month dominating presence
  on the UTOPIA network.

Mr. Fenn said Qwest was not trying to kill UTOPIA with S.B. 66, but to make UTOPIA go back to “the original plan.”

Mr. Fenn also rattled off a list of other businesses and organizations that were also supportive of S.B. 66 including Utah Taxpayers Association, Merit Medical, and the Utah Board of Realtors (I think).

There was a member of the local telecommunication workers union in attendance. I spoke briefly with him after the meeting and he indicated there was some concern about UTOPIA because the UTOPIA plan included hiring contractors (i.e. not union workers) and paying them low hourly rates and not providing them with health insurance benefits.

Nobody cares. All that work on comments and nobody uses it. Oh well. I didn’t start doing this in the first place to be popular. I just did it so I’d have a convenient place to put my stuff.

Conversions

So, a couple weeks ago, I was in Logan to do some work and I had lunch with ”the gang” and an associate of mine had a plastic bag full of 8mm video tapes and he wanted to give them to Chadd so Chadd could copy all the video onto VHS tapes. I said, “Hey, I can transfer those to DVD if you’d like.” He liked that idea and gave me the tapes instead.

It took me a few days to find time in my schedule to start on this project, but I got started recently and worked out a pretty good procedure for converting the tapes to DVD video. Because 8mm is only slightly better than VHS quality to begin with, I’m capturing the video at 352x240. If I wanted to, I could put between 165 and 300 minutes of video on one DVD in this format. I’m just doing one tape (up to 120 minutes) per DVD.

In light of my interest in some kind of “menial job” that could provide me with a little extra money on the side, I got wondering if I could do these home movie conversions for profit.

Looking around briefly online, I see conversion priced on a per-tape basis at about $8-15 per tape. My understanding is that it’s based on an unattended process- digitize all video to one DVD track.

With this recent video project, I captured each event to a DVD track/chapter and included a simple menu so you have random access to all video on the disc.

I think I would charge $20/tape for that.

Anyway- if you have some home movies you want preserved digitally, let me know.

It’s been an interesting weekend.

Office update

I got the doorway framed for the office. Next, I need to box in the heating duct running along the ceiling and install insulation in the outside walls. I’ve also got to decide how to deal with a strange plumbing situation that intersects the office ceiling: The previous owners have cut some copper pipe and replaced it with some plastic tubing. I don’t know why — it’s not intuitively obvious what they were trying to do. The only theory I have is that a pipe sprung a leak and they didn’t know how to solder, so they went with plastic tubing instead.

I feel I should get the tubing out of there because it’s much more likely to have problems in the future than copper.

Aside from that, the only thing left to do before I can start putting up wallboard is the electrical. Of course, this is a major point of contemplation for me. How do I want to light the office? How many wall jacks do I want to have and in what configuration? How many data and voice jacks do I want? Do I want to run a couple coax lines in for television?

I learned a lot from finishing the basement in our house in Hyrum. I know I need to think about this stuff now and not later.

Feeling stressed

I think stress has been sneaking up on me. I had to kind of vegetate on Friday and not do much because I felt overwhelmed. I took it easy this weekend.

I’m probably not too different from other people. When I notice stress in my life, I take a look at the big picture of everything I’ve got to content with and it just seems unbearable. That leads me into a bit of a depression because I don’t feel confident I can deal with everything.

Usually, I snap out of it.

Let me expound on some of the things that have me stressed lately.

Iodynamics has been real busy lately. If every month could be as busy as February has been, I wouldn’t be worried at all about my ability to provide for my family’s well-being. The problem is, it tends to come in waves... and when the tide is low, it gets scary.

Hopefully, we;’re learning as we go. I think part of the problem we’ve had in Iodynamics is we stop pursuing new jobs when we’re busy with current work. This results in less work to do when current work is finished. Not good for business. We’re trying harder to keep new business coming in while we work on current projects.

Mike has been working on a business plan we can use to solicit investors. We’re not looking for a lot of investment - just some capital to help us do better marketing, new product development, and manage the salary of a salesperson.

But, yeah, Iodynamics has been keeping me very busy and I haven’t been staying as organized as I like. If I concentrate on being more organized, it won’t get away from me. I need to spend more time using and reviewing my schedule and task list in my PDA. I should make sure I consult my PDA before I commit to anything new.

Speaking of scheduling, I need to communicate and coordinate my schedule better with my family. Christine gets frustrated with me coming and going at random. She never knows if or when I’m going to be home. That makes it a lot more difficult for her to plan anything.

Christine’s been searching for jobs for me to apply for. We both miss the nice salaries I’ve had while employed by other companies. Having that kind of salary again would really help us out in paying down the debt we’ve accumulated by fixing up the house. That’s not to say we’re in a lot of debt. We’re not. But because our income doesn’t currently give us a lot of breathing room, debt is a concern.

The job market for Perl programmers and Linux system administrators has not been very good in the area for the last several months. It has improved over the last couple of months, but it’s still nothing like it was a couple years ago. When a job comes up, I’ll apply. Often, I get called in for an interview. These interviews are really nerve wracking.

I’m sure some people can just go into a job interview and think of it as a social event: Just getting to know the company and letting the company get to know you. No pressure, right? Well, I beat myself over the head about job interviews. I’m constantly asking myself if I want to work for the company. I worry about representing myself truthfully. I worry about how to talk about Iodynamics. I worry about what kind of message I’m sending to my Iodynamics partners if I took a job. What kind of message would I be sending to myself? Basically, I worry myself silly.

I had a couple interviews this last week. I cancelled on one I had Wednesday because the company looked like a bunch of e-mail spammers using terms like “e-mail broadcasting” and “list fulfillment” to describe their services. It just sounds like a company that’s willing to blur the line between what is ethical and not by what is justifiable from a marketing and sales standpoint. I hate those types of people.

I had another interview scheduled for Friday and I cancelled on that one too just because I didn’t want to deal with it.

I’m sure that’s a big part of my problem. I have all these “principles” that get in the way of me just rendering services to get a paycheck. Why can’t I just be someone’s whore (in the figurative sense) and let them use me and pay me and not worry about what it is I’m doing and how I’m doing it? Oh... that thought just stresses me out.

I’m getting sleepy. I’ll have to resume this thread another time... maybe.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

The girls get a treat

Our eventually-ex sister in law Jennie took Maya and Lucy to the Lollipop Symphony at Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake City as a treat for them and a treat for us because we got to do something without the girls.

We took Eli and went out for lunch and then wandered around Sears at Jordan Landing. Not the most romantic or fun thing we could have done, but it was relaxing. Christine and I enjoyed our semi-alone time together.

Speaking of Jennie

We haven’t heard much from Jennie regarding the situation with her and Jay. I know they’ve exchanged some proposals on how to handle the separation of things. Jennie proposed that he go ahead and keep the house, but she would need enough alimony to afford an apartment. Jay rejected that proposal. Jay proposed that she go off her lupron hormone treatment because he read somewhere on the Internet that one possible side effect of lupron is depression and he feels that could explain all their problems. I don’t think Jennie took that very seriously.

So, they’re pretty much destined for court to settle the divorce. Meanwhile, Jay has given Jennie no money in several weeks. In addition to her full time job at the hospital, she’s doing some part time work taking care of a friend’s mother who just had surgery.

I’m going to interject a little opinion here.

<opinion>

I think a lot of men dealing with divorce forget their obligations to their wives while they’re still married. Jay certainly appears to me to fit into this classification. He has repeatedly told Jennie that since he has been the primary source of income in their marriage, that he should have precedence on how things are distributed in the divorce or who should have money while they are separated.

When two people are married, their marriage forms a corporation of sorts. Any money that comes into the marriage belongs to this corporation and does not belong to the partners of the corporation. The disgruntled husband may not like this, but it means the wife is entitled to half of everything the corporation owns if the corporation is dismantled.

</opinion>

Jennie’s holding up, but I’ve never seen her so worn out. I don’t know how she’s going to be able to afford this undoubtably-lengthy divorce without help from her parents and what-not. This is when things are going to be ugly.

When do you think Thom is going to plan on posting an “after action review” for the 30 Jan show?

Am update on the office.

As you can see, I’ve got two inside walls now. The doorway in the new wall is going to go into storage. The opening between the two walls will be another diagonal wall which will also encase the main door.

I’ve only got one full stud left, so I’ll have to pick up another six to eight studs in the next couple of days.

Other stuff

I’m heading to Logan again tomorrow. I’m doing some work for a couple clients there. My mom is heading up with me because she wants to visit with her great-grandson Parker for his birthday. I still can’t believe my sister is a grandmother. That blows my mind.

My new home-office in the basement is slowly starting to take form.

Must sleep. Must... get... sleep... Must Fozzolog first!

Unbelievable amounts of viagra

... Probably enough to keep me busy for 36 hours or more! ;-)

Am I talking about the latest revolution in all-natural, all-organic, all-legal male enhancement? No, I’m talking about the ridiculous amount of spam people have to deal with who don’t have any kind of anti-spam measures in place.

One of our clients contacted us last week about their “spam problem.” They said it was just getting to be “too much.” We told them we had an add-on for the NetGateway that was based on the world-famous SpamAssassin software. They said let’s do it.

So, I installed SpamAssassin on their mail server — one of our Linux-powered NetGateway boxes — and trained each users Bayes database with a few thousand known spam messages I’ve received in my caughtspam mailbox over the past few months. Then, I went into each of their mailboxes to use their own spam to train their individual databases.

I was blown away by the sheer amount of spam I was seeing. Wow. One user had about 1300 messages in her mailbox in the previous four days and there were probably less than 100 that were legitimate messages.

Now what is this about me reading other people’s e-mail?

Well, I wasn’t going through and reading people’s e-mail. Maybe “skimming” with the intent to only notice spam. I made a concious effort to ignore anything that wasn’t obviously spam.

Surprise, I’m elite!

A couple weeks ago, I read about Orkut on Slashdot. From Orkut’s website, Orkut is, “an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends.”

And it’s by-invitation only. When I read that, I thought, “Pffft!“ I’d never get invited to be involved with something like that.

Well, tonight, I was invited to join Orkut! I am thrilled to be honored as Orkut-worthy!

Orkut is pretty cool. It’s kind of like LiveJournal (only without the journals) and, like LiveJournal, you can waste a LOT of time exploring other people’s profiles, exploring their network of friends and seeing how people connect to each other.

Orkut is an experiment, of sorts, created by a developer within Google. It will be interesting to see how it progresses.

You know you’re in geek chatspace when...

I was in the #fedora IRC channel on the Freenode network and some guy came in and said, “is there a good qmail RPM around?”

I thought this was pretty funny because it reminded me a lot of traditional “chatroom” experiences I’ve had where lots of horny kids pop in and out of the chat saying stuff like, “Are there any hot 15-year old chicks who wanna chat?!”

Not much to talk about right now. But I did see a good movie on TV last night.

Can’t sleep

Last night, the film Insomnia was on HBO or Cinemax (I don’t remember which). I remembered I wanted to see this, but I couldn’t remember exactly why.

Was it because Robin Williams was in it? Was it because Al Pacino was in it? Or was it because the film was directed by Christopher Nolan (of “Memento” fame)? Probably a little of all the above.

I read a few of the comments made about this movie on the IMDB. I didn’ know this 2002 film was an American adaptation of a Norwegian film by the same name made in 1997. A few people leaving comments on the IMDB said the 2002 version couldn’t hold a candle to the 1997 version. Having not seen the 1997 version, I really enjoyed the 2002 version. I was impressed by how drawn into Det. Dormer’s (Pacino) character I was.

I think the film is about shades of gray in life and how there really is no black and white. It asks the audience to think about some tough questions. You constantly ask yourself if you still think Dormer is a good guy. You ask yourself if Walt Finch (Williams) is truthful about his “accidental” crime. You ask yourself if Det. Burr (Hillary Swank) is blinded by her naivete and admiration for Dormer to realize he may not be everything she thinks he is.

In the end, everyone comes off as incredibly human and real... except maybe Dormer who endures several days of sleeplessness due to the Alaskan midnight sun — more than I think should be humanly possible for a man Pacino’s age. :-)

Some quotes from the dialogue I really enjoyed:

“A good cop can't sleep because he's missing a piece of the puzzle. And a bad cop can't sleep because his conscience won't let him.“
— Burr to Dormer

“I think it's about what you thought was right at the time, and what you're willing to live with.”
— Rachel Clement to Dormer

My brain is a little numb.

Oh the Hairy Harry Os

Last night was a Sons of Nothing show at Harry O’s in Park City — the first SoN show of the year.

If you’ve been following the Fozzolog at all, you know I wasn’t planning on being able to go to this concert, but because I came back from Iowa early, my availability status changed significantly.

I picked up Thom around 4:40 or so and then we had to go back to my house to get the computer monitor I forgot to put in the car. I wouldn’t have been able to do much good producing computerized visuals without a monitor. So, that wasted some time. Then, we had to shove our way through the Salt Lake valley during rush hour up to Eric’s house to help him load his gear into his Sequoia.

Then, it was up Parley’s Canyon to Park City. It started snowing. Of course, this put Thom into DreadMode^TM and he was stressed about nobody coming to the show.

When we got to Park City, the city was packed because of a Mardi Gras street festival going on which turned out to be great for concert attendance but made it near impossible for any of us to find parking close to the venue.

As soon as I started unpacking my gear, I realized I had forgotten something else: my KVM switch. Since I use the switch to go between the two different computers I use, not having it would mean I’d only be able to use one computer.

Fortunately, I remember my brother-in-law Adam was talking about coming up to the show, so I called him and asked him if he was coming. He was. I arranged for Christine to take the KVM to meet up with Adam so he could bring it to me. He showed up about 5 minutes before the show started and I was able to do video and visualizations for the show.

From my perspective, the show went pretty well. The new video I rendered got fairly good reception, but I’m probably going to make some changes. The band was a little loose, partly, I think, because the crowd wasn’t as intensely attentive as they usually are. Usually, there’s a nice set of bodies up by the front of the stage after a couple Floyd songs. Most of the crowd hung back by the bar this time.

I stuck around to help carry gear out and then Thom and I decided we needed something to eat after all that hard work. We hit a Dennys in the Fort Union area and then I took him home. I got home around 4:30 a.m., showered (to get all that smoke off my skin), and went to bed.

Upgrading Logan

Today, after a late start, I headed up to Logan to install Fedora Core on some of the Iodynamics servers that are housed at “an undisclosed location” in Logan. I got two of the servers moved to Fedora. I did a fresh install on one and restored the data from backup. The other, I did an upgrade. Both appear to be working fine.