i lost count of what round this is

November 02, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Can I just say that 2004 for me has been the year of the vengeful computer? Obviously the whole server drive debacle is pretty fresh, but that wasn't at all the beginning of it.

It started January 6th, when my laptop started its death spiral. The spiral slowed, though, and must have started pretty high, 'cause after its near-death experience it didn't completely succumb. Instead it committed itself to a life of torture. It's been in that life up to today. If you leave it on too long it'll start to kill itself. The clicking begins, but oddly you can prolong the suffering by tilting the machine a little. It's like the data gets stuck, and you need to loosen it up and help it find its spot on the platter. Eventually though you're waving the laptop like a fan just to keep it moving and it's really not keeping up. That's when you have to shut it down for a day or two and let it recuperate.

January 11, of course, I got back to LA to discover that my desktop drives had been traumatized by a power supply fan failure.

At times I've thought my laptop was getting better, but over the past few days it's put that idea to rest. I think it's finally time for it to be dealt with. Of course now that it struggled out so long the warranty has expired, so any new drive will be on my dime.

I need a profession dealing with something friendlier, like snakes.

Update (4:00pm): I just ordered a new 40gig drive from CDW. It should be here end of the week or so. For now I've set drive spindown timeout as short as possible to give it rest.

LA Times on NextBus

November 02, 2004 by Eric Richardson

The LA Times today has an article on NextBus in Ventura. Basic gist is that GPS sensors on the buses allow people to hop online, see where the bus is, and see a dynamically computed time for the bus's arrival at their stop.

That's cool stuff, and it's something you have to have for buses that have long headway times. For example, this morning I took the Metro 38 from 6th/Spring to USC. The bus runs roughly every 20 minutes. To make it to school for a 9am class I have to catch the bus at around 8:34. I'm always right on the edge, and until I see that bus show up I always assume I've missed it. As the article says,

"It makes a big difference whether you're there a minute before a bus arrives or one minute after it leaves," Schmier said.

Hopefully LA will be getting to this party sometime soon.

indigo magic

October 31, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Yesterday I finally got around to doing something about the SGI Indigo I had sitting in my living room. If you remember back to July you'll note that this box had a dead clock battery, which thanks to some smart design work, made it completely inoperable. And, oh yeah, the battery was soldered onto the motherboard.

But that didn't stop me. I used my trusty soldering iron to loosen things up and get the old battery out, and then yesterday I went to Radio Shack and picked up a new 3.6V battery, some paired wire, and some electrical tape. You can see a few pictures on my buzznet site.

So the machine now boots. Here's my hinv output:

clu 10% hinv
CPU: MIPS R4000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.2
FPU: MIPS R4000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 0.0
1 100 MHZ IP20 Processor
Main memory size: 64 Mbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte on Processor 0
Instruction cache size: 8 Kbytes
Data cache size: 8 Kbytes
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision C
  Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
  Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0
  Disk drive: unit 3 on SCSI controller 0
  CDROM: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Graphics board: GR2-Elan
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Iris Audio Processor: revision 10

The cool part is that GR2-Elan line. The three hard drives are all really small (1gig and 2 .5gigs), so that makes life fun (though I installed a clean IRIX inside a gig yesterday). I think I might have some memory lying around that I can try to bump that 64meg up with.

big city efficiency

October 29, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I was driving into work this morning when all of a sudden I had a very "doh!" moment. It occured to me that I had a wedding to go to tomorrow, and that suit that I really needed to take to the dry cleaners was still sitting rumpled in my closet.

No fear, though. A quick look at the now useful google local (dry cleaner near 90014), a few phone calls, and I had soon found Sloan's Dry Cleaners in the Wells Fargo Center. They weren't the closest, but when I called them and asked about getting my suit done before the wedding tomorrow they gave me an unequivocal "No problem." I went with their confidence.

So I left JPL around 3:30, came back to Premiere Towers to pick up my suit, and checked the mail. In it was my North Muskegon, MI, absentee ballot, due back by the close of polling on Tuesday. Now, it's not North Muskegon's fault it's so late; I did just fax them the form late Monday. So I grabbed the ballot, walked over to the dry cleaners, dropped off my suit, and found a place to sit down and make a phone call. I called my mom and told her I knew nothing about any of the Michigan races. Together we went through the ballot and she told me what the Michigan buzz was for each of the races. I didn't vote for regents for U of M or MSU, but I came to a decision on most of the rest. Then I went next door to the Fedex store and sent the ballot back 2nd day. They tell me it'll be delivered Tuesday between 12 and 4.

Now to finish a little of the work I left to come home early, and then to head out somewhere to go pick up a gift for the wedding tomorrow. They're registered at Macy's, so I think we might go see what we can find at their downtown location. I've never been in there.

"God to Run DWP!"

October 29, 2004 by Eric Richardson

There's a lot about LA politics I don't know or understand, but there's one thing I'm pretty sure of: Ron Deaton is a powerful man. Now the long-time city hall guru is Hahn's choice to take over as top man at DWP. I first read the story last night on LA Observed (today's followup has links to the Times and Daily News).

My first Ron Deaton experience was at the meeting over the new LAPD headquarters held a month or two ago at City Hall. Deaton was there answering questions and responding to public comments. I vividly remember an exchange after someone had been particularly forceful about asserting that the Caltrans site had been promised as a park. Deaton went to the mic and responded something along the lines of "Go back and look at who negotiated that contract for the city. I did. Don't try to tell me what the contract says. I wrote the contract." Obviously his response was a little more political, but you get the idea. I was standing in the back of the room next to Brady Westwater and I turned and asked him who this guy was. Brady's response: "I'd call him god, but I don't think he'd accept the demotion." (Brady today sent an email to the newdowntown list titled "God to Run DWP!")

From Hahn's email (available at the LA Observed link above):

We all know of Ron's commitment to the success of LADWP, and his even deeper dedication to the City of Los Angeles. Because he began his career at LADWP and has a long record of support for the Department, Ron is perhaps one of the only people who can successfully bring the Department into the City family.

I think that's important. From my limited perspective of just watching through the news it does often feel like DWP is out doing its own thing separate from the rest of the city. It'll be interesting to see if Deaton is the one who can change that image.