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April 2005 Archive
Thursday, April 28, 2005
[Comments: 0] 4:40 AM - don't-park-there
Ray and I had some work to do down at Equinix today, so in order to save some time, we opted to drive down. The train and buses take an hour and a half or more, whereas driving can get us there in 30 to 50 minutes, depending on traffic and how well we hit the traffic lights. Unfortunately, there's really nowhere to park around the Lakeside Technology Center building other than the roads, so I always park there.
This is usually fine. There are signs that say there's no parking only two hours before and an hour after Soldier Field events. That rarely happens this time of year. You can see Soldier Field from the building at night when everything's lit up, but it's not really very easy to tell there's anything going on unless you're actually there.
So Ray and I got there at around 6:20 PM, and we left around 11:00. It turns out there was a Soldier Field event and as we were getting in the car, I discovered to my dismay an orange "City of Chicago Violation Notice"—a parking ticket. Now I owe the City of Chicago fifty bucks for parking on a side street to go to work. Ugh.
I was a pretty annoyed. I mean, I couldn't imagine why they'd have such an inane parking rule in effect, considering it exempts only people with residence parking permits, meaning it's not like I'm blocking up a space someone else would actually be able to use. Then I realized a little while ago, they mean to keep people that go to Soldier Field from parking on side streets altogether. I can see that it'd be one way to eliminate the parking mess that would sprawl across neighborhoods in the area during those events. Unfortunately, it screws up legitimate use of the parking space.
I really don't see much point in contesting the ticket. The sign was clearly posted, and I feel that in light of that, I ought to have been responsible enough to verify that there was no Soldier Field event going on at the time. Though I'm not sure where exactly I was supposed to park failing the road near the building....
Next time, I'll drop by a certain events listing before I get in my car and save myself the cash.
Friday, April 15, 2005
[Comments: 1] 6:11 AM - shifty-time
As I promised, here is my next rant, and it's about time zones and daylight savings time!
I'm feeling like I need someone to explain to me why exactly time zones and daylight savings time are each helpful to society. They bug the hell out of me, and I hardly even travel. I can't imagine how people feel when they live right on a zone boundary....
So here's what I'm thinking... First, get rid of Daylight Savings Time. Some people in Arizona and Indiana know what they're talking about. There's no modern definable reason for having this confusing time switch twice a year, other than possibly to remind people to double check their clocks for accuracy. The time change screws up TV scheduling. It makes people late for work one day a year, and early on yet another... and the backup of one of our web servers was skipped because there was no 2 AM on the night in question. In 6 months the backup's going to run twice because there'll be two 2 AMs. Why does this make sense to anyone? More than half the world already doesn't use DST, which means the USA oscillates on its GMT offset constantly, which confuses me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Second, get rid of time zones. They don't serve any useful purpose other than making international scheduling confusing... or do they? Say we ditch time zones entirely and just center on what's currently UTC time. We'd surely abandon the ideas of high noon and midnight as the twelves, because they wouldn't really apply anywhere, but then when we say the event is at 13:35, it's at 13:35 everywhere on the planet! A guy in New York knows that 13:35 is somewhat mid-morning for him and a guy in Japan knows that 13:35 is around late evening, but neither will miss the event because there's no math involved. When an office is open from 14:00 to 22:00, everyone knows when they can call or drop by with nothing more than a check of their watch!
There are a bunch of reasons why a removal of time zones would never fly, though. Now, while London's day is normalized in the same manner as it always was, it's going to be 00:00 at about dinner time in the United States, meaning the day changes right about when you get off from work. That's going to be a little disconcerting for most people. Also, as the USA is clearly the most important country in the world, it would surely never stand for a solution which didn't recenter the standard day around itself, even if that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. :P
So what can be done about time zones? Probably nothing. Removing them would be chaotic, leaving a lot of people very confused, and the benefits are fairly small. However, there doesn't seem to be anything standing in the way of nuking Daylight Savings Time. Let's do that some day so I stop having reset a dozen timepieces twice a year, and have to correct backup schedules for no good reason.
Now if only someone would normalize the calendar a little bit, so I don't have to remember how many days are in each month. ;) (I'm just kidding... the planet would surely implode with a change like that.)
Saturday, April 9, 2005
[Comments: 4] 6:39 AM - burst-of-accomplishment
This feeling isn't nearly regular enough, as might have been evidenced by the symptom requiring it (a pileup of stuff needing to be done). Starting this past evening, I decided to get stuff done! [Insert some thunder and lightning or something.]
We needed to go food shopping, so I drove Karl over to Jewel Osco and we picked up a bunch of stuff. Karl's got a habit of leaving his license on the scanner for random business related things, and so I had to pay for the alcohol we bought! Oops, yes, but not a problem as long as I get paid back or I get to drink some of it. ;)
Anyway, I also decided I should buy a card for my sister's birthday because if I don't do it immediately, I'll keep meaning to and eventually it'll be late. I should rant about how American Greetings sucks for cards of any occasion, and how their humor is mostly stupid or immature, but I got lucky and I found a card I like. Hopefully she'll like it, too, but I'm not really worried. :)
Okay, so, on to the dishes. In spite of the fact that I've been battling an annoying cold this past week and still feel on the whole rather crappy, I have a good amount of energy from just sitting here blowing my nose all and coughing while I answer the support line, so tonight, I ran three loads through the dishwasher, plus emptying each of them, and I got around to cleaning items that just don't fit in the dishwasher, like the wine glasses. Then I cleaned off the counters and the stove, and got the kitchen looking pretty good overall. So that was a good start.
The next step was of course to take the rush of getting things done to somewhere else, so I decided to answer all the emails I didn't answer in the past three weeks. It might have been my best time to answer them too, because I feel terrible, but I'm in a great mood, and I was extremely cheerful and helpful to the people I answered. My mind was just flowing with nicely worded sentences and everything! So that was a good idea.
Then, I decided that I should blog all this stuff, and so I figure I'll just toss in some details of all the things I just forgot about or didn't feel well enough to blog about over the past week, so here's that:
Monday, after some issues with the previous tenant not getting herself out of the place on time, we managed to finally tour the apartment we're going to live in. The location is Prairie District Lofts, and the pictures (which I took) are in Ray's gallery. The place is huge... much larger than what we've got now, and though the layout is a bit strange, we know it'll work great. It's actually cheaper than where we are now, which is amazing. We've got the paperwork started, and we've notified our current place that we're clearing out. The move-in date will be June 1st.
The location of the complex is perfect. The datacenter is only a few blocks away. It's a great walk on a nice day, and if I'm in a good mood like I am now, a nice enough walk in a thunderstorm (assuming my laptop doesn't get wet)!
Now that I think about it, I didn't do much else this week, being sick and all. Karl bought a fryer, so we played around with that tonight and made some fried foods. Tomorrow on the menu is tacos! Yum. :)
Friday, April 1, 2005
[Comments: 1] 5:43 AM - give-me-one-good-reason
I was messing around with my computer at around 4 AM, when I suddenly decided I wanted to see if there was a new nVidia graphics driver. There was, and there was also a new tool called nTune, which for nForce-based computers claims to tune performance of your system to get things working better in games and such. Well, it didn't really seem to be able to read anything useful from my system, presumably because it's designed for nForce4 chips and I have an nForce2, so I gave up and started playing with the performance options in my BIOS. It all ended in my needing to open my computer and reset my BIOS so that I could actually get the thing to stop beeping incessantly (and also not booting).
While I had the thing opened up, I figured I might as well try to hook up my front USB ports again. Last time I replaced my motherboard, I could no longer get them to work properly, because as I understand it, the pin configuration for USB 2.0 is reversed from 1.1. Anyway, I started trying the ports different ways until the computer would power on and both ports would register devices, and now I finally have my USB ports working in the front of my computer again. I never did like leaning over my computer at an awkward angle trying to plug in a device to one of the rear ports. :)
Nothing I did got me any of those performance improvements I was hoping for, but ever since I reset the BIOS and messed around with inside the computer, the temperatures of the CPU and motherboard sensors seem to have dropped by about 10 C. I don't know why that is, but I'm reasonably happy about it. :)
Oh, and happy April Fools Day. I don't think I'm going to bother pulling any jokes on SimGuy.net, though I'll be watching for jokers around the rest of the Internet to provide for my amusement.
