Morgajel.net

If you ever see me talking to myself, I’m just working through ideas for my book, honest… Here’s a good example of what I’m chomping on right now.

So I’ve been thinking, why does Ziggy’s Aunt Makuran hate Ziggy so much? Why does his cousin resent him?

First off, Ziggy is adopted, so take that into account.

Originally I thought it was because she was upset that Keltrem was made chief instead of her(since she’s female), and resented him for it because she is the eldest child. When Keltrem’s biological son died, she knew her son Gunthorm would be the next chief. When Keltrem adopted Ziggy, she blamed him, and raised her son to hate them both.

…but that didn’t Gel. Why didn’t Kinnon, Marukan’s husband hate Ziggy? There was power to be had if his son became chief… unless it wasn’t his son.

What if Marukan’s first husband was killed in battle by Keltrem’s decision? That is a much better reason not to forgive her brother. But why would Gunthorm share that hate? He was the son of the first husband… and Kinnon adopted him and had another child with Marukan. Kinnon would feel empathy towards Keltrem’s plight with an adopted son, and give ziggy the benefit of the doubt in private, but be distant when around Marukan.

Marukan’s second son (Agaleron) was fathered by Kinnon, and doesn’t care about all that crap, but since his older brother hates ziggy, he hates ziggy as well.

Gunthorm doesn’t empathize with ziggy being adopted because he doesn’t see Kinnon as a father figure, he sees him as a guy who married his mom. There’s tension there.

Lets back up a bit. Keltrem and his wife Zimissa had a son named Botulf. When Botulf was very young, he wandered near some contaminated turnips and ate one, then died of poisoning. That’s what everyone things. … but did Marukan have a role in that? intentional or unintentional?

Zimissa was heartbroken. Keltrem comforts her. Years later, she becomes pregnant again, but miscarries several months short. (did Marukan have a role in that? just how evil is she??)

Zimissa is devastated, tries to commit suicide (did Marukan have a role in that?) She does so by walking past the dark curtain into the plane of chaos. Keltrem follows, but watches her die, unable to save her. Kinnon (the best tracker in the tribe) witnesses this.

Keltrem is despondent, returns to the tribe, only to walk away without saying a word. Marukan takes command of the tribe much to the anger of the elders.

Keltrem wanders, finds Ziggy, thinks it’s a gift from the gods for his loss.

Keltrem returns several days later, tells all what happened. They accept this as truth, and kick Marukan to the curb.

This adds much more depth to the family dynamics.

This is what I was thinking about this morning.

So I’ve been pretty quiet since I hit 100k words- what’s been going on?

• Round of layoffs at work
• Friend diagnosed with cancer
• Another round of layoffs at work.
• Jackie became a pampered chef consultant
• Finances have been wiped out from christmas and getting her PC stuff off the ground.
• 10% paycut at work
• Guitar lessons are now done because no one can afford them.
• Have been reading Manuscript Makeover for ways to improve my book
• Decided to do an initial cleanup of the first draft of my script, then rewrite the outline before starting draft #2
• started yet another opensource project- this time it’s a collection of Nagios Plugins.

So I’ve been pretty busy. I’ve finished the cleanup of the first two chapters of book 1; hopefully I’ll finish the rest shortly, but it’s very slow going. We’ll see where things head in the next few months- I expect more crappiness.

I recently crossed the 100k barrier and came to a realization- this book is way too long. I think I’m gonna chop it after section 7 (90k words, 360 or so pages) and split it into two books-

The Autobiography of Ziggy Swift: The Rise
The Autobiography of Ziggy Swift: The Fall

This means that the first book is technically complete and ready for a revision. I’d like to finish the rough draft of both books before I proceed with a second draft of the first.

Jackie is about to start working heavy on revising the first section- hopefully that’ll mean I’ll have something for you guys to read soon.

muahahahahaha.

So I’ve started on another book- this one however isn’t a novel, it’s a notebook for guitar students. The first two pages contain a layout of notes on the fretboard, commonly played chords (open, barred and power), pentatonic modes, and relationship of the guitar and tablature to standard musical notation.

The rest of the book will follow a simple format, allowing notes, sketches and some notation on the left page and the right containing 6 tab staffs similar to this:

e|----------------------------------------
B|----------------------------------------
G|----------------------------------------
D|----------------------------------------
A|----------------------------------------
E|----------------------------------------


If you can think of anything else that should be added to the first two pages of cheat sheet, let me know. I also need a name for this beast, something better than "Morgajel's Guitar Notebook".


Ingredients

• kid
• hose
• sprinkler
• yard
• wife who doesn’t want to get wet

step 1
take the kid outside to play in the sprinkler
step 2
immediately get wet with the water that’s still in the hose and warmed from the sun
step 3
get the kid soaked
step 4
take the sprinkler off of hose
step 5
show kid how to drink out of hose, hand him hose. Make sure to hold onto a length for crimping
step 6
tell him to go share with momma
step 7
enjoy the show

in the event of retribution
step 8
Crimp hose
step 9
take hose away and spray until wife is soaked

My internet connection.

SO here’s the scoop

5 days until cutover:
I call AT&T, tell them I’m moving and need to transfer my Static IP DSL service on the 30th(Monday). Tech says no problem it’s all set. I am pleasantly surprised at how little of a hassle it was and that it was way smoother than any other interaction I’ve had with them.

Saturday, 2 days until cutover:
We’re planning on doing the actual moving Sunday morning and plan to spend Saturday packing and planning. However at 3am Saturday morning, the internet connection drops, leaving me unable to contact many of the people who may be able to help us move. It sucks, but ok, we can work around it. I still have enough people to get by with and have ways to contact most of them. Since we asked to be connected on Monday, maybe they had to disconnect the old line the day before in order to get their stuff in place. Maybe they cut it on Saturday rather than Sunday because nobody works on Sunday. I get that, I can understand it. While annoying, it’s still better than my previous interactions with them.

Sunday,move day, day before cutover:
We move on Sunday and realize that we never actually checked to see if the house had any phone cables in it. It didn’t. Fortunately my father-in-law knows a bit about phone installation and was able to help me wire up a stub for the AT&T guy to connect to.

Monday, 1 day after move:
AT&T shows up, runs cable, says service will be enabled withing X hours. yippie.

Tuesday, 2 days after move:
Connection is there, but my ip address has changed. “crap,” I think, “now I gotta update dns entries for our sites.” But I can understand this, perhaps my old static ip was tied to the network near my old apartment and didn’t reach this area. I can buy that. So I change my DNS entries… and they don’t work. I look again and I apparently mistyped the IP because the new DNS entry doesn’t match the external IP on the router. So I change it again. and 20 minutes later the external IP has changed again.

They had me on a fricking dynamic IP. For the non techies out there, large ISPs only have a limited number of ip addresses, and more often than not don’t have one for every customer. Since few customers stay online 100% of the time, they can take addresses away from people not using them and redistribute them as needed. This is called a Dynamic IP account. For people who run servers from their homes, keeping the same IP is important, so when your computer goes to connect to morgajel.com, it needs to be able to find the right IP address. That’s why I pay extra for AT&T to guarantee me the same IP address. That is why I am pissed. While there are ways to get around this (dyndns) but they’re a pain in the ass an not an option for me since I run an IRC server as well.

So I tinker around, thinking maybe *I* did something wrong- maybe my router was reset and it cleared the static info. I dig around with Jackie’s help and find the original documentation and try to set up the networking listed manually. No dice. Then I remember that yes, they did manage the info via the PPOE settings, and that just required a user name and password, which is what I was originally using. I switch it back and get yet another dynamic IP. I should point out that my static IP range was 75.x.x.x, while the dynamic stayed in the 66.x.x.x range- this made it easy to keep track of what was going on.

So I call them up and surprise surprise, they screwed up. See, they don’t really transfer accounts so much as shut off the old one and create a new one. The tech didn’t bother to notice I had a static account and replaced it with a dynamic account. I’m livid at this point, and tell them that it needs to be switched back. “Ok, I’ll put in the order. It’ll be ready in 10 days.” Now, this should NOT take 10 days from a technical point of view, this is all red tape causing the delay. But WTF can I do, so I say hell with it and go along with it.

At some point my father-in-law comes back over to help with the baby gate and notes that the technician illegally ran the line through the neighbor’s yard. While I’m half tempted to yell at them to fix it, I just wanna get a connection up and running again so I can actually write about the house.

Saturday, 5 days after cutover (timeline gets a little fuzzy here)
Connection is still flaky, but generally working. I call to check on the status of the static IP order, and find out it was never placed. They’ll get right on that.

Sunday, 6 days after cutover
Connection goes down at 7:37am. Completely. It does not come back. Jackie calls tech support this time. Flames, brimstone cries of the undead ensue. Eventually I take the phone and find out there’s still no mention of a static order of any sort for our account. Guess what? They can’t do anything about it because “orders” isn’t open on weekends. They agree to send out a tech to look at the line since they can’t see the modem from their end. He should be out between 8am and noon on monday

Monday, 7 days after cutover:
Connection begins working again around 7am- I think to myself “great, maybe they just took it down to switch over to the static IP- finally I can get my stuff up.” Nope, still a dynamic IP address. I call AT&T to get the static IP address set up and let them know the connection is up. They say hold off until the technician confirms it’s not an issue. ok. I’ll call back later. I spend my time waiting for the technician looking for any other ISPs in the area on dslreports.com

Technician comes out, nice guy, doesn’t see anything wrong, says he’s seen this behavior before when switching from dynamic to static, but the business won’t fess up to it. Whatever. At least the wiring was good, presuming that both the installer and the inspecting tech were both competent. While he was tooling around, I found out that Cyberonic, my ISP from DC, covers this area (they didn’t in grand rapids or rochester hills). They resell business class Covad lines to residential customers. I contemplate switching over to them, but figure it would be too much effort since I’ve gotten this far. I’m not even sure they’d have a decent plan in this area.

So he leaves and I call AT&T back and get the static all set up. She also said the static IP would be in place tomorrow. Just as we’re finishing she informs me that since I don’t have a contract, my payment will go up to $70 a month from $55. “WTF, this isn’t my screwup- you guys said you could transfer service, then you pooch it, then you want to charge me for it??”

“Oh, no,” she says, “When we transfer service, we don’t transfer contracts. If you want the original rate, you’ll have to sign up for another year of service.”

This is where Jesse snaps.

“You know what? Fine, make it the month to month price, because it’ll take me about 3 weeks to get covad in here.” She was a bit shocked by that statement, and the conversation ended awkwardly. I think she was supposed to ask if I was please with my experience but she knew the answer.

I then spent 10 minutes looking through DSL reports for ISPs in the area and narrowing down their plans- turns out that Cyberonic offers the same plan I had in DC for $60. Lets compare the plans side by side:

I call up cyberonic, phone is picked up on the 3rd ring. I tell the technician that I’m interested in their plan, I get signed up, cc infos taken, etc. The entire call lasted 22 minutes and 28 seconds. I was never transferred once, my call was never dropped, the technician never once said “I don’t know,” and they were going to do a hotswap on the line and cancel the AT&T DSL for us since we obviously can’t have 2 DSL services on the same line. The transfer should take place in the next 7-14 business days.

I’d like to point out that AT&T still hasn’t got their act together as of this morning (Thursday), and dropped my connection while I was beginning a deployment for work. That was real awesome btw. Thankfully my neighbor is allowing us to use his wireless connection until we get it straightened out. If the issues aren’t resolved by switching to cyberonic, I’ll have the neighbor report the cable crossing his yard and they’ll have to come out and redo it (this is my backup plan).

The good news is we’ve moved our blogs to gopedro.net. I’m still in the process of converting them, but expect to be done by next Monday. The only site that will still point to my static IP is morgajel.com, for my streaming music, IRC server, etc. We’ve also decided to move all of our pictures to flickr, so expect to see broken images for a while.

I really want to thank gopedro.net for in all of this. I highly recommend them for any domain name purchases or hosting. They’ve been handling our domain names for years now, and their service is outstanding. I’d also like to thank our new neighbor Bobby for being one hell of a cool guy.

I’ll keep you updated on how things go. Hopefully I’ll start writing about the house soon.

*UPDATE 2008-07-14*
Cybronic called and told me they’d be sending a technician out tomorrow to verify the lines. Hopefully I should have a working connection soon.

*UPDATE 2008-07-16*
My bad, it was wednesday. Connection is up now and I’m back online with a static IP!

So I think I need to actually keep track of the Wii games I like so I don’t lose track of them. Here’s what I recall being worth buying, what I am anticipating, and what were good purchases.

• Mario Kart Wii (bought)
• Excite Truck (bought)
• Mario Galaxy
• Mario Strikers Charged
• Warioware: Smooth Moves
• PuzzleQuest
• Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• Metroid Prime: Corruption
• Spore (?)

More to come as I think of them. Any suggestions?

So Ian is staying with Jackie’s mom this weekend. Jackie left to drop him off about 10am friday morning with the intent of being back in Troy to pick me up around 6pm. Around 3pm one of the guys I work with walked into the room and began a conversation like this:

[matt] Anyone want tickets to see Kids in the Hall?
[me] How much?
[matt] Free.
[me] ooh, I’ll take them!

The show was 7:30 that night- enough time for Jackie to get back, grab a quick bite to eat, and go. The venue was only about 15 minutes away and there were plenty of fast places to eat between work and there. It was unbelievable timing. So the next time Jackie calls I let her know what’s going on. She wasn’t real excited (“I’m neutral”), but that was mainly because she had been driving for 2+ hours already and was ready to vegitate on the couch.

We hit a National Coney Island and then the show. Another friend pointed out that the show should be called “Old Guys in the Hall” now since it’s been 20 years since their show started airing, but I gotta tell you, it was still some funny shit. You could tell Kevin McDonald and and Dave Foley still have great chemistry- Two great scenes come to mind.

The first was a drunk scene between Kevin and Dave. A minute or so in, Kevin’s ear-mic
became sweaty and fell off. He wasn’t able to get it to stay back on (even with dave quickly trying to help), and had to say his lines while pressing the mic to his cheek with one finger. Dave jumped in and started doing the same thing (as if drunk and mocking him). Kevin was barely able to finish the skit (from laughing at the absurdity of it).

The second scene involved Kevin having an affair with Dave’s imaginary girlfriend. The amusing part was kevin was wearing a silk robe that looked like it should have went down to his knees, but only got about halfway. When he sat down, he did something that involved him grabbing the sides of his folding chair and dry humping the air in front of him. Apparently the black spandex trunks he was wearing showed the front row his balls. Dave gave him a look and Kevin became very self conscious and tried to fold the robe up to cover his boys, but the stage direction had him moving all over so he kept trying to cover himself. After a few attempts he grabbed the front flaps of the robe and crammed them down the front of the shorts giving him a giant codpiece. Dave started to lose it and took off the trenchcoat he was wearing and had Kevin put it on backwards, which in reality gave him about as much coverage as the robe.

Two great lines spawned from this scene:
“My trench coat isn’t going to cover your balls forever.”
“I’m pretty sure the stage direction didn’t say ’show the audience your balls’!”

I would definitely recommend seeing them if you get the chance… unless you don’t want your head crushed.

Had an amusing conversation with a developer at work that had the feeling of an abbot and costello bit. I’m leaving his name out of this to protect him, but he’s read this site before and will know instantly that it’s him. The conversation revolves around our new continuous integration system, and how the terminology has changed.

BTW, QA=Quality Assurance, UAT= User Acceptance Testing (staging)

(10:50:50 AM) morgajel: ok, so after talking to mick, it looks like my suspicions were correct
(10:50:54 AM) morgajel: there is no QA
(10:51:04 AM) morgajel: the name QA is misleading.
(10:51:16 AM) DeveloperX: hmmm
(10:51:25 AM) morgajel: trunk is for development, release is for qa, uat and prod
(10:51:26 AM) DeveloperX: what do u mean
(10:52:47 AM) DeveloperX: i have a release branch…
(10:52:50 AM) morgajel: think about it- anything going to QA is being marked as a release.
(10:53:12 AM) morgajel: so so release gets deployed to QA, then if it passes it goes on up the chain to production
(10:53:52 AM) DeveloperX: this is how the system currentlyis
(10:54:23 AM) DeveloperX: it seems to make snese to me? assueming nothing makes it ti UAT unlees it goes through QA
(10:54:36 AM) morgajel: that’s the way it should be.
(10:54:49 AM) DeveloperX: i think thats how it is
(10:54:57 AM) morgajel: the difference between this and the old system is, rather than labelling it projectX[QA], they’re now calling projectX_release_
(10:55:07 AM) DeveloperX: no? i only have a trunk and a release
(10:55:11 AM) morgajel: that’s the main difference for you
(10:55:20 AM) DeveloperX: which means the only thing goingto UAT will be from the release
(10:55:51 AM) morgajel: correct- the only thing going to qa or uat or prod will be from the release.
(10:56:12 AM) DeveloperX: so why can’t we still call it QA?
(10:56:42 AM) morgajel: because it’s *more* that QA- QA was a bad name for it from a organizational perspective
(10:57:32 AM) DeveloperX: is his only going to affect me, or is this the new approach for everyone?
(10:57:40 AM) morgajel: for everyone
(10:58:27 AM) DeveloperX: so your saying there is no pointin multiple srevers?
(10:58:33 AM) morgajel: no
(10:59:04 AM) morgajel: I’m saying whatever we put on UAT should be the EXACT same thing as QA
(10:59:13 AM) DeveloperX: so we will still push from trunkto release to UAT?
(10:59:20 AM) morgajel: and whatever we put in prod should be the EXACT same thing as both of them.
(10:59:24 AM) DeveloperX: it is
(10:59:28 AM) DeveloperX: currenlty
(10:59:29 AM) morgajel: well, from your side, here’s what happens
(10:59:37 AM) DeveloperX: at least for anything i;ve worked on
(10:59:44 AM) morgajel: you guys develop in trunk, and when you’re ready to release, you mark it as release.
(10:59:53 AM) DeveloperX: k
(10:59:55 AM) morgajel: then the QA people will check out release to the QA servers
(11:00:04 AM) DeveloperX: k
(11:00:10 AM) morgajel: once they give it a go, we will check it out to UAT,
(11:00:22 AM) DeveloperX: k
(11:00:24 AM) morgajel: once that’s good, it will be checked out from release toprod,
(11:00:54 AM) DeveloperX: put the code that is working it’s way up is exacly the same in each instance
(11:01:12 AM) morgajel: correct- as it should be.
(11:01:18 AM) DeveloperX: it is jsut being push multiple times, to make sure everything will work when we finally hit orid
(11:01:20 AM) DeveloperX: prod
(11:01:27 AM) morgajel: correct
(11:02:06 AM) morgajel:
now, I’m not sure what the exact mechanism will be for pushing to uat
and prod- we may check it out directly from svn, but more likely than
not, we won’t.
(11:02:33 AM) DeveloperX: ya, i would guess not
(11:02:37 AM) morgajel: the important thing is we can say “release 11234234 of projectX” and can match it up with a specific commit in subversion.
(11:03:50 AM) DeveloperX: i gotcha there…we used to havesomethiing like that, but it completely maintianed by me
(11:04:16 AM) DeveloperX: i have a new release branch for every deployment i make to projectX
(11:04:34 AM) DeveloperX: so I code in theory go back to 3deployments ago
(11:04:46 AM) DeveloperX: but you guys should have access to this…not just me
(11:05:35 AM) DeveloperX: make sense?
(11:08:09 AM) morgajel: you’re close
(11:08:23 AM) morgajel: I’m presuming you’re talking about http://buildserver/svn/projectX/branches/, correct?
(11:08:32 AM) morgajel: each of those listed is a different release branch, correct?
(11:09:01 AM) morgajel: what they’re doing is instead of creating a folder for each release, they’re creating a single folder
(11:09:17 AM) morgajel: and making note of the commit version when they commit acode to it
(11:10:14 AM) morgajel: hence when subversion says “committed version #1123223″,you’d call it “release 1123223″ in your notes
(11:10:30 AM) morgajel: I think that’s what brandon is trying to aim for, but we’ll have to have him verify.
(11:11:00 AM) DeveloperX: ok, i think i gocha