The Carpet Guy

I made an appointment to get my carpet cleaned last night.  The rude secretary told me that a time slot was available the next day...sweet!  So I scheduled an appointment for 8-10 this morning.  At around 9:55 I was starting to get impatient as you can imagine.  Of course just as I was about ready to leave for work the doorbell rings and hes ready to get busy.  I always love burning 4 hours of vacation time because of someones incompetence.  At least he seemed knowledgable, could speak english, and did a good job with the carpet.  Hopefully Ms. Peanut will be a bit more forgiving on it this time.  Its supposed to be off white, not yellow!

Post Horsey Mortem

Well my fears of sore legs after the horse riding excursion did not come to fruition. However, there was another sort of pain during the ride but I'll spare you the details. Needless to say, the greatest impediment to me running well in my race the next morning at 8:30 was the lack of sleep and the number of beers I had the night before.

Race Details

In any case, the race was by far the largest I have ever been involved in. The organizers said there were approximately 6000 run/walkers and I have no doubt that this was true. It was truly inspiring to be able to pass so many people at the start of the race. What is better motivation than racing a bunch of slow walking people? Anyways, here are my results...about what I expected.

235 35/103 1992 Rodney Jokerst 26 27:24 24:30 7:54

Now I just need to find one more race to run at the end of the summer...inspiration to keep myself in shape and just enough time to train to be my 24:30 time :)

Horsey

I've been getting alot of feedback recently that my horseback riding expedition on Saturday is going to make my 5k race on Sunday miserable. Well, I am ready to take on this challenge. I think my ass is well suited to handling anything a horse might attempt to throw at it. Bring it on. Just be gentle on the other stuff down there.

Redhat 9 Sucks

I spent the better part of 3 hours at work on Friday trying to figure out why my Perl script wasn't working. I had an arbitrary collection of binary data skimmed from the network that was perfectly coherent and viable when stored in a hashtable. However, as soon as I decide to write this data to a file, random garbage was interspersed with real data, resulting in a file on disk that was much larger than the file in memory, in addition to it being total garbage. Since my work is on an isolated system, I cant post details of what I was seeing. Nevertheless, it was a very perplexing problem. Perplexing that is until I remembered having a similar problem a number of years ago with Perl on a Redhat 9 system...back when Redhat 9 was relatively new and still in favor with me.

After several futile google searches to narrow down the problem, I decided to try the solution that I remembered from my prior disastrous experiences...open the file in binary mode. Even though the documentation explicitly says that this is only necessary on broken operating systems like Microsoft Windows, this simple modification made my script work flawlessly. I am not in the mood to run this issue into the ground much further since I don't use Redhat products by choice anymore and this work project is nearing its completion. However, I did find out what the culprit most likely was.

At some point around the release of Redhat 9, Perl was going through its transition to Unicode support. Apparently, parts of the system were not completely functional for the Redhat 9 Perl release. In particular, it seems that the print function was converting my binary data to Unicode before writing it to the file, translating certain bytes to the extended form. This would explain why I had extra data in my file on disk. Doesn't make me any happier though :(

Divorcing Religion

Ran across an interesting article that led me to this website:

http://www.barna.org

Apparently, these crazy folks have been doing alot of research on the religious affiliation of divorcees and some of the results are kinda sorta surprising. In particular those born-again crazies that always claim moral superiority have, at best, the exact same divorce rate (~35%) as most other religions including atheists. That's right...even the fear of Jesus Christ can't scare these people into suffering through the brutalities of a bad marriage. Interestingly, catholics had one of the lowest rates at 25%. I guess my former life as a catholic might be worth something afterall.

This blog sucks

I don't understand why this blog doesnt let me have the ability to tag my entries. Isnt the whole point of a blog that you can add interesting metadata tags to your entries so that they can be easily searched? Oh well, I am too tired at the moment to set up my own blogging software on my home server, so I will have to live with this for now :P

In the mean time, I need to go back through my past posts and make them a bit more interesting...maybe add a few pictures or something?

Of course, if all of my freaking pictures are still on my old dead harddrive, how the hell am I supposed to do that? I need to work on being a better geek. Anyways, here is a picture from my last trip to the land of guys with big thingies...

No more tuesdays

Well, today was my last day of Tuesday volleyball for a while. I've decided to just play one night per week in leagues to leave room for free play with the club at work. With all the extra money I save, I'll surely be able to retire in my 40's.