OceanPark

11-22-07 I'm Baaaaaack

It was sometime around 5:30 a.m., during a time in which I decided that extra-natural forces were afoot in my house, that I decided to re-start this blog. I had gotten up at 5 a.m., well before any hint of light in the eastern sky, for a last ditch ever to finish a story that had bedeviled me for weeks.

Five a.m. is still lights out in my home. Maybe 45 minutes away from my son, age 6, the quintessential morning person, rousing me awake with his daily "Daddy, can you play with me?" It's an hour or more away from any sign of wakefulness from my wife. Peace. The street outside is equally quiet. The only noise I will hear will come from the automatic sprinklers on the front lawn. And so, of course, I step into my office, close the door, flip the light switch, and hear that worst of all possible noises. That electrical energy noise, the last little death throw of spark, and the bulb blinks out.

I don't actually NEED the goddam light. The glow from the 21-inch CRT monitor on my AMD X2 Dual Core 4800+ gaming computer casts more than enough illumination to see the keys on my Acer notebook, the computer on which I do all of my work. But I know I'll forget and get up every five or seven minutes or so to turn on the light switch and only then remember that the bulbs are dead. I'm like that when I'm writing. ('Ah, great line! Rolling now! Say, why am I sitting in the dark?') Besides, I already had a bulb. There are two bulbs up there on that most ancient fixture of our 103-year-old house. One died some time ago, but in my infinite laziness, I had managed to do no more than move a new bulb into the same room with the one that needed to be changed, content to endure dim light until both were out.

At 5-ish in my slumbering house, desperate to keep it that way for as long as possible, the bulb is a Godsend. I balance on my busted office chair, and twist the new bulb into place. Within five minutes: deja vu. Fzzzt. Spark. Darkness.

This is where those extra-natural critters come in. Oh, there was nothing there, really, but it was fun for a moment to imagine that some kind of entity was fracking with me mightily at that moment and really needed a piece of my mind. I came up with nothing imaginative, equally desperate in another way at that moment to preserve all dwindling amounts of creativity for my story. So, about 25 slightly above a whisper yet viciously enunciated 'F**K YOUs" did it for me, replete with various finger gestures designed to mimic the exploratory medical probing of both the traditional male and female body forms.

If you ever want to see something funny, try watching someone National Football League sized like me tiptoeing the entire length of my house because--of course--the goddam light bulbs are in a cabinet at the back of the house and my office is in the front.

The goddam childproofed cabinet, which the plastic lock on it with the serrated teeth which is of course impossble to open witout some noise.

Managed it. Guessed on the bulb. Back to the office. Guessed wrong. 25 watts. Goddam refrigerator bulb. Back to the rear of the house. Mr. Disaster Preparedness here with no access to a flashlight without waking someone up. Guessed again. Bigger bulb this time. Back to the office. Guessed wrong, again. (Few more F**K YOUs, but not as satisfying.) 150 watts. Abulb like that on those wires, and the house would spontaneously combust. Back to the rear of the house again. Another guess. 100 watts this time. Adequate. Light! Back to work.

The worst thing that can happy to a carefully reported story is to have a bunch of other stories rise up and take precedence. Now, the notes are a month old. I can't even read some of my notes because I was walking at the time or in a moving vehicle. It makes it hard to summon the moment. The writing creeps along. And then of course, nature intervenes.

Young gamers today have a term for needing to hit the old head, rest room, bathroom, whatever. They call it a bio break, which is just perfect because anything else I just don't need to know and falls under the heading of Too Much Information.

If I am playing my Hero on the the MMORPG City of Heroes, in a group with other heroic sorts from all over the world, I really don't need to hear that one member of my super posse needs to pee or--even worse--is going to do the old number two pencil.

I don't care what superhero you followed as a child. Not one of them ever said ''Scuse me, gotta go pee.' Didn't happen. I guess the super power specs also included Super Bladders, able to hold vast amounts of...well...pee...for hours on end or until justice had been dispensed. Or they had Super Will Power. Whatever. At any rate, my story not yet finished, I had to take an extended bio break.

It was at that moment that my son, who had shown remarkable restraint until that moment, decided to come into the bathroom to ask if I could come play with him.

I'm not like my dad was. I play with my son almost every morning before work. I play with him when I get home. I play with him during dinner. I play with him before he goes to bed. So, I really don't feel too badly when I have to tell him I can't, that there is more work for me to do.

But "the story" had prevented me from playing with him the night before, a night in which he announced that he wished there was no such thing as work or any such thing as "downtown," since both happen to interrupt my time to play with him.

Two denials in a row was, of course, more than my son could take. In that marvelous way six year olds have or being completely unable to mask their emotions, he plopped down on the stool he uses to see in the mirror to brush his teeth and sobbed.

After about five minutes, I had talked him down off his bad mood. By now it was well after 8 a.m., about the time my editor sometimes signs online to see what progress has been made, and my story still wasn't done.

Finally, it was. I had five minutes to run a bath. I had two minutes to actually sit in the bath. Okay, it was three minutes. It was so relaxing, that I stole a minute. Fracking sue me, okay? I counted down the final 60 seconds in my head.

Now, I'm at work, about to get my second coffee of the day. Groove Salad on SOMA-FM is jamming another cinematic instrumental (Group: Lemongrass; Track: 'Feel Good'; Album: Space Night 9), and my boss hasn't complained once about the story that was about as close as I will ever come to experiencing the agony of givng birth to a child.

I am blogging again...and a big F**K YOU very much to anyone who says I shouldn't.

Cool Ocean Park Links: Urban Dictionary; SOMA-FM; Groove Salad; City of Heroes; Battlestar Gallactica glossary.

1-1-2006 Happy New Year!

5/31/05 On Strike...Not!

I'm a very happy guy today. A particular union is not going on strike against a particular major airline, and so this story ends today, and not weeks or months from now.

I hate covering strikes. The main reason is that you are on call 24/7. You work nights. You work weekends. You sometimes spend more time with other families than you do with your own. And if some clown gets upset one night and starts a brawl and gets arrested, you have to go cover that event.

Things have really changed, though. Strikes (the workers walk out) and lockouts (the employer locks them out) have become unbelievably tame events. No one gets out of line. No one engages in fiery oratory. Everything is pretty much by the rules and by the book. In fact, I haven't seen one arrest that wasn't as carefully choreographed as a New York ballet.

The police are notified in advance of the event. So are the employers. The police are told exactly how many people will be committing the precisely described example of civil disobedience. And the police pretty much agree to go along with the exercise, and are just as polite as possible about taking people off to the police van for the ceremonial ride to the lockup.

I once followed a group of striking/locked out employees all the way up to the posh, mountaintop gated community of a certain high ranking supermarket chain exec. The whole event was choreographed from beginning to end, and I filed a story that got buried in the next day's newspaper. When asked why the story was so brief and so badly placed. I had to tell them.

"Well, you folks didn't exactly DO anything."

It wasn't always like this. The very first labor fight I covered involved the United Steelworkers of America and their effort to wrest union control from another labor body at Newport News Shipbuilding, then the largest shipyard in the world.

Those guys were serious. I'll just give you one example. Every time a strikebreaker tried to drive a vehicle past the picket line, the steelworkers would stop it, start pounding on it enough to leave dents in it, and rock it to the point of nearly turning it over. They did that with EVERY vehicle, every day. Now, people are so concerned about liability and being sued that they pretty much always play by the rules.

I'm just happy I don't have to cover another strike, and can just go home tonight.

4-12-05 When Building Or Buying Your Dream Gaming Rig...

...don't ignore the power supply.

I suspect now that this has been my rig's primary problem all along. Occasional game crashes I attributed to improper settings on my video cards. Sluggish performance while multitasking, despite very high end components. Sluggish distributed computing performance, with machines with much slower components delivering much better processng times than mine.

What I had was a 350 watt power supply. Don't laugh. Most of the megawatt power users who insist on 550 and even 600 watt power supplies are into expensive and wasteful overkill. You just don't need that kind of juice.

But 350 was clearly not enough and I think the final straws were the addition of a third hard drive, three more cooling fans, and the ATi Radeon Pro 9800 All-In-Wonder video card. The 9800 was an upgrade from a 9600 A.I.W., the biggest difference being twice the pixel shaders: eight instead of four. But more importantly, the 9800 requires a direct feed from the power supply to ramp up its substantially larger cooling fan. All in all, the drain was probably too much.

So, the Lantech guys opted for the same 435 watt, High Quality Evolution power supply used in servers and in my two dual opteron workstations.

The difference has been very noticeable. No game crashes, and my climateprediction.net processing times have begun to drop again.

You can gain energy saving efficiencies in more productive ways than just scrimping on the power supplies, such as dual processor computers like my opterons. Instead of running six single cpu boxes with 350 watt power supplies each (2100 watts total), for example, I'm running four boxes and six CPUs at 435 watts each (1,740 watts). But I'd have to say that any top flight gaming rig probably ought to have 400 to 450 watts to be efficient. Mine seems much happier and more deadly now.

In fact, my box started out as an Intel P4C at 2.6Ghz with 512Mb of DDR400 RAM, one 80gig hard drive and the 9600 video card, a pair of cheap speakers, and two cooling fans.

It evolved into a hotter running and power hungry Intel P4E Prescott at 3.4Ghz, 2048Mb of faster DDR400 RAM, 730gigs of storage space on three hard drives, the 9800 video card, high output speakers and a total of six cooling fans.

Makes sense that a power upgrade was in order.

4-7-05 Shutting Down the Home Computer Network...

...for a few days while a new wood floor is installed in our home. Will take the opportunity to add new power supplies to the Dual Opterons and beef their RAM up to 3 gigs each. Ouch!

Back on by the weekend, I hope.

Later.

Meanwhile, made great strides on Climateprediction.net and now I'll have to make up the progress again when I get back online.

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4-5-05 You haven't been to the boondocks until you've been to Bentonville, Arkansas

Even the airport is a trip. They have one luggage carousel, surrounded by all of the rental car units. And you have to hoof it to your rental car, even the Hertz people. You leave the airport and there is nothing. Repeat. NOTHING. No lights. You think you're lost even when you are heading in the right direction because there is nothing but wide open pitch black space. They don't even have a decent two-lane freeway. So, you're tooling along, two hours later than L.A. time wise and driving about 45 on this narrow-ass blacktop they call a highway and thinking that you are lost and up behind you comes a big semi-trailer rig who isn't too frigging happy about having to drop his speed.

I swear I stopped three times on the way to the hotel because I just knew I HAD to be lost. They kept assuring me that I wasn't. I kept telling them, her, Debbie, that I didn't believe her.

Meanwhile, I'm on the freaking lookout for various wildlife who also think that they are in the middle of no where and thereby unmindful of the rights of cars and other vehicles at night. Deer. Armadilloes. I don't even fucking know how to spell Armadilloes. And possums. The lady at the rental car place was the one who warned me about the traveling nocturnal menagerie. She winked at me as she was telling me this. Women don't wink at you in L.A. They are guilty of a lot of transgressions, real and imagined, but they don't wink, unless maybe a Santa Ana wind is blowing and something just got caught in their eye. So, I don't know if she was flirting or putting me on. Maybe a little of both.

And they warned me about the speed traps waiting right outside the airport. Lotsa local Bubbas looking to fill their quota on the unsuspecting out of town city folk. So, that was also why I was driving 45 miles an hour on the "freeway."

Suddenly, out of the darkness, is the Clarion Conference Center and Hotel. I arrive at 10:05 p.m. local time. Room service, I'm told, ended at 10 p.m.

Debbie, who I swear had the biggest eyes I have ever seen, is kind enough to give me the number of the local Domino's Pizza, which is the only place that delivers "at this hour" she says. Sigh.

I then ask if the hotel has a broadband connection. She looks at me as if I just started speaking in Latin. I try a different tack, realizing that just about anything that is about to leave my mouth at this point is going to border on condescension or insult. Like commenting on the fact that the hotel looks absolutely deserted.

Lots of bandwidth, I try. Still Latin, maybe moving on to Greek. Hard to tell.

"Do you have fat phone plugs in the rooms?"

Debbie contemplates this for a second and says that she doesn't know.

I get to the room and, thankfully (this was actually worthy of a Hallelujah at this point), I see that they have broadband connections.

I order a pizza and decide to call Debbie at the front desk, lest some other businessman consider staying somewhere else on the count of no broadband connection.

"So, you do have a high speed internet connection," I said.

She responds that she did know that. So, she asks, broadband and high speed are the same thing? Yes, I said, in most places anyway.

3-21-05 Dumb Shit You Do When You're Sick

#1. Missing time.

My inspiration is the Honey Bear. How sick have I been? Four 12 oz. Honey Bear's worth. Number four just bit the dust, and I was just sitting here, for God knows how many minutes exactly, holding the inverted Honey Bear bottle over my cup of tea, hoping that I could gather enough agonizingly slow droplets for decent flavor. I'm beginning to think that most people who claim to be UFO abductees are just people with really bad head colds.

#2. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Pouring boiling water into plastic Honey Bear #3 to melt the crystalized shards at the bottom of the bottle. Honey Bears are almost always made of plastic. Really bad idea.

#4. Driving.

Anywhere, anytime when you are full of antibiotics, corticosteroids, and prescription strength codeine-laced cough syrup.

#3. Forgeting to ask your brain to call you now and then to let you know where it's gone and when it might be coming back.

'Cause you apparently can't count to ten without hints.

#5. Dropping out of sight.

I have been to the office twice in the past two weeks. Haven't seen my trainer, my shrink, my accupuncture doctor, friends, masseuse, etc. etc. Haven't really talked to any of them much either.

#6. Melted the teapot.

Okay, so the pot itself didn't melt, just the cute little green plastic ball on the lid, which sort of oozed down and wound up looking like an old-fashioned wax letter seal. The stainless steel pot just changed to a neat pewter color.

#7. Missing Time, part deux, or It seemed like a good idea at the time, part deux.

Pouring cold water on a teapot that has been heated to blast furnace forge temperatures on your stove.

#8. It was either that or my shirt.

You haven't lived until you are so desperate to blow your nose that you turn to the used Mickey Dee's napkin you found wedged between the car seats.

3-14-05 (technically, there are four minutes to go) I hate being sick

I am apparently done with sleep for at least awhile. Understandable, I guess, since I was nodding off at my desk at home at 7:33 p.m. and decided to go to bed. I did get in some Xbox time with my four-year-old son, Julian, who seemed particularly happy to see me tonight. Thrilled, in fact, to have daddy home.

God, there is no kind of love like this. Better than the love of a girlfriend, which, if you are lucky, maybe lasts once or twice in your life. Better than the love of a spouse, at least here, because my spouse depends on me for just about everything and so I am constantly worried about living up to that. This is even better than pet love, which is always wildly enthusiastic and unadulterated no matter what kind of skanky condition you happen to be in. But, let's face it, the pet is about as smart as lint and maybe not such a good judge of character.

The love of your child is better than all of that because your child does have a brain like a sponge and can already make choices and decisions about who he likes and dislikes.

(Painful segue here, but hold on while the g-forces hit because I am still on point.)

In most electronic games, you can hack your way into something called God-mode. Better yet, you can usually find someone online who has developed a ready made hack that you can just type into the code or install from a zipfile. It's always fun to go into God-mode for awhile, especially if life is throwing you some high hard ones inside and brushing you back off the plate. In God-mode, you are impervious. You are invulnerable. The Big Unstoppable, in the words of Shaquille O'Neal. In other words, everything you can't be in real life.

I am at the God-mode stage with my son, where he looks at me as if I'm the Big Unstoppable. Accomplisher of all things Important, like fixing his toy or being able to find the pick from his guitar or always watching at just the right moment when he has figured out a new skateboard trick on his XBox game.

I love God-mode. I love my son.

Unfortunately, I am sick. It's like God-mode in reverse. And the following, for me, is unheard of. I have been sick for nine days and now it is doing that awful morphing thing that illnesses sometimes do these days, which is to shapeshift into some other frigging malady. So, I have left behind last week's ridiculously sore throat and headaches and bad stomach and have acquired what seems more and more like one of those awful sinus infections that sap your energy and destroy all efforts at concentration.

Hence, my hitting the sack at 7:33 p.m., three minutes after my son, who is also sick and barfed all over his bed, which is kind of why I'm up right now.

I'm going to give myself a time limit here. I have to be back in bed, at least trying to sleep, by 1 a.m. Problem is, thngs are just pouring out of me the way I wish this infection would pour out. I can't seem to stop. Probably delirium. Great.

Yep, at 12:17 a.m., it's now official. I have become a booger/snot factory.

*Grabs tissue. Blows nose for the fourth time in the last 10 minutes. Little snow mountain building up between keyboard and monitor.*

Work sucks at the moment, which is odd because it hasn't sucked in quite a long time. I think it is because I'm sick and my best friend at work is away in New Zealand and there is her absence combined with the addition of a Jerk.

The Jerk is someone I've seen around for years and who now, during my illness, sits one aisle over from me. For some reason that escapes me, he has developed an instant dislike for me, or maybe it has been festering in him for a long psychotic eon. Who knows? All I know is that he directs enthusiastic, charming conversation at everyone around me but me, to whom he barely grunts an acknowledgment. Weird. I am always amazed at reporters who can so enthusiastically seek the truth in their stories and not leap to stupid conclusions but are unable to summon an iota of that trait in their regular interactions with other people. There, I feel a little better now.

I just coughed. I sound like Doc-frigging-Holliday when I cough. What the f**k is this anyway? I could summon geese in heat with this cough.

*Thinks the worst. Imagines opening paragraphs in respected medical journal. "The unfortunate Patient Zero in this pandemic succumbed to his illness while blogging in the wee hours, his symptoms eerily reminiscent to the super flu that annihilated most of humankind in Stephen King's 'The Stand.'"*

Another cough. Damn. I'm surprised I'm not waking half the neighborhood.

*end of transmission*

3-4-05 Distributed Computing Statistics-Part 1

Climateprediction.net

Raven5655:

climateprediction.net member since	12 Feb 2005 17:39:13 UTC
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Team	Ars Technica - Team Baked Alaska

2-9-05 The Difference Between Moms and Dads

My wife came home frantic the other day. It seems our four-year-old son, Julian, decided to lay some rubber down on the pavement for the first time by making his bike skid. Somehow, he tumbled off and managed to scrape both his knees.

"You have to talk to him and tell him to never do that again," my wife told me. "I thought I was going to have a heart attack."

Of course, being a dad, I decided instead to instruct my son on the finer points of bike skidding. I was remembering my own childhood and how we used to see who could lay down the longest skid.

"Go a little slower than your top speed. Keep your weight back on the foot that's doing the braking, and make sure you keep your handlebars straight," I said.

My son looked a little exasperated and said, "Dad, I wasn't trying to skid."

"No? Then what were you doing?"

"I was trying to do a 180," my son said. This is skateboard lingo for a trick in which the rider kicks up into the air and turns the board around and then lands on it, with the front end of the board winding up as the tail end. I had an immediate image of my son trying to whip his bike around so that he was facing in the opposite direction.

"Really?!?," I said. "That is so cool!"

My son and I exchanged high fives, and then I remembered what my wife asked me to do.

"Uh, son. Do me a favor and save the 180s for the skateboard, okay?"

"Okay Dad."

A few minutes later, I'm in the kitchen with my wife.

"So, did you talk to him about it?" she asked.

"Oh, yeah. You know, I don't think he's going to try any more skids on the bike," I said.

"That's a relief," my wife said.