One of the weird things that I’ve come to realize is that people tend to have long email addresses.  Originally, back in the day, you might have been first@company.com – which was relatively easy to remember and tell people.  Of course, the whole internet thing started to catch on, so companies started assigning all of their employees email addresses.  This lead to the comical situation of 38 Michaels all having an e-mail address, which lead to – you guessed it – michael38@company.com.  This started to look unprofessional, so some corporate wonk decided that it should now be ‘first.last@company.com’.  Name collisions were less likely, but whenever you had to tell somebody your email address, you had to make sure you had some time on your hands.

Support Person (SP): “Okay sir, may I please have your email address?”
Random Guy (RG): “Sure.  It’s marcus.aurelius@romanshouseofawesome.com.”
SP: “Sorry sir, I missed that – it’s m..a..r..?”
RG: “Sure – it’s m..a..r..c..u..s..dot..”
SP: “M..a..r..a..”
RG:" “No, M..a..r..c – no ‘a’ after the c”
SP: “Oh, okay.  M..a..r..c..”
RG: “u..s..dot..a..u..”

It continues in this vein for a few minutes, with many back-pedals and random usage of words to describe letters.  “M..a for apple..r..c..u..s for susan…”  Eventually, the email address has hopefully been written down properly, and people can get on to actually trying to get help with whatever was the actual issue.  Of course, this isn’t always the case – I’m always amused when I get a paper record of a transaction or a welcome letter and my email address has been mangled beyond understanding.  It has to be those double Cs and double Ts – doesn’t help that the Italian pronunciation doesn’t really make sense to any non-Italian.

To combat this problem, I decided to procure a short domain and make myself a nice short email.  The io domains are pretty cool (woo geekery), so I procured one – lf.io.  Then, to make my life super easy, I decided that my email address would be m@lf.io – six whole characters.  Even if I had to revert to some crazy NATO-like reading, it’d be easy – “mike at lima foxtrot dot india oscar”.

It turns out that there was a problem with this whole premise.  You see, after at least a decade of having to do the whole long email dance, people can’t process a short email address.  It screws with their perception of reality, fragile thing that it is.  Recently, I had to fill out some form, and I was asked for my email address.  This was all done in person, so I got to see things up close and personal.  She filled out my name, address, birth date and the rest, then came to the email address part.  She looked up at me, pen ready.  “M,” I say.  She writes it down, clearly expecting much more.  “@,” I continue.  She paused and looked up at me, a question on her face, asking me if I had forgotten anything.  I just nodded and kept going – “lf dot io.”  She wrote it down and looked at it, then looked back up at me, looking confused and concerned, as if I had given her a fake email address.  “It’s okay – that’s my real email address,” I told her.  A few more seconds of confusion pass, until she decides it is okay.  With that, she burst out into a huge smile and excitedly tells me that I have the shorted email address ever, and how cool is that!

I wonder if I should have used one of my brutally long ones, instead.  I guess I have an experiment for the next time!

I just stumbled across this link (HCI 2020) while doing some research – curious to see if they’d update it to address things like Surface, Kinect, Tablets, LTE/WiMax and the like along with the ongoing intensified war between x86 and ARM. If they did update it, what would the difference(s) be?

This is such a small feature, and yet would be so invaluable – the ability to sort the Archive page by purchase date.  Currently, when I buy a book from the Amazon website, I have to remember the artist or title, then search the archive for it.  It’d be much nicer if I could hit up the archive page and simply sort by purchase date, and then select the item that I just bought.  I’m kind of baffled how this has been overlooked.

As part of my ongoing saga with having a cab decide to try to merge into my car, I’ve had to hand over my car to the body shop for roughly two weeks. In that time, my insurance has graciously (due to me paying, of course) provided me with a rental car. The rep offered me a Mitsubishi Lancer, which I was very excited by – I’ve always wanted to drive one, and this was my chance! But lo, my hopes were dashed, when a few moments later the rep told me that the Lancer was actually out. I was then presented with a few different options – a Nissan Sentra, the Ford Focus, and a Chevrolet Malibu.

Originally, I was leaning towards the Focus – it’s a decent little car, and in the right model, very peppy. This being a rental company, I figured it’d be the bare minimum – four wheels and, if I was lucky, a motor. (If I wasn’t, picture Fred Flinstone’s feet.) Based on that, I decided I’d try the Malibu – a large-ish, generic American car. I knew it’d have a big engine that did nothing but suck gas, and wouldn’t so much corner as wallow around a bend. However, I also knew that it’d have the interior space of a drawing room, and that I’d probably feel lost in the car.

Well, the first two predictions came true. The last, not so much! Turns out that the room in the car is taken up by the engine and trunk – the middle portion is probably 1/4 of the car! (No, not quite that bad, but still a pronounced smallness to it.) The front seat only moves back so far, and until the rep found the button to make the seat go down, I was pretty much part of the steering wheel. If I tried to take a corner, I’d be bruising my thighs with my ham hands. While the steering wheel does telescope and move up, it doesn’t come out very far, and sure doesn’t go up very much. The designers also thought that they should take the steering wheel from a bus – that thing is MASSIVE.

To top it all off, I’ve gotten so used to having a gas pedal that requires pressure that the vapid feedback I get from the accelerator drives me bonkers, and gave me a cramp from having to keep things “just so.”

TL;DR (you’d better have gotten this far) – it wallows, it wheezes, and it has the interior room for a family of mutant dwarf pigs. Steer clear!

Addendum
Things I’ve noticed in the last day while driving this behemoth:
1) Every time you hit a pothole, a crack in the pavement, or some other protrusion marring the perfectly flat surface of the road that the Malibu expects, the steering wheel bucks like an enraged steer trying to break loose. This causes some serious consternation.
2) On the flip side, the steering wheel has a good 10-15 degrees of play before it notices that you’re attempting to turn. Seriously – I feel like a bus driver.
3) A bus is a good comparison, especially when it comes to turning radii. I’d need an empty six lane highway to get this thing to do a 360. Parking in Toronto requires a nine point turn.
4) The person (or committee) that decided that the turn signal had to have the loudest, most horrible clacking noise should be summarily executed. I spend a lot of my time waiting to turn trying to decide what weight sledgehammer I want to introduce to the dashboard.

Hopefully I have found the full extent of the nightmare that is this car. Any more surprises would be very unwelcome. Can’t wait to have my car back!

My UPS nightmare is over, and the servers have arrived.  My living room table now has some 1U servers in it, and my closet has the 2U servers.  With the hardware taken care of, now it comes down to the fun part – software.  Do I use OpenStack, OpenNebula, or Eucalyptus?  Help!

I want to setup a little cloud at a local colo – while I won’t have the same amount of bandwidth as I do using dedicated servers down in the US, I’ll have better hardware, and I won’t have to pay outrageous sums of money for crappy hardware.  To this end, I went to eBay and snagged a few 1U servers; coupled with the existing hardware I have, I can have a pretty decent little setup.  Everything went smoothly – I paid for the servers and the seller set the shipment up using UPS.  I got my tracking number, and then the fun began.

You see, I am enthusiastic about tracking my package – overzealous, even.  I memorize that stupid UPS tracking URL and visit every two seconds, hoping that something will have changed.  When it does change, I get happier, as it means my package will be getting closer to me.  On Friday evening, I was super excited, because the package had arrived at the local depot, which meant that the package would be on a truck on Monday (today) morning.

First thing this morning, back to the website, and there it is – “Out for Delivery” as of 7:07am!  Of course, I then realize the downside – I’m basically going to be sitting around in a panic all day long, hearing phantom doorbells, rushing to the terrace to look over the railing to see if the delivery person was there.  Bathroom break?  Push!  Food?  Inhale it!  No food in the house?  What’s the closest (healthy) place?  The end result is that I have the longest, slowest day ever – where is my package!?

Finally, at around 6:15, I couldn’t take it anymore and started walking around the block in an attempt to burn off some nervous energy.  As I’m doing this, I see the UPS van pull up!  I’m all excited, and get ready to wander over, when I see the driver grab a (small) package and head over to drop it off.  I tell myself to relax, and go hang out in front of my place, so I will stop scaring the neighbourhood kids.  I hear the van start up, and start cruising around the crescent – I tell myself that he’s trying to find my unit.

Note to everybody: the block of townhouses I live in is beyond poorly marked – the signs are at the sides, not the front, and they are put so high up that you cannot see them from a vehicle.  When I first came to see the unit, I wandered around lost for roughly 20 minutes before I finally found it.  If anybody had moved in, I would have asked them, but the development was a ghost town.

Back to the UPS van – he’s driving around the crescent, passes my block.  Keeps going.  Accelerates.  Gets back to the “main” road, and stops.  I hear him get out – I’ve got ears that would rival those of an owl, when it comes to deliveries!  A few minutes pass, and I don’t see him walking around, looking for the unit.  Then, horror of horrors, the engine fires, and the van zooms off.  I don’t have a package, and I’ve wasted nearly twelve hours in a panicky state.

I venture online and check to see if the tracking information has updated.  Why, yes, it has!  “First Attempt Made” – “The driver was unable to collect funds on the 1st delivery attempt.”  I go from panicking that I’d miss the driver to wanting to immolate him with my mind!  I was right here!  I was sitting right out from of my damn house when you were here!  You went to the unit on Foundry, didn’t you!  If I walked over to that unit, I’m pretty sure there is a notice on their door, or that he had spoken to them asking for the $200 in “duties and fees” that my $900 package had slapped on it and the person at the door choked.  (Can’t wait to argue about the fees, too!)

With my anger tap wide open and spewing venom, I call UPS’ 800 number.  I breathe and tell myself to be calm, that the agent who calls isn’t the person who screwed up, and doesn’t need to put up with an irate person.  Calmly, I explain that there seems to have been some mix up, and could they send the driver back?  “I’m pretty sure that they went to the right unit, but on the wrong road!”  The agent proves to be less than useful, and says that she can send a message to the centre and that they’ll arrange for delivery tomorrow.

Seriously?  I get to do this whole thing again tomorrow?  I’m not sure my heart can take it.  Or if the driver will have both arms.

Okay, so I’m not moving just yet, but I did want to replace the table that collects the contents of my pockets. Here we have the before and after shots – kitty not included.

Update!

Here’s the replacement mostly put together:

You see Building 18 in that picture?  They are in the process of putting up a blockade around it so that they can gut it, and then tear it down.  I’m scared – not because they are going to remove a semi-historic building, but because of the fact that I received a package from GE detailing the plan.  You see, there is a block at the bottom, between Brandon Avenue and the railway line, and from Foundry Avenue to Lansdowne Avenue that GE will retain ownership of.  Why?  For the most terrifying reason ever – the area is contaminated with PCBs from when they used to build transformers there. 

Now, I realized that when I moved here that it was a former industrial site, and that it had been a foundry.  The developer and former owner spent a lot of time rehabilitating the area, and I was happy with the work they did. But seriously, PCBs?  I sure hope that they have a good containment plan, with all the houses they are building around here.

I’ve bounced this blog around from provider to provider, trying to find a place to call home.  If I was a smarter person, I would test things out BEFORE migrating my blog around, but alas, I’m just not that bright.  I experimented with Tumblr (slick, but the templating system didn’t win me over), Posterous (too limited) and WordPress (hosted – problems with custom domains).  In the end, I decided to migrate back to hosting my own WordPress instance, and I am very happy.  I’ve customized it the way I like, and I can make the CSS as pretty as my non-existent skills allow me to.  The end result is that I can blog far more frequently!  Here’s to a prodigious 2011!

After a few months of gear lust, I bit the bullet and bought a new workstation.  It isn’t so much that I really needed it, but more that I wanted something that’d sit under my desk and be silent; working away and keeping me content.

You see, my last workstation, while well spec’d, had an annoying habit of eating itself, particularly in the RAID department.  I’d shutdown the machine at night, boot up the next morning, and find out that one of the drives in the array had magically died.  Physically, it was fine – I just had to use the Intel management tool to disconnect, reconnect, and rebuild the array.  This was time consuming and annoying, however.

For posterity, here is a picture of the old machine, sitting at the desk to my left.  Also for posterity, the specs:

Dual Xeon 5520
Noctual HSFs
Tyan S7025 Motherboard
16GB DDR3-1333
Two ATI Radeon 5850s, CrossFire’d
240GB OCZ RevoDrive SSD
Lian Li Tyr PC-X2000 Case
PC Power and Cooling 1200W PSU

For comparison, here’s a picture of the new beast!  Please note that it doesn’t actually fit underneath my desk. On the plus side, it is dead quiet – I can leave it on overnight and not hear a thing.  For those of you that are curious, here is what you can see:

Xeon 5650
Corsair H70 Water Cooler
EVGA SR-2 Motherboard
24GB DDR3-1600
ATI Radeon 5970
Two Crucial RealSSD C300s, RAID1
MountainMods U2-UFO Extended Case
EVGA SR-2 1200W PSU

There are some bits that are still coming in:

Second Xeon 5650
Full KooLance Watercooling System
Another 24GB DDR3-1600
Another ATI Radeon 5970

With that in place, I should be good to go for a goodly while.