We've had a lot of minor outages lately, and currently we're having trouble getting the filesystem to mount.

I'm beginning to suspect that the earlier minor outages (power issues at the datacenter) caused some database corruption, which has led to the runaways that have caused us to have to reboot, which has led to the filesystem hiccups.

Worst case, we do have offsite backups, so we're not too worried. Annoyed, yes, but not too worried.

Reading various feeds from use.perl.org turns up frequent references to jobs.perl.org, so okay. Set up a search (so far, perpetually empty) for Wichita.

Frequent discussions compare the number of Perl jobs on Dice to the ones on jobs.perl.org, so fine, set up a search there (so far, empty except for the occasional sysadmin/DBA position that mentions Perl as an aside. Still, more than jpo for local stuff).

It's depressing watching empty searches, so set up a more generic IT search on Monster.

Get tired of seeing the same companies over and over, so argue with CareerBuilder and its bizarre half-missing CSS, and eventually find the accesscb.com version which is actually readable, and set up a search there.

Realize you're looking for something at a level that's seldom advertised. How do nerds network, though? Oh, yeah.

Set up Facebook profile and LinkedIn profile. Realize that almost no one at your past employers seems to be on either of those systems. Bah.

Realize that at no point did you consciously make the decision to go job-hunting.

Huh.

I teeter on the edge of unsubscribing from the Dilbert comic feed, but every now and then it goes back to that "You spied on my workplace!" feeling.

Case in point.

Only ours was even worse. Corp HQ had moved out of state, taking all the good jobs, good furniture, and hope of advancement. They'd opened a shiny new building, and had a big party to celebrate it. We got... video of the party. Complete with top management doing a karaoke video ("The Future's So Bright," in Hawaiian shirts, in front of a rear-projected surfing video) (surfing is very popular in Ohio, I guess), and lots and lots of shots of the luau-themed buffet, the open bar, et cetera.

Yes. They sent us video of them partying, and made us watch it in a mandatory all-hands. This was supposed to motivate us.

On the other hand, knowing that most of the people there had been forced to pay their own relocation fees or, at best, sign an agreement to pay back moving expenses (I saw it... if you got LAID OFF you had to pay them back, and if I'm remembering right it was a two-year NOT PRORATED deal) helped. In that, I guess, I was so demotivated already the video couldn't do any harm. (But then, I was only there so I could put an IBM shop on my resume, so I brought my own motivations to the job anyway.)

Drove through downtown Wichita at lunchtime today. Pretty sure Douglas Avenue has not seen so much crinoline and petticoat traffic in a over a century.

In fact, it pretty much looks like what Hollywood would have you think Wichita normally looks like, other than they're riding around on tour buses rather the antique pickup trucks . It's people like this and this this and this.

One thing I noticed: the men aren't wearing anything that stands out (at least from a distance and when there's not a bunch of them wearing the same thing, anyway). The women, you kinda can't miss.

Oh well. Can't much complain about winning convention bids. I could wish it was YAPC or Worldcon, of course.

(Well, provided the attendees didn't wear too many petticoats.)

... iff Pontiac still made the Firebird/Trans Am anymore.

http://www.ohgizmo.com/2008/06/25/mio-unveils-knight-rider-gps/

We've had one duckling that's always the odd man out... when everybody else is standing, that one's lying down. It's been easy to identify: at first, it was the smallest duckling, and now that it's catching up, it has a lighter bill and orange-er legs. Which latter has become more and more pronounced, to where it's almost certain that "odd man" is very appropriate: she's a he.

We bought six, got two free. It's not unlikely that the extras were from the straight-run batch, especially since ravenx99 told them when we ordered them that the extras were for the table. So despite the small sample size, looks like we got a fifty-fifty split. And now we have a flock of (probably) seven hens, one drake. Huh.

Yesterday, a couple of shipments arrived. One was a pair of Wooted cheapo USB tablets... in theory, one for me, one for Mom's birthday, though ravenx99 is kind of tempted by the second. (They're USB, so in theory we could share one.)

Another was a bundle of Sheldon books, including as part of the deal, the Halfpixel How To Make Webcomics book. (Bundled, plus hey, it probably has some inspiration on how to make other web-based things self-funding if not profitable, which could be interesting.)

...

... Nahhhhh.

is that I can't name any of them "Arthur."

http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/080619.html

Not that they're shedding yet (they don't have feathers to shed yet), or that we've let any of them perch on a lamp or anything. Or that they're talking yet. (They twitter like a cage full of finches when they're sleepy, and they squeak demandingly whenever we open the cage door, though.)

Video would be even cuter. They peep continuously, and if you scare them they "get the crazies" and run around in a panic.

Our dachshund has the perpetual "crazies." More so than usual. Just wait until they're big enough to beat up on him. Very shortly, they'll collectively outweigh him.

We have eight; three more than the legal limit. In theory, they're all hens, so there's enough for two flocks. Elsewise, three of them are duck dinner in a couple of months.

If I've done my math right, they should start laying around October 20. In the meantime, they'll start to earn their keep (after a few weeks in the house) de-snail-ifying the back yard, so my cabbages will stop looking like lace.

http://quickerfixerupper.blogspot.com/2008/06/houston-we-have-ducks.html

ravenx99 's been doing duck research, which means he's subscribed to forums and journals and such lately, and so he started reading a quote to me, about someone who's filled a brooder with chickens and ducks and such, which resulted in the following conversation:

ravenx99:...wait, they're *all* four weeks old? They got them all at the same time? Well, "Kit's zoo," I guess that's about right.
gamehawk: kitszoo? That's a friend of the [caulay and ahf's last name]s.
ravenx99: In Maine?
gamehawk: Yup. Also, http://kitszoo.livejournal.com. Friended me awhile back. [The LJ etiquette thing escapes me completely: I read with Google Reader, so don't generally friend people, since I don't make friends-locked entries to speak of.]
ravenx99: (pause) The Internet is a very small place.
gamehawk: Yup. 'Bout a hundred people, I figure.

(Our own duck news belongs on the houseblog, but since I brought it up here: We visited the farmer's market today, and picked up duck eggs (the eating kind, not the hatching kind - if we're gonna raise 'em, we probably ought to try 'em). The seller didn't know what kind they were; it's her neighbor, and she hasn't been over to their farm to actually see the critters. The market was pretty sparse (something to do with, oh, the up-to-golfball-sized hail this morning maybe... we got the fringes of it), so nobody else with ducks was there. So still no luck on the Wichita-area acquisition of Khaki Campbells. Gonna hafta mail-order.)

I just got to check off "Get Social Security straightened out" in Hiveminder.

Hurrah!

Of course, that was a task I created in January. For a change I should have made in 1992. Ahem.

Progress!

On watching our seven-year-old do what looked like a nerdy (and/or neurologically impaired) version of the Robot Dance while trying to do the marble/tile game in Wii Fit, I am inspired to predict that YouTube will shortly be flooded with Wii Fit-oriented videos. Because if we had an easy-to-digitize camera, and a good angle to take video from, I would totally put him on there.

On getting talked into the two-person footrace thingy (which involves stuffing the Wiimote in your pocket so it can play pedometer), I am compelled to observe that you're not supposed to have to worry about getting mauled by a dog when you're jogging indoors. Our sixty-pound senior-citizen mutt decided to get involved, dancing around head-butting me and finally wrapping a paw around my ankle and chewing on my foot. Hey, now!

On getting halfway through the footrace and running out of breath (I entirely blame the dog, and not the fact that I don't get enough aerobic exercise), I have to say, pulling a Wiimote out of your pocket and shaking it to get through the stupid race looks like... well, not something I would want to be seen on YouTube doing, that's all. Oddly appropriate, though.

So far, the kiddo seems to be most interested in the various balance games. This is probably good, since his teachers and doctors suspect at least some of his "hyperactivity" is an underresponsive vestibular system.

Fun toy. We'll see how long the novelty lasts, though.

According to Section 11.52.020 (25) of the Code of the City of Wichita, Kansas, it is unlawful:


Emphasis mine.

OH NOES!!1! We've been parking the Little Blue Truck in front of the house for years. (Every night, for a long time, though now it gets to sit at the top of the driveway most of the time.)

Who knew?

I was heading down Douglas (the original main east-west street in Wichita) when the train signals ahead started blinking.

And I see a guy in railroad coveralls, waving a red flag, ahead of... a slow-moving diesel loco. Okay, great, track maintenance, hope they don't take too long. The diesel turns out to be pulling cars, which worries me, other than only one engine means it's not one of the slow-moving monsters.

And then... WTF? The loco is pulling... passenger cars? My first thought is "Boy, Amtrak's really having issues." They neither run on that track (which is a short-haul, sub-30mph-rated track), nor do they run anywhere in the vicinity during daylight hours unless they're horribly off-schedule, which I guess if they were clear down here they might well be. (The Newton station, thirty miles north, is pretty much the crossover point for the east- and westbound Southwest Chiefs, which go through between 3 and 4 am.)

And then I look again: those aren't Amtrak's double-decker cars, but some kind of tour-train looking stuff. Not the old steam-train styling of the Abilene & Smoky Valley, either. Unlike the diesel, though, the cars were well-labeled: "Great Plains Passenger Trains" - three passenger cars, labeled Afton Leigh, Fallyne Marie, and Kaleigh Ann, followed up by another diesel playing caboose.

Apparently it's an "excursion train" (that was the Hutchinson Fiesta Train), run by these people.

WHY WAS I NOT TOLD ABOUT THIS?

Because it's a recurring theme. ahf is not kidding about the warranty expiry.

Yesterday and the day before was the Wichita River Festival art show, which I went to one day with ravenx99 and the kiddo, and the next day with my mother and mother-in-law.

Today, after last week's garage sale and school shadow-day madness, I decided that despite my bad knee letting me know this morning that it had Had Enough, I still needed to get stuff done. So I pulled out the old knee brace, and started to put it on. Now, it's an immobilizing brace, so I kinda had to stand up to put it on. On the other leg.

Now, when I say "my bad knee," that shouldn't imply that my other knee is any good. I have luxating patellas in *both* knees. It's just that the left one hasn't given me trouble (where "trouble" involves torn ACLs and things) in over twenty years. Or rather, hadn't.

Bah.

So anyway, Riverfest. Art.

Acquired painted-feather prints from here, but not, as you might expect, this one, although I like it very very much. I don't have my Ruth Thompson phoenixes framed yet, nor do I have any idea where I'd put them until I get all the house rearrangement done, and since that phoenix doesn't come in the smaller size (I didn't ask, but I assume they're all printed at 100%) I passed. For now.

Somehow failed to acquire Bob Holloway's "Wichita" print, which isn't on his website or I'd link to it. My mother has a ton of his work, and when took ravenx99's mom to the Arkansas craft fairs Mom introduced her to the stuff, and whenever we don't have a Mother's Day present I can always count on getting her a print at the Riverfest show. We visited the booth, inspected all the nifty new stuff, and I planned to buy something for camoflauge (guess I should have picked up the phoenix print after all) elsewhere in the fair, then excuse myself to the bathroom and go buy the print from Bob. And I didn't end up buying anything, and forgot about the print. D'oh!

His website does not do the stuff justice - it's highly detailed pen and ink work with oils. There are very often words worked into the details - poems, Bible verses, humorous things like "Rest Your Assets" on a chair. And plenty of visual jokes, including the one that the kiddo got, some years back: Bob himself appears as many of the characters, sometimes cameos, sometimes the main character: the peddler,  the piper... and yes, he does wear little round glasses, at least at the shows. He also has an amazing memory... in one conversation, my mother (of course) mentioned that I was "an artist" too. I admitted I'd gotten away from art in favor of computers many years ago, but I did play with colored pencils on occasion, and a couple years later, at the Wichita rather than the Arkansas show, he asked if I still did.

Um... no.  Not to speak of. Though every time I go to an art show, I feel the need to pick it up again. (To my mom's dismay, my stuff leans more toward that of the Windwolf than the Holloway, though.)

Oh, and "happy" Fibromyalgia Awareness Day. (You know who you are, but since I only (recently!) saw it in friends-locked entries (which don't go in RSS feeds, so I miss them), so I won't name names.)

I have gray hair.

Well, at least four gray hairs.

This wouldn't bother me, if they weren't big, coarse, wiry gray hairs. Because my hair is already too coarse and wiry for managability, and the idea of THIS MUCH HAIR being all like that is terrifying.

Aaaaaand suddenly puts me in mind of something.
Only, that much volume at a much higher density. Eek.

It's the garden, you see.

Day before yesterday, it was wind. Wind, wind, wind. I dumped buckets and buckets of water on the garden to keep my little plant starts from being sucked dry. Then, last night, after I thought the line of storms had passed us, we got hail. Not huge hail (fairly consistently marble-sized), but horizontal hail, for close to thirty minutes. Ouch. And four inches of rain, in less than three hours.

I expected the garden to be churned mud (as we were lying in bed listening to the last of it, ravenx99 said to me, "I'm sorry your garden didn't work out"), but it's actually not that bad. The cabbages are raggedy, and a couple of the smaller peppers (the two I keep expecting to die, but just don't) were almost buried, and the cucumbers' hills aren't hills anymore, but I think most everything is going to pull through. Of course, even if it hadn't, it wouldn't negate most of the work, just the first planting and about $15 worth of plants. But still, I was just about ready to harvest my first green onions this weekend. Still probably will, but they won't be quite as pretty.

My poor, poor pink Supertunia (TM, I'm sure) doesn't have any blossoms anymore... I forgot I'd hung it on the shepherd's hook already, so it was out in the worst of it. The purple one is all smug and pretty, hanging on the porch under the overhang. I deadheaded both of them today, so they should be nice and pretty again by Mother's Day, which is all that really counts (purple's for Mom, pink's for my sister the mother-to-be).

But it's going to be a very, very rough summer: mark my words. And it's all my fault.

Aside: Once again, I'm ahead of the curve.

So, continuing my recent spam theme: I got a 419 spam, about the only kind I see these days with greylisting on my personal account. Apparently Nigerian-scammers can't afford botnets. They're rare enough sometimes I read them, just to keep up on the state of that particular art.

This is a new variant: it claims to be from a banker telling me some guy is trying to divert "my" 7.4 million dollars into his Swiss bank account. But never fear, the intrepid banker has insisted that this guy prove his legitimacy by producing... a power of Anthony.

In order not pay your fund to the wrong person, because the above Thomas Mick??s have been insisting, we have started processing his application, why we request from him a power of Anthony authorizing him to pursue this payment on your behalf. We will effect the ( $7.4m USD )belonging to you to the above account immediately If he is able to come with the power of Anthony authorizing him as prove is from you.
Please forward to use your power of Anthony in return mail to effect the transfer of the fund to above account, Or provide to us an account where you want the money to be transferred to.

Yyyyyyeah.

Not too long ago, the moderation queue for the managers list at the Phoenyx filled up with dozens of backscatter posts. This was, far as I could tell, from a spam campaign that randomized the sending address as well as the recipient address out of its database of target addresses. Most places that reject the spam (like us) do so properly (at SMTP time) rather than causing backscatter. (Actually, because it's a bot itself, the Phoenyx occasionally causes backscatter of a different flavor: when it *accepts* spam because it didn't recognize it as such, and then tries to helpfully autorespond. That's regrettable, but sometimes unavoidable.) But a small percentage of stuff gets accepted from the botnet, then rejected later - sometimes because the filtering is just plain happening in the wrong place (after the SMTP transaction is complete and the botnet has moved on), sometimes because it's a forwarded post and the final recipient is (1) stricter about filtering and (2) too lazy to check to see whether it's a forwarded post, which it should always accept.

We got hit with a more unpleasant flavor of botnet software today, though: one in which the sending addresses are randomized usernames tacked onto a real domain name.
In this case, the real domain name was fudgefactor.org. It's gotten about twenty thousand bounces in the last three hours, which kind of tells you the sheer volume of any given spam campaign (remember: these are *only* the bounces from the small percentage of places who are rejecting after the fact). Early on, they came in fast enough to saturate all the connections on our mail receiver, even though all we're doing is promptly rejecting the connection because it's not a valid fudgefactor.org address.

I'm thinking we should accept a few just so we can get a copy of the spams, so I know on whom to declare open season. I guess I'll just chalk it up to 202.86.221.60 again.

202.86.221.60, for their phishing spam informing me that someone has made "[5] suspicious attemps" [sic] to access my ebay account, from address 202.86.221.60, so would I please verify myself by entering my eBay information into the web page at (wait for it) http ://202.86.221.60/ws/etc., etc.