This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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Too Many Stairs

I woke up this morning feeling not too great. First of all, something I ate yesterday obviously wasn’t too happy with me. Second, I think the air mattress I sleep on has lost just a bit too much air without me repumping it, so I am all sore. My back hurts and my chest hurts. But both only on the right top side. Plus there is the whole thing about everybody deciding to start doing everything an hour earlier starting this week. So I need to start aiming at being at work at 16 UTC instead of 17 UTC. Which is a pain. (Of course, any of those are better than the 12 or 13 UTC which was common at the last job…)

I drag myself out of bed, on track for 17 UTC, not 16 UTC and manage to get to work. A bit late, but not so much anyone would really care. Things are pretty loose here as long as you get done what you are supposed to get done.

In any case, there is a 18 UTC weekly staff meeting (used to be 19 UTC damn it). I am at work in plenty of time for that. I get coffee. I get settled. Then a few minutes before hand I head up to the meeting on the 10th floor of this building. The rest of the folks weren’t heading up quite yet, but I figured I’d get up there a couple minutes early.

There is another meeting in the room. I think nothing of it, I am early. But a few minutes go by and they do not leave, and the rest of my team doesn’t show up. A couple more minutes and someone from the meeting that is going on asks if I have a meeting scheduled and tells me he has that room booked for the next hour. WTF?

I go back down to my office on the 5th floor to double check the meeting request. Yup. 10th floor. And everybody is gone. Not one person from my group left in their offices.

I go back up to the 10th and check other conference rooms. Then the 9th, then the 8th, then the 7th, then the 6th, then the conference rooms on the 5th floor. Still nothing. I run into one other person from my group who has also gotten lost. We call a couple cell phones. Voice mail. We email one person in the group with a blackberry. Nothing. So I start looking at more conference rooms. 4th. 3rd. 2nd. 1st. Then back up again. 2nd. 3rd. 4th. 5th. 6th. 7th. 8th. 9th. 10th. Still nothing.

I am about to give up when I realize the 10th floor is not the top floor. I decide to make one last effort and go to the 11th floor. And there they are. I emailed the other lost person from my phone to let him know I had found the meeting.

Then I joined the meeting, 20 minutes late, and pretty tired from not feeling great to begin with and now having gone up and down the stairs multiple times. (Not to mention the various additional elevator trips I also took but did not enumerate… the ups and downs above were just the ones I did by stairs… OK, I mentioned it…)

It was promised that next week the meeting reuqest would be updated to reflect the actual room the meeting would be in.

I hope so. I’m not in good enough shape to go running up and down ten stories of steps several times just to find a meeting!

I want a nap now.

Broken (and Fixed) Reatta

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Since Brandy never did, I figured I’d go ahead and post about her car. Well, one of them. You see, Brandy has a Nissan that she drives every day (and hates). But in the garage she keeps and only very rarely drives, a Buick Reatta, which she loves. There were less than 22 thousand of them ever made, and it is getting to be a decently old car. (And hers was one of the ones with the touchscreen computer, of which they made less than 12 thousand.) The resale price of these cars has bottomed out and is actually starting to go up again as they start becoming collectables. Brandy hopes to keep it until someday we are actually able to do a full restoration and make it a nice classic car. (Something I wish I could have done with my 1976 Dodge Colt, but alas, it is long gone…)

Since we moved to the Palm Bay house, the Reatta never left the garage. It needed a new battery, some repairs to one of the seats, and some other things. Last month it was time. Brandy took the Reatta to the local Buick dealer. They did the work they were supposed to do. Then they called her and said it was ready to pick up. She said she would pick it up the enxt day. The next morning, before she came in, she got another call from the Buick dealer. Overnight her car had been broken into in the dealer’s parking lot. The lock was smashed and removed and then inside the car whoever it was had completely ripped apart the center console. Lovely.

The first call to the insurance company… Insurance company felt this was all the dealer’s fault and they should pay everything… however, they said that if a claim was made, they would most likely just declare the car totaled due to the age and the fact that replacement parts are no longer made and are in many cases very hard to find (particularly for that center console). This was very upsetting. Losing the car was not desired. Brandy had carted this thing around for many many years and was very attached to it. At first the dealer said they absolutely would not be responsible. (Oh, and by the way, there were not even any security cameras pointing at the lot… what’s up with that?) A few calls up the management chain though fixed that and they decided they would after all handle the repairs due to the break in. Well… as best they could… they couldn’t replace anything for which no replacement parts were available.

So, next question… was there anything missing? The pattern of the break in matched someone scrounging for parts, not someone looking to steal the car itself, or grabbing valuables from inside the car. When they did the complete examination though, nothing was missing. The biggest difficulty was the center console though. It was pretty beat up and torn, but that is one of the parts that there are no replacments for absent scrounging through junkyards and such.

In the end though, they were able to patch it up relatively well, replace the lock, etc.

Brandy picked up the car on Friday. The immediate things needed for it to be drivaable are all done. A bunch more would still need to happen to do the whole full resoration thing, but that wasn’t the goal quite yet. We just wanted it out of the garage and ready to drive and such. The Nissan will not be coming to the West Coast, only the Buick will be. The center console is a little worse from the experience, but not as bad as it initially looked and the lock and such has been replaced properly, and the intial things Brandy had taken the car in for in the first place are also all done.

And so yet another adventure on the way to the move…

Fun.

Excellent Content Management System

Oops.

The Spider of Doom
(The Daily WTF, Alex Papadimoulis)

Josh was called in to investigate and noticed that one particularly troublesome external IP had gone in and deleted *all* of the content on the system. The IP didn’t belong to some overseas hacker bent on destroying helpful government information. It resolved to googlebot.com, Google’s very own web crawling spider. Whoops.

(via Digg)

Dumbasses.

Fixing It More

Adding in a couple of loops to have it be a bit more like what we actually listend to at dinner. This should be pretty much exactly that, except it ends after three loops as opposed to going on for hours:

And then another looping both voices at their full lengths rather than clipping at the end of the first loop:

[Edit 3/27/2006: I included that second one only because Amy said she liked it.]

The Corrected Beat

When I woke up they told me I had completely messed it up. They made me sad.

So here is EXACTLY the track as it was while we were eating dinner yesterday.

Although it sounded better then cause it was looped and the echo carried over into the next loop, which it does not here. But whatever. Here it is exact and untouched. When I’d added a manual couple of loops and a fade at the end I’d also turned on a third vocal track which turns out was unwanted. Pooh.

The Beat

Amy does much better at this than I do.

Pandora

Pretty cool.

Can you help me discover more music that I’ll like?

Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.

We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.

Sleepy Groceries

After a long day of travel, there was no waiting for parents to finish grocery shopping.

Brandy Over PacMed

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I noticed on the flight tracking online that Brandy and Amy’s plane was about to pass over head. So I ran outside to the parking lot with my camera phone, and there they were. It was a camera phone, so you can’t tell, but I could see the Delta markings and such, so I knew it was them. I took several shots, but this one as they were about to fly into the sun and the building in view was the coolest I think. (You can actually see the plane better in a couple of the others, but in this it looks like they are about to be devoured by a black hole, so I liked it damn it!)

They should be on the ground by now. I expect a call from them any second. I have a meeting to go to, then I’ll be picking them up. Yea!!

Don’t Shoot the Puppy

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(via Boing Boing)

It took awhile and a lot of work, but I finished all the levels and won the game. Woo!