I haven't been posting a whole lot lately since Lyssa and I got back from Pittsburgh two weekends ago; we'd gone home to finalize the wedding plans that remained, such as getting hold of the marriage license, agreeing on the floral arrangements, and whatnot. Unfortunately, this involved a lot of driving, totalling out in the neighborhood of twelve hours behind the wheel, a bit more if you factor in actually driving to and from Pennsylvania itself.
The first thing we ran into was the wedding license. To save ourselves some time and energy we decided to go to the Greene …
Late on Friday afternoon, Lyssa and I hurriedly packed our bags, jumped into the TARDIS, and set course northward once again for southwestern Pennsylvania and the general direction of home. As I've alluded to a few times, we're getting married in October and thus there are many plans to make, things to get, and arrangements to hammer out. In the early twenty-first century we can do many of these things over the net or on the telephone, but sometimes matters require the up close and personal touch. Things like tasting samples of wedding cake and taking recon photographs of the …
Telerama, one of the first Internet Service Providers in the world has finally jacked the big black, but somehow managed to pull off a miracle as it flatlined. Telerama (referred to as Teletrauma by ex-employees) has dropped offline a couple of times in the past because they couldn't pay their bills, management vanishing, and suchlike. In the net.community they're notorious for some of their business practices (such as outsourcing IT to the country of Brasil and running their tech support entirely off of IRC), which has probably contributed to the ISP's decline in the past nine years or so …
I lost track of Howard after he graduated from CMU in 1999 and moved away from Pittsburgh not long before I left IUP. Hell, I was at his going-away party that night. It seems that he made good, and I'm really proud of him: Employee #40 at Google, a key engineer on the Google File System project, and generally all over the place.
Short, sweet, and to the point because I"ve been out of touch for somewhere in the neighborhood of a week now. Also because I'm tired, jetlagged, and fighting back a nasty headache that seems to want to reduce my forebrain to a 386.
Last Wednesday night, Lyssa and I drove back to Pennsylvania to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with her family. We spent part of Friday with my folks after several misadventures in trying to find an open bank in the North Hills on Black Friday. We parted company briefly on Saturday, and I traveled back to PIttsburgh to …
GNU Screen makes coding so much easier: Run screen to multiplex your shell, then run a text editor in one, a debugger in another, have another shell open to compile.. no more mousing between windows. There isn't much of a learning curve, if you feel comfortable coding under Unix (or using the Cygwin tools for Windows) you'll pick it up in no time.
Sleeping just enough to recoup your strength so you can go out again isn't a good thing. Sleep enough to get all your energy back. Don't pull two or three all-nighters in a row, either. It'll crush …
