Casual Times at Workplace High

Job satisfaction is what people feel right before they die from stress-related problems. - Wally

I broke my usual schedule of heading to the office every other Mon/Tue to head down for a team event where we spent the afternoon just having fun together. I normally wear slacks and a button-up to the office and have always been clean shaven. In fact, I think the entire time I've worked there I have never "dressed down." But for the team event we were going hiking so I wore a t-shirt, hoodie and jeans. (Or did I mention I started wearing jeans? Mrs.Chaos has been pressuring me for years to give up my jean boycott and I have finally given in with the acceptance that dads wear jeans.)

I stopped shaving for a week because Mrs.Chaos said, "do you remember how cute you were when we first met and you had your beard?" I showed up to the team event dressed entirely casually with my week of scruff and got a multiple compliments. One of the young ladies on my team pulled me aside, "Like - totally don't take this the wrong way - but you're always dressed so formal. With your hoodie and jeans and your scruff, you totally look like a Brogrammer. I mean - you are really good looking."

I went straight to HR over the sexual harassment! I mean! Sheesh!

Summer Flowers

The earth laughs in flowers. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we got the house a couple of years ago just had them put a ton of lantana everywhere. It's pretty in the summer, but when winter rolls around it all turns into dead plants, the yard doesn't look so nice. I have to cleanup all the dead lantana leaves and trim back all the bushes. It's not that nice.

When we choose to put in the lantana it was a temporary thing - but few things can last as long as a temporary solution. Over the last weekend we got four rose bushes and I put my back into it! Give it a few months and it'll be beautiful.

Automation is Automation

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. - Bill Gates

I've got all of my music and movies and TV shows out on a shared drive on my Drobo. I've got this great script I wrote a little bit ago that scans across those drives and automatically adds it into iTunes on the home server. So the theory is that I can run Handbrake on my DVD on any machine, drop the MP4s onto the shared drive, and viola - they appear in iTunes. This command is the magic:

osascript -e "tell application \"iTunes\" to add POSIX file \"${VID_FILEPATH}\""

We're struggling with home Internet again, because this is my life, and AT&T came by to check things out. Whenever AT&T comes back I revert my home network into a standard configuration. Normally I have the AT&T supplied device just bridging the connection over to my much better AirPort Extreme. The challenge is that the AT&T response to this is, "Oh, you're running a non-standard configuration. Obviously the fact that our PPPoE server is dropping your connection is caused by this! It has nothing to do with our servers."

How are these two things related?

iTunes does some sort of magic where it checks if it has already added the file, but it is not doing this through a POSIX path, it is instead doing this through HFS+ magical references that I don't understand. Here is what I do understand: when the AFP mount goes away (because I switched my network back to standard mode) and then comes back, even though the POSIX filepath doesn't change, the HFS+ reference does. And iTunes re-adds.

Switching my home network back to standard mode on Friday was the first time my server had lost connection with Drobo since I started running the script months ago. I have good uptime! Once I switched the network back to normal and ChaosServer reconnected to Drobo - 100% of my content duplicated.

So I solved it by having it add all the POSIX paths to a text file and then checking the text file before loading it. Not the most elegant thing, but it's working.

It's kind of our friends fault

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. - Walt Disney

For countless years one of my friends went to Disneyland for her birthday. The annual trip in November became know as Birthdayland. With the annual trip we learned to maximum the Fast Pass system. In fact, we realized that Disneyland was really just a fluid dynamics problem. With multiple scientists in the group, solving simple partial differential equation just meant have six fast passes at once

Many of my friends have had annual passes. Then one year MsChaos and I got annual passes. The problem with annual passes is that once you have one, every day you are not at Disneyland, you are losing money! So we went a lot that year.

We still have a lot of friends with annuals passes who still lose money ever day that they aren't at Disney and so we still get a ton of invites. Got a free weekend, why not go to Disneyland.

All this Disney got a little bit infective. I mean, I did propose at Disneyworld. Which caused Disney-themed wedding gifts. MrsChaos did walk down the aisle to "When You Wish Upon a Star." So even though I look at my friends and think, "they are way more Disney nerds then I am," I guess I shouldn't be surprised when I get a present from my dad with the first photo of Mini-Chaos inside a Disney frame.

When you wish upon a star and all...