PennGwyn's ProGress

My Visual DNA

2007-04-23T09:13:58Z

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

Consonance 2007 photos

2007-03-15T02:00:37Z

http://www.flickr.com/photos/83246852@N00/sets/72157594580086937/

Things I Know and You Might Not Want To

2007-03-04T07:16:08Z

It turns out that there's no liquid lock in humans: It is fairly easy to drink and urinate at the same time.

Bechtel

2006-12-11T21:33:59Z

Why is it that Bechtel can get out of Iraq, and the U.S. military can't?

Oh wait, I guess it's because they're "cut and run" Capitalists....

Pirates versus Ninjas

2006-12-11T21:30:50Z

Frank Sinatra ("That's Life") has never been a ninja.

sing me a song, you're the Piano Man...

2006-08-03T18:45:00Z

This is a twist on the Letter Meme. Instead of coming up with ten items for a certain letter, you come up with five song titles for a certain letter and explain why you picked them. If interested then leave a comment. I'll give you a letter. You post this blurb in your journal along with your list.

</strong></a>cflute posted this, and I asked for a letter, so she offered me 'O'.

1. Oh Canada -- of course, eh? I wish the government would stop mucking with the lyrics.

2. Ooooooklahoma! -- "Mendocino, where the smoke wafts down toward the sea...."

3. One Tin Soldier Rides Away, The Original Cast -- theme from the movie "Billy Jack". First song I ever learned completely off the radio ("She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" is not the complete song....)

4. Oranges and Lemons -- London church bells chime the hour

5. Once I Built a Railroad -- now it's done!

Anybody who'd like me to give them a letter, feel free to comment. One to a customer, and I'll limit it to one iteration of each letter in the western alphabet.

penngwyn @ 2006-07-06T15:38:00

2006-07-06T22:38:38Z

You scored as Neo, the "One". Neo is the computer hacker-turned-Messiah of the Matrix. He leads a small group of human rebels against the technology that controls them. Neo doubts his ability to lead but doesn't want to disappoint his friends. His goal is for a world where all men know the Truth and are free from the bonds of the Matrix.

</td>

Neo, the "One"

79%

Indiana Jones

75%

Batman, the Dark Knight

67%

Captain Jack Sparrow

63%

The Amazing Spider-Man

63%

The Terminator

58%

William Wallace

54%

Lara Croft

54%

Maximus

50%

El Zorro

46%

James Bond, Agent 007

42%

Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0
created with QuizFarm.com

Celestial Choir Meme

2006-06-01T20:10:18Z

Find your Celestial Choir

gakked from capplor

Visitor map meme

2006-05-10T19:49:02Z

Track Your Visitors on a Map!

Snow job == new White House Press Secretary

2006-04-25T19:14:02Z

'Nuff said.

Hard way to lose 12 pounds FAST

2006-04-21T09:43:53Z

Saturday morning, I was a little dehydrated. It happens sometimes, nothing to worry about. Took my normal morning insulin shot, went and did tai chi for 90 minutes, and headed down to the chinese seafood buffet we had recently discovered. I didn't go quite as hog wild this week as last week. (That's "Crazy Buffet", on El Camino, in Sunnyvale....)

At 7pm, my blood sugar was about 150. That's high for normal folks, but not bad for me. It had come down 50 points in the previous 3 hours, which was good.

At 8:30pm, I started feeling bloated and unfocussed abdominal pain, and my blood sugar was 97. That's excellent -- but I don't generally drop that fast. Time to eat something!

Half a cracker and a glass of milk, and the vomitting started, soon followed by diarrhea. Sucked on a hard candy to stabilize sugar -- it took five(!) finger-sticks to get enough blood for a reading (103).

My partner took me over to Kaiser Santa Clara ER. Did EKG and electrolytes to make sure there was no cardiac involvement (whew!). BP 96/45 -- I'm on meds for high BP, but hadn't taken them that day, and looks like a lucky thing. They ran in two liters of fluid, with a bit of anti-vomit something and a smidge of morphine, and sent me home after some hours with a diagnosis of gastroenteritis and dehydration.

So I'm sleeping a lot, sipping rehydration formula, and gradually reintroducing solid food. And that's why I haven't gotten online *at all* in a couple of days.

penngwyn @ 2006-03-10T16:37:00

2006-03-11T00:37:45Z

I would have an abortion. The circumstances under which I would, might, have, or might have chosen to have an abortion are nobody's business but mine and those I choose to tell. They are not the business of any government. I do not accept the proposition that either the state or my sexual partner(s) should have any say over when and if I choose to bear a child. I do not accept any sovereignty over my body and my reproductive organs but my own. If faced with the situation, I will do everything feasible to help other women and girls I know exercise their rights to safely terminate a pregnancy if they so choose. When a state treats women and girls as chattel, it is they that commit a crime.

**

If you agree, please place the preceding paragraph in your journal. Then use the following link to send a message to South Dakota's governor: Planned Parenthood's take action page. And thanks.

Not like it could actually happen to me, any more than it could happen to most of the politicians playing these games with women's lives.

Conversation at Dinner

2006-03-04T20:42:35Z

Thursday night, Pasta Pomodoro in Milpitas, (some of the) Consonance 2006 concom and (some of the) guests of honor....

Chris Conway: I'm still pretty jet-lagged, and feel like a zombie.

Some Concommer: As long as you don't eat our brains.

Another Concommer: And if you need anything, there's a WalMart(*) right over there.

Me: With plenty of brains for the taking.

* - Might have said Walgreen's, actually.

Spurious George

2005-12-21T07:01:05Z

I've been reflecting on George's rather lame attempts to justify illegal domestic surveillance, and I've come up with a nice little meme to sum it up:

George W. Bush is the president that Richard Nixon would have been if The Press hadn't been so unsympathetic to him.

[Nicely captures not only George's imperial paranoia, but also the way the DC press corps has benn giving him a free ride for five years.)

Meme going around?

2005-11-28T09:11:44Z

I got this from </a></b></a>

Glucosamine Update

2005-11-24T10:41:02Z

Well, it has been 10 days now. The pain in my left hip joint is at least 80% better. My knees are about 50% better generally.

So, I think it's reasonable to step up to 750 mg/day and see if that further improves things. That's still only HALF the dose many web sites discuss, so side-effects shouldn't be an issue.

Glucosamine

2005-11-15T18:43:45Z

This past weekend, I've added glucosamine (HCl) to the pills I take every day, in hopes that it will make a dent in the joint pain I've been having since mid-September. (Well, it has come and gone for *years*; it has just be constant and excruciating since September....)

I'm taking 375mg, once a day, which is about a quarter of what most sites seem to assume. Already the pain in my left hip joint is *gone* and my knees seem to be doing noticably better -- I may have to increase the dosage for complete relief there.

I'm reluctant to go to a larger dose, though, for a couple of reasons. One is the chance that it might have negative impact on my diabetes, although it appears that a study by the Air Force was unable to find any evidence for that. Another is that I just generally hate pumping chemicals into my body without a much fuller understanding of what they do (and HOW) than I have yet for glucosamine.

Stay tuned.

The O'Reilly Fictor

2005-10-15T21:53:13Z

English provides various excellent words for someone who, like Bill O'Reilly, airs opinions and fantasies. "Journalist" is not among them.

Long day at work

2005-10-15T21:50:41Z

So Friday I go in at 6am (8am is normal) to supervise cutover of power to a couple of critical switches. They've got multiple power supplies, and so will stay up as long as only one loses power at a time. My job is to make sure the electricians don't just unplug everything from the old circuit before they start connecting to the new.

It turns out that the circuit that the switches are on is not, after all, one of the three ciruits to be cut over. I really didn't have to be there early after all. So I get an early start on the day's work, at time and a half.

At our group meeting, I'm assigned to configure a couple of network ports for printers in one of the new buildings, and I'm told who to contact to get the details. I call him up and he gives me details of two printer ports to be configured. As I do it, I realize that although the switch is the right model, it's in a different building from what was mentioned in the meeting. I raise this question, and he tells me he hasn't done anything with *that* building in a couple of weeks. I put it down to a typo.

The meeting I had scheduled from 3:30 to 5pm runs real short, and it looks like I can go home around 4. Oops, left something in my office that I'll need over the weekend. As I arrive back at my office, my cell phone goes off. The boss confirms that the two printer ports are supposed to be in the building we talked about, and they're in an office that will be opne and busy on Saturday; I *must* get them done before I go home. I find out which office, and go see it to get the actual jack number and track them to the switch ports.

Then back to my office to connect to the switch and configure the ports. Uh oh, I can't establish a session to the switch! You know, I can't seem to get to much else on the network, either. Call the boss -- she can't either, so it's not just my machine.

Fire up the sniffer. There's plenty of traffic; in fact, it looks like a couple of Internet clients are SYN-flooding one of out systems. Block them at the perimeter -- still no joy, now it looks like some internal machines are generating a lot of traffic....

About two years ago, we were trying to track down some instability in the network. One early theory was that spanning-tree was constantly reconverging the network unnecessarily. The vendor had us try disabling spanning-tree in hopes that would resolve the issue. (It didn't.) Six months later, a hardware failure in a switch mimicked a network loop, and the resulting broadcast storms took down one of our larger VLANs. So we re-enabled spanning-tree and removed the failed equipment.

Well, it turns out that we missed re-enabling spanning-tree on our alrgest and most crucial VLAN. And apparently someone had plugged in something they shouldn't, creating a loop. Over the next four hours, I was able to use another VLAN to connect to every switch on the network and enable spanning-tree on that VLAN, and somewhere in the middle of that process, the network returned to normal.

So then I finally configured the two printer ports, wrote up my timesheet for a 14-hour work day, and finally went home.

Fall term is under way!

2005-09-26T22:23:24Z

It kept me pretty busy, but everything was ready for the start of Fall term.

Last minute emergencies:

1. The WAN switch at DeAnza needed a reboot last night, and held the ATM backbone hostage until it got one.

2. One of the switches in the Geology area at Foothill decided that learning MAC addresses was work it was no longer willing or able to perform. I've brought in a temporary while arranging a permanent replacement.

I'm Number One!

2005-08-31T22:29:29Z

You are the First Doctor: Irascible, brusque, and
occasionally condescending and rude. You do not
suffer fools gladly, nor do you harbor any
false modesty about your capabilities. You have
a sharp tongue, though you're first-class
company when you're in a good mood.

Which Incarnation of the Doctor Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

penngwyn @ 2005-08-24T13:47:00

2005-08-24T20:48:54Z

The Random Question Meme!

An array of completely random questions about my friends!

Do you envy dampscribbler's job?: No.
decharles: ninja, pirate, monkey, or robot?: Ninja!
What's the biggest difference between troymccluresf and rowanf?: Gender, probably.
Will moonfroggy ever amount to anything?: Um, *I* think she already has.
Who would make a better window-washer, flower_cat or jonsinger?: jonsinger, definitely.
Would you sooner donate a kidney to roadnotes or davidlevine?: roadnotes, who would then remember who I am.
What does nancylebov look for in a significant other?: Complexity, I think. Intellectual stimulation and surprise, at least.
What is ssprince's favorite meal?: No idea.
Why shouldn't redbird and kennita be a couple?: Long distance relationships are too much stress.
Is amelia_g hiding under your bed right now?: I wish!

This is by heptadecagram. You can find your own completely random questions here.

Do you feel enlightened now?

Not a Lesbian Love Goddess? Oh well....

2005-08-24T19:03:43Z

Not My Soulmate!
Congratulations! You scored 58!

You're hip, cool, fun, and sooo not my type. This is probably for the best because you would probably find me extremely boring. Thanks for taking the test, and good luck in love!

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 99% on Goddess points

Link: The Lesbian Love Goddess Test written by Link36587 on OkCupid Free Online Dating

What Kind of Anarchist Am I?

2005-08-23T19:10:33Z

You scored as Anarcha-Feminist. Anarcha-feminists put a strong emphasis on the importance of patriachy, arguing that all forms of hierachy can be traced back to man's domination over woman. Although associated with the 1960s, the movement has its roots in the theories of Emma Goldman and Voltarine DeCleyre.

</td>

Anarcha-Feminist

75%

Anarcho-Communist

70%

Anarcho-Primitivist

45%

Christian Anarchist

40%

Anarcho-Syndicalist

30%

Anarcho-Capitalist

20%

What kind of Anarchist are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Round Table Pizza driver

2005-08-22T07:10:05Z

So I'm coming up Grant Rd this evening from Foothill Expressway. It's signed 25mph, and I'm actually tooling along at 27-28 on the Prius's electrics.

This pickup truck comes right up on my rear bumper, obviously hoping I'll psychically realize that he thinks the speed limit signs are wrong, at least about the "enforced by radar" part.

Glancing in my rear-view, I realize that one hand is holding a cell phone to his ear, and the other keeps gesticulating around the cab and then lunging back to the steering wheel for a few seconds. This is getting scary....

The road widens, the speed limit goes up to 35, I speed up to about that and he roars around to pass me on the right. And I see that it's a Round Table Pizza delivery vehicle, probably from their location in the plaza on El Camino at Grant.

I don't think I should orcer from them any more.

(cross-posted to mountain_view)