grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

I feel like the serenity prayer encompasses important parts of living better than anything else I’ve read. Of course it normally starts with “God,”. I don’t expect shit from this God and take responsibility for my life anyways. Tori and I joked about changing it to “Gods of Kobol” or such to insert a sci-fi reference, but I found it loses no meaning and sits better with my just by remove the reference to god altogether.

you know, fucking running out of labels. I know everyone said some day being a geek would be cool. I don’t know if they entirely meant hip cool, or that geeks run the world now, kinda. All the same, I see a lot of people these days that call themselves geeks. I guess ‘computer geek’ would be more accurate for what people always thought I was, but I don’t take to that well because I don’t think I fit any stereotype of computer geek. Yes, I know a lot of random computer shit, and much of it is to impressive depths if you’re the type that cares about it at all. But I know how to fix a lot of things, some to small degrees, others to much deeper ones. It all depends on how much I needed to spend time on it at the time. I kind of figured that was the significant part of my geekdom. M-w by way of wikipedia says “The word geek is a slang term, noting individuals as “a peculiar or otherwise odd person, especially one who is perceived to be overly intellectual”. I don’t know, I still feel thats accurate, but somehow people seem to feel like they’re geeky if they’re really into something random.

One size never does fit all I suppose, and people are just going to have to not stereotype and care enough to ask if they want to know what I really think.

Finally did go snowshoeing today, been talking about it since coming back from visiting Maine over Christmas vacation. That was awesome. Having the suburban back is definitely super. Actually an awesome weekend, went to a couple good food places in Georgetown, cleaned up the yard, dump run, bought snowshoes. Good times.

I was just thinking about socially annoying people that are given a pass because they actually accomplish good things in the software community. “Sure, he’s a PITA, but he gets shit done.” I wonder if that’s something that mostly not socially inept people think and say.

A couple kids from the house and I saw Be Kind Rewind. It was good, a little different than what I expected, but funny. Anthony hung out at the office today and watched Wizard People Dear Reader while waiting for a >2TB ext3 partition to format (omg). That was pretty humorous, MST3k + Harry Potter.

Couple things on my mind as of late. I recently emailed Maria, “what makes the trend of egomaniacs thinking their nice people? what’s the cause? upbringing? jesus loves you?”. There’s some back story and jokes in the wording of that questions that are probably left off the dump truck. Anthony and I were talking today about people whose personalities change when they get fame (or too many friends) or money, and don’t seem to look back. I suppose it’s a common tale, I feel like it’s a movie plot I’ve seen dozens of times. I feel like I’ve written recently about confidence and arrogance, but all I can find quickly is a rant after watching Into the wild, and some okcupid inspired bits about being surprised at the number of of power hungry people out there in search of fast cars and fast [wo]men.

I have this pet peeve when it comes to people that never say “I’m not sure”, “I don’t think thats right”, etc. I know I’ve written about it and talk about it to the degree that makes it obvious it bothers me. The only people I ever take seriously when offering information are people that I’ve deemed of the caliber that can say these things. The rest of them I almost ritualistically ignore, and then search on the Internet instead later. The problem is that blogs aside, the Internet has these opinions with no framework with which to judge the sanity of the person providing them. I prefer opinions of people, because I usually know those people. Someone who always has an answer and masquerades such opinions as facts is just troubling.

I feel like that’s a sort of arrogance. I have this balancing thought of “Of the 230492293049203942 people in this world, am I the one genius?” Of course the answer is no. It’s not a ‘cry for attention’ or anything, it’s not a thought I ever talk about. Except, well, right now. It’s my way of trying to make sure I’m not being overly arrogant. I think it works alright.

As time goes on, I realize more and more that most people aren’t as cool as society raised me to think they were supposed to be. Not that I ever was convinced that they were cool, but that on the whole I should have no part of interacting with them. There’s this whole stereotype that you’re supposed to look back and see that the cool kids mostly didn’t do anything with their lives. That’s probably true, because I know I do a lot of things simply because they seem fun at the time and don’t get caught up in a lot of the traps that seem to have held down people from my teenage years. All the same though, other peoples lives are not an indicator of my success. Indicators of my success are things like getting the engine running in the surbuban, despite being wholly trounced by already having to rebuild the front clip, including frame welding. Or technical projects like massaging a pile of open source software into a system to make my days easier, like RT.

I haven’t worked on large bandwidth networks much. That is, a large website like Amazon or whatnot. There’s this whisper about F5 BIG-IPs being a big deal in large website land. We have a few at my new job, and I’ve had to mess with them a few times. They’re not all that big of a deal. Now maybe the product is special and handle load balancing better than other things, but from a sysadmin perspective, it’s just some other normal piece of gear. It’s nice I can ssh into it and use tcpdump and whatnot to see what’s going on, but I miss the part where one really needs a lot of special training to configure them. It seems like it would be like the Breezecom/Alvarion training I had, totally corporate training for people who don’t make a hobby of reading network design books on their own time.

Hmm. That paragraph was intended to have something to do with my confidence, and knowing that I am a capable, decent, intelligent type person. Too many distractions I think, I’m off to pick up a take out order now anyways.

The suburban’s running again! David and I drove around for a while, picked up a few supplies, searched for a car wash and hung out with Maria a bit along the way. I’m really glad that I didn’t throw a connecting rod when it was hydro-locked. Took some time to take care of some small things like the license plate, changing the oil again, deciding not to put the old grille “guard” back on (too hard, didn’t do crap in the last accident), etc. Had to hassle some weird renting neighbor to stop parking in my driveway and blocking me in too.

Once all was settled with the plugs and the battery, I spun the engine over for about a minute all together with no kick. I gave it gas eventually and it started coughing a bit. I had to nurse it for about 45 seconds to keep it running, then it idled okay and burned out all the mess. Some MMO in the new oil, the new fuel, and some isoheet in the fuel. It’s all cleaned up now, even washed underneath a bit so I can see if we leak any fluids. Did need  abunch of power steering fluid, I don’t know if it was low before but the power steering made an awful noise before I added some. The brakes are still a little soft, I wonder if it’s the hydro-boost.

I’m really excited about this. Pauzed and I started making plans already for him to come up for a weekend of snowboarding in March. I took Anthony and David out to Orexi for dinner in thanks for helping me out so much over the last week. Tomorrow I’m racking my new server at SeaCCP, so I probably won’t get big adventure in, but soon I’ll have to get up to the mountains, snowboarding at Snoqualmie at the very least. It was more convenient when I worked in Bellevue to bring the truck and night ski, I’ll have to figure out something similar now.

I wince a little as I put my left my left hand in my pocket as it’s all cut up and sprained from wrenching in a tight engine compartment and dropping large portions of the truck on it. I have to laugh at the irony because the other arm has the serious injuries like the crooked pinky from being broken that hurts when its cold and the arm laceration the mostly just itches at odd times, like when drinking.

As I’m laughing I remember the scene in Die Hard 4 after Bruce Willis flies the car into the helicopter and starts laughing maniacally; this is common in the series. I think, I’d laugh too, and suddenly consider that watching too many action movies may have been a big part of my culture, however self initiated.

it turns! yay!

I got a neat little funnel that was really a like a bendy straw with lots of bendys. Well, it seemed perfect, I can stick another funnel in the top of it, and I used it to pour MMO into the cylinders tonight. Didn’t really work that well though. I think there wasn’t enough force for it to really make the uphill slant, plus if you stuck the end tight into the spark plug whole, I think the liquid had a hard time displacing the air, as the air had no place to go. Anyways, I overfilled the cylinders, that is, probably 2-4 tablespoons each. Then I sat for fifteen minutes. Then I sprayed WD40 again. I waited another 15 minutes and turned the engine over by hand and it moved as easy I would expect it to normally, basically requiring a 1/2″ breaker bar, but I didn’t have to use a pipe on the breaker bar or anything. At first I heard a bunch of water come out, then what I assumed was last nights liberal application of WD40. After a minute no liquids could be heard anymore.

Then I reapplied MMO and WD40, waiting a bit and tried turning it over. At first the started seemed to stall like it was stuck and over-drawing (lights dimming more than they should). About the third try it turned just a little. I flicked the ignition a few times and it got a couple good gos, which all sounded normal. After than every turn of the engine went fine, with the engine turning over fairly normally. Or as normally as I could expect, as I’m not that used to listening to an engine turn over without plugs.

I’ll wait until tomorrow night or whenever so the WD40 can evaporate and whatever MMO that got into the cylinders can settle. I’ll turn it over a little more, then put the plugs back in and see if it’ll fire up. Assuming it does, I’ll run it for a few, drive it to the autoparts store and get new plugs and another change of oil, come home and change those. Glad to hear it turn today.

I used to go out to lunch with ‘the guys’ at a previous job. On nice days we’d usually eat outside to watch the girls. I’ve always enjoyed pople watching but with a goal of being amused by the people, rather than anything to do with physical attraction. I’m not sure which is worse really. It was fine though, I try to make lunch into a relaxing period in the middle of my workday and sitting out in nice weather is always good.

I’ve been thinking lately about shoes. I think a lot about shoes. I think I write about them too. I reall a conversation once with my father where we disagreed over hoop earrings. I just don’t get them, while he seemed to think they could be attractive. I still don’t get them, the conversation didn’t go anywhere. I feel similarly about shoes. I’ve talked about heels before, and I think i’ve decided that any motivation for wearing heels is evidence of a character flaw. Wow i’m getting judgemental.

Yup. It’s hydrolocked. Water somehow poured out of cylinder four when I pulled the plug. I picked some Marvel Mystery Oil today, but didn’t realize the plugs are installed at an upward angle so I lack a piece of tube or something with which to insert it. I sprayed liberal amounts of WD40 into all of the cylinders and tomorrow I’ll look for an engine-baster or some tube.

Well it’s back together. My bright idea of hiring a mechanic/welder failed. He never showed up and didn’t answer when I called. So most of the house went out to breakfast and then I got Anthony to give me a ride to Lowes to pick up a welder. Expensive, but nice to have of course. David cut off the mount and we used some heat and a sledge to pound the frame back into shape mostly, then welded some stock to straighten out the mounts home. It wasn’t perfect in the end, but it didn’t matter and the radiator support was happy to be a little off because the mount bolts weren’t fitted, so to speak. The fender bolted back on without much hassle, much less than getting the new bumper on. I got black as it was much cheaper than chrome, Maybe I should have spray painted the grille black. Anthony helped for a bit and Wendell came over for a few hours, it was great having them all helping.

Definitely need a kit of clips for the radiator as support a lot of them didn’t come off the old one in  one piece. Super glad I picked up the bumper parts and just bolted them on rather than trying to straighten the old ones. I did save the hood and that’s about it. It’s awesome having a function hood again, now if only I can still drive the thing…

It looks like the tarp failed and some point and the engine filled with water. Great. I changed the oil and I’m charging the battery overnight and hopefully tomorrow the truck will start up fine tomorrow. In retrospect, it was all a pain in the ass. Not having a vehicle sucks and I’m going to go on some kind of murderous spree if there’s engine problems from all of this.

I made a techblog post about shmoocon labs last night. It turned out reasonably sane for being trashed at the time. I guess I’ve got a lot of experience at writing while drunk at this point. Mechanic that was supposed to come this morning is MIA. Good thing I magically got the day off I guess, as otherwise I would have missed him if I had to go to work. I took Shuttle Express on Mattw’s recommendation to the airport on my way out of town, and it was pretty slick. Online reservations and all that, but I still feel better about supporting mass transit so I took the bus home. On the way out I needed to leave for the airport before the 11 started running and that night owl route is just too confusing.

Anyways. Shmoocon is a lot of fun. I definitely like that its small enough to still feel like it’s knit full of good people but big enough to basically take over a hotel. When a few of us wandered to another hotel Saturday to mess around we ran into like four groups of people we had been drinking with earlier, so it’s a lot of fun seeing people you know. Since I tend not to make friends with random people that I don’t have anything to say to, labs is a great opportunity to work with people and thus get to know them. I’m not particularly a fan socially of the hacker-raver scene which can limit how much I socialize with this crowd, so I value finding these sorts of people. Plus cons can be a little boring for me when I don’t have anything to do. I’m a big doer, so I love Shmoocon because I get to help Ken run the network. People generally thank me for doing such things, but it’s really my nature. I just prefer to be doing something. Besides, you learn a lot from deploying a network on the fly like that if you take responsibility and get involved, it’s just hard to get involved sometimes. Doubly so when you’re dealing with security people who don’t want to give out passwords and stuff.

No word from mechanic, so the house and I are going to go get some grub methinks.