periodic personal update

By anders pearson 25 Aug 2007

I’m in the office now on a Saturday enjoying the free air conditioning and functioning ceiling, which, at the moment, my apartment is lacking. I don’t have anything else pressing to do at the moment so I figured I would take this opportunity to post an all too rare update on the miscellaneous stuff going on in my life for those of you that I’m not in frequent contact with.

For the most part, it’s been pretty quiet here. I work a lot, paint and draw obsessively (I think there should be enough material for a Volume 2 soon, in the meantime, it usually ends up on flickr), and occasionally go out for beers, movies, or concerts with my friends. I’ve even been running semi-regularly.

I currently have two plants which, by some miracle, I haven’t managed to kill yet with my neglect.

In July, a couple coworkers and I went skydiving. I can not possibly recommend it highly enough if you’ve never done it. I liked it for a very different reason than I expected. When you jump out of the plane, there’s about a minute of free fall which is pretty exhilarating. You don’t know which way is up for a few seconds, then you’re assaulted by 120mph wind and deafening noise. Your brain sort of shuts off because it can’t handle the intensity of the sensations which it has absolutely nothing in memory to compare to. I actually kind of forgot how to breathe during free fall and had to consciously remind myself. That was fun in its way, but I’m not an adrenaline junky type so it wasn’t the big draw for me. When your chute opens, you’re suddenly thrown into a different universe. In a second or two, you go from free fall to absolute stillness and dead silence. You’re far enough up that you have no sensation of movement at all and you can see for hundreds of miles to the horizon in all directions. You realize that there’s basically no other solid matter anywhere within thousands of feet of you in any direction. It’s an amazing sense of serenity and calm more powerful than anything I’ve ever experienced with yoga or meditation.

One thing I don’t recommend is getting an ear infection. I was pretty much knocked out of commission last week with strep throat that turned into an ear infection. The strep was quite pleasant in comparison. The ear infection was several days of continuous, unrelenting, maddening pain. Pain killers seemed to have no effect. If you’ve never had one, it’s basically like jabbing a pencil into your ear, sharp end first, then giving it a little tap with a ball peen hammer about once a second. For days. Antibiotics eventually were brought in and made short work of the infection, but it’s not an experience I would ever like to repeat.

On the technical front, I’ve been continuing my climb up the Erlang learning curve. The recently published book by Joe Armstrong has been a big help. I’m particularly smitten with Mnesia at the moment and I also see the OTP framework being very useful to me in the future. I’ve prototyped some simple microapps with Erlang and Mnesia and am scheming on how I can sneak some of it into work.

Speaking of work, we’ve been up to some cool stuff. I spent a couple weeks converting our whole (modest) server infrastructure to virtual servers running on Xen. So far it’s gone really smoothly and it should make things even more reliable and flexible in the future. I’m really impressed with Xen. We evaluated VMWare as well and it has some advantages, but for our situation, we found Xen to be more than adequate performance-wise and much simpler to deal with (I’m vastly more comfortable with arcane Unix commands than point and click stuff. YMMV).

We also recently got a nice grant from NIMH for a very worthwhile HIV prevention project. Sadly, I don’t think most of the grant money is going directly into my salary. We’ve got more cool projects in development too.

I’ve also been psyched that we recently hired a new programmer to help out with our general world domination plans. She’s been kicking ass and taking names, rapidly getting up to speed with the Python and TurboGears stuff we use, and she’s an industrial fan to boot. I expect the orbital laser to be operational very soon.

With that addition, we’re up to four desktop Linux users in the office now (all Ubuntu) with some others experimenting, which is a nice change from two years ago when it was just me.

Finally, it appears that the Japanese convenience store in my neighborhood is again carrying Choco Monaka Jumbo ice cream bars after months of being out of stock. I was beginning to panic.