hang in there, this is a long one. and i don't even know if it's going to be funny.

so i lost my cell phone this weekend. it is an unfortunate time, as my at&t contract has about 6 weeks left on it, and the iTMS phones aren't out yet. but, my current phone wasn't bluetooth (at&t sent it for free when they were merging with cingular, since the t68i didn't work on cingular's network) so it would be nice to get a bluetooth phone like my friends joe and robert. it would almost be like 2000 again, us with the same phones! although i don't think we'd hit these phones out of each other's hand, the battery popping out like we used to do with our old sanyos (which are still the best cell phone i have used).

anyway, t-mobile no longer has the sony ericsson (hi janice! i'll buy a nokia when they make a small bluetooth phone with a normal keypad layout), and cingular has some ulgy t637 or something. so i went down to coolidge corner yesterday. i kind of love doing cell phone stuff there, because there 4 cell phone places within like 300 feet, so you can say "well if you won't help me, maybe someone across the street at t-mobile, or next door at nextel (i bluff in this case) will!"

also, phil had offered to loan me his at&t phone. while it isn't a long term solution as it doesn't have bluetooth, it gives me a little more leverage power with the drivelling wireless telco masses.

i set out with the following goals, listed here in descending order of importance:

1. getting a bluetooth phone that does not rival the former soviet union in size
2. giving at&t as little money as possible
3. giving t-mobile as little money as possible
4. some other things that i can't remember
5. keeping my number

i had a few options at my disposal:

1. get a new at&t phone and sim card, and wait out my current contract
2. get a new phone and sim card at t-mobile, keeping my number but breaking my current contract
3. get a new phone, sim card, and number at t-mobile, and keep paying the rest of my at&t bill
4. get a phone at nextel, so i could annoy all my friends with that beeping noise

at some point phil had been able to decrease his at&t plan without a new contract, although increasing his plan required a new contract. i don't understand why they are ok with getting less money but not more, but maybe that's why i'm not bankrupt or under acquisition.

so the most likely thing is #3 above, in addition to changing my at&t plan to the lowest allowable by arbitrary corporate policy.

the first stop was the at&t wireless store, to find out how much switching to t-mobile before my contract was up was going to cost me. apparently it was two or three times the amount i had left in my contract, and that would violate importance #2. i couldn't just pay the rest of my contract, or leave it open without a phone number, and they didn't have any sim cards for at&t (but i could sign up for a new cingular contract no problem!) so the only option left was #3. i headed to t-mobile.

there are times that i wish tycho taught creative ranting class, because i lack the ability to express my shock at the size of the motorola v600. the best way to describe it is to say that it is two sony ericsson phones, attached by a breakable hinge. were my friends up for hanging out with me, risking a broken foot if the phone should happen to slip out of my hands? no way.

so i told the t-mobile guy what i wanted, and asked what happened to the sony ericssons. he then tried to sell me all the phones that i didn't want, claiming that phones supported bluetooth when they didn't, etc. etc. i asked if i stole one from my friend, would i be able to get a sim card for it from him. he said definitely, just bring it in and i'll be set up in no time.

i was hungry, so i went over to quizno's for a classic italian with no tomatoes. the guy working there sliced the bread, put the dressing on, then reached for a two-handed mound of the vile vegetable.

my current plan was to just buy an unlocked phone from sony ericsson, get an at&t sim card and then switch when my contract expires. so i call at&t up to find out when my contract ends, and she says it ended on march 6, 2004! i asked when the contract began, and she said march 16 2004. i was not quite sure what to say, but it should be obvious now why at&t have so many financial problems. then she asked if i could hold for a minute, and when she came back she said yeah, i wasn't under contract anymore.

it would have been nice to know that a year ago, when i signed up for a new contract, but it's ok. these are the sort of cosmic rewards that make modern life so... rewarding.

i just talked to another at&t support person, and they confirmed this, so i am off to the t-mobile store with phil's old phone in hand, to change the world.

so i was trying to get at&t to put in writing that my contract is expired, so that i have something to show for myself when they charge me the early cancellation fee. the person on the phone said to go to the store, the person at the store said to call, the next person on the phone could not fathom that i would have any problem, and noted that my contract was up in the account. there's nothing more i can do; it is fate at this point.

i got a new sim card with t-mobile. no hassle, and no deposit. he was going to charge me like $20 for the sim card, but my cc payment hasn't gone through yet so it got denied. "don't worry about it," he said. good times indeed.

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today i was expecting two deliveries: my phone, and replacement disks for my failing mds drives. i was woken up by the ups guy with my phone, but no drives yet. the tracking page claims (again) "Customer not available or Business closed." what this really means is "your stairs are too icy for me, even though the ups guy had no problem two hours ago."

shovel isn't quite the right word. i was out there with a hammer and a chisel.

today i found this review of the k700i. i think i agree with just about everything there, but why can't i remember to look these things up before i get stuff? i think this phone's ui (both visual and navigational) is the best i've seen or used. it's about time!

tonight i moved my 5 lustre boxes to (sles 9) 2.6. they hang for like 5 minutes when udev starts, but i can do io on lustre which is an improvement over the last time i tried this.

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in my dream last night i think i lost like 6 teeth. one was like some sort of reptile or bird claw, one was like a charred piece of wood from a fire, but the rest were normal teeth. i blame the superbowl ad with refrigerator perry in it.

or maybe it was spending 7 hours at the beanpot last night fantasizing about dipping double stuffed oreos in a tub of frosting.

which was caused by shona bringing over frosting for cupcakes, seeing the dippin' strips ad and thinking the white dip was frosting, and having some leftover pizzas in the fridge.

i think bt was in the dream too, doing some sort of modelling. he was really into it.

i can't explain that one so easily.

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i met the husband who owns the house last night. he was fixing my "front" door (it's really on the back of the house, although being on a corner it feels like the side), as it wouldn't open or close. it does now!

since i live by myself, i decided to remove all the doors in my apartment (information wants to be free, right?). During the cold spell the other week, i needed firewood at 3 in the morning (new phone books didn't arrive until yesterday), so i threw the doors in the fire.

now my friends won't come over because there's no door on the bathroom. i didn't know they were so uptight.

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last year i listed a summary of the the top 15 artists in my iTunes Library. here is this year's collection:

total for all artists: 16.7 days (+6.7 days over last year)

if i ever have a band it will be named the 7/11 commission.

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This is the cover for my band's self-titled debut album, featuring the hit singles Bust-ah Your Brainz and Brain Fevah.

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from some web page it seemed debian/ubuntu had some awesome tool for creating initrds for mounting root over nfs with kernels that don't support nfsroot. see, we are trying to get our test clusters and customers to use the binary kernels we release instead of everyone building their own kernels, because building kernels is not easy. also, it makes sense that if one customer has some problem with our kernels that another customer may have that same problem.

but i don't ues these kernels at home, since i have / on nfs (it makes switching distros on nodes to test things a lot easier, although some things are more difficult). really the goal is to use lustre for /, but i am still taking baby steps here. and how hard could it be to have my initrd mount / from nfs?

so anyway, ubuntu had this tool and i figured it'd be easier to install it on a test node than to build rpms or whatever. the ubuntu install went fine, aside from the fact that it let me install without setting a root password or creating a user account (my user accounts are done with ldap), and that it overwrote my netbooting mbr with its own grubby grub.

fortunately, i have installed linux before so i have a usb flash drive that knows how to boot from the network so i can fix my mbr. unfortunately, the sles kernel i have hangs during boot with scsi errors if i leave the usb key in. so i have to wait for the nic to initialize and the kernel to start loading, but pull it out before too long. fortunately, udev takes about 5 minutes to start because it hammers my (k6 300) LDAP server, and is started before nscd. but that is for another day.

at some point here, before i fixed my mbr, my test box stopped booting from my usb drive. i don't know if it was editing a text file on it with my mac (the linux boxes all hang or crash when i put it in, i think, and my windows box stays turned off when i'm not playing starcraft) or ubuntu or the scsi errors, but booting to ubuntu (single user mode, of course, since i have no way to log in) and toggling the bootable flag on the partition off then on with fdisk fixed that.

eventually i got to a point where i wanted to try an initrd, but all i can get linux to do is panic:

RAMDISK: cramfs filesystem found at block 0 RAMDISK: Loading 1416 blocks [1 disk] into ram disk... done. Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on hda2

so i'm left wondering if i should just turn on nfsroot on our kernels; is there a good reason red hat and suse don't have it enabled? i hope it's something about fitting something on a floppy disk, so that i can make sure phil puts that next to the slide about petabytes of storage at gigabytes per second.

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joe beat me when jon stewart was on crossfire, so i wanted to mention that the nhl season was canceled.

i am putting my season ticket money straight into the powermac g5 fund.

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i was really thirsty today and now my laptop's Tab key is broken.

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the guy at the genius bar took a couple minutes from his busy schedule to put a new tab key on my laptop. without even checking for my applecare, or sending it back to california for a week! also, i managed to escape without buying any new iPods, although i did get a new iPod remote (i think i'm on my 517th remote so far. i use the earbud headphones as disposable earplugs).

my mac mini finally arrived yesterday, and installing os x server on it was a snap. unfortunately, my ex-ldap serving linux box might have to get reinstalled, as it makes me change my root password every time i log in, and i can't figure out why. none of the other nodes (which all use the mini as their ldap server) have this problem. i'm too old to spend any more time debugging pam.

the os x server admin tools are pretty ok so far. like ye old helix setup tools, they use the native config formats. faced with no import functionality, i just copied my bind config files over from my linux box and they worked. and the ldap stuff is just openldap, so i should be able to have it replicate to a linux box with no troubles. sadly the one thing i can't do is configure static dhcp entries, so i will still need to edit text files in linux for a while.

a new printer arrives on friday, to replace the one i took with me to college. the old one still kind of works, after getting a new ink thing and a jetdirect thing, except that it sometimes grabs like 50 sheets at a time and gets stuck or doesn't print that page well. the cpu and ram in the new printer are comparable to the pc i took to college. i expect no less than to be shocked and awed.

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i think all my days this week were wrong.

i can't get my lustre-over-smb box to join the os x server domain. fortunately i didn't nuke the settings on the linux box, so it was easy to revert back to that one i've given up hope.

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since i've moved to boston, i've eaten many foods for the first time: indian, thai, korean, ethiopian, and probably some others. for the most part, i've liked them so i figure it was time to try sushi. so phil brought some over saturday. unfortunately i was not thrilled, but at least now people will have to believe me when i say i don't like sushi.

a couple of weeks ago the first copy of nintendo power made it to my new apartment since i moved in... 6 months ago. i figured they stopped printing them until another game was released for the gamecube. i was surprised, since i didn't think the new celda was coming out until late summer. anyway another issue arrived today and it said it is the last one. which is fine by me, i only ordered it to get the gc versions of the original zelda games.

i am so glad february is over.

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i don't understand why people - especially those who don't "get" the show - focus so much on the aqua teens being pieces of food. i mean, they are funny. shouldn't that be enough? why does it have to be about race?

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