Bored as toast

I’m in Atlanta for SAP training this week. Amy came down with me on Sunday, but she went home this morning. The end result is that I’m bored and uninspired. I’ve exhausted my ration of Cadbury’s Royal Dark for the week, and I’m down to orange juice and Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA to stave-off dehydration. As our Mr. Jerome noted, thirst is a dangerous thing. Now, the 90 Minute IPA is quite tasty, but the amazing hops presence and slightly elevated ethanol content means that one has to take it easy with this stuff.

The SAP training is going well. I’ve seen a lot of the material we’re covering before in the real world, but I haven’t usually understood what I was doing or why. This class has done a good job of filling in the gaps in my understanding. I know that I still have a long way to go in understanding why Jerry made some of the decisions he did in desiging this product, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive. SAP is a good system, but it’s large and complex. There is a lot to learn about it, and a person so inclined could make a career of it. To a large extent, I have. With the exception of the one year I worked at the NASA Integrated Services Network, I have been supporting SAP systems in one way or another since 1998. With any luck, we’ll keep at it. It seems to pay well, and the hours are good mostly.

Travelogue

May 8-12 Newark, California: SunUP Network Forum

Wednesday

SunUP didn’t start until 09:00 today. Missed the shuttle bus. No big deal. The campus is only a few miles from the hotel. Got delayed in toll-booth traffic for a few minutes. Drove straight to the right building, no wrong turns. This place is MUCH easier to get around than New York.

The first talk this morning was about the Sun-Fujitsu relationship. Basically it amounts to a way for Sun and Fujitsu to trade some technology for a few years, until they can find a way to screw each other. Diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice Doggy” until you can find a big stick.

Then came the Solaris 10 migration “Lessons Learned” session. This was possibly the best talk of the conference. Some of the highlights were:

• Most applications experience a performance gain simply by upgrading to Solaris 10.
• The IP Stack has been rewritten to vastly improve performance.
• A “Container” == A Zone + Resource Management.
• “Whole Root” local zones!!!
• All Zones in a domain share the same process table. So a fork-bomb in any local zone will crash the global zone. I knew this already, but it is nice to see Sun admit to it.
• Memory leaks in a local zone can also take down the global zone. I didn’t know that, but I suspected.

It would be nice if Sun were actually able to get Zones to be as fine grained and self sufficient as LPARS on an IBM mainframe, but they have a LONG way to go.

This would have been the most appropriate discussion to bring up some of the gripes I had about Solaris, but it didn’t seem right to voice them to the guy who migrated his datacenter to Solaris 10. It would have been REALLY nice to have had access to an actual Solaris Engineer.

Then we talked about the new DIMM replacement policy. Most sites like to replace DIMMs that are throwing Correctable memory errors, under the assumption that soft errors will lead to hard errors. Sun did some research, and found that 70% of these correctable errors were replaced on ’suspicion’ of being bad. They collected 800 of these DIMMs that were throwing correctable errors, and ran them all for 5 months under heavy load. They found that at the end of that 5 month period, they didn’t have a single non-correctable error (read system panic). I know that we replaced a LOT of them on our E10k machines in the first
two years I was here.

The new policy is to replace a DIMM only if it has thrown 24 errors over 24 hours. I’m not sure how this meshes with the new Memory Page Retirement functionality that was introduced in Solaris 10, then back-ported to Solaris 9 and Solaris 8. It seems like MPR would retire pages of memory (essentially a “bad block map” for RAM) before they hit that threshold of 24 in 24, and you’d never see enough errors to replace a failing DIMM. They had a customer testimonial, and the guy said that they don’t bother replacing a DIMM until the memory error is logged as persistent. That is how we’ve treated them for the most part over the last few years, anyway.

Sun also suggested the new cediag. This new and presumably useful tool does not ship with the OS, but
instead the 5.0 version of the explorer package. Talking of which, why isn’t explorer part of the OS by now??

The only choices for technical break-out sessions were “Capacity Management” and “Disaster Recovery.” I stayed for the DR discussion. It wasn’t very useful unfortunately. That being said, I’d like to see more break-out sessions next time, particularly ones with Solaris engineers.

The next discussion was on Time Dependant Reliability (snooze). The guy giving the talk was so far above the heads of the audience it wasn’t funny. The crux of his argument was that MTBF is a poor tool for reliability analysis.

The last thing we did was to plan the next meeting. Hopefully, it will be at Sun’s Broomfield campus. Fat Tire is plentiful near Broomfield because the brewery is less than an hour away. I’ve done the tour, and quite enjoyed it.

Wednesday night, I had dinner with Stephen. As good as it was to see Shannon, it was better to see Stephen because I did get to hang out with Shannon and So Jung over Christmas. Stephen, I hadn’t seen since one week before I got married, very near five years. Stephen didn’t have long. Something about Google working him to death, I suspect. Still, it is incredible to me that with real friends, the passage of time evaporates when you get together. It has been eleven years since high school, and it just didn’t matter. I really appreciate that, since it reassures me that I made the right choices in friends so long ago. We ate at the same steak place I had eaten at on the first night. I had two Lagunitas India Pale Ales which claim to be made with 65 different malts and 43 different types of hops. That is incredible. Needless to say, the first one was so good, I had to have a second. Stephen had to leave early, but it was so good to hang out with him that I didn’t care. Hopefully, I’ll get to go back some time.

Thursday

Got up at 09:30. Checked out at just before 10:30. On the I880 toward San Jose. I only missed one turn going into the airport, mostly due to construction around the airport. Flight was supposed to depart at 12:15 PDT. We had to wait on the plane at the terminal for an hour, while they fixed the plan with duct tape. Seriously. Ok, ok… so the problem was that one of the overhead bins came unhinged, and they had to tape it closed. I really didn’t think I’d make my flight from DFW to HSV, and I was certain my luggage wouldn’t. Fortunately, I got to the gate just as boarding was starting. My luggage also made it to HSV unharmed. All-in-all, long, boring, and full flights, but safe ones. I got to Huntsvegas at about 20:15, made it home by 21:00.

Travelogue

May 8-12 Newark, California: SunUP Network Forum

Monday
No required SunUP events today. I
think most people used today as their travel-day since Sunday was
Mother’s day (thanks again, Hallmark). Woke up at about 8:00
PDT/10:00 CDT. Let me tell you… It was nice. I still haven’t
gotten used to DST, so I felt like I was taking my hour back.

Got all of my ironing for the week done. This is always a PITA, but
at least it is done now, and I won’t have to worry about ironing
anything else until I get home. Got out on the road. Took US-101
into San Francisco. Crossed the bottom deck of the Bay Bridge, then
turned around and headed back into SF on the upper deck. That was
a really nice view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, etc…
Drove around down-town SF for about 30 minutes… Seen one city,
seen them all, and what do you know… It looked JUST like it does
on TV.

I’d killed enough time. Now it was 13:00, and time to head to
Monterey. I didn’t bring/buy a paper map. But I got good directions
from Google Maps, plus I had the GPS. I’d done a good job of route
planning, making sure to go through Cupertino. I quickly typed in “1
Infinite Loop” into my Garmin eMap, drove there (there
is a REALLY nice looking Target just around the corner), and took a GPS
waypoint in the parking lot of Apple Computer’s main campus. It was
really a nice campus. Didn’t have much time, so I didn’t dally. Back
on the road.

Talked to Sutton about 15 minutes out of
Monterey. Great timing. Monterey/Pacific Grove was absolutely beautiful.
Seeing Sutton again was awesome. It is amazing to me that it has been more than
10 years since we went our separate ways, and when we get back together, it is
like nothing has changed. Shannon and I have each traveled a boat-load of miles
on a lot of different roads since high school. Despite that fact, I still
regard him as a brother.

Shannon, you have an awesome wife who understands you. I know that because I
can see it. Not many people have that, but I can tell you from experience, that
it makes life enjoyable and worth living. Brandon, you’d better be taking
notes.

Shannon took me on a brief but very productive beer hunt. Didn’t find the
Stone Vertical Epic that I was looking for, but they had Fat Tire (and New
Belgium Abbey). I know that I’m going to Denver next month (it is a
traveling year, after all), but I just couldn’t wait. I know that there are
many good California beers that are worth my time (I bought a bottle of
Lagunitas something-or-other that is still in the rental car). But when New
Belgium brews are available, I just can’t help myself. Fortunately, I
restricted myself to $15. It was difficult, but I managed. We also discovered that Shannon’s dog, Judith, likes dried banana chips. I doubt that our feline would be so inclined, unless someone’s making fish-flavoured bananas now.

Also of note was the really cool tree in Shannon’s front yard that had purple flowers and orange leaves. I wish I knew what kind of tree it is because Amy would love it, and try to plant a dozen of them.

Travelogue

May 8-12 Newark, California: SunUP Network Forum

This is turning out
to be quite the year for travel. I guess that is a good thing
because it certainly makes life more interesting. However, it tends
to generate a lot of extraneous paperwork, particularly when traveling
for work.

Sunday
Not much here. I had a 12:55 flight
from Huntsville to Dallas, to San Jose. Had weather going into
Dallas, but landing wasn’t too bad. I found out that the Scurvy Pirates make really
good nerve-calming music leaving out of Huntsville. I’m kind of
strange about flying. I usually am pretty freaked out during my
first take-off on any given trip. After about 10 minutes in the
air, I usually calm down for the rest of the whole trip. Somehow
listening to “Worse Things than Dying” helped this time.

To get myself into the California state of mind, I dug up all
of the California songs on my iPod at 35,00 feet. Ok, there only
turned out to be two. Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication” and
the Dead Kennedy’s “California Uber Alles.” Fitting.

The approach into San Jose was ridiculously “entertaining.” I’ve had worse landings, but there were a couple of pilots sitting behind me cracking wise the whole way down.

Got my luggage, and drug it out to the shuttle-bus stop.

Douglas Adams wrote somewhere in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy series, something about having that inner twinge that lets
you know just exactly how far you’ve gone from the place of your
birth, and in that instant, experiencing some small part of the
vastness of the Universe. On Earth, he wrote, most people don’t
really notice it because you can never be more than 36,000-odd miles
from your birth-place at any time. Regardless, while waiting for
the bus to the rental car place, I got the twinge. It isn’t unusual
for me. It was just a small matter of wondering why (oh, why) did
I make the decision to take 10 hours out of my life, to go careering
across the sky at 35,000 feet in a pressurized metal tube, and end
up 2000-odd miles from the relative comfort, safety, and routine
of my home. What possessed me to do such a thing, and why the hell
am I here, when I could be at home? Douglas Adams fans would
probably answer: “Excitement, Adventure! Really Wild Things!!!”

I got to the rental car place, and secured an upgrade… I’m a
careful driver, but I don’t consider compact cars to provide much
protection in the unlikely event of a crash. Besides, it was only
a couple quid more per day. I ended up with a Camry (grey) that
came fully equipped with a Sirius radio. Ahh… right at home then. I
found the hotel very easily, after only a 20 minute drive (and only
one wrong turn). GPS is a lovely thing, and I don’t think I’d ever
like to travel without one ever again (ever).

Found a steak joint across the road from the hotel. Had a nice NY Strip (medium,
thank you), and my very first draft Sierra Nevada. The bottled
version is good, but this was awesome. Google maps tells me that
I am less than 200 miles from the brewery. Nice.

Travelogue

April 9-10 Oak Mountain State Park, Birmingham, AL.

Tony Cowan was in Birmingham for a Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia event on Saturday. He was planning on staying the night so he could hang with Robb for a while. So, I suggested the we just camp out in the park. Bought a cheap 8′x8′ Coleman tent the night before… $38 at Wal-mart. Excellent. I haven’t been camping properly since I was about 16. It was LONG past time to do it again. Got to the camp site just at dusk. Got the tent set up, but it was too dark to go dinking around for fire wood. Went to the little camp store, and it was $5 for a bundle of about 7 or 8 bits of split log. I only bought one, which was enough to get the fire started.

It ended up being me, Tony, and a guy called Zack from Mobile. Robb show up after he got off of work… around 9 PM. Knowing that the beer in the metal cup thing had been so successful before, I brought 3 litres of my brown ale. That stuff should be gone soon. All of the Scottish Ale is already gone. So we drank some beer, grilled some food, and poked the fire for a few hours. By midnight, all of the food was gone. So was all of the firewood and charcoal that I had packed with me. The camp store was closed by 9 so, we were pretty much out of luck. Robb had the bright idea to go to a grocery store to find some. We had talked just a few minutes earlier and discovered that both Tony and this Zack guy used to work at Delchamps. So, someone
suggested that we go to Delchamps for firewood. Then Robb made the quote of the night:
Unless you’re driving a Delorean, we’re not going to Delchamps.

Then again, maybe you had to be there.

We found a place open, but they didn’t have any proper fire wood. They had charcoal, but what we needed was light. And charcoal isn’t renowned for burning brightly. We settled on a couple of those freaky firelog things. Turns out, they were just what we needed. Three of them burned all night, and threw enought light to see by. The campground rules said “no open fires” but there didn’t seem to be anybody paying attention to that. We also didn’t pay much attention to the no glass bottles rule. Robb ended up leaving at about 3:30 AM. It was a nice night, so I just layed my sleeping bag out on the picnic table. This was the first time I’ve used one of those mummy style bags. It was a bit clostrophobic for about the first 10 minutes. Then I started to get cold, and it was fine. The bag is rated to -10 F, and I now believe it will take it. Sweet.

At about 10:00 PM Saturday night, Amy’s dad called, so I just called her and told her to call him. Apparently, her grandmother had fallen and broken her hip. So, she called me at 7:00 AM Sunday. I got up, broke camp, then drove home. It was a good trip, and I really enjoyed catching up with Robb and Tony again. Now that I have all the gear, I’ll probably go more often.

Travelogue

March 24-27 Grand Rivers, KY

It has been a while, but I thought that I would write about it anyway. March the 24-27, Amy and I took a short and much-needed weekend trip to Kentucky with Brandon and Miranda. It couldn’t have been a better trip. We got a cottage on Kentucky Lake, at a place called Lighthouse Landing. LL is in Grand Rivers, KY, and is located at the north border of the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. This is really the first time Amy and I have taken a weekend off to go anywhere other than Mobile since we moved to Huntsville.

LBL is a great place to go. The park is huge. It took us over an hour to drive through the length of it. We got to see many different types of wild animals… Bison, elk, deer, turkeys, skunks… All I can say is that Bison are freaking huge. The first one I saw was from a distance, and I just thought he was a particularly hilly part of the terrain. I was quite surprised to see this hill stand up and walk around.

We left from our house on Thursday morning, drove to Nashville, then got onto I-24. About 6 miles from the TN/KY border, Brandon called back and wanted to stop for an early lunch. He saw a Subway sign, and headed for it. When we got to the Subway, it turned out to be one of those Subway-in-a-gas-station thinggies that I typically distrust. In the process of ordering, we worked-out that some weeks previous, this particular deli had severed all afflilation with Subway. Unfortunately, this turned out to be the worst meal of the trip. Fortunately, no one got sick.

We got to Lighthouse Landing about 3 hours and 20 minutes after leaving home. The place is sort of 3/4 marina with %25 cottages and RV campground attached. The weather was still just a little too cold
for most people at that point. Which means that it was perfect for me, and had the side-effect of keeping most of the people away. We also got a good discount on the cottage.

The cottage was about the same as staying in a fully furnished extended-stay hotels. The kitchen came fully equiped. Stove. Microwave. Toaster. Coffee Maker. Freaking dish washer. There was some wicker furniture, a table, a bedroom, and a bathroom on the bottom floor. The top floor had a bedroom and a foyer with a pull-out couch. You could have easily had 6 people stay here without too much stepping on of toes. Most importantly, there was a very nice Weber “One Touch” grill outside, which we used regularly.

The first thing Amy wanted to do was to go check out the Bison. So, we did, and killed most of the afternoon driving around the park, checking things out. Brandon and Miranda took their bikes out for a ride instead. We met back at basecamp at about 4, then drove to Paducah, KY for food, since none of us had packed any. We ended up eating at Applebees for some reason.  After that, we hit up the Wal-Mart for things to grill over the next couple of days. Left Wal-Mart, and went on a beer hunt.  Selection was rather limited, but they DID have Chimay White, so I can’t call it a bust. I got a bottle of the Chimay, Brandon got one too, plus a couple of Sam Smiths (one IPA, one other I don’t remember).

Later that night, we fired up the grill. We ate brats, and drank good beer (including my brown ale and abbey ale) from metal camping cups I had brought. Man, it was great. The weather was cold enough to keep those metal cups and the beer in them cold and quaffable. Perhaps I’ll have people harass me about wasting Chimay white with brats around the grill. All I can say is that it was damn good beer, and I’ll probably never forget the experience. The only problem is that we drank it all up the first night.

Friday we went horse-back riding. I hate horse-back riding. There is something about the smell of horse crap and hay that I find… disgusting. It cost way too much money, and the horses… well just put it this way, if the horses had been donkeys, you would have described them as “sad assed.” They had been taken care of, but were just really old and slow. I took great delight in making mine walk through the mud when ever he tried to walk around it and pin me against a tree. Fortunately, the saddles were western, not English… so I didn’t fall off.

More grilling Friday night. Dry county. No beer run. I really liked that Weber grill. I think I’m going to buy one. I actually managed to get grill marks. Excellent.

Brandon and Miranda left Saturday morning because they had peeps coming into town for Easter (maybe peeps wasn’t the best choice of words). Amy and I went back to Paducah because she wanted to go the big fabric store. We got there only about 20 minutes before they closed, but she wasn’t disappointed. The place was huge, and her eyes lit up as we walked in. I wish we would have had longer to stay there. It was painful for me, but she was digging it the same way I dig poking around a record store for hours.

Did more beer hunting in Paducah. Jackpot. Found this place called “Proof Brothers.” Too bad Brandon had left already. Came back with many beers, including but not limited to:

1. Goose Island Bourbon County Stout (INCREDIBLE! Scored a 97 in the latest “All About Beer” Magazine I had seen before going)
2. Anchor Brewery Old Foghorn
3. Unibrou Terrible
4. Bellhaven Wee Heavy (Very good too)
5. Scotch de Silly
6. Ommengang Three Philosophers
7. Fuller’s Vintage Ale (Looking forward to this one. Only 90,000 were bottled. Mine is #66000-something )
8. Stone Brewery 8th Anniversary Ale
9. A four pack of historic beers from Scottland, including “Alba — Scotch Pine Ale”

They had many more, and I could have spent HOURS and thousands of dollars there. Fortunately restraint prevailed.

After that, we drove across a very scary bridge over the Ohio River into Illinois over US Hwy. 45. We ended up in a place called “Metropolis.” They had posters and statues of Superman everywhere. Truth be told, the place was more like Smallville than Metropolis. It was entertaining for about 2 minutes.

Easter Sunday. Packed-kit and headed home. Took about an hour and a half longer because we drove down through the park. Did I mention that place is huge? I think we’ll probably go back in October. I’m already saving my pennies for the next beer hunt.