Five parts rage, three parts delight

This morning, my laptop's fan finally started grinding, badly. It was a loud buzzing noise that filled me with fear; although I have the critical material backed up and don't have much fear about the hard drive at the moment, it is the fastest CPU and best monitor I own. Working on the hunk of junk desktop I have would be severely limiting.

But, I thought to myself, I have a spare fan assembly downstairs, one I ordered a few months ago when the fan started to go bad. I knew I'd need it one day. Today is that day, right?

So I sat down and started working my way through the instructions on how to disassemble a thinkpad. If the T43 was fun to disassemble, the T60 is a dream. Not only is it easy to get right down to the motherboard on this baby, but every screw is iconographically marked, making it child's play to know which screws to undo. All you have to remember is to reassemble the parts in reverse order and it's all good.

Then I opened up the box from the parts retailer, took out the fan assembly, and tried to put it into place. It didn't fit. I pulled out the packing slip and discovered that, although I had ordered a 41W6409 fan assembly for a Thinkpad T60, what was actually in the box was a 41W6568 fan assembly for a Thinkpad Z60. And it's long since past when I can return it. Fuck me. Even worse, now looking at the packing slip, that's not even my name on it! It's some guy name "Faisal" who lives in Orange County, California!

So, I reassembled the laptop with the dubious fan. It's behaving right now (I cleaned out the inside with a can of air, and it really needed that), but it still makes a threatening rattle.

I called the parts supplier and even though it's long past the return period, they agreed to replace it with the correct model, as this was clearly their mistake, and they don't want to get slammed. That's delight number two.

And delight number three: for reassembly I applied some Arctic Silver thermal paste after cleaning the old stuff off, and it seems to be running about three degrees cooler than it used to. That's a win all around.

Now if the fan will behave long enough for its replacement to get here, I'll be happy.

Sexist pigs?

Why is Keith Olbermann's URL "olbermann.msnbc.com", but Rachel Maddow's URL is "rachel.msnbc.com"?

"Is this real, or just a fantasy?"

Omaha had some political event going on Wednesday evening so I took Kouryou-chan out to the local swimming pool, and while we were there I had the most peculiar encounter with a teenage boy who I'd estimate was around sixteen years of age.

I was showering off after the swim. The shower is a large, open space with a pair of towers covered in showerheads. He was under one tower, and I was under the other, and he turned to me and said, "Have you ever cheated on a woman?"

While what happened between Der Ex, Omaha and I was far messier than anything Senator John Edwards (D-North Carolina) or Senator John Ensign (R-Nevada) went through, I rationalized that it could accurately be described as cheating and, curious to see his reaction said, "Yeah."

"Oh," he said. "'Cause I think I just made a big mistake. I got this girlfriend, and she's like, 15. But now, I made a date with a 17 year old and, like... I mean, my girlfriend, she's nice and all, she's not a slut. I mean, the 17 year-old's not either, but she'll fuck me." I refrained from commenting on this pasty, pudgy specimen of manhood. His eyes were lit up with something far more primeval than contrition.

"Well," I said, "Just don't get either one pregnant. You'll fuck up your life for the next twenty years."

"Yeah, but, she's on the pill. Ain't nothing gonna happen."

"I'm just sayin'," I said. "Just don't do it. It'll take your whole life in a direction you probably aren't ready to go."

"Nah, nothing's gonna happen." He left the shower and went to the lockers to talk smack with his friend.

Omaha said I should have been a little more forceful about condoms and responsbility. I felt weird just having the conversation.

A Rite of Spring

Yamaraashi-chan tries to look tough.

One of those interminable rites of fatherhood is attending your child's school play. I know they mean well, but even Dave Barry admits that this is basically a routine form of torture, similar to waterboarding but without the desire from either party for you to confess anything at all.

Yamaraashi-chan's class play was called The Castaways, and was not, unfortunately, an updated version of Lord of the Flies. Instead, it was a meandering morality tale about kids in the 1920s and how being homeless sucked so we should all band together and try to feed the homeless and voluntarily becoming homeless by running away from home is a really bad idea, mmmmkay?

Yamaraashi-chan acquitted herself well enough, although if she wants to ever sing professionally she'll have to learn how to belt out a song, not keep it high and sweet and all inside. She had a solo, although saying it was "the only solo," as she had claimed for weeks, was not entirely true-- two other kids got solos.

Kouryou-chan joined me, but she sat in the back row and read her book. This wasn't much to her liking anyway, and we could either barely hear the kids when they didn't have a mic, or were overwhelmed with volume when they did.

And there were three denouements! What sadist thought that up? The play-within-a-play had an ending, and you could see everyone thinking, "Oh, it's over. Yay!" And then the surrounding play had an ending, in which the teller of the tale and his audience (attempting to convince one girl not to run away) left the stage, at which point the audience again started to shuffle with "Oh, it's over now. Yay!" But the teller-and-audience shtick had it's own wrapper about them being part of an after-school program to help the homeless by putting on a benefit concert, so there was one more number for the whole cast to sing, and when the curtain finally fell the audience was in an "Is it really over this time? Really?" mood.

I love going to Yamaraashi-chan's events, but the ones she did with KidsSounds were so much better than this. She's slid back a little on her voicework. Ah, well. She'll find the thing she loves someday. But I doubt musical theater is it.

"Muddled" experience at the Keg

Omaha and I decided to go to the Keg down in Renton, since the one in Burien had recently closed. The place is nestled between two casinos and across the street from the new movie multiplex, and it's far more "themed" than the Burien one. It looks like a former Claim Jumper, in a way. The inside is pure Keg.

The food was as good as always, but the service was awful. I don't know if the guy we had was new or what, but he was brusque, didn't offer many helpful suggestions, didn't offer any specials, and had to be goaded into bringing us things that are normally routine. He didn't try to connect with the customer at all. He forgot our steak knives, was slow with the appetizers, and brought the rest of the food out too quickly. At one point he dropped a few plates on the floor for another table, and later he dropped a steak knife into Omaha's lap. About the best that can be said for him is that he kept us well-hydrated.

And the word of the year, in alcohol, appears to be "muddled." Damn the mojito. "Muddled" just means "mashed fruit or herbs." You'd think that a blender would be a perfectly acceptable tool, but no, now the poor bartender has to "muddle" everything by hand, and I mean everything: mojitos, margaritas, and other drinks all contained "muddled" this and "muddled" that. It's enough to drive someone to drink.

On the way out, I passed another waiter and said, "Weren't you at the Burien?"

"Yeah," he said, obviously pleased to be recognized. "I remember you guys. Yeah, there are a few lucky refugees down here." I remembered him clearly enough; with his good looks, bald head and goatee he seems like the sort of fellow who would pop out of a lamp if you rubbed it hard enough.

A religious discussion of sorts

I got an email today from one of the super secret stealth start-ups, the one I really wanted, and they told me that they had chosen to go with another candidate. Bummer.

At one recent interview, an engineer asked me to “give him the sum of the two highest digits in an integer array. Any language.” I thought for a moment, then wrote:

array.sort()
return array[-1] + array[-2]

He said that was fine, but since it would be O(n*log_n), could I do it in O(n). He wanted a linear search instead.

After answering the question to his satisfaction, we got into a bit of a religious discussion about the merits of concentrating on performance during initial composition, versus concentrating on correctness. I’m much more a “get it working, then get it right, then profile the working program for bottlenecks and work them out.” It is possible that you can create systemically slow solutions that’ll require a re-write, but that’s actually far less likely than having I/O or CPU bottlenecks in small functions of code that can be fixed with optimization.

He later told me that, although I didn’t get the job, he voted to hire me. He liked my answers and appreciated that I was willing to stand my ground and discuss the relative merits of different approaches.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com