Almost, but not quite, Disaster

So when upgrading a FreeBSD install via make world you really should read UPDATING first.

Especially when upgrading to a version of the OS that adds a new system call.

You do not want to install a set of userland tools that require said system call without first installing a kernel that supports it.

Figuring out how to install the kernel without working make and ls commands was fun.

At least I had already built the new kernel, so I didn't have to scramble to find a bootable rescue CD...

This is totally why I am not a sysadmin.

Realization

Only now, as I sit in my new apartment, surrounded by a significant percentage of my stuff, noticing that it's gotten rather dark, do I realize that I left all of my lamps in the other apartment.

Needless to say, since I spent all day moving that significant percentage of my stuff into this apartment, I am far too tired to do anything about this tonight.

I'll just have to add it to the list of things to grab on the next trip to Stamford.

Other than the distinct lack of light in several of the rooms, things in the new apartment are looking great. All my major bits of furniture have made their way here, and over the next week or so the remaining chunk of my clothing and consumer electronics will make the trip. Now that there's actual furniture in the rooms, they're actually looking quite a bit better than I'd thought they would. I had been a bit worried about some of the rooms being a bit small, but now that there's some stuff in them to give the whole thing some sense of scale, they actually look more than roomy enough.

Yes, I promise we'll be having some sort of apartment warming party in the reasonably near future, once we've settled in a bit.

Update

Just a few random notes from my life over the past week or so...

• Framemaker is considerably pickier than xsltproc and the Docbook XSL stylesheets. This means it's considerably more of a pain in the ass to import my book into Framemaker than one would think, considering that the book is written in Docbook and Framemaker supports Docbook...
• Coldstone Creamery rules. Any ice crean store where the employees will sing for tips is just damn cool.
• Apparently the Emacs people fixed whatever bug was screwing up syntax highlighting after using nxml-mode.
• The readdir implementation on Mac OS X can bite me.
• My parent's beach house looks totally different (and damn nice) with it's new deck.
• In related news, my Dad's friends who actually built the deck are just too damn good at estimating, both in the amount of time it would take to build and in how much raw material would be required. If I could estimate half as well at my job I'd be a god.

Page 23, Sentence 5

Well, lots of other people have been doing this...

"Our attempts to define comics are an on-going process which won't end anytime soon."

(from Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics)

The idea is to take the closest book to you, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post it to your weblog, along with these instructions.

The Moving Process

So my friend Craig and I spent much of the last week scrambling around searching for apartments in Norwalk.

Since $COMPANY is moving there later this summer, and we're both tired of paying insane amounts of rent in our one bedroom apartments, we figured now would be a good time to find someplace close to the new office with enough room for two geeks and a truly absurd collection of computers.

After a lot of procrastination followed by a few days of actually looking, we found our new apartment.

It's half of a duplex on a dead end street between railroad tracks and the highway, directly adjacent to a cemetery!

How can you go wrong with a place like that? ;-)

Actually, the place is pretty nice. Other than the lack of AC it's better than the other places we looked at. There seems to be sufficient room for all our crap, it's within walking distance of the new office, my half of the rent will come out to only slightly more than half of what I'm currently paying, and the neighborhood seems decent.

Our lease starts mid-may, so if you're in the area and feel like helping us move in return for free pizza and beer drop me an email or something.