down comforters are the best things ever.
there can be no greater luxury in all the world than a fluffy down comforter. that is all.another wednesday night wherein i had work to do, and elected to do it by working on the laptop at kasey’s.
today i actually managed to exhaust both laptop batteries, and damned near the cell phone battery as well. about five hours online at the bar, working, in toto. i hail this as a triumph of battery technology. it wasn’t like, you know, i was sitting there chewing my nails waiting for my puremessage test jobs to exit. honest. promise. sweartagod! … okay, the bartenders kept buying me drinks too. … i forkbombed poor little pretty — the xserve g4; oh, honestly, they let *me* name it: what did you think it was going to end up named? they’re just lucky i already took “shiny” for my laptop — repeatedly, and now i just have to sit and wait for it to tell me its uptime. poor abused little pretty. if it helps, i think everyone should buy at least one of you, if not a dozen.it’s true. legwarmers actually are back in style. i saw them at target, in the sock section, a couple of weeks ago, but i didn’t believe it. more fool me!
now that’s shock and awe.via blair, Top court brands Belgian far-right party racist:
Belgium’s far-right Vlaams Blok was branded racist in a supreme court ruling that will force one of Europe’s most successful anti-immigrant parties to relaunch itself. The supreme court upheld a verdict by a lower court in April that found the party to be guilty of “permanent incitement to segregation and racism”.
i can see why you would want to punish people for racist beliefs, and outlaw them in order to extinguish the practice, but i can’t say that i think that’s necessarily the solution. my fluffy liberal side wants to say that people are fundamentally good and that if you teach them why racism is bad, that’s better than telling them they’re bad people and squelching them. and my “i’m from peoria” side says that matt hales will always find comfort in being told that they’re bad and thus giving them a reason to rebel…and an attractive feature for people to gather around. and then my libertarian side screeches “free speech, free speech,” and as much as i loathe the beliefs that unite groups such as the KKK, i have no right to interfere with their rights to hold them.
i guess my response is, you have a right to be an asshole and i have the right to think you’re an asshole, because i don’t have to share your opinions if i don’t want to. so, yeah, kinda scary. and, speaking of matt hale, matthale.org: “Free Matt Hale!” … man, i grew up in that fucker’s neck of the woods and i loathe him like no one but a liberal local could. and i have to say that i was just as pleased as punch when he went up — not to mention how amused i was at his unsuccessful attempt to sue the illinois bar for refusing to admit him. he makes me sad, because he makes all of central illinois look like backwater assholes. and frankly, they don’t need that kind of publicity. they’re not backwater assholes, they’re rural communities, and there’s a difference. yes, there’s hate for the different, and yes, sometimes i worry that if i put a rainbow sticker on my car and went home for a visit i might get a window smashed — but by and large that worry is locational, which is to say that if i’m at my grandma’s house i don’t worry but if i was in pekin (“pekkkin”) i would. although i digress: i think mr. hale’s hate, specifically, is mostly reserved for non-whites, versus fags. oh, matt hale: how you irritated me all growing up, and how you continued to fucking irritate me after i moved to chicago to get away from people like you. but now that you’re in jail, you’re sort of a nostalgic, “look at the silly racist instigator” point of my life. and, see, that gets back to the original point of this post: if you let the racists do their thing, they’ll eventually fuck up on their own and you don’t have to be an enforcer-nanny to make that happen. because, yeah, i fundamentally believe that people are fundamentally decent (that’s not unknowingly repetitious; i intended to use “fundamentally” twice) and that if you let them reason it out on their own they’ll come around to believe the same way you do. (and if they don’t, it’s possible that you were wrong. — of course, there are things that i, personally, refuse to believe that i am wrong in thinking — such as that homosexuality is not a bad thing, and that black people are just as okay as whites — but i’m making a blanket statement, here.)today, i spent working on a project that will not produce anything, will not make anything better, will not amount to anything… and i feel *fabulous* about it.
i spent today working on setting up a test for the puremessage servers, working on throwing mail at one of the milters as fast as i can to try and make it choke. i actually got to run one example test — not a valid test, but sort of a proof-of-concept that the structure of the test is going to work — yesterday, but i didn’t get all the ducks in a row to actually run one of the actual tests until late this afternoon. disappointingly, our fastest development machine — an apple xserve g4 with an xraid appliance — can only throw about half the traffic i need to generate (roughly 100k messages/hour, or about 1700 messages/min) at the milter, so i’m going to have to move on to other machines as well. i have had absolutely *fantastic* luck with the xserve — and it’s a g4, not a g5! — it blows our toy suns out of the water, absolutely. it’s the fastest goddamn machine, shit you not. so i was hoping it would be all that i needed for that particular portion of the test, and i also don’t know what i’m going to have to dig up in terms of other machines to generate spew. but that’s for tomorrow. right now i’m generating about 650 messages/min, and the milter host is holding up relatively well — under its suboptimal configuration (the one we used on rollout day, which we had to back out because its performance was so awful — but that was with 8GB of core, and now these machines have 32GB). so i’m very hopeful about the optimized configuration that we got from their pro services. if i can handle the load with the crappy configuration, the non-crappy configuration should be way better. at least, that’s my expectation, and hope. i may work late tonight just to find out, because i really want to know. and i really want something to go well. if this goes well, then my life will look much more pleasant going into my trip to lisa. of course, if it doesn’t, i have some serious problems… not the least of which is “why the hell isn’t this helping when anyone would think that it would” …but that is a worry for later.
