A Life on Hold

My theme of the past few days is waiting.

I've purchased a used Viewsonic gTablet on eBay. Largely, I just want a fast-booting, lightweight web browser, eRearder and file viewer. I'm now waiting for it to arrive; UPS says it should be here some time on Monday.

I've determined that I need to read up on a lot of geeky topics to sharpen and update my skills. I need to learn more about programming with Python, Javascript, Hadoop and Amazon EC2. Towards that end, I'd like to purchase some books but since I can save $8 each on the O'Reilly texts by getting the electronic version, I'm waiting for the tablet to show up.

We're going to the trailer in West Virginia for an extended stay Sept 2-10 as a vacation. I'd like to have a tonne of reading to take with me, using the extra time to fill my brain with some novel new stuff. I'm looking forward to the downtime but won't be able to enjoy it much if I'm not properly prepared with ebooks.

I ordered FiOS nearly a month ago but its installation date two weeks ago was scrubbed because of the Verizon strike. The strike is now resolved but they've yet to give me a rescheduled installation date. I'm trying to be patient but I'm frustrated by the tiny throughput of my DSL while working on the following project...

In order to punch up my resume and professional skills a bit, I've rebuilt my old creaky SuSE Linux box with Ubuntu 11 so I can build out a Hadoop cluster and a Eucalyptus cluster. I was stymied for a while because of an annoying Grub2 boot configuration issue but I resolved that last night. Still, there are a lot of software and package updates which need to be downloaded. Waiting is required.

The latest rumoured release date for Motorola's Droid Bionic is September 8. I desperately want to ditch my Blackberry Storm --there are so many apps I want to get but don't exist for the Storm, including vastly improved Google calendar & contacts integration-- but I want a dual-core phone working with Verizon's 4G LTE network. The Bionic is the first such phone. I also want to ditch my 3g wireless broadband data modem to save some money on the month bills; I can use the Droid phone as a wifi bridge for my other toys. Sept 8 seems such a long time away right now, and even that is just a rumour. I'm supposed to be at the trailer in West Virginia anyway at that time. Waiting, sigh.

The ultimate pressing concern at the moment, however, is Hurricane Irene: it is scheduled to arrive Saturday evening. We're as prepared as we can be for this but I remember with dread 2003's Isabel blowing through the area. How severe will the storm be? Will the electricity fail, and for how long? Will traffic lights be out? Will streets be blocked with downed trees & branches? How quickly can life resume when it blows over? So many questions, so much waiting.

On the work front, I have a $90k storage array expansion which I'd dearly love to have powered up. The urgency has increased a great deal since we're nearly out of storage in our production facility. The finance committee took their sweet time approving the purchase order for extra power and I'm now waiting on the Savvis folks to run the conduit and inject electrons. Our best guess is that we may have power for September 2 so I've contacted our Fujitsu field engineer to book some time. I'm really hoping this gets done sooner, but until I get word from the powers-that-be, I'll have to just sit and wait.

I'm trying to be patient about all of this, but I actually have a fair amount of spare time on my hands right now and feel very guilty about not using it more efficiently. If any of these pending items would just happen, I could make better use of my time & resources.

Hurricane-ready

I think we're set for Hurricane Irene.

• We buy most of our household items in bulk so we're well stocked with just about everything, especially paper products (toilet paper, paper towels, napkins, tissues, etc.).
  
• We have a tonne of candles standing by.
  
• We have a battery powered radio with a solar panel and hand crank.
  
• All battery powered devices are charging currently.
  
• We have a large stock of spare batteries. If the economy collapses and dollars become useless, we can probably use the extra batteries to barter for food. :-)
  
• All vehicles are fully fueled, especially the minivan: it has multiple electrical outlets so we can charge all of our mobile phones simultaneously if needed.
  
• We have two power inverters for the cars so we can recharge batteries or even briefly power small appliances as needed.
  
• We have plenty of propane for the backyard barbecue.
  
• The food in the freezers has been reshuffled so the items we're most likely to use are the freezer of the refrigerator rather than the chest freezer. That will minimize the times the larger chest freezer has to be opened, preserving its items longer if the power is down for an extended period.
  
• We have ice and more being made currently.
  
• Our kitchen stove and water heater are fueled with natural gas. While we'll have to manually light the burners of the stove, the water heater has a pilot light so we'll have hot water as long as there is running water.
  
• I'm not concerned about our water supply as the municipal supply is gravity fed and the tower down the street from us is enormous. Even if the power is off for five days (think Hurricane Isabel in 2003), we'll still have water. We are setting aside a couple of jugs of water for cooking though, just in case.
  
• The dishwasher and laundry will be caught up Saturday, just in case.
  

At the moment, I'm confident we're ready for the apocalypse. We have nothing to fear except days of unemployed yokels rioting & looting or perhaps a tsunami disrupting power to our nuclear reactors causing three of six to go into meltdown contaminating the area for centuries to come.