Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

This has been the weekend from hell. On Thursday we lost our Internet access and I spent close to 3 hours on the phone with various Sympatico people trying to diagnose the problem. I can’t keep a connection to their service. Their conclusion is that suddenly all three of our phone jacks have “gone bad”. How this happens is a mystery to me, but whatever. So then I have to call Bell and schedule a repair person to come who’ll show up between 8AM and 4PM on Thursday.

So because I work on call and have to connect to work from home, I grabbed the cheapest package Rogers has for the Internet. It works, but it’s about 15 kilobytes per second in each direction. It’s fine if I’m not using BitTorrent on it (which Rogers fucking throttles anyways).

Now in the midst of plugging in the new cable modem my router, a Linksys WRT54G pre-VXWare fiasco, fries. As in suddenly it resets and when it comes back none of the network interfaces on it work anymore. So I factory restore it, change the firmware, and so on and nothing. It responds just fine on the wireless LAN but will transmit no data on it’s wired jacks.

Pissed off, I go and replace the stupid router and get a new power bar with a surge protector for the cable line and the phone line, on the off chance that the power is fucked up enough to damage equipment.

To add to the whole mess I went into work on Saturday morning to upgrade our firewall there (since it’s pretty much the one thing I can’t do remotely) and it should have been seamless. It was almost seamless, except post-upgrade it wouldn’t accept any more inbound VPN connections due to a bug in the configuration update system. A bug that their engineers confirmed, yet no one else has had before. Luckily rolling back the firmware and restoring was no big deal.

And to top everything off, over the last couple weeks my Xbox 360 has been sounding more and more like a goddamned jet engine spooling up in our living room, getting so loud that I have to keep increasing the volume on the games to drown it out. Well I don’t have to worry about that anymore, since now it won’t read discs! I’ve called and they’re replacing it and sending a box this week. For anyone keeping score this is the second time since January that a 360 has croaked on me.

So yeah, the last few days have been last than fun.

I finished my first day today as at my new job - I’m one of two Senior Unix Administrators at Points.com. It actually went really well. I don’t want to get ahead of myself since it was one day, so I’ll probably post more on Friday or the weekend or something.

Speaking of the weekend we’re heading up north for a week on Saturday to visit the parents. I can’t wait to freeze my ass off.

We made it back on the weekend, and then guess what - I got sick! I mean really sick, like horribly violently sick. It sucked. I had a couple of interviews earlier this week that I had to reschedule to today and yesterday because I couldn’t leave our place.

Other than that the trip went well and we had a blast. Sometime soon all of us Guitar Hero people gotta get together for a session. You know who!

Our family here went on a three day trip up to Izu this weekend to go to an Onsen resort (hot spa kind of thing). I posted a ton more photos to Flickr and some are private; if anyone wants access just either comment with you Yahoo ID or e-mail me.

Also if Yahoo phases out Flickr in favor of their subpar “Gallery” site I’ll be totally pissed, what with having just upgraded to the premium version.

Well the first week here went fairly well! I finally seem to over the jet-lag (I feel like an old man for Christ’s sake). We hung out with a bunch of our friends this week for various outings to places around and inside Tokyo, and everything has been cool.

I got to play a Playstation 3 at the Sony Building - specifically Gran Turismo 4 HD. It was visually gorgeous, way nicer looking than I expected… but it’s still Gran Turismo 4 with zero damage and shitty A.I. Not to mention I’m quite sure that the copy I own on the PS2 outputs in 1080i already (if I had an HD television). The launch of the system was today, but I didn’t see it basically because I forgot it was on the 11th here but no big deal.

Oh and last night I ate horse sashimi! Yeah that’s right, uncooked. It tasted pretty much exactly like I expected, and though I ate two slices I’ll probably never try it again in my life but at least I can say I have now :-)

Also Matt I miss you dearly please call - you never answer! If Matt agrees I’ll go up and hang out with him after he works during the following week. And that’s about it for now.

Well we made it to Japan last night, and it’s a day later and I’m fucking wiped. I started uploading a bunch of photos to my account on Flickr since it has a much nicer package all around than when I shoehorn things into Wordpress. There’s an RSS feed there somewhere too that I’ll link to once I awake fully.

And I gotta say - it’s a nice and warm here. Take that Canada!

This is why the North can suck. Here’s the deck at my parents house last week:

And this week:

My mom discovered how well Picasa and Thunderbird integrate and has been sending me a bunch of photos, but I had to post those.

On another note though Chie just got her permanent resident card today so we no longer have to worry about our trip to Japan having a sad ending :-)

For better or for worse I resigned from my job yesterday. Alright, for better; I’ll hopefully never quit for something worse obviously. I joined a company of about a dozen people and ended up working at a massive place with tens of thousands of employees, and attached with that was all the expected ramifications. I “toughed it out” for a while (including a brutal commute) but enough is enough. It actually had zero to do with my earlier mention of becoming a team leader. I’ve done that role before and felt comfortable with it at my last job and this job. I’d basically just like to move onto something that engages and interests me on a personal level.

Goddamnit that sounds really formal, but I assure you it’s true. So now Chie and I are gonna extend our early November trip to Japan for at least a few weeks (probably three for me) so that’s pretty cool. This week and weekend I’ve got to dust off my resume and update it - it’s been two years now since I’ve needed it, and I don’t have any plans for the future yet but I’ll be spamming that thing to everywhere I can pretty soon.

Good times!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and this one’s gonna be short! We’ve been both busy as all hell recently - Chie has been taking on more and more responsibilities at her job and I got made the “team leader” at mine. It’s good on the whole for both of us, but it definitely adds more work and stress.

The best thing happening recently is Chie becoming a permanent resident of Canada today. We applied last August for the residency for her and the big interview/appointment was in the afternoon. We were both nervous; turns out the only questions were if she had a criminal record (no) and was I her husband and sponsor (yes). And that was it! So now she’s a permanent resident and can almost travel out of the country.

I say almost because technically she needs her P.R. card to leave the country. Related to that is the fact that we’ve booked our next trip to Japan in the start of November - and we learned today that the card can take up to 8 weeks to come in the mail. So needless to say we’re sort of both shitting our pants on that front and praying (just kidding) that it’ll come in on time.

The bad news is that we - well, my parents - had to put down our dog, Jake, on the weekend. He was eleven years old and pretty sick so it was understandable but still very depressing.

And that’s all for now!

I’ve been writing things in Java for a hell of a lot years now and few things come up in the base language that surprise me or mess me up - usually the only new things are external libraries and APIs. But today something caught me. There was a method I was responsible for that essentially converts database query results into XML. One of the fields was for money, and represented as a double (with varying amounts of decimal places due to it being the aggregate of other data). Normally using Double.toString() would give a normal number like “958725.48″. For some results though (larger ones) the string given by the toString() method was in scientific notation with an exponent, like “9.5872548E5″. So I checked the documentation for the method and sure enough the behaviour is documented:

If m is less than 10-3 or greater than or equal to 107, then it is represented in so-called “computerized scientific notation.”…

I can deal with things like this, but I just don’t get the rationale behind it - if you’re converting a double to a String representation, it’s not going to overflow since it returns a new String object. So in the end I had code like this:

NumberFormat nf = NumberFormat.getInstance();
nf.setGroupingUsed(false);
columnValue = nf.format(double);

I guess I learned something new, but it was still kind of a waste of time and if I was personally responsible for that method’s behaviour I would have made the conversion to scientific notation an option and not a conditional.