i really hate my alarm clock. it should be smart enough to know that when i turn it off at 4 in the morning that there's no way in hell i'm staying awake.

on friday morning i woke up at 4, turned the alarm off, and went back to sleep instead of getting ready for the audi chicago advanced drivers day at the autobahn country club.

at about 7, carl started howling at the passing fire trucks and ambulances which finally woke me up. i peered at the clock at started mumbling obscenities, then jumped out of bed and quickly took a shower and got ready. i was out of the house by 7:30 and off on my 2-hour drive to joliet to arrive at the track an hour late, completely missing tech inspection, the drivers meeting, and my first run session. the worst part about missing the drivers meeting is missing key tidbits of information like... what the hell the track looks like and where the passing zones are.

it's 01:31 which means today is the 24th, and so i am now 24 years old.

since i graduated high school, i think, time has seemed to go very slowly. there are never enough hours in a day when i need them, but long-term, the course of the past year seems so long. not that i'm complaining. i'm glad i have enough going on in my life to make a year seem like forever.

when people ask me how old i am, i usually have to pause and actually calculate and think, "twenty... three... no wait, am i still 23? yes... how can i still be 23, i've been 23 forever."

went to blackhawk again this weekend with the audi club. drove fast, got sunburned, ate hotdogs, didn't go off track, came back in one piece.

anyway, back to the show.

a few weeks ago i switched back to using openbsd on an x40 and am no longer using mac os x on a powerbook for my workstation.

i don't really have many bad things to say about mac os x or the powerbook, i just wanted to switch back to openbsd because i've been away from it for so long. i picked up a new x40 on ebay for the same price as i sold my old one, and this new one has more memory, a faster processor, integrated bluetooth and an a/b/g wireless card (more on that in a second.)

i was laid off yesterday after 7 years at dls internet.

i had written a long, boring history of my time there but i couldn't commit it last night because of the extended power outage due to the storms. now that i read it, it's not very interesting, so i'll just say that i no longer work there.

so if you are looking to hire a full-time php / perl / ruby (on rails or off) / c / sql / html / css / javascript / unix (especially openbsd) / networking / security guy that doesn't do asp.net or java in the chicago area (or a telecommuting position), please contact me.

i've been reading audiworld for many years now and i've always preferred that style forum to the typical zeroforum/phpbb/rforum forum like vwvortex. audiworld uses a php-based system named kawf, which i prefer for a number of reasons:

• kawf: viewing a single page of a forum shows many threads at once, with each thread's posts in-line. this allows for a lot of information to be viewed with a single page load. when users post meaningful content in the subjects of replies, an entire discussion can be read without clicking anything, promoting near real-time discussion in threads.

carl woke me up early this morning by jumping around on my chest. i got ready and drove back down to chicago for day two of railsconf.

the first session of the day for me was obie fernandez's thoughtworks on rails which was a broad overview of the rails projects that thoughtworks has done for its customers after introducing it into their development environment. nothing too technical, but useful to see the lifecycle for a rails app from the point of meeting with the customer to creating "stories" as they put it, to coding individual pieces, to quality assurance testing, to final deployment. i couldn't help but think about how many people are involved in these "normal" development processes versus things at dls where one developer has to take a request from another staff member and develop, code, test, and deploy an entire app himself.

i woke up at the crack of dawn and drove to the wyndham in rosemont for railsconf 2006. i registered and got some free crap, grabbed some food and found a seat in the ballroom. dave thomas gave a keynote presentation about the big three things that he thinks rails needs to become better.

for my first session i opted for introduction to capistrano by mike clark, just because the other two didn't really look very interesting. mike's presentation was pretty good and i picked up a few ideas for using cap that i hadn't thought of before (namely for basic system administration tasks not related to rails).

i bought a nokia 770 a few weeks ago for no real reason at all (probably because i've been reading planet gnome too long). it is only sold through nokia directly and compusa, the nearest store of which is about an hour away. since i didn't want to wait to get it from nokia, i drove to compusa and picked one up.

it's a bit smaller than i expected from pictures of it, which was nice. the screen is bright and crisp. the initial setup wizard easily configured the 802.11b wireless with wep and bonded with my moto slvr phone for connectivity over bluetooth.

the default theme is decent but the pushbuttons look kind of cheap. the default e-mail client worked fine with my imap+ssl server and the web browser was able to correctly render most webpages i went to. the large amount of pre-packaged applications for the 700 is a big plus. i installed xterm, gaim, openssh, and rhythmbox, the latter of which gave me wireless access to the shared music on my laptop through itunes.

i sure wish there was a way to easily filter out weblogs from google search results, like the inverse of their blog search, on a per-query basis. all too often now i search for something and the first page of results are just useless pages from people whose opinions don't matter and have nothing useful to say about the subject. or worse, they're just posts that link to other idiots' weblogs who also have nothing useful to say.

for the five years i've been making notes to myself on this thing that is not a weblog, my robots.txt has explicitly forbid search engines from spidering it so as not to spam them with my ramblings. but i guess now that nobody has a "website" anymore and can only maintain a "blog", asking everyone else to do the same would remove a lot of semi-useful content from search engines.

i have decided not to sell my r32, after having it on the market for a few months and only being able to drive it about 1500 miles in about 3½ months. i ordered new tires for it today since the toyo t1s' have nothing left on them. i pulled out the rear seats again and swapped in the driver's side sparco seat.

hopefully i will be able to do at least one or two track events this season.

since i had my car for sale on a bunch of sites, i thought i'd mention my experiences with them:

• cars.com
  nice car-detail pages and allows uploading a bunch of pictures. i opted for the most expensive package (i think it was around $50) that put a free carfax link on my page for viewers to run a free report, and allowed me to renew and update the ad for as long as i wanted until the car sold. according to the stats they provided, my ad received about 4000 views. i received a handful of e-mails and phone calls from this ad and would recommend the site.

sma and becky got married yesterday. i was sma's best man (am i still or do i relinquish the title once the ceremony is over?) and have no pictures of the event to share except this crappy cameraphone picture of sma nervously watching tv a few hours before the ceremony started. they are somewhere in mexico now on their honeymoon.

it took me nine months to finally put blinds on those windows.

eventually i acquired an old couch from somewhere for free, i don't remember where, and when i moved to my new house, i only took the recliner.

later, when sma moved in with me, he brought his couch and chair from his old house. he needed somewhere to sit, after all.

then he moved out a year later and took his couches with him and i was back to a single recliner chair.

some time in march, dls was served with a subpoena for information about one of the ip addresses assigned to my co-located server, namely the one i have specifically setup for a tor exit node. they of course complied, and i didn't think much of it. i've personally processed quite a few subpoenas in my time while in charge of the abuse department at dls.

in early april, i was contacted by one of the lawyers for the case asking me about the subpoena. i told him i hadn't personally received one yet, but i explained what tor was, how it worked, and that i didn't have any logs to give them for whatever they were asking for.