David's Mumblings

Fortune cookies

I've gotten two rather strange fortune cookie messages recently:

- "Made in USA"
- "Here we go. Low fat, whole wheat green tea."

I'm not entirely sure what to make of them... ^ TOP

Posted on 06/09/09 at 21:24:43 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Tax SNAFU

I did a brief internship at SAP Labs during Spring Quarter 2008 while wrapping up my MS thesis. I'm preparing my taxes now, and it seems that they completely screwed up my W-2 forms. They have me paying taxes to CA, NY, and NYC. The "funny" thing is that I lived in California for the totality of my employment period. It would appear that I'm paying taxes to New York that simply should not be paid.

My theory is that since I changed my mailing address toward the end of my internship to a NYC PO Box, their very clever system decided that I lived in NYC and therefore started handling taxes accordingly.

I find some irony that a company that makes business management software managed to set me up paying taxes to a state I neither lived in nor worked in...

Now I just have to figure out how to get this fixed. Too bad taxes are due in two days. ^ TOP

Posted on 04/12/09 at 21:48:59 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Don't shout at your disk

This analysis of disk latency is funny and very interesting at the same time. (Make sure you watch the video below the graphs.) The moral of the story: don't shout at your data center disks! Disks are people too :-) ^ TOP

Posted on 03/24/09 at 10:35:46 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Don Quixote Strikes Back

Alternative Energy Revolution
:-) ^ TOP

Posted on 03/16/09 at 12:33:37 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Test beds for AI

I came across this citation in an article on a new world record set by a computer Go player:

After the victory of IBM's Deep Blue against Garry Kasparov, the game of Go has replaced chess as a test bed for research in artificial intelligence (AI).

DVDs not recognized by DVD drive

Tonight I was trying to install Civ4 on my desktop and found that Windows would not recognize the DVD. It's not that the copy protection was being overzealous: it was as if the disk simply wasn't there. Explorer showed the drive as empty, and nothing would spin when I inserted it into the drive. This was the second time I'd encountered a problem like this, and I was pretty ticked off about it.

After poking around on various support sites, most of which were useless to me (as they catered to people trying to break the copy protection -- this is an original darnit!!), I decided to see if the manufacturer (NEC) had released new drivers. Turns out that although they hadn't released any new drivers, they had released new firmware for my drive model (NEC DVD_RW ND-3550A). After installing it, the disk was detected -- finally. Not sure what the problem was exactly, but at least it's fixed now. Sigh. Nice way to waste 40 minutes. :-/ ^ TOP

Posted on 03/02/09 at 20:35:35 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Web sites and comment forms

I found this comic to be a fairly amusing parody of the idea of opening things up to comment by the general public. :-) ^ TOP

Posted on 02/25/09 at 20:18:58 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Being on call

There's nothing quite like being about ready to go to bed, logging on 'one last time' to make sure all the systems are happy, just to find out that there's something akin to a potential catastrophic meltdown if things aren't fixed. Then a phone call comes in from Hong Kong making sure I know of the problem. Fortunately the Ninjas (i.e. very experience people) noticed the issue too and also worked to fix it.

Anyhow, three and a half hours later at 3:20am, still awake and working... ^ TOP

Posted on 02/25/09 at 00:21:05 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Red hair

I've always had a very slight red tint in certain lights to my otherwise very dark hair, and my beard grows out in a funny red/black mix. (No red/black trees here, though! Heh... never mind.) But one thing I've noticed is that as I grow older, I'm finding more actual red hairs instead of gray. Maybe by age 35 I'll be a redhead? ^ TOP

Posted on 02/09/09 at 06:25:50 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Snow!

It's snowing quite a bit outside. It's pretty cool! I haven't seen this much snow in quite a while. When we went to Tahoe in California, it snowed only a tiny bit. Now I just have to see how much this snow stays... and what it's like walking around in the city with so much snow! ^ TOP

Posted on 12/16/08 at 10:34:58 by dchaley (David Haley)
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