Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in carlcoryell's LiveJournal:

Saturday, March 3rd, 2007
9:10 pm	Company Blogging I suppose the proper course of action here is to actually jump through the hoops of setting up a company blog, but till that time, there is no reason not to do a post here. (in the unlikely event that anyone ever reads this...) So last week was a landmark week. We signed the papers with ADP and we're going to have fully automated legal payroll on March 15th. I've been paying people the old school way: writing checks. Which of course means that I've been late paying off all the various government agencies that insist on pieces of paychecks and they send me letters that I then need to read and deal with and it goes on and on and on. So, hopefully it will work out well and we will have the cashflow to pay people by the 13th of march. So this has freed up the mental energy for me to try new projects. Conveniently, Record4, the computer that runs 1/2 of our production stopped being able to process mp3's fast enough to keep up with all the tapes that are being loaded onto it on Thursday. We had been running a bit under capacity for a couple of weeks with some vacation and people being sick and the computer had just not been stressed like it finally was this week and it filled up with uncompressed data and wouldn't accept additional tapes till it had time to process all the audio and ship it off to the next computer. So, we just happen to have a honking quad core Mac Pro (we call it Dev1) in the office that is sitting around printing postage waiting for special projects to consume it's cpu. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to write a little code and help out Record4. And into the rabbit hole I went. So all of the source code that runs our company lives in a single, mostly flat directory: ../cassettes2cds/ if you do an ls (directory listing) of the contents, here is what you see: [carl@crunch1 cassettes2cds]$ ls 00_incoming_from_recording 01_02Aor02B_post_dir_for_tracking.tcl 01_02Aor02B_post_dir_for_tracking.tcl~ 01A_01B_make_rms_graphs.tcl 01AAA_01A_fake_tapes_as_records.tcl ... [1701 other files and directories removed for clarity] ... yes~ y.gif yolog.txt zeros.dat zerso2.dat [carl@crunch1 cassettes2cds]$ Awesome. Further this very directory is NFS mounted by all the other computers in the office so all of the recording computers dump their processed data into this directory (specifically into the 00_incoming_from_recording sub directory) and read the scripts and binaries from this directory. So, I picked up the version control and automated testing habit at my last job and now I can't touch source code unless it's versioned and there is a test that will pass when I'm done. I can't hardly bring myself to even look into this directory. But a bit of detective work on Record4 revealed to me the program that does the mp3 compression (not hard since it is working all the time) so at least I can start with that. This program has the mellifluous name process_transfer_raws_to_crunch1_wav_fast_4nowait.tcl and it calls lame (the mp3 compression program) and a custom C program that craig wrote. Happily we have subversion installed and (mostly) set up, so a couple hours later I have a happy little directory with the .tcl files and the .c file I need, in theory, to run this program on Dev1 and help poor overburdened Record4 out. But I need a computer to write it on. I don't want to add any additional work to the production computers in the office so that means my laptop and Dev1. Now I want to draw one of the curtains of decency we saw in the old movies when the leading lady and gentleman would go off upstairs to do what ever it is that they do, cause system administration is not my strong suite and yes it did take me 3 hours to get subversion 1.4 (I should have just installed the 1.3 binaries) and emacs22 with X11 support installed on Dev1 so I could actually use it as a development machine. At least while I waited for things to compile, I had time to find, install and run the automated self tests for t-unit the tcl unit testing library. Hopefully next week I will actually have a failing test and get to write some code. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005
11:31 am	Changing Habits is Hard. Film at 11. Changing Habits is Hard. Film at 11. Well I feel off the wagon as it were over the weekend, starting sunday night when I was procrastinating processing financial paperwork and thought, "man, it's a sunday, there's no harm in this, and I can catch up with all the things that I miss." Well there is harm in it, once the charm is broken it's very difficult to repair and I spent several hours on Monday, then Tuesday, then this morning surfing. Dang. Hence this post. It's time to come clean, re-commit, and muster the energy to go another week and finish out my initial goal. After that I am going to build my little newsreader script and make myself a daily paper of the blogs I like to read. (Comment on this)
Friday, November 18th, 2005
4:51 pm	One Week Update Well, I have finished my first 168 hours of non-internet surfing in november and I'll give myself a grade of 97%. Twice, I read some irrelevant pages while trying to solve a specific problem (First I looking for a good bluetooth headset [I don't think they exist] and when I was trying to figure out a quicksilver question). And probably 6 times, I followed a link from an email newsletter to an interesting article. So far this experience has given me more free time and forced honesty about work avoidance. This posting for example, is to avoid dealing with a couple of annoying emails. And I have thought about some more long term solutions. Like the newspaper script: once a day, this script checks the sites I like for updates. If so, it builds me a cute little custom newspaper, maybe pdf files and prints them out to my printer. So I get up in the morning and I have a cute stack of personalized reading material to read over breakfast. Since this posting is really a distraction, I'm going to get back to work. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, November 11th, 2005
2:58 pm	A Brief Public Announcement This Posting is to give public notice that I, Carl Coryell-Martin, will not surf the internet for the remainder of this November. So what motivated this? Well, I have been using surfing the internet as a drug to avoid dealing with some tricky questions in my life. It turns out that I was blessed with a slightly obsessive brain that loves to collect new information. As a result 3 hours can easily disappear while I am catching up on my favorite blogs. I have collected enough data to show that I can't reliably cut back and dang it, I have more important things to be doing right now, so it's cold turkey for me. Why LiveJournal? Well, I had an account already so I could read various friends private entries so this was zero setup. And I didn't necessarily want to mix this with a more professionally oriented blog so I didn't try to optimize that or mix it with the existing Carl's Blog [beta]. So it seemed like a good tool and I as MacCready use to say: "If somethings worth doing, its worth doing shitty." So what does not surfing the internet actually mean? Non-directed reading of news, blogs and other web pages. That general, "I just want to be informed and keep tabs on what all my favorite people are doing surfing," that doesn't actually result in completing tasks on my todo list or actual human contact. What about journal notifies? This one hurts. I'll particularly miss friends journals and Mimi Smartypants. But it's only for about 3 weeks at this point and I can manage that. I survived longer when I was in Africa just fine. Cool links sent in emails? Huh, this is one of those nasty grey areas. I'll discourage you all from sending me links, but I fully intend to respond to correspondence and understand that following a link in a personal email might be necessary to do so properly. I don't consider this 'surfing' as such because it's directed as part of processing my inbox. I expect that I'll avoid them if I fear it leading to the above. Not even Friends LiveJournal postings? Sigh. No. its too easy to then follow links into cool things and two hours later I'll look up and wonder where my morning went. Sorry friends, I love you all, but I have to draw a line for awhile. Won't it suck not knowing what's going on in the world around you? Yup. Oh well. I now grant myself an unlimited license to purchase as many copies of the Seattle P-I, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times as I desire, for this duration. Will you follow this posting up? Maybe; it might be fun to do intermittent updates describing my progress, but right now I'm not So how can I help? Well, my current email is carl@coryellmartin.org. (Comment on this)