Monthly Archives: March 2009

Peace

Family

Today over lunch, I and 6 others went to visit Grandma.

She was in her room, looking better physically today than yesterday. When I walked in, I said brightly, “Hi Grandma!” She took my hand warmly, and said to me, “Now I don’t think we’ve met. Who are you?”

I knew that moment would happen someday, but still was surprised when it happened.

Mom told her that we were there to tell her we love her. Grandma counted out the seven of us, and said, “All these wonderful people here to tell that to ME?” That’s Grandma still there!

It was a difficult moment. Many of us were tearful, and Grandma was sick enough that she sometimes lost the battle to stay awake. But we were all glad it was happening.

Mom thought it right (me too) that she should tell Grandma about the latest word from the doctors. The conversation went, in part, something like this, with my mom addressing her mother:

My Mom: “Mom, the doctors say your heart is probably wearing out.”

My Grandma: *shrug* “Yeah.”

My Mom: “And your body is probably tiring out too.”

My Gramdma: “Yes it is. I’m 94.”

It’s not that Grandma was depressed or anything. Just that she had long ago been at peace with the idea of death, and actually told us more than once that the was rather surprised that she has lived to be as old as she has. So it wasn’t frightening or surprising to her to confront her own mortality. To her, it was a fact, and an obvious one at that.

My brother brought along Grandma’s old Bible. She had given it to him a few years ago. It was filled with highlights and handwritten notes from cover to cover. She had carefully analyzed it, and when she bought a new Bible, had carefully copied the notes to it. My brother read to her two passages that she had highlighted:Psalm 23: (which she has noted as “a favorite of many Christians”) and Numbers 6:24-26. He then held her hand and said a prayer with her. Then he said a blessing for her, and as he was getting to the end, she interrupted, saying the last word for him: “forever!”

She still had her sense of humor, and made us all laugh several times. She said, as she always has when any of us stop by to visit, how happy she is that we came by, and what a wonderful family she has. She said several times “Danke schön, Danke schön, Danke schön!” (Thank you, thank you, thank you! — she had made sure to teach a few German words to all of us as kids.)

When it was time to go, she got lots of hugs from us, and made a point to tell each of us individually “thank you for coming!”

As we walked down the hall, I was reminded of her old tradition going back many years. Whenever we would leave her house, she’d wave to us from the porch. And, if it was dark, we’d turn on the car light and wave back. Since she’s been in the nursing home, she’ll wave to us from her doorway as we walk down the hall.

And, sure enough, today’s visit ended with her waving to us from her doorway with both hands (as she always does) and a big smile. We all waved back with a smile as we walked away, too.

I don’t know if this will be the last goodbye with her, but if it is, I can’t think of a better one.

Time

Family

When I was a child, I was learning to play piano. My parents didn’t have one at the time, but my grandparents did. Every evening, we’d go over to their house so I could practice. I suspect I was more interested in other things most of the time, though — whether Grandma has some cherry moos in her fridge, or whether Grandpa would play chess with me or do something fun in his workshop.

Grandma would often be in her curlers, and we’d often leave her in the evening saying goodbye in the pink fluorescent lights she had shining on her plants by the door.

Other times, we’d just go to visit, or I’d ride my bike over. I liked helping Grandma cook or bake peppernuts. And when I was trying to learn chess from Grandpa, and Grandma thought he was being too hard on me, she’d say something to him in German and I’d magically start winning.

Grandma volunteered at a local thrift store weaving rugs. These were made by hand on old looms in a traditional way, mainly out of donated clothes and drapes that were too tattered to sell. My mom used to drop me off with grandma while she went shopping. I maybe brought my lunch, and watched grandma, until one time I asked her if I could help. She let me, and eventually the store manager told grandma that I ought to be able to work on my own loom. Pretty soon we had a routine down: in summer, Grandma would pick me up at home, I’d read a computing magazine in the car to town, and work at a loom side-by-side with Grandma. That lasted until I got too busy in high school. But ever since then, Grandma delighted in telling this whole story almost every time she saw me, and she remembered word for word what the store manager said — something I never quite could remember.

I remember watching Grandma care for my brothers when they were sick, or helping out my parents with whatever they needed help with. We had a tradition for a number of years of spending New Year’s Eve at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, and going back home the next morning. The three of us boys slept in a cold upstairs room, but we didn’t care because the bed had more layers on it than we could count, and an electric blanket besides.

When my Grandpa Klassen passed away in 1990, Grandma missed him but didn’t get too worked up about it. She was convinced that he was in a better place, and appeared to be at peace with it. Death was a normal part of life to her, and it didn’t surprise her that it happened.

In the last few years, Grandma’s health has been failing. Her knees have been bothering her for years, and she has also been struggling with dementia for a few years. It’s been hard on me to visit her, because in some ways she hasn’t been the same person I remember for awhile now, and in other ways she’s exactly the same. Lately she hasn’t always remembered where I live, or what Terah and Jacob’s names are, we knew to expect that and are respectful of the situation. For years now, Grandma has been saying, “I don’t know why the Good Lord doesn’t take me up to be with him yet. My bags are packed and I’m ready!”

Last time I saw her, I mentioned that we used to do weaving together, and she couldn’t remember. That was a sure sign to me that things had taken a turn for the worse. Our last several visits have ended with a big hug, and her still iron grip on my hand, with her saying, “Thank you for coming! My family is so good to me. We love each other!”

She’s been battling infections and heart problems the past few weeks. This evening, I got an email from my mom saying “It’s time” to say our goodbyes. She had been to see Grandma today, and Grandma still managed to tell her, “We love each other.”

As much as time has changed her in the past few years, she’s still there, the same loving Grandma as ever.

Review: David Copperfield

Reviews

I finished reading David Copperfield on the Kindle a few days ago. This is a review of the novel, not the Kindle.

I’m not an English major, and so I’m not going to pretend to be one. I’m not going to discuss what themes the book touches on, what category it fits in, or generally dissect it to the point where it’s more monotonous than fun.

I read the book because I wanted to, not because I had to write a paper about it.

I must say, first of all, that this has got to be one of the best books I’ve ever read. The vivid descriptions of the characters were just fun to read. One particularly meek man was described like this: “He was so extremely conciliatory in his manner that he seemed to apologize to the very newspaper for taking the liberty of reading it.”

Some of the scenes in the novel are amazingly vivid and memorable. The hilarious and tense scene towards the end where one of the main villains is taken down was one, and of course just about every scene involving David’s aunt is too.

Dickens is a master of suspense. He does it through subtle premonitions in the book. You might not even really notice them as you’re reading. But it sure had an effect on me: I had trouble putting the book down, and stayed up later than I should have on more than one night to keep reading another chapter or three.

Like any good book, this one left me to think even after I was done reading it, and left me wanting to read it again. Right now.

There are some practical downsides to it, though. It was written in the 1850s, and some of the vocabulary and British legal, business, and monetary discussions are strange to a modern American audience. Nevertheless, with the exception of the particularly verbose Mr. Micawber, you can probably make it through without a dictionary, though one will be handy. I read it on the Kindle, which integrates a dictionary and makes it very easy to look up words. I learned that a nosegay is a bouquet of showy flowers. And that Mr. Micawber was fond of using words obsolete since the 17th century, according to the Kindle. If you remember that “pecuniary emoluments” refers to a salary, you’ll be doing OK.

The other thing that occasionally bugged me was that the narrator (David) would comment on some sort of gesture, or comment that wasn’t very direct, and then say something like, “But she didn’t need to be more explicit, because I understood the meaning perfectly.” Well, sometimes I didn’t. Though I usually figured it out after a bit. I was never quite sure if Dickens was being intentionally needling to the reader, or if an 1850s British reader would have figured out the meaning perfectly well. But that was part of the fun of it, I think.

QUISH!

Family

Today, I was sitting on the couch. Jacob crawled up, and pushed me forward, saying “I go there.” He crawled behind me. Then, ready for one of his favorite games, yelled out: “QUISH, daddy!”

So I leaned back gently a bit, and said “squish!” Jacob yelled, laughing, “QUISH!” “Quish again, daddy!”

So I’d lean back a bit, gently, again, this time reaching behind me to tickle him a bit as I leaned. “Squash!”

Louder laughing. “QUASH!!!” Right in my ear — ouch, but I didn’t mind. “Do it again, daddy!”

Right now, being a dad seems complicated enough. You’ve got to have the right touch to “squish” a 2-year-old without really squishing him. Or have the presence of mind to realize that when Jacob was happily playing outside, then suddenly comes running over, very upset, saying “Go inside!” it means he probably needs to use the potty urgently, or just had an accident. (Or both, as it happened today.) Or to recognize that little walk that means he really does need to use the potty even though he’d rather not. And, of course, there’s figuring out what he’s saying, when his words can still be a bit garbled.

But these all seem simple to me, compared to what will come. How will we help Jacob to grow as a person of good character? How will we meet his need to be challenged intellectually? Will we be able to maintain a good relationship, and yet still have the judgment to have the right set of rules, when he gets to high school? Will I have a good relationship with him as an adult? And how am I going to react when the day comes when he tells me I ought to move into the nursing home?

Jacob, of course, doesn’t care about any of that right now. Each night, when I put him down for the night, he wants me to cover him up with blankets. Once I’ve done that, he peeks out and says, “Have a good night, dad!” I always reply with “You have a good night too, Jacob!”

If we can get along that well for the next 60 years, I guess we’ll do all right.

A Few Days With the Kindle 2

Reviews

So I am going to do something that nobody on the Internet is doing lately: post a review of the Kindle 2 after having only used it for three days.

Shocking, yes, I know.

I had never even seen a Kindle of either model before getting the Kindle 2. I had, though, thought about getting an eInk device for some time. The $359 Kindle 2 price tag caused me significant pause, though in the end I went for it due to the 30-day return policy.

On the surface, I thought that it would be weird to have a Kindle. After all, how often am I away from the computer? And there’s a small local library a few blocks from where I work. But I had a hunch it might turn out for me like my iPod did: something that didn’t sound all that useful from reading about it, but turned out to be tremendously so after having actually used it.

Turtleback Delivery

I ordered my Kindle 2 with standard shipping, which meant that it went by FedEx Smart Post. Here is my SmartPost rant.

There are two words in “Smart Post” that are misleading. I once had an item take literally a week to make it from St. Louis to Kansas. That is, I kid you not, slower than the Pony Express ran in 1860. This time, my Kindle made it from Kentucky to Kansas in a mere five days. Oh, and it spent more than 24 hours just sitting in St. Louis.

The Device

Overall, the device is physically quite nice. It is larger and thinner than I had imagined, and the screen also is a bit smaller. It is usually easier to hold than a paperback, due to not having to prevent it from closing too far at the binding edge. The buttons are easy to press, though I could occasionally wish for them to be easier, but that’s a minor nit.

The Screen

The most important consideration for me was the screen. The eInk display as both stunningly awesome and disappointing.

This is not the kind of display you get on your computer. Or, for that matter, any other device. It isn’t backlit. It reacts to light as paper does. It can be viewed from any angle. And it consumes no power to sustain an image; only to change it. Consequently, it puts up a beautiful portrait of a famous author on the screen when it is put to sleep, and consumes no power to maintain it.

The screen’s response time isn’t anywhere near as good as you’d expect from a regular LCD. It flashes to black when you turn a page, and there is no scrolling. On the other hand, this is not really a problem. I found the page turning speed to be more than adequate, and probably faster than I’d turn the page on a real book.

The resolution of the display has the feeling of being incredible. The whole thing provides a far different, and in my eyes superior, experience to reading on an LCD or CRT screen.

My nit is the level of contrast. The background is not really a pure white, but more of a light gray. This results in a contrast level that is quite clearly poorer than that of the printed page. At first I thought this would be a serious problem, though I am growing somewhat more used to it as I read more.

Reading Experience

Overall, I’ve got to say that it is a great device. You can easily get lost in a book reading it on the Kindle. I’m reading David Copperfield for the first time, and have beat a rather rapid path through the first five chapters on the Kindle already. And that, I think, is the best thing that could be said about an ebook reader. It stays out of the way and lets you immerse yourself in your reading.

The Kindle’s smartly-integrated Oxford-American Dictionary was useful too. One thing about a novel written 150 years ago is that there are some words I just haven’t ever heard. “Nosegay,” for instance. You can move a cursor to a word to see a brief pop-up definition appear, or press Enter to see the entire entry. This is nice and so easy that I’m looking up words I wouldn’t have bothered to if I were reading the book any other way.

A nosegay, by the way, is a bouquet of showy flowers.

Buying Experience

The Kindle has a wireless modem tied to the Sprint network on it. The data charges for this, whatever they may be, are absorbed by Amazon in the cost of the device and/or the books you buy for it.

This turned out to be a very smart piece of engineering. I discovered on Amazon’s Kindle Daily Post that Random House is offering five mostly highly-rated sci-fi books for free on the Kindle for a limited time. So I went over to the page for each, and made my “purchase”. It was only a click or two, and I saw a note saying it was being delivered.

A few minutes later, I picked up the Kindle off the kitchen counter. Sure enough, my purchases were there ready to read. Impressive. This level of ease of use smells an awful lot like Apple. Actually, I think it’s surpassed them.

You can delete books from the Kindle and re-download them at any time. You can initiate that operation from either the PC or the Kindle. And you can also browse Amazon’s Kindle store directly from the device itself.

I haven’t subscribed to any magazines or newspapers, but I gather that they deliver each new issue automatically the moment it’s released by the publisher, in the middle of the night.

I pre-ordered the (free to Kindle) Cook’s Illustrated How-to-Cook Library. It makes me way happier than it should to see “This item will be auto-delivered to your Kindle on March 26” in the order status.

Free Books

Amazon’s Kindle library has a number of completely free Kindle books as well. These are mostly out-of-copyright books, probably sourced from public etext places like Project Gutenberg, and converted to the Mobipocket format that is the Kindle’s native format with a minimum of human intervention. As they are free, you can see them in Amazon’s library if you sort by price. And, of course, Amazon will transfer them to the Kindle wirelessly, and maintain a copy of them in your amazon.com account.

Unfortunately, as with free etexts in general on the Internet, the quality of these varies. I was very annoyed to find that many free etexts look like they were done on a typewriter, rather than professionally printed. They don’t use smart quotes; only the straight ones. When reading on a device that normally shows you a faithful print experience, this is jarring. And I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find a copy of Return of Sherlock Holmes that actually had the graphic figures in Dancing Men. Ah well.

Your Own Content

Amazon operates a mail server, username@kindle.com. You can email stuff to it, and it will convert it to the Kindle format and wirelessly upload it to your kindle for a fee of $0.10. Alternatively, you can use username@free.kindle.com, which does the same thing at no charge, but emails you back a link to download the converted work to install via USB yourself.

I tried it with a number of PDFs. It rejected — about a dozen times from only my single mail message — a PDF containing graphic images only. However, it does quite well with most text-heavy PDFs — notably doing an excellent job with Return of Sherlock Holmes from bookstacks.org — the only source I found that was both beautifully typeset and preserved the original figures. Unfortunately, the PDF converter occasionally has troubles identifying what should be a paragraph, particularly in sections of novels dealing with brief dialog.

I have also sent it some HTML files to convert, which it also does a great job with.

You can also create Mobipocket files yourself and upload them directly. There is a Mobipocket creator, or you can use mobiperl if you are Windows-impaired or prefer something scriptable on Linux.

The device presents itself as a USB mass storage device, so you can see it under any OS. There’s a documents folder to put your files in. You can back it up with your regular backup tools, too. And it charges over USB.

Web Browser

I haven’t tried it much. It usually works, but seems to be completely down on occasion. It would get by in a pinch, but is not suitable for any serious work.

The guys over at XKCD seem to love it; in fact, their blog post was what finally convinced me to try the Kindle in the first place.

Final Thoughts

I’ve ordered a clip-on light and a “leather” case for the Kindle. The light, I believe, will completely resolve my contrast complaint. The leather case to protect it, of course.

I can’t really see myself returning the Kindle anymore. It’s way too much fun, and it’s making it easier to read more again.

And really, if Amazon manages to reach out to a whole generation of people and make it easy and fun for them to read again — and make a profit doing it, of course — they may move up a notch or two from being an “evil patent troll” company to a “positive social force” company. Wow, never thought I’d say that one.

My Week

Hardware

It’s been quite the week.

Stomach Flu

Last Friday, my stomach was just starting to feel a little odd. I didn’t think much off it — a little food that didn’t go over well or stress, I thought.

Saturday I got out of bed and almost immediately felt like throwing up. Ugh. I probably caught some sort of stomach flu. I was nauseous all day and had some terrible diarrhea to boot. I spent parts of Saturday, Saturday night, Sunday, and Sunday night “supervising some emergency downloads” as the BOFH would say. By Sunday afternoon, I thought I was doing good enough to attend a practice of the Kansas Mennonite Men’s Choir. I made it through but it wasn’t quite as up to it as I thought.

Monday morning I woke up and thought the worst was behind me, so I went to work. By evening, the worst clearly was not behind me. I was extremely cold, and then got very hot a few hours later. Tuesday I left work a little early because of not feeling well.

Servers

Wednesday a colleague called me at home before I left to say that the ERP database had a major hiccup. That’s never good. The database is this creaky old dinosaur thing that has a habit of inventing novel ways to fail (favorite pastime: exceeding some arbitrary limit to the size of files that no OS has cared about for 5 years, then hanging without telling anybody why). My coworkers had been working on it since 5.

I went into the office and did what I could to help out, though they had mostly taken care of it. Then we went to reboot the server. It didn’t come back. I/O error on sda just after init started, and it hung. Puzzled, as it just used that disk to boot from. Try rebooting again.

This time, I/O error as the fibre channel controller driver loads. Again, puzzled as it just used that controller to load grub. Power cycle this time.

And now the server doesn’t see the fibre channel link at all. Eep. Check our fiber optic cables, and power cycle again.

And THIS time, the server doesn’t power back up. Fans whir for about a second, then an ominous red light I never knew was there shows up. Eeep!

So I call HP. They want me to remove one CPU. Yes, remove one CPU. I tried, and long story short, they dispatch a local guy with a replacement motherboard. “Can you send along a FC controller, in case it’s dead too?” “Nope, not until we diagnose a problem with it.”

Local guy comes out. He’s a sharp guy and I really like him. But the motherboard wasn’t in stock at the local HP warehouse, so he had to have it driven in from Oklahoma City. He gets here with it by about 4:30. At this point the single most important server to the company’s business has been down almost 12 hours.

He replaces the motherboard. The server now powers up — yay! And it POSTs, and it…. doesn’t see the disks. !#$!#$

He orders the FC controller, which is so very much not in stock that they can’t get it to us until 8:30AM the next morning (keep in mind this thing is on a 4-hour 24/7 contract).

Next morning rolls around. Outage now more than 24 hours. He pops the FC controller in, we tweak the SAN settings appropriately, we power up the machine, and….

still doesn’t see any disks, and the SAN switch still doesn’t see any link. EEP!

Even the BIOS firmware tool built into the controller doesn’t see a link, so we KNOW it’s not a software issue. We try plugging and unplugging cables, trying different ports, everything. Nothing makes a difference.

At this point, while he ponders what else he can replace while we start migrating the server to a different blade. We get ERP back up on its temporary home an hour later, and he basically orders us every part he can think of while we’ve bought him some room.

Several additional trips later, he’s replaced just about everything at least once, some things 2 or 3 times, and still no FC link. Meanwhile, I’ve asked my colleague to submit a new ticket to HP’s SAN team so we can try checking of the switch has an issue. They take their sweet time answering until he informs them this morning that it’s been *48 HOURS* since we first reported the outage. All of a sudden half a dozen people at HP take a keen interest in our case. As if they could smell this blog post coming…

So they advise us to upgrade the firmware in the SAN switch, but they also say “we really should send this to the blade group; the problem can’t be with the SAN” — and of course the blade people are saying “the problem’s GOT to be with the SAN”. We try to plan the firmware upgrade. In theory, we can lose a switch and nobody ever notices due to multipathing redundancy. In practice, we haven’t tested that in 2 years. None of this equipment had even been rebooted in 390 days.

While investigating this, we discovered that one of the blade servers could only see one path to its disks, not two. Strange. Fortunately, THAT blade wasn’t mission-critical on a Friday, so I power cycled it.

And it powered back up. And it promptly lost connection to its disks entirely, causing the SAN switches to display the same mysterious error they did with the first blade — the one that nobody at HP had heard of, could find in their documentation, or even on Google. Yes, that’s right. Apparently power cycling a server means it loses access to its disks.

Faced with the prospect of our network coming to a halt if anything else rebooted (or worse, if the problem started happening without a reboot), we decided we’d power cycle one switch now and see what would happen. If it worked out, our problems would be fixed. If not, at least things would go down in our and HP’s presence.

And that… worked? What? Yes. Power cycling the switch fixed every problem over the course of about 2 minutes, without us having to do anything.

Meanwhile, HP calls back to say, “Uhm, that firmware upgrade we told you to do? DON’T DO IT!” We power cycle the other switch, and have a normal SAN life again.

I let out a “WOOHOO!” My colleague, however, had the opposite reaction. “Now we’ll never be able to reproduce this problem to get it fixed!” Fair point, I suppose.

Then began the fairly quick job of migrating ERP back to its rightful home — it’s all on Xen already, designed to be nimble for just these circumstances. Full speed restored 4:55PM today.

So, to cap it all off, within the space of four hours, we had fail:

  • One ERP database
  • ERP server’s motherboard
  • Two fiber optic switches — but only regarding their ability to talk to machines recently rebooted
  • And possibly one FC controller

Murphy, I hate you.

The one fun moment out of this was this conversation:

Me to HP guy: “So yeah, that machine you’ve got open wasn’t rebooted in 392 days until today.”

HP guy: “WOW! That’s INCRED — oh wait, are you running Linux on it?”

Me: “Yep.”

HP: “Figures. No WAY you’d get that kind of uptime from Windows.”

And here he was going to be all impressed.