Brokeback mountain, macaroni and cheese, and a Rabbit

I finally went to see Brokeback Mountain this weekend (also known as "the gay cowboy movie"). I guess I can finally forgive Heath Ledger for A Knight's Tale.

I thought the movie was good and sad and thought-provoking, though I think the storytelling fell short in a few places. I liked the second half of the movie far more than the first half -- this may have something to do with the fact that I went in with expectations, though.

The rest of the weekend was spent in Eugene, where the intrepid Ransom and his friend Trent were busily putting a new engine in his VW Rabbit. The highlight for me was definitely hanging out with Chris and Becky and eating their super tricked out version of macaroni and cheese. The thing is, I haven't had macaroni and cheese for years. Possibly a decade, other than the times when I tried a bite to see if I still disliked it. And after all these years, I find out that if you get the good stuff from the hippie store and then put tomato and veggie sausage in it, it's actually really good. Who knew?

We drove back from Eugene last night in the Rabbit with its new engine. Very impressive, methinks.

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Earning my keep

Every once in awhile, I find that I'm just dumb enough to be of use. Take today at work, for instance. There is a SQL query that gets called from a couple of places in our website. One of these pages is the welcome page, which is the first page our users hit upon logging in. The query in question was taking anywhere from 45 seconds to 4 minutes to execute, depending on what other loads the server was under, which left our customers waiting before they could do anything -- not a good entry to the site.

I decided to take on the role of SQL repair woman today, and started attempting to profile and fix the problem. In the meantime, the other two engineers, both of whom know more about SQL, gave it a glance as well (though not with as much focus, as I was tying up the test database for my profiling).

I ran the query on our test database and it took over 7 minutes (the production server is much faster than the test server). This was good, since I could reproduce the problem. But then I couldn't get the query to take more than 30 seconds because the SQL server had cached results or execution plans or table indexes or something. So I learned something very useful by searching "clear sql cache" in Google: DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS combined with DBCC FREEPROCCACHE will clear the cache and give consistent results when benchmarking SQL queries. I love learning new things.

Once I was able to replicate the insanely long execution time for the query (approx 6 minutes, 44 seconds consistently), I started modifying the query itself. I tried a few things here and there, but the long, long wait wasn't making any sense. To make a long story short and skip some stuff which you'll find even more boring than the rest of this post, I eventually tried changing this:

where (@CompanyID is null or table.CompanyID = @CompanyID)

to this:

where (table.CompanyID = @CompanyID or @CompanyID is null).

If you look closely, you'll notice that these say the EXACT SAME THING, just in a different order. For whatever reason, this changed the entire execution plan of the query and knocked the time down to 18 seconds. That's a savings of 6 minutes, 26 seconds -- pretty frickin' sweet. On production, the query runs even faster.

The neat thing is that the other two engineers here are too smart to have tried anything like that early on because there's no way in hell that should have mattered. Hooray for not knowing any better!

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Make it stop

I get approximately six tons of junk mail every month. The real, envelop enclosed variety that stacks up and spills over onto the floor and is threatening to take over my house. It hurts. I hate it.

I'm basically willing to try anything at this point to make it stop. I printed up some nice little postcards, asking people to remove me from their mailing lists (because I am 80 years old). It sort of (not really) worked. I bookmarked a page about how to get off junk mail lists awhile ago, but never really followed through with it. However, I just read it a bit more thoroughly and called the opt out number to make it so the four major credit reporting agencies can't sell my address or credit info for five years. That's pretty sweet.

I plan to contact some of the other numbers and addresses on there soon. I hope it works!

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Linguistically challenged supervillain

After getting a bit verbally confused last weekend, I decided that "Spoonerism Man" (or Moonerism Span, rather) would make an excellent supervillain. He'd yend spears working on his plaster man, attempting to wake over the morld torld.

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Vonage report

I'm not a big phone person, never have been. Not that I won't use it, especially to talk to friends and relatives out of town; it's just that I really don't use it that much. So the fact that I was paying Qwest and Working Assets about $45/month for local and long distance service at my house on top of my cell phone bill felt pretty silly.

For most people, the obvious choice is to get rid of the land line and just use a cell phone. But I hate cell phone to cell phone calls, and most people I spend any amount of time talking to have cell phones. In rare instances where they have land lines, I revel in the quality of the communication. Not only that, but I'm somewhat flaky when it comes to keeping track of ordinary details like making sure my phone is recharged. I frequently leave the charger at work, so if my phone goes dead on a weekend, it's useless.

When I saw that Vonage has a $15/month plan (+ $1.50 tax or fee or whatever and a $30 activation fee) that includes long distance, well, I had to check it out. I get 500 minutes a monthand that's it. And there's no way I'm on the phone for 8 hours a month.

The deal with Vonage is that they use Voice Over IP (VoIP) technology. My setup is this: I have a cable modem that is connected to the internet. The modem is also connected to a router. The router has ports for my phone and computers (and sends out a wireless signal because that's what I use for my laptop). My phone and computers are connected to the internet through this router.

Initially, I was pissed off at Vonage. I made the switch right before all the technology in my life blew up at home and at work, so I had a fairly short fuse anyhow. What happened was, they put in a transfer order with Qwest that went through before I even got the router that would allow me to connect to Vonage. It was in the mail. Ergo, I was without phone service at home for two days, rather than the 1-2 hours they said it would be. I called and told them, "this is crap!" They told me I could forward all calls to my cell phone (which I didn't like, but it was nice I had the option) and refunded me a whole $8. So things were off to an unimpressive start.

If it hadn't been for an incredibly strange coincidence, the rest of the Vonage installation would have gone very smoothly. As it happens, my cable modem up and died the same day I was trying to switch over to Vonage. Easily remedied, however, by spending some time on the phone with Jamal at Comcast who was one of those rare excellent tech support people. He was great, even though we spent 45 minutes talking and he couldn't actually fix my problem. I went down to the Comcast office the next day and got a new modem in about 5 minutes. Within 10 minutes of arriving back home, I was back online and my phone worked. Even better, there are instructions on the Vonage website for using the existing telephone wiring in your house to connect your phones. You simply unplug the outside box from any external phone lines (very easy), and then your house has its own isolated network of telephone wiring. Then you plug the router into a phone jack instead of a phone and you can plug phones into any jack in your house (I think they recommend limiting it to 5).

So, I don't know much about the voice quality yet -- as I said, I'm not a phone person, so I've only used it to call Ransom to test it out and say, "hey, my phone works!". He said the quality wasn't quite as good as with Qwest, but totally acceptable.

The coolest thing (aside from free long distance, which just makes so much sense!) is that I get an email when someone leaves me a voicemail message. Also, I can listen to the messages on the web through my Vonage account. Neat!

And that's my report on Vonage. I'm exploring new technology so you don't have to. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it yet -- still don't know much about voice quality -- but aside from the gap in service, it seems to be pretty good thus far.

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Businessman orders tough-sounding coffee drink

Portland, OR - An area businessman puffed out his chest a little today as he ordered a "Depth Charge". The second part of his drink order was muffled, but the pride with which he looked around suggested he may have added additional espresso shots. The order caused the appropriately cynical Pacific Northwest barista to roll his eyes in disdain. The Depth Charge, which contains regular coffee with an added shot of espresso, goes by many names, and is more frequently referred to as a "Shot in the Dark").

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Yelling fuck loudly

Last week, it was the virus that caused me to yell fuck loudly. Also, to growl a lot. Grrr.

Yesterday, it was my own sheer stupidity. I left my dremel tool box on the back of my car while backing into the street and taking off. When it fell, it produced a clunking noise, which in turn caused me to look in the rear view mirror. The toolbox was sitting in the middle of the road.

"Fuck!" I yelled, loudly. I may not have repeated the expletive out loud as the Tri-Met bus caught the toolbox with its right front tire, but I'm sure the expression on my face said it plainly enough. I ran back to the scene of my stupidity to gather up approximately 847* separate dremel tool bits, cutting disks, and other various accessories. A very kind man on a motorcycle offered to help and stopped a few cars for me while I picked up the last of it. I was quite the damsel in distress -- the hem of my skirt and my coat were dripping wet as I knelt down to scoop up my dremel kit. Luckily, I had left the actual dremel in my garage, so there wasn't any harm done, except to the case where the bus hit it.

Today, it was the woman who opened her door right before I passed her SUV. I was on my bicycle. Then I was almost off my bicycle, yelling fuck loudly, right in her ear. It's extremely awkward, being that close to a stranger who has just managed to maim you. She was standing right next to me; I was blocking her from shutting her door and walking away from her car. She muttered a sorry and asked if I was okay a few times. I was tempted to yell at her and tell her to be careful, but I figured me riding into her door was probably a better way of demonstrating the need to look around before opening her door and stepping onto the street. I rode off with a sore knee, but the extra adrenaline made the rest of the ride go by quite quickly.

And so it was that when I finally finished the hat I've been knitting and realized that I managed to knit it into the shape of a funnel... well that just made me laugh. Because it's funny. If I ever recharge the batteries for my digital camera, I'll even take a picture for you.

Tomorrow, I might not leave my house.

* What, you never exaggerate?

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Blond joke

I read the best blond joke yesterday!

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What you should take from that last post

If you're running windows, read the Internet Storm Center's FAQ and seriously consider installing the unoffical patch for the WMF vulnerability. Also, buy a baseball bat.

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But what do you know about me?

So here's the problem. It's clear that I've got a virus on my machine at home. Several of them. It became clear when two of the smartest people I know clicked on what looked to be an informative link on Google. The link immediately redirected and suddenly my desktop was hijacked with a Winhound ad, which suggested that my computer might be vulnerable to that sort of thing. You think? Undeletable entries were made in the registry on my machine. Trojan horse viruses were detected. Spyware, adware, and who knows what else was installed.

Crap.

My guess is that this has to do with the WMF vulnerability that's in the news. Sadly, Microsoft won't release a patch for another week.

So what will I do? Well, I've already installed and run Spybot. This helped a little. Then I got me some free virus software, AVG, and ran that. With AVG, I attempted to "heal" the infected files. No more viruses, but Windows will now only boot in safe mode. Awesome.

I've copied the files I need onto my mp3 player, and will make further recovery efforts this evening. If I can't get the fucking winhound.com registry entry deleted, however, I'll reinstall the OS.

Whatever else happens, I'll definitely be installing the unoffical patch for the WMF vulnerability.

I'll also need to do some research so I can try to figure out exactly what on my computer was messed with. Did they try to take passwords, credit card numbers, email addresses...? Would they have gotten them from a Thunderbird email address book, or only Outlook Express (in which case I'm safe)? I know for a fact that some information was sent somewhere (thanks, Windows Firewall) because I saw on the task bar that a window opened, processed, and closed itself before I was able to figure out what was going on.

So I'll probably change all my passwords and see if I can figure out what else I need to do. Also, I'd like to hit someone very hard with a baseball bat, but I don't know who yet. Grrr.

Maybe this is the year I make good on my threats to learn something about Linux.

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