Ramblings of a mental patient

I’m shaking off my jet lag and going through our C13 photos. I’ve created an initial gallery. I haven’t captioned the photos yet, but you can have a look if you like.

I’ll be home tonight, late. I really miss our cats, but we had a blast. Lots of photos and stories to come.

We did so much over the weekend and met so many fantastic people. This was a much needed vacation and I’m happy to have come.

We’re in our layover for C13. The fight is overbooked so we’re trying to ensure that we can get to our destination as we hope. The scenery when we were landing was fantastic!

*update*
Kat worked her magic and we’re on. So, in about an hour or so we’ll begin the next leg of our trip.

Its 6AM and we’re in. Now we just wait for our flight to arrive. I was excited to see that there was a wireless network here at the airport at first. Then I realized it was an AT&T pay through the nose network. So, I’m tunneling through my cell phone.

For the record, airports suck in this country. TSA are fear mongering jackasses. That is all.

Kat and I have a 7AM flight tomorrow out to Oregon for C13. We both figure this means we need to be up at 3AM or so so we get to the air port early enough to deal with all the crap you have to deal with at those places these days.

I’m actually pretty psyched for the trip. I haven’t been to Portland before, so it’ll be new. I’m stocked up on books, ipod is loaded and laptop is backed up. This should be a very fun weekend.

In about a week I’ll be flying out to Portland, Oregon for C13. Kat has gone all out making clothes for us. I find myself really looking forward to the trip and events.

I really enjoy traveling with Kat. She helps negate my cranky, hermit like tendencies without being over bearing about it. As much as I despise airports, I think the trip will be reasonably fun. What we really need to do is stock up on books for the flight. I’m really glad she’s cool with just hanging out, relaxing and reading together while we’re on the plane.

Today I finally tracked down the actual cause of deadlocks in my application. I alternate between feeling silly for not knowing and wondering what the hell would possess Oracle to make busted behavior the default.

After a maddening experience trying to diagnose deadlocking in an application where many concurrent transactions involving discrete non-overlapping transactions were failing I got to the bottom of things.

In oracle, if you have foreign keys and you do not explicitly index them, changes to the parent table create a shared lock on the child tables. This will break concurrent updates. The fix, which was maddeningly simple, is to create indexes for all columns foreign keyed back to another table. This has the effect of concurrent updates using row level locking, which is what you want in the first place.

Ah well, thats one lesson I won’t be forgetting any time soon.

Friday saw me wasting more time at Worst Buy, but happily the saga is now at an end. About 2 1/2 years ago I bought my 40g ipod there. At the time, they actually had a much better replacement plan than apple did. Long story short, that changed. Now they’re theoretically equivalent. However, after my first ipod developed a busted hard drive the irritation began.

After a lot of wasted time they finally admitted they lost my ipod and offered to replace it with a *smaller* model. At this point I was just pissed and demanded a refund. That, at least, happened. The funny part is that 80g ipods today cost less than 40g ipods did back then.

Saturday was a fantastic day. And despite Kat hiding the bike pump, I managed to get out for a solid 3-3 1/2 hour ride. This was followed by dinner with friends and we saw the spider man movie. No spoilers, but I don’t see what the fuss was about. The effects were ok, but the movie was a little weak. Still, I enjoyed it so it wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t great by any stretch.

Today, Kat is going to a friends birthday party and I’m taking the opportunity to catch up with some friends I haven’t seen in a bit.