Kevin DeGraaf’s Blog

Generally, when (reasonable) parents co-sign student loans for their children, they do so with confidence; they trust that once we move on into the working world with a college education, we will make good salaries and pay our loans back faithfully. (Thanks, Mom and Dad! So far, so good.)

But what of those parents with a looser grip on reality? Being unable to rationally counter the points I made in support of Lisa being given her passport (in fact, the email has been read and ignored), Lisa’s mother has invented another line of argument: if given her passport, Lisa might flee the country and leave her parents holding the bag for her existing college loans! (The mind boggles.)

I wish I were making this up. I wish that my girlfriend’s parents could call her on her 21st birthday to wish her well, inquire about how things are going, trade light-hearted banter, etc. instead of spewing deranged screeds about financial conspiracy theories as a justification for inappropriately controlling the travel abilities of a 21-year-old adult. That’d be neat.

Happy 21st birthday, Lisa!

This post is a rant, and I have no qualms about such. It may seem strange to post blow-by-blow details of a family quarrel for all the Web to see, but I need the catharsis. Deal with it.

Those of you who know Lisa are aware that she is level-headed, open-minded and rational. For this, I am deeply grateful. Unfortunately, the apple fell pretty far from the tree.

She recently requested that her parents turn over her passport, which is stored in their safe. The immediate impetus is that we will be in Sault Ste. Marie on our upcoming vacation, and we might decide to visit Canada. Beyond that, however, Lisa is an adult and has the right to make decisions regarding the management of her personal paperwork.

Therefore, perhaps naively, neither of us anticipated any problems with this straightforward request. To make a long story short, her mother threw a fit; she has, thus far, refused to provide the passport or any satisfactory reason for hoarding it.

I had to suppress quite a bit of rage as I wrote the following email:

Can you please explain why you are rejecting Lisa’s request for her
passport? What possible use could you have for it?

If the issue is the cost you incurred (application fees, photo fees,
etc.), I will be glad to reimburse you.

If the issue is safe-keeping, rest assured that I have offered the use
of my bank safety-deposit box, and Lisa is very comfortable storing it
there.

If the issue is a concern that we are planning to leave the country,
rest assured that, aside from the occasional short trips to Canada, we
have no plans along these lines. (And even if we did, that’s our business.)

Lisa is an adult, and I’d appreciate it if you treated her accordingly.

Thank you.

This is the same mother (a term I’m using lightly) who has told Lisa, to her face, “I am not proud of the young lady you’re becoming” and “heaven forbid you have kids — some people should not reproduce”.

I was really hoping to have an amicable relationship with Lisa’s parents.  It saddens me deeply that we’ve been forced into the position of considering a complete estrangement in order to protect ourselves from a steady stream of insulting and irrational behavior.

This gem from Xen is the most obtuse, unhelpful error message I’ve seen in quite a while:

Error: Device 768 (vbd) could not be connected. Hotplug scripts not working.

One of the top Google results for this text is a PDF file of the official Xen 3.1 Release Notes. According to these notes, you should check whether your CPU load is abnormally high, and configure Xen such that the host domain (dom0) is assigned fewer CPU cores.

When that didn’t work, I continued Googling. It turns out that this is the error message produced by Xen when you configure a guest OS image to use a non-existent device (block device, LVM logical volume, loopback file, etc.) as a virtual disk.

Compare the aforementioned error message to the following suggestion:

Error: invalid device /dev/vg0/blah specified in /etc/xen/foo.cfg, line X.

I guess that would have been far too easy.

Only three more work days until Vacation 2007!

As is our family’s tradition, we’re staying in Cedarville, MI (map, weather, site). Lisa and I are driving up on Friday (after celebrating her 21st birthday on Thursday).

Look for updates, pictures, etc. on this blog.

Hello, everyone.

After over a decade of telling myself that there was no point in doing so, I’ve finally decided to begin “blogging”.

My goals for this blog are twofold: to post semi-regularly and to avoid boring my readers to death. How well I can meet those goals remains to be seen…

Seriously, though, my plans include:

• Keeping my friends and family informed about things going on in my life.
• Ranting about things that make me mad (and occasionally raving about the things that don’t).
• Linking to interesting websites and sharing them with my audience.
• Posting information about my technical projects, including Google-able solutions to problems.

I welcome comments on my posts. Yes, that means you. The integrity of the public record is very important to me, and so I promise not to edit, mangle, delete, or otherwise mess with user-submitted comments unless there is a clear and obvious reason to do so (spam, illegal content, etc.).

Let the fun begin!