Rhonabwy

Ordered a hard drive, so

Ordered a hard drive, so that part's done and it's on it's way. Found a nice deal at Outpost.com and ordered a 120Gb for just under $160. It wasn't the pricing sweet spot (maximal Gb/$ appeared to be 80Gb today), but I thought an additional 40Gb for $40 was a decent deal and I'd use it.

120Gb is four times what I have in the G4 today, so as I've gone way out there this time. But I'm thinking I'll be able to keep lots of DV stream online, which would be nice.

I called up The Computer Store (the closest we have to an Apple store up here in Seattle, and host to the MacBusinessExpo) today and had a fairly bad reaction. I called to ask about hard drives, what the pricing sweet point was, and if there was an option to add a DVD-RW to my G4/533. It was really frustrating, because the guy wouldn't even bloody well talk to me. I got back monosyllabic clipped responses, and I had to practically pull every detail out. What's amazing about this is that I wasn't talking with your typical service guy - but to someone in sales. Let me tell you - if that's sales, it sucks. I'm pretty big on supporting the local store, but they can go fuck themselves. Maybe there's some cool folks in that store, but I haven't found them yet.

On one hand, I'm glad

On one hand, I'm glad they settled, which effectively reinforces ofr me that they're the evil badies. On the other hand, I think the states should have hurt them for a lot more money than that.

Well, my hard drive at home is pretty definitely fucked - or at least one partition (the large one, of course) is. I've got most of it backed up, and can recover the rest with some effort, but I really want to consolidate and back up everything. So a new hard drive is somewhere in the works - just need to order it and get it here to install it.

Evening. All's quiet at home,

Evening.

All's quiet at home, so I thought I'd write in my blog a bit. We had John and Sue over for desert tonight, along with Karen's folks who are staying with us for the weekend visiting. A busy day of siteseeing occupied most of the day - Pike's Place Market, the Aquarium, the Underground Tour, etc. It's been a busy day - a lot of walking.

Yesterday didn't end until quite late either - Vas and I stayed late at the office (11:30pm) trying to get the newest version of our internal workflow (imagine a monstrously complex assembly line of computer software agents) running before we left for the day. This whole past week was dedicated to getting the new version rollout out, but we spent the entire week screwing with data and data quality issues, so the software didn't even touch down until friday at 6pm. I've been half wondering if I shouldn't have pulled the plug on the upgrade because of the data quality issues and backed out on Thursday. From a strict QA and scheduling viewpoint, it would have been the right call - but I was swayed by the desire not to punt and try again later, but to push on and get this working.

I have to say, it looks like it's mostly working pretty well. A few code problems that were more or less expected, but the system is running as advertised. Which, I've got to say, is incredibly cool. I just wish it hadn't kept me at the office until 11:30pm at night with my in-laws arriving for a 3 day visit.

I got email from Tim Allwine this evening. I'd read an article at OReilly that mentioned him working on a single sign-on project, so I'd written him asking about it. Getting his email reminded me that Gus and I had come up with some really interesting ideas regarding SSO and such while we'd both been at MU. They're still using the code we all worked on, although I have no idea how much anymore.

That sort of leads to an article set I saw on the Apple Developer News - Apple's published a website with details about taking advantage of the internal security mechanisms and libraries on MacOS X. They've got some decent things up there, including links to a number of articles and highlights of the Apple specific technologies they've implemented and are using.

I recall Jason Gorden (a hacker who left MU to go be a lawyer) exclaiming that what we'd built together was something that a lot of folks would pay money for - that it was a definite product possibility. We never explored that route (and looking back, I'm glad - no fuckin' way were we prepared for that game), but I somethings wonder now what else we created in that flurry of geek freedom that we took for granted and missed as a possible opportunity.

I sometimes wonder if I've wasted away too much at my current job. I mean, I'm high energy, i get shit done and all that - but I dream of being creative and I never do be creative there. Then when the end of the day rolls around, I find excuses (some quite valid - which I may write about more at some future point) to not go attack these ideas and theories I wildly come up with. Thinking about our SSO project, our goals, and how much we created in so short a timespan - it's really pretty amazing. I miss that. Staying late rolling out the latest large revision of our code was some of the same thrill, but I didn't take much part in this one's creation and nurturing - just delivery.

Ken Bereskin has a new

Ken Bereskin has a new entry in his blog with a feature in Jaguar I wasn't aware of - viewing with icon preview! That makes scanning through pictures really easy (Karen's been using this feature on XP extensively). Maybe I take too many photos - but man, I'm glad he stuck that up there.

I'm listening to gregorian chant

I'm listening to gregorian chant and putting off working on the numbers for next year's budget. The chant is pretty good, and reminded me of the fellow who married Karen's cousin. The wedding was a full catholic wedding - mass, the whole kaboodle. The priest had a really good voice, and some of the prayers (in english) he sung in a polyphony chant, which was pretty cool. He sermon was a bit cloying, but I don't expect them to be perfect. There was a section of the mass that he did in latin too - in chant - that was very cool. I don't care much for church doctrine, but I do admire the artistic aspect of the chant.

And just to prove how much a heathen I am - I kept looking at the statue of Christ and thinking of the "Buddy Jesus" from Dogma.

Well, this thing is kinda

Well, this thing is kinda cool...

I've got access to Forrester

I've got access to Forrester Research papers at work. Today, I downloaded a boatload to read while I had to go to the dentist's office. Sometimes I read these things and think what the fuck was this guy smoking?. He comes up with perfectly valid data points and links them into this quagmire of CIO wet-dream pantin' non-reality.

It seems pretty clear to me that the future of IT doesn't lie with disparate ivory towers of data centers and white-coated lab techs, but with a merger of understanding between the IT staff that understands the business and business that understands what an IT staff can accomplish. The report would seem to have your average CIO expecting that a consolidation of services was coming in another 3 or 4 years, and that all the old problems of consolidated services from an IT shop would go away - that all of a sudden, they'd become more responsive, able to provide better decision making information, and more effectively control the whole shebang. What he completely discounted is that while Microsoft is desperately trying to do (and is effectively accomplishing) is to make the system administrator a commodity. And other than that, all these big companies have almost zero desire to provide transparency into their systems and the kind of data coordination that would be required to dynamically shift resources around like this OrganicIT thing suggestions. There's zero incentive - they'll all looking for the lock-in, for the "special sauce" that will keep the customers with them as opposed to someone else. They don't want to be commoditized - then the high margin business is gone, and it's down to brutal slugfests and razorthin margins. Dude - wake the fuck up! Or better yet, share those drugs!

Ok, I think I'll go on to reading more of that research now...

There's an interesting article at

There's an interesting article at IEEE Spectrum on the perceiving future of engineering by Robert Lucky. It's an opinion piece that I'd like to just discount as wistful reflections on "how the don't build 'em like they used to" sorts of things, but he does have a good point - engineers in general, having been given the levers to move the world, are doing so. And are, over time, becoming more distracted from the realities around them. He claims Edison as his baseline of the every-pragmatic engineer, and yet part of me wonders if he realizes how critical Edison's business sense was to allowing his tinkering and meandering to continue. I think one of the key issues surrounding engineering (from a software/systems standpoint) is that Engineers are frequently told they can't do business and so shouldn't, and sometimes genuinely don't have the sense of when to stop and call it good enough.

So I'm sitting here pondering joining the ACM, since I got this cool little letter and an intro offer with a 15% discount. I'm thinking it would be good to sort of have that on my resume as an organization I belong to - along with the USENIX membership. (Speaking of which, Lisa 2002 looks like another pretty good conference, which I'm completely unable to attend)

Well, it looks like I

Well, it looks like I have some infection in the upper reaches of my jaw. I went to my dentist today complaining about an ache focused around the tooth I got capped about a month ago. He's going for the conservative approach (YEAH!) and has me on a dose of penicilin for the next week or so. He poked and prodded around in there, and other than tapping on the tooth (which caused me to jump out of the seat), he said things look good. They even took an Xray, and there's no sign of a terrible absesce or anything. With luck, this will make it all better. If not... well, then I'm looking at a root canal to resolve the pain. In the meantime, I'm chewing on Ibuprofen and that's making a big difference.

I finally got through my mail from last Thursday and found (at the bottom - I worked it backwards) a note asking if my leaving would impact the rollout that is happening and demanding assurances that it would not before I would go. Of course, this was on Thursday after Karen and I had already left for Oregon, so I didn't exactly get a good response in. The answer was no - but I find it sort of amusing that I got a demand after I left to assure that things would go smoothly. (It didn't all go perfectly, but my being here wouldn't have helped or hurt the situation as it turns out)

Val's latest entry reminded me of dinner last night. I'm nursing my head, slowly eating some pasta and glancing through a magazine when Karen (across the table from me) lets out this incredible scream of terror. Aside from the instant fear that caused me to send my chair flying backwards into the wall, I bit down really hard - causing a spike of pain. Then as I focused on Karen to see what hurt or scared her, she looks at me and says calmly: It's an earwig. She backed away, and I took care of it, but it was a truly amazing scream. The kind that definitely gets your attention, especially from 3 feet away. I think she gave up on that clothing catalog after that - it apparently crawled out of it. Ewww.

There's some news out on

There's some news out on the merger of Columbia campus and System IT at the University of Missouri. Not much detail, but then I wouldn't expect there to be. They went through a staff reduction earlier this year (with some really incredibly stupid choices made I might add), so I'd guess they're all creeping around again, waiting for whatever odd axe to fall. The news story and announcement from MU seemed to indicate than any layoffs/reduction-in-force wouldn't be immediate, so that's good news. Given the way this is hitting the news, I'd guess it's a more political battle than the last. Hope it goes smoothly for my friends back there.

I'd say I'm positively caught

I'd say I'm positively caught up, but I know I've missed something. Or several somethings.

Tommorow ought to be a joy at work - looks like some problems occured with the initial rollout of V2 workflow, but appear to have been resolved fairly nicely. There's a few personality bugaboo's rising from the ashes of long dead bitches. I'm not surprised that it didn't all go along "perfectly" - it never does really - but it'll take some time to work out tomorrow. That and catch-up from all the things people want to undoubtably pester me about.

Ok - so I'll bite Ryan - why the investigation into MOM and getting things to share nicely? I'm not worried about a BB replacement, but I am curious where you're headin'. Oh - and any code/zample's you might have to share on making it all work purty. And it's to your credit that I found Dave's Blog. It took how long? to write that PHP? Oh - and since you're doing the SciFi thing, I thought I might point out Wired's ephemera had a little tidbit on Robert Forward, mentioning his business: Tether's Unlimited up here in Washington.

My cat is pestering me brutally - I suppose that's the results of leaving him alone since last Thursday. So I'm having to type a fair bit of this with one arm - otherwise he starts knocking stuff off tables, shelves, etc. The usual ploy to demand attention.

Ranchero has released the final NetNewsWire Lite. I wondered if I'd use it when I first got it - now it's an indespensible part of aggregating information. I just wish News at Google would provide an RSS aggregation feed.

Good lord! I leave for

Good lord! I leave for a little six-day weekend down into California and Oregon and everyone starts blogging up a freakin' storm. Clearly, withdrawing the BlogFix from Ryan has caused him to post more - I'll have to do that more often. I'm slowly catching up on stuff around here. One of the folks at work fucked with our IMAP server, and now MS Entourage can't see the mailboxes but Apple's Mail.app can!. What's up with that?

News at MU is a organizational flip-flop. MU IT appears to now be reporting to both MU Campus and MU System. Hopefully Ed will get his lines hauled in a little bit. The mass email sent out quotes at 58 million dollar budget at MU - and a 40 million shortfall. They're claiming this consolidation will only save 4 million, but I think the long run impact will be far, far greater.

I'm back, tired, and in

I'm back, tired, and in a little pain. Something's gotten screwed up in my mouth, so I need to get to the dentist and figure out if I've done more dental damage. In other news, Karen and I had a great time yesterday down in Oregon at her Aunt and Uncle's. We rafted down the Rogue River for 3 or so hours, including some small (class 2) rapids. We've basically just gotten back into town, and are both pretty exhausted. I'll write more later tonight.

OReillyNet has a nice article

OReillyNet has a nice article on embedding a simple web server in Perl. It's back to that ole' interface thing - a simple web server makes the UI pretty universal, even if you don't have all the fancy doo-dads that come with a Win32 or MacOS GUI. It's the universal "generic" UI.

On that note, I removed the Microsoft programs from my iBook tonight. It just didn't make sense to keep them on there when I was so short of space on it and could do everything I needed with TextEdit and Apple's Mail application. For whatever reason, Apple's update mechanism demands that you have over 350Mb free, even if it only needs 20Mb to do it's thing. It's damn annoying, and with the OS X office suite installed, I maintained a free space of about 150Mb. Got rid of all the iApps (which I don't really need on the iBook either) and I've now got 550Mb free on the little guy. If I didn't have the developer tools installed, I'm sure life would be easier in that respect - but I'd rather have ProjectBuilder on the laptop than Microsoft's Excel.

Went out sailing with the

Went out sailing with the usual monday night crew of the Manta Ray tonight. Jen and JR got themselves a new mainsail, so we took it out and worked with the sailmaker to learn it up.

Well, it was pretty clear we were all terribly rusty. Nothing really felt right, and the interactions with Chris (the sailmaker) just didn't feel very good. Communications basically sucked all night, so the end result was sort of a frustrating practice. But it was good as a practice too - simply because I hadn't trimmed crap for the past three weeks and needed the refresher before some race came along. Like in another 10 days or so.

Got a nice little project brewing at work that looks to be set to focus on getting some ecommerce stuff whipped out and implemented in short order. The specifics look to be all pretty flexible, which is good because it looks like I'll be wringing it out on my own given the project vs. people overload we're in. I might even be able to wrangle a paid trip or two down to San Francisco to sync things up between all the folks involved. I'm just an implementor/integrator in this game, but it'll be an interesting technical thing to get knocked out.

I'm sure the central IS folks would love to know what I'm about to do - but ya know, I think I might just forget to tell them. Hard to say really.

I thought I was going

I thought I was going to be really busy today. In fact, I guess I should have been. Needless to say, I wasn't. It's 4pm (little after) now as I write this, and it's all be reasonably quiet. I'm outahere for the next few days, so y'all won't see much blog action until wednesday. Ok, so I'll probably post tonight and tomorrow with my random thoughts, but who knows.

Kinda neat - a Computational

Kinda neat - a Computational Complexity Weblog. Court's to BoingBoing and Kottke for the link..

11am. Workflow is shut down,

11am.

Workflow is shut down, code updates are propogating.

Why do I feel like i'm sitting on the edge of knife? Like any slip will cut deep today. There's no radical code changes rolling out, no database horkin' happenin.

Maybe I'm just getting paranoid.

it's past midnight now and

it's past midnight now and I'm still awake. I'm just puttering really, not sure why or anything brilliant like that. just quite don't want to go to sleep, but I'm not sure why I don't want to go to sleep. I should - my eyes are watering and I'm feeling sort of tired. And I'm yawning as I write this.

I need a bigger hard drive in my ole iBook. I guess I ought to sort that out before too long.

Oh well. I give up. Goodnight.

Good evening world. I thought

Good evening world. I thought I'd post a little earlier than usual tonight. Mostly, I post at 11pm or later, but tonight I'm feeling gracious and will give out my words to you 90 minutes ahead of the time you expect.

So today was just a weird fuckin' day. A coworked chose to leave today, with a decent severance package, and I'm both happy for him and depressed at the state that my office is moving towards. I did manage to pay a little more attention to my energy levels at work, and although it was a weird day, it seemed to be more even keeled than many past.

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone in the technical industry, but we're again finding ourselves completely understaffed and over-projected. By that I mean we simply have way to much work to do, and even with a top three priorities set down, we'll be short of staff to complete everything to it's best effect. There's some bit of bureaucratic mockery in the fact that we're also getting pinged with the usual and periodic software quality bugaboo, and some short-sighted amphibious freak signed a deal in the depths of time and is now demanding that we pay outrageous amounts for network access through the central mothership agreements when we get the data at half the cost.

Have a repeated lately that it's amazing that businesses survive? I've thought about starting my own business. On one hand it seems terribly scary and doomed to failure, and then I see shit like this and I think "How the fuck can I fail?!?!"

There's other stupid stuff happening at work, but it doesn't really seem to be worth posting. It'll be a short week for me - only through Wednesday this week. That'll be nice.

For those in the Mac know, Apple has been readying it's 10.2.1 release of the OS. Apparently CNET caught the tech notes when they were accidently published earlier this week, and detail out the bugfixes and other good stuff inside.

Looks like we're moving ahead with a house refinance. The rates have dropped enough to make it worth while, and it's cutting a fair bit off the monthly payment. While I'm not particularly worried about loosing my job, that does provide some measure of additional comfort.

Weird day.

Weird day.

I crawled into bed about

I crawled into bed about 1:30am, after reading several more chapters of Lord of the Rings. As I was falling asleep, I could hear the wind picking up and a light breeze starting to become insistent through the bedroom window. I got to fall asleep to the patter of a light rain and cool air breezing it's way through the house.

When I woke up this morning, the world outside had all greened up. There's so much moss and lichen lurking in plain colors during the dry months, you just don't recognize them until a good rain wets everything down for an hour or more. The grass hadn't greened up, but I figure that's really only a day or two behind.

So now it's the start of a new day, and a new week, at work. Going to focus on the low energy thing, and maybe have a couple of conversations to get some topics out of my system and into the open. Onward!

Karen and I just got

Karen and I just got done playing a marathon session of Morrowind, stopping only for dinner and a couple rounds of making popcorn. Didn't do too bad - overcame some evil badies that were previously beyond our abilities.

Hey, that's kinda cool... When I was looking back at my blog history to get the link for Morrowind, I realized that I'm almost at my one year bloggin' anniversary. Ober 13, 2001 was my first entry into the Notebook.

Speaking of Barenaked Ladies earlier today, there's an article in the CBC News about BNL supporting a political candidate. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out - it's pretty uncommon to have artists in Canada supporting political candidates. Causes in general, yes - but a candidate in a political race is kinda new.

New MacOS X hint out

New MacOS X hint out - one I hadn't noticed previously. You can now make Stickies both transparent and floating windows

On the Linux news front, IBM and RedHat are expanding their agreements according to CNet.

Took a nice quiet walk

Took a nice quiet walk around the neighborhood today. Snagged the iPod and tuned in some Barenaked Ladies for the walk. They've got great tunes, good lyrics, and make for fun listening - either specifically or just as background.

But now I'm back, and there's textured grey clouds hanging low over the area. I wish it would rain, but it looks like it might not given the lightness of the clouds. One of the cool mists soaking everything down would feel right today.

Couple of new books on

Couple of new books on Cocoa programming are getting set to hit the shelves: Cocoa Programming and Cocoa Recipes for MacOS X. The later is based on Bill Cheeseman's amazing Vermont Recipes - a series of articles and how-to's on Cocoa that were my first available introduction.

Interesting story relating to Vermont Recipes that I heard at WWDC2002: It seems that Bill Cheeseman (who's a really nice guy, by the way - met him at WWDC) submitted a concept to OReilly for publishing his work. Only OReilly apparently had a single employee responsible for reading the submission ideas. And apparently, that single employee was both disgruntled and currently is no longer an employee of OReilly. Well in the duration that OReilly didn't get it's info appropriately, PeachPit Press snagged him up El Pronto for publication, and that's why his book is being published by Peach Pit instead of what many folks expected: O'Reilly.

Headed over to Nate and

Headed over to Nate and Leah's new digs up on Capitol Hill - they're back on 17th, so more in the residential area up near the top of that ridge. They're experiencing the usual chaos of moving in - boxes everywhere, some stuff left to move, stress levels uniformly high. They seemed happy to have us barge in on 'em though, and we went out to a great celebratory dinner at a vegetarian place down in Madison Valley called Cafe Flora. Not cheap, but damn was it good.

As for me and the rest of the evening, I think it's time to go attack some more Lord of the Rings.

It appears that my reading

It appears that my reading late into the night with insomnia woke up Karen. About 20 minutes after my last entry, she got up and wandered into her studio to get some work done instead of lying in bed restlessly. I think I finally fell asleep about 4am.

Somewhere in the process of last night I slammed my left foot into a chair leg. Now it hurts to walk on it - I I jammed up one of my toes pretty badly, and I'm hoping I haven't broken it. It's not swollen horribly, so maybe it'll work itself out.

Karen finished sealing the porch this morning, and then about 9am I took her to a contemporary quilt arts meeting down at the base of Queen Anne Hill. I'm supposed to be picking her up in 5-10 minutes, so I'll cut this off here.

sleeping directly when I got

sleeping directly when I got home clearly wasn't the best idea. Now it's 2am and I'm still awake.

Quite the day, quite the

Quite the day, quite the evening. The majority of my day seemed to be filled with conference calls, setting up a bit of work that sounds at least mildly interesting. I spent a bit of the afternoon with a friend of a friend, getting some concept of other companies and how they're doing business. It may prove useful, and was at least an interesting chat.

By the time I got home though, I was wiped out. More so than any other time this week I think. I had meant to get up on the roof and do the tuckpointing, but that just didn't happen. I went inside, stripped and crawled into bed. Karen woke me up at 7:30 so that I could call it a nap instead of sleeping through the night. I'm now not sure if I would have slept on through. I wasn't a physical tiredness, because I'm feeling pretty OK again now (and it's 11:15pm).

I'm fretting about work too much, I think is the key and the core. I'm dumping a hell of a lot of energy into it right now, and I'm not getting anything back. I think that's why I'm coming home exhausted instead of jazzed. I think some part of me wants to give it a valiant go, but it's pretty clear I need to change something. I'm doing this subconciously, so maybe just recognizing it will help - but the energy drain is leaving nothing for the time after work, and that's a dark, dark way to live. It's been particularly bad in the past two weeks, and especially this past week as I look back into my own blog. I complain of being tired, drawn out, etc. Definitely best that this is obvious to me now - let's see if next week gets better because of it.

Cool... Working with Web Services

Cool... Working with Web Services - Web Services with AppleScript and Perl

Gus pointed out an article

Gus pointed out an article at LinuxJournal on Objective-C: Objective-C: the More Flexible C. It's very complementary and a pretty good overview besides.

Finally found a link for

Finally found a link for the De Dannan album - How The West Was Won. Very nice set of music - 2CD's of their work covering 25 years.

Got home from a very emotionally wearing day and cleaned the garage. That might sound really horrible, but it was actually kinda fun. The garage wasn't filled with crap - it only took me 3 minutes to empty the stuff out. I just needed to pressure wash the insides to get this nasty yellow flaking paint off the walls. And boy did it really come off in some sections. Also got the outside areas of the garage, getting rid of the deep algae and mosses that built up in the cracks and crevices. All nice a clean now.

Karen started working on resealing the deck - got a fair bit done, but it's definitely two or three evening's work. All the small detail stuff is a killer for time. So far, it looks pretty good. We're both interested in finding out what it looks like after it's sealed.

On the geek news front, /. has an article on autonomic computing that's primarily a link to an IEEE Spectrum article. The IEEE article is a pretty good overview of the problems and solutions that enterprise systems (IBM, HP, Sun, etc) are offering. It includes a lot more than the standard autonomic computing stuff that IBM's pushing - in particular there's some detail on the storage brick concept

On the darker side of the news, there appears to have been some protests in Portland where the police acted with too much force.

And my favorite bit of news: Buzz Aldrin apparently punched some jerk in the face for being asked to swear on a bible he'd been to the moon. The guy probably deserved to be punched, even if Buzz shouldn'a oughta done that.

Deep Fried Twinkie's are cool! Prolly not worth 3 bucks, but ya just got a try one once... (Thanks John)

Be careful when you go to cut apart an old howitzer...

I've been re-reading Lord of the Rings. I'm just getting into book 3 (after the breaking of the fellowship) and diving in to get up to where the movies will be taking us this Thanksgiving. I was impressed with the movies, but I'm still shocked at the shear detail that got cut (I'm sure they could have made a 16 hour movie with the entire book) when I read. I hadn't recalled so much detail that really took place over 5 minutes of movie time (the trip down the river from Lothlorien).

I'm sort of bummed tonight because the oligarchy running the engineering staff is now collapsing at work. I knew it was going to, but I didn't think it would go so fast. I took myself out of the running for leading the engineering group, but not having information shared hurt. I thought it would last more, but I guess not. It's not like I'm not looking for other opportunities anyway.

Thank god nothing happened today.

Thank god nothing happened today. Dubya and AssCroft would have probably succeeded in completely removing the rest of the civil liberties that we have.

Had a phone screening the other day, but the results don't appear to be very promising. They've apparently discounted me because I'm lacking a rather explicit bit of experience. My eyes see that as silly and wasteful, because I know I could kick ass on the job in question. At the same time, I've got to respect their position - it's hard to know that a candidate is "good" and often the only resource you have to really check is past experience. Oh well - more opportunities will arrive in the future.

What a nice day! Karen

What a nice day! Karen and I flew the kite for a while, but it was really, really gusty over at Magnuson Park. So we bailed, wandered back into Fremont, picked up a few new irish instrumental albums (Lunasa and Da Dannan), and then took a long rambling walk around our neighborhood. Of course, now that I've spent my money on these 4 CD's, I have every intention of RipMixBurn'n these guys and listenin' to them any way I want. The RIAA can fuck right off.

We're doing the same as

We're doing the same as Andy and Gus

Attended a Sun technical briefing

Attended a Sun technical briefing today. It was really a rollout shpiel about the LX50 that Sun announced, but it included a number of items like why the fuck is Sun promoting Linux...

So the end results were really pretty clear. They're porting a baseline, commodity linux box with "sun decorative wrapping", in order to get people (as much as possible) locked in, or maintained in "The Sun Way". So it's been integrated into their management components, where they're attacking the whole "total cost of ownership" question.

Interestingly, they've taken a page from VA Linux's book and are optimizing the distro of linux they're providing for the hardware they're providing. The whole package and piece of this strategy is being developed by the Cobalt Qube section that Sun aquired a while back, and instead of (or more appropriately, in addition to...) doing appliances, they've added a general Linux server. Another interesting tidbit is the sales monkey reported that Solaris x86 will be Sun hardware only with Solaris 9 - in effect taking a page or two from Apple's game.

Although he really needed a systems engineer to back him up on the technical details, the guy giving the presentation (A. Sean Copp) was pretty good, and fairly straightforward. He had an annoying habit of saying "yeah" before actually hearing a question though, which led to some really strange answers and confusion. But he was clear in his message that Sun was doing this to allow for a migration path to Solaris on big iron - this being the low end (where Solaris isn't effectively competing) and they're still ruling the "high end".

I personally see it as a response to a disruptive technology, and that if they didn't get into this game, Linux would eventually destroy them. Linux appears to be a classic case of disruptive technology - cheaper but not as good in the beginning, with a movement to continually get better and better. In this case, Sun appears to have realized it's getting it's ass kicked on the low end market, and need a solution to keep people locked into doing business with Sun.

One of the key points they're offering, from Sean's talk anyway, was a single point of support. They kept repeating this sort of frightening image: "one throat to choke". I kept thinking that it was probably mine if I bought into their world view. The other item, which Sean didn't do a great job representing, was the SunONE products which are providing quite the leverage point if they can pull it off. All these guys are apparently bundled with the LX50 - perhaps being the real concept in what's getting added as value. They splashed a little over the Grid Computing concept too - although nobody seemed particularly interesting in taking advantage of this stuff for a compute cluster setup.

One of the folks in the audience asked "You keep talking about Dell, Compaq, and IBM - what about Apple and their Xserver? It's priced comparably, it's optimized for it's hardware, and it's BSD underneath..." (They were quoting a baseline of $2795 to get into the door with their 1U LX50 server). Sean was pretty dismissive, which was telling - as was the fact that someone asked the question. This was where Sean's lack of technical knowledge really, really became apparent - he didn't know what benefits the competition was really offering, and was pretty much just throwing around FUD against IBM, and derision for lack of support against Compaq and Dell.

An interesting topic that he did bring up. Cobalt was apparently not cutting it in the market where people wanted to do custom developing on their boxen. I guess they fucked with the kernel and OS in their box enough that it made it really difficult to do custom work on their appliances.

So that was the basic rundown. They were focusing on value add in their management, SunONE, and support abilities around a Sun distribution of Linux. They blathered a lot about 'edge computing', but that's the same ole swing to and from centralization of servers that's been going on for ages. They just happen to be aimed away from centralization in this case.

Time to go fly a kite - it's Karen's and mine 9th wedding anniversary today.

Went out on the water

Went out on the water for a bit this evening with John and Sue - that was really nice. I managed to catch an early bus home (I was feeling lazy today), and so we were all out on the water by 5:45 or so. We stayed out until 7pm, just floating about in Lake Union, enjoying the sun and clear evening. Saw a few float planes land, and a couple others take off while we drifted about.

Got some good shit done at work today. We're getting near to rolling out our next rev of workflow, so I dragged all the various folks into a room to talk about the rollout, current plans and timelines, fall back plans, etc. I rather expected at least some contentious bits, but the meeting went extremely smoothly and everyone seemed to be pretty much on the same page. I'll admit it - I was surprised. That isn't common, even with a small organization like we have. Pleasantly surprised, mind you. I wish this was the case more often.

Apple's iCal was released today,

Apple's iCal was released today, coinciding with the Apple Paris Expo. Some folks think it sucks, while others are pretty happy with the app existing. Apple went to some effort to make iCal scriptable with Applescript, which looks to be a pretty big win. Someone's already taken iCal and scripted it up to use Eudora for email notifications, for example.

I think the folks bitching about the interface have some incredibly valid points. Apple clearly isn't spending many cycles doing extensive usability testing on these little apps. At the same time, they're pushing the limits and commoditizing standards - they're setting a bar on what should be easily available, and in this case it's calendaring using the vCal and vCard standards. (Yeah, it's a crap standard - it was whipped up during the height the Netscape egomania and thoughtlessness - but at least it's something).

On the flip side, it really is kind of cool that Apple is hosting public calendars and really exemplifying the publish and subscribe model of working with this info. Exchange/Outlook could have done this years ago. Of course they didn't want to - Microsoft is in a leadership position and wants all the lockin they can get. Did you expect otherwise?

Mike Diegel wrote an article

Mike Diegel wrote an article on TidBITS today about marketing software that was really a good primer on the basics of getting your stuff known and how the "sales process" worked. I've learned, rather forcefully, that sales is a critical aspect - engineering or coding alone doesn't do the trick.

Dan Gilmor has an article

Dan Gilmor has an article in the Sunday SJ Mercury news about 10 insights into what made the Internet successful. Interesting read.

I have this conversation rattling around in the back of my head. It goes something like this:

You should stop bitching about all the wrongs you're perceiving in your current state of affairs. You're so much better off than so many, why are you raising such a fuss? Spoiled brat - you have a job, you own a house, and if you kick the walls, it'll all come crashing down on you. You don't want that - do you? You know Karen depends on you...

then another voice speaks up:

You're successful because you're honest, sincere and don't put up with shit for too long. It's perfectly natural for you to want better and better - and that's the key to why you're so good. You're ambitious: every time you reach a goal, you're ready to attack the next. Those goals aren't all technical, and if the company you worked for had any brains, they'd realize that they'd be more profitable and have more energy if they focused on some of the problems you're wanting to see solved. If the current job isn't doing it, bail on 'em. You're the one doing three people's work. Yeah, you get paid more than the average employee probably - but you're a value compared to the work and effort they get from you. The very best environments are what motivate you - so go make them if you must. It's only when you're doing your best work that you're going to be able to make a difference for anyone else. Besides, you're golden. You're worth it. If they don't realize it, that's their problem.

I'm not going to talk

I'm not going to talk about work today. I thought about it, but I'd probably say things I really shouldn't (and given my proclivity to do so in the past should tell you something). No, I haven't been fired, but I'm watching something happen that is just plain wrong. I'm powerless to stop it too - but I'm giving it a try.

The morning was beautiful today in Seattle - I work up early (7am, which is early for me) and felt great. I'm actually still feeling pretty good, but only because I'm doing my damndest to distance myself from happenings at the office. Workin' with the people that make a difference and do good things - I'll just run from there.

Got a possible lead from a headhunter today - couldn't have come at a better time. The salary would definitely be lower though, so we'll take a leap at the phone screening and see what develops. Maybe nothing, maybe something really cool.

Got a out-of-the-blue email from a student in Singapore too. Apparently he saw my project at sourceforge (I'm not linking to it because embarrasingly nothing has happened with - a consequence of my worry regarding ownership of IP I might develop while working for my current employer) and threw a question out of the blue at me regarding agents. It was kind of neat, so I answered and get back a couple long emails. Neat fellow, although he doesn't have much confidence in himself from the email, and it would appear that he or his professor has bought into the hype about agents a little too much.

Balancing Linux and Microsoft or

Balancing Linux and Microsoft or not - Bruce Perens was terminated from HP...

I read this article at

I read this article at the WashingtonPost. Saw a link from my subscription to UMBC AgentWeb News (collects news clippings and stories related to agent and ai technologies).

It's got to be one of the worst articles I've read in a really long time. It's basically a rah-rah story for SmarterChild. While they do some neat stuff with chatterbots, they certainly aren't causing any significant stir in the AI circles. And the writer - Ariana Eunjung Cha - certainly didn't understand anything about the basics of AI, what chatterbots are or do, or even present a reasonable case for her freakin' wild-assed assertions. In case you're curious, nothing has yet passed the Turing Test. Loebner Prize - yeah, in fact AliceBot's kicked ole SmarterChild's ass in those tests.

danger! Hell has frozen over,

danger!

Hell has frozen over, and the legions are pouring out. JDR has updated his homepage. I mean, yeah - he used MS Frontpage to do it, but still...

Well, for the record -

Well, for the record - I was right. I am sore today.

Okay, so currently it's pretty worn off and I'm feeling OK. It was chilly and slightly damp outside today, which encouraged Karen and I to get a very minimal amount of work done outside (picking up some of the hedge-damage I did yesterday) and then retreat inside to play Morrowind.

We actually got some useful things done today as well - I vacuumed around the house, we picked some apple's from the neighbor tree, and made an apple crisp for the block party today. Originally we thought the block party was going to be at 3pm, but chill weather and some drizzle moved it back to 4:30pm. Even still, we all chatted around and had a good time out on the street until 7:30pm. Met a couple of neighbors from around the corner I hadn't known previously, and reaquainted with a couple of others from across the street and down a bit. Had some lovely blackberry bubbly that Chuck made (neighbor across the street). May have even found a taller ladder to help finish tackling the big-damn-hedge. Although the current joke is that we're doing to paint the bushy remaining top red and leave it... although if I could reach that point to paint it, I'd be able to reach that part to cut it down!!!

Karen was all excited to play more videogames after the blockparty, so we played on up until 10pm, when we finally gave in and called it a night.

Oh - we did one other useful thing today. We have this cat tower/scratching post that the cats have been working on for the better part of four years. The lower half of it was just shreded - the carpet wasn't even really hanging on anymore. I'd purchased 100' of 1/4" sisal rope, so Karen and I wrapped it with the rope to give them a decent scratching experience back again. God forbid we ever get rope-wrapped furniture, or the cats will constantly be attacking it. Pooka (one of my cats) really appears to have taken a liking to the new rope-wrapped look.

I think I'm going to

I think I'm going to be very sore tomorrow. At least from the feeling I'm getting tonight.

Karen and I knocked off about 6:30pm, wandered inside and dropped around on the couch. After a while, soup and bread sounded like an easy dinner, so we fixed it up and noshed it down. After a hot shower, some light reading, and snacking in the kitchen because soup just wasn't quite enough, I've gotten to now.

So the latest issue of Dr. Dobb's showed up today. A better than usual complement of articles in this one. They've got a couple interesting tidbits - one on complexity (available on the DDJ website) and one on personalization software. There's a couple of other articles in there I haven't yet attacked - a preference/intelligent MP3 jukebox and some detail on the Cg language.

Since I was digging around on speech technologies earlier this week, I thought I'd do a more thorough search of Apple's website for info. Turns out there's a webpage that was recently slapped up without a whole lot of content checking... they listed a mailing list which didn't exist, and talked about filling out a form that likewise didn't exist. As of WWDC, there was possibly some neat code coming out in Jaguar (10.2) that would encapsulate the 3-4 pages of C code you'd normally have to throw together to get speech technologies going. The website was still refering to the old stuff. So I did the logical thing and started digging around in Jaguar itself. After some crawling about with find and grep, I found SpeechObjects framework residing in the Apple private frameworks section. At least they've wrapped this stuff in Objective-C ... I just wish they'd made it public.

That got me all fired up to do more digging, so I goofed off with the development tools for a while until I realized that I really didn't know of anything short that I wanted to churn out. After screwing up my preferences a couple dozen times in a fit of boredom and curiousity, I finally bailed and decided to write here instead.

OReillyNet has a couple new articles out - one on tweaking java programs to look better on MacOS X and one on installing Nagios (same baseline stuff as NetSaint, a system monitoring software package).

Gus pointed me at this

Gus pointed me at this linky - ver cool...

Wow. Four hours goes fast

Wow. Four hours goes fast when you're playing with power tools. Today's combination: pressure washer and electric hedge trimmer. The grey clouds overhead disuaded the mortaring/tuckpointing needed on the chimney (it really felt like it was going to rain), so we stuck with things that we could dash out of if it started raining (or that wouldn't matter). Of the past four hours, three were pressure washing the front deck and steps.

Damn but that thing is cool! It's like painting with a mouse on a computer - keep the little spray about an inch or two wide, and just swipe across and stuff comes clean. It takes a little more effort (move the spray closer for more pressure...) to scrape the moss off the deep indentions and crevices on the front of the steps, but it all just comes right off. I'm definitely a pressure washin' fan now.

One item I found really interesting was how fast the deck "greened" when the mist and moisture from the outblast of the washer started hitting it. It went from dark to noticably green in a matter of minutes. I sort of wish I had a video camera on it to show the time lapse - the photosynthesis just kickin' in to high gear in a pretty clear adaptation to the kind of water we most commonly get around here.

The big-fuckin-hedge is gettin itself shorn back quite a bit. The top is still being a bit elusive, but mostly because it's hard to hold the vibrating electric hedge trimmer straight out at maximum reach horizontally while balancing on the top of a ladder. I guess it's my very own stability workout - my arms sure are tired. We've about nailed all the sides up to 9 feet, and two large semicircles across the top. The rest of the afternoon will be playing with manuevering the ladder and sweeping the wand around, using the big hand trimmer/chopper thingy to get the nasty stuff that's just too large to attack with the electric.

Karen and I had breakfast with Nate and Leah at Voula's offshore cafe. If you're looking for the big breakfast that will fill you with carbs and harden your arteries, this is the place. Very tasty omlettes, by the way. We'd been there a couple times previously, and arranged to meet with Nate and Leah for breakfast and the borrowing of the pressure washer that I had so much fun with earlier today. I've been working a good 4 hours straight now, and I'm not even hungry - all of which I attest to the monstrous breakfast eaten.

Another quick note for the

Another quick note for the MacOS X reading list: John Siracusa has posted a really good (and very exhaustive!) overview of the positive and negative bits in Jaguar - MacOS X 10.2.

I got some good stuff

I got some good stuff done at work today. I finally pinned down a leak in some reporting code that Austin redid three weeks ago. Like all good bugs that are a complete bitch to resolve, it was obvious. I'm just glad I have it nailed down and resolved.

I also got a whole set of notes transcribed from one of the WWDC sessions. Since I had these huge lags in testing the code that was leaking, I played one of the WWDC 2002 sessions (the one on Speech Synthesis and Recognition that comes built in to MacOS) that are available via Quicktime broadcast and took notes on it.

Tonight, Karen and I hit the hardware store (did you know the smallest bag of mortar available at Home Depot is 80 pounds!) and then spent the rest of the evening playing Morrowind.

As I've been reading tidbits using NetNewsWire Lite, I've really come to appreciate the great details and tidbits available at MacOS X Hints. They've got a freshmeat/slashdot (Okay, it's a Geeklog server) kind of system set up where the nitty gritty details of commands and config files are availabe for the average person. It's really nice to have the notes for me - saves me from having to screw around reading buried docs and man pages. Shoot, just check out how many 'hints' they have under the topic Unix.

MacCentral is reporting a little

MacCentral is reporting a little crowing and slinging from Apple to Microsoft regarding the recent WindowsMedia 9 launch: Apple: Windows Media Player shows anti-standards behavior

That's an interesting combination of

That's an interesting combination of goodies. I guess I've missed out on the initial flurry of oooh's and aahh's, but Jesse Shanks has put together this interesting idea called an audioblog. It basically uses a boatload the MacOS X technologies to automatically generate audio files (mp3's) from Blogs - making them sound bites you can just listen to.

Now I just wish MacOS X had some better speech synth than the stuff they do - but I know that's A) a hard problem and B) expensive to purchase a fix.

I took a slow walk

I took a slow walk home, mostly following Taylor and 5th on my wander to the top of Queen Anne. It's a pleasant afternoon out there - large fluffy clouds that I used to associated with thunderheads are building against the mountains to the east. There's some low steel-grey stuff overhead, but no imminent rain appeared to be heading my way. Cool air too - cool like a wonderful fall flavor. I was almost sad to actually make it to the house.

Karen's making dinner - a fennel and potatoe salad of some form that sounded pretty darn tasty. I snagged open the mail today and the cover of the latest National Geographic has a Meerkat on it. I thought it was sort of amusing that my first thought when I saw it was of O'Reilly's Meerkat news site. I'm sure they'd be sort of happy about that - the marketing has clearly worked.

Speaking of which, it's probably just coincidence, but Gus turned me on to some MacOS X software that performs the same basic setup as O'Reilly's Meerkat service - NetNewsWire by Brent Simmons/Ranchero Software.

Odd and interesting how all those connections were sort of made within a day or so. Somewhere in there, I just happened to realize that Brent Simmons is a Seattlite - apparently lives just north of me in Ballard. Jeezus! Now that's frightening! I just tried to Google on "Brent Simmons Seattle" and got his home address, phone number, and links to Yahoo and MapQuest for maps to his house.

Another reason that proprietary, closed

Another reason that proprietary, closed source server software is a bad idea...

This is kinda cool -

This is kinda cool - Phil Windley, CIO of Utah (yes, as in the state), has a blog. He apparently went flying around Utah with a netstumbler setup in a private plane...

Cool that a state CIO is getting into the details. Probably scary as hell for his staff, but at least he appears to have an informed opinion on things.

Another really freakin' busy day.

Another really freakin' busy day. You'd think I'd get a break with wednesday being our normal downtime an all... Guess not.

I submitted a huge amount of data for reprocessing by our system tuesday morning. This morning when we shut everything down for backups, I'd only gotten 20% of it really into the system. Yowza. So today I invoked it back up to resume, skipping the crap it's already gone over. I expect it'll be running for quite a while yet... like until Saturday. That's just to queue it up - lord knows how long it'll actually take to completely propogate through the system.

I'm finally getting to installing Fink on the Mac with 10.2. I don't quite know why FinkCommander is a seperate project - it's only 3000% easier than fucking with an ncurses based interface with dselect. I don't mind the command line - in fact, I really like it for some things (hence my desire to get Fink installed), but given the choice between an ncurses interface and a standard graphical interface... well, uhm - DUH.

Karen's got some folks coming over this evening at 7pm - they're going to be jurying some artwork for a show I haven't quite tracked on. She's nervous about it, but as usual has everything way, way under control. I did my two jobs: bring home Thai food for dinner and start the wash with the old tablecloth that had winestains on it.

The house next door appears to have an offer on it. Maybe we'll have new neighbors soon. Karen talked with Claude and MaryAnne, and apparently the potential buyers are a couple with no children and they're in the inspection period.

Busy freakin' day. Decent too,

Busy freakin' day. Decent too, really. Kind of a nice change.

Started out this morning getting a few items on the to-do list knocked out - code updated, deployed - that sort of thing. 10am rolled around to our standard Engineering meeting, where it was pretty quick. 11am brought the otherwise-normally-horrific Monday AM meeting, which was really quite blessedly short. I thought there was some sour feelings in the room, but I successfully ignored most of the crap and even skipped out with Phil to go resolve a little operational problem towards the end. The rest of the day was a flurry of short discussions, all of which felt useful. Austin snagged me and we ran out to lunch at a new place for me: Nordstrom's Cafe. Kinda neat place, although it was a little pricy for a sandwhich.

So I feel like I just got back from that, and now it's 5pm and where did the last 3 hours go? It feels nice, since most of the days recently have had that terribly lagging drudgery feeling to them.

Rain. It's been threatening for

Rain.

It's been threatening for most of the weekend - those low gray clouds. Finally, it's here. Light, gentle sprinkles dampening everything down and greening up the grass. Man, we needed it.

I guess the TV's and

I guess the TV's and stuff have been playing the previews for this, but I hadn't been aware. Anyway, I found out about Spirited Away, a new anime film coming out later this month. It looks very nice, and this scene from the preview really shows it's artisitic connection to Princess Mononoke (well, to me at least).

Want to put a little

Want to put a little fear into the congressional system? Check out Tara Grubb's blog, and if you think what she's saying has some merit, send her some cash...

(Oh, she's running against Howard Coble. Who, in my opinion, needs to be seriously bitch-slapped for his endless support of the RIAA. Yeah, giving Tara some money to run a campaign against him is starting to be that kind of slap...)

A busy quiet day, if

A busy quiet day, if that sort of thing is really possible. I've spent the day working on my forge, doing laundry, helping Karen make pesto (five pounds of basil is getting close to that intangible metric buttload mass), and deleting email.

Why, do you ask, am I including deleting email in my list? Because there's some notification code that it deluging me (and several others at work) every 15 minutes with 2 pieces of email, letting me know some bit of our code at work is fucked up. It's not critical, but it is sort of annoying. On the good side, getting that email every 15 minutes lets me know exactly where in the code to look. Unfortunately, I haven't had time at the office to do any code digging for about two weeks. Maybe Tuesday...

Firing up the forge was cool, although it made me realize I needed to plan more before I started banging crap out. More to the point, if I didn't want to just bang out random bits of twisted metal (that would be the crap bits), then I needed to plan what the hell I was doing. I did get a hook made, and it's downstairs drying from it's paint job (didn't want it to rust). One of the books I have talks about various carburizing finishes which sound interesting, but I wasn't quite ready to dive into that game for this piece. (Ooh - side note. In getting that book link, I noticed there's a second edition of the book that looks very worthwhile). I did, however, use a hot-punch for the first time today. Didn't go too badly, although I think I need to make myself some tools specifically for the forge so I don't feel bad about fucking them up. I'm scared I'll take a perfectly good punch and ruin it on the hot steel - so if I just make it myself, then I can always say "Oh well. Fucked it up. Guess I'll have to make another one" instead of worrying about buying all the tools I need.

Also decided I needed a straight peen hammer. I have a sledge head (no handle) in the basement that's just begging to be converted. But before I do, I need to have a piece of steel to retain the eye shape so I don't loose the ability to have it as a hammer. That's also on the "need to make" list of tools.

Five pounds of basil. Making Pesto. Small food processor. Yeah, enough said.

Got email today from one of my neighbors - looks like the annual "block party" thing is coming up here next weekend or so. That ought to be fun - we've got a cool street.

Also got email from Apple. Apparently the technote with all the details of MacOS 10.2 is out. I'm really pleased to see bug reference numbers in the technote - they'd disappeared for quite a while, and it's really nice to see them back in. Can't say any were related to bug reports from me, but it's nice to note anyway.

Ken (one of the guys in my group at work) has put up pictures of the Engineering/Ops raftup from last week.

The movies were great. Dave

The movies were great. Dave was as good as we remembered, and we both really enjoyed Amelie. By the end of Amelie, we'd completely lost track of the idea that we were watching a film entirely in french and only subtitled in english.

Interesting technical tidbit for the night. /. has a link to a story about genetic algorithms breeding a radio. Interesting effect.