Before just now, the realms.org virtual host was running on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. It is now on Ubuntu 10.04. I figure upgrading my server OS every 4 years is sufficient. :-)
Even though the stats of the server are exactly the same, it is a LOT faster than the old one. I'll try to do more interesting things here.
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Some sweet kitty loving!
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From this blog post:
For many of us, the biggest gains in productivity do not come from following a specific methodology for "getting things done." It comes from erecting transaction costs to nonproductive behavior.
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Beautiful picture, thanks to reddit:
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My wonderful wife is at the Salamander Camp this weekend, and having a great time!
Noah and I are going to go hiking shortly; we're cleaning and in general working to give Michelle an exceptional Mother's Day when she returns tomrrow.
We are doing well. We're told that Noah's school will begin mainstreaming him before the end of the term. He is progressing very well. Holy cow is he tall!
We're terribly short-handed at work, so I've been filling many roles. The hours aren't terrible, but there are occasional bumps. I'm just exceedingly busy, doing a lot of different tasks throughout the day.
For talented people, employment opportunities are really heating up in the bay area. Google, Facebook and others are grabbing, with very strong salaries, most of the very good people. Much of the time, the canidates that come our way are passing their resume around for a reason; they're not top-drawer talent.
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By the way, I didn't get one of these.. I should call them and find out if I can get *something*.
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From Reddit. "Challenge: Tell me your life in just six words." I think some of these are pretty moving.
I ALWAYS TRY TO BE FRIENDLY!
I'm on reddit while I'm pooping.
In West Philadelphia born and raised.
I'll finish this later.
THE RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH!
These pretzels are making me thirsty
Everything turned out better than expected.
Failure. Failure. Failure. Failure. Reflection. Growth.
Do Not Turn Into My Mom.
I'm alive. So far, so good.
Early opportunities wasted, now attempting redemption.
This hits too close to home.
Birth. School. Wait... I'm an adult?
I still feel like a child.
Easy-- male middle class and white.
Living with Multiple Sclerosis, shit sucks.
I have never known how to count.
Missed opportunities, some successes, mostly regrets.
Insane ambition meets debilitating self doubt.
Moderate ambition meets debilitating self doubt
I had a life before reddit.
well you have an upboat now!
It's too interesting for six words.
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Too much work. Never enough money.
Was born, am living, will die.
Can not poop. Try so hard.
shyness, self-doubts, gluttony, anxiety, awareness, change.
I am stuck on part 4.
What in the fuck just happened?
Small dick no sex forever alone
Slowly getting the hang of it.
No girlfriend, no money, no hope.
I measure time by my cats.
poor family rich minds broken dreams
Must learn everything. Impress at parties.
Herring scales stick to fucking everything.
Underpromise; overdeliver. Collect the fucking money.
Born, found the Internet, still here.
Walked. Ran. Fell. Got up again.
Privileged, Highly Educated, Conceited, not White.
Just life, the universe, and everything!
Life with no friends is wasted.
the worst of the best. ...always.
Profound and well put. Same here.
Searching tirelessly for that one thing.
Wishing that I was someone else.
Someone is wishing they were you.
I'm capable of so much more.
Living your dream requires modifying dream.
Gifted child, ordinary adulthood. Change needed?
Awesome, one day at a time.
One big fuck up, the end.
Born decades ago; not dead yet.
It's very unlikely anyone from Reddit will read this, and that's perfectly fine. I'll just say this: hang in there. You're a wonderful, smart, diverse group of mostly young people. It's going to be fine.
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My spreadsheet has about 40 contacts; a *lot* of people have been interested in the MO property. Woot!
Valentine's day is, I believe, going to be pretty fabulous. In about three hours, Michelle and I are going on a date to a nice restaurant called Arya in Cupertino.
I think we've finally found a church home in this area: Bay Area Christian Church. We've been three weeks straight. They have a pretty fabulous kids program for our son, and everyone we've met seems to have their heads screwed on very straight. The preaching and music is pretty great too!
Very briefly, since I have a lot to do over the next two hours:during the service, I was considering my own beliefs. During a friendly debate with some Atheists on reddit, I posted something along the lines of, And what about the Old Testament? WTF is up with that? But there's a lot of very healthy material throughout the Bible. There's also a lot of, frankly, unhealthy material. (I'll try to define 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' later on.) Even in the New Testament: women having to be silent in church, etc etc. Here's my new line of thinking: carefully consider the difference between spiritual truth and what I'll not so gently call 'baggage'. (I had a better phrase than just 'baggage' a few minutes ago, but I lost it, and I don't have time to find it. Bummer.)
My incomplete phrase 'baggage' references things were important to the people and society writing the Bible. And this stuff is important for us to read and understand, since it creates context and informs our discovery of real spiritual truth. But I'm neither comfortable killing people who take the Lord's name in vain or not allowing women to teach in church.
Ha, I found it: "Cultural Bagage". So I need to write a lot more about this, since it's kind of a risky, nuanced topic. But it's interesting and useful.
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We're now on a full-blown mission to sell our property in MO. More details to come, but for now, I'm turning realms.org into a 100% directed resource for that goal. Initially, it'll just contain a map to the property and some pictures and description. I'm doing this so I can easily give people on the phone a web site they can look at for our property.
I found this: Susan Wojcicki: The most important Googler you've never heard of. Amazingly cool stuff; I'm pretty moved by her story.
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I'm loving jquery and now Backbone.js to death these days. The only web apps I write now are a simply a one-time load set of .js, .css and .html files. After that, the entire app is in javascript in the web browser. It communications state changes and updates back and forth to the server with ajax and json. And with MongoDB on the server side, which basically uses JSON as it's native query language, there's no friction between the app, the server and the database.
Plus, with just a hand-full of simple JSON accepting and emitting server calls, that accept JSON from the web server, I believe a large chunk of basic web security problems just disappear. MongoDB uses completely different client parameters for query, update, insert, delete, etc. In SQL, all that is conflated into, essentially, a string. With MongoDB, for an update, the first parameter is a json document which describes what documents to update. The second parameter is the update document itself. That simple model, I believe, hugely lessens attack surface area.
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Saddest cartoon ever.
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2010 was pretty fabulous. 2011 is going to be even better. We've been looking at my old LiveJournal posts here. We've come a long ways. :-) I hope to post here more often; I think it was good for me to post more frequently.
Among other things, my wife bought me Linux Kernel Development 3rd edition. I have been devouring it; it's about time I really start understanding what's going on under the scenes. :-)
I bumped into a system called Pit. Turns out it's written by a guy that I work with at LiveOps. Neat stuff!
Sun Jan 2 15:08:28 PST 2011
I think I'm going to try to release a Perl module that interfaces with the various Linux scheduler functions, such as sched_[set|get]affinity. That'll be useful for a lot of people, myself included.
I also am going to try to give the venerable Perl shell Zoidburg another try. I enjoyed it many years ago, but I stopped using it for some reason. Time to get back on the wagon.(0 comments to this post)
Fri Sep 24 07:28:19 PDT 2010
Tomorrow we're renewing our vows after 10 years of marriage. I can't wait.
And on the technical front, I noticed that Ubuntu is talking about 'getting physical': making the desktop aware of the physical presence and orientation of its user. Interesting stuff!
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We're doing better than ever. I do truly intend to start posting here agin.
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I've been using Tumblr to do my photo and video blogging, if anyone's interested.
I'll make special mention of the visible shock waves coming from the new crater at Eyjafjalajöku. Thanks, God, for such an awesome planet.
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We can almost see them! My prediction is, in the next 30 years, we'll see on the surface of an exoplanet the uncontrovertible fingerprints of life. That will be an amazing, perhaps civilization-changing day.
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I've had a youtube account for a long, long time, but only today have I uploaded anything to it. Here it is. We went to hole in the wall beach yesterday. It was cold and secluded, and we had a great time.
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Whew, I need to start posting stuff again. I haven't even been wasting my time on Facebook. What's going on? We've been enjoying Northern California very greatly, during the weekends. Michelle is doing very well, mind and body. Except for her gall bladder, which is a common side-effect after her June procedure. Noah is growing *very* tall and learning. He's behind the curve, but he may be catching up some. He's a very good boy.
I have been working very, very hard at LiveOps. I made some aggressive goals. Too aggressive; my ex co-workers will recognize that trait. But we are moving right along, and the work is more enjoyable than anything I've done in many, many years.
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Thanks, XKCD, for amusing me just enough to link to an oldie but goodie: Fields arranged by Purity
Oh, and this too.
Happy 2010. We're all doing very well. There was a pretty intense health scare for Michelle late last year, but it's all 100% clear. We are truly blessed.
Michelle is recovering quite nicely from her unexpectedly painful laproscopic oophorectomy. For most, I suspect 2009 will be considered a 'good' year. For us, God has blessed us very richly; there were thrills and chills. When I was laid off in February, things could have turned out very differently. Things have turned out better for us than we could have ever planned. Life is very good right now.
Thu Jan 7 07:37:35 PST 2010
This talks about how much better kids in Texas do than kids in California. One to two YEARS better, even though CA spends 12% more per kid and per capita income in CA is substantially higher.(0 comments to this post)
We have been sick as can be with a very nasty flu, starting on Saturday the 5th of December. Noah came down with it, then me, then Michelle. We were slowly getting better the last half of last week, but then got a bit worse yesterday. As of now, I feel a little better. Noah went to school one day last week, and he's going again today. Michelle is going to see a doc to make sure her lungs are ok.
To get this blog kicking again, I'll start posting links. Kind of boring, but it may do the trick.
Here is a link that talks about how to use Perl to make recursive regular expressions. Kind of a mind-blowing affair, really.
And here is the worst run big city in the US: our own, silly, beloved San Francisco. The classic liberal excesses at their most excessive. For shame.
Some good news here for a change.
Tue Dec 29 08:00:23 PST 2009
Wed Dec 30 07:50:44 PST 2009
Someone who is actually talking sense with respect to national security and terrorism.
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Has it really come to this?
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Taken from the script the movie Gettysburg. For some reason, this script came to me as I considered the possible end of the modern movement to reduce carbon emissions. Yeah, that thing.
You know what's happening here
in the morning?
Sir?
The whole damn rebel army
is gonna be here.
They'll move through this town,
occupy the hills on the other side.
When our people arrive, Lee'll have
high ground. There'll be the devil to pay.
The high ground!
Meade will come in slowly, cautiously,
new to command.
They'll be on his back from Washington.
Wires hot with messages. Attack! Attack!
So he will set up a ring around these hills.
And when Lee's army is nicely entrenched
behind fat rocks on the high ground...
Meade will finally attack,
if he can coordinate the army.
Straight up the hillside, out in the open...
in that gorgeous field of fire.
We will charge valiantly
and be butchered valiantly.
And afterward, men in tall hats and
gold watch fobs will thump their chest...
and say what a brave charge it was.
Devin, I've led a soldier's life...
and I've never seen anything
as brutally clear as this.
It's as if I can actually see the blue troops
in one long bloody moment...
going up the long slope to the stony top...
as if it were already done...
and already a memory.
An odd, set...
stony quality to it.
As if tomorrow has already happened
and there's nothing you can do about it.
The way you sometimes feel
before an ill-considered attack...
knowing it will fail...
but you cannot stop it.
You must even take part and help it fail.
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I bought a nice home in Bella Vista, Arkansas, shortly after I hired on to Wal-Mart permanently, in early 1998. I paid about $54k for this home. It was built in 1979, was a little bit over 1000 square feet, had a new roof and a new heat pump, and was in generally good condition. Though the entire house (I mean entire) was covered in ugly carpet. Including the bathrooms and kitchen. The house was on about 2.5 acres of land, much of it steeply sloped. It was about 14 miles from downtown Bentonville. Later on, I bought the 2.5 acre lot next to us and the 3 acre lot across the street for about $2k and $3k respectively.
I married my best friend in late 2000, and we had our son in 2002. During that time, we ended up getting some huge medical bills that my wonderful employer decided to not insure, and it pretty much wrecked our credit. In fact, the last of that was paid back only in 2007. But our credit was well and truly trashed, and we had a lot of nasty bills over our heads. I was --this-- close to declaring bankruptcy in 2003, but it didn't QUITE make sense.
We always had the idea of buying a nice plot of land somewhere along the Missouri Arkansas border and eventually building a nice house on it. But the possibility of any such spending was pretty much ruled out because of our financial state.
During 2004, God told us to move out in faith and just start looking for a home on some land in Missouri. It was crazy and irrational, and certainly impossible, but we started looking. Within a week, we located a 20 acre piece of property with a 1450 square foot house on it. It was only a few miles down the road. The seller was motivated. The price was $165k. And we were struggling to keep up with our current house payment, which was (wait for it) $345/month at the time. So we started thinking, and a plan came through. We discovered that the house and land we had bought for $54k plus a few thousand in cash was now worth over 100k. The housing bubble was entering the height of crazy. So we very completely redid the inside of our small home. It looked great; new wood-looking floors, new paint, new stove, new fixtures. We did a bang-up job. But it was still a pretty small house, and we had to find a buyer. Oh, and we had to get a loan for $165k.
So, the plan. We would use the cash money we made from selling our Bella Vista home to pay off huge chunks of our debt. It turns out we could not turn this plan into a contract or anything that lenders would consider, so we had to simply get the loan without 'the plan'. Which is really crazy, given our financial state, but in those days, crazy loans were possible. Crazy being irresponsible. In the end, all we could qualify for was a suicidal adjustable rate interest only loan. And we took it, with the idea that we would then refinance a year later, which much improved credit.
So I'll skip some of the drama, which was extreme at times. We found a buyer for our home in Bella Vista, but she was barily qualified. So I took point on finding her a lender. Yeah, that's crazy too, but in the end, it worked and she qualified for a 30 year fixed loan for $112k. Except she had to some up with about 10k of downpayment. And she didn't have any money, and she didn't qualify for any secondary loans.
What to do. Even more insanity. I loaned her $5k and my seller loaned her $5k. Insane. Oh, and her funds had to be sourced, but not seasoned. So we had to give the cash to her aunt, who then gave it to her. I have no idea if that's legal or not. But we made it happen.
I was able to justify all of this by the simple fact that her monthly payment was actually going to go down slightly, compared to the stiff rent she was paying at the time. Plus she would be building equity. Great!
And so, the deal was done, and I helped our seller move his stuff to his new house, which was under construction a dozen or so miles away. And he helped me move our stuff. And our buyer had some of her family or someone help move her stuff.
Oh I forgot a piece of this. We decided to do the move well before all of the loans were approved. A good three weeks before. I just asked my wife why we did that and she said 'crazy faith'. So be it.
We made a good $50k in cash from the deal. Our seller made a lot more; I think he owed something like 30 or 40k on the house and land. He built the house himself, and the land was a lot cheaper when he bought it about six years earlier. We did use some of that money as a 10% down payment. We used the rest to pay off debts. Sealed the deal in April 2005, almost a month after we moved in.
So a year later, in mid 2006, after scrubbing our credit record for all I was worth, our credit score was substantially better. Still not great; on the edge of 'poor', but not quite 'poor'. We were able to refinance to a 30 year fixed rate of 6 percent. Turns out our monthly rate went down a little, because we were paying so many points on the first, toxic loan.
After I was laid off in February 2009, I immediately set out to refinance again, because of extremely low rates. And I did a streamline refinance with the same bank, and locked our 30 year rate in at 5%, which is pretty awesome. It had to be a 'streamline' refinance, because our property value had fallen tremendously. We were way underwater, and the streamline allowed a refinance based on the initial valuation. Basically, it allowed the bank to 'look the other way'.
At this point, we have paid off all but one of our old medical debts. We should be able to knock that one out next year or so. The only thing we owe on now is our land and house in Missouri. We own our cars and tractor outright. I haven't checked, but I'm sure our credit score has gotten much, much better. It probably hasn't been enough years for some of that ugly debt we paid off in 2005 to drop off, but it will over the next few years.
In the end, we leveraged the crazy housing bubble to our full advantage. We used the ability to get a really bad loan to get what I call 'funny money' from our property, which we used to get a very good, conservative loan.
Shortly after she bought our Bella Vista property, our single mom buyer was laid off from the real estate company she worked for. She had defaulted within a year. The bank she received her loan from, much of which turned into the 'funny money' that we used to dig ourselves out of debt, was closed by the government in 2008, one of the many bank failures that year. Too many bad loans that went bad. The bank that took over most of the holdings sold the property to some law firm, which put the house up for sale in mid 2008. It sold for $65k in late 2008.
Sometimes I think about where that $50k of funny money came from. Certainly not from our buyer. Not from her failed bank. Funny money indeed.
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Things are going well at home and at work. Noah is doing very well in school. Michelle is healthy, and getting more healthy every day. We adopted a very cute pair of cats last week. They're both about six months old, and almost completely black, both short hair. The little brother is very outgoing, friendly, and cute as can be. The little sister cat is extremely scared; she hides all the time. Michelle will have to work with her for a long time, but it'll be a work of love. She spent years working with the tortured and abused Sugarplum, who turned into a wonderful cat.
Not sure what else to talk about. Oh, I went to Startup School 2009. There were a lot of excellent speakers. I was very, very highly inspired and motivated, and came up with some good and interesting ideas, but I find it so hard to press forward with them. It's just so much work. :-)
I think this is pretty cool. I've spent more than my share of time working on flow diagrams; this web based tool makes it very easy to just type in your words and comments, then turn it into a diagram. This Perl module is a slick front-end to it too.
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This is an e-mail I received from an old high school friend of mine:
The caption is "Worth a Thousand Words... "
This is the response I sent to the entire distribution list:
I think facts are worth ten thousand words, rather than whatever is being spouted out of Fox news and right wing radio: Under the Carter administration, US National Debt as a percentage of per capita personal income fell from 56% to 53%. Under the combined Reagan/Bush Sr. administrations, that percentage doubled from 53% to 110%. Under the Clinton administration, US National Debt as a percentage of per capita income fell from 112% to 90%. And under GWB, who had a Republican controlled congress 6 out of 8 years, the percentage climbed from 91% to 131%. I have no doubt that the first year or two of Obama's administration will show a mounting debt. The same happened to Carter and Clinton as they struggled to bring financial order back to the table. Let's put to rest the myth that Republicans are fiscally conservative. They make that claim, but the facts are quite different. They toot the horn of social responsibility and small government, but what they are really doing is feeding our money to the already wealthy. Cheers, -Dana Raw numbers: FORD 12/31/1976 2,997 57% CARTER 12/31/1977 3,264 56% CARTER 12/31/1978 3,546 55% CARTER 12/31/1979 3,755 52% CARTER 12/31/1980 4,094 53% REAGAN 12/31/1981 4,483 53% REAGAN 12/31/1982 5,167 58% REAGAN 12/31/1983 6,034 64% REAGAN 12/31/1984 7,052 68% REAGAN 12/31/1985 8,179 74% REAGAN 12/31/1986 9,223 79% REAGAN 12/31/1987 10,036 81% REAGAN 12/31/1988 10,979 84% BUSH 12/31/1989 11,964 85% BUSH 12/31/1990 13,488 94% BUSH 12/31/1991 15,077 103% BUSH 12/31/1992 16,379 110% CLINTON 12/31/1993 17,595 112% CLINTON 12/31/1994 18,439 111% CLINTON 12/31/1995 18,983 110% CLINTON 12/31/1996 20,070 111% CLINTON 12/31/1997 20,548 107% CLINTON 12/31/1998 20,774 103% CLINTON 12/31/1999 21,182 100% CLINTON 12/31/2000 20,065 90% BUSH 12/31/2001 20,847 91% BUSH 12/31/2002 22,247 98% BUSH 12/31/2003 24,077 103% BUSH 12/31/2004 25,868 108% BUSH 12/30/2005 27,565 110% BUSH 12/28/2006 28,848 112% BUSH 12/31/2007 30,599 117% BUSH 12/31/2008 35,123 131% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt http://www.skymachines.com/US-National-Debt-Per-Capita-Percent-of-GDP-and-by-Presidental-Term.htm
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Finally made a home page for my ancient mud. One person is helping me with it, and maybe some others will be soon. :-) Hope springs eternal.
Great day at work; Michelle is doing well, but Noah is not doing well in school. We're working with him pretty extensively. His teacher and staff at his school are just great.
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At least I am adding new bookmarks to Delicious. Facebook is killing this blog.
We feel like Michelle picked up H1N1 on Thursday; she was pretty violently ill, and it came on really fast. But we took care of it, and she's almost all better today. We even went to the Norcal Ren Faire on Saturday. It was just wonderful; we all had a great time.
Of course, I was rather ill feeling on Saturday, but I managed to recover today, so all is well.
As always, work is good but hectic. We're VERY short handed, but we're getting used to it, unfortunately. But there are some interesting things coming up!
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Recently, I have been greatly moved by a particular song in Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown album. I have only known my wife for 10 years, 3 months, 8 days, 3 hours and 11 minutes. But in that time, I have learned about everything about her, including and especially her terrible, wonderful past. As I have been listening to this song, I have been asking her about it, and she says that it speaks to and about her. She, along with many others, was the girl in this song. So, here are the lyrics, as well as the song itself at the bottom. Screw the RIAA. :)
She puts her makeup on like graffiti on the walls of the heartland She's got her little book of conspiracies right in her hand She is paranoid like endangered species headed into extinction She is one of a kind, well, she's the last of the American girls She wears her overcoat for the coming of the nuclear winter She is riding her bike like a fugitive of critical mass She's on a hunger strike for the ones who won't make it for dinner She makes enough to survive for a holiday of the working class She's a runaway of the establishment incorporated She won't cooperate, well, she's the last of the American girls She plays her vinyl records singing songs on the eve of destruction She's a sucker for all the criminals breaking the laws She will come in first for the end of Western civilization She's an endless war, she's a hero for the lost cause Like a hurricane in the heart of the devastation She's a natural disaster, she's the last of the American girls She puts her makeup on like graffiti on the walls of the heartland She's got her little book of conspiracies right in her hand She will come in first for the end of Western civilization She's a natural disaster, she's the last of the American girls Aw yeah, all right, aw yeahLast Of The American Girls
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Curse facebook for forcing me to not post here. :(
We went to Monterey California on Saturday. We checked out the Thomas Kinkade Nagional Archive, walked the world famous Cannery Row of John Steinbeck note. We also hit a couple of beaches. Alas, they were very "keply". And "kelpy" on the beach means that were tons and tons of rotting vegitation and jillions of flies. That stuff needs to stay out to sea. :(
And just for the foo of it, here's my last bunch of Facebook posts:
Michelle wnated to 'drive somewhere' yesterday, so I found that the nearest coastal redwoods are at the Navarro River Redwoods State Park. (Located here.) Google said this was a four hour drive, so we got started. Unfortunately, the traffic on the freeways was relatively slow. So I bailed off of the freeways and went over to the Pacific Coast Highway. This was great, except it's way more twisty than I thought. I, of course, should ahve known better. It's on the damn Pacific Coast; of course it's twisty. So it was taking us forever to make any progress. So we turned around and stopped at Goat Rock State Beach. We climbed some rocks, Michelle skinned her shin, and we had a great time.
On the way back, we ate at a great over-the-water restaurant called Lucas Wharf Restaurant and Bar, located in Bodega Bay, California.
I wanted to mention that Michelle's lung problem has been getting better and better. I think the move to California has been very good for her lungs. It took a while, but slowly, ever so slowly, her condition has been getting better and better. So that's all kinds of awesome. We're very grateful.
My work has been going fairly well; I'm getting pretty over-loaded with stuff to do, which is the idea. :-)
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Facebook is eating my personal 'update' time. So let me just take a little time to put a few things on the record here. I'm not sure any of this is written down anywhere, so here goes.
In general, I am pro-life, mostly in the Catholic sense. The Republican party has hijacked the pro-life movement in the last decade or so to mean something more narrow than it should. I'm pro-life, through and through. I don't believe in the death penalty. I'm generally anti-war. I believe that a theoretically viable fetus has basic human rights, including the right to live. I do not believe that sperm and egg cells represent independent life; in that way I diverge from most Catholics. My opposition to abortion is a sliding scale; I'm mildly uncomfortable with it immediately after conception. I fully stand against it at the point of theoretical viability. I oppose abortion for unwanted pregnancies. I believe the Christian church should practice what it preaches and create a formal, efficient and comprehensive system that FULLY supports the mothers of unwanted pregnancies. I am personally torn about how to handle pregnancies that are dangerous to the mother. The mother, seeking the Creator's will, should decide how best to proceed.
In the same way, I'm an Environmentalist. To me, working to keep the earth from killing tens of millions, or more, is the most pro-life path anyone can walk.
I tend to vote for the Democratic Party. This is difficult for me, since the party is pro-choice, which I believe is anti-life. The bigger issue is environmentalism. The Democratic Party screws environmental policies up less than the Republican Party, and so I must vote for Democrats. As a plus, modern Democrats tend to be anti-death penalty and anti-war.
I could write extensively about each one of these views; maybe later. :)
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Hell yeah!. (Sorry mom...)
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In my inbox from Tiger Direct: Deal Alert: Seagate 1.5tb Hard Drive $119. According to this, the library of congress has about 100 terabytes of data. So with this new Seagate drive, you could store the entire library on 67 of them, at a cost of about $8000. That's just amazing.
What's even more sobering is that the rate of storage increase is expected to increase even further.
I predict that, within my lifetime, unless 'the whole thing' goes belly-up, pretty much the whole world will be continuously digitized and stored forever. The future Google street view will be high resolution, current, and have full history and time scale. One way to find out exactly where you are would be to take a picture and submit it to a search engine. It will compare what's in your picture with its archive of all things video and tell you where you are to within inches.
We are rapidly getting very comfortable with an abject lack of privacy. Most of us carry cell phones around. Any of those people can be located, most of the time, by the cell carrier. Our ancesters would have been utterly horrified by that.
Most of us will, in not too many years, be happily living completely transparent lives. The implications of that future are unclear at best.
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We're getting along pretty well, though we're still 'up to here' in boxes. I have assembled our bed, as well as Noah's bed. Our video and sound system is basically setup, though not well. My wife's computer desk is setup, and her computer and my computer are functional. We have a fair percentage of our kitchen stuff unpacked and in working order. Mobility is still strictly limited because of boxes everywhere, but that's diminishing.
I'm pretty far behind at work, but working hard to catch up. We're in full Scrum mode at work now. It's interesting; we kind of used this system at my last job in my team, and I liked it. We'll see how it can apply to operations here.
Back on the home front. We initially had one car port and one garage slot to park in. Of course, we only had Michelle's Saturn and my motor cycle to park. For convenience, she parked in the car port and I parked in the garage. We decided we didn't like the garage; it's hot, and you have to drive 'all the way in' so that the door can close. Plus, now I have my Saturn here, and I need a place to park my motor cycle along with two cars, using only two parking places. My initial thought was to park in front of one of the cars, but the bike is a lot wider than I thought, so that didn't work out too well. So we requested a pair of car port spots adjacent to one another. This has worked nicely; I can park my bike between the cars, pulled far forward, mostly in front of the front doors of the cars. Oh, and then we found out that we pay $15/month less for not using a garage. Awesome!
I had reported earlier that our apartment complex was getting empty. Some units are now filling back up. I guess there is a certain cycle to this. Plus, we're getting more and more friendly with the landlords, so we hear about the ebb and flow more directly than most everyone else.
And here is a short story about what it was like to program the Apollo days. Apollo 11 landed 40 years ago yesterday, which is awesome and depressing in different quantities. Awesome that it happened, depressing that we as a nation have lost so much capability and ability since.
PS: For no good reason, and because I'm kind of manic this morning, I want to show you our old and new parking places. This is where I used to park my motor cycle. My wife's saturn was right across the street. This is where we park now. So there. I don't care if you don't care. :-)
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Ok, just to let everyone know, we have all arrived in Sunnyvale. Utterly exhausted, but fine. I faced 12000 unread e-mail messages at work today. That'll be fine.
Unfortunately, we brought the heat with us. It was in the high 80s today, though the humidity is FAR lower. It's still quite hot.
The drive across country was difficult. I got a very late start Saturday, because the 'little bit of remaining packing' took six hours. So I got started after 4pm lima, and got into my hotel in Groom, TX after 2am. The next evening I stayed in Seligman, Arizona. This is right next to the town that was used as the model for the Pixar movie, Cars. The scenery looked just like the movie, and the town itself looked a lot like the town in the movie. It was pretty cool!
Our townhouse complex is getting more and more empty. We have no neighbors on either side of us, two deep even. Pretty scary, overall.
I think I'm posting here less frequently because I'm posting more to facebook. People actually read that. :-) I do plan on continuing blogging here. My intent is to, eventually, post more in-depth topics.
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Back to link aggregator service. This is an incredibly cool feature of rsync.net.
This morning, I'm going to Lowes to get a bit more lumber. Then I'm going to pickup a grill from a friend of ours who's giving a bunch of stuff away. Then I'm going to return the grill we bought at Wal-Mart, and finally close our Arvest checking account.
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We've been SLAM busy. Burning Man is coming up in three days; we're leaving the next morning. Packing is continuing apace.
My rough sketches of The Man indicated about the required height of 35 feet. Now that I have him mostly built, he tops out at 42 feet. This is an insanely large structure. I'm getting better at making these things; it uses less lumber and it's far more sturdy than previous efforts. Tomorrow the head goes on, along with the braces and the cardboard, and it's a done deal.
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Cats are so awesome.
Michelle is steadily better, and we're steadily getting ready to move.
EDIT: This is creepy. But really cool!
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