musings from the sleep deprived

It was certainly our intent to see the last Phish show in Coventry, VT. Tickets purchased well ahead of time, flights, rental cars, friends to tag along with, etc. Mother Nature, apparently, had made other plans.

The closest we got was about 25 miles from the campsite before Mike Gordon got on the radio with the local constabulary and announced that they were going to begin turning people away. We were roughly 15 miles from where they were going to setup that roadblock. Being the pseudo-responsible citizens of the world that we are, we turned the car around, and went home.

A significant portion of the people in the immense snake of cars, though, had different plans. Some 2100-2500 groups abandoned their vehicles on the interstate and hiked the rest of the way in, and saw the show. In retrospect, it would have meant abandoning our food/drink filled cooler, slogging along 25 miles on a gouty foot (yes, my gout took that opportunity to flare up on me) and spending the remainder of the weekend muddy and/or wet. Did I miss an opportunity there? Sure. Do I regret that we turned back and avoided alot of pain in the process? Not so much.

Additionally, based on an official statement from the band manager, folks who still have unripped tickets will additionally get free downloads of the show and sound checks from their site, as well as an exclusive, signed photo book of the band. No, it isn’t a replacement for the missed show, but it goes at least down the right road of giving us some recompense for the trouble we went through. On the whole, I’m pretty ok with the whole thing.

I wanted to see how this thing handles image data. So I’m including one in this post. I’m also going to link it to the larger image of my back tat. Not that you care. I’m just experimenting.

Dig it.

I suppose that is the nature of all things. Even more so when you take into account that, like just about anyone else working in IT worth their salt, I’m about as ADD and OCD as the next guy. Ok, so I don’t have to count the nuimber of CDs in the stacks every day to make sure they’re still there, but you get the idea. Bottom line: things have a tendency to, and will come in and out of my attention span at seemingly random intervals. Like say … this blog for instance. I may have frenzied posts for weeks, and then nothing for a month.

Oh well.

I was a comic page reader from way back. I grew up on Peanuts, Garfield and later discovered Calvin and Hobbes, the Berke Breathed efforts and the more politically geared works like Doonesbury. My current active reading list is just three. They’re listed in the links on the right. This topic deserves more discussion than my brain is willing to give it right now, but I will get back to this in the future.

Once again, in an effort to start moving stuff from my old site to this one, here’s a general post regarding graphics. This one will hopefully get quite a bit more attention as time goes on.

It is true, as I mentioned almost 4 years ago in that original posting, that I’ve always been fascinated by the visual aesthetics of things. I think, with the possible exception of people who are born blind, that everyone, likewise, does have a certain ‘taste’, in art. Color combinations they find appealing, shapes and overlay and combinations of layers that strikes them as pleasing to the eye, and such. I would also say that most people never really develop this sense. They simply accept what they perceive as fact, and never delve into the hows or whys of it, nor do they ever really find any way to enunciate it clearly, or find particular art or artists that particularly exemplifies the things they like.

I won’t say I’m any expert in art. Far from it. I’d say I’m more in the ‘discovery’ phase of things. I do know some artists that I particularly enjoy…. Escher, Dali, Klimt, Giger and Mandlebrot, to name a few. Don’t know that last one? Well … it is definitely a name that doesn’t really belong with the others, at least in the traditional sense. But it does bring out one aspect of art that I’m particularly fond of. Benoit Mandlebrot was one of the formative scientists in the field of fractal, or chaos theory. One of the more popular ‘sets’ of data, or more accurately, formulas describing data is named for him as well.

Eventually, I’ll link in several of the research documents on fractal theory for those who want to pursue it deeper. In the meantime, go google it and see what turns up. The crux of it though, is that these researchers were finding ways to describe patterns they observed in nature, in seemingly random things (cloud patterns, for example), with formulas. The visual representation of these formulas were strikingly similar to the kinds of things we’d see in the summer, cloud filled sky. Soon after, they starting using these formulas for a whole series of predictive simulations, many in the weather related fields (as well as others).

While this research is all very interesting, one of the more appealing parts of this is the sheer visual splendor of the images these formulas are capable of producing. Eventually, there were people out there doing nothing but investigating new ways to make these fancy formulas produce pretty images. Dozens of tools exist out there today, and producing these is pretty trivial. No understanding of the core math behind it all is necessary anymore. Which, to some extent, is good, because its pretty high-powered stuff.

Anyway, fractals led me to look more closely at the computer as a source and creation tool for art, and is where any of my current efforts at producing anything are focused. Mostly, this has produced just some nice wallpapers and such, but occasionally, something pretty nice spits out. The graphic on the top of this page is a good example. Thanks again to Tom for help ing with that one.

Enough for now. Eventually, I’ll post some example images, and integrate some kind of graphics database or something into this page.

Let’s see….

Karen
Kathy Jo
Clarence
Karen
Terry
Karen
Dave
Pat
and now Rory. 8 manager switches in less than 4 years. Not too bad. The one positive thing to come from this, I think, is that Rory will be the first technical manager I’ve had at SUN. While not required while I was an instructor, everything after that really required one. On the one hand, its nice not having your decisions questioned …. on the other hand, its nice to have validation for those same decisions.

Ah well, time will tell.

Another vacation coming to a close. Back into the fray, as it were. This is not going to be an easy time, SUN is not “being all it can be”. Here’s to hoping our esteemed colleagues in upper management can defy gravity, nature’s laws and lawyers, and turn this all around. That’d be nice. 3 more years. 3 more years. Its like a mantra.

And what then? Who knows, but its got to be better than this. Ah well … *tips a glass* … back into the fray.

It almost seems as if I’m on vacation from myself. I forgot everything I was supposed to do for work. It required force of will to remember those things again. Man, apparently I really needed a break from all this.

It was a fairly low profile week. Played a decent round of golf with Jason, and then subsequently, probably one of my worst rounds ever with Sky, John and Rob. Ah well, I got some good advice from them, so it was definitely worth it. If I can find some time, I’m going to grab a lesson from someone. Golfing, if nothing else, is another sport where you’re sort of competing mainly against yourself (first and foremost). It reminds me of pool (billiards) in that regard. Body control, perception, consistency, assessment, etc. They are all elements of both.

I should listen to my own advice that I give others when teaching them pool. Start with the absolute basics. In this case, I still need to learn what all those are. Stance, grip, body position, arm position, backswing, etc. Once again, all the same terms from pool. I need to either rent some video or something, or spend some time with a pro who can get me those basics. Once those are consistent, then I can start working on all the nuances that make up the rest of the game. Before then, the rest of it is silly to focus on. It’ll get there.

Talk to Sky about the pool league team. I’m going to sit the next session out in order to make sure the whole team can play without hindrance of worrying about ranking out of a match. The APA has a rule that says that you can’t have more than 23 “points” of players play in given week. The ranks vary from 2 to 7 in 8-ball. Since I’m currently shooting as a 7, if I play, that means (currently) that not only MUST Ella play, but we also can’t play two 5’s in that week either. Me sitting out a session will get the discussion going as to what to do with the team longer term. Sky and I discussed splitting into two teams, etc … but I think we’ll just wait and see what happens this session and how the discussion develops.

Played alot of WoW and AC. Go figure. In AC, StormWlf was around this week, and Friday night, we had the Queen’s Quest which I went on for the first time ever, and got the kill! Holy smokes. Lemme see if I can link in a screenshot of that…. there we go QQ.png (148K). Quite a fun ride. Thanks again to all the PL, and Lyc as well, who joined us for the mayhem. We will definitely be doing that again.

WoW has been pretty crashy since the last push. Seems like they’re trying to push alot of new function in at once. This last push was Auction Houses, the beginnings of the talent system, level cap raise, etc. Its been hard to quest with how much its gone down. But then again, thats what Beta is all about, right? They’re definitely making progress though.

Ah well, more later.

The latest idea thats been swimming around in my head remind me of the early Lazarus Long novels. This one family had been tracking its most long-lived members, and was trying to get certain of them to breed to continue those traits, often seeking out specific other families or particular individuals to reinforce those traits in their children and future generations.

The idea I’ve been having is similar in nature. I wanted the initial … hmm … maybe even significant portion of the book to be flashbacks to earlier days. In each case, a particular character would be highlighted and focused on, with the eventual end of the chapter focusing on a particular character trait that they have, and also some insinuation that some mysterious party has made a note of that trait.

In the early chapters where all this is happening, I’m looking the mysterious party to take on a sort of illuminati type feel to it, or close to it.

I love technology. I really do. I think its one of the core things about me that just drives my being. Its a difficult field, constantly in motion and driven by a strange set of forces. On one side of the rolling ball, there are the monolith companies driving billions of dollars into research to come up with “the next big thing”. On the other side are the small companies, even sometimes single people … who hit it big with an amazing idea, new invention, or new use for some existing thing. Either way, there is this momentum of progress that keeps the geeks of the world slathering through their webpages, tech news sites and magazines to see what toy they get to play with next.

I’ve had discussions with folks in the past who think we should still be swinging around in the trees by our tails, happily spending our days with simple thoughts. There’s something to be said for that, I agree. Simplicity has its rewards … life remains predictable, stable and comfortable. On the other hand, there’s an inate curiosity in me that has to know what the framerate I can push is using the latest video card with Far Cry, or what improvements I can get in my rendering projects by switching to a 3GHz processor instead of a 2GHz one. I mean, I really want to know. Y’know? No? Oh well.

This is also a pretty complex general topic. There’s all kinds of mini-asides that can be made about technology … our dependence on it, research driving its advancement, controls on it, and so on, so I fully expect to address many more of those topics at some later time. For now, though … I just wanted to be clear about my fascination with it, and leave it at that.

I currently work for SUN Microsystems as a Data Center Architect. Or a Systems Administrator. Or as a generalist of one sort or another. It seems to vary depending on what day of the week it is and how many conference calls are scheduled.

I expect I’m going to probably have quite a bit to say about my employer in the near future, but for now, I just wanted to comment on one trend going on internally. There is a current push trying to get the employees to blog, and if/when they do, to adhere to certain guidelines about what they say about SUN and so on. I’m not precisely sure what started that idea, or why they felt the need to respond to it, but they’ve provided a portal for SUN employees who wish to blog on SUN’s dime (hardware and bandwidth) . For the record, this is not one of those.

Immediately after making this resource available, there was another flurry of notices about what they felt folks should and should not say about the company in these blogs. Hmm… I’m still formulating my thoughts on that. There seems to be a conflicting principle present in those statements.

Blogs seem to be, at their very core nature, sort of free-flowing streams of consciousness expressing the feelings of a particular individual (or perhaps a group) on a loosely defined set of topics. It seems reasonable to me that if one of those topics might be employment, or someone’s relationship to their employer, that those streams of consciousness may very well, at times, express some elements of discontent. This is a nice, flowery pleasant way of saying that if someone isn’t HAPPY with their job, their blog is going to reflect those feelings. So, enter SUN and its desire to have the public opinion of the company be a good one.

They want people who work for them, who also happen to blog, to not disparage the company in their remarks and comments. Suddenly, this mechanism for expression has a filter, or watchdog. That seems to defeat the very purpose.

That having been said… I’ll go a bit further on the topic. If I, as a loyal employee of said company, want to do my best to have the public (and oh … say … the financial analyst community) view of the company be a favorable one, since it also benefits me personally when that is true, isn’t it in my best interest to not disparage them as well? I’d think so.

Finally, my own stance I think… I do want SUN to succeed. I want to see the analyst view of the company improve, their stock prices go up, my own vested interest in the company to benefit from those events. So no… I won’t say bad things about the company that might influence those elements in a negative way. What I will go on to talk about, though, is how some of the internal machinations of the company impact my life, and how the changes they go through internally impact me. Issues of morale, RIFs (reductions in force), management movement, company strategy, product placement, marketing and publicly issued statements all seem to be fair game and topics for discussion.

If you also happen to work for SUN, and find something I say in here objectionable, please feel free to let me know so we can discuss it further, and assess the impact of those statements.

Every year I do this exercise to see whats needed to fill out a “well-rounded” bar that can suit most needs for the folks that come over and want to mix drinks. Most of the books for bartenders list way too much, or are so outdated that they still think drinks from the 60’s are en vogue. Since we generally don’t drink too much hard liquor at home, this is, to some extent, an attempt to match our bar up to the tastes of the people who will visit.

I do enjoy Scotch (single malt), and good tequila, so there are several types of each. Beyond that, its mostly an attempt to have a good solid set of mixers so people can play around and try something new if they want.

Invariably, the things we end up using the most of are shots (tequila, jaeger, rumple, goldschlagger, etc) and the ingredients in the most common party drinks, like margueritas. There is usually a least one instance of scotch tasting for the expert and uninitiated. After reading this, it sounds like we’re a bunch of alcoholics. That isn’t really accurate. There are a few people who maybe go a bit too far, and they are invariably labelled as the year’s party victims (there’s always at least one), but most people keep it under control.

I don’t consider myself a heavy drinker. I drink socially (never alone), and usually about once or twice a week. I occasionally have a beer with a meal as well, but not normally. For all that though, when I do drink, I’m sort of a snob about it, and want very fine tasting stuff. Single malt scotches, never blends. Anejo tequilas, small batch beers that tend towards the very hoppy (IPA, ESB, etc). I’d sooner die than have to stomach a mass produced beer (the Bud, Coors and Millers of the world). I’d rather spend that very small amount of time I am drinking enjoying it. Just like life.

The quiet before the storm. I’m home from work. Took Friday and Monday off, so I don’t have to think about any of that again (with any luck) until Monday evening or Tuesday morning. There’s a ton of stuff to do, cleaning-wise, preparation-wise and all that, to prepare, but for now, I’m just sitting, not thinking, in the dark basement. Kind of a nice quiet feeling.

I may take a nap until my better half gets home. That would be nice. Today was actually productive, despite all the work related nonsense. I managed to get them to come get the garbage canister thinger, so its gone. I managed to get a hold of the guy who will weed the back porch, and he promises me they’ll put at least two hours in before tomorrow evening. Also setup an appointment for the week of the 4th for the eye doctor.

Speaking of, the week of the fourth should be tremendous. No work for 9 days in a row. OMG. An extended break is just exactly what I need on the menu right now. That should do nicely for catching me back up on sleep, and giving me some liesure time to play and whatever else I wanna do. Praise the gods.

The last two days have been concall hell. Yesterday was 6:30am, 8, 10, 11, 2pm and 4. Today was 8am, 10, 11, 1pm and 2. Wow, look at all the work I got done!

You know, from the design and architecture perspective, I understand that this role is important. I need to be able to help other groups understand what it is we’re implementing, and assist with their using my environment as a useful tool, and get the best use out of it possible. On the other hand, I haven’t actually set foot in my own data center in over a week.

I like it down there. Its nice and cool, constant thrum of the A/C, surrounded by the latest in server and grid technologies. A geek’s wet dream, really. So why can’t I be down there! Instead, I sit on the phone call day, headset glued to my face, not getting enough time to eat lunch, and sipping down can after can of Mt.Dew.

<mantra>I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.</mantra>

I was originally thinking I was going to take my old site and just basically convert it over full bore. Take all the old rant posts, the content from the pages, etc, and just put them in as new posts, etc.

As I’m reading through alot of my old stuff, I’m realizing that its alot of crap. Or, at a minimum, I’d like to see the content of it updated and revised before I re-express those opinions and talk about those topics. Life changes, and rather than start the chronology here with a point-in-time snapshot from years ago, and then suddenly dive into new topics, I think I’m going to just spend some time thinking about those old topics, and then write about them anew. Seems to make more sense that way.

Another thought, just to keep things clean… I’m going to stick with a flat organization on the categories. I am, however, going to have to rethink how links work. Its taking up WAY too much space on the menu, and I’m not sure yet how to manipulate the way the links are displayed well enough to customize that. I’ll work it out.