May 2006

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First BBQ of the Season

May 29, 2006 in Current Events | No comments

Perhaps this family is running late…  We did our first family BBQ today.  Weather was perfect, steaks grilled out to perfection.  We also have a few family favs around potatoes, cauliflower, etc on the grill.  The weather is starting to get us to talking about doing this on the weekends or when Val is off during the weeks. 

I enjoy the family sociel thing with the food; but I really enjoy the backyard porch, the beer, the cool breezes and the sun slowly sinking.  Here in the South Bay, the evenings get nice and cool and the Weber heats up.  Tonite we did Ribeye Steaks, chicken, sausage, potatoes, and more.  Our old friend weber turns out classy eats and we sit around and talk about the day, the days, and the things coming up.

Perhaps this is just a placeholder blogpost; but everyone should get out and kung fu tonite.  If you cannot kung fu try a BBQ instead.

Guarding Change, solitude highways, lost thoughts

May 25, 2006 in News, Views | No comments

I tend to post a bit about anthropology and tag the post as anthropology because I have that so-called tag or category.  Anthropology still means a lot to me but I don’t practice any more.  I can still read about investigations in the Mojave Desert or get the odd email from a friend that tells me in his terms the how and why of things.  But mroe than a few friends have departed that scene and I did back in the 90s.  Those damned 90s.  Everything changes and decades come and go and I wonder if the advice my mom gave me still holds true.  Its amazing that she really grokked most of the ways people are and are not.  She could look at a person right away and tell me whether I should trust that person.  She had eyes inside the souls of others I think.

I had a call today from an old TAM friend from the Linuxcare days.  He’s working over at RedHat now which sounds okay but everyone needs change and he and I talked about life as a TAM, the olden days of doing enterprise TAM-ship, and changes in both of our lives.  We both had a good laugh and he thought it was interesting that I was back at Levanta working.  Back in “the day”,  we used to travel across the US basically doing deals, managing those pesky technology relationships for Fortune this and that.  Lotsa trips to this little town in Texas called Round Rock where this little OEM lived.  Lots of trips to Austin where Big Blue was visited and more than a few trips to RTP, North Carolina where all kindsa people live.  We both thought that that life was challenging, fun, but the travel was way too much.  I got to know the inside of more Marriott Marquis and Wingate and Hilton and other hotels better than my own house.  We rated those hotels for their “business level”.  It went like this:

  • Is there a Desk in the room? [n] [y].  If Yes; add 10 points for ease of work.
  • Is the broadband access cable on the desk too? [n] [y[.  If Yes; add another 5 points for ease of access to the 'net
  • Is room service available all the time or most of it? [n] [y].  If Yes; higher points fo that midnight beer and burger thing

The best hotels for business traveler have to be Marriotts.  They just have it all for you.  I stayed at more than a few with sushi bars, incredible freebies, etc. Very nice!

After dealing with my friend for about 45 minutes, I got back to my main business at that time which was a bit of solitude.  You all ever notice that solitude can be desperately wanted or that you can want it desperately to end.  There are poles of difference.  Its the Yin and Yang of our lives.  Its the difference between being alone and being lonely.  One you want; the other you don’t.

I also had a few lost thoughts today.  I remembered after the call many things that seemed to rise unbidden and I was then, in turn, captivated by people and artifacts and processes.  Life is an elaborate work, for sure.  Partly truth and partly fiction :)

weekend deliberations

May 21, 2006 in Subterfuge, Views | 1 comment

Weekends are always a relaxation time.  I pull away from work on Fridays and have this sensation that I have this well of time to drink beer, watch old westerns, read stuff.  Every other weekend I get to sleep in as late as I want too!  Sleeping in, no 7 year old telling me at 0530 that its time to get up; no 15 year old insisting on some tribal rites of passage… its a good thing!

I’ve tried also to stay away from news.  News frustrates, angers, and disappoints me.  That is until this morning when I saw coverage of the Bay to Breakers race.  Here in full glorious sight were people with bags on their heads, other people with nothing on at all, still others dressed as various and sundry characters.  With all the serious news that we all have to contend with; its good to also have a thing to write about which tips the other scales. 

I don’t have serious topics to blog about today.  Its more like a recap of a weekend of rain and some shine and a bit of humor.  I noticed that the average amount of time spent blogging is falling off of late.  With the best of intentions I still read using one of them RSS gators.  On Linux, I’ve been using Liferea which is pretty nice.  But, I’ve also been using the Sage extension for Firefox which rules in the areas of quick reading of a few feeds.  If you want one that can travel across OS’es and a Firefox extension is not your cup of tea; may I humbly suggest RSSOwl?

I also spent some time this weekend getting rid of my last real XP system and replacing it with VMware Server and a virtual XP system.  I just don’t need XP any longer on a real computer.  VMware Server is very nice and easy to install and I can reach my install of XP Professional from anywhere on my home LAN.  Its pretty respectable in speed even over 11g wireless connections.  If you don’t know about VMware Server its what GSX Server turned into.  Give it a look if you want to run virtualized guests within Linux.  Works very well.  I came down to realizing I only need XP Pro for a few tasks on a weekly basis and most times with what I do now,  I can get by with VMware sessions.

Moving to some Beat — drawing on the napkin of life

May 15, 2006 in Anthropology, Views, Weblogs | No comments

This is more of a interesting story perhaps because today I caught myself back in archeology for some period of time; telling stories of what it was like to wander the deserts, forests, and American Southwest. We all went to a Macaroni Grill for lunch and you can draw on the tables there. So I drew things like little hearths and people around them and we talked about what its like to do archeology. Simply put and as a friend once said, “its the most fun you can have with your pants on”. But the real definition has to be,

The systematic study of past human life and culture by the recovery and examination of remaining material evidence, such as graves, buildings, tools, and pottery.

and that is the truth :) But there is also beer involved. You do all the neat stuff but you consume quantities of beer doing it.

Anyways, it reminded me for some reason of this other story of some years ago. My wife and I were at a meeting called the Society for California Archeologists’ Annual Meetings. I think they were in Salinas that way back year. We were there with my buddy and mentor RWR from AV College. We were eating Mexican Food that day and RWR showed us how evolution happened by drawing on tortilla chips. Failed species were summarily ingested. Others found themselves crawling out of a sea of salsa. Successful tortilla chips suddenly had more tortilla chips around them…

A defining moment and a reason to go on and do archeology? Perhaps. But better, it was a defining moment in a friendship because we both have treasured and remembered that day for some years.

Thanks DaveR for letting me remember those days.

My Gosh! Its the DaveR

May 13, 2006 in Weblogs | 1 comment

Well, welcome to DaveR.

Days go by; no blog

May 11, 2006 in Current Events | No comments

Things have been kinda busy lately and next thing you know, I have not said a thing here for almost a week. My work schedule has been pretty focused lately on getting some larger projects done which have taken energy and commitment. But there is no real excuse for not blogging. I read over on Dan York’s weblog that he’s been blogging for 6 years now including a bunch of time over on Advogato. Its interesting that many people started there by keeping a diary and notating it daily if not more. At Advogato, I published thoughts until around 2002. Here is some of it for jokes and grins. I started moving away from Advogato and started playing with Manila hosting for awhile, then did MovableType, back to this and that, then to Wordpress for a long stretch. I also worked over at Technorati for a spell and learned that blogging was kewl and links were king. Perhaps I wanted to be “authoritative” so I blogged at typepad for awhile. But being authoritative was boring because I ran out of really interesting, provocative, and useful things to say. Then I discovered the true worth of blogging is not tagging, linking, being authoritative on a subject or topic. No, fellow virtual travelers. Its none of those things. Its the act of doing it that matters. All the linking engines in the world and all the great clued-in authority figures will never sway the person that does not write.

But over the past mini-dry spell, I wondered what prompted me to continue to blog. Its easy sometimes to just not do it and you can travel the roads and highways of life and not do it. For me, after the requisite period of time, I miss it. Its like a thing I truly enjoy is gone or there is the 5 pound chicken and 10 pound egg syndrome. I want to write so much that I cannot pass it. Its a blogstone for heaven’s sake! And it f**king hurts. Man. I am pain sometimes because the thoughts swirl all around and I just cannot find the time.

Perhaps I’ll be able to blog more often now. Time will tell :)

Traveled here and there

May 7, 2006 in Linux | 3 comments

Well, I decided about a month ago to go taste a few different distributions.  I tried out Fedora, Ubuntu, and SuSE.  I got to say each has something that I like and each has a thing I don’t like.  In the case of FC5, I like the attention spent to the desktop and its looks. What I did not like was having to really work at getting suspends to work with APM instead of ACPI.  I also did not like some kind of memory race conditions that rendered my Dell Inspiron almost useless every few days and needing a reboot after things locked up solid.  After a week or so of Fedora, it was outa there and on to the next contender.

Ubuntu is a debian thing and its an interesting choice.  Hardware works great with is; but the 5.10 release is kinda long in the tooth when you compare it with how fast modern desktop environments ship updates.  As an example, with the default sources I could not get a Firefox 1.5.0.3 or recent Thunderbird.  But its other management tools make up for this and Automatix really does.

SuSE has what I like and dislike all in one tool.  Its YAST.  I never did like the tools which claimed everything because they hardly ever do a single thing right.  Remember Linuxconf?  SuSE’s behavior sometimes is great but other times with its yast software updates and its mantra to always load most of YAST to get any one thing done left me a bit frustrated.  Especially with its proclivity to to wipe out changes to system files I just made.

So… It takes me back to a place that I do feel at home.  Someone asked me my favorite Linux distribution for desktop use.  I had settled on easy ones; but often if you have to work at a thing a bit longer, you get some kinda payback for it.  Enter my love affair with regular old Debian.  It just does what it says and its fun to run and it comes in three flavors.  I most always run Unstable on desktop or laptop systems because I just do.  On my 2 servers, they run Testing just for my own sanity.  I hardly ever run Stable.

In my non-scientific and personal quest, I name Debian the best.  At least for my uses.  I still get frustrated with Linux and I tend to wander off and do other things for awhile.  But, in the final analysis, Debian’s apt-get and other tools just works for me.

Why did you…

May 3, 2006 in Weblogs | No comments

I entertained a few questions from an old friend on the cell the other day.  We were talking yet again about those old days.  He and I had done this work up around Redding for an entire summer and we could see both Lassen and Shasta.  It was a body beautiful but it ended in this crappy hotel’s bar every night where they had the coldest, cheapest beer ever.  People tell me not to lessen myself by drinking cheap beer; but let me tell ya.  When you been doing archeology for a day and some; the actual cost of the beer does not matter.  What really matter is that you have some.  Some could mean this or that many.  When I worked in Needles for a few months, the pipeliners would drink that many and I would not.  If you’ve never seen a natural gas pipeline project, its an amazing feat.  Long green pipeline snaking across a right-of-way.  The pipeline segments are first welded together in long groups and then the crew lowers each section down and the welders start yet again.  At the end of these days, the pipeliners all gather and drink and drink and gather and then drink.

We always wondered.  Why do you…?  And they would smile and tell us that they only worked 4 months of each year and the rest of the time they stayed mostly drunk on beautiful homes out in the southwest.  Oh yeah!  I could see why they did…

But we were talking about changing actually.  My friend said “but why did you…”  I thought for awhile about the question and the answer.  The answer to “why did I” is a mysterious blend of events, facts, and fictions.  But someone else asked if I just grew out of it.  No!  You never grow out of archeology.  Its a total mistress.  Anthropology runs the life and the thoughts and the dreams.  You cannot just go to technology and expect not to engage.  Technology became another mistress to me that meant more stability; actually some money in the pocket.  And then Linuxcare came along and then 2001.

Geez.  Who woulda figured?  Then my friend asked “Why do you… Blog?”  Well, that one gets me.  Why do I?  Is it to be authoritative or to have comments or to find an exclusive blogging club where i work or to be known?  No.  Do I visit a lot of sites that tell me how popular my blog is, how authoritative it is?  No.  So Why do I?

I do it because I have to and I want to and it brings relief.  Sometimes the pressure suits up and I know there is a need to release that flood.  Why do you all blog?  Wanna find some good readers?  Want to say a thing or two?  Or just want to find a place and a way to make your own statement?

Line it up and then ask someone else why they…  I bet they all have reasons.