September 2006

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Every Year but only once

September 23, 2006 in Views | No comments

Every year; but only once and sans kids, my wife and I do a weekend away.  This year we chose to go here.  This place is cool, has restaurants, art galleries, nice shops, and interesting nightlife.  We tend to not really do much and end up sitting in the room, drinking a bit too much, talking, comparing, and remembering.  I think adults need time sans kids.  Kids are great, fun, challenging.  And frustrating.  They are not finished yet and they know it.  So, being unfinished, their emotions, rationalizations, ideas all cram into time and make life seem hurried and less peaceful.  So now, I am in a really beautiful hotel room at the Adobe Inn watcing NCAA football, drinking some beer, and just savoring the moment.  We don’t take pictures, but we buy stuff for ourselves and perhaps for the unfinished ones.

The requirements for the weekend away is that the drive must be less than 3 hours, must have great restaurants and social life, neat shops, etc.  In past years we went to Tiburon, Saratoga, and up to Mendocino.  All offer really nice food, drink, and a bit of away-time.  Its battery charging time and this time I took some days away from work because work has become dark sometimes and I need the light. 

People should all take some time away, find a place to recharge the batteries and come back refreshed and ready to cope.

The PTO

September 21, 2006 in News | No comments

Not the Parent Teacher Organization…

Its Personal Time Off.  First time in 8 months I’ve done this and I only took 2 days. I shoulda done a week now that I think about it. I have some personal stuff to get done the next days but I am also counting on writing some blogposts on a few various/sundry topics.

Recently, I’ve posted more about what I would call “coming of age” or “questions of life” posts than technology, anthropology, social issues.  The blog here has no real focus and I try to always post a bit of subterfuge in keeping with the overall title of the thing.

Work has been an item of interest of late to me and I’ve spent a deal of time considering it, talking to others, getting a feel for what its all about.  After years of being at work’s tit, I still don’t have the great feeling for what I am supposed to accomplish with it.  I do know there are different kinds of employment though:

  • job – this is something I believe we do to meet a set of goals perhaps over the short-term.  the actual work milieu may not be challenging or the challenge may be to make it not challenging.  It may be something around survival or something necessary for the family, self, etc. I don’t think its a long-term salvation thing.
  • career – I think career is a thing we decide to do when the job becomes inevitably more and we reach a plateau of age. Suddenly challenge means less and stability means more.  We’re talking about spending money into 401k plans, planning out that 25 foot RV, looking at our “golden years”.  The career may not be challenging in and of itself; but its stable, perhaps is not a startup, and may not be in technology.  We do it because we’ve made it fit well in our lifecycle and perhaps the pay is good.

I’ve never really know “career” bliss. I don’t think job bliss really exists since I believe we always look toward that next startup opportunity as the great one and the current one has the high suckage factor.  I’ve done my fair share of technology startups and none of them are careers yet for me. Its too dynamic and stressful.  No one wants a career of 20 years embroiled with the level of stress and chaos that a startup brings in its first few months of life.

But…

As we get older, do we want more or less?  Does the ever-chaotic and changing job lifestyle drain us, make us want a more realistic and predictable world?  Age brings certain realizations.  One is that no matter what we say about “loving that job”; work really does suck. It will always suck and even careers will in the end.  Because the career is about ending.  The gold watch, the retirement and RV.  Those are ends and beginnings all rolled into one.

 

Miles, Days, time to go before I sleep

September 19, 2006 in News | No comments

You all remember that famous Robert Frost lyric which chimes with time and places and distances we have to go, right? It seems to tell us all we have places to go, things to see, and distances to travel before we end our journeys. I was at a bookstore/Internet Cafe the other day chatting with the person sharing my table. This person, a stranger completely, told me his story about being employed during the dot.com and then the dot.bust taking it from him. He had been at a flashy, bright technology start-up and we both shared a laugh because I was at this starcrossed startup too then. We both remembered the wild rides, the money pouring out, the ventures, and the

The PDPC, Linux, Freenode

September 16, 2006 in Linux | No comments

I found this over on Slashdot this evening regarding an old friend and colleague Rob Levin. Rob appears to have passed away in a bikeriding accident. I worked with Rob on initially building the PDPC and making it a non-profit and able to direct, manage, and fund projects. I had never worked on a non-profit at that level and found the exercise in building the legal case, the paperwork, and the documentation an interesting journey. Many people had open and private feuds with Rob over things; but I never let those things come into the relationship I enjoyed with Lilo. As everyone knows that runs Linux, Lilo is a boot loader and is probably the oldest or most used or something. Rob was a boot loader himself and I think the name was fitting. He boot loaded how we could get support on open networks for many, many projects. I used to hang out on Freenode back when and spent many an evening using Xchat on that network. I also hung on EFnet until I got banned from the Linux channel there and found out that Rob could help me get

Truth be Told

September 14, 2006 in Current Events | No comments

You all remember when you were kids and an adult would tell you to tell the truth and that lies pave the way to

Weekend Ploys and Skullduggery

September 9, 2006 in News | No comments

Its yet another weekend and around noonish here in the wonderful east or south bay of San Francisco depending on if you are standing on your head looking at a map. I

Sometimes you feel like a nut

September 7, 2006 in Current Events | No comments

I’ve been building this new computer system at home now for about 4 days of frustrating installing, removing, retrying, etc.  Things work to a point and then for some reason when I mount the motherboard it shorts out completely and won’t post test, display the BIOS, etc.  I usually have decent luck with building PCs from scratch but this time I am dismayed but not down for the count. 

I started looking at the little metal screws that you screw down in the case that the motherboard mounts on.  They are metal screws and when I tap in the little screws nothing works.  Could be I need to add paper washers on top because the little screw heads go too far or the case has a metal thingie poking out somewhere that touches things.  Thingies are basically dangerous and time consuming and mean I have to spend yet more time in diagnosis mode.

I’ll prevail yet and get my brand new AMD64 running with its 256mb Nvidia card, 2g of memory, and a RAIDed 250g drive set.

When work avails ye not…

A friend and I had this discussion about work, its nature, and how technology companies the world over are messed up one way or another.  Its come to me that each company is messed up but in our zeal to move to the next one, we get a set of tunnel vision.  The “Silly Icon” Valley does not help much. We have the full load of entrepreneurs, starters, VCs, enders, boomers and busters that all meet in some cosmic mis-mash of style, consciousness, meetings, and despair.  When did work turn out that way I wonder? 

I don’t remember it always being that way.  Long, long time ago when I did archeology, it seemed I lived in a pristine virtual state that I moved through with no friction.  I’m sure there was even then but it was different and I dealt with it.  I had this discussion some time ago with RWR about work and I remember it pretty clearly.  RWR and I had spent this memorable day tromping through the Tehachapi’s and found prehistoric and historic cultural resources, got lost, got found.  The jeep then decided it wanted to die on the side of Highway 14 in the Antelope Valley.  So it did.  We were dusty, dirty travelers from another world and a wondrous woman in a BMW or Mercedes gave us a ride.  We sat in the back and she talked to us the entire way back.  No fear of the dusty and dirty mountain men I guess.  But the distance between the front seat and back could have been miles.  We were prehistorians looking for a rest stop or car repair or gas station.  She was a rich upwardly 40 female doing a good deed.  In the end, we all laughed a lot about the perceptions, what they meant, how they did what they did.  But I learned then that there is a chasm between people and it takes laughing to break it down.  RWR and I talked a lot about the person, their good samaritan nature, and how we mis-represented their intentions at the beginning.  We bridged the chasm and that unnamed lady was a friend that we told stories about hunting cultural resources, finding treasures (and garbage), and the general wonder of doing desert archeology.

Is a lot of that feeling gone in present-day technology startups?  I don’t really know.  You tell me.

how can you tell when its time for a change?

September 4, 2006 in Views | No comments

For us men, we know when to say when.  I’ve read that men do three career changes in a life.  I’ve counted mine.  I’m up to three now.  These would be completely different career paths.  The one I come back to more than once is archeology and anthropology because its taught me more about how life and people operate than any other I’ve done.  My time in the computer technology industry has taught me that working in a start up often ends up not working at all.  But when I did archeology, I had this cosmic connection of outdoors, comeraderie, philosophy, belief and ideology.  Often, I would meander to a local ‘watering hole” and meet wiht others that found stones and bones.  My mentor RWR would often join us at a local Pizza joint after a day out and we would drink some amount of beer, talk about the richness and tapestry of life.  I learned early on that I wanted to do the thing that RWR did; but I wanted to do it differently.  No one can emulate what another does and gain from it.  I wanted archeology but on my own and not a mere copy of what RWR had.  My wife and I decided that it was time to leave this place and go to New Mexico because it was different, it seemed the archeology was better, and that I could study in a cross section of the plains and the southwest.  All of that was true; but I ended up back in the Mojave Desert working after. 

Archeology also allows one to transcend the norms of life and apply the lessons learned doing it to other challenges.  When I moved to doing “technology” it dawned on me that the people I found there were great and fun; but they sure were not “the cowboys of science”.  Now I feel sometimes that my sunset days are approaching with this particular thread.  I have never felt like a zealot with what I use to get a job done.  I love the idea of Linux and its promise and what it does.  I also know that you need to bound all that with a healthy dose of what it takes to get at your particular reality.

Archeology prepared me for computer technology in many ways.  I had learned about stone tools because they transcended just the makers of them.  One could delve into more interesting social and cultural and technological patterns.  The use of technology transcends the mere OS of choice and actually empowers people to do more with the tools they have.

So anthropology by extension prepares people for lives outside anthropology.  I had wondered once how many people stayed in anthropology after X years.  I think people naturally move on, find new things, and travel across many spectrums looking for their success and reality.  Perhaps they borrow bits and pieces from each thing that lead them to success.

I have this feeling at some discrete point I may do that.  Or I may leave it all behind and go back to traveling the hills and mountains and reading other books and not really caring what I run on a computer compared to what it allows me to get done.  People made stone tools for reasons and people use computers for reasons.  Are there patterns to those techno-choices?  I bet there are.

Perhaps its the stuff that a good “coming of age” novel is all about…

 

Muddling through the colonoscopy

September 1, 2006 in News | No comments

I don’t know how many of you fine folk are over 50 years of age; but as my Doctor told me today, “when you hit 50, there are new places to go and things to do”.  I told him like you doing a colonoscopy on me?  He just laughed and told me I was a good sport.  In all actuality, and as others say, the preparation is many time worse than the actual thing.  The preparation tired me, made me sore, gave me nocturnal emissions of the worst kind.  But the actual procedure is not felt thanks to the wonder of modern drugs that produce a “twilight” zone kind of knock-out or uncaring.  I was in the room for 25 minutes but slept through some of it.  I was awake staring out an open window for the other part thinking how beautiful it was outside.  There was no real sensation at all and no pain or soreness afterwards.  And I could eat!  Eat, they said.  So eat I did.  Chicken, olives, food.  More food.  I had not eaten in 1.5 days so the hunger was bad.

In the end (bad pun, sorry); this was the end for me as far as medical procedures go.  And it was a good thing because nasty little polyps were found that were removed as part of the whole operation.

I don’t meant to blog a very personal thing.  Well, perhaps I do.  In a way, many of the blog posts have centered around my “longest wellcheck” and its been a scary, fun, emotional ride.  I’ve found out that after 50, life is good but things are different. 

Now its sleepy time for me.  I only slept 1 hour last night inbetween trips to the toilet.  I’ll be up for an interesting blog post tomorrow that I’ve saved as a draft going back to some days I spent before doing archeology and anthropology in the south central plains.  Stop on by and catch me refreshed and ready to blog!