My solution is simpler and so are the places that need to remind me. I share a google calendar with my wife so its nice if she sees my google calendar with its important update. But how do I tell her that there is a change without calling? Definitely a problem; but enter this cute little service called goosync. When I change an appointment time on my phone or at work or wherever, googsync syncs automatically to google calendar and whammo, blammo. My wife knows I am gonna be later for the hamburger helper. The other tools in my collaboration aberration are Sunbird with the Google Calendar Provider add-in. This gives me pretty nice and flexible access to my caldndar. The combination of a web calendar, goosync, and sunbird; make it all good. I also tried Scheduleworld and while I like the concept, I had a devil of a time making it actually work. Bu t it appears that others can accomplish.

My final take is that Evolution is too much like Outlook and I’ve used Outlook for over a year at Visa. But where I’m going also has an exchange server. I’m moving farther away from that open source company that I once thought was out there for me. Its dawned on me that I don’t belong in one of those because they have “issues”. I have issues too though and perhaps the combination of theirs and mine are just too great of a chasm. I cannot cross that divide and find something of worth. Or, its something like Levanta and the worth eroded into competing kingdoms of self-aggrandizement and empire building.

But the main thing is that I don’t need that crap. I don’t need what I went for before which was a company that appeared to have it together on the outside but could not understand why my resume could possibly change every 2 years. Dood! Its consulting man. But at a bigger level it all changes. Consider your own miserable failure of a life Mr. VP of this or that or Mr. CEO or Founder that thinks your s**t don’t stink. It does. Yours may be solid gold but its still shit. Solid gold poop is still poop. But you can probably find a VC buzzard that will sell it, promote it, or steal it.

So somehow, I got off the beam and way from calendaring. But its all communication folks. Writing, reading, listening, talking. I’ll soon be gone from what was and communication and its media will change.

In the end, I’m glad. I’ll put up with things, make the best even better and go off and build the things of worth for where I’m going. I’ll tell everyone next Monday where “that” is.

See ya then

Its the same with work folks. Work does the same trickery and slight of hand. Its like having a hand full of cards and see the top edge of one but the number is not visible. Its red. It may have a diamond on it. But how many? The wild card may also appear and take the plans you have so carefully placed down and toss the cards in the air in a life encompassing 52 card pickup.

So it is with my work. I’ve reached the end of days at Visa and its time to build the next iteration of my reality. I also know that reality is not really real and I learned a life lesson from “Into the Wild” when I watched it. Perhaps even from from an old book by Richard Bach called Jonathon Livingston Seagull. Watch what you wish for because it can be granted. The granting of it can take your life to its edge or back to its beginning.

Thanks to everyone at Visa and what they’ve done for me. I’ve enjoyed my days and I’ll savor the memories. You all rule.

I don’t know if I blogged this before, but I hit my weight goal. Its been a year. I started last May 20th or so I believe. I topped the scales then at 275 pounds of happy beer guzzling and burger swallowing me. But I had back aches, strained this and that. High blood pressure which was really bad. I’ll just say a word for going to see a Doctor if you are the usual American Male. Go. If you are over 40, Go. There are too many things which can happen. My friend DaveR; with every reason to live did not. Go seek out the physician and listen if she tells you that the time has come to look whatyou are inserting into thy stomach. Bad things cause bad things.

I’m probably doing about 1700 cals a day now but its not so much the cals but its what I eat. Only a little meat and not even every day. More salads and lots of fruit. Veggies once a day or so. Now I am at 181.5 and I feel pretty good. Definitely better than a year ago. I’ll just try to get my friend Ed to move forward. Ed you owe it to you, kids, wife, world.

The job thing has inserted stress; but one funny thing at Visa is the classic level of most people’s computing experience. People I talk with complain bitterly about Windows and its virii, malware, spyware, bad things. I tell them “why not try something else?” Get a Knoppix or a Live Ubuntu CD. But its too hard. Its easier to just be miserable. After all, Linux does not work on desktops or laptops and its only really meant for servers. The last time I booted a Windows desktop here was a Virtual One and since Amazon was kind enough to release the Linux MP3 client with easy dependencies to satisfy for the most part; iTunes and its silly “all or nothing” thing does not befuddle me any longer. Now I buy music, sync music with rsync. Yes… I don’t even use the original iPod firmware. Thanks to Rockbox. My iPod has signed its declaration of independence away from iTunes and Windows as well. But I am speaking to those that choose to be deaf. Its far easier to just bitterly complain than to try something else.

So, I’ll just go away into my corner with my Linux systems that don’t work.

rsnapshot - this one does some real magic with creating incremental snapshots of data files and its quick. I like the configuration file and what it does with the backups. Its also very fast. What I would like is a way to do copies of the rsnapshot archive to a secondary disk drive. I could probably rsnapshot the rsnapshot but I wish I could make it all work with one solution on one box. That leads me to…

rdiff-backup - a different model and not rsync based but it borrows a lot I think from the approach. You want a way to install minimal software that will run against local and remove systems. You may want to write your own shell script. It does a great job of creating the deltas of backups too.

Of course, you have to accept a learning curve with either or both. On ubuntu or debian its easy to test them though and I have this setup which allows me to painlessly backup mp3s, data, web, Maildir files. I built my own little NAS super-server with a Shuttle PC, a nice AMD64 CPU, and memory. All real cheap at Newegg. So I backup from a eSATA external enclosure with two 500g drives in it configured as a RAID1 array to a 1tb Fantom USB Drive. Both are formatted XFS.

Just a plug for the Fantom drives folks. They work very well on Linux if you are needing something. I combined all the things into a little server. Now I run rsnapshot against the files and I get really fast backups. Ubuntu supports all the extremities.

Backup does not have to be hard. But you do have to invest time in deciding what you need. I don’t need full system backups. Linux is just flat files and the diffs are important so I save a number of the important files in /etc for example. I can recreate the whole install, rsync the diffs, and be back before the ole tape drive would have been done.

Weblog Realities

So I went to Drupal and I’m back. Back to Wordpress. Because its what I like.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of the wordpress philosophy and approach. Making a change is actually quite easy as long as I go to Drupal 5.7 first.

Thanks to Ian for the pointers on the buglets.

Change is. But the real thing here is that we tack change into time and space. But neither of them truly exist I am sure. Time is just a fabrication we invented to explain something away that we could not manage. Space is too vast for our puny minds to grok. We simply cannot grasp the entity and what it truly is. I would ask if you destroy and negate time; does space yet exist?

How it comes down to the individual layer is this. I’ve been offered a new job. It takes me to a few places I’m interested in. I truly love where I work though. I’m torn and its hard to see that the forest and the trees are the same. Work is. Unless you win the lotto. But I think that even then you are not of the higher order. My plan is to move forward because change is. We cannot resist change no matter how much we propel ourselves the other way. For as the sly anthropologist once told me,

“there is nothing so constant as change…”

Embrace it or be its victim.

I happened to find the little Shuttle above on sale at NewEgg and grabbed it up. I’ve been playing around with NAS solutions for awhile and wanted to take one of these, put in a AMD64 5300+ chip, 4g of memory, and make it into something a bit more memorable. Lets face it; these things are cheap these days folks. But what can you do with one? Well, Ubuntu Gutsy goes on one nice. The external eSATA ports all work. I plugged in an external cabinet with two 500g SATA drives smashed into a raid array and whammo! This can be more than just a server if you want. I’m considering replacing my aging mail server with one of these too. Size, heat, noise.

The ad says recertified but I had purchased a separate AMD64 chip and 4g of memory. Pretty good deal for a smal form factor PC that’s whisper quiet and that can do good duty as a variety of things. I used it for file server, desktop, NFS, Samba, Firefly, internal web server. Its the guts of the world-class infrastructure here

Best of all it all works with Linux very well. I got the networking, RAID/eSATA, wired network, USB all working first attempt.

Very nice.

disruptive technologies - we all want to work for a someone that challenges the status quo in open source. It makes the moments more exciting to be taking on Uncle Bill and spinning the technology in a new direction.

innovation and evolution - we want a clear path to tomorrow. Open source startups are supposed to chart new courses, excite us, thrill us. They are supposed to reach to our hearts and brains with new ideas.

mundane security at some minimum - perhaps we want a paycheck for the other two ideas; but often we are idealists and the plumbing and hours and reasons and ethic may be up front. Lets face it though. We do these things to make money. Here in the bay area and the Silly Icon valley we need money. Hell; gas alone is costing me over $4 a gallon now in Foster City.

But for many of us soon the shine has worn off the shoe. The shoe is all scuffed and needs a new sole. Perhaps we need a new soul too. We also seem to lose our reasons for being there. The first two blur away and we’re left with the last thing. That’s too bad. Because we lose the joy and only want the mundane things that the money brings. Forget passion, fun, challenge. Now its gasoline, food, health insurance. But those things are important. Because here too; those things are expensive. A one job family simply cannot make it here in the Bay area. It costs too damned much. But the startups spin off and VCs give money for new gizmo-ology. What is gizmo-ology you ask? Its the thing a fuzzy headed, soft spoken entra pa noor does with money. They invent gizmos and gadgets that they pitch and sell and tell VCs that the world simply must have more of the first two things in my list.

Soon though, like the sad Levanta story and the Linuxcare story before it; the reality sets in. I’m happy at this point to not work at a startup. I have been “started up” way too many times and unfortunately, I’ve been “spun down” way too many too. Visa suits me. It gives me a bit of both. Lets be honest. They pay good. They give me challenge and innovation in some areas. But most of all, I think they offer the other “s word”. Stability.

Startups may start with the same first few letters as Stabilkity but they many don’t have the “ability” to be a ST. Their left with substituting letters and spinning down to a point where they’re left in a building with no employees, no vision, no feeling. Forget innovation and evolution. Find something that pays the bills.