There is something elemental, riveting, that transcends. Perhaps its something I need or want or vision. Perhaps I need that journey that Bob describes. We each partake of the journey differently though. Many of us though cannot do solitude. An anthropologist friend once asked me if I knew the difference between solitude and loneliness. I said no. He said,

Solitude is being alone and loving it. Loneliness is being alone and hating it

This has stayed with me since my days of solitude in the forests and deserts.

Update….

Someone else told me about this differentiator between the two as well:

Solitude is being alone and not lonely; Loneliness is being lonely and alone. It strikes me we can we find solitude even in a mish-mash of people but something else calls, beckons. Somewhere some of us (me included) need that solitude even if we never find out the real truths. Perhaps as others have pointed out, there are no real truths. But it may be the search and not the result that matters. Thanks to Will for the email.

I’ve given thought to how we Americans are programmed to do work. Its such a slippery slope for our lives. Work is a necessity and we’re basically socialized to expect a lifetime of 9 to 5 and then a few precarious years of wishing perhaps it was back. Can it be that there is more than just the 9 to 5 and then missing it? I’m at the point where I wonder what to do next. Do I just continue to do technology? I could see a point where its fundamental attraction leaves me. Where I would want another contribution. What would that be? I’m sure my wife wonders. She is dedicated to her career and I like seeing someone with that level of focus. For me, the whole work thing is good now; but I can see past it.

Perhaps my day dream is to have a thing which is more, less,different. Some thing which is a job but encompasses more. A dream? Of course. We’re americans and thus programmed to live those Thoreau “lives of quiet desperation”. There is nothing left for us as we reach those other years of ages. We’re locked in and locked down.

But our spirits and consciousnesses stream far away and into the clouds and sun and dimensions. I’m sure that our indomitable spirits see much more than even our day dreams show. Perhaps I’ll find that “other thing” that seems to hover forever right out of reach. Time will tell.

But lets get down to the Ibex. What are the compelling reasons to upgrade or why delay it for a bit? Well, some of the things I will like to see like the file encryption for things I just don’t want to encrypt with secret commands and things. The second are the new goodies for my desktop. I’m a gadget sort of guy. I’d like integrated widgets like Yahoo Widgets on my Linux boxen. A final reason is the promise of longer battery life. On this laptop I have the extended thinkpad battery and it appears to get about 4 hours of life. Not sure how accurate that is. In previous versions of Ubuntu I had to mess with suspending and hibernating. These are two features I make use of since I travel on occasion or even more often. Lets be serious. In the past, Linux suffered in this area. The advice I would get is to shut the laptop down when I’m done. Why in the Hell do that I’d wonder? I have a laptop because its a “mobile device” for a mobile life. If I wanted just a desktop I’d haul a shuttle around.

So there are about 5 reasons to upgrade. Goodies, kernel, power management. Enough? Well, I may do one laptop since I have dual laptops of the same make. Or I may pop in a new laptop drive and give it a whirl.

A work colleague told me I was in prison with Windows and to break free. he was right and I thank him for that bit of advice. Now its time to look at the Intrepid one. Hopefully the treat is there and the trick is less

But Jeremy mentioned in the comment that I should give VirtualBox a try. So I did. In all fairness, I have VirtualBox with XP SP3 and VMware 2.5 Player with Server 2003. In my completely unofficial test; VirtualBox beats the pants off VMware Player. Both have a seamless or unity mode feature; but VirtualBox seems to actually want to run on my Thinkpad T43 with 1.5g of memory while VMware Player seems to struggle.

I think VMware has tried to do too much with too much bloat. it just feels all syrupy slow and loaded with a unity mode which really makes it not useful. My advice, VMware, is to lose the menu thing on top which lets you find menus or whatever. Instead try the lower in fuel VirtualBox method and just let us launch from the Windows Taskbar. Secondly, take a look at the memory use here.

All that being said, I’m still a VMWare Server and ESXi afficianado. Server must be the 1.0.x release though. The 2.0 server seems awkward and all webified. ESXi just rocks but Linux desktoppers need a VI client.

I’d say for lightweight desktop virtualization, it does not get much better than VirtualBox.

All of them offer a set of constructs and use which are similar; but Twiki seems to bill itself as a enterprise collaboration tool. Mediawiki is nothing short of amazing as it powers the Wikipedia and PMwiki is simply simple. My first test was installing and setup. Installing Twiki seems rather daunting at times and you can mess up the whole thing easily with a twiki.conf which is not written correctly. Mediawiki and Pmwiki install easily. Use is not much different that I can see. The markup language is all the same. Adoption is another area. Who will adopt a particular media and then publish on it? And why? It seems we all chose Twiki and now we are off and running on it. I do prefer simpler tools like PMwiki; but I can use Twiki.

Adoption Grids

Wiki’s are great tools to bring folks together, build networks that bind thoughts, and also allow people to refine ideas. They also need to be used. Simply put a wiki requires “we”. Without a “we”, there is no I on a wiki. Thoughts, expressions, verbal jousting. Its all grist for the wiki mill.

I found this project to be very satisfying in that i got to listen to my fellow product manager, the VP of our group, the CEO. I also happen to work for those guys so its easier. But I also wanted to see how the use would be. Would Sales people use the tool? We want Sales guys to reach the site, understand it, use it. We’ll see if the adoption grid stretches to encompass sales.

Time passages have been going on of late and I’ve had to build new servers at work for knowledge management, collaboration/wiki, and mailing lists. It all takes a bite out of time. I do have some time reserved for “play” and I will be learning iSCSI this next week to bring on dedicated storage via that protocol to my ESXi box. Its more about learning than needing.

I just noticed that now its been about 5 months or so since I left Visa Information Products and one of the most enjoyable jobs I ever had. A person at the defunked Levanta once told me I would never had a job with a big company with my work attitude. Neener. But I left it and now things are even better. I do miss Scott and Mani and I miss the times we spent working on product things, change management, etc. Visa was a great job but when it came time to turn the corner they simply could not equal where I’m at now. Celestix is just better in so many diverse areas. I wrote my own new job description and then the company management agreed. What a refreshing turn. I was able to name what i wanted to do.

I’ll definitely try to blog more often. I’ve had some pretty basic feelings about the whole anthropology thing. I seem to go through “spikes” of emotion over it. I guess I will never let it go all the way. Dammit. Baggage has its tentacles on me. Archeology was just so much more and different than anything I have ever done. I guess I do miss it.

Anyways, I am planning another trip back to Singapore and India and this time, I’m gonna get elsewhere. I want to get to HongKong for 2 days and then a day or so in Shanghai. We’ll see when it happens…

1. ECS GeForce 6100SM-M2 Socket AM2 Motherboard (RETAIL) GeForce6100SM-M2 (V1.0A)
2. Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Chipset
3. NVIDIA nForce 405 Chipset
4. SATA RAID 0/1
5. NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Video Onboard

My particular system has 4g of memory but I could go farther with it as it all the way up to 16gb of memory and it has a dual core AMD64 6000+ CPU in it.

Note that most of the list above will not work with ESXi. Well, the memory and CPU will and perhaps that’s the most important. Here is what I had to add to make it work though:

• Promise SATA300 TX4
• 2 x 500gb Seagate SATA 3.0 Drives
• 1 crummy but reliable E100 Network card

So I assembled all this into the system, booted the ESXi installer ISO image and off it went. It found the Promise SATA controller, gave me a choice of drives to install to. The install went fine but of course the Marvel Yukon gig ethernet card is not found. Hence, the E100 card above that I have a few of. When done, I got the warning from the ESXi install that I had no “persistent memory”. So I configured two disks worth of 900gb of usable storage space.Promise SATA300 TX4. The other nice thing about this promise controller is that I still have two more SATA ports left with nothing on them and plenty of space in the case I chose.

So what to do with this you may ask? Well, its a home experiment and I already had the system. Just had to add the Promise controller which cost about $70.00. Its baremetal so things are different than VMWare Server at a few levels. Its faster, cleaner, and more dedicated which is fine for me. it also has a very constrained HCL that VMWare openly promotes; but as you can see it is possible to do ESXi on a comfortable; yet minimal system at home.

The next step is to run the VMware converter which talks to ESXi directly and “port” a few VMWare workstation images I have to the server. I could also just do installs of new guests if I wanted; but I have a few different ones.

If you decide to go play in the fields of ESXi, read the vm-help website for tips and tricks to get you through the experience. You too can have a whitebox running a baremetal hypervisor!

Final Steps

Why you may ask would I do this? Mess around with temporal and spatial things like virtualization. This leads me to my last area. My position has changed dramatically at the company. I am know working as a product evangelist and technologist/product manager for our evolving and emerging solutions which includes our Linux portfolio. I am expected to participate in wide-ranging technology discussions with partners, assess new technologies (like virtualization) and then promote their use in the company ecology. I’m very excited about this move because I think I’m good at this. I’ve been around Linux for about 12 years now in a few settings. I’ve managed deployments, built custom distributions, managed large PS engagements. I also feel that I understand its place and what it offers as a compelling alternative in a few settings to more standardized solutions. Call me a disruptive solutions specialist if you will

Things never stay the same and when they change, they really change. Change is good and I believe our minds and spirits and bodies thrive with it. If we just stay the status quo, we never feel the challenge.

I’ve given a great deal of thought lately to my current state of affairs; what I enjoy doing; what I miss; what I have. Its like blowing a balloon up and then knowingly letitng it whisper out a bit. Its not full; but if you did not know that I left air out; it would not be obvious. That’s the way “it is”. I’m very content; very happy; but I feel that somewhere some air was left out.

I go to work, come home, perhaps write a bloggable. Or not. More often, I don’t write a bloggable these days during the weekdays. Too many other things to sit and hope and think on. Why is it we reachable venerable ages and we seem to live vicariously I wonder? Why cannot we go out and challenge some life direct? March into our life actively and not always just watch and wait.

But the BBQ made up for it all the way. The tritip was excellent, the turket fair. The potatoes ruled. My daughter, the lovely little irritant in my evenings always tells me how much she loves these cookeries. Thanks daughter of mine. You may irritate me at times; but I do love you.

I miss the other things though. The mornings staring at a breathless desert sky. The days with sweat streaming down and feeling damned alive. The days with a trowel and a tape measure. Now its VMWare and Hyper-V.

At least its all fun and my company insists on participating and is giving me brand new work on the Linux appliance frontier. I’m about to morph into something else. Perhaps a platform product manager of sorts. I like it. I like what we do with Linux. I feel kinda lost with its desktop aspirations; but on servers I love it.

So, I’ll post a bloggable tomorrow maybe when the news come down officially. Or perhaps not… There is no trowel in my hands. Its in my mind now and it carves effortlessly through paths of air and history. Fitting, wondrous, and simple.

This brought me to looking at the authors I really enjoy and the ones that may have let me see a world that was brutal, sensual, or stripped of its ecological niceties. Cormac writes in this brutal way that makes you pay attention. It strips away all the pretty and nice things and lets you see a world perhaps in the West that has terrible truth in it. I hated and loved Pretty Horses for that reason. It upset me, bothered me, made me want more.

The second guy that always got me was Edward Abbey. Mr. Abbey always struck me with his vision questing and desires to see a world for what it was. Desert Solitaire was perhaps the one book I read that made me love the desert even more than growing up in it, practicing archeology in it, seeing its myriad hues.

I remember also reading a passage from a mysterious author named Ambrose Bierce that simply disappeared into the west. Once asked what he thought about a book he was reviewing, he remarked that there were too many pages between the covers. As the venerable wikipedia notes in the link, Bierce simply disappeared. I watched a Gregory Peck movie onced called Old Gringo that tried to capture that moment. Krakauer’s Into the Wild remains the most disturbing vision quest movie though for me. It still haunts steps I take.

Why, I wonder. Because we all take steps like a wandering Alexander SuperTramp. Because we all know that we each have journeyed forth on perilous reaches. Some like Bierce and Christopher did not come back and their mark was larger than their reach.

I wanted to tie a blogpost together with string and twine and wire that made people see that we can read material that challenges, perhaps threatens, even disgusts us at times. Because life is that way. Its not all Winnie the Pooh and 100 acre woods and Piglets that get hungry and afraid. Its terrible lonely death in obscure border towns. They are Cormac’s rules and life either goes on or not.

Most often it does, but some of us are not there for the return trip.

Now I’m sitting at the bathroom door; laptop in lap. Beer iced and drinkable and thinking. I watched the sun do its retirement tonite and I remembered so many days in the field as an archeologist watching it. Days in the Mojave; afternoons in the Sequioa. Evenings in the Sierra. Wonderment in the Great Basin. What became of those years? Simply memories that I cull up when the mood strikes. I miss them though. I miss the best part of anthropology which was the cowboy science and the looking at incomplete things and forming pictures. Truly archeology is a record of trash and dumps and converting it all to behavior. I’ve always felt that those prehistoric cave painters were the ancestors of the blogger today. They reached to a pinnacle of expression and found a cave wall. It became their canvas and paradigm and speech network. They marked their world in uncertain hues.

I traveled that world, saw the record, and ate home-cooked rattlesnake chili many times. Drank way too much beer and considered the wonder of a sunset with a bunch of people that fell silent at the same time. Was there some bond or boundary that no one crossed those days? Yes. There was. I have never seen the same boundary and bond today. Computer technologists don’t possess the same joy, frustration, and love. Because archeology reaches to a depth of the spirit and rewards.

I’ll hoist my beer to all those I knew, that I dug with, that broke bread with me. I’m still here guys. I’m sitting in a bathroom blogging.