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Recently, I’ve been playing a bit with my AMD64 box and since I have a Technet Plus subscription with Microsoft, I can get access to operating systems, applications, and other stuff early on.  That’s kinda cool because I am a OS junkie.  I like playing with various OS’es, seeing what they do, etc.  There are interesting challenges on AMD64 systems and this one is really a desktop type computer.  Its got 2g of really fast memory, a 256mb nvidia card, an AMD 4000+ processor.  I’ve had Ubuntu Edgy Eft AMD64, Debian Etch pure 64, and now Vista RTM on it.  Each has its interesting quirks and positives.  My overall thought is that Vista is a nice desktop OS but its demanding on the hardware.  With Linux you have to do this crazy mix of 32 and 64bit libraries and applications.  Some things will not work and others require some massaging and yet others you need what is called a “chroot environment” to get them operational.

I think for the meanwhile, I’ll just run Vista RTM and play around a bit with its interesting applications, etc.  I tend to appreciate Linux on laptops these days and Ubuntu is probably the best I’ve seen on a laptop.  The ACPI and driver tools are topnotch.

It seems we are in the season of conundrums. There are conflicting things which could happen given any outcome. One amazing factoid is that the Raiders won today! How did that ever happen? Two games in a row. Goodness.

Today also was the day of falling back. I don

Its come to me after a 17 day absence that I simply need to write weblog posts.  So many things come and go in a day that without blogging, I seem to miss the measure of them because I cannot live them vicariously again when I blog them.  Age has this determining affect on you and I think as I’ve grown older, I’ve wanted to get more of a keen zest from the things I do; but it gets more difficult at the same time to get that.  Physical deterioration and even mental loss plagues us all as we age.  Even graceful aging takes its toll and I find that things I used to do are not the same if I try them now.  Now I enjoy quieter passtimes with a few friends and a beer.  Before as an archeologist I traveled, nomaded to various ports of call, reached to a zenith and then pulled back.

Its always a case of pulling back when you reach the point.  Sometimes its the point of no return and other times its the point of “know return”.  You know the return from the gambit and gamble yet its worth it.

My wonderful wife, that most of significant of significant others had a coronary angiogram or heart cath if you use the medical terminologies.  There was a risk of an occluded artery at the heart.  It was a week of tears, worry, significant emotional issues.  Then the hospital called and said the date had been wrong and it was the next day.  Suddenly, all the issues piled up and we dealt with it gracefully.  I’ve reached the conclusion in my advancing age that I need her to help me get through all the big and little adventures that life tosses.

After 17 days of no-blog reality, I’m glad to be back.  I feel constipated with worthless blog posts.  So hang on and hang out.  I’ll try to make each one at least have a small bubble of something you can take away.  Perhaps you’ll find some minimal truth in my adventures that will make yours seem better, different, worthwhile…

And then again, perhaps not.

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.

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…

• park ranger
• superhero
• deep sea diver
• adventurer

You have all played the game before, right?  Its like the result of midnight film noir, afternoon westerns, morning things.  We all dream of things that might have been, places we can go play that may look like work, levels of effort far different than the regular ones that include:

work, work, work.  There is nothing else so we end this bubble!

I still have my sets of “wanna be” things.  I’d like to learn how to write Perl but I don’t have a certain mindset for coding.  I’d like to travel back to Asia because I like Japan and Korea.  Will that happen?  Who knows.  Its not on my list though.  Its getting time for me to rev up the blogging engine.  This here blog has been around for over a year now and I’ve managed to back it up, restore it, keep it alive.  That’s darned good for me.  But as Neil says,

once you’re gone, you can’t come back…

Who knows if I will come back to write another day?  Perhaps I do because the blog is the thing that I leave when the words are through.

All is said and done.  Fade to black.