Anomie is a sociological term from back when. I like its meaning overall. It bridges a few gaps. I always felt that sociologists were kinda funny kids on the block back when I did anthropology. We used to joke that they were “almost enlightened”. But psychologists were unworthy. I still feel that way for some reason. Perhaps because they always felt that they had some magic answers and they only did the observation for an hour a week. After all, anthropologists study behaviors for years and often admit to still not knowing nearly enough. This is human and cultural behavior folks. How can you sum up another culture in an hour a week?

Sincerely Moving Away from Center

I find myself these days getting some kind of wanderlust. I drift off sometimes to find a reality that I once had. Advancing years? I still feel in command of my senses (for the most part). No, I think its some mental wanderlust. I still connect to Alexander Supertramp and still see that magical bus and wonder at his life and places. Darn that Sean Penn anyways. He had to do that movie. He left me scarred.

Now I am moving off the center beam. I remember when I went into my wild. For me, it was those days of wandering deserts, mountains, hills. I could have stayed there for those years and more. Anthropology was such a mistress folks. Demanding, sometimes demented; but always very possessive and needing more.

And I miss it sometimes very much and other times even more. But I miss it in a way of not wanting to go back. I like what I have now; in fact would say I love it. But its the secret life of my own conscience that drags me around its hurricane force winds.

Linux on the Corners of the World

Back to my travel to Chennai. I like India folks. I told a colleague that India and Linux are a lot alike. Both seem unfinished, promising, rich, and tapestried. They both have potential and like most human conditions some flaws. Software is never finished and my feeling about India is its not finished either. And that’s a wondrous thing. Its mold is still be shaped and I think the people know it. So off I go soon.

Wish me well and safe travels. I wonder why Dave and his Offbeat Guides guys won’t invite me. I’m a good traveler guys. I like adventure. Gimme a try. I want to be a Offbeat travel guy. I’m going to Singapore and India soon. I have 3 days of a weekend to go poke around in dusty corners.

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.

Why have blogs become a significant part of the media landscape so
quickly? Just what is it that makes the medium of blogging so
compelling? What are bloggers blogging about and why?

From Day 2: The What and Why of Blogging

No, I understand the Big Why questions and why they’re important. But the why question I have both transcends and is more basic. Why blog at all? What is it that draws people to the blog as a media of discovery, definition, deliberation, and perhaps even creation? I think we are all anthropologists of a sort on a mission of discovery and we perhaps do the blogging as Technorati says to present personal and professional ideologies. But why? I think its just as personal as though Mojave Desert prehistoric bloggers so long ago told us mysterious bits and pieces.

Imagine a blog-ologist digging up the remains of the blogosphere some years ahead. She turns to her robotic companion and begins the archeological meandering that makes up so much science.

This blogosphere was rich and textured. It seems to take into account a wide tapestry of human behavior, condition, and social life. People did this and did this often. This sphere of the blog was rich but yet people hammered each other at times and the media loved and hated it. We don’t have enough material culture; but was this sphere of the blog truly full of the same kind of human or did a wide swatch of humans do this blogging? Are there so-called socio-economic indicators of power, wealth at work? What is this whole authority thing and how did it cause stress and evolution of this sphere? Did the sphere ever look fractured or at stress because its social evolution could not keep up with its technical? Was there ever anomie at work?

Soon this future blog-ologist would put down the word-based trowel and rest. I bet if there were one blog she would read with relish and desire and wanting more; it would be Doc’s. I sure would want Doc’s blog encapsulated so I could read his journey. There is wheat and there is chaff. Blogs come and go. People update or not. The deeper why questions remain. But the blog-ologist would want to know. What were those social, economic, technological, and personal things? What caused the sphere to fragment and join again and get more complex? Is it the answers that Technorati presents or are the questions deeper and the report, while it provides a wealth of statistical, personal, and other information, cannot really reach the fabric.

Who knows?

Good bye, Paul. I’ll remember you always and miss your style and grace.

Truth be told, I like finding things which perhaps other scoff at, admit seems less than interesting; but when you see things in a different perspective, it becomes interesting. Light years ago, I studied prehistoric spatial relationships amongst western desert hunter-gatherers. I had noticed with the years spent recording prehistoric cultural resources, that the number and size of prehistoric cooking pits and hearths grew. The hearths simply got bigger in size. I wondered whether there was some kind of cultural continuity going. Was it merely because the rocks degenerated and were replaced? Were there different uses for the different sized hearths?

Suddenly, I remembered this class I took at graduate school. It was on non-verbal communication. We studied the idea of proxemics or spatial relations between people. It was as if a light bulb started appearing. What if people expect so much distance between themselves sitting around a fire? What if the firepits grew because populations using the sites were growing? I started compiling the location of the larger firepits with other indicators of population size.

Its sad to say at this point, the whole thing fell apart for a variety of reasons. My tenure at the place ended under cloudy conditions. I was accused of filing erroneous expense vouchers by someone simply wanting my job there. It was ugly and I wanted out. I left this thing behind which still jabs at me every so often. I was so close to I think finding something that tied material culture to people and their lives. And I had to leave it behind.

Others have told me since it was not a big deal. Everything just changes and I should adapt. But to me it was not hearths. It was the people around the hearths and how they arranged themselves proxemically. It was a shattering revelation. Then it ended.

So… Its not the dogs either and the people walking them. Its something else. Its the ability to see a thing and process it with that remaining pair of “anthropological synapses”. I hope I never lose those. I’d hate to only ramble through life and never see the ties that bind.

My phone, a Motorola Q9 global, still does what I want. Its the hub of my own collaboration approaches and lets me keep updated with email, calendaring, tasks and I don’t interface all that much with exchange.

I do have a infrequent need to access specific programs like Visio so I have a native Server 2008 box all pimped out looking like Vista for those rare times.

You can live in a Windows-centric world and use other tools. Its not hard to get there.

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.