Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/06/sunday-august-5-2007/
Sunday I slept in a bit because this is my last chance to do so for a bit . . . when I arose I bathed, then . . . I ended up writing about Tunji. I had learned of his death the night before. After my little impromptu memorial, I noted that I happened to be wearing black this day. I was dressed for mourning.
I headed out to the Tennessee Grill for brunch, it getting on towards 11:30. The Catholic church a few blocks downhill was ringing their bells: the call to mass. I detoured towards the Church . . . followed a lady in. Mass had just begun, and I followed other late arrivals into an adjoining little altar area.
They had votive candles burning, which had been what I had in mind. I lit one in Tunji’s memory and sat through mass. I enjoyed the community spirit, some of the songs. The liturgy was pretty light–the priest explained that temperance was avoiding excess. During one song I was overtaken by the beauty and the spirit and I cried quietly for my friend: the lives he had touched, the lives he would have touched had not fate taken him young. I lit a second candle for the lives Tunji touched: his family, us, his friends, and the people he would have served had he become a doctor.
A lady sat in front of me with two young sons. One she held in her arms and the older son, maybe four years old, played with her hair, casually trying to braid one side. I like the harmony: she was there for her purposes and he managed to entertain himself in a manner that hopefully felt pleasant to her.
The priest explained that Jesus had passed the bread around, take it. This is my body. By taking the bread you will spread the word. I figured out that people were getting up for Eucharist, and followed. I savored a Jesus Wafer to take communion for Tunji.
I walked down to the Grill, and had some French Toast and coffee. I had really wanted sausage. Yum!
Back home, read about bonobos in the New Yorker. Then scrubbed the shower out and bathed again after the dirty work, to head out to a date in the East Bay. I met the lady I have been dating the past three months, and she dumped me. I could see it coming and we settled things amicably. She paid for dinner. Classy lady, and too bad . . . I walked away feeling alright for having made a good effort and for having participated in some good times these past three months, and thought about how to work my next approach to dating.
Back home, I’m listening to the Avett Brothers. Surprisingly good bluegrass. They are singing now:
And I love you but I can’t remember why
And I’d love to find a reason to deny
I was a one hit wonder in my own home town
And I guess I might have made a few mistakes
But maybe that’s exactly what it takes
To get a little happy in this big sad world
How many have you made?
And which of those have you laid on down to die?
Well didn’t I say I need you?
I try to move on but I can’t
I try to think of bad times
Good memories are all I have
Not the most apropos excerpt for the moment, but a good tune anyway.
And so it goes. To bed soon, and up around 7am tomorrow to head off to the new job. The new company is about the last place I would ever have thought to look for work, but with an open mind and no agenda I went to interview, and I got on well with the team, and they got on well with me. I have good feelings, and I must make a sincere effort. :)
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/08/nonbinding-resolve/
Bush escalates the war while Democrats hem and haw. I don’t get it: with a majority in both houses, is a “nonbinding resolution” really the best they can do? It sounds like something a timid married couple dreamt up to invigorate their humdrum sex life.
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
The Sun
July, 2007
I chuckled on the BART this morning.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/09/joy-of-disqualification/
So, sometimes I talk to other single folk who would rather not be single and there’s whining about what a drag it is dating all these random people and how scuzzy / weird / annoying / random is online dating and how much of a pain meeting people blah blah blah. I figure if I want to be not-single then I have to learn to enjoy the art of being single. You need to have hobbies, right? So, writer-type that I am I love ever-rewriting personals ads. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/13/the-way-home/
I was slow in getting away from Pueblo. The Colorado side of the family isn’t a hurried bunch and especially with Dad in the hospital nobody but me felt any haste in leaving. “Only the weekend,” I demure. Dad’s second stroke arrived just as I went to my first lunch with new co-workers on Monday. After not-working for nearly five months, I had selected this fateful day to get started at a new job?
He’s doing pretty well, for a guy who can’t talk and who requires 24-hour nursing assistance, a guy who has several weeks of therapy at the hospital before he gets to return home, and years more of therapy ahead. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/13/sysadmin-chaos/
Getting a handle on the new job, reading up at infrastructures.org:
In the financial industry, generally accepted accounting practices call for double-entry bookkeeping, a chart of accounts, budgets and forecasting, and repeatable, well-understood procedures such as purchase orders and invoices. An accountant or financial analyst moving from one company to another will quickly understand the books and financial structure of their new environment, regardless of the line of business or size of the company.
There are no generally accepted administration procedures for the IT industry. Because of the ad-hoc nature of activity in a traditional IT shop, no two sets of IT procedures are ever alike. There is no industry-standard way to install machines, deploy applications, or update operating systems. Solutions are generally created on the spot, without input from any external community. The wheel is invented and re-invented, over and over, with the company footing the bill. A systems administrator moving from one company to another encounters a new set of methodologies and procedures each time.
[. . .]
This means that the people who are drawn to systems administration tend to be individualists. They are proud of their ability to absorb technology like a sponge, and to tackle horrible outages single-handedly. They tend to be highly independent, deeply technical people. They often have little patience for those who are unable to also teach themselves the terminology and concepts of systems management. This further contributes to failed communications within IT organizations.
Caveat SysAdmin. It’s just the price we pay for working in a nascent field.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/20/grownups-walk/
“Little boys love machines. Grown-up men and women like to walk.”
–Edward Abbey
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/20/the-glamorous-life-of-sachiko-hanai/
From a missive I am writing:
Today I took myself out to a movie. I couldn’t find anyone else who was interested in “The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai” at the Red Vic. But now I know the answer to the question of what might happen if a Tokyo call girl gets shot in the forehead, giving her super intellectual powers, and then finds in her possession the cloned trigger finger of George W Bush, and is thus chased by North Korean agents looking to control a Russo-Uzbek doomsday device. I’m not sure if it is a porno or a porn parody, but especially the early part of the movie involves excessive quantities of semen. For that reason I am glad that I was shy about asking friends to go see it. This movie is wrong in so many ways that I see why it has become a cult classic.
If you live in San Francisco and possess a sufficiently perverse sense of humor and politics, its run at the Red Vic concludes tomorrow Monday August 20, with showings at 7:15pm and 9:15pm.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/21/geeks-fight-back/
So, this is neat.
Big companies like to try to control consumers with new technology. Consumers invariably defeat this technology. Copy-protected video cassettes, CDs, DVDs . . . DVD “regions” so that a DVD bought in one part of the world can’t play in another part of the world, and of course, you can’t play DVDs on Linux . . . but faster and faster all these restrictions get hacked away with software. The geeks have an understanding that a new technology isn’t really useful until the “Digital Rights Management” has been defeated.
I read, the other day, in the O’Reilly Radar blog, that simple electronic “hack” gadgets are getting cheaper, and more commercialized. Just now I read of a new consumer hack to unlock iPhones from requiring AT&T service. This is a neat step in the efforts of geeks and consumers to wrestle control away from another industry full of big companies that would prefer to limit consumer freedom. A neat confluence.
The big corporation Google has been trying to fight, ostensibly, on our behalf as well, convincing Congress to sell new radio spectrum for use with open standards, which would give us more raw material to work with that isn’t managed by the big telephone companies. Exciting, esoteric struggles afoot, and you know who I’m rooting for!
-danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/22/rice-king-cliche/
Min Jung Kim shares her thoughts on marrying a white dude:
“In fact, it’s a running joke amongst my friends that to be a true bay area hipster god you have to move to San Francisco, work in tech, and if you’re a white guy – have an Asian girlfriend. Bi-racial couples are pervasive in San Francisco. But then again, so are all kinds of couples . . .”
I never figured I could be seen as a true bay area hipster god, but once my foreign bride left I was able to move to San Francisco and complete the puzzle. Now I must confound expectations and date non-Asian women . . . a true hipster god defies easy understanding and sets his own trends by defining the next big cliché.
For the generation before mine, “miscegenation” was a crime, and one movie that the Japanese wife and I enjoyed was “Sayonara” . . . we have come a long way now for this to be trendy! I recently heard an account on the radio from a bi-racial man whose parents had difficulty being legally married, and now that he is openly gay, he carries the burden of his own generation to open our minds and liberalize our laws.
More power to him.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/22/sh-split-via-set/
Recently, I wrote a shell script that had to break an IP address into octets. I wrote:
# octects
oct1=`echo $subnet | awk -F . '{print $1}'`
oct2=`echo $subnet | awk -F . '{print $2}'`
oct3=`echo $subnet | awk -F . '{print $3}'`
oct4=`echo $subnet | awk -F . '{print $4}'`
Later, when reviewing my script, Anonymous Coward offered this little gem:
$ set `echo 10.20.30.40 | tr '.' ' '`
$ echo $1
10
$ echo $2
20
$ echo $3
30
$ echo $4
40
Which means, you can just set a series of variables to $1, $2, $3, and so forth. In Anon’s example, the IP address is split into words with tr, and the variables set nice and easy with set.
Of course, if your script gets complex, you probably want to avoid relying on those variables. My original code could be re-expressed:
set `echo $subnet | tr '.' ' '`
oct1=$1; oct2=$2; oct3=$3; oct4=$4
Much nicer than invoking awk several times.
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/24/television-just-say-no/
[From a discussion I recently engaged.]
Q: What are the pros and cons of cable versus satellite in terms of cost, features, and quality of service?
Television’s Best Deal (CC: dsasso.)
A: This isn’t for everyone, but here is the deal I am on right now:
$14/mo for Netflix
$12/mo for DSL
------------------
$26/mo Video+Internet
This lets me watch a few movies each week, and when I really want to watch TV I can download the “Daily Show” with the commercials already edited out from BitTorrent. Since adopting this plan I have gotten more into the “shopping for my own food and cooking it myself” channel, the “tidying up and arranging my own apartment” channel, the low-key reality show “can dannyman take care of these flowers” and some call-in shows featuring friends and family. I’m considering some plus packages like “my new pet” and maybe “learn a musical instrument” but I haven’t even gotten in to the last one I tried: “Mandarin Chinese”
One of the big drawbacks to this approach is that there’s not much of a channel guide to help me keep track of all the possibilities, and good luck finding a universal remote! On the other hand, the commercials are pretty rare and innocuous, so you don’t need a DVR.
Thanks,
-danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/24/volunteer/
Cool things I have come into as a consequence of volunteering with One Brick these past few months:
- $50 gift card for Williams-Sonoma at the Elks Lodge Blood Drive
- My new job, after a tip from a One Brick volunteer coordinator
- This past weekend, a hand-me-down laptop that I can soon re-gift
Or, as Saint Francis put it: “it is in giving that we receive.”
If you are looking for fulfilling ways to spend your free time, I heartily recommend One Brick, which is very simply an organization that organizes volunteer opportunities: just sign up for their e-mail list and every week you’ll be informed of cool opportunities to get out, do some good, and make friends.
I am looking forward to working the Elks Club Card Night next month, so much that I posted the event to Yelp to see about getting more folks over there.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/29/yahoo-insider-search-assist/
I recently participated in some beta test challenge thing for something called Yahoo! Insiders. They sent me some schwag, including a nice little flashlight that came without the requisite 3 AAA batteries, and a cute little USB mouse that is too tiny for my massive hand. The program consisted of 9 “challenges” which basically boiled down to “use our search engine to find the answer to this question and you might win a prize.” (The prizes were nice, one day was a nice digital camera.) The search engine had some “suggestions” of what search terms you might be better off searching, which would appear if you clicked a little widget. Kind of like the Google spell checker, but with synonyms.
I didn’t use the feature because, well, it was buried under a widget and because I’m pretty good with typing keywords into search engines. I’m guessing they think “suggested keywords” might do something for newbies, though it really isn’t clear.
They just solicited some feedback. I filled out the form, and at the end they asked “is there anything at all that you would like us to know about Yahoo!, The Yahoo! Search Insiders Program or Yahoo! Search Assist?” I thought a moment, then:
What are you trying to accomplish? Build a slightly better search engine? Google works awfully damn well 90% of the time, so the bar to get anyone to switch for “better” is extremely high. Maybe you can put your massive resources behind a more ambitious idea like combining social bookmarking with Netflix/Amazon-style “recommendations” and thereby build a more personalized “Page Rank” index using social networking . . . the sort of thing Google SUCKS at.
I sound like a big dork.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/31/yahoo-prefers-chinese-law/
Yahoo! is a California company. A few years back they complied with Chinese law to reveal the identity of Chinese dissidents who then became Chinese political prisoners. Now the dissidents are suing Yahoo! for violating a California civil rights law.
Yahoo! says:
“This is a lawsuit by citizens of China imprisoned for using the internet in China to express political views in violation of China law. It is a political case challenging the laws and actions of the Chinese government. It has no place in the American courts.”
Which, on the face of it, sounds fair, but Yahoo! made the choice to engage the Chinese government and Chinese law and thereby send Chinese citizens to prison. I don’t approve. And as a California resident, I figure Yahoo! is reaping what it sowed.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/09/08/my-larry-craig-dream/
I was dining out with coworkers, in a group of four. These colleagues were nobody specific: just extras fabricated from spare parts in the subconscious. The topic drifted to the subject of building rapport, and how light physical touches can build a connection with someone, but you might be careful about that in the work place. I reached across the table to brush my colleague’s wrist, and he leaned back, grinning. My hand came to a stop before it would have come over his dinner plate. I smiled back, “and this is about the line where I would have invaded your personal space,” and withdrew.
I headed to the bathroom, where there was a short line waiting outside the men’s room. One or two guys turned back, not wanting to stand in line, and thus making it shorter. I was confident that the line would move quickly, and in a moment I was attending to my business at a urinal. (more…)
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