Nobody reads my blog. And that’s okay. Nobody read my blog when I started back in 1996, either. For about a decade, blogs were a thing. Now they’re quiet again.
Now I am middle-aged, and life is full with family and work. There’s no time and need for a blog. But sometimes I feel the itch. I give it a scratch. Sometimes I look back on what I’ve written recently. It pleases me. That’s all we need.
An excellent headline. This shop is “just around the corner” from where I grew up, at least in Suburban terms. I went to a closer bike shop, though mainly I had access to an on-site mechanic I call Uncle John.
Ross found himself in the city because he fell in love with a Chicagoan and left his old life behind for her. Although she died two years ago, Ross can’t return to the Amish community he grew up in because he was shunned for choosing to marry her, he said.
“I was so blessed to have her in my life,” Ross said. “Even knowing how things turned out, I’d still make the same choices a thousand times over because I had never experienced love like that before. But, it’s challenging to live here without her to protect me. … I miss her constantly.”
Ross has remained committed to his faith and still follows many of the Amish traditions he grew up with. His wife helped him learn to use a phone and navigate public transportation, but she “respected that [he’d] always be Amish,” Ross said.
The couple’s strong bond “developed naturally,” and they easily found ways to co-exist, Ross said. For example, Ross won’t take any photos that show his face, but he got pretty good at snapping pictures of his wife. When Ross proposed, he gave her a ring as she expected. But instead of wearing one himself, he honored Amish traditions by growing out his beard.
Fixing electric bikes helps Ross “keep his mind off things,” he said. He also finds a lot of joy in caring for his dog, Lucy, who he brings everywhere with him.
“I just keep to myself and let others deal with people,” Ross said. “My favorite part of my work is designing a concept, then bringing it off the page into reality, and seeing how happy and surprised the customer looks when they pick it up.”
Relatable guy.
2024-04-08 Monday
2024-04-09 Tuesday
Sometimes your local Planning Commission is a forum for personal frustrations. We call this Democracy.
2024-04-12 Friday
Some people’s best angles are behind them.
2024-04-12 Friday
I was walking to the train station but it rolled up early. The gates came down and the train rolled into the station. A few young women went around the down gates to make their train. I wanted to Follow The Rules and wait for the gate, but experience has taught me that Caltrain can not be trusted to wait. I looked both ways and joined the crowd rushing to board the train. We got up the steps and the train was rolling ten seconds after the scheduled departure time. I have read that in Switzerland the trains depart at 59 seconds after. (I can not verify this information … Swiss trains appear to depart at the top of the minute.) I found an article that in New York, trains unofficially depart one minute after the official time. But I learn Caltrain doesn’t treat the timetable as a schedule and that passengers are recommended to arrive ten minutes before the posted time because trains will totally leave early. (A coworker shared a story of missing an 11pm train that had left early. Ouch!)
Then there was a 35-minute delay at California because of a “trespasser” incident. Someone had died on the tracks. Probably a suicide but I was upset that the railroad’s practices induce reckless behavior. Had I waited for the gate to raise, I would have missed my train, and had to wait 45 minutes for the next train, which was itself delayed another 20 minutes.
My train home departed 30 seconds before the timetable. In Japan, this would warrant an apology. But with Caltrain, passengers could have just waited around for another twenty-ish minutes for the next train. After all, it is rush hour! The train “ran hot” down to Mountain View, where the conductor explained that you could get off the train to catch the express to San Jose, because as early as our train was, it was going to have to wait at Lawrence for the express to pass.
So … why?
After the stress of running across the tracks in the morning, because the railroad doesn’t care about the passengers and then catching sight of someone’s Last Day, I needed to take a walk. I did spy a diesel train pulling an electric trainset up the tracks. The progress made me happy. We’ll soon be running Swiss trains. Maybe we can run on Swiss schedules.
2024-04-13 Saturday
The taxes are done now, which is important because we are having a nice overnight trip with the in-laws on Sunday.
Thursday was nice. Older kid graduated across the Arrow of Light into Scouts BSA. What we called “Boy Scouts” in my day but now that girls can join “BSA” is like “YMCA.” I’ve volunteered with the Cub Scouts so I went down to the Scout Shop and picked up a tan shirt and patches to wear at the ceremony. Baby Adult Leader. The guy at the shop said if I volunteer with Cub Scouts and BSA I can get velcro from the craft store to facilitate swapping-of-patches without having to buy two shirts.
I googled and found lunch at the nearby Uncle John’s, which is a pancake shop in this hip San Jose neighborhood. I ate and walked across the street and visited the Bike Store, called Upshift, formerly La Dolce Vella. They had Bianchis out front but I was curious to “ask about bikepacking” and so I did and the deal is you roll up with a sleeping bag and $100 and they’ll roll out to the State Park in a group and spend the night and feed everyone. I need to get on that.
On my way out through the gorgeous mansions adjacent to the hip shopping district I saw what I thought was an Estate Sale but turns out it was a rummage sale for the local Neighborhood Preservation association. If you weren’t a registered NIMBY it was $5 admission. I had somewhere to be anyway so I left peacefully.
We had Pho for dinner, because it was across from the Auditorium, and because we love us some Pho. My belly is still full from drinking the broth. Elder Son walked across the bridge, and the guys from his new troop adorned him with a fancy new bi-color kerchief. It’s weekly meetings from here on out, but led by the boys, and I have some Tigers to lead. Life is good.
2024-03-13 Wednesday
Last night on the TV, a “man on the street” Trump supporter explained that yeah he would love for Trump to be a dictator for four years. I had to pause the video and rant. “That’s not how dictators work, dumbass!”
I think the majority of Americans still figure Democracy is good and worth keeping but this is going to be a year that tests our faith.
2024-03-14 Thursday
Pi Day. Yesterday, in “Ministry for the Future,” a Science Fiction novel about Climate Change, I got to the chapter where they saw the first anthropogenic YoY drop in Carbon Emissions. They achieve sequestration at 475 ppm. What’s that from where I sit? I looked it up. We’re at 420 ppm, going up about 5 ppm per year. At a constant rate, that is … eleven years from now? 2035? Maybe if emissions start to slow, but they seem to be picking up. (The book notes a decade of levelling, so 2045.) What I saw yesterday was that we’re at 1.6 degrees C, or about 80% to the 2.0 C threshold where we become more likely to hit tipping points that lead to an irreversible transition towards a jungle planet. An uninhabitable zone around the equator, and a truly massive extinction that takes a few million years to recover from.
And the refugees! There are so many already and we’re trying to keep them “under the rug” but the number will only grow.
I live in one of those cool bubbles where … we are trying. I saw that near 40% of new vehicles sold in the San Jose metro are EVs or at least plug-in hybrids. That’s something. Incentives to electrify your house. There are trends around the world that may cause the tide to flip. But will it happen in time?
Last century had the Pandemic at year 18. By year 45, they had concluded The Ultimate Battle Between Good and Evil. Their First Battle started in year 14, and that’s when Putin took Crimea. If the Ukraine Invasion counts as the start of our Ultimate Battle … 2028? This century has been gentler than the last, so far. So far.
In year 45, I’ll be an Old Man, if I am still around. I hope to be. I hope along the way to be a force for good. It is my Sons I worry about. They’re growing into Interesting Times and I hope The Ancestors can guide and comfort.
We have been watching “The Bear” which is, imho, incoherent and overrated, but the scenes are spliced together with L trains and skyscrapers. I get a nostalgia for the Old Country. RJ says that people from Chicago who settle elsewhere always feel an instinct to return. The instinct is not found in suburbanites or people from downstate. The instinct is for the children of the city. I count myself among them. I feel the pull. But I’ve also settled in California. Married. Bought a house. Once I suggested we look at a house in Chicago, just to see. My son was not having it. “I don’t want to switch schools,” he said. Fair enough. I am a Californian. There’s a sense of The Future here. The air and the politics tend to be clean, and there’s little crime in my suburb. But not much character, either. The sprawl has a monotonous consistency that reflects the weather.
But today it is raining, so anything is possible.
2024-02-02 Fr:
There’s a sense that educated, middle-aged people who buy houses and raise families in the suburbs should naturally become more conservative and vote Republican. The bread and butter of the GOP. But it turns out all us would be Republicans like stuff like healthcare, racial diversity and bodily autonomy, so there’s a bunch of missing Republicans, more Atheists, fewer white people, and now pop stars are corrupting our football heroes!? If this keeps up the only people left who can be relied upon to vote Republican will be racist basement trolls, evangelical Christians, and crypto Libertarians.
This demographic is the bread and butter of any fascist movement. Donald understands this on an intuitive level and he lacks the capacity for shame. He will take this group as far as he can. The adoration of a culture’s worst people is one hell of a drug.
2024-02-05 Mo:
It has been rainy and windy. Yesterday, our power went out. On a tip from a neighbor, I walked down to where the line had failed. It was easy to spot, thanks to the fire engine and the tape. There was a burning smell in the air and a spot in the park strip that was smoldering at the end of what had at some point been a live wire. I stood nearby with a couple of other onlookers and we caught video clips as the man in the bucket was lifted into the air, then carefully trimmed back the remaining pieces of the broken wire.
I correctly deduced that, because there were a lot of power outages, this crew was just a first responder, clearing away the danger, and another crew would come out for repairs when they could. I got home, dug out the flashlights, and as the evening came on, we went downtown for dinner. The street where the line had fallen was open, and I pointed out the missing wire. On the way back, the street was again closed and we saw two bucket trucks and two light trucks getting ready for action. The lights were on a couple of hours later.
2024-02-06 Tu:
At first they were just itchy spots. We could feel them here and there, with greater frequency. Too small to see. But before long I could see flocks of the buggers scurrying across the floor. There was nothing we could do to get rid of them, we knew. There would just only ever be more of them. I found a fly in my drink. I tried to ignore it, knowing the futility, that little grubs were surely suffused throughout the glass, like so much microplastic. When I decided to try and fish it out, it had become two flies, thrice the size, just floating contentedly on the surface, confident in their inevitable triumph.
When I awoke, I figured the dream was about cancer. I feel a tender spot beneath my eye, and I choose to believe that I recently got bumped in the face at some point I don’t remember. Stray elbows in the night.
2024-02-14 We:
I noticed this mild-looking guy had a large, black tattoo shaped like Texas on his forehead. Then I remembered it was Ash Wednesday.
2024-02-23 Fr:
Q: Anything else you would like to tell us about the check-in process for flight number 1093 from DEN to SFO departed on 02-22-2024?
A: I got hit with the “carry on bag fee” which I have avoided on previous flights. Since enforcement is lax, opting in to the fee is pointless, and when you do have to pay you just feel like Frontier Airlines is overall this weird gamble for people who are trying to save money but maybe have to occasionally and randomly cough up an extra $200 because they wanted to read a book on the plane, and because their kid’s plastic carryall is an inch larger than the sizer. It feels like some weird immigration checkpoint designed to remind people who don’t have a lot of money that they will always be subject to random cruel indignities.
To be sure, this reminder is probably appropriate given our xenophobic tendencies and flirtation with fascism.
Q: Anything else you would like to tell us about your experience at the gate at the DEN airport on 02-22-2024?
A: Oh shit this is not about the carry-on fee but the actual check-in. I travel with my kids, and every time I check in, we are seated apart, then the gate agent has to go and fix the seat assignments. You don’t make any money on this: you are wasting labor. Program the damn computer to “randomly” seat children with their parents and you’ll be a more efficient and profitable airline.
The article “Teenagers’ accidents expose e-bike risks” published on July 30 is a master class in victim blaming. We are provided several examples of someone riding an e-bike who is then injured or killed when being forced to mix with motorized traffic.
The problem isn’t e-bikes, the problem is that we have chosen not to provide safe routes for people to get around on bicycles. E-bikes magnify this failure by making it easier for more people to ride.
E-bikes can also lead to the fix: as more people ride bicycles, there will be more pressure to build safe routes for people to get around on bikes. More bicycles means fewer cars on the road, reduced Carbon emissions, and less road congestion.
We need to stop blaming our children for our failures and get to work.
I wait in the lobby, sprawled on a bench. At one point there’s more of a crowd. I sit up and set the carrier on the floor.
I wait. And I wait. Staff have called in sick, but the triage nurse is on top of things.
I watch the parade. A family comes in with a dog. The dog is in trouble. They go back right away.
I wait. And I wait. Another family comes in with another dog. This dog is in trouble. They go back right away.
I wait, and I watch the families return, one by one, teary eyes. No dog.
I wait. The front desk quietly chatter about clients selecting urns.
I wait. The front desk staff leave.
It is 2am. I see the Doctor. We run through The History together. I am not very good answering questions. My middle aged mind doesn’t run full tilt at 2am. The bulb on the cat’s nose that is filled with puss, one can squeeze like a zit. “Your cat is not very happy with me now.” Fair enough. A prescription for something that can stimulate appetite. Wear gloves and rub it in the ear. Alright.
We get home. The cat is hungry. I feed her. I may not need to rub medicine in her ears.
I have friends who in 2023 have occasion to leave their house and they return with breathless reports of how few people at the airport were wearing masks. They cluck to each other at how sad it is that humanity seems to have given up the fight against the Coronavirus. Meanwhile my prison friend says that he’s probably had Coronavirus a half dozen times. He says he doesn’t want to get a vaccination because he really doesn’t trust the government.
Rags
Time Magazine likes to talk about how great it is to have been Time magazine in the past. An attentive reader is in and out in fifteen minutes.
The New Yorker Magazine will explain that living in New York today has it’s moments, but that the world is full of meaty goings on and it can be fascinating to explore a few of these things in depth if you have a few hours to kill. Or just look at the cartoons. This is New York, after all.
Detour Spiral
Public Transit advocates are concerned that because of a lack of funding and a lack of riders, public transit could soon enter a death spiral which means they cut back services so fewer people ride so they cut back services, etc.
This morning, the highway was closed down on both sides because of a multiple car pileup. Death Spiral. My children and I rode our bikes to school. On the way back some douchebag in a truck felt obliged to honk his horn at me because he had to detour around the Death Spiral and what kind of jerk rides a bicycle down a narrow neighborhood street?
SFO Outbound
On our way to the gate, we saw a pack of soldiers, dressed in fatigues. I got excited, a tingle, to see they were Ukraine soldiers. “Slava Ukraine,” said I. I noticed at least three prosthetics among them. A nice blade foot and two guys with claw hands. My guess is that they hadn’t come to the US for training, but for some leave, earned hard.
They got their bearings, turned around and returned in the direction they had come. Were they coming or going? When people are surviving a war, the future is especially hazy.
Any Questions?
“Any questions,” asks the waiter.
“… why is it so expensive?” Asks our older son.
“Questions about the food,” we prompt him.
But his is a good question. The food is expensive, but we have money. But when I was growing up, we wouldn’t eat at a place this expensive. We had money but not the kind of money his family grows up with. He is aware of his privilege. We want him to grow up not to be an entitled jerk. If he is occasionally questioning the Price of Things, I guess we aren’t doing so bad?
He knows he has Privilege. Why does his family have more money than others, I ask myself. Shouldn’t we all make the same … shouldn’t we be equal?
I think to myself, I have said it before, for the same money, I would wait tables. Computers are engaging but helping people is emotionally rewarding. The market economy says pay the computer technicians more to incentivize them to use the rare skills we all so desperately need. You can’t have all the computer guys wandering off to serve in more emotionally rewarding roles!
Or can you? Necessity .. invention ..
Ursula Le Guin. I think of the novel about a planet where the people have no gender, except for the brief periods where they need to mate. Their planet is Socialist. Or was it Anarchist? People are assigned jobs for a period of time by a computer. A fair system. Maybe not as efficient as we prize.
I think I would enjoy not doing the same career forever. But the money … I can not complain too loudly. This frustration is enviable.
Helping people is a reward in itself. Early on, I preferred IT. Or, as I called it: Information Services. But the economic path of the profession seeks to divorce itself from the “cost center” of “helping people work more effectively” to the prestige concept of “Engineering” … Systems Administrators call themselves DevOps now, which is a nonsense word that connotes “Developer Operators,” I guess?
I was thinking about National Service the other day. I have long thought it would be maybe not such a bad thing if we “earned” the right to vote by demonstrating our personal commitment to our collective success. But it needn’t just be a year or six months in your youth. The tree of liberty needs constant watering. Every decade or so, spend a few months helping out. In the classroom. In the streets. On the land. Cleaning a public restroom. Doing what needs doing. Helping a family with paperwork at the hospital or the funeral home. Learning the skills we will all need at some point.
The people who run the computers. The people who run our businesses. The people in charge. The People with Privilege. These are all folks who could use some better context in their “day jobs” just as anyone and everyone could use an open pair of eyes. To ask the questions worth asking.
Under Water
I have a friend who posts trench warfare videos on his Facebook. I see a lot of Russian soldiers get killed each week. I take a dose of joy and sadness at the same time.
My sympathy for people who had everything and paid a bunch of money to a charlatan and signed all the disclaimers for the adventure of riding in a janky submarine … good for them. They died as they lived. Lives of privilege. They have no need of my sympathy.
Some guy from a rust belt mining town in the Ural mountains who signed up to die in a shit-stained trench in a propaganda video on Facebook. He made a bad choice among bad options. My feels for that guy, and his family.
I wondered about the name “Las Vegas.” I am a California resident who dabbles in Duo Lingo. “Las Vegas” means “The Meadow,” named by a Spaniard who enjoyed stopping over at this grassy meadow in the desert. A meadow fed by natural springs. Later, the Americans would come and build pumps, draining the springs, and leaving the city to sink several feet into the desert sand: vegas no más. Other minds beheld this sunken place near the Hoover Dam, nodded at the lack of prohibitions on gambling, and began building casinos. The casinos begat a nice airport. Other minds contemplated diversification: cheap power, cheap land and easy logistics are all good for the datacenter business. The party will last as long as the Colorado River flows. It is a visit to the dimmed lights of the datacenter that brought me.
When America allows itself to take all its worst instincts and run with them, we get Las Vegas. The City feels like any suburb in America: a series of large shopping malls in the middle of town sealed in to their own reality, surrounded by humbler strip malls where the locals satisfy their day-to-day commercial needs. All generously connected by a grid of six lane roads and choked highways. The area leading to the Buy N Large datacenter is rocky desert strewn with trash. A developing country missing its stray dogs.
It was from the driver of the rental car shuttle bus that I gleaned a potential use for Las Vegas. As we rode from the Airport Terminal to the Car Rental complex across the street, he took to the mic to entertain and inform. The weather was in the fifties that day, but in a few days the forecast called for ninety. He then explained that the airport had recently been renamed from “McCarran” to “Harry Reid” and fortunately most of the signs have been changed, but for the first year a lot of folks had been confused. Our driver then informed us of a list of national parks and how many hours of driving they were from Las Vegas: Bryce, Zion, Death Valley, and the North Rim and the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Ah, I thought: as an air hub, Las Vegas could be a good spot to fly to with the family to rent a car and explore. Coastal Northern California is surpringly far from The West. Perhaps I would be back.
An early morning line at the airport Starbucks, where I’m pretty sure I won’t be served.
The morning was long. I had been up at 5:30 to shower, drive, park, and catch my flight. I had hoped for a pastry and coffee at the airport Starbucks, but the line was long and moved at zombie speed. I stood patiently for a few minutes until the airport loud speaker announced that my plane was now boarding, and I had the length of the terminal to cross. On the plane, the pilot announced that due to the unusual presence of Weather in California, the flight could be choppy, so no “service” would be attempted, for safety. At Harry Reid’s rental car terminal, there was a big Starbucks in the middle, but I had an orientation to get to at the Buy N Large datacenter, and at that point I had achieved my “cruising altitude” for the morning and didn’t need anything. I made my way to the cars and picked the Blue One. When asked to choose a rental car, I try to go for the most unusual color, in hopes of remembering which car I was driving.
Driving rental cars is its own pleasure for me, because at any given point in my life I am probably driving an older car. Behold, the crisp video feed from the backup camera! How does the cruise control work? Lane keeping! That’s neat. Where do I put my phone for easy navigation. Once I discover that I can pair my phone to the car’s video screen I am in a good place. At some point I ask myself whether I might want to be the kind of person who always drives a newer car. And I explain to myself that sounds nice but what is even better than that is to be the kind of person who doesn’t spend enough time driving for car quality to be important.
The Buy N Large datacenter has several entries in the Maps App. Because I had shipped some hardware last month, I recognized the street name of the one I needed to get to. I met my colleague and an armed security guard gave us the orientation, and guided us through our navigation of the sectors. Buy N Large is the largest data center I have ever worked in. It is one of those monuments which people in my line of work are likely to visit at some point in our careers. I recalled an old colleague who gave up living in Oakland, because The Company was content to have him work remote near the datacenter. He was content to rent a Large House to share with his cats, and drive out into the desert some nights to look up at the stars. Las Vegas was a home base from which he could visit The Universe.
Between orientation and getting work done I needed to eat. I asked The App for Brunch and settled on a place called “Mr Mamas.” A diner in a strip mall. Clean and efficient and delicous, with American portions. I had French Toast and eggs and a lot of coffee and was in a great mood for an afternoon of Moving Cables Around. At one point, I realized I would need More Cables which can be a problem because after all, Fry’s Electronics is no more. But the app suggested that Kiesub Electronics was on the way to Grainger. I hopped in the Blue Car and found The Cables that I needed at Kiesub. I had wanted to buy Extra but they had exactly Enough for my purposes. I got to chatting with the guy and he noted that while Fry’s had come and gone, Kiesub had stood for fifty years. We chatted some more. He inquired about me and I enumerated my blessings, and noted that for me, everything was pretty great. For Now. I’ll always remember the Lean Years after 2001. The guy had been married some decades and explained that while Marriage is Work, it really helps if you don’t take yourself too seriously. Amen.
Back at Buy N Large, I got the cables moved around and around 5:30pm, I called it A Day. I checked in at the hotel and asked for advice regarding dinner. The clerk kindly explained her favorite options which I duly checked out but I just wasn’t Feeling It. I wanted to sit at The Bar, somewhere quiet. I resorted to asking The App for Irish Pubs. After all, that is our comfort in Sunnyvale, which is the name we settled on when the Post Office told us we couldn’t call our town Murphy. The first on the list was in Mandalay Bay, which is a massive golden cube. I drove up to it, and pulled into a driveway. I passed a line of taxis wondering what the parking situation would be. I was deposited back out onto another six lane street. I asked The App again, and scrolled West into the Sprawl. I found my way to an Irish Pub in a Strip Mall. The parking lot was full, but a local vouched that the No Parking Tow Zone filled with parked cars was a place he parked Every Week. For tonight was Trivia Night.
I sat at the bar and the menu bragged that the Fish and Chips were the best in the US in 2019. I had travelled to an inland desert and I ordered The Fish and it was tasty. As suggested, I filled out the trivia cards. Brian the Owner stood near and we chatted. I told him about Buy N Large and he recounted a friend who was gifted in the ways of computers who had a confidence that he could talk himself out of anything, who had met a violent end from a neighbor who had mental problems. It was Halloween, and another Body in the yard had initially been mistaken by the kids as a decoration.
Come morning, I surveyed the Hotel Breakfast. Eager guests fed themselves off styrofoam plates, as is The Custom at American Hotel Breakfast Buffets. I allowed myself to recoil and to drive back over to Mr Mamas to enjoy the same damn meal I had enjoyed the day before. It did not disappoint. I dropped by Buy N Large to check on my colleague. My work done, I dropped in at a local coffee shop, which was okay. Back to Buy N Large, to bring my colleague to the Rental Car Return and on to the airport, where we parted ways, to our different airlines serving different sectors of the Bay Area.
I had a few hours to kill. I walked the length of the terminal, studying my options for sustenance and souveniers. I eventually settled on a $4 Nathan’s hot dog and discovered another Irish Bar next to my gate. A guy left a Blue Moon at the counter, which the barkeep acknowledged would be an insult in Ireland. I took this neglected pint under my care, which I nursed alongside my own Goose Island IPA. Another Illinoisan from Naperville who had matriculated from the same High School as the girl I had once dated from Naperville asked the Irish Bartender what he thought of the mixed drink known as an “Irish Car Bomb.” The bartender named a woman who he had known who got blown up in the early eighties. “It wasn’t intended for her, but her boyfriend, an English soldier.” If an Irish Pub promoted “Car Bombs” you could tell it was run by Americans. Conversation passed well through a third beer.
“Nevada” means “snow” and this year the “Sierra Nevada” lives up to its name.
The flight home was pleasant. I was served a Coke and a snack and had time for the buzz to recede so that I could drive home safely from the Long Term Parking, and help my sweetheart put our boys to bed.
Part of my day job involves looking at Nagios and checking up on systems that are filling their disks. I was looking at a system with a lot of large files, which are often duplicated, and I thought this would be less of an issue with de-duplication. There are filesystems that support de-duplication, but I recalled the fdupes command, a tool that “finds duplicate files” … if it can find duplicate files, could it perhaps hard-link the duplicates? The short answer is no.
But there is a fork of fdupes called jdupes, which supports de-duplication! I had to try it out.
It turns out your average Hadoop release ships with a healthy number of duplicate files, so I use that as a test corpus.
> du -hs hadoop-3.3.4
1.4G hadoop-3.3.4
> du -s hadoop-3.3.4
1413144 hadoop-3.3.4
> find hadoop-3.3.4 -type f | wc -l
22565
22,565 files in 1.4G, okay. What does jdupes think?
> jdupes -r hadoop-3.3.4 | head
Scanning: 22561 files, 2616 items (in 1 specified)
hadoop-3.3.4/NOTICE.txt
hadoop-3.3.4/share/hadoop/yarn/webapps/ui2/WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/NOTICE.txt
In the ls output, the “2” in the second column indicates the number of hard links to a file. Before we ran jdupes, each file only linked to itself. After, these two files link to the same spot on disk.
> du -s hadoop-3.3.4
1388980 hadoop-3.3.4
> find hadoop-3.3.4 -type f | wc -l
22566
The directory uses slightly less space, but the file count is the same!
But, be careful!
If you have a filesystem that de-duplicates data, that’s great. If you change the contents of a de-duplicated file, the filesystem will store the new data for the changed file and the old data for the unchanged file. If you de-duplicate with hard links and you edit a deduplicated file, you edit all the files that link to that location on disk. For example:
Both files are now 4 bytes longer! Maybe this is desired, but in plenty of cases, this could be a problem.
Of course, the nature of how you “edit” a file is very important. A file copy utility might replace the files, or it may re-write them in place. You need to experiment and check your documentation. Here is an experiment.
> ls -l hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1640 Mar 23 16:19 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1640 Mar 23 16:19 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
> cp hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
cp: 'hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd' and 'hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd' are the same file
The cp command is not having it. What if we replace one of the files?
> cp hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd.orig
> echo foo >> hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
> ls -l hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1644 Mar 23 16:19 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1644 Mar 23 16:19 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
> cp hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd.orig hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
> ls -l hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1640 Mar 23 16:19 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1640 Mar 23 16:19 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
When I run the cp command to replace one file, it replaces both files.
Back at work, I found I could save a lot of disk space on the system in question with jdupes -L, but I am also wary of unintended consequences of linking files together. If we pursue this strategy in the future, it will be with considerable caution.
My preschool was in a decrepit VA facility. One day a pipe burst and one of the classrooms was flooding. So they worked around it but to me it felt apocalyptic and I cried accordingly.
Another time I made a bird feeder with a roll of toilet paper, slathered in peanut butter, rolled in bird seed.
Another time we helped the teachers unwrap hella taffy cubes that they melted in a pot and dipped apples in to make us taffy apples. That was excellent.
Another time they gave us eye exams and I was upset that half the exam I couldn’t see the promised capital E. I felt I had been misled.
We would walk as a class down the halls of the VA hospital to the playground, and broken men slept along the walls. We never spoke of them, that I recall.
[I wrote this up in 2018 but never posted it. Since then, we have added bike lanes on Maude and approved bike lanes on Sunnyvale Ave. I think the contrasting approaches to street design are still really interesting. -danny]
I thought I would catch up on a little reading. I skimmed this article about an intersection in the Netherlands where a distributor road with bicycle lanes intersects smaller roads. The main road is similar in form and function to Maude between Mathilda and Fair Oaks: it is a local distributor with one lane in each direction and a speed limit of 30mph. The Dutch street has curb-separated bicycle lanes and no parking. Maude is slated to eventually receive bicycle lanes, and City Council decided to retain parking.
Graafseweg, as featured in Bicycle Dutch. This is what Maude might look like under Dutch design standards: bicycle lanes are buffered from traffic, and traffic lights are avoided in favor of clear markings and buffers for turning vehicles.
Here’s a look at these streets on a map.
E Maude Ave, in Sunnyvale
Graafseweg, in ‘s-Hertogenbosch
Both streets pass through a residential neighborhood with small businesses. There’s a main road to the West, and most intersections with the collector road are Ts. Because the bicycle lanes and sidewalks are separated from Graafseweg by parkways, the Dutch road looks much bigger on the map. If you zoom down on the satellite view, the roads, especially the travel lanes, are comparable in size. If you drop street parking and narrow the parkways, this design could fit in the Maude corridor.
Here’s a rough overlay of the intersection of Graafseweg and Pater van Den Elsenstraat overlaid at Maude and Sunnyvale Ave.
Maude and Sunnyvale Ave: Current Version
Maude and Sunnyvale Ave: Dutch Version
The street itself lines up perfectly, but the park strip would need to be trimmed to fit. The first difference you notice is the absence of slip lanes, which Sunnyvale plans to remove from this intersection. (The Dutch intersection does have a slip lane on the lower right for bicycle traffic.) The next difference you notice is the absence of turn lanes. There is no signal in the Dutch intersection: vehicles turning left pull into a succession of buffer zones yielding to oncoming traffic.
Consider the pedestrian experience: right now, pedestrians crossing Sunnyvale or Maude must press a “beg button” and wait a minute or two for a walk signal. (This can feel like an eternity and is especially infuriating when there is no oncoming traffic. This is why people “jaywalk.”) In the Dutch version, pedestrians make a series of crossings: a one-way bike lane, then a one-way vehicle lane, then a one-way vehicle lane, and a one-way bike lane. Each crossing is much simpler, and pedestrians complete each crossing in a few seconds.
Motorists also experience a series of simpler crossings. For example, a left from Sunnyvale onto Maude would require a yield to the pedestrian and bicycle lanes, then a yield to Eastbound traffic on Maude, and then a yield to Westbound traffic.
One distinction from the Netherlands is that in California, without a signal, pedestrians have the right-of-way at intersections. In this Dutch intersection, bicycles and pedestrians have the right of way across Sunnyvale Ave but would be obliged to yield to traffic on Maude. You can parse this out by looking closely at the placement of “shark tooth” triangle markings on the pavement to see who is being told to yield. I don’t know if that would be allowed under existing state law.
If you look closely at the Dutch analog of Sunnyvale Ave, you see something very interesting.
Many wish to see a cycle track along Sunnyvale Ave, Sunnyvale’s principal North-South bicycle route. The Dutch street looks like a parkway, but the street to the left is a separate street. The street on the right is narrow and two-way. The bicycle lanes are just under 5′ wide, and between those lanes is a 15′ wide road for two-way traffic. The standard speed limit for this road would be 30mph, but drivers likely slow down because they don’t have much room to maneuver. Also, check out that sweet bus shelter! Compare this with the scene on Sunnyvale Ave at Hazelton. Can you spot the bus stop?
What about parking? The American approach seems to be “put in as much road as possible, and use the sides for parking.” The Dutch approach seems to be “put in less road, more landscaping, and sidewalks, then carve out parking spots where you need them.”
Yes, that mom has enough confidence in the safety of this street to have a young child riding on the back of her bicycle.
The Right-of-Way for these streets is comparable, but the Sunnyvale Ave roadway is 40′ wide. The Doctor Poelsstraat roadway is 25′ wide. The Dutch street still accommodates parking, but the overall experience is more pleasant: pedestrians can cross a narrower street, and the narrow street is a cue for drivers to slow down.
The Dutch have also found a convenient use for their wide, separated bicycle lanes: they can double as parking lanes! Let’s take another look at the Dutch version of Maude Ave.
The 10′ bike lane has car parking along the sides. The nearest car on the right is a reserved spot for a disabled resident. Maude is 50′ curb-to-curb and could fit a 20′ roadway, two 10′ bike lanes, and parking on one side of the street. Parking on both sides might fit at the cost of removed park strips or smaller lawns. The parking-versus-landscaping tradeoff could be made at the block level by local property owners.
I remember asking Adina about the Green Caltrain blog. Had blogs died, or is that still a way to reach people? Times have changed, she acknowledged, but a lot of people subscribed to the blog via email, and that made it, to this day, a very good way for news to reach people. One “obsolete” technology relied on an older, and even more “obsolete” technology. Video leans upon the radio star.
I put “obsolete” in quotes because while blogs had their day and receded some, people still use them. And email is still great at being email. Some of us are even daring to believe in distributed communication platforms again, thanks to Elon’s ongoing effort to drive Twitter into a wall.
When I was in college, I initially avoided Computer Science, mainly because it felt like Microsoft was eating the technology world, and that wasn’t a platform that gave me joy. But then I discovered Unix, and the ideals of an Internet built by different folks along open standards. Linux and FreeBSD and the ideal that software should be as free (to inspect and modify) as possible. In the early days, most web sites, like this one, were just people writing up HTML markup by hand, later with tools. Blogs came along: get access to a server and run some software, and you can publish your own thoughts for the world to see. And people would subscribe in Google Reader.
Then the Internet took a dark turn. All the content got hoovered into The Walled Garden. I can understand. The Internet is complicated, and Facebook serves some compelling, predictable, fast content. Why leave the restaurant when a visit to McDonald’s is sure to engage you in petty squabbles punctuated with pictures of cats and grandkids?
Twitter is dying. It will shuffle along in a zombie state, perhaps indefinitely. For me, the walled gardens are just so much ping pong distraction candy. Put the engagement machine down, quiet the mind, and let the inner Creation flow.
I’ve signed up for Mastodon. I get more “engagement” than I did on Twitter, and then I get bored and put it away. The concept is Social Media built on Open Standards. Blogs with open standards, shrunk to a Twittery microblog essence. It is nice to be trying a New Thing, especially when that New Thing isn’t built to contain us all in some weird psychology experiment where we are the product.
A year ago I was finishing my second Steve Ramsey build. Or first, if you count the workbench as a “bonus” … I had fun doing the miter cuts and setting up a jig for square angles, sanding, gluing, assembling, screwing … the finishing and sanding and finishing and sanding and finishing was a drag, especially because it was cold out and I had to do the smelly stuff indoors and even put a little space heater in the garage just to keep the gooey stuff warm enough.
At the end of the day, I had a nice table. It has been sitting out in my yard all year, and the tabletop is still smooth as silk.
But as I finished that project, a mob attacked the US Capitol and tried to kill Congress, and we let it happen. We barely managed to keep our Democracy that day. I stayed up late to watch Congress certify the damn vote count. And a few weeks later I listened to Amanda Gorman’s poetry.
I look forward to rekindling my enthusiasm for woodworking. That’s been deferred a bit as I slowly erect a bike shed / fun fort in the back yard to store the bicycles so I can once again putter around the garage workshop.
