dannyman.toldme.com

On my way in to the office this morning, I noticed a random Muni bus trundling down Mission Street, with the destination sign reading:

GAY PRIDE PARADE

I was thinking “That’s today? But this is Thursday.” The people riding the bus looked like people riding the Mission Street bus. None of their expressions conveyed that they were headed for gay pride.

I figured this is just San Francisco, and some morning you could be on board the gay pride parade and completely not realize it.

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japolo: haha, danny quotes locutus of borg in his code
anna: locutus was cool
dman: hrmmm.
dman: that sounds familiar … care to paste a bit, sir?
japolo: # “Sleep.” –Locutus
japolo: sleep($sleep);

I used to love Star Trek: The Next Generation.  But that was pretty damn lame when the Borg got blown up just when they were about to destroy Earth because someone told them to sleep.  Now, it just makes me grin.

There are three lights!

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Curse your RSS Feeds, Gmail, for linking me to this spastic hyperbole:

When the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, the web changed with it.

While phone networks and big news sites struggled to cope with heavy traffic, many survivors and spectators turned to online journals to share feelings, get information or detail their whereabouts. It was raw, emotional and new — and many commentators now remember it as a key moment in the birth of the blog.

“If Americans learned anything from the surprise mass-murder perpetrated on 9/11, it was that they could express their feelings honestly on the Internet.”

I try not to be a cynical, jaded, old man, but please . . . its schlocky writing like that that makes me want to invade foreign countries, just so we can bring back the draft so that instead of talking about the contribution that Muhamed Atta made to the blogosphere, a few talentless hacks might be torn from their comfort zone and have some life to share with us.

Don’t mind me, I’m just venting my spleen.  After all, blogging about September 11 is “raw, emotional and new.”  You’re witnessing a re-enactment of Internet History!

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Stolen from gapingvoid, which has some delicious perspective on creative endeavour:

Every creative person is looking for “The Big Idea”. You know, the one that is going to catapult them out from the murky depths of obscurity and on to the highest planes of incandescent ludicity.

The one that’s all love-at-first-sight with the Zeitgeist.

The one that’s going to get them invited to all the right parties, metaphorical or otherwise.

So naturally you ask yourself, if and when you finally come up with The Big Idea, after years of toil, struggle and doubt, how do you know whether or not it is “The One”?

Answer: You don’t.

There’s no glorious swelling of existential triumph.

That’s not what happens.

All you get is this rather kvetchy voice inside you that seems to say, “This is totally stupid.This is utterly moronic. This is a complete waste of time. I’m going to do it anyway.”

And you go do it anyway.

Second-rate ideas like glorious swellings far more. Keeps them alive longer.

Mainly, I like “don’t quit your day job” . . . gives you something to do on the long commute to work. I’d take from that: have a long commute to work that leaves your arms free, if you can swing it. One thing I am completely loving about San Francisco is that I can stumble out of my house when I am good and ready, catch the next Muni that happens by, and repeat the process at the end of the day. People pay good money to drive cars, but the $45 monthly Muni pass . . . . . . at the current rate, I may part with my wheels. I spend more time driving the car around from one street cleaning zone to the next than I do actually driving anywhere!

(Still reading the darn thing. ’tis a delicious fountain of philosophy that most any of my friends should find somewhat gratifying. :)

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At Church, this morning, was read the following poem, which resonated with current life activity:

Love After Love
Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

On Labor Day I took myself out on a date: we went to Peet’s, then had some pizza, and then popcorn and soda while watching the new Woody Allen movie at the local theater. “I was born in the Hebrew faith, but when I got older I converted to Narcissism,” said Woody. (more…)

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One interesting thing about getting divorced in California is that you have to wait six months after filing for a Joint Petition for Summary Dissolution of Marriage, before you can petition for final judgement. Yup, it takes six months to get a divorce. “You’d think they’d make you wait six months before getting married,” was Grandma’s response.

This leaves open questions as to what constitutes Community Property, and filing taxes. Answers I have not easily found online. A bit of “friendly advice” I got from someone is that Community Property ends at separation. As far as filing taxes, I found another bit of advice:

You are considered unmarried if you were legally separated on December 31 or if your spouse did not live in your home for the last six months of the year.

So, let us say your spouse seperates from you in April, files in July, and you are still legally married until January.  As best I can tell, you file separately, and the assets your acquire later in the year are yours.

Of course, I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant.

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So, I’m setting up a box. I need to test different filesystem configurations, which will involve a lot of boot-configure-install-post-install-benchmark cycles. We have a nice network boot infrastructure, but getting serial booting to work is always fun. Today I found that the vendor has set up BIOS “remote access” to COM2. Funny thing, the box only has one serial port! So, I set that to COM1, and configure console redirection only up to the boot loader, tell the bootloader that I want text console=ttyS0 and we’re in business!

But man, if SuSE’s YaST aint a bloody mess when it downgrades to text on a serial port:

What you don’t see here is the constant slow screen-redraw, constant pressing control-L. This is what it looks like at a good moment!

I think I understand why. I mean, I would think that Linux developers would take serial consoles and text mode to heart. After all, that’s the whole point, right? But that’s how I think, because I manage dozens of servers at a time, remote, and all my boxes are rack-mount jobbies with lots o’ fans and nobody wants to be in the same room.

But the developers who hack on Linux probably aren’t hard-core SysAdmins. Their dev system is some beat-up old hardware sitting near their desk, wired up to a spare VGA monitor, so yeah, text mode is kind of an afterthought. Especially given the pain in the butt that setting up serial consoles can be!

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Says Paul Graham:

Of course you have to have a business model eventually. But experience so far suggests that figuring out how to make money from something popular is a lot easier than making something popular.

I get a lot of criticism for telling founders to focus first on making something great, instead of worrying about how to make money. And yet that is exactly what Google did. And Apple, for that matter. You’d think examples like that would be enough to convince people.

Is this another Bubble? I don’t think so, not so far. There may be a lot of lame startups being started, but that’s not the definition of a bubble. A bubble is when a lot of money is being invested in lame startups, and that’s not happening yet. The reason so many new startups are getting started is that the cost has gone down, not that funding has gone up.

This is one reason I’m optimistic about my present employer: we’ve got something that is proving to be very popular. We’ve got a good thing going such that we can become hugely popular, and if we can capitalize on that even a little bit, we should be doing alright.

As to whether this is the mentality that brought us the Bubble, I think the thing to watch out for is Irrational Exuberence, and over-reaching. Popular or not, VC-backed or not, I haven’t heard any of that since the bust. I’d like to think that we of the Silicon Valley have Gotten Over Ourselves a bit–our experiments, called “startups”–have some sense of scope, and few companies outside of Microsoft or Google have barrels of F-U money to throw around. We’re no longer surrounded by IPO-funded Mercedeses and BMWs, and nobody I know is paying $2,000/mo rent. I hope we retain this sense of sensibility.

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A few cool quotes Grandma forwarded to me. This I’d say “lost . . . and found:”

It’s true that we don’t know what we’ve got until we lose it,
But it’s also true that we don’t know
What we’ve been missing until it arrives.

I have felt both ways about my wife, and now I’m looking forward to discovering what else I have been missing.

I recall the scene from “Dances With Wolves” where the one guy tells Dunbar that he was good friends with Stands With a Fist’s deceased husband, and he at first resented Dunbar, but now he thinks that maybe his friend “left” because he knew Dunbar would come along.

Then, “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life . . .”

Don’t go for looks; they can deceive.
Don’t go for wealth; even that fades away.
Go for someone who makes you smile
Because it takes only a smile to make a dark day seem bright.
Find the one that makes your heart smile.

And then, ask a optimist:

The happiest of people
Don’t necessarily have the best of everything;
They just make the most of everything that comes along their way.

There have been times when I was maybe more bi-polar, and people would ask, “why are you so happy all the time?” And I would answer “Because it beats being sad!”

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When you are just trying to enjoy the moment, and not start a relationship, you are much freer in sharing yourself. This tends to be when you fall in love despite yourself.

When you are trying to pull off a relationship, you are more inhibited. You take some care in how and what you reveal so as not to scare off the other person. Then you do an impaired job of being present in the relationship.

You do best, in my opinion, when you shrug off that inhibition, and share yourself freely, but considerately. The best medium, I think, is when you are broaching some potentially sensitive topic and ask your partner if they are comfortable about it and they can find it in themselves to be comfortable, because they dig you, they are coming to accept you for who you are, and not for who you present yourself to be.

And of course, in order to best be accepting of another person’s sharing, you’ll have to be accepting of what you know about yourself. Love starts in your own heart.

“Be a brilliant soul
Sparkling in the galaxy
While walking on Earth.”

And also, be polite. If you are an interesting cat, there can be a lot to take in. Don’t hold back on the sharing, but leave enough time for listening to appreciate how much sharing your partner can digest in a sitting. That is a good opportunity to shift gears, shut up, and listen. Especially for us guys, listening is a skill that takes a bit of cultivation.

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Just after we moved to the new place in Walnut Creek, the marriage started falling apart. Throughout the crisis my attention was focused on that, and a lot of daily life stuff just stopped completely. Here’s the pile of unopened bills, some with yellow forwarding stickers from March. The pile in the foreground is in the recycling, the background pile are keepers.

Since I started the new job, all bills are caught up, and the credit cards are all paid off for the first time in a couple of years. I don’t want to go back and keep my records straight for the last half year, as it would be too painful. I’m giving my financial records a “fresh ‘start over'” in Quicken.

This picture doesn’t make me sad or anything, but kind of glad to be paring things down and moving along. The pile just struck me as symbolic, so I self-indulgently snapped a picture to share.

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Some ladies started yammering on the Yelp message boards about what a joy it is to hover over a toilet seat rather than sitting on it, and I . . . I respectfully disagreed:

Jesus Christ, people.

I check out the seat, and if there’s skank on it, I take a bit of toilet paper and wipe that skank off.  Pubes?  A bit of splatter?  Nothing can resist my mastery of toilet paper!

(Well, okay, some toilets are just hopeless, I lose the urge, my genitals pucker up into my body and I hold out for the next opportunity.)

Then, I place my ass DIRECTLY ON THE SEAT.

I’m proud to say, i tend to leave a potty cleaner than I found it.  And I believe that is a way to measure a person’s character.

Personally, I think squat toilets are superior for public venues.  Drop your drawers, poop in the hole, wipe up, wash up and go!  Sitting is a luxury i can save for my apartment, at least until I have kids and we all start fighting over the bathroom.

I have read that with a bit of practice (in the shower) that most women can actually get a handle on the stand-and-pee thing.

I mean, in case you were wondering where I stood, er, sat, on the issue of public toilets.

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