Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/09/11/colin-powell-close-guantanamo/
It is exciting, inspiring, and hopeful, to hear a conservative like Colin Powell speaking like this:
Let’s welcome every foreign student we can get our hands on. Let’s make sure that foreigners come to the Mayo Clinic here, and not the Mayo facility in Dubai or somewhere else. Let’s make sure people come to Disney World and not throw them up against the wall in Orlando simply because they have a Muslim name. Let’s also remember that this country was created by immigrants and thrives as a result of immigration, and we need a sound immigration policy.
Let’s show the world a face of openness and what a democratic system can do. That’s why I want to see Guantánamo closed. It’s so harmful to what we stand for. We literally bang ourselves in the head by having that place. What are we doing this to ourselves for? Because we’re worried about the 380 guys there? Bring them here! Give them lawyers and habeas corpus. We can deal with them. We are paying a price when the rest of the world sees an America that seems to be afraid and is not the America they remember.
Amen! Let’s stop hiding behind an Iron Curtain of Fear.
Are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves.
(Thanks, Craig Newmark.)
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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.
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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/2007/08/13/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/2007/08/09/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/2007/08/08/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/2007/08/04/viktor-frankl/
“What is to give light must endure burning.”
—Viktor Frankl
From “The Sun” March, 2007
I read this quote shortly after a significant personal setback. I believe the author is alluding to the Holocaust, which puts things in perspective. For me, the take-away is that if you want to shine, you must be ready to be burned.
I had rushed in to marriage, and consequently took a conservative approach to feeling my own love and expressing it. I figured we should take things slow. I got burnt anyway. Nowadays . . . I’ll give patience its due, but I must shoot for giving light. Keep the senses keen for that flame within, and if it seems right, throw gas on the fire . . .
. . . and be prepared to endure burning.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/08/01/bleak/
“The coldest Winter I ever knew was a summer in San Francisco.”
It has been overcast, chilly and wet in my neighborhood throughout July. Monday the sun came out for about an hour in the morning, then again at sunset. I ran out of the house when that happened but it was too late in the day to get much sun. The midwesterner in me reminds myself that this is a temporary and “symbolic” Winter, without the snow. It is just weird the way the seasons work when you live adjacent to the Pacific Ocean.
(No, I’m not actually depressed. Well, this gray does make me blue, and that is why I am conscientious about getting out doors any time the clouds break. I am supposed to be starting work next week, so I should be getting more sun during the week.)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/31/enchanted-magic-kingdom/
Inhabitat has an informative and lightheartedly disturbing visit with the “Sustainable Agriculture Production and Research Center” at Disney World’s EPCOT center. The overall gist of the place is good old fashioned 1950s optimism that technology will make the future awesome, touched up a layer of 21st century “green washing”.
Next stop on the “Living With the Land” tour took us up close and personal with stacked gardens. While we love the idea of maximizing space and efficiency by vertically stacking plants, we can’t figure out why on earth a greenhouse preaching sustainability uses STYROFOAM pots for all their plants! A precocious 6-year-old boy on my tour apparently noticed the same thing and asked our intern-guide why there was so much styrofoam, since the foam plastic is not biodegradable and not really a “sustainable” choice for an exhibit on sustainability. Our guide, apparently not understanding the implications of the question, explained glibly that EPCOT uses styrofoam because it is cheap, lightweight and easy to toss out in order to get fresh new pots daily. Huh?
The primary byproduct of the sustainable “Research Center” seems to be genetically-modified vegetables grown in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head. Well, that and the styrofoam containers.
I had a friend from Indiana who said she knew someone from Florida, who thought that, compared to Governor Jeb, President George was oh-so-eloquent. I suppose it is fortunate that the state will mostly disappear when the ice caps melt.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/27/varnish-architect-notes/
Interesting, enjoying, and even funny technical read from Poul-Henning Kamp: Architect Notes for the Varnish HTTP Accelerator
His big point is that programmers need to stop fretting over moving things between memory and disk themselves. He explains that on a modern computer system, RAM is backed by disk, and disk accesses are buffered in RAM, and a lot of work goes in to the kernel to ensure that the system behaves effectively. By managing your own RAM-or-disk conundrum, you end up making a mess of things, because when you go to move an unused “memory” object to disk, the kernel may already have paged the memory region to disk, and what happens is the object then must move from virtual memory on disk, to RAM, to a disk memory cache in RAM, and then back out to disk. It is simpler and more efficient to just ask for a big chunk of memory and let the kernel page things to disk for you.
He then explains some clever things you can do for multi-processor programming. It seems to boil down to trying to give threads their own stack space wherever practical, and managing worker pools as a stack, so that you are most likely to find yourself processing on the same CPU at the lowest level of cache, and least likely to need to pass memory variables between CPUs.
Not that I write multi-threaded applications, but if I ever do, I’ll try to keep this understanding in mind.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/25/ritalin-for-swine/
Until the last twenty out of a million years of human history, our “neurological disorders” were merely our personalities.
–Poe Ballantine
“Methamphetamine for Dummies”
from The Sun, July, 2007
Which only brings to mind that line from Pulp Fiction:
Vincent: Want some bacon?
Jules: No man, I don’t eat pork.
[ . . . ]
Vincent: Why not?
Jules: Pigs are filthy animals. I don’t eat filthy animals. . . . I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces.
Vincent: How about a dog? A dog eats its own feces. . . . do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?
Jules: I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?
Jules: Well we’d have to be talkin’ about one charmin’ motherfuckin’ pig. I mean he’d have to be ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’?
Perhaps Jules is avoiding “mad swine” disease. Were the pigs to receive proper medication that addressed their poop-eating neurological disorders, he might find their personalities tasty delicious.
5 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/06/listening-to-users/
I recall Tom Limoncelli giving a presentation called “Time Management for System Administrators” and he explained how, as part of his routine, he would walk over by his customers–his users within the company he worked at–and check in at a regular time. Some days, they might ask questions that would reveal to him potential improvements in the systems architecture, and other times they might ask simple technical support questions. Either way, by dropping in at regular intervals, the users came to feel good about their Systems staff. This can be damned handy when, as they occasionally do, the systems go down hard, staff scramble to fight fires, and users are left out in the cold with little more to work with than their innate feelings about the Systems staff. If they like you, they will feel sympathetic in your hours of stress. If they don’t like you, they hope the present outage may be a nail in the coffin of your tenure.
I was put in mind of this by the story presented in today’s Daily WTF . . . the user, who could be described as “dim” had been following a really complicated, error-prone process. She had no idea that a trivial change to the system could be made to make her life easier. The hero of the story happened to be walking by, hear her frustration, politely inquire, and five minutes later, make betterness happen:
Still, there’s a good lesson here that’s often missed; pay attention to what users are doing with the provided system and by unblocking minor bottlenecks you can become the hero.
Amen. Amen. Amen. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/04/independence-day/
[Update: weaselly underscores omitted from cuss words per Andrew Ho’s patriotic fervor, and because it might look neat.]
Girlfriend came over, with six peaches she picked from her peach tree this very morning. I washed the earwig out of one. We walked down to the beach, and back up again, stopping for pastries and a slice of pizza. We watched “Winged Migration” which is really good if you don’t pay attention to the self-important French people, and tolerate the silly parts when the bird flies up an out of the atmosphere to circle the Earth like Sputnik, except yeah, “no special effects were used while filming the birds.”
Saw the girlfriend off . . . neighborhood goes boom . . . boom . . . occasional bursts in the distance. A groovy Independence Day.
Then I see a URL to a comic strip with kids eating Bald Eagle tacos. Okay, crass. But the commentary rant is worth sharing:
I know I’m starting to sound like a curmudgeony old bastard but… it really did used to be better, even just a few years ago. I swear to God right now you could watch Dick Cheney beat a homeless vet to death with a cinder block and everybody would just kind of let out a weak sigh and go “only two more years” but then go into full-blown warrior mode when the Youtube button on their iPhone got scratched. Stand in line to buy portable telephone, wondering what you’ll say to the first person to ask you to touch it while the thing you Pledged Allegiance to everyday when you were growing up gets gang-banged by a handful of frat boys that pay less taxes than you and don’t have to go to jail when they may have committed treason.
And, quiet as I have kept, I gotta admit, I think the iPhone spectacle . . . geeks waiting in line to pay $600 for a cell phone with a $1400 service commitment . . . but what is worse is to hear President Bush prattling on about how we must defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq or else they’ll follow us home–the best that can be said for why we need to be over there is because we chose to go there and f_ck up that sh_thole of a countryfuck up that shithole of a country, and it is hella true if Dick Cheney beat the crap out of a homeless man we would just shake our heads with a tear in our eye. If you commit treason you should go to jail, even, hell, especially if you’re just some hack taking a bullet for the White House! GAH!
Okay, back to munching on my toast and pondering my regular life. If there’s a protest in the streets sign me up . . .
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/07/02/marriage-socrates-ferber-campbell-fellini/
The morning of July 2, I have arrived at the last page of June’s “The Sun” and find an occasion to chuckle:
“By all means marry: if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”
–Socrates
Socrates is a mortal. And so am I.
“Wasn’t marriage, like life itself, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well-ordered and protected and guarded. Wasn’t it finer, more splendid, more nourishing when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt.
–Edna Ferber
It was.
Yes, the title says “Two Perspectives” but we wouldn’t want this content to be too well-ordered, yeah? Here’s an assertion that I know many would take exception to. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2007/06/26/too-close-for-comfort/
Copied without permission from the Readers Write section of “The Sun” May, 2007.
The theme was “Too Close for Comfort”.
NOT ONE WOMAN LOOKS UP WHEN I walk into the breast-cancer clinic and sit down. We are invisible to one another as we anxiously anticipate placing our bare breasts between the cold metal plates of the mammogram machine.
Before leaving home, I placed a rosary in my pocket. Now, I secretly move my thumb and forefinger from one royal blue bead to the next. Some of the women appear to be reading magazines, but I can tell by the way they turn the pages that it is only to give the impression of doing something. Next to me, a pretty, thirtyish woman talks nonstop on her cellphone, her body turned away to muffle her conversation.
When it’s my turn, I enter the dressing room as instructed, take off my clothes from the waist up, remove my deodorant with the wipe provided, and put on a pink gown. Then I wait in the second holding area until I am called behind door number two.
I always wonder if the technician (who says little and smiles even less) ever tires of looking at breasts. She expertly takes four frames, two of the right breast and two of the left, then tells me to return to the waiting room and not to get dressed until I am given permission. If some abnormality is discovered, more pictures will have to be taken. All of us waiting women long to hear the same five words: You may get dressed now.
After I am finally given permission to leave, I exit past the young woman on the cellphone, who is the last one still waiting at 6:30. She rocks forward and back, cupping her forehead in the palm of her hand, taking no notice of me. As I rush past her, relieved to be cleared for another year, my hand slips into my pocket and closes around the rosary. My fingers trace the cross, and I ask the Lord to have mercy on this woman.
Back on the street, I feel hungry. At the bottom of my purse I find a small dark chocolate that I packed this morning — in case of an “emergency.”
I hurry back to the waiting room, tap the woman on the shoulder, and hand her the chocolate. Her cheeks are wet, but she smiles
Adele Sweetman
Pasadena, California
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