General Rambling

Thank You, Mr. Carneal

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I will miss Herb Carneal’s voice as the announcer of the Minnesota Twins. He passed away yesterday at 83. I have fond memories of a sunny fall day in Saint Paul as a kid, listening to the 1987 World Series on the radio, his voice echoing the game as I sat at my mother’s sewing desk assembling a collection of leaves & tree descriptions for a Boy Scout project. I can see the whole thing perfectly, feel the warm sun and light breeze through the windows, smell the leaves and the Elmer’s Glue, hear his voice on the radio. I love autumn more than any other season, and Twins baseball was a big reason why. I hope wherever you are, …

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Move Forward a Baby Step at a Time

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You cannot get something right the first time you try. Put another way, your first time is always flawed. Version 1.0 != perfect. Realize this. Realize that getting something right is iterative. Realize that you don’t really know how to do something until you have done it at least once. Start small and move forward a baby step at a time. So many organizations follow the process of “discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss, implement” when they should really be doing “discuss, implement, discuss, implement.” Shorter cycles means a better end result.

Flying Pants

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I always wondered when I’d get to see something strange happen during a show. Turns out that last night, during the “Black Boys/White Boys” part of the production of “Hair” we’re doing, an actor threw his pants into the lights, over one of the pipes that the lights attach to. They didn’t come back down. The audience went nuts, as did the cast. The assistant stage manager ran in back, grabbed a pole with a paint roller on it and tried hooking them. No go, but the audience was laughing harder, and the cast was improvising some stuff around it. The actor eventually hustled backstage and put his own jeans on. The nice thing, though, is that the stage and …

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Alt-248

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I think Alt-248 is one of the first things I discovered on PCs that is still useful today. I just typed it, mentally scoffing at that glorified cheat sheet Character Map. 🙂 I remember my glee when, as a pimply-faced seventh grader, I inadvertently held Alt down while I tried typing something on the numeric keypad of my XT. Out of some hidden world a character appeared, the degree symbol. Shortly thereafter, I knew a lot more about ASCII. So much of my knowledge is because of accidents I’ve been allowed to explore. So much of my creativity is because of raw materials I’ve been allowed to arrange. So much of my vision is because of experiences I’ve been allowed …

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Having Options is Nice

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Taken from the Slashdot article on Linux finding homes on the desktop: “The State of Illinois recently consolidated its IT systems onto Microsoft software — and has no interest in using Linux, says Paul Campbell, director of the state’s Central Management Services department. ‘We don’t have time for science projects in state government,’ he says.” I’m all for organizations deciding to go one way or another. I’ve worked with a number of clients who had some Windows, some Solaris, some AIX, some OS/400, some z/OS, etc. The IT staff could barely keep up with everything, much less be experts in any of it. On the other hand, though, an organization should take advantage of the strengths of certain OSes. UNIXes …

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Upgrade to the Latest Version

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If you are bothering to upgrade something, upgrade it to the latest version. If it isn’t the latest version it’s deprecated. Deprecated == needs to be upgraded again, soon. End of discussion.

Noob Spammers

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I’ve been getting a lot of backscatter from spammers lately. One of them was particularly interesting. The spam message was: Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 02:01:24 -0600 From: %FROM_NAME < %FROM_EMAIL> Subject: %SUBJECT %MESSAGE_BODY If you’re going to use my email address to spam at least do a good job of it.

Electronic Theatre Controls Has The Best Support Ever

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1. Arrive at theatre. Conduct dimmer check approximately 30 minutes before the house opens. 2. Discover that about 10 dimmers will not shut down. 3. Power cycle light board several times. Nothing changes (usually ghosts and whatnot will resolve themselves once the board is off). Attempt to control the dimmers with commands, to no avail. Inspect dimmer rack, nothing obviously wrong. Double check everything. 4. Call ETC support. Leave a message. 5. ETC support technician Heather calls me back within five minutes. Calmly walks me (who is not very calm) through some diagnostics, and then instructs us to reset the dimmer control module. Explains what we are doing and why it is necessary. Psychically predicts and answers my question of …

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One Month Of Mac

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Well, I scrounged up a PPC-based Mac Mini yesterday, and I’ve decided that I am going to use it almost exclusively at home for one month. I am not committing to switching to Macintosh, but seeing as it’s been almost six years since I used a Macintosh regularly I think it’s an interesting experiment. At the end of the month it might be interesting to try Linux on my desktop for another month, but we’ll see. So, for day 1, here’s my report: Cons: – There is not a single SSH client I can find that is worth anything. I want tabs, I want green-on-black. Basically I want Van Dyke’s SecureCRT on Mac OS X. I am willing to pay …

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