General Rambling

We Need Better Data Privacy Laws

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Bruce Schneier posted a piece yesterday about the death of ephemeral conversation. I think it meshes well with what I was saying a few days ago, albeit in reference to this blog and myself: With the Internet caching everything that becomes part of it, what if I write something that labels me? What if I say something that makes me unemployable, or causes mail bombs to be sent to my mother? The scope of a blunder is no longer local, it is global. The lifetime of a blunder is no longer measured in hours or days, but in lifetimes, as humanity records everything as a permanent record. People routinely judge others as they would never want to be judged. Corporations …

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Vacation

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So I’m on vacation this week, up in Minnesota for my brother’s wedding this weekend. It’s nice to be on vacation, though I do feel out of touch with the office. For example, my boss resigned yesterday. That’ll be interesting when I get back next week. The notes so far from this trip: Mama’s Pizza in Saint Paul is my continuing benchmark for thin crust pizza. Damn, that’s tasty. If you go I recommend a large “Special Deluxe” pizza. The beer selection is not great so have a Coke then head over to the Muddy Pig in Saint Paul. Decent selection of microbrews, especially local stuff like Summit and Surly. Phil’s Tara Hideaway in Stillwater doesn’t look like much from …

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Unmasked

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I don’t know quite when I began reading blogs. Almost certainly three to five years ago. The advent of RSS and news aggregators definitely helped that, making the phenomenon about the content and not about visiting a lot of web sites. Two blogs I started reading early on are written by women, each creating an intensely personal chronicle of each life, often with a resolution of minutes. As I thought about it, it amazed me that each one, in the face of identity theft, stalkers, rapists, and general inconsiderate behaviour these two were maintaining their privacy. They were doing so despite their sharing information with the anonymous world. Is this possible? Can privacy be sustained by a blogger? I haven’t …

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Sudo

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xkcd.com has a wonderful cartoon: (I picked this up via 37signals)

What an Installer Should Do

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Certainly many of you have seen my rants about installers that don’t do a very good job of installing. I must extend props to the EA/Dice guys for doing the right thing with the Battlefield 2142 installer when it encounters a version of Windows it doesn’t know about: It warns you and then lets you continue. Which means that, unlike other retarded installers, I can actually play Battlefield 2142 on my Windows Server 2003 desktop machine. Thank you, whoever built this installer.

My Favorite Problem Reports

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“Hey, there was a problem this afternoon with the application mail relay.” I adore anecdotal problem reports. Oh, there was a problem with the mail server? I’m sure I can find it in the 546,291 log entries for today. “Did you happen to note the error message?” I reply. “Would that help?” No. Error messages are just annoyances, and never to be recorded for troubleshooting. “Yeah, that’d be handy. Or, maybe you could tell me what time the error occurred.” “Hmmm, okay.” …two hours pass… “The error occurred again.” “What was the error?” “I don’t know but it’s happening on all of our web servers.” “You know, that’s actually the most helpful thing you’ve said.” There are really only three …

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Batting Practice

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Ugh, the last two days have not gone anywhere as planned. It’s been a rollercoaster of fires needing to get put out, colleagues being jackasses, and good things, too. Like getting invited to teach a virtualization class at a conference in Phoenix on November 6th. Of course, that’s the day before VMworld, so I’m hoping that I can just drive over to LA and indulge. We’ll see how well that works out. My stress relief lately has been the batting cages. I swam in high school, but never played any sports that required coordination. That was my brother’s domain, and he excelled at it. As we age he and I are swapping lives. He becomes a sysadmin and I become …

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Robotic Caterpillars

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Engadget has a blurb about Caterpillar looking to make their product line robotic. Does anybody else remember the scene in “I, Robot” where the robotic demolition machine tries to kill Sergeant Spooner? Oh, but they don’t have some gigantic positronic AI thing in the lobby to control all their Earth movers, do they? I guess we’re safe. Update: See, I’m not the only one that worries that the future will be like Sci-Fi movies. Though it is a little odd to see Ars Technica posting about this at nearly the same time.

Modern, Cool Nerd

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Sometimes I’m just a sucker for stupid tests on the web. I just took the “Are you a nerd, geek, or dork?” test, and I am a: Modern, Cool Nerd 52 % Nerd, 52% Geek, 34% Dork I guess that’s good. I wish I knew what the opposite ends of nerd, geek, and dork are. If I’m 34% dork that means I’m 66% something else, right?

Plumbing 0, Me 1

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I’ve been working balls-out all week, so I took today off to do some stuff around the house. Last weekend my mother showed up and suggested some new plants for outside my house. We worked out a three stage plan for redoing my plants, but to implement that I need to water the new flora, lest it die. Last winter my outside faucet’s pipe burst when it was -20 degrees out, and I still hadn’t fixed it. I’ve wanted to learn some plumbing techniques (while not paying big $$$ to a plumber) and had been putting it off, but I couldn’t do so anymore since I’ve got stuff I need to get into the ground. So, off I went to …

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