General Rambling

My Week So Far

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Moron: “Our mail server is blacklisted in SpamCop. I need you to fix it. I’m trying to send an important email out.” Me: “Didn’t you tell me last week that you were going to start doing your part to end spam by sending all of your spam to SpamCop?” Moron: “Yeah. What does that have to do with this?” Me: “Did you teach SpamCop your mail server IPs? Did you read the instructions?” Moron: “Sure I read them. Didn’t see how I’d tell them my mail server IPs. Why would our mail server be blacklisted now? This is really inconvenient — this mail has to go out right now. You need to do a better job of securing our mail …

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Hi Crazy Nazis

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On Saturday I attended my first protest. As of this week I have lived in Madison, WI for eleven years. I had not attended a single event even remotely like a protest until this. I wasn’t going to go. I wanted to go home and mow my lawn, having spent the morning working on Stroller’s production of “Sylvia.” However, two of my crew employed drastic coercion methods to get me to go (they pointed out that it was raining and I couldn’t mow my lawn, and that they’d probably go for beer afterwards). The result was that I had a blast, which may be an odd thing to say about a Nazi rally. On arrival we walked past Genna’s bar, …

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Alt-248

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Alt-248 is the first thing that I discovered on my own on the IBM PC. At least, the first thing I discovered that I still use today. I was messing around one day with the keypad one day after I discovered that the bell was Ctrl-G. It was shortly after my parents bought me my first PC. An Epson Apex 80. 10 MHz of 8088 goodness, 640 KB of RAM, and dual 5.25″ 360K floppies. Some days I get nostalgic for B:. It was 1989. I was 12. Four color CGA was fine. I was absolutely distraught that BASIC wasn’t included. The first productive thing I did with that PC was fire up the bundled copy of PFS: First Choice …

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TMNT Rises Again

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Oh, hell yeah. I hope they do the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles justice. The trailer looks amazing, insofar as the graphics look wonderful. The end of the trailer has “Only in Theaters.” Have they heard of the Internet? For those of you reading that may have listened to my rant a couple weeks ago about the guy in the bar that wouldn’t shut up about the Transformers… um, this is different. That guy was speculating what kind of people Optimus Prime and Starscream would be if they kicked up their heels and smoked a big fatty. Like, WTF, I’m cool with the abstract thinking but not when you never shut up about it. And that’s all I’m gonna say …

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I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better.

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Just saw “A Scanner Darkly.” I’ve seen bad reviews. I’ve seen good reviews. It is good. Linklater didn’t make it funny as some have criticized, though parts of it are. Humor happens sometimes even amidst bad situations. “What does a scanner see?” he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me – into us – clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the …

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Do Or Do Not, There Is No "What If"

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What’s the difference between a one-off solution and the beginning of a trend? What’s the difference between a kludge and a brilliant fix? What’s the difference between the bleeding edge and the cutting edge? Vision. How do you get a vision? Be out there doing things. Find out what works and what doesn’t. What if I don’t have time to be out there doing things? Then you will always be at the mercy of others. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, …

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I Dream Of Genie

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Hah! Today I got to play with a power tool I’d never used before: a Genie GS-2032 scissor lift. It sure beats the snot out of a huge ladder for hanging theater lighting instruments, and it’s pretty darn stable with my 250 pound frame on it. The best thing is that you can move it around yourself while you are in the air. Theater folks move around on ladders and scaffold all the time. The difference with this is its nice, predictable, controllable motion, rather than a person on the ground shoving you around. I want one. One of their Z-135/70 booms could be a lot of fun, too. There’s a lot I could do 141 feet in the air. …

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Wisconsin VMUG Still Going Strong

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Sorry folks for being out of the game for a bit. Last week got busy with flash floods in our data centers, projects going sideways, and the Wisconsin VMware User’s Group meeting on Friday. Some of you have commented on some of my posts and I want to get back to them with a response. Like a flash flood, though, I find myself being swept away in time by dozens of small fires that need extinguishing. The VMUG was at The American Club in Kohler, WI. It’s the only five-star hotel in the Midwest, and it was really awesome that Fujitsu sponsored it. Even though it was 90° Fahrenheit outside the beer was cold. There was lots of news about …

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