General Rambling

Idiot Trunking: mashing idiots together in parallel to add idiocy. Idiot Multiplexing: mashing idiots together in a perpendicular fashion to improve, um, their arrangement. It’s one of those days again. 🙂 Props to Jon for helping me define these, and Derick for the song suggestion. The lineup for Coachella looks completely freaking awesome. I’m thinking that this might be the year I’m going to grow a set and go. In the meantime, though, the theme song for the day is the Dead Milkmen, singing “Takin’ Retards to the Zoo.”

My brain is fried, and I have a total lack of focus today. So I spent the day messing around with IPv6. Our network guys have it enabled, so with the addition of a IPv6 stack to my Windows box all three of my work machines (Mac OS X, Windows 2003, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux) can talk IPv6 to each other. Of course, that also meant I needed AAAA records. And to tell the services on my machines to listen on an IPv6 socket. And to figure out how to replicate things like “nslookup” for IPv6. That’s easy, though, once you learn that everything assumes an A record. Thank god for shell aliases. My problem now is Samba on …

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I just happened upon a post over at Read/WriteWeb commenting on Umair Haque’s assessment of Google versus Yahoo!. In short, Haque’s feeling is that Yahoo! does not innovate in these markets, they merely purchase companies that do, and then they don’t understand the market well enough to innovate. Google does innovate, creating value at the edge of the market. MacManus’ question is “Is Yahoo! creating new value chains?” It’s always hard to be the innovator. You burn through cash, you have millions of false starts, and you sometimes look like you don’t have direction. It’s much easier to be second. You watch what works for the market leader and then you do it better and quicker, before they get to …

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“There is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at, without result!” – Winston Churchill I hate to carve a chunk out of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s argument, but there are more pirates on Earth now than there ever were. I’m not talking about software or music pirates. I bet the pirates mentioned in the recent CNN article were crapping their pants when one of our AEGIS-equipped destroyers was shooting at them. An excellent book on the topic is John Burnett’s “Dangerous Waters.” I read it a year ago and it amazed me how little we hear about piracy. I’m guessing it’s coming up more now, given the attack on the cruise ship a couple months ago. On an unrelated …

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Too much sysadmin stuff lately, so I’m going to share with you my love for Thai panang curry. Easiest recipe on earth. If you don’t have a wok get one. If you don’t cook, well, you should. 🙂 It’s also a great way to deal with slightly freezerburned chicken. Ingredients: 2 tbps. oil (I use peanut oil) 3 tbps. of red curry paste 1 lb. chicken breast, carved up into bite-sized pieces 2 cups of thick coconut milk (I use two cans of it) 2 tbps. of fish sauce 1 tsp. of brown sugar Thai red chilis or hot sauce or whatever for spicyness (read below) I cheat and use two cans of coconut milk. Remember to shake them vigorously …

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When I was in the Twin Cities over Christmas my friend Nate pointed out The Current, which is a listener-sponsored popular music station run by Minnesota Public Radio. I had been bitching about my old favorite, Cities 97.1, going all Clear Channel. F’in Clear Channel, making everybody conform. When I say “popular music” I mean they play music that normal people like listening to, including all the weird tracks on discs that people like but aren’t Clear Channel-approved. Lots of requests, and good taste on the part of the DJs. They have a CD-quality stream along with the more standard 32k mono crap that every other station broadcasts. Aside from that, though, the one feature I absolutely require in a …

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Matt Brett, http://feedicons.com is a great idea. It ain’t a standard until everybody is using it, and if it’s easy to use and easy to get the graphics people will just do it. Even though you didn’t create the icon, nobody at the Mozilla Foundation was making it easy (or hard, for that matter) to get a copy. In unrelated news Google Book Search sucks (I know it’s a “beta,” and I did submit feedback). They’ve got some sort of error and I cannot search Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West” part 2. I need to find the reference that Edward Albee makes in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and while I can search Part 1, um, the “encumbered with …

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I have been working at the theatre all afternoon hanging lights for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Specifically, instead of hanging instruments I spent the afternoon repairing them for the guys on the ladders. I don’t know what it is, but people just cannot seem to handle doing the right thing when it comes to fixing things. Why do something right when you can do a hack job of it, and then have to fix it again later? Arggh! It’s easy to say that it’s because people don’t care, that they conciously think “I’ll do just enough so that my show is good, and who cares about anyone else.” I don’t believe that. It’s more likely that they think they …

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It’s interesting to note how I’ve changed my thinking regarding vacations since I started being able to take them. I’m on vacation from my day job right now, and its blissful. I used to take a vacation day and just basically work from home. Now I take a vacation day and do nothing. I sleep in, I make myself a nice lunch and/or dinner, watch a movie, clean the house, work on a personal coding project, do whatever I can but I never open my email. Never. As soon as I look at my email I get sucked in, in the same way that projects die. “Oh, this will be quick,” I think to myself. It never is quick, though. …

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