There are a few blogs that I read, well, just to read them. I like to think that maybe some people read my blog for that reason once in a while. One of these blogs is caterina.net. I don’t know how I found her blog once upon a time, but hey, she’s got a good quote today: “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.” – William Blake Right-on.
My favorite blog posts, forum posts, and web sites are the ones that just regurgitate the documentation for a product. Any moron that gets the product documentation can read it. Sure, I’ll give some people a break if the docs are awful. But, for instance, Oracle has documented the living crap out of installing their products on Linux. Why do people feel the need to type up how to install Oracle products on Linux? Is it just to steal search-engine results away from the company itself? Installing Oracle 10g on Linux is a great example of this B.S. I know, for a fact, that if you grab the Oracle quick-start guide they tell you exactly how to install their product, …
I think I understand why Solaris system administrators are angry at the world. Their operating system sucks. I have been watching a colleague of mine who is an excellent Linux and Windows administrator learn the workings of Solaris, and he’s been describing some of it to me. I helped him set up Solaris x86 version 10 on a SunFire v20z yesterday, and my god did that suck. The installation took an hour, mostly because the machine sat there trying to detect things that it was ultimately going to ask us about later anyhow, and then it took forever to copy the data from the DVD to the hard disk. How does an OS still not have logical volume management built …
So this morning I discovered I have a cold. I hate colds. I don’t know what is up, but this is the third cold in as many months. I hate taking cold medicine, mostly because it makes me feel even worse than the cold itself. Taking a drug to ease an infection just seems like it’s making my body work twice as hard, once for the cold and once to get rid of the drugs. So for now I remain mucus boy, double-fisting huge glasses of water. Ugh. I just hope I didn’t give it to anybody I was with this weekend. The bad feelings of a cold are far outweighed by the knowledge that someone else is ill because …
Phil over at Haacked started this — what are ten blogs you enjoyed reading recently? A timely question, since a friend of mine was just astonished that I read blogs and asked for some recommendations (I haven’t told him I post on one yet — I’m waiting for him to find it sometime on his own). For me it’s been: Vinography – Alder over at Vinography has some excellent, down-to-earth commentary on wine, with some reviews, some advice. I drink the occassional bottle of wine and love cigars, so his commentary is well received by me. Which also makes me wonder why I haven’t found any cigar blogs yet (haven’t been looking, really). Fermentations – Tom Wark is a wine …
William Gibson has a wonderful entry on his blog from the other day, regarding old Dutch names like Crapahildis. It is no wonder why names like that, and Hortense, etc. have died out. My god. It’s strange, though, that I feel a machine naming scheme coming on…
Ah, New York City is a wonderful place. But it’s good to be home now, too. More later, when I get a chance to sort through all my email.
I’m exhausted. In the last five days I’ve spent 26 hours at the Bartell Theatre in Madison, along with two days of weddings, and softball practice (I haven’t played softball in years and my arms are going to fall off). I do a lot of work as a tech with the Strollers theatre company. I’ve looked for a hobby for a long time that involves a minimal amount of computers but still appeals to my technical nature, and theater tech work fits the bill. Often the tech work spills over into other non-Strollers stuff, like installing a new stage floor, but it’s fun, and the techs get comp tickets (usually used by friends, since the techs often see the show …
There seems to be a spectrum that all people can be classified into. One end of the spectrum is “doing” and the other is “planning.” There are the cowboys at one end, who never plan anything but just do things. There are the dullards at the other end that never actually do anything because their plan might not be complete. Most of the IT folks I work with seem to fall in the center somewhere, where they know just the right amount of planning that it will take to implement something, but then can switch gears and get it done. Often these people fall towards the “doing” side of the spectrum. I’ve noticed a disturbing trend lately, though, where managers …
I just spent an extended weekend in New Orleans. That town is amazing. Given the liquor I seem to have consumed, at least based on the rate my wallet was getting lighter (aside from the airport parking kiosk eating my credit card), I can’t even believe the amount of alcohol that must flow through the French Quarter. I was definitely less intoxicated than many people. One neat thing I did was taking the City Segway Tour. While the tour itself wasn’t super informative, the novelty of riding a Segway HT through parts of the French Quarter and Algiers Point far outweighed any negatives. Those Segways are awesome little machines. The controls themselves are fairly simple, once you get used to …