Month: July 2007

Do you guys have an estate plan set up in the event both you and your spouse were simultaneously fatalized? From something like a plane crash? Or car accident? Or, perhaps, coming across a bear in the woods?

Let’s play an imaginary game we’ll call: You’re Walking Along A Trail In Alaska When You Come Across A Bear. Pretend you’re standing in the middle of a hiking trail in the woods. A pretty blue sky and white glaciers melt around you. The sounds of the wind in the pine trees and the burbling of a meltwater creek mix sweetly nearby. You are happily trekking along, making the proper amount of noise with Wife Unit, in the half-joking spirit of warning bears of your presence. You don’t really think you’ll meet up with a bear, but there’s been enough fearmongering delivered aboard the cruise ship that you’re not taking any chances. Just then, in the midst of your assured state of we-may-be-puny-humans-but-we-have-guns confidence, a bear happens to emerge from the woods and cross your path.

Now, prior to this instance, I did attend on the cruise ship two environmentalist presentations on the varieties of bears. There of lots of bear types. Some big, some small. The bear that came out of the woods definitely wasn’t one of the largest bears on the planet. But let me just write you that at the moment of first contact the diminutive brown bear was playing the lead role of Ursa Very F*****g Major.

The picture is not doctored in any way. That’s how close we were to Mr. Kill The Tourist Bear.

EDIT by matthew: Created smaller image.

This week, one of my co-workers is taking vacation time while he relocates to California. Although he expects to resume work in a few days, I am really feeling the fact that he is not here at the moment. Unfortunately, because overtime is basically prohibited in my division, I’m not at liberty to put in extra time to deliver what people need… instead, I have to delay their projects for days or weeks because they are stuck in the queue behind more urgent issues.

That creates three kinds of pain.

1. I’m unhappy because I can’t earn overtime.
2. The customer (an internal employee) is unhappy because their project won’t be delivered on time.
3. The company is unhappy as a whole because it fails to deliver major milestones on time.

Now, the main problem with that last bit is that if I abide by the “no overtime” rule while this co-worker is out, when the time comes for blame on a late project, it’s going to trickle right down to me. I hate the blame game, but I know how it works.

The President will call together his Vice-Presidents and ask them to explain why the product is late. The Vice-Presidents quickly confer to decide who to blame among them, and solemnly intone, “Most of us aren’t to blame: it was Development’s fault.” The Senior Directors in Development are called together by the Vice President of Development to account for the delay; after a consultation with the members of their teams, they blame one of their Directors. That Director calls together his Managers, who confer and blame one of themselves. The Manager talks to his team members, and the team members confer and blame one of their own. The chosen team member protests, “I wasn’t allowed to work overtime!” to his manager. The manager tells the Director it was the Director’s policy against overtime which slowed down the project, the Director tells the Vice-President that it was his budget cuts which prevented overtime allowing timely delivery of the project, and the Vice-President says “I can’t tell the President that, it would mean my job!” so he fires the poor sop who did the work and blamed the lack of overtime, then the VP promises the President immense profitability gains by moving that worker’s job to India.

Luckily, the wheels of corporatocracies turn slowly. My way out is to hope that a co-worker leaves the company within the next year, then when the Fit hits the Shan several months down the road with product delays, I can blame the former co-worker. Thus the Vice-President will hear from his minions that the problem is already solved, and can claim dramatic efficiency improvements, including forcing out that unproductive worker in Cube 20286 at the data center who was responsible for this massive project delay.

This will fuel positive spin about the product that the delays are actually the result of improved processes and attention to detail. This will build buzz about the product, resulting in increased stock prices, then the product will be released and stock prices will fall.

At which point the President will call together his Vice-Presidents and ask them to explain why the stock price is falling. Ultimately some poor schmuck somewhere is going to be blamed, fired, and his job outsourced to India so that the Vice-President of Profiteering promise immense profitability gains by moving that worker’s job to India.

I love Corporate America.

It’s a story of an intern blamed for losing a large fraction of the entire state of Ohio’s personal information. I blame whoever the first real employee was in the line up from him. I don’t blame the contractors. I was a contractor, and your responsibilities are critically limited. The State of Ohio should have had an actual backup plan, not “haul this home in your station wagon”.

Here’s an outline of how we treat this kind of data at UltraMegaCorp where I work:

1. The backup unit is inside a caged area of the data center, with a locked door. 2. The data center housing the backup storage unit requires entry through an oubliette with two locked, key-carded, handprint-scan-recognizing doors, separate for in and out. 3. The building housing the data center requires a keycard to get in, and has a guard 24/7. 4. The grounds have a keyed gate with plenty of surveillance.

So much for physical security of the backup system. Then when I handle the backups:

5. I am granted entry to the backup cage. 6. I hook up a laptop to eject the tapes to be shipped off-site. 7. I print out a list of tapes and the date they are sent. This list will be signed, dated, and included inside the container. 8. I fill out a form for the driver and retain a copy. 9. I put the tapes in the case and secure it with a lock. 10. The driver has to do all the same security checks, fills out his part of the form, and transports the tape case in a locked truck. 11. It’s stored at a facility with similar security precautions, totally separate from the other tapes nearby.

This may sound like overkill, but when you store the financial data for millions of people, it’s your fiduciary responsibility.

Don’t read anymore if you don’t want minor Buffy Spoilers (If you’ve finished the show, you’re safe).

Umm.. so.. http://whedonesque.com/comments/13859#more

Looks like there may be a “Ripper” movie probably chronicling the life of a teenaged Rupert Giles and Ethan Rayne, being made for the BBC by Joss Whedon. THIS is a happy day.

Also, Buffy Season 8 Issue 5 is out (LOVE it). For the unititiated, Joss Whedon is writing an official Canon “season Eight” in comic book form and it is Top notch.

Clicking the link will give minor comic spoilers.

but.. umm.. yeah. RIPPER!

A point of pride for US Citizens are our political freedoms. While we may quibble about the value of one or two rights, as a whole we pride ourselves on our rights to write or say what we wish about whom we wish, defend ourselves, have a fair justice system, and support the underdog. I have some concerns about habitual restriction of some rights by our country, but I think that with enough public ridicule, lobbying, and voter support, we can keep our government from stomping all over us.

An acquaintance of mine, Sylvia Haegle (who happens to be a German citizen), once said that “The shackles of bondage are most often worn on the hands of those who forged them.” It is our failure to defend our liberties which leads to us becoming prisoners of our own policies.

With Sylvia’s quote in mind, I read of the effort of US politicians to devise a country-wide internet filtering program. This effort is being promoted under the legerdemain of “combating child pornography.”

Whenever any legislation is proposed “for the children”, my internal bulls–t meter begins ringing very loudly. This internal klaxon rings loudly when I hear of attempts to restrict computer games, too. Sure, the effort may actually be legit, but pushing it under the banner of “protecting children” is a sure-fire way to call for it to be examined very, very closely.

As an example, then, let’s look at how another country has used their ability to restrict the viewing habits of readers. The only country which has taken strong, pro-active moves in this direction — in part for the “protection of children” — is China. How have they used their internet filtering capabilities?

• Established an Internet Police Task Force numbering 30,000 law enforcement officials
• Blocked news from foreign news outlets which did not carry news favorable to the country
• Poisoned DNS caches of articles unfavorable to officials
• Blocked IP addresses of known seditionist sites
• Filtered out content containing controversial keywords
• Prevented access regarding certain religions
• Forced compliance from search engines to exclude results unfavorable to the government: either be blocked or comply
• Created a chilling effect on speech due to fear of reprisal and blocking
• Established an ad-hoc network of “Big Mamas” devoted to reporting suspected criminal or anti-government activity

Based on the fruits of their effort, I’d say the main by-product of China’s attempt at nation-wide Internet filtering is squashing speech with which the powers-that-be disagree. I strongly suspect our own efforts at filtering would be no more successful than theirs: easily bypassed by those with the least bit of technical acumen. However, by bypassing it you are breaking the law, even if what you are doing is not otherwise illegal.

Papers, please?

Ran across an interesting Slashdot link the other day to computing companies that we miss. My mother worked for two of them!

Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!

Yeah, like Secretary’s day, only fewer people know about it. Anyway, yay me. And if I recall correctly, Yay Weed, too. If I’ve missed you, let me know and keep me in the loop next time, would you?

And to all you other under-appreciated, glad-hearted system administrators, may your data centers stay cool, your networks stay up, and your blood pressure stay down.

So my music collection has ballooned to about 140GB of tunes. I use high-quality encoding, so it’s not a gigantic collection, but there’s plenty to it.

But we’ve run into a snag.

You see, we use iTunes to manage our music. Christy has a Mac; I use Linux, another Mac, or a Windows PC (depending on what I’m doing). Up until the music collection got huge, we just kept the “master” copy on Christy’s Mac, and I’d use rsync to duplicate the library to other systems as needed. Simple, and it allowed us to sync tunes to an iPod which, if you use the Rendezvous stuff that iTunes wants you to, you can’t do from someone else’s shared library.

Now that our library is that big, I’m using an external hard drive, but it’s clunky, and due to filesystem restriction the Mac can’t write to it. It’s totally work-around-able, but irritating. And who wants to lug around a second hard drive when you want to listen to some tunes while typing away on your laptop?

So step forward. Here we have 120GB of tunes. We can’t just share it out over a network easily for iTunes to connect to, because the database format will vary between a PC and a Mac (the paths to files are totally different). I think I figured out how to make it work, but it’s a bit of a hack. Also, we like to take some music with us on trips, and how do you take just part of your collection, other than an iPod?

Some obvious solutions present themselves:

1. Upgrade the hard drives in our laptops and desktops. You can pick up a 250GB for about $200 in a laptop form factor, and for the desktops it’s substantially cheaper ($100 for 500 GB). This is the most expensive option, and not entirely satisfactory since one laptop belongs to my employer. Total cost is around $600, plus massive amounts of annoyance as I reinstall applications and operating systems.

2. Make a computer in my house into a Linux server. Heck, I have one available. Stick a single large hard drive into it, then mount the music collection over the network from clients. This is the cheapest option, at only $100 for the new large HDD, but the downside is that when we’re not at home, our iTunes collections — except on our iPods — are not available. This method also involves some strange hackery to make sure the iTunes databases for the PC and Mac are kept separate.

3. Use some other clever method suggested by you.

So how would you approach the “problem” of having a music library which is entirely too large to put on a notebook PC without a significant hard drive upgrade.

I’ve been keeping up on upcoming movie excitement.. and there are some cool things coming up!!

1) INDIANA JONES AND THE… and then Spielberg’s mic conveniently cut out. But its coming next summer.. Here’s a pic.. They say this one acknowledges his age.. is set in the 50s, and will use only minimal CGI. Beaucoup stunts. More info at indianajones.com

2) STAR TREK Here’s what we know. Nimoy is in. Shatner is, for now, out. It features an old Spock, but not Kirk, and chronicles the earliest meeting between Kirk and spock. Zachary Quinto (Heroes) will be playing the younger Spock. J.J. Abrams is directing. What I think this means is that it will not be a complete reboot, but will at least respect current TREK continuity, in which Kirk is Dead.

3) THE DARK KNIGHT The Batman sequel is currently shooting in Chicago.. Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain, A Knights Tale) is the Joker. Like Batman begins, this is a dark take.. and these pics are exciting. Next Summer is the release. Also look for Harvey Dent (Two Face).

4) IRON MAN The classic Marvel Character comes to life with Robert Downey Jr. in the lead role of Tony Stark.. a wealthy disabled man who becomes a superhero by building himself a robotic suit.

5) The Mummy 3 No pics here.. but Jet Li as an asian Mummy? Sounds like FUN!

6) Finally.. SWEENEY TODD They are making my favorite musical into a movie. Check out the poster. “Swing your razor high.. Sweeney.” Tim Burton Directing Jack Sparrow, Bellatrix La Strange, Severus Snape, and Rupert Giles. SWEET!

This year (or 2) is gonna be FUN!

Bill Lodbell, former religion writer for the LA Times, writes movingly regarding his de-conversion from Christianity and move from being a religion writer of 9 years into something less painful.

My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don’t. It’s not a choice. It can’t be willed into existence. And there’s no faking it if you’re honest about the state of your soul.

Sitting in a park across the street from the courthouse, I called my wife on a cellphone. I told her I was putting in for a new beat at the paper.

Bill gets it. Being de-converted from faith isn’t something you search for. You look with longing at those who seem to be happy in their faith, wishing you could have something like it, following the recipes piously proclaimed from the pulpit, putting your whole heart into it.. and finding nothingness in return. It isn’t that one day you set out to be an atheist… one day you wake up and realize you are one, despite your best efforts to believe.

Too bad most believers don’t get it. One stinging criticism still rings in my mind, from someone very close to me: “The way I see it, you went looking for a reason to quit”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

With no adequate way to defend your heart from that kind of abuse, there is little solace to be found in acknowledging the truth about yourself. Just a long, empty silence with elephants dancing in the living room while you try to ignore them.