The Idiot bastard Son

I'm very disturbed by this trend.  I realize that it is a crime in this country to threaten the President.  However, should people really be losing their jobs for expressing an opinion?

Interesting that the people who were viciously verbally assaulting President Clinton, calling him far worse than a moron, and even fairly openly threatening him (see Jesse Helms) are now the same ones who are calling for people who simply opine that Bush is a moron to be fired and even banned from ever holding a government job again.  I love hypocrites.

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It's always one thing

Thoughts thoughts thoughts. Today is going to be busy, so I'm kicking this out fast while I have a spare :30.

Gartner says Linux servers ^ 100% next year. Note the growth will come at the expense of RISC based boxes rather than MS boxes. My concern is that I'm not entirely convinced that x86 is the right choice for high end servers. Workstations/desktops are fine on Intelish systems but high end really needs the architectural advantages that x86 simply doesn't have. I think this will bite Linux in the ass as it's bitten MS in the ass. People blame the OS for the shortcomings of the architecture. For all the bitching about blue screens, I never heard the level of complaints from people using NT on Alphas as I did from people using NT on Intel. Consider that for a moment.

W3C rejects RAND. This is good. Applaud, send w3c emails of support. Encourage open free protocols that everyone can use.

Changes will be happening here over the next few days as I continue development of the blogtool.

I'll buy a drink for the first person to identify the quote in the entry title.

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I want someone else to stand behind me and write it all down

PABlog 0.7 is done. Code will be up over the holidays, if you're a Zopatista and want to mess with it and tell me everything I did wrong.

UPDATE: Here it is.

I'll be doing much cleanup over the weekend and expect 0.8 sometime on Sunday (it will include some documentation, maybe).

Thankful for:  the holidays only screwing up 2 months out of the year.

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Because he's bad, you know it

World + dog seem to be freaking out that Jacko was dangling his alleged offspring over a balcony. Why is anyone surprised that he did something incredibly stupid and (too any sane person) totally bizarre? Aren't we inured of this sort of thing by now? The man is a complete whack job. If you ignore him he'll eventually go away. Paying attention to his behavior is simply encouraging him to continue.

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It's like slapping yourself in the face

What a week or two. I've been overwhelmed with Websphere issues and the site upgrade to Mae and the new blogtool and updating the look on this site and etc etc.

Websphere:  Suuuuure "if it works in the IDE, it will work on the server, 4.0 is all about ease of deployment."  Liars.

I'm going to corporate on Mon to be marketed at by MSFT. They'd like us to help them get a foot in the door with the federal facility I'm working with (they've tried several times and been rebuffed) and encourage them to use .Net. I'm the server/infrastructure guy for the meet. I solicited everyone I know who is actually using .Net for their opinions good and bad, and the general conclusion I can draw is the same as that which I can draw for most technologies in the market today: Some if it is great, some sucks, most of it is OK. It's better than x at y, worse than x at z. However, one individual did ask repeatedly if each time the salesloser says "Web Services" I would punch him in the stomach. I'll see what I can do. I do plan on wearing my Penguin Computing t shirt ;)

Buy Nothing.

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This is my house, and I make the rules

We had a party not too long ago, as I mentioned before. Yesterday I got home and encountered something I'd never seen before. One of the guests from the party sent a note thanking us for inviting them into our home. That is class. I'm not saying I think any less of people who don't do that (I sure don't do it), just that I think it was a very cool thing for this person to do, and leaves me inclined to look forward to having them as a guest, since it creates a perception that they respect my wife and myself and genuinely had a good time. Perhaps I'm simply responding to the novelty. Nonetheless, a nice gesture.

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And all the hippies work for IBM or take control

Fershlugginer damn IBM crap crap crap crap.

Now, I'm not necessarily the brightest guy around but could you possibly make it any more difficult to figure out how to log in to your business account on IBM's site? Not that I *really* want to install  WebSphere MQ Series.

At least it's a quick and painless install if I can ever GET the damn software.

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upgrade

OK, so the upgrade had a hiccup or two. Most everything works now. I'll be putting up the archived blog when I get around to getting it to work (the blog tool I was using doesn't work in the new version of Zope, and is no longer being supported. I've considered doing the work myself to get it running, but there are enough things I didn't like about it that I'll just finish writing my own blog tool and archiving the old stuff).

The sluug meeting was great, and Jason Burke put on a solid presentation on developing Zope Applications. Robert from CWE-LUG and I talked afterwards about starting a STL Zope group, perhaps in coordination with PySTL. The PySTL meetup for tonight was cancelled :(

I'll talk more with Jason and Robert this weekend about the ZopePy SIG. Off to figure out why CMP isn't working in WAS 4 (all else works just fine).

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Why don't you do right?

An interesting read here. First up, it's very very cool that O'Reilly's CTO is a woman. There are not enough women in tech, and even fewer in senior tech positions. Second I find it very interesting that it is the highly technical people that are adopting Mac the fastest. If Apple is smart (which is always an iffy proposition) they will do everything they can to help ORA do a corporate migration. Having the most highly respected published of technical reference books running primarily on Mac would be a HUGE selling point. Now if only they could get some decent audio production apps for OSX out there...

If money were no option, I'd drop my linux boxes today for a nicely loaded G4 towers and a Sun Blade along with a few rackmount servers. I love using linux, but I'm underwhelmed with x86 architecture.

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No Sleep Till...

So this experiment with removing caffeine seems to be working moderately well. The headaches are gone. I feel more tired than when I was drinking caffeine, but that is at least partially due to staying up late several nights/getting up early several mornings while working on the new site tools. I'm going to try to get more sleep this weekend, and since our plans are fairly minimal (well, we're actually going out both tonight and tomorrow, but the days are flexibly scheduled) I might be able to pull it off. We'll see.

I want to see this, and not just because CAT3 has been a monstrous pain in the ass lately.

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Yourself

Several times over the past year I've had conversation with friends or read exchanges online about self. The fundamental self. Who am I? Why is my life the way it is? Why isn't my life more like [tv/my parents/whatever]? Why do I do what I do? Deep. Obviously, there are simple answers to these questions, and there are no answers. That's the beauty of questions that can be answered on many levels. You can answer and answer and answer without ever answering. In each of the instances, I could have (and sometimes did) present rational concrete reasons for WHY on a purely mechanical level. I could have (and sometimes did) explore the question from a more metaphysical level and answer the why of why. That doesn't always help. Sometimes people don't want to know how their mind works or why they do the things they do. They say they want to know, but they really don't. My rule has always been "If you don't want to know the truth, don't ask.".
Adrian Belew has a song that samples a talk radio host in the South, the Prophet Omega .

You've got to remain to bein' yourself...you cannot be
nobody else, it ain't no use tryin' bein' no whirlwind
an' uh, jumpin' here an' an' playin' checkers with
your own life, that ain't gonna work, baby...

Now repeat these words behind me:
'I am what I am'...now that's all you are...
you are what you believe you are...stretch out

So many of you all in Radioland, you're not stretchin' out...
but I want to say one thing to you today...it makes no
differen' who you are, what you're doin', what you're
tryin' to do or want to do, repeat these words
'I am what I am and that's all I am...is what I am'...
that's all I, look, that, that's all I am is what I am...and I'm it

Make no differen' whether it's in the mornin',
the evenin', or in the night time...
hair breakin' out, bald headed...it's the same thing...
you are what you believe you are

©1990 Saiko Music
I operate under the assumption that we only have one pass at life. I don't know if there's an afterlife. Nor do I particularly care. I know I've got this shot and that's all that's available to this particular consciousness. If there were previous existences I don't know about them, and if there are future ones they won't know what happened in this one. How does this relate to the question of being unsure of how you're living your life? You've got this life, live it in the manner that is going to make you the most happy. If you're happy, or at least comfortable, you're probably doing OK. So what if your life isn't like someone elses? It's not their life. It's yours. Live it. If you're happy, that's the only thing that really matters. If you're not happy, change your ...

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