Author: Stagger Lee

I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before, but Flock is basically your one-app get out of jail free card for Linux – it includes support for blogging, Twitter, Facebook and the like.  What I’m really curious to see is how it works with WYSIWYG stuff…

While I’m at it, I’m wondering too…where the hell did all this zombie media come from?  Actually, never mind, I think I know.

Sitting in Krispy Kreme across from the Costco where I’m having four new tires put on the car. The Continentals that came with it barely made 43K, so now we’re going to have some nice solid Michelins warrantied for 60K, which at current use rates means I shouldn’t need new tires again before the start of the 2014 college football season. If then. Getting rid of the stop-and-start driving from my last job (literally 19 stops in 3 miles) should do wonders for tires, brakes and gas mileage alike.

(New paragraph here. It looks fine on the website, but for some reason isn’t there in the RSS feed. I guess it’s time to start asking around and see a) who reads this drivel and b) who reads it on the site as opposed to a feed reader. I don’t know of any blog that I don’t read through RSS anymore.)

The Mini is a perfect travelling companion – when put by itself in the old blue Timbuk2 sleeve I used to use for 12-inch Apple laptops (or even a 13″ MacBook with some squishing), you can throw the bag over your shoulder and it feels like it’s still empty. Typing is fine, RSS reading through Google is fine, Facebook is usable…and since we’re in Googleburg this morning, Wi-Fi is free and plentiful. Assuming you can see the antenna. I really need to get to work on setting up the secure version of Google Wi-Fi again, but it’s slow going especially on an iPhone…

Speaking of, I have a weird problem with the iPhone where you can put the switch in the “mute” position and the phone will vibrate like crazy as it toggles between “mute” and “not mute” every time you barely touch it in the general vicinity of the switch. Screen, side, just setting it down on the table is a show. But so far, it behaves all right in the normal position, so I have put it back in the hard case and just left it on. I guess it’ll have to be turned off altogether if I’m in a critical situation. And as always, there’s the Worst Case Scenario fallback of letting work pay for my phone directly and accepting the new hotness…which won’t be the new hotness anymore by summer, so I am strongly incentivized to wait.

After some trepidation, and the realization that resizing partitions in Linux isn’t something I’m really competent to do, I have left the Strumpet with all four operating systems installed. I don’t know what XUbunutu is going to be for at this point, though, because I really have been successful in getting everything up to scratch in UNR. The Wi-Fi works (after some driver weirdness), the codecs are in place to stream Absolute Radio or watch ripped episodes of Father Ted, and the Drivel app actually posts to the blog without a fight. I have a feeling I’m going to come to regret not having system-wide spellcheck in text fields, but that’s for another day.

And last but not least, before I walk back over to be fleeced of $500, this advice: a glass of club soda on ice, with a squirt of lime juice and four firm dashes of Angostura bitters, makes for the single best non-alcoholic fireside refresher you can imagine.

We’re not talking about Vanderbilt basketball today…

to see whether this works…

This is the netbook using Drivel. if I knew this would work, I would be happy to let it ride just like this.
The real question is whether I still have to manually tag everything.

Back in the day, I saw more than once that the 12″ Powerbook G4 was referred to as “the blogger’s delight.” Pound for pound, it was the best device of its kind: more potent than an iBook, powerful enough to churn through any apps of its day, compact and portable (if not appreciably lighter than the iBook, it was at least thinner and certainly less of a challenge than the 15″ or 17″ variety.

The whole rationale behind the netbook was that it could be used to blog much more effectively than an iPhone. Adding the Linux and open source layer only pushes the envelope further – so this is brought to you by Drivel, an open-source package for blogging with MT, Livejournal, Blogger, WordPress, Drupal…the whole kit and kaboodle. It’s lean and light, and in this form at least it’s a full-screen writing solution and easy to cope with.

If this is all mashed together, by the way, you’ll know who to blame. My biggest gripe with MarsEdit on the Mac is that you actually have to run a damned AppleScript to get the paragraphs to separate with HTML tags. I’m not doing any tags on purpose with this post, just to see what happens.

I have to say that a couple days in, the Strumpet is bearing up well. I don’t feel like I have to boot into Windows to accomplish anything, although I expect I’ll keep that piece around just in case. The default boot was Xubuntu, but I’m getting more confortable with Ubuntu Netbook Remix to the point where I may wind up ditching the XU partition before long. Not that partition size is all that key to me – I still intend to keep as much in the cloud as possible, as much for safety as anything else.

(I’m starting to think that maybe I’m going to regret not having auto spellcheck on this thing. I can also say that it types more comfortably if it’s not in your lap. The lack of breadth on the 12″ PB was its biggest drawback for me – the 13″ MacBook was critical in that it was wide enough to keep on your lap and still use in a stable fashion.)

Well, this’ll have to do. Let me know how it works out…

these I will probably delete.
But I just have to see if I manually tag paragraphs or not.

Not again. Sheesh.

What does it take to get WYSIWYG?

I sold off the last of my Apple stock this week. In typical fashion, it shot up 5% the day after the sale cleared. I got no manner of luck at all, as a former co-worker at Cupertino Hexachrome Fruit might have said. Coincidentally, the day I made the sale was the day I took delivery of a Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 netbook, bought with birthday money and credit card reward points. First time I bought myself a laptop in literally a decade – and for an order of magnitude less than the last one I bought. (Some wags might say I got an order of magnitude less computer, too – but 1 GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive kick the shit out of anything that iBook SE could have managed. Screen’s higher-res too, and the Atom N450 beats the G3 and probably kills it on battery life too.)

This netbook’s machine name is “Strumpet.” So far, it came with WinXP and has been made to run Ubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Xubuntu, Chromium and Jolicloud. In fact, all those but Ubuntu and Chromium are on the hard drive now. And since UNR and XUbuntu have had kernel updates since the last 9.10 release, and since there’s a Dell partition for hardware test and etc, there are literally ten or eleven different entries when GRUB loads up at boot. I’m still looking at install options for things like Easy Peasy, too.

Ultimately I decided not to get the older 10v, which is generally considered the gold standard for Hackintosh building (to the point where a well-known political blogger who is not known for technical wizardry was able to convert hers in under an hour). My reasoning is that after 12 years in support, with multiple certifications in hardware and software, I know the Mac environment well enough that forcing OS X onto a weak Dell would be more of an exercise in masochism than a legit learning experience. So I do Mac stuff on – gasp! – a Mac. Even if they yanked my MBP tomorrow, all my home stuff resides on the Mac mini in the office, and I could sync the iPhone to it on a regular basis.

This – and my previous musings about the Nexus One, and my expenditure of cash to convert most of my iTunes Music Store purchases to an un-DRM’d format – should not be taken as any sort of indication that I have run out on Apple. On the contrary, I still think that Apple’s particular genius is in making things accessible enough for Them Asses while still offering a glide path up to more technical experiences if you like. The reason I’m able to run all my business at work drum-tight is because OS X is the best consumer OS ever, and it comes on standard and reliable hardware.

If somebody else came out with something better, though, I would go like a shot. And while I don’t think any of the Linuxes above are necessarily better, they are something else: a step toward a new future of low-cost computing. Think about it – you could take out 2 of the 3 USB ports and the VGA, replace the 160 GB hard drive with 4 GB of flash memory, and as long as you’re willing to do all significant file storage in the cloud, you still have computer enough for 90% of everything I do. It’s the circle of life; after all these years we’re back to the same old model. Time was, it was mainframes with terminals. Then words like “client/server” and “network computing” were thrown around. Now it’s called the Cloud, and the original meaning (“cloud computing” meant that actual processing power, not just data, lived in the cloud) has given way to this vision that all your stuff can just reside somewhere out there in the ether. Which, as far as most computer users are concerned, it already does.

It’s cheaper, too – once you build out your data center with multiple redundancies and six-nines reliability, you can add users at the marginal cost of a login account (and hell, maybe $200 worth of netbook or smartphone). Serious processing can take place on the back end; all you really need is enough to run a display, a screen-scraper, a network connection and some user inputs. Park one of those data-center-in-a-truck things, connect it to the phone system, hand out netbooks with cellular cards, and just like that, your neighborhood or village or whatever is right online.

More important, it’s critical not to get stuck into your product loyalties for the wrong reasons. If I wear Dr Martens, or Levis 501s, or use a MacBook Pro or drive a VW, it’s not because I believe that these companies represent some sort of higher purpose or morality or world-changing vision – it’s because, for me, their shit works. If it stopped working, I would go elsewhere (see: Saturn, Reebok, UniBall Micro) and if they went elsewhere, I would find something else (see: Britches of Georgetown, Saturn, Bahia Cigars). I think ascribing some sort of post-materialist aspirations to your vendors – Google would never be evil, Apple is all that is right with the universe, Ford is, well, whatever Ford is – is ultimately as foolish as the notion of corporations with personhood and rights. A company exists for one reason alone: to make money. Not to pave the way to a brighter future, not to make you feel good about yourself, not to bring freedom to TheM asses or what have you. If that happens, great, but the stockholders aren’t going to give a shit about all the snowy plovers you saved with box tops if you’re hemorrhaging profits.

So I have a Mac mini, an iPhone, and a Dell. And that’s what works for me today.

23-6.

OOC road wins at Missouri and St Mary’s.

12-3 in conference with one game left.

6-0 vs the SEC West.

Swept the two teams behind us in the SEC East.

6-2 on the road in the conference.

ANY QUESTIONS?

Well, if you’ve got to lose, may as well lose to the best. And this means SO SO SO much more to Canada than winning would have meant to the US…
…but SIDNEY FUCKING CROSBY. All the hockey fans in the greater DC area just threw up in their mouths a little.

The notion of a saint, by one measure, is “someone through whom we catch a glimpse of what God is like — and of what we are called to be.” If the measure of a saint is that their life is an exemplar of what our morality calls us to be, you could hardly do worse than the Man in Black, as exemplified by the eponymous song – first performed in 1971 at Vanderbilt University.

Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,

Why you never see bright colors on my back,

And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.

Well, there’s a reason for the things that I have on.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,

Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,

I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,

But is there because he’s a victim of the times.

I wear the black for those who never read,

Or listened to the words that Jesus said,

About the road to happiness through love and charity,

Why, you’d think He’s talking straight to you and me.

Well, we’re doin’ mighty fine, I do suppose,

In our streak of lightnin’ cars and fancy clothes,

But just so we’re reminded of the ones who are held back,

Up front there ought ‘a be a Man In Black.

I wear it for the sick and lonely old,

For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,

I wear the black in mournin’ for the lives that could have been,

Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.

And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,

Believen’ that the Lord was on their side,

I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,

Believen’ that we all were on their side.

Well, there’s things that never will be right I know,

And things need changin’ everywhere you go,

But ’til we start to make a move to make a few things right,

You’ll never see me wear a suit of white.

Ah, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day,

And tell the world that everything’s OK,

But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,

‘Till things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.

I don’t know why I always pick February to get melancholy. It’s not a mid-life crisis. Unless you count the fact that it’s been happening for more than half my life now, obviously…maybe you can trace it back to the time I found out the night before I turned 18 that I wasn’t going to be going to Vanderbilt as an undergrad after all. Which is another long story – I could have, but I couldn’t, but…that’s for another time. Anyway.

I guess in 2007, it was the result of having been away from DC for almost a year and a half and just plain missing my crew. I’m pretty sure that’s part of it this time, because I’m facing some situations not entirely unlike what I’ve been through before. See if this sounds familiar, Rifles of the EUS: manpower cuts, exhortations to work smarter, managers who cover their lack of technical acumen with the mantra of “customer service” and eventually turn into lawyers for the end-users, inexplicable additional project that reek of make-work, and a belief that firemen should be fighting fires every second of the day, even if you have to set them yourself.

Fortunately, it’s not like it was before. For one thing, I’ve been doing this for twelve years and I’ve seen all this before. For another, I’m older, wiser, and probably more senile. There may be some chemical influence, I couldn’t say. Long story short: I stay firmly in what we used to call Phase Five, and everything holds together.

But it’s no EUS.

The name itself was a fluke. We had an NT server running under a desk that we were using as a repository for useful tools and file space to back up over the network if a machine needed drastic treatment. And the infrastructure group – consisting mostly of reclassified mainframe operators who had been handed books on Lotus Notes or Windows NT or Netware, because Towers Perrin decided that they were already making the same money as server admins – decided they should take that machine over. Some quick thinking by our top guns led to the declaration that it was an archive, not a server, so hands off – and we even labelled it EUS_Archive, for End User Services. And just like that, we had an identity.

I know I’ve said it before, but it’s true: we were the fucking lords of the earth. Need Lotus Notes on 1600 computers? And domain repairs on another 1200? And viruses cleaned off all the PCs? And all in a month? Users call the help desk, but the help desk called the EUS. We went through a lot of manpower in the go-go 90s, when you had to staff the help desk with Hooters waitresses hired at $50K a year because everyone more technical was getting $80K elsewhere, but there was that hard core that barely budged for many years. When one of us left, it was always moving up – and it was always with regret at leaving the team.

I’m gonna make the donkey blush, I know, but I’m going to say it anyway: nobody could have managed us but the guy who was our lead. He did a lot of director-level work on a lead-tech salary, he led the charge and held the line straight (just barely, sometimes, but he did; there were times our crew would have looked good on a box of Borax), he was technical to close a bunch of tickets himself and to know whether a tech was bullshitting him or not, and he wouldn’t ask anybody to show up at 6 or stay ’til midnight without he was right there alongside, ripping out token ring cards and cursing people who never vacuumed under the desk.

He also had to ride herd on a lot of egos. More than once, somebody cracked that we would sit five-wide around the table at the coffee shop and not a person sat there who didn’t think they were the greatest tech at the table. Our best guys had a lot in common: technical curiosity, institutional memory, more tenacity than an Oatman jackass, and a dangerous excess of personality. Plus I’m pretty sure we all liked a drink or seven. If we didn’t know something, we’d damn well figure it out, and we’d have a good time doing it.

Another thing, too – after the first few months, we started hiring only guys we knew. If we had an opening, the first move was to ask in the team meeting if anybody knew someone looking to make a move. That’s how we were able to lose guys like the Casman and the Lyon King and Ronny-Ron and replace them with guys like T Banga and EZ-E and the Blockster. Anybody we hired had somebody who could vouch for their skills and would put their own rep on the line that their guy could pull his weight. And it paid out, big time. We sustained a level of excellence for the better part of a decade that most places could only dream of. Most of our guys could cover three corners of the two-by-two matrix of Mac and PC hardware and software, work fast, innovate, charm the users, catch the troublemakers, snuff the fires, and best of all – be dropped down in the middle of a world of horseshit only to ride out on the pony.

For the most part, too, we were all friends. We went to lunch in groups of six or eight or ten – at first for self-defense against users who were facing an average 9-day wait time for PC software support (you try servicing a thousand Windows NT 4 machines with two techs and no domain or admin tools), but later because that was just how we rolled. We went out after work – whether it was prime rib in 1998 or karaoke in 1999 or Irish pubs in 2001 or Christmas parties whenever we could get somebody else to pay for them, we were there drinking other people’s booze (and how we avoided getting arrested a couple of times I’ll never know). We helped each other move. We were in each other’s weddings (and bachelor parties). There are kids in Virginia who know me as “Uncle Donkey.”

That’s the consolation now when the work goes south, when eight problems pile up at once and each is more urgent than the last, and the new boss who should be keeping the trouble at bay is instead asking me to fix his laptop which he broke. By all rights, I should be losing my shit – the way I did in the old days more than I should have – but I don’t. Instead, I lace the Docs tight and go to work, with the memories of a pantheon of demigods riding shotgun. And that shit gets settled.

We may be scattered to the four winds now, but we were stars once. We still are. Just because we’re not side by side doesn’t mean we’re not still shoulder to shoulder.